Sunday, August 31, 2008

In My Beginning Is My End

There is a seamless nature to existence. We divide time into seconds, nanoseconds and the like. But these a just abstractions. All movements, all actions, all existence is one continuous moving whole.

Therefore, is Individualism and individuality of the person a fantasy? Is it just an illusion brought about by circumstances of our brains being bound to our physical bodies, our "bonelockers" as they say in Old English?

NO. Individuality is NOT an illusion. Free will within the individual does exist, as does Freedom as an intrinsic reality in each individual. To say that something is WHOLE is NOT to say that it is uniform or unchangeable. To say that our lives are affected one to another is NOT to say that each one of us has a license upon the life of any of the rest of us.

When a substance is uniform it is generally brittle and breaks easily. But the substance of reality is not uniform. It is individuated into countless entities of living and non-living matter. These individual entities are joined, they overlap, but they are still individuals. They are NOT part of some "universal mind" of cosmic whole bound to serve the "greater good."

Reality has overlaps and seams. It has places that are messy and dirty and non-uniform. That is called Freedom and free-will. Does this serve the "interests of the whole?" In the end, the "interests of the whole" are served by the "happiness" of its individual parts as those parts make up the reality of the whole as opposed to its notional reality.

As this takes us to the end of the thought process it turns us back to the beginning. As one action ends, another begins. As one thought ends, another begins. As one life ends, another begins. This is the essence of the whole and ALSO the life of the individual mind. The really interesting parts of the whole of reality are in the seams that represent our differences. It is in these seams that the mystery of individual genius lies.

It is often said that geniuses have split minds, or personalities. Their genius lies in realizing this and examining the seams or gulfs that divide their minds: living within those spaces, between love and hate, peace and war, sanity and insanity. It is the division in the wholeness of their mind that gives it strength and genius. In the same way, it is the differences in life as they exist in the totality of reality that make life worth living and links the process within our internal minds to the reality of the whole of existence. It is the divisions that individuality creates within reality that gives the wholeness of reality its natural genius, its inherent worth to us as thinking beings. (as an aside, it is also the philosophical and practical justification for a Federal system of government.)

In my beginning is my end. In my end is my beginning.

John.

Friday, August 29, 2008

Friendship

Never choose a friend on the basis of common opinions. Choose a friend on the basis of common beliefs as to what ideas are important in life. These will be the best and most lasting friendships and will always transcend any opinion that one may have about a given current issue.

John.

New Eyes

"The real journey of discovery lies not in finding new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes."

Marcel Proust

Don't be blinded by political or historical labels attached to historical eras. Look at the politics and history with "new eyes", not as disconnected bits and pieces of events but as continuities. There is far more continuity in history than discontinuity. We cannot escape our past, and those who try condemn future generations to historical blindness. Simply labeling a time in history does not break the seamless connections that link people and events over time. The Romantic Era was affected by the Enlightened Era. Our era is affected by the "Cold War" Era. The patterns of one era don't simply vanish with the onset of another era. No, these patterns often become the unseen instigators of present troubles or triumphs, the currents beneath the waves of change continually buffeting and bobbing us upon the wine-dark seas.

Events flow with one another. Sudden changes are usually illusions. Old patterns tend to reassert themselves over time, just as habits of an individual built over a lifetime. To follow a policy based upon the assumption that sudden changes are permanent is the height of folly and invariably leads to disaster. Look upon the past with new eyes, eyes that see patterns, not random events. Despite the disdain that the modern world holds for seeing patterns, the fact is that patterns are far more prevalent in history and current events than chaos. There are patterns in the lives of individuals, this leads to patterns in social life and in the lives of nations.

Chaos usually is the confusion that exists in your mind, NOT any phenomenon in the outside world. Kant was wrong. The mind is far more susceptible to chaos than is the world. We tend to find Truth complicated and declare its nonexistence, just as we found God complicated and declared His death.

Embrace complications. Look at the world in all its aspects with "new eyes." Don't fall for the easy way of declaring that all is chaotic and unknowable. Dare to see patterns.

John.

Defeating Obama

I thought Obama's speech was fantastic tonight. It was nationalistic, well-crafted and written and delivered, cerebral AND emotional, soaring AND grounded, confident not arrogant, combative not nasty.

