For example Heisenberg. The uncertainty principle describes the contradiction between position/momentum and energy/time; it’s what “allows” an electron to jump past an otherwise insurmountable barrier, which is happing millions of times in the diodes in this computer; it does not allow me to walk through walls. To observe an electron, I have to change it’s state by hitting it with an other particle or wave; but I can observe the sun by opening my eyes; it is not affected by my observations in the least. I’m not trying to be pedantic; I’m trying to point out that misusing theory to give an argument a semblence of scientific basis is a form of scientism.

Similarly, people misuse Godel to undermine logic itself, rather than see its real limitations.

I’m familiar with positivism and scientism, which I think you are using as a straw man here (the critique of positivism is not a new thing, even to Marxists). I think when you imply objectivity is a male conceit you are overstating things. Sure, it can be done that way (“I’m objective, you’re hysterical”), but any kind of analysis or observation begins with objectification, by trying to step outside the thing in question. The point is not to get stuck there, and to understand that our “objectivity” is inherently limited since we can never be completely disconnected from what we observe. Anyway, for Hegel the endpoint is the unity of the subjective and the objective, which I guess is the goal of Eastern thought as well; but I digress.

On chaos, I’m trying to point out that yes, initial conditions and accumulating errors matter, but there is an opposite dynamic as well: systems that at first glance are highly random and chaotic and exhibit suprising degrees of orderliness. I think it’s unwise to only look at one side of a contradiction.

I won’t comment more on military matters, because I’m pretty ignorant. I only know Boyd through Lind’s essays, and he always seems to highlight the political and moral dimension as primary, which is why I see him as one of the few reactionaries who “gets it”. But of course his politics are 180 degrees the opposite of anything progressive.

On centralism/decentralism, I don’t have a good synthesis yet of even my own experiences; what I’m pretty sure of is that both extremes are rotten, and that not everything about D.C. is worthless. That’s trite, I know, but what I’m trying to get at is something like this: yes, I agree, here in the U.S. at this time, D.C.is not a very useful thing. But if things advance it might be the case that we need to reconsider an “improved” version of D.C. I know I’m being vague and idealist here, but it seems to me that every successful revolution has needed a center for strategizing and decision making.

Finally, my snide remark about “male bashing” is because of sentences like this, which pervade your writing:

The very idea of imposing order on “chaos” is part and parcel of Enlightenment masculinity, and the adoption of hierarchical military models for struggle organizations brings with it the culture of masculinity that is in the very fiber of military organization.

I mostly agree with the second part of the sentence, that adopting military models when it’s not appropriate (“the militarization of the party” as I was taught to say) has potentially tragic as well as comic results; but the first part about imposing order on chaos being a result of Enlightenment masculinity strikes me as gratuitious male bashing. One, nature routinely brings order out of chaos (it it didn’t we’d all be gas), and there’s nothing inherently wrong with trying to do so when appropriate. Two, it’s not inherently a male conceit to try and do so (that’s why I used the example of weeding a garden or housework — these have traditionally been viewed as women’s work, etc.) And Enlightenment masculinity? The Enlightment was revolutionary in its day but we’re way past that. I understand that excessive rationalism becomes irrational, but I don’t buy the male/female epistemology. Logic should be common ground, not a battle ground.

I think I’ll leave it there. I’m not trying to score points, believe it or not, just contribute to a useful discussion.

BH

But in any case, these connections are also made by Ilya Prigogene. Godel and Heisenberg are deployed against positivism, which is not a critique of science, but of scientism… the issue is both physical and philosophical… a breakdown of those border one might suggest, and a good thing, too. Positivism embodies within it and reproduces bourgeois and masculine assumptions that left unexamined inoculate positivism from any critque. Bourgeois masculinity is fundamentally based on a posture of disinterestedness… called objectivity, as well as a compulson for control and the taxonomies that are necessary to maintain the impression (and sometimes reality) of control. It establishes boundaries between everything that do not, strictly speaking, exist in nature; and that is not saying the same thing the post-modernists do at all. We are still acknowledging at the philospohical level that existence precedes essence, as it were. There is a material world out there; but it is as constituted by relations between things as it is by things… which certainly exist, but in a perpetual state of change, which at some level defies taxonmies. Things and relations, in the real world, are not separable from one another, and that is precisely why chaos/complexity is being developed to achieve a synthesis between the mechanical implications of Newtonianism and the free-for-all implied by quantum physics, which so disturbed Comrade Einstein.

