Welcome to my last post; it’s been a great run.
This is not the last post I will make on the blog; it’s the last post I have written as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. There are still a few loose ends to tie up, a few things to pack in the office, but we’ve had the goodbye party and the last staff meeting and the last paycheck is about to be cut. It’s been a great thirteen-year run, and I have a lot of good friends and colleagues still at the Council. I’m not going to miss them because I’ll stay in touch — reading their books, op-eds and blog posts, and as a member attending the events and the roundtables they organize. Participating in the life and work of this organization for more than a decade gave me a window into how the US foreign policy community works and thinks, and that perspective will inform and enrich my work going forward.
That said, though, it’s time to move on. The shift in my career focus from think tanks to the university and journalism is being driven by my growing sense that the greatest problems in American foreign policy and more generally in our political life do not flow from an absence of policy proposals and the other products that a good think tank makes. We do not, in my opinion, suffer from a lack of ingenious plans for fixing Bosnia, preventing conflict in the African Great Lakes region, or for redesigning the international financial system. At the levels at which think tank fellows characteristically work and think, we are pretty well covered. There are more task force reports, issue studies and position papers being produced thancan be put to use– and many of them (especially the ones prepared by my CFR colleagues) are often very good.
But if the country has never been so rich in policy institutes and policy scholars producing policy positions and policy papers, we don’t seem to be doing so well when it comes to adopting and sticking to good policies. Our capacity for sensible public discussions about our alternatives, and our ability to produce and elect leaders who understand the world we live in also look weak. This isn’t just a criticism of the Obama administration; the Bush and the Clinton administrations were both better at rhetoric than at policy. Increasingly I’m drawn to the conclusion that the weak links in the American foreign (and domestic) policy processes reflect weaknesses in the way we train and prepare people for this kind of work and more generally in the relationship of intellectuals to American society overall.
As someone who has worked and hopes to keep working in the three major groups of institutions where American intellectuals are most active (the academy, ‘serious’ journalism and publishing, and policy institutes or think tanks), I find that the relations among these institutions and between all of them and the educated lay public are shifting in complex and not always helpful ways. The problems we face cannot simply be addressed by writing more and better policy papers in think tanks; we need to prepare for big changes in the institutions where intellectuals work, in the way that intellectuals understand their role in society, and in the way that intellectuals are formed.
The rise of the think tank world (the Council on Foreign Relations alone has gone from about maybe one dozen senior fellows when I joined to several times that today) partly reflects a crisis in the universities. A generation ago, university professors were the country’s repository of talent for most policy matters, foreign and domestic. Henry Kissinger was teaching at Harvard before he joined the Nixon Administration. Partly as a result of the Vietnam War, which created an entire generation of academics who believed that to serve the American government was to betray the purity of the scholarly calling, and partly as the result of academic pressures for ever narrower specialization and ever more emphasis on theoretical constructs, the universities have become less and less relevant to the policy process. (Law schools and economics departments are the principal exceptions to the rule.) Great scholars with global reputations like Joe Nye at Harvard can still move between the academy and government, but each generation is finding that harder to do.
The rise of think tanks reflects many forces, including the interest of ideological or economic special interests to collect and promote ‘stables’ of thinkers who will reliably produce work that reflects a given worldview. But the reason think tanks have become so valuable in the government and policy world is because a gap grew up that needed to be filled. The academy has abdicated its former role of providing comfortable resting places for out of power (or preparing for power) policy thinkers. The political studies and international relations departments of many leading universities are becoming places for introspective, sometimes navel-gazing study aimed chiefly at clarifying and reflecting on the terms of debate and the scholarly discourse; the think tanks have emerged to host extroverted study aimed primarily at changing the external world. This is not, I think, a particularly elegant, cost-effective or intellectually fruitful way of organizing American intellectual life or of teaching young people, but there it is.
The third leg of the tripod of American intellectual life is the world of serious generalist intellectual comment. In the past the combination of serious book publishing and magazines (back when The Atlantic was one of many general circulation magazines attempting to deal seriously with ideas, culture and politics) could support independent intellectuals who were not affiliated with universities or think tanks. The economic base of those thinkers has been declining for generations. After World War Two, most of the intellectuals were forced to take on university positions to earn a living. As the universities became less hospitable to the generalists, and as it became progressively more difficult for serious writers to live on book royalties, some fled into the world of think tanks; others responded by writing for glossy magazines — where possible without dumbing down the content too much. The continuing decline of magazines and serious newspapers, the travails of book publishing and, so far, the failure of internet journalism to produce much revenue further complicates the task of those who want to make a living by writing intelligently about important issues for the public at large.
