Thinking a bit more about this week's blog post (https://acoup.blog/2021/09/24/collections-no-mans-land-part-ii-breaking-the-stalemate/ …) and its predecessor, one thing I hope comes through clearly in this analysis is how many 'easy' solutions fall apart when they make contact with the finicky, stubborn details.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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(Livy 44.41.4) Or, to put it back in WWI trench warfare terms: it doesn't matter how good your tank doctrine could be, if your best tank can't make 6mph on an open road...you aren't going to have a 'breakthrough.' Anyway, just random thoughts.
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I did read enough to think about it that way but it’s very frustrating, because it’s hard to follow up and understand why the Americans, having paid all that money didn’t put good audit in place. Especially after what happened in S Vietnam
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Think about managing that audit - you need bunches of (presumably American) officials going around doing all of this auditing, charging or sacking corrupt leaders. By the time you're done, you'll have essentially created a colonial government in the country.
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