I myself see Godel as a kind of >a href=”http://linas.org/mirrors/www.ltn.lv/2005.01.29/~podnieks/marxism.htm”>mathematical Hegelian. Boyd saw him as a reference for an infinite dynamism. As to Heisenberg, he noted that observation itself changes what one observes, no matter how small the change. This is most assuredly NOT limited to the study of particles, but operates in our daily lives with absolute consistency. The relation to the Butterfly Effect (which is Boy’s quote) is a premise of chaos theory, ie, that small changes over time develop into big ones. If I am following a compass azimuth overland, and I deviate one degree, a distance traveled of one kilometer is not terribly signficant. If I deviate one degree for one thousand meters, then I have gone quite badly astray.

The question of centralism is where and what to centralize. A suggested alternative to Lenin’s formulaton was provided. No doubt military formations growing out of political ones will have a strong element of centralism. The various resistance force in Iraq are also centralized, but they are so numerous, and some so small, that they have greater (reference Boyd here) tactical agility. The problem with regard to the value of individual initiative is that the larger and more politically embedded military organization cannot afford to allow too much initiative, because of political outcomes… like Haditha or Qana, as two wretched examples. Scale matters, and the existence of a state underneath the military matters overwhlemingly because of potential and highly unpredictable disruptions of interstate equilibrium. The scale of organizaton centralization needs to match the scale of the problem at hand. The problem, which you note you have experienced, with left sects is that they treat every question as if everyone’s lives depended on it, and they attempt to impose ideological conformity on the whole organization. This inevitably leads to creepy, backstabbing line-struggles, and if they are not careful, bizarre cults of personality.

On Lind and Boyd, neither was looking at war as a political activity, and therein was THEIR limitation.

Since you seem compelled to throw in a non-remark remark about male bashing, perhaps you’d like to give an example. I don’t feel bashed.

Many things jump out at me. First, the misappropriation of science; I’d say your use of three scientific principles are wrong: Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem is not just about “any logical model of reality “, it’s about the limitations of formal systems which require a meta-system to handle certain inconsistencies. A small distinction, but the way you use it undermines the value of logical models, kind of like postmodernism is said to do.

Second, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle: it only applies to the quantum scale regarding position/momentum, etc., it gets “smoothed out” at the macro level. It has nothing to do with the “butterfly effect”.

Third, the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to closed systems, not open ones. This is more relevant to your writings on energy (e.g. the Earth is not a closed system), but you seem to fetishize entropy. Anyone who’s weeded are garden or cleaned a house (not exclusively male activity, BTW) knows that “imposing” order out on chaos is a useful albeit endless task.

I’m not a chaos theory expert, but I know enough about dynamics and Lorenz attractors to know there’s a dialectic here: the most ordered systems have a tendency towards chaos, *but* highly random systems can show unexpected tendencies towards order (e.g. crystal formation, of the rings of Saturn).

I’m not trying to nitpick, it’s just that if you misuse theory you can expect your conclusions to be off.

I’ll not comment more on the gratuitous male bashing — no point preaching against the choir.

On the political front, I’ve worked with both extremely centralized DC cults (which make the RCP you quote look like rank amateurs) and the completely structureless D.A.N. post Seattle. I’d say both approaches are dysfunctional. There’s a need for synthesis.

As an exercise, compare the Iraqi resistence to Hezbollah. The IR is so decentralized it can never be crushed; but it’s also unable to stop the extreme religious sectarianism which aliented Shiites who are anti-occupation. That seems like a big weakness.

