The State Department report on the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi, Libya.

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The U.S. State Department recently released a report on the killing of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and four other people by Jihadists in Benghazi, Libya on September 11 of this past year. Briefly, a well-armed militia attacked the U.S. consulate’s Benghazi compound, setting its buildings on fire. Ambassador Stevens and a security officer, who were visiting from Tripoli, the capital city, died of smoke inhalation. An hour-and-a-half later, militia members followed a CIA truck to its secretly located building some distance away, called in State Department documents, “the Annex.” They used RPGs to kill two CIA agents. Everyone now agrees, that the attack was not, as the Obama administration first suggested, a spontaneous demonstration in response to an inflammatory video depicting Islam as corrupt and murderous. Instead, it was planned and executed by well-armed jihadists.

In response to the killing, the State department convened a task force to review why security at the consulate was insufficient. The resulting report, released this past month, is thoughtful and judicious, and is anchored in a discourse of what it means to effectively assess and mitigate threats. The report exemplifies the good practice of “after-action reviews” through which leaders and executives debrief a mission or program and try to learn from their mistakes. Yet the report misses the forest for the trees and is peculiarly off-key. The question is why?

Consider three sensible arguments the report writers make.

·      The consulate's vulnerability was heightened because personnel seconded to it were relatively inexperienced, and often on temporary assignments of less than 40 days. The result was “diminished institutional knowledge, continuity and mission capacity.”

·      Following good practice, consulate officials had well-defined “tripwires,” such as the city’s crime rate, or attacks on westerners, which could alert consulate staff to the possibility of an attack on the consulate compound. But, the report goes on to argue, these, “Tripwires are too often treated only as indicators of threat rather than essential trigger mechanisms for serious risk management decisions.”

·      Communication between Washington, Tripoli, and Benghazi “occurred collegially at the working level,” but it was, “constrained by a lack of transparency, responsiveness, and leadership at senior bureau levels.”

This discourse has all the earmarks of reasonableness and rationality. It applies the lessons of threat assessment and management, and makes recommendations for better results in the future, e.g., better communication at senior levels, better staffing practices, and a more thoughtful use of tripwires. But I want to argue that the report is nonetheless misleading and insufficient because it is focused at the tactical rather than strategic level. It pays no attention to a wider narrative that shaped the Obama administration’s decision making at the level of foreign policy; a policy that colored all tactical decisions. This narrative presumes that the U.S., through the judicious use of military measures and modern “nation-building” practices, can help people in lawless settings evolve democratic and civil societies.  Indeed, this narrative is why the Obama administration at first suggested that the attack on the consulate was spontaneous, in response to an anti-Islam video produced in the U.S. It was not that jihadists, unleashed by a revolutionary situation the U.S. helped create, were out to kill us as well as their Libyan enemies. Rather, we had inadvertently trampled on their religious sensibilities.

I want to argue in this blog post that the purpose of the State Department report was not to improve practices, but to protect decision makers from the psychological burden of wrestling with the contradictions and tensions implicit in this wider narrative. It functioned as what organizational psychodynamics calls, a “social defense;” a collective process of psychological denial.   

Consider how the report fails. It turns out that senior State Department officials gave the Ambassador wide berth to make his own threat assessment decisions. The vision of local officials applying protocols, some acceptable, some not, to secure the consulate’s safety, or of seniors officers collaborating, or not, on consulate safety, is misleading. As the report itself notes, “The ambassador did not see a direct threat of this nature and scale on the U.S. mission in the overall negative trend line of security incidents (in Benghazi) from spring to summer of 2012.” In other words, Steven’s discounted signals of threat. The report goes on to note, “His status as the leading U.S. government advocate on Libya policy, and his expertise on Benghazi in particular, caused Washington to give unusual deference to his judgments.”

This suggests that the State Department after-action review should have been focused on two entirely different questions. First, what compelled State Department officials, perhaps against their better judgment, to defer to Stevens, and second, why did Stevens discount signals of threat?

Why the deference? After his death, Secretary of State Clinton, President Obama, and others referred to Stevens as the ideal diplomat. Describing Stevens and his colleagues, Obama said, “They knew the danger, and they accepted it. They didn't simply embrace the American ideal. They lived it." There seems little doubt that Stevens’ actions during the uprising against Gaddafi, and this was before he was appointed ambassador, were deservedly considered heroic. As ABC, the news organization, reports, “During the early days of the Libyans' fight to overthrow Moammar Gaddafi, Christopher Stevens, not yet ambassador, wrangled a ride on a Greek cargo ship and sailed into the rebels' stronghold city of Benghazi.” (Benghazi, it should be noted, was the seat of the revolution.) The ABC report goes on to note, “He arrived at a time when the crackle of gunfire could be heard each night. Stevens and his team didn't even have a place to stay, but found space in a hotel briefly, moving out after a car bomb went off in the parking lot.” Stevens and a political officer, “spent their days and nights building up the U.S. government’s first on-the-ground contacts with the Transitional National Council, as well as with members of the emerging civil society and newly freed news media.”

