Читать книгу Teaching Common Sense - Henry Kissinger - Страница 11

GS’s goal, Gaddis has often said, is “to make it okay for people to be generalists again.”¹ The program was on the front end of a push by some academics for more interdisciplinary courses—an antidote to ever-increasing stove-piping that has come to characterize higher education. “As departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less,” higher education critic Mark Taylor has written. “Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems.”² Gaddis added, “If you pick up the history department course listings for undergraduates, there are about 150 courses, but if you look carefully at them most will tend to be narrow. Part of the reason is that professors like to teach their own research specialties. That used to happen only at the graduate level, but it is increasingly happening at the undergraduate level.”³

Allan Bloom addresses some of the implications of specialization in his 1987 social critique The Closing of the American Mind: “The net effect of the student’s encounter with the college catalogue is bewilderment and very often demoralization,” he writes. “It is just a matter of chance whether he finds one or two professors who can give him an insight into one of the great visions of education that have been the distinguishing part of every civilized nation . . . So the student must navigate among a collection of carnival barkers, each trying to lure him into a particular sideshow. This undecided student is an embarrassment to most universities, because he seems to be saying, ‘I am a whole human being. Help me to form myself in my wholeness and let me develop my real potential,’ and he is the one to whom they have nothing to say.”⁴

Compartmentalization also has broader ramifications. “The [US] president, or whomever, can’t be bound by disciplines,” Hill added. “He can’t say to himself, ‘I’m only going to think about the economics of this, or I’m only going to think about the demographics or the domestic politics of this.’ You’ve got to think about it without any fences. Everything comes at you at once . . . So you have to be multidisciplinary.”⁵

Gaddis, Kennedy, and Hill try to avoid “fences” at every level, beginning with what, exactly, they mean by the term “grand strategy.” “The reason why no one can tell you what it is is because it’s more than one thing,” Hill said. “No two of us are alike in the way we see things.”⁶ While the professors share the conviction that “having a grand strategy is a good thing,”⁷ the course determinedly offers no formal definition, forcing students to reconcile it themselves.

The way Kennedy defines it is: “The crux of grand strategy lies . . . in policy, that is, in the capacity of the nation’s leaders to bring together all of the elements, both military and nonmilitary, for the preservation and enhancement of the nation’s long-term (that is, in wartime and peacetime) best interests.”⁸

Hill hopes students “will come away having learned to become foundationalists”—people who believe that some ideas have been proved true over time and must be assumed before other truths can be known—“but I don’t think that my teaching colleagues necessarily share that,” he said. “I don’t think that’s something they think about much. That’s something I bring up. To me that’s what grand strategy is. My definition of grand strategy is multidirectional, multidefinitional. You need to know what is going on here, which is extremely difficult to get people to deal with.”⁹

But speaking before a group of Ethiopian government officials at Yale in 2014, Gaddis joked that his definition—“the calculated relationship of means to large ends”—is “the briefest, the most eloquent, and the most correct . . . You can wish for the stars, but your ability to get to the stars is always going to be limited.”¹⁰ He elaborated in an earlier address at Duke University in 2009: “Our knowledge of [grand strategy] derives chiefly from the realm of war and statecraft because the fighting of wars and the management of states have demanded the calculation of relationships between means and ends for a longer stretch of time than any other documented area of collective human activity.”¹¹ Grand strategy “applies to all fields of human endeavor,” Gaddis told the Ethiopian contingent. “We all have things we need and have to figure out how to get them, and that is strategy. The ‘grand’ has to do with significance.”¹²

“Gaddis’s definition is miniscule, and it’s circular,” Hill said. “Essentially it means don’t do stupid things. If you can’t reach the grapes, get a ladder. That encourages students to do what they want to do, which is to stay away from grand strategy.”¹³ The opposite reflex—going toward grand strategy—would be a tolerance for ambiguity. “Students have been instructed since kindergarten, ‘If you do something this way, this will be the outcome,’” he elaborated. When a situation is uncertain, “they’re at sea. They say, ‘Quick, get me back to land as quickly as possible.’”¹⁴ Similarly Hill believes that most people are so conditioned to think issue by issue, it’s tough for them to step back to see the whole picture. “Whenever they’re asked, they get jumpy and beads of sweat develop.”¹⁵

After critiquing a fall semester Marshall Brief in which the students got stuck discussing the minutiae of the Ebola virus rather than the overall relationship of the United States with Africa, the assigned topic, Hill emailed Gaddis. “Maybe we should have some kind of joint session between now and the end of the term to go over this with them. They really don’t get what GS is, even allowing for the faculty’s various angles on it. We know that it’s not because they lack intellectual capability; it has to be a very deep cultural-educational conditioning that puts them in a ‘paradigm’ . . . that they can’t imagine themselves beyond.”¹⁶

Separately, Hill said, “The area where we’re successful is not this year’s class or last year’s. When they graduate, they don’t ‘get it’”—a Hill refrain. “Five years out, if they’ve had real experiences, then they begin to get it.”¹⁷

When asked to define Grand Strategy, the vast majority of alumni, regardless of when they took GS, did seem to get it. They tended to cite Gaddis’s definition, expounding on it to present a grasp of grand strategy as a compelling model for leadership. Some viewed the concept primarily through the lens of political power: the state’s strategic assessment of economic and military priorities. As Benjamin Klay (GS ’02) remarked, grand strategy is “a nation’s means of achieving its clearly articulated objectives through progress that is measurable.” Similarly, a GS ’06 student maintained that it signals “the level of planning that focuses on domestic and international relations as they play out over the extremely long term and at the highest levels.”¹⁸

