Category: Book Reviews

I tend to finish books in related pairs. This is because of Amazon/Audible marketing, and it works. When you buy one, you get the ad, “Customers who viewed this item also viewed.” Often there is a related book that looks similarly interesting.
My pair this time was a biography of the great George C Marshall – “George Marshall Defender of the Republic” – and an autobiography of James Mattis – “Call Sign Chaos.” The two generals are similar in their integrity and the fact that both needed special Congressional permission to become Secretary of Defense.
George C Marshall, one of the greatest men
I visited his home in Leesburg and my kids HS was named for him. He was almost a local guy around here. And I read a lot about him, recently including “China Mission” about his time in China and “The Marshall Plan,” but this was the first time I read a full-length biography. This one is good. The author frequently references other biographies, so you get the feeling of the scholarship. Marshall himself refused to write his on memoirs. He didn’t want to cash in on his fame. Marshall was a truly honorable man.
He came from a relatively humble background, not poor and he was related to John Marshall but not rich. He studied at VMI, not West Point. He was a guy with great potential from an early age. His big break came in World War I when he told the truth to power in the form of General John Pershing. He was a relatively junior officer and people thought it a career risking thing to do, but Pershing was impressed and became Marshall’s mentor.
Getting a mentor and being one
There are details of Marshall’s personal life. They are interesting, but it was not of great interest. His personal life was remarkable for being so unremarkable. He was just a steady guy who always did his duty. It was tough going in the years between the wars for career officers. Marshall just stuck to it, exhibiting exceptional organizational aptitude and superb ability to spot and develop talent.
He became chief of staff of the Army in 1939. FDR tried his trademark charm on Marshall, calling him George. This is was the only time. After that he called him General Marshall. Marshall always gave good and honest advice and – like Pershing – Roosevelt wanted and needed that.
Not political leadership
I was rather more interesting in Marshall’s time as Secretary of State, but I learned a bit more about his time during the war and as Secretary of Defense. And I learned a lot about the inside game in Washington. Marshall was above politics and that sometimes got him in trouble with politicians, but his integrity was such that he could play a unique role. He disagreed with political leaders on occasions, but he soldiered on. For example, Marshall opposed the use of atomic bombs, but never made a public case after the decision was made. He deferred to political leadership. Marshall, famously, never voted so that he would not be on a political side.
The book was inspiring. It is refreshing to read about a man so honorable, competent and – let’s use the word – great.
Jame Mattis
James Mattis did not have the deep impact of George Marshall. It is a little unfair to juxtapose them. Mattis is truly exceptional and in almost. any comparison except with Marshall, he would come out on top.
In many ways, I got more from the Mattis book. I “knew” Marshall well before I started the book, but this was the first time I got to know Mattis. Not the first time I met him. I met him in Iraq. I knew he was a great leader, but I didn’t appreciate at the time how great. We ate with him at the chow hall. I squandered my opportunity and asked him nothing that I can recall.
Mattis is more a self-made man. He came from a humble background, like Marshall, but maybe more so. In his early life, he got in trouble with the law, but always worked to learn from experience and books. He was/is a self-taught scholar. I like the about him.
Leadership
Two things stand out in this book for me. The first is his general management philosophy. He believes in boots-on-the-ground knowledge and in pushing responsibility to the lowest competent level. He believes that leaders’ job is to prepare subordinates. In this, he is much like Marshall. Prepare people for all they need to know and then let them decide within their competence. We used to call it “train and trust.” I do not recall Mattis using that precise term, but that is that it was.
Iraq
The other great part was his assessment of our policy in Iraq from 2006 until around 2012. He talked about the Surge, of which I was a small part, and about our victory in Iraq. Yes – victory. We had the capacity to change the whole region. The future did not need to resemble the horrible past. We blew it in 2011. We paid a high price and those who had trusted us paid a bigger one, sometimes with their lives.
I am not haunted by many things in my life. Among the things that still bother profoundly me is my behavior in Iraq. I think I acted honorable and did my duty to the United States, and I thought it was in the interest of Iraq too. I told our friends what I believed, that the USA would be there for them until the situation stabilized. I was mistaken and it cost our country and theirs, and them.
Young men die
I also think of Aaron Ward. He was killed in Hit in 2008. I did not know him well, but I came to think of him until now. Hit was mostly peaceful. Ward came out of his vehicle and reached to his toes to stretch. He was killed when a bullet went through his helmet. We do not think that the shooter intended to kill him. Our belief was that they wanted to injure to show that we still needed to invest money in Hit. Colonel Malay made it a priority to investigate the issue, but we never found the truth and had only our suspicions. Aaron Ward joined up in a time of war and went as a volunteer into a war zone. I think his sacrifice affects me more because I think of Alex. Aaron liked to lift weights and saw the Army (he was military police) as a way to get some good training. He died a young man with his potential wasted, his beautiful songs unsung.
Heavy burdens of command
I respect men like Mattis and Marshall who send men into battle knowing that some will not make it. It is a horrible choice. Mattis wrote that he feels as if each Gold Star Marine is his son or daughter. George Marshall lost his stepson Alan Brown in the fighting in Italy. Theirs is an unbelievable burden. Better to read about it than have to live it.

