Fragments

It has been sometime since I have written on this blog, particularly some time since I waxed a bit personal. Most recent posts have been analytical examinations of policy issues. Sometimes they have included personal asides, such as when I told a little bit about my experience on a US naval ship in my discussion on March 22 about the Libya caper. But for the most part these have been posts written for other venues and placed here on this blog just for the sake of having something to put here. Today, however, I want to write just for this venue. All I have to say, however, amounts to fragments of this and that. In a way, I intend to use my blog today as a kind of diary or list, just so that I won't completely forget some of the things that have been on my mind, and to which I hope one day to return for fuller exposition.

I have been stimulated to do this for two reasons. First, we are at a point in the cycle of the magazine where I happen to be caught up on my immediate obligations and so am not pressed as I often am to do something other than this. The second, there is a new technology that I have acquired that is stimulating me to explore its potential uses. I am speaking of a voice-recognition technology, called the Dragon, which is dramatically better in doing its job then the comparable technology was some 8 to 10 years ago, the last time that I investigated it. The thing is absolutely amazing. Of course it does make mistakes, but not so many that the technology does not represent a qualitative leap in my capacity to put words on paper, or on a screen, as the case may be. It is only slowly dawning on me the range of uses to which I might put this new facility.

The main reason I got it in the first place was because I have somewhat advancing arthritis in my hands that has caused me in recent months, I have noticed, to make more typing mistakes than I am used to making. It is very frustrating to repeatedly hit the wrong keys and have to go back repeatedly to make corrections. Sometimes I get so frustrated that I feel like pounding the keyboard and the piece of furniture on which it is sitting. This is unhealthy for the keyboard, and likewise unhealthy for the piece of furniture. Nor is it such a great idea for my hand. If I can reduce the level of frustration that I experience everyday in writing, and limit myself to mere cursing, not only will I save the machines I use but I also may reduce my general stress level, which will make me happy, and also please my doctor.

As I say, it dawned on me only slowly the uses to which this technology might be put. I realized the other day while walking down the sidewalk that my doctoral dissertation, completed in 1978 and which I have only in a typed version (since personal computers at that time were in a primitive stage and since the University required that all dissertations submitted be typed old-fashioned like), that I can now read my dissertation into this machine and create a book in a vastly shorter time than I would've been able to do so had I had to retype the manuscript. Now, of course, I could've scanned the manuscript and done it that way, but I have all along intended to revise quite extensively the language that I used in producing this book. I know a lot more now than I did when I wrote it, not just because I'm older and more mature but also because in the course of my career I have collected more information about the subject: namely, the Jordanian Civil War of 1970. I wrote the dissertation before traveling many times to Jordan, and in those travels I was able to talk to some of the Jordanian principals and get a good idea of how they perceived American decision-making at the time that it was happening. Now I can re-create the manuscript at a higher, more sophisticated level at remarkably efficient speed, thanks to this new technology. I am going to try this very soon and see what happens.

Similarly, about a year ago I was moved to try to write a novel. Every writer should try to write a novel even if the result ends up in dismal failure. In my case I actually had an idea of a sort. I had a title that encapsulated the moral of the story. I had a setting, and I had the makings of a dramatis personae. I had a structure. All I lacked was an actual story.

I discussed my problem with Scooter Libby, an old acquaintance, who has made a success of writing a novel. I don't know that he has made a success of selling it, but you can't sell what you haven't written, can you? I have been too busy to pursue it. When I began I wrote one page. I liked what I wrote. It was a good page. It was so good, in truth, that I was hesitant to write a second page for fear that it might not be as good. This of course is quite silly, but there you have it. But now, with this voice recognition technology I think that perhaps I can be re-inspired to continue on with this project because I can now wander down many cul-de-sacs, make lots of mistakes, take several wrong turns and the pain of revision, it seems to me, will be far less onerous with this new technology then it would've been, at least psychologically, had it all come down to a matter of retyping.

So I have time around now for several writing projects that had been on my lists for years in some cases, but which I have never really summoned the energy to pursue. Whether this really turns out as I expect, or hope, remains to be seen, but on this beautiful spring day, things seem to be looking, and feeling, rather more "up" on this score than they have been across the gray skies of the dreary winter just past.

