History ended. The only fight left is over who gets to inherit Michael Oakeshott’s legacy.

The end of history and the last man

Francis Fukuyama, the author of "The End of History” the 1989 lecture, which, along with Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations”which was written in response, framed much of the debate in international politics departments around the globe, has made a resurgent comeback. In a recent interview with DW, the influential social theorist argued that he’s still right about the end of history—that he’s been right all along. 

Author Francis Fukuyama

In response to a question asking how he’d respond to critics who question whether the triumph of Western liberal democracy was the last step in the human species’ sociocultural evolution—the endpoint of all human history, by saying, “I think the biggest problems have been with the misunderstanding. The concept of the end of history was the question: Where does the direction of history point? Does it point towards communism, which was the view of many intellectuals prior to that point? Or does it point towards liberal democracy? Which I think, in that respect, I'm still right.

History, in the philosophical sense, is really the development, or the evolution - or the modernization - of institutions, and the question is: In the world's most developed societies, what type [of institutions] are they? I think it's pretty clear that any society that wants to be modern still needs to have a combination of democratic political institutions in a market economy. And I don't think that China, or Russia, or any of the competitors out there really undermine that point.”

The End of History according to David Brooks

David Brooks in a recent New York Times piece advances an argument that echoes Fukuyama’s position. “The Cold War settled this contest of historic visions,” Brooks writes. “Democracy won.” 

David Brooks of the New York Times

But he’s a little less triumphant about this ideological victory than Fukuyama. Brooks cites Mark Lilla’s New Republic essay called “The Truth About Our Libertarian Age” as holding that “the post-Cold War era hasn’t meant the triumph of one ideology; it destroyed the tendency to rely upon big historic visions of any sort. Lilla argues that we have slid into a debauched libertarianism. Nobody envisions the large sweep of events; we just go our own separate ways making individual choices.”

Yes, history is over, Brooks asserts, but it has no shape. “The dream of universal democracy seems naïve. National interest matters most.” Brooks thinks Lilla is right to doubt Fukuyama in thinking that history is the inexorable march toward universal democracy—his piece “both describes and unfortunately exemplifies the current mood—and he laments it. “Arab nations are not going to be democratic anytime soon. The world is an aviary of different systems – autocracy, mercantile despotism – and always will be. Instead of worrying about spreading democracy, we’d be better off trying to make theocracies less beastly.”

Andrew Sullivan thinks Fukuyama was right and David Brooks is the only non-libertarian left standing

Andrew Sullivan wades into the debate—he’s ready to take Brooks on regarding his take on Lilla’s piece, on geopolitics, and, as we’ll see later, on Michael Oakeshott. Sullivan’s recent blog post more or less concedes that Fukuyama was right, too—calling “foolish” anyone who would “deny that most countries still seem headed over time toward Western norms. While I think Sullivan overstates the degree to which Francis Fukuyama was right, I completely agree with his point that illiberal, undemocratic political formations each have their own distinctive natures that need to be understood in their own terms, not as a lesser or greater form of democracy in potentia.

Andrew Sullivan of The Dish

Sullivan, the good Oakeshottian, rightly reminds us that “in the here and now, all sorts of hybrid [forms of government] are forming and will form, as they always have,” and that given such realities, “our goal in foreign policy is to understand them better by using the vast apparatus of political philosophy bequeathed to us by our Western canon, and tapping into our collective reserves of diplomatic and military experience, and adjust accordingly.” 

Sullivan labels Brooks a ‘liberal’ on the basis of Brooks’s impulse to assert the universal values found in American droit de seigneur. 

The passage in Brooks’s piece that Sullivan cites as being the exemplification of this ethos of American exceptionalism is this: “Such is life in a spiritual recession. Americans have lost faith in their own gospel. This loss of faith is ruinous from any practical standpoint. The faith bound diverse Americans, reducing polarization. The faith gave elites a sense of historic responsibility and helped them resist the money and corruption that always licked at the political system. Without the vibrant faith, there is no spiritual counterweight to rampant materialism. Without the faith, the left has grown strangely callous and withdrawing in the face of genocide around the world. The right adopts a zero-sum mentality about immigration and a pinched attitude about foreign affairs. Without the faith, leaders grow small; they have no sacred purpose to align themselves with.”

Toward a Libertarianism?

