Empowered Dialogue
What happens when the words of the people have real power? In an Obvious
Society, that
will be the case, though we'll need to realize that the words of any one
of us have as little interest for most of us as our office webcam. We will
surely listen better. We're already seeing that effect
with blogs, where the dialogue is so much more
reasonable
than in the media circus.
In an Obvious Society, just as we'll feel constrained
from stealing, lying and bullying, we'll
be
more
balanced
in our
rants,
since a conversation without respect, patience and nuance is just a variant
on road rage. If we are to rise above whining about each others' stupidity,
we have to acknowledge each other's core starting points as valid. You know—war
vs. no war; profiling vs. not; right to choose vs. not; marijuana vs. not;
etc.
I came across a couple of interesting essays last week. They
deserve more than just a link, so please indulge me. They forced me to think
through
some realities I had not truly dealt with before. Let me know if any of this
is illogical.
- Any
one of us is less likely to be hurt by terrorism than we are likely to win
the lottery.
- But some of us will win a lottery this year.
- We're not in a war but we are in a street
fight, with guys who will die to bloody our nose.
- An unacceptable number of
us will be killed by terrorism in the next couple
of years.
- If we don't occupy Iraq now, the body count goes up—not because
that's where the terrorists are, but because we will not have been forceful
enough to do so and silence the Arab machismo affect.
John Perry Barlow, acting
counter to type, sounds like his own Op-Ed contributor
describing the way Dick Cheney's mind works, and wondering if the crazy guys
in the White
House may know what they're doing. Ming is
similarly uncomfortable with the means vs.ends issues here:
Sympathy for the Devil
I remember a time years ago when I was as convinced that Dick Cheney
was obscenely wrong about something as I am now. Subsequent events
raised the possibility that he might not have been so wrong after all...
I once
knew Cheney pretty well. I helped him get elected to his first public office
as Wyoming's lone congressman. I conspired with him on the right side of
environmental issues...
With the possible exception of Bill Gates, Dick
Cheney is the
smartest man I've ever met. If you get into a dispute with him, he
will take you on a devastatingly brief tour of all the weak points in
your argument. But he is a careful listener and not at all the
ideologue he appears at this distance. I believe he is personally
indifferent to greed. In the final analysis, this may simply be about
oil, but I doubt that Dick sees it that way. I am relatively certain
that he is acting in the service of principles to which he has
devoted megawatts of a kind of thought that is unimpeded by sentiment
or other emotional overhead...
[There's a] technique I once used
to avoid being run off the road by Mexican bus drivers, back when
their roads were narrower and their bus drivers even more macho.
Whenever I saw a bus barrelling down the centerline at me, I would
start driving unpredictably, weaving from shoulder to shoulder as
though muy borracho. As soon as I started to radiate dangerously low
regard for my own preservation, the bus would slow down and move over.
As it turned out, this is more or less what Cheney and his phalanx of
Big Stategic Thinkers were doing [in 1982], if one imagined the
Soviet Union as
a speeding Mexican bus. They were determined to project such a vision
of implacable, irrational lethality that the Soviet leaders would
decide to capitulate rather than risk universal annihilation. It worked.
While I think that rock 'n roll and
the systemic failures
of central planning had as much to do with the collapse of communism
as did Dick's mad [Mutually Assured Destruction] gamble,
I have to confess that, by 1990, Cheney didn't look quite so nuts to me
after
all. The MX, along with Star Wars and
Reagan's terrifying rhetoric, had been all along a weapon for waging
psychological rather than nuclear warfare.
I'm starting to wonder if we
aren't watching something like the
same strategy again. In other words, it's possible Cheney and company
are actually bluffing. This time, instead of trying to terrify the
Soviets into collapse, the objective is even grander. If I'm right
about this, they have two goals. Neither involves actual war, any
more than the MX missile did.
First, they seek to scare Saddam Hussein into
voluntarily turning his
country over to the U.S. and choosing safe exile or, failing that,
they want to convince the Iraqi people that it's safer to attempt his
overthrow or assassination than to endure an invasion by American ground
troops.
Second, they are trying to convince every other nation on the planet
that the United States is the Mother of All Rogue States, run by mad thugs
in possession of 15,000 nuclear warheads they are willing
to
use and spending, as they already are, more on death-making capacity
than all the other countries on the planet combined. In other words,
they want the rest of the world to think that we are the ultimate
weaving driver. Not to be trusted, but certainly not to be messed
with either...
