A response to Deresiewicz's, "An Empty Regard"

For those who followed the link in Monday's post to William Deresiewicz's article, An Empty Regard, I have something in addition to Greyhawk's ponderings for you to consider.

Occasional guest poster here and USNIBlog, Professor of English at the United States Naval Academy Bruce Fleming, has a interesting personal and philosophical take on it. The rest of the post is his. Well worth your time.

Professor Fleming, over to you.

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William Deresiewicz’s front page New York Times Sunday Review article (August 21, 2011) that the editors entitled “An Empty Regard” provided amusement value for military insiders with its initial photo of the mismatched insignia the model was wearing. Anybody who’s ever been to the Naval Academy must have been similarly amused by the Hollywood movie entitled “Annapolis but shot in the neo-classical buildings of a private school in Philadelphia, and completely unfaithful to the Academy (a mid slugs an officer). Both the newspaper’s treatment of the topic and this (really dumb) movie, both ostensibly about the military, are clearly aimed at people who don’t know much about their subject matter. What’s unsettling is when you have to conclude that the people who made them don’t either.

The problem with Deresiewicz’s article was not that it wasn’t true: it was. The problem is that it took center stage to air a completely trivial issue. The article and its presentation show how clueless both author and editors of “the newspaper of record” are about the real issues it all but avoided. Deresiewicz is an interesting guy, but he and his editors are outsiders both talking about and exemplifying their outsidership.

I think I “get” Deresiewicz. We wrote dance criticism together (!) in the 1990s for some of the same publications. He was an English professor for a decade; I’m in year 25 here in the English Department at the Naval Academy. Like me, he’s distrustful of what institutions like colleges do to individual products like literature, or individual pursuits like original thinking—so distrustful that he wrote a “what’s wrong with American education in general and Ivies in particular” essay for the American Scholar after he failed to get tenure at Yale. (My take on this problem was the essay “Leaving Literature Behind” for the Chronicle of Higher Education and the book on which it was based.) And the points he makes in his much-publicized address of 2009 to plebes at West Point, “Solitude and Leadership,” are things that every English professor at a service academy makes over and over: learn to think for yourself, don’t follow the herd. (Unlike Deresiewicz, however , I know that extrovert alphas will never be lovers of solitude, nor should they be, so he’s on the wrong track here.)

He’s not afraid to swing hard and wide, either: give him credit for having a pair. What bugs Deresiewicz about the military is what bugs him about Yale: according to him, it’s largely company (wo)men, lemmings, creatures of hierarchy, apparachicks (Gen. Petraeus is the exception that proves the rule, he says). The real issue in his article is this line, buried in the center: “Has the military really ceased to be the big, bumbling bureaucracy it was always taken to be?”

Of course not. Thus the troublesome point is not that the military gets universal respect these days: I say oohrah. About time we retreated from the universal lack of respect for the military of the post-Vietnam era. Sure, it’s too much love (to the point where even Park rangers are “heroes”) and it’s based on ignorance. Americans blow hot and cold on the military: now it’s hot, and that’s better than cold. My concern, however (as I said in a C-Span interview) is that the military can’t be addicted to the “sugar rush” (as I call it) of this public acclaim, because sure as shootin’ the public is going to blow cold again—and the military still needs to go on. That’s why it needs a self-image that is not based on this kind of “empty regard.”

The real issue is not the silly but sweet post-9/11 love for anything in a uniform. It’s that this blanket love will let the military continue being a bureaucracy that is prone to the ills of all hierarchical monopolies. (These are what I call the “structural weaknesses” of the military, in my recent book Bridging the Military-Civilian Divide.) The military has few external checks and balances (Congress doesn’t know squat, usually), and as anybody in uniform knows, the internal ones are very weak. Try opposing the whims of one of what the Army’s recent study called “toxic” leaders: 80 % of respondents to their survey said they had known one of these, and 20% had worked for one. Try, for that matter, getting a new idea off the ground that the old (wo)man doesn’t want to hear about. Combine this with the fierce military rejection nowadays of rare civilian criticism (this is close to Deresiewicz’s point) and you have trouble: no checks from within, those from without rejected (I’m thinking of journalists who uncover problems, like finding out that Pat Tillman’s death was due to “friendly fire”).

There’s nothing wrong with the current reverence for the uniform except that the military might begin to take it seriously—and conclude that they really are perfect. Now that’s a real problem: the insistence of the military that it’s morally more virtuous than the civilians it exists to protect. Why put your behind on the line to defend a bunch of bagits? Instead of this nonsense, I propose a new professionalism, a realization that the military is a tool of the civilian world, with the measure of its success being effectiveness, not whether it’s Boy Scout eunuchs (being “held to a higher moral standard”). Dissent from within has to be actively encouraged, and “leaders” taught that they can’t “lead” from the gut, but by looking at the evidence and encouraging others to share their views. Leading isn’t about imposing your will, but about getting the best out of your players. Some officers know this; everybody has to be reminded of it.

That’s a more realistic goal, I think, than Deresiewicz’s embittered ex-Ivy Assistant Professor of English who wants officers to be solitary thinkers (he’s got the military personality all wrong with that one). These are the real issues facing the military in America today. As for this uniform business: take the civilian love while you can get it, and enjoy it. You deserve it. But don’t take it too seriously.