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[ by Charles Cameron — four shifts in apocalyptic thinking, us & them, sacred and secular ]
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Every time something significant happens in Europe or the Middle East, those who have worked out their apocalyptic timelines ahead of time have to make appropriate adjustments.

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Today, the Christian apocalyptic writer Joel Richardson took note of recent events in Europe in a piece entitled The Collapse of the Euro = The Collapse of the Euro-Centered End-Time Perspective? and asked:

as the collapse of the Euro monetary unity appears to loom over all of us, how will such an global earthquake affect the popular, but equally collapsing Euro-centered perspective on the end times?

Joel may be onto something, we may be on the verge of a major shift in Christian end times emphasis — away from Europe and towards Joel’s Islamic Antichrist theory, as explored in his book The Islamic Antichrist: The Shocking Truth about the Real Nature of the Beast and his forthcoming Mideast Beast: The Scriptural Case For an Islamic Antichrist.

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I’ve put a screen shot at the top of this post from an end times video featuring Europe as the evil empire and the Pope as Antichrist – it’s a brilliant graphic pairing that illustrates the older theory visually and viscerally, and should you so wish, you can watch the whole thing here. Note also the comment from SyriacBoy10 below the video:

In the Bible and the Quran, it is said that the Antichrist will come from Europe which is expected to be in this generation due to the signs and global disasters.

Just what place names in scriptures might refer to just what places or entities in modern or far future times is always a matter of interpretation — as Joel himself neatly demonstrated with a variety of “biblical” maps in his Prophezine post Where is Magog, Meshech and Tubal?

And for that matter, is our Coptic friend speaking of the Antichrist in the Qur’an, or the Dajjal? The two are commonly inflated, which gets a bit confusing after a while…

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And here’s Joel on failed predictions of the EU as the pivotal demonic empire of the last days in prophecy:

Nearly 20 years ago, I intently watched as a very popular Christian television prophecy teacher declared, “The present formation of the European Union is literally the fulfillment of Bible prophecy right before our eyes!”

According to this teacher, the creation of the European Union represented a biblically prophesied revived Roman Empire. Because the last-days empire of the Antichrist, as described in the books of Daniel and Revelation, is portrayed as a 10-nation alliance, this teacher confidently declared that when the number of EU member states reached 10, this would signal the imminent return of Jesus Christ.

Soon, the number of EU member states reached the magic number 10, just as this teacher had predicted. Then the number reached 11, and then 12. Soon there were 20. Today there are 27 member states. The teacher’s very confident predictions failed.

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As it happens, I correspond with Joel on occasion and like the man, despite our holding very different theological opinions. In particular, I like to quote this passage from his description of an interview he gave on NPR:

I explained to my host that unless a supernatural man bursts forth from the sky in glory, there is absolutely nothing that the world needs to worry about with regard to Christian end-time beliefs. Christians are called to passively await their defender. They are not attempting to usher in His return. Muslims, on the other hand, are actively pursuing the day when their militaristic leader comes to lead them on into victory. Many believe that they can usher in his coming.

I’d be interested to know what GEN Boykin would make of that…

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All in all, I see four trends in apocalyptic thinking at the present time.

First, there’s a trend, suggested by Joel Richardson in his articles linked above, away from an earlier Eurocentric focus of end times interpretation, and towards his own view of Islam – and of the Mahdi (awaited by many Muslims) as Antichrist.

Second, there’s a trend noted by another occasional correspondent of mine, Julie Ingersoll, in one of her two recent articles on Kirk Cameron in Religion Dispatches – more precisely, a theological shift:

from the larger premillennialist evangelical world that he depicted in Left Behind to the postmillennialist dominion theology of the Reconstructionists.

Third, It seems to me that there’s a trend away from the “soon expectation” of the Mahdi of President Ahmadinejad in Iran, as the Supreme Jurisprudent, Khamenei, withdraws his support from his President and Ahmadinejad enters his lame duck phase…

And finally, there are mild signs that apocalyptic itself and religious motives more generally are slowly entering the discourse of the strategically minded, including those whose secular worldviews have hitherto all too often led them to dismiss both religious and apocalyptic drivers as irrational and unserious.

