Sometimes the truth is arrived at by adding all the little lies together and deducting them from the totality of what is known.
Recently, I re-read Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal. Superficially, it looks like a humorous fantasy book. But like so many of Pratchett’s works, it’s about something else entirely. The Wikipedia summary follows:
The story takes place in Ankh-Morpork, a powerful city-state based on the modern and historical settings of New York City and London. The protagonist of the story is Moist von Lipwig, a skilled con artist who was hanged for his crimes, but saved at the very last moment by the cunning and manipulative Patrician Havelock Vetinari, who fakes Moist’s death on the scaffold.
As Moist attempts to revitalize the service, he discovers that a few months before taking the job, a number of his predecessors have predeceased in the building within weeks of each other in unusual circumstances. He also discovers that the mail inside the building has taken on a life of its own, and is nearly suffocated as a result.
In his office, Vetinari then presents Moist with two choices: he may accept a job offer to become Postmaster of the city’s rundown Postal Service or he may choose to walk out of the door and never hear from Vetinari again. As the latter turned out to have a decidedly final outcome, Moist accepts the job.
It turns out that the Post Office has not functioned for decades, and the building is full of undelivered mail, concealed under a layer of pigeon dung. Only two employees remain: the aged Junior Postman Tolliver Groat and his assistant Stanley Howler.
Meanwhile, Vetinari is holding a meeting with the board executives of the Grand Trunk Company, a company that owns and operates a system of visual telegraph towers known as “clacks”. He notes that since they have taken full control, the quality of service had gone down considerably. Despite unnerving most of the board, Vetinari fails to make headway, especially with its chairman, Reacher Gilt.
Familiar Themes
The book is timely, having to do with the rise of new communication technologies and the seedy businessmen that manipulate them. In the wake of the banking crisis, it’s particularly relevant as it involves the work of people being creative with money, but at the expense of others. There are monopolistic business practices, loathsome criminals, and other loathsome criminals that develop consciences quite against their own expectations. It’s a joy to read. I’ve learned more about human nature from Pratchett’s books than I have from a stack of dry non-fiction books.
This is about words, and how you can twist them, and how you can spin them in people’s heads so that they think the way you want them to. We’ll send a message of our own, and do you know that? The boys in the towers will want to send it, and when people know what it says they’ll want to believe it, because they’ll want to live in a world where it’s true.
The Forthcoming Adaptation
I’m particularly interested in the mini-series adaptation coming from Sky One this Easter. The previous adaptations have been wonderful, thus far. I’m eager to see how they distill the essence of the story into two parts. I have no doubts that they’ll get the visual style right because, on that score, both the previous works have been stellar.
The Main Cast of Terry Pratchett's Going Postal, due this Easter
I realize that this isn’t exactly related to long-term thinking, but I love Pratchett so screw format. It’s about human nature, and that’s something we’ll have to deal with in the coming centuries. So there.
One of my favorite websites, in the whimsical category, is PaleoFuture. It’s about all those predictions about what life would be like in the future. Growing up, I remember watching old black and white films predicting what life would be like in the year 2000. Since it’s now 2010, it’s worth noting that all-white nylon jumpsuits are – strangely – not the norm. Neither are we traveling anywhere in our hover-cars. I’m sure there’s a conspiracy in there somewhere.
This illustration is a prediction of what the fashions of 1952 would be... from the people of 1883. Note how correct their predictions were. Which is to say "not at all."
Predicting the future is hard. I’m trying to do this right now, but I’m only taking the tiniest baby-steps. Constraining predictions to a particular aspect of the future is how I’ve started. I’m using learned people’s predictions about technologies to try to get a handle on how we’ll be generating our powers a hundred years from now. If I were to choose predicting fashions, I’d end up with results that are far worse than that image above.
Hunting Partridges with a Baseball
This image is from the "In The Year 2000..." blog. It's a scan from the Sept 1, 1899 issue of the London Daily Mail
For instance, if I were to assume that some sport very popular today would still be popular 100 years from now, I’d be making a conceit that looks something like this the image to the right. That is to say, I’d be wrong again. My lame prediction is that baseball will be dead in a hundred years. I’m pretty ambivalent about baseball, and sports for that matter, but I’m simply wondering about the changing nature of sports.
Football and basketball are examples of fast action sports. Football, in particular, is renowned for constantly evolving rules. What’s more, watching a football game today is very much like watching someone play a videogame. There are so many super-imposed field-effects that I want to push the “A” button to force the QB to execute a pass.
