Late morning. After a long soaking bath (for
body aches) you played with Jadah. You had discussions with Carol about Paris
and what will be done, and how this may effectively change the U. S. elections
next year. Yesterday you posted a recent series of articles on last Friday’s
events.
2257
hours. Here is the "Edge" article in whole.
** **
Edge: To arrive at the edge of the
world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them
in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking
themselves.
CONVERSATION : CONVERSATIONS
A
MESSAGE FROM PARIS
An
EDGE Special Event!
by Ian McEwan [11.14.15]
ED. NOTE:
Ian McEwan, who is living in France this month, sent the following email this
afternoon from Paris which he asked us to share with the Edge
community. And the community is responding - we are pleased to include a
Reality Club discussion with contributions from: Scott Atran, Daniel L.
Everett, Dan Sperber, James J.
O'Donnell, Lawrence B.
Brilliant, Lisa Randall,
Lee Smolin,
John Tooby. . . .
IAN
MCEWAN, the award-winning British novelist, is the author of The Child in Time
(winner of the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award, 1987), Amsterdam
(winner of the Booker Prize, 1998), Atonement, Sweet
Tooth, and The Children Act.
He lives in London.
Ian McEwan's Edge Bio Page.
The
death cult chose its city well—Paris, secular capital of the world, as
hospitable, diverse and charming a metropolis as was ever devised. And the
death cult chose its targets in the city with ghoulish, self-damning accuracy—everything
they loathed stood plainly before them on a happy Friday evening: men and women
in easy association, wine, free-thinking, laughter, tolerance, music—wild and
satirical rock and blues. The cultists came armed with savage nihilism and a
hatred that lies beyond our understanding. Their protective armour was the
suicide belt, their idea of the ultimate hiding place was the virtuous
after-life, where the police cannot go. (The jihadist paradise is turning out
to be one of humanity’s worst ever ideas; slash and burn in this life, eternal
rest among kitsch in the next).
Paris,
dazed and subdued, woke this morning to reflect on its new circumstances. Those
of us who were out on the town last night can only wonder at the vagaries of
chance that lets us live and others die. As the slaughter began, my wife and I
were in a venerable Paris institution, a cliché of the modest good life since
1845. In this charming restaurant in the sixieme, one shares crowded tables
with good-willed strangers, visitors and locals in a friendly crush. With our
Pouilly Fume and filets d’hareng, we were as good a target as any. The cult
chose the onzieme, the dixieme, barely a mile away and we didn’t know a thing.
Now
we do. What are those changed circumstances? Security will tighten and Paris
must become a little less charming. The necessary tension between security and
freedom will remain a challenge. The death-cult’s bullets and bombs will come
again, here or somewhere else, we can be sure. The citizens of London, New
York, Berlin are paying close and nervous attention. In January we were all
CharlieHebdo. Now, we are all Parisians and that at least, in a dark time, is a
matter of pride.
REALITY CLUB DISCUSSION
Scott Atran
Anthropologist,
Directeur de recherche, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut
Jean Nicod, Paris, Co-Founder, Centre for the Resolution of Intractable
Conflict, University of Oxford. Author of Talking to the Enemy
The
latest round of ISIS-inspired attacks in Paris, “The First of the Storm”
proclaimed by ISIS, the chaotic scenes on the streets, and the angry reactions
provoked among the public are, unfortunately, precisely what ISIS plans
and prays for. For the greater the reaction against Muslims in Europe, the
deeper the West becomes involved in military action in the Middle East, the
happier ISIS. Its key strategy is finding, creating and managing chaos, as
outlined in the manifesto Idharat at-Tawahoush (The Management of Savagery/Chaos,
“tawahoush”, from “Wahsh = Beast, so an animal-like state).
Some
principal axioms:
"Diversify
and widen the vexation strikes against the Crusader-Zionist enemy in every
place in the Islamic world, and even outside of it if possible, so as to disperse
the efforts of the alliance of the enemy and thus drain it to the greatest
extent possible."
