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THE INTERNET AS “INFOCRACK”

Nicholas Carr at Rough Type has two posts on the cognitive effect the internet may be having on thinking. In his first post ” A beautiful mindlessness ” Carr observes:

“Like me, you’ve probably sensed the same thing, in yourself and in others – the way the constant collection of information becomes an easy substitute for trying to achieve any kind of true understanding. It seems a form of laziness as much as anything else, a laziness that the internet both encourages and justifies. The web is “a hall of mirrors” that provides the illusion of thinking, Michael Gorman, the president of the American Library Association, tells Orlowski. “No one would tell you a student using Google today is producing work as good as they were 20 years ago using printed sources. Despite these amazing technical breakthroughs, these technologies haven’t added to human wellbeing.”

In his follow up post, Carr argues the following:

“The more we suck in information from the blogosphere or the web in general, the more we tune our minds to brief bursts of input. It becomes harder to muster the concentration required to read books or lengthy articles – or to follow the flow of dense or complex arguments in general. Haven’t you, dear blog reader, noticed that, too?”

Interesting.

There is probably something to Carr’s second post because he is referencing the creation of a psychological habit. The Buddhist maxim ” What we think we become” can also very easily be expressed as ” How we think we become”. Short attentions spans are also natural to human beings – intense powers of concentration are usually acquired by practicing activities that are predicated on that skill-set, like learning a musical instrument, martial arts, meditation, mathematical problem-solving, various complex athletic activities and so on. Moreover, reading on the web tends to ” reward” our brains in a more stimulating way than do books not only in terms of speed but with more frequent, non-textual, imagery. And that’s assuming that we don’t wander away and engage in less constructive but more amusing pursuits !

A friend of mine, a serious scholar who speaks many languages and reads more, disconnected his internet at home for a time because it was too tempting a presence and was interfering with his tackling more challenging books. It was too easy to put off the intellectual heavy lifting in favor of intellectual entetainment. He’s since returned to the online world, but now is more disciplined about his use of time there. As much as I enjoy the blogosphere and certain listervs and forums, they don’t replace the experience of serious reading with a good book. I like marking up my books and scrawling, at times furiously, in the margins. Many great historical figures were voracious readers, from John Adams to Joseph Stalin, they revealed much of themselves in the marginalia found in the books of their private libraries.

That being said, Carr is also proffering a very old argument, one that is renewed with each new revolution in communication. Marshal McLuhan was not incorrect in his philosophy but he was correct up to a point; substantive content still retains a deeper influence than does presentation – though some forms of presentation are more equal than others. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address will resound through the ages as an epitome of prose, but it can also be reformatted and it will then be understood by some for whom the meaning may have previously been elusive. This doesn’t mean the new format is better but that it has utility.

There is also, I humbly suggest, a self-referential quality at work here. Some of the people complaining about the internet distracting them from reading today were the ones who were vegging in front of the tube yesterday instead of picking up that copy of War and Peace. Tomorrow these folks may be complaining about the computer chips in their heads or some other innovation. Mediums of communication are means and not ends; they are not dictating that we make poor choices with the use of our time.

The road you take is oftentimes less important than your wilingness to get up and take it.

JUST A TEST…NOT AN EDITORIAL COMMENT

I’m not trying to be cryptic; Picasa has not been working right for me lately, so I am going to have to start inserting graphics directly when I want to illustrate something. Just testing my rudimentary skills. Plus, I’ve always liked Durer.

THE PERIL OF SHIITE MAHDISM

Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett recommended an article in Commentary by Dr. Edward Luttwak, noted historian and Defense intellectual, for his careful and nuanced assessment of the strategic situation in regard to Iran.

I like Luttwak as well; he’s a provocative and thoughtful scholar at all with an impressive grasp of large historical issues as well as policy details. One of those details caught my eye in Luttwak’s essay regarding Iran’s government:

“Although the world now knows him [ Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ] for his persistent denial of the Holocaust and his rants against Israel and Zionism, at home Ahmadinejad’s hostility is directed not against Iran’s dwindling Jewish community but against the Sunnis. Lately, moreover, his ultra-extremism has antagonized even many of his fellow Shiites: he is an enthusiastic follower of both Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi Misbah Yazdi, for whom all current prohibitions are insufficient and who would impose an even stricter Islamic puritanism, and of a messianic, end-of-days cult centered on the Jamkaran mosque outside the theological capital of Qum. More traditional believers are alarmed by the hysterical supplications of the Jamkaran pilgrims for the return of Abul-Qassem Muhammad, the twelfth imam who occulted himself in the year 941 and is to return as the mahdi, or Shiite messiah. More urgently they fear that in trying to “force” the return of the mahdi, Ahmadinejad may deliberately try to provoke a catastrophic external attack on Iran that the mahdi himself would have to avert.”

