[ by Charles Cameron — Facebook diplomacy between Israeli and Iranian individuals, atheist proselytizing in the US, popular media uses in a “monitory” world ]
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I have long been intrigued by some of the unofficial ways in which we communicate with one another — some of you may recall an earlier post of mine on a spate of religious arguments carried out on “duelling buses“, while another more recent post noted some of the stencilled graffiti and at times quite sophisticated artwork featured on the walls around Tahrir Square during the demonstrations there…
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In much the same spirit, I’d like to offer here for your consideration four thumbnails of images recently posted on Facebook by individual citizens in Israel and Iran, in response to a posting (above) by two Israeli graphic artists, Ronnie Edri and Michal Tamir, which seems to have triggered quite a response in both countries.
The two Israeli posters appear to have posted images of individuals, perhaps themselves. The Iranian posters, interestingly, used images of Abdol-Hossein Sardari, the “Iranian Schindler” (upper image), with a caption that reads in part:
Abdol Hossain Sardari, a junior Iranian diplomat, found himself almost by accident in charge of Iran’s mission in Paris in 1940 and went on to help up to 2,000 Iranian Jews flee France…
and an image of the tomb of Esther and Mordecai — the tomb in Hamadan, Iran, of the same Jewish heroine recently celebrated at Purim, and pointedly referenced by Netanyahu in his gift of a Megillah to Obama — and a popular site of pilgrimage for Iran’s present day Jewish population.
Apparently there has been quite an exchange of these graphics, although some have been on the more caustic side, expressing what I can only call .. strangelove…
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My other graphic examples are of a pair of billboards recently put up by American Atheists:
As we might expect, these were to be displayed (respectively) in or near Jewish (above) and Muslim (below) communities — the Jewish-oriented billboard in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, New York, and the Islamic-oriented billboard in Paterson, New Jersey.
According to the MSNBC report where I first ran across these billboards a couple of weeks ago, a Williamsburg rabbi said the sign in his district was “a disgrace. .. The name of God is very holy to us and to the whole world” — while the American Atheists’ president David Silverman reported he had not received “any blowback” from the Muslim Community in Patterson.
One imagines that some in each community would have had hurt feelings, while some in each community clearly had the good sense to show tolerance.
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These images tie in, I believe, with John Keane‘s notion of “monitory democracy” [link is to .pdf] that our blog-friend David Ronfeldt discussed in his post today… with our discussions here [1, 2] of the wicked complexity of many of the problems that face us… and also perhaps of the Slaughter doctrine [1, 2, 3]of the responsibility to protect…
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:
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 — modeling / scoring CVE as a flow of ideas, with related matter from Hesse, Melville, Tufte, Rushdie and John Seely Brown ]
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[ graphic: McCants / Berger, see below ]
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I am interested in thoughts: in the way thoughts connect to one another, differ from one another, lead to one another, parallel or echo one another, and oppose one another…
That’s my interest, that’s me.
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So when Will McCants of Jihadica posts the first two parts of his three-part series on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE), two points in particular strike me:
McCants proposes his own definition for CVE – “Reducing the number of terrorist group supporters through non-coercive means” – in part 1 of his presentation, indicating what in his view it should and shouldn’t involve, and in supporting this definition, he notes (recommendation #3):
The focus is not on reducing support for ideas, which is difficult to judge, but rather support for specific organizations that embody those ideas and seek their realization, which is easier to document and more closely related to criminal behavior.
In part 2, he mentions “thought police” twice, the second time saying:
But if counter terrorism is to involve more than just locking people up, it should not stray too far from stopping bomb throwers into social engineering and thought policing.
I’m definitely not into thought police either — but while I’d agree that ideas are by nature difficult to track or assess, that’s nonetheless where my own curiosity and creativity finds its level.
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Just how CVE should operate in general is outside my scope — but since I do tend to focus in on ideas, I have the sense that paralleling McCant’s diagram of the approximate stages of support for terrorist groups:
or the version JM Berger reworked with McCants and posted on Intelwire, which I’ve placed at the top of this post — there could in theory be a diagram of the evolution of thought that accompanies those stages, and that such a diagram, intricate though it would undoubtedly be, might still be of some use.
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It seems to me that two main streams off thought – some might say “narrative” — would tend to flow together towards the eventual outcome of full radicalization and active jihad.