Sullivan argues that the same political ideology that regards government or governmental authority ‘axiomatically’ not keeping individuals from being what and who they want to be has been extended to apply to the international relationship of sovereign states. No super-power, even a benevolent one, has the “right to dictate the choices and fate of any other individual country, however despotic and evil its regime might be.” So, there’s no principle to stop Putin from annexing Crimea or to keep Israel from pursuing its policy agenda against the West Bank. Sullivan cites the Iraq war as the cause célèbre of this movement—as “a catastrophe now regarded as utterly illegitimate by everybody on the planet, apart from a few Cheney dead-enders and Tony Blair.”

Arguing over Oakeshott & what it means for politics

Michael Oakeshott argued that "politics is the art not of imposing a way of life, but of organising a common life… the art of accommodating moralities to one another." 

Michael Oakeshott

Oakeshott, interestingly, while Sullivan espouses a theory hewed from Oakeshott’s politics, it was Brooks who used Oakeshott’s thought as a guide to dealing with the goings-on in Iraq as far back as 2003. Brooks even cites Sullivan as providing the best insight into how to understand Oakeshott. “Sullivan, he wrote, observes that “the easiest way to grasp Oakeshott is to know that he loved Montaigne and Shakespeare. He loved Montaigne for his skepticism and Shakespeare for his array of eccentric characters. Oakeshott seemed to measure a society by how well it nurtured idiosyncratic individuals, and he certainly qualified as one.”

Brooks, circa 2003, sounds a lot like Sullivan from this morning—a similarity that extends beyond their shared desire to cultivate intellectual and personal idiosyrancies to encompass their outlooks on geopolitics.  In his 2003 piece ‘Arguing with Oakeshott, Brooks wrote, “We can't know how Oakeshott would have judged the decision to go to war in Iraq, but it is impossible not to see the warnings entailed in his writings. Be aware of what you do not know. Do not go charging off to remake a society when you don't understand its moral traditions, when you do not even understand yourself. Do not imagine that if you conquer a nation and impose something you call democracy that the results will be in any way predictable. Do not try to administer a country from behind a security bunker.”

Whose conservative?, Which rationality?

In thinking through the political landscape in 2003, Brooks made a ‘concession’ to his imagined Oakeshott: “government should be limited, prudent and conservative, but only when there is something decent to conserve. Saddam sent Iraqi society spinning off so violently, prudence became imprudent. The Middle East could not continue down its former course.” 

What was Brooks’s basis for holding such a position? He broke to Oakeshott, who was ambivalent about the American revolution, and thought that the ideals espoused in 1776 and the political regime that followed worked “precisely because our founders were epistemologically modest too, and didn't pretend to know what is the good life, only that people should be free to figure it out for themselves.” 

Compare that to Sullivan’s contemporary position that, in politics, we now must bracket “the simple democracy-spectrum and look for how to deal with various forms of oligarchy, kleptocracy, or emerging democratic society. Now and again, a little nudge might help (see the Balkans in the 1990s). But for the most part, the changes we want will happen without us (Tunisia, anyone?), and the places where we simply act as if the world were a blank page ready to be filled by democracies (Israel, Libya, anyone?) will turn out to be a case study in the frequent destiny of good intentions.”

I’m not the rationalist, you are

Both Brooks and Sullivan are careful to avoid the ideological plague that Oakeshott identified: rationalism. 

“By a pardonable abridgement of history,” Oakeshott wrote, “the rationalist character may be seen springing from the exaggeration of Bacon’s hopes and the neglect of the skepticism of Decartes; modern rationalism is what commonplace minds made out of the inspiration of men of discrimination and genius.” 

Oakeshott traces the evolution of the rationalist from his seventeenth century origins, in which what “was ‘L’art de penser’, became Your mind and how to use it, a plan by world-famous experts for developing a trained mind at a fraction of the usual cost. What was the Art of Living has become the Technique of Success, and the early and more modest incursions of the sovereignty of technique into education has blossomed into Pelmanism.”

Sullivan and Brooks both advance positions relative to international intervention that draw heavily on the ‘conservative’ thought of Michael Oakeshott. Interestingly, both react to Lilla’s use of the aviary metaphor. It’s Sullivan, though, who makes explicit the anti-rationalist insight borrowed from Oakeshott that would guide the Oakeshottian confronting such an unfriendly world. Sullivan is right: such a world calls for aviarists, not ideologues. 