If one takes the view that war is worse than tyranny and that the
latter doesn't necessarily beget the former, there is a case to be
made for global despotism. That case is unfortunately stronger, in
the light of history, than the proposition that nations will coexist
peacefully if we all try really, really hard to be nice to each other.
It is certainly unlikely at the moment that geopolitical stability
can be achieved by the formation of some new detente like the one
that terrified us into peace during the Cold War...
If I were in charge, this is neither the flavor of peace I would
prefer nor the way I would achieve it. But if I'd been in charge back
in 1983, there might still be a Soviet Union and we might all still
be waiting for the world to end in fifteen nuclear minutes.
Of course, I could be completely wrong about this. Maybe they
actually are possessed of a madness to which there is no method.
Maybe they really do intend to invade Iraq and for no more noble
reason than giving American SUVs another 50 years of cheap gas.
We'll probably know which it's going to be sometime in the next
fortnight.
By then, I expect to be dancing in Brazil, far from this heart
of
darkness and closer to the heart itself.
Now that's an astonishing post by our Chief
Cognitive Dissident, whom we expect to oppose every grasping move by
the greatest empire in the history of empires. It's
nuanced, which you expect from Barlow, and shares some
personal
insight into one of the world's chief players. Unlike most of us, Barlow
has a voice that's heard, as might most of us in an Obvious Society with
empowered dialogue.
One thing's for sure, the Cheney et. al. strategy resonates with the
teachings of biology in general and Howard Bloom in particular. In The
Lucifer Principle (1995), Bloom introduced us to superorganisms
and how unprincipled they are in rising up the pecking order. (You and I and
companies and nations are superorganisms). In Global
Brain, he teaches us that the growth
of a superorganism—its only purpose—increases when its members
are richly interconnected. Bloom's lesson is that warfare, rape and torture
will
continue as long as the
superorganisms (or just
its leader!) believe they even might make a move up the pecking
order. When the option for pecking order advancement is removed, peace reigns
in the chicken coop, baboon troop or United Nations.
Then comes the problem
of reigning in the snarly bastard ruling the roost. Barlow calls this
"the Divine right of thugs."
The blogging community is almost as tightly connected as Japanese schoolgirls.
Clearly the third world is not. Third world machismo regards westerners as
wimps. Arab males of the alpha, bravo, etc.stripe are guys who
act with force and confidence in
the world, silencing dialogue with brutality and administering a code of justice
frozen
in
the sixth
century. Revenge and unbridled world rage gives them a sense of purpose. They
hold no political power nor are they connected to any significant cultural
decision-making, but they have the power of life, death and genital mutilation
over their families. They (and many NRA members) pity the weak,
hollowed-out American male, forced to
live
in a
world
of subtle forces and endless compromises. These men bully their wives and families
and neighbors. They may be no more the Arab male majority than are
America's assault weapons owners, but they are in charge of the Arab
dialogue.
These are the people who hate the way of life beaming in on them from the
Running Dog Satellite Service,. They will do anything to stop it and for them
any day
is
a good day to die, for that is the manly thing to do. If you've ever felt road
rage welling up in your chest, you know how these guys feel all the time.
My next insight came from the Christian Science Monitor, another
reliable voice for peace and progressive values:
If antiwar protesters succeed
[Ed: To publish an unsigned
opinion piece is an exception to the Monitor's policy. But the views
expressed here, if put with a name, could endanger the
writer's extended family in Baghdad. The author - known to Monitor
staff - was born and raised in Iraq. Now a US citizen with a business
that
requires extensive world travel, the author is in frequent touch
with the Iraqi diaspora but is not connected with organized opposition
to
Saddam Hussein.]
Since Amr Moussa, the secretary-general of the Arab League,
started warning that a US invasion of Iraq would "open the gates
of hell," the
retort that has been flying around Iraqi exiles' websites is, "Good!
We'd like to get out!"
It got me wondering: What if you antiwar protesters
and politicians succeed in stopping a US-led war to change the regime in
Baghdad? What then will
you do?
Will you also demonstrate and demand "peaceful" actions
to cure the abysmal human rights violations of the Iraqi people under the
rule of
Saddam Hussein?
Or, will you simply forget about us Iraqis once you discredit George
W. Bush?
Will you demand that the United Nations send human rights inspectors
to Iraq? Or are you only interested in weapons of "mass destruction" inspections,
not of "mass torture" practices?
Will you also insist that such
human rights inspectors be given time to discover Hussein's secret prisons
and coercion as you do for the weapons
inspectors?
Or will you simply accept a "clean bill of health" if you can't
find the thousands of buried corpses?
