That man is a political animal is well observed.  The need for association and its manifold expressions are found throughout every phase and dimension of life.  Family, friendship, all manner of social, religious, political, and professional relationships, along with the necessary and understandable desire to support them and come to their defense, if need be, contribute to a sense of shared cause and identity.  Not uncommonly, enthusiastic partisanship results, rooting for the home team regardless of roster or ability, or voting a straight-party ticket without studying the issues or candidates’ positions.  This same tendency can extend to a kind of intellectual tribalism, where a particular frame of reference, world view, or school of thought is adhered to as unbreachable orthodoxy, uniformly applied to each and every situation or problem.  However valid any single approach, it is just that, and risks omission of crucial insights to be gained by study from other perspectives; rigidly linear thinking plowing a deep furrow straight ahead, ignoring the need to first gain an understanding of a complex, multi-faceted, field.

This might be termed the folly, or perhaps fallacy, of the Pure Model.  Folly, in that reasoning dominated by the demands of adhering to an over-arching framework, whether self-imposed, motivated by sincere commitment to intellectual rigor, seeking to produce results that can be compared against a formal conceptual standard, or influenced by collegial, professional, or popular pressure to conform to accepted thinking, may lead to conclusions that satisfy its own aims at the expense of addressing the situation for which remedy was sought in the first place, too often with disastrous consequences.  The fallacy is buying into any one system with the expectation that it offers all the answers when it may not even be asking the right questions.

It might seem odd to present the Principle in the previous chapter as a fully comprehensive model, a unique means of explaining how Rights of Settlement are obtained, along with providing a useful diplomatic tool for accomplishing this, and then in the next chapter to cast doubt on models in general.  Models, or principles, theories, maxims, and so on, are only as reliable as those who employ them.  Like one of a series of equations used to solve a complex mathematical problem, each will have its necessary function.  The problem cannot be solved without any one of the equations, but neither can it be solved with only one equation.  We do not want to smash our thumb with Maslow’s hammer; where if the only tool is a hammer, all problems look like nails.

As much as the Principle tells us, neither it nor any other single model should be expected to deliver all the means for achieving a solution.  Within the parameters of the Principle are entire fields with their own bodies of knowledge.  We can identify cycles of Conflict and Convention, but the factors driving them are subject to principles and models from other disciplines.  If resource scarcity is the root cause of a Migration or Conflict, for example, then solving for that variable, that is, gaining an understanding of the issue and applying the appropriate tools, will at the least be helpful in moving to Convention and on to obtaining Rights.  In that case, principles and models from agriculture, ecology, economics, may offer a key piece of the greater puzzle, without which the parties may not be able to arrive at an agreed upon solution.

 

Intellectual Tribalism

Intellectual tribes form around the received wisdom of their wise men and women.  Battle lines divide opposing camps in diverse fields.  At the far ends of any field one can think of–politics, religion, the sciences, the arts, sports–are found the true believers.

The Marxist variety of this type explains everything from the exploitation and alienation of the working class to the infield fly rule from the perspective of the surplus value of labor theory, just as diehard free market capitalists hold firm to Adam Smith’s invisible hand that guides a market with participants acting in their own self-interests for the best interests of all.

Never mind that in the United States, the working class as defined by Marxism, of those who must live by their own labor, includes just about everyone, from the retail clerk and assembly worker to doctors, lawyers, and small business owners.  (Small business owners, however bourgeois by category, end up working for everyone: their customers, employees, and creditors.)  As for Adam Smith and the free market, by the time he wrote The Wealth of Nations the economic environment it portrayed was hardly a market of equal interests, given the growing influence of powerful trading companies, some government chartered, like the British and the Dutch East India Companies, nearly sovereign entities in themselves.

Such excesses of zeal on the part of these partisans unfortunately tend to obscure the valuable contributions made by their movements’ founding figures.  Philosophies and disciplines of any and all kinds, sectarian and secular, have demonstrated their susceptibility to misuse and misappropriation.  Continuing the point made in the previous chapter, these works are part of a greater tradition of thought, and within it subject to contexts of time and place.  They contain concepts that express a whole truth but not all truth; ideas that are reliably accurate while the entire work taken together may not be.

