Philosophy of the Mind
posted by John Aristides at 2/27/2006 08:03:00 PM
0 comments
Monday, February 27, 2006
Friday, February 24, 2006
The Naturalness of Religion
The Naturalness of Religion and the Unnaturalness of Science. Excerpt:
Religion occurs in every human culture. If a new religion does not surface quickly enough within a given society, then an existing religious system inevitably invades from without. Religious ideas are contagious. Religions propound ideas to which humans seem particularly susceptible.
In contrast to science, religion relies far more fundamentally on our standard cognitive equipment. Science demands developed intellectual skills, most notably literacy and mathematical fluency.
The vehicles for imparting religious knowledge and the cognitive capacities on which they depend are far more basic. Typically, religion (in contrast to science and theology) relies primarily on theater and narrative.
In the absence of cultural forms that foster the collective growth of humans’ critical and imaginative capacities, human beings rely on their natural cognitive dispositions, which often appear to be domain specific and comparatively inflexible in their application. CPS (culturally postulated superhuman) agents, stories about them, and rituals for controlling and appeasing them are natural the inevitable outcomes of a cognitive system that simultaneously seeks explanations, possesses an overactive agent detector, and, perhaps, most importantly, lacks scientific traditions.
Cognitive mechanisms that arose to address very different problems—such as distinguishing basic ontological categories and differentiating actions and other sorts of events—are fundamentally engaged in the generation and acquisition of religion.
Religion occurs in every human culture. If a new religion does not surface quickly enough within a given society, then an existing religious system inevitably invades from without. Religious ideas are contagious. Religions propound ideas to which humans seem particularly susceptible.
In contrast to science, religion relies far more fundamentally on our standard cognitive equipment. Science demands developed intellectual skills, most notably literacy and mathematical fluency.
The vehicles for imparting religious knowledge and the cognitive capacities on which they depend are far more basic. Typically, religion (in contrast to science and theology) relies primarily on theater and narrative.
In the absence of cultural forms that foster the collective growth of humans’ critical and imaginative capacities, human beings rely on their natural cognitive dispositions, which often appear to be domain specific and comparatively inflexible in their application. CPS (culturally postulated superhuman) agents, stories about them, and rituals for controlling and appeasing them are natural the inevitable outcomes of a cognitive system that simultaneously seeks explanations, possesses an overactive agent detector, and, perhaps, most importantly, lacks scientific traditions.
Cognitive mechanisms that arose to address very different problems—such as distinguishing basic ontological categories and differentiating actions and other sorts of events—are fundamentally engaged in the generation and acquisition of religion.
posted by John Aristides at 2/24/2006 07:03:00 PM
1 comments
The Adversary Culture
Here. Excerpt:
The concepts of free enquiry and free expression and the right to criticise entrenched beliefs are things we take so much for granted they are almost part of the air we breathe. We need to recognise them as distinctly Western phenomena. They were never produced by Confucian or Hindu culture. Under Islam, the idea of objective inquiry had a brief life in the fourteenth century but was never heard of again. In the twentieth century, the first thing that every single communist government in the world did was suppress it.
But without this concept, the world would not be as it is today. There would have been no Copernicus, Galileo, Newton or Darwin. All of these thinkers profoundly offended the conventional wisdom of their day, and at great personal risk, in some cases to their lives but in all cases to their reputations and careers. But because they inherited a culture that valued free inquiry and free expression, it gave them the strength to continue.
Today, we live in an age of barbarism and decadence. There are barbarians outside the walls who want to destroy us and there is a decadent culture within. We are only getting what we deserve. The relentless critique of the West which has engaged our academic left and cultural elite since the 1960s has emboldened our adversaries and at the same time sapped our will to resist.
The consequences of this adversary culture are all around us. The way to oppose it, however, is less clear. The survival of the Western principles of free inquiry and free expression now depend entirely on whether we have the intelligence to understand their true value and the will to face down their enemies.
The concepts of free enquiry and free expression and the right to criticise entrenched beliefs are things we take so much for granted they are almost part of the air we breathe. We need to recognise them as distinctly Western phenomena. They were never produced by Confucian or Hindu culture. Under Islam, the idea of objective inquiry had a brief life in the fourteenth century but was never heard of again. In the twentieth century, the first thing that every single communist government in the world did was suppress it.
But without this concept, the world would not be as it is today. There would have been no Copernicus, Galileo, Newton or Darwin. All of these thinkers profoundly offended the conventional wisdom of their day, and at great personal risk, in some cases to their lives but in all cases to their reputations and careers. But because they inherited a culture that valued free inquiry and free expression, it gave them the strength to continue.
Today, we live in an age of barbarism and decadence. There are barbarians outside the walls who want to destroy us and there is a decadent culture within. We are only getting what we deserve. The relentless critique of the West which has engaged our academic left and cultural elite since the 1960s has emboldened our adversaries and at the same time sapped our will to resist.
The consequences of this adversary culture are all around us. The way to oppose it, however, is less clear. The survival of the Western principles of free inquiry and free expression now depend entirely on whether we have the intelligence to understand their true value and the will to face down their enemies.
posted by John Aristides at 2/24/2006 03:09:00 PM
0 comments
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Europe and the Post-Modern Left
Found here. Some excerpts:
From a practical perspective, however, this missed an important point: in order to stand together to eliminate terrorism, the world must share a common view of a "good" society or else the very definition of terrorism itself will remain in play.
[...]
In the final analysis, the root cause of this clash of ideals, and the reason that Europeans find a choice between America and Islamofascism a bit of a toss-up, is that America and France (and Germany) are not philosophical allies. Indeed, the French are defending a specific European ideal from American depredation.
The thrust of this statement is incorrect. There is no equating the competition amongst the various Western political philosophies and the competition of the entire Western 'set' with Islam, for the position of both America and France is circumscribed by shared principles and values. These 'set' parameters do imply an alliance of sorts, because it is through this encapsulating membrane that we interact with Islamofascism.
We and the French are much closer to each other than either of us is to Radical Islam. To equate ideological competition within a civilization with civilizational competition itself is an error of the first order.
When he says, "Similarly, they may fear the Islamic Fascists and Baathists in the abstract but they have a greater fear of Anglo-American ideals in their concrete, McWorld reality. America is the bigger threat," he is correct only in the immediate sense. French intellectuals may hold such beliefs, but it seems to me this is indicative of philosophical condescension rather than true ideological prioritization. America is the bigger threat precisely because Islam has been dismissed by Continental intellectuals as a viable alternative. If, in the future, Islamic extremism can no longer be ignored, this dynamic will change, and we and the French will find ourselves standing and fighting on common ground and common principle.
Of course, this may be belaboring the point, for his overall argument is that post-modern leftism is a greater threat than Islam precisely because it has greater potency within our civilizational set--and I would agree with that, in the near term: Islamic philosophical tradition must overcome a significant language barrier before it can compete on our terms. However, because Islamic literalism is so contradictory to our system, in the long run it may pose the greatest threat of all. Demographic data suggest Islam could bypass this ideological game by breeding adherents instead of converting them. If this happens, the memetic competition within the West will be exposed for what it is: friendly fire in a much larger war. If Islam ascends, we are looking at a full-blown clash of civilizations--our spectrum, in all its diversity, versus theirs.
Nevertheless, as a treatise on the dynamics of sub-set competition, Wild Monk's essay is well worth reading.
From a practical perspective, however, this missed an important point: in order to stand together to eliminate terrorism, the world must share a common view of a "good" society or else the very definition of terrorism itself will remain in play.
[...]
In the final analysis, the root cause of this clash of ideals, and the reason that Europeans find a choice between America and Islamofascism a bit of a toss-up, is that America and France (and Germany) are not philosophical allies. Indeed, the French are defending a specific European ideal from American depredation.
The thrust of this statement is incorrect. There is no equating the competition amongst the various Western political philosophies and the competition of the entire Western 'set' with Islam, for the position of both America and France is circumscribed by shared principles and values. These 'set' parameters do imply an alliance of sorts, because it is through this encapsulating membrane that we interact with Islamofascism.
We and the French are much closer to each other than either of us is to Radical Islam. To equate ideological competition within a civilization with civilizational competition itself is an error of the first order.
When he says, "Similarly, they may fear the Islamic Fascists and Baathists in the abstract but they have a greater fear of Anglo-American ideals in their concrete, McWorld reality. America is the bigger threat," he is correct only in the immediate sense. French intellectuals may hold such beliefs, but it seems to me this is indicative of philosophical condescension rather than true ideological prioritization. America is the bigger threat precisely because Islam has been dismissed by Continental intellectuals as a viable alternative. If, in the future, Islamic extremism can no longer be ignored, this dynamic will change, and we and the French will find ourselves standing and fighting on common ground and common principle.
Of course, this may be belaboring the point, for his overall argument is that post-modern leftism is a greater threat than Islam precisely because it has greater potency within our civilizational set--and I would agree with that, in the near term: Islamic philosophical tradition must overcome a significant language barrier before it can compete on our terms. However, because Islamic literalism is so contradictory to our system, in the long run it may pose the greatest threat of all. Demographic data suggest Islam could bypass this ideological game by breeding adherents instead of converting them. If this happens, the memetic competition within the West will be exposed for what it is: friendly fire in a much larger war. If Islam ascends, we are looking at a full-blown clash of civilizations--our spectrum, in all its diversity, versus theirs.
Nevertheless, as a treatise on the dynamics of sub-set competition, Wild Monk's essay is well worth reading.
posted by John Aristides at 2/23/2006 11:45:00 AM
0 comments
Monday, February 20, 2006
International Artistic Outreach
We should come together to create, and ultimately make, a time piece film, using state of the art graphics and real Arabic voices, that is set in the intellectually vibrant period of Islamic history. (Arabic DVD sales are going through the roof: http://www.ameinfo.com/16693.html).
It must be an atmospheric film, completely immersive, focused on the feel of the times. It must show an ideal vision of that time, inspiring and gripping.
But above all, the film must be calibrated towards the audience, but interesting enough to draw modest earnings here at home.
As for Ibn Rushd, his story must also be carefully calibrated. No matter what we do, however, we should stay true to his philosophy (for one, if they ever get the ability to double-check, we don’t want to kill our message through factual dishonesty). We might even want to make his philosophy the hero, a hero which is ultimately vanquished by the forces of suppression. I think the important thing here is to use public square debate in an almost Socratic way to nudge the audience along through various consciousnesses and their interactions (perhaps the first scene). But buried within this framework (or fleshing it out, however you want to think about it), will be human stories and human archetypes to draw the audience in.
We should write the story with this in mind: 1) we want them to smile, 2) we want to fill them with wonder, 3) we want to make them think, and 4) we want to make them feel.
For these reasons, we first need to understand the audience as they are, in addition to how they were. We would need cultural, historical, philosophical, and religious experts (or just us) to put together a story that works for the audience. We need to know the soil if we are to cultivate a viable flower.
