Is a Science of Cultural Change Possible?  

Posted by T. Greer in , , ,


Peter Turchin is one of the leading minds behind cliodynamics, an effort to make the study of history a fully scientific discipline with the same sort of theoretical and mathematical rigor that under-girds modern scholarship in disciplines like ecology or evolutionary biology. In a 2008 essay written for Nature he justified this project in the following terms:

What caused the collapse of the Roman Empire? More than 200 explanations have been proposed, but there is no consensus about which explanations are plausible and which should be rejected. This situation is as risible as if, in physics, phlogiston theory and thermodynamics coexisted on equal terms. This state of affairs is holding us back. We invest in medical science to preserve the health of our bodies, and in environmental science to maintain the health of ecosystems. Yet our understanding of what makes societies healthy is in the pre-scientific stage.

Sociology that focuses on the past few years or decades is important. In addition, we need a historical social science, because processes that operate over long timescales can affect the health of societies. It is time for history to become an analytical, and even a predictive, science....  Rather than trying to reform the historical profession, perhaps we need an entirely new discipline: theoretical historical social science. We could call this ‘cliodynamics’, from Clio, the muse of history, and dynamics, the study of temporally varying processes and the search for causal mechanisms Let history continue to focus on the particular. Cliodynamics, meanwhile, will develop unifying theories and test them with data generated by history, archaeology and specialized disciplines such as numismatics (the study of ancient coins). [1]

 I commend the intentions of this project and have been impressed with the research it has produced thusfar.  However, I remain skeptical that it will ever be able to dethrone the messy, unscientific narratives most historians use to describe trends in macro-history. In particular, I doubt our ability to ever produce convincing, predicative models of cultural change.
Image Source: Fig 1 from Justin Mcarthy, 
"Record 60% of Americans Support Same-Sex Marriage,"
 Gallup (19 May 2015)

Americans have witnessed a rather dramatic example of cultural change quite recently. On June 26th, 2015 same-sex marriage became the official law of the land in the United States of America. Many have marveled at the rapid shifts in public opinion that made this possible. As late as 1995, less than 27% of Americans believed same-sex unions should be recognized legitimate unions; a bit more than 60% do today. Younger generations support for same-sex marriage is even more lopsided. This astonishing cultural transformation begs explanation.

An important part of the puzzle is found in popular attitudes about the purpose of marriage and its role in society generally. These attitudes have changed dramatically. A 2010 report from the National Marriage Council does an excellent job describing these changes and some of their social implications:
Over the last four decades, many Americans have moved away from identifying with an “institutional” model of marriage, which seeks to integrate sex, parenthood, economic cooperation, and emotional intimacy in a permanent union. This model has been overwritten by the “soul mate” model, which sees marriage as primarily a couple-centered vehicle for personal growth, emotional intimacy, and shared consumption that depends for its survival on the happiness of both spouses. Thus where marriage used to serve as the gateway to responsible adulthood, it has come to be increasingly seen as a capstone of sorts that signals couples have arrived, both financially and emotionally—or are on the cusp of arriving.
Although this newer model of marriage—and the new norms associated with it—has affected all Americans, it poses unique challenges to poor and Middle American adults. One problem with this newer model—which sets a high financial and emotional bar for marriage—is that many poor and Middle American couples now believe that they do not have the requisite emotional and economic resources to get or stay married. By contrast, poor and Middle Americans of a generation or two ago would have identified with the institutional model of marriage and been markedly more likely to get and stay married, even if they did not have much money or a consistently good relationship. They made do.
But their children and grandchildren are much less likely to accept less-than-ideal relationships. And because infidelity, substance abuse, and unplanned pregnancies are more common in Middle America than they are in upscale America, Middle Americans are less likely than their better-educated peers to experience high-quality soul-mate relationships and are, hence, less likely to get and stay married. Their standards for marriage have increased, but their ability to achieve those standards has not. [2]
As Ross Douthat has pointed out, same-sex marriage fits into the old "institutional" conception marriage only with great difficulty, but it is a natural consequence—indeed, a paramount example—of the new "soul-mate" model. This new conception of marriage cannot offer any logical reproof to same sex unions (nor does it, for that matter, offer any reasonable objection to polyamorous relationships). Once the new model became orthodoxy it was simply a matter of time before previously heterodox relationships of these sorts were accepted. Same sex marriage was simply a very high profile and contentious marker of this much deeper change change.

 But why did this change happen? How do we account for a large reversals in popular attitudes towards the purpose and social roles of families and marriage?

 This is not the first time sweeping change of this sort has washed over American society. You would not know this from the way people talk about marriage and family today. Indeed, the most frustrating thing about the Culture War debates of our time is the lack of historical awareness on the part of debaters. Conservatives seldom know the historical origin of the institutions and practices they defend. Progressives, for their part, are even more historically stunted: their narratives of change and progress a rarely stretch back past their days of youthful activism in the 1960s. But we must look back much further into the past than this to see where the "institutional" ideal of marriage and family life comes from. It is approximately two centuries old. The ideal the National Marriage Council labels "institutional"—and which conservatives simply call "traditional"—was created between 1770 and 1830 among New England's bourgeoisie. By the end of the nineteenth century it provided the standard vision of family life for men and women across America.

In their excellent book Domestic Revolutions: a Social History of American Family Life Steven Mintz and Susan Kellog call this model of family and marriage relations “the Democratic Family.” Its basic features will sound familiar: as an institution marriage was designed to provide love and companionship for both spouses and a nurturing and safe environment for rearing children. Marriage partners were chosen carefully by the future spouses themselves, not by their parents or extended families. Husbands and wives were expected to act as an equal partnership, though each was responsible for sharply differentiated social spheres. Men worked outside of the home itself, acting as the family's primary breadwinners. Family and home life were conceptualized as a "haven" and resting place from the pressures of that outside world. In the domestic sphere the wife reigned supreme; she was expected to cultivate the sort of warm, loving home environment mentioned above, as well as be the primary care taker and nurturer of the children.

 Children were to be nurtured. Through the good example and patient instruction of the parents—especially the mother—each child's individual talents and abilities could be found and developed. By the same careful and loving methods their character could be refined and improved. Children would be few. They would be treasured. Most importantly of all, they would be treated as children—not as miniature adults or unthinking beasts—until they reached adolescence. They were supposed to feel the same sense of warmth, love and respect for their parents that their parents were expected to feel for each other. They were considered autonomous individuals whose own personality traits and desires, not their family name or background, was at the core of their identity. At a comparatively early age they would separate from their parents completely to establish their own independent household. [3]

This vision of family life seems familiar to us because it persisted with few rivals right up to through the 1960s. It did evolve in that time (the most serious change occurring during the 30s and 40s, when the category of what we now call "teenager" first developed) but most changes were gradual, and the the basic tenets of family life in the century between the civil war and the civil rights movement were essentially the same. But if the sexual revolution was a sharp transition away from the Democratic Family of old, the Democratic Family itself was just as sharp a transition away from the pattern of familial relations that came before it. New England life was then dominated by the Puritan family. The type of family relations championed by the Puritans couldn't be more different from the "traditional family values" that dominated American society over the last two centuries.

