David Brooks ain't so bad!

I've found a new reason to like David Brooks. Brooks is a senior editor at the conservative Weekly Standard, as well as a contributing editor at the Atlantic Monthly and Newsweek, and a regular on NPR and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer (where I often watch him doing his Friday roundup with Mark Shields). Although Brooks is definitely conservative, I've always admired his relative open-mindedness, and his ability to concede at least half the point whenever it's clear that the standard "conservative position" is flawed. (Compare this with conservatives such as Kate O'Beirne or Charles Krauthammer, who always seem to be in lock-step and "on message" with the Republican line of the day, no matter how ludicrous it might seem.) At the same time, he manages to retain his gravitas and avoid the sophomoric wishy-washiness that haunts, say, Tucker Carlson.

Brooks is also now a regular columnist for the New York Times, and I typically find his writing interesting and thought-provoking, even when I don't agree with it. But in Saturday's Times I found a Brooks column that I could heartily and unreservedly endorse. In fact I was jumping up and down with joy! (On the inside!) I happily found myself reading his piece, "The Art of Intelligence" - which, I realized, was not only a scathing critique of the U.S. intelligence services, but also a compelling "real-world" argument for something I am committed to: qualitative research methods!

The news hook is last week's release of a damning presidential commission report that the CIA got its Iraq intelligence "dead wrong" and today still knows "'disturbingly little' about the capabilities and intentions of other potential adversaries such as Iran and North Korea."

Brooks places this chronic underperformance within a decades-long historical context of success followed by chronic failure:

The years between 1950 and 1965 were the golden age of American nonfiction. Writers like Jane Jacobs, Louis Hartz, Daniel Bell and David Riesman produced sweeping books on American society and global affairs. They relied on their knowledge of history, literature, philosophy and theology to recognize social patterns and grasp emerging trends.

But even as their books hit the stores, their method was being undermined. A different group rejected this generalist/humanist approach and sought to turn social analysis into a science. For example, the father of the U.S. intelligence community, Sherman Kent, argued that social science and intelligence analysis needed a systematic method, "much like the method of the physical sciences." Social research - in urban planning, sociology and intelligence analysis - began to mimic the hard sciences.

This is a spin on the oft-head refrain that the CIA has long eschewed "humint," or human intelligence (spies on the ground) with machine intelligence (computers, satellites, etc.) But Brooks takes things much further. He blames the CIA's problems squarely on its infatuation with the scientific method to the exclusion of consideration of deeper, historical, hermeneutic analyses that the agency (and the prominent scholars who used to work with it) used to do so well. The trouble, says Brooks, is that this approach is where the money is. "The scientific method used by the C.I.A., and its technical jargon, can seem to have more authority (used to justify bigger budgets)." This has also led to serious overspecialization in what needs to be a more generalist field. Thus "academic analyses of society and world affairs are now often quantitative, jargon-laden and hyperspecialized. Historical works have gigantic titles and minuscule subjects - think 'Power and Passion: Walloon Shovel Making, 1723-1724.' It's all part of the same problem.

So we get decades of calamitous intelligence failures. This week the presidential panel on intelligence pointed to the same failings found by other reports. It said intelligence analysts "displayed a lack of imagination." They created artificial specialties - separating regional, technical and terrorism analyses. They built layers of hard analysis on fuzzy and impressionistic information.

The present commission, unfortunately, seems to be going down the same wrong path that has led so many commissions astray as "it tries to reorganize the bureaucratic flow charts to produce better results."

But the problem is not bureaucratic. It's epistemological. [My italics.] Individuals are good at using intuition and imagination to understand other humans. We know from recent advances in neuroscience, popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink," that the human mind can perform fantastically complicated feats of subconscious pattern recognition. There is a powerful backstage process we use to interpret the world and the people around us. When you try to analyze human affairs using a process that is systematic, codified and bureaucratic, as the C.I.A. does, you anesthetize all of these tools. You don't produce reason - you produce what Irving Kristol called the elephantiasis of reason.

Brooks concludes:

I'll believe the intelligence community has really changed when I see analysts being sent to training academies where they study Thucydides, Tolstoy and Churchill to get a broad understanding of the full range of human behavior. I'll believe the system has been reformed when policy makers are presented with competing reports, signed by individual thinkers, and are no longer presented with anonymous, bureaucratically homogenized, bulleted points that pretend to be the product of scientific consensus. I'll believe it's been reformed when there's a big sign in front of C.I.A. headquarters that reads: Individuals think better than groups.

As a manifesto for serious reconsideration of humanist, generalist area studies - and what anthropoligist Clifford Geertz called "thick description" - I can't think of a better argument for qualitative (i.e., naturalist, idiographic, emic) research than this Brooks piece. And it's all the more powerful because it reminds us that academic debates of this type need not be considered arcane, boring, and peripheral; rather, they can and do have enormous real-world consequences.

You go, David Brooks!