Hedgehogs, Berlin explained, "relate everything to a single central vision" through which "all that they say and do has significance." Foxes, in contrast, "pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory, connected, if at all, only in some de facto way."#1659•
The foxes relied, for their predictions, on an intuitive "stitching together [of] diverse sources of information," not on deductions derived from "grand schemes." They doubted "that the cloudlike subject of politics" could ever be "the object of a clocklike science." The best of them "shared a self-deprecating style of thinking" that "elevate[d] no thought above criticism." But they tended to be too discursive—too inclined to qualify their claims—to hold an audience.#1656•
Tetlock's hedgehogs, in contrast, shunned self-deprecation and brushed aside criticism. Aggressively deploying big explanations, they displayed a "bristly impatience with those who 'do not get it.'" When the intellectual holes they dug got too deep, they'd simply dig deeper. They became "prisoners of their preconceptions," trapped in cycles of self-congratulation.
These played well as sound bites, but bore little relationship to what subsequently occurred.#1684•
Little things add up in unpredictably big ways—and yet, leaders can't let uncertainties paralyze them.#1674•
[A] compass . . . [will] point you true north from where you're standing, but it's got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you'll encounter along the way. If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp . . . , [then] what's the use of knowing true north?28#1679•
Spielberg's Lincoln, therefore, shows actions taken across time (Berlin), the coexistence of opposites within a space (Fitzgerald), and a shifting of scale that echoes—why not Tolstoy? For both Lincolns, the one portrayed and the one who lived, grasped intuitively what Tolstoy tried to convey in his own colossal dramatization, War and Peace: that everything relates to everything else.
Perhaps that's why the great novelist, who rarely saw "greatness" in any leader, accorded that accolade posthumously to the martyred president#1666•
This worsens a problem Henry Kissinger identified long ago: that the "intellectual capital" leaders accumulate prior to reaching the top is all they'll be able to draw on while at the top. There's less time now than Lincoln had to learn anything new.#1729•
Historians, knowing that their field rewards specialized research, tend to avoid the generalizations upon which theories depend: they thereby deny complexity the simplicities that guide us through it. Theorists, keen to be seen as social "scientists," seek "reproducibility" in results: that replaces complexity with simplicity in the pursuit of predictability.
Both communities neglect relationships between the general and the particular—between universal and local knowledge—that nurture strategic thinking.
And both, as if to add opacity to this insufficiency, too often write badly.#1721•
It's much the same in most aspects of life, where we make such choices instinctively, or almost so. As authority increases, however, so does self-consciousness. With more people watching, practice becomes performance. Reputations now matter, narrowing the freedom to be flexible. Leaders who've reached the top—like Xerxes, or Tetlock's experts—can become prisoners of their own preeminence: they lock themselves into roles from which they can't escape.#6329•
Preface
Thucydides warned his readers, however, that he wouldn't be Herodotus. His history would refrain from attractiveness "at truth's expense." Its "absence of romance" might "detract somewhat from its interest," but he hoped for what Plutarch would later find in the remains of Athens: preservation from the effects of time, and hence, "a possession for all time." It would suffice, Thucydides wrote, to have his history judged useful by those seeking "knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it."#6382•
7
The past and future are no more equivalent, in Thucydides, than are capabilities and aspirations in strategy—they are, however, connected. The past we can know only from imperfect sources, including our own memories. The future we can't know, other than that it will originate in the past but then depart from it.
Thucydides' distinction between resemblance and reflection—between patterns surviving across time and repetitions degraded by time—aligns the asymmetry, for it suggests that the past prepares us for the future only when, however imperfectly, it transfers.
Just as capabilities restrict aspirations to what circumstances will allow.#6342•