So,
hit soft targets that cannot possibly be defended to any appreciable degree:
"Capture
the rebelliousness of youth, their energy and idealism, and their readiness for
self-sacrifice, while fools preach 'moderation' (wasatiyyah) and avoidance of
risk:
“[The]
media plan… its specific target [is] to motivate crowds drawn from the masses
to fly to the regions which we manage, particularly the youth… [For] the youth
of the nation are closer to the innate nature [of humans] on account of the
rebelliousness within them, which… the inert Islamic groups [only try to
suppress].”
And
draw the West as deeply and actively as possible into the quagmire:
“Work
to expose the weakness of America’s centralized power by pushing it to abandon
the media psychological war and the war by proxy until it fights directly.”
Ditto
for France, the UK and other allies.
In
“The Gray Zone,” a 10 page editorial in ISIS’s online magazine Dabiq,
in early 2015, the anonymous author describes the twilight area occupied by
most Muslims between good and evil, the Caliphate and the Infidel, which the “blessed
operations of September 11” brought into relief. Quoting Bin Laden: “The world
today is divided. Bush spoke the truth when he said, 'Either you are with us or
you are with the terrorists,' with the actual 'terrorist' being the Western
Crusaders." Now, "the time had come for another event to . . . bring
division to the world and destroy the Gray Zone," of which the Paris
attacks are in reality just the latest, ever more effective, installment.
Simply
treating the Islamic State as a form of “terrorism” or “violent extremism”
masks the menace. Merely dismissing it as “nihilistic” reflects a willful and
dangerous avoidance of trying to comprehend, and deal with, its profoundly
alluring moral mission to change and save the world. And the constant refrain
that the Islamic State seeks to turn back history to the Middle Ages is no more
compelling than a claim that the Tea Party wants everything the way it was in
1776. As Abu Mousa, the Islamic State’s press officer in Raqqa put it: “We
are not sending people back to the time of the carrier pigeon. On the contrary,
we will benefit from development.”
Meanwhile,
the Islamic State is reaching out wherever a state of “chaos” or “savagery”
exists, to fill the void (over 700 hundred Saudi fighters alone in recent
months according to evidence Saudi leaders presented to me in August). Where
there is insufficient chaos it seeks to create it, as in Europe. It
conscientiously exploits the disheartening dynamic between the rise of radical
Islamism and the revival of the xenophobic ethno-nationalist movements that are
beginning to seriously undermine the middle class—the mainstay of stability and
democracy—in Europe in ways reminiscent of the hatchet job that the communists
and fascists did on European democracy in the 1920s and 30s. The fact that Europe's
reproductive rate is 1.4 children per couple and so needs considerable
immigration to maintain a productive workforce that can sustain the middle
class standard of living—at a time where there has never been less tolerance
for immigration, and which is another situation of chaos that the Islamic State
is well-positioned to exploit—is a godsend for the movement.
In
our preferred world of liberal democracy, tolerance of diversity and
distributive justice, violence—especially extreme forms of mass bloodshed—are
generally considered pathological or evil expressions of human nature gone
awry, or collateral damage as the unintended consequence of righteous
intentions. But across most human history and cultures violence against other
groups is universally claimed by the perpetrators to be a sublime matter of
moral virtue. For without a claim to virtue, it is difficult to endeavor to
kill large numbers of people innocent of direct harm to others.
Daniel L. Everett
Linguistic
Researcher; Dean of Arts and Sciences, Bentley University; Author, Language:
The Cultural Tool
After
the news of the Paris shootings and bombings, I was wondering how I could
explain terrorism to the Amazonian people, the Pirahãs, with whom I spent a
great deal of my life. At first I thought I would not be able to explain such a
thing. Then I remembered acts of terrorism that these people had suffered in
their history, where men calling themselves “traders” raped and murdered women
of the village. That much could be recounted. Sadly, all cultures have
suffered. So I could tell the people that many such men arrived and killed many
women, children, and other men. But then I realized that the Pirahãs would ask
the question I was unable to answer, “Why?” They would never do this. Why do
others do it?
Culture
is that abstract network of values, structured knowledge, and social roles that
shapes the dark matter of our minds, as we accumulate apperceptions and unify
those by the unspoken narrative of our episodic memory. In other words, we
become who we are by the confluence of individual experience and cultural
interpretation of that experience. We talk to those with whom we believe we
share values and experiences in order to bring sense to and give direction to
ourselves as we navigate through the difficult world that has nurtured our
genus since it emerged from the plains of Africa more than two million years
ago.
