Habits of the Heart

We had an interesting lunch with CCBEU staff.  Among other things, we talked about the culture of responsibility. It is a common complain among Brazilians that people here expect too much from the government and that the government delivers much too little. Everybody mentions the various corruption scandals that seem to surface with monotonous regularity. I was able to give a little favorable perspective. The Brazil I found when I returned after almost twenty-five years was better in almost every way than the one I left in 1988, I told them. Problems remain, of course. But they are not uniquely Brazilian and, IMO, many can be traced to expectations mentioned above.

I mentioned the work of Alexis de Tocqueville. Any American who has seriously studied our history is familiar with Tocqueville, but his fame doesn’t seem to cross our borders. I explained that Tocqueville was a French aristocrat who wrote about democracy in America in the 1830s. We Americans take lots of what he wrote as compliments; he didn’t always mean it that way. In the America that Tocqueville described, hard work, enterprise and money-making are the rule. Americans, he noted, do not defer to elites, as they still did in Europe. This included, to Tocqueville’s distress, not deferring even to those of “superior talent and intelligence.” America was a dynamic, although maybe a rude place. But the America was more exceptional in the amount of local and personal initiative.

In the Old World, citizens petitioned their government to do things for them. After that they waited for it to happen and complained when it wasn’t done right. Tocqueville observed that in America many of these “government” tasks were taken up by individuals in voluntary, often temporary, association. We formed task forces and committees to address local problems, bringing in government as last resort and even then resorting to government at the lowest level possible. In France at the time, power to make decisions about local roads or building codes would migrate to Paris and the choices made there. In America, they were often not made by government at all and when government was necessary, it was usually the local officials who called the shots.

American tradition of working through voluntary associations has persisted to this day. One of our colleagues said that this is what surprised him when he was on an exchange in the U.S. He gave the example of his host family and all the neighbors getting together to do the dirty work, literally shoveling manure, in the barns at the Indiana State Fair. In most other countries, this just doesn’t happen. At best, people might give money to hire somebody to do it.

I pointed out that government in the U.S. has plenty of problems and petty corruption, but one reason why it has historically been more responsive to the people is that we, the people, ask it to do less. Tocqueville warned of a “soft despotism” in democracies, where citizens vote for politicians who promise to give them things. When people have the habit (Tocqueville called them “habits of the heart”) to do things for themselves in voluntary association with their fellow citizens, it preempts the necessity of government intervention and also preempts the creation of a network of petty rules and regulations that are the bane of existence in the more bureaucratic states. Soft despotism is ameliorated if those voting benefits have to pay for them and even more so if they have to work in their creations.

My life in other countries has, IMO, helped me see America in a more objective way and I think there has been a convergence in the last quarter century. People in many other countries have become somewhat more active in doing things in voluntary association rather than waiting or demanding government action.  I am certainly seeing that in Brazil. On the other hand, America has become more bureaucratized. Government has reached into voluntary associations in ways it did not before, establishing rules and standards that seem to make sense but end up crippling the voluntary impulse.

I read about a recent (Thanksgiving) example where the authorities in New Jersey have imposed various regulations on church-run soup kitchens. People can no longer bring food from home to donate and there are stricter rules on facilities and reporting requirements that will cost more than $150,000.00 a year. You can argue that such regulations are good, but they will have two effects. They will take it out of the hands of people and make another activity the responsibility of the government. In short order, costs will rise. The people who used to get satisfaction from carry out their responsibly as good citizens will resent the taxes and the recipients will get less and lower quality food.

Lawyers are also getting involved. People engaged in voluntary activities are now advised to get liability insurance. We are managing to make good citizenship costly and hazardous to your financial future. When you make things harder or more expensive, you get less of them.

America really was exceptional in the number of things we did voluntarily. Authorities are/were not always welcoming. I recall reading a biography of Ben Franklin, who was the godfather of many good citizenship practices. The local representatives of the king did not always welcome his self-help plans. They considered them subversive and they were right. When people can do things for themselves they become less dependent on the beneficence and largess of the state.

I am glad to see that people in many places around the world are seeing the benefit of acting outside both governmental and the strictly private spheres. People working together in voluntary association is the essence of community. We don’t make friends face-to-face; we make them shoulder-to-shoulder working on common goals. I think it is healthy that they are becoming more like us, even if that means American is less “exceptional”. But I am not healthy that we are becoming less like we were.

Ideas

I am home today for a Brazilian holiday. If it stops raining, I will go run.  In the meantime I am thinking about how ideas get developed.