One stream would begin with dissatisfaction and wend its way through a general sense of injustice in the world to the idea that Islamic nations and groups in particular are being targeted for military interventions by America and its allies, perhaps with a detour though the issues associated with “underdog” Palestinians, and thence towards a sympathy for jihadists, some level of identification with the Ummah, formal acceptance at some point of Islam (ie the taking of the Shahada), to an acceptance that jihad is an individual obligation for able Muslims under present circumstances…
The other stream would arise from religious seeking and theological speculation, finding in Islam a simple and clear-cut answer to the seeker’s questions, via further discussion and the taking of Shahada — and then move along roughly the same trajectory that Daveed Gartenstein-Ross meticulously chronicled in his first, less widely known book, My Year Inside Radical Islam: A Memoir, with an emphasis on an increasingly “puritanical” salafi / wahhabi / deobandi interpretation of the religion, which can then lead in turn to a sense of potential political ramifications, again that the West is involved not merely in wars that happen to be in Muslim countries but in wars against the Ummah, and thence again to the acceptance of jihad as individual obligation.
That individual obligation (fard ‘ayn) being, I suspect, the likely “bottleneck” where any and all such streams would converge.
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For those interested in how this ties in with wider currents in contemporary thought, and with the bead game in particular:
I said above that I am interested in thoughts. I mean by this that my natural focus is more on thoughts than on people. Not that this is better or worse than some other focus…
In Hermann Hesse terms, I’m more interested in the great game of juxtaposed cultural contents played by the Castalians in his book Magister Ludi:
All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number.
than I am in the game that Hesse tells us he played in reverie while raking and burning leaves in his garden — visualizing the great men of all times walking and talking together across the centuries – a game which quite a few great minds seem to have stumbled upon, and which Hermann Melville describes in his novel, Mardi:
In me, many worthies recline, and converse. I list to St. Paul who argues the doubts of Montaigne; Julian the Apostate cross- questions Augustine: and Thomas-a-Kempis unrolls his old black letters for all to decipher. Zeno murmurs maxims beneath the hoarse shout of Democritus; and though Democritus laugh loud and long, and the sneer of Pyrrho be seen; yet, divine Plato, and Proclus, and Verulam are of my counsel; and Zoroaster whispered me before I was born… My memory is a life beyond birth; my memory, my library of the Vatican, its alcoves all endless perspectives, eve-tinted by cross-lights from Middle-Age oriels…
Both modes are valuable, I’d suggest, both are worth pursuing.
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Edward Tufte has the above diagram in Visual Explanations, one of his several beautiful and profound books. That diagram in turn is based on Salman Rushdie‘s description of the Indian epid Kathasaritsagara or Ocean of the Streams of Story in his book Haroun and the Sea of Stories:
…the Water Genie told Haroun about the Ocean of the Streams of Story, and even though he was full of a sense of hopelessness and failure the magic of the Ocean began to have an effect on Haroun. He looked into the water and saw that it was made up of a thousand thousand thousand and one different currents, each one a different color, weaving in and out of one another like a liquid tapestry of breathtaking complexity; and [the Water Genie] explained that these were the Streams of Story, that each colored strand represented and contained a single tale. Different parts of the Ocean contained different sorts of stories, and as all stories that had ever been told and many that were still in the process of being invented could be found here, the Ocean of the Streams of Story was in fact the biggest library in the universe. And because the stories were held here in fluid form, they retained the ability to change, to become new versions of themselves, to join up with other stories and so become yet other stories…
That diagram offers a quick approximation to the idea that I’d like to be able to model / diagram / score the ideas in play in CVE.
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If an idea is timely, it will find its kin — that’s one way to check that you’re not hopelessly out to lunch — and I certainly feel kinship with Tufte, Rushdie and Hesse here.
This, from John Seely Brown‘s opening keynote [video] at the 2012 Digital Media and Learning Conference, also strikes a kindred note for me:
How do you participate on the ever-moving flows of activities, knowledge and so on and so forth; how do you move from being like a steamship that sets course and keeps going for a long time to what you might call whitewater-kayaking, that you have to be in the flow, and you have to be able to pick things up on the moment, you gotta feel it with your body, you gotta be a part of that, you’ve gotta be in it, not just above it and learning about it. … In this new world of flows, participating in these knowledge flows is an active sport. And the whole catch is, how do you participate in these flows…?