 In Puritan New England, the decision to marry was an economic one which husband, wife, and their families would haggle over. Marriage was understood as a “union where a man provided financial support in exchange for domestic service.” The hierarchy between husband and wife was thus not altogether different from that which separated a man from his servants. Affection between spouses would develop after marriage, if it developed at all. The purpose of a wife was domestic industry, and the family’s wealth was just as a much a product of her labors as that of her husband’s. Families would have far more children than in later times, but “child rearing was not the family’s main function; the care and nurture of children were subordinate to the family’s other interests.” We moderns would be not call Puritan parenting nurturing at all: “in their view the primary task of child rearing was to break down a child’s sinful will and internalize respect for divinity.” This task was given to fathers, not mothers. It ended by the age of seven, “when boys adopted adult clothing, were prevented from sleeping any longer with their sisters or female servants,” and were “fostered out as indentured servants, apprentices, or in rare cases, sent to boarding schools.” For all intents and purposes the Puritan was no longer treated as a child at this point, but simply as a “little adult.” However, the father still wielded immense authority over his children; “Puritan children were dependent on their father’s support in order to marry and set up independent households,” and their fathers possessed a legal right to deny their children’s choice of spouse and retained legal authority over their son’s farms and lands until their death. [4] 

 I explain the old Puritan practices and ideals at such length so that readers may get a sense of just how alien their social world is to modern sensibilities. It would have been just as alien to most Americans from any period of this country's independent history. Modern children can open up domestic children’s novels written in nineteenth century like Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods or Louisa May Alcott's Little Women and instantly recognize families whose ideals and patterns of life are much like their own. There is no undue sense of culture shock, nor is there a need for long footnotes or introductions to make the social worlds of Josephine March or Laura Ingalls comprehensible. The same could not be said for a novel about family life written a century earlier—though par my point, such a novel would never have been written. Books written specifically for children would have made no sense to the Puritan mind, and as most women were illiterate, it would be hard to find a woman of Alcott's talents to write one. This past truly was a different country. It took a titanic change in popular attitudes before today's ‘traditional family values’ could come into being.

 Those familiar with the broad span of global history will recognize that these rapid and dramatic changes in attitudes and practices within family life have happened many times before. Often—as was the case in Southern Song dynasty China or is the case in many parts of the contemporary Middle East—these changes would be considered regressive by the standards of 21st century liberals. Yet despite the great variety of family regimes history has given us to examine, we have not been able to create a compelling theory that explains why certain family practices and attitudes persist or change over time. Some parts of this puzzle are fairly well understood—demographers have posited and provided overwhelming evidence for what they term “Demographic Transition Theory,” which describes average fertility rates mostly as a function of GDP per capita and the level of education available to women. But while economic and demographic conditions can largely explain how many children couples across the world have,  it cannot explain what they expect from these children or what they think is the proper way to parent them. Today countries with fairly similar economic and demographic profiles—such as much of Western Europe and Japan—have very different attitudes and expectations for the roles men, women, and children are supposed to play in family life. Things like the age at which children leave the home or marry can be quantified and coded with ease. It is much harder to quantify or code how much affection husbands are expected to show their wives, or how harshly parents should discipline their children. [5]

 So what does explain these things? And more importantly, how can we verify if any proposed explanation is true? Is it possible to establish a science of family life?

Families are an interesting object of study, because they are at once a demographic unit, an economic partnership, and set of human relationships that have great cultural meaning. Historians who study families of the past tend to focus one of these three parts, describing change in terms of demographic structure, economic survival strategy, or cultural values. This post concerns the last of these. So that we don’t get bogged down in debates over demographics and economics, it might be helpful to consider shifts in cultural values and attitudes that happened outside of the family entirely. Consider the changes in popular culture Brendan Bruce discusses in his 2013 book, The Origins of 'Spin':
The development of the sound bite is closely aligned to the process "dumbing down’ television, which started almost immediately.... In 1955 15 million people paid to attend major league baseball games, while 35 million paid to attend classical music concerts. The New York Metropolitan Opera’s Saturday afternoon radio broadcast drew a listenership of 15 million out of an overall population of 165 million. As the sociologist David White has noted, NBC spent $500,000 in 1956 to present a three-hour version of Shakespeare’s Richard III starring Sir Laurence Olivier. The broadcast drew 50 million mowers; as many as 25 million watched all three hours. White also went on to note that on March 16, I956, a Sunday chosen at random, the viewer could have seen a discussion of the life and times Toulouse-Lauflec by three prominent art critics, an interview with theologian Paul Tillieh, an adaptation of Walter Van Tilburg Clark's Hook, a documentary on mental illness with Dr. William Menninger, and a 90-minute performance of The Taming of the Shrew. It was not to last.

In 1968, when television still had Murrow-like pretensions to be in the news business, the average length given over to a politician's reply to a question, or an excerpt from a speech, was 42.3 seconds. Fully 21 percent of these sound bites ran for at least a minute. In 1972 it was 25.2 seconds. By 1976 it had reduced to 18.2 seconds and in 1980 was down again to 12.2 seconds. In 1984 it was down yet again - this time to 9.9 seconds. In 1988 it reduced to 9.8 seconds; in 1992 to 8.2; and in 1996 to 7 seconds. 18 seconds in twenty five years. The press equivalent - the 'ink bite’- has reduced over time from 14 column lines to six. [6]
Mr. Bruce presents compelling evidence that both American political culture and American popular culture has been “dumbed down” over the last sixty years. Anyone who has watched game shows or news programs from the era Bruce extols, or has read through the archives of magazines like Time, Life, Newsweek, or Foreign Affairs can attest that American information culture has become more vulgar, less erudite, and geared towards smaller and smaller attention spans during this time.

I discussed this passage in a private exchange with Adam Elkus, blogger at Rethinking Security and Zero Derp Thirty several weeks ago. Over the course of our exchange we came up with nine different plausible explanations for why this "dumbing down" of popular media might have happened. In the weeks since then I have developed another three potentials explanations for the trend. But this is precisely the problem. As it stands now, discussions of cultural change are no different than the discussions of Rome's decline that distress Peter Turchin. It is easy to create a story that explains why Americans have grown less articulate and formal over the last few decades, or why their expectations for marriage have changed. It is difficult to prove which of these stories is correct. We simply don’t have the methodological tools we need to scientifically test one hypothesis over the other.

