My CIRCLE colleagues met with an Egyptian youth delegation yesterday and report having a very interesting conversation about how to sustain engagement in that country as the revolution moves into the rear-view mirror.
I enjoyed War, Sebastian Junger’s vivid report of an American platoon in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan during five months of regular combat. I was a little taken aback to note that the other Amazon customers who had bought War had also bought the memoirs of Dick Cheney and Herman Cain and polemics by the likes of Ann Coulter. On the other hand, some readers of Junger had bought Hadji Murad, by the pacifist Tolstoy, The Chickenhawk Syndrome: War, Sacrifice, and Personal Responsibility by the philosopher Cheney Ryan, and books about the history of Afghanistan. Probably the Amazon customer database is not the best tool for deciding where to place a book on the ideological spectrum, and it’s good to know that ideologically diverse people still share some common reading. Still, the political implications of War (the book) are interesting to think about.
Junger’s focus is tight. He is interested in a platoon of US combat industry in a particular valley in Afghanistan. Although he knows something of the country’s history and culture, he ignores it here because the American soldiers understand little of it. He has almost nothing to say about the overall purpose or strategy of the war. Other parts of the military effort in Afghanistan, such as air support and intelligence, are off stage. Junger describes individual soldiers, but none emerges as a particularly vivid character. The New York Times critic Dexter Filkins sees that as a weakness, but I thought it was a defensible choice. Junger’s thesis is the importance of the group, the bonds that make the platoon hang together even in the direst situations and that submerge individual differences.
(By the way, Filkins generally seems biased against Junger’s book. He complains that Junger digresses into the “unusual physics of fighting in the Korangal: you can see a gunshot but not have enough time to move before it hits you.” But this is true of all modern gunshots and has nothing special to do with the Korangal.)
I’m not sure that conservatives should especially like Junger’s portrait of this platoon. Its soldiers are bad at “free enterprise” and have chosen to be government employees instead. They hold counter-cultural personal values, as reflected by their troubled experiences back home and disciplinary infractions on bases. They put the group well ahead of the individual.
One aspect of the portrait that might appeal to conservatives is its celebration of masculinity. The men of Battle Company have vices as well as virtues, but their virtues are real and at least stereotypically male. They are not so much courageous as determined not to let down the group, in a particularly male way. Of course, the stakes are life and death, and their willingness to sacrifice for the group is what keeps most of them alive.
The book also hints at an idea that Junger captures with an epigraph: “We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. — Winston Churchill (or George Orwell).” The uncertain, double attribution suggests some irony on Junger’s part, Churchill and Orwell being rather different types of people. But he at least wants us to consider the possibility that we sleep safely because of “rough” nineteen-year-olds like the ones he lived with in Korengal.
Is it true? On the one hand, I think that every society probably does need people who are willing and able to use violence on its behalf. A more rapid and deadly reaction force would have saved lives recently in peaceful Norway. On the other hand, we could clearly rely less on violence if we chose not to extend ourselves aggressively overseas. Further, even if it’s true that we sleep soundly because we have rough men on our side, we also rely on computer nerds, emergency room nurses, and logistics specialists for basic needs. (So the quote proves more than it intended.) Finally, the men themselves realize their own dispensability. A Black Hawk helicopter costs lot of money and is a scarce resource. Combat infantry are, or at least they feel they are, “the most replaceable part of the whole deadly show.” Junger’s achievement is to show that their skills and commitment are in fact rare and valuable.
(West Tisbury, MA) We at CIRCLE are in the business of measuring educational outcomes, including those in colleges and universities. I have fairly complex and nuanced opinions about the role of measurement, whether it’s qualitative or quantitative. Measurement is helpful when it supports making wise value-judgments, and harmful when it obscures the value-judgments that one must make.
Of all the professional groups we encounter–including philanthropists and grantmakers, government officials, k-12 educators, and corporate executives–I’d say that professors are the most resistant to measuring the impact of their work. K-12 teachers have reasonable objections to crude measures of “value added,” but they are resigned to (or even supportive of) the idea that someone should assess what their students have learned. Not so with professors, many of whom reject the whole conversation. Their response may be a little surprising, considering that most of the available tools and methods for measurement originate in academia. I suspect several factors are in play:
In my opinion, higher education (which is funded by the rest of society) has a legitimacy crisis and does owe outsiders accounts of what it accomplishes for them. The problem of crude and inappropriate measurement is serious, but it is unacceptable to avoid evaluation completely.
I believe that: 1) moral knowledge is irreducibly experiential and particularistic; hence 2) efforts to replace moral judgment with general methods and principles cannot succeed; and thus 3) we need democratic deliberation by people who also have diverse practical experiences.
The particularistic part of this argument (1) seems an overlooked element in Alexis de Tocqueville’s political philosophy. Consider vol. 2, book 1, chapter 3 of Democracy in America:
THE deity does not regard the human race collectively. He surveys at one glance and severally all the beings of whom mankind is composed; and he discerns in each man the resemblances that assimilate him to all his fellows, and the differences that distinguish him from them. God, therefore, stands in no need of general ideas. …
Such, however, is not the case with man. If the human mind were to attempt to examine and pass a judgment on all the individual cases before it, the immensity of detail would soon lead it astray and it would no longer see anything. [So people are forced to generalize, but …]
General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect; for there are in nature no beings exactly alike, no things precisely identical, no rules indiscriminately and alike applicable to several objects at once.
