Posts Tagged ‘emerging’

Guilty innocents

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

I have been watching Peace is Peace is every step by Thick Nhan Hanh on YouTube. The video takes about an hour, it is not very good quality, but I was stunned and moved and kept watching the full 52 minutes. (If you click the link above you will get to it. I recommend all to watch this).

Why was I moved so much? There is quite a lot to tell about. The whole idea: a bunch of Vietnam veterans, oldies now, but rough. You see these rough guys doing exercises with Thich Nhan Hahn like a bunch of softies. One explains that he was in Nam at the age of 17 and had been responsible (his words) of killing more than 50 before the age of 18. This part is tearing me apart, having a son of 18. All this was moving.

But maybe more than that I was moved and intrigued by Thich Nhan’s speech. Both the words and the tone of his voice. Let me start with the latter. We hear speaking a man that suffered the Vietnam war as a victim. As a Zen monk he had chosen to fight for peace and not to choose the side of one of the two parties in war. As a consequence he has never been able to live in Vietnam, even after the war, because he was felt as a traitor. And you hear no remorse, no hate, no frustration in his voice. This in itself is an act of peace. A deliberate chosen one, because it is clear that his life was dedicated to fight for peace. His choice is to live peace as an act of life, every moment. This moved me even more, after reading the daily on the middle east conflict. You know this conflict has been going on for a long time, and that an awful lot of suffering is going on. If you see how devastated the Vietnam Veterans are and how they struggle now, decades after having been there to find peace in themselves, you know that there wil have to be done a lot of healing in the future.

This about the tone of voice, now the words. These where fascinating, both in an theoretical and practical sense. I can’t quote literary (again: watch the video!). But in essence he speaks to those feeling guilty about the killing they have done. He says: why do you take all the guilt for this? You where not there on your own. You were send by a president. The president was chosen by the people. You were the hands, but are the hands guilty alone? The interesting about this argument is that it is correct. America is an abstract phenomenon, consisting of several hundreds of million people, interrelated in a complex way. From all of their individual thinking, feeling and acting, based on a history of thinking, feeling and acting, within a wider context of the world, emerged this war. This is an insight, worthy pondering on. War as an emergent property. The way a highly structured and intelligent colony emerges from the individual, stupid ants. The way (the illusion of a) consciousness emerges from a relatively a little bit of grey matter with quite a large amount of interconnected cells . A big mass of little interactions, sum up to a new degree of abstraction, creating its own laws. Maybe each of the ‘little’ interactions is understandable: fear for being taken over by communists, regret about losing a highly profitable country, seeing movies about heroic soldiers and wanting to join that romantic lot, the need to earn your money, the stories about your father having rescued Europe from the Germans, the need to act as a president. Apart from that there are without doubt all of the real bad intentions of a few. And all together, this blends into something terrible, with its own laws and it can’t be stopped. (Well, it stopped eventually, but at what costs? And how much sorrow, grieve, remorse, hatred and pain is still there? I mean, even the mines haven’t been all moved away, the war still has its victims more than 30 years after it was ended).

This was exactly my point in my blog about ‘The benevolents’. It is creepy to see how atrocities can emerge from a bunch of people that are all on there own (or at least most of them) not of bad intention. (by the way, I stopped reading it. I still think it is a brilliant book but it is too much tot digest).

The argument is extra interesting since it has been misused after the 2nd world war. War criminals tried to hide behind it. They used it to mask there misdeeds and get away with it. For this reason there has been a long ban on the argument. Saying ‘i didn’t know’ ‘I was acting in commission’ are suspect.

Apparently the same argument can be valid and invalid in different contexts, depending on the intention it is used. The context of Thich Nhan Hanh is consolation, with the intention to take away or at least diminish the negative energy created by the feelings of guild of boys who where sent to Vietnam and put in a situation where normal man start to kill. As a means of defence. As a means of wrath, and probably in the end – as the mind gets dumb – out of fun or boredom or whatever stupid reason. Even if they went there voluntary, they could not be blamed for this alone. But Thich Nhan Hanh goes further. He says: do not take a grunge against those who send you. The leaders could have been victims of ignorance. Maybe if they knew how bad war is, they would have refrained. This is debatable, because I think they did know or at least could have known, but probably put it out of their minds. But I get his intention. If it is true that war is an emergent property of the complex system called ’society’, then it is useless to spend your energy trying to find the guilty ones. As a victims of war (as he calls the veterans) you should better spend your energy for more positive things, trying to get war, guild and hate out of your system, maybe do something positive. As his advice to one soldier who suffered from his responsability of the death of 5 children (in an ambush meant for soldiers). His advice: 40.000 children die each day right now. You can save 5 children today. Why spend you life time in regret about the children who died 30 years ago?

