Learning Resilience in the Age of Turbulence

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Recently a chorus of voices from various backgrounds have been pointing to the patterns found in nature as holding the keys to the future security and ultimately survival of an increasingly fragile globalized world.

The argument goes something like this: globalization has exponentially increased the complexity of modern civilization and eliminated many of its redundancies (inefficiencies?) based on the pursuit of specialization and comparative advantage.  While many praise, and duly so, the various benefits of globalization, few understand or acknowledge the fragile state it has created in its campaign for greater efficiency.

The stripping away of redundancies and growing interconnectedness of nations and markets now makes a “butterfly in Brazil” scenario more likely as the global system has become much more sensitive to change and less robust.  To secure ourselves from future doomsday scenarios we should model nature and trade back some of our efficiency for increased redundancy and robustness.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb has been hammering on this theme for years now, adding a new updated section to “The Black Swan” on Robustness and Fragility,

First, Mother Nature likes redundancies, three different types of redundancies.  The first, the simplest to understand, is defensive redundancy, the insurance type of redundancy that allows you to survive under adversity, thanks to the availability of spare parts.  Look at the human body.  We have two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys, even two brains (with the possible exception of corporate executives)—and each has more capacity than needed in ordinary circumstances.  So redundancy equals insurance, and the apparent inefficiencies are associated with the costs of maintaining these spare parts and the energy needed to keep them around in spite of their idleness.

The exact opposite of redundancy is naïve optimization.  I tell everyone to avoid attending (orthodox) economics classes and say that economics will fail us and blow us up (and, as we will see, we have proofs that it failed us; but, as I kept saying in the original text, we did not need them; all we needed was to look at the lack of scientific rigor—and of ethics).  The reason is the following: It is largely based on notions of naïve optimization, mathematized (poorly) by Paul Samuelson—and this mathematics contributed massively to the construction of an error-prone society.  An economist would find it inefficient to maintain two lungs and two kidneys: consider the costs involved in transporting these heavy items across the savannah.  Such optimization would, eventually, kill you, after the first accident, the first “outlier.”  Also, consider that if we gave Mother Nature to economists, it would dispense with individual kidneys: since we do not need them all the time, it would be more “efficient” if we sold ours and used a central kidney on a time-share basis.  You could also lend your eyes at night since you do not need them to dream.

In an e-mail discussion with Timothy Thompson he drilled down the objections of many in this growing crowd to a more specific risk,

…the whole globalized economy relies on just one critical element: cheap transportation. And cheap transportation means cheap transoceanic container shipping, which in turn relies on just one critical factor: cheap oil. The world economic system can be disrupted at any time by simply increasing the price of marine fuel.

So, an entire global economic system has become dependent on the price of just a single commodity, crude oil.

From a security standpoint, the anti-globalization crew also write that any terrorist or military threat that stops transoceanic container cargo also stops most of the world economy.  So just one big terrorist bomb arriving in just one shipping container in just one port can cripple the whole global economy.

In coming up with solutions, John Robb is making a good go of it with his study and writings on resilient communities, also modeled in Suarez’s “Freedom.” He believes one of the answers to the potential problem of long-distance production and shipping is the use of 3D fabrication technologies to manufacture tools and products locally.   In his own words, “Localize Production.  Virtualize everything else.”

Concerning food, we can already see a glimpse of this ethos  in the rise of urban farming and local farmer’s markets.  It’s very possible that this will spill over into manufacturing (See Etsy) as the technology becomes cheaper and more readily available.

So, what to do as an individual?  Well, globalization is not going anywhere for now.  Rather than fighting its advance or holing up in a cabin in Alaska, the best stance may be to skeptically embrace its benefits, rebuffing naive claims of global utopia, while doing more to safeguard ourselves against its weaknesses.  It’s a balance of course.