There is also little doubt that Stevens represented and deeply believed in the democratic ideal. Consider for example the video Stevens released, shortly after he was appointed ambassador, through which he addressed the Libyan people. At one point in the video, shot in Washington D.C., he says, “I am in Washington preparing for my assignment. As I walk around the monuments and memorials commemorating courageous men and women who made America what it is, I am reminded that we too went through challenging periods. When America was divided by a bitter civil war 150 years ago, President Abraham Lincoln had the vision and courage to pull the nation together and helped us move forward toward a shared goal of peace and prosperity.” (In the video he is at the Lincoln Memorial). In other words, he is suggesting that the Libyan civil war and the U.S. civil war were cut from the same cloth. This means that Libyans, despite their country’s history of violence, fragmentation and oppression, can aspire to the kind of constitutional and civil order that U.S. citizens, for the most part, have come to enjoy.

The reference to Lincoln is particularly telling, and highlights the strengths and limitations of what is called the “idealist” as opposed to the “realist” strain in U.S. foreign policy.  Lincoln is usefully thought of as the second, or in fact the “true” father of his nation, and his greatness lies partly in his ability to use force in the service of civilization, without losing his own moral compass, humanness and civility. But it takes a distinctive culture to produce such a leader. We could say that Stevens’ analogy, and the strain of idealism he represents, is partly hope, but also partly projection, imagining that the social context that gave rise to Lincoln can be replicated in Libya. This projection of American history and sensibilities onto other cultures and countries reinforces the belief that they can traverse our path to democracy.

We have now one plausible account of the deference,  but can we account for Stevens' judgments about the situation? One thing we can rule out; Stevens was by no means naïve, and understood the risks he was personally facing. His diary, found by a CNN reporter at the burned and now abandoned consulate, shows that he believed Al Qaeda was targeting him for assassination.

In this regard,  while the discourse about risk assessment and mitigation in the report is reasonable, it fails in one elementary way, and on its own terms. The report does not consider the relationship between risks and opportunities. That a setting such as Benghazi is risky, is a given. The question is, what is to be to be gained by having a consulate in Benghazi despite these risks? Or to put the matter differently, what were the risks of not having a consulate in the city?

I think the answer is apparent, and was the basis for Stevens' judgment. For the same reason that Benghazi was the seat of the uprising against Gaddafi, it was thus also a threat to creating a centralized political authority in Tripoli. The tribes in eastern Libya had long been hostile to Tripoli’s power, and resented their subordination to Gaddafi’s army and his associated elites in business and politics. As we have seen elsewhere, a revolutionary situation is just as likely, if not more, to lead to chaos and fragmentation, as to a new political order based on representation and civility. After all, this is one reason the CIA had established a sizeable station in Benghazi to begin with. Its senior personnel understood that the tribes in Eastern Libya, wanted to secure their rightful share of weapons from Gaddafi’s arsenal, and they worried that Al Qaeda inspired jihadists would get them.

This suggests that Stevens established a consulate in Benghazi, described as “lawless town,” in the State Department report, to begin the work of linking the elites of Benghazi to Tripoli. He planned to do this by helping to build what are called “civil society” institutions, such as businesses, schools, government agencies, NGOs, courts and media. For example, one State Department memo, released in a cache of memos to the world- wide-web, refers to U.N. supported initiatives such as;

·      Preparing lawyers for constitution drafting.

·      Engaging lawyers in the Libyan diaspora to train local lawyers.

·      Forming a local chapter of NAPEO, the “North Africa Partnership for Economic Opportunity,” to educate participants about public-private partnerships.

·      Ensuring that the TOEFL English language exam is offered in Libya, and,

·      Training aspiring entrepreneurs in business skills.

These are practical steps, familiar to practitioners of nation-building.  But the reader, unaccustomed to this work, can’t help but wonder if they are off-kilter and potentially irrelevant efforts in the context of a lawless city in a nation of tribes. Indeed, one measure of this irrelevance is a peculiar paragraph in another State Department memo, dated December 2011. It notes that, “Many Libyans have said that the U.S. presence (in Benghazi) has a salutary calming effect (my underlining) on easterners who are fearful that the new focus on Tripoli could once again lead to their neglect and exclusion from reconstruction and wealth distribution, and (therefore) strongly favor a permanent U.S. presence in the form of a full consulate.” In other words, the powerful tribes and families in Benghazi would welcome a U.S. presence to protect them and assure them their fair share of the spoils, rather than depend on their own militias and force of arms. This may be where idealism shades into naiveté.

In addition, the narrative of democratic empowerment protected senior officials in the state department and in the Obama administration from the psychological burden of facing the unfortunate that, that from 2003 on, the U.S. considered Gaddafi to be an ally. As a Wikipedia entry notes, in December of that year,

“Libya renounced its possession of weapons of mass destruction and agreed to decommission its chemical weapons program. Relations with the U.S. improved as a result, while U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair met with Gaddafi in the Libyan desert in March 2004. The following month, Gaddafi travelled to the headquarters of the European Union in Brussels signifying improved relations between Libya and the EU, the latter of whom ended its remaining sanctions in October.

Indeed, as the Wall Street Journal reported, from 2003 to 2011, the CIA had close ties to Gaddafi’s secret services!