The Plan to resist all planning is better than its opposite, but…

Oakeshott dismissed Hayek’s brand of political economic thinking with the line, “A plan to resist all planning may be better than its opposite, but it belongs to the same style of politics.” He did so on grounds that Hayek had committed the kind of intellectual sin that Sullivan and Brooks are trying so hard to avoid: he was a rationalist. As Oakeshott put it, “This is, perhaps, the main significance of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom—not the cogency of his doctrine, but the fact that it is a doctrine.”

Sullivan and Brooks come to slightly different political positions from a very similar ideology. One thinker who better articulates the principled reasons (and the reasons are important—Oakeshott argued, “when we come to consider what a man actually thought, it is not [the] bare ideas which are important, but the grounds or reasons for them which he believed to be cogent, the ratio decidendi”) we might hold for deciding one way or another is Richard Flathman. 

Willful liberalism and the liberal principle

Flathman persuasively argues in favor of what he calls the 'liberal principle'. Flathman’s liberal principle holds "it is a prima facie good for persons to form, to act on, and to satisfy and achieve desires and interestes, objectives and purposes."

In addition to the liberal principle, Flathman calls for a general presumption in favor of freedom—meaning when we assess what people should and should not be allowed to do, our default position should always be in favor of letting them do it. And any restriction on human action needs to pass a rigorous bar.

The highest ideal available to us, from Flathman’s perspective, is individuality "understood as self-making or self-enacting." And that the pursuit of this ideal requires "abundant social and political plurality and, essential to both, the widest possible freedom of action." His devotion to individual freedom is so extensive, those passages come from a book called Reflections of a Would-Be Anarchist.

Flathman is consistently silent on matters of policy and how his ideas translate to the realm of politics (he comes by thisdisposition largely via Oakeshott, who thought that theory and practice were modally different enterprises. Many thinkers believe that theory and practice are different on normative grounds—for Oakeshott, the disjunction was epistemological!). But Sullivan’s take on politics can certainly fit easily within Flathman’s theoretical framework. Like Sullivan, Flathman argues insistently against the coercive power of the modern state.

Though Flathman is as wary of state power as any thinker I know, he’s no libertarian. Though it’s very begrudgingly, Flathman does allow that institutions are both necessary and desirable.

His reason? The most important question that can be asked about institutions is "whether or in what ways...[institutions] contribute to or obstruct attempts to pursue and...realize...the ideals of self-making, self-overcoming, and self-enactment."

Instead of libertarianism, Flathman posits a 'willful liberalism' in which a society will only work well so long as “a substantial number of people” for the most part “take care of themselves,” and don’t need to be “cared for” by others or by society. And there must be associates who, by cultivating virtuosities such as civility and especially magnanimity, care for others in the sense of not inflicting themselves harmfully or destructively on the latter.

Taking Flathman’s willful liberalism as a guide would allow for principled intervention—not on the basis of Brooks’s ‘spiritual’ purposiveness or Sullivan’s too-fatalistic libertarianism—but when it looks like stepping in is likely to do better for the institutions and institutionalisms people need to care for themselves.

Even better than Flathman: Mose Allison

I wasn’t convinced by either Fukuyama’s claim that history was at an end, or that any ideological opponent to ourselves as Hegelian last men would be on the wrong side of this post-historical world. You’d have to take a long—very long—view to be as sanguine as Fukuyama is here, “I think we're in for a rough period of time, with both Russia and China expanding. But I do think that it's a limited phenomenon - that in the long run, there's really only one important organizing idea out there: the idea of democracy in a market economy. So in the long run, I'm still optimistic.”

Whether Sullivan is correct that the answer is conservative—with conservatism properly understood—or more liberal—as Richard Flathman’s cultivation of a Nietzschean ‘pathos of distance’ vis-à-vis the coercive power of the modern state, the appropriate response to the set of circumstances we find ourselves in is perfectly embodied by Mose Allison:

“Ever since the world ended / There’s no more black and white / Ever since we all got blended / There’s no more reason to fuss and fight / Dogmas that we once defended / No longer seem worthwhile / Ever since the world ended / I face the future with a smile.”

Charlie Munger's solution for gym class: stopping the thing doing the most harm to girls' fitness

From at least the time of Aristotle, music and gymnastics were education’s foundation. Those charged with providing for children’s education sought to develop their pupils’ minds and bodies. A recent LinkedIn piece illustrates how far removed we are from that ideal. 

