Like Fritjof Capra, I instinctively see Eastern philosophy and Western science as yin and yang. They rarely disagree and usually reinforce each other, the East using the vocabulary of metaphor, the West that of empiricism. So indulge me as I apply this instinct to my current thread on stuff.

The Feng Shui view is that stuff, ie clutter, blocks the flow of energy (qi) in your house and, since you are not ultimately separate from the space around you, in you.

The relevant Western analog is that clutter wants to increase all by itself. You have to expend energy to keep your stuff from spreading, multiplying, breaking, rotting.

This idea is called the Second Law of Thermodynamics. “Clutter”, in the argot, is entropy, the amount of disorder in a system. Disorder will increase as surely as water flows downhill (from a high-energy state to a low-energy state). The “system” in question can be:

• your body, in which entropy manifests as aging and breaking,
• a glass of warm water that cools (trading the “order” of warmth here and cold there for the “disorder” of lukewarmth everywhere)
• your house or home office as it mysteriously gets submerged in stuff,
• the entire universe (which is incredibly bad news for us, since there is no other system that we can decamp to), and
• almost anything else.

Now, you might object that you can make water flow uphill, and you can warm a glass of water even in a cool room. Yes. But the key insight is that this takes energy, which must be added into the system. You have to pump, or boil, et cetera.

Hence the dilemma of stuff: First the clutter increases, thus (according to Feng Shui) blocking our energy, which is thus unavailable to reverse the cluttering, and so the shit–sorry, stuff–just happens.

Let’s return to Croesus for a moment. That’s the guy who gave us the phrase “rich as Croesus” and who learned the hard way about the ups and downs of life. Today I want to use him, the richest of the rich, to begin a brief meditation on wealth, as a way of understanding our modern problem with stuff. Because stuff is what we’re trying to figure out in this thread.

It used to be that wealth was a thingy thing, a state of having lots of stuff, especially stuff that others wanted and did not have. Let’s savor for a moment a brief passage from Herodotus, in which he dwells lovingly on the details of Croesus’ stuff/wealth. This was the porn of the fifth century BCE.

Croesus, in this passage, wants to impress the Delphic oracle, so he gives it lots of stuff:

three thousand of every kind of sacrificial beast, and besides made a huge pile, and placed upon it couches coated with silver and with gold, and golden goblets, and robes and vests of purple…. The king melted down a vast quantity of gold, and ran it into ingots, making them six palms long, three palms broad, and one palm in thickness. The number of ingots was a hundred and seventeen, four being of refined gold, in weight two talents and a half; the others of pale gold, and in weight two talents. He also caused a statue of a lion to be made in refined gold, the weight of which was ten talents…

On the completion of these works Croesus sent them away to Delphi, and with them two bowls of an enormous size, one of gold, the other of silver… Croesus sent also four silver casks, which are in the Corinthian treasury, and two lustral vases, a golden and a silver one… Besides these various offerings, Croesus sent to Delphi many others of less account, among the rest a number of round silver basins. Also he dedicated a female figure in gold, three cubits high, which is said by the Delphians to be the statue of his baking-woman; and further, he presented the necklace and the girdles of his wife.

Necklace and girdles? That sounds like the junk we just got rid off at the yard sale.

This, in other words, was the age of things, of stuff. Almost all people had extremely little of it, so to get any stuff at all was a stroke of fortune, and immediately imposed the need to hoard it and the anxiety of losing it. When you gave people gifts (and I’ll have more to say about gifts in another post), you gave things/stuff, because that’s how worth and sacrifice was defined.

All that is over, at least for the middle and upper classes of the rich countries today. (If you’re reading blogs, you belong to that set.) Our wealth is no longer thingy/stuffy. If anything, an excess of things is a mark of poverty. Any household today, even a trailer in Appalachia, is filled with gadgets that would have made Croesus green with envy.

What has taken the place of things? Two things:

1. Time. We have so little of it, and so much stuff, that the exchange rate between the two has shifted hugely toward time. If you have money/things but no time, you are poor. Time is now one definition of worth and sacrifice, so when you really want to give a special gift, you give your time. You volunteer, or you spend a few hours of totally focused playtime with your children, or you take time to talk, really talk, with a friend/lover.
2. Experiences. While the people in the Appalachian trailer haul in more TVs and fridges and toasters, the wealthy now buy themselves and their children experiences. Education is the big one, and that includes piano and tennis lessons, the trip to Europe and the Louvre. In my twenties, wealth was having hiked the Annapurna Circuit, say, or having sat in on a session of the House of Commons. Now, in my thirties, wealth is giving my children the experience of snow in the winter, seawater in the summer, and so forth.

So stuff is obsolete. Out of date. Unnecessary. Not worth anything. Which raises the question: Why do most of us hang on to it anyway, ruining their Feng Shui and making themselves miserable? I’ll try to tackle that anon, but I’m sure you’ve all got your ideas, so let’s have them.

As a way of getting deeper into our new thread on stuff, here is a basic way of understanding why clutter is so bad for you: it “kills” space and blocks the flow of energy around your house and in your mind.

That’s how a Feng Shui guy explained it to me when I lived in Hong Kong.

Feng Shui, if you’re new to it, means wind water (characters above), which is entirely unhelpful in understanding what it is. It’s the ancient Chinese version of geomancy–figuring out how to place buildings, furniture and other features of interior and exterior living in such a way that they make us feel healthier, more energetic and positive.

Feng Shui shares the fate of most things Eastern that are becoming fashionable in the West. That is: there are all sorts of quacks and weirdos eager to sell it to you as modern snake oil. If you know somebody who suddenly put mirrors, crystals and fish tanks all over his house, he probably became a Feng Shui victim.

On the other hand, if you encounter buildings such as this (right behind a great beach I used to go to), you know you’re in Hong Kong. In this case, Feng Shui (ie, the hole that allows better energy flow) makes for idiosyncratic local architecture.

But if you’re lucky, you meet an expert who treats Feng Shui as the subtle application of common sense. I was lucky.

Like Chinese medicine (and indeed Indian Ayurveda), Feng Shui tries to optimize the flow of vital energy, or qi.

That qi is the ki in Aikido and the chi (different transliteration) in Tai Chi and the qi in Qigong. In Sanskrit it is called Prana. It behaves a little like electric energy, as it flows between a positive and a negative “pole”, Yang and Yin. When they stick needles into you in acupuncture, they are using the tiny conductors to amplify the flow of qi along certain conduits (called meridians in Chinese medicine, nadis in Ayurveda and Yoga).

What, you may be asking, does any of this have to do with stuff?

Stuff = dead energy

The way this Feng Shui master explained it to me, clutter in your home or office blocks the flow of qi in that space. The space becomes not just dusty but in effect dead.

Think of a corner of your house, or a drawer or a basement or a tabletop, that is hopelessly cluttered with stuff. (I’m using stuff to mean extraneous things here.) You don’t even want to look into that direction because it makes you feel bad. It reminds you that you should clean it up. Perhaps it reminds you of things on your to-do list that you never did because you didn’t want to, and now they’re piling up in that corner. Perhaps there are really important or useful or sentimental things hidden underneath that crap, but how would you ever know, without digging through it? Just thinking about all this makes you …. go somewhere else–anywhere else–and run away from the clutter once again.

And so your house becomes deader and deader with each cluttered corner. You walk through it as through a graveyard. The constricted space constricts your thoughts, perhaps your breathing (in Sanskrit, Prana means both breath and qi.)

So, to you hoarders: It’s not true that storing stuff costs nothing. It costs you more than any accountant could tally up.

Orestes and the Furies

Slowly, in this thread on Socrates and his surprising relevance to us today, we are leading up to his jury trial, the most famous in all of history. So a word is in order about Athenian juries.

I am skeptical of jury-systems, as I have hinted before and as I may eventually spell out more coherently. But that is neither here nor there today. Today I want to look at what juries meant to the Athenians, and how they worked.

Above, you see a strapping but unfortunate lad named Orestes being beset by the Furies. He is one of the main characters in the Oresteia, a famous trilogy of tragedies by Aeschylus, the oldest of the three great Greek playwrights (the others being Sophocles and Euripides). It is a heart-rending story about a truly haunted family that, generation after generation, goes from bad to worse until it ends …. in the world’s first jury trial!

Background

Very quickly: Several generations of disastering downstream, a king (Agamemnon) continues the pattern by sacrificing his own daughter (!) so that he can take an army to Troy to get his brother’s wife (Helen) back. More than a decade later, he comes back–victorious, as it were. But his wife is humping another man and hates her husband for killing her daughter and takes revenge: she stabs him in the bath tub.

Now the disastering moves on to the next generation: The remaining children of Agamemnon and his wife, Orestes and Electra, must avenge …. well, whom exactly? Their sister, whom their father had murdered? Or their father, whom their mother had murdered? They settle for the latter, and Orestes kills his mother. The Furies are beside themselves and go to work on Orestes.

What could possibly happen next? It would seem that everybody has to keep slaughtering everybody forever, were it not for…

The Athenian Jury

Aeschylus now did something very cheeky. The Trojan War took place, if indeed it did, around 1250 BCE. It was already ancient mythology for the Athenians of the fifth century BCE. But Aeschylus modernized the story. He added a patriotic Athenian twist: They do not keep slaughtering one another. Instead, they settle things in an Athenian jury trial!

The jury, as it happened, was split. Half thought Orestes was in the wrong, the other half thought he had had no choice. So Athena herself had to join in to break the tie. She voted to acquit, thus setting the precedent for all subsequent Athenian trials that a tied vote meant acquittal.

And so the days of blood feuding were over. The scary Furies turned into something else: the benevolent and beautiful Eumenides (”kind ones”), whom the Athenians would revere among their gods. Civilization had begun. Athens had begun! She stood for freedom and justice.

Practicalities

A few other things are worth mentioning:

1. The juries were huge, numbering about 500. Sitting on juries and in the assembly was all that Athenian citizens did (slaves and women did what we would call work).
2. Anybody could bring an indictment.
3. There were two rounds of voting: First, to decide whether the defendant was guilty or innocent of the charges; second, if guilty, to decide between the punishments proposed by the prosecution and defense.

But the most important point is the one you’re supposed to infer from Aeschylus: the Athenians loved their jury courts, their assembly, their free speech, their democracy. The worst thing that could happen would be for something to call these institutions into doubt. And that’s what happened when an Athenian jury put Socrates to death.

In preparation for this new thread on stuff, I spent much of the day talking and thinking about it at the perfect venue for this sort of thing: a yard sale.

Friends of ours were having one and invited us to piggyback on theirs, so we had a “multi-family” purge on a sun-baked California street corner. My daughter was scotch-taping the signs up around the neighborhood (which is why they are knee-level for a tall adult), and then I hauled our crap, I mean stuff, onto that lawn. And people bought it.

It was cleansing. The families hung out and talked about this odd tyranny of stuff. The other family was getting dirty looks from the mom/mother-in-law, who is a bit of a hoarder and couldn’t quite believe what we were giving away. My friend was walking out with something or other, allegedly a thing of beauty, and his mother-in-law interrupted her phone conversation to raise her eyebrows and say: “That was a wedding present from [so-and-so], you know.”

He chortled. It was his dang wedding, and a fun one, and it’s his dang marriage, and a good one, so where is the law that says he must forever junk up his house with crap, I mean stuff, that he never wanted in the first place?

The ladies did, however, share how hard it often has been for them to part with their stuff. The other mom had already tried dumping the baby things once, and said she was overcome by a sort of “nausea” and had to stop. This time, fortunately, she was ready.

The lads had no memories of any psychosomatic stuff-parting pains to report.

I have found myself, to my considerable surprise, doing some deep thinking about stuff. As in: Crap. Things. Knick knack. Papers. All that.

The occasion was a move–the before, during and after. My wife and I have been having to confront the cumulative load of stuff in our house and lives, stuff that has to be stored, then moved in order to be stored again. (Irony, anyone?)

If you are a regular reader and remember my feelings about, say, Diogenes or simplicity, or my utter loathing of clutter and complexity, you can pretty much figure out how I feel about stuff.

My wife does not disagree–and fortunately loves me for my eccentricities–but she is nonetheless

1. female and
2. not me.

This places her in a sufficiently different vantage point to produce some fascinating and highly entertaining discussions between us and ideas that I want to share with you in subsequent posts.

So I’m starting a new thread (ie tag) called stuff. Talking about things per se would be boring, so we are talking about things only in order to find out more about life and clutter, Feng Shui and simplicity, fear and serenity, and these sorts of things.

As regular readers know, this does not mean that any other ongoing threads–such as the ones on storytelling, the great thinkers, America, Socrates or, of course, Hannibal–will be interrupted, only that yet another one will be woven into them.

Prepare to get stuffed.

Antisthenes

Socrates’ most famous disciple was of course Plato. But his oldest disciple was a man named Antisthenes (above), who became the first of the cynics and the teacher of that Diogenes whom I so admire and envy, because I would love the simplicity of living in a barrel.

I quite sympathize with Antisthenes, in several ways. Socrates was forever going around interrogating everybody in this intense–we would say anal-retentive–quest to come up with perfect definitions. What is virtue? What is justice? What is the good? Whatever answers others gave, Socrates dismantled them, but rarely came up with anything positive. Antisthenes eventually got rather bored and frustrated by all this.

So he concluded that these things that Socrates was obsessed with were really just names, or words. They mean what you want them to mean. 2,360 years later, French intellectuals like Derrida would say the same thing and get famous for it.

So to hell with words, said Antisthenes, and let’s get out of here. Screw society and its norms and conventions. Jury duty? Puhleeze. Vote? No way. That stuff was for those do-goody Athenians who were under the illusion that they were “free“. Antisthenes, who had a good sense of humor, regularly recommended that the Athenians should vote that asses are horses, as a way of celebrating democracy.

He, and all the Cynics, were thus what we would call apolitical: without politics, without a polis, without a city. Aristotle thought there was something pathetic about being apolitical, cityless–like being “a solitary piece in checkers”. But Socrates, Antisthenes, Diogenes and those types saw freedom in this withdrawal.

