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[ by Charles Cameron — silos, motorcycles, zen and the DNI ]
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Pam Benson writing at the CNN Security blog may or may not have had anything to do with the title of her post, Spy chief gets Zen, but she’s presumably responsible for her first paragraph:

You usually don’t associate spying with being Zen, but that’s exactly what the nation’s chief intelligence officer did this week at an intelligence gathering in Orlando, Florida.

Here at Zenpundit we’re naturally prone to both Zen and Punditry, so we like that — but to be honest it’s a little over the top. I’m dropping his entire keynote in at the bottom of this post, but for now let’s just say instead that DNI James R Clapper gets bikers.

Okay, maybe we can go a little further, and say he gets Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. That’s not quite Zen, but it’s getting closer. Kristin Quinn‘s piece at Trajectory magazine is titled GEOINT 2012: Zen and the Art of Intelligence, which at least pays hommage to Pirsig’s book, and focuses on Pirsig-zen as it applies to Intelligence…

And that’s a direction we can applaud.

Two questions, then: what is zen, and what is intelligence?

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Zen is, strictly speaking:

A direct transmission outside the Scriptures,
Not dependent on words and letters,
Directly pointing to one’s own mind
Seeing into one’s own nature.

Those words, however, are something of a scripture, so the transmission isn’t in them — it’s one of those things like ceaseless change, always there, never the same, flexible beyond the capacity of words to capture it — as Laozi remarked at the start of the Dao De Jing, in scribbled response to a border guard who demanded that his scriptures be verbal — “dao ke dao, fei chang dao” — two Chinese phrases English can barely translate.

Where do we go from here, then, if we’re accustomed to think in words?

The zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi has one answer in the title of his book Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind.

Zen takes you back to where your mind is fresh and playful, before it got narrow-minded, siloed and rutted. Zen means wide-angle alertness, from a point prior to preference, assumption and prejudice.

Zen takes your thoughts and emotions to the laundry, while you take a shower. They come back lighter and cleaner, and you’re freshened up and ready to go.

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Let me put that another way, using the analogy of Google glasses. Zen takes you behind words: you can still see them, you can see through them. Very quickly, then, since 5 images are worth 5,000 words and take a lot less time to ingest:

Wearing some futuristic Google Glasses, you would be able to…

Let your glasses know you want to go to the Strand Bookstore (great idea, btw!):

Get yourself a quick map from there to here, visible but superposed on your natural ability to see the street:

Know when you’ve arrived at the bookstore (a) because you can see the books and (b) because your glasses tell you so.

Use a map to navigate to the Music section:

And locate the Ukulele shelf:

When IMO you’d be better off reading about Johann Sebastian Bach — though that’s a matter of personal taste.

With zen, your thoughts and emotions are like head- and heart-mounted displays — you can see them, they can inform your understanding, but you can also see through them, they’re transparent. You can see the world.

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I’m going to suggest my own definition of intelligence: it’s the ability, given some data point or points, to recognize a variety of salient patterns into which it or they fit, and to create a synthetic understanding of how to move, given that all those salient pattern-fields are in play.

It is seeing in depth, past the surface, where the surface is your assumptions and expectations, and depth is the currents and undercurrents of nuance that your expectations hide.

Let me say that another way: assumptions and preferences — taking sides, being on a team — deprive you of depth. And another: the opposite of surface / superficial thinking is depthful thinking / pattern-recognition.

That, in a nutshell, is why I feel intelligence and zen “go together” even more seamlessly than zen and bikers.

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Here’s Clapper’s speech:

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In a future post, I hope to tackle the question of koans — those strange zen riddles, of which the best known may be…

What is the sound of one hand clapping?

[ by Charles Cameron — comparative images, Russian and British, with videos of Sunday’s Occupy-related protest during Evensong at St Paul’s in London ]
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By way of contrast with the bright balaclavas of the Pussy Riot grrls, the British protesters wore white, and chained themselves to the pulpit steps during the Sunday service of Evensong.

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Here’s a short video featuring the way St Paul’s integrates their protest into a ceremonial procession, so that it’s just a little odd in about the same way that Elton John playing piano during a service in the same cathedral is just a little odd.

Or let’s just say, eccentric… British.

Here’s the 30-minute official St Paul’s version, including the sermon, some muffled protester voices, and some blasts from the great cathedral organ…

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Essentially, the protesters get co-opted by the clerics — with an offer of a little chat, probably over a cuppa tea, to follow…

At the Boyd & Beyond 2012 Conference, one of the people I had the pleasure of meeting was British political consultant Chris Cox, who blogs at Campaign Reboot. Chris not only a presenter at the conference, he was first out with a review of the proceedings too.

