Spy vs. spy: the problem of the false negative vs. the false positive

The New Neo Posted on by

The excellent Callimachus has expanded on some of the points in this post of mine, about those who think Bush lied concerning WMDs in Iraq.

Callimachus tackles a subset of this group, those who say Bush didn’t lie–well, not exactly, and not precisely–but that he nevertheless consciously and purposely did the next best (worst?) thing: he sifted through the intelligence information and took only that which fit his already-made decision to attack Iraq for other nefarious reasons such as to steal its oil. Or he told confederates and advisors to shape intelligence information to bolster his argument, and to block anything that didn’t.

Callimachus writes, of espionage in general, and the need to evaluate possible threats such as Saddam’s:

There are fundamentally two types of mistake you can make at it: to fail to perceive a threat, or to perceive one that does not exist.

Of the two, the former is more catastrophic — think Pearl Harbor, or Sept. 11 — and so if the two errors represent the Scylla and Charybdis of the system, the conscientious espionage worker will strive to sail between them, but tack slightly closer toward the error of over-assumption.

The intelligence trade has two components: collection and analysis — call them hands and head. Agents in the field will gather a mass of data and information: tips from credible sources, rumors, the gleanings of wiretaps and intercepts, newspaper reports. Among them will be some true facts, and some wrong ones and some good guesses, and some bad guesses, and some deliberate deceptions planted by the other side.

It’s the analysts’ job to try to weed through them and find the best bits of information and use them to construct a coherent picture of what the other fellow is up to. Of course it’s “cherry-picking.” That’s the whole nature of this part of the business. And, again, there likely will be a bias toward seeing something rather than not seeing it.

In fact, Callimachus is describing the age-old scientific problem of the false negative vs. the false positive. They are both bad. But in the case of self defense, the false negative is, as Callimachus points out, a good deal more dangerous, if one is looking at it from the point of view of the need to prevent a threat from becoming a reality.

In the case of the “Bush lied” or “Bush cherry-picked the information” people, however, they seem to act as though a false (or partly-false) positive is far worse than a false negative would be. Is this because they feel this country is so invincible that they don’t believe any threats are real? Or is it because, in their hearts, the most important thing is to keep their own hands clean? Or is it some combination of the two? Sometimes it even seems to me as though they think the function of prewar intelligence was to have acted as defense attorney for Saddam—to make sure he was considered innocent till proven guilty.

Actually, I’m probably being too kind to them–or, at least, to some of them. For a certain number, if in fact Bush’s intelligence-gathering had been guilty of a false negative rather than the false positive that appears to have been the case, they’d be saying the false negative was worse, instead (just look at the 9/11 Commission for examples). The bottom line seems to be, at least for some, that whatever Bush happens to have done is defined as worse–false negative or false positive. And unrealistic perfection is the standard by which he is to be judged.

In this respect, those who act this way are very fortunate to have been out of power during these trying post-9/11 times. As such, they have the wonderful luxury of constant Monday-morning quarterbacking. They get to criticize errors, whether those be of the false negative or the false positive variety. They get to pretend they had nothing to do with the situation that built up to those errors, such as 9/11. They get away with being altogether vague about what they could do differently to prevent such errors, if they were in power. Or, if they are specific, they get the luxury of knowing that, at least for now, their suggestions will not be tried and found wanting in the field of reality (this is always true of a party out of power, by the way).

And, most importantly, they get to enjoy whatever the Bush Administration may have actually done to prevent further attacks on this country, and thus to have preserved their right to speak out in any way they see fit. And this, of course, is as it should be.

Sympathy for the devil: identification with the aggressor

The New Neo Posted on by

Dr. Sanity has a post that’s well worth reading, on the topic of identification with the aggressor–how it begins as a normal process in childhood, enabling a child to manage threats and anxiety, and how it sometimes morphs into the pathological. She links this latter point to what’s known as “Stockholm Syndrome,” the identification with a kidnapper or hostage-taker by the hostage him/herself.

One of the worst feelings on earth is that of being a vulnerable victim. Humans will go quite far to avoid such a feeling–including, at times, deciding the aggressor is not so bad, after all; maybe even good. Of course, brainwashing can play a role in that transformation, especially if the kidnapping has gone on for a long time. But sometimes it doesn’t take all that much, and overt brainwashing is not a necessary part of the process.