Theme:
There is more to Islam.
There is more to life.
There is more to the world.
There is more to the universe.
There is a better way.
Once you get that down thematically, I have some suggestions to get us to the next step.
One of the things I think we need to nail is Averroes’s curiosity. His access to libraries and information, the long days of reading and writing, the debates in the public square, the careful study of heavenly bodies will all be central plot devices.
Another thing we need to nail is Averroes’s love of life: his love and affinity for justice (the central Islamic virtue) and his devotion to his God, towards whom he feels unendingly grateful for the beauty of the world and his ability to be a part of it. Beauty will be a theme, its virtue and its rareness.
Women will obviously have to play an important role. I’m not talking about contemporary feminist traits. I’m talking about true and pure feminine Virtue. We should attempt to show the power women wield through their Virtue, in a time when man’s feelings of inadequacy did not lead them to cover it up. Women should be unleashed, if you will, to be truly feminine. We will focus on the challenging nature of this freedom (challenging for men), but also we should show the justice of this. We should have Averroes ask: because men are weak our women should be enslaved? I think not. A true Muslim would not enslave his women because of his own weaknesses. He would, instead, master his weaknesses.
Barbarians (Europeans) should play a role. Averroes should have discussions about them, maybe even visit a slave yard, and talk about how sad it is that they are so backwards. The subtle jab here will be that, in these discussions, Averroes will aver why they are backwards. When he tags the concept "backwardness" to familiar traits, it will create what can only be a beneficial impression on the audience. They will think, “Hey, we taught those damn Europeans how to behave. Why did we devolve so?” Of course, their thoughts will be less articulate. But the effect on their behavior should be the same. The barbaric traits Averroes condemns should resemble behaviors that so trouble Islam now (hyper-religiosity, sloth, uncuriousness, mistreatment of women).
We will have to show Averroes’s initiative, and his struggle with himself and with his contemporaries--‘individual initiative’ and ‘struggle’ being other central themes in this story. To pull this off we will need, at least, overbearing religious authorities as characters, scared of losing their turf and power, who in the end pervert or suppress Averroes’s writings so as to control the uneducated crowds. In the end they close down the schools, and start indoctrinating the youth to serve their own interests. “School” and “Education” being another theme.
The tension will flow from Averroes’s true faith, which is a celebration of life through personal discipline and structure, as he struggles against the cynical fundamentalism of the Ash'arite theologians (Mutakallimun), who only offer a perversion of life through a mechanism of control. The “structure” and ‘discipline’ here is the religious discipline of the self: a striving for enlightened happiness, through the exercise of mind, body, and soul. Our story will show how Islam gives one the strength of discipline and self-control through routine and focus. This allows the mind to be elevated, which in turn is used to better understand and appreciate the world Allah has blessed us with. [Insofar as it meshes with Islamic scripture and thought, we need to really focus on why Islam gives one strength, as a way of showing what things Islam should not be used for. In this way we will characterize Islam as way to control the baser urges, a way to gain true freedom by becoming a Man, who can be moral and happy, instead of a beast, in thrall to its passions. Once one becomes a Man, rising above the beast, one can appreciate the true beauty of the world.] Philosophy and Art will be therefore be the highest endeavors of Man.
The religious theme will focus on the raising up of individual virtuous man--preparing oneself against the trials of the world, strength against the wickedness of evil men--and the suppressing or minimizing of the intemperate and pitiful beast that lives inside him. It will show that external control is not true virtue, because it is always vulnerable to being manipulated by evil men. Only through self-control and personal morality can a society reach virtue. “Temperance” and “Serenity”.
And so on. We still need an intriguing story arc, intriguing characters, and a lot of historical information. The important thing is to make it realistic but magical (magical because we want to inspire ‘wow’, a cool factor, to suck in the kids, who are, if you think about it, the future of Islam), factual yet idealistic, tense but still thoughtful, emotional but also deep—happy in parts, sad in others, but above all moving and satisfying.
It must be an atmospheric film, completely immersive, focused on the feel of the times. It must show an ideal vision of that time, inspiring and gripping.
But above all, the film must be calibrated towards the audience, but interesting enough to draw modest earnings here at home.
As for Ibn Rushd, his story must also be carefully calibrated. No matter what we do, however, we should stay true to his philosophy (for one, if they ever get the ability to double-check, we don’t want to kill our message through factual dishonesty). We might even want to make his philosophy the hero, a hero which is ultimately vanquished by the forces of suppression. I think the important thing here is to use public square debate in an almost Socratic way to nudge the audience along through various consciousnesses and their interactions (perhaps the first scene). But buried within this framework (or fleshing it out, however you want to think about it), will be human stories and human archetypes to draw the audience in.
We should write the story with this in mind: 1) we want them to smile, 2) we want to fill them with wonder, 3) we want to make them think, and 4) we want to make them feel.
For these reasons, we first need to understand the audience as they are, in addition to how they were. We would need cultural, historical, philosophical, and religious experts (or just us) to put together a story that works for the audience. We need to know the soil if we are to cultivate a viable flower.
Theme:
There is more to Islam.
There is more to life.
There is more to the world.
There is more to the universe.
There is a better way.
Once you get that down thematically, I have some suggestions to get us to the next step.
One of the things I think we need to nail is Averroes’s curiosity. His access to libraries and information, the long days of reading and writing, the debates in the public square, the careful study of heavenly bodies will all be central plot devices.
Another thing we need to nail is Averroes’s love of life: his love and affinity for justice (the central Islamic virtue) and his devotion to his God, towards whom he feels unendingly grateful for the beauty of the world and his ability to be a part of it. Beauty will be a theme, its virtue and its rareness.
Women will obviously have to play an important role. I’m not talking about contemporary feminist traits. I’m talking about true and pure feminine Virtue. We should attempt to show the power women wield through their Virtue, in a time when man’s feelings of inadequacy did not lead them to cover it up. Women should be unleashed, if you will, to be truly feminine. We will focus on the challenging nature of this freedom (challenging for men), but also we should show the justice of this. We should have Averroes ask: because men are weak our women should be enslaved? I think not. A true Muslim would not enslave his women because of his own weaknesses. He would, instead, master his weaknesses.
Barbarians (Europeans) should play a role. Averroes should have discussions about them, maybe even visit a slave yard, and talk about how sad it is that they are so backwards. The subtle jab here will be that, in these discussions, Averroes will aver why they are backwards. When he tags the concept "backwardness" to familiar traits, it will create what can only be a beneficial impression on the audience. They will think, “Hey, we taught those damn Europeans how to behave. Why did we devolve so?” Of course, their thoughts will be less articulate. But the effect on their behavior should be the same. The barbaric traits Averroes condemns should resemble behaviors that so trouble Islam now (hyper-religiosity, sloth, uncuriousness, mistreatment of women).
We will have to show Averroes’s initiative, and his struggle with himself and with his contemporaries--‘individual initiative’ and ‘struggle’ being other central themes in this story. To pull this off we will need, at least, overbearing religious authorities as characters, scared of losing their turf and power, who in the end pervert or suppress Averroes’s writings so as to control the uneducated crowds. In the end they close down the schools, and start indoctrinating the youth to serve their own interests. “School” and “Education” being another theme.
The tension will flow from Averroes’s true faith, which is a celebration of life through personal discipline and structure, as he struggles against the cynical fundamentalism of the Ash'arite theologians (Mutakallimun), who only offer a perversion of life through a mechanism of control. The “structure” and ‘discipline’ here is the religious discipline of the self: a striving for enlightened happiness, through the exercise of mind, body, and soul. Our story will show how Islam gives one the strength of discipline and self-control through routine and focus. This allows the mind to be elevated, which in turn is used to better understand and appreciate the world Allah has blessed us with. [Insofar as it meshes with Islamic scripture and thought, we need to really focus on why Islam gives one strength, as a way of showing what things Islam should not be used for. In this way we will characterize Islam as way to control the baser urges, a way to gain true freedom by becoming a Man, who can be moral and happy, instead of a beast, in thrall to its passions. Once one becomes a Man, rising above the beast, one can appreciate the true beauty of the world.] Philosophy and Art will be therefore be the highest endeavors of Man.
The religious theme will focus on the raising up of individual virtuous man--preparing oneself against the trials of the world, strength against the wickedness of evil men--and the suppressing or minimizing of the intemperate and pitiful beast that lives inside him. It will show that external control is not true virtue, because it is always vulnerable to being manipulated by evil men. Only through self-control and personal morality can a society reach virtue. “Temperance” and “Serenity”.
And so on. We still need an intriguing story arc, intriguing characters, and a lot of historical information. The important thing is to make it realistic but magical (magical because we want to inspire ‘wow’, a cool factor, to suck in the kids, who are, if you think about it, the future of Islam), factual yet idealistic, tense but still thoughtful, emotional but also deep—happy in parts, sad in others, but above all moving and satisfying.
posted by John Aristides at 2/20/2006 12:24:00 AM
1 comments
Sunday, February 19, 2006
David Reiff: A New Age of Liberal Imperialism 1999
Located here. Some excerpts:
However, the fact that while the NATO powers are often willing to intervene they have also shown themselves almost never willing to take casualties suggests that this commitment is as much about having fallen into a rhetorical trap as about being guided by a new moralizing principle. The means employed simply do not match the high-flown rhetoric about ends. There have been times during the Kosovo crisis, as there were during the Bosnian war and the Rwandan emergency, when it has appeared that Western involvement came about because the leaders of the Western countries no longer found it politically possible to get up at a press conference before a television audience and say, in effect, "Sorry about the starving X's or the ethnically cleansed Y's. It's just awful what's happening to them, but frankly they don't have any oil, nor are those that oppress them a threat to us. So you, Mr. and Ms. Voter, will have to continue to watch the slaughter on the evening news until it burns itself out."
Of course, that is precisely what members of the policy elites in Washington, Brussels, Paris, London, or Berlin say in private to one another all the time. But public language, along with public pressure, is often what drives policy. By now, commonplace expressions of realism in international affairs have become, to borrow the Early Christian theological distinction between elite and mass Christianity, an esoteric language restricted by and large to policymakers when they are out of public view. It is the language of human rights and humanitarianism that now stands as the exoteric language of public discourse about such questions. What this demonstrates is the degree to which there really has been a human rights revolution in the attitudes, though not to nearly the same degree in the practices, of the Western public and its poll-addicted, pandering governments [...]
Time and time again, our moral ambitions have been revealed as being far larger than our political, military, or even cognitive means [...]
The human rights activist seeks, first and foremost, to halt abuses. Usually, this involves denouncing the states or movements who are violating the laws of war or the rights of their citizens. In contrast, the humanitarian aid worker usually finds that he or she must deal with the abusive government or rampaging militia if the aid is to get through safely and be distributed.
So far at least, there is more confusion than any new synthesis between human rights and humanitarianism [...]
