ShrinkWrapped

The Third Classic Blunder

The prospect of a President Obama fills me with a deep sense of unease.  I worry what his left-liberal policy prescriptions will do to our economy, our Supreme Court, and our zeitgeist, yet I expect or democracy will continue to thrive despite his best (or worst, depending on one's point of view) excesses.  I also tend to broadly agree with those who suggest that in foreign policy, there is such a weight of inertia supporting a common conception of our national interest that a President Obama will be constrained from committing any particularly egregious acts.  Yet I also find reason for worry that President Obama will manage to trump President Carter in setting a course down the wrong trunk of a complex decision tree. 

Yesterday Tom Friedman discussed Obama and the Jews in an attempt to be reassuring that President Obama would not alter the longstanding American consensus in favor of Israel:

America today has — rightly — a bipartisan approach to Arab-Israeli peace that is not going to change no matter who becomes our next president. America, whether under a Republican or Democratic administration, is now committed to a two-state solution in which the Palestinians get back the West Bank, Gaza and Arab parts of East Jerusalem, and Israel gives back most of the settlements in the West Bank, offsetting those it does not evacuate with land from Israel.

The notion that a President Barack Obama would have a desire or ability to walk away from this consensus American position is ludicrous. But given the simmering controversy over whether Mr. Obama is “good for Israel,” it’s worth exploring this question: What really makes a pro-Israel president?

While reading the article, I allowed my mind to wonder and what came to mind was revealing in terms of the source of my anxiety about Barack Obama.  Consider this piece of dialog from one of the greatest movies of the last 30 years; the scene involves a battle of wits, to the death:

Vizzini:  You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!

Man in Black: You guessed wrong.

Vizzini: You only think I guessed wrong! That's what's so funny! I switched glasses when your back was turned! Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well-known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha...

This is How the West Will Fall

When the West turns upon itself and against those values that have made us worth preserving, we are digging our own graves, or, to paraphrase a long dead tyrant's words, we are giving our enemies the rope with which to hang us.   Those of us who value our shared legacy of personal freedom and the concomitant right to pursue our own happiness are now at risk of becoming enemies of the state:

Dutch cartoonist arrested for 'insulting people'

Cartoonist known for mocking Muslims, leftists has received death threats

A Dutch political cartoonist was arrested this week on suspicion of insulting people because of their race or religion through his work, authorities said Friday.

The cartoonist, who works under the pseudonym Gregorius Nekschot, was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of violating hate speech laws and held overnight before being released, a spokeswoman for his publisher Uitgeverij Xtra said.

"He was arrested with a great show of force, by around 10 policemen," the spokeswoman said.

Imagine, it took 10 policemen to arrest this dangerous enemy of the state.  I suppose that is easier than ensuring public safety when there is a cadre of psychotically angry, hyper-sensitive, rage fueled primitives whose feelings must be attended to.

This is how we fall.

Sometimes a thing gets broke can't be fixed.

Firefly is a wonderful Science Fiction Western, with an entertaining mix of high and low technology, a crew filled with memorable characters, and excellent writing and directing.  In one of the best episodes, "Out of Gas", the Serenity is damaged and adrift in space, without life support.  Captain Mal, who is both deeply cynical and even more deeply optimistic, tells his genius engineer Kaylee to fix the problem and get them moving again.  Kaylee's mournful response is the title of this post:

Sometimes a thing gets broke can't be fixed

One of the most wonderful and most disastrous aspects of the American zeitgeist is our often naive optimism, the belief that every problem can be solved if only people of good will sit down and talk.  An inverted version of the same naive optimism occurs in those who believe that if only we use our military power wisely to defeat the enemies of freedom, the people will find the time and space in which to embrace freedom and democracy.  Barack Obama may well be an example of the first type of naif while George W. Bush may well be an example of the second.  Both approaches will inevitably fail when the desire for the optimistic outcome overwhelms a brutally honest look at the realities involved.  This is nowhere more true than in the Middle East, a place where passion long ago replaced reason, yet where one American administration after another has attempted to use reason to defuse passions that are not amenable to reason.  It is very likely that either a President Obama or a President McCain will simply continue the dysfunctional pattern that has been established over the years.  Both, in their own ways, are optimists and, for the most American of reasons, incapable of admitting the sad truth:  Some problems just can't be solved.

