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[ by Charles Cameron – extended analytic game on Israeli-Palestinian conflict — for those who wish to catch up, our game thus far consists of an intro to the game and game board, followed by moves 1-5, 6-9, then moves 10-11 which together constitute a meditation, moves 12, 13-15, 16-17, and most recently before this, move 18 with cadenza ]

Move 19: The view from above

Move content:

Discussing strategy, the very canny LTG (USMC, Ret’d.) Paul Van Riper had this to say:

What we tend to do is look toward the enemy. We’re only looking one way: from us to them. But the good commanders take two other views. They mentally move forward and look back to themselves. They look from the enemy back to the friendly, and they try to imagine how the enemy might attack them. The third is to get a bird’s-eye view, a top-down view, where you take the whole scene in. The amateur looks one way; the professional looks at least three different ways.

A bird’s-eye view, a hawk’s eye view, a top-down view, an overview, a view from 30,000 feet, a God’s eye view, a view from above, a zoom…

If move 18 and its cadenza gave us a view of the depth of vision or insight that is necessary for a full and rich understanding of the world we live in — its qualitative or spiritual scope, if you like — this next move, with its picnic and drone-sight, addresses its breadth in space and time — materially and quantitatively speaking.

The classic expression of the sheer material scope of the universe was put together by Charles and Ray Eames in their justly celebrated film, Powers of Ten, from which the lower of these two images is drawn:

Here are some other relevant scans of the scope of things, in terms of time and space:

The Scale of the Universe 2
A Brief History of The Universe
The Known Universe
A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945

These are impressive videos to be sure, but as an aside I’ll invite you to ask yourselves how well they compare with this zoom in words, a poem by the zennist, ecologist, essayist and poet Gary Snyder, from his book, Axe Handles: Poems:

Such breadth of vision, such craft.

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If this “material scope of things” too has a cadenza, it would be that all of this is shot through with some primary oppositions, dappled as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins would have it, with swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim — as indicated in the drone-sight and picnic double image at the head of this move.

This dappling, this constant flux of opposites, takes many forms — day and night lead to the more abstract light and dark, which can then be interpreted morally as good and evil, to which we respond with repulsion and attraction as the case may be, building our worldviews from love or fear…

At different scales the opposites that matter most to us may have different names and shadings, but here I’d just like to draw attention to the dappling of our world with:

competition and cooperation
Darwin‘s natural selection and Kropotkin‘s mutual aid
duel and duet (ah! — a favorite phrasing of mine)
war and peace

Provocatively, we find this dappling in scriptures, too, wherein the ripples of such verses as “The LORD is a man of war: the LORD is his name” (Exodus 15.3) dropped like a stone into the pond of the human mind, meet with the ripples of other verses such as “God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him” (I John 4.16).

There are times when we take such oppositions literally, perhaps too literally, and times when we begin to see oppositions as abstract and theoretical end-points to what is in fact a yin-yang process continually unfolding…

Which brings me by a commodius vicus of recirculation to this image of the great opposition between war and peace, its dappling, its unfolding:

Links claimed:

To the Lamb, move 18: this move presents the material scope of the universe in counterpoint to its visionary scope as laid out in move 18 with its cadenza.

To Revelation, move 17 — the word revelation means unveiling, as we have seen, and our sciences and technologies, with their spectra of telescopes, microscopes, cameras and zooms, are unveiling and revealing to us much about the physicality of the world we live in — much that was accounted for in other times and places through intuition, vision and poetry.

This scientific and technical revelation of material existence, for many of us moderns, has largely eclipsed the mode of visionary revelation of move 17 — yet it cannot eradicate it. Implicit in this move, then, is the sense that we carry with us both subjective and objective, inner and outer, qualitative and quantitative understandings — though the data that “sight” and “insight” provide us with may be different in kind, and resolving them may be something of a koan to us, the deep problem in consciousness as philosophers of science have named it — and that we can discount neither one if we are to have and maintain a rich sense of our situation.

Comment:

If the two previous moves have shown us the scope of the universe we co-inhabit, perhaps we should now make our own zoom in, much as James Joyce did when he had the schoolboy Stephen inscribe his name and address in his geography book as Stephen Dedalus, Class of Elements, Clongowes Wood College, Sallins, County Kildare, Ireland, Europe, The World, Universe – an address that Stephen then read both forwards and backwards, finding himself in one direction, and finding in the other that he had no means of knowing what might lie beyond the universe…

Imagine then, skipping rapidly from (unimaginable) cosmos via such things as the intriguingly named End of Greatness to galaxy or nebula…

…solar system and planet — whence we can slow down and zero gently in on the Middle (or as my friend Ralph Birnbaum would call it, the Muddle) East, Israel / Palestine, Jerusalem / Al Quds / the Temple Mount / Noble Sanctuary – and to such matters of contemplative vision and tribal passion as the first, second and projected third Temples, the al-Aqsa mosque.

Our increasing focus will bring us, then, to that the rock which Jews believe marks the place where Abraham bound his son Isaac (the Akedah), and which Muslims believe to be the place of ascent of the Prophet to the celestial realms (the Mi’raj) on his Night Journey (Qur’an, Al-Isra).