Aristotle continues to inform and influence thought and study today.  His works covered the ancient world’s full range of knowledge with his Physics and Metaphysics, Poetics and Rhetoric, Ethics and Politics, among others.  With good reason he remains part of the standard curriculum for students of numerous disciplines, both as a foundation for understanding the progress of thought as well as for lessons of enduring value still applicable.  Reading the Politics today, it is worth noting, as it is apparently not often enough emulated in practice, the example set by Aristotle in writing on society and politics.  He and his pupils studied and documented 158 constitutions of city-states [citation?], understood that each had its own culture and character, even within the relatively small compass, by today’s standards, of that corner of the Mediterranean, and treated his subject with the necessary nuance.  Yet a modern astrophysicist as strict Aristotelian would not fare so well, working from the theory of the spheres only to find the hard dome of the firmament elusive, perhaps found much further out than previously thought.

Hegel was another complete systems thinker.  And, as with Aristotle, he continues to offer intellectual tools and concepts of immense utility.  But that is not to say that one could rely on Hegel for anything like a single source of universal knowledge, The Phenomenology of Spirit, notwithstanding.  His writing can be almost impenetrably dense and demanding.  If we are to take Hegel at his word and agree with his conclusions, reading his writings on Right (society and politics) or History, we would have to believe that the political state reached perfection in early 19^th Century Prussia.  But, of course, we need not, and should not, depend on even as comprehensive a thinker as Hegel as a sole source of wisdom.  If all of Hegelian thought were reduced to his dialectic, it would be a more than sufficient legacy.  With the dialectic, Hegel demonstrates an openness to change, innovation, and possibilities that might not be apparent in his works, with concepts resolved in his thoroughness or outright obscured by his language.  But that is the nature of Hegel, expressed in the dialectic, an idea contradicted then resolved then to be contradicted and resolved once again; the very notion of the necessity of reexamining our assumptions and considering them from a different perspective.

 

The Folly of the Pure Model in Three Wars

The decision to take a nation to war is arguably the most serious act of any head of state.  Its consequences shudder through the entire society, even when the cause is just and the nation victorious.  A nation’s legitimate security and foreign policy needs may well call for military action, but that response does not have to mean general war, let alone total multi-theater war.  The range of possibilities is broad: from special operations, advisors and force multiplier teams aiding local forces, no-fly zones, and targeted missile strikes, all the way to carpet bombing and full scale invasion by a massive expeditionary army.  And, if indeed, as Clausewitz writes, war is another means of continuing policy, then likewise there are those other means–skillful, judicious, and vigorous pursuit of diplomacy.

It would seem naïve to suggest that any nation, let alone the United States, would go to war without fully comprehending the reasons and purposes for doing so, taking into account the history, character, and capacities, human and material, of all parties, and calculating the true costs and benefits, for war often results in a zero-sum outcome at best. Yet, this has evidently not been the case, in a meaningfully effective sense, at least not in three examples–World War I, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War–where the Folly of the Pure Model, a narrow, faulty rationale pursued to the exclusion of a more comprehensive understanding of the war’s potential courses and outcomes, led to very different results than intended.

The natural question is how the leadership of an advanced nation with ample material and intellectual resources comes to find itself in such a position taking a path to war so wanting in exits and alternatives?  The answer might be in the politics, either domestic or with other nations, where the lure of an exploitable advantage or need to strengthen a vulnerable position presents compelling cause for action.  But that still would not explain pursuing a Pure Model approach.

An individual wants to buy a car.  They have the money.  They are single, with no dependent children.  They are free to choose whatever car they desire.  Their motivations and criteria, appropriate or not, well thought out or on impulse, rest with them alone.  The guiding principle of performance would lead to buying a car with the most horsepower; handling and agility to a sports car; going off road to some kind of SUV.  Maximizing just one factor to the exclusion of equally important others is fraught with pitfalls.  If our buyer falls in love with a car solely for its engine, but overlooks the vehicle’s condition, mileage, cost, and suitability for everyday use they, all the while expecting trouble free motoring at exhilarating speed, as the old saying goes, they are cruising for a bruising down the road.

