Tag: history

A brief foray into distraction’s history

~ Michael A. Innes

This looks interesting:

A Crisis of Short Attention Spans, 250 Years Ago

By Natalie M. Phillips | January 01, 2017

When most people think of distraction, they think of flooded inboxes, cellphone beeps, Twitter feeds. An ever-present and unavoidable consequence of our fast-paced contemporary world, distraction is cast as a — if not the — mental state of modernity. Whatever came before — childhood, our parents’ generation, the Enlightenment — must have been, it seems, a more attentive age.

Yet even a brief foray into distraction’s history discourages nostalgia about an idyllic past of easy attention, particularly when we consider the history of reading. Rather than a quiet environment in which audiences were always found absorbed, or “lost in a book,” 18th-century poets and artists describe reading as occurring amid high cacophony: chamber pots sloshing and street hubbub. John Gay’s poem “Trivia” offers us this soundscape of London street life: “Now industry awakes her busy sons, / Full charg’d with news the breathless hawker runs: / Shops open, coaches roll, carts shake the ground, / And all the streets with passing cries resound.” If we complain today of media, and social-media, oversaturation, writers then worried about industrial, vocal, and literary tumult.

Many people both presumed and complained of novels’ unusual ability to capture attention, but fiction competed with a flood of essays, poems, sermons, and histories. The expansion of the book trade inspired a further flourishing of reviews, anthologies, and summaries that were meant to manage this literary surplus but only added to it.

But if inattention was a worry for writers, it also became a literary theme.

Read the rest at the Chronicle of Higher Education, here.

Maps: Telling a Story of Imagined Omniscience

~ Michael A. Innes

In lieu of something original from me, I offer you something insightful by someone else – Michael Caines, in the Times Literary Supplement, reviewing a new British Library exhibition entitled Maps and the Twentieth Century: Drawing the line. It tells “a story of imagined omniscience,” Caines writes, “of the world seen in a series of bird’s-eye overviews, albeit on widely varying scales and for competing purposes.” The subject is entirely apropos as Britain debates and decides its identity and its future, a discursive brew chock full of  myths and realities.

What’s a map exhibit at a London institution without an entree focused on the city’s infamous underground?

It  is odd to think that one of the most popular of British maps insinuates an outright falsehood about the territory it covers – that all routes through it lie parallel, perpendicular or at 45 degrees to one another. As this sketched Tube Map by its originator Harry Beck illustrates, the London Underground’s subterranean tentacles required simplification to become comprehensible at a stranger’s glance long before they arrived at their current state of complexity. Here (back in 1931) the only sign of the world above ground is the meandering course of the River Thames, that more venerable metropolitan conduit – on the modern Tube Map, those smooth turns are, for the most part, right angles, as if the river has adapted itself to suit the Transport for London view of the world.

There’s something for students of political contention, too:

Although the exhibition divides war and peace into separate sections, the welcome, disorientating effect is of the two being constantly overlaid. Liverpool appears here as both a target for the Luftwaffe and a vast shrine to Beatle-mania. A Russian moon globe from 1961 recalls the superpowers’ space race. The Guardian’s excellent April Fools spoof of 1977 – a feature about the island of San Serriffe – is represented in the same display case as the Hundred Acre Wood, as based by E. H. Shepherd (under A. A. Milne’s guidance) on Ashdown Forest in Sussex. These exercises in imaginary cartography amuse even as they touch lightly on histories of violence: San Serriffe is supposed to be a former colony of the Spanish and Portuguese, and Milne wouldn’t have thought up Winnie the Pooh without a little help from both London Zoo and the Canadian lieutenant through whom it gained a bear called Winnie, formerly a regimental mascot, in 1919.

There’s more. Caines’ concluding note on a homogenizing representation of Africa’s physical geography – taken out of context here – is worth special mention: “It is a fine thing to be able to contemplate this non-human world made to some degree visible by cartographic means, as well as the one carved up by power-mad idiots. And, of course, the London Underground.”