Simply having good ideas is easy.  Developing them into integrating them into meaningful systems is hard and making them operationally useful is even harder than that.  And then there is the problem of communicating to others.  Idea creators are rarely the ones who can make them work.  Of course, everything takes time and there are lots of distractions along the way.  

We have a marketplace of ideas.  I understand that term is a little cliché, but I think it fits.  But I think we need to think of the marketplace is broader terms and include the element of time.  In the short term, both products and ideas compete in something almost like a zero sum game.  I buy more Coke and less Pepsi. But the longer term is much more dynamic.  New products are introduced; old ones change. Some products disappear, but something very much like them fills their market niche and you could see how the new one is related to the old one.  In the long run, it is very much NOT a zero sum game.  It is a vast interaction with everything and everyone reacting and changing to the others.  Products in markets tend to improve over time, or at least they better serve current needs and the best markets have lots of diverse participants.   

Like products in a dynamic market, ideas do not merely compete. Instead they develop and change in response to conditions and each other. Unlike physical products, ideas can merge in create whole new combinations. Historians of ideas like to trace the ancestry.  They make categories to differentiate the “species”. Sometimes trace the way back to ancient Greece or Ancient China; the more PC include supposed contributions by pre-literate cultures.  The lineages make sense and they are compelling, but they are wrong if taken too literally.  The historian not only tells the story, but also creates it.  In fact, the lives of ideas are much more chaotic than any story can capture, since everybody has a different hybrid of even the simplest concept.  

I understand that there is no such thing as linear causality in any even reasonably complex in system.  Everything is subject to complex feedback loops with the cause affected by the effect.  It rarely makes any practical sense to trace an idea to its origin.  At best it is like tracing a river to its source.  They say, for example, that Lake Itasca in Minnesota is the source of the Mississippi, but only a few drops of water that reach the Gulf of Mexico actually came from Lake Itasca and w/o water from additional sources, the river would never make it even as far as Bemidji.  Ideas are like that.  Even the best idea cannot get past Bemidji unless they are carried along by others.

So John Maynard Keynes was correct in principle when he wrote that “Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist,”   but he was exhibiting more than a bit of intellectual arrogance when he assumed that the “practical men” are simply vessels for the ideas or that the ideas came down to them in a clear line; he also overestimated the role of individual ideas and thinkers.  

We are used to thinking of ideas as coming from one wise person (or maybe a wise guy). Whole branches of ideology traced back to a single individual sometimes even named after them. We have Platonism, Marxism or Confucianism.  But how much are they really the product of their eponymous creator?   Not really very much.  How can we know? Think about how many varieties there are of any long-established “ism” and how they change over time.  Plato has been dead for more than two millennia. Presumably he is no longer editing his work, so they changes in interpretation cannot be his.  

Good philosophies are group projects, produced by interactions among individuals often over time, sometimes generations.  This allows the accumulated wisdom of people from different places and times to be put into the balance.   They evolve.  And the best do it while accomplishing the ostensibly contradictory task of maintaining and changing traditions.

Nothing new here, I guess. Just some thoughts on a rainy morning.

Lost Like Tears in the Rain

Foreign Service Officers get to experience more transitions than most people.  We go to different countries, do different things, speak different languages and in some ways even have different personas.  It is no surprise that some people refer to them as “incarnations.”  Each transformation seems more comprehensive or more important than the others, but from the longer perspective they don’t seem as discontinuous.  

I am in the cleaning up and throwing away stage of this transition. It is a slow process because many things cause pause and stimulate introspection. Today I dug out a bunch of green pocket-notebooks, where I had taken notes and recorded impressions from my first weeks in Iraq until now. What should I do with them? Do I throw them out or save them? I have too much stuff, have written too many words.  I feel the compulsion to write “history” but even I am unlikely ever to read it with any meaning.

The ephemeral nature of life is weighing on me just now. My history and observations are ephemeral.  My blogging gives me the illusion of eminence. I read that there are more blogs than there are people in the earth.  Most are not active, but that gives an idea of the scope.  One more disappears like tears in the rain.  So why write? Because this is one of the things I do. 

This is not a useless “because it is there” rationalization. I believe you have to go through the motions and duties of life.  The meaning lies in the activity itself as much as, maybe more than, the putative effects. The accomplishment of our activities is what creates joy and fulfillment. I have always written journals. Now some of that goes to the blog.  What it has accomplished in the great scheme of things I don’t know.  But it made me a better and more joyful person. My question in almost all parts of life is “So, what do I do?” You can often know what to do before you can understand the reasons and sometimes if you do the right things, the reasons follow.