Here are some links to articles and videos discussing the themes of efficiency, redundancy, nature and security:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Robustness

http://www.isegoria.net/2010/06/natural-security/

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2003/09/01/adapt_or_die?page=full

http://www.physorg.com/news193586040.html

http://fora.tv/2008/08/08/Daniel_Suarez_Daemon_Bot-Mediated_Reality

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In a recent post, Joseph Fouche explored the concept of story ecology and wrote the following:

Much of what we know we do not know that we know. Many of the stories that make up our master narratives are explicit: we know we know them.  But many more of the stories that make up our master narratives are tacit: we don’t know we know them. Explicit stories are the visible tip of the iceberg while tacit stories are the unseen looming mass beneath.  For every one thing we do in accordance with an explicit storyline, we do ten in accordance with a tacit storyline.

In a discussion with a fellow English professor Mark Edmundson, William Deresiewicz says that he tells his literature students every semester, “I’m not going to be teaching you anything you don’t already know, it’s just that you don’t know that you know it yet.”

Edmundson paraphrases Longinus‘ “On the Sublime”, “When you’re reading or listening to somebody and you feel as though you have created what you have only heard, you have hit an instance of the sublime.”

It seems that the greatest pieces of literature are able to uncover certain things buried in the DNA of our humanity that we didn’t know that we knew existed until that very moment.  Literature’s “aha!” moments are rarely due to new discoveries, they are simply putting into words and images things that before we could only sense dimly and inexpressively as shadows.

The truths found in classics are not novel ideas, they are often ancient and universal, but continually needing to be rediscovered as they move from the tacit to the explicit then back to tacit, like sand on a sea floor being kicked up, floating around in its glory for a short period, then settling once more.

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.” – Ecclesiastes 3:11

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So gang, it has been a little while since I’ve blogged.  I must admit that it wasn’t an intentional break, at least at first.  But, now that I’m returning to it I’m glad that I took a little time off.  Sometimes, it’s necessary to stop with all the output and allow some time for input, inspiration, and ultimately rest.

Here are a few of the things I’ve been reading and watching lately that have caught my attention.

Afghanistan

1)  “The 72-Hour Expert” by P.J. O’Rourke

The intro is classic O’Rourke and sets the tone for what proves to be a heck of an article on the tragedy of Afghanistan, the kind of tragedy that you have to sometimes laugh at lest you break down and weep.

If you spend 72 hours in a place you’ve never been, talking to people whose language you don’t speak about social, political, and economic complexities you don’t understand, and you come back as the world’s biggest know-it-all, you’re a reporter.  Either that or you’re President Obama.  I called my wife. She said, no, she certainly is not vacationing at government expense in some jet-set hot spot with scads of her BFFs.  Looks like I’m not President Obama.  But I am a reporter, fresh from Kabul.  What do you want to know about Afghanistan, past, present, or future?  Ask me anything.

On traditionalism,

Traditionalism being one of the things that makes Afghanistan so hard for Americans to understand.  We Americans have so many traditions.  For instance our political traditions date back to the 12th-century English Parliament if not to the Roman Senate.  Afghans, on the other hand, have had the representative democracy kind of politics for only six years.  Afghanistan’s political traditions are just beginning to develop.  A Pashtun tribal leader told me that a “problem among Afghan politicians is that they do not tell the truth.”  It’s a political system so new that that needed to be said out loud.

The Pashtun tribal leader was one of a number of people that Amin arranged for me to interview.  Tribalism is another thing that makes Afghanistan hard to understand.  We Americans are probably too tribal to grasp the subtlety of Afghan tribal concepts.

The Pashtun tribal leader was joined by a Turkmen tribal leader who has a Ph.D. in sociology.  I asked the Turkmen tribal leader about the socioeconomic, class, and status aspects of Afghan tribalism.

“No tribe is resented for wealth,” he said. So, right off the bat, Afghans show greater tribal sophistication than Americans. There is no Wall Street Tribe upon which the Afghan government can blame everything.

The reality of why hearts and minds may be a big illusion,

We’re outsiders in Afghanistan, and this is Occam’s razor for explaining the Taliban.  Imagine if America were a country beset with all sorts of intractable difficulties.  Or don’t imagine it—America is a country beset with all sorts of intractable difficulties.  Our government is out of control, wantonly interfering in every aspect of our private lives and heedlessly squandering our national treasure at a time when Americans are suffering grave economic woes.  Meanwhile vicious tribal conflicts are being fought for control of America’s culture and way of life.  (I’ve been watching Fox News.)

