Col Pat Lang (ret), a Green Beret and military intelligence officer, has written another of many short and authoritative commentaries on the current messes which are the US civilian government and US military. Of the two, the military seems to be the far lesser mess, even to the point of being reformable so long as we can prevent our corrupt politicians and war-mongering corporations from further spreading their corruption into the uniformed services.
In this commentary, Clapper’s Edict, we can read the specific idea I wish to discuss from my way of thinking.
As has been observed here, open source information is the bedrock of the information base from which analysts work. Contrary to the egotistical belief of many policy people who think themselves as capable of dealing with data, the intelligence analysts’ minds are the true weapons in the intelligence business, not secret information. As I have said before, secret information is often useful but it is not the base of the data pool. [Emphasis is mine.]
I’ve made very similar claims before including the fundamental claim that our minds form as we shape our very complex and very flexible brains in active response to what lies around us. At some point, we might be part of a large population of individuals who are members of a variety of communities also shaped as their members respond, as individuals and as communal beings, to what lies around them. An uncertain future lies ahead and those minds will need to respond to what is new or sometimes what is known but suddenly becomes new in a new context. Back in the late 1950s, Jacques Barzun claimed in The House of Intellect that Americans were in pretty good shape so far as individual intelligence went, even perhaps using their individual intelligences when intellect (part of what I call “communal intelligence”) might better serve. Unfortunately, the individual intelligences of Americans entered a period of degradation shortly after Professor Barzun’s book was first published.
You should also be aware that where I wrote `mind(s)’ in the above paragraphs would be more complete if I had written `mind(s) and heart(s) and hand(s)’. I’ll stick to the simpler language because mind is the most important of the three in the context dealt with by Col Lang, but be advised you should also keep this more complete understanding of human being in the back of your mind.
I’ll expand on this idea of the importance of the intelligence analyst’s mind and the reasons I see behind Col Lang’s quite justifiable dismissal of the “many policy people who think themselves as capable of dealing with data.”
I stated above that “our minds form as we shape our very complex and very flexible brains in active response to what lies around us.” This is a claim consistent with what is known about the human brain by way of modern science, obviously neuroscientists lead the way in this research but evolutionary theorists and geneticists and mathematicians and engineers and various other sorts of scientists (or those from related fields) have played a role. It is also a claim first made by St Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century and implicitly made by many a literary man or woman of substance. Actually, the situation is more complex because Aquinas had a fully `modern’ theory of the development or shaping of moral character but he placed abstract reasoning in a `soul’ or `mind’ which was nonhuman and only accidentally attached to the human being—from at least the time of Aristotle philosophers and medical doctors knew of the importance of the brain in thinking and perception but they didn’t understand how dynamic matter is, and they thought the brain itself was largely inert. So it was that Aquinas didn’t think a mere hunk of even living stuff could be flexible enough to engage in more abstract forms of reasoning, such as realizing—as an infant does—that the dachshund and the greyhound are members of the same species. I’ll ignore this complication, as did the neuroscientist and philosopher Walter J Freeman in his insightful book, How Brains Make Up Their Minds which explains this part of Thomistic thought far better than any other book I’ve yet seen, even those of Etienne Gilson who is generally the best at explaining Aquinas and his context.
I can only sigh at the mere mention of such matters as `American mind’ or `American moral character’ or `American education’ or the very basic `American attitude toward reality’. It is that attitude which guides us in responding to reality, leading us Americans to respond to some fairy-tale version of reality; so it is that our minds and moral characters and our educational systems are deformed and serve something other than God’s truths which are drawn from reality. I confess to having too readily accepted deformation, or perhaps lack of proper formation, in my moral character as well as in the shaping of my individual mind and my relationship to greater intellects, especially the somewhat general and even ghostly intellect of Western men. I attended a school system up through high school which encouraged all to move to some level of laziness and acceptance of a comfort-zone of mediocrity. I took the bait and didn’t start recovering a stronger mind or moral character until nearly ten years after a disappointing career in college. Under the circumstances, I had little hope of fulfilling my desire for a successful career in physics because that is one of the fields where standards had been maintained at a properly high level. Help was available but I had gone into a bad spin of too much drinking and games-playing as a freshman and didn’t take that help. By my junior year, I was getting good grades again but that isn’t good enough for a field with high standards—a bit of interest and signs of a well-developing mind are more important. I was burned out and exited the academic life, perhaps wisely or perhaps just in a cowardly manner.
