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 Charles Cameron is the regular guest-blogger at Zenpundit, and has also posted at Small Wars Journal, All Things Counterterrorism, for the Chicago Boyz Afghanistan 2050 roundtable and elsewhere.  Charles read Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, under AE Harvey, and was at one time a Principal Researcher with Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies and the Senior Analyst with the Arlington Institute:

Connecting the Dots: Light on Light

by Charles Cameron 

In a recent blog-post on MahdiWatch, Timothy Furnish draws our attention to an Islamic think tank named Grande Strategy.

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Their page of further readings on a future Islamic state includes works by an eclectic bunch – including Sir Muhammad Iqbal, recognized after his death and the foundation of the State as the national poet of Pakistan; Sheikh Taqiuddin An-Nabhani, the founder of the Hizb-ut-tahrir movement; Ali Shariati, the Marx-influenced Shi’ite radical intellectual viewed by some as the ideological force behind the Iranian revolution; Abul A’ala Maududi, Sunni writer and founder of Jamaat-e-Islam; Harun Yahya, also known as Adnan Oktar, a major Islamic creationist writer who holds that “Alawites, Wahabbites, Jafarites, they are all pure Muslims; harboring enmity against them is by no means acceptable”; Sayyid Qutb, Sunni author and Muslim Brotherhood member; and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, father of the Iranian Revolution.

Let’s just say that if the books of all these worthies were placed on a single bookshelf and given voices, the ensuing hubbub would resemble the House of Commons at Question Time.

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One article on the Grande Strategy site – the one that caught Timothy Furnish’s attention – is titled To the Unknown Mujahid, May We Never Forget You. It is interesting, as Furnish notes, because it is yet another sign of Mahdist thinking in the region of Afghanistan / Pakistan. It describes a man seen teaching in a mosque in the Faisal Masjid (presumably in Islamabad):

I have never seen a human spirit glow in this manner. I did not think this was even possible. I checked myself by discretely asking a few other brothers (perhaps it was some deficiency in me), and they too confirmed. Let me intimately describe you this man, he was tall, bearded wore a military camo jacket and in all his manners was as if he had walked out of the 1st century Hijri. He spoke English well enough that you could tell he was well-educated and belonged to a noble family. He was from Kashmir, in fact an elected member of the local government (back then Musharaf was all about devolution of power to press the national parties). Some close relatives of his were also senior officers in the Pakistan Army. He was obviously a mujahid, although in my opinion one that was fighting against India and in Kashmir and had nothing to do with the Afghanistan war.

The writer recounts his experience of this man because, as he puts it…

Because I believe (and Allah knows best) that if he is not the Mahdi himself or one of his men, at the least he is the precursor to the kind of men that would make up the army of the Mahdi. Or for those who do not believe in the Mahdi, he is the category of men that can save us from our present circumstances. A prototype to our success. And Allah knows best. Disclaimer: I don’t want to claim that he is the Mahdi.

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There’s also an article on the site about the Black Banners from Khurasan — another marker for Mahdist expectation — that includes quite a mix of sources and resources: commentary, for instance, on the Scofield Reference Bible (a major source of “dispensationalist” end times beliefs) and the “Project for New American Century”, together with some conspiracism about 9/11 specifically and US policy in general:

The US’s War on Terror is a deceptive game and a mind boggling riddle. The term terrorism is itself vague and un-defined and built on repetitive lies upon lies as evident in the case of 9/11. It is almost always blindly used against Muslims. The unilateral, pre-emptive extra-judicial violence by the western powers is always named as wars of democracy and freedom.

— plus for good measure some information about the Jewish origins of the Pashtun / Pathan peoples, and this intriguing statement:

According to Syed Saleem Shehzad of Asia Times Online, Al Qaeda shares this belief with the Taliban that Afghanistan is the promised land of Bilad-e-Khurasan.

— which would mark both as apocalyptic movements (see here and here).

