Bret Devereaux

One problem I see with a lot of history, but also nat. sec. political analysis that gets to the public is that it stays up at the level of abstraction. For example recently, the explanation the public got for the collapse of the ANA/ANP was 'corruption' and 'demoralization.'

Which is true, in an airy, summary kind of way. But at some point, you need to make that concrete: the problem was leaders stealing gasoline and ammo from their units and selling it or putting people on the roles to get a paycheck who weren't really there, etc.

I notice this issue in student papers: if you ask them why something happened, they are very prepared to give you 3-4 abstract nouns which explain why something happened. If you ask them for the nuts and bolts of how <abstract noun> leads to event...they've got nothing.

And I notice this same problem in a lot of 'explainer' journalist focused on foreign policy. You saw this, again, with coverage of the Taliban's setting up a government...very few articles sought to sit down and explain who was who and who might actually have power.

I lost count, for instance, of the number of Taliban explainers where somehow Hibatullah Akhundzada... the ::checks notes:: "supreme leader & commander of the faithful" just didn't figure in. His *existence* much less his role in the leaderships structure was never explained.

This tendency to dwell entirely in abstraction - and to propose solutions which only exist in the air of abstraction and not on the ground of reality - seems to me to be a common error of the intellectual class and one that good teaching should push against.

Give students the tools they need to understand something at a more granular level and then keep asking "and *how* do you do that?" until you get down to the very concrete 'who-goes-where-and-eats-what' sort of implementation questions on which the entire issue depends.

Because a solution or theory that works at the level of air abstraction but doesn't work in the details...doesn't work. Abstraction is useful and important but only as the servant of the real, finicky details, never in replacement of them.

Livy puts it brilliantly: "For as new inventions often have great force in the words of men, but when tried, when they need to work, and not just have their working described, they evaporate without any effect – just so the war elephants were just a name without any real use."