Abused children are among the most vulnerable of humans. Way too early in life, they are faced with the terrible dilemma of dealing with their own powerlessness in the face of an aggressor, sometimes even a family member whose proper role should be to protect. It’s a fact that, although most abused children do not go on to becoming abusive adults, most abusive adults were abused as children.

I’m not offering this as any sort of excuse for such behavior–unfortunately, I’m not sure it’s even an explanation. For we cannot ignore the fact that the majority of the abused do not take identification with the aggressor to the point where they become one. Au contraire.

So, how can we really explain the difference between those who end up becoming what, in childhood, they most hated, and those who go on to become exemplary citizens and parents? Those who identify with the aggressor, and those who don’t? At this point, we really can’t. It’s one of the most important unsolved riddles in the social sciences.

It seems to me that there are two responses for a victim of childhood abuse. The first is to say “Never again.” This child grows up knowing that this is one thing he/she will never do, and perhaps even later joins a profession or group that is involved in preventing, treating, studying, or fighting abuse. The second reaction is to let feelings be the guide. In a certain percentage of people who seem to lack operating moral brakes and who have identified with the aggressor, those feelings lead to a re-enactment of the crime, this time as powerful perpetrator. And thus the torch is passed.

[ADDENDUM: Just to clarify: abused children who grow up to abuse others do not necessarily norm their own abuse and think it was OK.

There are those who do, of course. For example, there are abusing parents who justify their actions in abusing the child by saying they are just “teaching my child about his/her sexuality,” or who offer any number of other twisted but benign reframings, and who say they were not harmed by themselves being abused as children.

However, there are those who hate what the abusive adult did to them when they were a child, and yet they still grow up to abuse children. This is done by some mental mechanism as yet poorly understood, but the best description I can offer is that they are on emotional automatic pilot when they are doing the abusing. The feelings of rage and powerlessness are all there, encapsulated inside the adult, unprocessed and poorly understood. Those feelings now drive the behavior of the abusive adult, who converts the feelings of powerlessness felt as a child into a feeling of power over another child.

The worm turns–the victim becomes powerful by being the vicimizer. But the adult usually does not understand or have any awareness of the process by which this happens.]

Chasing Moby Dick: eliminating the evil inclination?

The New Neo Posted on by

As promised, I’ve got more to say about Moby Dick. Just think of it as that essay I struggled with in high school, redux (and, by the way, I’m still struggling).

I prefer to state the question about the symbolism of the white whale differently, as in: what’s up with Ahab? What is he trying to do, and why? (In the allegorical sense, that is—because without the allegory, Ahab is just a more somber Captain Hook, pursuing the alligator that ran off with his hand.)

In trying to answer the question, this is one of the times I’m with those folks who believe in relative truth: there certainly is no one answer to this question. But the following is an answer—and my answer, at least for now:

Ahab is an absolutist. He sees the whale as the embodiment of whatever is evil and untamable in the universe, and therefore it’s worthy of his monomaniacal quest. Strangely enough, that vision puts him in the company of some other uncompromising (although very different) figures of fiction—Don Quixote, starry-eyed idealist, comes to mind.

The Don is a sort of flip side to Ahab—his pursuit is of the good. But he goes after it with an absolutist vision that’s very out of touch with reality, as does Ahab in his very different pursuit.

Here’s Melville on the subject of Ahab’s attitude towards the whale:

All that most maddens and torments, all that stirs up the lees of things, all truth with malice in it…were visibly personified and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale’s white hum the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar (like a cannon thing), he burst his hot heart’s shell upon it.”

Talk about extremism and fanaticism, talk about scapegoating! Realists try to jolt people such as Don Q and Ahab out of their narrow and uncompromising visions: the Don has his Sancho Panza as foil; Ahab, his Starbuck. I wish both Sancho and Starbuck luck. The task they’ve chosen is difficult—in fact, well-nigh impossible.

One of Ahab’s biggest troubles is his idea that there is one single thing that embodies all that’s wrong with the world. It’s what gives his quest its intensity and accounts for its gleam of insanity. It’s a simplistic vision of evil, and Ahab’s hubris lies in thinking he can eliminate that evil.

Should we then give up the task of opposing evil, of fighting against it? Absolutely not. I am not suggesting a fatalistic, “que sera, sera” attitude towards the world. Evil must be fought against on many fronts and with many weapons: persuasion, isolation, and force. But there is no one thing that embodies evil, and no way to eliminate it from the world.