I have also realized another use for this technology. I don't have very many letter correspondence these days. Not all that many people are still inclined to put words on actual pages, fold them into an envelope, affix postage stamps and send them in the mail. As for me, I still get a thrill from the receipt of actual personal letter, much more so than I do from receiving an e-mail. Maybe it's just my generation and my age, but it seems to me that the old-fashioned personal touch evokes a different emotional pitch then electrons on a page. It will now be possible to write to my few correspondents in a far more efficient way if I don't have to type the letters and make all the mistakes that I typically make. I suspect that I might write more frequently on account of this, and while that also raises potential dangers, I think they are controllable ones.

So much for the technology. Now let me talk about a few things that have been on my mind, again in hopes that I will not lose track of whatever thoughts I have had.

One subject that has been occupying my mind off and on now for a year or two has been the question of how the human-created technological environment in which we live affects things. And by things I mean not only our social, economic, and political, but at a more interior level also our physiology. I reread this past summer a slightly crazy book by a guy named Gerry Mander, called Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television. It was a book that I read the first time more than 25 years ago. When I read it then it impressed me in two ways. First, I was sympathetic to the argument in general because I've always disliked television. But it also impressed me as somewhat nutty, because in several ways the author went well beyond any kind of empirical evidence to make some rather mystical, New Age remarks that did not sit well with my rational education. When I reread it, I had the same impression; I still think the guy was quite clearly out lunch in many ways. But he was also onto something.

When he was studying, or trying to study, the effects of television he noted that nearly all of the research that had been done at the time when he wrote the book, which was some 35 years ago, had been on the content of programming, mainly for children. Very little research had been done on the effects of the technology itself on those who were watching it. In other words, here were people aiming a 24,000 volt cathode ray tube at their heads and it didn't occur to most researchers to ask what effects, if any, this might have on the human body. It was later learned that many of the old black and white television sets emitted dangerous levels of radiation, and this was fixed. But other, more subtle aspects of the technology remained beyond the interest, it seems, of most researchers. Later on, evidence did accumulate that television watching causes hyperactivity in children.

The point was that Mander at least vaguely understood that all animals, as they interact with their environment from the very first day they are born (if not even before they are born), engage in a kind of literal dialectic with that environment. The human brain at birth is a dense dendrite reservoir. Each and every experience that the organism has with the environment sends an electrical impulse into the brain that creates pathways in it. The brain is in a sense "wired" in certain ways according to the experiences that it has. It therefore stands to reason, it has always seemed to me, that as one changes the environment in systematic ways, then the neural pathways formed in the brain will take on a characteristic shape in accordance with those changes in the environment.

I am not presupposing that these changes are evil, or bad in any way, but I'm not presupposing that they're not either. I would like to start simply by understanding the empirical reality of what is going on; judgments about good or bad can come perhaps later. I suspect this is mainly a matter of values and tastes, far more so, I suspect than any possible empirical or objective basis upon which to judge such things. But it does strike me as sort of odd that there isn't a great deal of curiosity about such subjects. When I asked a woman named Edythe London, who is a world-class expert on addiction, what she knew of the research that had been done on the physiological effects on the human brain of the various information technology advances of recent years, she replied that as far she could tell there weren't any that got at the questions I was asking.

I want to know, for example, how the existence of mediated images affects the hippocampus. I want to know how the technical events and astounding complexes that Mander described many years ago have changed, or not, at a time when the volume, verisimilitude and seductive capacities of mediated images are so much more advanced now than they were 30 or 40 years ago. I am especially interested in any changes in how the brain develops, especially in children.

There is a fellow in Denver named Harvey Milkman who, with a co-author, wrote a textbook about how the brain works. I first approached him to go beyond his professional interest and speculate about the broader social and political effects of the changes in brain chemistry that we have witnessed over recent years parallel to some changes in behavior. For example people now talk about addiction to the Internet, as he does in the book. It's clear that addiction is not just a matter concerning substances but can also concerned experiences. People are addicted to gambling, for example, or to roller coasters and jumping out of airplanes with parachutes and such. The question is, can we draw a link between the physiology of addiction, as we know it, whether to experiences or to drugs, and sub-threshold forms of psychological shaping that is the consequence of the cascade of mediated images delivered to us these days through all the new technologies we have adopted? I perhaps have not expressed this question very well, but I think you get the general idea.

