Tsunami Relief Plus

Things get extremely complicated very quickly when compassion gets tangled up with other motivations.

In an earlier DoubleQuotes, Tsunami and Tamil Tigers, we saw how the urgent need to get aid to tsunami victims brought Tamil Tigers and Sri Lankan government officials together despite the decades old civil war between them.

Relief work is important in a way that can transcend conflicts, but it can also be used as a weapon. In the two quotes juxtaposed here, we see the US Government intensely suspicious of an NGO providing aid in Tamil areas of Sri Lanka, and a subset of Christian relief workers offering religion along with other forms of aid.

Are these two examples of the ways in which relief work can be subverted to political or religious ends?

Charity Governance, an educational outfit that helps NGOs avoid some of the pitfalls and complexities that surround their work, has suggested in a post about Sri Lanka that the U.S. government might "relax its standards in view of the need to quickly get relief to the people needing aid." Is the US in its concern to avoid financing terrorists putting the lives of Sri Lankan tsunami victims at risk? Is it perhaps foolish, as the saying goes, to look a gift horse in the mouth?

Contrariwise, is the Antioch Community Church, the Texas church described in the second quote as offering religion along with aid, using relief work as a Trojan horse to get into otherwise inaccessible parts of the world to preach the gospel? Rev. Duleep Fernando, a Methodist minister based in Colombo who introduced these particular church members to the camp in question is quoted as saying they "described themselves as humanitarian aid workers," and that "raising religion with traumatized refugees is unethical".

Apparently the Antioch Community Church is the same church two of whose members, Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry, ran afoul of the Taliban for proselytizing Muslims in Afghanistan while doing aid work with Shelter Now…

Varieties of Driving

Once again, the issue is cooperation. Here are two quotes from fascinating articles that tie traffic flows to philosophy -- one about a counterintuitive feat of traffic engineering, the other about NASCAR racing (though written by a RAND analyst who is best known for his books on Netwar and the like...).

Sources:

Roads Gone Wild: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic_pr.html
Social Science at 190mph: http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_2/ronfeldt/index.html

My thanks to Annette Leung and Howard Rheingold for pointing me to thse two articles.

The dampening effect

The Birkerts' quote has long been a favorite of mine, setting forth what is in my view the great artistic opportunity of the age. It's a challenge, though, which requires allowing the artist free access to the cultural artefacts of the past, as Hesse's Magister Ludi makes abundantly clear for me at least when he describes the Glass Bead Game thus:

The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays with them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property - on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ. And this organ has attained an almost unimaginable perfection; its manuals and pedals range over the entire intellectual cosmos; its stops are almost beyond number. Theoretically this instrument is capable of reproducing in the Game the entire intellectual content of the universe.

Putting it simply, I think Hesse's Glass Bead Game is the archetype of those art forms which Birkerts shrewdly surmises must await us.

The second quote comes from a particularly sympathetic article on the arts and copyright, a topic which I hope the conjunction of quotes here will show is of profound significance. I was particularly impressed to find the references to counter-melody, counter-image and dialogic practice in van Schijndel and Smiers' article -- they go right to the heart of the issue as Bohm, Bakhtin and Hesse each perceive it...

To coin a well-worn phrase, We stand on the shoulders of giants.

Game Theorists

I have been thinking about cooperation recently, and my sense that we are getting to the point where science and mathematics can teach us some things about mutual aid that we may have turned deaf ears to when the great religious leaders spoke them, and that sent me back to Hume and Rousseau, two (as these quotes show) early game theorists..

You'll find both quotes in Howard Rheingold's book, Smartmobs, and I suspect his recent work Towards a Literacy of Cooperation at Stanford is pioneering this frontier...

Remembering Ashura

Today (perhaps tomorrow) is Ashura, the day on which Shi'ites mourn the death of Hussein, grandson of the Prophet, who was martyred on this day (10th Muharram) in the Battle of Karbara, 680 CE. The first quote in this pair comes from a Christian missionary's 1936 account of the "passion play" enacted in Karbala on this day. The missionary comments:

The first time I watched this procession I cried out from the depth of my soul, "Oh, God, where art thou?" I had never realized that people could get so far away from God and yet think they were pleasing Him. And the sad part of it is that all this is done in the name of religion-a religion that works on the emotions but gives no peace, no joy, and no hope.

The Ta'zieh or "passion play" at Karbala, however, is not without its equivalent within popular Christian piety, as indicated in the second quote, describing a passion play enacted in Mexico City on Good Friday last year.