This must be kept in mind when considering the contretemps between the Obama campaign and John McCain after President Bush's appeasement comments to the Israeli Knesset yesterday.  David Brooks has a well balanced and nuanced view of Obama's response:

Is Obama naïve enough to think that an extremist ideological organization like Hezbollah can be mollified with a less corrupt patronage system and some electoral reform? Does he really believe that Hezbollah is a normal social welfare agency seeking more government services for its followers? Does Obama believe that even the most intractable enemies can be pacified with diplomacy? What “Lebanese consensus” can Hezbollah possibly be a part of?

If Obama believes all this, he’s not just a Jimmy Carter-style liberal. He’s off in Noam Chomskyland.

That didn’t strike me as right, so I spoke with Obama Tuesday to ask him what he meant by all this.

On the Necessity of Self Knowledge

New technology often leads to exponential increases in human knowledge.  Consider how the discovery of the X-Ray eventually led to an entire new field of human endeavor, allowing for an investigation of the internal workings of the body.  Or consider the transistor, which eventually led to the personal computer and eventually, the internet. 

The Neurosciences are now in the early stages of an exponential increase of knowledge about the workings of our brains and a potentially commensurate increase in knowledge about our minds.  The fMRI (functional MRI), PET Scan, increasingly sophisticated computerized sensor arrays that are coming on line will facilitate great leaps in understanding.  Already reports from the frontiers of Neuroscience have made their way into the MSM; such reports typically sensationalize the research in ways which would (or should) embarrass the authors, and the reports also tend to trivialize the difficulties ahead in taking the rudimentary knowledge being accumulated and   For example, recent reports that scientists can via their computers and sensors, "read" the mind of a subject are extreme exaggerations.  The movement from being able to distinguish via patterns of neuronal firings between two distinct viewed images requires such an exponential increase in complexity that to suggest what is happening is mind reading brings to mind Wolfgang Pauli's famous retort to a nonsensical paper, "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."

Theodore Dalrymple made many of the same points in an article in the New English Review last year: {HT: Sigmund, Carl, & Alfred]

Do the Impossible: Know Thyself

I attended a fascinating conference on neuropsychiatry recently. Neuroscience, it seems to me, is the current most hopeful candidate for the role of putative but delusory answer to all Mankind's deepest questions: what is Man's place in Nature, and how should he live. What is the good life, at least in the western world?

...

During the conference, I heard one of the best lectures I have ever heard by a professor at the Salpetriere in Paris.

The Arab Mind: Part XIII

[All posts in this series can be found at The Arab Mind archive.]

There was a lively discussion after the last post in this series which centered around the question of how relevant the Arab Mind is to understanding our present day conflict with the Arab and Muslim world.  As well, and not for the first time, I was taken to task for underestimating or ignoring the role of Islam in the formation of Arab culture. 

For the first part, I would suggest that beyond the ad hominem argument put forth in an effort to invalidate this series, Nina, the commenter took the position that since her experiences in an Islamic country (she did not specify which country) did not match what I was describing, the series could have no validity.  Perhaps she had not read the entire series, including several disclaimers, but I have tried to be clear that the Arab Mind represented a distillation of an "ideal" Arab/Muslim developmental line as epitomized by the Saudis.  It is no coincidence that the Shia Persians have adopted very similar practices in their efforts to prove their bona fides as the truest representatives of Allah's will and the true heirs of the caliphate.  There remains something profoundly idealized in the Muslim World (spreading out from the concentric circles around Mecca and Medina) that the most devout fundamentalist Muslims aspire to.  For the second part, I would simply counsel patience; I have not yet attempted to integrate the particular teachings of Wahhabi/Salafi Islam into the Arab Mind, but would suggest that the radical interpretation of Islam promulgated by the Saudis supports all of the most problematic aspects of the Arab Mind.

To the objection that I have not spent years living in the Arab world and therefore have limited sociological and anthropological data upon which to base this discussion, I can only respond that my lack of such intimate knowledge of the culture does not mean that I can not use other sources of data and interpret such data through the lens of Psychoanalysis.  Some of the data is systematic and anthropological, such as Raphael Patai's The Arab Mind and Philip Carl Salzman's Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, and some more anecdotal and sociological, as in the recent New York Times's articles about adolescent and young adult "relationships" (more below); further, I have also had a fair amount of direct discussion with Arabs and Western expatriates living in Muslim countries.   Most of the data supports the contention that there are narrowly constrained approaches to child rearing and sexuality and that these approaches can be usefully applied to an understanding of the development of the typical Arab Mind.