Each of these three legs of the tripod of American intellectual life has its problems; there are also problems that affect the tripod as a whole. First, there is a widening gap between intellectual and ‘expert’ opinion and American society as a whole. Americans have always been skeptical, iconoclastic and lacking in deference to intellectual and social authorities; in some ways that populist irreverence and revolt is now stronger than ever. Our universities are producing more theories than ever; our think tanks are producing more complex policy papers than ever; our thinkers and journalists are producing more commentary than ever: but the people aren’t buying.
This is partly a question of ideology (American intellectuals and professionals have a set of class interests that are not identical to that of other groups in society and few American professionals reflect deeply on the ways that warps their judgment); it is also a question of the second major failing in our intellectual system: preparation. We are doing a lousy job of equipping people with the social and verbal ability to communicate effectively between different specialist audiences (environmentalists and political scientists, for example) or between specialists and academics as a whole and the educated lay public. Being able to write clear and compelling books and articles for the educated lay public about important topics and complex ideas isn’t just a way for intellectuals to sell more books. This skill is vital to the health of a democratic society; without a healthy discussion of important ideas it’s going to be hard to get broad public support for difficult but important policy choices. In any case, the people need to be involved in the discussion and in the United States today our universities have largely abdicated what ought to be part of their core mission. These skills aren’t valued; they aren’t even taught. In the late Middle Ages many monkish scholars pursued ever finer theological distinctions and arguments as the church rotted away in gross corruption and society moved beyond the ideas and institutions that had once served it well. Something like that seems to be happening today in the United States; it’s not a good trend.
The third problem is, I think, related to the first two. As a society, we seem to be good at producing technicians and bad at cultivating and nurturing people with vision. There are conspicuous and outstanding exceptions to this generalization (people like my TAI colleague Frank Fukuyama or in a different way my old CFR boss Les Gelb), but on the whole both our think tank technicians and our academic theoreticians are weakest when it comes to what George H. W. Bush famously called ‘the vision thing’. This has a lot to do with the way our emphasis on technical and specialist education produces policy people with surprisingly little understanding of either history or the great cultural forces like religion that shape the way people encounter and respond to the world.
One result is that many Americans come out of the higher educational system with a combination of detailed knowledge about a specific subject area and quite naive and simplistic ideological views. Simplistic ideas about ‘nation building’, the relationship of development and democracy, the nature of democracy and both the nature and direction of the historical process itself are widespread among American policymakers and even more prevalent among the bureaucrats and experts who staff large government institutions. Quite responsible people sometimes have shockingly crude ideas about the relationship of power to ideals in history, the nature of a liberal international order, and the relationship of culture and history to contemporary politics not only in the United States but around the world.
Like the urban planners of past generations who devastated whole cities by building vast projects that ignored the human factor, many of the people who think about policy in this country are in the grip of great theoretical abstractions and are poorly prepared to manage the inevitable problems when the grand concept meets the friction and resistance of history and human reality. The ambitious globalism of the Clinton administration, the Bush administration’s dash for democracy and the Obama administration’s liberal internationalism are very different approaches intellectually speaking, but they share a common abstraction from the real world. These ideological abstractions miss the details and the fine points like the way a South Park cartoon sketch misses the detailed verisimilitude of a Vermeer.
The individuals who try to apply these caricatured ideals to history aren’t stupid; they are often extremely intelligent. But the educational system that created them and the intellectual life and discourse that has surrounded them have failed to prepare them for their tasks. We are failing to provide what in an earlier post I called the που στω, or ‘standing place’ (as in “Give me a lever and a place on which I can stand, and I will move the world”): a vision of culture and history that enables someone to see far, reflect broadly, think deeply and communicate clearly about the major issues of the day.
We are also failing to provide that standing place in another sense: a way for people called to make a living as they develop the vision and skills that can ultimately enable them to emerge as great thinkers or leaders. The universities and the think tanks increasingly reward specialists rather than holistic thinkers; the media environment rewards predictable controversialists — provocateurs of the right and left. This will be ruinous if it continues.
History, culture, religion: we have produced a caste of policymakers and intellectuals who for the most part are color blind or nearly so when it comes to these topics. There are many exceptions of course, including many of my old Council colleagues, but taken as a group, we have a policy elite that too frequently can neither understand nor plan for nor communicate effectively with the broader public in this country and abroad.
If democracy is going to flourish in this turbulent new century, we need to equip, prepare and support a new kind of socially engaged intellectual (or an old kind of intellectual made new). I hope that my work at Bard and at The American Interest Online is going to contribute in some small way to addressing this problem. The health and strength of American society is essential, not only for our own continued freedom and prosperity, but to ensure that we can make our necessary contribution to the peace, development and well being of the world.
It’s easy to complain; hard to do. At Bard and The American Interest Online I’m going to try to do something useful about these problems. You, the readers of The American Interest Online, have ringside seats to watch the show. Judging from the comments I’ve received to date, you won’t be shy about sharing your opinions about how well, or how poorly, I succeed.