This example takes one individual making choices for which they alone are responsible and will bear the consequences.  It becomes more difficult to understand when a nation makes the decision to go to war.  Even assuming a monarchy or authoritarian government, where the head of state has greater individual powers, there will be the entire machinery of state and all its citizens involved, making decisions and participating at all levels.  How then does pure model reasoning manage to occur, let alone prevail?

For each of the three wars—WWI, Vietnam, and Iraq—we will in turn briefly consider: how intelligent people commit unwise acts; ask the question, “What am I missing?”; and take a look at a product planning meeting where the participants end up working at cross purposes.

 

World War I

Disparaging the intelligence of those with whom we disagree is a sport with a long tradition.  Fouls, whether uncalled or met with like by the opposition, are just part of the game.  Online comments to news and articles make up in volume what they lack in quality, far succeeding earlier outlets for amateur pundits, who might have once made due with heckling from the crowd or writing a letter to the editor.  The level of discourse in tone and substance found in the mass media is of a higher standard, but that is relative.  We might say that the lowest common denominator is indeed very low, and all too common.  Even so, criticism of a public leader, however exaggerated, may also have a core of valid substance.

Perhaps most shocking, more so than policy errors, poor personal character, outright malfeasance, or criminal activity, is the realization that events of immense scope with devastating consequences were the result of direct, purposeful actions, not by the sort of intellectual deficients their detractors make them out to be, but rather, of very intelligent people, often the most capable and accomplished of their peers.  Want of raw intellect is often not the chief culprit, nor necessarily is the absence of key information and analysis.  Rather, it is a lack of perspective, a failure to give due consideration to a fuller spectrum of possibilities and pitfalls.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, whatever else might be said of his qualities, lack of intelligence was not one of them, and certainly not in comparison to his cousins, King George V of England and Nicholas II of Russia.  Yet this very bright, if impetuous, man led the way to industrialized slaughter, the remapping of the world with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and the devastation of his own nation.  Why?  It had seemed like such a good idea at the time.  A quick, decisive war would bring France into line, strengthen Germany’s position in the world, and demonstrate to his cousins that he too, Wilhelm, could more than hold his own in the empire game.  Fair enough.  And if he failed to anticipate the radical transition to modern warfare—the shift from horse and rail to the automobile, chemical weapons, widespread use of machine guns, artillery like Germany’s own immense rail guns (the medium range missiles of the day), and the introduction of aircraft—neither did anyone else.  Likewise the stalemate of the trenches, month after month of each side taking a tremendous beating, mostly getting nowhere.  The Kaiser’s entire enterprise rested on a ready capitulation; the French would come to terms, the armies would retreat, and Germany’s interests advance.  Even if granting the validity of the motivating rationale, that Germany’s global position was so compromised by the status quo that war was the necessary path for it to break through and progress, the design for any particular war is a strategic, not a policy, decision.  All the greater tragedy that history is littered with the remains of civilization, the result not of careless ignorance, but willful genius.

 

The Vietnam War

“What am I missing?”  That is the question to ask.  Because, almost certainly, we will overlook something, perhaps something crucial.  Much of what needs to be known will long have been public knowledge, related and written about by academics, diplomats, missionaries, commercial travelers, and tourists.  Even for more opaque societies, like the Soviet Union, there were centuries of history to draw upon in assessing them.  Viewing the Soviet Union solely through the filter of Communism, without taking account of the Russian experience with foreign invasion–the Swedish, the Mongols, the French, the Germans twice in the 20^th Century–for example, would lead to an incomplete or flawed understanding of their motivations and actions.  Cold War policy that focused on the East-West conflict made sense, based as it was on the dominant power dynamic of that time, but doing so to the exclusion of other interpretations, elevating it to near sacred doctrine, led to neglecting and misunderstanding other long term underlying factors, the results of which comprise the history of the Vietnam War.

To be clear, asserting that if only the U.S. approached the situation in Southeast Asia in some more holistic fashion we could have readily found the way to stabilize the region, if not establish democracy in our own image, would be engaging in fantasy unfit even for empty election campaign rhetoric.  A case could be made that the conflict had no true good side or right cause, not by the time the 60s wore on, at any rate.  And given where U.S. relations with Vietnam are today, with trade, tourism, and a healthy measure of reconciliation, could we have found any worse route from there to here?