But it is by insisting that there is no intellectual or moral problem with demanding that international law should be upheld as strenuously as the domestic laws of democratic states that human rights activists, and the governments that are influenced by them, however intermittently, are engaged in a project that almost certainly seems doomed to failure. Starkly put, its presuppositions do not withstand scrutiny. It is all very well to talk about these laws, or courts, or imperatives, as expressing the will of the "international community." In practice, however, the definition of this "community" is highly if not exclusively legalistic and consists of the states that sign various treaties and conventions and the activist non-governmental organizations that lobby them to do so.
In finessing this fundamental problem of legitimacy-the ICC, as one of its American defenders once conceded, was largely the concern of "hobbyists and specialists"-and in asserting that a body of law that is the product of a treaty has the same authority as a body of law that is the result of long historical processes that involve parliaments, elections, and popular debate, the activists have in effect constructed a legal system for a political and social system that neither exists nor is likely to exist any time in the foreseeable future. Presented as the product of some new global consensus, it is in fact the legal code of a world government.
nt
But there is no world government [...]
The new language of rights, so prevalent in Western capitals, has been revealed to be at least as misleading about what is and is not possible, what it did and did not commit Western states to, as it is a departure from the old language of state sovereignty [...]
But war, even war undertaken on human rights grounds, is not like jazz singing. Improvisation is fatal-as the Kosovars have learned [...] And yet it continues to be the implicit assumption of the NATO powers that they can confront the crisis of failed states by making it up as they go along. In Somalia, in Rwanda, and in Congo, the Western powers chose to respond with disaster relief, which both guaranteed that the political crises in those countries would continue and represented a terrible misuse of humanitarian aid [...]
It is to be hoped that in the wake of Kosovo, the realization that this kind of geo-strategic frivolity and ad hoc-ism, this resolve to act out of moral paradigms that now command the sympathy but do not yet command the deep allegiance of Western public opinion-at least not to the extent that people are willing to sacrifice in order to see that they are upheld-will no longer do [...]
The conclusion is inescapable. At the present time, only the West has both the power and, however intermittently, the readiness to act. And by the West, one really means the United States. Obviously, to say that America could act effectively if it chose to do so as, yes, the world's policeman of last resort, is not the same thing as saying that it should. Those who argue, as George Kennan has done, that we overestimate ourselves when we believe we can right the wrongs of the world, must be listened to seriously. So should the views of principled isolationists. And those on what remains of the left who insist that the result of such a broad licensing of American power will be a further entrenchment of America's hegemony over the rest of the world are also unquestionably correct.
But the implications of not doing anything are equally clear. Those who fear American power are-this is absolutely certain-condemning other people to death [...]
However controversial it may be to say this, our choice at the millennium seems to boil down to imperialism or barbarism. Half-measures of the type we have seen in various humanitarian interventions and in Kosovo represent the worst of both worlds. Better to grasp the nettle and accept that liberal imperialism may be the best we are going to do in these callous and sentimental times.
Indeed, the real task for people who reject both realism and the utopian nihilism of a left that would prefer to see genocide in Bosnia and the mass deportation of the Kosovars rather than strengthen, however marginally, the hegemony of the United States, is to try to humanize this new imperial order-assuming it can come into being-and to curb the excesses that it will doubtless produce.
However, the fact that while the NATO powers are often willing to intervene they have also shown themselves almost never willing to take casualties suggests that this commitment is as much about having fallen into a rhetorical trap as about being guided by a new moralizing principle. The means employed simply do not match the high-flown rhetoric about ends. There have been times during the Kosovo crisis, as there were during the Bosnian war and the Rwandan emergency, when it has appeared that Western involvement came about because the leaders of the Western countries no longer found it politically possible to get up at a press conference before a television audience and say, in effect, "Sorry about the starving X's or the ethnically cleansed Y's. It's just awful what's happening to them, but frankly they don't have any oil, nor are those that oppress them a threat to us. So you, Mr. and Ms. Voter, will have to continue to watch the slaughter on the evening news until it burns itself out."
Of course, that is precisely what members of the policy elites in Washington, Brussels, Paris, London, or Berlin say in private to one another all the time. But public language, along with public pressure, is often what drives policy. By now, commonplace expressions of realism in international affairs have become, to borrow the Early Christian theological distinction between elite and mass Christianity, an esoteric language restricted by and large to policymakers when they are out of public view. It is the language of human rights and humanitarianism that now stands as the exoteric language of public discourse about such questions. What this demonstrates is the degree to which there really has been a human rights revolution in the attitudes, though not to nearly the same degree in the practices, of the Western public and its poll-addicted, pandering governments [...]
Time and time again, our moral ambitions have been revealed as being far larger than our political, military, or even cognitive means [...]
The human rights activist seeks, first and foremost, to halt abuses. Usually, this involves denouncing the states or movements who are violating the laws of war or the rights of their citizens. In contrast, the humanitarian aid worker usually finds that he or she must deal with the abusive government or rampaging militia if the aid is to get through safely and be distributed.
So far at least, there is more confusion than any new synthesis between human rights and humanitarianism [...]
But it is by insisting that there is no intellectual or moral problem with demanding that international law should be upheld as strenuously as the domestic laws of democratic states that human rights activists, and the governments that are influenced by them, however intermittently, are engaged in a project that almost certainly seems doomed to failure. Starkly put, its presuppositions do not withstand scrutiny. It is all very well to talk about these laws, or courts, or imperatives, as expressing the will of the "international community." In practice, however, the definition of this "community" is highly if not exclusively legalistic and consists of the states that sign various treaties and conventions and the activist non-governmental organizations that lobby them to do so.
In finessing this fundamental problem of legitimacy-the ICC, as one of its American defenders once conceded, was largely the concern of "hobbyists and specialists"-and in asserting that a body of law that is the product of a treaty has the same authority as a body of law that is the result of long historical processes that involve parliaments, elections, and popular debate, the activists have in effect constructed a legal system for a political and social system that neither exists nor is likely to exist any time in the foreseeable future. Presented as the product of some new global consensus, it is in fact the legal code of a world government.
nt
But there is no world government [...]
The new language of rights, so prevalent in Western capitals, has been revealed to be at least as misleading about what is and is not possible, what it did and did not commit Western states to, as it is a departure from the old language of state sovereignty [...]
But war, even war undertaken on human rights grounds, is not like jazz singing. Improvisation is fatal-as the Kosovars have learned [...] And yet it continues to be the implicit assumption of the NATO powers that they can confront the crisis of failed states by making it up as they go along. In Somalia, in Rwanda, and in Congo, the Western powers chose to respond with disaster relief, which both guaranteed that the political crises in those countries would continue and represented a terrible misuse of humanitarian aid [...]
It is to be hoped that in the wake of Kosovo, the realization that this kind of geo-strategic frivolity and ad hoc-ism, this resolve to act out of moral paradigms that now command the sympathy but do not yet command the deep allegiance of Western public opinion-at least not to the extent that people are willing to sacrifice in order to see that they are upheld-will no longer do [...]
The conclusion is inescapable. At the present time, only the West has both the power and, however intermittently, the readiness to act. And by the West, one really means the United States. Obviously, to say that America could act effectively if it chose to do so as, yes, the world's policeman of last resort, is not the same thing as saying that it should. Those who argue, as George Kennan has done, that we overestimate ourselves when we believe we can right the wrongs of the world, must be listened to seriously. So should the views of principled isolationists. And those on what remains of the left who insist that the result of such a broad licensing of American power will be a further entrenchment of America's hegemony over the rest of the world are also unquestionably correct.
But the implications of not doing anything are equally clear. Those who fear American power are-this is absolutely certain-condemning other people to death [...]
However controversial it may be to say this, our choice at the millennium seems to boil down to imperialism or barbarism. Half-measures of the type we have seen in various humanitarian interventions and in Kosovo represent the worst of both worlds. Better to grasp the nettle and accept that liberal imperialism may be the best we are going to do in these callous and sentimental times.
Indeed, the real task for people who reject both realism and the utopian nihilism of a left that would prefer to see genocide in Bosnia and the mass deportation of the Kosovars rather than strengthen, however marginally, the hegemony of the United States, is to try to humanize this new imperial order-assuming it can come into being-and to curb the excesses that it will doubtless produce.
posted by John Aristides at 2/19/2006 04:37:00 PM
0 comments
Saturday, February 18, 2006
Rumsfeld's Speech 2/17/06
We are in a long struggle unlike any other we’ve seen.
Zawahiri says, “More than half of this battle will take place in the Media, a hearts and mind struggle for the people.”
Rumsfeld issues a slight on our ‘modern’ perspective: this is from Zawahiri, “not a modern day image consultant.”
We live in a new Media Age.
Al’Qaeda has Media Relations Committees, and they meet and talk about strategy.
Many critical battles will be in the News Rooms.
They are highly successful at manipulating the opinion elites of the world.
The violent extremists have established media relation committees.
Not with bullets, but with words.
Plan and design the attacks using every means to communicate to intimidate and break the collective wills of free peoples.
They know that communication transcends borders.
A single news story handled skillfully can be as damaging to our cause, and as helpful to theirs, as any other method of military attack. And their doing it.
Our enemy is able to act quickly, with relatively few people. The government is only beginning to adapt to the 21st century.
This is the first war in history, unconventional and irregular as it may be, in an error of emails blogs and cellphone, blackberry, instant messaging etc. There has never been a war fought in this environment before.
Even in the poorest neighborhoods in the Muslim world you find satellites on building and after building. A couple of years ago in Iraq, the penalty for a satellite was disfigurement or death.
Regrettably, many of the news channels in the Muslim world are hostile to the west
A growing number of foreign media outlets have immature standards and practices; they serve to inflame and distort, rather than enlighten and inform.
We have barely begun to compete for reaching their audiences. A lie can be half way…
Desecration of the Koran, the history of its dissemination and effect. Posted on websites, repeated on emails, etc.
The US had to be sure they had the facts before they responded. Could not compete with the few days it took to be spread. Appropriately and of necessity, took the time it needed to try and ensure they had the facts before responding.
But in the meantime some lives had been lost and damage had been done to our country.
What complicates the ability to respond quickly is that, unlike our enemies who lie with impunity, with no penalty ‘whatsoever, our government does not have the luxury of relying on other sources of information, ‘Anonymous or otherwise, our government has to be the source and well tell the Truth.
Today’s correspondents are under ‘hyper-pressure, to meet a constant news scrawl deadline and produce exclusives, daily deadlines have turned into hourly. The fact is gov at the speed in which it operates doesn’t always make their job easier. The standard gov foreign affairs operation was built to respond to individual requests for information, it is reactive not proactive, still operates at a 8 hour five or six day a week basis, while world events and our enemies are operating 24/7 across ‘every time zone.’
That’s an unacceptable dangerous deficiency.
Our government is seeking to adapt. US government has sought non-traditional means to provide accurate information to Iraqi people, yet this has been portrayed as inappropriate. For example, the allegations of someone in the military hiring a contractor to pay someone to print a story, a True story, but paying to print a story.