I am unsure this will ever change. A central problem is that many cultural values and meanings at play here are too nuanced to be coded or quantified, and thus hypotheses built on them are quite difficult to falsify. To a great extent this explains why obscurist, ideology-heavy, “critical theory” interpretations of culture hold so much sway over much of the humanities. To outsiders looking in these interpretations are obvious foolishness, but until there is a science of cultural change capable of falsifying these interpretations, the study of culture will remain a morass where nothing but academic fashion and popular opinion can privilege one explanation over another.


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[1] Peter Turchin, "Arise 'cliodynamics'," Nature 454, iss 3 (2008), 34-35.

 [2]  Brad Wilcox, ed., When Marriage Disappears: Retreat From Marriage in Middle America (State of our Unions 2010) (Charlottesville, VA: National Marriage Project), 38-39.

 [3] Susan Kellogg and Steven Mintz, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life, (New York: The Free Press, 1988),43-67.

 [4] ibid., 1-23. Quotations from 9, 14-17, 58.

 [5] It is also worth noting that--contrary to the claim that changes in marriage and family ideals are purely a function of economic realities--the current shift from “institutional” to “soul-mate” models of marriage has carried heavy economic costs for most of American society. Economic survival models of family structure struggle to explain the rise of the "soul-mate" model of marriage. See note 2.

[6] Bruce Brendan, On the Origin of Spin: Or how Hollywood, the Ad Men and the World Wide Web became the Fifth Estate and created our images of power (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013); 249.

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What History Should An American Know?  

Posted by T. Greer in , , ,

A Serbian Gypsy Family at Ellis Island. 

"Gitanos Augustus" by Augustus Sherman (1917), displayed at Statue of Liberty National Park.

 Image Credit: Wikimedia.

What history should an educated American be expected to know?

 The most recent issue of Democracy Journal includes a long essay by Eric Liu on "cultural literacy," a term coined by E.D. Hersh for the title of his 1988 book on "what every American should know." Mr. Liu likes Hersh's approach, but argues it must be updated to better fit multi-cultural, 21st century America. As Liu states:
The decades-long [culture] war is about to give way to something else. The question then arises: What? What is the story of “us” when “us” is no longer by default “white”? The answer, of course, will depend on how aware we are of what we are, of what our culture already (and always) has been. And that awareness demands a new kind of mirror....

 First, Hirsch, a lifelong Democrat who considered himself progressive, believed his enterprise to be in service of social justice and equality. Cultural illiteracy, he argued, is most common among the poor and power-illiterate, and compounds both their poverty and powerlessness. Second: He was right.

 A generation of hindsight now enables us to see that it is indeed necessary for a nation as far-flung and entropic as ours, one where rising economic inequality begets worsening civic inequality, to cultivate continuously a shared cultural core. A vocabulary. A set of shared referents and symbols.
Yet that generational distance now also requires us to see that any such core has to be radically reimagined if it’s to be worthy of America’s actual and accelerating diversity. If it isn’t drastically more inclusive and empowering, what takes the place of whiteness may not in fact be progress. It may be drift and slow disunion. So, first of all, we do need a list. But second, it should not be Hirsch’s list. And third, it should not made the way he made his." [1]

  I encourage you to read the entire thing. The essay has been making the rounds on social media. I'd like to make three brief points in response:

1. Liu devotes a great deal of space to convincing his fellow progressives that an America whose citizens know their history is better than an America whose citizens do not. It is interesting—and a tad bit depressing—that pieces like this are necessary. It should be obvious that a broad base of shared historical knowledge is a prerequisite for democracy, and that such knowledge is helpful in a few other domains as well. That the author must spend so much time justifying the mere idea of shared historical knowledge is discouraging.

 2. The most interesting (and most divisive) topic up for discussion is what kind of history educated, culturally-literate Americans should be expected to know. This cannot be answered until we have a clear picture of how this historical knowledge will be used. Ancient historians like Plutarch viewed the study of history as a form of character development—through studying the lives of great men of the past, the student would find inspiration and patterns he needed to become a more virtuous man in the present. Moderns are more prosaic: personal enjoyment and class signaling are probably the most common reasons history is studied or cited today.  These reasons are all narrow and private; none are compelling enough to demand historical literacy from every American who participates in the public square. 

Most other reasons given can be boiled down to one of three claims:
  • a) History helps one understand contemporary events from the long view. Some trends are only visible on long time scales; other crises make no sense without a thorough knowledge of the events that preceded them. Historical context matters; all politics is white noise without it.
  • b) History helps one understand today's world as others understand it. History is a living thing. The words and actions of dead men echo through time, popping up in poems, speeches, songs, and books many years later. Most importantly, people's perceptions of the past influence how they think about the future and how they act in the present. One cannot navigate the words and treatises of today’s thinkers—nor those of worthies now gone—without background knowledge of the events, people, and ideas they reference. 
  • c) History helps one understand how society actually works. This approach differs substantially from the other two. They are tethered to the world as it is - or as it is perceived - now. This approach suffers from no such limitations. It does not aim to tell the story of humanity, but to explore history and discover the dynamics or recurring patterns that make history what it has been and what it may be. We all have theories of cause and effect that we rely on to make decisions and predict what consequences these decisions will have. The data that these mental models are built upon is history.
I have discussed these categories in an earlier post on world history and its textbooks. Those curious about how each shapes the way world history is presented and understood in general surveys may find it of interest. But these categories—and the purpose each is built around—are also quite useful for the challenge Liu presents. Looking at potential items for the list of "21st Century cultural literacy terms" Liu would like to build in their light can help us prioritize what should make the list. 

Some items might be surprising. To pick one example: the history of the Roman republic is far removed from 21st century America. At first glance it is unlikely to make it on the list. However, it is quite important for reason b), as the people who created the institutions that now govern America did so specifically in reference to the Roman experience. It is very hard to understand what the founding generation did and said without a bare knowledge of what Rome was, who its major figures were, and a basic idea of how it slid from republic to dictatorship.  

3) The other notable thing about Liu's essay is its acute focus on all things American. Americans ought to prioritize their own history and cultural heritage—it is in America they live and with Americans they all must deal with it. But what about the rest of the world? Do words like “Mencius,” “Ancien Regime,” or “Partition of India” have no place in civic literacy? These words and concepts don’t appear too much in American politics—but they appear in the politics of other places regularly. Americans have trouble seeing the world as others see it. Basic cultural literacy may be the best place to start changing that.