The Domino Theory, that if we let one country in a region fall to Communism then each successive nation would fall until all were lost, described a scenario where a takeover of South Vietnam would not end there, that the entire peninsula and beyond were at risk.  A persuasive argument, given what had taken place elsewhere, with Mitteleuropa’s whole eastern flank caught firmly within the grasp of the Soviet Bloc.  But was the essence of the conflict one between Communism and Democracy or was it driven by other factors?  In other words, what were we missing?

North Vietnam’s strongest motivations were nationalistic, a desire to finally throw off the burdens of colonialism, and assert Vietnam’s own character, distinct from not only European influence, but Chinese, as well.  Robert D. Kaplan, in The Revenge of Geography, reminds us that the region is called IndoChina with good reason, drawing on South Asian as well as Chinese culture.   And we know that Ho Chi Minh had contact with U.S. operatives during WWII, and had further reached out to Truman after the war.  On the U.S. side from early on engagement in Vietnam was not viewed in a positive light.  Recall that De Gaulle had warned Kennedy of involvement there; the French experience informed what might follow.  Still, we were deep in the Cold War, presented with the potential loss of an ally and all that that implied. [citations?]

Key to the history of the conflict, how it was handled and why it might have gone otherwise, is the assassination of President Kennedy.  What transpired from Johnson’s more narrowly focused Cold War approach versus Kennedy’s decision making style provides an excellent contrast between Pure Model policy and one benefiting from a multi-perspective approach.  Convincing evidence comes from comparing Kennedy’s performance in the Bay of Pigs incident against the Cuban Missile Crisis, where he implemented the kind of “Best and the Brightest” decision making model described in the book of the same name by David Halberstam, in effect asking the question “What am I missing?” and finding a solution to avert disaster.

 

The Iraq War

While man is social by nature, joining together around a common cause, each individual may well understand that cause in a different way.  Consider a corporate planning meeting, a useful proxy for any like purpose of discussing items, services, or policies developed through collaborative effort.  Around the table there would be Product Development and/or Engineering, Marketing/Business Development, Finance, Legal, and so on.  It commonly occurs that each will have their own concept of the goal, what they are trying to accomplish, that thing in the center of the table right there in front of them.  Everyone is talking English.  Yet each construes the words in their own way, talking past one another, so that at the project’s completion, having worked at cross-purposes unaware, and after much time, money, and human resources spent, they are met with failure.  They have created a Frankenstein’s monster, a golem, with Marketing asking Product Development for the creature’s Social Security number, to which Legal responds warning of a potential felony.  The process should have benefitted from the particular expertise of each participant, but for that to happen would require a translator to keep everyone on the same page, or even the same book.  So while maintaining the desirability of considering a problem from a variety of perspectives, building into the process a continuing search for key omissions, it is also important that lessons learned be appropriately understood and applied.

Iraq War policy, in its formation, execution, and consequences, demonstrates all the failings common to adhering to a pure model so far discussed.  That the war resulted from the actions of very intelligent individuals is almost a given, as at no phase would it have been within the ability of those less capable.  The truly incompetent would not have been able gain access to such high levels of power and authority, at least not so many to fill all the senior positions.                          “What am I missing?”  As the president and his advisors deliberated policy, that is the question that they should have been asking at each stage along the way.  What might have come to their attention?  The history, culture, and institutions of the country; the Sunni-Shite sectarian divide; Iran.  A short list, but a good place to start.  And like the corporate planning meeting, the president, cabinet, and advisors managed to ignore the significance or utility of competing narratives. The main one, the pure model, being that Saddam had WMDs–an active program and stockpile, along with the necessity of regime change, and the effectiveness of an invasion which would be followed by a popularly supported democratic government.  Though in this case the entire model was in error.  Even if there were WMDs, or regime change and use of force desirable, it did not necessarily follow that full scale invasion was the only option.  After all, there were continuous military operations since the Gulf War in the form of enforced no-fly zones over Kurdistan in the north and the Shia areas in the south; the UN inspections, searching for evidence of WMDs, were in place and effective; and Special Operations teams could have provided a more focused military resource—the kind of military advocated by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld–though as the war and its aftermath demonstrated, the success of the project required less sheer military power and far more in the way of effective civil administration and security—something anticipated by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who counseled that if the U.S. broke it, we’d buy it.  So we went to war with the army Rumsfeld wanted, not the one the objective required, and Powell’s cautions were swept aside with the assurance that the only the outcome would be the one predicted by the pure model.