Social
media helps in this sense. In the past couple of days I have seen many attempts
to answer the question — “Why did these men kill those people?” It is only
natural that we, children of the Enlightenment, itself partially a gift of
Paris, should try to answer this question. And over the coming weeks and months
the governments of the western world will try to answer this question, as well
as “How were they able to do this?” “What is our proper response?” “What
aspect of world politics is most responsible for the cultivation of terrorism?”
And so on.
Indeed,
there are many lessons to draw from the tragedy in France. For example, do we
get more upset when white Christians are murdered than brown Muslims? Shouldn’t
we feel compassion for all who suffer, not merely those who look like us? It is
right and proper that we should think about the complex issues surrounding
terror. And I do think about these things.
But
not today.
Dan Sperber
When
you grow up and live in Paris, you are very aware that, throughout its history,
it has been the scene of great violence: the St Barthélemy massacre of
Protestants 1572, to the Bloody Week of the Commune de Paris in 1871, and the
17 October 1961 massacre of Algerian demonstrators, among many others. Some of
these episodes evoke only shame, others pride also. Relatively rare, but more
frequent recently, have been indiscriminate terrorist acts aimed at whoever
happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong moment. What do you feel then?
This
Friday’s series of massacres is the worst of its kind. It breaks the heart. It
evokes in us Parisians such sadness, such revulsion, and also this sense of
solidarity with people of all backgrounds who live here and together make our
city, solidarity also with visitors who, like Ian McEwan, rightly feel they
belong.
For
me, Friday's events also evoke two quite different feelings of pity.
Breath-taking pity for the victims, their friends, lovers, family. Pity for all
of us who could have met them, become friends or lovers, or might have just
exchanged a smile in the street—those frequent, ephemeral micro-rapprochements
between two strangers that are a great part of the joy of living here.
And
then I think of the killers. How sad to have grown up and lived in such a way
that doing what they did would, at some point, seem a most glorious
achievement! What senseless, pitiable lives! How much happier are we all, even
the victims of the killers, who have been humans among humans enough to be able
to enjoy our diverse company, to share with one another, for instance, our old,
loving, lovable Paris!
James J. O'Donnell
Classical
Scholar, University Professor, Georgetown University; Author, The Ruin of the
Roman Empire; Pagans; Webmaster, St. Augustine's Website
Terrorist
acts are, till yet, trivial events. 9/11 caused the death rate in the
United States that year to tick up by 1/10 of one percent. Paris on Friday
will raise the rate in that country 2/100 of one percent. These are cold numbers
to recite, and doing so just now probably repels most readers.
But
we should not ignore them. A few million years after the first hominids
began to explore their remarkable abilities, we have built societies incapable
of looking away from carnage, even when the whole purpose of the carnage is to
make us look and to cringe. The multiplier effect for what these few killers
have done is provided by...us.
In
a world of spectacles and science and ordinary human existence, what we pay
attention to defines our experience. My spouse merits my attention, attends to
me in return, and that is love. Terrorist acts and internet clickbait and
vulgar politicians and telemarketers all profit when I pay attention to them
instead. Why should I? Should we not school ourselves to attend to diseases,
not symptoms?
Paris,
and we, could all use Camus at this point, in the famous conclusion to his 1951
L'Homme Révolté (The Rebel):
At
this meridian of thought, the rebel thus rejects divinity in order to share in
the struggles and destiny of all men. We shall choose Ithaca, the faithful
land, frugal and audacious thought, lucid action, and the generosity of the man
who understands. In the light, the earth remains our first and our last love.
Our brothers are breathing under the same sky as we; justice is a living thing.
