zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — addendum to an earlier post ]
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Blog-friend Michael Robinson pointed me towards some interesting materials today that are relevant to my earlier post Of dust and breath, and I’m drawing here on his various emails to present them to you.

Each of these stories has more details than can be mentioned here: in each case, the link will take you to further riches.

1.

As Michael points out, “The ‘celebrity memorabilia,’ ‘sports memorabilia’ market — and also the ‘film memorabilia’ stuff is completely analogous to relics” featuring “individual players ‘worn’ unwashed game shirts or ‘Gone With The Wind Dresses’ and the like”.

His reference here for further reading is to Tim Munby‘s Cult of the Autograph Letter in England (1962), which “traces the rise of these sentimental phenomena in what after all was a Protestant Culture”. Michael notes, “if memory serves I think it simultaneous to the beginnings of Methodism, though from memory Munby draws no parallels”.

2.

Moving on to religious collectibles (assuming for a moment that sports memorabilia don’t qualify, not a necessary assumption), he points us to an article in the Toledo Blade today titled Ex-Toledoan sleuths out biblical relics for collectors, which discusses Scott Carroll‘s work in putting together the Green Collection, selections from which are currently on display at the Vatican:

Former Toledoan Scott Carroll doesn’t break into dusty tombs or dodge poisoned arrows, but the charismatic professor’s globe-trotting adventures in amassing the world’s largest private collection of rare biblical texts and artifacts have earned him the reputation of “the Indiana Jones of biblical archaeology.”

Mr. Carroll … has purchased nearly 50,000 ancient biblical papyri, texts, and artifacts since November, 2009, for the Green Collection, funded by Steve Green and the Green family. The Oklahoma City-based owners of 499 Hobby Lobby retail stores in 41 states, the Greens have been bankrolling Mr. Carroll’s collecting with the ultimate goal of having the items displayed in a nonsectarian Bible museum.

“I tell the Greens that I trust them to know where to put a store, and they need to trust me to stock the shelves,” Mr. Carroll said in a telephone interview he gave The Blade from Rome, where the Green Collection this month opened an exhibit at the Vatican called Verbum Domini, or Word of the Lord. The exhibit, which is free and open to the public, features 152 artifacts displayed contextually in settings ranging from re-creations of the Qumran caves where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered to a monastic scriptorium and an excavation of a Roman garbage city in Egypt.

I liked this passage, too…

Mr. Carroll said he has to laugh at opening an exhibit in Vatican City, seat of the global Roman Catholic Church, when he thinks of his childhood run-ins with the church.

“It’s kind of ironic because I was suspended and expelled from several Toledo Catholic schools in my upbringing,” he said. One of the expulsions, he added, was for setting fire to a church when he was in grade school.

“I chuckled at length talking to cardinals about my expulsions,” he said. “I was an athlete and rather rambunctious as a child — and that is putting it mildly. I was too active, not very self-disciplined, and ran into trouble.”

Reminiscing about one’s setting a church on fire as a youth sounds like an intriguing was of breaking the ice with their Eminences.

3.

Michael also drew my attention to this account of Rabbi Menachem Youlus [depicted above], “a self-described ‘Jewish Indiana Jones'” according to the New York Times – Indiana lookalikes seem to be cropping up all over! – who for years “told stories of traveling to Eastern Europe and beyond to search for historic Torahs that were lost or hidden during the Holocaust” but recently admitted he had lied (NYT, Rabbi Admits Torah Tales Were a Fraud, February 2):

“Between 2004 and 2010, I falsely represented that I had personally obtained vintage Torah scrolls — in particular ways, in particular locations — in Europe and Israel,” he told Judge Colleen McMahon of Federal District Court. “I know what I did was wrong, and I deeply regret my conduct.”

4.

Finally, from the world of Islamic art, Michael brings us another tale of collectors and their sometimes disreputable practices — this time from The Economist and having to do with the 16th-century illuminated version of Ferdowsi‘s epic Shahnameh, with its “lyrical calligraphy on gold-spattered pages” and “258 painted miniatures”, purchased at auction and “broken up” [as also depicted] – to the horror of collectors and bibliophiles – by Arthur Houghton :

In 1976 Houghton auctioned seven of its paintings at Christie’s for £863,500 ($1.6m): nearly four times more than the $450,000 he had paid for the whole book. He gave 78 pages to the Metropolitan where he was chairman of the trustees. When he died in 1990, 120 pages remained in the manuscript. These went back to Iran in 1994 in a swap for “Woman III” by Willem de Kooning, an abstract expressionist painter. Each side of the swap was valued at $20m.

5.

Hypothesis: all collectibles are talismans, all talismans are sacred.

