It would be a grotesque exaggeration to leave you with the impression that the primary domains of policy analysis are the social sciences. If policy-relevant ideas and insights are what you are searching for, then you go to the humanities and arts as well.
Twelve very different examples discussed below are:
^Socrates, the Delphic oracle and a different public ethics
^What Shakespeare’s missing lines tell us about war
^Recasting 9/11 through a Gerhard Richter painting
^Rails, bluejays and clenched fists
^The entire point of revolt may be revolts
^Meredith, Hiroshige and one very mportant function of surprise
^Betterment and the brothers, William and Henry James
^Yes, no, but
^Escaping from Hell is a right!
^Christopher Ricks and the unimaginable
^The alternative histories of ideas (newly added)
^Reframing policy, implementation and evaluation: an analogy from music (newly added)
1. Socrates, the Delphic oracle and a different public ethics
I
What the Delphic oracle said about Socrates varies by the account of how Socrates defended himself at his trial for impiety and corrupting the young.
Plato’s version has Socrates’ recounting that the oracle pronounced no human being wiser than Socrates. Socrates then goes on to ask, Aren’t there others in fact wiser? In the process, he underscores knowing his own ignorance.
In contrast, Xenophon (a contemporary of Socrates and Plato) has Socrates saying the Delphic oracle pronounced no one freer, more just, or more prudent than Socrates. Socrates then proceeds by asking and answering nine questions which are meant to lead to that conclusion.
II
For my part, I like the updated composite version: wise enough to disagree, free enough to agree.
Though apparently not symmetrically so: Socrates being wise is entailed in Xenophon’s version, whereas being wise in Plato’s version also means knowing you’re ignorant of things. Or prudently put, just how free am I?
2. What Shakespeare’s missing lines tell us about war
The playhouse manuscript, Sir Thomas More, has been called “an immensely complex palimpsest of composition, scribal transcription, rewriting, censorship and further additions that features multiple hands”. One of those hands was Shakespeare–and that has contemporary relevance.
–The authoritative Arden Shakespeare text renders a passage from Shakespeare’s Scene 6 as follows (this being Thomas More speaking to a crowd of insurrectionists opposing Henry VIII):
What do you, then,
Rising ’gainst him that God Himself installs,
But rise ’gainst God? What do you to your souls
In doing this? O, desperate as you are,
Wash your foul minds with tears, and those same hands,
That you, like rebels, lift against the peace,
Lift up for peace; and your unreverent knees,
Make them your feet to kneel to be forgiven.
Tell me but this: what rebel captain…
The last two lines had been edited by another of the play’s writers (“Hand C”), deleting the bolded lines Shakespeare had originally written,
Make them your feet. To kneel to be forgiven
Is safer wars than ever you can make
Whose discipline is riot.
In, in to your obedience. While even your hurly
Cannot proceed but by obedience.
What rebel captain….
What has been effaced away by the deletion is, first, the notion that contrition is itself a kind of war and a safer war at that.
–According to the Arden Shakespeare, “The act of contrition might be described as wars because the former rebels would enlist themselves in the struggle of good and evil, and would fight against their own sin of rebellion.” In either case—contrition or rebellion—obedience is required. Actually, nothing was less safe than rebellion whose “discipline is riot”.
What had been scored out, in other words, from Shakespeare’s original passage is the clear accent on contrition and peace over continued upheaval.
–But the absence of contrition by those involved in the formulation and implementation of war policies is precisely what we have seen and are seeing today.
For to prioritize contrition would mean refocusing obedience from battle to a very different struggle in securing peace and security, a mission in which our ministries of interior and defence are notably inferior, be they in Russia, the US, China or elsewhere.
3. Recasting 9/11 through a Gerhard Richter painting
In a 2002 interview, painter Gerhard Richter was asked if he would paint the 9/11 terrorists (as he’d done earlier with Baader-Meinhof members): “Definitely not. This horrific form of global terror is something I cannot fathom”.
“September 11 bothered me more than I expected,” Richter admitted later. By 2005, when an interviewer asked about a small painting appearing to show the World Trade Center’s towers, Richter said: “These here are only failed attempts. I couldn’t get this stereotypical image of the two towers, with the some billowing out of them across the deep blue sky, out of my mind.” He went on to say that the painting in question “couldn’t work; only when I destroyed it, so to speak, scratched it off, was it fit to be seen”.