To defeat this gentleman I would say is going to be difficult, my preliminary prediction is McCain 45%, Obama 51%, others 4%

To defeat him one must point out a contradiction in him in that he professes to be for a bottom-up form of politics in America but his rhetoric suggests a top-down form of paternalism. The Left has never understood that their fundamental beliefs presuppose government imposed from a centralized location, from the top down. To implement Barack's policies requires direction from a central location. Progressives and Liberals fail to see that the policies they advocate have a tendency to make grass-roots politics less energetic and effective precisely because the grass-roots will be expecting so much from Washington during his administration.

The challenge for Barack when he is President, as I suspect he will be, will be to stimulate the grass-roots and still implement his programs which are by their nature centralizing. The challenge for McCain is to try to show the contradiction and defeat Obama on that point.

In other words, McCain must point out the contradiction while trying to cover up all of his and the Right's.

A caveat is that the next months will be one's of great social and economic turmoil in the country and tension in the world. Hang on. The overture has just ended, the symphony is beginning.

John.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Analysis of Huntington

Dr. Samuel P. Huntington's provocative and incisive essay, "The Clash of Civilization's?" was perhaps the most influential intellectual response to the challenge of forming a new view of geopolitics and world society following the end of the Cold War and the dual power system that that conflict had formed.

Huntington's thesis was that the source of new conflicts would spring forth from cultural differences, not ideological, religious, or economic as they had in the past.

Using historical analysis, Huntington describes these transformative patterns of conflict. The Westphalian settlement of 1648 that ended the 30 years war brought about states dedicated to the maintenance of absolute monarchs. Conflict between those states led to the rise of national identity and thus to states devoted to the success of the nation. Conflict thus engendered culminated in the carnage of World War I, the Russian Revolution and the rise of the great ideologies of Fascism, Communism, and Liberalism's modern form. States became dedicated and founded upon these ideologies. World War II brought an end to Fascism, at least at the state level. The Cold War brought an end to Communism or more precisely Communism's transformation into autocracy in Russia and China, now led by "former" Communists in the former and "market" Communists in the latter.

Huntington goes on to describe a civilization as the broadest level of cultural identity that people have short of species differentiation. He posits an emerging world order where the conflict is driven by differences between eight civilizations: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and African.

Huntington believed that conflicts would occur along the fault lines of culture that separate civilizations from each other. This would happen for six reasons. First, civilizational differences are basic, leading to vast differences in peoples. Secondly, as people communicate more between civilizations, their identification with their own increases as they see the differences. Third, vast economic and social changes are weakening local and national identifications. Regional identities are filling the void. Fourth, as the West is perceived to be dominant, this stimulates competition with other civilizations that wish to keep from falling behind. Fifith, cultural differences are more difficult to bridge than opthers because they are fundamental to a person's identity. Lastly, the economies of civilizations are rapidly integrating within themselves, but not among themselves. Trade wars and protectionism become more prevalent between civilizations than within them.

One of Huntington's most profound points is that Western civilization is different from all the others. Unfortunately many in the West think the opposite of this. They believe other peoples are fundamentally Western or aspire to be. Others civilizations view the West as unique and this draws all the others closer to each other, in opposition to the West. This will potentially create a great deal of conflict as non-Western nations coordinate their actions to confront and oppose the West. Huntington coins this as "the West vs. the rest."

Another important Huntington makes is that even as the rest of the world, to some extent, competes against the West, they also begin to emulate it. Western liberals see this as a sign of hope that Western notions of democracywill move east. Huntington believed that the east will try to modernize, not Westernize. That is to say that the eastern civilizations, the Confucian and Islamic principally, will try to use Western technology and its derivatives in order to serve eastern notions of autocracy and oligarchy, most notably the Chinese Communist Party.

I found much to agree with in Dr. Huntington's broad view of the way the world is transforming geopolitically. THis essay, written in 1993, was expanded into an influential book in 1996. Much that has occured in the fifteen years since Huntington wrote has borne his ideas out.

One might say that for the West in 1993 there were broadly two possible outcomes to Huntington's hypothesis. The optimistic outcome was one of conflict that could be managed by world trade institutions and multilateral organizations such as the G-7/8 and the UN. The pessimistic path is the one that is unfolding under present circumstances this very minute. The multilateral institutions have become sclerotic and powerless. Trade agreements are becoming less popular and therefore harder if not impossible to formulate. Institutions such as the G-8 and the UN security council are hopelessly divided along civilizational lines. The one being the divide between the West and Russia, the other being the divide between the West and a new Russian-Confucian cooperation signified by the friendship treaty signed by Russia and China in 2001. This was implicitly anti-American and, to be honest, probably secretly a military alliance as well.

