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WRETCHARD, NETWORK-CENTRIC WARFARE,
AND A DEBATE ON MULTICULTURALISM |
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Wretchard the Cat has a great post up on Network-centric warfare and
what it means for America and those on our side versus our enemies and those on the jihadist side:
One of the coolest posts I’ve read in a long time is Chester’s Globalization and War. His reference links to Philip Bobbitt’s The Shield of Achilles and the really nifty eMachineShop alone are worth the read. The fundamental issue he discusses is whether nation-states are in some sense being replaced
by distributed networks of people. Many activities, from community building to earning a living have jumped over traditional
boundaries. Criminal and terrorist organizations have been among the first to exploit this fact. Viewed from one angle, modern
Islamic terrorist cells are not so much a return to the forms of the 8th century as new structures made possible by 21st century
technologies.
Attempts to develop “network-centric” methods of warfare in
the service of a nation state are ultimately limited by their subordination to a highly centralized command and control system.
Can we meet the Islamofascist challenge? Wretchard isn’t sure:
The key challenge is whether America,
in the sense of a shared idea, can be expansive enough to permit subordinate threads
which can truly “take on a life of their own”, and so become agile enough to engage the Jihadis at the lowest level. We are some of us familiar with the idea of multithreaded
applications which can leave the main program and be re-entrant at an indeterminate point. Max Boot had hoped in 2003 that
decentralized decision making would be part of the “new American way of war“, multithreading within a larger architecture.
Yet no sooner had those tendencies appeared when they were reined in by an American Left determined to impose all the blessings
of the bureaucratic state upon networked warfare: oversight, endless hearings, legalisms -- the clanking apparatus of the
unitary Sovereign -- to ‘aid’ in the pursuit of nimble bands of modern Mongols contemptuous of boundaries.
It’s a typically good post. The entire discussion in the comments
revolves, naturally, around individuals, groups, cultures and nation-states. Most interesting to me, however, was a response
to a comment in the thread that Wretchard made:
When directions
can be given in the broadest possible shared terms -- in terms of a culture -- then detailed instructions are unnecessary.
Individual initiative can be given full scope.
However, when the
first order of business is to destroy one’s own culture then it necessarily becomes impossible, or at least very difficult,
to exercise control through broad guidance. What multiculturalism
does is reduce membership in a society to a legal relationship. All expectations are delimited; all responsibility is parsed.
Nothing “goes without saying”; everything must be spelled out. The parts of the social organism which are not positively
commanded will remain inert, or perhaps, even attack the main organism as part of its “democratic” duty. Not that any of this
is objectionable, but it does characterize a mode of behavior and describe its limits.
Well, sir. That really caught my attention. His definition
of multiculturalism seemed to go well beyond mine. Is this a final hurdle I’m going to have to traverse on my journey toward
conservatism, or is that simply an unnecessarily extreme definition of multiculturalism? I responded in the thread:
This is all starting
to come together for me, and I suspect, many others.
When I first read
Den Beste talking about hive minds, etc., I thought it was interesting but I wasn’t sure of the real applicability.
Great post, Wretchard.
I’m still not sure that multiculturalism is necessarily what you say it is. “What multiculturalism does is reduce membership
in a society to a legal relationship.”
I don’t see mainstream
black people understanding multiculturalism that way and I suspect we’re in a situation where the same language is being spoken
(e.g., American English vs. Dutch English) but there are crucial misunderstanings occurring in both directions. This is similar
(it seems to me) to the whole anti-disco thing when it was very hard to determine if it was “disco” that was hated, or just
black music.
It has been a revelation
to me, this viewing of multiculturalism as some sort of proxy that leads back to Marx, etc. I don’t know how to express this
more succinctly so I’ll just state it: this viewpoint seems so “white,” if you know what I mean.
Does everything
loop back through Europe?
Maybe Europeans
have bastardized multiculturalism so much that within “their” concept, it is nothing but a proxy. However, does that settle
the matter?
I’m not so sure
about that.
