The Definite Article

My mother is right. It's time to post something new. I haven't put togetha an approach for the next anti-terrorism step, though, because I've been too busy (turn your eyes away, Mum) pursuing debauchery (it's okay to read now).

So, instead, I'm posting a side bit that's caught my eye.

Alternative competing hypotheses and methodological cultural relativism. The phrase just rolls right off the tongue, doesn't it?

A comment by FS in Thinkin' like a terrorist, part 3 gave me pause. It was:

"I think you're falling in to the trap of cultural relativism. Many countries repress their citizens, and may well have cultural reasons for it, but I think it's clear they are prima facie wrong to do so." -FS

I responded to this with a bit of fluff later down about how we don't use enough cultural relativism in our analysis. I'd like to take a pause and talk about alternative competing hypotheses and methodological cultural relativism rather than moral cultural relativism. Feel free to skip if you're already bored, 'cause, well, it ain't gonna get any easier.

Cultural relativism traditionally refers to (in this case taken directly from the Webster's New Millennium Dictionary of English) "the concept that the importance of a particular cultural idea varies from one society or societal subgroup to another, the view that ethical and moral standards are relative to what a particular society or culture believes to be good/bad, right/wrong."

I want to cut into this definition, cut away the second half of it - effectively anything to do with ethical or moral standards - and call that methodological cultural relativism. Why is the distinction important? And why did FS say that cultural relativism was a trap?

Moral cultural relativism is considered a trap because it limits the concept of morality to the portions that are shared universally - which is pretty few, to be honest. Everyone might believe that torture is wrong as a policy, but there are definitely different definitions of what constitutes torture (anyone for a little moderate physical pressure?). Because these definitions differ, adherents to moral cultural relativism sometimes absolve or excuse atrocious acts simply because they happen somewhere else and are therefore subject to a different moral standard.

FS, feel free to jump in if you think I've read you wrong.

What I'm arguing for is an injection of methodological cultural relativism. This is not terribly surprising, considering that my posts are entitled Thinkin' like a terrorist.

Methodological cultural relativism is a method by which the analyst will try to get inside the head of folks living in that culture and assume their mindset for the purpose of analysis. Alternative competing hypotheses (ACHs) result when this temprorary plurality of thought generates different reasons for an action - some times mutually exclusive, sometimes not - that create cognitive dissonance in the analysts head. There are other ways that alternative competing hypotheses come about. They are often intentionally constructed in order to combat unknown cognitive bias. That's an unknown unknown, for you Rumsfeld fans.

Cognitive bias is exactly what it sounds like it is. It results from the fact that analysts have a set of presuppositions and they don't know what those presuppositions are.

But, if you assume you've got cognitive bias, you can construct alternative competing hypotheses to help combat it. It's pretty straightforward: construct the hypothesis, the contrapositive, the negation, the inverse, the converse and then get creative. The more ACHs you can hold in your head, then the more likely you are to arrive at the right conclusion.

Methodological cultural relativism is a way of generating the creative ACHs that we need to crack the terrorism nut.

You can't solve terrorism by shooting terrorists. Gonna hafta start with the thinkin', then.

Posted by Nate at 3:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

There were only two public responses to the September 11th plane crashes in the Western world: righteous fury and liberal angst.

The righteous fury crowd feels that there is no better use for a terrorist than to shoot one. The images that came out of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Grhaib bother them only because no one had the good sense to keep the activities concealed.

The liberal angst crowd feels that we were attacked because we have such terrible, oppressive policies towards the rest of the world.

In the days shortly following the crashes, after loved ones' safety was assured, an outpouring of sentiment occurred. The most prevalent was righteous anger, with the notable exception of the late Mary McGrory, who was on some other planet than the rest of us that fateful day, telling the world she thought the President had "flunked" the test of leadership presented by the attacks, as early as September 13.

After the attacks, a sense of liberal angst did seep into the public conscious, the worst of which is the meretricious portrayal by Michael Moore of Iraq as an idyll, where laughing children play with kites while simple shopkeepers proudly display their hammered copper pots.

