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C H A P T E R 1 5 Legacies, Identities, Improvisation, and Innovations of Intelligence Philip H. J. Davies and Kristian C. Gustafson Tradition is a guide and not a gaoler. —W. Somerset Maugham L ike so many other institutions in human social and political affairs, intelligence is a field characterized by the presence of culture as a medium through which people both understand and act. As Talcott Parsons observed, culture may articulate both ends and means, but human action is ‘‘voluntaristic’’—that is, individuals act of their own accord but use culture rather than being directed by it.1 Culture tells us less what people will do than how they will go about doing it. Beliefs, concepts, values, and norms are, in the last analysis, toolkits to help human beings navigate this life individually and collectively. In this sense those who would try and set cultural explanations against ‘‘materialist,’’ ‘‘realist,’’ or ‘‘structural’’ accounts have fundamentally misunderstood not only the explanatory role and value of cultural approaches but also the actual processes whereby ‘‘realist,’’ ‘‘structural,’’ and ‘‘materialist’’ factors play into institutions, decisions, and actions. Therefore, those who reduce all human affairs to culture and ideology— concluding thereby that because something is socially constructed it is nothing / 287 / 288 / Philip H. J. Davies and Kristian C. Gustafson but social construction—are as mistaken as biological reductivists who would reduce human affairs to environmental natural selection and evolutionary strategy at the genetic level. In this sense there is an important parallel with physics. Uncertainty has been as axiomatic in social science as it has been in physics for far longer but in ways that have been less coherently articulated. Mayo and the Chicago team who first described the Hawthorne Effect demonstrated, in effect, that the human observing a system directed the humans being observed.2 It took modern physics two centuries to mine down far enough into the observable effects of matter and energy to reach the doubt-ridden realms of the Planck scale. By contrast, in the study of humanity by humanity, the magnitude of the observing system has always been the same as the magnitude of the system being observed, with all that this implies. Frankly, however, the hard sciences have proven rather better at managing uncertainty than the social sciences, where there has been far too much willingness to equate the uncertain with the unknowable and then to take that as a license to opt for tendentious, partisan , pleasing tales that cast the world in the light of preferred political preconceptions . In the process analysis is conflated with advocacy, and conviction substitutes for caveated estimation because, after all, the human mind does not manage uncertainty well or comfortably. And yet here is the rub: Intelligence, broadly or narrowly understood, is ultimately about managing uncertainty where one must and mitigating it when one can. At a certain level it matters little whether that management of uncertainty serves regimes that are benign or malign, actors that are state or substate, or governments or corporations—the process of knowing remains the same. It should be no surprise not only that both Indian and Chinese thinkers on intelligence should concern themselves with validating as well as collecting information but also that they should both do so through strikingly similar rules of threes. Thus Kautilya asserts that when information received from ‘‘three different sources it shall be held reliable’’ but ‘‘if they [the three sources] frequently differ, the spies concerned shall be either punished in secret or dismissed.’’3 As Sawyer notes in his seminal The Tao of Spycraft, the Chinese rule of three varies only in their tradition of trying to apply some epistemological reasoning to why it worked.4 Although the tale of the defeat of the king of the Sung Dynasty (who executed the first and second spy to bring bad news, convincing the third to lie) is used to illustrate the soundness of the rule of three and the idea of validation via multiple sources, other sources understood that ‘‘words act in such a way that their credibility stems from greater numbers. Something untrue, if reported by ten men, is still doubted; by a hundred is taken to be so; and if by a thousand becomes irrefutable.’’ Accordingly, the Lü-shih Ch’un-ch’iu observed that ‘‘the way words are obtained must be analysed. . . . If one learns something and analyses it, it will be fortunate; if not, it would be better not to have learned it.’’5...

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