Now is born that strange joy which helps one live and die, and which we shall
never again postpone to a later time. On the sorrowing earth it is the
unresting thorn, the bitter brew, the harsh wind off the sea, the old and the
new dawn. With this joy, through long struggle, we shall remake the soul of our
time, and a Europe which will exclude nothing. Not even that phantom Nietzsche,
who for twelve years after his downfall was continually invoked by the West as
the blasted image of its loftiest knowledge and nihilism; nor the prophet of
justice without mercy who lies, by mistake, in the unbelievers' plot at
Highgate Cemetery; nor the deified mummy of the man of action in his glass
coffin; nor any part of what intelligence and energy of Europe have ceaselessly
furnished to the pride of a contemptible period. All may indeed live again,
side by side with the martyrs of 1905, but on condition that it is understood
that they correct one another, and that a limit, under the sun, shall curb them
all. Each tells the other that he is not God; this is the end of romanticism.
At this moment, when each of us must fit an arrow to his bow and enter the
lists anew, to reconquer, within history and in spite of it, that which he owns
already, the thin yield of his fields, the brief love of this earth, at this
moment when at last a man is born, it is time to forsake our age and its
adolescent furies. The bow bends; the wood complains. At the moment of supreme
tension, there will leap into flight an unswerving arrow, a shaft that is
inflexible and free.
Lawrence B. Brilliant
President
of the Skoll Urgent Threats Fund and Senior Adviser to Jeff Skoll
Sigh.
A really rough one. This does not end well. The attacks in Paris will be to
ISIS camps in Syria what 9/11 was to Al-Qaida terrorist camps in
Afghanistan, and so it will go.
Lisa Randall
Physicist,
Harvard University; Author, Warped Passages, Knocking on Heaven's Door, and
Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the
Universe
McEwan's
words are powerful and a good start to a difficult conversation that indeed
requires "deep, serious thinking and ideas based on empirical
evidence", as Brockman rightly points out. This is too difficult a problem
to solve with one magic hit but we can at least try to benefit from empirical
evidence. Let's go back to 9/11/01 and ask which aspects of our response made
the world better or even simply safer? I am not yet advocating any particular
point of view but before deciding what to do next we can at least ask any
hypothetical—from what if we had done nothing to what if we did any specific
subset of our actions? Though it's hard to imagine a good response, we can at
least learn from past mistakes.
Lee Smolin
Physicist,
Perimeter Institute; Author, Time Reborn
As
Popper taught us, there are open societies and closed societies. The latter
seek to impose a vision of the future, for what they perceive is the betterment
of all. Open societies understand we can neither control nor foresee the
future. We have diverse visions of the future that we passionately dispute,
through elections and other means short of violence. On the other hand, all who
resist a closed societies vision of the future are its enemies, which include
us in the open societies. Because they are sure of the truth, they have little
hesitation in using violence to attempt to impose their story of the future.
Thus, closed societies produce refugees, whom open societies welcome as people
who will invigorate and enrich them.
Sadly,
this is an old story. At one time, Islamic societies were open and Christian
societies were closed. Jewish refugees from the Spanish Inquisition found
hospitality in the Islamic centers of Morocco, Istanbul and Damascus. Within
living memory, fascists, Nazis, communists, military dictatorships, as well as
religious extremists of several kinds have imposed closed societies. Paris has
suffered violence from several of these. The stories of these conflicts show
open societies lose only when we are intimidated into closing our own minds and
borders. For example, in the short history of Canada, refuge has been offered
to people fleeing the violence of the American Revolution, the slavery
practiced by Christians in the Southern states, Nazism, Communism, Chinese
expansionism in Tibet, and religious extremism of several varieties. The
current policy of accepting 25,000 refugees from Syria is an expression of this
lasting tradition.
So
if there is a message from Paris, it is that what just occurred there is the
same violence, by the same people, that is impelling so many to leave Syria.
Part of the answer to this barbarity must be not to let up our efforts to
rescue people from the horrors of that war.
