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An interesting piece in Democracy Journal by James Kwak:

Failure Is an Option

….Countries differ in their economic success because of their different institutions, the rules influencing how the economy works, and the incentives that motivate people,” write Acemoglu and Robinson. Extractive institutions, whether feudalism in medieval Europe or the use of schoolchildren to harvest cotton in contemporary Uzbekistan, transfer wealth from the masses to elites. In contrast, inclusive institutions—based on property rights, the rule of law, equal provision of public services, and free economic choices—create incentives for citizens to gain skills, make capital investments, and pursue technological innovation, all of which increase productivity and generate wealth. Economic institutions are themselves the products of political processes, which depend on political institutions. These can also be extractive, if they enable an elite to maintain its dominance over society, or inclusive, if many groups have access to the political process. Poverty is not an accident: “[P]oor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty.” Therefore, Acemoglu and Robinson argue, it is ultimately politics that matters.

The logic of extractive and inclusive institutions explains why growth is not foreordained. Where a cohesive elite can use its political dominance to get rich at the expense of ordinary people, it has no need for markets and free enterprise, which can create political competitors. In addition, because control of the state can be highly lucrative, infighting among contenders for power produces instability and violence. This vicious circle keeps societies poor. In more fortunate countries, pluralistic political institutions prevent any one group from monopolizing resources for itself, while free markets empower a large class of people with an interest in defending the current system against absolutism. This virtuous circle, which first took form in seventeenth-century England, is the secret to economic growth….

Read the rest here. 

“The horror! The horror!

Charles Cameron sparked a discussion with his doublequotes post on two colonels, the late strategist John Boyd and the fictional monster,  Walter Kurtz from Francis Ford Coppola’s classic Vietnam War film homage to Joseph Conrad,  Apocalypse Now.  Kurtz is a disturbing figure, one who is recurrent in literature and history going back to Homer’s Iliad. A superlative warrior who excels above all others who nonetheless sheds all trace of civilization in his descent into barbarism. While the fall of a heroic individual can take many narrative forms, Kurtz is of a particular and dreaded kind of fallen man, the warlord.

Warlords are fascinating and repellent figures who seem to thrive best when the normal order of a society is breaking down, permitting the strong and ruthless to carve out their reputations in blood and infamy. As I have written previously:

Kent’s Imperative had a post up that would have been worthy of Coming Anarchy:

Enigmatic biographies of the damned 

“….Via the Economist this week, we learn of the death of an adversary whose kind has nearly been forgotten. Khun Sa was a warlord who amassed a private army and smuggling operation which dominated Asian heroin trafficking from remotest Burma over the course of nearly two decades. In the end, despite indictment in US courts, the politics of a failed state permitted him to retire as an investor and business figure, and to die peacefully in his own bed.

The stories of men such as these however shaped more than a region. They are the defining features of the flow of events in a world of dark globalization. Yet these are not the biographies that are taught in international relations academia, nor even in their counterpart intelligence studies classrooms. The psychology of such men, and the personal and organizational decision-making processes of the non-state groups which amassed power to rival a princeling of Renaissance Europe, are equally as worthy of study both for historical reasons as well as for the lessons they teach about the nature of empowered individuals.

….There are no shortage of warlords for such a study. Among the living we have Walid Jumblatt, the crafty chief of the Druze during the 1980’s civil war in Lebanon, the egomaniacal and democidal Charles Taylor of Liberia, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar the Islamist mujahedin commander and a large assortment of Somali, Colombian, Indonesian and El Salvadoran militiamen and paramilitaries. The history of the twentieth century alone offers up such colorful characters as “The Dogmeat General“, the ghoulishly brutal Ta Mok of the Khmer Rouge, “The Mad Baron” Ungern von Sternberg, Captain Hermann Ehrhardt and Pancho Villa among many others.

