Variation and Pieta

These two images come from BAGnewsNotes -- a blog with the subtitle Where The Analysis Of News Photos Is A New Art. If this particular juxtaposition is anything to judge by, the site may deserve its subtitle.

The upper image is that of of a woman protesting the Terri Schiavo issue: she is carrying a poster of the (supposed) face of Christ from the Shroud of Turin.

BAGnews comments:

the first person I showed this photo to said, without blinking an eye: "Oh, it's the Pieta."

So, I don't know. Is the woman in the photo just Mary Syversen from Front Royal, Virginia, keeping a private vigil outside the Supreme Court, or is it a political actress mindful of the visual weight of Michelangelo's youthful Mary in mourning? Or is it just Mary Syversen carrying a unique protest prop and captured in the rain by a quick and literate photographer? (And, does it really matter which?)

The lower image is indeed that of Michaelangelo's breathtakingly beautiful sculpture of the Pieta in St Peter's, now only visible (alas) behind bullet-proof glass...

Good Friday

The cultural differences alluded to here are striking. The Catholicism of my youth situates the Stations of the Cross within the church, so that the focus is unambiguously on Christ's suffering. Taking the Stations of the Cross to the streets and visiting a jail, a homeless shelter and so forth links Christ's suffering with the suffering of everyday humans, as the first of these quotes points out. That's fair enough: as Paul Griffiths says, Christ's sufferings represent the sufferings of all humankind. The situation gets a little more complex when the Pope's suffering is taken as a symbol of Christ's suffering, which is itself symbolic of our own... in a nesting of symbols... as in this excerpt from an article in today's LA Times:

The pope is using the final chapter of his life as a parable for the world's 1 billion Roman Catholics. He wants his public suffering to convey the value of human life, even in its decline. Especially during the time Christians recall the crucifixion of Jesus, the church is emphasizing the symbolic parallels between the pope's ordeal and that of Christ — an analogy John Paul and his aides have been keen to make. ... "The cross of Christ neither depresses nor weakens," [Cardinal] Ruini told thousands of worshipers gathered in a sun-bathed St. Peter's Square. "On the contrary, from it comes ever new energy, energy that shines forth in the deeds of saints and that has made the history of the church fruitful. Energy that stands out particularly clearly today in the fatigued face of the Holy Father."

Tracy Wilkinson, Holy Week Marked by an Absence, LA Times, March 25, 2005

And using the liturgical imitation of Christ's passion as a form of penitence calibrated to the severity of an offence (in the second quote, to the length of time a policeman has been absent without leave)... That brings us closer to the Penitentes of New Mexico, the piercings of the Sun Dance, of Kataragama.

Routing around it

Both the instances quoted here fall under the rubric of unintended consequences. We really need to learn how to avoid them. As these two quotes show, however, unintended consequences often follow patterns -- in these cases, the same pattern you'll find in John Gilmore's celebrated phrase:

The net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it.

-- hence our title...

Consider: if there are patterns of unintended consequences, we should be able to learn them and... route around them.

Two Ways of War

The link between these quotes may be a little oblique, but I think it's there, and more interesting than another pair of "David and Goliath" quotes might be. First, Van Creveld, dean of military historians, tells us pithily why the superpower is also the looser in the current situation in Iraq -- he goes on to hammer the point home:

In other words, he who fights against the weak—note, in this connection, that the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed—and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins, also loses. To kill a much weaker opponent is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force, however rich, however powerful, however advanced, or however well motivated, is immune to this dilemma.

The solution is to win admiration not contempt, and that's a matter of public diplomacy.

Contrast with this approach -- the continuation of war by subtler means, restrained by it's very nature -- the utterly unrestrained vigor of the insurgent, as typified by the comment from Libyan jihadist Noman Benotman in a current Jamestown interview -- and he's just talking about training! Another comment from the same section of the interview:

We trained on weapons, tactics, enemy engagement techniques and survival in hostile environments. All weapons training was with live ammunition, which was available everywhere. Indeed, there were a number of casualties during these training sessions.

The polarities are stunning!

Divorce, perforce?

Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog carried an entry yesterday entitled The Schiavo Case and the Islamization of the Republican Party.

I'm illustrating Cole's thesis here, drawing on two examples he gave of divorce imposed by law on individuals who have not requested it. There are of course significant differences between the two situations: the point as I see it is that the similarities are nonetheless too close for comfort.

2020 Visions?

Some while back, I suggested that Al-Qaida's strategic timeline might be responsive to a comment made by Sheikh Safar al-Hawali at the end of his book, Day of Wrath, to the effect that Jerusalem would likely return to Muslim hands in 2012. Al-Hawali drew this conclusion from his study of Biblical prophecies, and as bin Laden has been known to read al-Hawali's writings, the possibility exists that he might think in terms of the Sheikh's apocalyptic timeline.

This DoublesQuotes presents an even longer timeline, juxtaposing the strategic thinking of Makkawi (ie Sayf al-Adel) of al-Qaida with an apocalytpic date from Sheikh Bassam Jarrar, a Hamas leader whose prophetic predictions are to be found in his book The Wonders of 19: Between the Inattentiveness of the Muslims and the Errors of the Falsifiers. Hamas is not al-Qaida, and I am not claiming a direct connection between the two dates -- merely suggesting that these two quotes between them are suggestive of an even longer possible strategic overview than the one I proposed earlier.