–Below is his September, a 2005 photo-painting of the event and relatively small at approximately 28” x 20”:
The image you are seeing was rendered from a photograph showing the south tower of the World Trade Center as it was hit. The specific photo was, in Richter’s words, “very typical…Colorful—red, yellow, fire” “I painted it first in full colour, and then I had to slowly destroy it. . . ”
“I failed,” he told a friend; the painting “shows my helplessness. In German, my scheitern, failure.”
–Really? Is the painting in a failed state? Look at September again. Do you see the active, living absence of the deep red and yellow that initially tripped Richter up? By extension, do you see the active, living absence of the new democracies to come into being this century from presently failing states, including—dare we say—parts of the US?
4. The entire point of revolt may be revolts
–For Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, 18th century German Enlightener, the point is not for the sculptor or painter to portray a crisis at its climax, when visualizing a single moment. Better to choose a moment before or after the apex of destruction, so as to allow the viewers’ imaginations freer rein over what is to come. That way, Lessing argues, the narrative continues in an arc of reflection that is not cut short by any climax’s overpowering intensity:
[S]ince the works of both the painter and the sculptor are created not merely to be given a glance but to be contemplated. . .it is evident that the single moment and the point of view from which the whole scene is presented cannot be chosen with too great a regard for its effect. But only that which allows the imagination free play is effective. The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine. And the more we add in our imagination, the more must think we see. In the full trajectory of an effect, no point is less suitable for this than its climax. There is nothing beyond this, and to present to the eye what is most extreme is to bind the wings of fancy and constrain it, since it cannot. . .shun[ ] the visible fullness already presented as a limit beyond which it cannot go.
Instead of picturing Ajax at the height of his rage and slaughter, better he be depicted afterwards in the full realization of what he has done and in the despair leading him to what comes next.
–One problem with today’s crisis scenarios is the preoccupation with or fixation on a visual climax. Obviously post-apocalypse can be pictured as even deadlier, but the point holds: In today’s catastrophe scenarios, the worst is imagined and imagination stalls there–like shining deer at night–in the glare of it all. Our unrelieved stream of crisis scenarios is itself proof that a prophesied climax can’t do all the talking.
–So what?
Any disappointment that one or more revolts–Occupy, Yellow Vests, Hong Kong protests, Arab Spring, the Extinction Rebellion–have not culminated into “far-reaching substantive change” is but one scenario. One only, because the climax scenario may not be the most fruitful, suggestive moment to focus on anyway, let alone be overawed by. The entire point of revolt may be revolts.
5. Rails, bluejays and clenched fists
Eudora Welty, American author, wrote a short story where “bluejays lighted on the rail,” which prompted one reader to reply: “Dear Madam, I enjoyed your stories, but bluejays do not sit on railroad tracks.” On further reflection, Welty conceded that this too had been her own experience. Yet there the bluejays still sit in the Library of America’s definitive edition of Welty’s work.
That’s the view from the inside out; there is also outside-in. We know through photographs that when Picasso was painting Guernica, he had a powerful image of a clenched fist raised high. That image, however, was painted away under what we see today.
To bring to light all these present-but-absent bluejays and absent-but-present clenched fists parallels the challenge of identifying what’s missing in major policy arguments. Clenched fists matter now more than ever, here; rail tracks without those bluejays still matter, there.
Yes, of course, this bringing to light is difficult, but less so than being in the dark might suggest. “Things shine more brightly to an observer who is in the dark,” conceded Diderot, the French Enlightener. A blank canvas, according to visual artist Gérard Fromanger, is ‘‘black with everything every painter has painted before me’’.
How different from the reactions of those confronting opaque policy. Let’s sweep the table clear, wipe the slate clean! As if it’s best to start over by missing what is already there.
6. Meredith, Hiroshige and one very important function of surprise
What I’m missing right in front of me is coming to see in the lines from a George Meredith poem–
In tragic hints here see what evermore
Moves dark as yonder midnight ocean’s force,
Thundering like ramping hosts of warrior horse,
To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!
–that “horse” and “shore” are anagrams, and then ask: To what effect or difference does this make for my reading? (E.g., as if “ramping hosts of warrior” reversed into a “faint thin line”.)
It’s also coming to see in the Hiroshige print–
that the waves of water and night-light are produced by the underlying grain of the woodblock, and then ask: To what effect or difference does this make for my viewing? (E.g., as if the female image is slipping side-ways out from the grain-waves.)