Hizbollah, by contrast, is super-centralized and highly compartmentalized. That has made it’s military wing impervious to infiltration and betrayal, and has allowed the creation of social services which give it mass support, to control corruption and make strategic descions to unite with other forces. The point is that centralism has it’s value *if* there’s wise leadership and the ability to reproduce leadership.

I’m not a military expert, but it’s seems to me that military structures, like political parties, can benefit from both centralization and independent decision making. Isn’t that what made the German officer corp so fearsome, that young officers where trained to take independent initiatives in the field? Not to praise the Nazis or anything, but Boyd’s accolyte William Lind seems to think the U.S. military was never able to achieve mobile warfare with it’s centralize strategy/tactical initiate the way the Germans did.

Isn’t a synthesis between individualism and centralism a potentially useful thing? Don’t the concepts of institutional memory and culture have some value, or the concept of “el mando nunca muere” (“the leadership never dies” school of regenerating cadre)? Doesn’t the extreme individualism of American culture and it’s reject of centralism, discipline, etc. merit some criticism?

Not to harp on disagreements, just trying to look at the flip side of the coin.

Guardian, Saturday July 29, 2006
As the shells fall around them, Hizbullah men await the Israelis
Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, south of Tyre

Inside a well-furnished apartment in a village on the outskirts of Tyre, with shelves of books piled from floor to ceiling, a black turbaned cleric and three men sit sipping bitter coffee. By the door is a pile of Kalashnikovs and ammunition boxes; handguns are tucked into the men’s trousers. The four are Hizbullah fighters, waiting for the Israelis.

“Patience is our main virtue, we can wait for days, weeks, months before we attack. The Israelis are always impatient in battle and in strategy,” says the cleric, Sayed Ali, who claims to be a descendant of the prophet. “I know them very well.”

As if to make his point, the sound of Israeli shells blasting the surrounding hills shakes the door and shutters every few minutes. Ali does know the Israelis. He started fighting them at the age of 17 when they invaded Lebanon in 1982. Three years later he was arrested with two of his comrades and spent a few months in an Israeli prison. Within weeks of his release he was fighting them again.That’s what he did for the next six years.

For the last five years he has been finishing his theology studies in Tehran. A month ago, he was asked by Hizbullah to return to southern Lebanon. He arrived a week before the fighting began.

Standing at the window, he points to the banana plantations between us and the blue Mediterranean. “I have fought for years in these groves. We used to sit and wait for them [the Israelis] to make a move and then we would hit. They always moved too quickly, too soon.”

All over the hills of south Lebanon hundreds of men like Sayed Ali and his comrades are waiting – some in bunkers, some in farm houses – for the Israeli troops to arrive. Sayed Ali and his men spend most of their time in the building where his apartment is, moving only at night.

“We stay put and we don’t move till we get our orders, and this is why we are not like any other militia. A militiaman will fire whenever he likes at whatever he likes,” explains one of the men, who says he has been involved in firing Katyusha rockets into northern Israel. “We have specific orders. Even when we fire rockets we know when and where [to fire] and each of the men manning the launchers runs to a specific hiding place after firing the rockets.”

He says Hizbullah fighters expect the site of a rocket launch to be hit by an Israeli airstrike or shell within 10 to 15 minutes.

Another of the men, who says he is Sayed Ali’s brother, explains how Hizbullah teaches its fighters patience: “During our training we spend days in empty buildings without talking to anyone or doing anything. They tell me go and sit in that building, and I go and sit there and wait.”

According to Ali, Hizbullah operates as “a state within the state”, with its own hospitals, social organisations and social security system. “But we are also an Islamic resistance movement, an indoctrinated army,” he adds. “I would go and knock the door at someone and say we need $50,000, he would give me [that] because they trust us.”