Missiles of Outrage and Anger

~ Michael A. Innes ~ Leave a comment

In the early pages of his memoir Known and Unknown, Donald Rumsfeld described boyhood memories of an America struggling to come to grips with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. One of those recollections was of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s reassuring voice, its “formal, almost aristocratic tone” cutting across the airwaves. “Outlining the indictment against the Japanese Empire, he spoke slowly and deliberately,” Rumsfeld wrote. “Every syllable was carefully enunciated, as if the words themselves were missiles of outrage and anger. That gave him a singular quality as America heard for the first time the words that have now become so familiar to history: ‘Yesterday, December 7, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy…’.”*

Rumsfeld’s biographers have noted his preoccupation with Pearl Harbor. As Secretary of Defense, he repeatedly summoned the ghosts of that day in his efforts to promote US defense preparedness and ruthlessly assess the intelligence community’s performance. We don’t have to take Rumsfeld’s word for it, either, or that of his biographers. There’s a thick public record of the things he’s said, written, authorized and championed. His public output makes for a good baseline for understanding what he said, to whom it was said, and what it meant for the policy processes of the time. But the public record is only part of the picture.  Investigative journalism like James Mann’s Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (Viking Penguin 2004), helps to fill in the gaps with much needed detail on closed door discussions and private deliberations.

Researchers take their chances when they look to memoirs for accurate information about historical events. The New Yorker writer George Packer, in a hydrochloric 2010 review of another political memoir, George W. Bush’s Decision Points, made the somewhat obvious but nonetheless key point that “Every memoir is a tissue of omission and evasion; memoirs by public figures are especially unreliable.” The second Bush White House generated what must be a record number of tell-alls and insider accounts. Even speechwriters got in on the act, publicly staking claims to the carefully enunciated syllables and missiles of outrage and anger that are supposed to be exclusively Presidential, not claimable intellectual property.

I’ve been using memoirs to help reconstruct some of the things that were said and done before and after 9/11. I approach most of them with a degree of cynicism and distrust of authorial motive. Two of them, Rumsfeld’s Known and Unknown and Douglas Feith’s War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism, stand out, for the simple reason that both books enable readers to critically evaluate the claims their authors make.  They do this by providing access to declassified papers and documents – the original source materials that, one assumes, corroborate what Rumsfeld and Feith were trying to convey in their respective accounts. Needless to say these will have been carefully selected, so it’s up to the reader to consider both source and context when reviewing the primary sources.

Both books came equipped with supporting websites stocked with digitized documents. Feith’s, at http://www.waranddecision.com/,  appears to have died of neglect at some point in early 2014. Some of those documents are reproduced in the pages of War and Decision, and readers can still get a sense of what the website contained if they know how to retrieve cached material on the web. Rumsfeld’s sources are in an entirely different category. The “Rumsfeld Papers”, at http://papers.rumsfeld.com/, contain thousands of digitized document spanning his entire career in government service, and more besides. In a video posted on the website, Rumsfeld speaks directly to visitors and encourages them to make up their own minds.

As an exercise in digital history, the Rumsfeld Papers website is superb. As an artefact of Rumsfeld’s time in governement, the collection is remarkably transparent. It’s an ironic oddity that won’t be lost on those who remember Rumsfeld’s caustic style or the level of effort he put into bureaucratic turf wars and “controlling the narrative”.  That irony is recursive, too. I’ve found the Rumsfeld Papers less useful as a window into Rumsfeld’s  thinking or that of the people around him – there’s that cynicism again – but quite good as narrative nuts and bolts. Some of the sources in the Rumsfeld Papers – the infamous “snowflakes” come to mind – are as invidual documents often sparsely detailed, and only provide new insights on an aggregate basis. But there are some real gems that provide a glimpse into the stuff of internal discussions and behind-the-scenes bureaucratic labors, and they make it possible to trace the paths of ideas as they worked their way through the policy process.

*Donald Rumsfeld, Known and Unknown: A Memoir (Sentinel, 2011), p. 39.

COIN-Love Redux

~ Michael A. Innes ~ 1 Comment

Alternate title: “why smart people diversify, and why those who don’t go splat face-first into the pavement”. An interesting piece in The New Republic from Senior Editor Michael Crowley, on COIN-love. Crowley writes about how CNAS has staked its claim as guru-central for counterinsurgency, and throws a few subtle barbs about the quality of its salesmanship vice the gloss of its ideas.

Excerpts:

Washington’s current enthusiasm for counterinsurgency is based largely on its apparent success in stabilizing Iraq–even though it’s not clear that the doctrine’s sophisticated tenets deserve all or even most of the credit. Indeed, an argument is brewing in military circles about whether the doctrine’s potential has been oversold. What happens next in Afghanistan could settle it.

and

Though CNAS is loath to be known as a one-trick pony–it recently completed a report encouraging U.S. cooperation with China and runs an energy and climate-based “natural security” program–it is effectively cornering the market on counterinsurgency thought.

and

The stakes for the United States in Afghanistan are enormous. But, in a more parochial sense, so are the stakes for CNAS and what you might call the cult of counterinsurgency.

and

… if Afghanistan doesn’t turn around soon, the Democrats who founded and support CNAS, and who have come to embrace the Petraeus-Nagl view of modern warfare, may find themselves wondering whether it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Or they could just read some history. Yes, yes, of course I mean Algeria, Malaysia, and Vietnam. But really I mean that decade between the end of the Cold War and 2001 that everyone ignores. You know, the 1990s, the decade that offered reams of lessons learned about civil-military cooperation, good governance, official corruption, armed non-state actors and the like, before we decided to reinvent the wheel – again (Ed’s Note: Gasp… blasphemer!) for Afghanistan and Iraq.

I mean no ill will to the CNAS crowd. A smart and accomplished group of people, just a little too smug, smarmy, and overinflated about their special understanding of the nature of conflict and the poor schmucks who just don’t get it (not to mention their own qualifications for proclaiming how others don’t get it). In my unkinder moments, I think of COIN obsession as the fetish of those waaayyyyy too young for Vietnam and pissed off that they missed such a groovy fight (and the ability to claim a really great soundtrack as their own, in the bargain). Or those dissatisfied with the prohibition on proactively killing things absence of bona fide warfighting that was part and parcel of…. wait for it… peacekeeping. Remember that?

Next time you read a current or ex- military bio that includes the words “fought” or “combat” in relation to service in Bosnia, give it some thought. Only a handful of individuals can actually claim it with integrity, and only if they were in this place, did this, or participated in the rare mission of this kind that actually resulted in a shot fired (there weren’t many). Kosovo was much the same, except for a short bit in 1999, and that was mostly air power at work. Short version: it just wasn’t that kind of intervention. But I’ve been seeing some revisionist verbiage creep into some biographical characterizations of Balkan deployments as late as 2004 and 2005. That, and COIN-fetishization, reinforce a sneaking suspicion that we’re stuck in the midst of a convoluted memory hole and positively deluded about at least two things: the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and of what we think we’ve learned about them and the lessons of “the past”.

Rant over. Go read the rest of Crowley’s article here.

Originally published at CTlab.

The View From the Veranda

~ Michael A. Innes ~ 1 Comment

Last week I gave a talk to some students at the School of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), at the University of Leeds. I’ve been an honorary Visiting Research Fellow with POLIS since April 2006, and it’s a rare occasion when I’m actually on-site. In fact, this was only the second time, the first being a talk I gave in late 2007. Then, I was still a serving staff officer with NATO, and my talk was about a book I’d just published. This time, I was speaking as an academic, recently resigned from NATO service, and offering students my observations on what it’s like to be a functionary in an International Organization. Despite working in some very interesting places – Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghansitan, as well as Western Europe – I couldn’t honestly claim to know much about them, and my own perceptions of those experiences are very much “the view from the veranda.”

