PANDORA'S BOX

As state vs. state conflict increasingly becomes an historical outlier (which should still be guarded against, but done so with a cold eye to the costs), it is being replaced by a form of sub-state warfare that is much more confusing and complex. Despite this complexity, there are those that would wrongly boil down the emerging conflict into good vs. evil narratives. Here's an intellectual antidote.

The Keys to Pandora's Box

The onrush of globalization and a weakening of the nation-state (across a wide variety of measures) has unlocked Pandora's box. A plethora of violent groups, derived from an equally diverse set of primary loyalties (the sources of group loyalty that are more powerful than loyalties to the state), have emerged. Many of these groups utilize old pre-Westphalian motivations for warfare, although some motivations are being shoehorned into new synthetic models. Regardless, these motivations derive from the following:

• Guerrilla Economics. Everyone is now in competition with everyone else, without regard to the borders of the melted global map. Further, most nation-states have found themselves unable to mitigate the effects of rapid cycles of global economic destruction/creation. As a result, an increasing number of people have turned to primary loyalties for succor. Many of these groups have opted for "black globalization" (the $3 trillion dollar transnational criminal economy) as a means of advancement. This path has put these groups on a collision course with nation-states. We've seen this from Nigeria to Brazil.
  
  
• Toxic ideas. When western European colonists arrived on the shores of previously isolated locations, they often carried many afflictions to which they had immunity (a product of a large and diverse population). The result was devastating to local populations since they didn't share this immunity. A reprise of this process is underway within the world of ideas. Ideas (or Richard Dawkins' memes) for which we have a certain degree of immunity to -- from alcohol to pornography to divorce to gambling to irreverence... -- in the developed world can be toxic to those populations that are now exposed by globalization. The result is a violent reaction as people turn to primary loyalties for protection. For an excellent primer on this, please watch a short video by the philosopher Dan Dennett (at TED). We've seen this from Thailand to Algeria.
  
  
• Disruptions. The motivations of the previous two categories can be accelerated by shocks to the global system. These shocks include the unintentionally self-inflicted like regime change/nation-building or intentional like terrorism that targets systems. Others include those that we don't control: from economic dislocations caused by malfunctions/non-linearity in the global marketplace (energy shocks to financial panics) to pandemics to natural disasters. The list goes on. In each of these situations, the shock causes a return to primary loyalties for safety (we will see much more of this as uncontrolled global systems go non-linear, exacerbated by our unwillingness to adopt dampening strategies such as resilient communities).

Comments

[Charles Cameron (hipbone)]

The Dennett video is an absolute gem. Many thanks for the pointer.

[Duncan Kinder]

The question arises: How to develop antibodies to toxic ideas.

It seems that the Taoist conception of the "uncarv3d block" would be an antidote to the problem Dennett describes. Zen Buddhism, as is well known, is quite similar.

Within the Western tradition, Diogenes and the Cynics seem to have played a similar roles - as have the Holy Fools of Eastern Christiandom.

I understand there is a Hindu analogue to this, about which I know little. Within Islam, many Sufi's play this role - see particularly the tales of Nasrudin.

[Kim McD]

Most ideas are toxic and offer food for thought. We would be wise to sublate them by putting them into rigorous psychological differentiation as Wolfgang Giegerich does. His Technology and the Soul shows this working.

Somewhat like fermenting food stuffs to enable nourishment, a culturing process both literal and figurative...

[Duncan Kinder]

Nickolas Kristof in the NYT writes an article about "bleeding heart evangelicals."

While Kristof's main thrust is that considering them should influence the Democratic nomination, a topic almost entirely irrelevant to the point of this blog - and one we certainly do not want to discuss here - there is another point to be found in Kristof's materials that does interest us.

Kristof portrays Evangelicals as engaged in transnational relief work of various sorts.
E.g. "In parts of Africa where bandits and warlords shoot or rape anything that moves, you often find that the only groups still operating are Doctors Without Borders and religious aid workers: crazy doctors and crazy Christians. In the town of Rutshuru in war-ravaged Congo, I found starving children, raped widows and shellshocked survivors. And there was a determined Catholic nun from Poland, serenely running a church clinic."
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/opinion/03kristof.html?ref=opinion

This is the sort of order that is emerging, on an ad hoc, almost subconscious, level and which can be ascertained amongst the points that Kristof is making.