zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron ]

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The description of Egyptian troops attacking a Christian monastery that forms the first quote in this DoubleQuote is horrifying in many ways.

Recent events in Egypt had featured mutual support between Muslims and their Coptic Christian neighbors, each group in turn acting as human shields to protect the other while they were praying. Here, by contrast, the army – which is effectively now “ruling” Egypt in the interregnum between the fall of Mubarak and the election of a new President and government – is attacking the humans it is supposed to protect.

But what does that have to do with Bach?

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Part I: a monastery attacked in Egypt

This is vile.

Those who are being attacked happen to be Christians and monks, no less human on either account, and just as subject to bleeding as others – so they might ask, with Shakespeare‘s Shylock speaking for the Jews:

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?

That last question of Shylock’s is an interesting one, and gets to the heart of what I want to discuss here, as we shall see.

Specifically, these human beings were monks. Muhammad had a higher opinion of monks than of many others. In the Qur’an, we find:

The nearest to the faithful are those who say “We are Christians.” That is because there are priests and monks among them and because they are free of pride.

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Sigh.

These “followers” of Muhammad were attacking Christian monks with live ammunition and RPGs continuously for 30 minutes, wounding 19.

They felt superior to their compatriots the monks, they cried “God is Great” and “Victory, Victory” as they did it.

In this they resemble GEN Boykin, who famously responded to a Somali warlord claiming that God would protect him, “Well, you know what? I knew that my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.”

I could easily have made that my second quote here, pairing it with the description of the Egyptian army attack on the monastery, for between the two of them they raise the question of whether weaponry is stronger than belief – and while some Christians might agree with General Boykin, some Muslims might agree no less strongly with the members of the Egyptian military shouting “Allahu Akbar”.

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I believe that taking sides here misses the point.

Which I am happy to say, Abraham Lincoln made with considerable eloquence in his Second Inaugural Address in 1865, almost a century and a half ago:

The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

That point is one which HaShem made to his angels, according to rabbinic teaching:

The Talmud teaches us that on the night that the Egyptian army drowned in the Red Sea, the first true moment of freedom for the Jews fleeing Egypt, God refused to hear the angels sing their prayers, and said “my creations are drowning in the sea, and you will sing songs?”

So, no — revenge is not the way to go…

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But please note that the point I am making is not one of moral equivalence.

That God which created “both sides” in any human conflict and loves each and every one of his own creations, might indeed find one creed superior to another, as he might find one scientific law more accurately describing the workings of, say, gravitational attraction than another – or the night sky at Saint-Rémy portrayed by Van Gogh more or less moving than the thunderous sky over Toledo of El Greco.

In the view I am proposing, the “God who takes neither side” in fact takes both, but with this distinction: he sides with the wounded more than with those who inflict wounds – not because one side has a better creed than the other, but because he made us to learn not to unmercifully maim and destroy one another…

…one of whose names is The Merciful, in whose scriptures it is written:

If thou dost stretch thy hand against me, to slay me, it is not for me to stretch my hand against thee to slay thee: for I do fear Allah, the cherisher of the worlds.

…one of whose names is The Lord is Peace, in whose scriptures it is written:

Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.

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Part II: Bach and contrapuntal analysis

All of which brings me to the second “quote” in my DoubleQuote above: JS Bach‘s “concordia discors” canon in two voices, BWV 1086 – which you can hear or purchase here.

Bach’s mastery was in counterpoint, the play of one musical idea against another, and in this particular work, the two ideas are exact opposite: in musical terms, the melody is played here against its inversion. And the point of counterpoint, if I may put it that way, is not to provide “harmony” but to show how discord can become harmonious and concordant — or to put that in the geopolitical terms that interest me, how conflict and opposition can be resolved…

Not, you understand, that this state of affairs then leads necessarily to the singing of Kumbaya or the kind of ending in which “they all lived happily ever after”.

Concordia discors: the resolution of the present conflict, in a continuing overall “music” of great power and beauty, in which further conflicts will inevitably arise and find resolution.

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Here’s the essence: Bach takes contrasting and at times conflicting melodic ideas and makes music.

He teaches us to hear distinct and differing voices, to allow ourselves to hear and feel both the discomfort that their disagreements raise in us, and the satisfaction that comes as those disagreements are worked out. He does this by teaching us to hear them as voices within a choir, ribbons in a complex braid, making together a greater music that any of them alone could give rise to. And in this process, their differences are neither denied nor lost, but resolved and transcended.