What would such a historical/cross-cultural/psychological “warlord study” reveal ? Primarily the type of man that the German journalist Konrad Heiden termed “armed bohemians”. Men who are ill-suited to achieving success in an orderly society but are acutely sensitive to minute shifts that they can exploit during times of uncertainty, coupled with an amoral sociopathology to do so ruthlessly. Paranoid and vindictive, they also frequently possess a recklessness akin to bravery and a dramatic sentimentality that charms followers and naive observers alike. Some warlords can manifest a manic energy or regularly display great administrative talents while a minority are little better than half-mad gangsters getting by, for a time, on easy violence, low cunning and lady luck.

Every society, no matter how civilized or polite on the surface, harbors many such men within it. They are like ancient seeds waiting for the drought-breaking rains.

There are occasionally positive portrayals of warlords. Ahmed Shah Massoud, “the Lion of Panjshir” who fought tenaciously first against the Soviets, then later against the murderous Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s army of thugs and the Taliban’s fanatics, providing a modicum of civilized governance to ordinary Afghans wherever his power ran, until his assassination by al Qaida. The cagey and mercurial Walid Jumblatt, made the transition from Druze warlord in the 1980’s to Lebanese politician and something of an elder statesman.

In literature, Xenophon was the de facto strategos of the retreating Greek mercenaries in The Anabasis of Cyrus, cut a noble example, but like Massoud, this is a rarity. In recent fiction, Stephen Pressfield created as an antagonist in The Profession, General James Salter, a totemic and caesarian figure who takes on the great powers with his PMC forces with impressive ruthlessness. In the popular fantasy series of George R.R. Martin that began with The Game of Thrones, the notable warlord is the outlandish, cruel and somewhat demented Vargo Hoat, who leads a freebooting company of misfit brigands “The Brave Companions“, whose nonstop atrocities and ludicrous pretensions lead all the other characters to call them “the Bloody Mummers“.

Given the world’s recent experiences with the Lord’s Resistance Army, General Butt Naked and the uprisings in Syria and Libya, I think Martin and Coppola have captured warlordism in it’s most frequent incarnation.

[ by Charles Cameron — importance of the ratio form (“this is to that as thus is to so”) as a bridge between domains and silos, creative leaps, the glass bead game, and finally, Chittick’s joke about camels, sex and translations from the Arabic ]
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I retweeted this tweet of Andrew Exum‘s to my friend Paul Pilkington because I know he’s working on a project to find out what “this is to that” is to some other “this is to that” — across a wide swathe of human culture.

Note particularly that Exum is using this formal device to illuminate, to give insight, in an area of importance to analysts, strategic thinkers and decision makers.

I’m also retweeting Exum to Paul because I believe Paul’s simple experiment, based as it is on his reading of Hermann Hesse‘s Glass Bead Game, has the capacity to build an architecture of thought (a) crossing all disciplines and (b) spanning the trivial with the profound.

I’m doing something similar with Cath Styles in our Sembl games project — but this time I want to concentrate on Paul’s approach, and since there are four moving parts in an a is to be as c is to d configuration, I’m calling this post Numbers by the numbers: four — number three will just have to wait a while.

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To get a sense of what Paul is up to, we can go to his Twitter Project page, which describes the fourth in a series of books he’s writing — and also follow him on Twitter, where he posts as Just Knecht.

Two of Paul’s recent tweets express his sense of the task pretty incisively:

The whole of language is the holding up of one unlike thing to compare, contrast and connect with another

Curating is a matter juxtaposition of work against work, artist against artist, place against place – A.Searle on Documenta 13, The Guardian

On his Twitter Project Page, he tells us:

Each tweet is an individual Glass Bead Game move, which is a comparison (metaphor, simile or analogy) across different areas, and may be either a statement or a question.

In question form, these are not unlike analogy questions from SAT tests with an additional dimension of general knowledge, cultural invention and intellectual playfulness. The basic challenge is to work out the relationship between two terms in one context, and apply it in another. Sometimes a tweet will extend an analogy further, which would be the beginning of forming a larger game from an individual move.

