It happens at the start of every school year that a teacher
would receive a student who puzzles him. At times the student would show a high
degree of intelligence; at other times he would show the opposite. The way to
assess the intelligence of such a student is to probe his depth of
understanding in the subject where he seems to display a high degree of
intelligence.
It is important to do this because it often happens that a
student would come from an environment where he was immersed in a subject he
learned something about, but learned it at the superficial level only. Thus,
a probing of the depth to which the student understands the subject will help
the teacher determine the student's level of intelligence.
That same technique can be used to assess the level of
intelligence shown by the editorial writers of a publication – people that may
puzzle you at times by their erratic performances. It is not that their
intelligence or lack of it should be of interest to you; it is that you need to
know how much credibility you should assign to the points they make in the
areas where your knowledge is not complete.
We have an example against which we can apply that technique
and see what comes of it. The piece is a Wall Street Journal editorial,
published on January 31, 2013 under the title: “Hagel and the Shrinking
Gulliver”. The editors who wrote it begin with this confident assertion: “The
Senate needs to pin down the Defense nominee on big issues.” And they give their
reasons as to why it should be so. They say that a few things happened which
tend to negate President Obama's declaration to the effect that “a decade of
war is now ending.”
And they itemize those things: Israel bombed a neighbor yet again.
An American Commander in Afghanistan
has once again made a prediction that was not too rosy. The French conducted a
successful military operation in Mali . Egypt 's military chief has hinted
for the umpteenth time that if the street demonstrations do not end, he may order
the troops to intervene. The Chinese navy conducted another legitimate exercise
along its coastline. And the Pentagon announced plans concerning cyber defenses
and air bases in North Africa .
Based on that litany, the editors of the Journal draw the conclusion
that “war is not ending” which, in their view, negates the President's
declaration. And so, they go a step further and question the qualifications of
Mr. Hagel to be Secretary of Defense. To do that, they bring up the subject of
the Pentagon budget. Since your knowledge in this field is limited, you want to
know if you should believe what they say. How do you do that?
You do it by returning to the litany they say proves the war
is not ending. Knowing what wars the President was talking about, you ask: What
war are the editors of the Journal talking about? Do they consider the litany
they gave as proof that some kind of a war is still on? You go through the
whole article in search of an answer to that question. And this is what you
encounter at the very end: “The US
[is] the world's superpower. This has … kept Europe peaceful, Asia mostly
stable, the seas secure … and the US safe for nearly 70 years.
And so you ask: But what about the Korean War, the Vietnam
War, the Cuban revolution, the Bay of pigs fiasco, the Cuban missile crisis,
the Cambodian Genocide, the Rwandan genocide, the Balkan genocide, the Spanish
Revolution, the fall of Communism, the Eastern European revolutions, the
various South American revolutions, the Rhodesia/Zimbabwe transformation, the
South African transformation, the various African tribal wars, The Sri Lanka
civil war, The East Timor uprising and the hundred other wars that erupted in
the past 70 years? Don't they count for something?
If the world was manageable while those wars were happening,
why the panic now with a litany that only looks like this: Israel bombed a
neighbor yet again. An American Commander in Afghanistan has once again made a
prediction that was not too rosy. The French conducted a successful military operation
in Mali .
Egypt 's
military chief has hinted for the umpteenth time that if the street
demonstrations do not end, he may order the troops to intervene. The Chinese
navy conducted another legitimate exercise along its coastline. And the
Pentagon announced plans concerning cyber defenses and air bases in North Africa .
You see a puzzle here that leads you to conclude the editors
of the Wall Street Journal do not know in depth what they talk about. It is
that they were immersed in the subject for a while, and they have learned to
rattle off a few smart sounding utterances but these are superficial utterances
of the Smart Aleck kind.