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[1] Eric Liu, "How To Be An American," Democracy Journal 37 (Summer 2015). 

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The CNRP Won't Save the South China Sea  

Posted by T. Greer in , , ,


A map of "Khmer Krom," territory once dominated by 
Khmer speakers before it was conquered by Vietnam in the 18th and 19th centuries.  

Image Source: Douc Sokha, "​សហគមន៍​ខ្មែរក្រោម​ថា​រកឃើញ​ឯកសារ​ជាង​៤០០០​ទំព័រ​ ទាក់ទង​នឹង​ការ​កាត់​ទឹកដី​កម្ពុជា​ក្រោម​ឲ្យ​វៀតណាម​​", Vod Hot News (15 February 2015)
Americans are rarely disinterested observers when watching elections held in foreign climes. The further outside the Western world Americans roam the more lopsided their views tend to be. Those Americans who are familiar with Cambodian politics are overwhelmingly supporters of the Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP), opposition party to Hun Sen’s one man autocracy, the Cambodian People's Party (CPP). In terms of human rights, the CNRP’s hands are far less bloody than Hun Sen’s regime, while the party’s young, media-savvy, and loudly democratic base are just the thing needed to melt the tender heart of any Western activist. But it is not hard to detect a realpolitik slant behind American interest in the CNRP. There is a feeling, more common to observers who focus on the larger diplomatic and military events of the entire region instead of Cambodia specifically, that a CNRP led Cambodia would be a Cambodia more amenable to American interests. In a broad sense this is probably true. The young masses of Cambodia—the CNRP’s main voting demographic—are great fans of America, and the party’s foreign policy platform strikes a far more balanced tone than the unabashedly Sino-centric foreign policy favored by the CPP. Democrats stick together, the story goes: if push comes to shove a truly democratic Cambodia would favor democratic America over authoritarian China.

The problem with this rosy vision is the diplomatic controversy forcing Phnom Penh to choose between the United States and China in the first place. The South China Sea is the wedge issue of Asia. Without the sea’s territorial squabbles it is unlikely the United States would be courting the poor, rick-shaw filled capitals of the region at all. China’s pressing interests in the South China Sea are natural and obvious. The United State's are remarkably less so, but now that American prestige and ‘credibility’ has been placed on her ability to deter China from island building and reef stealing, the contest is set. All that remains is for the lines to be divided. In such a contest between global giants humble Cambodia is a more useful ally than it may seem—as was made apparent in 2012, when Cambodia took advantage of its position as chairman of the annual ASEAN summit to completely sabotage proceedings in China’s favor. America and her allies cannot afford many more diplomatic disasters like 2012. Thus they look to the growing influence of the CNRP—which weilds greater power than any opposition group has since Hun Sen's bloody 1997 purge of the royalist FUCINPEC party—for hope.

 This hope is misplaced. This has been clear for quite some time, but the controversies that have gripped Cambodian politics over the last two weeks makes this clearer than ever. The scandal—though unreported by all media outlets in the West—illustrates quite well how the dynamics of Cambodia’s inner politics are expressed in its international relations, and why a CNRP led Cambodia is unlikely to ever take the American line in the South China Sea.

The facts of the matter are these: on June 21st Um Sam An and Real Khamerin, MPs for the CNRP, led a group of some 250 monks, youth activists, and party members to inspect the border dividing Cambodia’s Svay Rieng province from Vietnam's Long An province. The stated intent of this expedition was to investigate whether or not Vietnamese government had been building on the Cambodian side of the border, as activists had claimed. On the way there—either several dozen meters within Long An or several dozen meters on the Svay Rieng side of the line, depending on who is telling the story—they were met by a hundred of so Vietnamese villagers, who blocked the road with brandished sticks. A scuffle ensued. Before the melee was over some 20 Cambodians and 7 Vietnamese were injured, including one of the MPs who led the expedition.

Then the Cambodian internets went crazy.

 See, this was not the first time this had happened. Complaints of Vietnamese encroachment on the Cambodian border have been growing louder for a year now and nationalist protests have been staged several times in response. Never the type to let claims of Vietnamese perfidy pass them by, CNRP politicians were quick to make this top-profile scandal. A few weeks before Sam An and Khamerin's ill fated venture, another CNRP MP led his own highly publicized fact-finding expedition to the border (in this case to Ratakiri). His group was also met with a blockade, though here they were not blocked with villagers holding sticks, but soldiers welding electric batons and machine guns. (Some have suggested that the villagers who met the June 21st expedition were actually soldiers in plainclothes. Impossible to verify, but a real possibility—the optics of local villagers armed with sticks are far better than soldiers with AK-47s facing down unarmed monks). When the MP reported that he had been “attacked” by the soldiers, the results were predictable: the CNRP has accused the CPP of cooperation with the Vietnamese and refusal to protect Cambodian citizens from foreign invaders. CNRP head Sam Rainsy signaled how much traction he thinks his party can get from the controversy  when he declared the 2005 border treaty issued between Vietnam and Cambodia should be considered null and that the entire thing should be renegotiated with his party’s participation. Other CNRP members demanded that the government cease all efforts to demarcate the border until 2018, after the next election. That was all a result of the first confrontation between CNRP activists and Vietnamese border guards. After the second incident accusations of treachery grew to such a fury pitch that Hun Sen’s government was  forced into arranging border talks to press the Vietnamese government for concessions.

The emotion this issue generates is hard to understand if you are unfamiliar with Khmer nationalism and its ethnic prerogatives. Southeast Asia is a region of ethnic disharmony, but few of its prejudices—outside of Burma, at least—can match the feelings of distrust and disgust the average Khmer feels towards the Vietnamese. If readers recall how conservative Americans talked about the Soviet Union at the height of communist power, add the way their counterparts in modern Europe discuss Arab immigration now, and then throw in a dash of the type of humiliation that marked Germany in interwar years, then they will have a fair idea of how wild and vitriolic a force anti-Vietnamese rhetoric can be in Cambodian politics.