I have never been very religious, but I believe in transcendent truth. There are many ways to truth. Religion is a road for some people. I love the idea of Jesus. I have read the Bible and still do. I know the words to the old hymns and they inspire me. These are good to help find the way to truth & right action, but religion is not the road I can travel.  I cannot base my faith on words, no matter how beautiful, true or good. I usually know what to do, even when the explanations are difficult.

Mysterious experiences are not part of my daily thoughts, but I have a big one. Some people think I am nuts when I tell the story, but I will tell it anyway with the caveat that my words cannot describe the feeling. My father’s death affected me profoundly and grieved until I had a strange dream. In my dream I glimpsed a transcendent reality, an eternal now.  Everybody, yesterday, today and tomorrow was there and I knew them all. I cannot explain much better, but even after more than ten years this feeling lingers and comforts me.

My title comes from an old science fiction movie called “Blade Runner”. A character, who had been a ruthless villain is about to die.  He recalls his unique & fantastic experiences and laments that all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.  It is all accompanied by the evocative music of Vangelis.  Watch the scene at the link above. You could interpret it as a lamentation on the futility of life.  I do not. I always found the scene vaguely uplifting. My dream gave me an answer to the words at least.  Are tears in the rain lost? They are certainly small in comparison to the mass of rain water, but are they truly insignificant?  Aren’t they really just returning to their “home” or did they ever really leave? Didn’t they always remain part? All the water in the world is always part of the water system. I am content with my own answers to the questions themselves and to the wider ones they imply. And I know what to do.  

Life is changing for me again. I have been doing this part long enough and it is time to do something else. Brazil will be a new adventure with new ideas. It will change but stay the same. I look for meaning in the paradox.

The picture up top has nothing to do with the posting. It is my last left from my tree farm visit. It shows the truck up near the first wildlife plot. Alex has the truck now. Maybe he will let me use it when I need it. 

The Great Ronald Reagan & Me

Ronald Reagan would have been 100 years old on February 6. As the partisan passions fade, everybody is starting to recognize the greatness of the man. President Obama recently read a Reagan biography for inspiration and wrote an article in USA Today praising him.  

Any president who leads a big change will provoke dislike on the part of his opponents and I recall the rabid hatred among some of them in the 1980s. They can be forgiven some of their faults. Reagan was a very insightful & intelligent man and a hard worker. We know that now from reading his journals and from other sources coming out about him. But he evidently liked to hide these things. Maybe he was modest or maybe it was a strategy.  

Ronald Reagan used to say that you can accomplish almost anything as long as you don’t care who gets the credit. The easygoing persona that he projected allowed lots of people to feel they deserved credit. It also allowed people to give him things he wanted w/o appearing to give in. Reagan didn’t score points off the failures of others, but his affable personality also led opponents to underestimate him. They thought many of his accomplishments were just dumb luck. In my experience, someone who is consistently “lucky” has something special going on. Only a man truly confident in himself can behave as Reagan did. That is one reason he was such a unique leader.

I voted for Reagan in 1980 & 1984. It was a little hard for me to do in 1980. I had voted for Carter in my first election in 1976 and I was living in Madison, Wisconsin, in one of the nation’s most liberal enclaves. When I would say anything good about Reagan, or even when I didn’t join in the criticism of him, my colleagues would make fun of me. There is considerable social pressure in a liberal university setting to “rebel” within acceptable margins. I was finishing my MA in history and looking forward to going on to my PhD. As I recall, most of my colleagues considered Jimmy Carter too conservative and Reagan was clean off the map. The popular candidate around my part of town was a guy called Barry Commoner. Commoner was a bit of a nut, but he said the right things about the environment and was sufficiently obscure to get the “intelligent” student vote. 

Anyway, it came as a surprise to me too that Reagan made sense to me. Up until that time, I just assumed that I was a type of liberal, which was the local default option. I think that my vote for Reagan actually had significant effect on my life. Of course, not the vote itself, but the cognitive dissonance it provoked.  I have never been good at keeping secrets and so I talked about it with my friends. They treated me like someone who had been in the sun too long and tried to explain why I was just being foolish.