There’s plenty of discussion these days about the common core and what it means for our children. By comparison, there’s very little talk about how we’re providing for the common core of our children’s physical well being. 

Nick Morrison in a recent Forbes piece published to LinkedIn examines why school-age children—especially girls—aren’t participating in sport in greater numbers. He cites the United Kingdom’s Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation findings that show that girls start doing significantly less physical activity than boys by the age of nine.

Alarmingly, at age fifteen, only 15% of girls are physically active for one hour per day; boys aren’t great, either, but at thirty-two percent, they’re more than twice as likely to get the sixty minutes of daily exercise. Perhaps illustrating one cause for the dearth of conversation about physical activity in schools, the U.K. Women’s Sport and Fitness Foundation found that one in five girls does no physical activity in any given week—despite it being ‘mandatory’ in school.

Why? Gymtimidation?

Morrison cites several reasons, including social pressures and the standard of changing rooms. The changing room phenomenon is significant, and was lampooned for an ad campaign to good effect:

In gym class, where there's this...

 

There's also this. "I hate gyms."

It turns out there may be another cause as well: many girls just don’t find the activities on offer appealing. And I wonder if that holds true for boys as well. In gearing so many physical education programs toward ‘traditional’ competitive sports, I wonder if we’re offering activities geared to those young people most likely to participate in—and failing to attract those least likely to engage in—physical activity. 

My boss is a great example. He’s tall and strong, physically fit and active, he nevertheless tells a hilarious story of not wanting to play baseball in his high school gym class. The class was divided into several teams who would compete against each other. One team would sit on the bench waiting for their turn at bat while the other played in the field. In between innings, the teams would switch sides. At the conclusion of each half-inning, my boss said he’d get up from the bench walk around shaking hands and congratulating his ‘team’ walk up the line a bit…and then turn around and head back to the bench, where he’d sit with the other team. 

No one ever caught on all year he never played the field or came to bat. Each team—and the instructor—just assumed he was always with the proper team. He got an ‘A’ in the class. And the extent of his exertion was limited to high-fives and handshakes. 

Troublingly, I suspect that the boys who took to baseball the most would have had ample opportunities to participate in athletic endeavors they liked elsewhere, but those who weren’t so inclined—like my boss—were probably less likely to find activities that engaged them elsewhere. 

Eliminate the thing doing the most harm.

Charlie Munger loves to apply the principle of inversion in tackling difficult, complex problems. 

Thinking that many conundrums that involve human behavior are so complicated that it’s practically impossible to fully understand all of the variables involved, Munger proposes to simplify the course to action by simply tackling first the single thing causing the most harm. Stop that, and you’re on your way to helping the situation. 

Interestingly, CrossFit may offer solutions, but more on that another day. 

One attempt to correct: ask them.

In the case of girls and participation in physical activity, several such obstacles have been proposed. Jennie Price, the head of Sport England, argues that girls should be given enough time to dry their hair and put themselves together after taking part in physical activities at school; Helen Fraser, chief executive of the Girls’ Day School Trust, advocates letting girls do stuff they like—such as Zumba classes—to get them  interested in sport and fitness.

So, what might be done to increase participation among young people—especially girls?

Civic republican thinkers, in the tradition of Aristotle, from at least the time of Machiavelli have argued that the people know what the best forms of government are for themselves. They’ve argued on the basis that no one knows quite how his shoe pinches his foot better than himself.

A recent pilot program in the U.K. used such an understanding to tailor offerings to suit the girls it aimed at reaching. It had some positive effects. 

Schools participating in the program recruited a small group of young leaders, and charged them with finding out what would motivate girls to get involved in sporting activity. The schools then developed plans  based on the reports of the leaders’ findings.

And it worked. At the end of the pilot program, the girls from the schools involved were surveyed. Those who reported looking forward to physical education in school rose from 38% to 71%. The proportion who said they liked the way they felt after exercise went from 41% to 73%.

The positive outlook extended beyond the gymnasium. Girls reported to feeling positive about school generally rose from 24% to 78%! So, doing what girls liked in gym class meant fewer than one-in-four feeling good about school to more than three-in-four feeling good.

‘Competitive Greatness’: a case of preferring poetry to pushpin?

