Below the Fold: Knowing Just Enough to Know That I Don't Know Anything

I've heard it said that what you don’t know won’t hurt you. It was said by me.

The other day I was straightening up the dining room and under the table I noticed a collection of things that our dog had taken there for “safe-keeping”. There was a boot, an old running shoe of mine, some unidentifiable plastic items, 3 wooden pencils and a crusted-over stuffed animal with no eyes that my daughter had once loved. It had been a dog too, and maybe Dash felt threatened by it.

Anyway, I returned the boot (thankfully not destroyed) and the running shoe (which I had already destroyed by running in them) and put them back in their rightful spot. The rest I scooped up and threw in the garbage being sure to hide the stuffed dog at the very bottom so that my daughter would not see it. She hadn’t played with – or likely even considered –that stuffed dog in years and I knew that she would not be scarred if it simply remained forgotten forever.

What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. This is an example of that statement being true.

There are, of course, examples of situations in which this statement is not only patently false, it is inherently dangerous. For instance:

I’m hiking in the woods and I see a pretty flower that I want to pick and take with me. It’s in the middle of a lot of other plants…mostly green foliage…and I don’t know what poison ivy looks like. And I am allergic to poison ivy. Very allergic. This is an instance in which what I don’t know (the shape of a poison ivy leaf) could definitely hurt me.

In the most important of matters, the decisions we make and/or the actions we take based on what we do or do not know can actually hurt others as well. Lately, I have come to recognize that my own ignorance (and the general ignorance of most Westerners) about the Middle East has had disastrous results – international implications, in fact – for the people living there and for the world at large.

So I have gone on a learning quest – a reading binge made possible by the fact that I am not watching TV this month. Interestingly enough, I must have had an inkling as to my own ignorance about 2 years ago. At that time, I stumbled across a list of people compiled by Reuters who have been covering the civil war in Syria since the Arab Spring in 2011 and doing a thorough, unbiased job of it. For some reason, I created a Twitter list of all these people (10 in total) and told myself that I should check it periodically to keep myself informed.

I took advantage of this self-created, 21^st Century listserv exactly ZERO times.

But since Friday’s attack in Paris and in the days that followed with all of the…er…conversation about Syrians and refugees and ISIS and terrorism, I realized that what I knew about the war in Syria – and it IS a war – could fit in a thimble. The realization was magnified by a factor of 100 when I watched this 5 minute video created by Ezra Klein back in October. After watching this, I realized that what I knew about the war in Syria could fit in a thimble…for Tinkerbell.

And I knew that wasn’t good enough.

In my attempt over the last 4-5 years to remove the ugliness of American politics from my social life, I have also stopped reading about current events. These two things, at one time in my life, were hopelessly intertwined because I worked in politics and all of my friends did too.

I used to spend hours and hours reading research and policy papers on any number of subjects. It was a habit shaped by my years working on Capitol Hill where it was my job to flood my brain with as much information as possible on a given subject until I could speak and write intelligently about it. It was a really marvelous way to enter the workforce. Being informed and knowledgeable was seen as a positive quality. Sharing different perspectives was commonplace – especially among people my age who were still trying to figure out what we thought about the world around us.

Our parents had shaped our views until they handed us to our college professors who honed our outlooks a bit more. Now we had bosses, colleagues, and influences which were further shaping our policy perspectives and it was up to us to figure out what voices were our own and what voices belonged to other people. We did this together and because we were friends, we did it respectfully. Despite spendning each day reading and learning and soaking up all there was to know, I lived with the constant awareness of how much I still didn’t know. This type of environment can engender humility and, for me, this humility was an ever-present reminder that I didn’t (and still don’t) have all the answers.

The best part was that I was living in a vacuum in which fact-based arguments were appreciated – invited – by people regardless of their ideology. We had feelings about domestic and world issues, but our discussions were largely free from emotion and, more importantly, free from reactive response.

The real world offers no such vacuum though it has its share of unbreathable space, namely cyberspace and particularly social media. And I won’t go into the pros and cons of one environment over the other, but I will say this…there is a lot of reactive response going on, precious little true knowledge, and absolutely no humility. And it’s not just our leaders who are showing it.

It’s US. Me and you.

So, I’ve been revisiting my roots. I’m not going back to DC or Capitol Hill, but I am going back to some of the behaviors that I learned there that helped me grow, specifically, binge reading. Right now, the subject is the Syrian War and, peripherally, its relationship to the Islamic State. I am not qualified to have an opinion, engage in an argument, support a position, or judge a Syrian (or anyone else, for that matter) until I have at least tried to understand what is actually going on over there. As you saw in that video, there is much more to this than just Syria and ISIS. This bleeds into Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Russia, Iran, Iraq, Yemen, and a dozen other places. Everyone has an agenda and allies and enemies shift with each passing day. It can't be "boiled down" into one article, premise, opinion, or soundbyte and anyone claiming to do so is lying to you. There is nuance and complexity and…

There is no black and white about it.

If grey area is not your thing, then you will not like studying the War in Syria. Also, if you’ve been a supporter of US policy in the Middle East at any time in the last 60 years, you may not like the questions that this kind of examination will raise in your mind. So, if American exceptionalism is something that you need to embrace to the exclusion of self-edification, you should know that studying this might be for you.

But I hope you will not allow fear of knowledge to keep you from seeking wisdom outside of your normal circle of influence. What you don’t know can hurt you and it can actually hurt lots of people. We have to remember that the story of this violent and turbulent region is a story about people. They are unlike us in many ways, but just like us in many important ones. Like us, they long for security and stability and freedom and they are struggling to find a balance that gives them a fair amount of each. If we allow our leaders to construct a narrative in which these people are mere characters used to justify their agendas, then we are ignoring their humanity.

Below is a list of my resources so far. If you are already reading a lot on this subject and would like to add to my list, please do so in the comments. I’m looking for fact-based articles and thoughtful analysis from people with boots on the ground and feet firmly planted in reality. I'm not interested in rants or quips from people sitting behind a desk jockeying for airtime or trolling from behind a computer screen to collect “hits,” “likes,” “follows,” or “shares.” So, if you have things to share...I welcome them.

I’m regularly reading from these websites:

These are the people on my Twitter list – some because of what they share themselves from inside or nearby the conflict or because they tweet other interesting information about the war and other happenings in the Middle East:

Joshua Landis @joshua_landis (Director of the Center for Mid East Studies at the University of Oklahoma)
@BSyria (This is just a twitter feed that retweets other Syria-related tweets from Twitter – like a listserv inside my listserv)
Randa Slim @rmslim (she wears many hats and is an expert on Middle East affairs)
Jenan Moussa @jenanmoussa (reporter based in Dubai who works for Arabic Al Aan TV)
Laila Lalami @LailaLalami (novelist and essayist)
Laura Rozen @lrozen (reporter for al monitor)
Liz Sly @LizSly (WaPost Beirut Bureau Chief)
Hassan Hassan @hxhassan (author, Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Non-resident fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy

This is very good:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/inside-assads-syria/

And these are some of the articles that I (a) have already read, (b) am currently reading, or (c) am about to read:

Below the Fold

Thursday, November 19, 2015

Knowing Just Enough to Know That I Don't Know Anything

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