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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   26704 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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I propose, in line with your Greek theme:

The Ephorate Option

The Spartans were famously martial, but they were also famously reticent to go to war. They would frequently hem and haw well past the point where the Athenians or Thebans would have jumped into battle. This was largely tied to the martial nature of Sparta's slave society: Sparta always had a weak birthrate and Helot supermajorities and could not afford to spend Spartan blood profligately.

What's changed from the past is that the current leader of the Red Tribe is something of a putative dove, loudly declaring the wars of the past twenty years to be mistakes, and in a sotto voce stage whisper calling dead soldiers suckers and fools. The Trumpian takeover of the GOP has left us with three consecutive presidents who ran promising to pull us out of Afghanistan and arguing that the war in Iraq was a mistake, that there was public outcry when Biden ripped the band-aid off and that we still have troops in Iraq for some reason is a kind of deep-state zombie inertia. No one with any credibility is telling young American men that the wars they will enlist to fight are just. On the Left, they have always been baby-killers, but when Clinton or Carter were president there still existed credible conservative institutions encouraging young men to join up for patriotic red-blooded reasons. Trump, with his anti-war schtick, has supplanted those conservative institutions.

Young Americans are increasingly against America's continued fealty to Israel. As the majority of America's foreign adventures are at root about Israel, this leaves little reason to join up.

If America wants young men to join the military, it needs to rebuild the credibility of the defense establishment as caring about its soldiers. Both in the sense of "don't throw lives away for failed nation building missions," and in the sense of looking after their souls, doing their best to make sure the violence they are called on to practice is righteous. Speaking autobiographically, I should have joined the military, I had all the qualifications and interests they were looking for, and was recruited intensely. But, at the end of the day, I simply disagreed with the wars we were fighting on a moral basis. So when I hear "recruitment crisis" and I see Red Tribe figures like Donald Trump catching up to where my family was in 2003 on the advisability of invading Iraq, I can't help but think that a lot of people are thinking the same things I thought in 2010.

We need to revamp how we go to war, and rework our foreign policy. We need to build a credible system by which we show that we are making intelligent foreign policy decisions. The SecDef needs to be on the job. The President needs to be competent. The Congress needs to do its job and assert authority over the war powers of the executive. We need to have faith that the military is doing the right thing, at the right time, for the right reasons. That will make people more interested in serving: if they know that their pledge of their lives and their sacred honor won't be wasted.

On a more prosaic note...

The Malcolm Gladwell Option

There might be little mechanical and procedural tweaks that need to be twucked that can fix things right up. Marijuana usage, for example, is still a black mark on enlisting without a waiver, while alcohol usage is mostly tolerated. This may not reflect modern cultural choices. Moreso a question for career officers than for enlisted: the famous mobility of army careers, with soldiers being moved around assignments constantly even in peacetime, more or less requires that your partner subordinate her life to yours. In a world of two career households, it's a tough sell to any woman I would have considered marrying: you'll have to follow me around, your own career will have to come second, but your career will probably produce more money than mine. I thought about this while talking to a friend from Singapore about reading From Third World to First about how they tried to make careers in the military more appealing, how if I were Singaporean and an army officer even getting deployed to the other side of Singapore is a jokingly short distance from family/friends/spouse's career, while in the USA joining up meant I might end up anywhere at any time even outside deployment in a warzone. Is my young wife going to sacrifice her legal/medical/programming career to my military career?

Speaking of LKY and Singapore, they faced similar problems early on with racial composition of their armed forces:

We faced another security risk from the racial composition of our army and police. Independent Singapore could not continue the old British practice of having a city three-quarters Chinese policed and guarded by Malay police and soldiers. The British had recruited mostly Malays born in Malaya, who traditionally had come co Singapore co enlist. Malays liked soldiering whereas the Chinese shunned it, a historical legacy of the predatory habits of soldiers during the years of rebellions and warlords in China. The question was whether the army and police would be as loyal to a government no longer British or Malay, but one the Malays perceived as Chinese. We had to find some way co induct more Chinese and Indians into the police and armed forces to reflect the population.