What I liked most about my work in the Foreign Service were the opportunities to for interaction with other systems and cultures. I used historical-anthropological method and came up with lots of insights beyond the simple joy of doing the work, but I always kept in mind the limits of my understanding. I was always an outsider and should never let myself believe otherwise.
We cannot be objective
And my interpretations were very much colored by my own perspective. Even if I was somehow able to recall and report what people told me w/o any of my own interpretations (not possible, BTW), the questions I asked would shape the narrative. I noticed that my “memorandums of conversation” had lots of commonalities no matter the variety of people I met. There is no way around this. We cannot be objective. The best we can do is to broaden our outlooks. Despite the limitations, the insights are sometimes useful for others and almost always enlightening for the one making the observations. It is way to personal growth.
Life and times of Franz Boas
“Gods of the Upper Air” spoke to these concerns. The book is essentially a life and intellectual times of anthropologist Franz Boas and his students. It made me wonder about my own methods. I studied anthropology in college. I remembered reading Franz Boas, but remembered nothing specific besides the name. Nevertheless, it is likely that I internalized some of his ideas and methods, his emphasis on boots-on-the-ground observation and the need to look at cultures on their own terms w/o too many generalizations. When Boas was asked to generalize, the generalized only that people cannot use what they do not have.
Cultural relativism
The Boas groups believed in cultural relativism. I don’t buy the whole relativist idea. Rather, I think of culture in an ecological paradigm. Everything depends on the factors of the environment. Some cultures are better adapted to the current situation. They all have equal “value”, but they are not all equally valuable. But I cannot blame Boas. There has been a lot of advance in biological sciences as well as just experience since his time.
Marget Mead
Boas’ most famous accolade was Margret Mead. She was maybe one of our most influential anthropologists. She was mostly wrong about details. As the book outlines, she found what she was looking for rather than what was when doing her work in Samoa. She fell victim to the biases I described up top. The additional problem is the people you meet. The people outsiders are likely to meet are probably not the people who really know best.
… and Frasier Crane
Think of an anthropologist trying to understand the USA by hanging around in a bar and talking to the people there. The image that came into my mind was that old comedy series “Cheers,” the place where “everybody knows your name.” I think of the sophisticated and erudite Frasier Crane observing the natives. He might produce a better narrative, but it would be his narrative and maybe useful but not the truth.
The book is more joint biographies than anthropology. The members of the Boas circle were all weird. They were misfits in their own societies, which is maybe why they looked for meaning in others. Now I don’t know how much of this is the product of the narrative of the book and how much is how it was.
Taking it personally
The great thing about this book for me was the thoughts it provoked. I know this is very personal. I thought back to my education in history and the importance of evidence and narrative. I learned to “do” history in the tradition of Leopold von Ranke, with emphasis on primary sources and evidence and lack of confidence in unifying theories of history. Yes, I know it is old fashioned, but I still am a true believer in that method, adding to that the boots-on-the-ground imperative. Where I part company, however, is with the idea that we can find the truth, as Ranke said history as it really was.
But while we cannot find the truth in an absolute sense, we should continue to search for it, so that we can reject things that clearly are not true and so that we can come closer to at least a useful truth.
I am drifting from the book, but maybe that is the sign of a good book. I recommend it for those who studied anthropology and maybe even more those who did not. Lots of our routine ideas are influenced by these guys, whether we know it or not.
I wonder if my friend and colleague Rick Roberts knows this book.