Boyd and Beyond – Initial thoughts

In terms of the event itself, I need to put it in the context that I found it. I know about 3 people who I can mention John Boyd to and have them know who I mean, so coming to the conference was special in and of itself. It was also gratifying to meet some other Brits there, JB and Michael Moore, who both spoke on their specific areas of expertise. Having so many people there who have immersed themselves in the concepts was hugely exciting.

The calibre of all the speakers was extremely high and the range of topics as diverse as could be expected. It was particularly good to have so many Marine speakers in attendance, since for a civilian it’s sometimes hard to conceive of how Boyd’s ideas get used in the military context. I don’t want to call out particular speakers as being better than others. Some were more resonant to me but all had a perspective which was interesting and valuable.

Getting to visit the Boyd archives was also a very special experience, and Mary Ellen Boyd was kind enough to take the time to talk to some of us about her father on a more personal level. I now have a copy of a hand drawn version of the OODA loop which we found in a draft of one of Boyd’s presentations. I also received audio copies of various of Boyd’s briefings which I can’t wait to listen to when I’m back in the UK.

Overall I felt the strength of the event wasn’t in the questions that it answered, but in the questions that it raised. It’s easy to become navel gazing when you’re coming up with ideas in isolation, and I don’t think anyone who spoke got away without someone asking a sharp question or two which challenged what they were saying. I know from my own experience that I need to go back to the drawing board.

Although the focus of the conference is on Boyd there was healthy discussion of ideas which are only loosely connected to Boyd, or are implementations of his ideas which could not be predicted. It’s a chaotic field, which I imagine is how Boyd would have wanted it to be, with people spinning off his ideas to unexpected places. 

Read the rest here.

Working on my review, but the record of livetweeting is at #boydandbeyond on Twitter.

[ by Charles Cameron — continuing discussion with Prof Kohen re Rushdoony, dominionism, and cherry picking of Torah laws for US implementation ]
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Prof. Ari Kohen at Running Chicken responded to a comment of mine about Fuqua and Rushdoony, suggesting he’s cherry picking which Old Testament / Torah laws he would like to see brought into US law:

I’ll admit I don’t know anything at all about Rushdoony, but I use cherry-picking because my sense is that people like Fuqua aren’t really concerned with all of the laws in the Torah and that, in fact, they don’t follow most of them. Instead, they gravitate toward the ones that speak to their own (political) positions and then use the Torah as “back up.” Do you think, for example, that Fuqua cares about shatnes or kashrut? If not, why not? If so, what makes you think that he does? Also, what makes you think that Fuqua is connected to Rushdoony? Is there some evidence for the connection?

This sent me digging — I don’t know nearly as much as I’d like about Rushdoony and his influence on the Christian Right — and since my response was was too long to go in Running Chicken’s comment box, I thought I’d post it here.

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Ari, if you’ll permit me to greet you thus, many thanks for your care in encouraging me to tease out the subtleties.

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First, let me say that while I cannot say for certain that Fuqua is connected to Rushdoony, the latter’s impact on strands of modern evangelical thinking has been considerable, both overtly and covertly, by affiliation and more loosely by influence. He is generally considered the father of the Dominionist movement, sometimes termed Theonomy or Christian Reconstructionism, and Frederick Clarkson’s coverage of the movement for the progressive Political Research Associates magazine, Public Eye, characterizes it as a “stealth theology”:

A key, if not exclusively Reconstructionist, doctrine uniting many evangelicals is the “dominion mandate,” also called the “cultural mandate.” This concept derives from the Book of Genesis and God’s direction to “subdue” the earth and exercise “dominion” over it. While much of Reconstructionism, as one observer put it, “dies the death of a thousand qualifications,” the commitment to dominion is the theological principle that serves as the uniting force of Christian Right extremism, while people debate the particulars.
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Christian Reconstructionism is a stealth theology, spreading its influence throughout the Religious Right. Its analysis of America as a Christian nation and the security of complete control implied in the concept of dominion is understandably appealing to many conservative Christians. Its apocalyptic vision of rule by Biblical Law is a mandate for political involvement. Organizations such as COR and the Rutherford Institute provide political guidance and act as vehicles for growing political aspirations.

In A Covert Kingdom, Part Four of his article, Clarkson writes:

Gary North proposed stealth tactics more than a decade ago in The Journal of Christian Reconstruction (1981), urging “infiltration” of government to help “smooth the transition to Christian political leadership. . . .Christians must begin to organize politically within the present party structure, and they must begin to infiltrate the existing institutional order.”

and:

The Christian Coalition actually proposed something similar to Gary North’s notion of “infiltration” when its 1992 “County Action Plan” for Pennsylvania advised that “You should never mention the name Christian Coalition in Republican circles.” The goal, apparently, is to facilitate becoming “directly involved in the local Republican Central Committee so that you are an insider. This way,” continues the manual, “you can get a copy of the local committee rules and a feel for who is in the current Republican Committee.” The next step is to recruit conservative Christians to occupy vacant party posts or to run against moderates who “put the Republican Party ahead of principle.”