Columbia’s upcoming Hertog Global Strategy Initiative with its focus this year on Religious Violence and Apocalyptic Movements, which I mentioned recently, is one such sign – another is the attention paid to Khorasan — a name with strong Mahdist associations — in a post at the Long Wars Journal today.

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Luckily, we have Richard Landes‘ massive, brilliant Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience to educate us in the bewildering profusion of forms, both secular and sacred, that millennial hopes and fears can take.

And with Israel’s departing Shin Beth chief calling PM Netanyahu “messianic” – using the same term Netanyahu used for Ahmedinajad – it’s about time, too.

[ by Charles Cameron — modeling / scoring recruitment conversations as a flow of ideas, continued from CVE Variants I ]
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Look, in any guidance, in any persuasion, there’s a conversation.

In the image above, the flow is from Anwar al-Awlaki, who already knows and speaks, to Nidal Hasan, who listens and thinks and is persuaded.

But what interests me more than that specific conversation, limited as it was to a handful of emails, is the overall route taken by many different conversations between what the NYPD calls a “spiritual sanctioner” and a prospective recruit.

We know that like a river, any conversation will have its eddies and flows — but if it’s a successful conversation, if it leads to persuasion, if it radicalizes the recruit… then the eddies won’t have prevented or reversed the flow, they’ll just have been a natural part of it.

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Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt addressed the stages they believed the radicalization process generally followed in their report for the NYPD, Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, and the steps they described after self-identification — in which the proto-jihadist comes to think of themselves as within the broad Salafist thought-stream, were these:

Indoctrination is the phase in which an individual progressively intensifies his beliefs, wholly adopts jihadi-Salafi ideology and concludes, without question, that the conditions and circumstances exist where action is required to support and further the cause. That action is militant jihad. This phase is typically facilitated and driven by a “spiritual sanctioner”.

While the initial self-identification process may be an individual act, as noted above, association with like-minded people is an important factor as the process deepens. By the indoctrination phase this self-selecting group becomes increasingly important as radical views are encouraged and reinforced.

Jihadization is the phase in which members of the cluster accept their individual duty to participate in jihad and self-designate themselves as holy warriors or mujahedeen. Ultimately, the group will begin operational planning for the jihad or a terrorist attack.

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For the record: I do understand that the “conversational terrain” of the radicalization process is going to be considerably more twisty and convoluted than any map — as indeed do Silber and Bhatt, who write “Although this model is sequential, individuals do not always follow a perfectly linear progression.”

Let’s take a close look.

Here, for starters, is a diagram from Jeff Conklin, the guy who brought us wicked problems, showing in red the linear path that the creativity books tell you you should take from problem to solution — and in blue, the zigzag path an “actual” designer’s mind might take on its way to that solution — from the first chapter of Conklin’s book, Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems —

I’ve paired Conklin’s diagram with a Von Kármán Vortex Street (I wrote about those recently in Having eyes to see) showing eddies within a successful flow, from M Van Dyke‘s An Album of Fluid Motion — both images are a little too “pure” and “diagrammatic” to fit the actual complexity of human thought.

Recruitment conversations will have their eddies, but it’s both the general route of the flow and the specificities of those eddies that would interest me — not because I wish to “police” those thoughts but because I wish to understand them — and any eddies that repeat themselves from one recruitment conversation to the next will likely contain useful hints as to inherent weak points in the sanctioner’s argument.

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Let me be clear about this. As to our using such an understanding in an attempt to police the thoughts of a “suspect” community – I would think that would be a piss-poor approach to take, with pretty immediate blowback effects.

What I am trying to get at here is not “how to do CVE” – a topic best left to others, and specifically to those who contest the thrust of the recruitment argument from within the same general theological tradition – but how to better understand the conceptual drivers in play in the recruitment process. I am asking, if you like, for concept-level mapping of the terrain. And I should probably have said something about that in my first post in this series.

Here again, non-linearity seems to be the order of the day — and we need to understand what that implies and learn to think in comparably non-linear ways.