De Tocqueville is not quick to connect particularistic thinking and democracy. Quite the contrary; he presumes that democracy encourages the habit of hasty generalization:
In the ages of equality all men are independent of each other, isolated, and weak. The movements of the multitude are not permanently guided by the will of any individuals; at such times humanity seems always to advance of itself. In order, therefore, to explain what is passing in the world, man is driven to seek for some great causes, which, acting in the same manner on all our fellow creatures, thus induce them all voluntarily to pursue the same track. This again naturally leads the human mind to conceive general ideas and superinduces a taste for them. … When I repudiate the traditions of rank, professions, and birth …, I am inclined to derive the motives of my opinions from human nature itself, and this leads me necessarily, and almost unconsciously, to adopt a great number of very general notions.
His leading example is his own people, the French, who are both egalitarian and prone to quick generalization and abstract thinking. But the Americans are an exception (chap. 4):
This difference between the Americans and the French originates in several causes, but principally in the following one. The Americans are a democratic people who have always directed public affairs themselves. The French are a democratic people who for a long time could only speculate on the best manner of conducting them. The social condition of the French led them to conceive very general ideas on the subject of government, while their political constitution prevented them from correcting those ideas by experiment and from gradually detecting their insufficiency; whereas in America the two things constantly balance and correct each other.
I am not interested in distinctions between French and American people, but in the ideal model that de Tocqueville attributed to the United States of his time. Because Americans made relatively few social distinctions, and great masses of people could vote on legislation, they were in danger of embracing general ideas that would distort reality. Indeed, this has been a recurrent frailty of our political culture. However, because we Americans “direct public affairs ourselves,” we learn to accommodate our general principles to complex reality. Denying Americans the right to participate directly–for instance, by dramatically limiting the role of juries in criminal law or, in general, by over-empowering an expert class–will make Americans worse at thinking and judging.
According to the New York Times, the White House has instructed domestic agencies about “9/11 Anniversary Planning”:
These guidelines also acknowledge that Americans will expect government leaders to explain what steps have been taken to prevent another 9/11-style attack and to encourage Americans to volunteer in their communities this Sept. 11. [They] also ask something of Americans that has been lacking in Washington: ‘We will also draw on the spirit of unity that prevailed in the immediate aftermath of the attacks.’
I wish I could read the instructions themselves. (Googling for them produces outraged headlines on right-wing sites, like: “Obama even regulates how to commemorate the 9/11 terror attacks.” In fact, the Chief Executive gave instructions to employees who report to him within the federal government.)
Meanwhile, I’ve also been getting press questions about the relationship between 9/11 and volunteering, service, or national unity. People ask whether the original attacks increased service, whether that effect has worn off, and whether leaders took advantage of the opportunity to enhance service. These are my main thoughts:
1. Volunteering rose between 2002 and 2004 and then fell off somewhat after 2005. We don’t know much about the trends before 2002 because relevant survey questions were not asked regularly, but we do know that high school students’ volunteering rose through the 1980s and 1990s. The changes in national rates since 2002 have not been dramatic. If 9/11 had an effect, it probably wasn’t large.
source: CIRCLE
2. Volunteering is not mainly a reflection of motivation. It is more a function of opportunity, organization, and recruitment. The neighbors you see picking up trash on the local playground are not there primarily because they had an urge to serve and looked for something to do. They are there because: 1) there is a playground, 2) somebody organized a clean-up, and 3) they were asked to participate. Motivation matters at the margin, especially to get the organizers going. It is not the main factor in explaining volunteer rates.
Thus I wouldn’t expect 9/11/01 to produce a vast wave of extra volunteering by motivating people, nor would I explain the modest decline after 2005 as a result of waning enthusiasm. I suspect budget cuts hurt from 2006-10. After all, if the playground is closed, the volunteer coordinator is laid off, or the community newspaper shuts down, that will suppress volunteering rates.
3. There is, and always has been, a non sequitur in this argument: The United States was attacked by dangerous terrorists, so volunteer at your neighborhood school. The problem is not that civic engagement lacks value or relevance at a time of crisis. The problem is with the standard modes of “volunteering,” which miss the kinds of problems that 9/11 represents (national security, a destroyed section of a great city, relations with the Muslim world, civil liberties).
In a period of rampant professionalism, we assume that paid experts must address those really serious problems, while volunteers can read to kindergartners. Reading to kindergartners is good, but it has nothing to do with 9/11 except symbolically. And the meaning of the symbol troubles me. It is supposed to be about caring and unity, but to me it conveys passivity and marginalization. It’s as if the government said: “We’ll ‘explain what steps have been taken to prevent another 9/11-style attack’; you show you care by volunteering in your community.”