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Further addendum:

I’d intended to post this as a comment, but the comment function seems to be off — will try to fix that — but Michael’s most recent post to me included a pointer to a still current offer of a highly-collectible Americana twosome:

Available for order today from The Historical Shop, Metairie, LA

ADDENDUM:

Zen here – dealing with an internal server error as it relates to comments and pings on Charles’ post. Unable to turn comments back on at the present time – only this post seems to be encountering problems. Trying to fix.

ADDENDUM to the ADDENDUM:

Comments are now open.

Dual Top Billing!  New Criterion (Thomas Bruscino)- “The New Old Lie” 
Rethinking Security (Adam Elkus)- On the War of Art 

The former is the smart essay making the rounds. The second is the smart blogospheric reaction to it. Here are samples:

For Schwarz, this was Bierce’s greatest attribute: to cut through the phony cant of the war’s causes, “including the North’s smug myth of a Battle Cry of Freedom (still cherished by many contemporary historians, as it flatters their sense of their own righteousness).” Bierce’s cynicism was not just the result of a painful individual experience that allowed him to produce affecting works of art; it was an identification of the universal truth of war.

….This conceit has long been de rigueur among professional critics of high culture. In his introduction to Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson equated human war to the aggression of gangs of baboons and sea slugs: “at bottom the irrational instinct of an active power organism in the presence of another such organism.” Only humans, whether they are Napoleon, or the Nazis, or Americans, justify their instincts in terms of “morality” and “reason” and “virtue” and “civilization.”

….Over the past half century, scarcely an American student has studied Great War poetry without finding out that Wilfred Owen produced the greatest poem of the war. With its horrifying depictions of the suffering and death of fighting in the trenches, his poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” proved “the old lie”—that it is sweet and fitting to die for your country. Tellingly, we would be hard-pressed to find a student these days who has read “Dulce et Decorum Est” in its original form by Horace. After all, the Roman poet could not possibly have produced art if it contained such sentimental pap.

and from Adam:

There are two paramount problems with the dominance of strategic nihilism in art. First, it does not accurately represent the conflicts it depicts. While Ambrose Bierce may have mocked the Civil War, it was deadly serious for both the Confederate and Union forces. Whether fighting out of an idealistic loathing of aristocratic and retrograde Southern slave society or a desire to build a more perfect Union, war fever was an undeniable (and historically documented) fact. Wilfred Owen may have accurately depicted the horrors of World War I, but his writing only depicts one phase of the Western Front. World War I was a mobile war in the West in 1914 and 1918 and was completely mobile in the East. The African, Middle Easter, and Central Asian dimensions of the conflict are mostly unheralded. Owen’s experience, however, is continuously privileged over other and equally valid experiences.

SWJ Blog (Robert Killebrew) –Well, They’re Not About Taking Over the Government 

A few years ago Latin American specialists began warning the defense community at large that the Mexican cartels constituted an insurgency in the actual sense, though one that was strategically different from the ideologically-inspired ones with which we are all familiar. By now, the weakness of the oft-repeated response that “Well, they’re not about taking over the government” ought to be plain. Sure they are. The pattern of cartel corruption of local governments in some areas of Mexico makes that plain. They just care about influence and compliance with their wishes, not about traffic law and picking up the garbage at the curb.

Some still think this is only about crime. It is not. Considering the full scope of criminality and terrorism in today’s world, on a spectrum ranging from the local gangs inside the United States to the confluence of the cartels, international terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and criminal states like Iran and Venezuela — there are others — it seems obvious that what we’re seeing is a new wrinkle in warfare itself, consisting of the blending of the huge resources of the black economy (estimated at a fifth or more of the world’s GDP) with transnational state and criminal organizations that wage economic, cyber and kinetic warfare outside the bounds of what we have come to think of as “established” rules of warfare.

Nir Rosen –Q&A: Nir Rosen on Syria’s armed opposition and Islamism and the Syrian Uprising

Nir Rosen is a very, very controversial figure, putting it mildly. While I find his politics to be radically left-extremist, I can’t fault Rosen’s willingness to crawl through hellholes to report important stories firsthand, much like Robert Young Pelton, David Axe, Michael Yon or Robert Kaplan.

ISW – Syria’s Armed Opposition

The institute for the Study of War is the influential think tank run by the Kagans that, after CNAS, is the most closely associated with COIN and the “surge” in Iraq.

CNAS – Pressure Not War: A Pragmatic and Principled Policy Towards Syria

Title is self-explanatory, author is Marc Lynch.

The Atlantic (Joshua Foust) –Syria and the World’s Troubling Inconsistency on Intervention

Commentary (Michael Rubin) – Mrs. Clinton, Leave Sri Lanka Alone!