The vast majority of us, of course, are inexperienced and untrained in reading for anagrams or seeing the technique of kimetsubushi at work. We must instead be distracted to take at least a second look. For the inexperienced, the way to be sidetracked or distracted is by surprise—in this case, the surprise of finding the grain-wave pattern on your own or an oddity in the “ocean’s force” being contraposed by “horse” to “shore.” Even if afterwards Meredith’s lines remain mediocre and Hiroshige’s print astonishing, overlooking complexity is that simplification taken for granted which robs us of surprises that inform.
Note the most plausible reason for not seeing what is unseen—“Well, the reality is that it’s just not there at all”—turns out to be least plausible when living in a complex world of many components, functions and interconnections. In this world, new connections can and are to be uncovered all the time where not-knowing, inexperience and difficulty are ever present.
7. Betterment and the brothers, William and Henry James
I
In the first decade of the 20th century, sculptor Hendrik Anderson and architect Ernest Hébrard conceived of a World City unprecedented in scale and purpose. They promised a far better way to solve what was wrong with humankind and their designs and plans were eventually published as Creation of a World Centre of Communication.
In the final stages of preparing the volume, Anderson wrote his friend, novelist Henry James, seeking the latter’s help in reviewing and improving the work. James was appalled by the enormity of the project:
. . .[W]hen you write me that you are now lavishing time and money on a colossal ready-made City, I simply cover my head with my mantle and turn my face to the wall, and there, dearest Hendrik, just bitterly weep for you. . .I have practically said these things to you before—though perhaps never in so dreadfully straight and sore a form as today, when this culmination of your madness, to the tune of five hundred millions of tons of weight, simply squeezes it out of me. For that, dearest boy, is the dread Delusion to warn you against—what is called in Medical Science Megalomania (look it up in the dictionary). . .What I am trying to say to you, gentle and dearest Hendrik. . .[is] that you are extemporizing a World-City from top to toe, and employing forty architects to see you through with it. . .Cities are living organisms, that grow from within and by experience and piece by piece. . .and to attempt to plant one down. . .is to—well it’s to go forth into the deadly Desert and talk to the winds.
The language may not be yours, but the point remains all ours: Cities work only beyond design. More, they work because of their complexity. Betterment works where blueprints for progress and economic growth don’t.
Henry James also provides what may be the first glimpse of the importance Americans were to give to “high reliability” as the apogee of what can be achieved beyond design. He writes in the third person about his experience at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria early in the 20th century,
The amazing hotel-world quickly closes around him; with the process of transition reduced to its minimum he is transported to conditions of extraordinary complexity and brilliancy, operating—and with the proportionate perfection—by laws of their own and expressing after their fashion a complete scheme of life….a synonym for civilization. . .[O]ne is verily tempted to ask if the hotel-spirit may not just be the American spirit most seeking and finding itself.
II
His brother, William James, American psychologist and philosopher, had a different take on what made him better off, but resonating with his brother’s letter to Anderson. For William James, “hotel-spirit” went too far:
A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds on the borders of Chautauqua Lake…Here you have a town of many thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means of satisfying all the necessary lower and most of the superfluous higher wants of man. . .You have, in short, a foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and dark corners….And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: “Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage. . .to set the balance straight again.”
I’d like to think that somewhere just ahead of William James’s “set the balance straight” and just before Henry James’s hotel-spirit of “extraordinary complexity and brilliancy” is where you find betterment as good enough.
8. Yes, no, but
Lionel Trilling said of 19th century American writers “they contained both the yes and the no of their culture”. To the contrary, Gore Vidal said: Most Americans cannot tolerate yes and no; it always has to be yes or no. Though here as Robert Frost put it in his Notebooks, “yes and no are almost never ideas by themselves”. How might that be so?
“Education begins with the word no, and begins as the self-education that is called repression; this no has to be persuaded to turn into a yes,” Adam Phillips tells us, “and this requires another person.” Frost and Phillips are to my mind spot-on: Yes and no don’t go far enough, if they’re treated as ideas so much outside human interaction and contingency.
A character in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives asks of Mexican term: “If simón is slang for yes and nel means no, then what does simonel mean?” This is difficult to answer because any answer must be difficult if it is to matter:
And I saw two boys, one awake and the other asleep, and the one who was asleep said don’t worry, Amadeo, we’ll find Cesarea for you even if we have to look under every stone in the north…And I insisted: don’t do it for me. And the one who was asleep…said: we’re not doing it for you, Amadeo, we’re doing it for Mexico, for Latin America, for the Third World, for our girlfriends, because we feel like doing it. Were they joking? Weren’t they joking?…and then I said: boys, is it worth it? is it really worth it? and the one who was asleep said Simonel.