 Let us return to the two questions that I suggested the State Department Report should have addressed. What compelled State Department officials, perhaps against their better judgment, to defer to Stevens, and why did Stevens discount signals of threat? The answers are now apparent. First, Stevens was the ideal representative of the idealist strain, yet he had the physical courage, the realistic perspective and the diplomatic skills to operate in a lawless setting. Second, Stevens believed that absent civil society institutions in Benghazi, the country could break apart under the press of tribal warfare. The risks of not having a consulate in Benghazi were greater than the risks of having one. Stevens did not discount signals of threat, he simply saw and responded to a larger one.

It is a common feature of strategies and their associated narratives, that they contain tensions and contradictions. This is the underside of their breadth. The U.S. wants to advance democracy through open means, but it cannot and has not discounted the reality of armed non-state enemies who have no history of living in democratic settings. Indeed, this is why the CIA had its own secret annex in Benghazi, while the State Department had its public consulate. (There is good reason to believe that Jihadists only discovered the Annex when, after the fire at the consulate compound, they followed a CIA truck from the consulate to the CIA’s building). The physical separation of the two, while based on the need for secrecy, also symbolized the tensions of integrating the idealist and the realist orientations.

The U.S., for better or worse, is impelled to represent democracy in the clash of civilizations. But at the same time it has built up a security apparatus that enables it to protect U.S. security, political, and economic interests without regard to who is the “good guy,” or democrat; hence the alliance with Gaddafi prior to his overthrow. I also think Stevens was considered a hero not only because he was a courageous practitioner of what is called “expeditionary diplomacy,” but because he had a realistic understanding of the threats the U.S. faced and an abiding belief in the power of democratic ideals and practices to mitigate these threats. He offered for a moment, a synthesis of the idealist and realist strains, and his murder suggests that he paid with his life for trying to integrate the two.

We can now understand why the State Department report was inadequate and why it focused on tactical issues. Of course, the task force was not authorized to consider issues of strategy. But its focus on tactics also helps deflect attention from the painful realization that the work of integrating the two strains of foreign policy, work that every president has to take up, is difficult, consequential, and can lead to the murder of valued and honored diplomats who represent the “best the country can offer.” This is why I called the report a “social defense.” It deflects attention from what is guilt inducing, painful and has surprised us, to what can be managed and predicted. 

There may be a lesson here as well about "after-action" reviews. They may fail to give us real insight into our failures if we do not consider the strategic context that shaped our decisions.

The Newtown shooting and the NRA

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This blog post does not take a position on whether the National Rifle Association (NRA) or gun control advocates are right or wrong in their responses to the shootings in Newtown. 

(Note to my non-U.S. friends. On December 20, a young man, Adam Lanza, entered a school building in suburban Connecticut and killed twenty school children, kindergartners among them, and six adults, including the principal and the school psychologist.  He used a semi-automatic rifle and first killed his mother at home before entering the school building.  The shooting has revived a debate in the United States about whether or not the federal government should control gun sales). 

Instead, I suggest that there is always value in stepping away from such debates and asking how a particular debate resonates with wider trends and issues. For those who favor more gun control, as I do, it is nonetheless important to understand what the NRA might represent, both for us and against us, as participants in the wider cultural questions that affect us all.  This approach is linked to the hypothesis that, in social systems, we polarize our differences into camps of opinion when we cannot reconcile conflicting goals we face together. 

I was drawn in this regard to the press conference the NRA gave fully a week after the shooting. Its leaders, particular its executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, came to the press conference, “loaded for bear,” as the hunter’s expression goes. He attacked the media for its anticipated critique of the NRA. He proposed that the best way to protect school children, was not to control the sale of guns and the licensing of gun holders, but instead, to place armed guards in every school building. There was a brutal logic to his argument. 

“How have our nation's priorities gotten so far out of order, he asked, “think about it. We care about our money, so we protect our banks with armed guards. American airports, office buildings, power plants, courthouses -- even sports stadiums -- are all protected by armed security. We care about the President, so we protect him with armed Secret Service agents. Members of Congress work in offices surrounded by armed Capitol Police officers. Yet when it comes to the most beloved, innocent and vulnerable members of the American family -- our children -- we as a society leave them utterly defenseless, and the monsters and predators of this world know it and exploit it. That must change now!”

I can readily imagine how some parents, under the press of fear and anxiety, might feel reassured if an armed officer or civilian volunteer was deployed to protect their children while they were in school. In this sense, the NRA’s position is not as outrageous as some of its critics have suggested.

However, what I found telling was the NRA’s failure to consider what it means to provide children with a psychological sense of safety. Armed guns will protect their physical security, but they threaten to bring into the child’s view and experience the belief and fear that the world is dangerous, filled with bad people who can harm them. Why else have armed guards in the school building in the first place? In other words, what the NRA did not recognize is our shared hope that we can protect a child’s innocence; that is, an experience of the world as a loving place, where strangers are friendly, authority is dependable, optimism is realistic, curiosity is rewarded, and of course armed guards are unnecessary.