Ours was no easy task. We had to reorientate people's minds to accept the need for a people's army and overcome their traditional dislike for soldiering. Every Chinese parent knew the saying hao han bu dang bing, hao tie bu da ding (a good lad does not become a soldier, good steel does not become nails). We set up national cadet corps and national police cadet corps in all secondary schools so that parents would identify the army and police with their sons and daughters. We wanted the people to regard our soldiers as their protectors-a reversal from the days when army and police uniforms aroused fear and resentment as symbols of colonial coercion. People must admire military valor. As Keng Swee said in sorrow, "The Spartan approach to life does not come about naturally in a community that lives by buying and selling." I had to get people to change their attitudes. We also had to improve the physical condition of our young by getting them to participate in sports and physical activity of all kinds, and to develop a taste for adventure and strenuous, thrilling activities that were not without danger to themselves. Persuasion alone was not enough. We needed institutions, well organized, well staffed, and well directed to follow up the exhortations and stirring speeches. The prime responsibility was that of the ministry of education. Only if we changed people's thinking and attitudes could we raise a large citizen army like Switzerland's or Israel's. We gave ourselves a decade to accomplish this.

Looking at a lot of the moves Singapore made, an emphasis on making military careers compatible with professional accomplishment made significant inroads. I'm also in favor of conscription, less in the model of the draft historically, and more in the mode of an expanded and revamped National Guard* which most men would be expected to join.

*Really what I'm in favor of is replacing the system of police in our country with a militia made up of anyone under the age of 50 who wants to take a few shifts a month of acting as a first responder for public order/protection calls. The militia would be funded by a flat income tax, say .5%, on anyone who doesn't serve in the militia.

Data point of one, but the only Singaporean I've known loathed the army, loathed having been a conscript, and deeply resented the government for having deprived him of two years that he could have spent staying competitive with international students. He described a world of complete incompetence and lethargy, because none of the conscripts expect to stay on and therefore none of them have any incentive to work. They just rot for two years. And the cynicism has become institutional, so it's hard for even enthusiastic conscripts to escape the pull.

I'm torn on the subject, personally. The advantages of a well-run conscript system are clear, but it's expensive to run and encourages corruption and (often) dislike of the army. Similar to forced Irish teaching in Irish schools. The Brits used to have a fairly good system where you could sign up for the officer cadets (or something to that effect) and spend one weekend per month doing fun, interesting exercises that also made you a little bit of money. Most people didn't stay on, but many did and the ones who left still had acquaintances in the army and an appreciation for army life. We stopped doing it because it was too expensive. And I doubt that one could afford to do it for the poor bloody infantry.

I've known many young men from Singapore and this is a nearly universal opinion on their period of conscription. Its a waste of time and energy, no one wants to do it or cares about doing a good job, there often isn't really anything for them to do after they finish basic. There experience is more about what they can't do: start college, get a job, pursue a relationship. Most also express resentment that, while they are "unemployed in uniform" the women they just graduated with spend those same two years partying and sleeping with foreigners.

I hadn’t thought about the gendered aspect but you’re right. The Swiss 18 weeks seems like a much more viable form of conscription.

Similar to forced Irish teaching in Irish schools.

Threadjack, but I'm interested in the lessons drawn from this that can be applied to other language revitalization efforts. Young Cajuns usually find my partial speaking incredibly cool and wish that learning Cajun French was more available as an option.

And they successfully revived Hebrew in Israel. I don't know, I think it's some combination of bad timing and culture specific issues.

Re: bad timing, I will get some flack for this, but as far as I can see Irish and Scottish nationalism are heavily American- and returning-expat-influenced 'modern' nationalisms. In comparison to Israeli nationalism or Islamic nationalism, which are revivalist movements aimed at throwing off oppressors who prevented them from acting according to their ancient ways, they want to throw off the oppression of a British-tinged nationalism in order to become a modern, liberal, secular nation. The Irish people that I have known personally identified very strongly with chocolate-box Irishness but associated actual traditional Irish culture with backwardness and Catholic atrocities. There is a dislike of anything resembling ethno-nationalism that coexists uneasily with the explicitly nationalist (and anti-British) nature of the politics in both countries. Learning Irish is (I'm told) boring, compulsory, and was instituted by the bad old nationalists not the shiny new nationalists. It's resented in the same way that learning the Catechism is resented.

Re: culture, Irish and Gaelic were mostly spoken by the embarrassing parts of the country, backwards old country people that the cool crowd have no interest in associating with, and it's barely even spoken by those people. Learning Irish doesn't let you do anything cool, it's just something you have to put up with. The cool crowd therefore resent it, don't use it, don't make anything cool with it, meaning there's nothing cool you can do with it, and the cycle continues. A lot of Jews genuinely want to read the Old Testament and other religious documents in the original.

I'm aware that the above is really pretty insulting to Irish traditionalists. It's the anti-Irish-language perspective as I was told it by left-wing nationalists at an English university, recalled as accurately as I can and mixed with my own observations and those of an English acquintance who grew up in Ireland. Personally I think it's rather a shame.