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On the other hand, one comment from a Shi’ite reader suggests that President Ahmadinejad will be the one who recognizes the Mahdi and brings the victorious army to meet him:

When Shuayb Ibn Saleh (Pres. Ahmedinejad) learns of Al Mehdi (as) emergence he will head towards Syria under three banners each of which has 4,000-5,000 men. It is these banners that are of gaudiance that Allah’s Messenger (saas) spoke of when he mentioned that ‘ when you see this army coming from Khursan, then go and join that army even if you have to crawl over snow, because in that army is the Caliph Al Mehdi[as]’. This holds true because it is Shuayb Ibn Saleh who will consolidate the government of Al Mehdi (as) in Jerusalem within 6yrs (72months).

and:

The Black Flags Coming from Khurasan is not of the Taliban … These Black Flags Belongs To Only Shuayb Ibn Saleh (Pres. Ahmedinejad)

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But let’s get back to that business about the “Unknown Mujahid”. According to the report Furnish quotes from:

This particular class was being taught by a man, the like of whom I had never seen before, nor since have ever seen again. When you reach a certain level of spiritual enlightenment… sometimes you can “see” or “feel”… the “noor” or “aura” or “spiritual light” of another… This man did not have a glow – it was like a 1000 watt halogen lamp…

I have to say I find that report particularly interesting because, as Dr. Furnish notes, it offers a Sunni parallel to the self-description given by Iran’s Shi’ite President Ahmadinejad — who claimed on video that he’d been told by someone who was there, “When you began with the words ‘in the name of God,’ I saw that you became surrounded by a light until the end [of the speech]”, and commented, “I felt it myself, too. I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there, and for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink.”

The thing is, this sort of report can also be found on both sides of the Iranian / Israeli aisle.

Gershon Salomon – who as leader of the Temple Mountain Faithful has the twin goals of “the liberation of the Temple Mount from Arab (Islamic) occupation” and “the building of the Third Temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem in our lifetime” – wrote a revealing memoir in which he recounted:

I had the privilege to experience the appearance of the G–d of Israel and His angels in one of the critical battles of Israel when I served in the Israeli Army as a young officer and my small unit was attacked by thousands of Syrian Arab soldiers. … It was night but I could see a light covering me from all sides and lighting the dark night. At the same moment, I could see the Syrian soldiers not shooting me but turning and running very fast back to the mountains. I again lost consciousness. I was told later that the Israeli soldiers looking for me in the darkness were only successful in locating me when they saw the light.

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For what it’s worth, such stories can also be found about the divine or saintly figures of many religions.

Martin Buber tells a legend of the great Hassidic rabbi the Baal Shem Tov, in which a visiting rabbi saw that “the head of the master stood entirely in the white light … The rabbi saw that the master stood entirely in white light.

The Bhagavad Gita describes a moment when Krishna shows his divine form to Arjuna, who describes it thus: “If a thousand suns were to light up the sky all at once, that radiance would equal the radiance of my Lord.”

In the New Testament, Matthew describes how “Jesus taketh Peter, James, and John his brother, and bringeth them up into an high mountain apart, And was transfigured before them: and his face did shine as the sun, and his raiment was white as the light.” (Matt. 17:1-2).

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If I have points to make, there are several of them:

• That religious motivations can be powerful drivers at the level of popular morale.
• That we frequently overlook religious motivations.
• That reports of apocalyptic signs and miracles are potent amplifiers of religious motives.
• That when we study religions, we frequently overlook the miraculous and the apocalyptic.
• That comparative religious studies give context to events that seem extraordinary and affirming within a single religious tradition.
• That when we study religions, we frequently overlook its comparative aspects.

Oh – and that depth psychology (Freud, Brown, Jung, Hillman) and cultural anthropology (Bateson, Turner, Lansing) also have much to teach us.

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Connecting dots is not so hard once you can see them — but how do you connect your blind spots?

Charles Cameron is the regular guest-blogger at Zenpundit, and has also posted at Small Wars Journal, All Things Counterterrorism, for the Chicago Boyz Afghanistan 2050 roundtable and elsewhere.  Charles read Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, under AE Harvey, and was at one time a Principal Researcher with Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies and the Senior Analyst with the Arlington Institute:

A Hipbone Approach to Analysis

by Charles Cameron

I think it’s about time I laid out some of the basic thinking behind the style of analysis that I refer to as the “hipbone” approach.

Seen from one angle, it has to do with Sun Tzu’s double-whammy: “know your enemy, know yourself”.

F Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Let me be blunt about this: if you want to “know yourself” and “know your enemy” as Sun Tzu recommends you should, you’ll need to be able to keep two opposing minds in mind at the same time – and still retain the ability to function.

The hipbone approach uses very simple concept-mapping tools and some fairly subtle insights derived from a lifetime of introspection and the arts to facilitate and annotate that process, and to make the resulting understandings available to others.

But first, let’s get down to the kind of thinking that lies behind this approach.

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One thing I want to know is: what are the most subtle and complex mini-structures that the human mind can take in, more or less at one swoop. Then I’d like to know what their moving parts are, how — to the extent that they have a “main thrust” — they handle parallelisms and reconcile oppositions to that thrust, and what they do with stuff that’s oblique or orthogonal to it, how they put constraints to use in service of expression, what use they make of decoration, how they handle ignorance, how they reconcile head and heart, certainty and doubt, and how they keep the surface mind occupied while affecting the deeper layers of our being… And I want to know that, viscerally — to feel it in my bones, if you like – because I’d like to be able to do more or less the same thing with regard to complex real-world problems, on a napkin, by myself, or with friends or enemies.

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I want to know what those things are because (a) they’re the most nourishing things I can feed myself, and I need all the nourishment I can get, and (b) because it turns out that if I can come up with product that has the same formal properties, I’ll be able to explain things both to myself and other people that otherwise leave me stuttering platitudes.

Somewhere right about there, I run into a quotation like this one, from Cornelius Castoriadis in his World in fragments: writings on politics, society, psychoanalysis, and the imagination:

Remember that philosophers almost always start by saying: “I want to see what being is, what reality is. Now, here is a table. What does this table show to me as characteristic of a real being?” No philosopher ever started by saying: “I want to see what being is, what reality is. Now, here is my memory of my dream of last night. What does this show to me as characteristic of a real being?” No philosopher ever starts by saying “Let Mozart’s Requiem be a paradigm of being, let us start from that.” Why could we not start by positing a dream, a poem, a symphony as paradigmatic of the fullness of being and by seeing in the physical world a deficient mode of being, instead of looking at things the other way round, instead of seeing in the imaginary — that is, human — mode of existence, a deficient or secondary mode of being?

What I think I’m hearing here, half-hidden in the words, is that the Mozart Requiem is one of those high-density, subtle and complex mini-structures.

And I agree — in fact I find myself thinking of the arts that way, as the natural places to look for high-density, subtle and complex models of reality.

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Of course, it would be absurdly neat if nobody else had ever noticed this, and I could take all the credit for myself – but no, the great anthropologist and cybernetician Gregory Bateson makes pretty much the same observation about poetry:

One reason why poetry is important for finding out about the world is because in poetry a set of relationships get mapped onto a level of diversity in us that we don’t ordinarily have access to. We bring it out in poetry. We can give to each other in poetry the access to a set of relationships in the other person and in the world that we are not usually conscious of in ourselves. So we need poetry as knowledge about the world and about ourselves, because of this mapping from complexity to complexity.

Poems are precisely “high-density, subtle and complex mini-structures” – that’s how they manage the “mapping from complexity to complexity” – and so the question comes up, what’s the role of structure in the arts?

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Let’s take a quick look at musical structure, and at polyphony and counterpoint in particular. Your enemy’s perspective and your own – or the many perspectives of the various stakeholders in a complex, perhaps “sticky” or “wicked” problem – can be compared with the different, often discordant melodies from which a Bach or Mozart or Beethoven weaves a fugue – melodic themes which are not infrequently “inverted” or in “contrary motion”.

So what can the musical structure of counterpoint teach us, who are faced with real-world situations comprised of different needs and ideals — often discordant, often in counterpoint or opposition to one another, often in “contrary motion”?

Here’s Edward Said, discussing the Israeli-Palestinian problem in terms (gasp!) of musical form:

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.

Like him or leave him, Said in this paragraph is clearly thinking along similar lines to the ones I’m proposing.

Or to move to yet another art, that of theater — what can we learn about the simulation and modeling of complex issues from Shakespeare? Keith Oatley’s Shakespeare’s invention of theatre as simulation that runs on minds is a serious exploration of that possibility.