That’s not to say that baseball isn’t strategic and riddled with statistics, but aside from being associated with mom and apple pie, it appears very much in decline. The games are plodding and there are so many of them. Who knows. Maybe we’ll grow enamored with sports history to such a degree that the reality will flip. Maybe we’ll grow to dislike football because it changes too much. Maybe baseball will be seen as pure.
The Point?
My point is that predictions about these matters are a lot like fashion. How we appreciate sports itself is a sort of fashion. The evolution of change is so hard to predict. It gives me a headache. Call me when we’re living on tall spires and working for Spacely Sprockets.
Recently, in a post entitled The World Will Not End, I discussed the long-term implications of our ever-changing planet. For instance:
If you took the history of the planet and played it from its beginning to the present, you’d see its molten formation followed by the roiling motion of rock. Once the oceans formed, you’d note something else: the rising and falling of the ocean level relative to the land. Accompanying that, you’d find the encroachment and the withering of the ice-caps.
Well, a recent Lab Spaces article reported more about this phenomenon in a paper supervised by Dr. Dorit Sivan, Head of the Department of Maritime Civilizations at the University of Haifa.
According to Dr. Sivan, the changing sea level can be attributed to three main causes: the global cause – the volume of water in the ocean, which mirrors the mass of ice sheets and is related to global warming or cooling; the regional cause – vertical movement of the earth’s surface, which is usually related to the pressure placed on the surface by the ice; and the local cause – vertical tectonic activity. Seeing as Israel is not close to former ice caps and the tectonic activity along the Mediterranean coast is negligible over these periods, it can be concluded that drastic changes in Israel’s sea levels are mainly related to changes in the volume of water.
What the article gets at is the fact that, like many natural processes, there is natural variation over years. I think of this as a sort of “breathing” motion that takes place in many systems. Of course, Stuart Brand would be quick to note that we can’t rule out very sudden alterations to those natural variations if we created a detrimental positive-feedback loop.
Even so, when we look at natural processes like these over mere decades, we can draw the wrong conclusions about what to learn from our studies. Long-term matters can become difficult to understand if we don’t adequately shift our thinking toward the long now.
Taking pot-shots at Fox News’ journalistic style is like shooting sleep-deprived fish with a high-powered rifle. Into a fishbowl. Critical thinking is one of the keys to properly exploring long-term issues. This is why I spent as much time as I do picking apart the modern approach to news reporting. It’s the enemy of critical thought.
Recently, President Obama attended an RNC luncheon wherein he – how to put this delicately – pasted Republican questioners. Asking “who won” is a bunch of garbage. Right now nobody’s winning and everyone’s losing.
Click here to view a Daily Show video that covers the item.
The Relevant Item
Stewart can’t hide his glee. Given the right’s unapologetic gloating of late, turnabout is fair play. But that’s not the point. I would like to point you to the relevant item at the 6 minute mark.
For the purposes of this exploration, let’s make an assumption. I want to assume that everyone is wrong. Put aside your partisan leanings for a second and look at this singular fact:
Fox News cut away from the coverage while everyone else was rolling. You don’t have to agree with Jon Stewart’s take in order to appreciate the moment at the end of the video. Obama’s performance shot gigantic holes in the narrative that Fox is selling. Their response? Cut away.
Stuff Your Narrative
I don’t care for Fox News or MSNBC. I have often heard “everyone’s biased” as an excuse for swallowing either one. That amounts to the “everyone was doing it” argument from a 6th grader caught playing in the dumpster. If someone else is doing it, that’s not an argument for doing the same thing differently.
What’s more, the coverage of the president addressing his detractors if the first bit of honest inquiry I’ve seen in years. I hope to see more of it in the years ahead, but I obviously won’t be catching it on Fox news.
Demand Question Time
In the wake of the enlightening exchange between Obama and House Republicans, a website has gone live that hopes to make this a less one-off event. It’s called Demand Question Time. An excerpt from the site follows:
America could use more of this — an unfettered and public airing of political differences by our elected representatives. So we call on President Barack Obama and House Minority Leader John Boehner to hold these sessions regularly — and allow them to be broadcast and webcast live and without commercial interruption, sponsorship or intermediaries. We also urge the President and the Republican Senate caucus to follow suit. And we ask the President and the House and Senate caucuses of his own party to consider mounting similar direct question-and-answer sessions. We will ask future Presidents and Congresses to do the same.
Whether or not this happens or whether it doesn’t devolve into usefulness is an open question. But I’ll raise a glass to the hope that such events can further clarify the muddied political discussions happening in the public sphere.