As Jag Bhalla, an expert on such matters, has already pointed out on the Hannibal Blog, the Greeks had a word for these people: keeping out of public affairs, they were private, or idiotes. In time we came to call people who cut loose from conventions idiosyncratic, but also tried to discourage that sort of thing and gave idiots a bad name.

I, for one, stick by my Diogenes dream: Being an idiot sounds great to me.

You may recall that, a while ago, I showed you Brancusi’s Bird in Space as my overture to a brief meditation on simplicity, beauty, honesty (and Einstein). Well, I couldn’t find a copyright-kosher image of the sculpture I had in mind, so I took a different version, one that was almost as good but not quite.

This, on the left, is the version I had in mind (even though the image is crap). Everything I said stands. When you strip away all extraneous detail, the underlying form of your sculpture (argument, story, living room, body, dish, …) must speak for itself. In this case it reveals its beauty. If the underlying form is ugly, well, let’s at least find out.

How did I come by this picture? Oh, I forget. Let’s just say that an elderly Filipina museum guard made herself known rather instantaneously….

Here is one way of seeing the timeless relevance of Socrates for us today: Think of him as the archetype of individualism fighting against oppressive social conformity.

In this thread on Socrates, I’ve already looked at some noble and less noble aspects of the man’s character. And every time I found him to be thoroughly modern and recognizable. So too in this way.

Watch the 2-minute video above of the famous Asch Experiments that began in 1956. They were devastating: We saw confirmed what we already suspected, that people will readily surrender truth to a group.

To me, still emerging from my old Ayn Rand phase, this was always the ultimate, the most disgusting, sin. To me, this is how the Nazis perverted an entire nation, how Mao’s Red Guards did it again, how all great evil throughout history spreads.

Hence the inherent appeal of a hero such as Socrates. He told the group (the Athenians) to bugger off. In return, they killed him for it. (This will get a lot more nuanced in future posts, but let’s leave it at that for now.)

If Socrates had sat in the Asch Experiments, he would never have changed his answer.

But should the group really bugger off?

If it were as simple as all that, The Hannibal Blog would not find this so interesting. But it is not so simple. It turns out that we have moved on from the Asch Experiments somewhat. Read, for instance, Bert Hodges and Anne Geyer, two psychologists who took a new approach.

The people who might change their answer to “lie” in unison with the group were in fact facing an exceedingly difficult situation that inherently required all sorts of complex trade-offs, they argue:

• On one hand, there is the value of truth.
• On the other hand, there is the value of social solidarity.

In practice, most people did not conform consistently (ie, “lie” with the group every time) but varied their response in what Hodges and Geyer call

patterns of dissent and agreement to communicate larger scale truths and cooperative intentions.

In short, they were being biological organisms that keep in mind 1) their own survival in a group and 2) the survival of the group as a whole.

Now this is exactly the sort of poppycock that I used to have no time for at all. But as I get older I see more complexities. In Socrates’ case, for instance, there actually was a specific threat to the group survival of the Athenians, and I will get to that.

So we can add another timeless conundrum to the issues that Socrates raised. We already said that truth often conflicts with gentleness and kindness, and that one cannot assume truth must always win this fight. What if Hodges and Geyer are right and truth must also occasionally take a backseat to those “larger truths”– and that Socrates, failing to understand that, paid a fair price?

None wiser, says Apollo

So we opened this thread on Socrates and his relevance to us today by showing the heroically positive, then nuanced that with some more ambiguous observations. We must now add (before we eventually get to the heroic again) a few more. First: he was arrogant.

Yes, an arrogant S.O.B. I mean, let’s take his personal “creation myth”, ie the story that he would later use at his trial (to which we will get) as his raison d’être.

There are two versions of this story, one from each of the only two students whose writings we rely on to know anything at all about Socrates.

Xenophon, the less famous of the two, says that Socrates told the Athenian jury that he had sent a student/apprentice to Apollo’s oracle at Delphi, where the oracle opined that

no man was more free than I, or more just, or more prudent.

Ahem. Lest that sound a bit, you know, over-the-top, Socrates added that

Apollo did not compare me to a god [although he did] judge that I far excelled the rest of mankind.

So there, members of the jury. That’s why I have been going around humiliating and exposing you, disabusing you of your impression that you were free, undermining your self-confidence while tooting the horn of the Spartan enemy.

The more famous of the two students, Plato, wrote later and probably realized that it would be wise to tone this down a bit. Here Socrates ‘merely’ told the jury that the oracle told him that

there was no one wiser.

This is still rather cocky, but now with a twist. The twist is that Socrates is now on a divine mission. He must find out whether the oracle is right, whether anybody out there is wiser after all. So, you see, he had to make everybody look like a fool just to do justice to Apollo.

His ‘biographer’ I.F. Stone calls this one huge “ego-trip”, possibly the biggest in world history. It just so happens that I have a soft spot for huge egos, provided that they are intelligent and witty and not my editors. So on The Hannibal Blog, this is not an attack per se. It’s just, you know, ‘color’. We need to know who we’re dealing with.

My wife and I were talking about Malcolm Gladwell’s review of Chris Anderson’s new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price. We were trying to decide whether the review was merely lukewarm or devastating. Here is Gladwell’s last sentence:

The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.

Ouch. That seems to be Gladwell’s way of saying that the book should not have been written, because to be correct it would have had to be too obvious, and to be non-obvious it ended up being non-correct.

(And this in an industry with a preponderance of  inappropriately positive reviews.)

This is of interest to me for two reasons:

1. My own book will soon come out (no, I don’t yet know exactly when), and I hope to have reviews, and above all good reviews, and simultaneously wonder how I would deal with bad reviews.
2. Chris is a former colleague of mine at The Economist (he is now editor of Wired), and we are friends. Gladwell, on the other hand, is as close as you get in the writing world to a celebrity.

Chris has already responded to the review, in a remarkably measured tone. I couldn’t help but notice the parenthetical phrase

… Gladwell (who, by the way, I both like and admire, so let’s call this an intellectual debate between corporate cousins)…

The “corporate cousins” reference is to the relationship between the New Yorker and Wired, both of which are owned by Condé Nast. But I couldn’t help but wonder whether the “both like and admire” bit, which is indubitably true, was put there with the subtext “please don’t hurt me even more”.

Snob

Socrates was a snob, an unabashed elitist. How I love him.

Now, I know it’s not fashionable to be an elitist in today’s America–every four years, a Palinesque figure emerges to tell you that you don’t belong to “real America”. Elites, in some vague and unspecified way, then become those people out there who conspire to keep the honest folks down.

Socrates had none of it, and he too eventually ran into the Palin faction of his time. So this is yet another way in which Socrates, with his life and thought and personality, speaks to us across the ages, as we are discovering in this thread.

The mob and the experts

As ever, we must see Athens as his analog of America. So how did the Athenians see themselves? Above all, as free. Their word for their city was polis, a free and self-governing state. That’s where we get our word politics.

So the non-slave, male Athenians of a certain class lounged around the Acropolis and Agora, debating in their assemblies and deliberating in their huge juries–participating in this and that and every way.

To Socrates they were a dumb herd of sheep. It’s not that he was against democracy per se. It’s just that, as I.F. Stone puts it in his work of investigative journalism about the trial of Socrates (about which more in later posts), Socrates believed in

rule neither by the few nor the many but by the one who knows.

In short, he was neither oligarch nor democrat, but elitist! An Athenian, he always loved and admired Sparta, the elitist enemy of Athens.

(The orginal Greek meaning of aristocrat was “rule of the best”, similar to our meritocrat. How strange that we need to mix Latin and Greek roots together to understand a word properly. See: television.)

So Socrates thought it was just as ridiculous for the Athenians to expect masons and smiths to “govern” and “judge” in the assembly and jury-courts as it would be for them to hire a mason to build a ship. Obviously, they’d get a shipwright. So too they should get a properly qualified statesman for the ship of state.

Better, therefore, to look for the best, then train them, then pick the best again, then train them even more. What you are doing is eligere in Latin, to elect in English, élire in French, and that last variant is where elite comes from.

Americans in particular love this kind of market selection. When they step onto plane and hear from the pilot, when they send in the Marines overseas, when they appoint and compensate CEOs, they are proudly rooting for members of the respective elite.

Just don’t tell Americans that they love elites. When it comes to politics, nothing has changed since, well, the polis. Some sort of Nietzschean slave morality, a ressentiment against anybody who might think of himself as uppity, seizes Americans. This is when you get, say, billionaires posing for the cameras chowing hot dogs and slurping beers, to prove that they are ordinary enough to be president.

The downside of Socrates’ elitism, if we had ever tried to put his ideas into practice, may have been that we would have got a totalitarian society. Indeed, that’s not good.

The downside for Socrates personally was that they gave him hemlock. We’ll get to that.

As you may have noticed, The Hannibal Blog has been unusually quiet for a couple of days. That’s because I had to move the family to a new city, as part of my new beat at The Economist. Well, I’ve moved a good dozen times in my life, as has my wife, so we have more than a score of moves between us. We’re pros. Except not.

This was our first move with children. (If you don’t have any, you don’t know why I would bother to point this out.)

Now, as regular readers know, The Hannibal Blog can be relied upon to put forth profound analysis of important things; or, depending on availability, profound analysis of things; or, barring that, analysis of things.

So let me put forth a tentative theory of failure:

1. The probability of failure increases with the number of permutations (see: complexity).
2. Once the number of permutations rises above eight or nine, failure is assured.
3. Thereafter, the devastation of the failure increases with the number of permutations.
4. Eventually (this is the only good news) it doesn’t matter anymore, or seems not to.

PS: You obviously got me on that kind of day. For a more illuminating theory of failure (and success), wait for the book.

In opening this thread on Socrates and his relevance to our modern lives, I mentioned “an oddly serendipitous string of events”: Several of you had, independently, emailed me with links and thoughts that, directly or indirectly, touched on issues that Socrates raised.

Here is one example, which segues from the previous post on Socrates’ negativity, his apparent sacrifice of gentleness at the altar of unvarnished truth. A few weeks ago, Joel Rotem, a reader of The Hannibal Blog, emailed me this TED talk of theologist Karen Armstrong, in which she puts forth a theory of “good” religiosity. Joel was sceptical and asked philosophically:

Is it OK to misinform your listeners in order to get to a noble target? Do the ends justify the means?

As you see, Armstrong wants to persuade us that religion is not really about “believing” this or that, but about behaving in a certain way: with compassion. All religions, she argues, have at their core a version of the Golden Rule (”Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”). Hatred, she infers, is alien to true religiosity and a form of “hijacking” religion.

Now, this is of course a Rorschach test of sorts. Those who would like to exonerate religion will tend to confabulate ways to agree with Armstrong, those who would like to indict religion will do the opposite. Joel is in the later camp, as I tend to be. But that is not the point.

The point, as Joel said in our impromptu debate (because Socratic dialectic seems to come naturally and effortlessly to readers of The Hannibal Blog ) is this same tension between true and good that got Socrates into so much trouble. Joel’s words:

In western thought, we often equate truth with good (both very subjective terms). Telling the truth is good. Lying is bad. We must always strive to reveal the truth. We have book and movies dedicated to heroes struggling to reveal the truth. Some of our (my) heroes fighting to reveal the truth include: Woodward and Bernstein, Galileo and hey, how about that Superman guy fighting for truth, justice and the American way. Seems pretty open and shut until you listen to a Karen Armstrong. Is it better to paint Islam as the religion of humility and peace or to [point to] Islam’s bloody roots and doctrines?

Socrates saw himself as “a gadfly to a horse”, where the horse was Athens–a “sluggish horse” in need of a bit of “stinging”. This the origin of our cliché. As we keep discovering in this thread on Socrates, the old man is still with us all the time, whether we are aware of it or not.

Socrates also liked to compare himself to a midwife. (Perhaps that metaphor came to him because his mother was a midwife.) What he meant by it was that, through his dialectical questioning and conversation, he “birthed” the thoughts that his conversation partners were already pregnant with. Put differently: He felt that he brought something out of people: he led (Latin ducare) something out (ex), ie educated.

But how did others see him?

Cicero, a few centuries later, said that Socrates practiced a “purely negative dialectic which refrains from pronouncing any positive judgment.”

Hippias, one of the sophists (teachers) Socrates interrogated, said that “You mock at others, questioning and examining everybody, and never willing to render an account yourself or to state an opinion about anything.”

Meno, another conversation “partner”, tells Socrates that “You are extremely like the flat torpedo sea-fish; for it benumbs anyone who approaches and touches it… For in truth I feel my soul and my tongue quite benumbed.”

In short, it is hard to avoid concluding that Socrates left everybody feeling bad. If you were lucky, he merely belittled or embarrassed you; if you were unlucky, he exposed and humiliated you. He never made anybody feel confident or good. In our lingo, he left everybody and nobody .

What if Socrates had talked to Patanjali?

This is quite worth thinking about.

You recall that Patanjali was my nomination for the title of “the world’s greatest thinker ever“. He was the original sage of Ashtanga Yoga. Which is to say: Whereas the Bhagavad Gita outlines Ashtanga Yoga (which it calls “Raja Yoga”: “regal union” or “kingly discipline”) in a narrative form, Patanjali was the first to analyze the “how to”, step by step.

As it happens, he had a lot to say about something that Socrates valued: truth, or Satya in Sanskrit. It is one of the Yamas, or ethical principles, that yogis must adhere to if they want to embark on the journey that leads to enlightenment. Don’t lie, in Commandment language, to others or yourself.

But Patanjali is more subtle than Socrates. Another of the Yamas is Ahimsa, non-violence: Don’t hurt people (others or yourself), physically or psychologically.

The subtlety lies in understanding that Satya and Ahimsa, truth and gentleness, often conflict. It may be true that you are ugly, but do I need to tell you that and hurt you? In Socrates’ case, it may have been true that his interlocutors were, if not ignorant, at least far less wise than they pretended. But did he need to humiliate them publicly?

There was widespread consensus that his negativity helped the cause of truth only insofar as it tore down certain falsehoods. That’s a step forward! But Socrates did not then build on the rubble with a positive truth.

Patanjali might ask Socrates: What, sir, were you trying to accomplish by humiliating your opponents in your dialectic? Did you not forget your own distinction between eristic dialogue, in which the parties try to win, and proper dialectic, which brings people closer together in the common search for truth?