Sorry, cannot blame Trump
Some parts of America are doing very well; others are okay, and some are in serious decline. This is a long-term trend, not something we can blame on the policies of any president. And it is an international trend, not something we can blame America, and – something I need to add at this controversy plagued juncture, this book was written in 2012, so we cannot blame Trump.
Three Americas, only one prospering
Moretti talks about the three Americas. We have become much more integrated racially and ethnically. There are few completely black neighborhoods left in America and probably no completely white ones. Most neighborhoods have their share of immigrants. But we have become much more segregated in terms of economics of opportunity. This goes beyond average incomes, although income is a big factor. It is more the difference between communities that are going somewhere and those that are going nowhere.
First a stipulation. Nearly everybody has become more prosperous in strictly material terms because of general enrichment over recent decades. Some communities, however, have gotten a lot more of the gains than others have. The three Americas are those who are racing into a bright future, those that are just standing still and those that are declining in relatively in terms of material prosperity and in absolute terms in relation to human capital, as well as intangibles such as hope and spiritual strength. These communities are breaking down and not providing the sense of community the people need.
Skilled jobs and skilled workers
Moretti mentions economic reasons why this has happened, the usual changes in the means for production, international competition and automation. American manufacturing produces more than ever before, but it does so with many fewer workers. As automation has replaced workers, those workers who remain need to have higher level skills. There are fewer and fewer jobs available for unskilled workers. Gone are the days when a man could graduate high school, or not even that, and then walk into a decent job. This is good. This is the basis of productivity. It encourages people to improve their skills and work at jobs are more interesting and fulfilling, and ones more likely to pay better. The problem is that not enough of these jobs have become available and not enough workers are qualified to get them.
Highly skilled labor force and highly skilled jobs are a chicken-and-egg problem. Moretti talks about the places that are very attractive and prosperous. These places have both a lot of well-paying skilled jobs, many involving innovation, and they have a lot of skilled and innovative workers to take those jobs, what they call a thick labor market. Once a region has achieved this happy situation, it usually is self-catalyzing, as better jobs attract skilled workers and skilled workers attract or grow firms that employ skilled workers. Such places also benefit less skilled workers. Job prospects even for unskilled workers are better and they are paid more. There is a spillover, positive externalities. Skilled and educated workers produce conditions that improve the general environment.
Can we create these environments?
How to achieve this wonderful balance, however, is not known, although there are lots of theories. Good communities always have an infrastructure of prosperity – theaters, restaurants, brewpubs, nice shops, parks etc. Some think that communities need to provide lots of amenities loved by the “creative class.” This idea is based on two related suppositions. One is that if you have the creative people, creative jobs will follow and the other is that it is the pleasant things that attract them. Unfortunately, this does not always work. Moretti gives the example of Berlin, which is very pleasant for the creative class, with lots of parks, orchestras, restaurants etc. Berlin has relatively low rates and has indeed attracted lots of educated and creative young people, but it has done this w/o creating or attracting creative jobs. Instead, Berlin lives off tourism and government. There are lots of “creatives” living in a type of genteel poverty. (This made me think of Madison, Wisconsin, when I went to college there. We used to joke that you needed a PhD in philosophy to tend bar in Madison, and a taxi license required at least a PhD in history.)
A better-known strategy is for local governments to try to attract firms that will bring with them jobs. State and local governments spend or concede vast resources to get firms to move in. Research shows that this does not work in the long-term. It makes the firms richer, but the money spent could have produced more jobs if they just opened some brew pubs (my addition).
Researchers and leaders study successful innovation clusters and try to copy what they did or have. The problem is that it is easy to see AFTER but maybe what we see was not the cause. For example, ALL successful innovation clusters are near universities. This is not helpful as a predictor, however, since ALL major American communities are near universities.
One thing that seems to work is to have some active and competent individuals. There is no golden rule except persistence. Moretti talks about the growth of biotech clusters. The ones that developed were no better situated than hundreds of others. What they did have at one or more local universities were superstars, people who attracted others. Smart people like to be around other smart people and they attract each other.
You start to be like those you hang out with
Parents often worry that their kids will be negatively influenced by the people they hang out with. This can be good too, if the crowd is good. Clusters tend to have people who pull up others.
Perhaps the best local leaders can do is to run their jurisdictions competently and in ways that create good quality of life for as many as possible. Good education generally is important, but aiming at any particular firm is not practical, since there is so much change. By the time your educated workforce is ready, the situation is very different.
This is a good & interesting book. I think that after (or before) reading the “New Geography of Jobs” it might be useful to read “The Smartest Places on Earth” that talks about renaissances in some of the former rust belt places. I don’t think the one contradicts the other, but they complement and fill in weak spots.

