Form is insight: the funnel, part 1

October 11th, 2012 by Charles Cameron

I am not arguing for moral relativism. I am arguing for a recognition of complexity, and for an admission that sound bites and white papers cannot handle this style of problem. I have painted a highly impressionistic portrait of the complexities at work here, where China touches the tip of the eastwards panhandle of Afghanistan, where Kandahar can stand proxy for Jerusalem, where the national sport is a sort of polo with a goat’s head for a ball, and the tea served in thin, curved glasses is green and sweet.

**

I have checked Google and Dogpile, and as far as I can tell from poor memory, my sense of my own style, and the absence of the same text in the search engines, the above is my own work — the text of the bulk of which I found somewhat haphazardly on my hard drive while working on Part 2 of this post. If anyone else claims copyright, count me an admirer and let me know. I believe it’s “mine” for whatever that concept may be worth, I’m skeptical about solo creativity in any case, myself.

In part 2 of this post, which is definitely almost all borrowed from bright other beings, I’ll try to illustrate the funnel as it applies to America, Afghanistan, Obama and Osama, in a series of “zeroing in” quotes illustrating the complexity of the situation and analysis as contrasted with the “yes” of a kill-decision…

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Posted in barack obama, bin laden, Charles Cameron, copyright, counterterrorism, creativity, IC, intelligence, myth, Uncategorized | 2 comments

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  1. Derek Robinson:

    October 12th, 2012 at 4:04 am

    Charles, there’s a profile and interview of & with Alison Gopnik, here – http://bigthink.com/users/alisongopnik#!video_idea_id=16949 – that I think you’d be interested in seeing – she’s a Berkeley CA based research psychologist focused on the infant’s assimilation of the world during the first years outside the womb – she describes it as a progressive narrowing, the acquisition of funnel vision until we emerge from the enculturation / indoctrination process as ‘adults’ – or what Dr. Seuss termed “failed children” .. 
     

  2. Charles Cameron:

    October 12th, 2012 at 10:30 pm

    That’s the thing about patterns, eh?  They crop up all over the place.
    .
    I’m reminded of two quotes:

    When the surf echoes and crashes out to the horizon, its whorls repeat in similar ratios inside our flesh … We are extremely complicated, but our bloods and homones are fundamentally seawater and volcanic ash, congealed and refined. Our skin shares its chemistry with the maple leaf and moth wing. The currents our bodies regulate share a molecular flow with raw sun. Nerves and flashes of lightning are related events woven into nature at different levels.

    That’s from Richard Grossinger’s Planet Medicine, and:

    Seen together, aerial maps of river estuaries and road systems, feathers, fern leaves, branching blood vessels, nerve ganglia, electron micrographs of crystals and the tree-like patterns of electrical discharge-figures are connected, although they are vastly different in place, origin, and scale. Their similarity of form is by no means accidental.

    From Gyorgy Kepes, New Landscapes of Art & Science.
    .
    The thing is, these patterns are found “inside” us in our thoughts, as well as “outside” us in the physical world.