Sometimes, in life and world history, one must be violent in the name of truth. Other times truth is not worth violence. There must be a higher purpose, a positive goal. Otherwise a gadfly is just another gnat that bites to feed on the blood of others.

Aristophanes

And so we continue this thread on Socrates, and the profound ways that he is still with us today.

We’ve been looking at his ideas about conversations, good and bad, and his skepticism toward writing (as opposed to oral conversation). But what did this in fact lead to, in practical terms?

It led to a weird, perambulatory kind of school, as Socrates walked around with various people, mostly younger, engrossed in conversation. This would ultimately get him in trouble, of course. But before it got him killed, it merely raised eyebrows.

Aristophanes, the greatest comedian of ancient Greece and Socrates’ most cutting parodist, invented a word for this kind of purposeful and moderated conversation, in his play the Clouds: a thinkery (phrontisterion).

A think tank, in other words.

Indeed, think tanks are among Socrates’ legacies. His student Plato took over a grove dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and founded his Academy, which lasted for three hundred years, throughout the entire Hellenistic era.

One of the people perambulating and thinking and conversing at that Academy was Aristotle, who eventually took over another grove, dedicated to Apollo, the god of wisdom (and other things), and also started a think tank, called the Lyceum.

In time, Academy and Lyceum became the roots for “school” in many languages, depending on whether the insitution leant toward Platonism or Aristotelianism. But the more direct descendants today might be the likes of Heritage, Cato and Tellus.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. We need to start looking at whether Socrates actually practiced what he preached in his peculiar style of conversation. Stay tuned.

Willie Brown

Willie Brown, the only black mayor San Francisco has every had, as well as a California state assemblyman for donkey’s years, many of them as speaker, tells a good joke in his latest column:

There are three good arguments that Jesus was black: He called everyone brother, he liked gospel, and he didn’t get a fair trial.

But then, there are three equally good arguments that Jesus was Jewish: He went into his father’s business, he lived at home until he was 33, and his mother was sure he was God.

But then, there are three equally good arguments that Jesus was Californian: He never cut his hair, he walked around barefoot, and he started a new religion.

But most compelling of all are the three arguments that Jesus was a woman:

He fed a crowd at a moment’s notice. He kept trying to get a message across to a bunch of men who just didn’t get it. And even when he was dead, he had to get up because there was work to do.

Michael Hirschorn

Our success at The Economist continues to baffle and intrigue an entire industry.

Where some postulate that it is our tone (analogous to coffee beans “shat out be a civet cat“), others are analyzing our position as simultaneously niche and global, which is no longer oxymoronic but suddenly à la mode.

Michael Hirschorn in The Atlantic is the latest. As he puts it,

The Economist has become an arbiter of right-thinking opinion (free-market right-center, if you want to be technical about it; with a dose of left-center social progressivism) at a time when arbiters in general are in ill favor.

This is the American part of any article about us, which is always amusing, since there is a one-word synonym for the convoluted phrase “free-market right-center, if you want to be technical about it; with a dose of left-center social progressivism”: That word is liberal.

But Hirschorn is really interested in why we are doing well when Time and Newsweek, which are trying to copy us, are not.

The easy lesson might be that quality wins out. The Economist is truly a remarkable invention—a weekly newspaper, as it calls itself, that canvasses the globe with an assurance that no one else can match. Where else, really, can you actually keep up with Africa? But even as The Economist signals its gravitas with every strenuously reader-unfriendly page, it has never been quite as brilliant as its more devoted fans would have the rest of us believe. (Though, one must add, nor is it as shallow as its detractors would tell you it is.)

Here he is expressing what I’ve observed to be a persistent sour-grapes, cringing, squinting snobbishness toward The Economist from American journalists at the “good” publications: They always feel compelled to call us “smug”.

Indeed, he does:

At its worst, the writing can be shoddy, thin research supporting smug hypotheses.

I don’t actually disagree. But Hirschorn then comes around to what I’ve been saying internally at The Economist for a while now:

The Economist prides itself on cleverly distilling the world into a reasonably compact survey. Another word for this is blogging, or at least what blogging might be after it matures.

This of course leads to an irony that we at The Economist all savor:

For a magazine that effectively blogged avant la lettre, The Economist has never had much digital savvy…. most of the magazine’s readers seem to have no idea the site exists. While other publications whore themselves to Google, The Huffington Post, and the Drudge Report, almost no one links to The Economist. It sits primly apart from the orgy of link love elsewhere on the Web.

As it happens, this missing “link love” was the topic of my presentation at our internal powwow last fall in Danesfield. The title of my talk was “Google Juice”. I was offering thoughts on how to increase our link love, but Hirschorn thinks that our relative dearth of it

turns out to have been a lucky accident. Unlike practically all other media “brands,” The Economist remains primarily a print product, and it is valued accordingly. …

By that he means that we are really friggin’ expensive. He then signs off with an interesting thought:

General-interest is out; niche is in. The irony, as restaurateurs and club-owners and sneaker companies and Facebook and Martha Stewart know—and as The Economist demonstrates, week in and week out—is that niche is sometimes the smartest way to take over the world.

I like that. That’s exactly what I might try to do when my book comes out.

So Socrates loved good conversations, which he called dialectic, and disdained bad conversations, which he called eristic, as I described in the previous post of this series on Socrates. But that actually opens up lots and lots of fascinating and difficult issues.

For instance: the relative value of the spoken and the written word.

Since I happen to write words for a living, I spend quite a bit of time pondering this, as you might imagine.

Socrates never wrote a single word. He did not believe in it. Why waste your time killing words (since to write them down was, to him, to kill them) when you could send them back and forth in intimate conversation such as the scene (with him on the left) above?

His student Plato was more schizophrenic on the point. He agreed with Socrates but also, obviously, felt that he should write things down to make them immortal, to reach more people, to make Socrates’ wisdom ’scalable’ in our lingo. So he compromised, you see: He “wrote” by transcribing … conversations!

One generation on, and we get to Aristotle, who clearly did not agree at all, and wrote what we would consider genuine philosophical treatises. No qualms about the written word at all!

Why did Socrates disdain the written word?

He sort of tells us in one of his (ie, Plato’s) dialogues, the Phaedrus. He takes several shots:

• He tells a legend from Egypt, in which a god gives a king the gift of writing as an aid to memory. The king, however, observes that writing things down is likely to be a remedy for reminding, at the expense of remembering, and thus will lead to less wisdom, not more.
• He then compares writing to paintings, which “remain most solemnly silent” whenever you question them, and just say the same thing over and over, stupidly and dumbly. People wise and ignorant alike will look at them and understand and misunderstand them. And they (the words/pictures) cannot talk back, defend themselves, explain themselves.

So text has several problems, in Socrates’ opinion:

1. It is not a conversation, not dialectic, because it cannot go back and forth and climb toward something higher, such as a truth.
2. An author has no control over what idiots or assholes might read his text, whereas somebody in oral conversation does control with whom he speaks.
3. Words outside of their original context (ie the intention of the person using them, and the way a listener might hear them) can mean anything, and thus nothing at all.

Ultimately, Socrates disdained writing for a subtler reason that unifies all these points: It’s just not what life is about!

Instead, life is about communing with others and discovering yourself and truths in conversation. Not about recording this or that, or propagating this or that. Socrates believed that you can’t find yourself when you write, only when you converse.

Where does that leave us writers?

In a tight spot, it would seem.

Then again, we have moved on 2,400 years, and few things are becoming clearer. Here is how I would converse with Socrates on the matter if he were to visit us today:

The need for conversation…

First, I would tell him that he is mostly right, even and especially for writers. Only a tiny part of “writing” consists of typing words–5%, if I had to guess. The other 95% consists of living, experiencing, interviewing, discussing, talking, reading what others have written, and so on. The ideas and stories that end up on pages don’t come out of nowhere. They still come out of conversations.

… but also for order

But writing, which should never replace conversation, has something to contribute: order. Real conversations–and Socrates’ own dialogue with Phaedrus is a great example–run all over the place, like foals on a meadow. That’s the fun. But it can also be frustrating when you want structure and discipline about one particular issue. Writing can simply be a way of forcing yourself to structure the thoughts that came up in conversations.

Why not written conversation?

This is one bit that Socrates overlooked. You can converse in written form.

Some of the greatest conversations in history have been exchanges of letters. Just think of Voltaire and Frederick the Great.

Today there is a fascinating technological twist. In 400 BCE, it was impossible to imagine ‘place-shifting’ (via tele-phony, far-hearing) or time-shifting conversations. But time-shifting is exactly what we do when we …. blog!. I write words, and those then turn into conversations in the comments below, or on other blogs that link to them. So the words are not dead at all. They can talk back. Writing can be conversation.

Indeed, by time-shifting the back-and-forth of a real conversation, the dialectic can become better. All of the people who talked to Socrates must have felt, a few hours later: “Doh! If only I had said…..” Well, now it’s possible to take a moment to think–without the distractions of, say, a famously ugly face such as Socrates’, or body odor, or wind, or sun–and then to come back with a clearer thought.

The inevitability of context

But Socrates was right on at least one point: The written word without context, as provided by conversation, is treacherous. Just take this notorious example, which we call the 2nd Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Does that mean that a people has the right to keep an armed militia, or that every shmuck in the people individually has a right to bear everything from a pocket knife to nukes, whether there is a militia anywhere to be seen or not?

Socrates would find the author and … converse!

I ended the previous post, the first in this series on Socrates, by suggesting that we “count all the other ways in which Socrates, like Hannibal, is relevant to us, today.” So let’s start with perhaps the most important (if not the most famous) insight that Socrates gave us: the incredible importance of knowing good from bad conversations. And for that, I need to introduce you to that strange lady above, whose named is Eris.

We spend much of our lives, and indeed many of our happiest moments, conversing with others. I love that word, which means turning toward each other. Good conversations make us human and whole, make us feel connected to others and bring us closer to the truth of something (or at least further from a fallacy).

Unfortunately, we also spend at least as much time in bad conversations. You know them:

• bickering between husbands and wives
• political “debates” on Fox, or indeed almost anywhere else.
• Cross-examinations in courtrooms,
• and on and on and on

Those “conversations”, which are really a turning away from one another, do the opposite of what good conversations do: They leave us depleted, down, disconnected, alienated, sleazy, yucky.

What is the difference between the good and the bad conversations? Socrates told us, by giving us two new words:

• dialectic (=good), and
• eristic (=bad)

Meet Eris, the Ur-Bitch

So now it’s time for a story. It’s the most famous of the many stories about Eris, whose Roman name was Discordia.

Eris was the goddess of strife. Nobody liked her, so when the future parents of Achilles had their wedding, everybody was invited except Eris. Eris fumed.

She knew what she was good at, and did it: She left a golden apple lying around the wedding party. It said “To the most beautiful”. How cunning, how feminine.

Three extremely beautiful goddesses, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, immediately started bickering about who had rights to the apple. It was decided to appoint a judge, somebody sufficiently hapless, naive and male to be easily manipulated. They settled on Paris, a prince of Troy.

“Paris,” whispered Athena, “don’t you think I’m the most beautiful? I’m the goddess of wisdom, as you know, and I could be persuaded to make you the wisest man alive.”

“Choose me,” said Hera, “I’m the wife of Zeus and can make you the most powerful man in the whole world.”

“Oh, Paris,” cooed Aphrodite with a tiny bat of her languorous eyelids. “You know who I am, don’t you? We all know that the apple is mine. Say so, and I will give you the most beautiful woman in the world.”

Paris, with the priorities of the average teenager, chose Aphrodite. Athena and Hera were fuming. Hatred descended on the wedding party. And everybody knew that Paris was now to get Helen, the most beautiful of the mortal women.

The only problem: Helen was already married, to a Spartan who was the brother of the great king Agamemnon. Agamemnon and his Greeks would have to come after Paris and his Trojans to get Helen back. Ten years of bloody war followed. Eris had outdone herself.

Eristic conversation

So Socrates chooses to call bad conversations eristic. They are full of strife, because–and this is the key–they are conversations in which each side wants above all to win. Where there is a winner, there is usually a loser, so these conversations separate us.

The opposite was dialectic, whence our word dialogue, the Greek form of the Latin conversation (ie, turning toward). When you turn toward another, you are not trying to win, you are trying to find the truth. That is your motivation, and it is one you share with your conversation partner (as opposed to opponent). Everybody wins, as long as you climb higher through your conversing, toward more understanding or more communion.

We today

I mentioned in the previous post a series of serendipitous events recently. The first was an email from Cheri Block Sabraw, a writing teacher and reader of The Hannibal Blog, that pointed me to this essay, “Notes on Dialogue”, by a great intellect named Stringfellow Barr.

Written in 1968, it might as well have been penned today, as Barr describes eristic and dialectic conversation in our own world:

There is a pathos in television dialogue: the rapid exchange of monologues that fail to find the issue, like ships passing in the night; the reiterated preface, “I think that . . .,” as if it mattered who held which opinion rather than which opinion is worth holding; the impressive personal vanity that prevents each “discussant” from really listening to another speaker and that compels him to use this God-given pause to compose his own next monologue…

Expressing the Socratic ideal, Barr says that

We yearn, not always consciously, to commune with other persons, to learn with them by joint search,

and that

the most relevant sort of dialogue, though perhaps the most difficult, for twentieth century men to achieve and especially for Americans to achieve is the Socratic….

What makes good (Socratic) conversations good? They have a completely different dynamic than bad conversations. They tend to be

• poor in long-winded declarations and rich in short, pithy back-and-forth,
• egalitarian in that it does not matter who says what but what is said (even though this does not mean “equal time” for any nonsense)
• spontaneous, in that they follow wherever the argument leads, even and especially to surprising destinations,
• playful, and indeed humorous, for that is what makes “serious” investigation possible and sublime.

In short, this sort of conversation is what The Hannibal Blog is about, with the amazing input by all of you in the comments that make each topic come alive. If The Hannibal Blog is against anything, it is Eris and her spawn.

And so I leave you with just one famous instance when two fakers were called to account and told  just what sort of “conversation” they dealt in:

The Hannibal Blog is kicking off yet another series, this one on Socrates.