The legacy of liberalism
More than anything else, liberalism was responsible for the great enrichment that pulled humanity out of the poverty trap that has afflicted people always and everywhere from prehistoric times until just a few centuries ago. Liberalism was the instrumental in the scientific, democratic and market revolutions that created our modern prosperity. W/o liberalism, slavery would not have been abolished, our free market democracies could not have flourished and our great universities could not have developed into the innovative and free places they became. The last of these, or more accurately the danger of losing it, is the subject to the short book “The Assault on American Excellence,” by Anthony Kronman.
Let me add a note for both my liberal and conservative friends. The liberalism we are talking about here is not closely related to political liberalism. American Liberals and American Conservatives are both equally heirs to the small l liberal tradition. In fact, the use of the term liberal in the USA tends to confuse foreigners, since parties that call themselves liberal in Europe often tend to resemble moderate Republicans and the term “neo-liberal” refers to free market liberalization.

Back to the book.

Politics versus scholarship
The author is careful to make distinctions that we often ignore. A big one is the distinction between politics and scholarship. In politics, Americans generally believe in democracy and equality. Nobody’s vote should count for more than others. We decide by majority rule and we are generally suspicious of anybody who claims special expertise. Beyond that, winning is important. A political party is not seeking objective truth, but rather seeking to persuade, cajole or even intimidate people into supporting their candidate or platform. This is the opposite of what is true (or should be true) in scholarship.

Scholarship is by its nature hierarchical. All opinions are NOT assumed to be equal and decisions are not achieved by majority vote. Scholarship seeks truth, stipulating that the final truth never available to the mortal man. A university is elitist and maybe even anti-democratic, and we need institutions that are elitist and anti-democratic in a functioning pluralistic democracy.

Islands of excellence
Kronman makes the analogy of islands of aristocracy in a sea of democracy. I thought his choice of wording would get him into trouble, as many people will read that far and dismiss him as elitist. It is useful to read on. He is arguing for true diversity.
I would describe is islands in a way that I know is more obscure, but I think more accurate. These are like the “sky islands” of the Southwest Deserts. As the climate got warmer and drying after the last ice age, plant and animal communities adapted to the cooler and wetter environments moved north and up the mountain sides. Today if you go to the Southwest, you can find remnants of forest and biotic communities on the mountains. There is glorious diversity different from the many miles around.

This true diversity of the university – the diversity of ideas – is being eroded by the bogus diversity of identity and the general democratization of inclusion.

Excellence versus inclusion
Kronman traces the problem to the Bakke case in 1978. Bakke argued that he was denied admission to the University of California Davis medical school because of his race. He was technically correct. The school had set aside a quota of places for minority applicants. Had Bakke not been white, he would have gotten in. The Supreme Court declared quotas illegal but opened the door to a broader diversity standard. This made sense, but it opened the door for the mendacious system we have today and created all sorts of collateral damage for scholarship.

Kronman describes himself as liberal. He marched against the Vietnam War and has always supported Democrats for office. He saw no problem with a quota system, since it was transparent and could be justified based on past wrongs. It also could have a limit based on results. For example, in 1978 Asians were included in the quota as underrepresented minorities. This is no longer applicable, and Asians are among the chief victims of current affirmative action programs.

Diversity of ideas matter; others are mere proxies
The problem with the diversity argument, besides its mendacity, is that it is open ended, and it freezes people into identity, exactly what university is supposed to break down. Student are expected and sometime expect, to be “representatives” of their group, rather than scholars seeking to improve themselves and seeking truth. They are encouraged not to engage, but rather assert of message.

Kronman does not dismiss identity, emotions or peculiar points of view, but he says that they cannot be used to stop the discussion or as a trump card. For example, you might have as special point of view because of your experience. You might say, “as someone with this experience, this is my view.” BUT you cannot expect that experience to be accepted as proof. Rather you need to explain and make the other understand. If you believe your experience is so unique that it cannot be shared, at least intellectually, it is valueless in the greater search for truth.

Marketplace of ideas versus seeking to improve them
Kronman makes another useful distinction about free speech, and contrasts speaker’s corner free speech with an academic seminar. A speaker outside university has no obligation to seek truth, nor does his audience need to listen. The speaker is often trying to convince or cajole – in the political sense above – rather than find truth or even common ground. Audience members are free to heckle the speaker, within reason, and are under no obligation to add useful points. The speaker’s corner experience is a free market for ideas in the unregulated sense. An academic discussion, in contrast, has a leader, a subject and a goal of improving the outlook of all participants. Participants are expected to disagree, but they need to give good reasons. They are also expected to alter their own views based on what they hear or learn. In that end, the whole of the experience should be better than sum of the parts. Participants are expected to grow intellectually. If they come out with exactly the same views that they started, it was probably a waste of time.

Important to note that in the seminar above, participants are not subsuming their identities into the group nor is it necessary to come to consensus. Individuals will still come to their own conclusions, now better informed and more open to ideas. Ideas are not all equal and we can always improve.