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Spiritual sanctioner: what a concept! That’s someone who gives you the fear of hell for after-burners and the hope of paradise as your aim and destination…

And those after-burners burn hot, hot, and that aimed-for Paradise is cool, so very cool…

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Leaping quickly back to non-linearity, then: Dan McCauley, in a very recent Small Wars Journal article, Creative Thinking: Linking Environment, Vision, Change, and Strategy, explains:

The human mind does not work in a linear or list-like fashion. The most common forms of communication are speech or writing, but these are limited by time and space to one word at a time. Research shows that the brain is far more multidimensional and capable of processing enormous amounts of information using images, color, relationships, associations, and other depictions in addition to speech or the written word. Defined as “seeking original ways to reach goals when the means to do so are not readily apparent,” creative thinking uses divergent and convergent thinking. Divergent thinking begins at a common point and generates a variety of thoughts, whereas convergent thinking begins from various data points or potential solutions and searches for the one that best addresses the competing requirements.

So there’s more to non-linearity than just adding some feedback loops into a model that would otherwise move smoothly from premise to conclusion. There’s a whole, rich and ambiguous broth of a world in which each problem is found, and the whole, rich and ambiguous broth of each mind with which we approach it…

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By the time he presented his testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee in November, 2009, Silber had developed his idea of the sanctioner one stage further:

In 2007, we discussed the concept of a “spiritual sanctioner”, an individual who provides religious justification for violent political extremism for individuals who are radicalizing. Within the last six months we have identified a new catalyst for radicalization – what we call the “virtual spiritual sanctioner”. Although he is not the only one, Anwar al Awlaqi, based in Yemen is exemplar of this concept.

The recognition of an online component to recruitment may have been pretty obvious even then — but the February 2011 Lieberman / Collins report, A Ticking Time Bomb: Counterterrorism Lessons From The U.S. Government’s failure To Prevent The Fort Hood Attack picks up on the notion of “virutal spiritual sanctioners” and adds a small but significant detail to the overall picture of how we currently think about (and hence model and prepare ourselves against) such threats:

These individuals provide a false sense of religious justification for an act of terrorism over the internet.

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Which brings me to my last point. As David Martin Jones and MLR Smith say in Whose Hearts and Whose Minds? The Curious Case of Global Counter-Insurgency:

The process of radicalisation is obviously a complex one. Certainly, the passage to the act of terrorism cannot be reduced solely to religion.

That’s right: but to label the religious element in the recruitment discourse “a false sense of religious justification” comes close to dismissing it as irrelevant.

To return to my earlier statement, the after-burners of hell and the aim of Paradise alike are extremely vivid in the imagination to those whose sensibilities are attuned to them.

That’s why Hafez Abdul Qayoom of the Afghan Ulema Council could tell Rod Nordlund of the NY Times:

To Muslims, and especially to Afghans, religion is much higher a concern than civilian or human casualties … When something happens to their religion, they are much more sensitive and have much stronger reaction to it.

That’s why Robert R Fowler wrote of his al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb captors:

Kidnappings of Westerners have fueled debate among securocrats as to whether our AQIM captors might simply bandits flying an Islamic flag of convenience. I know that to be the wrong answer. Our kidnappers were utterly focused religious zealots who believed absolutely in their cause.

We post-enlightenment westerners mostly have a hard time accepting, let alone intuitively feeling this.

[ by Charles Cameron — sometimes i post things so obvious they might actually be useful ]
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One quick annotated quote from Sec. Clinton‘s speech at the U.S. Institute of Peace China Conference, March 7th:

Now when I say “we,” I do not mean only our governments, as important as they are. Every day, across both of our countries, executives and entrepreneurs, scientists and scholars, artists and athletes, students and teachers, family members and citizens of all kinds shape and pull and add to this relationship. Together, they represent a vast range of priorities, concerns, and points of view. And they are all stakeholders in how we build toward a shared future.