You’ve encountered Socrates before on this blog, as when he represented the “left leg” in this body metaphor of the Western tradition, or when discussing irony. He came up only indirectly, via Plato, in my series on the world’s greatest thinkers, of which he is of course one.

So why now an entire series? Because he deserves it. And because of an oddly serendipitous string of events:

1. I have been thinking for a while about writing my second book about a theme illustrated by Socrates, rather as the theme of success/failure is illustrated by Hannibal in my first book–even though it’s not even out yet.
2. Even though I haven’t told anybody about this, several people, indeed several readers of The Hannibal Blog, have been sending me ideas and links and recommendations that have to do with Socrates. (More about those soon.)

Hannibal embodies more than one theme in our lives, although any good story needs one theme for focus, with the others appearing along the way.

For Socrates, too, I have one theme in our lives in mind. But it’s way, way too early to get into that. For the rest of this blog thread, let’s just start counting all the other ways in which Socrates, like Hannibal, is relevant to us, today. There are so many.

Congratulations to Jag Bhalla, whose witty wordsmithery adorns many comment threads on The Hannibal Blog, for publishing his new book today.

It’s called: “I’m not Hanging Noodles on your Ears” and is about idioms–their mystery, meaning, beauty. I’ve read it, and it’s witty and entertaining, humorous here and intellectual there. Get yourself to Amazon now.

Now if I could just set my own publisher’s butt on fire to get my own publication date.

• What is sleep?
• What is an electron/photon?
• What is money?

I find it forever fascinating how utterly clueless we (Homo Sapiens) are, about almost anything. A different sort of person marvels at how much we know, but I marvel at how little we know.

Which sort of person you are, I find, depends on how curious you are–ie, how easily satisfied that you know enough about something, anything. To oversimplify for the sake of some easy labels, the first sort might be called intellectual, the second practical. Every joke you’ve ever heard about intellectuals applies to me.

The most boring branch of college philosophy, as I recall hazily, is epistemology, the logos of episteme, ie knowledge. You read and write endless stupid essays on whether we really know that the chair we’re sitting on is a chair, whether we can be sure that we are not brains in a vat, and so forth. Able-bodied twenty-year-olds tune out and go to the keg party, as I did.

But there are infinitely more interesting questions to ask, and they get more fascinating with age. Today I want to give you a sample of just three. They have two things in common: 1) the practical types are likely to roll their eyes because, you see, the answer is too obvious to merit the question, and 2) nobody who does ask the question, least of all the experts, has the foggiest notion of what the answer might be.

1) What is sleep?

The practical person says ‘Make sure you get enough of it.’ Thank you, and I do. I’m really good at it, or I was until I had children.

But what is it we’re getting ‘enough’ of? With food, it’s easy to tell. Chemical energy goes in, changes shape into bodily functions and waste. But with sleep, it’s a mystery.

Some animals do it standing up, others lying down, some for minutes a day, others for months on end. All of us go through different phases in our sleep and we should probably have different names for each phase. We can measure some brain waves and chart them. We can follow people who don’t sleep enough and observe their immune systems and reaction times and such. We can, in short, describe what sleep does to us.

But can we say what it is? I’ve been asking some neurologists lately, and the answer is No. You can answer with semantic layers (”rest”, eg), but each layer leaves you more frustrated. We just don’t know. If we find out, that might be one of the greatest breakthroughs in human consciousness ever.

2) What is an electron/photon?

The practical person says ‘If this light switch works, you see the electrons and photons in action, okay?’ Indeed, he might whip out all sorts of measuring devices for both. But we didn’t ask what electrons and photons can do. We asked what they are.

I love this example because it illustrates how we soothe our ignorance with labels. First we called “them” (we were/are not sure whether they are separate things or aspects of the same thing) waves. Waves, of course, are something we think we understand because we’ve skipped stones in ponds and all that. And somebody discovered that if you shoot electrons/photons through two slits, this happens:

A wave pattern, in other words. Aha.

Then somebody else discovered that when you shoot electrons at a metal plate, photons are knocked out, like this:

Particles, in other words. Aha.

And so we have the answer: “wave-particle duality“. It is Orwellian in its beauty. Rather than admit that we don’t know what it is (a “bundle” of energy? A “quantum”?) we take two things we know and mix them together with a hyphen.

This example goes far beyond electrons and photons, by the way. We follow this approach with all subatomic particles–ie, we bash them together, see another flying off, and instantly … name it. Bosons, muons, leptons. My favorites are the quarks which can be (and I kid you not) up, down, top, bottom, charmed or strange. Those guys in the hadron colliders have a great sense of humor.

What is money?

I actually found myself in the amusing situation once of teaching (to a class of journalism students) a lecture on this question. What you do, in case it ever happens to you, is that you say you don’t know, but at a high intellectual level, for two hours.

Again, the practical person says ‘I know it when it’s in my bank account’, or describes things that money does.

It does three things, by the way: It acts as a

1. medium of exchange (so we don’t have to barter)
2. unit of account (so we can keep track of value)
3. store of value (so we can save value over time, lest it rot as bananas do)

Great. We can describe other aspects of it. It has velocity. It has a multiplier effect. And so on.

But what is it? It is not cowry shells, although it once was. It is not gold or silver, although it once was (and still is in many names for money, such as Geld or argent). But even though the queen promises to pay me x pounds of sterling, she would not actually give me any metal if I showed up at Buckingham Palace. Other times money is cigarettes (post-war Germany) or sex (ditto). Often it is just paper (above). But almost all of the time, nowadays, it is just debits and credits on a computer screen. (!)

The key moment for me occurred when I was talking to an economist about this, and finally he said:

you have to understand that all this money isn’t actually … there.

He meant it can go pouff if people don’t believe it’s there (see: etymology of credit). It can reappear when people believe it might be there.

And that may be the appropriate note to leave this post on, in the second year of our Great Recession. Everything you lost was … faith-based to begin with.

From this quite fascinating piece about new architecture concepts for prisons (!): Written on a prison wall in this new compound in Austria, a line from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights reminds guards and inmates alike that

All persons deprived of their liberty shall be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person.

Could we please write that on every American prison wall?

So-and-so “won the peace,” my wife says to me. We say that often to each other. It has become part of our private spousal language, a shortcut to an expansive world of meaning. The context? Life, and success of the genuine, authentic, meaningful sort.

When I introduced Carl von Clausewitz as part of a little mini-series on strategy, I explicitly said that, in my forthcoming book and on this blog, I’m only using war as primal metaphor for the rest of life.

Failure is often the result of succeeding at the wrong thing (eg, choosing the wrong “battles” and “wars” to win, as Pyrrhus did). Ironically, success is therefore often the result of failing at the wrong thing, and thus having an opportunity to “return” to the right things.

But Success, capitalized, tends to be about being clear about what matters, about the ends you are ultimately pursuing in life, and then using little successes only as means. Means and ends. In short, it is about strategy as taught by Clausewitz. Those who Succeed in Life “won the peace”.

Thanks to Justin Hendrix, for pointing me to this TED talk by Richard St. John, who says he spent a decade researching success.

For an entirely different approach to that same topic–and its corollary; why failure can lead to success–please read my book when it comes out.

Here goes:

Anything to do with video has long been controversial at The Economist. We dabbled in something called Economist TV a decade ago, and that failed miserably. We’ve been having video clips on our site, and that works better but was always a bit fiddly to link to/share. But now we have a YouTube channel.

Some of it works, some of it less so. But one thing that always seems to work is KAL, our cartoonist, talking about his work. Here he is on Bill Clinton:

And here he is on Ronald Reagan:

On Friday the government is switching off analog TV broadcasting. My rabbit-ear set will go blank. I’ve known about it forever but, like millions, have not, er, bought my converter set, subscribed to cable, or whatever else the infomercial has been urging me to do.

Who are “we”? According to the FCC we are “society’s most vulnerable.” Elderly, handicapped, poor, fat, illiterate, and so forth. I’m sure that covers some of the millions. But not me, and not Knute Berger.

In this witty piece, he tells his story of how he and TV just sort of drifted apart, grew estranged and now decided to see other people. It is exactly what I would have said, had you asked me.

To tell the truth, my consumption of broadcast TV has been in a downward spiral for decades. Programming is often available online, and much local content, especially news, is dreadful… Cable TV holds out hope that there’s something wonderful just a few clicks away. I can waste hours in a hotel room just clicking through all the 100-plus cable channels, lost in an endless gyre of anticipation, hoping that something more than sports, cable shopping, movies you’d never rent, and TV preachers is a channel away… Which isn’t to say I won’t still watch TV: I can see Conan or Colbert highlights online, broadcast and cable clips at Huffington Post… I much prefer watching TV series on DVD, which allows you to avoid the ads and watch a whole season’s worth in a weekend… Of the 10 million or so households that aren’t ready for digital TV, a few will panic. But for me, I’m content just to let the old medium end like the Sopranos — with a fade to black.

Amen.

If Knute and I are, as I think, in the unmeasured millions, I will make another prediction: We will soon see a flowering of human culture and literacy, as we stop wasting our time on this shit and (re)discover thought, culture, the written word and creativity in all its new guises.

A strategic moment

What might Clausewitz say today about America’s double-war in the Middle East during this decade?

I was very tempted not to write a post on this. After all, in my forthcoming book I am ‘only’ using success and failure in war (ie, the one Hannibal and Scipio fought) as a primal metaphor for other contexts in life such as sports, love, business, relationships, exploration, reproduction, art and thought.

Ditto Clausewitz: I am interested in life strategy; but that is still strategy, and Clausewitz happens to be the sage on that subject.

(Incidentally, I’m impressed by the feedback I’ve gotten from that little post. Clausewitz is very topical, it seems. For instance, Mike Lotus emailed me to point out his recent roundtable on Clausewitz, which will become a book this fall.)

I am also aware that there is little to be gained from yet another analysis of where we went wrong in responding to 9/11. Everything has been said. Worse: in contrast to, say, the Korean War or the Second Punic War, our current wars are still going on and our society is still split, so it is too early to talk dispassionately about them.

But I’ve decided that if I bring up Clausewitz and strategy, I would be chicken not to take a stab at Iraq and Afghanistan. So here goes.

The situation as it appeared on September 12, 2001

Al-Qaeda attacked us; 3,000 of us are dead; 300 million of us are shocked, angry and scared.

1) From Al-Qaeda’s point of view

Student of Clausewitz?

For Al-Qaeda, this was an ideal alignment of tactics and strategy: With little effort and cost, it caused disproportionate levels of terror (hence ‘terrorism’) in the Western world that appeared (politically and psychologically) certain to provoke us to go on an offensive. (Notice ‘an’, not ‘the’.)

Clausewitz believed that defense was much easier than offense, because whoever is attacking will eventually reach a ‘culminating point‘ point at which he is overextended and exhausted, and the defender can counterattack with devastating ease. So if we play offense and Al Qaeda plays defense, that helps them. (This is the opposite of what Cheney thinks.) Al-Qaeda was pleased.

Clausewitz also believed that, to win a war, you need to find your enemy’s center of gravity and defeat him there. Defeating him elsewhere is pointless or counterproductive. (For Clausewitz the obvious example was Napoleon’s mistaking Moscow for Russia’s center of gravity, an error that was the beginning of his end.) Al Qaeda knew

1. that its center of gravity was not one that we were trained or able to identify militarily, because it had no capital and no army that we could bomb; and
2. that we were likely to miss its ultimate center of gravity, which is its support among Muslims at large.

Al-Qaeda might have believed (although we might be giving them too much credit) that our center of gravity was … us! If we could be terrorized into compromising our values then we might forfeit any appeal we might have for moderate Muslims around the world.

“War is nothing but the continuation of policy with other means,” Clausewitz said, and Al-Qaeda’s overarching policy was and is to defeat moderate or secular or Shia Muslims in Muslim countries. Any tactic (or means) that would weaken the moderates in those countries and strengthen the extremist Sunnis would therefore fit into its strategy (or end).

If we could be provoked into disarming (ie, no longer offering appealing values to moderate Muslims) and attacking the wrong center of gravity (=Napoleon to Moscow), then a Wahabi-Sunni caliphate, united against Shias and the West, would become more likely. Al-Qaeda would consider this victory.

2) From our point of view

Clause which?

For us, 9/11 was a wake-up call. There were people who were trying to kill us, and even though they had only box-cutters (and hence our planes) they might get nukes. We had to keep nukes and other WMDs out of their hands, and to keep our enemies out of our countries altogether. Strategically speaking, so far, so good.

Problem Nr 1: Offense or defense? Clausewitz said that defense was better. Even in this case, he might be right. After 9/11, there was a global outpouring of sympathy for America. In Europe, Asia, even in the Middle East, reasonable people were on our side. For Al-Qaeda, this might have been an early culminating point, an act of over-reaching that could have united us with our allies and even some enemies and estranged moderate Muslims from Al-Qaeda, thus leading to its defeat.

But defense was not an option, for reasons of domestic politics and psychology, and Al-Qaeda knew that. Hence…

Problem Nr 2: Since we were going on the offense, what was the enemy’s center of gravity? The difference between going on the offensive as opposed to an offensive is one of aim: if we hit, it’s the; if we miss, it’s an. So was the center of gravity

• Osama?
• Afghanistan?
• Al-Qaeda everywhere and anywhere?
• Its sympathizers anywhere?
• Muslims?
• The arms, ie the WMD, wherever they were, that might fall into Al-Qaeda’s hands?

You see the difficulty. As it turned out (but we could not have known that then), any item on the list above that seemed easy and straightforward subsequently turned out to be hard and elusive.

• We thought we could get Osama quickly (but worried even then that he personally was not the center of gravity–correctly, I think). But here we are and he is, well, somewhere.
• We thought we could do better than the Soviets, and as well as Alexander the Great, and just subdue Afghanistan. And we did. But then we didn’t. Or did we?

What we should have realized even then is that the center of gravity was the rest of that list.

• “Al-Qaeda everywhere,”
• “its sympathizers anywhere,” and
• “Muslims”

were and are three disctinct but fluid and overlapping populations. If we were to “win over” Muslims, then there would be fewer sympathizers, and thus also fewer (new) members of Al-Qaeda.