If you leave college with the same ideas had when you came, you failed
Returning to university admissions, Kronman advocates a more explicit inclusion of factor such as race and other identities but says that once in everybody should be subject to the same sorts of criteria for judging and improving. What you come in as, you should not go out as. Education means change and we hope improvement, else why bother with it at all. A good university education should break down preexisting identities, predilections and prejudices, not protect them. There should be no intellectual safe places.
The book is very much worth experiencing. I listened to the audio book while driving and working on the farm, so I cannot go into deeper detail in some of the specifics.

Liberal values in university worth protecting.
I fear that we are losing the great value of our universities to excess inclusion, identity and just a lack of rigor. I recall reading “The Closing of the American Mind” back in the 1980s. That book warned of many of these trends. Unfortunately, it has gotten worse. Our universities were and still are a fantastic resource. Yes, the best of them are elitist and elitism in the pursuit of truth is good.

Intelligent people do not make better choices than their less gifted colleagues. In fact, very intelligent people often tend to be amazingly stupid about “common sense” decisions. Let’s add two caveats. The first is within a reasonable range. There are people with such low intelligence that they cannot make good choices at all and there are subjects that require higher intelligence to master, but generally once you get “enough” it stops being useful to have more. The second caveat relates to what we call intelligence. Even though we don’t talk much about IQ anymore, we implicitly judge intelligence by the types of things IQ test measure.

The author begins by talking about very intelligent people who just believe very stupid things. Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the supremely rational Sherlock Holmes, believe is spiritualism and fairies, for example. One of the intelligence traps is that intelligent people can think up all sorts of good reasons to believe dumb things. They are used to people deferring to them and people do.

High intelligence is like a powerful engine. It can drive the car very fast, but it needs a competent driver, else it drives very fast in the wrong direction.

I thought “The Intelligence Trap” was very much like a book I read in the 1990s called “Decision Traps.” “Decision Traps” was one of the books that most influenced my life. If it makes me seem shallow because I mention such a book and not some wonderful classic, well too bad. “Decision Traps” featured a lot of useful wisdom and introduced me to the work of Kahneman and Tversky, before they were so famous. It mentioned specific paths that smart people go down that take them the wrong way. “The Intelligence Trap” does that too. It is in many ways and updated version, so I recommend it. It is an entertaining book too. The thoughts are not profound and I have read most of the examples elsewhere, but it is useful to remind ourselves.

Confirmation bias
“The Intelligence Trap” talks about confirmation bias, for example. I first came across the term in “Decision Traps” and the problem has become worse since 1990. Internet is a confirmation bias engine and it does it so seamlessly that we often do not even see it. One way I counter it is to have lots of Facebook friends who don’t agree with me. I tolerate even the abusive ones, since their points of view may be right, sometimes. The flaw in my plan is that some Facebook friends who disagree with me unfriend me, thereby denying themselves the benefit of my contrary wisdom and me of theirs.

This is related to motivated reasoning. This is when you are looking for information to bolster positions you already support or disparage information that contradicts.

Meta forgetting
I like to meet authors, but I always try to cut them a lot of slack. They often know less than is contained in the pages of their books. This makes perfect sense. When they finished the book, they were at the peak of their knowledge on that subject and forgetting set in that same day.

This happens to all of us. We can perceive it with subjects like math or language, but we miss it with other subjects. We tend to think we know all we did on the day we got the passing grade on the tests. We don’t. Good to recall and relearn if we need.

Hard is better than easy learning
Related is the idea that difficulty is good when we are trying to learn. We can often get better short term results when we concentrate. Out long-term recall and use of information is improved when we struggle a little, when we forget and have to relearn. This is one reason why crash courses tend to produce short-term wins, but long term don’t make much of an impression.

A man has gotta know his limitations
Socrates got it right. I liked that the author made many references to literature and philosophy. He mentioned the wisdom of Socrates and Solomon. Socrates was wise precisely because he knew that he didn’t know. He talked to all kinds of experts. These guys knew a lot about their specialties, but they lacked wisdom because they thought they knew more than they did about other things. There is the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Solomon’s case was different. He was said to be one of the wisest men ever, but he could not run his kingdom or his personal life well. In the wisdom of that great American philosopher Clint Eastwood – “A man has gotta know his limitations.”
Related to this is expert entrenchment. When people know a lot, they think they know everything about it. They may not know as much as they think, but even in the areas of their specialties information changes. Sometimes the super stars are the ones least likely to want to change. They are doing well with the status quo. This can also lead to functional stupidity. Functional because it works at least in the short term. Productivity may be boosted in the short-term if you do not question and just get it done. It also might help with career success if you don’t rock the boat.