So if the argument ‘you were not responsible alone, you were part of a system’ is used to console, it is all right. If it is used to escape, it is not so right. Because it might be so that all of the players within the systems are so to speak ‘victims’, this does not take away all personal responsiblity. Thich Nhan doesn’t claim it does. He didn’t say ‘why do you feel guilty’, he said ‘why do you take all the guilt on your shoulders’. Here we are at an extremely interesting field, highly ambiguous. There are no right or wrong answers here. If this whole idea of war as an emergent property is right we are all responsible for all that happens. Because we all function in the system called ’society’.

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The origin of ideas

Monday, January 12th, 2009

In february 2009 it will have been 200 years ago Charles Darwin was born. In NRC – a Dutch Daily – a science section was dedicated to this man. Although his theory is widely accepted scientifically it is still hard to grasp his ideas. Especially the idea of unintended change is extremely hard to get. Over and over you see in argumentation that the idea of evolution as striving to a goal, is popping up. We as a human race tend to think backward. We have the illusion that all of the events that lead to the state we are in, are deliberate steps leading towards this state. That is because we think in stories, and in the story lines we are constantly looking for meaning, a plan. I think this is because a meaning and a plan we can understand, and what we can understand we can control in one way or another. This is why the idea of ‘intelligent design’ is so much more easy to understand then the idea of natural selection without any purpose.

For me it took reading ‘the blind watchmaker’ from Richard Dawkins to really grasp this idea of unintended progress, without any plan or preconceived idea. Every next step in evolution as an emerging trend, the consequence of many interactions over a long time. It is apparent that we do have a problem to intuitively understand how complexity can grow out of ’simple laws’. But it is obvious that complexity does always emerge from simple interactions, such as weather systems with extremely high complexity arising from simple interactions between gas molecules.

Dawkins tried to apply the idea of natural selection to our thinking, introducing the concept of ‘memes‘ as the ‘genes of ideas and thinking’. I wonder if we really would need this ‘memes’ concept as a mechanism of how selection could work in ideas.  I feel that it is possible to conceive other ’simple’ mechanisms than these mysterious  ‘memes’ to account for a natural selection within the thought world. Some interactions are extremely simple: I remember reading Montaillou from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, describing in detail the way the religious ideas spread in this village. What really struck me was the simple explanation: you got ‘infected’ by the new religion by just hearing it from someone you new. It was quite simple to track down the current of the idea by understanding ‘who knew who’ and ‘who met who’. The conviction outcome was like a function of ‘meeting’.

Gladwell dived deeper into this in ‘the tipping point‘, using three simple basic laws as explanation of how ideas spread: the law of the few, the stickyness factor and the power of context. The only law really ‘explaining’  is the law of the few. This law describes in detail different ‘modes’ of infection of ideas by accounting for different kind of persons who spread the ideas. The other two are not really ’simple laws’ . As interesting as they are they are more a description of the the problem than an explanation to the spread of ideas.

Take for instance the ’stickyness factor’. Some ideas seem to have more sticking power than others. This law asks for an explanation. Why is the one idea more sticky than the othert? Why was the sticking power of the religious ideas spread in Montaillou so sticky?

I think the ‘Origin of ideas’, with an explanation of a process that steers the idea evolution would be an important next step in science.

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Pragmatics & maths in atrocities

Monday, December 15th, 2008

Currently reading Jonathan Littels novel ‘the kindly ones’ (written in french as ‘les bienveillantes’). The spooky thing about this novel is that you get a view from the second war atrocaties from the inside. And what you see is not as much the perspective you would have expected. What you get is the basics, the day-to-day aspect of it. So to say the organisational side of it. When we think about organizing killing in the scale it happened in the second world war (and as it happenes as we read or write this in other parts of the world), we think of the grand and malicious plan. Reading this books brings you in contact with the lower level organisation: the day to day decisions that lead directly to the intended result, all the smaller evils that sum up to the big evil. And the small ones are a bit more easy to perform, to understand. Here  we see the pattern of a monstrous and utterly evil act, emerging from smaller evils. Here we see again a system at work, the system that is ‘bigger’ than all of the individual parts in the system.

And the other way round. I will never forget the ‘maths’ of destruction, were Littell boils down the abstract number of death to the number of death per month, per week, per day, per hour and per minute.

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