To give an example close to home: as a neocon, I oppose tyrannical and cruel regimes that trample on people’s civil liberties, and I applaud the spread of democracy. But I am not so naive—at least, I try not to be—as to think that the process is either easy or perfect. Nor do I think it will eliminate human folly or evil. Not by a longshot.

It seems to me that Ahab not only believes the white whale to be the embodiment of all that’s evil and that he can vanquish it, but he actually thinks that eliminating evil—if it could in fact be done—would be an unequivocally good thing. In this, also, he is an absolutist.

And in this he would seem to be correct, at least at first glance. Eliminating evil—who wouldn’t want that to happen?

But would the elimination of evil—if possible—be unequivocally good? That’s not a trick question, either. I’m not an expert on comparative religion, but you may be surprised to find (as I was) that Judaism answers that question: “no.” In this it has a great deal in common, I believe, with Buddhism.

Here‘s a discussion of the subject I came upon a while back. It offers a parable:

The Jewish definition of “Evil” is a matter much more involved than the definition of “Good.” Here’s my best try: The force within each of us that causes us to act in an aggressive or an acquisitive manner — that is a reflection of the Evil Inclination. Unchecked aggression or acquisitiveness lead to terrible evil. Violence, theft, slander and betrayal are all products of these forces left unrestrained.

That’s the basic equation. It sounds simple. Beware of spiritual ideas that sound simple. They rarely ever are.

Jewish lore tells a tale of a time when Evil was actually captured (B. Tal. Yoma 69b). Now, one might think that if Evil could really be physically contained, the most sensible thing to do with it would be to destroy it right away. So much for sensibility. It turns out that Evil’s captors paused before they acted on their first instincts.

Evil was held captive for three days, during which time its fate was debated. The Talmud does not record many details from that debate. I suppose they decided to leave that part up to our imaginations.

Well, three days passed… And then, someone made a startling realization. During the time of Evil’s imprisonment, all chickens in the land stopped laying eggs. It was as if they had gone on strike.

Had folks looked further, they would have realized that other strange things had been occurring ”“ or more precisely, not occurring, during those three days. No houses were built. People didn’t show up for work. No marriages took place. No homework was done… and I suppose that no lawns were mowed, no leaves were raked, no trash taken out, and no gutters were cleared either.

The reason was obvious. The Evil Inclination is that which causes God’s creations to act aggressively and acquisitively. Building houses, and families, and careers ”“ these are activities that require healthy, yet well controlled, measures of both aggressiveness and acquisitiveness.

Folks realized that the Evil Inclination could not be obliterated. It couldn’t even be held captive forever. For Evil’s own source is also the source of creativity and productivity. The only thing that could be done before setting Evil loose again in the world, would be to wound it. So Evil was blinded, and then set free. Thus, it was placed at a decided disadvantage in its continuous struggle with Good.

And here the idea is stated in a different way, and tied to that illustrious (although much-maligned) father of psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud:

What gives this idea a Jewish “twist” quite different from the original Zoroastrian teaching is that the evil impulse, in Jewish thought, is not entirely evil. It is not, like the Zarathushtrian “hostile spirit,” completely inimical to goodness. The Jewish “evil impulse” is only evil when it is obeyed and yielded to without restraint. The evil impulse is sinful lust in excess, but in moderation it is necessary in order to prompt people to procreate; it is sinful greed in excess, but in right order, it is the drive behind trade and the pursuit of lawful profit. The Jewish “evil impulse” thus resembles Freud’s concept of the “id,” the amoral motive power behind human actions either for good or evil – and indeed, Freud was inspired by Jewish moral philosophy in his own thinking.

Ahab is an idealist without moderation or judgment, a man who believes he can do away with evil if he only pursues it with enough intensity. As such, he becomes a fanatic, and signs a pact with evil itself. It’s a pact that ends up destroying him, his ship, and his crew—all but Ishmael, who alone survived to tell the tale.

Islamic reform: is it an oxymoron?

The New Neo Posted on by

Many have looked to the possibility of reform of the Moslem religion for the best hope of avoiding a coming conflagration. After all, the other monotheistic Abrahamic religions have all grown and changed over time; why not Islam?