As I listened to their arguments and defended myself, I came to understand that I really did not hold the same sorts of views as they did. I started to read more widely and came to lots of different conclusions. One of the very practical changes I made was in my course of study. I began to perceive myself as a bit of an outsider in my history-sociology circles. I still loved history, but I became more interested in practical things like business (IMO a kind of applied history) and decided to get an MBA. This was greeted with some distress by my friends. One well-meaning guy carefully explained to me that an MBA was a kind of “trade school” degree and it was not the kind of thing somebody like me should do. For me, at least, the MBA was a lot more of an intellectual challenge than my MA, but maybe that was just me.

You follow well-worn paths for maybe 95% of your life. This is something you have to do, since nobody could abide the chaos of constant uncertain change. There are a small number of inflection points, however. These are usually little things. You may be almost unaware of them at the time, but over time they take you off the old path and put you on a new one. The little half turn doesn’t seem like much, but there can be substantial divergence a few miles down the path as the one change leads to another. 

Somebody once told me that there are only around 5-7 inflection points in any life and if you think about it, you can probably identify them. They are rarely the big, shocking events we think of. The road to Damascus type conversions are the ones we mark, but they may actually be the culmination of a long process of change, not the beginning.  By the time you make the public announcement, or even know it yourself, it may have been stewing for a long time.

Looking back, my decision in 1980 to vote for Ronald Reagan was one of those little decisions that changed the way I thought of myself and ended up changing lots of other things too. So like all Americans, I can thank Ronald Reagan for what he did for the country, but I also have a personal reason to be happy that he came along.

Groundhog Day

“Groundhog Day” is one of my favorite movies.  I was watching it this morning, dubbed into Portuguese with Portuguese subtitles, so I could assuage my guilt for not studying enough.

I like it for several reasons.  One is unrelated to the movie itself.  The movie was on cable at the Condo where we stayed when we took the kids to the theme parks in Orlando back in 1994. It seemed to be on over and over, so I recall it being on the whole time.  It was a good time.  The kids were excited about Disneyland etc.  The weather was perfect that October when we went and our sense of relief was accentuated because we were coming from Krakow, where the weather was turning bad and – more significantly – the air pollution in those days was horrendous.  So I remember being in a clean, green place with Chrissy and the kids having a good time.  Everything associated with that basks in the glory of that moment, including “Groundhog Day”.  But there must have been other things on too that I don’t recall.  “Groundhog Day” had other things going for it.

The setting is comforting.  The movie is set in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, but it was filmed somewhere in Illinois, so it has a thoroughly Middle American feel. Of course, I have never actually seen a small-medium sized city that is as lively or has so many diverse things to do, but it is nice to imagine.

If you have not seen the movie, you should. A brief summary is that a weather man comes to Punxsutawney for the annual groundhog festival, but each day he wakes up to the same day. It repeats, over and over. They never say how long this happens, but it is a long time, maybe thousands of years’ worth of February 2. The main character, Phil Connors played by Bill Murray, goes through predicable stages. At first he is confused; after that he takes advantage of life with no consequences; then he gets depressed and kills himself many times in many ways, but each day he wakes up in the same place. Finally he decides to live in the moment. He improves himself by reading and learns to play the piano.  He also improves the lives of the people around him w/o any expectation of personal gain.  He does these things essentially because they are the right things to do at the time when he does them.  Finally, after living the perfect day, he progresses to the next day and that is the end.

The movie raises lots of philosophical questions, but it does it in a stealthy almost unconscious way, which makes it such a unique film. I suppose you could watch the whole thing just for the fun of it w/o getting any deeper than the funny lines and situations.  But I think it would be hard not to think about it, if you were at all paying attention. Most of us have thought about how we might do things differently if we could do things over again, if we had a second chance. This takes us a little beyond that. What should be your ethics in a world where there are no permanent consequences to your actions? I think that the film leads to the conclusion that there ARE permanent consequences, even if external conditions don’t change, because the consequences are contained in the person, who chooses, or not, to do the right thing. The movie is a story of personal development, of redemption.

Phil starts out a selfish a-hole, who after many renditions of the same day develops into a man balanced and at peace with himself. It is not the he just becomes unselfish and helpful to others. More profoundly, he becomes selfless in the true sense of the term. He merges himself with the people, things and the place around him.  He becomes his task no matter what it is, he becomes what he does and loses himself in it. He no longer works on being good, no longer thinks about doing the right thing, he just does it because it has become what he is.