Dr. Milkman got the idea but he did not pursue it. I later came to realize, perhaps, why. His book is very reductionist. There are passages in quotations in which he and his co-author assert that if you can find out what is going on in individual cells in the brain, that this amounts to and understanding of human experience. This is the old-fashioned reduction of mind to brain, and is, in my view, very primitive. It cannot even begin to explain how cells act together to produce anything remotely like behavior and certainly not consciousness. Reductionism in neuroscience presumes that the only processes that matter are bottom up processes when it seems clear, or should to anyone who has ever heard of DNA, that the process is as much top-down as it is bottom-up. In retrospect, I am not surprised that someone of such a reductionist inclination was not interested in trying to see how brain function could have broader social impact.

There is a new book, out from Princeton University Press, by a womanly named Louise Barrett, called Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds. Based on the title, anyway, this is exactly the general question that I have been trying to formulate, th9ug my interests are more social and political. What I really want to know is how these new technologies, by affecting the way our brains work, might have an impact on what Robert Putnam has called social trust, or social capital. So I look forward very much to see what this book has to say. I am relieved, in any case, that I'm not the only one who has been thinking about this.

Of course I know that many observers have wondered and worried about the impact of the diminution of print culture over the years, a related subject. The Gutenberg Elegies, written by Sven Birkets, was perhaps the first expression of this concern, written more than 15 years ago. A newer book by the Nicholas Carr, The Shallows, has advanced this inquiry a great deal, suggesting that, yes, there are physiological effects, not mere social ones, from this new technology. I got Sven Birkets to review this book in the magazine, and he did a great job. Carr was worried that he could no longer focus or concentrate very well, and wondered why. He wondered whether Google or, really, the technological environment as a whole, might be responsible for changes in his mental aptitudes. He adduces some pretty persuasive evidence that, yes, it is likely responsible.

As I say, my real interests in this are not physiological alone but rather to try to extrapolate from what we know about the physiology to the social, the cultural, and ultimately the political. We do know already that advertisers use very sophisticated psychological knowledge to sell stuff. It is hardly news, for example, that those who want to sell expensive cars are well advised to produce television commercials in which sexy women clad in rather little or suggestive clothing are shown making symbolic love to the vehicle. The psychologists have advised the advertisers of a very basic fact of human nature, namely, that the human mind is promiscuously associative. We do not bring to be stoppedar our rational capacities onto what we perceive except when we deliberately focus them to do so. All of the activity undertaken by our subconscious mines goes on oblivious to this rational overlay. So it is not difficult to see how an advertiser can try to sell a car by associating it with a sex object that, when men see it, begins producing dopamine by the bucket up in their heads.

It is also no revelation that American political life has in many ways adopted the techniques and the cadences of advertising culture. The consultants, the pollsters, the media experts all suffuse American electoral politics nowadays. It is no great leap of imagination to suspect that many of the same psychological insights about how humans behave are being applied to getting elected as well as how to sell soap flakes, corn chips, cars and whatever else the corporations are trying to sell. How all this affects political community, including the aforementioned social capital levels in society, I confess I don't really know. But I just have an intuition, call it, that there is something here worth exploring.

As usual, I will try, and am trying, to use the magazine as a way to sate my curiosity. That is what I do with it in the main. I have a question, I have an obsession, I have a curiosity about something, and I use the world at large to try to help me get answers. My readers, in this process, are well described, I think, as fortunate bystanders. I realize that this is a very selfish way to imagine what being an editor is all about, but it's the way it seems to suit me best.

Last for now, I had this idea the other day--well, maybe "idea" is a little too strong a term for it-- of having a contest in the magazine. The contest I am going to call something like the New American Dream contest. For a while now, I have wanted to have a cluster or an ongoing series of essays in the magazine that would try to get contributors to think out a number of years, to get them to dream about what they hope America should look like in the future. I don't want fantasies, or visions so far beyond practicality that they just hang in the air. I want the kind of dream that connects what is desirable with the public policies, at least in broad definition, that can achieve them. But I really want to put a premium on defining the vision, because, as Lewis Carroll should by now have taught everyone, most any road will take us "there" if we don't know where it is we are going. It seems to me that we have many deficits of many sorts in American society today, but one of them is that we seem to be exhausted in terms of our collective mental life. So many things seem to be going wrong that it is all we can do to fix the system we have. This focus on urgent repair sucks all of the oxygen out of the room for longer-term thinking, not to speak of planning. So I am trying in my own very small way with this idea to re-balance the matter.