Jeremy Bentham postulated a utilitarian theory that sought to improve society by providing the most happiness to the greatest number of people. According to his rigorous calculus, this kind of program would be an unmitigated triumph. John Stuart Mill—his partner James Mill’s son—kept his teacher’s utilitarian ideas mostly in tact, but couldn’t help think that some pursuits were inherently better than others. He was famous for arguing that—no matter the pleasure people might report—the human species does better when engaged in lofty pursuits such as poetry than base pursuits such as playing pushpin or checkers. 

Where Bentham would look at girls engaging in physical activity in high numbers and see nothing but positives, might a curmudgeonly old guard look at the same legion of Zumba classes and wonder if something important has been lost? Might a physical education teacher, following in the ideological footstep of both J.S. Mill and John Wooden, and think, “Zumba? Let’s shoot instead for something higher?”

John Wooden pyramid of success.

Wooden was famous for proposing a pyramid of success. At the top was competitive greatness (well, competitive greatness, patience, and faith).  Human excellence was something to be worked for and achieved. His teams won a lot. His players frequently accomplished individual and collective greatness in their sport and in their lives. 

They did it by following the lead of their coach and teacher—often in contradiction of their own personal interests and desires. In short, they often found themselves doing stuff they didn’t like to achieve something even more significant than what their personal predilections would have earned them.

The stuff Wooden sought--and CrossFit seeks--can be summed up in Wooden's quote, "Success is peace of mind which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to become the best of which you are capable."

Girls as they are, gym class as it might be.

As impressive as Wooden achievements were, they were achieved in a very different setting than is to be found in any high school gym class. Wooden got to recruit his athletes (or had to—recruiting was reportedly his least favorite part of coaching and was likely the single biggest factor leading to his retirement).  

Instead of aiming for competitive greatness for all students—I’d argue for greater accommodation to what the students will take to for compulsory activity in class. Those who are interested in competition—or greatness of any kind—will be free to work to accomplishing it no matter the curricular focus. But letting people have a say in the manner of physical activity they’re asked to participate in will be more likely to get those who might not otherwise engage in physical activity at all the best chance to be active. Those who are interested in achieving competitive greatness will likely find avenues to do so no matter what gym class looks like. 

I agree with Alison Oliver, managing director of the Youth Sport Trust, who argues, “If we are to get girls more active…then we must work with them to understand what appeals to them,” she said. And I agree with Nick Morrison that “if getting girls to take part in sport involves giving them a say in what they do, then that seems a price worth paying”.

Mise-en-place: The Most Important Part of Any Task is the Beginning

A wonderful piece in Harvard Business Review argues for the technique mise-en-place. The piece highlights chef and best-selling author Anthony Bourdain, for whom the ritual is more than the latest time-saving trick; Bourdain starts his day the same way every time—and so do the chefs who work for him—because it’s an invaluable professional practice. 

Because Anthony Bourdain prepares early, he has plenty of time to relax.

“Mise-en-place is the religion of all good line cooks,” Bourdain wrote in his runaway bestseller Kitchen Confidential. “As a cook, your station, and its condition, its state of readiness, is an extension of your nervous system… The universe is in order when your station is set…”

Mise-en-place

Chefs like Anthony Bourdain have long appreciated that when it comes to exceptional cooking, the single most important ingredient of any dish is planning. It’s the “Meez” that forces Bourdain to think ahead, that saves him from having to distractedly search for items midway through, and that allows him to channel his full attention to the dish before him.
So what is it?

Mise-en-place  translates into “everything in its place.” In practice, it involves studying a recipe, thinking through the tools and equipment you will need, and assembling the ingredients in the right proportion before you begin. It is the planning phase of every meal—the moment when chefs evaluate the totality of what they are trying to achieve and create an action plan for the meal ahead.

Avoiding the worst thing

If mise-en-place can plausibly be described as the best way to start one’s day, what’s the worst? What’s the thing to avoid at all costs?
Glad you asked.

Shane Parrish, author of the irreplaceable blog Farnam Street, made a similar point in the LinkedIn piece ‘9 Habits You Need to Stop Now’. Second on the list was: Do not e-mail first thing in the morning or last thing at night.
Parrish cites Dilbert creator Scott Adams as thinking, “One of the most important tricks for maximizing your productivity involves matching your mental state to the task.”