But having noted this lapse, I can also ask, whether or not we adults, as bearers of our culture, any longer believe that children are entitled to their innocence. There is a sizeable literature, think of Neal Postman’s prescient, “The Disappearance of Childhood,” published in 1982, which argues that we have created a social world that undermines the experience of childhood innocence. Children are told to be wary of adults who touch them, lest they be abusers, and they are exposed to sexual stimuli as well as fantasies of violence throughout their childhood. In our anxiety for their future we overschedule their lives with programmed activities, and test preparation sessions, so that they experience little spontaneous play. Many children are also exposed to our psychological conflicts when, as parents, we divorce one another and then fight over their custody. The television series, “The Wire,” a story of Baltimore as a decaying postindustrial city, and widely regarded as realistic, highlights how some African-American children are far too soon introduced to the world of adult violence, ineptitude and corruption.

The list could go on, but do we care?  In others word are we committed to sustaining the experience of childhood innocence? One reason we might not be is because as adults we no longer feel psychologically, financially or physically safe ourselves. As a result we are pulled toward protecting ourselves rather than our children.  The psychologist David Bakan, argues in The Slaughter of Innocents,” that throughout history adults abandoned infants when faced with food shortages. Children in other words, potentially distract us from our own struggle for survival.  While in the developed world we have ample food, the anxieties associated with securing an adult role that confers dignity, purpose and a livelihood, have grown substantially. This may be one reason why birth rates are falling throughout much of the West. Perhaps the NRA's conviction that monsters threaten us and our children, represents, in an exaggerated form, a widely held belief that the world has become more dangerous for adults.  

If this is true, one question then is how one makes sense of danger? I want to suggest that the NRA’s philosophy, or perhaps theology, is based on the idea of an evil presence in the world, which, if and when acknowledged, makes innocence seem delusional. Harlon Carter, who helped “overthrow” the NRA’s “old guard” in 1977,  attacked it using the discourse of good and evil. “The latest news release from the NRA,” he said, "embraces a disastrous concept, that evil is imputed to the sale and delivery, the possession of a certain kind of firearm, entirely apart from the good or evil intent of the man who uses it.” This discourse of evil is also why LaPierre referred in the press conference to “predators and monsters,” rather than, for example, to mentally disturbed people. In this sense, the discourse of evil stands in contrast to the discourse of disease and health. The idea that Adam Lanza, was mentally disturbed, in other words, he had a diseased mind, can be usefully challenged by the idea that he, or much more likely, his mother and first victim, was evil.

Does the idea of evil have standing? Scott Peck, the psychiatrist and religious thinker, wrote a widely read book, “The People of the Lie,” based on the idea that evil people are hidden, their impacts insidious, and that through their failure to tolerate imperfection in themselves and others, they often drive others, particularly children, into acts of desperation. The book, published in 1978, in this sense might be read as a précis of the Newtown shooting.

The idea of evil is not compatible with the belief, that if social conditions are right, fair and just, people can be perfected. This belief has been the basis for much modern social policy as well as the foundation for tolerance and for a commitment to pluralism. My own sense however is that idea of evil remains unsettled within us, we are so to speak “bedeviled” by it, as we contemplate not simply the Holocaust, but more recently, the slaughters in Rwanda, in Bosnia, and the attack on women in parts of the Muslim world. Certainly, the psychoanalytic conception of character holds that loving and destructive feelings are comingled in our most intimate relationships. This is one basis for domestic violence. In other words, one hypothesis is that we are dishonest when we project our own struggle with the idea of evil onto people and groups, like the NRA, whose view of it we then label as extreme.

The belief that evil is real and insidious can certainly give rise to the conviction that we must defend ourselves against evil at all costs. But one question is why we can’t rely on the state. the government, to protect us against evil. Certainly, in the NRA’s worldview, the state cannot be counted on, and in fact may become the enemy. This is why its leaders put such great store on one interpretation of the U.S. constitution’s second amendment; namely that it protects the right of people, “to keep and bear arms.”

It is tempting to dismiss this as paranoid thinking, but surely one trend in the wider world is the apparent decline of states and the rise of non-state actors, such as terrorist organizations and criminal networks fully capable of attacking and defeating police forces and armies. In the U.S. we need only look southward to our neighbor, Mexico, to envision a scenario of how criminal gangs, wealthy and armed, might defeat the state. Moreover the conspiratorial idea that the United Nations is the first step toward global domination by hidden powers, an idea that attracts some NRA members, bears a family resemblance to the idea that the global corporation, which under certain conditions can equip private armies, is growing more powerful than the states that regulate them. Truth be told, in the United States, outlaws have often successfully challenged, defeated and corrupted the state. Think of outlaws on the western frontier, the Mafia in Chicago, whose leaders undermined judges and policemen with bribes and threats, or local urban police who, in decaying industrial cities, abandoned high crime areas to criminals.

I am reminded here – of all things! – of J.D. Salinger’s classic novel, “The Catcher in the Rye.”  It shows how young people lose their innocence, and potentially their sanity, when they come to grips with adult hypocrisy, or what Holden Caulfield, its hero, called its “phoniness.” I think the book had such enormous resonance for two reasons,  First,  it raised the question of whether we could sustain the innocence of childhood long enough in the life of each child so that children could become optimistic adults, even as they had to confront, in their adolescence, the dirty secrets of the adult world. Second, it had resonance because, published in 1949, it was anticipatory, foreshadowing young people's loss of trust in the adult world some fifteen years later.  Some thirty years after its publication, Neil Postman argued in his own book that the idea of childhood innocence in the United States, had a hundred year run, from 1850 to 1950, suggesting, once again, that an artist’s antenna, in this case Salinger's, picks up signals from the future.