It’s really that list I’m after…

There are seven billion individuals bouncing up and down on our trampoline, some of them holding hands, some of them in gangs that want to trip up rival gangs, or make a clearing for themselves and themselves alone, some too weak to bounce much at all…

and each time each one of us lands, we impact the trampoline from a different angle, stretch it a different way – tugging it to the will of the artist, the entrepreneur, the child, the retiree, the curious, the aggressive, the meek…

As we know, the earth is round, which is to say three-dimensional – but the tugs on it, the tensions, are more complicated than that, in fact they’re complex, n-dimensional – and constantly shifting.

Hilary Clinton wants to wake up in the morning, have coffee – and model that! – along with, and in balance with, her counterpart in another huge mass of population, half a globe and at least six philosophies away…

The coffee’s good, but it’s not enough — what we all could use is a new mode of thinking.

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Maps courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps used with permission

[ by Charles Cameron — more on the graphical mapping of heresy, radicalization, decision points, multiple ideas and complex issues, and some illustrations from railroad land ]

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Here’s a railway track illustration of, say, the difference between true Islam (the straight track) and bida (the introduction of new ideas into the religion, deviation, heresy).

This graphic could equally represent the radicalization process, with the “point switching” occurring when the decision is made to switch from sympathizing to active participation, or from participation in the virtual dimension (say by posting on the forums) to the preparation and execution of acts of violence.

Locating the “switching points” would then be a significant part of a successful de-radicalization program, and I’d suggest that the concept of jihad as a matter of obligation (fard ‘ayn) would be one such.

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What follows is essentially a quick-and-dirty pattern language of train tracks, switching points, marshaling yards, etc — I’ve even included one water-slide — to stir creative insights about linear thinking, multiple voices, multiple lines of thought, elegance and the polyphony of ideas…

I’m posting this because any strategic and / or creative thinking that includes the perspectives and voices of multiple stakeholders will require polyphony, as will any approach to the complex dynamics in play in wicked problems…

And much else besides.

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First, we have linear thinking — and a dilemma:

Then, there’s complication — not the same as complexity, and not nearly so hard to figure out —

— and a wicked problem, where the issues are indeed complex, and the problem itself may shift unexpectedly if, for instance, there’s another bombing run just as you are fixing things up after the last one…

And finally, by way of inspiration, there is always the possibility of elegance —

— and (here’s where I switch to the water-slide) — there’s always the possibility of playfulness…

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Finding ways to think graphically, elegantly and a bit playfully about wicked problems is what I’m after here…
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Addendum

Friend JM Berger aka @intelwire sent me a link to this image:

and commented, “I think it’s more like this, no single point of departure, no single destination, loopbacks, dead ends” — nice one, JM!

[ by Charles Cameron — mapping, modeling — no, scoring complexity ]
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I was interested to see David Bohm‘s On Dialogue (Pegasus Communications, 1990) listed in the bibliography of Nancy Roberts‘ paper, Wicked problems and Network Approaches to Resolution, which Mike Few quoted extensively in his recent post Failing into Collaboration? on the SWJ blog. Dr. Bohm’s book On Creativity was the topic of Zen’s recent post.

Wicked problems, multiple stakeholders, multiple voices, polyphony, counterpoint – there’s a whole nexus here that needs exploring.

My post on The speeds of thought, complexities of problems addresses the “thought-speed” that best addresses this kind of issue. There are ways to educate that particular style of thinking, and I hope to address them in a future post – but the other issue that’s of importance here is how to notate such problems, how to map them, or …

model them? No.

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The question we should be asking is not how to code a machine (via stocks and flows, agent based models) to model them, but how to sketch them in such a way that the human mind, working at that slowest and most profound of speeds, can model them using its own natural complexity and capacity for emergent (“aha!”) insights.

That’s a topic I have discussed here before (e.g.: i, ii, iii) and shall take up again, and my preferred term for the activity is the one used in music: scoring.

The other issue that’s of importance here, then, is how to notate such problems, how to map them, how to score them — so that the tortoise mind can read them the way a musician reads a score…

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Above: Score by Cornelius Cardew, “Treatise” (1963-1967), p.183
Below: Score of JS Bach, “Kyrie” from Mass in B Minor

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