Edward Said, whose politics my readers may dislike or like or even perhaps be unaware of, was for years the music critic for The Nation, wrote three books (and an opus posthumous) on music, and with his friend the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim co-founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, named for the West-östlicher Diwan, Goethe’s collection of lyric poems.

Barenboim (the Israeli) wrote of Said (the Palestinian):

In addition to being well versed in music, literature, philosophy, and the understanding of politics, he was one of those rare people who sought and recognized the connections between different and seemingly disparate disciplines. His unusual understanding of the human spirit and of the human being was perhaps a consequence of his revelatory construct that parallels between ideas, topics, and cultures can be of a paradoxical nature, not contradicting but enriching one another.

And there we have it again: Bach’s insight, this time transposed by an accomplished musician into the key of thoughts and ideas…

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Said talks quite a bit about counterpoint, both musically:

Musically, I’m very interested in contrapuntal writing, and contrapuntal forms. The kind of complexity that is available, aesthetically, to the whole range from consonant to dissonant, the tying together of multiple voices in a kind of disciplined whole, is something that I find tremendously appealing.

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[Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 99.]

and politically:

When you think about it, when you think about Jew and Palestinian not separately, but as part of a symphony, there is something magnificently imposing about it. A very rich, also very tragic, also in many ways desperate history of extremes — opposites in the Hegelian sense — that is yet to receive its due. So what you are faced with is a kind of sublime grandeur of a series of tragedies, of losses, of sacrifices, of pain that would take the brain of a Bach to figure out. It would require the imagination of someone like Edmund Burke to fathom.

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[Said, Power, Politics and Culture, p. 447.]

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As I commented in an earlier post that ties in with this one, the great pianist Glenn Gould was also preoccupied with counterpoint, both in Bach’s music and in conversations overheard at a truck-stop cafe or on long train journeys — he too was “working” the parallel between melodic and verbal forms of counterpoint.

And JRR Tolkien made the reconciliation of discordant musics in a greater concord the central to his creation myth in The Silmarillion, “The Music of the Ainur”, which can now be read online at the Random House site.

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Part III: invitation

May I strongly commend to your attention the movie, Of Gods and Men, which just opened in limited release, having won the grand jury prize at Cannes…

These are worth reading:

Top Billing! GrEaT sAtAn”s gIrLfRiEnD – COIN Passé?

…COIN, as done up in Iraq is certainly not a one size fits all bustier  – and the debate may be more about style over substance.

As world famous Surge Expert and charter member of Great Satan’s cadre of Combat Rock Stars Major Few recently shared about the sexyful upgradation of FM 3-24 – v2.0

 “…Courtney, FM 3-24 was born out of necessity.  GEN Petraeus brought together a team of experts to provide the US military some desperately needed help while Iraq was spiraling out of control.  The majority of the text covers the wisdom of David Galula, the godfather of population-centric counterinsurgency.   It was a good start.  Galula was smart, had a lot of experience, and could write, but, it was only a start.” (GsGf Editorial note -Italics bis mein)

 There’s more than one way to nail a hottie or do a Surge, as Captain Burke of WoI fame psychically predicted.

“Bottom line: keep FM 3-24–updated as necessary–on the bookshelves. While the book is not without its flaws, it does have a number of good lessons applicable from everything from counterinsurgency, to hybrid-style wars, to disaster relief.“Secondly, COIN is an operational framework, not a strategic one. Furthermore, FM 3-24 was written in a specific context, when America was good at offensive operations, but poor at human intelligence gathering and population security.”….

The intrepid Fraulein Messerschmidt was kind enough to solicit a jeremiad from me prior to posting and, knowing that her blog is a favorite read among the COINdinista set, I rode that hobby horse at a gallop.

Swedish Meatballs Confidential(p.NSFW) –The Intel Biz Is Changing As Never Before (Or Should Be)

Good observations here re: wikileaks, authoritarian states and institutions of manipulative antics.

The New Criterion/Arma Virumque (Bruce Kesler) – Jawohl Mein Professor!

…The stereotype of ruler-wielding, dogma-enforcing Catholic nuns has nothing on the parody-proofing self-image being created by the AAUP of college professors as academic thugs.

In its latest draft document to define academic freedom, the American Association of University Professors has gone abroad to authoritarian regimes and overboard to try to suck the air out of critiques of academia.

Fabius Maximus –An explanation of the US and Pakistan governments’ odd behavior in the Raymond Davis affair

The US-Pakistani alliance increasingly resembles a bad shotgun marriage between a white-knuckle drunkard and a hysterical mental patient.