 

The Perfect Model

Does the perfect model exist, and if it did, what would it look like?  It would be able to explain the past, putting events in order, provide context for present conditions, and anticipate the nature, scope, and scale of what we might expect in the future, all wrapped up in an easily comprehendible 3-D graphic.  The Conical Helix Model of History is a prime contender.  It states that over the course of history events are succeeded by parallel events, similar in character but greater in scope.  A conical helix is a spiral, in a constant progression, from a smaller to progressively larger circumference as it grows in height.  The vertical dimension represents time, the horizontal, scope.  Referring to this model we would find WWI at one point, with WWII on a parallel plane above it, later in history, but further out from the center, signifying greater scale and scope.  Simple.  Elegant.  Practical.  Immensely useful, and…if not completely inaccurate, then certainly flawed.

[Graphic of models]

Any single model need not be perfect to offer practical benefits, but it must be appropriately applied, with awareness of its strengths and shortcomings, as one evaluative tool among many.  The conical helix expands in a perfectly regular manner in a way that actual history does not.  History has velocity; important events over time change more rapidly, such that the even spacing of the coils should be closer together during times of greater activity.  Likewise, the horizontal axis should portray times of contraction, such as when war, sickness, famine, and natural disaster result in a shrinking population.  This doesn’t invalidate the model, but does suggest that it is more useful in its initial conception depicting history in broader terms, and requires an amended model to be accurate down to finer detail.  It suffers more from expectation than application, the fault of overly ambitious branding.  Calling the model a conical helix suggests a shape more perfect in its form than accurate in function.  In actual use, however, plotting the rise of history against the expansion and contraction of events, the picture it renders would be quite clear.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit breaks down the history of culture in excruciating detail; over 200 years later it is still the source of an industry of scholarship.  But, like the model just presented, history does not conform to a series of neat dialectics, all following one from the next.  And neither can it be explained solely in terms of ideas, any more that it can be exclusively comprehended through changes in material conditions, as Marx, following after Hegel, described. Again, not to single out Marx, as Pure Model orthodoxy is found among a broad range of secular and religious thought, but Marxism, from its beginnings to the present in forms that would dismay and likely have astonished Marx, continues as the unalloyed analytic basis for its philosophic adherents, as if history had not suggested a few helpful revisions.

The argument is not for relativism, that all standards are subject to context, or that one is as valid as the next.  Neither is it that comprehensive systems in any one example contain all truth to the exclusion of any other system.  Either position would commit the folly of the pure model.  It is rather than no model can be assumed entirely free of error as understood or applied, or that there is nothing to be learned from examination from a different perspective.  Returning to the analogy of mathematical problem solving, arriving at the other side of the equal sign may require solving for variables that are not apparent without applying the right equation.

The Venn diagram is a familiar model introduced to children in elementary school.  That it can be taught at that level is a testament to its fundamental simplicity, capable of making sense of the relationships between like and unlike things, even as they develop in complexity.  By its nature, applied without reference to other models, it will highlight similarities and differences, hopefully alerting it user to contradictory comparisons.  But keeping with the point being made in this chapter about not falling into overreliance on a single model, the Venn diagram lends itself well to complementing other models, serving to bring their assumptions and conclusions within verifiable bounds.

The Venn diagram begins with sets of like items.  The earth is a set of everything contained on our planet.  Living things would be a subset within the earth’s set.  Animals and vegetables are two completely separate sets within the set of living things.  Minerals are another subset within earth, but distinct from the living things set.  Within the animal set, there would be sets for vertebrates and invertebrates.  Within vertebrates we can have sets for animals that swim or fly, or sets for those with scales, fur, or feathers.  For the set of animals that fly, we would have an intersection of the sets of animals with scales, fur, and feathers containing flying fish, bats, and birds.

Suppose the problem to be solved involves identifying a particular flying animal.  It may be a disease vector, means of plant pollination, or species dispersal for plants or other animals.  If not found within that intersecting set of vertebrates with scales, fur, and feathers that fly, we get back to our question, “what am I missing?”  Now seeking a living thing that flies, and not finding it within the vertebrates, we create a new diagram beginning with the set of all living things that fly, finding we had failed to include insects in our previous search among vertebrates.  We can now begin to plot a new series of sets, selecting for size of animal, its geographic location, distance it can travel, habitat, and so on.