I suppose I am reading way too much into a Bill Murray movie. But I have read many books of wisdom: the Zen of this, the Tao of that or meaning of everything. I am not saying that watching the movie is the one-big-thing.  There is no one-big-thing; however, if someone asked me about the great spiritual sources, I would include this movie. Like all works of philosophy, it should be watched, considered and discussed over time. The book – or in this case the movie – doesn’t change but your different experiences make it different each time. That is why it is impossible to understand any philosophy at the first sitting.  It takes a while to sink in, maybe years with differing conditions.

Lately I have been giving a more philosophical career advice. I tell the young people who ask me that they should strive to become the person they want to be, become the person who deserves success rather than strive for success itself. Success can be limited. Only a few people can be the bosses, champions or among the best at anything.  But everybody can aspire to become what they think is a good person. Reasonable success will almost assuredly follow anyway, but no matter what, you will have something of value when you are finished.  

The picture up top I took of the TV with “Groundhog Day” playing. The other pictures I took when I was wandering around getting the car serviced.  You can see Fairfax Honda and the Borders Book where I got the Hadrian book I wrote about yesterday. The last one shows the respect that pedestrians get around there. I was clearly in the middle of a car-preferred zone.  It is no place for old men, since you have to make a run for it when you want to cross the road.

Be Happy

The Danes are the happiest people in the world. The U.S. is up near Denmark, while poor little Togo is both the unhappiest place on earth and the among the poorest, if you believe measurements of those things. China & India fall in the lower middle of both. They have some growing to do before they reach that land of sweet contentment where hardships don’t prevail.

I am happy until I ask why. Then I am just perplexed. Maybe that is because identifying the components of happiness is hard and they are often ethereal. When we look at them closely, they may disappear or seem insignificant. What made me really happy on Saturday, for example, was sitting in front of a south facing wall, after my run, soaking up the warm sun on a cool day. What goes into that, however, is having energy and time to run and to doze in the sun after. It is also the earned freedom to rest after even a small accomplishment. It would not be the same if I just went out and sat in the sun.

Enough money is clearly a component in happiness, since it gives you options and helps avoid hardships. I recall the old hippie saying, “Life is a shit sandwich; the more bread you have, the less shit you have to eat.”

Some people are naturally happier than others. But almost everybody can be made less happy by circumstances, some of which can be avoided by having money. Nevertheless, it remains a sort of statistical process. A rich person has better odds, but a poor person may come out better off with better luck and wise people may be able to maintain their equanimity despite the vicissitudes of capricious fortune. We all die pretty soon no matter what, which evens out all the material possessions, so it is probably not a great idea to get too wound up in the acquisition of stuff – or the lack thereof – anyway. Sic transit gloria mundi.

This interdependence of wisdom, wealth and luck is more or less what Solon explained to Croesus. Read the story at this link. (BTW – the Greeks thought of almost everything we care about in philosophy. This shows us that our problems are nothing new and ensures that you can always quote one of them if you want to be erudite.) A quick summary is that Solon was known as a wise man. He was asked to make reforms in Athens, which was going through challenges a lot worse than we are facing in America today. They had their own sort of globalization (or at least Mediterraneanization) going on and when you said you were a debt slave back then it was literally true. Solon did his duty and after he was done he wisely got out of town before the glow of the people’s gratitude and enthusiasm wore off. During his travels, he met Croesus, the King of Lydia & the richest man in the world. Croesus asked Solon who was the happiest man in the world, expecting that Solon would pick him. (The ancient Greeks rarely made a strong distinction between happy and rich, often using the same word for each w/o distinction.) To his surprise, Solon named others. Croesus thought Solon was nuts, but in the end it turned out Solon was right.

Solon & Croesus

Read the link above if you want the rest of the story and if you are apt to complain about not being happy, cut it out. If you cannot actually be happy, pretend to be happy. Acting happy is sometimes enough to actually make you happy. But even if that doesn’t work, at least you won’t be bothering other people.

Transitions (Sic Transit Gloria Mundi)

You don’t think of yourself getting older. But you do. At the cafeteria today, an acquaintance was talking to the checkout woman about coffee. He told her that he could remember when coffee was a quarter. Then he looked up, noticed me and said, “And that guy can remember when it was a nickel.” Actually, I can’t, although maybe it is just because I didn’t drink coffee.  But the young checkout clerk seemed to accept it w/o serious doubt. She looked at me and asked, “Really, you used to be able to buy coffee for a nickel?”  I suppose it is better to be talked about than not talked about. I just mumbled “yep” and let it go at that. This is my last day here, so I don’t need to maintain my credibility.