“The Catcher in the Rye,” is both the book’s title and Holden Caulfield’s fantasy of his life’s work. As he tells his younger sister Phoebe, “Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around- nobody big, I mean – except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff- I mean they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be.”

Perhaps the Newtown shooting and the NRA’s response both raise questions we all face. Who, if anyone, will do the work of “child-catching” in a post-industrial world, how should they do it and how do we help them? 

J.C. Penny as the Post-Modern Department Store.

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The “street” is punishing J.C. Penny, the department store, for its poor performance over the last year. It reported a $123 million loss in the last quarter, same store sales fell by 26% in that same period, and the stock price is down by 50% for the year. This, despite the fact that the relatively new CEO, Ron Johnson, who built Apple’s retail juggernaut, is bent upon transforming the chain, by drawing on his experience at Apple.  Once focused on offering discounts and coupons to low-income shoppers, Johnson hopes to re-stage J.C. Penney, which he now calls JCP, as an upscale aggregator of boutiques, where there are  “stores within a store.” Brand name manufacturers like Levis, Izod and Liz Claiborne would have outposts in J.C. Penney outlets. 

In a toughly worded article, Andrew Sorkin of the New York Times takes Johnson to task for being grossly unrealistic. How else to explain the company’s poor performance? Apple’s retail stores, he argues, are appealing because the products on offer are unique. While the Apple store concept and layout are terrific, these retail outlets would fail without the iPads, iPhones and Macs. But what can J.C. Penney offer? Jeans? Sweaters? Where is the thrill in that?

Sorkin’s critique poses the question of what being “realistic” means in the world of business. After all, we honor entrepreneurs who have “vision.” But doesn’t vision mean seeing beyond what is presently available or experienced? Doesn’t this mean being imaginative and therefore “unrealistic.” Steve Jobs, once Ron Johnson’s boss, and one of the great modern business visionaries, argued that customer focus groups were useless. Customers could not express desires or wants for products that did not yet exist.

But if a vision is not realistic, in the plain meaning of the word, if it is the product of imagination, how do we evaluate it before seeing if it can be fully implemented? This is not simply a matter of curiosity. Venture capitalists make judgments about ideas that have yet to be substantiated all the time. One conception of a fruitful business vision is that it needs to be simple. Think of Sam Walton’s vision for Wal-Mart, “bring large stores to small towns,” or Invagar Kamprad’s simple concept for building Ikea, “sell styled but low-cost knock-down furniture.” Simplicity signals that the business leader has not hedged his bets with provisos and exceptions. The leader has made an uncompromising commitment. Johnson’s business vision, “we are a store of stores,” certainly meets this test.

Fruitful visions are also linked to a social context that the business leader has personally experienced, but then interprets. This link strengthens the business’ leader’s conviction in what may appear to be at first too simple an idea. Sam Walton identified with small town America’s friendliness and frugality, but he also saw how the post-world-war two-highway system would link small towns together in a shopping region. Invagar Kamprad connected his experience of growing up in a poor region of Sweden with the country’s status as an international symbol of grace and design. He then saw how he could profit from the open world economy that emerged after the destruction of World War Two.  As these two examples suggest, business visionaries gain conviction because they link their personal experience to the context that gave it shape. It is not just about them, but about the social world that surrounds them.

One question then is; what is the context that gives Johnson's business vision its social character? His prototype or model store in Plano, Texas provides some clues. Divided into boutiques, the store aisles are uncluttered and shoppers have clear lines of sight to the far ends of the store. The cash registers are gone replaced by sales clerks with smart phones.  As the store architect said in an interview, the design theme is "square" so that people experience orderly right angles everywhere. This fits with the store's new pricing policy as well. There will be no more discount coupons. Instead the store posts "fair and square" prices everyday.

One hypothesis is that the "meaning" of the store is "transparency." There is no distance between surface and depth. What you see is what you get, but as a result what you see is entirely up to you. The store is a blank slate and you can project onto it whatever fantasy or meaning your shopping experience stimulates. The shopper's conversation is with the boutiques and their brands, the store is a container. Of course Apple stores have just this quality as well, the shopper's focus is entirely on the product.  Moreover, Apple computers were famously sealed, the hardware disappeared, while the user focused entirely on the screen.

This conception is strengthened in light of Johnson’s decision to change the store's appellation from “JCPenney” to “JCP.” The former is the name of a founder, and prompts recollections of an almost a century of experience. JCP, (actually the stock ticker), is by contrast an abstraction. Separated from its roots -- imagine a foreign tourist encountering the new appellation for the first time, it signifies that it signifies nothing in particular. Instead, as the company’s new logo below also suggests, JCP is a boundary marker and you are invited to fill in the blank.


 

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The new name, the new logo and the store design together suggest that Johnson is drawing on what we might call a "post-modern" sensibility. In this way of experiencing the world, reality is a blank slate, there is no script and it is up to us to invent who we are in conversation with one another.

