The Age of the Unthinkable (20 page)

Have you ever seen a Chinese landscape painting? If you have seen one done in the traditional style, it was probably what
Chinese call a
shanshui
painting, literally a “mountain and water” image, with looming peaks, hazy clouds, and an ocean that stretches across most
of the painting. People or animals usually feature in a
shanshui
landscape only as tiny brushstrokes, almost accidental ticks of ink dwarfed by the mountains or rivers around them. This
is an expression of the idea in Chinese philosophy and art that the environment is far more powerful than any individual.
It is never stable and, in its sudden changes from one state to another, more important than the desires of any of us. (No
matter how much we want to have a picnic on a rainy day, for instance, there’s not much we can do.) In other words,
context
is everything — an idea right out of Moritz’s or Farkash’s (or Gertrude Stein’s) thinking. The most cherished Chinese nature
paintings take their power not from photorealistic accuracy but rather from their ability to capture and hold the unfathomable
and terrifying tension of a natural environment shifting, colliding, and evolving around the much smaller humans. Great Chinese
paintings are inked context-snapshots that are designed specifically to be a little intimidating.

This emphasis on everything around us instead of a “me-first” view of life reveals a quirk in the Asian way of seeing, one
that also showed up in Nisbett’s study if we look at it in the right way. Western science saw the world as something that
could be understood and dominated. But ancient Chinese thinking was obsessed instead with the mysterious, impenetrable part
of nature. The foundation text of Chinese philosophy, after all, is called
The I-Ching or Book of Changes —
the very title emphasizing that we live in an environment of constant motion. The most famous oscillation, of course, is between
yin and yang, but those mountain-and-water paintings also contain a balance between the stability and hardness of mountain
stone and the softness of running water. With this view of the world, one that takes constant change as a given, it’s easy
to see why you might want to keep your eyes moving. More than anything, what you want to know is
when
change is going to begin. In Chinese philosophy this sense is known as a mastery of
incipience,
and the skill is often praised as the highest form of wisdom. Those Chinese graduate students dancing their eyes around the
background of Nisbett’s images were furiously trying to gather information about what surrounded the central object because
they believed, at a level so deep it was programmed into their eye movements, that the environment contained clues to what
was about to happen. If you stared at a single spot in the world around you, that incipient sensibility would be dulled to
the point of uselessness.

The Americans, by contrast, spent their time looking at the focal object, which, they clearly thought, was surely the essential
element. Think of a famous Western painting, and you will probably recall something like a warship pounding over waves or
Venus rising in the center of a Botticelli landscape. Western culture’s cult of individual power, the self-determination of
man, is one of its fundamental features. But it limits what we see when we look at the world. That tiger in Nisbett’s image,
for instance, took up about 25 percent of the space on the screen, but it captured 80 percent or more of the Western students’
attention. We think the focal object is the most important part of any image in front of us. We
stare
. And in so doing we miss crucial details
around
the object. In another study, Nisbett reversed the trick he had played on the Chinese students. Would American students notice
a change in the environment if the focal object remained the same? If, say, the horse stayed the same but the field around
it went from spring flowers to fall colors? Most of the subjects missed the shift. When it came to the environment, Americans
were almost completely “change blind.”

This important insight reveals something a little uncomfortable and awkward about our habits. After all, it’s not particularly
difficult to see that ignoring 75 percent of the picture of a fast-changing world could lead to some pretty suicidal decisions.
When you focus on an object (“Saddam” or “bank bailouts”) to the exclusion of the swirling, furious energy of the environment
around that object (clan rivalries, say, or the real-economy demands of homeowners), you force yourself into a very limited
understanding of the world. It’s like trying to watch a football game by fixating on the thirty-five-yard line. Look, for
instance, at the way the Pentagon has strategized for decades, using what is called “threat-based” planning: picking a particular
danger and then budgeting, training, and organizing to step into the conflict just in time to save the day. Such views are
appealing. They are easy to explain, they make the process of preparation simple to map out, and they offer compelling stories
for Congress and the public. But they are disastrous in practice. In peacetime they exhaust the military as it runs ragged
trying to prepare for conflicts that never occur. When the military is called into action, it is almost always used in ways
(think Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraqi reconstruction) that this threat-based thinking never envisioned.