We would do well to heed the perspective of those who themselves experience these rituals, however. Journalist Chris Kutschera, writing in 1995, characterizes the Karbala event thus:

What is typified by Karbala is the centuries old fight between good and evil, between the oppressed and the oppressors. It underlines the importance of the basic human right to rebel against injustice and suffering.

It is a thought worth pondering this year at this time.

Cures for AIDS: Africa

I tend to be favorably disposed to the cultural practices of other peoples, partly because I believe that cultural diversity serves a similar function to diversity of the gene pool -- but these horrific techniques for "curing" AIDS show the dangers of paranoid magical thinking in the "pre" phase of what Ken Wilber calls the "pre/trans fallacy". I had known for some time about the African notion that (a man) sleeping with a virgin (girl) would be cured of AIDS thereby, but the cure by potion made from a virgin boy's penis was unknown to me until I read about it today. The story of the two boys has a happy resolution, but it is the symbolic power of virginity and the way it is deployed in "myths" of purification that, as a poet and lover of the symbolic, horrify me.

Valentine's IV: Core Gap

These two quotes showed up on a Google search I made to see if there were any other interesting Valentine's Day news clips I should add to my small collection – and at first I didn't see much of a connection between them apart from their both being V-day pieces. As so often, however, the links are there if you just look for them…

It occurred to me that threse two pieces in juxtaposition neatly illuminate the current state of what Tom Barnett in his book The Pentagon's New Map calls "the Core and the Gap"… Valentine's Day (via online diamond sales) gave a thumbs up to that trend in the world represented by Barnett's "Core" nations, which is strong on connectivity and, so to speak, waging peace by economic means – and at the same time a significant setback to the reverse trend found concentrating in Barnett's "Gap", which seeks to avoid global connectivity and in its more extreme form wages war by means of terror.

Sources:

Valentine's Day bombing
Valentine's Day Online Spending

God on our Side

It occurred to me today that both Mark Twain, in his A War Prayer, and Abraham Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural, address our tendency to think our point of view and that of God Almighty closely coincide -- particularly when we are ourselve s feeling highly partisan vis-a-vis some other party, and most particularly when we are at war.

Twain's approach is ironic, of course, and he makes his point by showing us that while praying for blessings for ourselves, we are implicitly bringing curses down on the heads of our opponents -- while Lincoln, more dispassionately (thought with a dig at his own opponents nonetheless), points out that both sides are presumably praying to the same God for victory, and that God can hardly grant that same blessing to both sides.

On the surface the two points are very different: blessing implies curse in Twain, and prayer matches prayer in Lincoln. Today, howover, I see them as two sides of the same coin, two expressions of the one insight.

As Lincoln himself is supposed to have said on another occasion, the issue may not be whether God is on our side, so much as whether we are on God's side. Which, ahem, may transcend sides altogether.

Valentine's III

And here we have a juxtaposition between Valentine's Day seen as a universal and non-culturally controversial binding force, and the US-Mexican border as a symbol of division, keeping apart those whom Valentine's Day would join...

Valentine's Redux

And I couldn't resist...

Happy Valentine's

I find this eerily reminiscent of the first DoubleQuotes I posted here, which quoted attempts -- in Teheran and Washington -- to make sure people weren't exposed to the breasts of statues of the lady Justice...

And just as I mentioned earlier today that the conjunction of warfare and music catches my attention, so does the conjunction of the words religiou and police.

A happy Valentine's to my readers...

Sounds like Victory

Congratulations to Billmon's Whiskey Bar, incidentally, for posting what seems like a very apt DoubleQuotes pair at http://billmon.org/archives/001650.html. I won't "format" them as one of my DoubleQuotes since I wasn't the one who found them and put them together -- but if I had found them myself, I'd certainly have included them here:

From where I sit in Iraq, things are not all bad right now. In fact, they are going quite well . . . In the distance, I can hear the repeated impacts of heavy artillery and five-hundred-pound bombs hitting their targets. The occasional tank main gun report and the staccato rhythm of a Marine Corps LAV or Army Bradley Fighting Vehicle's 25-millimeter cannon provide the bass line for a symphony of destruction.

Lt. Col. Tim Ryan, Tacoma News Tribune, January 18, 2005

You smell that? Do you smell that? That's napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell — you know that gasoline smell — the whole hill. It smelled like . . . victory.

Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, Apocalypse Now

I find that final phrase of Col. Ryan's, the bass line for a symphony of destruction particularly interesting -- the conjunction of warfare and music gets me every time.

Thanks, Billmon...