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This hypothesis gains some credence when considering the company’s selection of Ellen DeGeneres, a publicly gay celebrity, to be its spokesperson. In response, the “million-moms network,” founded by the American Family Association- -a Christian conservative group opposed to homosexuality--announced a boycott of the stores that met with little success.

I have no knowledge of the decision process that led to DeGeneres’ selection. But it seems reasonable to suppose that J.C. Penney’s executives understood the risk they were taking with this choice, but believed on balance that they could benefit from it. If this is right it suggests that that they wanted to communicate their post-modernity, in the sense that in a post-modern setting sexual preference and even gender are matters of choice.

I was drawn in this regard to a shopper’s complaint posted on a web site. “I used to do most of my shopping at J.C, Penney,” the shopper writes. “But since their new fair and square program started, I have not bought much of anything. It is getting kind of scary when I walk in there. The store is half-empty. (Cash) registers are disappearing. There are more employees in the store than customers.”  If I may speculate for a moment, one reason the disappearing registers are scary is that they once marked out a boundary between the shopper and the store. They created a space of privacy in which the individual shopper, discount coupons in hand, could advance through the clutter to find a bargain. One feature of post-modern settings is just this loss of privacy, which as we know from the people who have been hurt by their own Facebook postings, can be risky. In this sense, the Christian conservative’s unsettled feelings in response to the world of modern media, particularly its sexualization, is understandable.  It is intrusive, preemptory and can undermine parental authority.  

So the question of whether or not Ron Johnson’s vision is realistic is linked partly to the question of whether a department store shaped by a post-modern sensibility is realistic. Interestingly, while only 11% of the company’s total retail space has been remodeled, the fully remodeled store returns $269 per square foot in sales, double the  $134 per square foot of the older store model.

This suggests that Johnson’s concept may in fact be right. But it does not means that his strategy will succeed. Reality is not simply a particular store, a design, or a prototype. Instead, it expresses itself everyday in the delays associated with any project, in the race between losing old customers and winning new ones, in the patience of investors as they watch a share price fall, and in people’s inertia.

Indeed, it seems likely that Johnson and his top team anticipated losing some of their old time customers as they transformed the stores. This may be one reason why Johnson has been sanguine about the decline in same store sales. But to ask Sorkin’s question again, where does “sanguine” stop and “wishful thinking” begin.

I don’t doubt that Johnson has what Abraham Zalenkik has called the “marketing imagination.” The Apple retail store network is a tour de force. But I don’t know if he or those around him also have the “logistical imagination,” a capacity to imagine the movement of materials, people, efforts and results through time. In the military this kind of imagination is critical. It ensures that troops never advance too far beyond their supply lines.

Ironically should Johnson fail in his transformation, we won’t know why. Was the concept grossly unrealistic, was the execution faulty, or did his new upscale competitors respond by offering shoppers a better experience or lower prices? This not knowing, really does mean that reality is to some degree, beyond our grasp. 

The Petraeus Scandal and the Stoic Warrior

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The resignation of David Petraeus has the feel of both farce and tragedy. For some, he was a paragon, felled by something as trivial as a sexual impulse. For others, his affair, and the foolishness with which he carried it out, for example, using a Gmail drop-box to communicate with his paramour, showed the feet of clay behind the trumped up image of a disciplined and intelligent military leader.  I want to focus this post, not on the question of his character, for example, was he too self-promoting, but rather on the meaning of his affair within the wider culture.

Some people have wondered if the popular response to this behavior, the shock and the disappointment, reflects a stubborn puritanism in the culture, even in an age when pornography is so widely available and adultery is common. I want to propose a different thesis. I think Petraeus represented the idealized image of what Nancy Sherman has called the “Stoic warrior.” The Stoic warrior is the military person who gains control over his feelings, particularly fear and anger, even in the face of the enormous stresses and losses associated with war and battle.

In a famous incident during World War Two, General Patton, a U.S. military hero, slapped and kicked a soldier who had been admitted to an army hospital for shell shock. Moved by the many bandaged and wounded soldiers he saw, Patton could not tolerate the idea that this solider could escape the line of fire by pleading nervousness. The incident was scandalous because witnesses saw Patton lose control in so egregious a manner. As Abraham Zaleznik writes, “At the height of this brief but violent encounter, Patton appeared to have been shaken by his own conduct. He began to sob, wheeled around and told Colonel Currier, ‘I can’t help it. It makes me break down to think of a yellow bastard being babied.’” The solider, it turned out, had just seen his buddy gravely wounded.

Encountering such a moment frightens people because it highlights how, when a leader loses control over this feelings, power can lead to abuse. History is of course filled with what Freud called “primal fathers” whose rage, paranoia and narcissism destroyed many lives. One thinks for example of Stalin, Mao, Idi Amin and Charles Taylor. And surely, most every child experiences moments when parents are frightening, and the gap between “big” and “small" feels so fateful and final. The stoic warrior is an ideal because it creates the hope that we can entrust leaders with the power they need to protect us, without them turning against us. Petraeus of course was not violent, but his foolishness suggests that he gave way to feelings of lust, so much so, that he became careless. Indeed, one signal measure of an army’s discipline is the degree to which its commanders ensure that the troops do not give way to lust for example, by raping vanquished women.