In this piece, I'm going to present a different stance based on an economic and a cultural observation.

For those of you looking around for assumptions to challenge, I am assuming that Dr. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations accurately describes the environment in which these conflicting viewpoints rest. Feel free to read the book and critique it.

A warning, before we begin: this piece, like many in the series, is going to contain some generalizations.

The perspective that I want you to consider is based on two pillars:

1. Pareto optimal solutions are always better than non-Pareto optimal solutions.
2. Freedom can be a bad thing.

Okay, what do these mean, and how on Earth do they hang together?

1. Pareto optimal solutions are always better than non-Pareto optimal solutions.

Pareto optimality is a more general form of the quote: "You can swing your fist until it touches my nose." Thomas Jefferson Pareto optimal solutions make someone better off without making anyone else worse off. Because of what's called the "initial endowment" problem, they are very rare between rich, developed countries and developing nations. The initial endowment problem refers to the difference in bargaining position. If one person has much greater wealth at the start of negotiations (a larger initial endowment), then they have a much stronger bargaining position and can push the negotiations in a way that exacerbates the disparity in relative wealth of the participants. This is mapped out mathematically in Calculus of Consent, by Buchanan and Tullock, and by Denis Mueller in Public Choice. Both books also make some suggestions, to which I will not subject you, about how to enforce Pareto optimal solutions in the face of an initial endowment problem.

Why does it apply here? What on earth does this seemingly obscure economic theory have to do with Muslim terrorism?

BJ probably doesn't remember it, but he and I worked out an economic theory of revolution back in 1992. I re-read our theory over the Christmas holidays. One statement we make is obvious: Under certain conditions, it is a better deal for a class of people to rise up and overthrow the current order, seemingly risking everything, than it is to suffer the current order.

We then went on to outline those conditions. While we wrote them as a series of equations, let me summarize by saying that an environment that consists of an initial endowment problem, without any Pareto optimal corrective measures and with a wealth redistribution policy that is below a certain threshhold, will ALWAYS lead to revolution. Always. Without fail. It is inevitable.

Revolution takes different forms, of course, and we used this to model the fall of the Soviet Empire, which was a current topic.

This was in direct contradiction to the conventional wisdom of the time, as told by Francis Fukuyama, that the fall of the Soviet empire signalled the end of history, as Western capitalist democracy would infect the world and conquer it.

If what BJ and I discovered is true (it is), then Francis Fukuyama is clearly wrong; there is a built in market failure as a result of wealth inequity that will lead to revolution.

I contend that for much of the Muslim world, they are in or nearing this revolutionary regime. Unless Pareto optimal contract enforcement techniques coupled with a redistributive social policy are enacted, a series of revolutions will be inevitable. Given the social network that has formed to reinforce the revolutionary tendencies of individual groups, this will likely be a global revolution. While we didn't have the term "tipping point" in 1992, we've got it now. Watch for a tipping point. When it happens, it will happen fast. Also, it won't happen in America.

2. Freedom can be a bad thing.

In December of 1997, The Atlantic ran an article by Robert Kaplan that challenged the idea that liberal democracy was compatible with Muslim regimes. This followed on the heels of Samuel Huntington's now legendary Foreign Affairs article entitled "The Clash of Civilizations" and expanded on one of its themes.

Namely, some places are ill-suited to democracy. The cultural tradition of many Muslim nations, and indeed of many heavily Christian portions of the U.S., favors justice over freedom. Under this tradition of thought, freedom becomes sedition.

My good friend James once said to me that Algeria was more free now, under a military regime installed by the West, than they would have been under the freely elected Islamic Salvation Front. I replied that there were differences between being free from something and free to do something. Islamic law gives you a society free of drugs, free of crime, free of pornography, free of sexual distraction. Western society gives you no such freedoms.