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I’m going to return to the arts, and lay out a theory of what an art is and how it works, in a later post in this series – but for now, let me just say that I’ve devised a cognitive mapping tool, or more precisely a family of games and mapping tools, that I call “HipBone Games and Analysis” because they’re all about the way one idea connects with another – just as “the hip-bone’s connected to the thigh-bone” in the song.

And as I commented recently on Zenpundit:

What I’m aiming for is a way of presenting the conflicting human feelings and understandings present in a single individual, or regarding a given topic in a small group, in a conceptual map format, with few enough nodes that the human mind can fairly easily see the major parallelisms and disjunctions, as an alternative to the linear format, always driving to its conclusion, that the white paper represents. Not as big as a book, therefore, let alone as vast as an enormous database that requires complex software like Starlight to graphically represent it, and not solely quantitative… but something you could sketch out on a napkin, showing nodes and connections, in a way that would be easily grasped and get some of the human and contextual side of an issue across.

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To balance Sun Tzu’s “know your enemy, know yourself” with which I began, I’ll offer by way of counterpoint Christ’s “But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you” (Luke 6.27). And now for two of my favorite words: more soon…

Charles Cameron is the regular guest-blogger at Zenpundit, and has also posted at Small Wars Journal, All Things Counterterrorism, for the Chicago Boyz Afghanistan 2050 roundtable and elsewhere.  Charles read Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, under AE Harvey, and was at one time a Principal Researcher with Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies and the Senior Analyst with the Arlington Institute:

Anecdote Before Statistic

by Charles Cameron

Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, one time commandant of the Army War College and author of books on strategy made one of those observations the other day that catch my attention out of the corner of my eye, and trigger a mini-avalanche of thought in response. What Scales said, in an interview with Government Executive, was:

Armies break anecdotally before they break statistically

Scales was discussing the dispiriting recent upwards trend in Army suicides, which has been discussed here and elsewhere – but that’s not what caught my eye or triggered the mini-avalanche.

What struck me was the pairing of the words “anecdote and “statistic”. Because that’s a pairing that’s already very prominent in my own thinking. So let me just say this:

When we think about “connecting the dots” and the intelligence community — whether it’s to discuss how the IC failed to notice this, or was overwhelmed with that excess of data, or might like the other form of massive data visualization tool — we generally think in terms of vast quantities of data, and technical means for making the appropriate connections.

My own focus is on anecdotes, not data points – on individuals and their thoughts, rather than on groups and their statistics – and on the human, pattern-recognizing brain, rather than on high tech tools and their associated budgets.

 Look: Gen. Scales is right, anecdotes come first. And whether we’re thinking about our own troops, or our involvements with others in Afghanistan, or Yemen, or wherever, let’s remember that anecdotes convey morale and context in a way that statistics never can.

So let’s begin to think a but more about our best human analysts, working with anecdotes rather than data points. The statistics and the data glut can follow later

From Lexington Green:

Defeat in Afghanistan? The View from 2050

As previously announced, ChicagoBoyz will be hosting a roundtable discussion of the American campaign in Afghanistan, looking back from a forty year distance, from 2050.

In the few weeks since the initial post went up, we have had several dramatic events occur: The end of Gen. McChrystal’s command, the rise of Gen. Petraeus for a historic second command of a very troubled war, the apparent abandonment of President Obama’s timetable, the appearance of the Wikileaks document trove … . These are major developments.

Yet, looking back at any historical events from a long enough distance, all the details get ironed flat, the granularity milled to smooth powder, the larger patterns emerge, while the roles of key individuals sometimes come into clearer focus.

But for now, we don’t know how this war is going to play out. We are doomed to live history marching backward, facing only the past, and not knowing what we will trip over next.

Imagining possible outcomes, and possible explanations for those outcomes, can help us understand what is happening now, and help to clarify what we should be doing.

Our Roundtable contributors will publish their posts and responses during the third and fourth weeks of August, 2010.