TDAXP, PhD.-Review of “The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers,” by Richard McGregor

Dr.Von – Multi-disciplinarity and The Birth Of America

….Building off that theme, a second book, Steven Johnson’s The Invention of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and The Birth of America, examines the life and work of Joseph Priestley, and his deep friendships with Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and his influence on those two Founding Fathers as well as John Adams.Priestley began as one of the leading and first modern chemists, whose main contemporary scientific rival was Antoine Lavoisier. Priestley had numerous discoveries, including providing key evidence for the existence of oxygen and its role in combustion and life itself, but what was new for me was his deep friendship with Benjamin Franklin. Franklin and Priestley met and corresponded with each other about science for many years prior to the American Revolution, and influenced each other greatly as far as the development of experiments, analysis and interpretation of data. Their letters show how they were onto the conceptual understanding of the cycling of oxygen and carbon dioxide for all of life, and how ecosystems work in terms of the flow and transformation of different energy types from one to another. These concepts were decades ahead of their time….

Shrinkwrapped – Fully Immersive Virtual Reality May Be Closer Than We Think

Don Vandergriff– Petraeus’s Last Stand?

Thomas Ricks –Why I don’t believe there is really such as thing as an ‘operational’ level of war

Out of my tattered Lands End attaché bag this week came Hew Strachan‘s article titled “Strategy or Alibi? Obama, McChrystal and the Operational Level of War,” which appeared last September in Survival….So far, so good. But then I think Strachan goes off the tracks a bit. Like a doctor whose diagnosis is spot on but who errs in prescribing the remedy, he argues that this sort of operational approach became problematic because it assumed the existence of strategy. But what, he says, if “strategy has been absent throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan”? (166)

I actually think that may have been true in Iraq until late 2006 or early 2007, because until then, American generals tended to offer up aspirations rather than strategy. But I do think we had a strategy under the Petraeus/Odierno/Crocker team. What may have thrown Professor Strachan off the scent is that the strategy couldn’t be stated explicitly. I don’t think I really understood this clearly when I was writing The Gamble, and Strachan’s paper helped me think it through…

I understand Ricks’ point re: Iraq and find it reasonable, but I think there really is an “operational level” of war….at least in the institutional culture of some armies in some historical periods, including  today’s US Army. I’ve previously argued   similarly to Strachan here, albeit not as authoritatively or persuasively and – FWIW – I think China’s PLA is moving in that direction as well (though I’m willing to be corrected by Sinologists out there).

Information Dissemination – US Naval Institute Official Announcement on Mission Change and The Mission of the U.S. Naval Institute by Rear Admiral Tom Marfiak (ret)

Campaign War Room – The dynamic nature of public opinion 

Inkspots –Some thoughts on LTG Caldwell’s probably-legal-but-still-wildly-inappropriate influence operations 

Eide Neurolearning Blog –Made to Stick Learning

SEED – Humans, Version 3.0

….Neuronal recycling exploits this wellspring of potent powers. If one wants to get a human brain to do task Y despite it not having evolved to efficiently carry out task Y, then a key point is not to forcefully twist the brain to do Y. Like all animal brains, human brains are not general-purpose universal learning machines, but, instead, are intricately structured suites of instincts optimized for the environments in which they evolved. To harness our brains, we want to let the brain’s brilliant mechanisms run as intended-i.e., not to be twisted. Rather, the strategy is to twist Y into a shape that the brain does know how to process.

American Scientist – Refuting a Myth About Human Origins

…Premodern humans-often described as “archaic Homo sapiens“-were thought to have lived in small, vulnerable groups of closely related individuals. They were believed to have been equipped only with simple tools and were likely heavily dependent on hunting large game. Individuals in such groups would have been much less insulated from environmental stresses than are modern humans. In Thomas Hobbes’s words, their lives were “solitary, nasty, brutish and short.” If you need a mental image here, close your eyes and conjure a picture of a stereotypical caveman. But archaeological evidence now shows that some of the behaviors associated with modern humans, most importantly our capacity for wide behavioral variability, actually did occur among people who lived very long ago, particularly in Africa. And a conviction is growing among some archaeologists that there was no sweeping transformation to “behavioral modernity” in our species’ recent past.

….The idea of an archaic-to-modern human transition in Homo sapiens arises, in part, from this narrative tradition. All this makes for a satisfying story, but it is not a realistic framework for understanding the actual, complex and contingent course of human evolution. Most evolutionary changes are relatively minor things whose consequences play out incrementally over thousands of generations.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

Conversations with History – Ian Morris on Why the West Rules for Now

Top Billing!COMMAND POST Clint Van Winkle – The Guilt

Powerful. Poignant.