Huntington wrote of a Confucian-Islamic cooperation. Russia, since 1993, has move decisively and definitively into the cooperation. Moscow has embarked upon a military expansion and has revived many of the aggressive tactics of the Cold War. This cooperation between Russian, Islamic and Confucian worlds has the potential to supplant the West as the dominant civilization of the world. If its leadership has the will to dominate, as I believe it does, and the West resists, as I think it eventually must, a profoundly catastrophic world conflict will occur, perhaps sooner than Western policy makers might be prepared for as most of them have fantasized and dreamed about "one world". As they dreamed, the east planned and seethed.

The situation is not hopeless yet, but the world is moving into a dark valley made darker still with conflict, potential conflict and economic distress. Only by seeing the world as it is and not fantasizing about post-Cold War neo-Conservative "one world" end of history fantasies can disaster be averted. The world will emerge eventually from this dark valley but it will be transformed in ways, for better or ill, that are impossible to predict.

John.

"The Steady Drummer"

On the idle hill of summer
Sleepy with the flow of streams,
Far I hear the steady drummer
Drumming like a noise in dreams.

Far and near and low and louder
On the roads of earth go by,
Dear friends and food for powder,
Soldiers marching all to die......

Far the calling bugles hollo,
High the screaming fife replies,
Gay the files of scarlet follow:
Woman bore me, I will rise.

A.E. Housman 1895

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Memory,Reason and History

In Walker Percy's "A Short Quiz" and Salman Rushdie's "The Broken Mirror" memory is examined as an individual phenomenon and a social phenomenon respectively.

Human memory has been a preoccupation for us since the beginning of the 20th century. The nature of time and space can distort the infallible memory of Man. In the scientific realm Einstein proved that time and space are related. In the philosophic world Henri Bergson postulated that since time and space are non-linear, then so must be memory. Marcel Proust wrote "Remembrance of Times Past" in Paris in 1914, occupying a cork-lined room to keep out the present. Not even the march of Von Moltke's armies bearing down on Paris could divert his memory from those muffins that so reminded him of his mother. The poets have always understood that emotions can distort memory.

Paradoxically the 20th century has been the great age of the present for men of practical affairs. Modern technology has allowed us to "save time" and "increase productivity". Thinking about the past is a waste of time. Thinking about the future is an exercise in futility.

One of the consequences of our preoccupation with the present is our disregard for the past and the future as exhibited by our ignorance of history and massive debt accumulations. Social amnesia is a consequence of mass amnesia. In Percy and Rushdie we see two reasons for this inability to remember the past: first, our nature as individual beings and second our nature as human beings. These intertwined natures and their implications for memory and reason have serious implications for my chosen profession of history.

In "A Short Quiz" we are confronted by the reality of our inability to examine ourselves. The Delphic exhortation, "Know thyself" has proven to be more aspiration than realization. Percy states, "Why is it that in our entire lifetime you will never be able to size yourself up?" The question Percy poses is one that only a human being can ask. However, the problem is not limited to humans. We often forget that human being constitutes two natures; that specific to humans and that specific to all beingness. The problem of knowing ourselves is related to the reality of our individual being. This confines itself not only to the realm of humanity, but to the animal world as well. The animal's eye, including the human animal's, is designed to see the physical world. One can see out but cannot see in. The eye is designed to examine the other, ultimately for self-protection. But no animal has a corresponding sense-organ so well designed to examine oneself. Humans have attempted to find such an organ, be it the head or the heart or a combination. But nothing has ever given us the definitive power to examine the inner mental world as the eye has given us the power to examine the physical world.

Aristotle knew that human being were animals, part of nature. However, he also knew that all animals have one particular characteristic that separates them from the others. For Aristotle, it was Man's ability to reason, to examine, to know that set him apart. To know thyself, for the Greeks, had a dual meaning. It meant to know yourself as an individual and to know yourself as a human being and the characteristics common to other human beings. For the Greeks it was reason, our mind, that was the golden chord by which to know the self. Since reason was the characteristic of humans, the knowing thyself, in both aspects, was the great enterprise of humanity. Our teleological purpose as human animals was to know ourselves through reason.