As noted, the New York Times, as liberal and multicultural a publication as one is wont to find, published two highly revealing articles this past week which illuminate and reinforce some of the points already made in this series.

Whose Side Are They On?

Why is this report buried down in the third page of news items at the on-line New York Times?

Series of Blasts Leave 56 Dead in India

JAIPUR, India — In the first terrorist attack in many months, seven bombs went off within minutes of one another on Tuesday evening in the crowded lanes of one of India’s main tourist hubs, the historic city of Jaipur, killing 56 and wounding 84, officials said.

Multiple simultaneous bomb attacks are a hall mark of al Qaeda and its affiliates.  There have already been indications in other news sources of links to a Bangladesh al Qaeda affiliate yet the New York Times does not see fit to even mention the possibility.

Maybe brown skinned people murdered by other brown skinned people don't count for much in the New York Times race-drenched universe.

Or, the naive among us might think the Times is trying to minimize the impact of Islamic terrorism. </sarc>

No Good Options

A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.

- Alvy Singer (Woody Allen) Annie Hall (1977)

Alvy Singer could have been talking about totalitarian and expansionist states. Totalitarian states cannot tolerate the openness necessary for prosperity because as people emerge from subsistence living, they naturally become less tolerant of constraints on their freedoms and eventually bump up against the limits established by their leaders. We see this in China, where greater openness and burgeoning wealth are leading people to demand a greater role in their lives, which will eventually translate into greater concern about their environment and demands for greater accountability from their leaders. (Note the rapid response to the earthquake in China versus the nonresponse to the cyclone in Myanmar.) A totalitarian state can thus either remain closed and poor (Myanmar, North Korea) or open up and risk evolution or revolution. However, there are two other alternatives:

• Be lucky enough to sit upon a sea of oil, which can be sold to wealthy and developing economies at high prices which can generate enough income to support one's military and adequate levels of bribes for one's people.
• The shark metaphor: appropriate wealth from those who have it; ie expansion.

The HISH alliance (Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Hamas) has oil wealth (though because of their misguided economic policies and their relative isolation from the global economy in terms of investment, their oil industry is failing, a long term deadly problem for the Mullahs) and an overt strategic plan to expand their influence and extort or appropriate the wealth of their neighbors.

There are two additional points that always must be kept in mind when considering the ongoing and escalating war in the Middle East between the HISH alliance and the semi-allied amalgam of the Sunni states, the West, and Israel:

• Iran is closing in on a (Shia) nuclear bomb.
• Iran, to an extent not seen since the Nazis, has centered their ideology on anti-Semitism and hatred of Jews and Israel.

Judith Apter Klinghoffer has an extremely insightful post concerning the events in Lebanon, which can frame and illuminate the near term:

The Sanity Squad on Blogtalkradio Tonight

Please join Dr. Sanity, Siggy, Neo and me for tonight's Sanity Squad Podcast.

TONIGHT'S SHOW BEGINS AT 7:30 PM

Our topics for the evening will include: The evolving situation in Lebanon, about which I wrote today, and the combination of a natural disaster exacerbated by man-made political effects in Myanmar.

Click on the button below to listen live:

The call in number is is (646) 716-9116. Showtime is at 7:30 PM

Ignorance, Stupidity, Laziness, or Venality? How the Left Deals With the Middle East's Complexity

Is it possible to understand a convoluted and complex situation such as the fighting in Lebanon between Hezbollah and the Sunni and Druze who have been described as pro-Western and pro-government (of Fouad Siniora) without exploring the relationship between the fighting in Lebanon and the strategic interests of Iran and Syria?  Apparently, the New York Times thinks so; their article starts with a brief description of the renewed fighting:

Fierce Fighting Breaks Out East of Beirut

Fierce clashes broke out on Sunday in the mountains east of Beirut between supporters of the Western-backed government and followers of Hezbollah, the militant group backed by Iran.

The fighting, in the Shouf and Aley districts in the mountains overlooking the capital, Beirut, followed overnight clashes in the northern city of Tripoli that left at least two people dead and five wounded, according to security officials.

And here is their synopsis of the causation:

Hezbollah’s military dominance, and its continuing blockade of the main road to Beirut’s airport, have raised pressure on the governing coalition to accept a resolution of Lebanon’s 17-month political crisis on terms favorable to Hezbollah and its allies in the opposition.