I am done and the day is not even over yet. I turned in my Blackberry, did the final checkouts, said my last goodbyes and reduced the size of my email box (according to IT, the most important thing). Nothing remains but to slip out the side door. Transferring within the Washington Metro area is not very hard. I look forward to the adventure of language at FSI and then to Brazil, but it is always sad to leave.

Of course, I will miss the big things like the people I work with and the job. But I am past that now. Now I am thinking about some small, prosaic things that have contributed to quality of life.  For example, the shower/locker room downstairs is what really made bike communing possible.  It was very refreshing after a hot ride.  It also made lunchtime running a realistic option.   It is really important to integrate exercise into the day, because you will usually be too tired, busy or have some other excuse for avoiding workouts in the evenings and weekends.   A valid excuse is weather and darkness.  In the winter you can run during the middle of the day, when it is often sunny and reasonably warm even many days in January. By evening it is dark and cold.

Another pragmatic benefit was Gold’s Gym, although when we moved to our new building that became less useful.  But when we were in our old building, Gold’s Gym sat between my office and the Metro.  There was never any excuse not to work out.  In fact, I felt compelled to go in, even if I was “tired from a long day.” I have been lifting weights fairly regularly since I was fifteen, which is now forty years, but over the past six years (except for my Iraq time) I lifted MORE regularly because it was just more convenient.  FSI has a gym, although I haven’t looked closely at it.  It probably will not be as good. Gold’s Gym doesn’t have the really fancy equipment, but it is a place more attractive to people who really want to work out, as opposed to the dilettantes who just want to be seen looking good.

Well, one door closes and another opens. I am sure I will find plenty to like in my new incarnation.  I am eager to get to the kinds of work I do well and the intellectual challenge of the language and area studies is attractive.  

Time passes slowly but before you notice it has lurched forward and the future has become the past. The many days of doing routine things and seeing the same places seem to merge.

It is funny how things end. That is why it is more important to have goals re what  the type of person you aspire to become, rather than attaining particular jobs or positions. The day after you leave your job, no matter how exalted, is the day you are a former-whatever it was you were. You cannot take the nice office with you and the fancy title is meaningless once it is done. But you always take yourself along wherever you go, so it is a good idea to get to like what you are and to work not so much to win respect as to be worthy of your own respect and that of others, not matter what position you currently hold, or not  Sic transit gloria mundi.

The pictures show the Lincoln Memorial at dusk.  Next is the Capitol with the preparations for the John Stewart/Stephen Colbert show.  Last is the Commerce Department from the Mall. 

Imagined Muscular Morality

Yesterday I watched an episode of “Law & Order –Criminal Intent” that featured a murderer obsessed with proving that people were not moral.  He captured loving couples and forced them into situations where one killed the other to save his/her own life.  Today I read about criticisms of “To Kill a Mockingbird.”  Evidently modern activists feel Atticus was not sufficiently outraged by the racism around him.   As different as these seem to be, they are both based on pernicious and self-indulgent interpretation of human morality, an interpretation that is superficially perceptive and intelligent, but is in fact just sophomoric.

I understand that my own interpretation will sound shallow compared with the deep thinking that some of the chattering classes do about historical transgressions like racism or the Holocaust, but I think it has the advantage of being more useful.   It has to do with capacities, and sometimes going beyond what we can expect of ourselves and other humans.

There are two types of judgments that are worthless: standards that are so high that nobody can pass and standards so low that everybody can.  Both, unfortunately, are attractive because we can alternatively claim to have high standards or to be inclusive. I was on the swim team in HS, but I cannot swim as fast as Olympic champion Michael Phelps. But there are two sorts of swimming contests where I am his equal.   If the test is simply the ability to swim 100 yards w/o any reference to the time involved in getting there, both of us can do it. If the test is to swim across Lake Michigan, neither of us can make it.   It sounds silly when I put it in these terms, but that is what we constantly do in our moral judgments of others, especially when we are thinking historically.

If you prove that Michael Phelps cannot swim across Lake Michigan, have you proven that he is a poor swimmer?  Of course not.   What if you put a person into an impossible moral situation?  You might conclude that this person is morally lacking, and you would be wrong.  You might conclude that all humans were morally lacking and you would be right by the standard you set up, but it is a stupid standard.   If nobody can succeed, the test is useless.  Why do people insist on postulating such things?  I think it is because it makes them feel better about their own personal moral shortcomings.  