Van Winkle is the author of Soft Spots: A Marine’s Memoir of Combat and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder:

The film focuses on my friend SSgt David Paxson. In 2003, Paxson and I fought at Nasiriyah together-one of the earliest and bloodiest battles of Iraq-and making the film forced us to relive those memories. It was a difficult shoot and took all of us months to recover. Talking about war isn’t easy either.

Paxson and I were 25 when we went to Iraq. One week we were in combat, trying to survive insurgent attacks and the next week we were at home, trying to survive panic attacks. After Iraq, we didn’t see each other much. We spoke, but rarely about our experiences. We didn’t talk about the smell of death, the killing, the loss of friends. Day-to-day life was a struggle, but we pretended like we were okay.

We thought we had experienced the worst life had to offer, but Paxson still had another round of pain coming his way….

The Economist – Our global oligarchs  ( hat tip Jessica Margolin)

The problem is that too many of the people who allegedly claim to understand capitalism best, working in the world of high finance are in reality, too frequently, short-term time horizon, zero-sum oriented, assholes with contempt for the idea that markets, to be free, also need to be free of illicit collusion, regulatory capture and rentier self-dealing.

Pennlive.com – Dick Winters, of ‘Band of Brothers’ fame, dies  ( Hat tip to Starbuck)

Dick Winters, the former World War II commander whose war story was told in the book and miniseries “Band of Brothers,” has died.

Dick Winters led a quiet life on his Fredericksburg farm and in his Hershey home until the book and miniseries “Band of Brothers” threw him into the international spotlight. Since then, the former World War II commander of Easy Company had received hundreds of requests for interviews and appearances all over the world.He stood at the podium with President George W. Bush in Hershey during the presidential campaign in 2007. He accepted the “Four Freedoms” award from Tom Brokaw on behalf of the Army. He was on familiar terms with Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, producers of the HBO mini-series, the most expensive television series ever produced.

Winters was always gracious about his new-found celebrity, but never really comfortable with it. He never claimed to be a hero and said that he had nothing to do with the national effort to get him the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military honor. When people asked him if he was a hero, he liked to answer the way his World War II buddy, Mike Ranney, did.

“No,” Ranney said. “But I served in a company of heroes.”

Zero Intelligence Agents –Swallowing the Academic “Red Pill”

….Part of the problem for academics is the mythology of their career is not celebrated to an even reasonably comparable degree as that of the professional athlete. On my first day of graduate school one of my professors said, “Congratulations on being accepted to the program. While most people will not understand it, you have one of the greatest jobs one the planet. People are going to pay you to think, and I think that is pretty cool.”

I think it is pretty cool too, and while at face value that statement no better reflects the reality of graduate school anymore than Summer Catch reflects the realities of the Minor League baseball system, it is an important to remember what an academic career is really about: to be one of the world’s best thinkers, period. The original article attacking academia never considers this point, and rather places doctoral research as any other kind of on-the-job training. The fact is, there are very few people who will successfully navigate their graduate program and be hired as a tenure-track faculty, and even fewer who will go on to be successful academics. It is an environment where a very specific set of goals blended with unique intellectual, interpersonal and labor skills are needed to flourish, not unlike many other highly specialized careers.

Pundita –The ghost

….The true Pakistan is a ghost, a ghost of the British Empire at its most glorious.Westerners can understand, I think, what the most informed Indians already know: that without the help of the ruling families who supported the British enterprise in India the British couldn’t have lasted there as long as they did. The ruling families were the British Raj. So it was a symbiotic relationship, not a parent-child one, a relationship that created a lifestyle of timeless order.

The order was an illusion, just as an unsinkable ship is an illusion, but that was seen only when the British could no longer afford to maintain the illusion. Yet the illusion was so powerful that Pakistan’s rulers didn’t see Partition as abandoning the motherland: they would go on ruling, as they had always done, and the mighty British Empire would continue to remain their protector. The second great European war was a blip, as the first great European war had been; the British would bounce back and everything would continue as before.

When the illusion vanished Pakistan’s ruling families were left with the outward forms, the mannerisms of Pax Britannica: cricket matches, marching bands, a patronizing contempt for Hindus, high tea. That’s what they gave up the motherland for and they know it. That’s why it could take Pakistan’s ruling families another generation before they’re able to let go of a past that is more real to them than anything around them today.

That’s it.