Will you pressure your own countries
to host millions more Iraqi refugees (estimated now at 4 million) fleeing
Hussein's brutality?Or will you prefer
they stay in bondage?
Will you vigorously demand an international tribunal
to indict Hussein's regime for crimes against humanity? Or will you simply
dismiss him as "another" dictator
of a "sovereign" country?
Will you question why Hussein builds
lavish palaces while his people are suffering? Or will you simply blame
it all on UN sanctions and US "hegemony?"
Will you decry the hypocritical oil and arms commerce of France, Germany,
Russia, and China with the butcher of Baghdad? Or are you only against
US interests in Iraqi oil?
Will you expose ethnic cleansing of native Iraqi
non-Arabs (Kurds, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Turkomens), non-Sunni-Muslims (Shiite),
and non-Muslims (Christians,
Mandaens, Yezidis)? Or are these not equivalent to the cleansing
of Bosnians and Kosovars?
Will you show concern about the brutal silencing of the "Iraqi
street"?
Or are you only worried about the orchestrated noises of "Arab and
Islamist streets" outside Iraq?
Will you hear the cries of Iraqis
executed in acid tanks in Baghdad? the Iraqi women raped in front of
their husbands and fathers to extract confessions?
Or of children tortured in front of their parents? Or of families billed
for the bullets used to execute military "deserters" in front
of their own homes?
No. I suspect that most of you will simply retire to
your cappuccino cafes
to brainstorm the next hot topic to protest, and that you will simply
forget about us Iraqis, once you succeed in discrediting President Bush.
Please,
prove me wrong.
Different Voices, Identical Threats
In the fall of 1967, I was flying C-130s in Viet Nam and my fiancée
was marching for peace in Washington. We didn't see that as a conflict—more
like covering both sides of the story. Nor did we feel any tension around this.
I was there because I was expected to be there, and, having been born in 1942,
I had grown up with the expectation of military service. She marched because
our generation was working out a new voice and that view had to be sent
to the
politicians.
Empowered dialogue takes opposing viewpoints seriously. Though near zero,
let's assume that there are threats that need to be faced and wars that need
to be fought. It's difficult for me to even type those words, so don't assume
I present that
lightly.
Opponents of this war need
to acknowledge the need for the rare war when you cannot accept the continuing
threat of attack. The acknowledgement makes for a nuanced conversation.
People who revere their inner child must also respect their inner demon.
As Deepak
Chopra says, the inner dialogue is the saint and the sinner comparing notes.
Warhawks need to acknowledge the possibility that there are times when we
shouldn't project our power on others, even when they hold wildly different
views. They have to stop thinking like missionaries in order to hold a nuanced
conversation, which should not be avoided just because it's more difficult
than fighting.
Let's be clear. We will establish the Pax Americana,
as Jay Bookman wrote in
the Atlantic Journal-Constitution last September. With luck, we'll do it with
no more than a fright display, as John Perry Barlow
suggests and upon which the animal kingdom relies to keep the peace. If we
don't colonize Iraq now, we will surely do it after the next terrorist attack,
and
we'll
be a lot more belligerent then. The reason we will colonize
Iraq is that we're in a street fight that won't stop until we put an end to
it.
It doesn't matter
that the terrorists aren't in Iraq. The terrorists are watching what happens
in Iraq to gauge where and how to attack again.
In a sense, we're like Wal-Mart looking to expand our western heritage franchise.
We believe deeply in our franchise and we feel threatened by the the band
of militant little retailers out there who have resorted to assassinating our
clerks. We believe
they will continue to do so until we intimidate them as they were before we
opened the store at the edge of town. As a superorganism, we really have no
choice. We'll grow or shrink. If we start to shrink, we'll be attacked more
and more because we'll be more attackable. These are the facts of life on earth,
from bacteria colony through super power. If you don't believe it, read
the book.
So what's the hope for we members of the splinter group that believes humanity
can rise above war? First we have to extricate ourselves from
the back alley brawl with this hopped-up kid with a knife. We'd rather not,
but we'll have to use those expensive karate lessons to disable him and then
get on with spreading the meme that violence is unnecessary. We may have to
go
to
a lot
of City Council meetings to hire more cops, change the zoning rules and get
the scumbag owner of that sleazy bar run out of town. It's not their tatoos
we hate, it's the lunatic fringe with the same tattoos as the rest, and everyone
attacking us has the same tattoo.
And we also have to stay up nights re-wiring our economy so there are more
opportunities for kids like these. Too bad there's no hope for these gang members,
though.
2:40:29 PM 
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