One question is how do we create stoic warriors, not only in the military but also in civilian life. After all, in every setting we face the risk that power will be abused. One is reminded here for example, of how the Tour de France bicycle champion, Lance Armstrong, abused his position as the seven-time winner to punish co-conspirators who revealed, or threatened to reveal the fact that he and his team members had used drugs to enhance their racing performance. He was enormously competitive, as all warriors must be, but he was also brutal. We have of course codes of ethics, stoicism was just a code, and we expect our leaders to be disciplined in their work, most importantly to bear the pain associated with long term achievement on our behalf. Petraeus had just this image of a man of great discipline, a capacity for work, and integrity.

But I want to suggest that our image of the Stoic warrior is linked as well to an idealized image of the parental couple. It is a common cultural trope that men learn to be responsible when they have children. They relinquish some degree of self-aggrandizement, and the freedom of adolescence, by learning to protect their children and make sacrifices on their behalf.

A Washington Post article conveys a revealing image of the Petraeus couple in this regard. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/gen-petraeuss-affair-tarnishes-seemingly-idyllic-marriage/2012/11/10/4425d986-2b68-11e2-96b6-8e6a7524553f_story.html). The reporter describes how Petraeus, and his wife Holly, “projected unity and love “as they presided “over their daughter’s wedding in Berryville, Va., at the stunning Rosemont Manor,” one month before the scandal. “Gen. Jack Keane, a longtime mentor who attended the nuptials noted that, ‘When dinner was over, Holly and Dave were both beaming throughout their evening.. They made their own way around the room saying hello to their friends and relatives.’ The reporter goes on to note that, “To many army couples Petraeus and his wife represented a role-model marriage.” Holly, herself the daughter of a four star general, had endured long separations from her husband when he was oversees and spent much of her work-life lobbying on behalf of veterans. “As the assistant director for the Obama administration's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, she monitors and investigates consumer complaints from U.S. service members.” It is also a common cultural trope that the family is a civilizing institution.

One hypothesis is that the presidential election was partly about whether and how we can and/or should sustain this idealized image of the parental couple. As David Brooks, the conservative columnist for the New York Times wrote, after the election, “At some point over the past generation, people around the world entered what you might call the age of possibility. They became intolerant of any arrangement that might close off their personal options. The transformation has been liberating, and it’s leading to some pretty astounding changes. For example, for centuries, most human societies forcefully guided people into two-parent families. Today that sort of family is increasingly seen as just one option among many. The number of Americans who are living alone has shot up from 9 percent in 1950 to 28 percent today. In 1990, 65 percent of Americans said that children are very important to a successful marriage. Now, only 41 percent of Americans say they believe that. There are now more American houses with dogs than with children.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/16/opinion/brooks-the-age-of-possibility.html)

Perhaps part of Obama’s appeal, and why the Republicans failed in their effort to characterize him as a radical, is that he appears so temperate and controlled, even if sometimes dull and disengaged. Most people would find it inconceivable that he would engage in extra-marital sex, as did his more exciting predecessor, Bill Clinton. It is also likely that Brooks wrote his column in response to the discourse about the coalition that elected Obama. It did not include, “white males,” one cultural repository, at least for some people, for the image of the good patriarch. 

This may be one reason that the Petraeus scandal, occurring so close to the election, had special resonance. It occurred on the heels of a cultural struggle, in which the stakes are high and there is no clear path forward. If Petraeus was as talented as some claim, then we faced the farce of losing a great leader to a sexual peccadillo. But if he also represented the hope associated with the ideal parental couple, our loss, while largely symbolic, hurts us more.  

The New York City Marathon and Mayor Bloomberg’s decision.

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In the aftermath of hurricane Sandy, which devastated communities along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean, the Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg faced an important decision. The New York City Marathon, which the city had sponsored for 40 years, was scheduled for the Sunday following the hurricane. The city expected forty thousand runners from all over the world. Yet this was only six days after the hurricane had devastated parts of lower Manhattan, Staten Island, Queens and Brooklyn, all boroughs of the city. As Sunday approached, many families still lived in unheated and darkened homes and apartments. Yet to mount the marathon the city would have to provide electric generators to heat marathon tents, provide runners with emergency medical care, food and water, deploy police to oversee the marathon and close off streets in neighborhoods that suffered flood damage. Over 400,000 people were still without power two days before the marathon was to start.

Looked at pragmatically there were good enough reasons to hold the marathon. Many runners made substantial sacrifices, measured in time and money, to participate in the marathon, and they would be deeply disappointed. In addition, charities that sponsored runners would not get their expected contributions, and the city would lose about $340 million in marathon related spending, a significant sum, though trivial compared to the damage the hurricane wrought. Responding to citizens who felt the marathon would detract from the work of recovery, the Mayor assured them that the marathon “does use some resources, but it doesn't use resources that can really make a difference in recovery...There will be no diversion of resources." He added that, "If I thought it took any resources away from that, we wouldn't do that. We haven plenty of police officers who work in areas that aren't affected."