The review points out how the past seems such a foregone conclusion. In truth, the outcome was anything but obvious. I urge you to read the review; it’s very interesting and quite short, so it won’t take much of your time.
But this order of things was hardly inevitable, as Mary Elise Sarotte, a professor of international relations at theUniversity of Southern California, reminds us in “1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe.” Between the wall’s opening (November 1989) and Germany’s unification (October 1990), history lurched forward with no fixed destination. Sarotte describes a host of competing conceptions of post-cold-war Europe that flourished, mutated and perished in the maelstrom of events that led up to German unity. In the end, the visions of President George H. W. Bush and Chancellor Helmut Kohl prevailed — which may not necessarily have been the best of all possible outcomes, though Sarotte stops short of this conclusion.
Pondering how things turned out is intriguing. Counterfactual history books are quite popular for this reason. The fluff in that genre of fictional books concerns itself with the idea of dropping a machine gun into Roman times. But that’s a pointless exercise.
I’m far more interested in the actually possible things that may have been, but which are not. Implicit in each historical account is the fact that had a certain battle or event turned out differently, the changes would ripple through time. The further back you go, the greater the changes as you work your way back to present times.
With regard to the outcome of the Cold War, it’s quite difficult to imagine how the world could have been different. We live in a time that is unique, not just because it’s the time we’re personally living in, but because there are billions of other possible outcomes. Lucky us.
I almost never watch network news. Whether it’s local coverage or the cable networks, it’s simply not on my radar. There are exceptions, of course. When tragedies strike, I tune in to get the brief of overviews. Then I ditch it for the internet once its clear that there won’t be anything useful following the first ten seconds.
The shows don’t offer any perspective. This has made the careful use of the internet’s resources invaluable. The internet is not an innately focused place, but the available options are immense when compared to TV. What does this have to do with long-term matters? Because you can’t properly evaluate the present and where we’re going if your thinking is fuzzy and uncritical.
Useless Labels
I lean left and right when you get down to it. Partisan political affiliations serve little useful purpose because they’re insufficient descriptors. I’ve discussed this previously. Causal factors, methodologies, and honest inquiry are far more important than some party platform.
This depiction (from Information is Beautiful) summarizes the generalities of political affiliations. Like all summaries, what it lacks in depth it makes up for by looking cool.
While not exclusive to them, this approach is more prevalent among my peers. Many Gen-X’ers like myself grew up in the shadow of angry Silent and Boomer political rhetoric. Whether left or right, we’ve had enough of your proselytizing, thank you very much.
I don’t want my notions validated; I want to figure things out. The former plays to my ego and the latter leaves me confused, but at least able to grope toward “more informed.” Tuning to the news in order to nod one’s head in agreement misses the point entirely.
My Sources
My StratFor addiction is well known. They may often be accused of leaning right, but at least they’re busy teasing out relevant details. NPR is accused of leaning left, but I’ve yet to hear an actual news reporter make distasteful mocking noises common to Fox. Beyond that, there are a number of interesting newsfeeds; the blogosphere contains insightful discussion that makes the cable talking-heads look like fools.
The closest thing to news that I watch on TV is The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I’ll be the first to admit those aren’t news programs. They’re critics and they serve a very useful purpose.
Gen-X to the Core
And it’s not just the content that’s rife for mockery, it’s the format. The standard motifs of the evening news are well known by most of us. We’re not fooled by the cheap ploys that give us the illusion of newsiness.
Such approaches are straight out of the Gen-X playbook. While Stewart, Colbert, and Brooker aren’t newscasters, they are informing us. They highlight the hypocrisy of elected officials and the morons that pretend to discuss their policies. They’re the unofficial fact-checkers – the skeptics of stated intentions.
I predict more friction ahead for those of us that embrace this analytical method. Our approach appears insulting and unserious to older generations. This is not an accident, but quite deliberate.
I’ll make the following deal with my elders. If you treat political discourse with seriousness, respectfulness, and genuine inquiry then I’ll stop making fun. In the mean time, I’ll get my TV news from the only people serious enough to relentlessly mock it.
The slums of Mumbia, for example. Click to visit the blog where this was found.
In reading Stuart Brant’s recent book, I’m struck by how similar the rise of the blogging community is to the rise of urban slums. In both cases, there’s an informal economy. Slums are the informal economy of cities. Blogging is the informal economy of ideas.
In the blogosphere, nobody cares what your qualifications are. They care only if you are writing something interesting. Of course education helps, but it’s not much of a barrier to entry. Do you have a PhD? Great. What else you got? The most talented and educated people I know, with titles to spare, think this way.