Some of the most interesting moves do not have right or wrong answers. Some have canonical or original answers, but they’re not necessarily right. In fact, very often I will post something I’ve picked up from elsewhere which I would love to see improved on, challenged, or at least better explained by others.

He then poses some of the sorts of questions that intrigue him:

Who is the J.H.Prynne of contemporary dance? Like Prynne in contemporary poetry they need to have been ‘out there’ right at the edge of theory and practice for some time, and also deeply steeped in tradition at the same time. Merce Cunningham? Suggestions welcome … And Heston Blumethal or Ferran Adrià might be the Prynne of cookery. But what about the Prynne of contemporary warfare?

What is the equivalent of sonata form in architecture? Goethe and Hegel both said ‘architecture is frozen music’ but neither really explained what they meant. If it is, then is there an architectural equivalent in Western architecture of the key structural form in Western art music? Suggestions welcome …

So, Zenpundit readers — who is the JH Prynne of contemporary warfare?

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Not so long ago, in Numbers by the numbers: one, I posted a series of self-referential tweets that I’d collected over the last month or two — here I’d like to present some of Paul’s recent tweets:

Let’s start with one that’s a foreign policy insight, arguably as significant to day as it was when Vance first said it:

16 Jul @justknecht
“The Strait of Hormuz is the jugular vein of the West” (Cyrus Vance)

If these tweets can be timeless, they can also be timely:

4 Jul @justknecht
The Higgs boson is the quantum of the Higgs field, just as the photon is the quantum of the electromagnetic field

As they accumulate over time, they can build a conceptual “mesh” that engages an entire field — in this case, recent classical music — while linking it to a variety of other areas:

16 Jul @justknecht
“Boulez’ Derive 2 sounds like birthday cakes ought to” – Philip Clark, Gramophone

22 Jun @justknecht
Wagner was a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn – Claude Debussy, quoted by Geoffrey Norris in Gramophone

30 May @justknecht
Fauré’s Theme and Variations (no. 9) is like an evening star falling slowly from the sky – Bryce Morrison cites Alfred Cortot in Gramophone

11 May @justknecht
Kraftwerk is the Warhol of pop music – The New Yorker

There’s profundity here:

9 Jun @justknecht
“Space is to place as eternity is to time.” – Joseph Joubert

This could be, as Paul says, “the beginning of forming a larger game from an individual move” — that quote in itself could plausibly be the keystone of an architecture bridging science with religion…

There are historical parallels to consider:

31 May @justknecht
Robert Burton : Oxford :: Jeremy Prynne :: Cambridge

Catty remarks by Nobel laureates:

21 May @justknecht
“Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats” (Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman)

Near-tautologies:

21 May @justknecht
Macon Telegraph: Recipes are to food as blueprints are to buildings.

And, ooh, exotic forms of slander!

18 May @justknecht
“[Your daughter] has lovers as numerous as the striking of tablas on Palm Sunday” – Arabic satire by Abu Nawas, 756 – 813 AD

Once again, it’s form that generates insight, not content. Get used to form, play around with it, and content will leap out at you from the page, from the screen.

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I’m no Arabist myself, but ah! that last quote reminds me irresistibly of the difficulties faced by translators from the Arabic, as recounted by William Chittick in The Self-disclosure of God: Principles of Ibn Al-‘Arabi’s Cosmology (SUNY Press, 1998, pp. xxxv-xxvi.)

An old joke among orientalists tells us that every Arabic word has four meanings: It means what it means, then it means the opposite of what it means, then it has something to do with sex, and finally it designates something to do with a camel …. The rational mind tends to push the meaning of a word away from experience to ‘what it means’ but the imaginal mind finds the self-disclosure of the Real in the sex and the camel … it is in the world’s concrete realities that God is found, not in its abstractions.

I’d been looking for an excuse to post that quote on Zenpundit — now I’ve found it!

[ by Charles Cameron — a little rock criticism with military, political and theological overtones ]
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When does music become noise?

• When it annoys you.
• Even when it’s Nancy Sinatra.
• And FWIW, much the same can be said of prayer.