TLDR: modern Irish nationalism is for various reasons surprisingly anti-Irish. Make sure that you have genuine ground roots support before making language teaching compulsory. Otherwise, sponsor making cool stuff in that language.

TLDR: modern Irish nationalism is for various reasons surprisingly anti-Irish. Make sure that you have genuine ground roots support before making language teaching compulsory. Otherwise, sponsor making cool stuff in that language.

On the other side, if you learn Irish Gaelic, you can be translator of official EU documents into this language.

And no one will ever check whether your translation is any good, no one will ever read EU regulations of banana size and curvature in Gaelic. Dream job for life.

Standard translation process for major institutions, EU included, is that translated documents will get proofread and possibly QA'ed, so at least someone will read that document.

https://toppandigital.com/translation-blog/welsh-road-sign-displays-out-of-office-message-in-translation-blunder/?amp=1

Government officials who requested a translation for a Welsh road sign thought they were receiving their translation via an email reply. They sent the text “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.” to Swansea Council for translation into Welsh and awaited a response. However, the response they received was Welsh for “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated”.

Officials assumed the response was the content they required and promptly approved the text for use on a road sign used to halt heavy goods vehicles near an Asda store in the Morriston area.

“When they’re proofing signs, they should really use someone who speaks Welsh,” said journalist Dylan Iorwerth.

Seriously, though, government work is as far as you can get from cool.

I think the advantage of conscription in Singapore that I'm trying to get at is that it increases the prestige of the army as a social institution, and the concomitant prestige of the career (non) commissioned officer corps. LKY is always about attracting the best.

Don't know about Singaporean system, but any prestige from conscription hinges on the implementation details. My hypothesis:

Conscription system where everyone is called up, avoiding draft is difficult, and candidates to officer and specialist tracks are selected by reliable, standardized tests and methods for IQ and other desiderata, compulsorily administered to all -> Military is unpleasant, but has some prestige to offset, because (a) if you made it to the officer track, your rank signals your IQ (b) no matter your personal rank, there is a high chance that in you observed relatively intelligent and competent superiors during your stint.

Conscription system where draft avoidance is easily possible -> Highly competent, affluent people who have most to gain from college or have family networks or otherwise good prospects of lucrative career have the highest opportunity cost from the draft -> They avoid the draft -> The majority of the elite in your country doesn't serve -> If you manage to nevertheless recruit competent officers, the elite won't observe their competence first-hand -> Avoiding draft correlates with elite status and signals good things, military career signals bad things. -> Prestige plummets.

Won't outline the failure mode where instead of standardized tests the officers are selected by either political patronage or nepotism.

Officer's rank absolutely offers prestige in Finland, even moreso in the old days than now (people unironically used to say that the Reserve Officer School offers better training for general leadership, in corporations and so on, than dedicated leadership courses), but it's probably still the case that young male job applicants are instructed that you shouldn't put your military rank in your CV when applying for jobs abroad, since it's... well, not a similar sign of prestige in many other countries, quite the opposite.

Has any conscription system ever placed officers through conscription? I was under the impression that officer corps always consisted of volunteers.

To my knowledge, Israel and Finland. I think both are offshoot developments the old German system, where a prospective officer candidates were volunteers but had to serve a lengthy period of time first in enlisted and NCO equivalent positions in regular regiments before and between officer school exams.

Basically, in the Finnish system, there are two sorts of officers:

Reserve officers: Every conscript starts as, well, a conscript, equal to all others. After eight weeks of basic training, the most suitable ones for command are selected for reserve NCO training, organized in their company, and after seven weeks of basic NCO training, the most suitable ones for further command then go to the Reserve Officer School, which can train them up to (generally) a major's rank, usually lieutenant's rank. They would then be activated in wartime but don't stay in the army after their conscript service are up (apart from refresher courses, of course).

Commissioned officers: These are commissioned for army service (training, rapid response etc.) during peacetime. They are trained at National Defence University, which takes applicants on the basis of exams like any other university, though you have to be a reserve officer (in some cases reserve NCO) to apply.

Huh, TIL. Looked it up, guess I was wrong. I was more used to the American system and assumed it was universal, I guess.

That's what I'm saying, judging purely by the chap I knew, it did the exact opposite, it instilled a lifelong contempt that otherwise he might not have felt. You cannot 'attract the best' and conscript every able-bodied man, they aren't compatible. If the army was prestigious (as in Rome) people would be queuing up to join of their own accord.

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