Here again myth and history collide, and both visionary and material considerations merge in the heart of the what my friend the Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg has justly called “the most contested piece of real estate on earth”.

[ by Charles Cameron — targeted killings, the one and the many, qualitative and quantitative approaches, statistics and analogy, sacrifice, rethinking thinking ]
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Albrecht Durer, Christ before Caiaphas, from The Small Passion.

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I seem to be clearing the decks with some scattershot smaller posts today, and will hopefully return to the matter of Esther, Bibi and Iran shortly – the sheer mass of interesting aspects there threatens to overwhelm me.

Here’s a brief note, from one religious angle, on the targeted killing on citizens who are found to threaten national security.

I would like to stress that as usual, my purpose in writing is to open up lines of thought, not to point to a particular conclusion: I see myself as a voice in conversation, not as a decider.

But there’s more than that. I am trying to rethink thinking – to define a way of coming at complex problems that’s polyhedral, polyphonic – because if there’s one property that’s common to the major problems we currently face, it’s that they are not linear, they are not single-sided, they are not black and white.

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I laid out some preparatory thinking on the “openness” this requires in yet another post earlier today.

Another aspect of this rethinking would be the willingness to make extensive use of analogy — and analogical thinking, while extremely powerful, also carries with it its own particular risks — so I would like to repeat another caution that I have suggested before. If we are to engage the riches of juxtaposition and analogical thinking — to open up those “new avenues” on thorny problems — we need to be very clear that our use of such analogies by no means implies moral equivalence, any more than for those using statistics, correlations necessarily imply causation.

We need to make a precision tool of analogy — to sharpen its blade — with a clear recognition both of what it can accomplish, and of what safeguards it demands of us if we are to avoid its pitfalls.

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Example:

In these times when the use of drones to kill targeted US citizens — and indeed presumed innocents such as the 16-year-old Abdulrahman al-Awlaki – is justified in the name of national security, the reason given by the High Priest for the death of Jesus in John’s Gospel bears reflection:

The context as given in John 11.47-53 is worth considering in full:

Then gathered the chief priests and the Pharisees a council, and said, What do we? for this man doeth many miracles. If we let him thus alone, all men will believe on him: and the Romans shall come and take away both our place and nation. And one of them, named Caiaphas, being the high priest that same year, said unto them, Ye know nothing at all, Nor consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die for the people, and that the whole nation perish not. And this spake he not of himself: but being high priest that year, he prophesied that Jesus should die for that nation; And not for that nation only, but that also he should gather together in one the children of God that were scattered abroad. Then from that day forth they took counsel together for to put him to death.

There’s a lot going on there, isn’t there?

On the one hand, Caiaphas quite clearly views Jesus as a dangerous trouble-maker whose rabble-rousing threatens the entire Jewish people with destruction — and wants him eliminated.

But there’s also the way the gospel turns the tables on Caiaphas, and reworks his authorization of the killing of Jesus into an unwitting prophecy of the latter’s sacrificial self-offering for the redemption of all humankind.

That is also remarkable.

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As I said above, my interest here is not in taking sides in the argument regarding drone strikes or targeted killings, but in opening up new avenues of thought – reminding us in this case that “one for many” arguments, pro and con, have been with us a long time.

And dare I suggest that the High Priest’s argument, together with the Evangelist’s skillful way of turning it on its head, offers us a stunning instance of how difficult it can be to reconcile qualitative with quantitative thinking — the interests of the one with those of the many? And perhaps too, that for an immortal deity (viewed now from within the faith perspective of Christianity) to make of himself a mortal sacrifice, could be an indicator of just how paradoxical that kind of difficulty really is?

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

[ by Charles Cameron — creative, automotive, drone? whither music? classical, pop, film? — & other questions ]
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Mozart on skates with ski sticks:

I’m posting three videos here that have quite a bit in common, each of which has gone viral at some point recently, and each of which features music making.

OK Go’s Needing/Getting on Chevy Sonic:

Three styles of music, three kinds of instrumental set-up… there’s something admirable about each of them, and also something I find faintly disturbing — a different something disturbing in each case

Quadrotor Drones play the James Bond theme:

So what do you make of them? I’ll be back with a John Cage video and my own comments in a follow-up post a few days hence.

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h/t +Jason Wells

[ by Charles Cameron — complex problems and a future with drones graphically depicted ]
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A couple of interesting, arresting and relevant signs here…

The top one is a perennial favorite, and is far too simple to represent genuine complexity with any accuracy — but still gets something of the point across.

The lower of the two comes from a post by blog-friend Shlok Vaida today — I’ve cropped the original because the lettering would be illegible in my “specs” format if I hadn’t, but I encourage you to click through and see it — and also to visit John Robb‘s very recent post Drone Swarms are Here: 1 Minute to Midnight?

Shloky is an enterprising fellow — is he already printing up large quantities of those “Authorized Drone Strike Zone” notices, or (more likely because more efficient) waiting a year or four before printing them on a just-in-time basis?

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Are we wearing our time-crash helmets yet?