In fact matching skills to the time of day is one of the most important changes you can make to improve your working habits.

Why?

Parrish has answers, “You want to get out of a reactive loop. If you move creative and thinking work to the start of the day, when we’re at our peak, you’ll have the rest of the day to be reactive.”

Of course, utilizing the ritual mise-en-place at the day’s beginning will allow for the early part of the day—before fatigue sets in—to be used for creative work. The kind of creative work Rafael Nadal does in between points—toweling off, examining a series of balls, um, adjusting his pants—is an elaborate set of rituals that allow him to take stock, to buy time for the mental (and sometimes physical) process of going through a mise-en-place. And once the points start, there are few in the history of his sport more creative or more powerful than Nadal.



And all that work before points lets him do stuff like this during them:



Plato was right—the most important part of any task is the beginning. Starting the day with mise-en-place (and not email!) will assist in many good beginnings.

Why Can't Andrew Sullivan be Secretary of State?

U.S. diplomacy in Iraq skewered

The Borowitz Report has some fun with the demands the U.S. would place on Iraq

Andy Borowitz’s latest satire is characteristically funny. And insightful. Normally, I wouldn’t post about anything like U.S. diplomacy vis-a-vis the Iraqi political situation, but this one illustrates one of Charlie Munger’s major arguments. Well, that and I somehow landed on the topic of Elie Kedourie’s Oakeshottian take on nationalism in a recent post (I get to Kedourie is about midway through the post).  

Borowitz sends up Secretary of State John Kerry’s rather stringent demands on the Iraqi government, writing, “In a meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry stressed the importance of forming a unity government in Iraq but refused to commit to a timetable for creating one in the United States. 

The sensitive topic of a unity government for the United States came at the end of a thirty-minute meeting, during which Secretary Kerry lectured the Iraqi Prime Minister about the value of a government ‘where people of different parties put aside their differences, make meaningful compromises, and work together for the good of the nation.’”

Hilarious. 

Or it would be if the situation is lampoons didn’t imperil people’s well-being. Or if the situation he sends-up didn’t stem from a continued miscalculation about the social, political, and religious situation ‘on the ground’. Michael Oakeshott was too conservative in some ways—perhaps most glaringly in his belief that it’s nearly impossible and nearly universally unwise to try to import a political tradition from one part of the world to another[i]. But, honestly, if ever there were a perfect case to highlight the stupidity of attempting to foist democracy on a group of peoples and a country, it’s got to be Iraq[ii].

Andrew Sullivan's more serious take 

Andrew Sullivan provides perspective on Kerry's Iraq position

Andrew Sullivan, who wrote his wonderful dissertation on Oakeshott and penned an even better follow-up book—and likely did as much to popularize the towering British theorist in the U.S. as anyone or anything else, makes a compelling case as to why Kerry’s position is so fraught with difficulty. Citing a piece by Michael Gordon in the New York Times that states Kerry’s case for intervention [iii] , Sullivan argues, “So we’ve gone from 300 military advisers and a new government before any military action … to a threat of potential airstrikes regardless in less than a week. When you think how long it took to ramp up the Vietnam disaster, that’s pretty damn quick. And check out what Kerry just said about ISIS: “they cannot be given safe haven anywhere.” That presumably means that their advance must not just be checked but reversed, a massive undertaking which is about as likely as a multi-sectarian democratic government in Baghdad.

From where I’m sitting, I see no way to achieve the ends John Kerry just outlined without a new war. And who will fight it? That shoe is the one that is yet to drop. My view: not a single American soldier, not a single cent, to build an Iraq that never existed and, at this point, never can. If Obama tries to do it, there has to be an insurrection from his supporters and from all sane Americans. If the Saudis and the Sunni states cannot rein in ISIS, then let the Iranians fight them.”
Right? 

And this tack, Sullivan notes, comes even after the U.S.’s singular foreign policy achievement of the past 12 months: the dismantling and relocation of Syria’s chemical weapons! So, the one-percent doctrine isn’t in play as a rationale for Kerry to use.
Sullivan is as right as he is truculent with his observation, “If Obama wants to find a middle ground, he’ll be the first Westerner ever to discover it in Iraq.”

While I’d admire the chutzpah and independence such a self-confidence requires, I only wish it were based a little more in reality.