Cambodians remember the centuries of warfare that led Vietnamese armies to pillage the Khmer heartland and strip away more than half of its territory. Cambodian nationalists still pine for “Khmer krom” (ខ្មែរក្រោម, lit: “outside Khmer”), a term used to refer both to ethnic Khmer living outside of Cambodia and to the lands in the lower Mekong delta that were conquered by the Vietnamese two centuries ago. Relations between the two groups did not improve  during the period of French control, a time in which the Vietnamese were given privileged status and imperial policy supported Vietnamese migration to the Cambodian heartland. Things only worsened with the French withdrawal. Historically informed Cambodians are quick to point out that the Khmer Rouge was a creation of the Viet-Cong; the more conspiratorial of their countrymen insist that the Khmer Rouge’s massacres were directed by them as well. Conspiratorial or not, all Cambodians remember that 150,000 Vietnamese soldiers invaded Cambodia in 1978 and then occupied their country as foreign conquerors for the next ten years. During this time the spigot of Vietnamese migrants moving into Cambodia was opened once again, sharpening fears that Vietnam sought to permanently subvert Khmer autonomy. While both Vietnamese immigration and government influence has waned in the days since Hanoi ordered its troops to withdraw from Cambodian territory, distrust of Vietnam's government and disgust felt towards Cambodia’s Vietnamese minority remains. You can see this even in the Khmer communities of the United States; to walk the streets of an American Cambodiatown is to see half a dozen posters warning of Vietnamese aggression, or (if you speak Khmer) be pressed to attend activist get-togethers or make donations to fight Vietnamese imperialism. [1]

 Many of these donations go straight into the coffers of the CNRP. Anti-Vietnamese agitation is a game the CNRP cannot lose. When the Vietnamese overthrew the Khmer Rouge the man they chose to head their new puppet regime was none other than Hun Sen. [2] Hun Sen was able to hold onto power after they withdrew, and the party which he heads is a direct descendent of the party the Vietnamese created to rule Cambodia. Though this may seem like ancient history (the Vietnamese withdrew two decades ago), Hun Sen remains vulnerable to nationalist claims that he is still little more than a Vietnamese puppet.  His regime’s abuses are regularly blamed on Vietnamese designs—I have personal friends who insist that the soldiers who broke up the January 2014 election protests were all Viet—and everything from the Prime Minister’s fluency in Vietnamese to his refusal to deport all ethnic Vietnamese from Cambodia are used as irrefutable proof of his traitorous intent. There is a kernel of truth behind these accusations. Hun Sen has worked hard to nip anti-Vietnamese sentiment before it ever grows to explosive (or violent) levels, and he has proven extremely hesitant to rock the boat with his old—and in every way much more powerful—patrons in Hanoi. In fact, the decision to force the Vietnamese into border talks next week is an unusual and to my knowledge unprecedented departure from normal policy. Even if the meeting amounts to nothing more than political theatre, its mere occurrence is is a testament both growing to the power of Cambodian nationalism and the increasing influence of the CNRP in Cambodian politics.
Which brings us back to the South China Sea. The critical thing to remember in discussions of Cambodia's position on the South China Sea is that Cambodia’s relationship with Vietnam is the most important and most explosive issue in Cambodian domestic politics. Of the two parties it is the democratic CNRP that has taken the harsher line against the Vietnamese—one could say that it is their defining issue. Thus as long as Vietnam is party to the South China Sea disputes, the natural impulse among CNRP members will be to favor whoever opposes them. This isn’t mere speculation on my part. Here is what CNRP party chief Sam Rainsy had to say about the South China Sea last year:
“[W]e are on the side of China, and we support China in fighting against Vietnam over the South China Sea issue,” Mr. Rainsy told a crowd of about 1,000 party supporters at the CNRP’s provincial headquarters in Siem Reap city.

During his speech, Mr. Rainsy again used anti-Vietnamese rhetoric, and repeatedly referred to the Vietnamese and Vietnam as “yuon,” a word some consider derogatory to describe the Vietnamese.

“It [Vietnam] goes and invades everywhere, and it steals land from Cambodians because the illegal government is a puppet of yuon,” he said in his speech.

“The islands belong to China, but yuon is trying to occupy [the islands] from China, because yuon is very bad,” Mr. Rainsy said. [3]

A few months later Rainsy reiterated his position on his official Facebook page (which in the internet based political culture of the CNRP is tantamount to giving a press interview):
My position vis-à-vis America, China and Vietnam

With regard to internal politics, more precisely the strengthening of democracy and the defense of human rights, we will continue to seek the support of America because we share the same values. 
But in international relations, ideology has become secondary, even irrelevant, at a time when national and strategic interests are the determining factors in choosing friends and allies. Look at the evolving relations between Vietnam and the US: the two former enemies – one communist, the other one capitalist – have become good friends and allies.

And when it comes to ensuring the survival of Cambodia as an independent nation, there is a saying as old as the world: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

By siding with China in her territorial dispute with Vietnam in the South China Sea, Cambodia could increase its chance to secure a fair resolution to its own territorial dispute with Vietnam in the Gulf of Thailand, which is part of, or adjacent to, the South China Sea. The objective would be to also internationalize the maritime conflict between Cambodia and Vietnam because, as a matter of consistency, Vietnam, in her relations with China, cannot call for the respect of international legal principles that she herself doesn’t respect in her relations with Cambodia. The international community, whose support Vietnam is counting on, cannot use double standards and turn a blind eye to Vietnam’s infringing on Cambodia’s territorial waters and islands. [4]

Now the CNRP has—in English at least—distanced itself from Sam Rainsy’s rather heated rhetoric and adopted a more neutral position. But it isn’t hard to see where their hearts lie. Indeed, as the party’s spats over the border with Vietnam grow more intense we should expect their hearts to harden. From the CNRP’s point of view, the Vietnamese are doing to the Cambodians exactly what the Chinese are doing to the Vietnamese—but in place of airstrips and islands, the Vietnamese are building roads and irrigation ponds. It is ludicrous to expect the CNRP to support the territorial rights of a country who is violating their own. No amount of American aid or moral opprobrium can make that kind of political contortion possible. As Lynn Rees might say, the wheel of the mandala has turned. There is very little Washington can do about it.

If present trends predict the future, the CNRP will continue to grow in power and influence, and they will start to exercise substantial pull on Cambodia’s foreign policy. Yet that is the crux of the problem. The CNRP base loves American democracy—but it hates Vietnam much, much more.

 FURTHER READING 

 Other posts at The Scholar's Stage on Cambodian Politics:

 "There Will Be No Cambodian Spring."
T. Greer. The Scholar's Stage. 15 August 2015.

 Other posts at the Scholar's Stage on the South China Sea disputes: 

"A Few Comments of China, Vietnam, and the HYSY981 Crisis"
T. Greer. The Scholar's Stage. 22 May 2014.

-------------------------------------

[1] Yes, this has actually happened to me. And I'm not Khmer!

[2] Things are actually a tad bit more complicated than this; Hun Sen was the second man he Vietnamese chose, elevated to power after the first passed away. 