Alexandra of All Things Beautiful offers some discouraging news about the possibility of Islamic reform (taken from a Hugh Hewitt radio interview):

Father Fessio [provost of Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida], described a private seminar on the subject of Islam last year at Castel Gandolfo, the Papal summer residence:

“The main presentation by this Father [Christian] Troll was very interesting. He based it on a Pakistani Muslim scholar [named] Rashan, who was at the University of Chicago for many years, and Rashan’s position was Islam can enter into dialogue with modernity, but only if it radically reinterprets the Koran, and takes the specific legislation of the Koran, like cutting off your hand if you’re a thief, or being able to have four wives, or whatever, and takes the principles behind those specific pieces of legislation for the 7th century of Arabia, and now applies them, and modifies them, for a new society [in] which women are now respected for their full dignity, where democracy’s important, religious freedom’s important, and so on. And if Islam does that, then it will be able to enter into real dialogue and live together with other religions and other kinds of cultures.

And immediately the holy father, in his beautiful calm but clear way, said, well, there’s a fundamental problem with that because, he said, in the Islamic tradition, God has given His word to Mohammed, but it’s an eternal word. It’s not Mohammed’s word. It’s there for eternity the way it is. There’s no possibility of adapting it or interpreting it, whereas in Christianity, and Judaism, the dynamism’s completely different, that God has worked through his creatures. And so it is not just the word of God, it’s the word of Isaiah, not just the word of God, but the word of Mark. He’s used his human creatures, and inspired them to speak his word to the world, and therefore by establishing a church in which he gives authority to his followers to carry on the tradition and interpret it, there’s an inner logic to the Christian Bible, which permits it and requires it to be adapted and applied to new situations…

Hebrew and Christian scripture claim to be the report of human encounters with God. After the Torah is read each Saturday in synagogues, the congregation intones that the text stems from “the mouth of God by the hand of Moses”, a leader whose flaws kept him from entering the Promised Land. The Jewish rabbis, moreover, postulated the existence of an unwritten Revelation whose interpretation permits considerable flexibility with the text. Christianity’s Gospels, by the same token, are the reports of human evangelists.

The Archangel Gabriel, by contrast, dictated the Koran to Mohammed, according to Islamic doctrine. That sets a dauntingly high threshold for textual critics. How does one criticize the word of God without rejecting its divine character?”

How, indeed? A great deal may be riding on the answer.

The great white whale metaphor: Moby Dick

The New Neo Posted on by

Sigmund, Carl, & Alfred recently put Gerard Van der Leun on the couch. As could have been predicted, the results are well worth reading.

Following the rule of threes, the three analysts (SC&A, speaking with one voice, as “they” always do) asked Van der Leun which three books are a must-read for Americans. His answer:

Well, that would be tough, but just off the top of my head I’d say: The King James Bible (Whether or not you believe.) The Works of William Shakespeare (Otherwise you know nothing of reading and writing.) Moby Dick (The great American novel has been written and this is it. Prophetic vision of America that proves more true with every passing year.)

Can’t argue with those choices; not at all.

Ah, Moby Dick (hyphenated or un)! I first encountered him in an abridged version in junior high, followed by the real (looooong) thing in high school, where I clearly remember struggling rather unsuccessfully with the obligatory essay question, “Discuss the symbolism of the white whale.” That protean metaphor for just about everything stumped me then, and I only started thinking hard about it many years later when I re-read old Moby as an adult.

I’m sure Gerard Van der Leun would have no trouble whatsoever tossing off a few thousand or so fascinating words on the subject of that “prophetic vision of America that proves more true with every passing year.” I, for one, would love to read such an essay, if he ever cares to write it.

But till then, I’ve got a few things to say about Moby Dick myself.

I’ve thought about it quite a bit over time, since it’s one of my favorite books (hated that 50s movie, though–what a lot of bloody water, and Gregory Peck was just way too Mr. Nice Guy to ever be Ahab).

So, what does the whale symbolize, anyway? I’ve called it a “protean” symbol, meaning “readily taking on various shapes, forms, or meanings.” So one thing we can agree on is that the text offers a lot of room for us to see any number of things in it. Evil, for starters. Or unbridled nature, with Ahab representing the hubris of fighting the way the world is set up, thinking he can subdue the chaos.

Or, well–I’m planning to discuss my own take in another essay, some time soon.

But right now my point will be brief (hey, it’s already not been brief, you say? Ah, well).

