Barnett - Keeping my eyes on the prize
Dateline: above the garage in Portsmouth RI, 28 December 2004
Quiet day going through rest of past blog posts (October through now), cataloguing ideas for the sequel. Tomorrow is the Big Think that puts it all in order, or at least creates the plan for what unfolds over three-dozen days.
Or nothing comes to me and I freak out completely because the contract just arrived in the mail from Putnam . . ..
I keep struggling with the notion that this book isn't going to be a compilation of future trends, predictions, etc., nor a tour d'horizon in terms of country-by-country descriptions, nor a giant reply to PNM critiques, nor a literary tour of the host of other foreign policy books recently written. Other people do all those sorts of books better than I could, so I have to keep reminding myself what it is I'm really trying to do here, and that is simply take the logic of PNM and extend deep into the future. I have the power of the approach, and now I'm going to really use it.
So the book is at once a description of how positive we could make the international security environment in the year . . . say 2025, plus a description of the tasks we'd need to complete and the institutions and rule sets we'd need to construct to get to that future worth creating, along with plenty of descriptors and sign posts for the journey foreseen.
That's what I'm trying to lay out. So it won't be a book that's written along the lines of, "If I can't find some other book or article that already said this, then I won't either!" Like the upcoming Esquire article (and even the one in Wired, I'm not interested in limiting the logic to that which people today find realistic, but extending it to that which people of tomorrow can find feasible (plus I want to write at something approaching that mix of density and speed). So it will be a book written not to impress the senior realists, but the upcoming idealists. It should fire the imagination without straining credulity.
Why I'm saying all this is that, in going through the huge number of references in the blog and reading a dozen or so books, I keep fighting the notion that I'm collecting data or "proof" per se, as though anyone is going to buy this logic extended into a future vision because I've got good endnotes or something. Instead, the book needs to read like a how-to description of getting from A to Z, if I were forced to plot it all out in a defensible, practical fashion.
You can't write that like some future history, as quaint as that approach is, but you can scenario-ize it here and there, present-tensing the account as you move through time. But you need to stay on top of it; you need to own it—as Mark Warren likes to say. In effect, you're writing it out exactly as you'd do it—if given the chance.
Sure, you can write a book about how nothing works out and there's loads of future conflict. The store shelves are full of those. But a realistic roadmap toward an ideal outcome, now that's different, not one full of caveats, and could-be's, but full of optimism and a sense of purpose in explaining itself.
That kind of book isn't a long one, so shooting for roughly half the length of PNM (actually, PNM's original target) makes sense. Keep it lean and tight, running almost at essay speed throughout, and then I'll let Mark demand that I fill in the gaps as he defines them in the editing process (he keeps predicting it will be roughly 100,000 words, no matter what I say).
So if PNM was mostly history and diagnostics, with a big dollop of prescriptions and rule-set enunciations, then the sequel is going to be one big exploration of one grand horizontal scenario—an unfolding future worth creating.
In short, all the fumbling through articles and the assembling of putative footnotes is—by and large—an exercise in training more than serious preparation. I need to write what I need to write, and then go back and slip in references as they make sense, not build this piece around references per se. The narrative will drive this, not the data points. |