What would that have entailed? Borrowing a bit from Lao Tzu, we might have done a lot less, because Al-Qaeda is so appalling to most Muslims. (Most of the people Al-Qaeda kills are Muslims.)

We might also have contemplated a full-fledged “Muslim Marshall Plan”, on the scale of the one that we brought to Germany and Western Europe after the war (against our then-new enemy, Communism). The earthquake in Pakistan and events like it were great opportunities, largely overlooked, to show them what we can be and what Al-Qaeda is not.

We did neither of those things. Instead, we got more active than Al-Qaeda, and blew up more than we built up. That was a strategic mistake, but not nearly as big as the following:

• The arms (ie, the WMD)

No, I am not talking about merely getting our intelligence about Iraq wrong (as tragic as that was). At the time (defined as: after Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN) we all thought that Saddam was making WMD.

But so what? The strategist (Clausewitz) would step back and look at the overall situation:

• a risk of loose nukes in the former USSR. Must secure as fast as possible!
• Pakistan, which is Muslim and next to Afghanistan, having nukes. Must support and stablize country! Check back in often.
• North Korea, which was on the verge of getting nukes, but still had our (IAEA) monitors inside the country. Must contain and engage! Otherwise consider pre-emptive strike!
• Iran, which was far behind North Korea in progress toward nukes, domestically complex, our enemy but also Al-Qaeda’s enemy. Must attempt to turn into potential ally against Al-Qaeda!
• Iraq, which was furthest behind, mostly dabbling in chemical and biological WMD (I’m still quoting what we thought then), which are infinitely less dangerous (harder to deliver, less lethal). Our enemy, but also Al-Qaeda’s natural enemy. Must attempt to turn into tool against Al-Qaeda!

I’m guessing that several of those points caused you whiplash (the bits in italics). But remember that the idea of Nixon going to China would have caused you whiplash too.

What we did not do, but should have done, is to think strategically about the world’s nukes. A clear hierarchy of danger existed, with North Korea at the top and Iraq not even on it.

What we also did not do, but should have done, is to think strategically about enemies and allies (as Nixon and Kissinger did). The biggest enemy was Al-Qaeda. Iraq and Iran were holding each other in check (thanks to Bush senior who, in a masterly and subtle gesture, pulled back in the first Gulf War just at the point that would allow Iraq to keep holding Iran in check.)

More importantly, Iran, being Persian and Shia, and Iraq, being secular and Baathist, were both natural enemies of Al-Qaeda. Duh!

I will never forget the day I came back from the slopes in Whistler on a ski holiday with my fiancee (now wife), turned on the TV and watched the news of North Korea kicking out our monitors. That was it. That was the moment I knew we had screwed up. (And we did not even know yet that Iraq had no WMD.)

Kim Jong-Il was watching what we were about to do to Saddam and decided to make a run for it–ie, for the nukes. Until we invaded Iraq, we had everyone in a tense stalemate: Saddam could not move and had monitors in every orifice, Kim Jong-Il had monitors, and Iran was worried about Iraq as much as us. After we invaded Iraq, North Korea and Iran called our bluff: We were not going to “pre-empt” anybody again.

The rest is history

• We invaded Iraq and found no weapons, even as we watched North Korea get nukes and Iran follow close behind.
• We weakened Muslim moderates in their own domestic debates against extremists by becoming what Al-Qaeda needed us to become: torturers, abusers of Muslims at Abu Ghraib, bombers of civilians. We gave them a Feindbild.
• At home, once we realized we were not advancing our strategy–indeed, not even formulating it properly–we began confabulating other war aims. Suddenly, it was about “democracy”, and bringing it to a region at gun point. This was somehow going to solve everything. This is when I became disgusted.

Summary: We kept sympathy for Al-Qaeda alive longer than was necessary and allowed nukes to get into the hands of people who might yet trade them to Al-Qaeda. Strategically speaking, an utter disaster.

Fortunately, the story is not over yet and, with luck, we will look back at the Bush years as merely lost time, not an irreversible defeat.

The Hannibal Blog is almost a year old now, so naturally I have pondered this phenomenon of blogging from time to time. I started pondering it long before I had a blog, for my day job. I then kept pondering it last fall, still for my day job, when I declared, tongue-in-cheek and not all that seriously, the “death of blogging“. But really, I was just savoring the irony that just when blogging was ‘dying’, I was starting my own blog.

Well, the New York Times has come to the same conclusion–ie, that blogging is, if not dying, at least moribund or ailing or sickly or something of that sort. But I detect no irony in the piece. It just quotes bloggers or former bloggers saying … absolutely silly things in a very earnest tone.

Thus I am told that

many people start blogs with lofty aspirations — to build an audience and leave their day job, to land a book deal, or simply to share their genius with the world.

Er, hang on. There are actually people who think they are going to leave their day jobs … to blog?

And regarding book deals, isn’t the natural order to do it the other way around? I mean, I got a book deal, and then it occurred to me that a blog might be a good complement.

As to sharing genius with the world, what’s wrong with just sharing thoughts and refining them? No need for genius.

Clearly, I am not on the wavelength of this article. But I plod on and learn that

blogs have a higher failure rate than restaurants [with] 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned

Well, isn’t that what you would expect if those blogs were started by people hoping to quit their day jobs, get book deals and share genius? There’s only so much in the way of day jobs, book deals and genius to go around.

One former blogger, “sounding a little betrayed” (!), is quoted saying that

Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, ‘I would like that.’

Sorry, but did you have anything to say? Or are you demanding $4,000  just for simultaneously procreating and having a WordPress account?

And so it continues, with more revelations:

Many people who think blogging is a fast path to financial independence also find themselves discouraged.

What can I say? Except that I clearly see blogging in a very different way. How do I see it?

• As a scratch pad for my sloppy, chaotic thoughts, before I clean them up and organize them for my day job or my book or something useful.
• As a hobby or diversion or outlet for thoughts that I would express anyway–just to fewer people, via email or dinner conversations.
• As a great way to get intellectual stimulation from people like you guys who leave these great comments and emails, with eclectic ideas and book tips that I would never otherwise know about and that make my table groan under the weight of unread texts.

That’s plenty, isn’t it?

Dan Ariely

Regular readers of The Hannibal Blog by now know my fascination with complexity and simplicity as subjects in their own right. I’ve equated simplicity with beauty and genius, and I’ve decried the nefarious complexity (man-made, as opposed to natural) in such vulgar monstrosities as America’s tax code.

Now I’ve come across one of two TED talks (below) by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist with an interesting life story (he was burnt in an explosion, recovered and used his agony to generate amazing research ideas.)

Here he talks about how awfully bad we are at making decisions, and how awfully confident we nonetheless tend to be that we make good decisions, indeed that we are the ones deciding at all. Much of the time we are not.

Most of the ‘choices’ we have to make in our lives are too complex. And often even a tiny bit of extra complexity puts us over the edge. We can’t handle it, so we become passive and ‘opt’ for the default, whatever that is. That means that somebody else (the one who set, deliberately or not, stupidly or not, the default settings) actually decides for us. As Ariely says,

it’s because we care, it’s difficult, and it’s complex, and it’s so complex that we don’t know what to do, and because we have no idea what to do we just pick whatever was chosen for us.

He shows this with examples from organ donors in Europe to health care to (my favorite, of course) a really stupid (or unbelievably cunning) marketing pitch that The Economist once ran.

Worth 17 minutes of your time:

Pattabhi Jois

One ongoing thread on The Hannibal Blog concerns the art of writing per se, and thus automatically also the art of editing. In this post and perhaps a few more, I will give you an inside view of what the actual process of editing and re-writing can look like at The Economist.

To me, observing such changes to a narrative and to words, seeing the huge differences that can spring from the subtlest tweaks, is more riveting than the most suspenseful whodunnit. Those of you who like to write may feel the same way. But the rest of you, be forewarned: This post is long, and if you’re not totally sure you’re interested and would rather watch cat videos, you’re excused.

To business:

One of my pieces in the new issue of The Economist is an Obituary of Pattabhi Jois, a yoga guru. A few observations before we look at what actually happened to the “copy” (as journalists call text):

1. For years, I practiced the style of yoga that Jois taught, and was immersed in the quasi-cultish subculture that is Ashtanga yoga. This is why his death meant something to me. At the same time, I knew that this put me in danger! The only thing more dangerous to a writer than not knowing what the heck he’s talking about is knowing too much and being too close to the topic.
2. This was my first Obituary. I’ve written tons of other types of personality profiles, and love doing them (indeed my forthcoming book is essentially a story built upon character studies). But the Obituary page is the domain of Ann Wroe, one of our best writers and editors, and it is her job to preserve a style, tone, cadence on this page that is just so. It’s as though a chef were being invited into the intimate kitchen and home of a tight-knit family of foodies and told to cook “you know, something we will love.” Is it more important to cook your best dish, or to know the family?

What happened is that I sent one version, heard back from Ann with suggestions, and then sent a very different (!) second version. Ann then did something that is rare at The Economist (usually an editor will change only one or two words in my copy): She wove my two versions into a new third version. Something very interesting happened in that process:

Version 1 (my raw copy)

Pattabhi Jois, a yoga teacher, died on May 18, aged 93

YOGA has entered the mainstream of Western society, at least the urbane bits of it, and one sure sign is that its practitioners have splintered into separate and sometimes competitive tribes. In spas, resorts and studios from Byron Bay, Australia, to Big Sur, California, and wherever else one might also expect Priuses on the roads and organic kale on the tables, the question is less likely to be “Do you do yoga?” than simply “Ashtanga or Iyengar?”

If the answer is Ashtanga, that has everything to do with Pattabhi Jois. The word, meaning “eight limbs”, causes some confusion. Properly used, it describes the stages which all yogis need to traverse to reach enlightenment, only one of which, asana or “postures”, involves the physical stretches and balancing poses that Westerners associate with yoga. These days, however, Ashtanga means simply the style of postures taught by Pattabhi Jois.

For it was his luck, as a twelve-year-old Brahmin boy in the 1920s, to see those postures demonstrated most beautifully by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, a charismatic yogi who performed them in a flowing series that was stunning in its grace, ease and power. Jois, able-bodied and strong, became Krishnamacharya’s student the very next day.

They called this vigorous style of yoga “vinyasa” because each movement was synchronised with one inhalation or exhalation. Each practice session began, usually at day break, with sun salutations toward the east until Jois was sweaty and hot. Then followed a never-changing sequence of standing postures to loosen up the joints.

Fully warmed up, Jois then began one of several series—progressively more challenging on each day of the week–of “seated” postures. In fact, there was precious little seating, for Jois strung each posture to the next by seeming to float, supported by his arms alone, into another sun salutation, then wafting effortlessly through his arms again and into the next posture. Each practice ended with backbends, shoulder and headstands, deep breathing in the Lotus position and meditative rest.

Jois soon went off to make a living by teaching this style of yoga to other Brahmins in relative obscurity. Meanwhile, Krishnamacharya had other students. One was B.K.S. Iyengar, Krishnamacharya’s brother-in-law.

Iyengar’s situation was the opposite of Jois’s, which may explain the intense and well-known, if rarely acknowledged, dislike between the two men. Whereas Jois was strong and vigorous, Iyengar was sickly and frail, recovering from malaria, tuberculosis and seemingly every other malady that India offered. Over time, Iyengar turned Krishnamacharya’s lessons into a very different style. His yoga was to be medicinal and bespoke for each student, depending on ability. Instead of sweaty acrobatics, the emphasis was on precise, almost mathematical, alignment.

Neither Jois nor Iyengar, however, was the first of Krishnamacharya’s students to become famous. That honour went to a Latvian woman who had the gall to burst into Krishnamacharya’s male, Indian, and Brahmin school, demanding to be taught. To his credit, Krishnamacharya did. By the late 1940s, this “First Lady of Yoga”, known as Indra Devi, had ecletic types from the Soviet Union to Hollywood breathing in the Lotus position.

By the 1960s and 70s, with summers of love and Eastern chic, the West was ready for the real deal: Brahmin men. Iyengar arguably got off to a head start, with the publication, in 1965, of “Light on Yoga”, often called the “bible of yoga”. Jois continued to teach his never-changing series of acrobatic postures until a few daring Westerners discovered him. One of them, David Williams, a hippie with a Carolinian drawl and spaghetti-like ligaments, brought Jois to California for a visit. His style and fame spread from there.

In time, the two branches, Iyengar and Ashtanga, became cult-like and easy to caricature. Iyengar studios drew the middle-aged women, who spent an eternity at the beginning of class simply spreading their toes properly while standing, then built complex poses with straps, blocks and chairs. Ashtangis were younger, more likely to have tattoos and rippling stomach and shoulder muscles. They began by chanting for “Guruji”, as they called Jois, then went into their hot sweaty routine, all doing the same exact sequences but at an individual pace.

The old teacher, Krishnamacharya, found plenty to frown about. He would live to the age of 100 in 1989, going ever deeper into the spiritual depths of yoga and now teaching his own son, T.K.V. Desikachar, a much gentler, more restorative style of yoga called “viniyoga”. He was not entirely happy with the cult-like aspects of the rival yoga camps in the West.

Jois, in particular, is said to have received a chilling sermon once when he met his teacher in later life. What had happened to the yogic principle of ahimsa, non-violence? In Jois’s yoga school in Mysore, it seemed, a good portion of the eager young things from the West were constantly limping around with injured knees or backs because they had received “adjustments” to yank them into Lotus or a backbend. And there were tales about the females receiving altogether different adjustments than the males.

Jois’s older students smiled at his foibles and were discreet about his contradictions. It was well known that Jois was estranged from his sons. One died young, the other emigrated to America and taught yoga, but kept his father’s movement at arm’s length for a long time; Jois’s grandson carries on the tradition instead. Most intriguingly, whereas Krishnamacharya, Iyengar and Desikachar all continued to practice what they taught, Pattabhi Jois long ago stopped doing his kind of yoga himself.

As you can see, the focus or “angle” I chose in this version was the amazing story of the heritage of yoga in the west, which goes back to one single teacher, Krishnamacharya, and has since branched out into different “tribes”. The unity of the origin and the rivalry and tension between Jois and Iyengar were what I thought might be most interesting.

