December 01, 2006 (2): The Fear Factor Compounds

The impact of the "imams on a plane" story is still being felt. Reuters began a story with a Washington byline this morning as follows:

When radio host Jerry Klein suggested that all Muslims in the United States should be identified with a crescent-shape tattoo or a distinctive arm band, the phone lines jammed instantly.

The story then went on to describe a depressing sample of callers who reinforced Klein's suggestion in any number of vindictive ways. After an hour of this, Klein let the cat out of the bag:

At the end of the one-hour show, rich with arguments on why visual identification of "the threat in our midst" would alleviate the public's fears, Klein revealed that he had staged a hoax. It drew out reactions that are not uncommon in post-9/11 America.

"I can't believe any of you are sick enough to have agreed for one second with anything I said," he told his audience on the AM station 630 WMAL (http://www.wmal.com/), which covers Washington, Northern Virginia and Maryland

"For me to suggest to tattoo marks on people's bodies, have them wear armbands, put a crescent moon on their driver's license on their passport or birth certificate is disgusting. It's beyond disgusting.

"Because basically what you just did was show me how the German people allowed what happened to the Jews to happen ... We need to separate them, we need to tattoo their arms, we need to make them wear the yellow Star of David, we need to put them in concentration camps, we basically just need to kill them all because they are dangerous."

As far as I am concerned, responsibility for this culture of fear lies primarily, if not entirely, with our Federal Government, particularly in the Executive Branch, which has probably done more than any previous administration to achieve results through fear. Any number of analysts have discussed the extent to which this administration was planning its moves according to the Nazi playbook, but that kind of analysis tends to be too abstract for the general public. Klein had the guts to move from the abstract to the concrete, but it remains to be seen whether or not his demonstration will have any impact.

November 28, 2006: Terrorism 101

One of the things that makes Max Rodenbeck's essay on terrorism for the November 30 issue of The New York Review so compelling is his choice of introductory quotations. The one from Clausewitz could be expected: where else would we turn when having to confront the fiasco of our own military adventurism. However, it is the perceptiveness of the second quotation that is far more fascinating:

The actual reason for the failure of the US policy in its political field and international relations is their lack of information regarding the world's realities and also the enclosure of the decision making people of that country in their own fabricated and false political propaganda.

It would not be hard to imagine these words coming from the apologetic mouth of Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, but that guess would fall about as far from the mark as one might imagine. No, the author of that sentence is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; and the text is an entry from his personal blog written after his visit to New York this past September. Of course one of the ways in which we all deprive ourselves of "information regarding the world's realities" is through our assumption that those who disagree with us substitute fanaticism for reflection; and, as far as Ahmadinejad is concerned, the media (with the possible exception of Mike Wallace), do a very good job of fueling that assumption. I suspect that Ahmadinejad's blog is written in a language that I cannot read very well (if at all); so I have no idea how consistently reflective he is in his writing. However, Rodenbeck made a powerful rhetorical move by situating him next to Clausewitz as the "voices of reason" that preface his analysis.

His next rhetorical move resides in his choice of language to describe the current "state of play" in those military adventures:

What has happened … is that the mental construct that framed the Bush administration's reaction to September 11 as a "war" is beginning to fall apart.

At the end of the day, it is not a matter of the illogic of White House rhetoric about democracy. Instead, it is about a "mental construct," "fabricated" (to use Ahmadinejad's language) by virtue (sic) of "lack of information regarding the world's realities." We can, of course, address the question of whether this lack of information had to do with the willful decision to sublate information in deference to faith; or we can flip the coin around and blame it on the myopia of those "dogmas" of Western civilization that sublate other cultural perspectives in deference to "scientific" thinking. Whether we followed the faith-based path of fundamentalism or the rationalist path that consumed McNamara, we blundered badly; and there is a supreme irony that a blog entry by a supposed faith-based fundamentalist should reveal such reflective insight into our blunder.

Most of Rodenbeck's article has to do with why it took so long for the general American public to recognize this insight; but he never really factors in the role that media play in shaping public opinion (or the role that the White House played in controlling those media). Instead, he writes about books that will probably never come to general public attention. The core of the article focuses on a "Terrorism 101" textbook entitled What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat:

One of the best [recent explanatory books] is by Louise Richardson, a Harvard professor who not only has been teaching about terrorism for a decade, but brings the experience of an Irish childhood, including youthful enthusiasm for the IRA, to understanding the phenomenon. As she explains, she had always thought it wise for academics to stay out of politics. The sheer boneheadedness of Washington's incumbents, who have ignored decades of accumulated wisdom on her subject, prompted her to write a belated primer.

