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GREEK RESILIENCE: SPARTAN AND ATHENIAN STRATEGIES

A while back, at the prompting of Dan Abbott, I picked up Howard Bloom’s excellent Global Brain:The Evolution of Mass Mind From the Big Bang To The 21st Century. The book lived up to the billing Dan gave it and I was as impressed with Bloom as I have been with such eminent scholars as Robert Conquest, E.O. Wilson or Jacques Barzun. Which is to say, that Global Mind is a work of a rare intellectual caliber.

This however, my opening paragraph to the contrary, is not a review of Global Mind. Instead, I would like to draw attention to a section where Bloom has, correctly in my view, pointed to a dichotomy of paradigms that describe two espistemological -cultural meta-strategies for civilizational resilience:

” …But the subcultural struggles retarding science’s advance are minor maladies of mass mind compared to a set of twenty-first century clashes in which Sparta and Athens remain vigorously alive.

Today’s cyber-era Spartans are bone crushers of conformity. they are the fundamentalists of both the left and the right. Some are godly, some are secular. Religious extreminsts, ultranationalists, ethnic liberationists and fascists fall on the fundamentalist side of the line. Brooking no tolerance of those who disagree, they invoke a golden past and a higher power, both which demand submission to authority. The worst shoot, burn and bomb to get their way. Their opposites are Athenian, Socratic, Aristotelian, diversity-generating, pluralistic and democratic….these champions of human rghts use the word ‘freedom’ to liberate he individual, not hammer the triumph of a chosen collectivity.”

Count me as an Athenian.

Nevertheless, while I find the people who are Bloom’s Spartans or Eric Hoffer’s True Believers to be anything from misguided to dangerous, I am aware that both the Spartan as well as the Athenian approaches to life represent resilience strategies. Each with particular advantages and dangers.

Spartans are resilient in the face of ideological and often physical attack. They react with moral certainty and outrage toward threats to deeply cherished beliefs. They have the solidarity of moral cohesion and rigidly disciplined unity and the heightened attention, even paranoia, of a people under siege. Hallowed traditions and unifying themes become banners of war, metaphorically or literally. This is a response of vigilance appropriate for an existential threat or similar grave emergency.

Athenians are resilient in the face of shifting conditions of the environment. They react with debate, analysis, multiple perspectives, insight and experimentation. They have the creativity of competent, self-confident, individuals and do not fear to hazard risks. Hallowed traditions that no longer serve are quickly discarded in favor of efficiency and effectiveness that force Rule Set resets. This is the response of adaptive evolution, even revolutionary change, appropriate for epochal shifts and long term adversity.

Each has their flaws. Spartans stubbornly corner themselves in mental cul-de-sacs built from self-imposed blindness, Athenians bicker over the existence of a threat at all even as the enemy is at the gates -or even after he has breached the walls. Of the two, though, I will place my bet on the Athenians. They can correct errors more readily.

Creative resilience deals with the unknown unknowns over the long haul as they emerge in a way that the most violent and reflexively vigilant response cannot.

SUNDAY’S RECOMMENDED READING

Hmmm…let’s go with strategic analytical perspectives this morning ( ok, afternoon, it was a late night yesterday).

Pride of place today goes to….

Kent’s Imperative for ” War in the next generation” and “The spread of hostile memes“.

Very nice to see some of the PNM/4GW/5GW concepts discussed here and in the old koinon moving into professional IC circles.

Dr. Barnett in his syndicated column on ” Time for a new generational voice in politics “.

As an aside, I am not in sync with Senator Obama’s politics though an understated factor in his charisma may be that he comes across as an earnest, responsible, adult in a chamber filled with political hacks ( case in point, Obama’s senior colleague from Illinois). With the Senate in Democratic hands, Obama will need to tie himself to at least one prominent legislative issue -and help steer it to passage – if he wishes to make the leap to the next political level.

Re; Tom’s take on worldviews -identifying, critically analyzing and metacognitively asserting control over one’s worldview is something I emphasize to my students.

Josh Manchester of The Adventures of Chester -“Radio: Interview with Fred Ikle“

Josh is an old blogfriend and a rising multimedia presence these days. Here he interviews a senior defense intellectual, Dr. Frederick C. Ikle on Ikle’s hot new book Annihilation From Within.

Steve Deangelis at ERMB – “An Electoral Lesson in Resilience“

Mostly in agreement with Steve – it will be interesting if the Democrats make a new start in terms of ideas or revert to type under the pressure of the party’s Liberal-Left gerontocracy in Congress.

John Robb at Global Guerillas -” GLOBAL GUERRILLAS IN THE UK“

John’s post raised the practical question for me of how long does the state permit these networks to mestastisize simply because they have them successfully under surveillance and “the devil you know” is better than dealing with ” unknown unknowns” ?

I would also add that not nearly enought thought has gone on in government circles into how authorities can demoralize these networks on the moral level, in conjunction with surveillance, prosecution and punitive action.