Fixed mind set
My father taught me many useful things. One of the not useful things that I had to jettison was a fixed mind set. He told me that either you were good at something or not. This was not strictly wrong, but it implies that you cannot change. In fact, we have lots of choices. Our futures need not be slaves of our pasts or of our CURRENT capacity.

The author gives the example of Richard Feynman, one of the top physicists of the 20th Century. Teachers didn’t think much of Feynman. He was self-motivated, which meant that he did not always study the things teachers thought important. He was also not incredibly intelligent on those traditional IQ measures. But he never stopped learning. He was always curious and looking for new information in wide varieties of subjects, not only physics. As a child, he was below average in language, but he kept on going and ended up mastering several foreign languages.

The race is not always won by the fastest, but by the one who just keeps running.
The race may be won by the fastest, but sometimes the fastest don’t know that the race is never over. You can keep on going and guys like Feynman just keep on going.
I learned this lesson from my friend David Brooks (the FSO, not the author. David, sadly, died a couple years ago.) What I learned from him was the usefulness of persistence in language learning. David seemed to have little talent learning Polish. He managed to get a 3/3 (enough to pass) but it was bad, so bad that even non-Poles like me noticed. But he kept on going. By the time he was done in Poland, he was among the best speakers. I took his lesson when I was in Brazil. I tried to keep on speaking and learning Portuguese until the day I left Brazil. Not sure how good I got, but I could communicate better.

Better in foreign language
Speaking of foreign language, if you know a foreign language well you know that your personality is different when you are speaking it versus your native language. I thought I was often a better diplomat in Portuguese than I was in English because I had to listen more carefully, reflect more and talk more thoughtfully. “The Intelligence Trap” talks about studies that indicate that people are more rational when explaining something in a language that is not their native one. The idea is that it slows you down so you don’t make the snap judgements. Even when you are very fluent, using a foreign language sets up a firebreak.

Tolerance of ambiguity
Finally, in my memory, if not in the book, is a tolerance of ambiguity. People who make better decisions often are those that can hold contradictory ideas at the same time and not go crazy. They do not feel the urgent need to resolve questions and so can take ideas from more sources. Sometimes you don’t need to resolve things. Sometimes it just doesn’t matter and so we should just leave it alone. Even if we “know” we are right, it does not mean others are wrong if they believe the opposite. Hard to resolve. Just lighten up.

George Will proved to me that he is much more erudite than I am, but he might have used his intelligence to write a shorter book. It seems to me that he was trying to pack in everything he knew. Sometimes he lost the theme, or maybe I did. As I said, he is more erudite than I am. With that in mind, I am not going to even try to include all the parts, but rather will concentrate on what I thought best.

Will starts out with a simple definition of American conservatism. American conservatives are similar but not the same as English conservatives. They are not much like conservatives in continental Europe. The reason is that conservatives conserve and their characters depend on what they are conserving. In parts of Europe, they are conserving (or maybe trying to revive) past aristocratic, royalist or authoritarian structures. We never had these in America, so American conservatives don’t conserve those things.

American conservatives, according to Will, are conserving the ideas of the American founding. American founding was based on classical liberal principles, so – confusingly – American conservatives are conserving the liberal tradition. Will did not originate this idea, BTW. I learned about this concept way back in the 1970s, when I was at University of Wisconsin.

Liberalism split in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Conservatives kept the liberal tradition, while those who called themselves liberals or progressives put more faith in centralized authority and government activity.

I don’t think that you can call Woodrow Wilson the villain of the book, but Will thinks Wilson was responsible for, or at least articulated much of the progressive ideas. Wilson is pushed the idea that government should have the power to address your needs. In this he built on what Theodore Roosevelt had done, creating the cult of the presidency.

World War I greatly advanced progressive effectiveness. Let’s think about those times for a minute. Restrictions on free speech, prohibition, scientific management, income taxes and concentration of power in the hands of “experts” were all progressive enterprises. The red scare that persecuted immigrants was carried out by progressives. Eugenics was a progressive idea and “scientific” racism was developed by progressive thinkers. In a remarkable feat of intellectual jujitsu, progressive have managed to get most people to associate the negatives with conservatives.

What does it mean to be a conservative in the USA?
First let’s stipulate that few politicians are conservative, even if they call themselves that. Progressives have natural advantages in politics, since they can promise people stuff and pretend to offer solutions and conservatives who want to get elected need to do that too. In what When there is a problem, government official ask HOW they will address, not whether government is appropriate. Conservatives and progressive struck an implicit bargain. Politicians on left and right provide more services than people would be willing to pay for and run up the debt.