Nevertheless, we can see the problem in getting out Richardson's message when, at this point in the article, Rodenbeck's rhetoric fails him. He decides to outline a dozen points from the book, and I believe that contemporary rhetoric would do well to acknowledge the cognitive impact of honoring "Miller's magic number" (seven plus or minus two). The Macarthur Report on media literacy makes a similar rhetorical blunder; but, while each of the Macarthur items can be distilled down to a relatively manageable phrase, each of Rodenbeck's points involves (at least) one paragraph of subtleties that would impede such distillation. Whether we like it or not, the path to public opinion leads through quick slogans and compelling images; and there we have it. Those "boneheads" know how to play the slogan-and-image game; and, once again, analytic thinking, regardless of how powerful its message may be, is left out in the cold. Once again we must confront that postmodern world in which fiction rules with a double-edged sword.

November 25, 2006: Imams on a Plane

Today's Chronicle ran a follow-up to the story of the six Muslim scholars who were removed from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix. One of the imams was from Bakersfield; and yesterday, shortly after noon, Associated Press ran a story about his arrival at his final destination. The bottom line was that it took him 27 hours to get there, and one of the reasons was that US Airways refused to let any of the six men board any of its flights. I continue to read this as evidence of the culture of fear we have created. I know from my own experience how fear can breed anger (on both sides of the coin); so I have been particularly depressed by this particular item and the way things have been proceeding.

November 21, 2006 (1): The Culture of Fear

The real story behind the incident at UCLA's Powell Library is the way in which it demonstrated how successful those in power have been at turning American society into a culture of fear. Anyone considering denying this proposition should consider a breaking story from Associated Press concerning the removal of six Muslim scholars from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix. Here is how Associated Press reported the grounds for the removal:

A passenger raised concerns about the imams — three of whom said their normal evening prayers in the airport terminal before boarding the Phoenix-bound plane, according to one — through a note passed to a flight attendant, according to Andrea Rader, a spokeswoman for US Airways.

The Council on Islamic-American Relations has called for an investigation, and I hope they get a good one. As is the case with the UCLA story, we are in no position to judge the merits of this case on the basis of what the media feed us. Nevertheless, I am sure it will not be long before the Internet is flooded with expressions of mass indignation on both sides of the story.

August 11, 2006: Normal (?) Science

One of the interesting ideas to come out of the "knowledge movement" was the attempt to view an business organization as a "knowledge structure." One of the champions of this position was Bruce Kogut, who, together with his colleagues Shan and Walker, published a paper in 1993 with the intriguing title, "Knowledge in the network and the network as knowledge: Structuring of new industries." In a recent survey paper on communication networks, Peter Monge and Noshir Contractor summarized one of Kogut's key insights:

Once organizations choose partners, however, they tend to spend less time seeking other partners. As Kogut, Shan, and Walker (1993) say, "because information is determined by previous relations and in turn influences the subsequent propensity to do more relations, the structure of the network tends to replicate itself over time. The early history of cooperation tends to lock in subsequent cooperation" (p. 70). Further, they observe that "The replication of the network is a statement of the tendency of learning to decline with time. The structure of the network is a limiting constraint on how much new learning can be achieved. ...But when viewed from the perspective of the evolution of networks, there is a tendency for old lessons to be retaught" (p. 71).

This got me to thinking about the concept of "normal science" and the role it played in Thomas Kuhn's study, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Here is how Kuhn characterized the concept:

In this essay, ‘normal science’ means research firmly based upon one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some particular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foundation for its further practice. Today such achievements are recounted, though seldom in their original form, by science textbooks, elementary and advanced. These textbooks expound the body of accepted theory, illustrate many or all of its successful applications, and compare these applications with exemplary observations and experiments. Before such books became popular early in the nineteenth century and until even more recently in the newly matured sciences, many of the famous classics of science, by such writers as Aristotle, Newton and Ben Franklin, served for a time to define the legitimate problems and methods of a research field for succeeding generations of practitioners.

It strikes me that Kogut's characterization of an organizational network as knowledge bears a strong family resemblance to Kuhn's characterization of normal science. The kind of knowledge that Kogut seems to have in mind is knowledge of "how things are supposed to be done" in an organization; and one strategy for maintaining that organization is to replicate that knowledge. In a similar way scientific communities may be viewed as organizations; and, to the extent that any community is based on the need to distinguish a collective "self" from an "other," normal science defines the community, not by its scientific results, but by the implicit knowledge of how things are supposed to be done. Straying from the path entails leaving (or being banished from) the community. Abandoning normative standards entails abandoning the recognition of one's activities as legitimate.

This returns us to the theme of order and chaos. Organizations, both industrial and scientific, depend heavily on a sense of identity in order to "get things done." However, we are now confronted with the question of how one establishes identity (which implies some sense of stability) in a context that is becoming increasingly chaotic. Normal science, in a sense, denies that there is chaos out there (or, to invoke Henry Miller's language, denies that there is no confusion that cannot ultimately be understood). Romanticism challenges this premise and, in so doing, challenges a normative approach to science (which is why Kuhn introduces the concept of scientific revolution in the first place) and may also challenge a normative approach to business organization.