What if some friendly, well-meaning, but very foreign power, with incomprehensible lingo and outrageous clothes, were to arrive on our shores to set things right?  What if it were Highland Scots?  There they go marching around wearing skirts and purses and ugly plaids, playing their hideous bagpipe music, handing out haggis to our kiddies and offending our sensibilities with a lack of BVDs under their kilts.  Maybe they do cut taxes, lower the federal deficit, eliminate the Department of Health and Human Services, and the EPA, give people jobs at their tartan factories and launch a manhunt for Harry Reid and the UC Berkeley faculty.  We still wouldn’t like them.

College Education

2) English Professor’s William Deresiewicz (author of two of my favorite articles on education and leadership) and Mark Edmundson discuss academia and the pressure for college professors to be cool in order to receive better student critiques which are increasingly important for faculty tenure and whether or not this trend is positive for education…among other things. Full Bloggingheads discussion here.

Thinking

3)  “We Are All Talk Radio Hosts” by Jonah Lehrer

Something that has grown in fascination to me over the past few years is how biases influence our thinking.  This article looks at how “overthinking” things can often lead us to poorer decisions as it allows time for the introduction of confirmation bias.

Reasoning is generally seen as a mean to improve knowledge and make better decisions. Much evidence, however, shows that reasoning often leads to epistemic distortions and poor decisions. This suggests rethinking the function of reasoning. Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade. Reasoning so conceived is adaptive given human exceptional dependence on communication and vulnerability to misinformation. A wide range of evidence in the psychology or reasoning and decision making can be reinterpreted and better explained in the light of this hypothesis. Poor performance in standard reasoning tasks is explained by the lack of argumentative context. When the same problems are placed in a proper argumentative setting, people turn out to be skilled arguers. Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views. This explains the notorious confirmation bias. This bias is apparent not only when people are actually arguing but also when they are reasoning proactively with the perspective of having to defend their opinions.

How about you?  What has been on your radar?  I look forward to slowly getting back into the grind of writing – hopefully more in the style of the “Why We Need to Read Fiction” post.

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From A.J. Heschel’s “The Sabbath”,

“Gallantly, ceaselessly, quietly, man must fight for inner liberty.  Inner liberty depends upon being exempt from domination of things as well as from domination of people.  There are many who have acquired a high degree of political and social liberty, but only very few are not enslaved to things.  This is our constant problem – how to live with people and remain free, how to live with things and remain independent.”

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“Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

When I was young it was not unusual to find me and my parentals spread around the family room reading our various books after dinner.  As we staked out our positions my dad would put on a record from his extensive collection, anything from Madame Butterfly to Maynard Ferguson.

My parent’s book choices ranged from Grisham (dad) and Steel (mom) to non-fiction, mostly western history, gardening, politics and religion.  I, on the other hand found their choices mostly dull and greedily hoarded my collection of Roald Dahl, Michael Crichton (he had me at “The Great Train Robbery“) and “The Boxcar Children” series…with a little Shel Silverstein thrown in to free up my poetic side.

Now before you mischaracterize my childhood as something out of a Wes Anderson movie let me assure you that we watched t.v. like every other red-blooded American family, but we weren’t afraid to turn it off once and a while either.

The exercise of daily reading is something I will always be most grateful to my parents for cultivating in me at such an early age.  The books I read served not only to keep me entertained for hours on end when either the friends were grounded or the sub-zero Wyoming winters turned my neighborhood into a freezer-burned  suburban still-life, they also taught me that the limits to knowledge and understanding were confined only by the endurance of the human eye to stay open for one more chapter.

Somewhere in high school, I can’t put my finger on a specific event or circumstance, the dark and poorly-formed idea entered my noggin that if a man truly wanted to be educated he must read only non-fiction and leave the fluff of novels to suburban moms, hairdressers and loyal subscribers of “People” magazine.  The people who were content with living in their self-imagined fantasy world rather than daring expose themselves to the harsh light and straight-edges of reality.  Fiction was a waste, non-fiction was utility, or so it went in my head as I perused the business section of our local Hastings.

