zenpundit.com

The Profession by Steven Pressfield 

Tequila Junction: 4th Generation Counterinsurgency by H. John Poole

Steve’s novel The Profession I have mentioned previously, but I confess that I am puzzled by the choice of book jacket on Tequila Junction, which looks somewhat like a children’s illustrated guide to COIN in 1980’s El Salvador. H. John Poole is a respected veteran and tactical expert and Tequila Junction carries the warm endorsements of General Anthony Zinni and William Lind. Maybe his grandson drew it? Odd.

In any event, small unit tactics are not a subject I pretend to know much about, so it will remedy a gap in my knowledge base.

Recall the “antilibrary ” discussion some years back, prompted by Nassim Nicholas Taleb?

The other day, I was having a conversation in the comments section regarding ancient Chinese philosophers with my learned friend Lexington Green, when I had cause to quote Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from his most recent book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable:

The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. he is the owner of a large personal library ( containing thirty thousand books), and separates vistors into two categories: those who react with ‘Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?’ and others – a very small minority- who get the point that a private library is not an ego boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real estate market allow you to put there. You wil accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growig number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call the collection of unread books an antilibrary.

A passage that immediately made me feel better about having resigned myself to falling further and further behind in reading the books that I keep purchasing ( I’m now also periodically finding myself going to IKEA to buy shelf extensions. I’ve resigned myself to that too).

Taleb was advocating building a library – an organized assemblage of books on a wide range of topics, of which the unread portion was your antilibrary. Libraries, private or public, are wonderful things, functioning in an earlier time as the poor man’s university. Andrew Carnegie endowed public libraries for that purpose and in past ages, wealthy patrons opened the doors of their private libraries to their favored scholars, like King George III did for Samuel Johnson.

My library is sizable but disorderly and eclectic. There are books on Turkic kingdoms and network theory, art history and classical economics, political memoirs and diplomatic papers, the “great books” and sci fi. And of course a great deal of books on strategy and history. My friends Lexington Green and Dave Schuler have far larger personal libraries and Lex’s, I can say firsthand, seems to be much better organized than mine ( though, admittedly, that would not be hard).

Recently, one of my uncles, an academic, decided he wanted to make me the eventual recipient of a major portion of his library, along with the funds to transport and shelve the books. This generous offer came with a proviso – that his collection is to be kept intact and passeed on only to someone else who would agree to keep it so. And it is really a collection and not a library. Naturally, I agreed

The difference between a library and a collection is puposeful focus and quality. My uncle decided on the advice of one of his mentors to really become a collector and decided to target the Hanoverian period of British history and only read and collect books that related directly in some way to the book previously read. He also specifically wanted to acquire rare editions and copies with the marginalia of important people from the period for purchase. My uncle also made a habit of going to the best rare and used bookstores (when he visits Illinois, Bookman’s Alley is his faviorite) wherever he happened to be. The uncle has been doing this for at least thirty+ years and has read his way forward to the early 20th century and in recent years, developed an extensive sub-collection dedicated to T.E. Lawrence.

Interestingly enough, none of this has anything remotely to do with his area of academic expertise (he has two doctorates; in a hard science and another in a medical specialty) but he’s made himself into more of an expert on the historiography of this period of British history than are most professional historians.The reason is a tunnel-like focus, which is the primary distinguishing characteristic between a building a general library and building a collection. There’s a comprehensiveness to a collection that becomes an end in itself.

The Profession by Steven Pressfield 

My friend Steven Pressfield has a new novel out, one that touches on many themes and issues discussed here at ZP, SWJ Blog, Global Guerrillas, Feral Jundi and the rest of this corner of the blogosphere. Sometimes fiction can be a lot more fun 🙂

You can read the first chapter here.

Will have commentary and review at a later date.

 [by J. Scott Shipman]

In Search of Civilization, by John Armstrong 

In Search of Civilization is a refreshing and erudite examination of civilization, how it developed in the past, negative present day connotations, and why it remains importance and relevant today. What follows is a detailed overview of Part One, and with any luck, the teaser will be enough to convince you to read this important book. For me, this is a truncated review. Normally, I would provide a 1200-1500 hundred word overview, but like Zen, I’ve been busy and wanted to share what I had with you. This books makes a nice foil for John Gray’s Black Mass, which I read recently but probably will not review.

Also, some books have wonderful finds in the bibliography. Back in the early 80’s I chased footnotes for about two years—and have no memory of what the original book was, but I went from one reference to another. Going forward, I’ll provide the titles from the bibliography that piqued my interest, which may also provide the you a little more insight on the works that influenced the author. Please let me know if this is or is not useful to you.

Part One Civilization as Belonging

Armstrong’s quest to define civilization began as he was reading a bedtime story to his son, and he advances that “with the possible exception of God, civilization is the grandest, most ambitious idea that humanity has devised.” From that introduction, Armstrong makes a compelling case for civilization.  He notes that it is difficult to get one’s mind around the concept since “civilization” touches everything. As a result, he offers that our ideas about “civilization tend to be rather messy and muddled.”

Armstrong goes on to frame civilization as “a way of living,” a level of political and economic development, “the sophisticated pursuit of pleasure,” and finally, “a high level of intellectual and artistic excellence.” Separately each of these, what I’ll call working definitions, made sense. But Armstrong rightly attempts to define, frame, contextualize civilization, not from historical perspective, but rather the philosophical in a way that is relevant to our times.