I say this, because there’s currently a battle of the noises in Jerusalem. Or should I call that a battle of rock music vs the call to prayer?

Noise, in any case. That’s what the people who don’t like it call it.

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It may be that you’ve sought out events with “strobe lights and screamingly loud rock and rap music” — they’re called concerts when you volunteer for them, but torture when you have no choice…

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The New York Times piece quoted above brings us a legal opinion that the practice at Gitmo constituted torture, and a hint of the playlist:

David Sheffer, a senior State Department human rights official in the Clinton administration who teaches law at George Washington University, said the procedure of shackling prisoners to the floor in a state of undress while playing loud music – the Guantánamo sources said it included the bands Limp Bizkit and Rage Against the Machine, and the rapper Eminem – and lights clearly constituted torture. “I don’t think there’s any question that treatment of that character satisfies the severe pain and suffering requirement, be it physical or mental, that is provided for in the Convention Against Torture,” Mr. Sheffer said.

It also tells us what impact of the “strobe lights and screamingly loud rock and rap music” had on the Gitmo prisoners, who had to put up with it for fourteen hour stretches:

Another person familiar with the procedure who was contacted by The Times said: “They were very wobbly. They came back to their cells and were just completely out of it.”

How does being shackled to the floor compare with being in a compound inside an FBI cordon — how does “Nancy Sinatra songs, shrieks of dying rabbits, Christmas carols and Tibetan monk chants” compare with “strobe lights and screamingly loud rock and rap music”?

I’d say there are significant similarities and significant differences.

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For one thing, David Koresh, the “sinful messiah” of Waco, was a guitarist-songwriter himself:

How shall I put this? That’s not what I expected…

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But hey, Manuel Noriega.

You remember him? It is perhaps worth recalling that when Gen. Noriega was holed up at the Panama City residence of the Papal Nuncio — a place where one can imagine the Angelus bell modestly calling the faithful to prayer thrice daily, but I digress — “American troops directed loudspeakers his way in an attempt to blast him out“.

Happily for those of us interested in the musics of siege and torture, the National Security Archive associated with George Washington University has posted a copy of the playlist of songs requested by US troops to regale the General.

One can only imagine how much a man of his discerning taste must have enjoyed listening to Jimi Hendrix’ high-tweakin’ guitar on one of Rolling Stone‘s top 500 songs evah — Voodoo Child:

Oh, and so much more besides. For the full playlist, see here and here and here. Those selections are drawn from USSOUTHCOM’s After Action report on Operation Just Cause.

The Papal Nuncio’s residence would in essence be a diplomatic extension of the Vatican, wouldn’t it? Can you imagine the berobed monsignori tapping their feet to Electric Spanking of War Babies by the Funkadelics — or, with subtle religious overtones, War Pigs by Black Sabbath?

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So, onwards to Jerusalem.

Today’s adhan or call to prayer in Jerusalem / al-Quds would have been sung out by the muezzin at 4:11am (Fajr) and again at 12:47pm, 4:27pm, 7:47pm and 9:17pm.

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Under the title Mosque’s Loud Prayer Generates Mega-Decibel ‘Battle of the Bands’, the Jewish Press reports:

After the French Hill neighborhood of Jerusalem has decided to play very loud music, in defiance of the volume and disturbance of the sound of the muezzin at the mosque in nearby Al-Issawiya, two additional Jewish neighborhoods, Pisgat Ze’ev and Har Choma, have announced that they, too, will take up a similar approach. French Hill also decided to go with hard rock, and not Mediterranean tunes, as had originally been planned, because, as they put it, hard rock is more likely to deliver the message.

According to Yediot Jerusalem, the French Hill neighborhood has recently approached an amplification company with an order for four huge speakers to be directed at Al-Isawiya. As soon as the village muezzin will start his exceedingly loud prayer, it will be responded to with ear shattering Rock n’ Roll, letting local Arabs understand how disturbing the loud prayers have been to their Jewish neighbors.