I carried this highly discriminatory view of reading with me to the Air Force Academy where I remember one fateful day using it as a verbal battering ram against my unsuspecting and slightly aloof sophomore English professor who had the poor fate of noticing my fiction-free reading diet.  Maybe he was content with spending hours probing the depths of literary themes, character development and other pie-in-the-sky nonsense, but as for me, I would not be donating my precious time to his cause when it was to be used for reading non-fiction books that would grow my mind, advance my career and further some unspoken notion I had of  future global domination.

I’ll never forget his response as he looked at me, all 6’4” of him, from behind his gold-rimmed English-professor-glasses.  ”Interesting…” is all he said with a slight raise of his eyebrows.  As if he was so convinced that I was wrong it was of no use discussing it when he knew I’d eventually discover it myself anyway.  I was ready for a fight, but his response took the wind out of my sails and I slumped off back to my room unsure of my next move…or book.

Of course, by the mere fact I’m writing this you know where the story turned.  It wasn’t that afternoon, perhaps not even that month, but I eventually picked up some fiction.  At first I was unsure what I was doing, it seemed so pointless, but I pressed.

Eventually I came to understand the immense value of fiction lie in its ability to subversively probe the thousand different angles of man and his relationship with the world in ways that the writer of non-fiction would never dare to mention, either out of sheer embarrassment or a loyal sense of discretion towards the subject.

Nothing is off-limits in fiction and it strikes a nerve with us because we realize that all the awkwardness, heroism, fear, courage, debauchery and love is more real than much of the sterile, surface-level commentary and theory found in non-fiction.  It’s real because it’s us.

As my friend and mentor Glenn Packiam once pointed out,

The best fiction, though, reminds you of yourself. It makes you come clean about your hidden thoughts or motives. It makes you admit your fears and face your demons. We are not as pure as we imagine. We are not as hopeless as we feel.

The beauty of good fiction is it makes us face ourselves without our being threatened by a confrontation. Think of Nathan the prophet telling David the King that he has sinned against God by sleeping with Bathsheba and murdering an innocent man. It was the power of a story that allowed Nathan to lead David to see his own guilt– though David didn’t know it until Nathan said “You are that man!”

Fiction reminds us that when we forsake the seemingly insignificant details, side-stories and irrational behavior found in a story, we don’t just lose a paradigm or angle, we lose humanity.  ”There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person,” remarked G.K. Chesterton.  Real life is found in the dirt and the weeds.

Interestingly, the implications of taking a negative or dismissive view of fiction may be more vast than simply missing out on some healthy soul-searching.  In his book “Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order” former diplomat and Yale graduate Charles Hill points out that perhaps a lack of literary knowledge is partially to blame for America’s deteriorating quality of foreign policy. (h/t Isegoria)

Of all the arts and sciences, only literature is substantially and methodologically unbounded. Literature’s freedom to explore endless or exquisite details, portray the thoughts of imaginary characters, and dramatize large themes through intricate plots brings it closest to the reality of “how the world really works.” This dimension of fiction is indispensible to the strategist who cannot, by the nature of the craft, know all of the facts, considerations, and potential consequences of a situation at the time a decision must be made, ready or not. Literature lives in the realm strategy requires, beyond rational calculations, in acts of the imagination.

——-

To be more specific about why literary insight is essential for statecraft, both endeavors are concerned with important questions that are only partly accessible to rational thought. Such matters as how a people begins to identify itself as a nation, the nature of trust between political actors or between a government and its people, how a nation commits itself to a more humane course of governance — all these and many more topics dealt with in this book — can’t be understood without some “grasp of the ungraspable” emotional and moral weight they bear. A purely rational or technocratic approach is likely to lead one astray.