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Ideas as flows, radicalization processes as flows — it’s mapping, modeling, and scoring them that really catches my own interest. It is still early days as yet…
[ by Charles Cameron – the “internal” complexity from which we relate to both the simplest and most complex issues and problems in the “external” world ]
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The painting is by Gustav Klimt: your eye sees it, you know it’s a painting, reproduced here in pixels, you can read the text that accompanies it — a Nobel laureate wrote it — which describes just one chemical level of the complexity in you that responds to the painting, reproduction, pixels, blog post..
Viewing the painting, reading the accompanying text — they’re complex activities. You notice the woman’s head, “detached” for her body by that golden necklace, might see the beheaded head she’s holding almost out of the picture frame, lower right — might or might not know the story of Judith and Holofernes, which gives the painting a cultural intensity of particular interest to Israel under threat — Alexander Kafka sketched the background thus in the Chronicle article that brought all this to my attention today:
In 590 BC, to protect her besieged city of Bethulia, the alluring Jewish widow Judith drank with and seduced the attacking Assyrian general Holofernes. When he fell into a drunken, sated heap, she decapitated him with his own sword and displayed his head as trophy, rallying her fellow citizens to rout the Babylonians.
And if the writer hadn’t forewarned you, you might well have missed that echo effect of the beheaded Holophernes and the necklaced head of his beheader.
All of which touches on meaning, while Nobel laureate (and long-time Klimt collector) Eric Kandel‘s commentary deals in neurotransmitters: dopamine, oxytocin, vasopressin, norepinephrine, serotonin, acetylcholine…
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Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner have a fine book out called The Way We Think: Comceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities in which they lay out some fascinating aspects of how the brain builds for us the “blend” of different impulses, correspondences and perceptions that we consider to be “the world we live in”…
They quote Sir Charles Sherrington‘s celebrated description of the mind waking from sleep as an enchanted loom in his Man on his Nature:
The brain is waking and with it the mind is returning. It is as if the Milky Way entered upon some cosmic dance. Swiftly the head mass becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one; a shifting harmony of subpatterns.
And it’s with that “shifting harmony of subpatterns” within us that we meet and attend to the shifting patterns of the world around us — a world that features its own “complex, n-dimensional and constantly shifting” problems, which we seek to understand and resolve via insights and solutions %i(that would also make good tight soundbites) for the TV.
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Indeed — are those two weaves of complex shifting patterns, within us and around us, distinct — or one and the same?
Earlier this week I had the privilege of speaking at the Navy Expeditionary Forces Conference (NAVEXFOR 2012) in Virginia Beach, VA. The theme for this year’s conference was “innovation in constrained environments.” In my talk, I focused on potential internal cultural constraints and deliberate actions to mitigate resulting threats. Not surprisingly, other speakers focused on our enemies and the constraints they place on our forces, and the fact those enemies impose constraints with innovative methods and weapons like roadside IEDs. Yesterday, through a friend on Twitter, I learned that insurgents in Iraq had used cell phone geotags to destroy AH-64’s; innovation, indeed.
One speaker made the comment in this post’s title: “Our enemy is adaptable, we must be, too.” He went on to characterized their adaptations as “simple.”
Using this description, through simple adaptation, our enemies disrupt our activities, destroy our equipment, and kill or maim our service members using cheap, simple, but deadly tools. The resulting affect isn’t limited to physical casualties; their innovations also disrupt our ability to control the initiative, and perhaps just as importantly our sensemaking abilities. The ability to alter an opponent’s sensemaking will inform and increase the complexity of an already complex environment, so adaptability is essential.
In most situations we counter these simple adaptations by employing complex and expensive solutions. This has been accurately called, “adaptation at acquisition speed.” Those expensive and complex solutions must make it through byzantine acquisition processes rife with political maneuvering, operating in a culture of “no,” which results in increased costs, schedule, and ultimately our frequent inability to be responsive to troops in field. Institutional inertia in the defense bureaucracy prevents significant change in the short-run, so these facts must be considered an on-going constraint.
In spite of these constraints, our troops are thinking and acting—they are adapting, using simple tools, like remote control vehicles. This “toy” was used to inspect vehicles and detect IEDs. Instead of an expensive long lead-time solution, they went to Radio Shack—and the vehicle lasted for several years—so they got another. According to the report, at least six lives were saved as a result. Not surprisingly, the folks closest to the problem produced an effective solution. No doubt there are other stories of ingenuity and adaptation, but this story exemplifies the possible. The underlying point is this soldier was thinking and acting—he was adapting in a way that allowed him and his colleagues to remain more safe.