(Hat tip to Bruce Kesler)

AFJ (Frank Hoffman) – A New Principle of War

Chacago Boyz – Chicago Send-Off, with Guinness, for Neptunus Lex and “Engineers vs humanities….”

Michigan War Studies Review –Barbarous Philosophers: Reflections on the Nature of War from Heraclitus to Heisenberg and Tirpitz and the Imperial German Navy

 Eide Neurolearning Blog –Metacognition, Math, and the Brain 

Ribbonfarm –Hall’s Law: The Nineteenth Century Prequel to Moore’s Law

[ by Charles Cameron — targeted killings, the one and the many, qualitative and quantitative approaches, statistics and analogy, sacrifice, rethinking thinking ]
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Albrecht Durer, Christ before Caiaphas, from The Small Passion.

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I seem to be clearing the decks with some scattershot smaller posts today, and will hopefully return to the matter of Esther, Bibi and Iran shortly – the sheer mass of interesting aspects there threatens to overwhelm me.

Here’s a brief note, from one religious angle, on the targeted killing on citizens who are found to threaten national security.

I would like to stress that as usual, my purpose in writing is to open up lines of thought, not to point to a particular conclusion: I see myself as a voice in conversation, not as a decider.

But there’s more than that. I am trying to rethink thinking – to define a way of coming at complex problems that’s polyhedral, polyphonic – because if there’s one property that’s common to the major problems we currently face, it’s that they are not linear, they are not single-sided, they are not black and white.

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I laid out some preparatory thinking on the “openness” this requires in yet another post earlier today.

Another aspect of this rethinking would be the willingness to make extensive use of analogy — and analogical thinking, while extremely powerful, also carries with it its own particular risks — so I would like to repeat another caution that I have suggested before. If we are to engage the riches of juxtaposition and analogical thinking — to open up those “new avenues” on thorny problems — we need to be very clear that our use of such analogies by no means implies moral equivalence, any more than for those using statistics, correlations necessarily imply causation.

We need to make a precision tool of analogy — to sharpen its blade — with a clear recognition both of what it can accomplish, and of what safeguards it demands of us if we are to avoid its pitfalls.

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Example:

In these times when the use of drones to kill targeted US citizens — and indeed presumed innocents such as the 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki – is justified in the name of national security, the reason given by the High Priest for the death of Jesus in John’s Gospel bears reflection:

The context as given in John 11.47-53 is worth considering in full:

Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation. And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not. And this spake he not of himself: but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation; And not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad. Then from that day forth they took counsel together for to put him to death.

There’s a lot going on there, isn’t there?

On the one hand, Caiaphas quite clearly views Jesus as a dangerous trouble-maker whose rabble-rousing threatens the entire Jewish people with destruction — and wants him eliminated.

But there’s also the way the gospel turns the tables on Caiaphas, and reworks his authorization of the killing of Jesus into an unwitting prophecy of the latter’s sacrificial self-offering for the redemption of all humankind.

That is also remarkable.

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As I said above, my interest here is not in taking sides in the argument regarding drone strikes or targeted killings, but in opening up new avenues of thought – reminding us in this case that “one for many” arguments, pro and con, have been with us a long time.

And dare I suggest that the High Priest’s argument, together with the Evangelist’s skillful way of turning it on its head, offers us a stunning instance of how difficult it can be to reconcile qualitative with quantitative thinking — the interests of the one with those of the many? And perhaps too, that for an immortal deity (viewed now from within the faith perspective of Christianity) to make of himself a mortal sacrifice, could be an indicator of just how paradoxical that kind of difficulty really is?

[ by Charles Cameron — Iran, unknown unknowns, Madhyamika philosophy and a blessed unknowing ]
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image from Jackson Pollock / AustinKids—
an artist’s representation of a wicked problem to be untangled?

1.

Dr. TX Hammes, who will need no introduction to most ZP readers, wrote a few days back in On Bombing Iran, A False Choice:

While there has been some discussion of Iran closing the Straits of Hormuz, there has been no consideration of other Iranian actions – mining harbors overseas (using merchant ships), major attacks on oil production chokepoints globally or major terror attacks using the nuclear equivalent explosive power inherent in many industrial practices. In short, bombing proponents assume Iran will be an essentially supine enemy and not attempt to expand the conflict geographically or chronographically.

Iran is a classic wicked problem. Any “solution” brings a new set of problems. Lacking a solution, the strategist’s job is to think through how to manage such a problem.

My train of thought now departing the National Defense University on Dr Hammes’ platform will make its way with stops at Hans Morgenthau, Jeff Conklin and Richard Feynman to a final destination deep in the heartland of Buddhist Madhyamika philosophy with Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel.

2.