The actual word “civilization” is, according to Armstrong, not “fashionable” in our globalized world, particularly among those one would expect to be the “defenders.” He offers that civilization carries a “moral implication” whereby one society is somehow better than another, “fully human” or “superior.” And nations often advance the idea that they are better, more civilized, etc. Those defenders (in the arts and humanities) mentioned above have become “wary and negative” with respect to civilization. I’ll call this standard-less ambivalence based primarily on fear. Fear of “what,” you may ask. Fear of offending. Harvey Mansfield in City Journal made an excellent point with respect to political correctness:

“When there is no basis for what we agree to, it becomes mandatory that we agree. The very fragility of change as a principle makes us hold on to it with insistence and tenacity. Having nothing to conform to, we conform to conformism—hence political correctness. Political correctness makes a moral principle of opposing, and excluding, those of us who believe in principles that don’t change.”

Principles are a big part of civilization.A brief review of Samuel P. Huntington’s classic The Clash of Civilizations follows. Armstrong reminds of Huntington’s words: “In coping with an identity crisis, what counts for people are blood and belief, faith and family.” Armstrong recounts Huntington’s view of civilization a sense of “loyalty” and “shared identity.” Armstrong calls this an “organic conception of civilization;” witness the identity politics of the in the aftermath of 9/11 where it seemed the US, for once, stood as one. The phenomena can be found around the world, regardless race, religion, or ethnicity.  If there is a community of people, chances are there will be shared identities, but is this “sharing” civilization?

One of the strongest parts of the book is the emphasis he places on the “quality of relationships.” With the aforementioned “sharing” and “loyalty” Armstrong rightly asks about the quality of individual relationships and the impact on civilization. He compares the loyalty of religious believers to their faith to their loyalty to their civilization. Armstrong believes, and I agree, we share much more in common than one might, on first glance imagine. He says, “The rich achievements of any civilization are not in violent conflict, and in fact are on the same side in a clash between cultivated intelligence and barbarism. The irony is that such barbarism too often goes under the name of loyalty to a civilization.” Armstrong believes that a “true civilization is constituted by high-quality relationships to ideas, objects, and people.” In high quality relationships there is love and Armstrong sees civilization as “the life-support system for high-quality relationships.” Civilization sustains love; I like the implications.

The cultivation of high quality relationships tends to bring out the best in people.  He goes on to discuss the paradox of freedom—as we in the West live in cultural democracies. He asserts that vulgarity is “triumphant” because of our democratic ideals; the majority rules. Freedom comes with great responsibilities, greater responsibilities than living in a coercive state. At the level of the individual we make choices, satisfy appetites. “The civilizing mission is to make what is genuinely good more readily available and to awaken an appetite for it.”

Part Two Civilization as Material Progress, Part Three: Civilization as the Art of Living, Part Four: Civilization as Spiritual Prosperity 

References you may find of interest:

F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition

C.P. Snow, a lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”

Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy  A free online copy here.

 Kenneth Clark’s BBC television series Civilization

Bernard Berenson, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (1896)

T.S. Elliot, an essay called “Tradition and the Individual Talent”

[by J. Scott Shipman]

John Boyd’s work led me to zenpundit a few years ago, and I am flattered and grateful to be small part of such an intellectually stimulating community.

One Boydian theme that has driven my reading is the “observe” node of his OODA (observe, orient, decide, act). While “orientation” gets most of the attention in Boydian circles, I have come to consider “observe” to be the foundation of knowledge, thus action.  “What” we see, or as my friend Dr. Terry Barnhart points out, what we “sense” directs orientations, decisions, and actions.

This short post is something of a preview (and an opportunity to try-out WordPress which does not like Safari—I’m using an old laptop that is slower than slow). I’d like to share four books that have influenced my thinking and I plan to review the first two of them here in the coming weeks.

Patterns, Thinking, and Cognition, A Theory of Judgment, by Howard Margolis

Margolis’ thesis is “thinking and judgment…everything is reduced to pattern recognition.” Accordingly, he offers what he calls a P’ Cognition spiral, where the “spirals” represent a cognitive cycle and at the tops of the cycles represent a pattern recognition process. A review is in the works.

Language and Human Behavior, by Derek Bickerton Bickerton’s thesis is that “human cognition came out of language.” In this work, he defines language, explains the connection of language and evolution, and how language is integral to intelligence and consciousness. A review is in the works.

The final two books are  Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy, and Meaning, by Michael Polanyi

“We know more than we can tell.” Michael Polanyi

There are several points of intersection between Polanyi’s work and that of Margolis and Bickerton, but what I found interesting were Polanyi’s treatment of what he refers to as two types of awareness; subsidiary and focal awareness. In Personal Knowledge, he offers an example of driving a nail, “I have a subsidiary awareness [also called from awareness in Meaning] of the feeling in the palm of my hand which is merged into my focal awareness of my driving the nail.” Subsidiary and focal awareness, according to Polanyi, are mutually exclusive where if one diverts one’s attention to the “feeling in the palm” one is likely to miss the nail. Musicians will recognize the distinction of “looking” at one’s hands will almost always divert from the music on the sheet.In Meaning, Polanyi goes further and assembles what he calls “three centers of tacit knowledge: first, the subsidiary particulars; second, the focal target; and third the knower who links the first to the second. We can place these three things in the three corners of a triangle. Or we can think of them as forming a triad, controlled by a person, the knower, who causes the subsidiaries to bear on the focus of his attention.”

Synthesis: I believe these ideas connect. For if Margolis is correct, then the “awareness” expressed by Polanyi would be apprehended using pattern recognition; recognition of patterns using Bickerton’s ideas with respect to language. Language is pattern-based, and we use language patterns in sense-making/creation of meaning.

More to come.