I have not been able to interest many authors in taking on this kind of essay. So I thought maybe what I would do is create contest and see if, somewhere in this country or somewhere on this planet, there are people who can do the thinking that I have in mind. Our publisher, Charles Davidson, is fine with this, so I am going to proceed. The first challenge is to define the contest and communicate precise instructions to would-be participants. I think I'll get at that sometime this afternoon. A second concern, of course, is how to advertise the contest without spending a lot of money doing it. This should not be that much of a challenge, however. I have found that contests featuring cash prizes have a way of becoming known. What is particularly attractive about this idea, this contest, is that I hope it attracts younger people to the magazine, because that is what we have always wanted to do, with only moderate success thus far. I will let you know how things go.

Last for now, (and this time I mean it), I really should lay down a few words about two recent experiences, one my two weeks in Brazil in December, and the other my six days on the USS Boxer in February. I'm going to let the Brazil business go for now, because there's just too much to say and time is not infinite. But I did want to say that I learned a great deal from being together with 980 crew and eight teen hundred Marines on this helicopter landing deck ship. I left San Diego on February 22 and the ship arrived in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on March 1. During that period I and my two associates in the RSEP (regional security education program) program gave a series of lectures and talks on various aspects of Middle Eastern and South Asian politics and society. But the one-on-one conversations I had in the ward room and around the ship provided a great deal of insight for me.

You actually have to live for a while with those who are part of the military culture to understand how these folks think, and how truly wonderful most of them are. Of course we spoke mostly to the officers, although we did have a little time to talk with enlisted men and women. We also learned about the ship's routine. I got to walk on the flight deck and see the helicopters and Harrier jets. I got to walk along the cat walk and see the ocean and I even got to exercise in the gym along with the Marines. That is quite an experience. I also observed more crew cuts then I had seen since 1956.

Perhaps most educational all, I got to see the scene on the dock at San Diego when the ship left for a planned seven-month deployment. There were families everywhere; children, wives, and I suppose the spouses of both female Navy and Marine deployees, were hugging and kissing and crying all over the place. It was like a scene from a movie, except it wasn't a movie. What it was, however, was moving.

I would like to do the program again sometime and, indeed, I was already invited to do one, a new one on an aircraft carrier this time, at the end of May. Unfortunately, that's a time when the magazine's schedule is far too heavy for me to be away. And it's too bad because this deployment starts from Norfolk Virginia and ends up somewhere in either Spain or Portugal. That would have been fun.

As it happened, I had never before been to Hawaii. And as it happened, too, Hawaii was the only state I had never been in. So when I walked ashore at Pearl Harbor I racked up my 50th state. It's silly, I know, but I feel rather proud of that. I have never been to Spain or Portugal either, so I would've been just as the lighted to land there, as well. Perhaps in the future this will come to be.

Let me end by coming full circle in a way. The Commodore on the Boxer, which is to say the man in charge of the amphibious attack squadron, consisting of three ships, asked me around February 26 or 27th whether the squadron might expect any action with regard to Libya. I had already discussed possible contingencies for the Navy and Marines with respect to Bahrain and perhaps also Yemen. We spoke about Egypt and about Jordan as well. The civil war in Libya had only just begun to develop when we left San Diego, so this question took me somewhat unawares.

My response to him was that there were very few American citizens in Libya. The embassy was not large and there were not many American workers in the oil fields; they were mostly Italians and others. I could not think of any vital or even important American interest that would justify the use of military force in a Libyan contingency, outside of very marginal and minor humanitarian or search-and-rescue kinds of operations. I think I said, if I can remember my exact words, that given the stakes in Libya it would be "crazy" for the United States to use military force. What I did not say, however, is that just because it would be crazy did not mean we would not do it. I sent him an e-mail once I was back in Washington, after we had started the war, making that minor point. He appreciated it in the spirit with which it was sent....

Those who read my March 22 analysis of Libya may note that a fair number of what might generously be called predictions have come true. Some friends who read the piece have been kind enough to note as much to me directly, which of course any writer appreciates. This is a case, however, where I am sorry to have been correct. That's life, I guess.