John Tooby
Founder
of field of Evolutionary Psychology; Co-director, Center for Evolutionary
Psychology, Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Barbara
How
are we to understand minds that take joy in slaughtering the innocent? To
oversimply stupefyingly, our minds evolved to operate in one of three modes:
with cooperative
rationality, predatory rationality, or subordinate
rationality. These
modes were tailored by selection to identify best bet behaviors given one’s
social ecology and individual situation. Each mode equips us with goals,
appetites, and strategic sensibilities appropriate to its corresponding
situation; each makes particular interpretations of others' intentions
(cooperative, malign) self-evident; each makes consonant cultural elements
appealing. To one mode, the Falangist cry "¡Viva la Muerte!" sounds repulsive; to another exalting. To one
mode, slaughtering people is horrifying; to another, a triumph. Most
importantly, we do not intuitively see the modern world as it is, but instead
in terms of simplifying interpretations supplied by these modes of rationality,
forged in a small-scale social world.
Over
evolution, humans have greatly expanded the range and importance of
positive-sum, win-win interactions so that we evolved a cooperative rationality
as a basic part of our nature. Because win-win interactions are highly
productive, and fighting is self-defeating among the equally powerful, cultures
of cooperative rationality can emerge. The core orientation is positive-sum;
the default setting is to put some weight on others, and the expectation is
that others will prefer to cooperate. (Of course, we are notoriously capable of
being cooperative at home, and predatory with outgroups.)
However,
aggression as exploitation of the weak by the strong has been with animals
almost since multicellularity, and so our minds come equipped with a predatory
rationality: If the individual or group is stronger, and the social ecology
does not suppress it, then minds activate this mode. This rationality is self
and group supremacist; is attracted to war and power; focuses on subordinating
others; places little weight on others, or even revels in inflicting suffering
as a display of power. History is full of predatory rationalists, most recently
Young Turk supremacists, National Socialist German supremacists, white
supremacists, fascists, Japanese militarists, Communist supremacists, and
lately Islamist supremacists. The core world-view is zero-sum, and the goal is
to win power over others and the benefits that go with it. As cooperators, we
see Hitler or Stalin or Saddam Hussein as “insane”; we see terrorists’ violence
as “senseless,”— rather than seeing them as operating rationally but in a
different mode with different values.
The
third mode is subordinate rationality, activated by nonconscious recognition
that if there were fighting, the adversary (the predator) would win. This
rationality makes decisions according to an evolved logic of managing one’s
subordination so it is less bad—predators are to be deferred to, excused,
propitiated, identified with and above all not provoked.
The
Enlightenment, human rights, markets, the printing press, science, the
dismantling of force-based privilege—all led to cultural regions of relative
internal peace and remarkable prosperity. Born into a world that has been
internally pacified for so long, it is easy (and convenient) to mistake this
for the state of nature, and not something maintained by the costly
self-sacrifice of some. People raised in cultures that are predominantly
organized around cooperative rationality cannot imagine any other rationality:
So when people use violence it must be that they are driven to it by
desperation or searing injustice, and they will stop when given justice. No one,
we think, could possibly prefer war. (They must be poor, because why would a
wealthy, well-educated Muslim doctor or engineer or billionaire fight?) A
cooperator wants to arrive at a win-win covenant among equals. But predators
envision instead an I-win-you-lose domination.
Another
side-effect of an enduringly cooperative society is a loss of confidence in the
efficacy of defense. Humans are designed to cultivate costly aggressive skills
to the extent it would pay off in their world; cooperative environments incline
us to invest instead in positive-sum skills. It follows that when cooperators
are challenged by serious predatory threats, we implicitly assess ourselves as
weak, and move into a subordinate rationality: Don’t provoke them! It is our
fault! We intuitively feel that if we conciliate, threats will disappear. In
contrast, predatory rationalists see concessions like the Sudetenland or Crimea
or withdrawal from Gaza as evidence that extortion is working, and should be
intensified.
It is
immensely difficult to understand our world of billions, with millions of
fractally overlapping identities, and new media rapidly shifting rationalities.
In such a world, knowing what to do is hard: Retaliation can turn
nonbelligerents into enemies, yet a failure to respond also intoxicates
predators. Still, to have a scientific understanding of the complex
anthropology of modernization, it will not do to simply view others through the
lens of our own cooperative and subordinate rationalities—our hopes and our
fears.
Selected and
edited from EdgeDotCom
** **
2308
hours. I love reading the above. We need to reason first. The above, whether I
agree or not, is reason worth reading. I hope Edge does not mind me sharing. - rho
No comments:
Post a Comment