As you can also see, I agonized over all those readers who were not already familiar with yoga. Hence what I would call an indirect opening, in which I was trying to give readers something familiar, before taking them into the arcane world of Brahmins to follow.

Ann wrote back and noted that the piece as it stood was “more about yoga than about Jois; as far as he’s concerned, it’s rather thin. The rivalry needs to be in the background, and J. in the foreground.”

I took this to heart, and completely turned the piece upside down. Preserving the length, I cut out almost everything about the lineage as such, and now went with a direct opening. Starting and ending with the man himself, with only a few side-trips along the way into yoga, would keep the focus squarely on Jois, as it should be. So I sent me second version:

Version 2 (my raw copy):

Pattabhi Jois, a yoga teacher, died on May 18, aged 93

A SMALL, smiling, potbellied Indian man in his undershirt and Calvin Klein shorts, Pattabhi Jois stood at the head of his yoga classes and counted, using Sanskrit numbers and broken English commands: “Ekam, inhale; dve, exhale; trini, inhale; catavari, exhale.” Before him, the lithe, mostly young and slim bodies stretched and balanced and swung through the air to the rhythm set by Jois, or “Guruji” as they affectionately called him. Their breathing was deliberate and audible, like Darth Vader’s; their perineal muscle flexed; their gaze fixed; their sweat dripping in rivulets.

This was just how Jois liked it. The ultra-athletic style of yoga he taught, known to his students as Ashtanga, was about generating intense internal heat to purify and cleanse the body. Jois disdained the fastidious and perfectionist alignment of postures that some of his rivals practiced in chilly yoga studios. To Jois, yoga was “99% practice and 1% theory,” as he liked to say with his squeaky and mischievous voice. Do the same sets of poses again and again, he believed, and the body will, over time, supply its own grace.

The yoga poses came in sets and sequences that never varied. They did not change when he taught his daughter’s son, whom he was grooming to carry on the tradition after losing one son to death and growing distant from another. Nor did they vary for new, pale and stiff arrivals from the West to Jois’s school in Mysore, India; nor for the Hollywood celebrities, from Madonna to Sting and Gwyneth Paltrow, who made the pilgrimage to catch Guruji on one of his world tours.

What changed was only how many of the six sequences—in theory, one for each day of the yoga week–the student was able and allowed to do. Each set had a theme. The first, with many forward bends, was cleansing and calming; the second, with lots of back bends, was very stimulating, and so on. Even the first series had its acrobatic moments, but the later ones began looking otherworldly in their contortions. It was said that only a handful of people in the world could do all six.

Jois first saw these yoga postures performed in one connected sequence in the 1920s, when he was twelve, as he was watching a demonstration by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, a charismatic guru who would teach all the major yogis who later brought yoga to the West. Jois was electrified. He became Krishnamacharya’s student the very next day.

Jois was young, flexible and strong, and Krishnamcharya wanted to challenge him physically to keep him from getting bored. So they developed their style and called it “vinyasa” because each physical movement was synchronised with one inhalation or exhalation. Each practice session began, usually at day break, with sun salutations toward the east until Jois was sweaty and hot. Then followed that day’s sequence, and then shoulderstands, headstands, deep breathing in the Lotus position and meditative rest.

The word Ashtanga was not originally meant as a brand for this, or any, particular style. Meaning “eight limbs”, it came from Patanjali, the ancient sage of yoga, and described all the stages which yogis must traverse to reach enlightenment, only one of which, asana or “postures”, involves the stretches and balancing poses that Westerners associate with yoga. Krishnamacharya never in the hundred years that he lived lost sight of the other seven limbs, and was quite hoping that his students would not either.

As Jois went off to make a living by teaching what he had been taught—initially in obscurity, and only to other Brahmin men—Krishnamacharya had other students. One of these was B.K.S. Iyengar, his brother-in-law. Iyengar’s situation was the opposite of Jois’s, which may explain the intense and well-known, if rarely acknowledged, dislike between the two men. Whereas Jois was strong and vigorous, Iyengar was sickly and frail, recovering from malaria, tuberculosis and seemingly every other malady that India offered.

So Iyengar developed a very different style. His yoga was to be medicinal and bespoke for each student, depending on need. Instead of sweaty acrobatics, the emphasis was on precise, almost mathematical, alignment. From the 1960s onward, Jois’s and Iyengar’s styles would both spread forth and multiply in the West, but take the form of very different subcultures. A caricature of an Iyengar class might have middle-aged ladies spending an eternity studying how to spread their toes properly while standing, before building complex poses with straps, blocks and chairs. The “Ashtangis” might be younger and more likely to have OM tattoos and rippling shoulder muscles.

Jois and Iyengar also had opposite intellectual inclinations. Iyengar’s is a deep intellect. He is a prolific writer and his 1965 book “Light on Yoga” is sometimes called the “bible of yoga.” Jois, by contrast, only smirked when asked about the deeper reasons for his methods and quirks, looking bemused to some, evasive to others. Why, for instance, did he insist that one must enter the Lotus position right leg first? “Practice and all is coming,” Jois would say, leaving it at that.

Among his followers, Jois inspired a loyalty that became cult-like. Authentic “Mysore-style” Ashtanga classes in the West begin with Sanskrit chanting to a picture of Guruji. But some of his students have become estranged over the years and alive to ironies and contradictions.

What happened to the yogic principle of ahimsa, non-violence? A good portion of Jois’s students seemed constantly to be limping around with injured knees or backs because they had received “adjustments” yanking them into Lotus, the splits or a backbend. Or the yogic principle of brahmacharya, sexual continence? There were rather a lot of tales about the females receiving altogether different adjustments than the males. Most mysteriously, why had Jois himself, to all appearances, stopped decades ago to practice the yoga style that he was teaching?

As you can see, there is now much more about Jois, some direct speech, and still quite a bit about the contrast with Iyengar, because I thought that contrast brought out the character of Jois (who was not exactly an open book).

I personally much preferred this second version, including its opening, to my first and was quite confident that Ann would go with it.

Instead, she wove paragraphs from the two together, and put in smatterings of information that she had picked up on her own. Most interestingly, she opted for my original opening. And thus you have the piece as it is now published:

Version 3 (edited and published):

Pattabhi Jois, a yoga teacher, died on May 18th, aged 93

ONE sure sign that yoga has entered the mainstream of Western society, or at least the urbane bits of it, is that its practitioners have splintered into separate and sometimes competitive tribes. In spas, resorts and studios from Byron Bay, Australia to Big Sur, California, and wherever else one might expect Priuses on the roads and organic kale on the tables, the question is less likely to be “Do you do yoga?” than simply “Ashtanga or Iyengar?”

If the answer is Ashtanga, that has everything to do with Pattabhi Jois—“Guruji”, as his disciples called him. The word Ashtanga, “eight limbs”, originally meant the eight stages yogis must traverse to reach enlightenment, only one of which, asana or “postures”, is the sort of thing Westerners associate with yoga. But used in Mr Jois’s way, which is how most Westerners understand it now, Ashtanga meant stretching, balancing and swinging to the relentless rhythm set by a little, smiling, potbellied man in an undershirt and Calvin Klein shorts, crying “Ekam, inhale! dve, exhale! trini, inhale! catavari, exhale!”, until every member of the class was breathing like Darth Vader and running with rivers of sweat.

This was just how Mr Jois liked it. The intense internal heat generated by his sort of yoga was meant to purify and cleanse the body. For him, yoga was “99% practice and 1% theory”, as he liked to say in his squeaky, mischievous voice. Though he was the son of a Brahmin priest, and knew the teachings, anyone asking him for deeper philosophy would get a smirk in reply, or a scrap of his famously broken English. Why, for instance, did he insist that one must enter the Lotus position right leg first? “Practice and all is coming,” Mr Jois would say, and leave it at that.

He disdained the fastidious and perfectionist alignment of postures that some of his rivals practised in chilly yoga studios. He scorned Iyengar, the careful and medicinal branch of the art which, like his, arrived in the West in the 1960s, in which middle-aged ladies spent an eternity studying how to spread their toes properly while standing, before building complex poses with straps, blocks and chairs. His Ashtangis were younger and fitter, more likely to have Om tattoos and rippling shoulder muscles, and to start their exercises with a chant of “Guruji!” to a portrait of him pinned up on the wall.

His yoga poses came in sets and sequences that never varied. Do the same sets again and again, Mr Jois believed, and the body would, over time, supply its own grace. The poses did not change when he taught his daughter’s son, whom he was grooming to carry on the tradition after losing one son to death and growing distant from another. Nor did they vary for new, pale, stiff arrivals from the West at his school in Mysore, in India; nor for the Hollywood celebrities, from Madonna to Sting and Gwyneth Paltrow, who made the pilgrimage to catch Guruji on one of his world tours.

What changed was only how many of the six sequences—in theory, one for each day of the yoga week—the student was able and allowed to do. Each set had a theme, and they got harder and harder. The first, with many forward bends, was cleansing and calming; the second, with lots of back bends, was stimulating, and so on. The later ones were otherworldly in their contortions. It was said that only a handful of people could do all six.

Saluting the sun

Mr Jois first saw these yoga postures performed in one connected sequence in the 1920s, when he was 12. He was watching a demonstration by Tirumalai Krishnamacharya, a charismatic guru who would teach all the principal yogis who later brought yoga to the West. Electrified, he became Krishnamacharya’s student the next day. His teacher made him start at daybreak, with sun salutations towards the east until he was sweaty and hot. Then followed postures, shoulderstands, headstands, deep breathing in the Lotus position and meditative rest. Strong, flexible and easily bored, the boy had found a discipline that challenged him.

After running away from his village with two rupees in his pocket, Mr Jois eventually managed to study at Mysore and then began to pass on what he had learnt. At first he taught in obscurity, in one small room with a grubby carpet, and only other Brahmin men. But from the late 1960s onwards, as the perfume of joss sticks drifted over Western civilisation, yoga caught on there too. A hippie fan brought him to California for a visit in 1975, and his fame spread.

Among his followers, Mr Jois inspired a cultish devotion. But his students were not unaware of their teacher’s contradictions. What had happened, for example, to the yogic principle of ahimsa, non-violence? A good number of Mr Jois’s students seemed constantly to be limping around with injured knees or backs because they had received his “adjustments”, yanking them into Lotus, the splits or a backbend. And what about the yogic principle of brahmacharya, sexual continence? Women followers, it was said, received altogether different adjustments from the men. Most mysteriously, why had Mr Jois himself apparently stopped practising his sort of yoga decades ago? Was that another instance of the wisdom of the East?

Early copy

My agent called me a while ago to say, to my great delight, that he had re-read my manuscript over the weekend and loved it even more than the first time. Also to my delight, he said that my publisher, Riverhead, is doing fantastic (even in this economy). And then–this made me laugh–he said that the reason they haven’t got around to processing my manuscript yet may be that I’ve done something unheard of, something shocking.

Apparently, in the entire history of book publishing, going back to Sumer, if not earlier, no author has ever handed in a manuscript on time.

I, however, delivered my manuscript several months before the contractual deadline. The entire management of my publishing house, we are speculating, is temporarily stunned, incapacitated, by the cognitive dissonance.

If you’re still into this emerging little sub-series on strategy and Clausewitz, read Kenneth Payne’s rebuttal to my posts and our discussion in the comments.

Kenneth challenges my view that Truman and MacArthur can be seen as archetypes for strategy and tactics, and frames them instead in the perennial tension between civilian and military leadership. In the comments, he then refines that into the idea of operational versus non-operational war-making.

This immediately reminded me, obliquely, of a great (incisive and entertaining) TED talk by Thomas Barnett, a great strategist. His thesis is precisely about how strategy affects operations–ie, the ‘boring’ bits of the Pentagon and State Department.

In a nutshell: The strategic situation of the United States today is one of

catastrophic successes

Sound familiar?

In this context, Barnett means that our military is so strong that nobody is willing to fight us in the “ordinary” way anymore. So what do we do with all our power?

The pattern (Iraq, etc) is this: We kick ass in war, then fail in peace. Because we are bad at the transition. What we have, according to Barnett, is

A Leviathan force.

What we now need to add is a

sysadmin (system administration) force … or  a “Department of Something Else” between war and peace

to manage the messes we create. Speaking like a true strategist–indeed, as I believe Clausewitz would have spoken–Barnett says:

Don’t plan for the war unless you plan to win the peace

So, to me, this is still all about ends and means, strategy and tactics. Here is the talk:

You know already that I consider Patanjali the greatest thinker ever, and that I have amused myself by pondering the resemblance between his medium, sutras, and the one you’re reading right now, blogging.

Now I come across this witty refinement of the idea. Patanjali, it turns out, was … a Tweeter!

I may yet have to eat my words about Twitter.

Tactician

• Knowing means from ends
• Knowing tactics from strategy
• Understanding why the first must always be subordinate to the second

These, as I argued in the previous post, are the greatest and most enduring lessons of Carl von Clausewitz, and the reason why I include him in my pantheon of great minds.

Where I have most fun in my forthcoming book is in fleshing out his ideas in contexts other than war, to show that strategy applies to all areas of life. But today I want to make his ideas a bit more concrete in the obvious context: war.

So allow me to introduce the two archetypes:

1. Douglas MacArthur and
2. Harry Truman

Strategist

Here is their story (from one of the best biographies ever written):

Nuke to win, nuke to lose

In June of 1950, Communist forces from North Korea poured south across the 38th parallel in an all-out attack on South Korea. Harry Truman, having come to power late in life, was the American commander-in-chief and had already made history by dropping the first and only two atomic bombs on Asian cities just five years earlier. He knew immediately and instinctively that this Communist attack had to be reversed or contained. And there to execute this purpose, in theory, was Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the United Nations forces in the region, as well as a certified American Hero from World War II and a notorious prima donna.

MacArthur began true to form, with a swashbuckling landing at Inchon in South Korea. He took the enemy by surprise, liberated Seoul in eleven days and, by October 1st of 1950, brought UN forces—primarily composed of Americans—back to the 38th parallel that the North Koreans had crossed. MacArthur now wanted a “hot pursuit” , and Truman authorized him to cross the 38th parallel.

Truman, however, added a crucial strategic condition: Do not to provoke the Chinese to enter the war, lest that should spark World War III and possible nuclear Armageddon!

