From the USNI:
November 2019
Proceedings
Vol. 145/11/1,401
The chief takeaway from David Epstein’s book Range, which investigates Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, is this: think broadly, not narrowly. Risk being called a dilettante. Learn from many disciplines and experiences rather than burrow so deeply into one field that you can no longer see above ground to survey the wider world. And then apply insights from one field when some baffling question arises in another.....MUCH MORE
That is sage counsel for students and practitioners of strategy, who tap insights from history, political science, economics, and an array of related fields.
Maintains Epstein, specialists encounter trouble when tackling the problems characteristic of a “wicked” world. Wicked problems are intricate. They involve variables that combine and recombine in offbeat ways. They defy the boundaries of a single field and often vex specialists. By contrast, generalists hunt for “distant” analogies to challenges. Analogies seldom reveal answers, but they help inquisitors discover the right questions to ask. Asking penetrating questions constitutes the first step toward a solution, toward wisdom.
One imagines Epstein would approve of harnessing fiction and literature as a source of wisdom. Fiction supplies abundant analogies for students of politics and strategy. Some of them are remote indeed, bounded only by the author’s whimsy. Exhibit A: stories about zombies! Max Brooks’s World War Z is an imaginary oral history compiled a decade after a global war against the undead. Brooks has a researcher interview protagonists in the zombie war, not just to unearth facts about it but to record their feelings and impressions.
The interviews make up the book’s narrative. The relative lack of commentary gives the book a stark, spare quality—amplifying its impact. Warning: major spoilers ahead.
World War Z relates unfamiliar phenomena that illuminate something familiar, namely the profession of arms. The approach works not because warmaking against living, breathing foes is exactly like fighting ghouls, but because counter-zombie combat resembles war in the real world in some respects while differing from it strikingly in others. Juxtaposing the ordinary against the extraordinary compels military readers to examine their profession afresh.
Brooks’s fictional chronicle raises questions—and questions make us think. Four pointers from the living dead and those who battle them:
Know yourself.
Brooks has either read Thucydides or takes the same jaundiced view of human nature he did. The father of history showed how a plague peeled away the veneer of civilization from the most cultured society in classical Greece, the city-state of Athens. Athenians reverted to base instincts and passions almost overnight, and why not? If you may die tomorrow, you may as well live it up tonight. Debauchery ensues. Similarly, citizen took up arms against citizen on the island of Corcyra (modern-day Corfu). Civil strife shattered all bonds of family and fellowship as democrats and oligarchs fought to determine who would rule.
Pockets of Brooks’s brave new world witness similar breakdowns. Industrial civilization is not exempt from the afflictions of the ancients. Far from it.
For example, during the “Great Panic” that accompanies the rise of the living dead, the Hollywood glitterati hire private security firms to guard them from zombies within luxury residences, all while preening on camera for reality shows that showcase their supposed fortitude. Ship crews screen evacuees by race, permitting only those with the correct skin hue to board their vessels to flee the onslaught. You can only imagine what transpires in refugee camps in the far north when populations swell, food and fuel supplies dwindle, and frigid temperatures and weather descend.
And on and on. World War Z holds up a mirror, forcing us to look ourselves in the face while contemplating the impact of mass disaster and warfare on human society. This forms part of the strategic context, and the sight isn’t always pretty.
Know the enemy.
Strategic grandmaster Carl von Clausewitz—not among the undead legions at last report—warns commanders and their political overseers to assess the nature of the war on which they are about to embark, “neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.” But the living do not get the chance to undertake Clausewitzian analysis in Brooks’s account. War is thrust upon them. World War Z haunts precisely because the tale unfolds in everyday surroundings, against a deathless enemy that should not even exist....