The fighting force of the organisation is divided into two: the “active” group, whose task is to serve in Hizbullah, and the reserve, or Ta’abi’a, as it is known in Arabic. The active fighters get monthly pay. The reserves are called on only in time of war, and receive bonuses but no regular pay. A third section, the Ansar, comprises people who support or are supported by the organisation.

Ali, the commander of Hizbullah in his village, and his men are part of the active force, and their orders are to wait for further orders. “Hizbullah hasn’t even mobilised all its active fighters, and the Israelis are calling their reserve units,” he said.

Hizbullah prides itself on its secretiveness and discipline. “We don’t take anyone who knocks at our door and says ‘I want to join’. We raise our fighters. We take them when they are young kids and raise them to become Hizbullah fighters. Every fighter we have believes that the ultimate form of being is martyrdom.” The three men nod their assent.

Shia symbols and mythology play a big role in the ideology of Hizbullah, especially the tragedy of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the prophet who in the 7th century led a few hundred men against the well-organised army of the caliph in Damascus. He was slain in Karbala, and Shia around the world commemorate these events in Ashura.

“Every one of those fighters is a true believer, he has been not only trained to use guns and weapons but [indoctrinated] in the Shia faith and the Husseini beliefs,” Ali says.

He and his fellow fighters have been preparing for the latest conflict with the Israelis for years and he acknowledges the support received from Iran.

“When we defeated them in 2000 we did that with [Katyusha] rockets. We had six years to prepare for this day – the Americans are sending laser-guided missiles to the Israelis, what’s wrong if the Iranians help us? When the Syrians were here we would get stuff through their supply lines, now it’s more difficult.”

The TV is blaring patriotic songs and pictures of destroyed bridges, houses and buildings. The men are feeling confident – only a day earlier the Israelis suffered heavy casualties in the village of Bint Jbeil.

“Our strategy is to hit the commandos and the Golani units like we did in Bint Jbeil,” Ali says. “Those are their best units. If they can’t do anything, the morale of the reserve units will sink.”

For Ali and his comrades, the latest conflict is a war of survival not only for Hizbullah but for the whole Shia community. It is not only as a war with Israel, their enemy for decades, but also with the Sunni community. Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt have all expressed fears of Iranian domination over the Middle East.

“If Israel comes out victorious from this conflict, this will be a victory for the Sunnis and they will take the Shia community back in history dozens of years to the time when we were only allowed to work as garbage collectors in this country. The Shia will all die before letting this happen again.”

He says that even if the international community calls on Hizbullah to disarm as part of a peace deal, he and his men will not lay down their arms. “This war is episode two in disarming Hizbullah. First they tried to do it through the Lebanese government and the UN. When they failed, the Americans asked the Israelis to do the job.”

Despite Israel’s claims to have inflicted heavy losses on Hizbullah, Ali insists his side is in a strong position. “Things are going very well now, whatever happens we are winning. If they keep bombing us we will stay in the shelters, and with each bomb more people support the resistance. If they invade they will repeat the miserable fate they had in 1982, and if they hold one square foot they will give the Islamic resistance all the legitimacy. If they want to kill Hizbullah they have to kill every Shia in the south of Lebanon.”

And even when the battle with the Israelis is over, he adds menacingly, Hizbullah will have other battles to fight. “The real battle is after the end of this war. We will have to settle score with the Lebanese politicians. We also have the best security and intelligence apparatus in this country, and we can reach any of those people who are speaking against us now. Let’s finish with the Israelis and then we will settle scores later.”

Orientation is paired in every case with action, yet what the enemy will do is not predictable.

That’s why, when things were as bad as they were by 2004, you go ahead and do the Nader thing – to try to break the system.

I like your bubbling group, Walkin’ to New Orleans. Self-selected and lively diversity.

For what it’s worth, I do think readers here at Feral Scholar have much more in common with what I’d call traditional conservatives than with the liberal left. Like people who have radical ideas like public libraries where you can get books and access to the world, for free.

It has the feel of a feminine regime, one where there is no strategy but changing the tactics; it is organic in nature.