 [3] Kuch Naren, "Rainsy Says CNRP Backs China, Not Vietnam, in Sea Dispute," Cambodia Daily (11 January 2014)

 [4] Sam Rainsy, "My Position vis-a-vis America, China, and Vietnam," Facebook Status Update (21 April 2014).

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There Is No "Right Side" of History  

Posted by T. Greer in , ,

I read with interest Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent historical essay for The Atlantic, "What This Cruel War Was Over." The article is worth reading. It consists mostly of quotations pulled from Southerner declarations, debates, and editorials from the Civil War and late antebellum eras, all on the theme of slavery and the desperate need to preserve it. One example Coates gives is the words spoken by James H. Hammond (then a South Carolina senator) on the senate floor in 1858:

The difference between us is, that our slaves are hired for life and well compensated; there is no starvation, no begging, no want of employment among our people, and not too much employment either. Yours are hired by the day, not care for, and scantily compensated, which may be proved in the most painful manner, at any hour in any street of your large towns. Why, you meet more beggars in one day, in any single street of the city of New York, than you would meet in a lifetime in the whole South. We do not think that whites should be slaves either by law or necessity. Our slaves are black, of another and inferior race. The status in which we have placed them is an elevation. They are elevated from the condition in which God first created them, by being made our slaves. None of that race on the whole face of the globe can be compared with the slaves of the South. They are happy, content, unaspiring, and utterly incapable, from intellectual weakness, ever to give us any trouble by their aspirations. [1]
What is most astonishing about this quotation (and the others like it that Coates cites) is how completely alien this kind of talk would have sounded to a Southerner living two or three generations before Hammond's time.

 One of the best books of American political or social history that I have yet read is William Freehling's The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776-1854. The book is a true pleasure to read. This cannot be said honestly about most historical tomes published over the last few decades, but it is true here. Freehling also manages to fill his book with insights about the nature of power and politics that are applicable to places and periods far removed from the antebellum South--long term readers might remember how I've used his observations to make sense of patterns in contemporary Salafist-jihadist terrorism. One of the major themes of Freehling's work is the diversity of interests and opinions found in antebellum Dixie. The rough division between "north" and "south" we used today was much harder to draw in the American republic's earliest days. As Freehling takes great pains to prove, there were many souths within the South, each with a different interest and attitude towards slavery. Slavery's greatest defenders saw this with horror and dismay. They knew their peculiar institution would not be preserved into perpetuity until the many souths learned to act in concert as The South, united by a shared commitment to slavery. Creating this sense of unity and mission was a political project that took almost a century to complete. Surprisingly, their greatest challenge in radicalizing Southern society was the slave holding class itself. In the colonial and early antebellum eras the majority of southern aristocrats did not see slavery as something worth defending. 

For example, here is what Thomas Jefferson had to say about slavery near the turn of the 19th century:
"There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it... The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other.... And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest. -- But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force their way into every one's mind. I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation." [2] (emphasis added).
As in so much else, Jefferson's words were those of a hypocrite. Jefferson's life curse was to  pen rhetoric that was powerful enough to inspire idealists across the ages while creating a standard he could never personally live up to. Not that this mattered much in the eyes of his contemporaries; a plantation master was never judged on what he physically accomplished. It was a man's ideas and manners that mattered on the Tidewater, and Jefferson's ideas were shared by many. Most intellectual southerners living at the turn of the century would willingly admit that chattel slavery was a wretched institution. They defended it on grounds of precedent and social stability: their society had not chosen slavery, the argument went, but inherited it from their British fore-bearers, and now that it was around it could not be done away with in a stroke without much suffering and misery. But there was a common expectation that slavery would end sooner than later, as economic and social forces slowly made the practice obsolete. This is exactly what happened in the state of New York. Southern gentry of Jefferson's day expected that this would happen everywhere else--and that America would be better off for it. 

 Open celebrations of slavery like the sort Hammond offered would not become common until the 1840s. By the eve of the Civil War they were the only "politically correct" things a politician from the Deep South could say about slavery. I refer those interested in the story of how slavery's most radical defenders were able to manipulate and mold southern society and culture until political elites across the region championed slavery as a positive good worth dying for to Freehling's book. The point I would like to make here is a bit more basic. The American south of 1860 was more racist, more despotic, and less tolerant of traditional Americans liberties like freedom of speech than was the American south 1790. If you had pulled Jefferson's grandchildren to the side in 1855 and asked them what the "right side" of history was, they would probably reply that it was the abolitionists, not the slavers, who were on the wrong side of it. 

 There is an obvious lesson here for all politicians and activists inclined to talk about "the right side of history" today. History has no direction discernible to mankind. Surveying current cultural trends is a foolish way to predict the future and the judgments of posterity are far too fickle to guide our actions in the present. 


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[1] James Henry Hammond, in Congressional Globe, 35th congress, 1st session, appendix, p. 71 (4 March 1858). Hammond's speech is one of the more famous defenses of slavery as a positive good, but it is not the most sophisticated. For that see E.N. Elliot, ed., Cotton is King and Pro-Slavery Arguments, comprising the writings of Hammond, Harper, Christy, Stringfellow, Hodge, Bledsoe, and Cartwright on this important subject, (Augusta GA: Pritchard, Abbott and Loomis, 1860).

 [2] Merrill D. Peterson, ed.  Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Library of America, 1984), pp. 288-291.

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Fiction and the Strategist  

Posted by T. Greer in , , ,

"The King's library at Buckingham House" from The History of Royal Residences, 
by William Henry Pines (1819), plate No. 48

Image Source: Wikimedia
When the moment of decision arrives the time for study and reflection has ended. Decisions made under pressure often rely on heuristics, assumptions, and interpretive frames formed long before crisis arrives. Some of these are created through personal experience; others are gifts of genetic inheritance. But a large part of our inner model of the world and its workings comes from what we have read. This is why the strategist should read. Books allow strategists to learn the painful lessons of defeat without the sort of destruction that usually attends it, provide the conceptual tools needed to make sense of a complex world, and helps strategists spot patterns and trends that they might be able to leverage to their own benefit. But--and this is an important but--this is only true if the lessons, ideas, and narratives incorporated into their model of the world are themselves accurate depictions of reality. The fruits of false assumptions about human motivation, war, or politics incorporated in the worldview of the strategist are disaster.

 The implication of all this is that one should choose carefully what one reads. This is especially true with works of fiction, whose events and characters are decided by the demands of narrative art, not the connections between cause and effect operative in the real world. The strategist must act in the world of the living, and there is no guarantee that interpretive frames built upon fictions will do him or her any good in it. In many contexts fiction is wonderful--but in the realm of strategy, fiction is far less wonderful than it is dangerous.