But many graduates of the program see grand strategy as a more nimble philosophy that can guide a wide range of personal and professional decisions. “It’s a way of looking on the world from an elevated position with a grounding in lessons from millennia of history behind you,” one student said, adding, “It gives you the courage to take steps forward not knowing where they will lead but with the confidence that you can stake out your own course and are capable of correcting for any mistakes.”¹⁹

“In practice, it means incorporating a sense of flexibility and appreciation for the unpredictable into one’s approach to complex problems,” Wittenstein, who negotiated the acquisition of Kissinger’s papers for Yale, noted. Marcel Logan (GS ’13) who took GS while attending the School of Management, said: “I always tell people that GS doesn’t teach as much as it reveals what is already there. Some people intuitively ‘get’ that.”²⁰

Another student maintained that while “grand strategy is a perspective that allows for greater comprehension of any situation,” it is for her most “closely connected to theology and the life of faith.” As such, it includes “virtues such as humility and hope.” She later explained that “these virtues are not merely ‘nice things’ or morals to practice; they are actually the strategy to right living. They are in accordance with the longer-term reality of the vision of God, which is also fundamentally the shorter-term reality as well.”²¹

But, from a more secular perspective, Max Nova (GS ’11) said: “It gave me the confidence to strike out and try something new and crazy, secure in the knowledge that Philip II [of Spain] didn’t really have much of a clue either.”²²

As Gaddis told the Ethiopians, people have faced “the gap between what they hope for and what they can hope to get” for a long time. Empires have risen and fallen because of this gap. Wars have been fought and won and lost over this disparity between aspirations and capabilities. Once human beings acquired the ability to pass ideas from one generation to another then a body of experience began to develop with respect to how to bridge that gap.”²³

It’s this broad sweep that GS draws on, introducing students to the field’s greatest thinkers and practitioners over two and a half millennia. Starting with Sun Tzu’s precepts on war, it moves briskly through Thucydides’s account of the Peloponnesian War, the life of Roman emperor Augustus; Niccolo Machiavelli’s recognition in The Prince of different kinds of morality; the contrasting leadership styles of Elizabeth I and Philip II; Carl von Clausewitz’s foundational text on grand strategy; eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant’s idea of peace through international order; the American founding fathers and Abraham Lincoln; European power balancers Klemens von Metternich and Otto von Bismarck; and in the twentieth century Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Winston Churchill, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Mao Zedong, Kennan, Kissinger, and Ronald Reagan. “The common thread is a search for timeless, transferrable principles,” Gaddis told the Ethiopians. These seminars “are not so much telling us what to do, but creating a checklist of things to think about.”²⁴ Or, as Wong, the engineering student who took GS as an undergraduate in 2011, summed it up: “It’s like having a library of minds to apply to different situations. You can grab Clausewitz off the shelf and have him advising you.”²⁵

Rather than focusing on specific knowledge, the course asks students to consider how knowledge is gained, pushing them to develop an agile, adaptable intellect. Each January Hill welcomes the new class by quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”²⁶ GS’s dominant metaphor, “the opposable mind,”²⁷ as Brooks calls it, reaches back to nineteenth-century poet John Keats’s concept of “negative capability”: the idea that “Men of Achievement,” as Keats wrote to his brothers in 1817, have the ability to tolerate life’s mysteries.²⁸

Two hundred years later the iPhone age celebrates the opposite sensibility: the idea that we have the answer to every question in our back pockets, or what Kennedy called “an explosion of data.”²⁹ But one of GS’s underpinnings is that research alone can’t help us deal with pressing, complex questions: the president can’t ask Siri whether or not it’s in our country’s best interests to send military advisers to Ukraine. Decision making isn’t about looking up answers; it’s about balancing a large objective and at the same time being attentive to your surroundings. In GS terminology, you have to be both a hedgehog, a person who knows only one thing, and a fox, a person who knows many.³⁰ Woven into the course is advice on the importance of taking first-rate notes (selectively and in longhand), of listening to hear the murmur beneath the main conversation; of seeing what others don’t. One mid-September class on distinguishing “noise” from “signals”—something FDR failed to do before the bombing of Pearl Harbor—began with Kennedy saying, “If you were walking to the library on Saturday morning and happened to look up instead of down you’d have seen a thousand broad wing hawks heading to the Carolinas.”³¹

It seemed like a benign opener; a random scrap of information—almost like a dust speck floating by. But it was enough to tee up Hill: “I looked out my office window about a year ago and there on a low limb in front of the provost’s house was perched a red-tailed hawk. Yale students were walking back and forth underneath this hawk, and no one knew it was there. They were looking at their texts and talking on the phone.” Hill continued, “This is not trivial. Consciousness is a modern thing. It’s the consciousness of what is around you. What you see is a version of the signals and noise of Pearl Harbor only [more] general. What do you perceive around you? How do you read it? And what is the range of your consciousness?”³² In a similar vein, Gaddis likened this awareness to squirrels. As he put it, “students need to be vigilant squirrels. Sure, squirrels run around, bury things, dig things up, and play with each other—but the ones that survive are aware, at all times, of the three dimensional environment in which they do these things.”³³

No matter what the animal analogy, the message is the same: pay attention. Consider everything. Context matters.

What’s being taught is “effective forecasting,” Brooks said. “How do you ask questions of a situation? I think the course gives your mind more clarity. The big thing it does is scope. It takes [students] five feet off the ground and puts them at five hundred feet”³⁴—like hawks.