Conservatives in America conserve the founding. That means we believe in limited government, dispersal of power, modest goals, personal responsibility and generally prudent leadership. If something NEED not be done it need NOT be done. Just say no.
The personal responsibility part is something Will covers at length and I generally agree. He talks about Obama and Elizabeth Warren talking about communal nature of society – the famous “you didn’t build that” idea. Will says that this is a straw man. Everybody knows that no individual is self-made, but that does not mean that individuals have no agency. If you have a successful firm, you did indeed depend on the general society, but you also built it. The two are no mutually exclusive.

Will sees that as a fundamental difference between conservatives and progressives. Conservatives believe that individual initiative matters. They know that history is contingent and has no direction that individuals do not give it. Things can have worked out very differently.

The government’s job is to create and maintain conditions so that individuals can prosper, not take care of people or create prosperity. Individual citizens, often working in voluntary cooperation, creates wealth, not government.

It is a good book. Takes a long time to get though and there is a lot of diverse information, but it is certainly worth it.3

Emergence
This book is about evolution and emergence. The author points out that nothing in biology makes sense except in the context of evolution and extrapolates that variation, selection and environmental pressures can explain much of how developments in human societies happen. He makes clear that he is not talking about “social Darwinism” or any of the deterministic ideas so often badly used a few generations ago, but societies are indeed subject to evolutionary principles. Science tells us what is, but not what ought to be. Einstein said that your theory decides what you can observe, determines what is even within the decision universe. When things do not make sense in our theory, our model, we often do not perceive them at all.

Theories and mental models determine what we can see
Our dominant model of society has been physics, machine like. Evolutionary interactions are not important in this model. But the physics model is only a sub-set of complex human societies, which do indeed evolve. Our mistaken assumption is often that we assume direction and planning, when this is not necessary in emergence. Evolutionary pressures give direction and incentive, but they are not planning.

You can often do before you understand
He points out that you can have competence in doing something w/o comprehension of how or why it works. This is a very simple but very profound idea. And very often competence precedes comprehension. A big mistake of the “new math” I learned as a kid is that they tried to make us understand before we used math. As I learned math later, you just practice until it makes sense. It does not make sense first, except maybe for those few prodigies among us.

Some things are designed, others develop and some just happen
The author makes a distinction among things that are designed, those that are developed and those that are just created by conditions or randomness. He tells a story about hiking in the woods. If you hear a crash and look up to see a bolder rolling towards you, appropriate action is to get out of its way. This is a physical and not an adaptive force. Now consider the same crash. You look up and instead of seeing a rolling bolder, you see a charging grizzly bear. Your appropriate response is surely not the same. Your response to the bear is developed, interactive. Your response to the bolder is mechanical. Now consider a snowflake. It seems designed, but it is merely the result of conditions. A snowflake is not designed or developed to do anything. It just is.

No harmony
In a prescientific world, people believe that everything has meaning, that everything happens for a reason, because they believe they live in a designed world. This is a comforting view even, especially, in life’s hardships. This idea is the basis of our believe in the balance of nature. It is comforting to think that there is some sort of default condition, something nature would return to if we “let nature take its course.” It also allows us to criticize the “sin” of others against nature.

Nature, however, is not and never in harmony. It is always out of balance, disturbance dependent and always becoming. Traits exist because of historical processes: contingencies and random events. Outcomes are influenced by environmental factors and constrained by many of them, but the outcomes we observe are not destiny.

Adaptive better than adapted
An organism that is perfectly adapted to its environment is fragile because environments inevitably change. Being adaptive is better than being adapted. This goes for human and “natural” environments. I put natural in quotes, since what we call human and natural are just subsets of the total. They are not distinct except in our formulations.

As I was listening to this part of the audio book, I was spraying some of my pine trees to fight an outbreak of turpentine beetles. I was changing environmental conditions in hopes of frustrating the breeding and population expansive of these little nasties. My own land ethic informed me that it was the right thing to do; it also constrained how much I put on. I wanted to do the minimum. The decision was informed by science that told me that the chemicals I used would produce an outcome I desired. Had I not observed the affected trees, or reacted in the way I did, the forests would be different in a small way. If the beetles could think it through, they would call me a contingency, maybe a constraint.

How can altruism emerge?
The author explained how altruism could emerge from organisms in competition with each other. Individual organisms would have incentive to benefit at the expense of others. But the unit of evolution is not always only the individual. In isolation, selfish individuals will enjoy advantages over their more generous competitors. This does not happen in group settings. Selfish individual beats generous individual, but cooperative groups beat selfish ones. Cooperation can develop because it helps the group. The danger is cheaters and free riders and human groups and all social species, have developed systems to catch cheaters and freeloaders. I often say that reciprocity, not generosity, is the basis of civilization. This is evidence.