Right around then, things began going wrong, not only in the war effort but also in the relationship between MacArthur and Truman.

When the two men met–for the only physical meeting of their lives–on  a tiny coral islet in the Pacific, MacArthur tellingly greeted his commander-in-chief but failed to salute. The two men then met alone, before inviting others to join them. Truman made clear his overarching concern, one that Clausewitz would have approved of: to keep this a “limited” war,  meaning a war to meet one single objective—rebuffing Communist aggression in Korea—without risking an escalation into what Clausewitz would have called an “absolute” war.

But the following month, Truman’s fears came true and the Communist Chinese attacked with huge force. Suddenly, MacArthur, who had been dreaming of another glorious military victory, was trying to avoid a humiliating defeat. He demanded:

• huge reinforcements,
• a wholesale naval blockade of all of China and
• immediate bombing of the Chinese mainland.

MacArthur wanted to broaden the war and to burst any remaining “limits” on it. For MacArthur, there was only one objective: victory. At all costs!

Truman thought the exact opposite. His first fear had already come true, and he now worried that the Chinese were the advance guard of a Soviet Russian intervention, what he called “a gigantic booby trap”  that could lead to the explosion of World War III.

Truman and MacArthur started issuing competing press releases. MacArthur began publicly blaming Washington for everything that was going wrong. He disobeyed specific orders. He called on Truman

• to drop thirty to fifty atomic bombs on the cities of China (!) and
• to “sever” Korea from China by laying down a field of radioactive waste all along the Yalu River.

MacArthur appeared to have lost his mind. He even issued his own ultimatum to the Chinese government, as if he were president.

Big Man vs Little Man

At last, Truman took the inevitable measure and fired MacArthur. This was an obvious step, but not an easy one. MacArthur, to ordinary Americans, was still a war hero, whereas Truman’s approval was at an all-time low of 26%. (Hard to remember today, but true.) Time Magazine wrote that “Douglas MacArthur was the personification of the big man” whereas “Harry Truman was almost a professional little man.”  In a poll, 69% of the country backed MacArthur. There were calls to impeach Truman. (Never underestimate the capacity of a democracy, whether Athenian or American, to run amok!)

In time, minds cleared. Truman settled for a stalemate in Korea that continues to this day and is as tense and unsatisfactory this week as ever. He chose a “defeat” of sorts that has brought lasting peace. Communism would be contained for another four decades and then crumble, leaving American as the only superpower. Parts of East Asia, like Western Europe, would prosper in relative safety.

Had MacArthur prevailed, America might well have achieved “victory”, at the cost of another world war, nuclear annihilation of millions, and perhaps nuclear counterstrikes on America from the Soviets, who were fast catching up to the Americans in the technology. It would have been the ultimate impostor of a triumph, with nobody left to march in the victory parade through the radioactive planet.

Clausewitz

It’s time to talk about tactics as opposed to strategy in life, because knowing the difference is crucial to achieving success, and avoiding disaster. And that, of course, is the topic of my forthcoming book.

The person to know about in this matter (besides Hannibal and Scipio, of course) is Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian (and later Russian) officer on the losing side against Napoleon. He also witnessed Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Russia, which made a deep impression on him. Think of him as the equivalent of an adviser to Scipio or Fabius, the Romans on the losing side against my main character, Hannibal.

Clausewitz is without any doubt one of the great thinkers in world history, even though he is enigmatic and still confuses people to this day. The main reason for that is that he spent his career taking notes–hundreds and hundreds of pages worth–which he meant to consolidate into a coherent whole. But then he died of cholera, at the age of fifty-one. So his great treatise, Vom Kriege, “On War”, was not coherent. Even so, it is now considered the most profound work on strategy ever, thanks to the thoughtful analysis of people such as Kenneth Payne, Patrick Porter and David Betz at King’s College in London.

Let’s look at his most famous and controversial quote:

War is nothing but the continuation of politics (or policy) with other means.

Lots of mediocre minds have, over the years, worked themselves into a fury over the alleged cynicism of this quote, entirely missing its point and getting the meaning backward. Clausewitz was not saying that all politics is potentially like war, but that all war must remain subservient to political/policy objectives. This is subtle.

Elsewhere he had set up the basic tension in war: War can in theory be:

1. absolute, or
2. limited

In practice, all wars must be limited but simultaneously “want to” escalate. And here we get into Clausewitz’s wisdom:

Means vs ends

A tactical mind always and only wants to win the battle–whatever battle is being waged. (Remember Pyrrhus?) This is the mind that wants to escalate any war toward its absolute extreme. In future posts I will give some devastating examples of what this can lead to.

A strategic mind wants to win “the war” or, better yet, “the peace”! Battles are simply a means to an end. So it makes perfect sense to adjust your battle tactics not to the goal of victory but to the goal of achieving the kind of peace you ultimately want. This almost always introduces moderation and limitation into your tactics.

As with so many bits of profound wisdom, this is deceptively easy to shrug off. But consider how earth-shattering it was in its time. There was, for instance, a pompous strategist named Heinrich von Bülow, who defined tactics as “the science of military movement in the presence of the enemy,” whereas strategy was “the science of military movements beyond the range of cannon-shot of either side.” What banal and trivial drivel!

Now consider how earth-shattering Clausewitz’s insight can be for your own life: “The object of war,” he said, and I will add emphasis in bold:

as of all creative activity, is the employment of the available means for the predetermined end.

And here you see why I include Clausewitz in my pantheon of great thinkers: Simple, profound and specific, and yet expandable to other areas of life.

Have you ever “won” a fight with your lover only to feel that you’ve lost something far greater? “Won” a promotion only to feel that you’ve lost something? “Won” in a bout of office politics only to feel that you should not have entered battle to begin with?

Are you, in your life, confusing tactics with strategy, means with ends? You need some Clausewitz.

Erin McKean

Words are alive, says Erin McKean in this TED talk below. She is a lexicographer, shares my geeky infatuation with words and will make equally gratuitous use of the bizarre ones.

Here she deplores the dictionary industry, which has been frozen in time. As a dictionary editor she no longer wants to be a

traffic cop

who “lets in the good words and keeps out the bad words.” Instead, she would rather be a

fisherman

who casts his net into the ocean of English to find what is there.

In another talk, she points out how worldview affects our relationship to language. Noah Webster–the Webster–apparently thought that all languages derive from Chaldean, since Noah–the Noah–spoke Chaldean and, well, he was the only one who survived the flood, wasn’t he?

(Also in that talk: Why “ass hat” is a great word, but not one that will make it into her dictionary. Defined as: Somebody who behaves as though he were wearing his ass as a hat.)

Herewith, the TED talk:

Well, things change when you take a new beat, as I recently did (and as we regularly do at The Economist). In this case, I switched from a rather geeky beat–Silicon Valley–to a more general beat–politics and society in the Western states. Mostly, I’m thrilled about this new, and much bigger, hunting ground. But it comes with, shall we say, rather different reader letters.

Our reader letters at The Economist can be witty but tend to be flamingly, aggressively, rantingly, lividly hostile. What varies is the level of sophistication. Some readers really know what they are talking about, and really know The Economist, and eviscerate us effectively and brutally.

Others are, well, just plain amusing.

Here is one of the dozen or so I am perusing this morning, all informing me of my wanton and despicable ignorance and depravity. This particular letter writer reminds me that one of my recent articles

once again shows the elite arrogance and display of socialist bias on the part of The Economist.

Elite arrogance. Hmmm. Socialist bias. Hmmm.

That’s a classical liberal/libertarian from a classical liberal family writing for the world’s oldest classical liberal magazine, displaying a consistently elitist and socialist bias. Gotta love our readers. Can’t wait to read the next batch.

I was talking yesterday to Eron Ferreira, a former marathon runner. Eron is Brazilian, grew up poor and could not afford shoes, so he ran barefoot, as many Kenyans do. Later, when he was able to afford shoes he realized that they were soft, mushy and pointless, so he kept running barefoot. But he still had to make a living, and in the 1990s he did that by being a “rabbit“.

Now bear with me: As Eron was telling me about his time as a rabbit, I suddenly understood why Obama’s health care plan, which includes a controversial public-sector insurance option alongside private plans, is correct.

In the context of marathons, Eron explained to me, a rabbit is somebody whom the event organizer pays to run quite fast for the first half of the race. It is understood that the rabbit wears himself out this way, and he can stop running in the second half.

Now, why would the event organizer do such a silly thing–ie, pay somebody … to run fast in a running race? (!)

Apparently, because without such a pace setter, the other runners would hang back tactically and not run fast. It would be boring for the spectators. It would be bad sport. In any other industry, including health care, we would call this a market failure. In theory, it should not happen, but in practice, it does.

1) Success for Eron

In Eron’s case, this once led to his big break in life. One day, during a marathon in France, he was being a rabbit and running quite fast for the first half. He felt great that day, and it occurred to him that he did not technically need to stop, or even to slow down, at all. All the other runners knew he was “just the rabbit”, so they had allowed him to get ahead a bit. Eron looked back, saw that they were far behind him, and just kept going till … he won!

2) Success for health care

And what does this have to do with Obama’s health care proposals? Well, you may have heard that the health care industry and Republicans are preparing to gun down his plan because it will have a new, public insurance option alongside private health insurers. How un-American! How unfair for the private insurers! How socialist!

(For my general thoughts about health care, look here.)

Need I say more? In theory, all the private health insurers should be running fast to win the marathon and make spectators happy. In practice, they are all hanging back tactically. What this sport needs …. is a rabbit!

“If you absolutely need to put it in the GPS, please pull over,” I said from the back seat. “You’ll kill us if you do it while getting on the highway. Besides, I’ll guide you all the way.”

“Sorry, you’re right,” he said with a polite and embarrassed voice. “It’s just that I’m new to driving a taxi, and I feel more confident if she guides me.”

After an endless and grueling travel day, with tight meetings and rental cars and wrong on-ramps and security checks and delays and an unexplained nose bleed at the most inopportune moment, I had finally landed and was on my way home to wife and kids. Only minutes separated me from them now. I wanted to speed it up.

But I couldn’t help noticing the taxi driver. He looked Middle-Eastern, twenty-something, intelligent and curious, tastefully dressed, out of place outside the empty, dark Oakland airport terminal.

“I’ll show you the shortcut to the Berkeley hills,” I said from my back seat, talking to his rear view mirror. “It’ll come in handy for future rides.”

“Thanks. That would be nice,” he said, smiling back into the mirror.

“If you’re new to driving a taxi, what were you doing before?” I asked.

I had just finished The Grapes of Wrath on the plane, that classic about suffering and dignity in Great-Depression California. Was this–the life I saw in the rear view mirror–such a tale in the making?

“I moved here from Minnesota to take the bar exam,” he said. “But I failed. 55% failed. I was one of them.”

“Try again,” I said.

“I will,” he said. “The next one is in July. That’s why I took this job. It doesn’t pay much. But I spend so much time sitting in front of the airport that I get to study and read.”

“Can you pay your bills?”

“Not at the moment. They told me that Oakland canceled half its flights. And there are so many of us driving cabs these days. Plus, there is this cab monopoly in Oakland. You lease the car from them; they get paid no matter what. There’s nothing left over after expenses.”

The missed exit

“Shit,” I said. “I was so absorbed in our conversation that I missed the exit I was going to show you. We’re already in the port.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I’m turning off the meter. This was my fault. I’m really sorry.”

“Don’t touch the meter,” I said. “I said I was going to guide you. There is one other exit we can take. I should have … There! Take that exit now…”

We were already in the chevrons of the exit. He would have one split second to decide whether to swerve out. He stayed the course. We went past it.

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “Now I’m turning off the meter. I feel terrible. This is embarrassing. I’m not good at this job yet.”

“Looks like we’re going over the bridge to San Francisco,” I said.

Philosophy between exits

For a few moments, as the car wound down the lonely turnpike through a dark and dangerous-looking Oakland port, we sat there silent. He felt terrible and did not want to be here, neither in the big sense–driving a taxi for a living–nor in the small sense–going to the wrong city with the meter off.

In the backseat, I felt annoyance rising. I had prepared mentally to be home now, kissing my children in their sleep. It would take a lot longer now. I had a headache and chapped lips. I did not want to be here.

Then I had a clarifying thought. This might well get a lot worse. My driver was terrified with embarrassment. We had, together, already compounded one mistake with a second–although he had saved us from something far worse by not swerving. If he remained mortified and I annoyed, we were likely to make several more mistakes now.

I thought of several of the characters in my book who met with disaster in life. Often, things had first taken a turn for the barely-noticeably worse, which they had found intolerable and made much, much worse, unnecessarily worse, irreversibly worse.

“You did the right thing back there,” I said. “You kept your cool. That was good driving.”

“I still feel terrible,” he said. “I’m paying the toll.”

“Never mind the toll,” I said, pressing a bill into his hand. “I know the flat rate between Oakland and my house. I’m paying that and a tip. Now let’s concentrate on not making this worse.”

He started fiddling with his GPS. “I’d feel better if I heard her talking to us.”

“There might be a way we could cut this short,” I said. “There is this little island, Yerba Buena or Treasure Island or whatever, between Oakland and San Francisco. I’ve never got off that exit, but I’m sure we could get around to the lower deck and head back to Oakland.”

“OK, if you think so.”

Silently, we took the exit onto the island.

The foggy windshield

“Thanks for being cool about this,” he said as we turned into a dimly lit hairpin turn. There was a cop car pulling somebody over. Otherwise, everything was black and empty now.

“I’ve done far worse in new jobs in my time,” I said.

We kept going. We had no idea where we were. He was leaning forward, hyper-alert, with all his adrenalin glands open. He was scared to take his eyes off the road. I noticed that our windows were fogging up and we could barely see. Would I humiliate and stress him by saying something?

“Is that our turn?” he asked.

“No idea,” I said. “Doesn’t look like a real street.”

Now we were down by the water. Everything was empty, except for a few people having some sort of get-together. Some boys, some girls. Tacky clothes. A stretch limo. Jewelry on the men. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw that my driver was scared.

“We missed it,” he said. “I’m doing a U-turn.”

“Sounds good,” I said.