The resulting explosion of critical press stories caused all activity and initiative to stop. It has a chilling effect, for those who are asked to serve in the military p affairs field. The conclusion is that there is no toleration for innovation, much less for human error that could be seized upon by a press that demands perfection from the government but does not from the enemy nor, sometimes, themselves.
Consider for a moment for the column inches and broadcast time was used on ‘unauthorized detainee’ mistreatment. The policy of the government was clear, it was against inhumane treatment of the exact type that took place. These were just some people who did some things on one night shift in a prison in Iraq. “And consider that the whole world knew simultaneously.”
Manchester manual, terrorists are trained to put out misinformation. Communications planning a central aspect of government at all levels. Trained to lie, to put out misinformation.
In some cases military public affairs officials have little communications training or grounding in the importance of timing and rapid response and the realities of digital and broadcast media. We’ve become somewhat more adept, but progress is slow and ‘importantly public affairs posts have proven not to be enhancing for careers.
Anyone that looks at those careers and recognizes the near instantaneous public penalty imposed on someone who is in the military who is involved in anything the media judges instantaneously to be imperfect, or improper, and that then requires a long time to figure out what actually took place. Military people are intelligent, they’ll move away from those careers.
We need to get better at engaging experts from both within and outside of government to help communicate rapidly, deploying the best military communications capabilities to theaters of operation, executing multifaceted media campaigns, print, radio, television, and the internet, but let their be no doubt!
The longer it takes to put together a strategic communication framework into place, the more we can be certain that the vacuum will be filled by the enemy, and news informers who most assuredly not paint an accurate picture of what is actually taking place.
There are some signs of modest progress. Within the past year and a half the military’s joint forces command has developed a rapidly deployable communication team. They are organized and focused on specific geographical areas of the world. For example, soon after the devastating earthquake in Pakistan I had occasion to fly over the areas where entire sides of mountains had collapsed from the quake, and entire buildings and homes gone.
One of these military teams went into the disaster area, working with the commander in charge, to help focus the attention on the US government’s truly extraordinary commitment to helping the Pakistani people.
Public opinion surveys, by private groups in Pakistan, taken before and after the earthquake, suggest that public opinion of the United States changed dramatically because of the new awareness by the Pakistani public.
It was not long before the favorite toy in Pakistan was a small replica of a Chinook helicopter—they were just everywhere in that country—because of the many lives our helicopters saved in the mountains with relief supplies they delivered.
The communication team was attached to it and rapidly deployable and needed because, frankly, we were concerned about out troops safety, given the number of people in that country that do not favor the west and the, ah, potential difficulties that occur, we were uncertain as to what the reception would be. The reception over time was terrific.
Reorient staffing and schedules and culture to engage full ranged of media that are having such an impact today. US central command has launched an online communications effort that includes electronic news updates and links campaign that has several hundred blogs receiving and publishing the cent-com content. The US government will have to develop an institutionalized capability to anticipate and act within the same news cycle. That will require instituting 24 hour press operation centers, expanding internet operations, and other channels of communication, to equal status with other 21st century press organizations.
It will result in much less reliance on the print press, just as the publics of the US and the world are relying less on newspapers as their principle source of information. And it will require attracting more experts in these areas from the private sector to government service. This also will likely mean embracing new institutions to engage people across the world.
During the Cold War, institutions such as the US Information Agency, Radio Free Europe just to name an example, proved to be valuable instruments for the United States. We need to take the opportunity to develop programs that would serve a similar valuable role in the War on Terror in this new century.
What should that look like? Most of us remember when USIA was criticized for making a film about President Kennedy. It was announced that this was taking tax payers dollars to promote a person running for public office in the United States, and was propagandizing the American people. Of course, when you speak today, there is no one audience. There are multiple audiences. We can’t avoid communicating whatever it is we communicate that will then be heard by multiple audiences. So I don’t know the answer. I don’t know what an Information Agency should look like in the 21st Century. There’s no guidebook for this, no roadmap, that says here’s what you got to do if you get up in the morning and you are the government of the United States. These are tough questions and its tough to find the answers for them, and to do it right.
So that we can tell our hard working folks what to do to meet these challenges, we’re having to figure it out as we go along. The country is trying to figure it out.
People need time to adjust and adapt to new ideas. For the past minutes I’ve been commenting on the challenges facing our country—not just our government but our country—in the new media age. I’ve noted the advantages the enemy has in his ability to manipulate the media.
But we have advantages as well. And that is quite simply that the Truth is on our side. And ultimately, in my view, Truth wins out. I believe with every bone in my body that free people exposed to sufficient information will over time find their way to right decisions.
Throughout the world, advances in technology are forcing massive information flow that dictators and extremists will ultimately not be able to control. Blogs are rapidly appearing in countries even where the press is controlled. Pro democracy are communicating and organizing by email, pagers, and blackberries.
Today in Iraq an energetic media has emerged from the rubble of Saddam Hussein’s police state, with nearly three hundred newspapers, over 90 radio stations, and more than forty television stations. They are now accessing the web.
We are fighting a battle where the survival of our free way of life is at stake, and the center of gravity is not simply on the battlefields overseas, it’s a test of wills and it will be won or lost with our publics and the publics of other nations. We’ll need to do all we can to attract supporters to our efforts, and to correct the lies which are told that are so damaging to our country, and are repeated, and repeated, and repeated.
Zawahiri says, “More than half of this battle will take place in the Media, a hearts and mind struggle for the people.”
Rumsfeld issues a slight on our ‘modern’ perspective: this is from Zawahiri, “not a modern day image consultant.”
We live in a new Media Age.
Al’Qaeda has Media Relations Committees, and they meet and talk about strategy.
Many critical battles will be in the News Rooms.
They are highly successful at manipulating the opinion elites of the world.
The violent extremists have established media relation committees.
Not with bullets, but with words.
Plan and design the attacks using every means to communicate to intimidate and break the collective wills of free peoples.
They know that communication transcends borders.
A single news story handled skillfully can be as damaging to our cause, and as helpful to theirs, as any other method of military attack. And their doing it.
Our enemy is able to act quickly, with relatively few people. The government is only beginning to adapt to the 21st century.
This is the first war in history, unconventional and irregular as it may be, in an error of emails blogs and cellphone, blackberry, instant messaging etc. There has never been a war fought in this environment before.
Even in the poorest neighborhoods in the Muslim world you find satellites on building and after building. A couple of years ago in Iraq, the penalty for a satellite was disfigurement or death.
Regrettably, many of the news channels in the Muslim world are hostile to the west
A growing number of foreign media outlets have immature standards and practices; they serve to inflame and distort, rather than enlighten and inform.
We have barely begun to compete for reaching their audiences. A lie can be half way…
Desecration of the Koran, the history of its dissemination and effect. Posted on websites, repeated on emails, etc.
The US had to be sure they had the facts before they responded. Could not compete with the few days it took to be spread. Appropriately and of necessity, took the time it needed to try and ensure they had the facts before responding.
But in the meantime some lives had been lost and damage had been done to our country.
What complicates the ability to respond quickly is that, unlike our enemies who lie with impunity, with no penalty ‘whatsoever, our government does not have the luxury of relying on other sources of information, ‘Anonymous or otherwise, our government has to be the source and well tell the Truth.
Today’s correspondents are under ‘hyper-pressure, to meet a constant news scrawl deadline and produce exclusives, daily deadlines have turned into hourly. The fact is gov at the speed in which it operates doesn’t always make their job easier. The standard gov foreign affairs operation was built to respond to individual requests for information, it is reactive not proactive, still operates at a 8 hour five or six day a week basis, while world events and our enemies are operating 24/7 across ‘every time zone.’
That’s an unacceptable dangerous deficiency.
Our government is seeking to adapt. US government has sought non-traditional means to provide accurate information to Iraqi people, yet this has been portrayed as inappropriate. For example, the allegations of someone in the military hiring a contractor to pay someone to print a story, a True story, but paying to print a story.
The resulting explosion of critical press stories caused all activity and initiative to stop. It has a chilling effect, for those who are asked to serve in the military p affairs field. The conclusion is that there is no toleration for innovation, much less for human error that could be seized upon by a press that demands perfection from the government but does not from the enemy nor, sometimes, themselves.
Consider for a moment for the column inches and broadcast time was used on ‘unauthorized detainee’ mistreatment. The policy of the government was clear, it was against inhumane treatment of the exact type that took place. These were just some people who did some things on one night shift in a prison in Iraq. “And consider that the whole world knew simultaneously.”
Manchester manual, terrorists are trained to put out misinformation. Communications planning a central aspect of government at all levels. Trained to lie, to put out misinformation.
In some cases military public affairs officials have little communications training or grounding in the importance of timing and rapid response and the realities of digital and broadcast media. We’ve become somewhat more adept, but progress is slow and ‘importantly public affairs posts have proven not to be enhancing for careers.
Anyone that looks at those careers and recognizes the near instantaneous public penalty imposed on someone who is in the military who is involved in anything the media judges instantaneously to be imperfect, or improper, and that then requires a long time to figure out what actually took place. Military people are intelligent, they’ll move away from those careers.
We need to get better at engaging experts from both within and outside of government to help communicate rapidly, deploying the best military communications capabilities to theaters of operation, executing multifaceted media campaigns, print, radio, television, and the internet, but let their be no doubt!
The longer it takes to put together a strategic communication framework into place, the more we can be certain that the vacuum will be filled by the enemy, and news informers who most assuredly not paint an accurate picture of what is actually taking place.
There are some signs of modest progress. Within the past year and a half the military’s joint forces command has developed a rapidly deployable communication team. They are organized and focused on specific geographical areas of the world. For example, soon after the devastating earthquake in Pakistan I had occasion to fly over the areas where entire sides of mountains had collapsed from the quake, and entire buildings and homes gone.
One of these military teams went into the disaster area, working with the commander in charge, to help focus the attention on the US government’s truly extraordinary commitment to helping the Pakistani people.
Public opinion surveys, by private groups in Pakistan, taken before and after the earthquake, suggest that public opinion of the United States changed dramatically because of the new awareness by the Pakistani public.
It was not long before the favorite toy in Pakistan was a small replica of a Chinook helicopter—they were just everywhere in that country—because of the many lives our helicopters saved in the mountains with relief supplies they delivered.
The communication team was attached to it and rapidly deployable and needed because, frankly, we were concerned about out troops safety, given the number of people in that country that do not favor the west and the, ah, potential difficulties that occur, we were uncertain as to what the reception would be. The reception over time was terrific.
Reorient staffing and schedules and culture to engage full ranged of media that are having such an impact today. US central command has launched an online communications effort that includes electronic news updates and links campaign that has several hundred blogs receiving and publishing the cent-com content. The US government will have to develop an institutionalized capability to anticipate and act within the same news cycle. That will require instituting 24 hour press operation centers, expanding internet operations, and other channels of communication, to equal status with other 21st century press organizations.
