Progress

I've thought a lot about progress in the last 16 years or so.

When I was a young first year college student, I had two goals: wisdom and to be a good dad. I think I found a lot of the former, often completely at odds with my plans, and I hope to be the latter, with enough grace and forgiveness from my children for the fumblings of a well-intentioned if clumsy and foolhardy father.

In the end, I can only offer them the only best guarantee that any father can offer his children. I will do my best.

But the last 5 years, in particular, are a time when my expectations have been most frequently and with constant surprise met with realities I could not forsee. It's been a humbling experience, to say the least.

And it's had me thinking lots about progress.

I no longer naively believe in progress which is authorized by my liberal professors or liberal activists or journalists. That was an innocent, somewhat pretensious, and ultimately wrong-headed view of my youth.

Neither, though, do I hold to romantic notions of the past or tradition or a past or present that is better, more moral, more decent, more thoughtful, or headed in a stronger direction than the current time.

I believe in progress. I believe people generally move in the direction of progress, in the direction of more decent and broadly liberal and more empirically and consequentially better fruits of better ideas over time. But I do not hold to the foolish notion that all change is progress or that progress is inevitable or the monopoly of certain groups or ideologies or even certain englightened people. I am well aware of many of the pitfalls and dangers of that term and the propensity for us to claim it as a mantle in the name of any number of causes, whether they actually produce progress or not.

And, after a lot of reflection and serious, engaged thought, I think I've decided that much progress is created by more enlightened and deeply reflective and considered views of the world taking hold because of the better ideas of life that they offer. And still much more progress is simply the result of much failure and disappointment and unexpected bad tidings that are turned to some better, more decent, more thoughtful, more constructive efforts because everything else has fallen through.

Progress is something that we guide because we have better ideas of how the world should be. And, equally if not more so, progress is something that guides us, as we flail and flounder dealing with the challenges in the world that we face.

We get there. But, often, the promised land looks very different than we anticipated. Oftener yet, it looks nothing like we imagined.

Keeps life interesting, I suppose.

But still, somehow we muddle forward, as often as we create visions and make them realities.

I couldn't have anticipated this path of progress, which always looks like a straight line that just keeps getter better if you romanticize it and chart it on a ever improving line-graph (after you've removed or downplayed every setback and failure or regressive blip).

But I like it better. Because it leaves me more humble. And more curious about what is on the other side of tomorrow.

If I can only get through today.

Love,
Ben

Another reason to like David Petraeus

David Petraeus, the U.S. army commander of the Multi-National Force - Iraq, has always impressed me. He wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on post-Vietnam military conflict. He's struck me as a remarkably humble yet brilliant military leader. And now I have one more great reason to appreciate this very smart military leader.

Beyond the Cloister

Petraeus writes this really well-argued and open-minded case for the need for military personell and officers to pursue a civilian graduate school education outside of military-specific institutions.

It is an excellent argument and an excellent idea to be promoted by the highest ranking army officer in this war. It is with profound appreciation that I can read such a respected and high-ranking officer encouraging future officers to engage in such a serious, important, and valuable experience in their lives.

But then there is this little tid-bit that made it stick that this is the kind of guy that I might trust, more, if he had my back:

"In my own experience, I found the most valuable situations to be those in which exceedingly bright senior professors held views substantially different from my own. I developed a particular friendship with one such professor at Princeton, one of the country’s leading international legal scholars at the time—even though we truly saw the world through different lenses. In the end, we decided that we never disagreed on anything but substance.

I happened to be taking a course with him when the United States invaded the island of Grenada in 1983. Now, some of you will remember that the legal underpinnings for that action were not the most robust to have ever justified an American military operation. Indeed, it later turned out that U.S. officials had actually written the request for American intervention that the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States submitted back to the United States to get us to intervene against one of their own member states. Nor was the action anchored in the most rock solid of ground when it came to traditional norms associated with the just war concept. Nonetheless, I wrote a paper for that professor entitled, “The Invasion of Grenada: Illegal, Immoral, and the Right Thing to Do.” It was great fun to write, and decent enough to earn an “A” despite a conclusion I know the professor did not share."

Now that is a military commander that I could trust, more. That's the kind of guy I want having my back in a tight situation. And it is gratifying to me that a man of such a powerful, legally-bound, and serious insitution could be thoughtful enough to know the distinction between taking democratic rule seriously without taking legal matters more seriously than doing the right thing.

And people who know that doing the right thing is more important than doing the legal thing are the kind of people who I can trust.

Love,
Ben