Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara will be best known by those whose who participated in the Vietnam War as the intellectual architect of a conflict whose beginnings are still murky and whose endings provides us with endless metaphors, and lessons, for today. What did McNamara fundamentally believe he got wrong? Nothing more, he wrote in 1995, than a misunderstanding about what America's history and traditions implied for the course of Vietnam. He had plenty of time to think about this concept, and yet he still didn't get it right. For people in Washington, McNamara's folly was an institutional folly: the belief that one smart person with a vision can see what thousands of others with experience cannot. The fog of war, the irrationality of human nature, the limits of formal chains of command, the limits of reason itself, and a fundamental conflation of decision-making and administration. John Ralston Saul, in Volatire's Bastards, makes McNamara a central character in his tale of Western governments came to rely on a cult of credentialed, jargon-y experts to make decisions that were better left to politicians. This is not a conservative critique of the elite, per se: it's merely a meditation on the limits of what humans can do, and know, and why it is dangerous to leave major decisions in the hands of people who think they can know. We've see a version of this fallacy play out among the central actors in our economic crisis: CEOs and experts, quants and traders, who created an orderly world from something fundamentally, almost irreducibly complex.
We live in an era where another band of credentialed experts promise answers to many profoundly complex questions. There may well be an element of humility in Barack Obama that his intellectual predecessors lacked -- Obama has shown a capacity to change his mind, quickly, and to surround himself with people who have made mistakes in public life (and thus acquired some humility of their own). Some elements are there: the creation of layers of czars and administratively-empowered specialists; the privileging of evidence-based decision making. Some are not: Obama seems to believe in the power of democratic institutions and the acculturation effect of permitting and an encouraging public debate about contentious issues. His deference to Congress -- and to his commanders -- probably stems from his understanding of balance of power issues and not necessarily because he agrees with the thesis that rationalism isn't all its cracked up to be.
Good post.
May I add that the McNamara story may have some forward application if some of the developing patterns are indicators.
Has "the privileging of evidence-based decision making" really become something with ambiguous value, and so rare that it's a point of comparison?
In a word: Yup. Remember, we've just come out of 8 dark years in which:
1) Global warming science was disputed -- and sometimes completely silenced, like NASA's photos of disappearing ice packs -- for political purposes.
2) Our nation got pushed further toward voodoo "supply-side" economics, with its inherent statements of faith like "The Market has wisdom" and "People will let free money trickle down to those lower on the totem pole." That this is Mammon worship never seems to cross anyone's minds.
3) Our government lied itself into a war of choice with Iraq, and the Right still won't admit that our pre-Iraq intel was very, very good -- they just ignored it because it didn't say what they wanted.
4) A significant percentage of Americans have been led to believe things that are demonstrably untrue, like "Obama is weak/is a Muslim/isn't a real American/isn't a citizen/got caught smuggling terrorists into America."
5) We were just ruled by a man who believed he could trust Vladimir Putin because he'd "looked him in the eye", who decided with his gut rather than his brains, and it led him to beliefs like "The Iraqis will shower us with flowers for ousting Saddam" and "We don't need a strategy to deal with what happens after we take control of Iraq."
So, yeah, given that one of our two functional political parties puts such a premium on faith-based governance and just spent 8 years ruling us accordingly, actual reality-based policies seem pretty refreshing (if not outright astonishing) these days.
And don't get me started on the lies of the torture-friendly right:
1) America does not torture.
2) Oh, we only tortured a couple of people.
3) Waterboarding, walling and hypothermia aren't torture.
4) We only tortured to save lives.
5) Torturing people saved American lives.
6) Torture provided us with valuable intelligence.
Of course, none of these turned out to be true, now did they?
Our best field generals were never our best politicians, and vice-versa.
This statement is remarkably short-sighted and erroneous. If it were true, one would be forced to wonder how Generals Washington, Jackson, and Eisenhower manage to be routinely named among the ten greatest Presidents in American history. General George Marshall, though never President, wasn't a slouch in either capacity, and General Sam Houston had a distinguished, and prescient, political career (President of Texas, US Senator, Governor of Texas) following his defeat of Santa Anna.
Sam Houston was not a great general. Jackson was not a great President. George Marshall not only was not President, but he also never held elected office. Presidents Washington and Eisenhower are exceptions, not the rule.
This piece had a surprisingly large number of grammatical errors.
Otherwise, an interesting argument.
There once were three tablets of commandments, but Moses broke the third over the head of a pedant who questioned the grammar of "Worship not the shiny words but the message within."
The number of grammatical errors, misspelled words, and punctuation errors in this article are definitely not minutiae in the presentation of knowledge. The quantity and quality of errors in this article are such that the meaning of the whole article is misplaced or lost. The presentation appears like it was written by a novice using English for the first time. It puts The Atlantic in a poor light.
Some examples that I noticed are:
In the first line: “known by those whose who participated” just a slight typing error, which is correct: whose or who
In the sentence : John Ralston Saul, in Volatire's Bastards, makes McNamara a central character in his tale of Western governments came to rely on a cult of credentialed, jargon-y experts to make decisions that were better left to politicians. Volatire’s is a simple transposition of ‘a’ and ‘t’ and not a spelling error. But then who does the past tense came refer to; is it McNamara or Saul, or could it be that who was left out. Then the word jargon-y is in Merriam-Webster as jargony and is listed as an adjective but the word jargon-y is not shown.
In the last sentence of the first paragraph: We've see a version – clearly the “n” in seen was left out.
In the third sentence of the second paragraph: Some elements are there: the creation of layers of czars and administratively-empowered specialists; the privileging of evidence-based decision making. Evidence-based is certainly correct use of a hyphen, but this is the first time I have seen a hyphen used between administratively and empowered. Well, I grant you that this last incorrect use of a hyphen is nit-picking. This is also the first time I can remember seeing a colon and a semicolon used in the same sentence to separate independent clauses.
Blogs apparently, written in haste and without editorial oversight, are not meant to be paragons of spelling, syntax or punctuation, but it sometimes helps to use words correctly. "Fortuitous" is not synonymous with fortunate. Rather, it means by chance. Robert Gates' selection as Defense Secretary may or may not have been fortunate, but it certainly was not fortuitous.
In an earlier blog, Mr. Ambinder uses the word "preventative", a word which exists only through ignorance (or perhaps out of the widespread desire to sound more learned by adding extra syllables). Its correct form is "preventive".
All this carping notwithstanding, Mr. Ambinder's article gets to the heart of a serious political and philosophical problem in the modern world that probbly finds its origins in the 18th century. This is the misplaced faith in rationalism and human rational behavior. And when humans disappoint, as they inevitably must, in come the "brilliant", "the best and the brightest" to impose their rational ways on us, to plan for us, and ultimately to subjugate us.