Drs. Francis J. Gavin and James B. Steinberg‘s recent Foreign Policy piece The Unknown Unknowns carried the subtitle:

If the past half-century of American political history has taught us anything, it’s that we can’t possibly know the consequences of bombing — or not bombing — Iran

and opined:

Based on our experiences — one of us a former senior policymaker, the other a historian of U.S. foreign policy — we are convinced that the “right” answer, but the one you will never read on blogs or hear on any cable news network, is that we simply cannot know ahead of time, with any degree of certainty, what the optimal policy will turn out to be. Why? Even if forecasters could provide probabilities about the likelihood of a narrow, specific event, it is simply beyond the capacity of human foresight to make confident predictions about the short- and long-term global consequences of a military strike against Iran.

3.

It appears that this sense of unknowing has application beyond the specific question of whether or not to bomb Iran. Blog-friend Peter J Munson just the other day quoted Hans Morgenthau in a short SWJ piece titled Gentile: Realities of a Syrian Intervention — using a Morgenthau quote that he also features as an epigraph to his book, Iraq in Transition: The Legacy of Dictatorship and the Prospects for Democracy.

So that’s Iran, Iraq and Syria — but the Morgenthau quote itself, from his Politics among Nations, is even more general in application:

The first lesson the student of international politics must learn and never forget is that the complexities of international affairs make simple solutions and trustworthy prophecies impossible.

Okay?

4.

And it goes further. Love that quote from Laurence J Peters that Jeff Conklin uses as the epigraph to his seminal paper on Wicked Problems:

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them

Next up, here’s the Nobel physicist Richard Feynman speaking in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a Horizon / Nova interview, illustrating the approach Morgenthau takes to international relations as applicable to the grand issues of philosophy, religion and science:

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean.

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And how far is that from Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, student and wife of the lama Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, writing in her book on Madhyamika, The Power of an Open Question (p. 58):

Maybe experiencing complexity brings us closer to reality than does thinking we’ve actually figured things out. False certainty doesn’t finalize anything. Things keep moving and changing. They are influenced by countless variables, twists and turns … never for a moment settling into thingness. So maybe we should question the accuracy or limitations of this kind of false certainty. Conflicting information confuses us only when we’re trying to reach a definite conclusion. But if we’re not trying to reach a conclusion in the first place — if we just observe and pay attention — we may actually have a fuller, more accurate reading of whatever we encounter.

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Zen, too, welcomes this “open ended” approach in its working with koans, those mysterious and / or paradoxical riddles and / or poetic statements and / or legal cases for which such teachers as Dogen Zenji had such affection. In the words of Shozan Jack Haubner:

The searching, open-ended nature of koan work yields the kind of answer, however, that frustrates easy analysis, not to mention that most exquisite of all human pleasures: being “right.” For, ultimately, koan practice teaches that as long as a question is alive in the world around us, it should not — indeed, cannot — be settled once and for all within us. Koan practice does not put life’s deepest issues “to bed.” It wakes these issues up within us, waking us up in the process.

or consider this, from Lin Jensen, An Ear to the Ground: Uncovering the living source of Zen ethics:

Judgments on right and wrong are a nearly irresistible enticement to pick sides. And that’s exactly why the old Zen masters warned against becoming a person of right and wrong. It isn’t that the masters were indifferent to questions of ethics, but for them ethical conduct went beyond simply taking the prescribed right side. For these masters, the source of ethical conduct is found in the way things are, circumstance itself: unfiltered immediate reality reveals what is needed.

Policy-makers, of course, can’t suspend judgment indefinitely — but maybe a contemplative approach in general would make them better prepared for snap judgments and sound intuitions when such are called for. Clausewitz [grinning, with an h/t to Zen here]:

When all is said and done, it really is the commander’s coup d’œil, his ability to see things simply, to identify the whole business of war completely with himself, that is the essence of good generalship. Only if the mind works in this comprehensive fashion can it achieve the freedom it needs to dominate events and not be dominated by them.

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And let’s go the distance…

Here’s Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel again, from an online retreat she gave last year for subscribers to Tricycle magazine:

We need to ask, what is love or beauty or pain before we objectify it? what happens when we can abide without conclusions? you know, these are questions for the practitioner, practitioners questions… and I wanted to use one word in Tibetan that I’ve found very useful for myself… and this is the word zöpa.. this translates usually as patience or endurance or tolerance, but there’s this very subtle translation of zöpa, which is the ability to tolerate emptiness basically, which is another ways of saying the ability to tolerate that things don’t exist in one way, that things are so full and infinite and leave you so speechless, and so undefinably grand – and these are just descriptive words, but you have to use some words to communicate, I guess — the ability to bear that, that fullness, like we’ve been talking about, not turning away, not turning away.