Whatever your preferred Moby Dick metaphor, it can be extended to some present day situations. Here are my current offerings:

(1) To Hitler, the Jews were Moby Dick.

(2) To the Arab world, the Israelis are Moby Dick.

(3) To quite a few Europe on the left, “Zionists” (read: “Jews”) are still Moby Dick.

(4) To those suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome, Bush is Moby Dick.

(5) To many who detest Bush, Iraq is Bush’s Moby Dick.

Iran: Victor Davis Hanson on the case

The New Neo Posted on by

The ever-perceptive Victor Davis Hanson’s National Review column yesterday dealt with some issues discussed recently on this blog concerning Iran (hat tip: Soxblog).

He first sets up the seriousness of the Iranian situation, and then goes methodically down the list of possible responses.

Hanson sees four. The first is what he calls the “ostrich option,” which he rejects without too much discussion. The second, worldwide diplomacy and strong sanctions, including support for an overthrow of the current government, is given a lengthy hearing. Hanson offers the following caveat: it is a long-term therapy and therefore suffers the obvious defect that Iran might become nuclear in the meantime (as discussed here yesterday in this comment and in others following).

The third option, unilateral action by Israel, Hanson analyzes and ultimately rejects for multiple strategic reasons. About the final possibility, Hanson writes:

The fourth scenario is as increasingly dreaded as it is apparently inevitable ”” a U.S. air strike. Most hope that it can be delayed…

He then goes on to analyze the possible consequences, including the PR fallout:

We remember the “quagmire” hysteria that followed week three in Afghanistan, and the sandstorm “pause” that prompted cries that we had lost Iraq. All that would be child’s play compared to an Iranian war, as retired generals and investigative reporters haggled every night on cable news over how many reactor sites were still left to go. So take for granted that we would be saturated by day four of the bombing with al Jazeera’s harangues, perhaps a downed and blindfolded pilot or two paraded on television, some gruesome footage of arms and legs in Tehran’s streets, and the usual Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer outtakes.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Hanson is a realist, not a Utopian. He is not bloodthirsty (although I’m sure his critics consider him so). But he realizes that situations such as that of Iran today present us with a situation in which the options sometimes are all bad, and we must choose the best of a bad business–or the least crazy choice among several competing crazinesses. His article ends with these words:

Finally, the public must be warned that dealing with a nuclear Iran is not a matter of a good versus a bad choice, but between a very bad one now and something far, far worse to come.

In my opinion, that was also true of the war in Iraq–and no doubt, to some degree or other, of all wars.

Iran’s dirty little weapon

The New Neo Posted on by

On this thread from yesterday, an interesting discussion is ensuing concerning what could–or should–be done about Iran’s nascent nuclear arsenal.

But one point I haven’t seen mentioned there, and which troubles me greatly, is the fact that intelligence has it that Iran has oh-so-cleverly built:

…many of their facilities under densely populated areas, and especially under buildings that would make Israel [or the US] look like the international villain if those were destroyed: hospitals, old age homes, etc. Could you imagine what a field day the UN would have after an Israeli [or American] strike ended up causing collateral damage among Iranians (from Iranian nuclear fallout or from the Israeli explosives) in the tens or even hundreds of thousands?

The Iranians are not stupid. The Israeli strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981 put them on notice. Sometimes an antibiotic only helps a disease mutate into a strain that is resistant to the drug. In this case, the Osirak attack made it clear to Iran that they needed to diversify their facilities in a way that would make successful repetition of a similar strike very difficult.

And so they have, making for some extremely complex decisions, not just in the tactical sense but in the moral sense:

If the Iranian nuclear facilities were located in one place, away from any civilian population center, it would be moral ”” and, under any reasonable regime of international law, legal ”” for Israel to destroy them. (Whether it would be tactically wise is another question.) But the ruthless Iranian militants have learned from the Iraqi experience and, according to recent intelligence reports, deliberately have spread its nuclear facilities around the country, including in heavily populated areas. This would force Israel into a terrible choice: Either allow Iran to complete its production of nuclear bombs aimed at the Jewish state’s civilian population centers, or destroy the facilities despite the inevitability of Iranian civilian casualties.

The laws of war prohibit the bombing of civilian population centers, even in retaliation against attacks on cities, but they permit the bombing of military targets, including nuclear facilities. By deliberately placing nuclear facilities in the midst of civilian population centers, the Iranian government has made the decision to expose its civilians to attacks, and it must assume all responsibility for any casualties caused by such attacks. Israel, the United States and other democracies always locate their military facilities away from population centers, precisely in order to minimize danger to their civilians. Iran does precisely the opposite, because its leaders realize that decent democracies ”” unlike indecent tyrannies ”” would hesitate to bomb a nuclear facility located in an urban center.

That’s the difference between states that act as terrorists and those that sometimes have to cause loss of life with deep regret. The former, such as Iran, not only sponsor outright terrorism of various kinds, but deliberately expose their civilian populations to harm, counting on the reluctance of countries such as the US or Israel to harm innocent civilians. All the while, Iran continues to castigate those states for being bloodthirsty villains. Clearly, the mullahs don’t believe their own rhetoric.

States, such as the US will indeed act in self-defense if they see no alternative. But the consequences of killing civilians in this way is likely to be further condemnation from the international community–not towards those who deliberately place the civilians in harm’s way, but towards those in the unenviable position of having made the terrible decision to bomb the facilities anyway.

As I said, those mullahs aren’t dumb.

The world wakes up to Iran?

The New Neo Posted on by

If I don’t write all that often on Iran, it’s certainly not due to a lack of concern about what’s happening there. Au contraire; I believe Iran is of extreme importance and danger to the world. It’s just that we all have our specialties, and others are covering Iran far better than I.

Recently the situation there has been escalating, both in pronouncements (see this and this, as well as this), and now, of course, in action: Iran’s bold and brazen breaking of the nuclear seals.

I wrote back here that I hoped Europe was at least beginning to awaken to the danger. And now someone who knows far more about Iran than I, Dr. Zin of the blog Regime Change Iran, seems to share that opinion.

If you haven’t ever seen his blog, now might be an excellent time to take a look. Recently Dr. Zin wrote: “As the world awakens, [there are] signs the regime may be fracturing as it prepares for a confrontation–Iran breaks the seals and the world wakes up.””

Would that it were true–the “world waking up” part, that is.

Unfortunately, I’m afraid that if it is waking, it’s waking to a nightmare that has been allowed to build for way too long, and one with no easy solution. One thing of which I’m relatively certain: mere words of condemnation are not going to cut it with Iran. This is a moment when a plan and true international cooperation–with teeth–is needed.

Follow Dr. Zin’s links and see if you thing such cooperation is likely.

In closing, I’ll take some liberties with the final lines of Yeats’s wonderful poem “The Second Coming”, and alter it a bit:

…vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Tehran to be born?

[ADDENDUM: Austin Bay discusses what’s to be done about Iran, with links.]

Another Haj stampede

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems to be an almost inevitable part of the ritual of the Haj, despite all the efforts (and they’ve been considerable) of the Saudi government to prevent it: a stampede that kills large numbers of pilgrims.

I wrote this post back in September on the subject of stampedes. The following words are as relevant today as they were then:

On analysis, it turns out there are three main categories of venues that would appear to favor stampedes: the soccer stadium (or other large sporting event); the crowded nightclub in which a fire breaks out; and the religious pilgrimage. They all share the characteristics of having very large and moving groups of people packed into a restricted space…

The situation, as far as I can determine, is a bit analogous to the elements that go into a tsunami, strangely enough. That is, a huge and extremely powerful force (in the case of crowds, the moving people; in the case of tsunamis, the moving water) is initially spread out horizontally. Then, some sort of blockage impedes that horizontal movement and converts it, at least partially, into a vertical one…

It’s no accident, either, that [this] stampede occurred on a bridge. Any sort of bottleneck or narrow passage through which the crowd must funnel itself represents a grave danger, because it potentially impedes that flow of horizontal movement.

As soon as I read the details of the present stampede, I suspected it had occurred on the very Saudi bridge that had been featured in my earlier post, here:

This website…is an example of a firm that specializes in…consulting with groups around the world to prevent similar disasters. For example, they were hired by the Saudis to supervise this year’s Haj (in particular, they redesigned a certain bridge over which the crowd needed to pass). They seem to have been successful because, unlike some earlier Hajs, this one apparently went off without a hitch.

Unfortunately, this year was not so lucky. Despite an extensive redesign of the bridge and new rules to expand the hours people can participate (the latter negated by fundamentalist Wahabi clerics, however) 345 people are now tragically dead.