Audacia et prudentia

Charlie Munger evinced an even more outrageous display of audacity when he showed up to a meeting of economists to present a paper on what’s wrong with their discipline, without ever having taken a single econ class. While opening with a compliment, “It’s my view that economics is better at the multi-disciplinary stuff than the rest of the soft science,” Munger’s flattery didn’t last too long. His subsequent sentence was,  “And it’s also my view that it’s still lousy, and I’d like to discuss this failure in this talk.”

Of course, if Munger were wrong about everything, no one would die—or even deploy. So he had that going for him. That and a pretty strong fallback position: immunity from the “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” argument.

While I don’t agree with Kerry or his cavalier position regarding Iraq, I do respect the courage it takes to go out on a limb for one’s convictions (I do realize that Kerry, in this instance, is more likely to deserve praise not for sticking to his own convictions but for the convictions of the administration he works for. So, perhaps rather than Oakeshott and Munger, we’ll get Josiah Royce and James Carville to plump for him). Whatever Kerry’s motivations, there’s certainly something to be said for exhibiting the individuality to hold a (drastically) divergent opinion. It’s one of the things Michael Oakeshott was best at.

You have my consent; do you want my soul as well?

As was another of his students, Richard Flathman, who—more than Kerry and perhaps as much as Munger—exhibits a fiercely independent streak. Harvard political theorist Richard Tuck tells one of my favorite stories about Flathman:

“My students at Harvard treasure a story that Richard Flathman told about himself when he came to give a paper to a political theory seminar.

“He said that many times in departmental meetings he has been outvoted on some issue, and like a good colleague, he has agreed to go along with the result. Other members of the department have often tried to persuade him after the meeting that he had been wrong in his original position. ‘I tell them, you have my consent; do you want my soul as well?’”

Tuck takes from this account that one of Flathman’s chief virtues as a thinker was his commitment to preserving people’s souls from capture by their fellow citizens. Flathman’s “most interesting targets have not been the obvious and familiar threats to individual liberty, which all modern right-thinking people can more or less agree on (and most of which ceased long ago to be much of a threat to the communities where right-thinking people tend to live).”

Flathman, like Munger, set his sights on disciplinary orthodoxies—though he set out to radicalize his own discipline. The crooked thinking Flathman set about righting were what he has called “virtue liberalism,” such as Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (“who in my judgement is no liberal at all”), John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls, and by a certain kind of rights theorist who is, at bottom, principally concerned with using rights to secure a civil order; John Locke is his prime example of this.

Against these writers, with their visions of communities united in the pursuit of widely disseminated and reasonable common goals, Flathman has pleaded for ‘willful liberalism,’ in which individuals are per-mitted and encouraged to make themselves, not to be made by the civic order. As he has admitted, [W]illful liberalism has affinities with libertarianism and especially with various strains in romanticism. The notion of liberation from state and other forms of power is reminiscent of libertarianism and even of individualistic anarchism, and the notions of self-making, selfenactment, and self-fashioning have manifest affinities with major tendencies in romanticism and expressivism.”

Flathman’s thought is trying to do what’s impossible in contemporary Iraq—provide for the conditions in which most people care for themselves. I wonder how, short of acquiring a fortune as vast as Charlie Munger’s so as to insulate oneself from criticism, might we cultivate the disposition to act independently—but without falling into the kind of wrongheadedness Kerry seems to be mired in.

Sullivan’s and Flathman’s teacher Michael Oakeshott has an idea

Oakeshott asks, “How does a pupil learn disinterested curiosity, patience, honesty, exactness, industry, concentration and doubt? How does he acquire a sensibility to small differences and the ability to recognize intellectual elegance? How does he come to inherit the disposition to submit to refutation? How does he not merely learn the love of truth and justice, but learn it n such a way as to escape the reproach of fanaticism? And beyond all this there is something more difficult to acquire: namely, the ability to detect the individual intelligence which is at work in every utterance, even those which convey impersonal information.” 

Michael Oakeshott served in France and Belgium with the British “Phantom” reconnaissance unit during WWII

His answer: “The intellectual virtues may be imparted only by a teacher who really cares about them for their own sake, and never stoops to the priggishness of mentioning them.”

After all, Oakeshott argues, it’s “not the cry but the rising of the wild duck impels the flock to follow him in flight.”