This comment is not unimportant. It represents the wild card in the strategic deck being dealt out over Iran’s nuclear program. Why ? Because Mahdism is to Islamism what Islamism is to traditional Islam.

As Dr. Tim Furnish, a scholar of Islamic history, wrote regarding Mahdist movements:

“Mahdism shares many characteristics with mere jihadism, the most important of which are: a yearning (indeed demand) for Islamic law and a burning desire to restore Islamic rule to its former environs and, in fact, to engineer the creation of a global caliphate. But Mahdist movements “are to fundamentalist uprisings what nuclear weapons are to conventional ones: triggered by the same detonating agents3 but far more powerful in scope and effect.”4 Once a charismatic Muslim leader becomes convinced he is the Mahdi, all bets are off. The Mahdi (and each one is of course convinced he is THE, not simply a, Mahdi) will, according to the Islamic traditions, be directed by Allah to restore the Prophetic caliphate and, as such, is not bound by the letter of the Islamic law. For example, both Ibn Tumart and Muhammad Ahmad declared that they alone were capable of interpreting the Qur’an, so any previous opinions and commentaries were relegated to irrelevance. And of course the opposition to them by establishment religious figures—for both of these men, as do most Mahdist, led revolutions against existing Islamic governments5—only served to reinforce their Mahdist claims, since true Muslims could recognize the Mahdi. Anyone claiming to be the Mahdi, then, is largely unfettered by any norms, Islamic or otherwise. Ibn Tumart and his leadership, for example, killed tens of thousands of their own followers deemed lukewarm in their support. And Muhammad Ahmad, who had Charles Gordon decapitated and his head displayed, may have proved just as bloodthirsty had he not died of malaria some six months after taking Khartoum. “

Such considerations affect the timetable for a possible ” soft kill” or illustrate the possibility of formenting or exploiting strife between Mahdist radicals and the larger Khomeinist establishment among the clergy. This is a point of possibilities. The existence of Mahdism also impacts assumptions about containment of a nuclear-armed Iran until it can mellow or crumble under its own internal contradictions. While Rafsanjani or Khameini might follow Khomeini’s teachings to preserve the jurisprudent state at all costs, a convinced Mahdist leader might welcome the risk of nuclear annihilation. He might even seek to provoke that kind of apocalyptic scenario. This ideology is simply millenarianism on steroids.

All avenues need to be considered when dealing with Iran. Different values tend to imply different premises than our own.

ADDENDUM:

Strongly recommend checking out Austin Bay’s review of Luttwak. Colonel Bay also has a second article for your perusal as well.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GENERAL ZINNI

Courtesy of the careful efforts of Dr. H.H. Gaffney and Mr. William D. O’Neil, we have a summative record of General Anthony Zinni’s recent remarks on the state of the world, Iraq, Martin Van Creveld, the Middle East, Islamism, Bush and many other topics. An excerpt:

“Military-military relations are best, but Congress dislikes them. In the case of Turkmenistan, we had established such relations, but then we were told to break them off because of the dictatorial regime there. The same thing happened in Kenya because the U.S. didn’t like President Moi [who stayed in office too long and didn’t curb corruption]. As for Musharraf in Pakistan, Zinni was told to break off relations with him when he seized power from the civilian government. At the request of senior officials Zinni later called Musharraf asking for assistance on several important matters. He helped us, but Washington didn’t want to do anything for him. Zinni had remarked about that to Musharraf, but Musharraf said that he had done things for us without recompense because it was the right thing to do. Military-to-military relations are an avenue to better relations and positive influence. It does not make sense to cut off contacts with the military because of some governmental action that the military has no part in or influence over. As one of his foreign military contacts asked after such a rupture, “When the police commit a human rights violation in the U.S., do you penalize your own military for it?”

Go read the whole thing.

TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES

For those who have just sent me an email, something is up with my Hotmail account or the server today. Hopefully, it will be cleared up in a few hours. My apologies.