On Asymmetrical Conflict

Very few conflicts take place between identical twins.

Often the adversaries are mismatched in any of a number of ways. For instance, imagine a basketball team of short, suburban girls who go up against another team of tall, inner-city girls. Malcolm Gladwell described how the short, suburban girls managed to win using a zone defense devised by a soccer coach.

Gladwell goes on to describe how Davids can beat Goliaths without divine intervention.

In World War II, the Japanese had the best fighter aircraft flying. This is despite the fact that Americans freaking invented aviation. The American pilots soon learned that you never get into a turning fight with Zero. American planes were faster, more powerful, and better armored. We could take more punishment, but they could dish it out better. In many cases, the only smart move was to lay on that power and flee.

American aviation learned the strengths and weaknesses of Japanese planes and matched them against the different strengths and weaknesses of American planes. With that knowledge, American strategies were formulated to avoid situations where Japanese strengths hit American weaknesses, and sought out situations where Japanese weaknesses were matched against American strengths.

Most conflicts are asymmetrical, but we don't like to think of them that way. If heavily armed French knights come out to battle, they don't like to go against lightly armed English archers. Red jacketed imperial British infantry don't do as well against Yanks with Kentucky long rifles skulking about forests.

Vietnam and the "War on Terror" (a stupid term) are asymmetric conflicts with large organized armies going up against dispersed insurgencies. Whereas in Basketball everyone follows the same rules, the antagonists in these wars follow different rules.

Then there are wars of words.

It is infuriating when the other side doesn't follow the same rules you do. It feels like they're cheating, but they're just playing their strengths against your weaknesses.

Consider the situation where you've just made a very subtle point about something interesting. Let's say that you can appreciate what the Federation scientist, John Gill, was doing in the Star Trek episode "Patterns of Force." You agree that his intention was good and you may think that he was following the most efficient system of government ever devised.

"Hold it. That's the episode with Kirk wearing a Nazi uniform."

"Yeah, Hugo Boss could really design a sharp-looking uniform, couldn't he?"

"You're advocating Nazism! You want to murder Jews!"

"I did not say that."

"You antisemite, racist jerk!"

"I never said anything like that."

"Nazi!"

The exchange is rather silly, but it illustrates a point. I like to explore the boundary between truth and falsehood. What are the distinctions that make one form of collectivism acceptable versus unacceptable? Suppose a large man is quarreling with his girlfriend and he punches her out? Is he a mere thug to be expelled from society? Or might he have been incited to violence?

Any attempt to talk about this in an even-handed fashion runs the risk of offending the "deliberately obtuse." In my little Nazi exchange, I identify with the accused, not because I'm a Nazi sympathizer, but because when this has happened to me, I've made a terrible rhetorical mistake.

I've assumed the person making the accusation is ignorant or stupid. This is because it is kinder to think this than to think that the person is evil. Evil? It is evil to twist the meaning of another's words into something ugly and unrecognizable. And to do so knowingly.

Some people feed off outrage, and use bogus accusations to make themselves larger and to hurt their perceived enemies. In a world where everyone is busy, it's easy to ignore the nuanced argument, and just glom onto falsehoods: Steve admits he's a Nazi sympathizer. He said it himself, "I'm a Nazi sympathizer."

Therefore, when you say something and another person takes it the way you did not intent, ask if that person is being deliberately obtuse.

I think that reason and truth are useful rhetorical tools to increase my store of knowledge. I hold an old-fashioned notion that if we know more, we'll act better, and by understanding each other we'll get along better.

However, Mao said that truth flows from the barrel of a gun. Post-modernists do not believe in truth and regard language as a mere power game. Logic is just a tool of the patriarchy to oppress the downtrodden. And all that.

You might think this is bad, but it is a mere asymmetrical conflict between what Ancient Greeks would call realists and sophists. Don't get mad. Recognize they're playing by different rules--rules where a grammatico-historical hermeneutic of your words are irrelevant to how those words can be spun.

If you are dealing with a sophist, do not expect honesty--expect a power game. If you detect your interlocutor is deliberately misconstruing your point, here is my permission to call them an ignoramus.

My sainted philosophy teacher once told me that sometimes the only rational response to modern art is ridicule.

Same goes for sophists.

The Truth Hurts

In the 1930s, Jiro Horikoshi had a problem. He had a set of impossible requirements for the design of an airplane. Other designers had gone over the requirements and agreed that they were impossible and quit. Yet, Mr. Horikoshi persisted in his work and set about making his design as light as possible. Then he did something unusual, he checked the strength-of-materials tables and found them in error.

After he corrected the errors in his reference materials, he achieved the impossible designing the Misubishi A6M Zero, the most capable fighter airplane at the beginning of World War II.

During the height of the Cold War, Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven wrote several stories about the Co-Dominium wherein the USA and USSR decide to get together quit competing and divide the world between them. The story shows a very stable empire wherein science and technology has stagnated and only the CoDo weapons labs are doing anything new.

What's interesting is the way the CoDo stifles scientific advancement. All the reference works published have had subtle errors deliberately introduced. This makes further scientific progress in the CoDo as impossible as the Japanese Zero.