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[i] There’s a kernel in Oakeshott’s piece “Political Education” of the arguments in favor of cultivating diversity as articulated by anthropologist Clifford Geertz in his piece “On the Uses of Diversity”. Oakeshott, though, instead of embracing the possibility that cultures might borrow and learn from each other more fruitfully in exchanges that would leave all sides richer, instead opted to advance a theory that limited a politician’s or theorist’s activity in seeking out ideas from cultures outside of his or her own only in cases of explicit, recognized need.

Interestingly, 538 recently published a pretty compelling piece that argues that the U.S. Men’s National Soccer team has had such limited success because of it’s comparatively limited exposure to different traditions and leagues that have forced other nations and their national team coaches and players to innovate their style of play and tactics. (Though, in fairness, the fact that U.S. kids have long had other ambitions than the beautiful game that lead to quicker and more fame and money might have something to do with it, too).

[ii] Middle Eastern literature is actually rife with the word ‘primordial’. Geertz in another piece defines ‘primordial attachment’ that, “stems from the ‘givens’…of social existence: immediate contiguity and kin connection mainly, but beyond them the givenness that stems from being born into a particular religious community, speaking a particular language, or even a dialect of language, and following particular social practices.” Geertz didn’t have the Middle Eastern region in his sights per se while writing that, but the concept gets used with a frequency and force in literature and analysis about that area unmatched by anywhere else in the world.

[iii] The full passage Sullivan has in mind, “Secretary of State John Kerry said on Monday that the Sunni militants seizing territory in Iraq had become such a threat that the United States might not wait for Iraqi politicians to form a new government before taking military action. “They do pose a threat,” Mr. Kerry said, referring to the fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. “They cannot be given safe haven anywhere.”

“That’s why, again, I reiterate the president will not be hampered if he deems it necessary if the formation is not complete,” he added, referring to the Iraqi efforts to establish a new multisectarian government that bridges the deep divisions among the majority Shiites and minority Sunnis, Kurds and other smaller groups.

The 2014 San Antonio Spurs were anti-fraglie. Charlie Munger knows why.

No time for self-pity

Many of Charlie Munger’s ideas don’t really require superhuman insight to realize. He’s so good at reducing issues to their most simple core that his wisdom often looks like nothing more than common sense. 

His approach to setbacks is one of those commonsensical ideas. He writes, “Generally speaking, envy, resentment, revenge and self-pity are disastrous modes of thoughts.”

And self-pity might be the worst of all.

“Self-pity gets fairly close to paranoia, and paranoia is one of the very hardest things to reverse. You do not want to drift into self-pity,” Munger said. Here’s why: “It’s a ridiculous way to behave and when you avoid it, you get a great advantage over everybody else or almost everybody else because self-pity is a standard condition.”

Best of all? Despite it being so much a part of our human experience that Munger (exaggeratedly) calls it a ‘standard condition’, he’s right on the money that it’s something each of us can train ourselves not to do.

It's all about practice 

The Spurs would have only 4 trophies if they'd fallen into self-pity

But knowing that it’s possible is a lot different from doing it in practice.

We may all know what Munger calls the grandma corollary: that it’s a good idea to eat one’s vegetables before having desert. Anyone not aware that empty calories are bad and consistent sleep and exercise are good?

There’s a lot more to it, though, than knowing. GI Joe was wrong, knowing isn’t even close to half the battle with Munger’s best ideas.

The San Antonio Spurs just provided an perfect an example as I’ve ever seen of a group of people working together and embracing Munger’s insight against self-pity. 

Spurs as anti-fragile

Grantland editor Bill Simmons makes a case for the Spurs’s anti-fragility nearly as eloquent as the lived experience of the organization he covers.

Q: What’s the best lesson of the 2014 Spurs that wasn’t ridiculously obvious?

Five words: Don’t feel sorry for yourself.

Instead of moping around after blowing last year’s title, they looked at everything logically and wondered, “Hmmmmm … why did we REALLY lose?” The conclusion: They weren’t good enough at small ball; they couldn’t play two point guards at once; they didn’t rest their veterans enough; and they didn’t exploit Diaw’s offensive skills enough. They spent the regular season working on those issues and transforming themselves into a superior version of the Seven Seconds or Less Suns. The end result: They treated the 2014 Heat the same way those slash-and-kick international teams treated American basketball in the mid-2000s. It almost looked like they were playing a different sport.