Fancy Pieces of Paper
We all know some talented person without a degree. We all know people who made their way through years of schooling only to let their lust for knowledge collect dust. Considering that humans eventually go the route of dust, it seems only fitting; to each his own and all that.
Blogging is just a fancy-pants way of having a conversation. It doesn’t have the resonance of a hefty, printed book held in the hand. But it’s also more concrete than spoken words in the air.
To Sum Up
Screw geography. It’s so hard to find the groups of people that I’ll really connect with in the 1-mile radius around my home. Yay internet. If you have something to say, we care. If you are engaging, we care. If you can differ about issues while still being kind, we care. Of course, if you like, you can still be an ass-hat. There’s plenty of folks that care about that too, if it floats your boat.
Don’t Post Classified Intelligence Estimates on the Internet
What a faux pas. It would appear that the U.S. Navy posted their estimates of the size and composition of the Chinese Navy on the internet.
Oops.
They quickly recognized their error and took it down, but not before it was replicated all over the place. Removing information from the internet is like trying to get pee out of a pool. I get the feeling that someone may have lost their job. But now that the laundry’s been aired, it’s worth taking a smell.
Looking at the Numbers
Let’s look at the reported composition of the Chinese & U.S. navies side-by-side. The following chart notes the vessels that are either on the water or in port. My presumption (not included in this data) is that all purchased (but undeployed) or in-development vehicles are not reported.
Some Perspective
I’m not interested in bashing China or America. Study geopolitics with any dedication and you’ll find that this is standard military fare. I’m sure that there were many who read about this stuff and had a range of indescribable emotions.
When you watch the local news report every fire, political sound-bite, and newest Hollywood star, you aren’t exactly prepared for this. Ditto any of the cable-news talking heads dribbling spittle down their lapels about how Obama is either Jesus or the Anti-Christ.
What is quite clear is that, in a short-to-medium term time period, China isn’t going to be posing any serious threats to American control of the international system. It’s all the rage to point at China as the next great military competitor, but there’s more than just a table to show that this is not likely.
In an economic sense, the Chinese nation is a power waiting to bloom, but all of this is very much in flux because China is going to be facing a great many challenges in the coming years. It’s irresponsible to assume that the current economic and military indicators are going to keep moving in the same direction. You may as well read goat entrails in a bowl before you draw conclusions from economists.
Most of the Chinese ships are older (in design, if not in the age of the vessels) than their American counterparts. China is building new classes of ships, with more modern equipment and weapons. Their new destroyers have better anti-aircraft weapons, although nothing to match the American Aegis system, much less the 20 U.S. Aegis ships with anti-missile capability. China is trying to develop classes of nuclear submarines that come close to the capabilities of their American counterparts. China is also vastly outmatched in naval aviation, with nothing comparable to the hundreds of American maritime patrol (P-3) aircraft. But China is building aircraft carriers, and upgrading its naval aviation. They are also innovating in some areas, like the development of a ballistic missile that can hit a moving ship (preferably an American carrier.)
Only a portion (about a third) of the U.S. fleet is facing China, because of other commitments, while nearly all the Chinese fleet operates along their coast. But the U.S. also has major naval allies in the region (like Japan and South Korea), while China has none. The Chinese fleet is no match for the U.S. Navy now, but the Chinese are building and planning for the future. In another few decades, the Chinese expect the situation to be quite different.
Many Parts in Motion
I have a continued fascination with StratFor’s weekly naval movement reports . I like to collect the images and then step through them like a flip book to see where carrier groups are moving from week to week.
Let’s keep this thing in perspective. We’re the ones with 11 carriers spread out all over the globe. It’s tempting to get nervous about America when you look at our domestic politics, but that’s little use here. China is certainly interested in getting a carrier or two. The recent anti-piracy operations are certainly an attempt to get more operational experience for the Chinese Navy. StratFor’s recent article highlights some of the realities:
The anti-piracy operations have given Beijing the perfect opportunity to test and refine its capabilities in a non-threatening manner, and talk of resupply bases — and thus a more permanent Chinese naval presence — is something Beijing is considering carefully but seriously. China is years, if not decades, away from having the ability to sustain a true blue water naval capability and even further from being able to truly challenge U.S. maritime dominance, but each step Beijing takes gives it the skills and experience necessary to make the next move forward. Taking a leadership role in SHADE also gives China a valuable opportunity to observe and learn the protocols and operations of other nations’ fleets — lessons it can apply to its own operations.
