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Or, at least a palliative.  Civilizational progress past and future.

[ by Charles Cameron — non-linearity, complexity, “constellational thinking”, a quick spin around the blogosphere, history, Walter Benjamin — following on from Nancy Fouts ]
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image: Galileo Galilei, Siderius Nuncius (i.e. The Starry Messenger), 1610

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The novelist Teju Cole has a piece in the Atlantic that’s triggered by the Kony2012 business, and zooms out to touch on much else besides. His piece is titled The White Savior Industrial Complex, and as I was reading it, I came across a phrase that tweaked my keen interest. Cole is talking about Nicholas Kristof, and writes:

His good heart does not always allow him to think constellationally. He does not connect the dots or see the patterns of power behind the isolated “disasters.” All he sees are hungry mouths, and he, in his own advocacy-by-journalism way, is putting food in those mouths as fast as he can. All he sees is need, and he sees no need to reason out the need for the need.

By my lights, “he sees no need to reason out the need for the need” is a powerful tongue-twister, but it’s the phrase “to think constellationally” that interests me here.

Cole returns to a slight variant on the phrase later, this time saying:

Success for Kony 2012 would mean increased militarization of the anti-democratic Yoweri Museveni government, which has been in power in Uganda since 1986 and has played a major role in the world’s deadliest ongoing conflict, the war in the Congo. But those whom privilege allows to deny constellational thinking would enjoy ignoring this fact.

Constellational thinking, then, connects the dots, sees the patterns behind isolated events, sees not just the events themselves but also the circumstances that caused them – and its absence allows us to reduce complexly-interwoven reality to one or more simplistic polarities — better suited to sound bites than to analysis.

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Cole also points us to Rosebell Kagumire‘s video response to the Kony affair, and she in turn has her own way of addressing the same kind of reduction of complexity to simplicity. She wrote, back on March 8th:

For the last many hours i have followed a campaign by Invisible Children NGO called KONY2012 that has gone viral getting more than 20 million hits on Youtube. I am a story teller and i know the danger of a single story.

So simple, that: I know the danger of a single story.

Remember the Ocean of the Streams of Story diagram in my post almost a week ago, Countering Violent Extremism: variants on a theme? Edward Tufte designed it, to illustrate a paragraph by Salman Rushdie…

The truth of a complex situation lives in the interweaving of many stories, not in a single strand, a single view.

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Constellations — of thoughts, of ideas.

image: Eugen Gomringer, Constellation, ca 1960

I did some digging – I’m not the Oxford English Dictionary, and I can’t say for sure that any particular use of “constellation” marks its first appearance in the sense that interests me here – Eugen Gomringer‘s Constellations (from 1954 onwards, example above) may be relevant in an avant-garde way– but my search brought me to a post by Liz Danzico at Bobulate titled Celestial History, in which Liz wrote:

Teaching constellations is an exercise in storytelling. You see, dots, these anonymous light encrusted patterns, must be memorized and categorized, and it’s only through stories that one can make sense of them. Starting with the north star, and systematically creating relationships in the winter sky among Hercules and Sagittarius, Libra and Polaris, we told tales. We’d trade stories on top of the old stone building in the middle of dark campus until late into the night. Creating these stories, giving Hercules a relationship to Cassiopeia — true or not, good or not, believable or not, it didn’t matter — what mattered were that patterns were found and marked.

Marking patterns and making content accessible through stories is what we do. And often, still, when we begin, we’re in the dark.

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This post in turn lead Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket to write a quick note of praise, Explosions in the sky, which drew a comment from Tim of Short Schrift that said:

After the Copernican revolution, a constellation isn’t even a constellation. Instead, it’s a two-dimensional flattening of a three-dimensional reality. Actually, we should probably say a FOUR-dimensional reality. The light from stars at varying distances, leaving their sources at various times in the distant past, gets mistaken, from our earthbound point-of-view, as a simultaneous two-dimensional pattern.

BUT! That distortion, that accident, produces something extremely powerful — both imaginatively and practically.

Take “constellational thinking” and apply it to something besides stars in space. Let’s say — history.

Over here, you’ve got the Roman Republic, over there, the French Revolution. Distant in time, distant in geography, no kind of causal proximity let alone a relationship between them.

But bam! Slap them together. View them as a single event, a collapse of time.

Now you begin to see the French Revolution the way part of the Revolution saw itself, as an explosion of the continuum of history.

Now — and sorry if I slow-played this — you’re in Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” Now you’re performing a genuinely three-dimensional nonlinear reading of historical time.

Consider that process, spelled out in the phrases “Distant in time, distant in geography, no kind of causal proximity let alone a relationship between them. But bam! Slap them together. View them as a single event, a collapse of time.”