Just as a reasonable person – even a great swimmer – would avoid jumping off the car-ferry in the middle of Lake Michigan because he knows that he cannot swim forty miles to the other side, so a moral person avoids situations where he will be pushed beyond his breaking point.   This is the moral thing to do.  You need to anticipate challenges and take steps in advance to address them.  In my experience, people who constantly get in trouble are not always worse at resisting temptation, but they are very clumsy about falling into situations where they cannot.   Taken to a higher level, a good society is one that permits and facilitates moral choices.  One of the biggest crimes committed in un-free societies is that they corrupt good people by making it very difficult for to make moral choices, or even recognize that there is a moral choice to be made.   As they are threatened or enticed into poor moral choices, they slip farther down the slope.

I am not arguing for moral relativism when I say that we have to judge people’s choices in the context of their situations.   There are standards we should uphold, but we have to recognize that when you are sitting in a comfortable chair in the safety of your home it is easier to postulate that you would make the right choice than if the Gestapo was asking you whether or not you saw someone hiding in a shed.   

There is also the element of knowledge and experience.  I know that I have become more interested in acting ethically as I have become older.  I don’t think it is merely age.   As I experienced more and learned more, my feeling of responsibility has grown.   Some of us like to idealize children as innocents who instinctually know right from wrong.   This is not true.  It is just that we cut them a lot of slack and we don’t expect them to make the really hard choices.  IMO, true ethics requires learning and introspection.  In a similar vein, I am not a big believer in the noble savage ideal.  I think Roseau was full of shit and besides his occasionally stirring phrases; he was harmful to the ethical development of humanity.

When Confidence outruns Competence (or a Man’s Gotta Know His Limitations)

There are times when my confidence outruns my competence. I cannot easily detect those instances beforehand, since blindness to the problem is essentially included in the definition. But years of painful experience have taught me how to recognize the general conditions, sort of the weather of error.

With all due modesty, I have a gift for quickly assimilating information and expressing it well to others.  With all due concern, this is a dangerous gift when not properly managed. There are two big pitfalls. The first is that it tempts the possessor not to prepare sufficiently for engagements. If you can “wing it” there is strong temptation to do just that. This is a clearly defined fault and while it is easier identified than address, it is simple (although not always easy) to manage by larding in “extra” time and care. The second pitfall is harder is more of a stealthy problem.   It is too easy to extrapolate from what you know into things that seem to make logic sense but are not really supported by the data.

The reason the extrapolation trap is so dangerous is that you MUST go to places where you may fall in, since you must make decisions and draw conclusions based on incomplete or contradictory information.   It is embedded in the very nature of decision making. If all the facts are clear and known, you don’t need to make a decision; you can just use a formula. So you have to extrapolate and there is danger in jumping too far as well as not jumping far enough.

The two bits of folk wisdom don’t always work together.  You need to look before you leap (i.e. hesitate), but you cannot jump a chasm in two hops (i.e. be bold).

If you are waiting for a solution, I will disappoint you. IMO, it is a problem that can be managed but never solved. Two things have made me think about it a little more recently.  

The first is my investments. I studied stocks ten years ago and got reasonably good at investing in my small way.  Of course, it was easy to seem smart back then when things in general we headed up, but I did better than the averages.  But I don’t really pay attention any more.   One reason is that with the kids in college and forest land to pay for, I don’t have much money to invest, but the bigger reason is that I am just not interested.  When I was moving some money in the kid’s college fund, I just realized that I should not buy any individual stocks.   I just don’t know enough about it.   So I am defaulting into index funds. That will guarantee that I will not make big money, but it will also protect against catastrophic loss. That might seem like a no brainer, but it hurt my self-concept to realize that I just don’t know enough anymore and I probably will never again learn enough to go back in.   So in this case, I take refuge in mediocrity … and forestry, which is slow but steady investment. A man has gotta know his limitations.

The second problem is more serious because mediocrity is not an option. I am talking about my job. Over the years, I have studied  the components of my work, such as negotiations, leadership and communications, and tried to integrate them into a continually improving and developing performance.  Of course, I produced some failures as well as successes, but on balance I made significant forward progress. As you can see from some of my blog entries, I have tried to stay in the forefront of applying new technologies of communication to public diplomacy. But I have recently had some serious doubts about my continued prowess.

I think we can learn lessons from the past and I reach back for analogies and lessons all the way to the dawn of history.  That is why I think it is good and useful to study and think about things like the grand strategy of the Byzantine Empire, among other things.   My trust in these things is based on the implicit assumption that fundamental human relations are constant, so there is something to be learned by looking at how things worked in a variety of places, times and circumstances. Not everybody agrees. My extrapolation comes from believing that things that Thucydides wrote 2500 years ago apply to our modern age communications, albeit with greatly accelerated connections.  What if this is not true?