A Power of Love

This DoubleQuotes is another supplement to my recent series on Decommissioning Terror.

I have chosen these two quotes because each of them cropped up in my reading in recent days, and each in turn has something profound to say about the mindsets of hatred and love.

The first startled me with that powerful phrase, a heaven-hell binary. which exactly captures the mindset in which onself is right to the point of certainty and the other is wrong to the point of demonization. In this case, it's the conflict between western and Islamic versions of human rights that is at stake, and Shadi Mokhtari's article on the topic is worth reading in full. But what does it take to cure that dichotomy? Judge Hitar's dialogue is suggestive, but again, I've already used it in a previous DoubleQuotes -- and I also wanted to use a reference to James Aho's excellent book, This Thing of Darkness.

In his book, Aho tells the story of a KKK Grand Wizard, Larry Trapp, who was "turned" by the respectful attitude of a Jewish cantor, Michael Weisser, and renounced the Klan, hatred and racism -- a story that is also told in Kathryn Watterson's Not by the Sword: How a Cantor and His Family Transformed a Klansman. This story, which Cantor Weisser himself describes as a "love story", is about the only other story I know of to compare with Bruce Hoffman's story of the Black Septembrists and Judge Hitar's tale of dialogues with the jihadists of Yemen, as illustrating a method of "curing" terrorism in those afflicted.

The particular quote I've used here does not tell that story, but immediately prefaces it in Aho's book, acting as a definition of the kind of transformative story that is about to be told. As an analyst with an interest in policy-making which has just this kind of transformative potential, I am of course particularly moved by that final, simple statement:

How such significant others are to be generated, assuming they can be, is perhaps the most challenging policy question of all.

The Wages of Death

I'm posting this particular DoubleQuotes in part as a way to balance the references to "retirement pay" for Palestinian terrorists in Decommissioning Terror 1 with a reference to the pay the families of suicide bombers have received for some time now as compensation for their acts. America suggesting Europe should pay Palestinians not to kill Israelis needs to be juxtaposed with Arab nations paying their families when those same Palestinians do in fact do so.

The thing is, the world is subtle, no? So while I can see the first quote in this pair as responating with the first quote in that one -- and would be happy to have used them both in a DoubleQuote if I hadn't already made use of one of them, no sooner did I go hunting for an apposite quote on who exactly was paying how much to the suicide bombers' families than I came across the quote from Dr. Sarraj, which sets me thinking, again, along unexpected lines -- and which I have now accordingly paired with the first suicide payment quote.

Let's get back, though, to this business of rewarding people (or at least their families) for blowing other people up. Amanda Ripley, in her piece "Why Suicide Bombing Is Now All The Rage" published in Time magazine, April 15th 2002, tells us:

...at wakes for Hamas bombers, it has become routine for an activist to approach the father with an envelope containing $10,000.

That's stunning. That juxtaposition, money envelope with funeral wake, delivers just the kind of jolt to my mind which these DoubleQuotes themselves are intended to deliver...

[ I'd like to thank Ralph Birnbaum for nudging me into making this post ]

Decommissioning Terror 5

In this fifth and last item in the series of DoubleQuotes on decommissioning terror, I'm returning to the recent news item which triggered my interest in developing the series -- recounting the Yemeni judge's apparently successful approach to "turning" terrorists by means of theological dialogue.

Dialogue is a term that can have many meanings, but the distinguished British physicist David Bohm spent a considerable amount of his time and understanding formulating the rules and practices of a type of dialogue which would, to the extent possieble, avoid some of the pitfalls of human communications, and enable understanding across those chasms of differing assumptions which so often plague us.

What interests me here is the degree to which Judge Hitar's method correlates with that of Bohm.

I would be very interested to learn more of Judge Hitar's methods, and perhaps even to attempt a mapping of the theological debate as he deploys it.

Decommissioning Terror 4

Considering the possibility that the Talmudic injunction quoted in the previous item might go some way towards explaining the IDF's pre-emptive strikes against their Palestinian attackers brought me to think once again of the strong role played by different cultures in the ways in which we see and evaluate the world around us. Accordingly, comparative anthropology can help us see past our own cultural assumpotions and easy certainties into the worldviews of (and hence the world as seen by) others.

The somewhat forthright Jewish aphorism in the previous item can therefore stand comarison with the two quotes offered in this one.