Simonel: not really yes and no, but rather not quite one or the other. I’d like to go where the term insists that “yes” and “no” matter only when followed by the qualifying “but. . .”
9. Escaping from Hell is a right! (new added)
(You need at least 30 minutes for this entry.)
Set to music by Frederic Rzewski (pron. JEV-skee), the first part of his Coming Together is based on text from a letter of Sam Melville, anti-war protester and convicted bomber, who was incarcerated at Attica. He was shot and killed in the 1971 Attica prison uprising.
Part Two, ‘Attica,’ uses the reply of another uprising leader, Richard X. Clark, just after being release. Asked how it felt leaving Attica behind, he said: “Attica is in front of me.”
Rzewski draws hope to and from those words for us.
10. Christopher Ricks and the unimaginable (newly added)
The literary critic, Christopher Ricks, elaborates an insight from the Oxford English Dictionary (OED):
‘Many adjectives in -ABLE suffix have negative counterparts in UN- prefix, and some of these are attested much earlier than their positive counterparts, the chronological difference being especially great in the case of UNTHINKABLE.’ The OED at this point withholds the dates, but here they are: unthinkable, c. 1430; thinkable, 1805.
Christopher Ricks (20210. Along Heroic Lines. Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 240
This notion that humans started by making important what’s unthinkable is suggestive. Even though the OED finds “unimaginable” preceding “imaginable” chronologically, both record the meaning of making imaginable and making unimaginable.
So what? I work in a field where what is not imaginable is unimaginable. The thought that we start with unimaginable disasters and work our way to rendering them or others imaginable hasn’t really occurred to me.
Currently, we start with the worse-ever floods and earthquakes in the US and then say, by way of comparison, the M9 earthquake off of the Pacific Northwest will be unimaginably worse. We don’t say in my experience: As unimaginable disasters are indescribably catastrophic, we must narrow our focus to something like a M9 earthquake in order to frame what we know and don’t know about worse-ever floods and earthquakes that have already happened in the States.
Upshot? Frankly, neither term, imaginable nor unimaginable, is good enough for the present without going into details. The skills we are talking about are those of making more or less (un)imaginable.
11. The alternative histories of ideas (newly added)
If a researcher only ever studies one political context, then the horizons of explanation are constrained because of selection bias. If one only studies the United States, without comparison to other countries, then this leads to a sample selection bias where one cannot answer why the United States has comparatively high poverty. To paraphrase [sociologist and political scientist, Seymour Martin Lipset], poverty scholars who only know one country, know no country.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10446494/
For a time, my serious reading centered on histories of ideas, like those of poverty and progress. Once I started reading Isaiah Berlin, there was no going back. That was the pull side of the attraction to abstractions.
The push side came from all those unsatisfactory, partial discussions about how “power” determined those ideas. “Power” has proved to be an instantly fissiparous concept, namely, all those varieties of capitalism, realpolitik, and modernities, to name just three other entangled constellations. The latter discussions are unsatisfactory, at least for me, when they stop short of recording the actually-existing practices on the ground–say, then and there versus here and now–even while admitting all this differentiation. Ideas that move humans are those abstractions that can be detailed contextually, right?
To put it differently, histories of ideas are my kind of abstractions. What is insufficiently abstract, again for me, is the weird undifferentiation that comes with the comparative absence of histories of the highly various and contingent practices at stake when filling in the details.
If a history of ideas is such that you can’t fill in the details of enacting those ideas, then to take that history seriously is like having to believe that parents of the Virgin Mary conceived her by no practical means so that she too was born free of messy human sin.
Please note: “comparative” absence of details, not their “total” absence. There are rare exceptions, albeit unreviewed in the academic, let alone popular, media.
For an example of the kind of history of ideas that goes further by identifying and comparing practices associated with those ideas, I can think of no more formidable book than the recent: Michael Sonenscher (2023). After Kant The Romans, the Germans, and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought. Princeton University Press.
12. Reframing policy, implementation and evaluation: an analogy from music (newly added)
Although most songwriting teams in the Great American Songbook wrote music first and lyrics second, most studies of music-text interaction in this repertoire still evince a lyrics-first mindset, in which the music is viewed as text-setting. In this article, I propose the opposite approach: considering lyrics as a form of music-setting, in which the lyricist’s superimposition of a verbal form (the rhyme scheme) upon the composer’s pre-existing musical form counts as an act of analysis. . . .