It will result in much less reliance on the print press, just as the publics of the US and the world are relying less on newspapers as their principle source of information. And it will require attracting more experts in these areas from the private sector to government service. This also will likely mean embracing new institutions to engage people across the world.
During the Cold War, institutions such as the US Information Agency, Radio Free Europe just to name an example, proved to be valuable instruments for the United States. We need to take the opportunity to develop programs that would serve a similar valuable role in the War on Terror in this new century.
What should that look like? Most of us remember when USIA was criticized for making a film about President Kennedy. It was announced that this was taking tax payers dollars to promote a person running for public office in the United States, and was propagandizing the American people. Of course, when you speak today, there is no one audience. There are multiple audiences. We can’t avoid communicating whatever it is we communicate that will then be heard by multiple audiences. So I don’t know the answer. I don’t know what an Information Agency should look like in the 21st Century. There’s no guidebook for this, no roadmap, that says here’s what you got to do if you get up in the morning and you are the government of the United States. These are tough questions and its tough to find the answers for them, and to do it right.
So that we can tell our hard working folks what to do to meet these challenges, we’re having to figure it out as we go along. The country is trying to figure it out.
People need time to adjust and adapt to new ideas. For the past minutes I’ve been commenting on the challenges facing our country—not just our government but our country—in the new media age. I’ve noted the advantages the enemy has in his ability to manipulate the media.
But we have advantages as well. And that is quite simply that the Truth is on our side. And ultimately, in my view, Truth wins out. I believe with every bone in my body that free people exposed to sufficient information will over time find their way to right decisions.
Throughout the world, advances in technology are forcing massive information flow that dictators and extremists will ultimately not be able to control. Blogs are rapidly appearing in countries even where the press is controlled. Pro democracy are communicating and organizing by email, pagers, and blackberries.
Today in Iraq an energetic media has emerged from the rubble of Saddam Hussein’s police state, with nearly three hundred newspapers, over 90 radio stations, and more than forty television stations. They are now accessing the web.
We are fighting a battle where the survival of our free way of life is at stake, and the center of gravity is not simply on the battlefields overseas, it’s a test of wills and it will be won or lost with our publics and the publics of other nations. We’ll need to do all we can to attract supporters to our efforts, and to correct the lies which are told that are so damaging to our country, and are repeated, and repeated, and repeated.
posted by John Aristides at 2/18/2006 03:52:00 PM
0 comments
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Thomas Sowell
Excerpts from Q & A with Thomas Sowell, Hoover Institution, Senior Fellow (and ex-Marxist):
On Dunbar (incredibly successful inner-city black high school):
And 100 years later, it would be considered utopian to even set that as a goal. And the question is, how did this happen, why did it happen? And why is there so little interest in it?
And the latter especially, just is very troubling. Because I first began writing about Dunbar (ph) 30 some years ago. Because people were saying how terrible the you know, the education of black kids was. And the question is, well what can we do? And the I said, well black kids have already been educated successfully, we don’t have to speculate and come up with esoteric theories, and so on. And I published this, and I found that there was virtually no interest among educators, or politicians, or intellectuals.
And the few who had any took any interest at all were concerned to discredit what was said, because it went so completely counter to what they already believed.
On Slavery:
A history professor had a student come up to him and ask him, well when did slavery begin? And he said you’re asking the wrong question, the question is when did freedom begin? Because slavery existed long as we have any records. And from archeological finds, we realize that people were enslaving other people before they could read and write. So that’s always existed, and it’s existed all over the world.
The number of white people enslaved by pirates in North Africa were greater than the number of Africans brought to the United States.
On why he doesn't credit the media:
I mean ever since ever since the engagement of Grenada, and ABC News featured a story about how Americans soldiers landing in Grenada were wearing the wrong kind of uniforms, I thought that was really not the significance of the Grenada invasion.
On Black Rednecks:
These would be blacks who came out of the southern culture and who carried that culture with them North into the into the urban ghettos, and into the ghettos of the South, for that matter, and who have not moved out of that culture since. Over the years, both blacks and whites have moved away from that culture, but in the poorest and worst of the ghetto areas, there are lots of people who have not. And these kinds it’s a it’s a culture which didn’t do whites any good, and it’s certainly not doing blacks any good today.
And the tragedy is that people regard this culture as somehow the authentic black culture, and therefore you’re not to interfere with it.
On giving his Joseph Goebbels award to Dan Rather:
The study wasn’t that great itself, but to conclude that one out of eight kids in this country are going to bed hungry at night, when in fact obesity is higher in the lower income brackets than in the higher brackets, was just madness.
On Nixon:
Well, you compare him with, say, Clinton. Nixon was, you know, was threatened with impeachment. And he quit. He spared the country. He wasn’t going to fight it.
Even more so if you go back to 1960, when there was that extremely close race between Nixon and was it ’60 yes, Nixon and Kennedy.
And there were people who said, you know, there was all kinds of voter fraud in Chicago. I mean, voter fraud in Chicago is not a new idea. And they asked they were saying he should challenge it, and he refused to challenge it. The country should not be put through that.
The stuff that went on in Florida in 2000, you know, that kind of stuff, he spared us all of that.
On McGovern:
But the more I saw of McGovern and the people around McGovern, the more I realized what a disaster it would be to have this man president.
On Democrats and Blacks:
The Democrats get something like 80 to 90 percent of the black vote. If that ever falls down to 60 or 70 percent, they’re in deep trouble, because they’ve alienated so many other people, that they have a hard time winning elections at all. And so, therefore, they must try to keep blacks paranoid.
On September 11, 2001:
Oh, my gosh. We will never be the same again.
I’m disappointed in people who seem not to realize that it’s not business as usual anymore. That it’s really there are things we have to do that we don’t want to do, but the alternative is far worse.
And so, the world will never be the same. I hope that it wakes up some people. It certainly hasn’t awakened all of them.
On Dunbar (incredibly successful inner-city black high school):
And 100 years later, it would be considered utopian to even set that as a goal. And the question is, how did this happen, why did it happen? And why is there so little interest in it?
And the latter especially, just is very troubling. Because I first began writing about Dunbar (ph) 30 some years ago. Because people were saying how terrible the you know, the education of black kids was. And the question is, well what can we do? And the I said, well black kids have already been educated successfully, we don’t have to speculate and come up with esoteric theories, and so on. And I published this, and I found that there was virtually no interest among educators, or politicians, or intellectuals.
And the few who had any took any interest at all were concerned to discredit what was said, because it went so completely counter to what they already believed.
On Slavery:
A history professor had a student come up to him and ask him, well when did slavery begin? And he said you’re asking the wrong question, the question is when did freedom begin? Because slavery existed long as we have any records. And from archeological finds, we realize that people were enslaving other people before they could read and write. So that’s always existed, and it’s existed all over the world.
The number of white people enslaved by pirates in North Africa were greater than the number of Africans brought to the United States.
On why he doesn't credit the media:
I mean ever since ever since the engagement of Grenada, and ABC News featured a story about how Americans soldiers landing in Grenada were wearing the wrong kind of uniforms, I thought that was really not the significance of the Grenada invasion.
On Black Rednecks:
These would be blacks who came out of the southern culture and who carried that culture with them North into the into the urban ghettos, and into the ghettos of the South, for that matter, and who have not moved out of that culture since. Over the years, both blacks and whites have moved away from that culture, but in the poorest and worst of the ghetto areas, there are lots of people who have not. And these kinds it’s a it’s a culture which didn’t do whites any good, and it’s certainly not doing blacks any good today.
And the tragedy is that people regard this culture as somehow the authentic black culture, and therefore you’re not to interfere with it.
On giving his Joseph Goebbels award to Dan Rather:
The study wasn’t that great itself, but to conclude that one out of eight kids in this country are going to bed hungry at night, when in fact obesity is higher in the lower income brackets than in the higher brackets, was just madness.
On Nixon:
Well, you compare him with, say, Clinton. Nixon was, you know, was threatened with impeachment. And he quit. He spared the country. He wasn’t going to fight it.
Even more so if you go back to 1960, when there was that extremely close race between Nixon and was it ’60 yes, Nixon and Kennedy.
And there were people who said, you know, there was all kinds of voter fraud in Chicago. I mean, voter fraud in Chicago is not a new idea. And they asked they were saying he should challenge it, and he refused to challenge it. The country should not be put through that.
The stuff that went on in Florida in 2000, you know, that kind of stuff, he spared us all of that.
On McGovern:
But the more I saw of McGovern and the people around McGovern, the more I realized what a disaster it would be to have this man president.
On Democrats and Blacks:
The Democrats get something like 80 to 90 percent of the black vote. If that ever falls down to 60 or 70 percent, they’re in deep trouble, because they’ve alienated so many other people, that they have a hard time winning elections at all. And so, therefore, they must try to keep blacks paranoid.
On September 11, 2001:
Oh, my gosh. We will never be the same again.
I’m disappointed in people who seem not to realize that it’s not business as usual anymore. That it’s really there are things we have to do that we don’t want to do, but the alternative is far worse.
And so, the world will never be the same. I hope that it wakes up some people. It certainly hasn’t awakened all of them.
posted by John Aristides at 2/09/2006 06:58:00 PM
2 comments
Clash of Civilizations
Here is Samuel Huntington's Foreign Affairs article, courtesy of American Future.
Some mental notes:
In 1793, as R. R. Palmer put it, "The wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun." This nineteenth- century pattern lasted until the end of World War 1. Then, as a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it, the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, first among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between communism and liberal democracy [...]
These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts within Western civilization, "Western civil wars," as William Lind has labeled them [...] With the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its center- piece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations.
This is an evolutionary theory of civilizational development. At some point in the past, most likely around the Enlightenment (both English and Continental), Western civilization branched off from the rest of the world and started evolving on its own. Western evolutionary fitness jumped ahead of the rest of the world, diminishing the influence of non-Western peoples on subsequent Western evolution. The West became its own genus, and species and sub-species began to form. Selection based on fitness started in earnest.
Now think about this. Imagine a graph, with the 'y' axis being evolutionary fitness and the 'x' axis being time. As human societies went forward in time, the plot-lines multiplied as more permutations registered into the system. At some point in time (at some 'x'), the plot-line of the West branched off and over the others. The West became more fit (had a higher 'y' value).
Soon, the plot-line for the West began to diversify. Nation-states based on ethnicities were the first segmentations to select against each other. When this selection reached a climax, its artificiality was exposed and supplanted, as another segmentation value, one that was much more fundamental, emerged. This segmentation value had greater primacy, and therefore greater effect, on organizating selective interactions. This segmentation value was, of course, ideology. Selection thereafter measured the fitness of values and first principles. It was a paradigmatic battle for the soul of Western civilization.