Humans are very cooperative
Humans are extraordinarily cooperative compared with any species besides social insects. It is amazing that we can (usually) walk safely among strangers and get the things we need from them w/o the need for coercion or deception.

A big problem for all sharing and social societies is the “tragedy of the commons,” whereby each individual has incentive and even pressure to take as much as he/she can from commonly held assets, even when everybody can see that the resource is being depleted or destroyed. This is illustrated in common pastures and fisheries. There are examples of successfully overcoming the commons problem. The most common effective method is to create stable property rights, but the author also gives examples of groups that were able to figure out how to share. These are usually bottom up affairs that emerge rather than are imposed. They allocate the resource in ways that member consider fair and they have mechanisms to detect and punish freeloaders and cheaters. One size does not fit all, and they need to adapt to change. This can be hard, and some do not make it.

Intelligent design
Evolutionary process need not be random. We humans can “intelligently design” the process, if not manage all the parts. The key is the goal. We do not specify, cannot know all the steps. Think of the process like a toolbox. When the plumber or carpenter shows up at your house to fix a problem, he has a box of tools with different ones appropriate to different tasks. He does not specify which tools before assessing the problem, but he is reasonably confident that his abilities and tools will be sufficient for the task.

Mega societies
The book finishes with a discussion of mega-societies and super organisms. An individual body is made up of “cooperating” cells. They work for the common good. Those that do not are problems, cancerous. Similarly, social insects form super society. The author thinks that humanity could be moving in this direction and thinks it would be a good thing.

I was with him for much of the book. The ideas make sense and I believe that emergence is the most powerful factor at work in our world. I do not share his enthusiasm for humanity becoming a super organism. As we said about, science can inform us about what is and what could be, but our values determine what ought to be. I just don’t see an ant hill or a beehive as a laudable goal for humanity. I prefer a little more disorder and even suffering if that is the price of freedom

But that is my main caveat. I found the book very informative. There are lots of things I did not write about, such as his discussion of epigenetics or cultural learning process. Those are worth topics too, but I did not want to write a whole outline. Read the book. It is worth the effort.

It is not a pleasant book. There is a lot of moral ambiguity and in the end the hero does not win, the good guys do not triumph. There is no deliverance, at least not in the lifetimes of the main characters. The only consolation is that the truth came out a generation later.
Witold Pilecki was a truly brave man who did all kinds of heroic things. He volunteered to allow himself to be arrested and sent to Auschwitz. His mission was to lead an uprising from there and a break-out. He succeeded in getting sent there and suffered mightily. He reported on conditions in the camp and would have made the world aware. He witnessed truly horrible things and reported them, but his reports did not change the situation, because of a mixture disbelief and cynical interests.

The book talks about Pilecki’s bravery and his suffering, as well as those of his colleagues. He lost his family and friends. He did his duty and then some. It was unrequited, however. He did manage to escape the camp but could not bring relief to his comrades. He fought in the Warsaw uprising and was captured by the Nazis. This time he was sent to a prisoner of war camp and freed by U.S. troops. He chose to go back to Poland. He had not fought the Nazis just to have the communists take over Poland. Unfortunately, they had. He was arrested, tried in a communist show trial and executed. The communist deleted him and rewrote the history. His story was submerged until after the fall of communism. His journals and writings did not come out until then.

His journal went into detail about the horrors of the Nazis and their casual use of violence. They would execute scores of random Polish citizens for minor infractions. In the camps they made a special effort to target educated and intelligent Poles. Of course, it is well known what they did to Jews. They developed systems that could kill 3500 people in two hours. Of course, they murdered millions.

I was a site officer for the Auschwitz camp five separate times. I recall a pond, full of frogs. It was very fertile because it contained the ashes of hundreds of thousands of victims. Of course, these were the big ones. Sometimes statistics with such large numbers do not convey as much. As Stalin said, the death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is just a statistic.

The book recounts a situation where the SS rounded up some Polish peasants. They killed the adults right away. For some reason (the author doesn’t know) they separated the children. He counted 36 the first night. Some of the older kids figured out they were going to die and started to cry. The slave laborers tried to comfort them, until the SS killed them with injections of phenol to the heart. They next time, they had 80 children. The Polish officer did not observe after that, but likely these were not the last.

We live in interesting times. We are so far from the industrial murder of the Nazis & communists that we confuse the nasty rhetoric of politicians with mass murder. It is useful to relearn the history.