I am grateful to Anne Marie Oliver and Paul Steinberg, whose brilliant, poetic book The Road to Martyrs' Square (Oxford, 2005) tipped me off to Jarrar's work.

Connections & Dependencies

We know we live in a richly interconnected world, and we have maps of some of the kinds of interconnections and dependencies involved -- we can trace the path from power plants across the grid to a wall socket, and from the wall socket to fridge or PC -- but there exists no map of our interconnections and dependencies which crosses the Cartesian divide between matter and mind, explaining among other things how rumors of wars can become wars, or rumors of bank runs can become bank runs. And yet that map, the purely notional, cross-disciplinary map of our global and psychic interconnectedness, is the one we need, because it is the map of the reality in which we live.

Umberto Eco, in his The Search for the Perfect Language, has explained the pitfalls of searches for encyclopedic visions of this sort, but the visions themselves remain compelling. I hope this DoubleQuotes pair will illuminate that compulsion. Barabasi's very general observation that it is all interconnected translates easily enough to communications, energy, and distribution networks that can be studied quantitatively -- but it comes as something of a shock to read MI5's aphorism suggesting the speed with which our dependencies might plunge us into anarchy.

I suspect that one reason for the shock has to do with the capacity of the human mind and emotions to radicalize any network in which they serve as nodes -- adding not just a qualitative (and hence hard to quantify) element to the mix, but also a switching system that moves at "the speed of thought"... Maps of financial routing networks, for instance, which omit the human component can give us, in the imagery of an earlier DoubleQuotes, "much-changed caterpillars" -- but it's the arrival of the human factor that can add panic to the mix, and perhaps take us from civil society to anarchy in those (supposed) four days...

Computer Religion

Umberto Eco's piece about the Catholic Macintosh and Protestant PC is a classic, and Linus Torvalds' comments in a Business Week interview is a neat variation on the theme -- though a bit harsh on witchcraft, perhaps?

Butterfly Complexities

Two uses of butterflies to explain complexity. It's fascinating to note that Lorenz' first explanation of the notion of "sensitive dependence on initial conditions" was phrased in terms of a seagull rather than a butterfly...

Harvard Business Review

Two from the Harvard Business Review. Elizabeth Dole's comment, made while she was President of the American Red Cross, stresses the importance of trust in time of crisis, Gary Hamel's that of foresight. A powerful pair of insights when put together, I think.

Awake at Night

Two examples of issues that keep the brass awake at night, both from today's Washington Post.

Colts and Assegais?

Reuters had these two items listed back to back in their "Oddly Enough Report" mailing today.

Open minded

Two quotes in favor of the freedom of (divergent) speech -- one drawn from the hadith of the Prophet, the other from Albion's great visionary poet William Blake.

In his remarks at the World Affairs Council, Monterey, on May 3, 2002, Secretary Wolfowitz actually quoted a different translation ("these differences among my people is a mercy of God") of the same hadith ("ikhtilafu ummati rahmatun li al-nas"). It is not my role to go into the niceties of hadith evaluation and interpretation; my point is simply to note that both a saying attributed to Mohammed and a remark by William Blake testify to the benefit on occasion of hearing more than one point of view...

Two Dalai Lamas

The Chinese appear to be promulgating a file claiming to contain the Dalai Lama's yearly speech, which is in fact a Trojan. I thought it might be instructive to compare this with an excerpt of the speech itself. The contrast couldn't be clearer: in prisoner's dilemma terms, the Dalai Lama is cooperating, the Chinese are defecting.

Values of lives

There's a substantial disparity between the amount offered as a token of practical compassion to those who have lost loved ones in Iraq, and the amount offered for the continuation of one American life, currently spent in a coma...

Is it the difference between nationalities and cultures that makes the difference, or or that between a wealthy individual donor and the Department of Defense (not known for tight control of finances in Iraq) -- or that between retrospective evaluation of an already completed life and evaluation of a life while the person involved, albeit in a coma, is still among the living?

Another in a series of DoubleQuotes concerning the monetary values assigned, one way and another, to human life...

A world electorate

The UK's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw can (and does) tell us his choice for PM of the Lebanon. Under the principle that turnabout is fair play, Lebanese Speaker Berri surely has an equal right to tell the UK his choice for PM in the upcoming British elections -- or doesn't he?

And the US? Why not, as de Jager almost suggests, allow the world to vote in US elections...

On the principle that all stakeholders should have a voice in what affects them...

Narnia Emphasized

Scurrying to avoid the idea that C S Lewis' Narnia stories might have a Christian subplot, in fear that such an emphasis might decerase potential sales, and scurrying to suggest the same idea, in hope of increasing sales... The scurrying is unseemly either way, but what is most fascinating is the sense that the decision-makers are, unlike Lewis himself, "blown by every wind" -- and that their hopes and fears are two sides of the same coin...