Meeting that challenge may involve returning to the theme of the opposition of faith and interpretation. At the end of the day, the decision to accept that the conduct of science or business management rests on normative standards is an act of faith. One cannot invoke scientific method to justify the conduct of normal science. Indeed, much of the reaction against Kuhn had to do with the fact that the concept of a scientific revolution could be seen as a refutation of the validity of the normative conduct of normal science, thus challenging the prevailing faith of scientists at the time Kuhn's book appeared. Similarly, our commitment to normative standards of business management is also an act of faith; and all it takes are intimations of refutation to remind us how strong that faith is in the established community of managers.

In posing interpretation as an opposition to faith, I argue that anything we confront in the world always needs to be subject to interpretation; and, because the context is always changing, we cannot assume that any interpretation is stable or enduring. All we can do is hone our interpretive skills and continue to exercise them as a safeguard against atrophy. There is no guarantee that this will solve any major problems like unemployment or war, but it should at least keep us from sleepwalking through the world that others want to make for us!

June 28, 2006: Narratology 101 or Both Sides Now

Movies can be a great source of irony, particularly when they are juxtaposed in the just the right way. Last night I was watching Patton and was struck by the amount of ceremony associated with our first view of the man in Africa, being honored before the Moroccan army. His reaction is to praise the Moroccans for having developed the most disciplined troops he had ever encountered. That was all very well and good, except that the previous evening I had watched Moroccan soldiers rape the "two women" from the title of Vittorio De Sica's outstanding film. This led me to think back on observations about how we use narrative to make sense of the world around us, which then led me to wonder whether or not too many of us now deal with the world only in terms of the stories we are told about it, neglecting not only other sources but also the whole question of what the story is trying to tell.

One of the products of the structuralist movement, particularly on the European continent, was the emergence of the discipline of narratology. If hermeneutics is concerned with the full generality of texts, then narratology narrows the field down to narrative texts and then invokes similar methodological baggage. On the one hand there are questions concerned with how a narrative account is structured (which then bring up questions of priority of the structural elements); and then there are the questions of what the story is actually trying to tell. Needless to say, this can then run into arguments over whether or not a story can be interpreted in different ways, which brings us back to the conflict over diversity of interpretation. Where faith is involved, this is a particularly sensitive issue, since much of the absolutism of fundamentalism involves the conviction that there is only one way to interpret Biblical narrative.

My personal feeling is that, if narrative can help us to make sense of the complexity of our world, it is not by providing us with punch-line answers (or the morals of Aesop). Rather, it is by virtue of the fact that narrative, itself, is often highly complex; but it can still be rendered in such a way as to make that complexity more palatable. This is why (artificial intelligence notwithstanding) it is so absurd to trying to reduce a play like Macbeth to a representation in some logical calculus. If you only pay attention to the "facts," you miss out on all the things that Shakespeare does to draw you into this story; and, as Aristotle observed in his "Poetics," that "being drawn in" is actually a highly-charged learning experience. Furthermore, different narratives will then cross over each other in our own minds (like the scenarios for Patton and Two Women), leading to further access to that complexity of the world.

Think about that the next time you lay out $10 for two hours of special effects that do not hang on much of a narrative line. As a former colleague of mine once put it, "That's like picking all of the raisins out of the box of raisin bran." A narrative experience is yet another invitation to commitment. Every rejection of that invitation is made at our own peril.

June 22, 2006: Faith and Interpretation

It occurred to me this morning that one of the reasons I have been investing so much energy in this blog is that I feel a very strong personal commitment to the practice of interpretation, and I can probably trace that commitment back to the first time I encountered a copy of the Bible that included commentary on the text. In retrospect (although I did not know it at the time) this was most likely my first exposure to hermeneutics, since, while I made no mention of this in my "Hermeneutics 101" entry, the practice of hermeneutics originated in problems concerned with the interpretation of Biblical texts. This raises an interesting irony, which I would like to explore briefly.

It goes back to a throw-away line delivered during last summer's San Francisco Mime Troupe production, Doing Good. One of the characters is a retired CIA agent who had considered going back to his old job but decided that "faith-based intelligence is not for me." As you might imagine, this got a good laugh from the audience; but, as I think back on it, it feels as if there is now a sense of opposition between interpretation (which is the primary work of intelligence analysts and hopefully is also a required skill for field agents) and faith. The age in which an appreciation of a religious text comes from the scrupulous examination of all the different things it might mean seems to have given way, in many circles, to the conviction that interpretation is irrelevant because the text has only a single, absolute meaning; and that meaning is given to you by some authority or, in a clutch, by your own devout sense of right and wrong.

Thus, I am confronted with evidence of a vociferous (if not strong) body of opinion that has written off one of the intellectual skills I most value as irrelevant! How seriously should I take this judgment? I would still prefer to subscribe to the more liberal attitude that reasonable people may differ and continue to explore the nooks and crannies of this deep-felt passion; but, as this note has probably demonstrated, I now seem to be exercising that skill in the interpretation of the actions and events I observe in the world at large, rather than confining myself to texts!