It is memory, our personal history if you will, that is at the core of this attempt to know. Without memory it is impossible to know ourselves as individuals. Without a collective memory, a history, we cannot know ourselves as a human society. Memory, reason and history are inextricably linked. The problem that both Percy and Rushdie demonstrate is that neither memory nor reason is infallible and one can distort the other. This poses a danger for history in that it rests upon both.

Percy shows how reason can distort memory. He demonstrates how that great perversion of reason, ideology, can prevent us from remembering our true self. By boxing ourselves into various identities be it Conservative, Liberal, Christian, Muslim, etc. we lose sight of the essential eclectic nature of each of our selves. Using our reason to create our identity distorts that identity and our memory of ourselves. Our identity is not a category that can be labeled. It is a category unto itself, our human identity. To categorize it is to distort and diminish it and block out all the memories we have that run counter to the categorical label we assign to ourselves.

So in Percy we see how our memory and therefore our history can be distorted in two related ways: our inability to examine ourselves as individual beings and our individual ability to use reason being so often misapplied into an ideology and perverting our individual memory.

In "The Broken Mirror" Rushdie shows how our collective nature as humans can distort our memory and how this distortion of collective memory can distort collective reasoning. Rushdie writes, "human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures...capable of only fractured perceptions." We are "partial beings." For Rushdie, there is some intrinsic human flaw that prevents us from accurately recovering the past. For Rushdie the definition of memory is the inaccurate, individual interpretation of the past. His view of Human Nature approximates the Christian view of original sin as the original flaw of Man. Our flaw does not cut us off from God so much as it cuts us off from our past. Memory is the imperfect tool used to try to recreate the past, as faith is the tool for the Christian to find God. It is not a tool of accuracy, but a blunt instrument that shatters the past into shards. It is these shards that constitute our memory. Memory is a particular characteristic of humans but it does not give us a vision of the past as a whole but only perspectives on the past. Memory is collective, common to all humans, but within each it is used in ways that define the self and separates us from our fellow man. For Rushdie, the notion of a collective memory is nearly impossible. There are so many individual memories that any collectivity that exists between them would be meaningless. Memory cannot be separated from the individual it belongs to because to do so is to strip memory of its meaning.

The impossibility of collective memory has serious, if not mortal, consequences for any notion of collective reasoning if we accept the notion, as argued above, that memory and reason are inextricably linked. If memory is simply an individual interpretation of the past and not an accurate view of it, then any reasoning about the past that tries to assimilate common human ideas is doomed to failure. Memory and history depend upon reason. Rushdie, it is assumed, would argue that because reason is flawed, stemming from our flawed nature, memory is by definition "flawed", that is to say not designed to accurately reconstruct the past. However, reason also depends upon memory and history. Can we ever come to any reasoned conclusions on anything if all our memories are simply individual interpretations of everything? Rushdie may be right. Perhaps the answer is no.

The realization of this terrifies me. At some point memory and history became perceived as purely individual and subjective and reason became perceived as purely collective. They have been hurtling away from each other ever since. The genius of the Greeks, and of the Western Liberal tradition, was to recognize that memory, reason and history contain individual and collective characteristics. It was possible to come to a collective reasoning through the use of individual memory and possible to achieve collective memory through the use of individual reasoning and vice versa. As a lover of history and future historian, the division of memory and reason has grave implications for the future of history as discipline. History depends upon both memory and reason in order to make any kind of analysis of the past. If they have no relation to one another then history is impossible. It might be, as Michel Foucault thought, simply an ideological construction designed to augment to dominant group's power. I hope this is not true, and still believe that it is not, but truths are often terrible and I am fallible.

We come back to Percy and Rushdie. In "A Short Quiz" memory is examined as an individual phenomenon. Self-knowledge is extremely difficult based upon the individual, separate nature of our being. We are designed, as are all animals, to examine the outside world, not our mental world. Percy shows how the perversion of reason, the constructed and ideological view of the self, can distort reason. In "The Broken Mirror" Rushdie examines memory as a collective phenomenon. The inherent flaw in mankind cancels out any ability to form a collective memory and it becomes individual interpretations of the past. From these it is impossible to come to reasonable conclusions which are by their nature collective, that is: common to all humans.

