Spengler’s Call for an Educated Imagination

Spengler’s latest column (“Benedict XVI is magnificently right“) concludes an assessment of the moral failings embedded in the current economic crisis with a broad condemnation of America’s immature imagination – the only thing, he notes, that can prepare us for the future – in this case, primarily businesses – is not static, faux-scientific econometric forecasts, but, quite literally, an ability to “imagine” potential future outcomes in an educated and mature manner:

“There is an even greater flaw in the theory of the free market, perhaps, and that is in the assertion that the market can form adequate expectations about the future profitability of firms and make proper judgments about allocation of capital. How do we explain away the misallocation of capital to Internet stocks during the late 1990s and to homes in the United States (and elsewhere) during the ensuing years?

The world simply is too uncertain for the market to look more than a year or two over the horizon. Technological and social change occurs in unexpected and dramatic ways, frustrating the best guesses of the cleverest entrepreneurs, not to mention the stodgy decisions of central planners. The market cannot form accurate long-term expectations; at best it can imagine future outcomes. The quality of its imagination in this case depends on cultural factors that transcend economic judgment. “

JM

The Minority Leader Gives It Away

House Minority Leader John Boehner may have both dismantled my previous post that “Jindal is not Obama” and blown the lid off of the GOP’s new strategy to recruit young Asian-American Catholics to reinvigorate the party.  Or so says Ross Douthat.  Ahem.  In an internal memo, Boehner writes:

 ”Joseph Cao is a Vietnamese immigrant whose experience in America drew him to the Republican Party and its traditional commitment to freedom and reform. Working with like-minded Republicans such as Governor Bobby Jindal, he took an aggressive stand against corruption, offering a principled alternative to what voters were offered by the local Democratic establishment.”

How can you not love a guy – and a Congressman no less! – with quotes like these:

Mr. Cao said that while he was studying to be a priest in the 1990s, he had “the great opportunity to work with the poor in conditions of extreme poverty” in Mexico and in Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong — children playing in the slums, children behind bars. He wanted to be a missionary.

and…

The central insight he appreciates from his philosophical masters, the Russian and French apostles of existentialism, is the rule for living that “life is absurd but one cannot succumb to the absurdity of it.”

and…

“I truly espouse Aristotle’s definition of virtue: To walk in the middle line.”

Who is this guy?  And how did he beat an entrenched crony like William Jefferson in a year when Republicans are laying eggs all over the country?

JM

Jindal is not Obama.

Have I ever mentioned that Bobby Jindal is not a GOP “version” of Barack Obama?  Because he’s actually not.  The man is not of a White Anglo Saxon Protestant background.  Neither is the President-elect.  Get over it.  Please.  Jindal is a politically and culturally conservative Catholic with a penchant for achieving progressive goals on social policy using conservative means.  Obama is a post-modernist (heretical?) Christian collectivist using recycled, repackaged ideas from the Great Society.

Dear Media:  Please don’t confuse the two.  Thx.      

JM

Tell Me a Story of the Red Dragon’s Glory

At the intersection of demographics, economics, politics, psychology, strategic business planning, and something I’ll call narrative arts (e.g. film, literature), sits a small but growing niche disipline (if it can even claim that title) called scenario planning.   Scenario planning, in spite of its management guru/Dilbert-like label, is only the creation and telling of plausible future scenarios (stories) in order to stimulate strategic thinking and better prepare for an uncertain future. 

Businesses and governments have for years used quantitative, economic models to forecast the future, using these models as a baseline for decisionmaking.  While clearly useful (no decision, either at the individual or corporate level, should be made without consideration of economic factors), these “forecasts” are by their very nature, wrong.  Worse still, they gave (and continue to give) an impression of numeric certainty.  Federal agencies are often required by law to create far-reaching policies based on such estimates.  The upcoming climate change debate in Washington will illustrate this phenomenon nicely. Climate and economic models will be asked to predict the nature of the world economy in the 22nd century, so that we can create policy on carbon emissions today.  They are being asked to predict the behavior of not just billions of individuals, but whole cities and nation-states – not just next year – but decades into the future.  Or in other words, we are dealing with irreducible uncertainties, ad infinitum, all with the apparent certainty of modeled discount rates, sensitivity analyses, and the projected GDP in the year 2078. 

Certainty about the future can lead to bad decisionmaking today, particularly when your numbers are wrong.  Or even more likely still, “events” intervene.*  Scenario planning seeks to fill some of the gaps, and expose the preconceived notions of decisionmakers.  Military strategists were the first to employ this type of thinking, and Shell Oil was the first to integrate it into their strategic business planning. 

Rather than focusing exclusively on economic and budgetary factors, scenarios attempt to weave together economic, demographic, technological, cultural and political data to construct plausible stories about what the world may look like in a specific time horizen.  The National Intelligence Council recently published their Global Trends 2025, a set of four “fictionalized scenarios” about what the world may look like in 2025 (hint: most scenarios highlight the rise of a couple densely populated countries in Asia).  Even though this document contains four fictional stories cooked up by the NIC, the media reports them as “predictions” and “forecasts.”  This reportage completely misunderstands the purpose of scenario planning – not to predict the future, but to prepare for it in light of our complete inability to predict the future with accuracy.

