ParisTampaBlog

One has trouble, I have trouble understanding General McChrystal’s agreeing to be interviewed by the reporter for Rolling Stone Magazine.

Why? Because the General is our President’s man in charge of the war in Afghanistan, now in its ninth year and without an end in sight. And the President’s man doesn’t do Rolling Stone interviews.

So given the interview one has to wonder if the General, incredible as this may seem, understood his own position and what this meant in regard to his own behavior in public.

First there was his position as the designated leader of our armed forces in Afghanistan. How could he not have understood that a free-wheeling Rolling Stone interview would be anything but detrimental to the war effort, probably reducing his own chances, as the leader of that effort, to succeed?

And then there was his subordinate position in the chain of command to the President. For in spite of his attitude and actions this wasn’t his war.

How could he not have understood, not been aware that the interview would have been seen as a flagrant disregard of not only this President’s, but any President’s authority?

Now during the time of the General’s Rolling Stone Interview Errol Morris was posting daily, five altogether, pieces in the Times, all about what he called the Anosognosic’s Dilemma, the dilemma being that although something may be terribly wrong we may not be aware of it.

The first to use the term (from the Greek  meaning no knowledge of an illness, or “nosos”) was the French-Polish neurologist Joseph Babinski

who in 1914 used it to describe what he saw when patients with a complete paralysis of the left side of the body didn’t know they were paralyzed and even believed they were moving their left hand or leg when they weren’t.

Well it occurred to me while reading Morris that this was how I could make some sense of the General’s behavior. Couldn’t he also be seen as a victim, as suffering from the Anosognosic’s Dilemma?

Just as the hemiplegic would go on “moving” (not moving) his left arm and hand, so the General evidently went on believing that he was leading the war effort for his President even while in the irreverent company of his closest aids and talking simultaneously with them and with the interviewer from Rolling Stone for later publication.

I have to understand what happened as the General not being aware of what he was doing. He certainly acted as if he weren’t, as if he didn’t know that his words and the disrespectful remarks of his staff regarding the civilian authority would be seen as totally irresponsible, totally detrimental to the war effort, and ultimately undoing his own position as the leader of that effort.

In this case the nosos, or illness, was his own ignorance of the meaning of his words and action. Clearly the General had reached the very top of his profession without having learned that the positions awarded him along the way, and in most instances probably having earned them, came with their own code of responsible behavior.

Will he ever again be in a position in which he can demonstrate a new found awareness of that code? His chances in that respect may be no greater than those of the hemiplegic becoming aware of the existence of his own paralysis.

Why did I never hear about this before now? What is it? According to Wickipedia

“The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which “people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”

“Metacognitive,” that’s knowing about knowing. People are not aware, all people, of their incompetence. And with all due respect to Steven Weinberg there is and will be no final theory. We’re destined to continue stumbling along, and some of us while doing so thinking that we’re the smart ones.

Last week BP’s embattled chief executive, Tony Hayward, was criticized for attending a yacht race (while, of course, his oil continued to gush into the Gulf waters).

This week, in the picture below, we see President Obama at Ray’s Hell Burger in Arlington, Va.  enjoying a hamburger and fries with President Dmitri Medvedev of Russia.

While the two presidents chatted, clearly enjoying themselves and the burgers while gently readying themselves for the G-20 Summit meeting this weekend in Toronto, wars in the North Caucasus and Afghanistan continued to rage.

Of the three, the millions of barrels of oil spewing into Gulf waters, the fighting verging onto civil war in Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, North Ossetia, and the other North Caucasus republics, and in Afghanistan the seemingly inexhaustible Taliban fighters tying down some 100,000 American troops onto bloody, inhospitable lands, while simultaneously  terrorizing the long brutalized (and terrorized) Afghan population, — the oil may well be the least destructive.

In any case the leaders of our world probably do just as well to enjoy themselves, at yacht races and at Ray’s Hell Burger. For there’s probably nothing they can do, no steps they might take, by what, by remaining on the job, —by Tony’s remaining on a BP platform in the Gulf, to improve either these sores of our civilization, or any number of others.