Consider how that “fits” the same Arthur Koestler model of thinking I was on about yesterday in my post Nancy Fouts and the heart of the matter, in which I described:

the “release of cognitive tension” that occurs when some form of analogy, similitude, overlap allows the mind to join conceptual clusters from two fields in a “creative leap”

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Well, I’m not along in finding this sort of thing useful. Here’s bethr from Mixed Bits writing on tumblr:

Constellational thinking

Omigosh… I’ve been using this phrase in numerous conversations for at least 4 years, usually when attempting to describe how I seem to process information and think, in contrast to the linear thinking which is more prevalent and encouraged in my profession. I’ve never heard anyone else use this phrase…it excites me that others have applied the same phrase and metaphor to the same idea and have articulated it much better than I ever have.

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And Walter Benjamin:

image: Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920

Turning to Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History for a moment, we find a remarkable and justly celebrated paragraph about the angel depicted above, a 1920 Paul Klee painted etching which Benjamin himself once owned, now housed in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem:

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

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More prosaically, Benjamin then gives us the twinned realities to which Tim had pointed in his comment at Snarkmarket:

For Robespierre, Roman antiquity was a past charged with the here-and-now, which he exploded out of the continuum of history. The French revolution thought of itself as a latter day Rome. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a past costume. Fashion has an eye for what is up-to-date, wherever it moves in the jungle of what was.

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Benjamin’s “moment” — his here-and-now — has passed, perhaps. The nuances discoverable through juxtaposition, counterpoint, overlay, constellational thinking, remain.

George Orwell was more right than he knew….

Congress passed a law – by unanimous consent in the Senate and by a suspension of rules in the House – to permit the Federal government to arbitrarily arrest and imprison for up to ten years members of the serf class (formerly known as “American citizens”) whose presence annoys or offends specally designated members of the elite and foreign dignitaries. A list that will no doubt expand greatly in future legislation to include very “special” private citizens.

Think about that, future “Joe the Plumbers” or Cindy Sheehans, before you ask an impertinent question of your betters or wave your handmade cardboard sign. Is ten seconds of glory on your local ABC affiliate news at 5 o’clock worth that felony arrest record and federally funded anal exam?

No? Then kindly shut your mouth, sir. Learn your place.

Two nebbish Representatives, one Republican and one Democrat, distinguished only by their lack of legislative or political importance, sponsored the bill on behalf of the big boys who fast-tracked it under the radar (they learned from the SOPA debacle). Forget ideology or boasts about carrying a copy of the Constitution in the breast pocket of their suit, whether you are in an archconservative Congressional district or an ultraliberal one, almost every member of Congress voted “aye” to trash multiple amendments in the Bill of Rights.

Almost every one.

This is an accelerating trend in recent years and in particular, a bipartisan theme of the 112th Congress, which views Constitutional rights of nobodies as an anachronistic hindrance to the interests (or convenience) of their powerful and wealthy political supporters. Our elected officials and their backers increasingly share an oligarchic class interest that in important matters, trumps the Kabuki partisanship of  FOXnews and MSNBC and inculcates a technocratic admiration for the “efficiency” of select police states.

It is from this demographic-cultural root of incestuous corruption that our creeping – and increasingly creepy – manifestations of authoritarianism in American life springs. The SOPA/PIPA internet censorship bills, naked scanners at airports, Stasi-like expansion of expensively wasteful TSA security theater, proposed 24/7 monitoring of  every American’s online activities, migration of police powers to unaccountable private firms, replacement of elected municipal governments with “emergency managers” (favoring financiers over taxpayers), Federal agencies monitoring political critics , the Department of Justice retro-legalizing corporate racketeering, fraud, perjury and conspiracy on a national scale, plus other infringements of liberty or gross corruption that I could list, ad nauseum.

We have reached the point where we as Americans need to stop, step back from moment by moment fixation on nonsensical, “white noise” fake political issues like “contraception” ginned up to keep the partisans distracted and become seriously involved in determining the direction in which our nation is headed. Our elite are telegraphing their strong preference for a “soft dictatorship” but we still have time to check their ambitions and rein in their looting.

It is almost quaint these days to pick up Friedrich von Hayek’s classic,  The Road to Serfdom and thumb through it. The libertarian antistatists of the 20th century were so focused on the clear and present dangers of totalitarianism that the idea of a weak state that endangered liberty through a mixture of corruption and regulatory capture eluded them. The Westphalian state at it’s apex was so overweening that the enemy of free societies, after foreign monsters like Hitler and Stalin, could be ambitious intellectual pygmies like Harold Laski or Tom Hayden. The state was so omnipotent that even it’s efforts at benevolence, to build a “Great Society” of the Welfare State were injurious to individual freedom because the expanse of statism crowded and weakened civil society , the market and private life. The argument gained political traction because, to varying degrees, it was true and looked prophetic when the Welfare-state began to crash economically in the 1970’s on stagflation.