Top billing! Spengler – BOOK REVIEW Reason to pause The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis by Robert R ReillyI am not a regular reader of Spengler except when friends draw my attention to him, but this column had a heavy dose of intellectual and cultural history, theology and epistemology. Much food for thought here ( hat tip to the Warlord):

Mainstream Islam rejected Greek-derived philosophy at the turn of the 12th century, when Abu Hamid al-Ghazali established a theology of divine caprice. In the normative Muslim view of things, Allah personally and immediately directs the motion of every molecule by his ineffable and incomprehensible will, according to the al-Ghazali synthesis, directly and without the mediation of natural law. Al-Ghazali abolished intermediate causes, that is, laws of nature, leaving great and small events to the caprice of the absolute tyrant of the universe.In place of Hellenistic reasoning, Islam turned to a literal reading of the Koran. Robert Reilly recounts Islam’s abandonment of Hellenistic reason, and blames it for the subsequent decline of Muslim civilization and the rise of radical Islam….

John P. Sullivan and Sam Logan –Los Zetas: Massacres, Assassinations and Infantry Tactics

Two expert and cutting edge thinkers on Mexico’s narco-insurgency: 

In the aftermath of the massacre, the lead investigator and another police officer were reported missing. Car bombs exploded near a police station and a Televisa office; a grenade exploded in a Puerto Vallarta bar; and, the mayor of Hidalgo was assassinated. The Zetas are suspected in those actions, too. Such is the tempo of extreme violence in areas contested by the Zetas: primitive car bombs, grenade attacks, assassinations, and massacres. Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Jalisco-states contested by the Zetas-are deluged by the spate of violence.Urban blockades, or narcobloqueos, are a quasi-political tool recently employed by Los Zetas in Monterrey and Reynosa. For example, on August 14, 2010, members of the Zetas blocked off at least 13 major roads in Monterrey, preventing access to the city’s international airport and major highways entering and exiting the northern industrial city. The narcobloqueos were deployed in the aftermath of a shootout between the military and Los Zetas that killed reputed Monterrey Zeta leader “El Sonrics.” Drivers were carjacked and their cars were used to close the roads. These blockades are a “show of force,” a demonstration of the Zetas’ power….

HG’s World –How Will Two Goliaths Meet?

….Today our national creed has become to spread American style democracy around the globe, even to the point of a gun. The results have backfired in several places as nationalistic tendencies led to the election of leaders now bent on confronting our hegemony by inciting disdain for all things American. We should all be reminded of America’s first foray into imperilism cum, “nation building” in 1900, which saw the Philippines racked with a war of resistance that cost thousands of American and Philippine lives and ended in the United States tarnishing it’s image of being the shinning hope for the down-trodden. Ultimately we left behind a country still struggling to make it’s way beyond the grinding poverty that still resides on many of their far flung islands.Many Americans still see the rise of China in Cold War terms. China is continually referred to as Communist or the Chi-Coms who are still bent on changing the world into a collective farm and concrete block apartments of robotic people dressed in  drab Mao jackets and riding bicycles in mass transit to equally drab work assignments. For anyone who has visited China, you will quickly learn that image has joined Chairman Mao in his tomb. Mao jackets along side Russian style fur caps are sold only to tourists by hundreds of vendors, all eager to gain a middle class existence. This is aptly apparent when one considers that just a short thirty years ago, over 65% of the Chinese people lived in extreme poverty on less than $1 per day, but by 2007 it had fallen to 4%. Today, it is even lower, but still far behind our American standard of living. Bottom line, they accomplished this by emulating the best traditions of liberal Capitalism, not Communism. If anything, China is returning to her roots, as the Communist Party assumes the role traditionally held by the Mandarin class who administered policy for the imperial court. We may not like it, but with the growing nationalist pride many Chinese feel, seeing them elect a firebrand who becomes bent on starting wars is not in any one’s best interest at this time. So in the short run it is better to allow them to progress towards a popularly elected representative government at their own pace.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING:

“Soft Power” theorist Joseph Nye on global power shifts

Remember this much ridiculed visual monstrosity?:

Excessively complex representations, much less the bureaucratic systems in practice, are poor vehicles for efficient communication of strategic conceptualizations to the uninformed – such as those downstream who must labor to execute such designs. Or those targeted by them for help or harm.  In addition to the difficulty in ascertaining prioritization, the unnaturally rigid complexity of the bureaucracy generally prevents an efficient focus of the system’s resources and latent power. The system gets in it’s own way while eating ever growing amounts of resources to produce less and less, leading to paralysis and collapse.

Does it have to?

Here’s an interesting, very brief take on analytical simplification from a natural scientist and network theorist Dr. Eric Berlow on how to cull simplification – and thus an advantage – out of complex systems by applying an ecological paradigm.

Cognitive simplification will be a critical strategic tool in the 21st century.