French Hill, according to Wikipedia:

French Hill (Hebrew: HaGiv’a HaTzarfatit, Arabic: at-tel al-faransiya), also Giv’at Shapira is a neighborhood in northeastern Jerusalem. It is located on territory occupied during the Six-Day War in 1967, later annexed to Israel under the Jerusalem Law in 1980. The United Nations Security Council declared this law a violation of international law, and states that the Council will not recognize this law, and calls on member states to accept the decision of the council. The International Court of Justice stated in its 2004 Advisory Opinion that the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (including East Jerusalem and therefore also in French Hill) have been established in breach of international law. The European Union considers French Hill to be an illegal settlement in East Jerusalem.

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Noise is in the hearts and minds of the hearers and beholders.

Or beauty, as the case may be.

[ by Charles Cameron — a light-hearted post about serious matters — not for the squeamish — discusses politicians, fecal matter, children’s glee and Christmas spirit ]
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top shelf: Mary, Joseph, the Christ Child, kings, shepherd; lower shelves: popes, princesses, and politicians, pooping

As children, we are taught that we extend from the crowns of our heads to the tips of our toes, that our skin is our outer boundary, that we’re us, here, this living, perceiving, thinking being — and we know that there’s an appropriate distance for others to keep, that under certain circumstances they can touch us, perhaps while demonstrating they don’t have a knife up their sleeve, and that with a certain amount of social approval, depending, they can enter partially inside us or vice versa — the result on occasion being the arrival of a third one that pretty much belongs to the two of us, growing inside one of us for months only to somewhat belatedly separate out…

That last example — child-bearing and childbirth — shows that the simple notion that we are our skin and whatever is inside it is a bit simple. And there are various bits of us that seem to cross the boundary that separates us from the rest without too much problem: nail clippings, hair, saliva, which I’ve covered in two recent posts, ear-wax…

Even the air we breathe in and hold in our lungs is “us” — our breath — though once we breathe it out again, it’s air, part of the room we’re in, or if we’re outdoors, part of the atmosphere, the sky…

Mathematician John Allen Paulos suggests in his book Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences, calculates that there’s a better than 99% chance that the last deep breath you breathed in and out contained one molecule from the dying breath of Julius Caesar…

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But it is poo, perhaps, that best exemplifies how something that was us a minute or two ago can be not us, and frankly faintly disgusting, a minute or two later. And because it breaches the me / not me distinction so forcefully, it’s a matter of keen delight and humor to all children, as far as I can tell, everywhere.

Which is where the caganer comes in.

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A caganer — I kid you not — is “a figurine depicted in the act of defecation appearing in nativity scenes in Catalonia and neighbouring areas with Catalan culture such as Andorra, Valencia, Northern Catalonia (in southern France) and the Balearic Islands. It is most popular and widespread in these areas, but can also be found in other areas of Spain (Murcia), Portugal and southern Italy (Naples)”. That’s Wikipedia‘s current take on the topic, which has also been written up extensively elsewhere, and indeed, caganers in their profusion have become collectibles in their own right…

All of which brings me to Bob Dylan‘s “emperor’s new clothes” line:

Even the president of the United States: Sometimes must have to stand naked.

Or squat, vulnerable and with his pants down. Even Fidel Castro must do the same. Even Death…

Even Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen, Defender of the Faith.

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All of which is either a complete mockery or a source of considerable hilarity — especially to the kids, who must find these caganer hidden in among the shepherds, kings, animals and straw that surround the Christ Child in his manger.

Right in the heart of the sacred, if you will.

Which brings up the twin questions:

Is no-one sacred?

Is everyone sacred?

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Which is actually a pretty profound pair of questions — and one which, again, may help us understand a little more about religion than piety alone can tell us.

The fact is, religion can exalt us, but does so at the risk of our becoming pompous and inflated — and when we do, it can also deflate us.

Which lands us right on the topic of liminality, communitas and the work of Victor Turner, which I shall address in a follow-up post — invoking a US submarine, a Hindu avatar and St Francis along the way.