On the economic front, do you remember the fears of a Japan dominating the U.S. back in the 1980’s? Well, China’s economic system is in worse shape than theirs in a few respects. Worse yet, our fears reveal deeply binary thinking in America – namely that another power’s success detracts from ours. Let the China bashing begin. It will help nothing and exposes our ugly nationalist id. Predictably, it invites a legitimately uppity response.
On top of that, our complicated relationship with Taiwan only serves to fuel the fire. The economic downturn has both the U.S. and China in a bit of a pinch. When times get tough, nationalism gets more intense. Whether true or not, it takes the heat off the government and projects it onto easier targets.
Geopolitical competition is inevitable, but it doesn’t have to manifest in warfare. I wonder if I’ll be eating those words inside the next decade.
My Foolish Hope
I don’t fear a multi-polar world. Indeed, I think that eventually this reality will reassert itself. American unipolarity is the exception to the rule when you look at history. I simply don’t think that a nation with in-built internal ethnic-group stresses and unsustainable economics is going to be the one to challenge America. I certainly could be wrong on that score.
My sincere hope is that China will undergo the convulsions associated with greater liberty and openness. While their at it, I hope we rediscover that increasingly lost art. Over the long term, this could spurn further creativity and free the minds of the citizenry further. But this is not going to happen except from within their culture – it won’t be done by meddling foreigners. The bipolar responses to our imaginations about China reflect our unease at a culture that is undergoing change. A very interesting article from Mr. Barnett at World Politics Review is particularly appropriate.
…all things being equal, democracies significantly outperform autocracies when it comes to intensive growth. China is right on the verge of bumping into that far-more-level playing field, meaning that, over the next generation or so, Beijing’s bosses will be forced to choose between higher rates of growth or maintaining their singular grip on power. So while, in our current fears, we imagine China will win every hand from here on out, the truth is, we hold all the face cards: a more responsive political system, a freer economic system, better and more flexible rules (our greatest advantage), and – most undeniably – the more favorable demographic trajectory.
Patience is required. If ever we needed an ally that can help us consider truly long-term social concerns, it’s the people that have a cultural heritage stretching back thousands of years. In the mean time, let’s keep the rhetoric down, shush the blow-hards, and keep things in perspective.
China isn’t overtaking the world. If we’re lucky, it will grow into the responsible stakeholder that we all hope for. There are a billion minds within China that yearn for that role and billions outside China that would benefit. It’s not a nationalism thing, it’s a civilization thing. At least, that’s my naïve hope.
I didn’t realize it until I started writing this blog, but I love writing essays.
Do you hear that? It’s the sound of all the last, lingering traces of cool departing from my being. But that’s okay because I never had much of that stuff to begin with. It’s too much effort and you always end up with bad hair and worse clothes.
What’s great about a blog is that you can take a subject that will fill a bunch of pages and break it down into bite sized chunks. In the interest of sharing the fruits of my labor, I offer the following essays which are posted on Scribd. If you want to catch up on some of my earlier writings, here’s a nice, printer-friendly way to do it.
A Starting Place
The following is a reasonable introduction to the worlds of geopolitics and realpolitik. It’s a great way to get a handle on the overall tone of this blog.
The next item is the experiment that led directly to this blog in its current form. StratFor held a contest wherein readers could submit their own re-write of history absent the 9/11 attacks. I took a different approach and it’s clearly not what they were looking for.
But more important than the merits of my conclusions is the fact that it got the ball rolling on my writing. After I worked hard for a week, I realized that I had much to say, and since we geeks have no excuses when it comes to pursuing our interests, I secured this WordPress address. And here we are.
The last is the most recent of my essays. I spread the contents out over six days (starting here). The objective was to wrap my head around some of the central observations of the book “The Next 100 Years.”
I’m quite happy with the results. It will be interesting to revisit some of my assertions in a year or more to see how my perspective has changed.
On tap for this year is some more coverage of the many books I have lined up. I’m particularly interested in a more thorough – and critical – look at the works of Strauss & Howe, since so many of my observations are inspired by their perspective.
Currently, I’m reading Stuart Brand’s newest book. It’s a joy; I love how that man’s mind works. I have no doubt that I will have interesting questions, comments, and criticisms of his often controversial thoughts.
Recently, I re-read Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal. Superficially, it looks like a humorous fantasy book. But like so many of Pratchett’s works, it’s about something else entirely. The Wikipedia summary follows:
There’s a
Don’t Post Classified Intelligence Estimates on the Internet
I didn’t realize it until I started writing this blog, but I love writing essays.