...

Hezbollah had agreed Saturday evening to withdraw its militants from the streets after the government said it would reconsider a decision it made last week to challenge the group’s private telephone network.

The government and the Hezbollah-led opposition have been locked in a stalemate that has prevented the election of a president, leaving the country without one since November.

Hezbollah vowed to continue what it called a civil disobedience campaign, continuing to block the airport road, until the government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora officially rescinded the decision on the telephone network and a solution to the political crisis was reached through dialogue.

This is, of course, how Hezbollah propaganda describes the fighting, as civil disobedience against an unjust regime.  If this explanation of a crisis that directly and indirectly affects the stability of the Middle East and the strategic interests of all of the important players in the neighborhood is accepted, it generates a response from the West that can only lead to the worst of all outcomes for supporters of civil society.

For a more complete and more nuanced understanding of the fighting, one can read al Manar (the radical Shia/Iranian pov), al Jazeera (the dominant Sunni pov), and other publications as well as those reporters who are especially plugged into the area, such as Michael Totten:

The Persistence of Magical Thinking

My second post ever was on Magic and Rationality.  I wrote that although we are the beneficiaries of tremendous advances in intellectual knowledge and technology, depending especially upon the incredible edifice of modern scientific thought, our minds remain relatively primitive structures easily confused and always at risk of regressing to magical explanations when reason does not meet our emotional needs. 

We live in a  world surrounded by magic.  Our minds evolved in a world of magic.  It is no wonder that it is such an ongoing struggle to think about the world in a rational way.  No one would question that our ancient ancestors, the prototypical hunter-gatherers on the savanna, were embedded in a world where magic was an everyday phenomenon. Their lives were dependent on the sun rising in the morning (where did it go at night anyway, and how did anyone know it would come back the next day all the way over there!), on the vagaries of the weather; they grew ill and died from unseen, invisible enemies.  They attempted to make sense of the world by developing myths and deities.  They would have no trouble with some of the explanations being bruited about concerning the provenance of the recent tsunami: the Gods must have become angry with us.  The idea that sophisticated 21st century, technologically adept people could be equally seen as surrounded by magic would, to many, be a non-starter.  However, I believe it is the necessary starting point in trying to make sense of the world. 

When we say something is magic, it can have various meanings.  It could mean that the event in question is impossible in our experience (a sophisticated and more nuanced comment would be that it violates the laws of physics); an alternative meaning is that we do not understand what is causing the event in question to occur.  For example, how many people do you know who can explain why light appears out of darkness when you flip the switch.  And don't bother telling me about electrons flowing through wires and heating up when the wire/filament forces them through a narrow space with higher resistance.  In a very fundamental way, this is not a meaningful explanation.  All of our science and technology have simply removed the locus of the magical activity.  To our aforementioned cave ancestor, a flashlight is a magical instrument of the gods.  We, of course, take lights for granted and yet, I would suggest that for all intents and purposes, most of what surrounds us is the equivalent of magic.  If we can not directly experience an action's cause and effect, we can ultimately only hope to infer its source.  No one has ever seen, or will ever see, an electron.  We can build complex machines and apparatuses which allow us to connect a long chain of experimental observations to deduce the existence of electrons.  We then hold forth that their existence has been conclusively proved and no longer is in question.  There is no doubt that this works for us (the computer I am typing this on is sufficient proof of that) but in reality it is a constructed world view; it has great predictive power and is therefore said to be an accurate representation of reality, but it is fundamentally a construct.  (This is, in part, where the deconstructionists have a point, which they then take to such ridiculous extremes as to render their philosophy meaningless, which I suppose is pretty consistent, when you stop to think about it; but I digress.)   The fact is that the construct can only be a reflection of some deeper level of reality, not the reality itself.  Furthermore, the failures of the construct are pretty obvious, even a little embarrassing: just try to wrap your mind around the concept that an electron is both a particle and a wave (and what is a particle, or a wave, anyway?), and let's not even start with Quantum Mechanics!

Although there was some hyperbole to my post, for most people, even the explanation I offered about how a light works would be well beyond their level of scientific explanation.  The persistence of magic is nowhere more apparent than in our approach to our energy problems.  Max Schulz sheds light on the magical thinking that motivates much of the environmental movement when it comes to our energy needs in California’s Potemkin Environmentalism: