Failed Schools, Failed States

A few weeks ago, I had a chance to listen to an episode of the Unraveling podcast in which the hosts discussed the debacle of the withdrawal of Afghanistan.  They had a laugh over the dark irony of Ashraf Ghani, the former president of that country and author of a book entitled Fixing Failed States, fleeing precipitously from the failed state he could not fix.  Apparently, an advanced degree from an Ivy League college and a teaching gig at Berkeley did not exactly prepare the man for the sort of real world conflict that came to engulf his country.  Apparently, a background in “management science” did not provide the best training for actually governing flesh and blood human beings.

It is worth reflecting for a moment why anyone in our government thought it would be.  Why would anyone acquainted with the ordinary patterns of history and power suppose that “failed states” are things that can be remedied with a set of diplomatic nostrums?  Clearly, the sort of people in government who made the decisions that led to the Afghanistan fiasco were completely unacquainted with those patterns.  Instead, they had “management science,” and the false confidence it inspires that some method exists, which, applied universally to political affairs, will bring about predictable and regular outcomes.  Deluded with the chimera of such a “science,” our foreign policy officials, along with their factotum in the Middle East, embarked on campaign of nation building that has ended in exactly the sort of disaster readily foreseen by anyone free from the grips of such delusions.

All of this is to say that there was an unmistakable educational component to the catastrophe in Afghanistan.  The sort of blind fantasizing that played out there was the direct result of our leaders immersing themselves in “management science,” with the outsized faith in abstract, universally applicable models it invariably implants in its adherents. Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, mocks such people for believing “the regulation and management of the world require no more abilities than the handling and turning of a globe.” Now, it is these miseducated people who determine the affairs of our country.

What kind of course of study would have actually prepared our leaders to engage fruitfully with the welter of history? What would such a course of study look like, and what would it teach?  It would consist of an inquiry into the great powers of the past – the Romans, the Venetians, the British, but also the reigns of the Taira clan in Japan and the Inca emperors. It would encompass a close examination of the causes of the rise and decline of these powers.  It would teach the endemic presence of brutality, self-dealing, treachery, and ruination in the affairs of nations.  Such a course of study would convey, first and foremost, a modesty about what can be accomplished in the political arena, and in particular, what can be accomplished by force exerted abroad.  It would teach us to regard disaster as the customary end of human designs, and the avoidance of disaster therefore as a proper goal of our designs.  It would teach us the precariousness of power, and the need to husband the exercise of that power with extreme judiciousness.  It would certainly teach us to contemn theories that make no reference to the specific cultural and historical conditions within which they are supposed to be implemented.

The kind of education I am referring to is, of course, a classical education, one rooted in the traditional humanistic discipline of history, rather than the new-fangled persiflage of “management science.”  The sort of impression I am claiming such an education makes upon the mind has to do with the inculcation of intellectual virtues like prudence and wisdom.  Nothing is more evident about the character of the people who determine the affairs of our country than that they are entirely lacking in prudence and wisdom.  This is the consequence of the type of schooling they have received, one that not only makes no provision for the cultivation of these virtues, but one which actively prevents their cultivation due to its radical deficiency.  To anyone with eyes to see, the catastrophe in Afghanistan was not only a political failure, but an educational failure as well.

We do not sufficiently consider the extent to which many, if not most, of our political ills have their roots in the deficiencies of our educational system.  We do think enough about the way the failures of our leadership class have resulted from the poverty of the schooling they have received.  Consider, for instance, the current debates raging over the vaccines.  I do not want to delve into any of the partisan or scientific issues involved in the issue; I only want to examine the tenor of the conversation.  Public officials across the country are in the position of trying to persuade the public to take the vaccines in order to mitigate the spread of the virus.  And how do they go about that task of persuasion?  By belittling, demeaning, cursing, and finally threatening anyone who disagrees with them.  What kind of idiot thinks that this is an effective strategy of persuasion? Who thinks anyone is going to be convinced by this sort of thing? I have taught rhetoric in the past, and I would have failed any student who carried on in one of their essays like this, yet we have an entire leadership class seemingly incapable of speaking any other way.  Why?  Because they have never been taught otherwise.  They have never been taught how to argue properly, and thus, have never been prepared for one of the basic demands of the public stations they occupy.

Examples could be multiplied.  What they would all serve to demonstrate is that the unfitness of our present leadership class to direct the affairs of our nation is the certain result of courses of study that served only to puff up their conceit and self-regard, rather than laying any solid foundations for virtue.  It follows that any real efforts of political reform must encompass a program of educational reform, and that such a program must aim to reestablish a training in the old humanistic curriculum as the basis for entry into public life. Until we have leaders whose minds and characters have been formed on that kind of curriculum, we will continue to watch our public affairs degraded by those who think they possess real knowledge, but only possess its simulacrum.