The winner was the English Enlightenment, which draws on much of the intellectual history of Western civilization, while adding empiricism and pragmatism as support beams. Out of all the differing ideologies that competed in the West for paramountcy, this one tracked closest to reality. By claiming derivative status to the integral world, it gained a power and adaptability that other paradigms couldn't hope to match. It's fitness ranked highest, and it won. See Gaddis's The Cold War (commenting on America's pragmatism and adaptability as our greatest advantage).
If one were to make a prediction, it is this: the rest of Western history will be one of absorption and refinement, but not one of paradigmatic crisis. Troubles may spring from forgetfulness, but these troubles will simultaneously be mnemonic devices, spurring memory and solution. If we go adrift, reality will bring us back. Experience is a harsh task-master, true, but the West is the best of all students. It's our approach to the lesson that makes us great. It's our way of thinking, even more than what we think, that gives us all the advantages.
And so the West's inner selection process reached a conclusion of sorts, and by 1991 America and everything she stands for reigned supreme. The smoke barely cleared from the air when the selection process began anew. The Western branch--which had been disengaged and largely immune from non-Western influence as its various permutations played out their own selective process--was once again drawn into the broader game of civilizational evolution. A refined West was once again going to be tested, but this time to find out if fitness within the context of the West translated into fitness within the context of the entire world.
Huntington goes on:
Civilization identity will be increasingly important in the future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization. The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another.
Think about the evolutionary paradigm mentioned above. I believe much of the interaction between civilizations are cross-pollinations. I also think the West has considerable advantages that other civilizations do not.
Much of the viability of non-Western civilizations will depend on them incorporating the values and first principles of the West, if not the trappings. Where Western first principles irreconcilably contradict the first principles of the host society, clashes and conflicts will manifest. Huntington is right about that.
But what will these clashes look like? I think they will resemble the intramural competition of the West--an interior selection of identifiers and ideologies--rather than the inter-civilizational warfare that Huntington predicts. The ideological battles of the 20th century will replay in new forums, as cross-pollination leads to mutations that then compete within their particular civilizational arenas. The fitness of the West will create a gravity that pulls others towards it, and much like the matter that gets burned off when approaching a black-hole, the unfit paradigms of each civilization will get discarded the closer the society gets to Western norms.
Of course, if the society itself is fundamentally contradictory to Western values, thereby precluding any successful mutations from appearing within its sphere of influence, it will burn up entirely as its contact with the West increases. Islam comes to mind here, with its embrace of revelatory truth at the expense of empiricism. If Islam is to survive, its ontology will have to burn up in the atmosphere. Like Christianity, its ethics and moral lessons might be salvageable. If this is not the case, however, not even a kernel will survive.
The clash of civilizations is fundamentally a non-Western evolutionary imperative. Survival for these various spheres depends on the evolution of their first principles, not on the evolution of ours. Most will peacefully integrate, some will not. Their ability to adapt will be determinative (our imperatives have less to do with adaptation than with consolidation). If they do not allow their culture to mate with Western values, in the words of Huntington, they will "disappear...[to be] buried in the sands of time."
In the end, our responsiveness and adaptability will win out, because tied to it is a fundamentally fit cultural identifier that is able to absorb all the rest. Huntington writes:
People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he intensely identifies.
He says that Western, Islamic, Asian, etc. are the highest levels of identification, so most of the clash will take place on this level. However, what is Western if not the rather simple concept that we are all human, all in it together? That uber-identification flows from the West, and specifically from the Enlightenment. It is a fundamentally inclusive identifier, capable of absorbing all others that do not directly contradict.
This is where I think we are going. When we all move forward together, it will be under the banner of Truth--empirical, not revelatory.
Some mental notes:
In 1793, as R. R. Palmer put it, "The wars of kings were over; the wars of peoples had begun." This nineteenth- century pattern lasted until the end of World War 1. Then, as a result of the Russian Revolution and the reaction against it, the conflict of nations yielded to the conflict of ideologies, first among communism, fascism-Nazism and liberal democracy, and then between communism and liberal democracy [...]
These conflicts between princes, nation states and ideologies were primarily conflicts within Western civilization, "Western civil wars," as William Lind has labeled them [...] With the end of the Cold War, international politics moves out of its Western phase, and its center- piece becomes the interaction between the West and non-Western civilizations and among non-Western civilizations.
This is an evolutionary theory of civilizational development. At some point in the past, most likely around the Enlightenment (both English and Continental), Western civilization branched off from the rest of the world and started evolving on its own. Western evolutionary fitness jumped ahead of the rest of the world, diminishing the influence of non-Western peoples on subsequent Western evolution. The West became its own genus, and species and sub-species began to form. Selection based on fitness started in earnest.
Now think about this. Imagine a graph, with the 'y' axis being evolutionary fitness and the 'x' axis being time. As human societies went forward in time, the plot-lines multiplied as more permutations registered into the system. At some point in time (at some 'x'), the plot-line of the West branched off and over the others. The West became more fit (had a higher 'y' value).
Soon, the plot-line for the West began to diversify. Nation-states based on ethnicities were the first segmentations to select against each other. When this selection reached a climax, its artificiality was exposed and supplanted, as another segmentation value, one that was much more fundamental, emerged. This segmentation value had greater primacy, and therefore greater effect, on organizating selective interactions. This segmentation value was, of course, ideology. Selection thereafter measured the fitness of values and first principles. It was a paradigmatic battle for the soul of Western civilization.
The winner was the English Enlightenment, which draws on much of the intellectual history of Western civilization, while adding empiricism and pragmatism as support beams. Out of all the differing ideologies that competed in the West for paramountcy, this one tracked closest to reality. By claiming derivative status to the integral world, it gained a power and adaptability that other paradigms couldn't hope to match. It's fitness ranked highest, and it won. See Gaddis's The Cold War (commenting on America's pragmatism and adaptability as our greatest advantage).
If one were to make a prediction, it is this: the rest of Western history will be one of absorption and refinement, but not one of paradigmatic crisis. Troubles may spring from forgetfulness, but these troubles will simultaneously be mnemonic devices, spurring memory and solution. If we go adrift, reality will bring us back. Experience is a harsh task-master, true, but the West is the best of all students. It's our approach to the lesson that makes us great. It's our way of thinking, even more than what we think, that gives us all the advantages.
And so the West's inner selection process reached a conclusion of sorts, and by 1991 America and everything she stands for reigned supreme. The smoke barely cleared from the air when the selection process began anew. The Western branch--which had been disengaged and largely immune from non-Western influence as its various permutations played out their own selective process--was once again drawn into the broader game of civilizational evolution. A refined West was once again going to be tested, but this time to find out if fitness within the context of the West translated into fitness within the context of the entire world.
Huntington goes on:
Civilization identity will be increasingly important in the future, and the world will be shaped in large measure by the interactions among seven or eight major civilizations. These include Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African civilization. The most important conflicts of the future will occur along the cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another.
Think about the evolutionary paradigm mentioned above. I believe much of the interaction between civilizations are cross-pollinations. I also think the West has considerable advantages that other civilizations do not.
Much of the viability of non-Western civilizations will depend on them incorporating the values and first principles of the West, if not the trappings. Where Western first principles irreconcilably contradict the first principles of the host society, clashes and conflicts will manifest. Huntington is right about that.
But what will these clashes look like? I think they will resemble the intramural competition of the West--an interior selection of identifiers and ideologies--rather than the inter-civilizational warfare that Huntington predicts. The ideological battles of the 20th century will replay in new forums, as cross-pollination leads to mutations that then compete within their particular civilizational arenas. The fitness of the West will create a gravity that pulls others towards it, and much like the matter that gets burned off when approaching a black-hole, the unfit paradigms of each civilization will get discarded the closer the society gets to Western norms.
Of course, if the society itself is fundamentally contradictory to Western values, thereby precluding any successful mutations from appearing within its sphere of influence, it will burn up entirely as its contact with the West increases. Islam comes to mind here, with its embrace of revelatory truth at the expense of empiricism. If Islam is to survive, its ontology will have to burn up in the atmosphere. Like Christianity, its ethics and moral lessons might be salvageable. If this is not the case, however, not even a kernel will survive.
The clash of civilizations is fundamentally a non-Western evolutionary imperative. Survival for these various spheres depends on the evolution of their first principles, not on the evolution of ours. Most will peacefully integrate, some will not. Their ability to adapt will be determinative (our imperatives have less to do with adaptation than with consolidation). If they do not allow their culture to mate with Western values, in the words of Huntington, they will "disappear...[to be] buried in the sands of time."
In the end, our responsiveness and adaptability will win out, because tied to it is a fundamentally fit cultural identifier that is able to absorb all the rest. Huntington writes:
People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he intensely identifies.
He says that Western, Islamic, Asian, etc. are the highest levels of identification, so most of the clash will take place on this level. However, what is Western if not the rather simple concept that we are all human, all in it together? That uber-identification flows from the West, and specifically from the Enlightenment. It is a fundamentally inclusive identifier, capable of absorbing all others that do not directly contradict.
This is where I think we are going. When we all move forward together, it will be under the banner of Truth--empirical, not revelatory.
posted by John Aristides at 2/09/2006 12:03:00 AM
0 comments
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
What Went Wrong with Islam
Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong, Interview with Brian Lamb 11/18/01.
Notes:
Starts with historical Islam, from center of culture and innovation to being roundly defeated. This absolute defeat in 1699 started a debate, which has gone on ever since. "Hitherto we have defeated the infidels, now they are defeating us." Defeat on the battlefield preceeded defeat in market place, and defeat politically and scientifically.
Tried to emulate economy, political systems, militaries of West. Nothing has worked. Situation has gotten worse and worse. Have come to be dominated by the West.
A debate which has been going on for three centuries, getting more ramified lately.
Lewis was in His Majesty's Service during WWII, saw much of the Middle East.
Two articles were his biggest initial contributions: "Root of Muslim Rage", 1990, he had come to realize more and more that there was a hostility towards the West and the US in particular.
Second article appeared in 1998, on Osama's Declaration of War on the US.
"Old enough to believe that history consists of facts supported by evidence."
Analyzes the phrase, "That's history", implying that something in the past is unimportant. Says Americans are generally ignorant of history. A major difference between the US and the cultures in the Middle East, where they have a very keen awareness of history and the narrative they fit into.
For example, in the Iraq Iran war, the war propaganda made frequent allusions to events of the seventh century, in the secure knowledge that the listeners and readers on both sides would pick up these allusions and understand them. When Osama, in one of his recent pronouncements, says "we have suffered this shame and humiliation for 80 years...", his audience understood him. He was, of course, referring to the fall of the Ottoman empire, the occupation and partition of that empire, ultimate point of degradation and humiliation of the Muslim world. At its height, extended from the suburbs of Vienna to the east of Iran. Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk" led an uprising and reeoccupied Anatolia, led a secular revolution and set up secular military state. From a Muslim point of view, this was the worst that could happen, eliminated the Caliphate.