Later on, another commenter (Kevin, known to be quite liberal)
posted an excerpt from Chester (not known to be quite liberal)
on globalization and contrasted it with the Wretchard language on multiculturalism I used above and asked:
Aren’t globalization
and multi-culturalism the exact same phenomenon; with “globalization” the label employed when seen as positive and “multi-culturalism”
when regarded as negative?
After all, is it really possible to have globalization without multi-culturalism?
That’s a good question because it gets at the heart of whether
the definition used by Wretchard was/is unnecessarily extreme.
As often happens on Wretchard’s website, another commenter
steps up to make a thought-provoking contribution. Here, cardozo bobo concurs that the reduction of human relationships to
legal responsibilities is the problem in adequately fighting Al Qaeda but disagrees (I think) that multiculturalism enhances
the problem:
If there is any
one thing that will strangle our ability to compete with Al Qaeda, you are correct in assuming it is the reduction of human
[relationships] to legal responsibilities. I think though that you misdiagnose the source of the disease. As I see it, it’s
not multi-culturalism that reduces all relationships to a legal relationship, but rather some combination of Civil Law and
litigants run amok. I was speaking with Lord Bhikhu Parekh a week or so ago (British House of Lords, [Royal] Society philosopher)
and while his politics were different from my own he correctly (IMO) diagnosed Britain’s current legal culture as moving from
one based on liberty to one based on rights, but not because of multiculturalism (a topic he knows quite a bit about). It’s
the EU’s body of law, the Civil Law, which is doing it. It is the antithesis of the Common Law.
The Civil Law (and
Civil Lawyers) are working their way deeper and deeper into many aspects of our Anglosphere culture. Our relationships are
being stifled by legalisms while at the same time our freedoms are being surrendered to ignorant stewards. It’s much more
than Justice Stevens looking to how ‘Europe’ is solving one legal problem or another. The
informal networks and relationships of many networks (banking networks, vocational networks, charitable networks) gets sucked
up and absorbed into the ever-growing body of law; frozen in time and burdened with ‘substantive rights’ while unchecked by
due process or other democratic safeguards. At one time arbitration between peers possessed liberty and gave justice; now
it does neither. Meanwhile our most cherished public freedoms, hard fought for, such as civil rights and commercial freedom
from monopolistic thuggery, are entrusted to ‘arbitrators’ in Paris, Tokyo, and further abroad, without a hint of judicial
review.
Meanwhile the effects our tort system [has] had on our society is the talk of newspaper columns, and well known
to all. Our plethora of networked individuals will be quite reluctant to extend their hands to Iraqis and Afghans in need
of aid if they fear they’ll just get sued for it later.
I thought that made a hell of a lot of sense.
But later, cardozo bobo took exception to the assertion that
globalization and multiculturalism are “good” and “bad” takes on the same thing. In doing so, cardozo bobo regurgitates a
notion as accepted fact that I believe is most definitely in dispute:
[Multiculturalism]
is a philosophy which posits that no culture is superior to any other culture.
Says who, pray tell? Even more curious, however, is this assertion
from cardozo bobo:
Globalization is
based on the idea that my Western way of life is superior to your tribal way of life, and if you want to escape the endless
cycles of famine and violence man was subject to for the first million years of its existence you must abandon the bad philosophies
which your ancestors handed down to you.
Is this generally accepted as fact vis-à-vis the conceptualization
of globalization or is , too, from an extreme end of the spectrum when it comes to defining globalization? Beats me, but check
out this concluding flourish from cardozo bobo:
[Multiculturalism]
and Globalization [are] as different as night and day. One is a philosophy, and the other is an observed process which proves
the philosophy wrong.
Well, damn. Kinda sorta ipso facto, huh? Which leads me directly
back to earlier statement I made:
I don’t know how
to express this more succinctly so I’ll just state it: this viewpoint seems so “white,” if you know what I mean.