The difference in perspective between the Muslim world and the West means that the West views cloistration, the chador, the muzzein's call, absolute submission to the will of God, the closed Gate of Ijtihaad, and indeed the very existence of Wahhabis and Salafists (let alone Khawariji) as an anomaly that will, with time and patience, be overcome as Muslims become more informed. Muslims in turn view baywatch, Coca Cola, heroin, petty theft, cohabitation, the prevailing content on the Internet, philosophy, ethics and secular law as zulm, shirk and bida - at best dross to be rejected, at worst corruption which must be rooted out and destroyed.

If your perspective is the latter, then freedom doesn't look that attractive. Instead, it becomes chaos, anarchy, strife and sedition. When the church is the state, iconoclasm and heresy are revolution and war.

Viewed through the lense of Islam (specifically Wahhabist, Salafist or Khawariji eyes), it's hard to know where to start criticizing the West, because so much of it is wrong. Certainly, the West is viewed as giving aid and succor to much reviled nepotic regimes in Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc. In other cases it is viewed as a corrupting influence, in Turkey and the UAE.

How does this inform the events of September 11, 2001?

Well, first, a large portion of the world is living in conditions which will change radically for the better if they rise up and challenge the existing order. We can show that it is inevitable that they will do so.

Further, these same people are currently living under the yoke of hypocritical leaders who wield dictatorial powers and are dependent on the flow of Western money and arms to suppress those very uprisings.

September 11 was, from this perspective, a strike at the root of the problem - the money that props up proximate oppressors.

This column presents only a perspective - watch this space for a program of solutions that will explain, step by step, what needs to be done to secure a safer world for Western culture in general and the U.S. specifically.

If you've got any comments, please post them below! I appreciate your feedback, and look forward to hearing from you.

Posted by Nate at 3:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBacks (0)

I was going to delete yesterday's post and put up a "We now return to our regularly scheduled silence" post, but it felt more motivated by trepidation than laziness.

Instead, I'm going to try and go through what I really wanted to say one point at a time rather than hit them all in a single, rambling, unfocussed post.

Here goes.

These ideas are in no real particular order, but I'm gonna try to keep it to just one idea per post.

The first point is that Western intelligence has failed to properly analyze the terrorist problem. It's hard to know the answers when you don't know the question, and we don't know the question.

Some Western intelligence failures:

1. We failed to construct and examine the alternative hypotheses in which Iraq had no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). This seems particularly egregious to me because I said well before the war that he did not have them. Click here.

2. We failed to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora. Or to simply accept the offer from the Sudanese government to give him over to U.S. custody. Click here.

3. We failed (and still fail) to understand the mindset of the terrorist. The folks we call terrorists are resisting what they call injustice and oppression. Their methods are dictated by their means. What we call freedom, they call sedition. Our need for oil pays for the yokes that will enslave their children.

4. We failed to recognize the need for mental discipline and scholarship. Subtlety was never an American strong point; it is now wholly absent.

5. We failed to find our opponents center of gravity - or even an opponent. Just who are we fighting here? Any analyst worth his pay will tell you the probable consequences of a course of action. To be fair, some folks quickly jumped up and stated that military action was likely to stir up a hotbed of anti-American hatred, but these people were ignored or discredited. This was and is reprehensible.

Okay. Five supporting assertions to a central point that Western intelligence has failed. I'll have more for you over the next few days.

Posted by Nate at 2:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

I spent most of the last couple of days trying to think like a terrorist. This is not a good idea if you succeed just before walking into work.

The endeavour came to me while I was reading the most recent issue of The Atlantic Monthly, one of my favorite magazines.

Because of the Iraqi elections, The Atlantic Monthly has run a special edition dedicated to Iraq, terrorism and Islam. I was ecstatic when I thumbed through it, and overjoyed when I had finished it. Finally, someone was saying some of the things I've been saying for years and it was respected professionals.

It took me back to an argument that I had with some friends about the Oklahoma bombing.