Though Hill points to the need for strategists and diplomats to read fiction, the underlying logic applies to all of us.   It’s an inconvenient truth that none of us know what’s going to happen in the next month, let alone the next decade.  Globalization has produced a world where change is both accelerated and multiplied.  To live well in such a world requires our ability to quickly match our own thinking and decision-making to the realities at work around us; fiction develops the muscles necessary to accomplish this.

Some will offer the accurate rebuttal that non-fiction helps us develop these decision-making abilities just the same.  It’s true in a way and I’m not trying to propose that one genre is better than the other.  Fiction, however, presents the world’s complexities in a manner that constantly forces our minds out of the limits set in place by non-fiction.  Put another way, non-fiction provides us a basic set of rules, fiction helps us learn when to ignore them.

If there was ever a time for us to exercise this nuance it is now.  Our nation, our military, our business institutions are suffering from an absence of leaders, few will disagree.  Technocrats and bureaucrats we have aplenty, but leaders seem to have gone John Galt.  But, maybe we’re missing the issue a bit when we cry out for leaders.  I agree with William Deresiewicz that when we talk about a need for more leaders what we really mean, though we may not know it, is that we need more thinkers.  People who can think for themselves and point us in new directions.

More than anything, I’ve found that fiction forces me to think deeply.  The classics are often categorized as such because they touch on universal questions common to humanity regardless of place or time.  The types of questions that cannot be evaded with a quick “yes” or “no”, but must be reckoned with over a long period of time, slowly and methodically like drawing sap from a maple tree.

Today we have access to more information than we know what to do with.  Blogs, podcasts, wikis, online forums, journals and books available in virtually any and every medium.  We have enough data and statistics to make a technocrat giddy as a schoolgirl, but the ominous revelation is beginning to sink in for some that maybe it’s doing more harm than good.  Just ask the intelligence community.

We have the information available, but few souls smart or courageous enough to honestly interpret it.  Ironically, the very reality we are desperately hunting after is being lost in the oceans of data we collect in its pursuit.  It’s a bit like the conundrum Wonka faced with his incredible “Wonkavision” which took reality, broke it up into bits floating through the broadcasting ether only to be reassembled again for the end user.  As Mike Teavee found out, this is devilish hard work.

What we need now are more thinkers, more people who can cut through the static, people who have read Tolstoy and Heinlein, Hemingway and Updike, who understand that the world isn’t always logical or one big game of carrots and sticks no matter how many pie charts or bar graphs there are saying otherwise.  It wouldn’t be wise to simply turn the keys of civilization over to philosophers and artists, but it’s quite possible that we’d all be better off if we read a bit more fiction and discovered what it really means to be human.

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Here are some of my favorite sentences from David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas,” a nesting-doll of stories and characters that proved to me yet again (not sure why I continue in my disbelief) that not all great writers are old, dead, or Russian.

A challenging read at times, but one fully worth the effort.  Mitchell manages to weave six separate stories together from various geographies and time periods without coming off as hokey or desperate.  This book has a Narnian-sorcery to it (those sly Brits) that pulls you in and allows your imagination to run.  Highly recommend.

“I cried and watched the girl gallop off until she was a miniature in the Van Dyck pastoral.”

“We toasted Bacchus and the Muses, and drank a wine rich as unicorn’s blood.”

“Old, blind, as sick as Ayrs is, he could hold his own in a college debating society, though I notice he rarely proposes alternatives for the systems he ridicules.  ’Liberality?  Timidity in the rich!’ ‘Socialism?  The younger brother of a decrepit despotism, which it wants to succeed.’  ’Conservatives?  Adventitious liars, whose doctrine of free will is their greatest deception.’  What sort of state does he want?  ’None!  The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.’”

“One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.”

“Houses like these secrete some dark sorcery that transforms their owners into fruitcakes.”

“Commuters, these hapless souls who enter a lottery of death twice daily on Britain’s decrepit railways, packed the dirty train.  Airplanes circled in holding patterns over Heathrow, densely as gnats over a summer puddle.  Too much matter in this ruddy city.”

“The cold sank its fangs into my exposed neck and frisked me for uninsulated patches.”

