Work diligently to discern the facts of the matter, and then use your principles to respond. - Thomas E. Ricks

We can all endeavor to do the same, pursuing the facts of the matter, especially about the past of our own country. Facts are impressively dual in their effects. “Truth and reconciliation” meetings in Argentina, South Africa, and in parts of Spain’s Basque country have demonstrated that facts are marvelously effective tools — they can rip down falsehoods but can also lay the foundations for going forward. For democracies to thrive, the majority must respect the rights of minorities to dissent, loudly. The accurate view almost always will, at first, be a minority position. Those in power often will want to divert people from the hard facts of a given matter, whether in Russia, Syria, or indeed at home. Why did it take so long for white Americans to realize that our police often treat black Americans as an enemy to be intimidated, even today? Why do we allow political leaders who have none of Churchill’s fealty to traditional institutions to call themselves “conservatives”? The struggle to see things as they are is perhaps the fundamental driver of Western civilization. There is a long but direct line from Aristotle and Archimedes to Locke, Hume, Mill, and Darwin, and from there through Orwell and Churchill to the “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” It is the agreement that objective reality exists, that people of goodwill can perceive it, and that other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter.

Lt. Gen. Zinni has distilled his experiences in a talk on “twenty lessons learned”that feels like a modern appendix to the Small Wars Manual. The earlier you go in, the better, he argues. Start planning as early as possible, and coordinate it with organizations like the United Nations and private relief groups. Assess the differences between your views of the situation and theirs. Coordinate everything, but decentralize execution. Know the culture. “Who makes decisions in this culture? What is the power of religious leaders? Of political people? Of professionals?”Zinni argues that this is probably where the American military fails most often, as it unconsciously seeks the levers of power that exist in its own society. “Truly, the decision makers are at the back of the tent. You have to find them.”Restart a key institution, probably the police, as soon as possible. But don’t offer well-intentioned help, such as extensive medical care, that you can’t sustain. Don’t set high expectations. “Don’t make enemies, but if you do, don’t treat them gently.

By having the self-confidence to apply the methods of scientific inquiry to human situations, they developed several new scholarly fields. In his magisterial study of the Enlightenment, Peter Gay states that Montesquieu invented sociology in The Spirit of Laws, that Edward Gibbon founded the modern writing of history with The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and that Adam Smith did the same for economics with The Wealth of Nations.57 (Xenophon’s Oeconomicus might from its title appear to claim to be a foundational document, but it really is about how to manage a household, which is what the word means in Greek.)58 Gay does not mention it, but Hume’s essay on “The Populousness of Ancient Nations” also was an early venture into creating the field of demography. Another Scot, James Hutton, came up with an astonishing new way to think about time, and so invented modern geology, a subject to which we will return. It is noteworthy that several of these innovative scholarly ventures — the ones by Montesquieu, Gibbon, and Hume — were rooted in the studies of the history of Rome.