I look back and see myself as having exhibited a typical, but not universal, American trait. When caught in a bluff, I didn’t just take the correction from someone who knew more than I about a specific topic—I would advance and increase my error in an immoral effort to defend my poorly formed beliefs or my false facts as the real truths. This attitude is easily seen in American political leaders and leaders in many in other realms as well. Such an attitude now seems to be desirable for any academics or diplomats or intelligence analysts who wish to rise to policy-making positions. Similar comments seem appropriate with regards to nearly all realms of human endeavor in the United States and increasingly in all the other countries which have been poisoned by American thoughts and attitudes. A succinct summary: we have become a country which uses the wealth and power accumulated by our ancestors to shelter us in our desires to feel good about ourselves as we destroy out country in a remarkable display of incompetence in dealing with reality. This tendency was always present in the American character, at least in New England—see The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding for my discussion of the stupidity and self-righteousness which lay behind the Puritan treatment of native Americans.
Physicists and other scientists and engineers are forced to be more honest and to be properly humble when their peer-review processes work well, sometimes public processes and sometimes private, but all fields of human endeavor should have a similar review process. In some fields, including literature and philosophy and theology where I spend most of my time and energy, the peer-review process can last over generations but there are some matters which can be settled quickly. Oddly enough, the process of writing serious novels or verse seems to enforce honesty even in men not so honest or morally courageous in most parts of their lives. The morally dissolute Flaubert portrayed a man much like himself with brutal honesty in Madame Bovary and the puritanical barbarian Tolstoy did the same in Anna Karenina.
Honesty of a certain sort, that is—honesty in perception of realities both internal and external and in the greater understanding of that reality—is necessary for higher achievement in nearly all fields of human endeavor, including politics and intelligence analysis. Note I speak of `achievement’ and not of `short-term success’, including that dangerous, blinding sort of success in American domestic politics. We Americans have benefited from such honesty in politics during the early decades of the United States when even the scoundrels were men of some moral intelligence and substance; there has been a notable lack of serious moral character from the time that noble generation left public life. There has been a scattering of presidents and senators and others of high and serious moral character, but that scattering seems to have further thinned in recent decades.
Let me mention a particular American agency which has been so dangerous just because there is a pretense of superhuman competence when the most basic levels of competence have been lacking. The CIA has been problematic from the beginning of its existence, despite the true OSS war-heroes who helped to found the CIA to fight the cold war where they had helped to fight the very hot war against the Japanese and the Germans. To be sure, my impression is that the OSS itself was an agency of mixed competency but always sliding too easily toward a state of playpen for adventure-seeking blue-bloods, disproportionately from Yale and from Skull and Bones and convinced the world corresponds to spy-novels and even the most ridiculous of spy movies. At the same time, we have living examples of CIA officers of high intelligence and high moral character in Philip Giraldi and Ray McGovern and Paul Pillar and a deceased example in Sam Adams. There are others including—I’m sure—many who never became known to the general public, but there are no indications that such men dominated the analysis or presidential advice-giving processes. Giraldi has said the CIA has the same distribution of human beings as other institutions: most put in an honest effort for their 40 hours each week, a very small minority are criminals of some sort, and a somewhat larger minority are men and women truly willing to sacrifice for their country and to simply achieve excellence in their work. I’ll only mention there is some evidence the criminal element in the CIA has been disproportionately powerful and dangerous given their small numbers. See Quietly Charitable or Quietly Murderous But Always Quietly American for a related discussion.
We Americans are prone to an “egotistical belief…[that we are born with minds fully] capable of dealing with data,” to somewhat rework one of Col Lang’s statements. It’s not just our recent presidents and senators and cabinet officials and even celebrity `policy-makers of the ilk of Condoleeza Rice or others in recent years who are supposedly competent academics but the mistakes they make seem to me to often be due not just to inexperience in the national security policy-making environment; they seem to be deeply ignorant in the fields in which they held prestigious academic posts.