Give the Welfare-state liberals and Social Democrats of the past their due though, their intentions by their own lights were benign. They wanted to make a safer, more secure, more equal, more just life through a more powerful state (whether that was a good idea or a realistic endeavor was the central political question between right and left). The current elite in comparison is so inferior in moral character and overconfident in their abilities that they may soon make us yearn for the former’s return.

What have now in our ruling class,  are the  builders of a Creepy-state and their intentions are not benign, except toward themselves, for as long as the looting of the American economy can last.

Unlike the Welfare-state, the Creepy-state, shot through with corruption, is  not omnipotent  because it is to be the servant and gendarme of the emerging oligarchy and not their master – but it is to be omniscient and omnipresent, constantly watching, monitoring, investigating, recording, interrogating, coercing, sorting, muzzling, gatekeeping and shearing the sheep on behalf of the shepherds.

Or the wolves.

The Creepy-state is not there to protect you or give you a higher standard of living or ensure justice or democracy, but to maintain a hierarchical public order from “disruption” (formerly known as “politics” or “democracy”). If the classical liberal ideal was the night watchman state, this state is the shadowy and ill-disposed watcher in the night.

The American political elite, Democrat and Republican, Conservative and Liberal, are in are largely in consensus that the government should, in regard to the American people:

Read your email
Listen to your phone calls
Track your movements on GPS
Track your online activity
Track your spending
Track your political activity
Read your medical records
Read your financial records
Scan your body
Scan your house
Scan your DNA
Keep you under video surveillance in public
Detain you at random in public places for security checks
Close off public spaces for private use
Seize private property for private use
Censor your speech
Block your access to judicial relief
Determine your educational and career path
Regulate your diet, place of residence, lifestyle and living standards (ever downwards)
Charge you with secret crimes for breaking secret regulations
Share or leak information about you at will

Is this the America we wish for our children or grandchildren? One that epitomizes the values of our Constitution or Declaration of Independence, or is it some kind of tawdry and shameful dime store fascism of a small Latin American country? Perhaps life is finally imitating fiction?

Fortunately, it is not too late. Irrevocable changes in the constitutional order have yet to be engineered. Our politicians are followers, not leaders here. They are a small and cowardly lot for the most part and will recoil in fear from this authoritarian ethos if a sufficiently large number of elected officials are thrown out of office at once. We can still roll this back – at least the most egregiously anti-American aspects – if we get sufficiently angry come November.

Self-interest is their only lodestone.

Sure, it’s all fun and games now, but….

Members of the Grand Army of the Republic, 1892

An estimated 2, 333, 972 Americans have been deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq since September 2001. Of these, 977, 542 were deployed more than once. When final combat operations end in Afghanistan and the numbers from peripheral theater operations against al Qaida are counted, these figures will be somewhat larger.  It must also be remembered, that among these volunteers were 4,683 men and women who did not return, except in a flag draped coffin. This grim statistic too, will increase before the end.

Wars continue to shape the fate of nations long after the guns fall silent.  Mrs. Florence Green, who served in Great Britain’s embryonic Royal Air Force and was the last living veteran of the First World War, died the other day at 110, but we are still grappling with the terrible consequences of the Great War. One of the ways in which wars shape society are through the collective memories and internalized lessons, expressed by it’s veterans.

Not every war produces a great riptide across a national psyche. The Korean War was as silent as the generation that fought it, despite being comparable in some ways to the war in Vietnam, whose images and memories are bitterly iconic.  Other wars loom large. The culture of the trenches and the bloody debacles of the Somme and Verdun produced ex-soldiers who contributed much to revolutionary upheaval and the mass militarization of European politics. In a more benign vein, the Civil War veterans, the “generation whose hearts were touched by fire” and “the greatest generation” of WWII did much to shape the character of  subsequent eras of peace, moderation, stability, social reform and economic growth.

What will the veterans of the wars of 9/11 come to personify?

They are different.  Volunteers in a small professional military, these veterans are far fewer in number and less strictly “generational” than their mass-mobilized predecessors of the world wars, Korea and Vietnam. Every man on D-Day or on Okinawa had “Pearl Harbor” as a common experience, but in 2011, an 18  year old Marine in Afghanistan was only in third grade when planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  Their close comrades in combat may include reservists a decade and a half their senior, married and with families. The United States fought it’s wars but not with your grandfather’s army.

They are held in high esteem by a public from which many feel isolated. They have committed suicide at three times the rate of the general population, to a studied indifference from a stultified and mismanaged military personnel bureaucracy. They receive public accolades and parades that eluded those who served in Vietnam but some veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan have had trouble getting the medical attention their injuries required.

These veterans have not yet found their collective “voice” but the early rumblings have been about broken faith in leaders who have let them down.

I suspect we will be hearing that voice soon and it may change our politics for the better.