I had said that I understood where Timothy McVeigh was coming from. I do understand where he was coming from. America stands for something, and what it means to me is freedom. Not unlimited freedom, a lawless anarchy where might rules and power flows from the barrel of a gun, but where the government uses its monopoly on violence to pursue policies that leave the most people free to pursue a lifestyle that meets the Jeffersonian criteria of swinging thier fists so long as they don't connect with someone's nose.

Waco didn't change all that; there have been other cases of blatant abuse: the internment of Americans of Japanese descent and the confiscation of their worldly posessions, the systematic disenfranchisement of Black Americans in the Jim Crow south, the Know-Nothing party, the anti-semitic climate that led to the formation of Israel, the subtle persecution of non-Christian faiths, the Woodrow Wilson's open racism that led directly to the Vietnam war - no system is perfect, and, like many others who see injustice, I'll accept a bit for the greater good.

What was different about Waco was that, first, it happened on my watch. It was within modern times and, like many others, I can remember exactly where I was when I heard about it. Second, unlike the other situations that I've mentioned, society as a whole has just accepted that the Branch Davidians were evil and had to be destroyed. It was no great loss that they all died. No one is interested in whether or not they were murdered by our government. No one cared.

At least, no one in power cared.

But a few people did. My blood boiled when I thought about them, burning to death in a fire started by government troops, simply because they believed in a different way of life. My blood still boils. What happened was an outrage.

In the argument with my friends, I said that if the U.S. was serious about stopping these kinds of acts of terrorism, it had to seek the moral high ground. That it had to learn the difference between right and wrong.

They were both horrified. There was no way that anyone other than a traitor could actually understand the Oklahoma city bombing. I felt then that I just wasn't conveying my point correctly. But there's two sides to every coin, and I know also think that this is something difficult for the average American to grasp. The average American wouldn't die for anything, beyond maybe their children. They have no sense of justice.

Furthermore, I said that unless America wanted to see acts like these again, it had better get serious about understanding the difference between right and wrong. If it didn't, then massive death was guaranteed to happen again. And again. And again.

When the twin towers and the Pentagon were attacked with our own planes, I spent a long few months reading the Koran. I tried to have a discussion about what the Koran said, about the enemy perspective, and about how what Osama bin Laden was saying was thoroughly internally consistent. His arguments are far better than anything we're saying to the Muslim world.

I was flatly asked if I was an al-Qaeda symaphizer.

I sighed, and again decided not to speak of it again. Eventually, I moved to another country. It's not true that the only reason I left was to flee a culture so stultified that it couldn't see how it had sown the seeds of its own demise, even as they sprouted and bore violent and bloody fruit, but it would also be a lie to say that this played no role. It's part of why I left.

Now I've picked up this article, and by God, here's some folks who think like me.

Let me see if I can put a few pieces together.

First, the most comitted side wins. To see this more clearly, go and watch The Siege. There are a lot of problems with this film, mostly in the sense that the CIA has never been even vaguely as competent as Annette Bening appears. Not even close. But it will help to understand the idea of "the most committed side wins."

Second, we have cognitive biases. There's a great book on correcting for cognitive biases that I can't rember the title of (it's Chris', and the last time I saw it it was sitting on the coffee table. We have a perspective and we bring it to all of our observations. In Physics, this is the ideal observer problem.

Third, the freedom we're selling is anarchy, disorder, cacophany. In places where the mosque is the state, Western freedom is sedition. Anyone who thinks people in Afghanistan or Iraq are better off is blind. The people of Iraq are much worse off than they were before the invasion, by virtually any measure - and Jim Fallows has the courage to say so.

Fourth, know your enemy. I can't stress this enough. If you don't know your enemy but they know you, you lose. We not only don't know our enemy, we refuse to learn. We don't read their newspapers, but they read ours. They study in our universities...

Okay, I have to cut this off and go to bed. I'll re-edit this tomorrow, and write a bunch more. Goodnight for now.

Our leaders won't appear on al-Jazeera, we dismiss Islam in countless casual ways, our every word a mockery and an insult.

Posted by Nate at 2:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)