Within the area of policy and diplomacy, Venn diagrams can be used to test assumptions about nations and societies, yielding a trove of information on the ways similarities and differences affect relations between them.  Take Thomas Friedman’s Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Resolution, which states: “No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.”  The two sets, of countries that had fought a war with another, and another set of countries with a McDonald’s, would be quite large, and plotting them on a Venn diagram made much easier if done with a computer program which could then pair the countries.  If Friedman were correct, these sets would remain apart.  As it turns out, they do intersect, in a number of examples, including NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, and the Kargil War between India and Pakistan that same year.  Friedman was asserting a broader point, which seems to express the hope as much as much as the reality, that middle-class societies with McDonald’s were more likely to want to continue to enjoy the kind of life that permits a peaceful meal at a McDonald’s rather than have that meal spoiled by being at war with their neighbors.  Setting aside the merits of the Golden Arches Theory as a model, it is by taking a fresh look at it from the vantage point of another model, the Venn diagram, that it can be better evaluated.

The suitability of countries as candidates for regime change and the adoption of a Western style democracy could be better determined if analyzed through use of Venn diagrams.  Factors involving the countries’ history, geography, language, culture, and religion would be grouped into sets.  Experience as a colony or a part of an empire, which empire, what form of government did the country have after independence, and the length and stability of governments could be compared.

Returning to the Iraq War as an example, setting aside the case for the war itself, plotting Venn diagrams with the sets just suggested would have usefully uncovered the possible scenarios for outcomes after the war.  It would have been interesting to look at the states formed from the Ottoman Empire.  Sets would include forms of government, their stability and duration, peaceful transitions of power or coups, one-party rule or multiparty system, and rule of law relative to corruption.  With the exception of Turkey, which is essentially the former imperial power, and possibly Egypt, there would be no small set containing a stable, transparent, viable semi-democratic example.  This should raise a red flag, at least.  The likelihood that Iraq would become a democracy, once the authoritarian regime that held it together was removed and the country was left to form itself afresh as functioning state, given all the challenges of its history, and its ethnic, cultural, and political make-up, was slim.

The Iraq War was based on models and principles of varying merit.  From the perspective of the United States and our allies, a democratic society that is transparent, guarantees the rights of its citizens, and abides by the rule of law is in itself good and desirable.  Anything that can be done to promote its spread would benefit the world.  It is a tougher case to support regime change, especially through invasion and war, as the means to achieve it.  Accomplishing regime change with a small, focused military, sufficient to topple the government, but not maintain civil and political order, relying instead on a dismantled society to quickly reconstitute all the necessary means of administration, was even more dubious.  Failure at any point would be open to exploitation by Iran.  Omission and contingency are givens that should be part of the premise and concept at the outset.  They will occur.  A perfect outcome may not.

The point is simply that an appropriate model properly used would benefit decision making.  Policy makers confronting hard choices may have to choose the least bad option.  But where there is obvious peril, laid bare and displayed on a large, easy to read graphic, they should expected to acknowledge it, even if it cannot be avoided.  The folly of the pure model is inexcusable.  If perfect knowledge is unattainable, an abundance of knowledge is not.  Analysts and academics produce more of it each year.  The tools are at hand, as the Venn diagram demonstrates.

 

Title?

The remedy for the shortcomings of pure model reasoning is found by checking the dominant model and assumptions derived from it with a multi-perspective, multi-factorial approach.  As obvious as this seems, the lesson of looking both ways before crossing the street must have been lost on too many policy makers in their youth.  If they did look, they also ignored the oncoming truck.  The concept of alternative or even competing takes on the dominant model needs to be made part of the model itself.  Again, as obvious as this seems, history tells us it has not been obvious enough in use.  The policy maker needs to continually ask, “What am I missing?” and accept constructive challenges from advisors.