That phrase is lifted from an article, written by Belgian academic Julian Eckl and published in International Political Sociology, entitled “Responsible Scholarship After Leaving the Veranda: Normative Issues Faced by Field Researchers – and Armchair Scientists.” Reading it was part of a broader effort to understand how the infrastructure of military interventions conflicts with the drive for ethnographic detail and context about states that host them. More importantly, I think it goes straight to the heart of knowledge claims. Debates on how we come to know the things we think we know – epistemological assumptions about the nature of research and understanding – are nothing new. In Iraq and Afghanistan, the problems are acute: headquarters life has been widely portrayed as  a disconnected bubble – an alien, hermetic imposition that squats amid the local environment while employing anthropologists and other social scientists to fill in the blanks on local culture.

Baghdad’s Green Zone, the barricaded home of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), has been a particular focus of such reporting. There, “imperial life in the emerald city” raises uncomfortable questions about just how much visiting advisors can learn and achieve – even those afforded a full year or more on the ground, and no matter how exotically qualified they might be. A number of journalists have been quick to point out the problem. New York Times reporter Dexter Filkins lived in Baghdad for almost four years, from the 2003 Invasion to the height of the insurgency in late 2006. In his memoir, The Forever War, he wrote “It was in the Green Zone that I would think the war was lost. I didn’t think about losing when I was outside – when I was in Iraq.” In The Assassin’s Gate, George Packer, the New Yorker staff writer, described the almost surreal disconnect that came with moving from one world to the next: “I went back and forth between the Green and Red Zones, between the CPA and Iraq, feeling almost dizzy at the transition, two separate realities existing on opposite sides of concrete and wire.”

What Packer and Filkins described in their respective books is almost identical to my own sense that the distance between observer and observed is infinitely elastic. In September 2001, the same month that Al Qaeda’s terrorists visited havoc on Manhattan, human rights activist and Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Samantha Power published an article in The Atlantic on the Rwanda Genocide of 1994. It’s opening section was titled “People Sitting In Offices,” an allusion to the bureaucratic penchant of far-away politicians in Washington and New York to second-guess the reports and judgments of field-based observers. The irony is thick: after living and working at both ends of the food chain, I often found myself sitting behind the protective barrier of a desktop monitor, in Sarajevo, Pristina, Kabul, reading reports from the field and second-guessing the facts they purported to convey. I wasn’t far away; I was right around the corner. People sitting in offices, as it turns out, don’t need to be squirreled away in bunkers on the Potomac to do their damage.

And so it’s with no small amount of skepticism about what can be “known”, one way or the other, that I read work like Eckl’s. His premise is, I think, straightforward and uncontroversial. “Ethnographic  methods like participant observation differ significantly from other methods,” the article’s abstract states, “since they explicitly blur the boundary between theory and practice; this blurring requires researchers to carefully evaluate their conflicting responsibilities to the people studied, to the scientific community, and to themselves.” Sure.  “Many of the insights generated in ethnology are relevant for political scientists, too, especially for those political scientists who are prepared to ‘‘leave the veranda’’ and want to put ethnographic methods to use, but also for those who prefer to remain in the position of an ‘‘armchair’’ researcher.” Still fine.

It’s Eck’s more practical recommendations that feel, well… awkward. Scholarly “objectivity” and “neutrality” are laudable goals for researchers, and achieving even some semblance of them is the height of methodological rigor. But when politics enters the picture, things get more complicated. At issue then is whether scholars should proactively seek to limit access to their research findings rather than allow some potential future misuse of their work. Eckl thinks so. He also makes an interesting case for the idea that “the field” has, traditionally, represented very different things to anthropologists and to political scientists, and that the pressures of co-option either way must be resisted. He recommends reliance on documentary evidence as one way of avoiding the perils of “going native”; as a trained historian, I see that as a red herring of sorts. What Eckl doesn’t do, unfortunately, is reconcile the worlds of the anthropologist and the political scientist, of the field observer and the deskbound researcher. There is real and social distance that separates people sitting in offices from their grubby counterparts living and breathing outside the wire. We need to understand both, and to value both.

Eckl, J. (2008). “Responsible Scholarship After Leaving the Veranda: Normative Issues Faced by Field Researchers-and Armchair Scientists.” International Political Sociology, 2 (3), 185-203 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-5687.2008.00044.x

Originally published at CTlab.