Critt Jarvis at ConversationBase – “CSR: ROI in the context of everything else“

Stakeholders is a useful analytical concept for defining ” who is affected ?” but is often a poor model for ” who gets to decide ?”. Inequalities of information flow, knowledge and provision of resources often lend themselves to manipulation more than true consensus. Nevertheless, key stakeholders who remain unaware or ill-informed about the interests of lesser players are doomed to strategic errors and will reap excessive friction. Reaching out is a better move.

Sun Bin – ” Machiavelli on Iraq“

Scathing. Machiavelli remains, however, a useful primer and classic lens for analysis as Sun Bin demonstrates.

That’s it !

TESTING…TESTING….

Errr…people with different browsers…is this thing working ?

Exclaimable.com is the source for this tool. Below, I try my hand at a self-portrait with their art function.

Rembrandt appears to be in no danger from me, but the palette tool is cool. Mrs. Zenpundit suggests can substitute some kind of drawing pad pen for the mouse and gain finer line control. There are other things that the crafty types like Critt, Sean, Younghusband and Dan might want to investigate.

Thanks to Howard Rheingold for alerting me to this tool via group email.

KRISTALLNACHT

Adrienne Redd was kind enough to remind me the other day that today and Thursday represented the 68th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the Nazi’s ” Night of Broken Glass” where Stormtroopers, SS men and frenzied mobs vandalized Jewish-owned businesses, burned synagogues, beat and murdered German Jews. The blogosphere has been relatively quiet on this topic. No doubt in part due to the intense focus on the aftermath of the election but in part, I believe, that we are slowing starting to forget.

Despite recitations of “Never Again”, the effort at memorials such as the National Holocaust Museum and Yad Vashem, the tireless witness of figures like Elie Wiesel or successful forays into global culture with such films as Schindler’s List and The Pianist, imminence of the Holocaust is fading in the public mind. Every year there are fewer survivors, every year more of the “Greatest Generation” that liberated the camps and brought home tales of unspeakable horror, pass away. Soon, the aged voices that strain with moral authority and remembered pain, voices that prick our conscience and discomfort our leaders, will be gone.

What then ? In the advent of the greatest industrialized mass-murder scheme in history, one carried out by the most modern of nation-states with the cooperation of hundreds of thousands and passive acquiescence of millions more, Hitler is reputed to have asked his nervous henchmen” And who today remembers the Armenians ?”. Who indeed ?

When Pol Pot, the lunatic Maoist, turned Cambodia into a vast charnel house with his autogenocide, only the Israeli representative at the UN called the international community to account on behalf of millions of innocent victims. When the Kurds were gassed by Saddam, we looked away. When Slobodan Milosevic butchered 200,000 Muslims and Hutu death squads were hacking nearly a million Tutsis to death, the genteel Secretary of State Warren Christopher contented himself with lawyerly instructions to State Department officials to draw ever finer semantic distinctions to avoid using the word “genocide” in public. Today in Dar Fur, the policy of the West follows in the tradition of calmly waiting for democide to wind down as the perpetrators start to run short of victims, before contemplating some form of action.

Only in Kosovo, has America acted in time to prevent slaughter on a grand scale as the Genocide Convention obligates the international community. Our sole companion in this lonely club of leading by example is that paragon of human rights, Communist Vietnam – which toppled the Khmer Rouge only because Cambodia as a Chinese satellite was a security risk to Hanoi. All this reticence and dolorous inaction with the example of the Holocaust fresh and looming by historical standards.

What will happen when it ceases to loom ? Will the twenty-first century be a better one than the twentieth ?

THE GATEKEEPER WHO PUSHED FOR GATES

In my view, was Secretary of State Condi Rice, whose warm working relationship with Robert Gates goes back to the days of Bush I, when both were key deputies to National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft. Assuming confirmation, the two will work in tandem, not in opposition, on Iraq and they will eventually dominate the foreign policy process in the last two years the way Cheney and Rumsfeld did in the first.

Dr. Barnett today had a take that attributed the nomination of Robert Gates to the rising grey eminence of former SecState/SecTreasury/WH Chief of Staff, James A. Baker III:

“Consensus growing that Rumsfeld had to go to clear way for Baker’s solution set to fly.

But make no mistake, we now have caretakers (and not the real players) in both the Building and Foggy Bottom”

I don’t disagree here with Tom so much that I am pointing out that Baker’s newfound premiership rests on the sand of George W. Bush’s desperation. Gates and Rice will have the bureaucracies, levers of power that will endure even when Bush’s gratitude to his father’s mentor/alter ego does not.

Baker’s best move is to strike hard and fast, effect some substantive policy changes while everyone is casting about for a life preserver, and then get the hell out of town with his dealmaker reputation intact. Sticking around will only mean twisting in the winds of shifting political fortune.

ADDENDUM:

Veteran journalist Robert Novak posts the first ” hit piece” on Gates – full of a fair amount of misinformation. Gates the anti-Soviet hardliner at Bill Casey’s CIA was a “liberal” ? WTF ????