Arthashastra

Ancient wisdom and intelligence hedging.

Last week I started reading in one of my favorite genres, that of spycraft, a new comprehensive history of the art and science of strategic intelligence. The book is The Secret World: A History of Intelligence by Christopher Andrew. There are two things I have gotten directly from the book which are new and exciting to discover, and another I am beginning to piece together from the overall view of history that it is giving me. Let’s start with the two that go in that bucket I call ‘Brain Spew’.

The Role of Divination
I’ve long had respect for religion in ways that weren’t fully self-serving. I came to this revelation while reading Ishmael Reed back in my 20s. Reed made me think that it was logical to be polytheistic. So at some point I declared that I believe in every god there ever was, with my aim to gain all knowledge anyone could ever have. The key sentence in my mind was ‘Religion was our first formalized education’. Consequently, the formalization of science, medicine and philosophy began to round out all of our knowledge. But none of that study, especially during those times when people generally didn’t live much beyond the age of 50, was as completely liberating as it could be today when proportionately more of us can grow old enough to become wise. Even as these protean disciplines were taking shape, we still retained the idea of God as infusing our world with knowledge and meaning. The idea that God would inevitably favor his faithful is a matter to take on faith and so many did. We could always fall back on faith and its pre-requisites to order and shape our priorities in the midst of confusion and indecision.

There are no atheists in the foxhole is not really true. There are people who feel most alive and full of purpose when death is the consequence of a misstep. It’s more accurate to say that the gallows focus the mind.

So the ancients needed to have a fully baked sense of confidence in areas where scholarship was incomplete. Once again, unlike those I wrote about in The Pessimist’s Edge, they like we Stoics believe that there is order in the Universe; we believe that there is purpose in the structure of everything that is possible. Even in irrational numbers like Pi, there is some ultimate and measurable meaning. Those of us who believe the Universe is not unending chaos and chance will search for generations for Planck’s Constant. There is prophesy in discovery. And so those ancients went looking for God’s wisdom in all the wrong places.

Romans, for example, would splatter the blood of a flamingo on a seer and interpret the pattern to foretell the outcome of a battle. Sailors at war would bring boxes of chickens aboard and attempt to divine the meaning of how quickly they eat corn thrown in front of their opened cages. They prioritized this kind of knowledge as much more important and significant that that dictum well understood by students of Sun Tzu “Know yourself and know your enemy”.

So the failures of the Roman legions, for example at the legendary Battle of Cannae owed much to the fact that the great general Hannibal had no respect for divination but used military intelligence. Imagine a military headquarters in which one general’s tent had spies and scout reporting on the enemy’s readiness for battle and in the other camp the general was inspecting the liver of a sacrificed calf.

According to Livy, the Romans discovered that one of Hannibal’s spies had been active in Rome for two years and cut off his hands to deter others. But other Carthaginian spies remained undetected. Rome’s intelligence, by contrast, was so feeble that the arrival of Hannibal’s large force in northern Italy took it by surprise. Not even the extraordinary news of elephants crossing the Alps seems to have percolated to Rome.

Andrew, Christopher. The Secret World: A History of Intelligence (The Henry L. Stimson Lectures Series) (p. 72). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

The Role of Intelligence
I read The Art of War and went through daily Tao meditations in my late 20s, but I didn’t realize that Sun Tzu was only discovered by the West just after the turn of the century in 1910 by a Brit named Lionel Giles who wrote the first English translation of the ancient text. As I’ve read further into Andrew’s history some fascinating details emerge, not only about the origins of MI5, CIA and NSA but how they were haphazardly organized in their beginnings.

In some ways, modern Western governments made similar mistakes as those of the Romans vis a vis contempt for the ways and means of their enemies and full faith that their own worldview was sufficient to provide constant victories. Publius Quinctilius Varus, the Roman governor of Germania in AD 7 regarded the barbarians in his charge to be unworthy of study.

“But Varus was so convinced of the inferiority of the barbarian Untermenschen that he paid no attention, just as two millennia later Hitler woefully underestimated the ability of the Slavs to resist his war of conquest in Eastern Europe.”

Two other great ancient texts that emphasize the necessity for not only the concept of intelligence but provided structural advise for the staffing and infrastructure of an intelligence organization are the Mahabharata and the Arthashastra both originating in India and translated from Sanskrit. From the Mahabharata:

A king shall have his own set of spies, all quick in their work, in the courts of the enemy, the ally, the middle and the neutral kings to spy on the kings as well as their eighteen types of high officials. The different types of spies are as follows: • Inside their houses: hunchbacks, dwarfs, eunuchs, women skilled in various arts, dumb persons, mlecchas ; • Inside their cities: traders, espionage establishments; • Near the cities: ascetics; • In the countryside: farmers, monks; • Frontiers: herdsmen; • Forest dwellers, such as shramanas and foresters.

Andrew, Christopher. The Secret World: A History of Intelligence (The Henry L. Stimson Lectures Series) (p. 101). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

So What About Us?
I’ve asked the question as to what is reasonable to assume about the permanence of America and its experiment in an open society. What I fundamentally believe its firmest challenge is its ability to sustain a large Peasant population willing to compete for Genius standing based on merit. When open competition dies, so dies the network effects of having a large population. When only insiders can profit from rigged hierarchies and regimes of truth, corruption is inevitable, and we are back to playing tribal, pre-modern games of divination, rather than having ordinary boots on the ground participating in the HUMINT necessary for effective governance.

It is in the context of Peasants on the down low that the Art of War gives guidance with regard to that HUMINT. These would be patriots in service to Constitutional authority and defense of civil rights here in the US.

Hence the use of spies, of whom there are five classes: (1) Local spies; (2) inward spies; (3) converted spies; (4) doomed spies; (5) surviving spies. 8. When these five kinds of spy are all at work, none can discover the secret system. This is called “divine manipulation of the threads.” It is the sovereign’s most precious faculty.

Sun Tzu. The Art of War (p. 3). Wilder Publications, Inc.. Kindle Edition.

So having patriotic citizens produces a force multiplier, even if they are ‘hunchbacks, dwarfs, eunuchs, herdsmen, forest dwellers, ascetics’ and all sorts of unlikely suspects. Of course this goes both ways. Subversive networks can make excellent use of the same sorts of peasants operating in secret, to great effect. Ultimately, who wins the battle depends upon whether or not at bottom, the sovereign powers are depending on divinations or ground truth.

As I’ve said before, the truth doesn’t automatically set you free, it binds one to obligations. If on the other hand, you believe in fantasy, cause and effect don’t matter. So where does this leave us? It leaves us with the opportunity to separate ourselves from the believers in fantasy and divination with competence in ground truth and the ways and means of intelligence. It means we need to be aware of all the tools of deception that might be used for or against us. It means the wisdom of the ancients may lie hidden for centuries until wise leaders pay it mind.

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As I get through the book, not only will I read the text and the subtext, I will take useful references to other scholars like Christopher Andrew. This is the new open source intelligence in the open society. We may have a deluded or corrupted Ivy League. We may have handwringing alarmists who see Nazis and genocide everywhere. We may have cancel culture and governance by populist polling. We may have legions of countercultural spies in our midst. But we also have truth and reality. We have our self-possession and discipline to keep us from the temptations of fantasy. And quite honestly, we have a Constitutional Republic which is energized by a large population, the framework upon which every modern nation can freely operate. We have the examples of our own history and the wisdom of the ancients. I think we’re going to do OK.

But I’m still prepping. More on that later.