“It is, I think, particularly in periods of acknowledged crisis that scientists have turned to philosophical analysis as a device for unlocking the riddles of their field. Scientists have not generally needed or wanted to be philosophers”  

 – Thomas Kuhn

It used to be used as a joke, but a well established string theorist, Erik Verlinde,  is challenging the existence of gravity, calling it an “illusion” (no word as to whether he is willing to step out of a 95th floor window to test his hypothesis):

The New York Times (Dennis Overbye) – A Scientist Takes On Gravity

It’s hard to imagine a more fundamental and ubiquitous aspect of life on the Earth than gravity, from the moment you first took a step and fell on your diapered bottom to the slow terminal sagging of flesh and dreams.

But what if it’s all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?

So says Erik Verlinde, 48, a respected string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, whose contention that gravity is indeed an illusion has caused a continuing ruckus among physicists, or at least among those who profess to understand it. Reversing the logic of 300 years of science, he argued in a recent paper, titled “On the Origin of Gravity and the Laws of Newton,” that gravity is a consequence of the venerable laws of thermodynamics, which describe the behavior of heat and gases.

“For me gravity doesn’t exist,” said Dr. Verlinde, who was recently in the United States to explain himself. Not that he can’t fall down, but Dr. Verlinde is among a number of physicists who say that science has been looking at gravity the wrong way and that there is something more basic, from which gravity “emerges,” the way stock markets emerge from the collective behavior of individual investors or that elasticity emerges from the mechanics of atoms.

Looking at gravity from this angle, they say, could shed light on some of the vexing cosmic issues of the day, like the dark energy, a kind of anti-gravity that seems to be speeding up the expansion of the universe, or the dark matter that is supposedly needed to hold galaxies together.

….It goes something like this: your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight, and nature likes options. So it takes a force to pull hair straight and eliminate nature’s options. Forget curved space or the spooky attraction at a distance described by Isaac Newton‘s equations well enough to let us navigate the rings of Saturn, the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder.

Some of the best physicists in the world say they don’t understand Dr. Verlinde’s paper, and many are outright skeptical. But some of those very same physicists say he has provided a fresh perspective on some of the deepest questions in science, namely why space, time and gravity exist at all – even if he has not yet answered them.

Dr. Verlinde goes into greater detail about his ideas on The Reference Frame, the blog of Czech string theory physicist Luboš Motl. It seems from the comment section that Dr. Motl  is not buying it at all and is politely saying that Verlinde’s hypothesis is complete nonsense ( or, conversely, if true, is so revolutionary that Verlinde upends not only everything we know about physics, but also logic). Here is another expert commentary. Here I cordially invite some of my scientist readers, Shane, Dr. Von and Cheryl to weigh in as well.

Nevertheless, what Verlinde is doing, challenging the unchallenged paradigm, is intellectually very useful.

Sir Isaac Newton who explained gravity’s action did not know what gravity was. We still don’t know what it is even though physicists today have a much wider perspective than did Newton, whose discoveries were the bedrock of not just modern science, but modernity itself. When concepts are accepted blindly we tend to stop thinking of them very deeply. Not everyone, Stephen Hawking has spent a great deal of time pondering gravity as did Albert Einstein in his later years when he groped hopelessly for a unified field theory. Richard Feynman too, was a deep thinker on gravity:

Most of us unfortunately, including most physicists, are not Einstein, Feynman or Hawking.

The difficulty with theoretical physics and questions as fundamental to the order of nature as gravity is that we may be limited in our ability to understand the universe conceptually by the physical, biological, structure of our brains and the scalar level and time frame we inhabit. It is very hard to mentally see outside that box. Our brains can only entertain so many variables or so much complexity at one time and our conceptual imagination is largely influenced by sense perceptions. Mathematics helps us get around our physical limitations as does the processing speed of supercomputers but these crutches themselves refer back to the preferred cognitive avenues of our physical brains.

In thinking about fundamental or overarching phenomena, it is useful to pause and consider that as primates, we may not have been optimized by evolution to easily discern the most significant mechanisms of the physical world when our hominid deep ancestors eluded the apex predators of the Paleolithic Age. With great probability, Verlinde is spectacularly wrong here but his paper, because he is is a credible scientist with an impressive record, is forcing a lot of very smart people to stop and reasses what they know to be true in order to defend it from his heresy – cough…excuse me – his hypothesis 🙂

In doing so, some of them may gain insights of importance that otherwise never might have occurred. Insights that may only be tangentially related to Verlinde’s original idea.

Dissent is the grain of sand that can yield a pearl.