“Ah, mountain stars are not these apologetic pinpricks over conurb skies; hanging plump they drip lite.”

“Books don’t offer real escape, but they can stop a mind scratching itself raw.”

“Ernie Blacksmith was the kind of quiet man you notice at a second glance.”

“Poor England.  Too much history for its acreage.  Years grow inwards here, like my toenails.”

“Three or four times in my youth did I glimpse the Joyous Isles, before they were lost to fogs, depressions, cold fronts, ill winds, and contrary tides…I mistook them for adulthood.  Assuming they were a fixed feature in my life’s voyage, I neglected to record their latitude, their longitude, their approach.  Young ruddy fool.  What wouldn’t I give now for a never-changing map of the ever-constant ineffable?  To possess, as it were, an atlas of clouds.”

“Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations.  My belief runs contrary, however.  To wit: history admits no rules, only outcomes.”

“In an individual selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.”

“Torturous advances won over generations can be lost by a single stroke of a myopic president’s pen or a vainglorious general’s sword.”

“A life spent shaping the world I want Jackson to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.”

“‘He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!’  Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?”

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As a kid I remember watching my dad work in our garage, mainly with wood, making things with a table saw, drills and other tools that he handled with apparent ease.  I watched, but seldom participated.  For one, I was often on my way to a basketball or soccer game and simply monitored his progress as a passing observer.  And secondly, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t too interested.  Maybe it was because I didn’t understand what was going on before my eyes, but I never asked my dad to teach me, though I’m sure at times he tried.

Now, I’m 26 and I can’t make anything.  I can land a $230 million aircraft in the mountains of Afghanistan, but the recent project of putting up a fence in our backyard terrified me (so instead I spent large sums to have other 20-somethings do it for me while I watched suspiciously through my kitchen window).  Lately this has really been bothering me.  I’ve been “struck dumb by my own dumbness,” as William Deresiewicz once wrote.

According to Matthew Crawford, author of “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” I’m not the only one.   It seems to be a trend that more of us our living life with very little control or understanding over the things that we own and operate.   We’ve ceased to be a culture of makers and settled for strict-consumption.  As evidence, high school shop programs are increasingly being cut with their funding redirected to more “modern” endeavors.  We, as a culture, have begun choosing to buy instead of make and replace instead of repair.  In doing so, Crawford contends that we’re losing our grasp on the world around us and ultimately a part of our soul.

Crawford explains in the introduction that he would like to show us what we lose when we no longer work with our hands and to,

“…speak up for an ideal that is timeless but finds little accommodation today: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world.  Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hardheaded: the hardheaded economist will point out the “opportunity costs” of spending one’s time making what can be bought, and the hardheaded educator will say that it is irresponsible to educated the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as jobs of the past.  But we might pause to consider just how hardheaded these presumptions are, and whether they don’t, on the contrary, issue from a peculiar sort of idealism, one that instantly steers young people toward the most ghostly kinds of work.”

He repeatedly points out that he isn’t trying to attach mysticism to manual labor, indeed plumbing is often just about unclogging drains, but as a burnt-out think tank director turned motorcycle repairmen he delves deeply into what makes manual trades so satisfying.   In doing so he taps into a growing tide of people searching for a measure of self-reliance in an increasingly outsourced and virtual world.

“We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it. This seems to require that the provenance of our things be brought closer to home. Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy.”

Critics of Crawford say he paints too great a divide between office work done in cubicles and manual trades done in shops and construction.  Not all office work is soulless and dull, just as not all manual labor is satisfying and filled with a sense of innocent artisan pride.

I agree that at times Crawford makes it seem as though to work in a white-collar occupation is to leave one’s soul and brain at the door, but he writes from his own life experience.  Growing up in a commune in the Bay Area with a theoretical physicist for a father, Crawford learned to tinker with his VW engine, worked as an electrician in high school and eventually ended up at the University of Chicago where he earned his PhD in political philosophy.