The Caliphate is the head of Islam. Theirs is a religion subdivided into nations, not nation subdivided into religion. They do not define themselves in national terms, but in religious identities and political allegiance.
Koran was revealed by the Archangel Gabriel to Mohammed, Koran is "divine and uncreated." Exile and return is a theme in Muslim history. Mecca to Medina and back again.
Non-Muslims are not allowed to go to Mecca. "Only one religion in Arabia" is the maxim, which caused Osama so much grief when America based troops there. Important difference between Mohammed and his "predecessors" was that Mohammed was successful during his lifetime. Was not he that was put to death but his enemies. Put together a state, conquered with the Sword, made peace and war, all things a head of state does. Forms part of the core of memories that all Muslims share. Therefore, Islam is political in a sense that Christianity and Judaism are not.
Mohammed was not divine, but he was a prophet, chosen to deliver God's message. They also revere Jesus as a prophet, but consider it blasphemy to consider him son of God.
Modern history of Middle East begins in 1798. The French Republic sent expeditionary force to Egypt under Bonaparte. Taught the first "appalling lesson" that even a small European army could enter, occupy, and govern the Middle East at their leisure. The departure of the French was second lesson: only another European power can get them out (driven out by Sir Horatio Nelson of Great Britain). Departure was not achieved by Egypt.
Middle East was more or less passive object of greater power games from outside the region. In the final phase it was the US v. USSR. But this was the end of it. Bush I and Gorbachev ended this Imperial rivalry over the Middle East. America because they wouldn't, Soviets because they couldn't.
When it comes to defining American interests in the Middle East, two big topics: 1) Oil, and 2) Israel.
Oil. Oil was found in the first part of the 20th century. The development of oil made a tremendous difference in every respect: the radical Islam originated in Arabia as far back in 18th century, but it would have remained there if not for oil. The unlimited wealth allowed them to set up schools and colleges all over the world to spread their ideology, their brand of fanatical, extremist Islam. Without oil money, this type of Islam would have remained on the fringe. By buying oil, we are indirectly contributing to the continuation of this problem.
Oil has been a curse to the Arab world. Provided vast wealth to an otherwise pastoral system. "No representation without taxation." Didn't need the people and their taxes to govern. Traditional Muslim government is authoritarian, but it wasn't dictatorial or tyrannical. Only recently has the power of the ruler been augmented by oil. Either they will run out of oil, or it will be superceded by some other tech. Oil has strengthened autocratic government, made it more effective in its oppression. Inhibited the development of other forms of gainful economic effort.
Came to Princeton because they "made me an offer I couldn't refuse, a New Jersey expression." There was a difference between the students at Princeton and in London. Undergraduate education is better in England, but graduate education is more rigorous here.
Israel. Israel/Palestine question is not really of primary importance. That and anti-Americanism are the only grievances that are allowed to be freely expressed in the Middle East. So it is of secondary importance, the primary factor being political oppression and the general feeling of Muslim discontent.
"Either get tough, or get out"
Kind of wishy-washy policies are not going to work. Why do they hate us is the wrong question, they've been hating us for centuries. You can't be rich, strong, successful...and loved, especially not by those who have nothing. The question should be why do they not fear and respect us. There has always been a struggle between these religions, and now the wrong one seems to be winning. The hatred is axiomatic.
Something that comes out in writings of bin Laden. There were always rival powers before, if they were unhappy with US they could turn to the Soviets. Can't do that anymore. It has concentrated their minds towards us, and they think they destroyed the Soviet Union. Saw this as stage one on the road to victory, were scared of the Soviets, thought they were the worst.
They thought dealing with the US would be comparatively easy. Litany is always repeated: Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, etc. They say that we were there to install Imperial Somalia, and were driven away by a few casualties. How do we get tough?
Continue good work we've started in Afghanistan, then deal with other countries and terrorist groups that are supported by them. The only other alternative is to get out completely. He prefers getting tough to getting out. Getting bullied then retreating is not a good idea.
People's goodwill is inverse to who the governments support. Divide Middle East into three regions. 1)Governments support America -- these countries have rabidly anti-American population. Notably Egypt and Saudi Arabia. "It's no accident" that a great majority of the hijackers come from these countries. Regard governments as American puppets. 2)Governments are anti-American -- people are very pro-American. Remarkable demonstrations in Iran after 9/11. If you have an unpopular government, and the government tells you America is bad, you will assume America is good.
He hopes that what has happened in Afghanistan continues into Iraq and Iran. He's been told that after seeing the scenes of rejoicing in Afghanistan, it would look like a funeral compared to what the celebrations would be in Iraq and Iran were they liberated from their present rulers.
The desire for freedom is very natural. Contitutional democracy is a Western idea, freedom as a political ideal is a Western idea. However, in Muslim world, the ideal government is one of justice, mean what we largely mean by justice, enough room to squeeze in the idea of freedom under this rubric.
Third group: where both government and people are friendly to US. Only two states, both democracies (oddly enough!), Israel and Turkey, where the government can be thrown out by the people if it becomes unpopular. This eliminates the inverse relationship between the opinions and assumptions of the people, and that of the government.
On media: much information that we get here is trivial. Is devoid of context, presented bare and naked, and therefore meaningless. Media is supposed to be intellectually useful. The paradigm has shifted to being one of stimulation. We are prodded with electricity and diverted by red meat. We are no longer educated. Sheep are treated such.
He speaks briefly of the role of women, and how Ataturk focused on the issue of women's rights. Quotes Muslim philosopher, "Society that eliminates the contribution of one half of its citizens is like a human body that is paralyzed on one side."
Notes:
Starts with historical Islam, from center of culture and innovation to being roundly defeated. This absolute defeat in 1699 started a debate, which has gone on ever since. "Hitherto we have defeated the infidels, now they are defeating us." Defeat on the battlefield preceeded defeat in market place, and defeat politically and scientifically.
Tried to emulate economy, political systems, militaries of West. Nothing has worked. Situation has gotten worse and worse. Have come to be dominated by the West.
A debate which has been going on for three centuries, getting more ramified lately.
Lewis was in His Majesty's Service during WWII, saw much of the Middle East.
Two articles were his biggest initial contributions: "Root of Muslim Rage", 1990, he had come to realize more and more that there was a hostility towards the West and the US in particular.
Second article appeared in 1998, on Osama's Declaration of War on the US.
"Old enough to believe that history consists of facts supported by evidence."
Analyzes the phrase, "That's history", implying that something in the past is unimportant. Says Americans are generally ignorant of history. A major difference between the US and the cultures in the Middle East, where they have a very keen awareness of history and the narrative they fit into.
For example, in the Iraq Iran war, the war propaganda made frequent allusions to events of the seventh century, in the secure knowledge that the listeners and readers on both sides would pick up these allusions and understand them. When Osama, in one of his recent pronouncements, says "we have suffered this shame and humiliation for 80 years...", his audience understood him. He was, of course, referring to the fall of the Ottoman empire, the occupation and partition of that empire, ultimate point of degradation and humiliation of the Muslim world. At its height, extended from the suburbs of Vienna to the east of Iran. Mustafa Kemal "Ataturk" led an uprising and reeoccupied Anatolia, led a secular revolution and set up secular military state. From a Muslim point of view, this was the worst that could happen, eliminated the Caliphate.
The Caliphate is the head of Islam. Theirs is a religion subdivided into nations, not nation subdivided into religion. They do not define themselves in national terms, but in religious identities and political allegiance.
Koran was revealed by the Archangel Gabriel to Mohammed, Koran is "divine and uncreated." Exile and return is a theme in Muslim history. Mecca to Medina and back again.
Non-Muslims are not allowed to go to Mecca. "Only one religion in Arabia" is the maxim, which caused Osama so much grief when America based troops there. Important difference between Mohammed and his "predecessors" was that Mohammed was successful during his lifetime. Was not he that was put to death but his enemies. Put together a state, conquered with the Sword, made peace and war, all things a head of state does. Forms part of the core of memories that all Muslims share. Therefore, Islam is political in a sense that Christianity and Judaism are not.
Mohammed was not divine, but he was a prophet, chosen to deliver God's message. They also revere Jesus as a prophet, but consider it blasphemy to consider him son of God.
Modern history of Middle East begins in 1798. The French Republic sent expeditionary force to Egypt under Bonaparte. Taught the first "appalling lesson" that even a small European army could enter, occupy, and govern the Middle East at their leisure. The departure of the French was second lesson: only another European power can get them out (driven out by Sir Horatio Nelson of Great Britain). Departure was not achieved by Egypt.
Middle East was more or less passive object of greater power games from outside the region. In the final phase it was the US v. USSR. But this was the end of it. Bush I and Gorbachev ended this Imperial rivalry over the Middle East. America because they wouldn't, Soviets because they couldn't.
When it comes to defining American interests in the Middle East, two big topics: 1) Oil, and 2) Israel.
Oil. Oil was found in the first part of the 20th century. The development of oil made a tremendous difference in every respect: the radical Islam originated in Arabia as far back in 18th century, but it would have remained there if not for oil. The unlimited wealth allowed them to set up schools and colleges all over the world to spread their ideology, their brand of fanatical, extremist Islam. Without oil money, this type of Islam would have remained on the fringe. By buying oil, we are indirectly contributing to the continuation of this problem.
Oil has been a curse to the Arab world. Provided vast wealth to an otherwise pastoral system. "No representation without taxation." Didn't need the people and their taxes to govern. Traditional Muslim government is authoritarian, but it wasn't dictatorial or tyrannical. Only recently has the power of the ruler been augmented by oil. Either they will run out of oil, or it will be superceded by some other tech. Oil has strengthened autocratic government, made it more effective in its oppression. Inhibited the development of other forms of gainful economic effort.
Came to Princeton because they "made me an offer I couldn't refuse, a New Jersey expression." There was a difference between the students at Princeton and in London. Undergraduate education is better in England, but graduate education is more rigorous here.
Israel. Israel/Palestine question is not really of primary importance. That and anti-Americanism are the only grievances that are allowed to be freely expressed in the Middle East. So it is of secondary importance, the primary factor being political oppression and the general feeling of Muslim discontent.
"Either get tough, or get out"
Kind of wishy-washy policies are not going to work. Why do they hate us is the wrong question, they've been hating us for centuries. You can't be rich, strong, successful...and loved, especially not by those who have nothing. The question should be why do they not fear and respect us. There has always been a struggle between these religions, and now the wrong one seems to be winning. The hatred is axiomatic.
Something that comes out in writings of bin Laden. There were always rival powers before, if they were unhappy with US they could turn to the Soviets. Can't do that anymore. It has concentrated their minds towards us, and they think they destroyed the Soviet Union. Saw this as stage one on the road to victory, were scared of the Soviets, thought they were the worst.
They thought dealing with the US would be comparatively easy. Litany is always repeated: Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, etc. They say that we were there to install Imperial Somalia, and were driven away by a few casualties. How do we get tough?