Perhaps sensing that pragmatism was not enough, Bloomberg also referenced a decision that the prior Mayor, Rudy Guiliani, took some two months after 9/11, to in fact hold the marathon. “I think Rudy had it right. You have to keep going and doing things, and you can grieve, cry, and laugh all at the same time. That's what human beings are good at." He added he had talked to Giuliani that morning, and Giuliani advised him to move forward: "New York has to show that we are here, and we are going to recover, and while we help people, we can still help companies that need business, still generate a tax base, and give people something to be cheery about in what's been a very dismal week for a lot of people."

The public reacted angrily, with people calling the decision selfish and unfeeling, while the Borough president of Staten Island, which had suffered great damage, called the decision “asinine.” A few hours later Bloomberg canceled the marathon.

One interesting question is, if Bloomberg was in fact unfeeling, what had he failed to feel? I don’t think it's sensible to say that he did not understand the public’s suffering. Rather, he failed to understand something more subtle, namely how the Marathon, if held, would lead people to feel that their suffering had been trivialized.

Bloomberg’s reference to 9/11 is telling. One can imagine holding a marathon after a terrorist attack --maybe even a week after -- if the event is experienced as a message to the terrorists and others that the city may be “bowed but not broken.” Under these circumstances the marathon becomes part of a narrative, which gives the disaster, in this case the attack, retrospective meaning. The narrative’s punch line is “we cannot be defeated” or “we represent life.” This message is embedded in a larger story about how people, when united, can defeat their enemies. Because an enemy launched the attack, people can feel that “an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us.”

The link between meaning-making and trauma is well established, and in fact is the basis for “logotherapy,” a form of psychotherapy developed by Victor Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist who was a concentration camp prisoner during World War Two. Logotherapy’s presumption is that we can bear suffering, and even grow psychologically from it, if we can infuse it with meaning. One reason that a personal trauma -- a rape, a deadly disease -- is traumatic, is because it is random. The trauma not only attacks our physical being but our belief that the world is orderly and that our life has some purpose. People who cope with trauma by discovering a meaning or purpose in it, for example, to live life fully, to help others who suffered, or to bear witness, are said to be resilient. While logotherapy has been called “the third Viennese psychotherapy,” to contrast it with Freud’s and Adler’s conceptions,  psychoanalysis can be thought of, in part, as a therapy for making meaning. The patient learns to tell the story of their personal suffering, where it came from and why, and in this way gains some psychological distance from it. 

People once saw meaning in natural disasters. Recall the tale of Jonah and whale. To avoid God’s injunction that he preach to the people of Nineveh, he escapes on a ship, which is soon lashed by a storm. Jonah knows that the storm is a message from God, and so, to calm the waters and save the people on the ship, he offers to be thrown overboard. But to those who accept a scientific worldview, the message of a natural disaster is that there is no message. While the natural world is our home it is also wholly indifferent to us. A comet could destroy most life on earth in an instant. That is why for example, Pat Robertson, the evangelist, insisted that hurricane Katrina, which resulted in New Orleans’ catastrophic flooding, was God’s message that abortion was a sin. This was the only way to preserve his conception that the natural world is orderly and meaningful. It is a measure of meaning’s salience that some people are willing to acknowledge that they are guilty and deserve to be punished, in order to give a disaster meaning. In this sense, the disaster strengthens belief. This is one reason why Orthodox Judaism is thriving in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

To be sure, in the longer run, many people, particularly those who were not directly affected, will draw out some meaning from this storm. To many, Sandy is even now a “message” that global warming imperils us, and that we need to take steps now, to save generations to come. But presently, people experience the storm and its impact as arbitrary. Indeed one feeling people have when faced with arbitrary outcomes, is the feeling that they have been treated “unfairly.” This feeling is a protest against randomness, but without denying it, as a religious person might. This also means that people are very sensitized to being treated unfairly in the disaster’s aftermath. This may be one reason that people in New York City, believed, despite the Mayor’s protestations, that the marathon would unfairly divert resources from the work of recovery to the plebian business of mounting a marathon.

One question is whether or not it is in the character of a pragmatist to be insensitive to these nuances of feeling and experience. I am inclined to answer, “at least sometimes.” Bloomberg is a very popular mayor, so much so that he persuaded New York City residents to change the city charter so that he could run for a third term! People appreciate deeply his focus on solving problem, using data in decision making, and planning for the long run. His administration was a respite from the polarizing politics of his predecessor, Rudy Guiliani, and from the racial politics of the mayor, David Dinkins, who preceded Guiliani. Pragmatists are practical people, who to their great credit and to our great benefit, are oriented to reality. That is why they are so good at solving problems. But their conception of reality can be too one dimensional – linked too tightly to the interplay between means and ends. They can’t see the reality beneath the surface.

This may account for Bloomberg’s clumsy rationale for mounting the marathon; “You have to keep going and doing things, and you can grieve, cry, and laugh all at the same time. That's what human beings are good at." The term “human beings” is an abstraction. Why not say “people” instead? One hypothesis is that his word-choice is a measure of his retreat from feeling, perhaps because as a pragmatist he cannot cope with its complexity. We say children are innocent because they do not recognize pain's necessity. We say that adults are naïve when they fail to understand feeling’s nuances, particularly its mixture of pleasure and pain. Perhaps it is not that Bloomberg can be unfeeling, but that he can appear naive. Perhaps this is one price we pay when we follow and reward pragmatists.