A few core scenario planning resources on the web:  Global Business Network, Scenario Planning Resources, The Art of the Long View.

* “Events dear boy, events.”
-British politician Harold MacMillan’s response to a journalist when asked what is most likely to derail the plans of government. 

JM

Tragic Ted

For someone who is still a bit shaken from Pastor Ted Haggard’s rapid and disturbing fall as lead pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, I am really questioning the wisdom of all of this.  Why does he not just stay out of the public eye – perhaps permanently?  Every re-entry point into the public sphere has seemed awkward, and kind of contrived.  And why the sudden exposition of an incident of apparent sexual abuse when he was seven?  Did that really directly contribute to his doing crystal meth and frequenting a male prostitute decades later?  I don’t know.  Part of me wants to see Pastor Ted rise from the ashes, but at the moment, I have to say that he still seems to have his PR face on.  I’m waiting anxiously for the day when he sheds any fear of recovering his reputation, and becomes a fool for Jesus like he’s never been before.  For someone who was present at New Life the Sunday after Pastor Ted’s admission, I wish he could recover the initial posture of heart indicated in the letter that was read aloud to thousands that Sunday morning on his behalf. 

JM

An “Apocalyptic” Policy Agenda

That’s the term used by prominent American-in-Vatican-City Cardinal Francis Stafford, who described President-elect Obama’s policy priority list as “apocalyptic.”   Hear the audio of his remarks below, and also read John Allen’s (preeminent Vatican reporter for NCR) analysis of the Cardinal’s words, which provide some valuable context. 

JM

What is a Republican these days?

A couple of years ago I was having a discussion with a couple of professors from grad school, both of whom are politically somewhere to the left of Chairman Mao, God love ‘em both.  Suffice it to say they didn’t do much thinking about the existential direction of the Republican party – but for a few drop-ins to Rush Limbaugh-style talk radio, just to assure themselves that “conservatives” were in fact the fundie fanatics of their dreams.  

I remember telling them I though the Republican party was about to undergo a schism of sorts, where the fusionism of the 1960s, linking traditional conservatives, libertarians, and national security hawks, would begin to rupture. 

I first noticed that all Repubulicans were not alike while interning at a state agency, headed by a Republican administration.  While having lunch with one of the smartest young staff members in the agency, I discovered that, while this guy was profoundly devoted to free-markets and low taxes, he was equally perterbed by “government intervention” in issues like abortion, gay “marriage”, and the like.  Yet he claimed the Republican party as much as James Dobson or Jerry Falwell. 

Following the recent election, the pundit/intellectual debate amongst traditional/crunchy conservatives, libertarians, national security hawks, and so-called “reform” conservatives is reaching a fever pitch. 

Frankly, I think it’s never been a more interesting time to be a Republican – particularly with the wide range of heterodox young conservative writers and thinkers who owe at least part of their success to the current intellectual crisis in the Republican party.  Here are a few I follow regularly:  Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, Ramesh Ponnuru, Rod Dreher, David Frum, Yuval Levin, and all the writers at the American Scene and Culture 11.  And of course, the grand old sage, David Brooks. 

If you’d like to observe the current TradCon/Libertarian tensions played out, just have a gander at this Mike Huckabee-slashing post from The New Right, links and all (especially to libertarian-leaning Kathleen Parker’s recent tirade against “religious conservatives” in the Washington Post). 

JM

Navel Gazing & “Unleaded Only”

If the birth of the novel some 500 years ago was seen as the beginning of introspective literature – the inner monologe of a “main character” was the central focus of the story - then the 21st century blog is probably the apex of navel-gazing as an approach to writing.  This is unfortunate.  But as my Grandpa used to say: “You have to do the best with what you have.”  Well, I have a blog.  So I will use it. 

I’ll start with a few core principles.  These provide a descriptive framework for how I interpret human life – including the actions of individuals, families, churches, governments, businesses, and so on.  To borrow a metaphor from a wise priest, I think these principles are like the sign on the gas tank that says “Unleaded Only.”  You can try to put diesel in if you want.  But the engine runs on Unleaded, so you might as well reconcile yourself to the fact.

1.  Human beings are capable of good, but are inclined toward evil.

2.  Human activity is motivated powerfully by the fear of the unkown, especially the fear of death.

3.  All human beings, either consciously or subconsciously, are striving toward perfect union with God. 

Some of these principles may seem obvious.  Others may seem to fail at describing the behavior of certain people or institutions.  Fair enough.  I don’ claim a Theory of Everything.  But this is the framework to which I subscribe, which I believe not because it’s ”mine,” but because I think it is the most comprehensive, and the most true.   

JM