 My thoughts on this topic were inspired by a short post written by Lt. Col Aaron Bazin, who currently works for the U.S. Army's Training and Doctrine Command. First published at the Strategy Bridge, Bazin's post is a book list titled "What Successful Strategist Read." The 'successful strategists' there referenced are the other officers and civilians who work for the Command and are bookish enough to gather together regularly as a reading group. The list is their creation, and together with the input gathered from a broader circle of professionals in the field, they were able to create a list of 100 or so titles. You can find the full list submitted for the project on this Google Doc page, but Bazin also aggregated the submissions to produce a "top ten" list of the works most commonly suggested:

"Books Critical to Read For Success as a Strategist,"

 Source: Aaron Bazin,  "What Successful Strategists Read," Strategy Bridge (12 June 2015)
This list created a large buzz on the social networks I'm a part of, most of which centered on the choices of the fiction side of the list. The high ranking of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game was particularly controversial--controversy I helped stoke by linking to and referencing the essay I wrote a few years back on why Ender's Game did not deserve its place on the official Marine Corps Commandant reading list. I encourage curious readers to read my entire critique, but to summarize the main points in a paragraph: Ender's Game is not a realistic depiction of politics and war. It was never designed to be. This is because its subject is not strategy, but ethics. Orson Scott Card believes that morality is not found in consequences of our actions, but in the intentions that lead us to act in the first place. [And SPOILER NOTE] Ender's Game is a well written thought experiment designed from its first page to prove this point--in essence, it is an especially elaborate and compelling example from extreme cases that moral philosophers use when they write about ethics and morality. Card takes the most heinous and horrible crime of the 20th century--genocide--and imagines a situation where this crime could be committed innocently. To accomplish this Card needs to write a series implausible and improbable events into the plot of Ender's Game that push the boundaries of credulity. As the narrative's main purpose is to set up Card's grand thought experiment, this isn't a real problem. It simply means looking to Ender's Game for meaningful lessons about how conflict, diplomacy, or politicking work in the real world is a fool's errand. If anything, the novel's central lesson is something a strategist should never internalize. Card's ethics could be right in a philosophical sense, but they have little application on the battlefield. In warfare intentions mean nothing and consequence means everything. In our world there is no Commander Graff to whisk the strategist away when the consequences of his or her decisions lead to death or disaster. [/END SPOILERS]

 That is my case against Ender's Game in a nut-shell, though I can understand why some of its other themes might make it popular with professional strategists. This is particularly true for the folks who first read the book shortly after it was first published. In a culture enamored with "disruptive innovation" and obsessed with "thinking outside of the box" it is easy to forget that these concepts are relatively new ideas. Ender's "the enemy gate is down" preceded both by two decades. A strategist should have something of a maverick mentality, and Ender's Game seems like a perfect case study in the art.

 The problem is that it is nothing of the sort.

 I was not aware of this until a few days ago, when a friend participating in this discussion forwarded an essay by Elizier Yudowsky on how to write good fiction that uses Ender's Game as a central case study. Yudoswky poses the following question: how does an author create a believable character who is smarter than himself? After all, if a writer was actually smart enough to create a fool-proof plan for his character to use to conquer the world or rob Fort Knox, why hasn't he used it already? He doesn't because he can't. The author is not actually a genius, and the stratagems of his novels only appear brilliant because authors uses a series of literary devices designed to fool the audience into thinking the characters they read about are true master strategists.  As Yudowsky explains:
Consider the dilemma faced by Orson Scott Card in writing Ender’s Game (the book, not the movie). Card can tell us that Andrew “Ender” Wiggin is a military genius and great at commanding ships, but this is merely telling. We cannot actually be shown how Ender Wiggin has arranged a set of ships into a 3D pattern, and see for ourselves that this is a more powerfully attacking 3D pattern than we’d have invented. (Especially in the book, as opposed to the movie!)  In order to show Ender being smart, Card had to put Ender in a situation that we as readers could understand was threateningly difficult, and then show Ender’s solution, which would be something we could understand, and see for ourselves was good or clever.
So Card establishes early in the book that when the enemy’s army is all frozen, the winning commander has four un-frozen soldiers open the enemy’s gate to ceremonialize the victory, after which the lights come on and the game is over. Card shows you this happening several times, so that it is there in your memory as a well-established fact. Then Card puts Ender up against two armies at once, odds that not even Ender can beat, gives the dilemma some time to establish plot tension… whereupon Ender gives up on playing by the rules, and just bulls through with five soldiers and opens the enemy’s gate immediately. It doesn’t have to be explained to you how this works. There’s no slowdown for exposition at the moment of climax. All the mechanical rules operating to declare Ender’s victory are already known to you; the story has already shown the ceremony several times so that it’ll be there in your literary memory at the critical moment when you’re shown Ender’s good idea and Card wants you to understand it immediately, without pausing in the story.
When you, as an author, have written similar scenes a few times yourself, it will occur to you that the only reason why this rule exists in the Enderverse - the real reason that a battle in Battle School ends with four soldiers pressing their helmets to the enemy’s gate - is because Card wanted to put Ender in an impossible fight, decided that Ender would fight two armies, asked himself “Now how the heck can Ender win?”, invented the victory condition, asked himself why commanders wouldn’t just vigorously defend their gates, and then decided to write (into the earlier parts of the story) that this was considered a ceremonial final move.

