zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — Iran, unknown unknowns, Madhyamika philosophy and a blessed unknowing ]
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image from Jackson Pollock / AustinKids—
an artist’s representation of a wicked problem to be untangled?

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Dr. TX Hammes, who will need no introduction to most ZP readers, wrote a few days back in On Bombing Iran, A False Choice:

While there has been some discussion of Iran closing the Straits of Hormuz, there has been no consideration of other Iranian actions – mining harbors overseas (using merchant ships), major attacks on oil production chokepoints globally or major terror attacks using the nuclear equivalent explosive power inherent in many industrial practices. In short, bombing proponents assume Iran will be an essentially supine enemy and not attempt to expand the conflict geographically or chronographically.

Iran is a classic wicked problem. Any “solution” brings a new set of problems. Lacking a solution, the strategist’s job is to think through how to manage such a problem.

My train of thought now departing the National Defense University on Dr Hammes’ platform will make its way with stops at Hans Morgenthau, Jeff Conklin and Richard Feynman to a final destination deep in the heartland of Buddhist Madhyamika philosophy with Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel.

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Drs. Francis J. Gavin and James B. Steinberg‘s recent Foreign Policy piece The Unknown Unknowns carried the subtitle:

If the past half-century of American political history has taught us anything, it’s that we can’t possibly know the consequences of bombing — or not bombing — Iran

and opined:

Based on our experiences — one of us a former senior policymaker, the other a historian of U.S. foreign policy — we are convinced that the “right” answer, but the one you will never read on blogs or hear on any cable news network, is that we simply cannot know ahead of time, with any degree of certainty, what the optimal policy will turn out to be. Why? Even if forecasters could provide probabilities about the likelihood of a narrow, specific event, it is simply beyond the capacity of human foresight to make confident predictions about the short- and long-term global consequences of a military strike against Iran.

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It appears that this sense of unknowing has application beyond the specific question of whether or not to bomb Iran. Blog-friend Peter J Munson just the other day quoted Hans Morgenthau in a short SWJ piece titled Gentile: Realities of a Syrian Intervention — using a Morgenthau quote that he also features as an epigraph to his book, Iraq in Transition: The Legacy of Dictatorship and the Prospects for Democracy.

So that’s Iran, Iraq and Syria — but the Morgenthau quote itself, from his Politics among Nations, is even more general in application:

The first lesson the student of international politics must learn and never forget is that the complexities of international affairs make simple solutions and trustworthy prophecies impossible.

Okay?

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And it goes further. Love that quote from Laurence J Peters that Jeff Conklin uses as the epigraph to his seminal paper on Wicked Problems:

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them

Next up, here’s the Nobel physicist Richard Feynman speaking in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a Horizon / Nova interview, illustrating the approach Morgenthau takes to international relations as applicable to the grand issues of philosophy, religion and science:

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we’re here, and what the question might mean.

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And how far is that from Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel, student and wife of the lama Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, writing in her book on Madhyamika, The Power of an Open Question (p. 58):

Maybe experiencing complexity brings us closer to reality than does thinking we’ve actually figured things out. False certainty doesn’t finalize anything. Things keep moving and changing. They are influenced by countless variables, twists and turns … never for a moment settling into thingness. So maybe we should question the accuracy or limitations of this kind of false certainty. Conflicting information confuses us only when we’re trying to reach a definite conclusion. But if we’re not trying to reach a conclusion in the first place — if we just observe and pay attention — we may actually have a fuller, more accurate reading of whatever we encounter.

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Zen, too, welcomes this “open ended” approach in its working with koans, those mysterious and / or paradoxical riddles and / or poetic statements and / or legal cases for which such teachers as Dogen Zenji had such affection. In the words of Shozan Jack Haubner:

The searching, open-ended nature of koan work yields the kind of answer, however, that frustrates easy analysis, not to mention that most exquisite of all human pleasures: being “right.” For, ultimately, koan practice teaches that as long as a question is alive in the world around us, it should not — indeed, cannot — be settled once and for all within us. Koan practice does not put life’s deepest issues “to bed.” It wakes these issues up within us, waking us up in the process.

or consider this, from Lin Jensen, An Ear to the Ground: Uncovering the living source of Zen ethics:

Judgments on right and wrong are a nearly irresistible enticement to pick sides. And that’s exactly why the old Zen masters warned against becoming a person of right and wrong. It isn’t that the masters were indifferent to questions of ethics, but for them ethical conduct went beyond simply taking the prescribed right side. For these masters, the source of ethical conduct is found in the way things are, circumstance itself: unfiltered immediate reality reveals what is needed.

Policy-makers, of course, can’t suspend judgment indefinitely — but maybe a contemplative approach in general would make them better prepared for snap judgments and sound intuitions when such are called for. Clausewitz [grinning, with an h/t to Zen here]:

When all is said and done, it really is the commander’s coup d’œil, his ability to see things simply, to identify the whole business of war completely with himself, that is the essence of good generalship. Only if the mind works in this comprehensive fashion can it achieve the freedom it needs to dominate events and not be dominated by them.

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And let’s go the distance…

Here’s Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel again, from an online retreat she gave last year for subscribers to Tricycle magazine:

We need to ask, what is love or beauty or pain before we objectify it? what happens when we can abide without conclusions? you know, these are questions for the practitioner, practitioners questions… and I wanted to use one word in Tibetan that I’ve found very useful for myself… and this is the word zöpa.. this translates usually as patience or endurance or tolerance, but there’s this very subtle translation of zöpa, which is the ability to tolerate emptiness basically, which is another ways of saying the ability to tolerate that things don’t exist in one way, that things are so full and infinite and leave you so speechless, and so undefinably grand – and these are just descriptive words, but you have to use some words to communicate, I guess — the ability to bear that, that fullness, like we’ve been talking about, not turning away, not turning away.

[ 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!

The RSA video below is very, very good. It gave me several insights:

First, that two of our more negative trends in American society – the tendency to politicize all aspects of life, no matter how trivial and then, after bitterly polarizing them, subject activities to litigation that were never meant to be regulated in a free society – is a result of a Left hemisphere -dominant cultural “ratchet”.

The cognitive capacity to isolate, compartmentalize and analyze free of context is a biological-psychological driver behind the “cultural imperialism” of the domains of politics and law to subsume and dominate all other human activities; this is quite apart from the content of specific ideologies held by the advocates, which could easily aggravate or inhibit these tendencies. It would also help if the most ideological of our politicians and lobbyist-activists were not also themselves lawyers with a professional training in crafting tunnel-visioned micromanaging language.

Secondly, the thesis in this RSA video might help explain the mystery of Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies– the stubborn rationalization of piling on ever greater degrees of complexity, despite empirical evidence of harm or decline mustered by advocates of social control that goes beyond protecting rice bowls or the horse-trading/bargaining. Much of the vast TSA security theater promoted by DHS, for example, represents a huge economic waste in terms of expense, spillover costs and opportunity costs while doing very little to increase security from terrorist attacks.

It becomes very difficult to secure agreement to reduce higher complexity levels to simpler structures or forms, once they are established. Instead, more complexity is usually added to route around the problem. In terms of the above example, the Obama administration is belatedly trying to undo years of post-9/11 nonsensical regs that deters legitimate business and scientific travelers from visiting the United States with various new tourism-friendly initiatives, but is avoiding the obvious solution of reducing the size and scope of DHS/TSA authority that has made air travel here a nightmare in the first place.  In fact, there are moves by the administration to expand TSA authority into all public spaces to habituate Americans to a greater degree of  (admittedly less sinister) scrutiny than East Germans once had from Stasi.

Check it out:

[ 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?

[ 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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