Perhaps then, we have stumbled upon the reason our current age is obsessed by the present. Memory and reason have been decoupled, the twin pillars upon which history rested. There is no common interpretation of the past. Therefore, any agreement about the efficacy of past actions and ideas that would lead to agreement about the efficacy of future actions and ideas is largely frustrated. Those who proclaim their interest in the present and future while professing dismissal and ignorance of the past have no interest or understanding in either. The present, like Freud's ego, is buffeted between the shoals of the super-ego of the past and the rocks of the id of the future. It is a precarious point upon which society stands on one leg, teetering from the push of a timeless past and the pull of an uncertain future. We hesitate, unsure of which force to succumb to, seeing dangers in both.

Happy weekend, John.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

provocation

The war in Georgia is more complicated than surface analysis. One can only understand what happened by realizing that Georgia never made a clean break with Moscow in the sense that it had rid itself of elements within its government and intel services whose loyalties lie with Russia not with Georgia. (btw this is true of the entire CIS space and large parts of eastern europe)

The war is real, but some of its elements have a made for television aspect. For instance it just so happens that cameras are around when Russian tanks are rolling over hapless Georgian police, or to film Russians leading away Georgian hostages and American Humvees.

My point is, yes the Russian operation's tactical goal is to establish effective control over Georgia. However, the more important strategic goal, aimed directly at the US and in cooperation with elements of the Georgian government whose loyalty lies with Moscow for various reasons, is to move US policy into a path of confronting Moscow, a confrontation that the US is wholly unprepared for and Moscow is fully prepared for and has been preparing for more than a decade.

My advice, for what its worth (nothing) would be to be conciliatory in public and perhaps in private to try to deceive Moscow, make no overt moves at all in Russia's Eurasian sphere of influence BUT drive like hell to prepare for a major war in the next two years or so in a desperate attempt to deter Moscow so that war will never occur and if god forbid it does we will smash them to pieces. This would involve, among much else, getting out of Iraq, Afghan and modernizing and increasing our strategic forces immediately.

So when some say that the Georgians are partially responsible for provoking the war I say "yes, but which Georgians??" There are double and triple games being played.

As long as we hold together we'll be ok, that's hard in an election year though when our passions are so stirred up we often don't think straight.

John.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

aug 19th

I don't know why but for years I've always had bad feelings about this date, like something incredibly horrific will happen on this date. Its strange because I have never been superstitious. I remember though as a small child having bad dreams about this date.

John.

Friday, August 15, 2008

Baiting the Bear

One mistake those on the Left often make in regard to Russia is to regard every foreign policy initiative by Russia as a response to something the US is doing. This has been most evident in the debate on the Georgian question. Even if, from a fundamentally legalistic point of view, Russian actions in Georgia are legal and Georgia is not a "perfect democracy"(and these assumptions are dubious, especially the first), that does not mean from a US perspective that we must treat both sides equally.

We must operate in a world in which there is a fundamental inequality between nations in terms of their power and their willingness to wield it in a way that affects the US. Georgia, by any logical, sane analysis, is not a military threat to the US or even to Russia. The idea that because the US has trained some small number of Georgian commandos that that is an "aggressive and threatening policy" against Russia, a continental sized nation of 140 million and armed to the teeth is nonsensical. It baffles why the Left, usually sensitive to small nations in competition with the powerful, is making this argument.

The new Russian policy of "respecting the sovereignty of Georgia but not her territorial integrity" is counter to Russian policy of even 1 week ago, according to the very thoughtful Strobe Talbott. Talbott went on to explain that Russia fundamentally agreed, under Yeltsin, to view the former bounderies of the Socialist Republics of the USSR as International Boundaries. Russia has now apparently shifted that policy and according to Talbott this is a highly provocative and dangerous development that necessitates a reevaluation of US policy toward Russia.

Talbott, a man I've often disagreed with but always respected was, I think, undersecretary of state in the Clinton years.

More on this soon.

John.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

A Wasted Summer

As usual this blog goes neglected. I've had no time or energy to post anything worthy of reading....which this is not. My time and energy however, are finally building and a stream of writing will come forth soon. I'm sure all one or none of you who read this await with bated breath :)

More soon, John.