Whither the generalist?

Last week, this post by Alex Thurston over at Sahel Blog made the rounds on the Twitter-sphere. The post was tweeted approvingly by a number of folks, and I agree with a lot of what is said. He certainly raises important questions about expertise that bloggers should ask, many of which I frequently ask myself as I offer commentary on issues here at RPB. And his comments on the difficulty of separating wheat from chaff, and the dubious signaling power of association with institutions are spot on.

I do take issue with one line in the post, and the pervasiveness of the opinion behind it. Alex writes

But many foreign affairs “experts” (old and new) claim expertise without possessing what I see as the key requirements for foreign affairs expertise, especially knowledge of local languages and local history.

This is a statement I've seen in many places in various guises, from Josh Foust to Abu Muqawama, often used while the poster is dismissing the opinion/perspective/insight of whomever they disagree with.

Is this really the important distinction for foreign affairs "experts," the two boxes that always must be checked for commentary to be valid and useful? By this logic, the fact that I lived for a couple years in Scotland, can understand a Glaswegian, and know the outline of the Auld Alliance, the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Treaty of Union, I've fulfilled the key requirements to offer expert comment on the Scottish National Party's 5 May electoral victory. It doesn't. Yet the fact that I read work by a lot of smart folks whose passions and careers revolve around reporting on Scottish politics is enough to give me some basic context for discussing the issue, perhaps not from a position of authority but certainly from a potentially useful vantage point. (I'm not planning a post on the election, other than to congratulate my friend Humza Yousaf, one of the youngest MSPs ever elected!)

In the same way, many intelligent people write valuable, persuasive contributions to discussions on regions and issues about which they lack the key elements of expertise (by Alex's definition above). These are the generalists, with a breadth of knowledge and interest, but lacking depth in the majority of the issues on which they engage. We've all read spectacular posts (and even articles and books) on Pakistan by authors who don't speak a lick of Urdu or Pashto. Several respected authorities on terrorism or Al Qaeda can't read Arabic. Yet I don't think we would suggest that their contributions should be discarded. Expertise in local language and local history should definitely inform discussion of issues, but its inclusion shouldn't drive the exclusion of informed, thoughtful commentary from those not possessing "expertise."

For isn't that why we are all here in the first place, to both gather others' and share our knowledge and perspective (in addition to the rather ornery folks that revel in argumentation)? Some may be more valuable than others on particular issues, but there is merit in a myriad of people, armed with some minimum measure of fact, offering different viewpoints and opinions. And if the Twitter-sphere and blogosphere is good for anything, it is letting you know when you are misinformed, but I'll be damned if there isn't value in being wrong as well.

Let's keep a spot at the table for the generalist. We'll all be better off for it.

Conversation on the Legacy of Empire

Before you ask, yes, this is how Kautilya and I spend our days. I originally planned to clean this up into a more polished post, but decided to just go with the original emails.

The catalyst for the discussion was the early April BBC News article entitled "Is Britain to blame for many of the world's problems?"

Kautilya:

For what it's worth, my perspective (largely informed by a very non-postmodern course of study followed by living in India) is that cultures have dominated each other throughout history-- indeed, it's one of the only constants of human civilization that we exploit. Given progress, it was inevitable that eventually some power would exert such influence across the entire globe. While acknowledging the myriad problems Imperialism caused, we can be thankful that it was acted out by the West. For all the horrors, atrocities, and legacies-- all of which are replicated at smaller scale across the globe and throughout time-- the West dominated the globe in a relatively progressive and positive manner. Particularly England. So the real question to me isn't "is Britain to blame for many of the world's problems," but "given that eventually some power would dominate the entire globe, how miserably did Britain do?" And of course the corollary, "how is the United States doing?"

Or, at the risk of getting too grand-historical, if we are to evaluate successive empires against the standard of their own power and their own times (as I propose here), rather than by absolute standards (as the two authors in the link do), then how do we assess the morality of the actions of the United States?

Stilicho:

I think I’m right there with you on this one. As you indicated, barring a parallel and relatively equal pace of technological advancement, the supremacy of more advanced nations/peoples over those who hadn’t developed was somewhat inevitable. And I agree that the West has perhaps better track record of balancing exploitation with somewhat enlightened progress than powers in other regions of the world; after all, the Roman Empire’s greatest impact wasn’t necessarily just in destroying cities and enslaving populations, but also-and more lastingly-in bringing technological advancement, infrastructure, laws, language to a vast swath of territory. Arguably, and correlation certainly doesn’t equal causation, that legacy (itself built on the colonizing impulses of the Greek city-states) laid the foundation for the technological leaps forward of Europe. Granted, there’s a PhD in proving or disproving that statement, but I think you get my point.

It might be a bit of a cop-out, but obviously the legacy of imperialism and colonialism is incredibly complex, and I have no doubt that living as a subjected person beneath a colonial administration was hardly pleasant. As a bit of an aside, I also think it is very important in this conversation to isolate the British, and to a much lesser extent the French, philosophy and practice of colonial rule, as it had a significant emphasis on not simply exploitation, but improvement in infrastructure, rule of law, education, etc (the whole “White Man’s Burden”). Certainly more than many Western powers – here’s looking at you Belgium, Italy, and Spain. It’s also important to take into account the historical context of the whole imperial enterprise. Obviously the atrocities committed by the Brits in India (Sepoy Rebellion 1857 on up) were terrible, but they were at a time when the British weren’t far removed from having committed the same riot-control, fire-on-the-crowd murder on their own people (Peterloo Massacre 1819). And given the wider global context of potential great power rulers at that time, my choice of colonial overlord would have been the British, hands-down.

This is getting a bit long and out-of-hand, but I’d almost argue that generally the British legacy of colonial rule from an institutional perspective is a positive one, while their mistakes were made during the process of decolonization (most notably the Afghanistan/Pakistan/India borders, African borders disregarding tribes, and failure to accommodate Jews and Palestinians). Yet the burden of those mistakes can almost equally be laid at the feet of the entire international system at the time, in which all countries failed to coordinate decolonization, refused to reevaluate antiquated colonial boundaries, and failed to fully adapt colonial institutions to the realities of independence. The pressure to “get out now” from both their domestic population and the colonial population was too great, and their resources much too constrained for those to have been realistic options. And failing to have addressed all of those things (and probably a myriad of others), I don’t see how any country, not just Britain, could have avoided “blame for many of the world’s problems.”