A better approach would be to build an adjustable military, one that understands it can’t know what it will face and is constantly
prepared for the widest possible range of contingencies. It might be wiser, as one RAND Corporation paper suggested, to think
of the Pentagon as a sort of investment portfolio that is constantly, boldly rebalanced to reflect the demands of the market
for violence — and that prizes real and easy liquidity over long-term fixed positions. This idea of an “adaptive national
defense” has been pushed by a few intellectuals, but usually it goes nowhere. That is part of the reason the historian Martin
van Creveld, taking a thousand-year look at nations with functional and dysfunctional defenses, comes to the conclusion that
“already, today, the most powerful armed forces are largely irrelevant to modern war. Indeed, their relevance stands in inverse
proportion to their modernity.” We have military planning that stares instead of shifts. Little wonder it is often surprised.
Pick up a copy of the latest
National Security Strategy of the United States,
for instance, and you will find nothing about empathy or about enhancing our ability to feel the environment or about financial
panic, or global disease. There is ten times as much in it about remaking the world as about remaking our own institutions.
And it focuses maniacally, like those ogling, slow-moving eyes of the American graduate students, on a single object: terrorism.
Who knows what we may be missing?

One of the studies Nisbett liked to mention was by Masako Watanabe, a Japanese historian who examined the differences between
the way Japanese and Western teachers taught history. The Americans, she found, tended to begin with the outcome of a historical
event. This approach condensed history into something resembling a cake recipe — specific sequential steps of the sort you
might remember from high school tests: “List the five reasons the Germans lost World War I.” When Watanabe observed Japanese
teachers, though, she saw something different. They began not with the outcome but with the context, sort of like a Chinese
painter framing an image with mountains and oceans. The teachers pressed students to picture themselves in the shoes of the
participants, to understand how they felt, to think of the options and pressures they confronted. In this approach to the
world, history isn’t baked like a cake — three teaspoons revolution and one cup religious strife — but rather emerges from
the complex interactions of subjects and environment. The Japanese teachers thought that if the goal was really to understand
history, they were better off grading students by their ability to “show empathy with the historical figures.” And maybe the
way history is taught in Japan is a reminder, in a way. Perhaps it carries an indirect message too: that the country once
was a source of terrible disaster when empathy was replaced with a blind, fanatical, and mercilessly focused ambition.

Empathy.
Recall that it was the one thing Moritz most feared losing, the key element Farkash tried to cultivate in his spies and war
planners. It was their way of saying that in a world of constant change, you need to try to connect with the environment around
you any way you can: by sweeping your eyes, by opening your mind to uncomfortable ideas, even by trying to sympathize with
historically noxious figures. Only then could you improve your chances of not missing the signs that something, something
important, was about to change.

The virtue of this kind of constant probing and ceaseless updating of your worldview was once captured by the American political
scientist and psychologist Philip Tetlock, who teaches at Berkeley. For more than a decade, starting in the late 1980s, Tetlock
ran studies on what he later called the “fox and hedgehog difference” in types of predictions. The name came from the famous
assertion by the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin that there were two kinds of thinkers in the world: hedgehogs, who know
one big thing, and foxes, who dart from idea to idea. “Plato, Lucretius, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Proust
are, in varying degrees, hedgehogs,” Berlin wrote. “Herodotus, Aristotle, Montaigne, Erasmus, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac
and Joyce are foxes.” Tetlock and his team interviewed hundreds of “experts” on subjects such as economics, international
relations, and politics and asked them to make predictions about the short-term future (the next five years). Then they divided
the subjects of the study into a number of categories: optimists and pessimists, left and right political orientation, foxes
and hedgehogs. After some time had passed, Tetlock’s team reviewed the prediction sheets to see who was most often right;
they found that the only really reliable predictor was the one that divided foxes and hedgehogs. “Low scorers look like hedgehogs,”
Tetlock wrote later; they were “thinkers who know ‘one big thing’ and aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one
big thing into new domains.” High scorers, he said, looked more like foxes: they were skeptical of easy historical analogy,
they tended to be more probabilistic in their thinking, and they were comfortable updating their models.