Not all performances from this era make the same changes as Hepburn [Audrey Hepburn singing in the 1957 film Funny Face]. But her performance is nonetheless representative of an evolutionary process that propagates throughout this repertoire: the composer supplies a musical form; the lyricist superimposes a different form above it; and the performer implicitly revises the music to better tally with the lyrics.
John Y. Lawrence (2023). Lyricist as Analyst: Rhyme Scheme as Music-Setting in the Great American Songbook. Music Theory Spectrum XX: 1 – 15 (accessed online at https://academic.oup.com/mts/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/mts/mtad015/7492927?redirectedFrom=fulltext)
For some, it’s the shortcut: Policy is about writing the lyrics, implementation about making those words real, and evaluation about assessing the good and bad in those words and performances.
That policy instead is the music and that implementers are like lyricists trying to find, among many possibilities, an implementation that fits better than others offers a revealing twist. Also revealing is the notion that “fits better” means “fits suggestively” for ongoing interpretations: namely, future evaluations, formal and informal, of the policy-as-implemented are performed in ways that offer up nuanced interpretations of what is seen, heard and done.
Revealing? For one thing, this suggests that the closure posed to policy by its implementation is not once and for all as long as evaluations (interpretations) are ongoing (literally, performed). In this way, repeated evaluation, not implementation on its own, is a de facto policymaking without closure. Or if you will, this is its own kind of democracy.
———————
Other principal sources
Bell, M. (2002). James and the sculptor. The Yale Review 90:4: 18-47
Bolaño, R. (2008). The Savage Detectives. Picador.
Cavell, S. (1979). The World Viewed. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA
Clark, T.J. (2013). Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica. Princeton University Press: Princeton & Oxford.
Ferris, W. (2013). A map of minds and imagination: An interview with Eudora Welty. The Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) 89(4): 222-238.Flaubert, G. accessed online on August 12 2017 at https://www.scribd.com/doc/187244/Flaubert-Gustave-Dictionary-of-Accepted-Ideas-1954)
French, P. (1980). Three Honest Men: Edmund Wilson, F.R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling. Carcanet New Press: Manchester, UK.
Frost, R. (2006). The Notebooks of Robert Frost. (R. Faggen, Ed.) The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA.
Gaiger, J. (2017). Transparency and imaginative engagement: Material as medium in Lessing’s Laocoon. In: A. Lifschitz and M. Squire (eds) (2017). Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry, Oxford University Press: Oxford, UK: 279 – 305
Hall, D. (1979). Remembering Poets. Harper & Row: New York, NY
James, H. (1946). The American Scene: Together With Three Essays from “Portraits of Places”. W.H. Auden (ed.), Charles Scribner’s Sons: New York
James, W. (1900). On Some of Life’s Ideals. Henry Holt and Company: New York, NY
Linderborg, O. (2023). The history of the Socratic Problem. Antigone (accessed online at https://antigonejournal.com/2023/01/history-socratic-problem/)
Phillips, A. (2006). Side Effects. Hamish Hamilton: London.
————- https://www.thebambamblog.com/2012/01/gerhard-richters-september/ & http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/33188/gerhard-richter [at the time of writing, live links]
Ricks, C. (2021). Along Heroic Lines, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK: 19 – 55, 240.
Salle, G. (2018). “Escaping from Hell Is a Right!”: The Case of France’s ‘Q.H.S.’ (1975–1982).” Chapter 7 In: Prison Breaks–Toward a Sociology of Escape (eds. T.M. Martin and G. Chantraine), Springer eBook (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-64358-8).
Shatz, A. (2010). Desire was everywhere. London Review of Books, December 16, 9–12.
Sir Thomas More (2011), ed. John Jowett (Arden Shakespeare, third series. Bloomsbury, London)
Storr, R. (2010). September. A History Painting by Gerhard Richter. Tate Publishing, London
Trilling, L. (1957). The Liberal Imagination. Doubleday & Company: Garden City, NY.
Vander Waerdt, P.A. (1993). “Socratic Justice and Self-Sufficiency. The Story of the Delphic Oracle in Xenophon’s Apology of Socrates”. In: Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, 11. 1-48
Van Es, B. (2019). Troubles of a glorious breath. TLS (March 22) Vendler, H. (2015). The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar: Essays on poets & poetry. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 
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