 Is this cheating? Yes, but cut Orson Scott Card some slack! He can’t actually show us Ender being a great tactical genius the way a real-life version of Ender would be, because we’re not tactical geniuses. [1] (emphasis added)
It is important to remember here the reason Card needs Ender to be a tactical genius is not because he wants to teach us enduring lessons about zero gravity combat tactics, but because the premise of his novel calls for an innocent but unparalleled genius to be its protagonist. The Battle School does not exist to teach readers universal principles of strategy, politics, or leadership, but to demonstrate the in-universe brilliance of Ender Wiggin. This point can be generalized to all of the ideas, events, and characters of the novel--indeed, to all novels. Storylines are created by the author to manipulate the emotions and perceptions of the audience. This is true for even simple plot points like Ender's maverick tag-line, "the enemy's gate is down":
For a more organic example of cleverness, think of Ender’s slogan, “The enemy’s gate is down!” In zero gravity, Ender tells his troops, you should think of the enemy as being below you, so that you orient yourself with your legs toward them. This presents a more narrow profile, and means that the enemy’s laser guns (which Card has previously shown you!) will freeze your legs (according to rules we’re now already familiar with!) rather than your arms. This doesn’t have the literary artifice of the way Ender wins his battle against two armies; it’s a natural idea for fighting in zero gravity with laser-tag guns. In this case I expect that Orson Scott Card spent a day thinking about how to fight in zero gravity—-or maybe just a few seconds, depending on how smart he was—-and then came up with something that seemed to him like an actual good idea. And then, perhaps, he discarded it, and generated another good idea, continuing until he had the best idea he could give to Ender....
Orson Scott Card does get to specify as a story outcome that Ender’s idea actually works and Ender’s soldiers win their battles. This too is ‘cheating’ in the sense that it makes the story-Ender more intelligent than the actual cognitive work that Orson Scott Card expended to invent the “orient downward” idea. As a reader, you were probably thinking of “The enemy’s gate is down” as that awesome idea Ender had which worked great (because that’s what you’ve been shown), rather than one of twenty possible suggestions for how to fight in zero gravity, none of which have ever been tested.
But at least it’s not a pretentious or an obvious idea that the story shows us as working great. It’s not like Ender said “Try pulling the trigger twice in a row!” and nobody in-story had ever thought of that before. It’s not like Ender tried some ridiculously complicated plot (that is, any plot relying on more than three separate events happening without superintelligent or precognitive guidance) which worked by sheer authorial fiat, a la Death Note. Again, have some sympathy for Orson Scott Card: he can’t actually build a Battle School and test his ideas. It’s at least plausible that if you actually built a Battle School in zero gravity and had the kids fight, they’d do better by thinking of the enemy’s gate as being downward.
Remember the purpose of Ender’s Game is not to prove that Card is smart, any more than Card was trying to prove, by writing Ender, that he himself was a seven-year-old killer.  Ender exists as a tactical genius in-universe; the literary challenge faced by Card is how he can put that fact into text....
Closely related is the second sneaky artifice of only presenting the character with problems that they can solve. Orson Scott Card didn’t put Ender Wiggin in a battle chamber stark naked and alone, because Ender Wiggin couldn’t have won that challenge, so Card elected not to have that be what happened. Maybe Card considered several different challenges for Ender, besides the final battle against two armies, and only picked one that Card could figure out how to have Ender solve. Again, this is a way of creating an in-universe character who is apparently smarter, in-universe, than the outer cognitive work you put in; the author is solving one of many possible challenges, but the in-universe character is demonstrating their ability to handle whatever reality throws at them. [2] (emphasis added)
The problem with using Ender's Battle Room scenes to teach or inspire the "think outside of the box" attitude real strategists might need is that Ender's Game does not provide a realistic model for how maverick solutions are actually created or implemented. Card's model is designed to convince readers that Ender is a strategic prodigy, not demonstrate how prodigious strategy is actually created and used. The events and characters of the novel are literary devices and expedients whose purpose is compelling narrative. It is dangerous to try and pull out of such obvious artifice patterns or lessons that explain the workings of the real world. 

 I have been picking on Ender's Game, but it should be obvious that this critique extends to fictional stories generally. Part of what makes the current obsession with Game of Thrones so nauseating, for example, is the insistence of many fans that it is a "realistic" depiction of intrigue or power politics.  An honest look at its storyline reveals that this is simply not true. Most of what happens in the show occurs because the writers wish to elicit a specific set of emotions from the audience, and the plot follows a predictable literary strategy that successfully does just that. The problem comes when viewers internalize plot lines designed for their emotional effect and use them as the frame through which they understand politics and power in the world outside of the show. 

 John Boyd's OODA Loop, diagram originally drawn by John Boyd, recreated by Patrick Moran (2008).

 Image Source: Wikimedia

Readers familiar with the work of strategic theorist John Boyd (which should include the "successful strategists" who inspired this post, for he made it into their top-ten nonfiction list) will understand why this is a matter of such concern. Strategic theory is in essence a theory of decision making. What Boyd understood is that decisions are made in reference to the knowledge we have about the world and the narratives we use to make this knowledge cohere. A strategic actor oriented around incorrect narratives or ideas (or a strategic actor which cannot update these ideas to match changing conditions) faces a severe disadvantage in competitive environments like international relations or war. My concern is that too many of the models and ideas we use to orient ourselves are complete fictions.

Some genres are worse in this regard than others. Fantasy and science fiction ("speculative fiction") seem to be the worse offenders here, for they are the genres least tethered to reality. In these genres the presentation of politics and historical change have no restraints outside of the whims of the authors and tastes of the audience. In such novels the flow of politics and war are slaves to narrative art, and their role in the story is to manipulate the perceptions and emotions of the audience so that the author can make his or her selected themes resonate as powerfully as possible. These books are usually entertaining, often thought provoking, and occasionally are even edifying, but they are suspect sources for understanding how and why strategic actors interact as they do.

 Similar criticism could be levied against military and historical novelists, or indeed, actual historians. When historians write their books they use many of the methods well known to authors of more fanciful tales, emphasizing certain facts or events over others to create powerful and emotional narratives. But there are limits to how far one can stretch the historical record. If you are familiar with the period of history in question the author's decisions to deviate from what is known or emphasize certain themes or events over others will be transparent and thus less deceptive. If understanding the cause-and-effect, post-and-counter riposte dynamics of strategy is our aim, then it is to these genres, which tell the stories of actual men and women who responded to actual strategic challenges, that we must turn. 

 This is not to say fiction (or speculative fiction specifically) are of no use in the study of war. As Ender's Game evidences, discussions of justice, ethics, and values are natural and useful by-products of such books. These are things men and women who have responsibility for others lives must think about. Fiction also has extraordinary power to capture slices of the human experience that would be otherwise inaccessible. If you want to know why the Great War happened, then I turn you to a historian. If you want to know what the Great War felt like, then it is All Quiet On The Western Front or Farewell to Arms I recommend. 

 The final use of fiction is its most common: entertainment. If it is only that, there is no great error in reading political thrillers or fantasy adventures--spending an evening reading such a book is no worse  than idling a few hours playing golf or watching a game of football. But the number of people who orient their internal model of international relations on the rules of golf or football is small. One can only hope that the number of strategists who have internalized the plot lines of Dune or Starship Troopers for their inner model of how politics and warfare is no larger. 
EDIT (22 June 2015): Diane Maye has written a rebuttal to this post that is worth reading:

Diane Maye, "Fiction For the Strategist," Strategy Bride (22 June 2015).
 
I'll likely post a longer response to her thoughts sometime later this week.

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[1] Elizier Yudowsky, "Level 2 Intelligent Characters," Optimize Literally Everything (undated; accessed 18 June 2015)

[2] Ibid.

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