During that time he also took a job writing abstracts for academic journals, a job which he accounts quite hilariously, noting the irony of being forced to dull his inquisitive mind in favor of meeting daily quotas; this in a job that he specifically took for its seemingly intellectual slant.  All this to say, the mix of the academia and manual labor gave him unique opportunities to judge the merits of both ways of life and it’s these personal experiences that make for an authentic discussion.

However, to paint this book simply as a debate between two different types of work would be severely misleading.  Thanks to Crawford’s background in philosophy, he craftily plumbs what is means to be human, quoting Aristotle, Heidegger and others while slowly digging away at the very roots of how we acquire and use knowledge.

He contrasts the very objective truths of motorcycle repair and other manual trades, either the bike starts or it doesn’t, to the often ambiguous and subjective truths found in most knowledge economy jobs where the status quo is often to, “…avoid making decisions, because they could damage your career, but then spin cover stories after the fact that interpret positive outcomes to your credit.”

Francis Fukuyama reviewing the book in the New York Times sums this aspect of “Shop Class” in much more fluent prose than I could muster,

“Crawford argues that the ideologists of the knowledge economy have posited a false dichotomy between knowing and doing.  The fact of the matter is that most forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge, come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of material objects — loosening a bolt without stripping its threads, or backing a semi rig into a loading dock.  All these activities, if done well, require knowledge both about the world as it is and about yourself, and your own limitations.  They can’t be learned simply by following rules, as a computer does; they require intuitive knowledge that comes from long experience and repeated encounters with difficulty and failure.  In this world, self- esteem cannot be faked: if you can’t get the valve cover off the engine, the customer won’t pay you.”

It’s in the depth of this argument that many will find the words they’ve been searching for to describe their general unease about everything moving to a knowledge economy, team-building activities and all, where everyone is a manager, a manager of other people’s stuff and ideas.  Rather than simply moving things around and repackaging them in the ether of the markets Crawford stands as an educated voice warning us not to abandon our manual competency in search of admittance into a theoretical, creative class that is often more concerned with consuming rather than actually creating.

It’s true that not everyone can be a motorcycle repairmen or electrician, nor should they, but for those who have slipped into passive consumerism as a lifestyle, this may be the best argument yet as to why we all need to spend a little more time in the garage, building things, not to mention ourselves.

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My good friend Beau Suder is in Africa right now for three weeks beginning what I hope will be a very fulfilling course of study in international development.  In honor of him and in light of the fact that the past couple weeks have seen me working late hours and unable to post much, here is a sentence to ponder via Marginal Revolution:

…you could completely wipe out the poorest 81 nations in the world, with a total population of 2.8 billion, and the blow to global GDP would “only” be about 5 percent…

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The always impressive Don Vandergriff highlighted an article that deserves the attention of anyone keeping a critical eye on Afghanistan. William Dalrymple writing in the New Statesmen takes a historical look at the similarities between the British defeat in the First Anglo-Afghan War and the U.S. and NATO’s current position.  While drawing historical analogies is often more witchcraft than science, the quotes from some of the local Afghans are revealing.  Read full article here.

Below are some sections that jumped out to me,

During lunch, as my hosts casually pointed out the various places in the village where the British had been massacred in 1842, I asked them if they saw any parallels between that war and the present situation. “It is exactly the same,” said Anwar Khan Jegdalek. “Both times the foreigners have come for their own interests, not for ours. They say, ‘We are your friends, we want democracy, we want to help.’ But they are lying.”

“Whoever comes to Afghanistan, even now, they will face the fate of Burnes, Macnaghten and Dr Brydon,” said Mohammad Khan, our host in the village and the owner of the orchard where we were sitting. The names of the fighters of 1842, long forgotten in their home country, were still known here.

“Since the British went, we’ve had the Russians,” said an old man to my right. “We saw them off, too, but not before they bombed many of the houses in the village.” He pointed at a ridge of ruined mud-brick houses.

“We are the roof of the world,” said Mohammad Khan. “From here, you can control and watch everywhere.”

“Afghanistan is like the crossroads for every nation that comes to power,” agreed Anwar Khan Jegdalek. “But we do not have the strength to control our own destiny – our fate is always determined by our neighbours. Next, it will be China. This is the last days of the Americans.”