Sun Tzu and the ultimate in adaptability
The speaker’s quote reminded me of this quote from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Chapter VI Weaknesses and Strengths (page 153 in the Samuel B. Griffith translation):
Now an army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strength and strikes weakness.
And as water shapes its flow in accordance with the ground, so an army manages its victory in accordance with the situation of the enemy.
And as water has no constant form, there are in war no constant condition.
Bear with me, as I like word pictures and synonyms and what follows is a bit like “plodding,” but I’ve found adjacencies in language illuminating (if I could draw this, I would). Water as a metaphor for adaptability presents any military force (or any other group) a daunting task. Considering the physical qualities of water several synonyms come to mind:
Water is transparent, so to be adaptable, we need to promote and practice clarity in internal communications and actions. Keeping ambiguity to a minimun is one method of promoting clarity, and practicing honesty is a good way to practice.
Water is physically cohesive, while being ultimately pliable. Think about it; put water in a jar, it conforms to the jar, pour it out, it follows gravity, and water surrounds whatever is submerged in it. Water moves as one, just as a group adaptability needs to be a key characteristic of any successful team. But in a larger sense, when one considers what I call the “bordering language” of synonyms, one discovers a greater depth to the concept of coherence, words like intelligence, comprehensibility, understandability, intelligibility, decipherability, conncinity (my favorite), unity, and harmony—just to name a few. Concinnity is a harmonious arrangement of things; where a culture is arranged and led in such a way as to promote and sustain harmony. My friend Ed H. has the best working definition for harmony that I’ve found. Ed derived his description from the novelist Douglas Adams and French impressionist painter Georges Seurat:
You don’t get harmony when everybody sings the same note. Harmony is the marriage of the contrary and of the similar; marrying discordant elements, regardless of tone, of color, of line, of thought and of purpose…
Water as described by Sun Tzu is fluid. Fluidity can be a blessing and a curse. On the one hand, fluidity implies adaptability, flexibility, fluency, smoothness, and ease. On the other, fluidity implies instability, unstableness, fickleness, inconstancy, changeableness, shifting, and flux. For cultures in a competitive environment, having the first form of fluidity is desired, while inflicting the second on the competitor. In addition, fluidity’s synonym fluency implies an eloquent and skillful use of language—or mediums of exchange. Fluency is possible only through practice, lots of practice. So much practice the skill becomes tacit knowledge, thus simple (effortless?)…even intuition.
Simplicity
Articulation in language and action are elements of simplicity. Simplicity implies tacit. As simple as the force of gravity directing water down a hill, going around and engulfing obstacles, thus is the potential of a group that has made their purpose/mission tacit and have the freedom to act. In fact, the sum of the skill sets may be so simple as to defy explanation—and more often than not in these cases, others learn by close association; watching, failing, learning, and making tacit those capabilities needed to cope and adapt. Boyd said as much in the abstract of Conceptual Spiral:
To flourish and grow in a many-sided, uncertain and ever-changing world that surrounds us, suggests that we have to make intuitive within ourselves those many practices we need to meet the exigencies of that world.
“To make intuitive within ourselves those many practices we need” implies the development and nurturing of habits that will enable us to adapt.That which is habitual becomes simple (and as mentioned above, yet another route to tacit).
Close
To the troops using the remote control vehicle mentioned above, the solution was obvious, and seemingly simple. Importantly, they were in a unit where they could act on their idea—and they did so outside the bureaucracy at little cost, and saved six lives (maybe more).
Taking a riff from the conference title, our leaders should be checking to make sure the rules of engagement (ROE) and other rigid rule sets aren’t implicitly making their folks hopelessly incapable of adaptability. As we increase adaptability, the more adaptability becomes a habit—and when it is a habit, it becomes simple. Just a thought.
Postscript:
The best short book I’ve read on tacit knowledge is Michael Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension, the best long book on the same topic is Personal Knowledge by the same author.
Zenpundit is a blog dedicated to exploring the intersections of foreign policy, history, military theory, national security,strategic thinking, futurism, cognition and a number of other esoteric pursuits.