Next, Kevin offers up a quote from Chester on just one myth related to globalization that seems to call into question the doctrinaire
assertions of cardozo bobo:
1. Globalization will inevitably lead to Westernization. It’s rather ironic that so many leftist academics espoused this theory,
since it manages to embrace a sort of assumed Western superiority while at the same time turning the rest of the world’s cultures
into victims. Or maybe, Westernization would result because we in the West are so aggressive? No matter. The assumption is
false. If there is any lesson to be learned these days from globalization’s effects on people and cultures, it is that it
transmits all of them, and transforms all of them. There is an process of give-and-take at play in nearly every place -- whether
physically or in cyberspace, or other media -- where two or more cultures and peoples collide. In this way, we find radicalized
Muslims as easily in Munich as we do in Mecca, and democrats
as easily in Kabul as in Kansas.
Moreover, the very cultures that were thought soon to be washed away by the onrush of global capitalism find themselves just
as easily transmitted by it as those of the West. Witness the border region of the US and Mexico, which is a teeming hybrid
of both Western and Latin cultures, or examine the growing influence of Chinese and Japanese pop culture upon the rest of
Asia and even the United States. Western -- and American -- culture have influenced each of these others in turn, but by no
means can be described as ascendant, and even less and less so, as dominant.
Sounds right on the money to me.
Here, then, is the dilemma for white folks in America: cardozo bobo disparages (one of) Chester’s
take on globalization posted above and (apparently) walks right into a trap of his own making:
Why is it that America is willing to adopt Mexican music, but that France fights against “cultural imperialism”? The same reason that French farmers
attack McDonalds: they fear change. [RattlerGator: so far, so good] They don’t
want their way of life to change. They know that Western culture, American culture, is more seductive than their own.
Come again, Kimosabe? Western=American, French≠Western?
Yeah, right. When confronted with such a trap, act as if you don’t see it, comprehend it or acknowledge it. Naturally, cardozo
bobo, does just that:
Both American entrepreneurs
and the French peasants ‘know’ that their culture is superior to the other; ergo, neither can be a multiculturalist.
Now, does that make sense to you? Sure as hell seems wrongheaded
to me – not because it is wrong, per se, but because it goes to an unnecessary definitional extreme. It may be a technically
incorrect formulation based on the English language . . . but that’s what I call a doctrinaire postulation, cardozo bobo.
Discussion in the thread then bounced around, including a focus
on the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia and its relationship to the present drive for an all-encompassing governing body by the EU
and a competing drive for a worldwide caliphate by Usama bin Laden. Ultimately, commenter Arthur Parry made this response:
Wretchard – I wasn’t
advocating Westphalia so much as trying to point out that it represents a point within the
spectrum of centralization rather than an extreme. Personally I think that the trends of globalization, decentralized networks,
and emergent order are mostly unalloyed goodness, though they are disruptive to formerly isolated cultures and economies.
And to would-be mandarins and caliphs.
With an eye firmly on the domestic front, and noting that the
difference between classical liberalism and what passes for liberalism today is a quite distinct difference, Bob Smith wrote:
If the Democrats
were to return to their classical liberal roots, they would present a more effective opposing ideology to the evolving strength
of conservatism.
As best as I can tell, the Democrats, as a
party, are being held hostage by the socialist liberals, in a case of political activism subsuming more moderate voices, many
of which are either converted moderate Republicans or looking for a relevant platform.
If those whose views
are more accurately described by classical liberal ideals, rather than utopian socialist ideals, then the challenge is balancing
the equation between rights and liberties in a way that allows the participation of non-legal influences, such as culture
and family structures. Removing such influences with the sweeping stroke of “all are equivalent” is not an effective rebuttal
position to the conservative goal of preserving historical institutions at the expense of the experimental.
A net-centric
organizational model would seem to favor experimentalism.
The issue will be moot if the party does not shed its socialist
skin.
Naturally, I agree with that sentiment.
On the multiculturalism discussion in this thread, it always
seems to me that white Americans have a supremely difficult time conceptualizing our Pacific future; the ascendance of our
Asian theater of operations rather than our previous focus on the North Atlantic. This difficulty
is most obvious in a discussion such as this.
I think cardozo bobo is basically right (that means Wretchard,
too) but goes well beyond what is necessary (in defining multiculturalism) because of an almost obsessive and unnecessary
focus on Europe.