Manics, writers, and bloggers

The New Neo Posted on by

Back when I was a young mother in my early thirties, still looking to “find myself” careerwise, I hauled myself down to Boston to the Johnson O’Connor Foundation, which was housed in a beautiful old brownstone on Beacon Avenue. There they gave me a rigorous two-day series of aptitude tests. These tests were like nothing I’d ever taken before; some were so esoteric and arcane I couldn’t figure out what they were testing for.

I’d always been a good student, and I was used to acing tests. But when I was given the results of these, I was told my score profile was rather strange. They felt that this explained the fact that I’d been exploring a lot of different paths but hadn’t caught on with any one thing yet. And the career I was most perfectly suited for, according to the folks at Johnson-O’Connor, was–of all things–designing opera houses. I didn’t quite know what to do with that information.

Mine was considered a difficult profile because I had quite a number of competing interests and aptitudes above the 90th percentile, and also some extremely low ones below the tenth. I had very few scores in-between. In particular, I scored in the 99th percentile on something they called “ideophoria,” which they defined as the generation of ideas at a fast clip. I scored in the 5th percentile or so on something they called “foresight,” which they described as the ability to plan, step by step, how to reach a goal. So their description of me was that I could rapidly generate ideas without a clue as to how to implement them, and as fast as I could think of solutions to a problem, I could think of reasons why those solutions wouldn’t work.

Unfortunately, I could identify somewhat with this, although I still am not sure whether the tests themselves were all that valid. For example, the test for “ideaphoria” was simply to write fast on an assigned topic, to churn out the verbiage at as speedy a clip as possible. The test for “foresight” was to name as many things as you could possibly see in a certain little indeterminate squiggle. This task utterly bored me; I think I came up with three half-hearted answers and then gave up.

When I first started blogging, many long years hence, it occurred to me that that ideophoria business might have been correct after all, and it may in fact be something all bloggers share.

The other day I thought of it again when I was thumbing through the book Exuberance: the passion for life, by Kay Redfield Jamison. I had come across the following passage, comparing and contrasting the thought processes of manics and writers:

Creative and manic thinking are both distinguished by fluidity and by the capacity to combine ideas in ways that form new and original connections. Thinking in both tends to be divergent in nature, less goal-bound, and more likely to leap about or wander in a variety of directions. Diffuse, diverse, and leapfrogging ideas were first noted thousands of years ago as one of the hallmarks of manic thought. More recently, the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler observed: “The thinking of the manic is flighty. He jumps by by-paths from one subject to another…With this the ideas run along very easily…Because of the more rapid flow of ideas, and especially because of the falling-off of inhibitions, artistic activities are facilitated even though something worthwhile is produced only in very mild cases and when the patient is otherwise talented in this direction.”…

Both individuals who are manic and those who are writers, when evaluated with neuropsychological tests, tend to combine ideas or images in a way that “blurs, broadens, or shifts conceptual boundaries,” a type of thinking known as conceptual overinclusiveness. They vary in this from normal subjects and from patients with schizophrenia. Researchers at the University of Iowa, for example, have shown that “both writers and manics tend to sort in large groups, change dimensions while in the process of sorting, arbitrarily change starting points, or use vaguely distantly related concepts as categorizing principles.” The writers are better able than the manics to maintain control over their patterns of thinking, however, and to use “controlled flights of fancy” rather than the more bizarre sorting systems used by the patients.

The second paragraph put me in mind of bloggers, who are of course writers first and foremost. Odd and unusual associations, a different way of combining ideas and images; yes, these seem to be the hallmark of bloggers. They also have a tendency to be a bit frenetic, mentally speaking. This was evident at the Pajamas Media meetup, and there were quite a few jokes tossed around about having mild touches of OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), although no one mentioned mania. And, all in all, I noticed that the bloggers did seem to be a rather exuberant bunch, although there was no dancing on the tables.

A while back, Ann Althouse discussed a related phenomenon when she linked to this article on bloggers’ brains by Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide:

Blogging can be a powerful promoter of creative, intuitive, and associational thinking.

To remain popular with readers, blogs must be updated frequently. This constant demand for output promotes a kind of spontaneity and ‘raw thinking’–the fleeting associations and the occasional outlandish ideas–seldom found in more formal media. (Fortunately, the permanence and easily searchable nature of archived posts helps maintain some sense of decorum.) Blogging technology itself fosters this kind of spontaneity, since blogging updates can be posted with just a few clicks whenever a new thought or interesting Internet tidbit is found. Blogging is ideally suited to follow the plan for promoting creativity advocated by pioneering molecular biologist Max Delbruck. Delbruck’s “Principle of Limited Sloppiness” states we should be sloppy enough so that unexpected things can happen, but not so sloppy that we can’t find out that it did. Raw, spontaneous, associational thinking has also been advocated by many creativity experts, including the brilliant mathematician Henri Poincare who recommended writing without much thought at times “to awaken some association of ideas.”

Hmmm—writing without much thought. I’m not sure that’s the goal; it doesn’t sound too desirable, does it? But the sheer volume of output necessary with blogging, the need to post very frequently, does mean that we must write–if not thoughtlessly–then quickly and unhesitatingly. In fact, I think the hallmark of bloggers is the ability to come up with a wide variety of ideas per hour (iph).

My home, my car, my purse, my countertops, my drawers–all are littered with little scraps of paper on which are written sentence fragments, notes for posts I haven’t written yet. My guess is that that is true of most bloggers. The generation of ideas is probably relatively easy for them. It’s finding the good ones, and fleshing them out with thoughts and well-reasoned argument, as well as doing the research that backs it all up, that’s the hard part. But for bloggers, it’s satisfying work.

Robert Frost quotations

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, Churchill or Orwell he’s not.

But Robert Frost isn’t too bad with the quotations, either–even some political ones (see here and here.)

I never dared to be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.

A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.

Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.

One aged man – one man – can’t fill a house.

A mind in the first throes of change?

The New Neo Posted on by

Via Dymphna at Gates of Vienna, I came across this article by one Jonathan Freedland, a writer for the Guardian.

Jonathan Freedland is what Norm Geras might call a “principled leftist”–at least, Freedland sounds like one. In the essay, he is struggling mightily with something he calls “heresy,” the idea that Bush might have been right about certain things:

For a left liberal like me, it is not easy to commit heresy. After all, we are meant to be open-minded free thinkers, unshackled by taboos. Nevertheless there is one thought so heretical, merely to utter it would ensure instant excommunication. I hesitate even to pose it as a question. But here goes. What if George W Bush was to prove to be one of the great American presidents?…

Today’s conventional wisdom, taking in every foreign ministry in the world ”“ including most of the US State Department ”“ holds that Operation Enduring Iraqi Freedom has been a tragedy of errors. Based on faulty premises, disingenuously sold and incompetently planned, the mission of 2003 is widely regarded as an abject failure.

But the future may not see it that way. The war removed one of the most hated tyrants of modern times, shifting Saddam Hussein from a palace to a prison cell. Couple that with the toppling of the Taliban, a regime of cruelty and brutal philistinism, and Bush’s defenders have a powerful opening argument.

Next, they can point further afield. For didn’t the war in Iraq, admittedly prosecuted at a high and bloody price, not set in train a wider series of events. Note Libya’s rapid decision to come clean…

Lebanon is the clearest example, with its Cedar Revolution leading to an outburst of people power on the streets of Beirut ”“ and the ejection of the Syrian occupier. Tentative moves toward electoral democracy have followed in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait and Bahrain. Even Syria seems, grudgingly, to understand that it lives in a changed region and that it too will have to adapt…

Yes, there are contradictions and hypocrisies, but that shift represents a break from at least 60 years of US foreign policy ”“ and in the right direction. If Washington was to honour this ideal, articulated well by Bush, then the world would be a better place…

…change will eventually come to the Middle East, just as it came, eventually, to Eastern Europe. And, when it does, it is at least conceivable that the man future generations will credit as the pioneer will be none other than George W Bush.

Freedland’s essay is a good example, I think, of a mind in the first throes of change. The tone is a bit wobbly–well-intentioned but rather stunned. He’s almost shocked to find himself saying these things (ah! I remember those feelings well).

Freedland doesn’t explain exactly how he got from there to here, but I wish him luck on the rest of his journey–assuming there is a “rest.”

I don’t for a minute doubt his sincerity in wanting freedom to come to the Middle East; I also don’t doubt his extreme reluctance to credit it to Bush. But, when push comes to shove, Freedland is to be commended for desiring the former, even if it comes with the crow-eating humiliation–the heresy–of the latter.