Moving forward to today, I was reminded by a twitter exchange with someone who was insistent upon damning me for insulting Indigenous Americans. I had, in fact, inserted tongue in cheek and referred to academics living in a 23rd century Ann Arbor as "savages." "Savages in the Americas" could only mean Indians. Despite the fact that savagery has been perpetrated by all races in the Americas. (Little known fact: white people taught scalping to the Indians.)

At first I thought she was just stupid, but I've come to believe that being deliberately obtuse is far too common in post-modernist rhetoric. I'm not ragging on any partisan group, but on ALL partisan groups. We all construe evil in the words of our political adversaries and impute good intent to the words of our political cobelligerents.

It is just easier to demonize the other than to engage, or learn from his/her ideas. I am openly a Christian, but I try not to blatantly shove it in people's faces. Yet, when I've talked to Atheists about whether any of that church stuff is real, the most thoughtful conversations have always taught me what my faith looks like from the outside. I've benefitted from those insights.

Sure, it would be less threatening to find an excuse to dismiss everything s/he's saying. We all have a fixed capacity for truth and can only accept truth in limited doses. Truth is complicated and as likely to critique my position in the midst of establishing it.

So, what has this to do with the Japanese Zero and the CoDominium?

In both of those cases, people were limited by mistake or by malice, because basic facts were wrong. In the case of Mr. Horikoshi, he dug deeper for the truth, found it and used it. Our post-modern rhetorical games of strawman bashing and deliberate obtuseness can win arguments, and make us feel better, but they push us away from truth and push us into stagnation like the CoDo. Think of it as a stupid tax.

And if you disagree with any of this, you're a poopyhead.

"Glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument

'But "glory" doesn't mean "a nice knock-down argument",' Alice objected.
 
'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

I went to a play a couple years ago, and grew quite annoyed. About midway through the play it became apparent that the play's villain was a preacher with a southern accent. Not like I haven't seen the Christian made into the villain before. Likewise it's not like I haven't seen the white guy, the business man, or the corporate lawyer similarly demonized.

This was so trite and predictable that I decided to rewrite the play in my mind. The preacher from Alabama was really a union organizer from Chicago posing as an Evangelist. Tho he said he intended to spread the gospel, the fella really wanted to spread International Marxism.

I decided to engage in a malicious interpretation of the text. And so can you. So can any reader with any text. Ask any Atheist to explain the Bible to you.

When the post-modernists speak of reader-response it is not immediately apparent that the response is disgust at heavy-handed axe-grinding by the author. That's the thing about reader-response, it varies with the reader and whatever s/he has in mind at the moment.

Returning to post-modernism, I think much of what passes for scholarship is mere vandalism. As our culture has died, they are the agents of putrefaction rendering our cultural heritage into bones and rich fertile earth.

Deconstruction generally takes the work of dead authors who cannot defend their work, and then attaches ridiculous meanings to their words. Disagree? Well, that's not how I read the post-moderns. But, but, that's not what they meant. This doesn't work when it's played against itself.

Perhaps a different model for reading is called for. One that uses communications theory as a metaphor. One big difference between mathy technical studies like communications theory and literary kultursmog is that the mathy stuff has to work. Bridges fall down and levees fail without any respect to the political influence of their builders.

When parties A and B communicate, the process begins with a message held by A that gets encoded for a channel, then the encoded message gets sent over that channel, then the message is decoded by B. In life A says something and B hears it. Thoughts are encoded as words in sentences, these words are pronounced by speaker A. Listener B hears the sounds, maps them to words, parses the words and thinks a corresponding thought.

Communication fails when the idea cannot be put into words, or the words cannot be heard, or the words map to different ideas.

Suppose A happens to be Pliny the Elder thinking Roman thoughts expressed in Latin on parchments that are copied by hand by Christian monks that are eventually printed and read by B, who happens to be Joe Random Latin student.

This communications problem is subject to the same considerations as a telephone conversation or a chat room. Since Pliny did not address his remarks to Joe, we should understand the historical-cultural context of Pliny and his interlocutors--in particular, how they used words and idioms. We should understand that some words like "damn" might be bowdlerized into "darn" by the copyists. And we should understand that Joe was napping during one of his Latin lessons.

It's hard enough to get communication right without axe-grinding vandals going on about dead white European males, colonialism, and sexual personae. They're just as bogus as me turning a southern evangelist into a union organizer.

This may seem a bit abstract, but it is as practical as reading a newspaper. In the novel 1984, Winston Smith's job is historical revisionism. He does his job by cutting away any aspect of the cultural legacy that does not support the state's current ends.

A less extreme example is Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominium stories where a US-Soviet alliance manages to freeze technological and scientific advance by subtly revising math tables and reference works to obscure the anomalies that point to scientific revolutions like quantum mechanics and relativity.

We need to grasp the world as it is. Not the way we would prefer it to be. Because truth is complicated, this means parts of it will support International Socialism, and other parts National Socialism. We've got to sort through what is while being prepared to modify our partisan positions in light of reality.

And we've got to stand up to bullies who'd sell our birthright for a pot of message.