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The second issue you present me with has to do with shatnez and kashruth, and here I certainly need to be explicit in saying that there are some aspects of the Mosaic law that Rushdoony would not apply to Christians.

Brian Schwertley, who has published in Rushdoony publications, divides Jewish law into three categories: ceremonial law, now superseded in Christ; moral law, unchanging and “binding on all nations, in all ages”; and judicial, “civil laws which applied only to the nation of Israel” – though he quickly adds:

There are also civil laws which are moral case laws. These case laws are based upon the Ten Commandments and are moral in character, and as such, are binding on all nations, in all ages. Laws that reflect God’s moral character are as binding and perpetual as the Ten Commandments themselves. [ … ] The continuing validity and necessity of the civil laws is plainly seen in the case of sexual immorality.

I’d say that’s probably a widely-held breakdown, and my previous comment should have been less sweeping. To my mind, though, this is still very far from cherry-picking — cherry-sorting, perhaps?

With that under our belt, we can proceed to the issues you suggested, shatnez and kashruth specifically.

In his Institutes, p. 23, Rushdoony writes:

Men dress in diverse and strange ways to conform to the world and its styles. What is so difficult or ‘coarse’ about any conformity to God’s law, or any mode God specifies? There is nothing difficult or strange about this law, nor any thing absurd or impossible.
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It [the wearing of fringed garments] is not observed by Christians, because it was, like circumcision, the Sabbath, and other aspects of the Mosaic form of the covenant, superseded by new signs of the covenant as renewed by Christ. The law of the covenant remains; the covenant rites and signs have been changed. But the forms of covenant signs are no less honorable, profound, and beautiful in the Mosaic form than in the Christian form. The change does not represent an evolutionary advance or a higher or lower relationship. The covenant was fulfilled in Jesus Christ; but God did not treat Moses, David, Isaiah, Hezekiah, or any of His Old Testament covenant people as lesser in His sight …

So yes, I’d have to agree that Rushdoony does not demand the fulfillment of all 613 mitzvoth, any more than most of Judaism does, if I understand correctly — but just as Judaism sees a specific subset of commandments as at least temporarily suspended in the absence of a Temple in Jerusalem, so Dominionism sees certain commandments suspended as fulfilled in Christ – with Rushdoony’s position tending to be very strict in limiting their number.

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Kashruth is an interesting case, because here Gary North, one of the premier writers on Dominionism and Rushdoony’s son-in-law, differs from Rushdoony himself.

There’s a section titled Rushdoony on the Dietary Laws in one of Gary North’s books which addresses the issue thus:

Because of a theological division within the Christian Reconstruction movement, I need to devote a little space to Acts 10. In a vision, God announced to Peter His definitive annulment of the Mosaic dietary laws:
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On the morrow, as they went on their journey, and drew nigh unto the city, Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour: And he became very hungry, and would have eaten: but while they made ready, he fell into a trance, And saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending unto him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat. But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean. And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common. This was done thrice: and the vessel was received up again into heaven (Acts 10:0-16).
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Rushdoony’s comment on Acts 10 asserts, but does not prove, his opinion that the dietary laws are still in force in New Testament times. He writes: “Acts 10 is commonly cited as abolishing the old dietary restrictions. There is no reason for this opinion. . . . There is no evidence in the chapter that the vision had anything to do with diet; . . .” [ … ]
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Rushdoony insists that the Mosaic dietary laws are still mandatory as health laws. “The various dietary laws, laws of separation, and other laws no longer mandatory as covenantal signs, are still valid and mandatory as health requirements in terms of Deuteronomy 7:12-16.”
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It is worth noting that Rushdoony broke sharply with Calvin on this crucial covenantal point. Calvin stated emphatically in his comments on Acts 10 that anyone who today establishes distinctions among foods based on the Mosaic law has adopted a position of “sacrilegious boldness” …

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There’s also an eschatological angle to Rushdoony’s (postmillennialist) influence and its reception in circles that also tend to favor “soon coming” / “left behind” (dispensational premillennialist pre-trib rapture) expectation — but that’s another story for another day…

At Boyd & Beyond 2012 Conference at Quantico, specifically today in the USMC Expeditionary Warfare Scool. Will review upon my return.

Follow live tweeting at #boydandbeyond from numerous participants including me