July 22, 2004

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Step Aside, Sun Tzu

Earlier this week, NYT columnist David Brooks gave us a column headlined “Learning to Think, and Live,” which began like this:

A few years ago, I taught a course at Yale. Over dinners, I’d listen to my students talk about their other courses, and in many of these conversations there was one that stood out: Grand Strategy. For many students, this yearlong course was not just a class, but a life-altering event. Somehow students in Grand Strategy were applying Thucydides, Kant and Sun Tzu to modern foreign policy crises. They talked excitedly about seeing the connections between big ideas and big events.

Hold up — “Grand Strategy”?

Okay, I can see the appeal. It’s the RISK-board view of history. Who doesn’t want to learn how to move the pieces? And the teachers sound great:

Grand Strategy is taught by three great professors — John Lewis Gaddis, Paul Kennedy and Charles Hill. But when my students talked, there was always a special reverence for Hill. This was the Renaissance man, the career foreign-service officer who had used power from the inside, but who also applied literature and philosophy to everyday problems. What they were really describing when they talked of Hill was a man of authority, an adult in full.

The rest of Brooks’s piece is about Hill’s relationship with his students. Near the end, he writes:

[…] It is no accident that [Hill’s students] are drawn to a teacher who is not a lifelong academic, but who was active in the real world. Yet our universities operate too much like a guild system, throwing plenty of people with dissertations at students, not enough with practical knowledge.

Now wait a minute.

Sure, Hill knows government. (Brooks says he was a foreign service officer and a close associate of Kissinger’s and George Shultz’s.) And sure, he knows his Sun Tzu.

But does he know his cog sci? Does he know his biochemistry? Does he know his statistics? Does he know his behavioral econ?

The conceptual map of the world that’s available to us today is much, much more complicated and interesting than a RISK board. If all you’re learning is the old rules — the old “Grand Strategy” — you’re missing out.

And if you think biochem and stats are only relevant or useful to scientists — well, you’re really missing out. This is the stuff of life.

No disrespect to Kant, but the canon alone doesn’t cut it any more.

Charles Eliot’s five-foot shelf is an anachronism in the age of Google. The notion that a close reading of “The History of the Peloponnesian War” will prepare young men and women to be “adults in full” in a world of genomics and geosynchronous satellites is, to put it mildly, ridonkulous.

What was the population of the world in Thucydides’ time, anyway? Like, 12?

On the other hand, these profs with dissertations can teach us some important things about the modern world. The last hundred years of scholarship, an intellectual project on a scale unprecedented in human history, have not been for naught: We don’t need to speculate as much. We can see into stars. We can map the brain.

And remember, the practical world has, in many ways, been playing catch-up to dissertation-land for decades. The university is where we first glimpsed DNA. Now, in 2004, whose hand lays heavier across the loom of history — Henry Kissinger’s or Francis Crick’s? This point is open to debate, but I’m with the scientist.

Again, I’m not knocking the oldies-but-goodies. But when Brooks says this…

Why aren’t there more scholars, like Hill, Gaddis and Kennedy, who teach students to be generalists, to see the great connections? Instead, the academy encourages squirrel-like specialization.

…it’s like he’s speaking from the year 1804. “Great connections,” yes — but between what? All the stuff worth connecting is the work of specialists. It’s all in the dissertations.

Here’s my suggested rewrite:

Why aren’t there more scholars who teach students to be connectors, to integrate the amazing discoveries being made in specialized fields of study? Back in the day, Kant could only speculate about reason and morality. Now, we’re tracing their biological roots and finding out where they come from. Would Sun Tzu have killed for a little game theory? Probably. And then he probably would only have applied it to warfare. We need to teach students to see across boundaries, to see how brand-new knowledge can change our most basic assumptions about everything from human emotion to urban planning. They need to put down their Thucydides and start exploring their universities.

(There’s more to Brooks’ piece than just the “squirrel-like specialization” angle; his notes on teacher-student relationships are wise and well-taken. But I still think Sun Tzu can go back on the shelf while the class of 2005 learns some basic stats.)