Americans, and certainly many politicians and the academics who pander to them, seem to believe they had been gifted at birth with well-formed minds which only need some `data’ from any given field and then the humans possessing those minds can penetrate to truths as readily as any who spent years shaping their minds to information and well-stated knowledge about reality, not `data’ which lies about reality as often as it tells the truth. This reminds me of the story of President Truman hosting a meeting of intelligence analysts, military officers, scientists, and engineers who were struggling with the question: When will the Soviets have a fusion (hydrogen) bomb? All of a sudden, Truman triumphantly announced, “Never!” A deep silence fell upon the room as the most antagonistic proponents of various viewpoints realized as a group that a man of this mental and moral caliber was in command of the United States government and military, including the nuclear-weapons systems.
The fact was: the Soviets had a true hydrogen bomb before us—the monster set off by the US on Bikini Island was the size and weight of a railroad car filled with mostly industrial freezing equipment. It maybe could have been transported as a unit by a C-5 but not by the B-52 or any other bomber. Some, including perhaps Solzhenitsyn by hints have claimed the nuclear spy rings run by Stalin himself at times had the main purpose of corrupting American intellectual circles. After all, the Soviets had Sakharov and Landau and other scientists of that caliber, many of nearly that caliber. They were missing prototyping quality machine-shops and a population of well-trained production machinists to have easily kept up with the United States in most technological fields. But that was a heck of a lot to be missing and was but one result of their badly functioning system. We should even remember that Solzhenitsyn himself, when an inmate in the research lab portion of the Gulag before his rebellion, was doing good work with little resources on voice-recognition systems when such was an exotic project even at the well-funded Bell Labs.
I hope I’ve given a good flavor of my philosophical reasons and even hints of my theological reasons, for strongly supporting Col Lang’s claim that “the intelligence analysts’ minds are the true weapons in the intelligence business.” If we use the analogy of weapons, those minds have been shaped to penetrate deeply into the thoughts and feelings of the military or political or economic leaders of another country—leaders at various levels. (Keep adding realms such as culture and science and engineering and you can get to a more complete statement which would be quite clumsy.) I wouldn’t follow this particular line of reasoning too far just because we undoubtedly have, and should have, analysts who work on countries which are quite friendly to us, yet we would wish to have some deeper understanding of foreign political events or the decisions of foreign businessmen to develop, say, their computer industry in a certain way. Such information would always be of general use in understanding friendly or unfriendly powers when we anticipate responding to some problem or when we go about our normal peacetime activities.
We Americans, not just our political leaders, end up with malformed minds largely because we don’t recognize that the human mind is shaped by our active responses to reality. We think we are gifted at conception with some sort of a mind which only needs “data” to understand the world outside of us. We are forced to admit there is something different about the mind of a physicist or a geneticist but we, certainly our elected and appointed government officials, believe that our monolingual and historically innocent `minds’ can come to a complete understanding of Iranian or Russian politics if we but pour a little bit of `data’ into those minds which are truly pure only in the way of a whitewashed sepulcher. I’ve been in conversations with the pompous sort of fellow who was charitable to the Iranians though advocating a tough chance: “After all, they don’t think in rational ways as we do.” Two men I’ve mentioned, Col Lang and Philip Giraldi were experts on Iran during their careers as intelligence analysts, have claimed the Iranian leaders are more rational than our leaders. Those Americans who `see’ that many of our enemies are such because they aren’t as rational as us have seemingly once had a thought flash across their minds and it seemed so good in its power to explain so much—let’s go with it. Those Americans deserve the leaders they have, leaders so much like them.
The fundamental problem is moral: we who claim to be a Christian people, when it suits our purposes, pay little attention to God’s Creation which is the totality of created being. We think we have minds which can reconstruct how things are and how they should be with just a little data as input.
As I noted before, this moral insanity, as Herman Melville labeled it, is an act of rebellion against God who failed to do as good a job as Creator as we would have wished. We deserve a better world to live in and we’ll remake it to our standards as well as we can and make up the difference by `knowing’ what the world really is. Who needs to listen to those who have worked for years to learn the languages and histories and cultures of various peoples, who have worked just as long or even longer to develop their minds to specific tasks such as the understanding of specific countries or specific types of situations—including crises such as those in the Ukraine or Syria. We’ll just wing it and eventually reality will come around to prove itself to be what we already believe it to be.
See my recently published essay, The Moral Superiority of the Modern Military Over Modern Civilian Society, for my take on a closely related issue.