In days of simpler technology, of paper and overhead projectors, there were transparencies.  One graphic would be printed on the page, or placed down on the bed of the projector.  It would display some base condition, a map or chart.  Over that would be placed a series of overlays, each offering a different view or set of conditions related to the primary graphic.  Like solving a mathematic equation for a different variable, it would provide a different perspective on the matter at hand.  Likewise, we can think in terms of photographing a subject from different angles or distances, at different times.  Internal views or 3D images might be desirable.

Today, models like the Venn diagram or the Principle, applied in this manner are perhaps best thought of as policy apps.  If not actual computer apps, though it should be possible to program apps for the models, then as cognitive exercises.  For any given task or policy, the primary model might be checked against alternative or competing models to get a different view to uncover possibilities or problems not anticipated by that model.

A city has determined that it doesn’t have the classroom capacity for its growing student population.  Its dominant model has been its public school system, staffed by school district employees, and funded by property taxes.  This model has served it well, and may continue to be the most desirable method of educating its citizens.  But, they only know what past experience has demonstrated.  There may be other options, to be employed or rejected.  Turning to policy apps, the city could check their public school model against the charter school model, the parochial school model, or the private school model; the junior high vs. the middle school model; property tax vs. sales tax, or outside funding from state or federal government grants, or partnerships with business.  They may find aspects from each worth exploring and possibly integrating into a new blended model.

The Rumsfeld Doctrine was not wrong.  A small, focused military was successful in removing Saddam Hussein from power.  The primary model was that through regime change Iraq would naturally transform into a democratic country.  The Rumsfeld Doctrine app pertained to only a part of that model, as the means to regime change.  The Bush Administration did have a valuable app in the Pottery Barn Rule, “if you break it, you bought it,” which made it clear that responsibility for the outcome would rest with the United States.  This valuable insight, if taken seriously, should have initiated used of a whole series of apps to uncover other outcomes, for better or worse.  Putting the Pottery Barn Rule together with the Venn diagrams suggested in this chapter would have offered ample warning of the risks ahead.  The decision to execute policy would still have been the president’s.  Even good policy formation methods cannot prevent their misuse.

The Folly of the Pure Model rests not on the model itself, but on how it is applied.  That is not to say that there cannot be faulty models.  The formula for turning lead into gold was a fantasy; useful for keeping alchemists occupied, but otherwise a failure at its intended purpose.  We can state with a good measure of confidence that as a general principle most models will provide useful service.  And a model doesn’t have to apply or even be correct to do so.

Models can be as valuable for what they do not tell as for what they do.  Tested and proved wrong, the premise that a skillful alchemist can turn lead into gold did succeed as a cautionary maxim for what cannot be accomplished.  In this case, not historically, and without a particle accelerator.  The Rumsfeld Doctrine applies to cases where special forces and elite infantry can perform best, in short duration, high intensity actions, but is much less suited bogged down in a quagmire, especially involving a large civilian population.  And Adam Smith’s invisible hand, the free market that benefits all, is all but tied behind the economy’s back when large and powerful commercial interests exert overwhelming influence.  That is, when a true free market is assumed by the model, but does not actually exist.

The principal of political theory this book presents and examines, that Rights of Settlement and Migration are established through Conflict and Convention, applies to an exceptionally broad and diverse set of circumstances common to the human condition, and arguably to that of the rest of the living world, as well.  In all cases where a single place or resource is contested by another party, whether the parties are at rest or in motion, their interaction will be expressed within the bounds of Conflict and Convention until resolution is achieved.  Comprehensive.  As near a law of nature or physics as it gets in the social sciences.  But, as with all such models, principles, theories, and their philosophic kin, it yields its best fruits when combined and compared with other concepts and methods that may complement or contradict it, where context is taken into account, and no single point of view is allowed to prevail without due examination.

 

Intellectual purity and the pursuit of pure model reasoning, whether applicable or even desirable in its exclusivity, become their own end.  Foundational beliefs are adapted to the needs and purposes of a specific group, analogous to tribal and societal customs blended with and under the banner of religion.  What should be points of discussion become war cries of opposing camps.  Taken to extremes, we get a polarized society moving further apart, a shutdown of the U.S. Congress, or worse yet, violent extremism.  Over what?  Ideas, which at their core should be complementary, however different, contributing to a fuller and more nuanced understanding of our world and its issues, instead falling victim to the folly of the pure model.