We went back. The on-ramp to Oakland was closed and barricaded.

He stopped the car. We were all alone, under the bridge. I was scared now, because I could see that he was really agitated. I decided that I had a role in this. I would calm him and give him confidence, because he had to drive me home.

“Never mind,” I said. “Let’s go back again to the water and ask. Maybe we can find the treasure on the island.”

He gave me a nervous smile in the mirror, backed up and went back to the water.

“I’ll ask one of these guys,” I said. “No, I should probably do that,” he said. “Sure,” I said. He had dignity and I liked it.

I watched him exchange a few words outside, then he jumped back in.

“We can only go to San Francisco,” he said.

“That’s where we should have gone in the first place,” I said. “My mistake for taking the exit. By the way, your windshield is fogged up.”

“Oh, yes. Thank you.” He blasted the hot air onto the window and we moved off.

Finding the right turn

Soon we were back on the bridge, going to San Francisco. Away from our destination but relieved. It would take a while longer now, and I could see that he was afraid of making yet more mistakes, afraid that this night would never end.

“Let’s shut up completely and just concentrate on the road and the next turn,” I said.

“Yes. Thanks.”

Thanks? He really seemed grateful. I could see him relax. Perhaps he felt that I was taking the pressure off.

We stayed silent for a long time.

“I know the San Francisco exit like the back of my hand,” I said, “but I think you’d feel better hearing her.”

He smiled into the rear view mirror and then typed some Oakland address into his GPS from the device’s memory. That universal female voice that soothes all male drivers and never criticizes said “Prepare to exit on the right.”

Before long we were at last heading in the right direction. “You did great,” I said. “You kept your cool. There were actually about ten or twenty worse mistakes we could have made.”

“Thanks for saying that.”

“Why did you leave Minnesota?” I asked. “Is the recession even worse there?”

“I just thought there would be more opportunity here. I’m interested in immigration law and bankruptcy. I’m on file with all the temp agencies, but there are no legal jobs at all right now.”

“I can get out here,” I said in the Berkeley hills. I shoved a few bills into his hand, rolled together so that he could not count them right away. “A receipt please.”

He gave me receipt but did not fill it out.

“Good luck with the exam in July. You’ll be a good lawyer,” I said.

“Thank you so much,” he said. “So much.” He waved as I went up the hill.

This is where I am at the moment.

In Rome, you ask? The home of Scipio, one of the two heroes in my coming book? The place that Hannibal almost took, almost destroyed, but not quite, and which, as a direct result, took over the world–our modern world–instead?

No, actually. I’m in a sleepy little state capital called Olympia. That’s Olympia, as in the abode of the Greco-Roman gods, the place my four-year-old could tell you all about.

Some of the people that I’ve been talking to in these buildings are very aware indeed of the heritage that their architects intended to remind them of, each and every time they walk in and out of their offices. Sam Reed, Washington’s erudite secretary of state (and apparently a direct descendant of Charles Sumner) could go toe to toe with me on Polybius.

Others here look at me blankly when I opine that it must have been quite a controversy to decide between … Doric, Ionic and Corinthian. (But even then they inform me proudly, as three people have now done, that Olympia’s Capitol has the fourth largest masonry dome in the world.)

In any case, I quite savor these improbable links–visual, symbolic, cultural–to our common Western heritage, and to the world of my imagination, peopled as it is with the likes of Fabius, Scipio, Hannibal, Polybius and all the others who are in my book and in our world.

Yes, Clausewitz. You might have heard of him or not. I intend to convince you that he is relevant to your life….

Stay tuned.

An amusing discussion on why The Economist does so well while other magazines are hurting: According to Tom Ascheim, the boss of Newsweek, it is because we:

• are non-American and thus necessarily global in outlook,
• have high subscription rates, and
• snob appeal

But the fun is in this quote attributed to Vanity Fair writer Matt Pressman:

The Economist is like that exotic coffee that comes from beans that have been eaten and shat out undigested by an Indonesian civet cat, and Time and Newsweek are like Starbucks — millions of people enjoy them, but it’s not a point of pride.

Would that make me the shitting civet cat?

Of which, as you will know by now, I am one. From the New Yorker:

Adam Galinsky

William Maddux

I’ve posted quite a bit about creativity, which fascinates me, but it had never occurred to me, until now, that living abroad could enhance it!

So it does, according to two psychologists: William Maddux and Adam Galinsky.

A colleague of mine wrote about their research in The Economist, and others have reported on it before.

Living abroad (as opposed to just traveling, say) makes people more open to new experiences, among other things, Maddux and Galinsky found. That in turn makes people more creative.

I’m thrilled to hear this, of course, because I have been a permanent expat almost all my life.

Other expats:

• Rudyard Kipling
• Pablo Picasso
• Ernest Hemingway
• Paul Gauguin
• Samuel Beckett

Indeed, let me add one more:

Hannibal: born in Tunisia; grew up in Spain; succeeded in France, Switzerland and Italy; failed in Tunisia; worked in Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Greece and Armenia; killed himself in Turkey. Other expats may skip the last step.

For many sophisticated people, heaven is “an uninterrupted day or five to go through my … pile of The New Yorker magazines.” The publication has a special cachet: very different from–though no greater or less than–The Economist’s, and indeed highly complementary. (We know from research that many coffee tables in many homes have both the New Yorker and The Economist on it.)

So I found myself fascinated by a rare lifting of the New Yorker’s kimono, as Dan Baum, a writer who got fired from the magazine, told his tale. (Thanks to Jag for pointing me to it.)

The first thing of interest is that Baum did this on Twitter. Yes, he tweeted his story in 140-character increments. If I may say so (redoubling my skepticism about Twitter), that part did not work. Twitter may be a great medium for some things, but not for storytelling. But Baum then consolidated the tweets here.

And what a very different culture the New Yorker’s is from the one I live in at The Economist. First of all, the writers do not make a good living:

you’re not an employee, but rather a contractor. So there’s no health insurance, no 401K, and most of all, no guarantee of a job beyond one year. My gig was a straight dollars-for-words arrangement: 30,000 words a year for $90,000. And the contract was year-to-Year. Every September, I was up for review. Turns out, all New Yorker writers work this way, even the bigfeet.

Why do they put up with it? Apparently, because they are all convinced that

writing for the New Yorker is the ne plus ultra of journalism gigs.

This it may be. Certainly, the New Yorker’s writers can expect to rise to fame with their bylines and become stars, selling books and going on lecture tours. We at The Economist, of course, have no bylines. As a result, we ‘don’t do’ the star thing.

Another contrast: The offices of the New Yorker, according to Baum, are an eerie place where

Everybody whispers. It’s not exactly like being in a library; it’s more like being in a hospital room where somebody is dying. Like someone’s dying, and everybody feels a little guilty about it. There’s a weird tension to the place. If you raise your voice to normal level, heads pop up from cubicles.

That is not how I would describe the merrily eccentric and light-flooded Tower that serves as our head office in London. Is it the time the science correspondent came into the editorial meeting in drag, with nobody even batting an eyelid, that springs to mind? Or the time I had to duck as I passed a senior editor’s office to evade a flying object, dispatched with a scream that made the windows vibrate, only to hear the same editor invite me in with a cheerful and jovial demeanor, since he had just loosened up a bit and now felt envigorated?

The whole way they pitch stories at the New Yorker is one I do not recognize. They apparently write elaborate treatises just for the pitch, then wait to have it rejected or accepted. Baum even puts his successful and failed pitches up on his site. We on the other hand might casually mention or email a half-formed and tongue-in-cheek phrase (something that I might shout through a closing Tube door), and off we go. The other day I was skyping with my editor and said two words (”whither [name]“) under my breath. I just saw it on the official planning list.

But the most subtle and interesting bit in Baum’s account was the psychological tension between him and his editor, which he blames for his firing. They were discussing story ideas, and the writer knew more about his subject than the editor (which is inevitable). Baum thinks he made a mistake, because

I made him feel uninformed.

Granted: Baum got fired and is looking for reasons to apportion blame. But he is not slinging mud. This is the closest he gets to it.

In my twelve years, I cannot remember a single conversation at The Economist where one party felt threatened if the other ‘knew more’ about something. We thrive on talking to people who know more. How boring the obverse tends to be.

I am a fan of The New Yorker. It is a special place. So are we.

I mentioned that A.E. Housman might have got the idea for his poem, To An Athlete Dying Young, from his study of the classics, in particular Herodotus. I had one particular story from Herodotus in mind when I said that. It is the story of King Croesus.

(The story almost made it into my coming book about success and failure in life, but then it got a bit crowded and I cut it out.)

1) Croesus the happy

In the sixth century BCE there was a king named Croesus in Lydia (today’s Turkey). He was so rich that we still today say “rich as Croesus”. But he always wanted confirmation from others that he was indeed the richest, the most successful, the happiest man alive. Why would he need confirmation? One wonders. But people always do.

As it happened, Solon, the man who had given the Athenians their laws and who was the wisest man in Greece at the time, came for a visit. This was exactly the sort of man Croesus wanted to impress.

I paraphrase (the text is here):

Croesus: ‘Welcome Solon. You’re the wisest man in Greece. I’ve heard so much about you. Please take a tour of my palace and look at all the gold and silver, the women and slaves and fruit, and all my splendor. Isn’t it wonderful? Tell me: who is the happiest man in the world?’

Solon: ‘Tellus of Athens, sire.”

Croesus: [Blank look. Silence.] ‘Sorry, but… Who?’

Solon: ‘Tellus, sire. He was this guy who lived when his country was prosperous, and he had two sons and some grandchildren.’

Croesus [still uncomprehending]: ‘Right. So what? What does that have to do with anything?’

Solon: ‘Well, you see, he died on the battlefield, and the Athenians gave him a proper funeral. So he died knowing that everything was good in his life.’

Croesus [rather miffed, irritable]: ‘Well never mind. Who is the second happiest man in the world?’ [smiles and nods, leans forward]

Solon: ‘Cleobis and Bito.’

Croesus [jumpy, shocked]: ‘Who the hell are Cleovice and Vico?’

Solon: ‘Cleobis and Bito, sire. They were these two young lads in Argos. Their mom wanted to go to a festival but couldn’t find any oxen to pull her cart. So the two sons put the yoke on their own necks and pulled the cart to give their mother a ride. The whole town was watching and everybody loved them for it. Their mom was really proud. Later that night, both her sons fell asleep and never woke up. What a wonderful way to die.’

Croesus: ‘You’re supposed to be a wise man, Solon! What is this gibberish you’re talking? I asked you who the happiest man in the world is. Look around, for god’s sake. Look at me! What about me?’

Solon: ‘You? How would I know? You’re doing well right now. But wealth and success don’t last. And what comes next, nobody knows. I will know whether you were successful and happy after you die.’

Croesus thought Solon was a senile idiot and sent him home. Then he went back to enjoying his life.

2) Croesus the miserable

He fell from happiness in stages.

It started with a bad dream. In it, one of his two sons, his favorite, was killed by an iron weapon. Croesus immediately banned all iron weapons and tools from his palace. But his son soon got bored and went with his friends into the woods for a boar hunt. They cornered the boar and one man hurled a spear. It missed the boar and killed the prince. Croesus was devastated.

But he still had his kingdom, his wealth and another son, even though that son was mute. Even so, that was a lot to be happy about.

At this time, Persia was a rising empire in the east, and Croesus wanted to know his future. So he asked the oracle of Apollo some questions:

• Will my surviving son ever speak? Answer: ‘You will rue the day when he speaks.’
• Should I launch a preemptive war against the Persians? Answer: ‘If you march, a great kingdom will be destroyed.’
• How long will I rule? Answer: ‘Until a mule rules over Persia.’

Apollo, you see, always said enough to be interesting and not enough to be helpful. (Ask Oedipus.) Croesus couldn’t figure out the bit about his son at all. He loved the second answer, since he was apparently fated to destroy the Persian kingdom. And he liked the third answer, since the Persians, as far as he knew, did not obey mules.

Off he went to war. The Persians won and stormed Croesus’ city, Sardis. A great kingdom was destroyed.

As the Persian soldiers were running through the streets to slaughter, Croesus took his son by the hand and ran for his life. One Persian grabbed Croesus and flashed his blade. Suddenly the mute boy screamed: “Do not kill him, for this is Croesus, king of the Lydians.” You will rue the day when he speaks.

So Cyrus, the Persian ruler, had Croesus, his defeated enemy, brought before him. Cyrus was half Mede, half Persian–a mutt. A mule.

A pyre was built, and Cyrus took his throne to watch the spectacle. Croesus was about to be burnt alive. The flames were already licking his feet.

Croesus on the pyre

3) Croesus the wise

Death was near, and Croesus suddenly thought of Solon. He started moaning:

“Solon, Solon, Solon!” “Solon, Solon, Solon!”

Cyrus sat up. What was this man muttering? This was not the name of a god. Just then it started raining. Cyrus looked up. Whatever Croesus was muttering seemed to be effective.

“Stop the fire. Bring him down. I want to ask him a question!”

Croesus was brought before Cyrus.

Cyrus: “Tell me what you were moaning.”

Croesus: “Solon, sire. He was a man who offered me wisdom and I spurned it.”

Cyrus: “What wisdom is that?”

Croesus: “He said to count nobody happy until the end is known.“

Cyrus [thoughtful, empathetic, reflective]: “You may have spurned Solon then, but you seem to be a wise man now. I would be foolish to be the one spurning the wisdom now. I will let you live. I want you to be my adviser.”

On principle, I do not use The Hannibal Blog to advertise my articles in The Economist, but my piece in the new issue does fit into one of my running threads: ‘the freedom lover’s critique of America‘.

The piece is about “the ungovernable state”–this being California. Consider it a case study that grew out of my thoughts here.

In it, I have fun chronicling the dysfunction, and in the process touch on several themes that I’ve mentioned on this blog before, such as:

• the surprisingly complicated and often paradoxical relationship between democracy and freedom,
• the need to restore the balanced constitution that the ancients and our founding fathers envisioned, and
• the devastating effects of complexity per se.

My conclusion: I endorse wholeheartedly the growing movement for a Constitutional Convention, which would throw out that ungainly tome and start from scratch to create something clean, elegant and simple.