The philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously divided thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs (like Plato, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen and Proust), who know one big thing and tend to view the world through the lens of a single organizing principle, and foxes (like Herodotus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Goethe, Balzac and Joyce), who know many things and who pursue various unrelated, even contradictory ends.
According to Joshua Cooper Ramo’s provocative new book, The Age of the Unthinkable, one study — in which hundreds of experts in subjects like economics, foreign policy and politics were asked to make predictions about the short-term future and whose predictions were evaluated five years later — showed that foxes, with their wide-ranging curiosity and willingness to embrace change, tended to be far more accurate in their forecasts than hedgehogs, eager for closure and keen on applying a few big ideas to an array of situations.
It’s a finding enthusiastically embraced by Ramo, who argues in these pages that today’s complex, interconnected, globalized world requires policymakers willing to toss out old assumptions (about cause and effect, deterrence and defense, nation states and balances of power) and embrace creative new approaches. Today’s world, he suggests, requires resilient pragmatists who, like the most talented Silicon Valley venture capitalists on the one hand or the survival-minded leadership of Hezbollah on the other, possess both an intuitive ability to see problems in a larger context and a willingness to rejigger their organizations continually to grapple with ever-shifting challenges and circumstances.
With this volume, Ramo, managing director at the geostrategic advisory firm Kissinger Associates and a former editor at Time magazine, seems to have set out to write a Malcolm Gladwellesque book: a book that popularizes complicated scientific theories while illustrating its arguments with colorful case studies and friendly how-to exhortations.
In drawing upon chaos science (explored in detail in James Gleick’s 1987 book, Chaos), complexity theory and the theory of disruptive innovation (pioneered by the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen), Ramo does a nimble job of showing how such theories shed light on the current political and economic climate while avoiding the worst pitfalls (like an overreliance on suggestion and innuendo and the use of unrepresentative examples) of Gladwell’s clumsy last book, Outliers.
But if Ramo is adept at assessing the precarious state of today’s post-Cold War world — in which nation states face asymmetric threats from the likes of terrorists, drug cartels and computer hackers — he proves much less convincing in articulating practical means of grappling with such daunting problems.
The central image that Ramo uses to evoke what he calls this “age of surprise” is Per Bak’s sand pile — that is, a sand pile described some two decades ago by the Danish-American physicist Per Bak, who argued that if grains of sand were dropped on a pile one at a time, the pile, at some point, would enter a critical state in which another grain of sand could cause a large avalanche — or nothing at all. It’s a hypothesis that shows that a small event can have momentous consequences and that seemingly stable systems can behave in highly unpredictable ways.
RSS