It wasn’t, Tetlock explained, that the foxes knew any more or less about the subject. After all, they were experts too. It
was how they acquired and updated their knowledge that seemed to matter. The more wide-ranging their curiosity — the more
they looked at the world like those Chinese students — the more accurate they tended to be. “We normally expect knowledge
to promote accuracy, so if it was surprising to discover how quickly we reached a point of diminishing returns,” Tetlock wrote,
“it should be downright disturbing to discover that knowledge handicaps so large a fraction of forecasters.” The problem,
he suspected, was that hedgehog personalities were generally very eager,
too
eager, for closure. They stuck with one big idea precisely because they wanted to know it completely, to have the sensation
of reaching a total and final understanding, as if they had finished the Saturday
New York Times
crossword in pen. But that instinct for a final sigh of knowing was, in a fast-changing and unpredictable world, deadly. Sometimes
the stubbornness of these hedgehogs did mean they made correct predictions; they were often right when calling big changes.
But overall, they were measurably inferior to fast-updating foxes. And the cost was stark: “When hedgehogs were wrong,” Tetlock
concluded wryly in his award-winning book
Expert Political Judgment,
“they were very, very wrong.” The list of misfires he found included predictions of “the disintegration of nation states
that are still with us (Canada, Nigeria, India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, etc.)” as well as a few nuclear wars, the end of political
parties, and early calls of economic collapse — in 1988.

Changing how we see isn’t easy. All of us have a little hedgehog in us, that desire to see and understand something completely,
once and for all. It’s not only that the habits Nisbett and his team studied are pretty much hardwired into our brains; it’s
also that it is exhausting to constantly change our point of view and options and attitudes. It’s nice to feel certain, even
if the certainty is that Canada will collapse. But the point is that the world is changing constantly — ever faster, frankly.
So mismatching our slow way of seeing with the way of the world is predictably disastrous. Picking up the habit of looking
constantly for new ideas and
empathizing
with our enemies is a bit counterintuitive and uncomfortable, but it is a really valuable kind of insurance against self-delusion.
It is strange to try to understand the mind-set of a Pakistani scientist, the dreams of a rogue trader, the fears of someone
helplessly trapped in poverty, or to sit side by side with a Hizb’allah leader and really try to see the way he does for a
time. But it might also have felt peculiar to explain that the most successful Israeli general endured because he could feel
the way a Gaza Strip mullah did, or that a venture capitalist owed his riches in part to an ability to climb into the head
of a dorm-dwelling twenty-three-year-old geek. What Farkash and Moritz and those Chinese grad students and the foxlike experts
are telling us is that the more we paper over complexities with simple old ideas and the less we try to take in the whole
picture, the greater the risk we’re running.

Per Bak once found himself puzzling over how to keep track of his sandpiles as they grew ever larger. It was impossible, he
figured, to separate any one grain from another, to study the pile in pieces, or even to leave it alone for a while, hoping
the math would somehow settle down. It never did. “In the beginning, when the pile is flat,” he wrote, “a local description
in terms of individual grains is appropriate. But in the critical state where the interactions tie far-away parts of the system
together, only a holistic description in terms of one sandpile will do.” Everything is connected. And that makes simple analysis
very, very dangerous. The implications are clear if you are trying to make foreign policy or manage a global financial or
ecological program. You can’t ever let your gaze settle or fixate on a single image of the world. You can’t — as the United
States did — go into a turbulent place like Iraq (made more turbulent by America’s arrival) and not update your plan for three
years. You can’t pressure a constantly changing nation like China in the same way for a decade without, at the most basic
level of philosophy and strategy, rejiggering how and why you are pressing for change. Trying to confront nuclear proliferation
with policies that are three decades old is similarly absurd. We’ll see later on how to act more as Farkash and Moritz might
have acted on all of these problems, but here it is enough to observe that any time you hear a crisis response from our leaders
that seems to focus on just one object — “bail out the banks” or “kill Osama” — you should feel nervous. Of course, this also
means we can’t demand such simple, one-shot policies from our leaders either. We need to accept that the best policies will
look like something out of one of Moritz’s constantly updating software companies.