I asked if they thought the Taliban would come back. “The Taliban?” said Mohammad Khan. “They are here already! At least after dark. Just over that pass.” He pointed in the direction of Gandamak and Tora Bora. “That is where they are strongest.”

It was nearly five in the afternoon before the final flaps of nan bread were cleared away, by which time it had become clear that it was too late to head on to the site of the British last stand at Gandamak. Instead, that evening we went to the relative safety of Jalalabad, where we discovered we’d had a narrow escape: it turned out there had been a huge battle at Gandamak that morning between government forces and a group of villagers supported by the Taliban. The sheer scale and length of the feast had saved us from walking straight into an ambush. The battle had taken place on exactly the site of the British last stand.

The following morning in Jalalabad, we went to a jirga, or assembly of tribal elders, to which the greybeards of Gandamak had come under a flag of truce to discuss what had happened the day before. The story was typical of many I heard about the current government, and revealed how a mixture of corruption, incompetence and insensitivity has helped give an opening for the return of the once-hated Taliban.

As Predator drones took off and landed incessantly at the nearby airfield, the elders related how the previous year government troops had turned up to destroy the opium harvest. The troops promised the villagers full compensation, and were allowed to burn the crops; but the money never turned up. Before the planting season, the villagers again went to Jalalabad and asked the government if they could be provided with assistance to grow other crops. Promises were made; again nothing was delivered. They planted poppy, informing the local authorities that if they again tried to burn the crop, the village would have no option but to resist. When the troops turned up, about the same time as we were arriving at nearby Jegdalek, the villagers were waiting for them, and had called in the local Taliban to assist. In the fighting that followed, nine policemen were killed, six vehicles destroyed and ten police hostages taken.

After the jirga was over, one of the tribal elders came over and we chatted for a while over a glass of green tea. “Last month,” he said, “some American officers called us to a hotel in Jalalabad for a meeting. One of them asked me, ‘Why do you hate us?’ I replied, ‘Because you blow down our doors, enter our houses, pull our women by the hair and kick our children. We cannot accept this. We will fight back, and we will break your teeth, and when your teeth are broken you will leave, just as the British left before you. It is just a matter of time.’”

What did he say to that? “He turned to his friend and said, ‘If the old men are like this, what will the younger ones be like?’ In truth, all the Americans here know that their game is over. It is just their politicians who deny this.”

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The reality of our present Afghan entanglement is that we took sides in a complex civil war, which has been running since the 1970s, siding with the north against the south, town against country, secularism against Islam, and the Tajiks against the Pashtuns. We have installed a government, and trained up an army, both of which in many ways have discriminated against the Pashtun majority, and whose top-down, highly centralised constitution allows for remarkably little federalism or regional representation. However much western liberals may dislike the Taliban – and they have very good reason for doing so – the truth remains that they are in many ways the authentic voice of rural Pashtun conservatism, whose views and wishes are ignored by the government in Kabul and who are still largely excluded from power. It is hardly surprising that the Pashtuns are determined to resist the regime and that the insurgency is widely supported, especially in the Pashtun heartlands of the south and east.

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George Lawrence, a veteran of that war, issued a prescient warning in the Times just before Britain blundered into the Second Anglo-Afghan War in the 1870s. “A new generation has arisen which, instead of profiting from the solemn lessons of the past, is willing and eager to embroil us in the affairs of that turbulent and unhappy country,” he wrote. “Although military disasters may be avoided, an advance now, however successful in a military point of view, would not fail to turn out to be as politically useless.”

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I really like this commercial….

I like it because it captures the feelings and themes of growing undercurrent of people, “the makers.” People who are choosing to build, tinker and invent in their garages, make their own clothes, grow their own food, turn off the television…and create rather than just consume. Who value quality, craftsmanship and ingenuity.

Of course the commercial places this all in the context of an American manufacturing crisis and our need to get back to making good things…a different conversation for a different day. For now I just appreciate that the Jeep marketers seem to have their ear to the cultural grindstone.

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