Continue good work we've started in Afghanistan, then deal with other countries and terrorist groups that are supported by them. The only other alternative is to get out completely. He prefers getting tough to getting out. Getting bullied then retreating is not a good idea.
People's goodwill is inverse to who the governments support. Divide Middle East into three regions. 1)Governments support America -- these countries have rabidly anti-American population. Notably Egypt and Saudi Arabia. "It's no accident" that a great majority of the hijackers come from these countries. Regard governments as American puppets. 2)Governments are anti-American -- people are very pro-American. Remarkable demonstrations in Iran after 9/11. If you have an unpopular government, and the government tells you America is bad, you will assume America is good.
He hopes that what has happened in Afghanistan continues into Iraq and Iran. He's been told that after seeing the scenes of rejoicing in Afghanistan, it would look like a funeral compared to what the celebrations would be in Iraq and Iran were they liberated from their present rulers.
The desire for freedom is very natural. Contitutional democracy is a Western idea, freedom as a political ideal is a Western idea. However, in Muslim world, the ideal government is one of justice, mean what we largely mean by justice, enough room to squeeze in the idea of freedom under this rubric.
Third group: where both government and people are friendly to US. Only two states, both democracies (oddly enough!), Israel and Turkey, where the government can be thrown out by the people if it becomes unpopular. This eliminates the inverse relationship between the opinions and assumptions of the people, and that of the government.
On media: much information that we get here is trivial. Is devoid of context, presented bare and naked, and therefore meaningless. Media is supposed to be intellectually useful. The paradigm has shifted to being one of stimulation. We are prodded with electricity and diverted by red meat. We are no longer educated. Sheep are treated such.
He speaks briefly of the role of women, and how Ataturk focused on the issue of women's rights. Quotes Muslim philosopher, "Society that eliminates the contribution of one half of its citizens is like a human body that is paralyzed on one side."
posted by John Aristides at 2/08/2006 11:29:00 PM
1 comments
Senate Hearing on 06 QDR
Rumsfeld's statement, direct quotes in italics:
The military must be above political and parochial views.
Only 200,000 soldiers in the Army on Dec. 7, 1941. Ranked right below Romania.
Within 3 months Taliban and Al’Qaeda were routed in a land-locked country thousands of miles away.
Urgency of the military changes made plain on Sept 11.
Radical Islam is a cult of murder and suicide. They cannot win battles, they must challenge us through other means.
They are experts at manipulating the global media. They have a strategy: force us to abandon Iraq, thereby gaining a base of operation. Expel the Americans from Iraq. Establish Islamic authority. Extend the Jihad.
It is not a war between Islam and the West. It is a conflict between moderate and radical Muslims.
We need to leave behind an inclusive, competent government that will be dedicated to moving the country forward.
We must not only meet today’s threats, we must plan for tomorrow’s contingencies.
No nation, no matter how powerful, has the resources and capability to defend everywhere at every moment of the day or night against every conceivable type of technique. The only way to protect the American people, therefore, is to provide our military with as wide a range of options as possible, to focus on developing a range of capabilities, rather than preparing to confront any one threat.
The word transformation has attracted a good deal of attention, but in many ways it’s more accurate to see this process of continuous change as a shift in emphasis or a shift in weight, from the practices and assumptions of the past to the kinds of arrangements necessary in the 21st century. We’ve shifted, for example, from preparing to fight conventional wars, which we’re still prepared to do, to a greater emphasis on fighting unconventional, or irregular, or asymmetrical against terrorist cells or enemy guerillas.
One of the most important shifts underway is the role and importance of intelligence. The US military has long excelled in engaging targets once they’ve been identified. In the future we must be better in ascertaining where the enemy’s going next, rather than simply where the enemy was. We’ve got to be able to find the enemy, and to fix the enemy, as well as be able to finish. The United States military has enormous capacity to finish, and insufficient capacity to find and fix. And this means upgrading US intelligence capability, both human and technological, and more effectively linking technology to operations, in real time, in the field.
We’re also shifting from the typically American impulse to try to do everything ourselves, to helping partners and allies develop their own capacity to better govern and defend themselves. This is particular important in the GWOT where many of our nation’s most dangerous enemies exist within the borders of countries we’re not at war with. The shift is at the heart of the effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other nations like the Republic of Georgia and the Philippines.
There are many other shifts in our posture and thinking: from a peace-time tempo to a war-time urgency, from operating in an era of certainty to one of surprise, from avoiding risk to managing and balancing risk, from confronting other nation-states to confronting decentralized terrorist networks, from garrisoned force defending fixed frontiers to expeditionary forces that can be deployed rapidly to anywhere in the world.
We have the most agile, skilled, and expeditionary Army in history. Any who use the word broken are incorrect. Think about the many rapid, complex, and dangerous operations the Army now undertakes all around the globe. They’ve made the extraordinary so routine that nobody pauses to think about what they do.
Where is this heading? Imagine a colonel proficient in Arabic whose knowledge of city management equals his skill in marksmanship, a commander with the flexibility in tactics and options that President Roosevelt entrusted to General Eisenhower, a self-sustaining brigade that surges rapidly from the US to a forward-operating facility elsewhere in the world to work with newly-trained allies against terrorist cells that threaten a new democracy. As we imagine that colonel, that commander, that brigade, and that facility, we have a notion of what America’s transformed armed forces might look like in the years ahead: changes that will be essential to defeating a range of enemies, changes essential to keeping our nation safe.
In discussing all this, the tendency will be to talk about numbers—numbers of troops, number of weapons, number of platforms, and the like. But I want to conclude by talking about a different metric that crossed my desk a few months ago: the number 371. That’s the total number of silver stars and service crosses that have been awarded since September 11, 2001 to our nation’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Were it not for the exacting standards the military has for these awards, I suspect the numbers would be much higher, given the superb performance of our troops in places like Falluja, Ramadi, Kandahar, and other grueling battlefields in this global war on terror.
In a conversation about this war a few weeks ago, I was asked, “Where are the heroes? In prior wars everyone knew the heroes.” Well, there are a great many, and they’re doing exactly what needs to be done, to keep our country safe and to preserve freedom for our children and theirs. I think we can all do a better job, media and the military alike, telling their stories. They are volunteers, every one of them, who could be doing something else, certainly something much easier, much safer, better compensated, but they step forward each year to raise their hands and say, “Send me.”
Eisenhower said, “We face a hostile ideology, global in scope, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. To meet it successfully, we must carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle, with liberty the stake.”
We will persevere in the Long War we face today.
The military must be above political and parochial views.
Only 200,000 soldiers in the Army on Dec. 7, 1941. Ranked right below Romania.
Within 3 months Taliban and Al’Qaeda were routed in a land-locked country thousands of miles away.
Urgency of the military changes made plain on Sept 11.
Radical Islam is a cult of murder and suicide. They cannot win battles, they must challenge us through other means.
They are experts at manipulating the global media. They have a strategy: force us to abandon Iraq, thereby gaining a base of operation. Expel the Americans from Iraq. Establish Islamic authority. Extend the Jihad.
It is not a war between Islam and the West. It is a conflict between moderate and radical Muslims.
We need to leave behind an inclusive, competent government that will be dedicated to moving the country forward.
We must not only meet today’s threats, we must plan for tomorrow’s contingencies.
No nation, no matter how powerful, has the resources and capability to defend everywhere at every moment of the day or night against every conceivable type of technique. The only way to protect the American people, therefore, is to provide our military with as wide a range of options as possible, to focus on developing a range of capabilities, rather than preparing to confront any one threat.
The word transformation has attracted a good deal of attention, but in many ways it’s more accurate to see this process of continuous change as a shift in emphasis or a shift in weight, from the practices and assumptions of the past to the kinds of arrangements necessary in the 21st century. We’ve shifted, for example, from preparing to fight conventional wars, which we’re still prepared to do, to a greater emphasis on fighting unconventional, or irregular, or asymmetrical against terrorist cells or enemy guerillas.
One of the most important shifts underway is the role and importance of intelligence. The US military has long excelled in engaging targets once they’ve been identified. In the future we must be better in ascertaining where the enemy’s going next, rather than simply where the enemy was. We’ve got to be able to find the enemy, and to fix the enemy, as well as be able to finish. The United States military has enormous capacity to finish, and insufficient capacity to find and fix. And this means upgrading US intelligence capability, both human and technological, and more effectively linking technology to operations, in real time, in the field.
We’re also shifting from the typically American impulse to try to do everything ourselves, to helping partners and allies develop their own capacity to better govern and defend themselves. This is particular important in the GWOT where many of our nation’s most dangerous enemies exist within the borders of countries we’re not at war with. The shift is at the heart of the effort in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other nations like the Republic of Georgia and the Philippines.
There are many other shifts in our posture and thinking: from a peace-time tempo to a war-time urgency, from operating in an era of certainty to one of surprise, from avoiding risk to managing and balancing risk, from confronting other nation-states to confronting decentralized terrorist networks, from garrisoned force defending fixed frontiers to expeditionary forces that can be deployed rapidly to anywhere in the world.
We have the most agile, skilled, and expeditionary Army in history. Any who use the word broken are incorrect. Think about the many rapid, complex, and dangerous operations the Army now undertakes all around the globe. They’ve made the extraordinary so routine that nobody pauses to think about what they do.
Where is this heading? Imagine a colonel proficient in Arabic whose knowledge of city management equals his skill in marksmanship, a commander with the flexibility in tactics and options that President Roosevelt entrusted to General Eisenhower, a self-sustaining brigade that surges rapidly from the US to a forward-operating facility elsewhere in the world to work with newly-trained allies against terrorist cells that threaten a new democracy. As we imagine that colonel, that commander, that brigade, and that facility, we have a notion of what America’s transformed armed forces might look like in the years ahead: changes that will be essential to defeating a range of enemies, changes essential to keeping our nation safe.
In discussing all this, the tendency will be to talk about numbers—numbers of troops, number of weapons, number of platforms, and the like. But I want to conclude by talking about a different metric that crossed my desk a few months ago: the number 371. That’s the total number of silver stars and service crosses that have been awarded since September 11, 2001 to our nation’s soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Were it not for the exacting standards the military has for these awards, I suspect the numbers would be much higher, given the superb performance of our troops in places like Falluja, Ramadi, Kandahar, and other grueling battlefields in this global war on terror.
In a conversation about this war a few weeks ago, I was asked, “Where are the heroes? In prior wars everyone knew the heroes.” Well, there are a great many, and they’re doing exactly what needs to be done, to keep our country safe and to preserve freedom for our children and theirs. I think we can all do a better job, media and the military alike, telling their stories. They are volunteers, every one of them, who could be doing something else, certainly something much easier, much safer, better compensated, but they step forward each year to raise their hands and say, “Send me.”
Eisenhower said, “We face a hostile ideology, global in scope, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. To meet it successfully, we must carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle, with liberty the stake.”
We will persevere in the Long War we face today.
posted by John Aristides at 2/08/2006 11:15:00 PM
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