The new media is creating a kind of global consciousness that may be a discontinuous break with the past, a “novus ordo seclorum” to steal the fancy phrase (I am still the historian and I have a dollar bill).  Discontinuous change invalidates previous experience.

I have helped design an FSI course on the social media and it has a lot of aspects of my personality are fixed in the structure and this goes beyond the fact that I am personally giving the keynote and handling one of the big “learning organization” modules.  Although it is about the NEW social media, the premise I embedded is that social media is more an anthropology or human relations question than a matter of technology. To me the actual technologies are superfluous.   I realize that this is the thinking and design or a classic historian. Not everybody would be so dismissive of the latest and greatest techno-wiz (BTW – I use the word wiz in both its slang versions) and I fear that it might be me who is out of line.

I recognize the weather of error, but it doesn’t tell me what to do.  It could be that my anthropology paradigm is a good one, or it could just be all wet.   I will do a couple of interactive talks at the new FSI social media seminar next week.  Maybe that will give me better insight.

Running in Circles

I don’t think that life runs in circles, but we kind of follow trials, maybe more like a bloodhound following scents.   The scents can be stronger or weaker.  Sometimes they are washed away completely, but more often it only seems that way.   Naturally the course of your career is often determined by your core competencies and talents.   You tend to circle around the places where you have expertise.   That is why it is so important to start along a path with lots of options, since you may be travelling that way a long time.

The natural circle

Forestry was probably my biggest circle. I have always loved nature and studied forestry in college, but abandoned it as impractical.  I believed that was the end of it, but I didn’t know myself as well as I thought.   While my conscious mind was not paying attention, under the surface I was always paying attention to the opportunities and – in the Chicago term – when I saw my chances, I took them.   I became a forest owner.   People wondered not only why I wanted to do that, but also how I knew what to do.  I just did.  I had learned to identify forest types and assess forest land, not in the professional sense but enough to know what I was buying because that program had been running in background for thirty years.

Bookending Brazil

Now I may well be bookending my career with Brazil.   Brazil was my first post and Portuguese was the first language the FS taught me.  That was a long time ago, a quarter century ago.  Besides my sojourn in Iraq, I spent the rest of my career in Europe.  But I wasn’t so completely out of it.  In 2000, I went to the EU Summit in Lisbon.  Their Portuguese is very different from the Brazilian variety and for a couple days I couldn’t say anything.  But then it came back, mostly.  A couple years ago, FSI offered an online Portuguese reading course.   I had no reason to take it, but I did.

I went down to Sao Paulo and the State of Parana in May of this year.   Brazil surprised me.  I guess I should have known that it would change in twenty-five years, but it had changed a lot.   The country of the future was finally catching up with its vast potential.  So when they advertised for the PAO in Brazil, I applied for the job.   Yesterday I got it.

Foreign language is hard and you tend to think you sound better than you do

It is well in the future.  The job doesn’t start until summer of 2011.   I will finish the job here in IIP next summer, so I will have to find something for a couple months before I start the area training and language again.   I want to get my Portuguese as nearly perfect as I can and that takes effort and training.   I was easily fluent in the language when I lived in Porto Alegre, but I know that at my best I sounded like the equivalent of Sergeant Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes.   I want to move up to the Louis Jordan or Ricardo Montalban level.  

FSI has language proficiency levels.  IMO – the 1 level is like those Japanese fighter pilots on old movies,  You can say just enough to make a few exclamations.  When you approach the 2 level, you can ask where directions to the bathroom or the train station, but you might not understand the answer well enough to find it.  The 3 is Sargeant Shultz.  People understand you, but it is often comical. You have to get at least 4 to approach Louis Jordan or Ricardo Montalban, but they are probably closer to 5.

Once more around the track

So it looks like I will be doing another lap around another circle.  Brazil is a very good post.  The PAO seemed like a real big deal when I was looking at it from the junior officer perspective.   Now, maybe not so much, but it will be a good and rewarding work.  It has a big budget and a lot to do.  This time I will be able to see the country and appreciate it more.  Last time we were so poor that we couldn’t afford to go anywhere unless the government sent us.  We were paying off student loans, car loans and then the expenses of the kid.  Mariza was born in Brazil.   We should be on easy street this time. The verse from TS Eliot seems appropriate.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.