I'd like to consider each of them in turn, very different as they are, as two ways of approaching the riddle proposed by Robert Axelrod in terms of iterative games of prisoners dilemma: what is the optimal strategy for social existence in terms of cooperation and defection? Axelrod in his two books, The Evolution of Cooperation and The Complexity of Cooperation, comes as close as anyone to providing a rational / empirical basis on which to propose the benfits of an altruistic component in human behavior. His finding is that treating others with an initial assumption of goodwill and then following their actions tit-for-tat is a strategy for success. The Qur'an here effectively endorses tit-for-tat, and indeed specifically permits Muslims to engage in otherwise prohibited behavior when that behavior has been initiated by their enemies. The contrast with Christ's proposal, in game theoretic terms that one should continue cooperating with a defector until seventy times seven times, couldn't be clearer.

But then Christ's teaching here admittedly doesn't work very well as a strategy in iterated games of prisoners dilemma...

And again, my purpose here is not to praise one perspective and denigrate another, but to offer the contrast between them as a sort of Socratic gift, a means of probing deeper into the extraordinarily vexed question of human morality.

Decommissioning Terror 3

This item in the series sets the Israeli policy of targeted assassination, here explicitly disapproved by Amnesty International, in the context of the Jewish (Talmudic) injunction, haba lehorgekha hashkem lehorgo -- which arguably offers ancient religious sanction for the contemporary notion of pre-emptive strikes...

The IDF doesn't exactly quote Talmud in support of its policies -- but the conjunction of these two quotes nevertheless seems suggestive.

Decommissioning Terror 2

Here is the Yemeni judge whose way of decommissioning jihadists is to hold theological dialogues with them -- a strategy, incidentally, which wouldn't work if the jihadists were insincere as to their religious beliefs, and whose success therefore argues for their sincerity...

I see this quote as complementing the two in the previous item in this series, and contrasting strongly with the quote I've paired it with, which describes the Israeli / IDF policy of "targeted assassination" -- another, very different approach to the decommissioning of terrorists.

My purpose here throughout is comparison, I hasten to add, not condemnation.

Decommissioning Terror 1

This is the first in a suite of DoubleQuotes that I've created in following up on two recent stories. The first is the suggestion from Secretary of State Rice that Europe should provide funds to pension off terrorists who are willing to "retire" from killing Israelis...

which compares and contrasts interestingly with the strategy by which the Palestinians decommissioned members of Black September, as narrated by Bruce Hoffman of RAND, one of our finer observers of global terror...

but it was the announcement of a Yemeni judge's successful application of theological dialogue to the same ends which really triggered this series, and I'll address it in the next DoubleQuotes in the series.

Early warnings

In retrospect, however...

*

I won't comment much on these two quotes here, except to say that I'm using them in a book submission I'm preparing, to illustrate the two great themes which seem to me to characterize our failure in Iraq and in the war on terror:

our inability to understand that in contemporary warfare less is more, or more poetically that in setting ourselves up as Goliath we are dooming ourselves to perpetual failure, and

our inability to recognize the extraordinary power of religious (and specifically apocalyptic) belief in contemporary geopolitics

Fedeli d'Amore

It is my conceit here that the Fedeli d'Amore, the Faithful to Love, are able to see something of the divine in other traditions than their own. Thus while Gandhi certainly wasn't a Christian and just as assuredly was a Hindu, his singular devotion to truth may in truth have been a Christlike quality in him, despite the apparent paradox. Similarly, the Catholic relief agency Caritas, in offering prayer rugs to Muslims so that they can make their own approach to God, may indeed be acting with a high level of that very caritas for which they are named.

The contrast with the two preceding quotes could not be more apparent.

Infidels

The exlusionary nature of salvation as preached by many religious bodies seems harmless enough, a simple reinforcement of the benefits accruing to the faithful -- until one considers what it implies about the fate of the other, the un-faithful, the infidel.

Nicholas Kristof is entitrely right in saying, in the article from which his quote above is taken:

If a Muslim were to write an Islamic version of "Glorious Appearing" and publish it in Saudi Arabia, jubilantly describing a massacre of millions of non-Muslims by God, we would have a fit

and to observe accordingly that:

It's disconcerting to find ethnic cleansing celebrated as the height of piety

in our own popular fiction.

The Saudi publication with which I'm pairing this quote from Kristof (and his invocation of the Left Behind series) is likewise notable for the frankness with which it attacks notions of religious equivalence, and particularly those which would equate Christianity or Judaism with Islam, on the grounds that such equivalence reduces the incentive to jihad...

The theological correctness of the exclusionary position in each case (extra ecclesiam nulla salus) can be (and is) argued from scripture -- and yet, as I hope the next DoubleQuotes will show, there is that within us which can see beyond the sectarian to a deeper and more universal truth.