Waiting for Godot bis

[Aldo Matteucci <aldo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Ken,

Thanks for the encouragement.

Style is all I got, the rest is social-democratic vCJ ? I guess, you
know, ?old? Europe. Still better than stone-age Rumsfeld, if you ask me.

On the specifics of the current political situation I feel a bit like
Cicero at the end of the Roman Republic. I see Caesarism coming, and I?d
like to stop it. Well, poor guy, he failed miserably. He was ? like me ?
a fast talker and bit of a coward. He lost his head anyway, and a lady
amused herself by piercing his tongue with pins.

Why Bush in particular? Bush has a system at his command: an ideology, a
devoted party (cum posse), massive economic interests, and is a
charismatic leader (Nixon, on the other hand was too much of a loner to
have more than rudiments of any of these elements). It matters to me that
this system not be fitted in place permanently. Though I might wish to be
in an egalitarian Paradise, I would still prefer to have reason not to
fear deportation to Guantanamo, should I enter the US (it is difficult to
avoid US territory when you fly, as I do, the Pacific). All right, I
presume Gore too would have ordered my shoes sniffed, but if the machine
can take, I can.

True this tsunami looks unstoppable. And I?m not asking anyone to go
about creating a mass movement. But we can prepare ourselves to ride the
mass movement, should it emerge, and to ride it successfully, i.e. to
give it meaningful direction, while acknowledging that we can?t turn it
into our preferred tool of social transformation. We have little time.
Six months from now the opportunity might be gone, or never materialise.

Where I part company with you ? and others of the group - is where you
state somewhat succintly: Movements are not directed by people. Let me
explain.

?Movement? is a construct, a convenient shorthand for compressing the
multifarious interactions into a term. Such shorthands were first
developed in mechanics, and they worked in predicting how fast an apple
would fall from the tree, and why. They worked because the determining
factors involved were few, and their interactions were ruled by simple
relations ? mass, distance, and acceleration.

At the latest since Plato the West tried ?the conquest of abundance
inherent in human life and society? ? in the words of Paul Feyerbabend ?
i.e. to distil essence behind contingence, to look beyond the shadows
moving inside the cave and discern the unmoving truth. It is a Faustian
bargain ? the attempt to squeeze life?s complexity into an eternal law.
Forget it, and take squarely Margarethe by the hips ? you?ll enjoy it
more.

We are in the world of pure non-linear interaction systems. To draw
predictive conclusions is pure sin of reification. By the same token that
you?d refuse the use of ?intelligence? as an operable concept, you should
refuse the use of ?movement? as an operable tool. The Chinese, ever the
wise, knew that we could not draw conclusions from history. That?s why
they gathered anecdotes, leaving to the individual the responsibility of
applying the analogy to the concrete situation.

The factual experience is that people do make a difference ? hence by
Popper?s law your assertion is falsified. By their stupidity ? as when
Marshall Ney rushed up the hill of Waterloo leaving the spikes for the
British guns behind. He took the guns, but could not spike them, he was
repulsed, the British started during the guns again, and the battle was
lost. By chance ? Krakatoa?s explosion in ca. 550 AD brought the plague
to Europe and weakened Byzantium to a point that it never recovered. The
kingdom of Saba was destroyed and Islam could emerge along the new trade
routes of the Arabian interior. Or by creating new technologies ? as when
my dear Swiss rolled down from the forest above logs and stones on the
advancing Austrian armour at Morgarten and gained their freedom. And I
could go on forever.

History is a fascinating mix of structures, multiple layers, fractal
recurrences and contingencies, and you can never sit back and assume that
it will play itself out before our eyes in stately and scientifically
predictable fashion. In Medieval times philosophers kept a skull on their
desk to remind them of their vanity and inanity. I?d keep a model of the
earth on my desk ? without its oceans. It would then look like a
misshapen pear, battered by meteorites, drawn apart by internal forces
and imperfections. That?s what life is all about. Life is no more than
fluff in a corner of a poorly cleaned room.

Conclusion? Sometimes people trigger movements like avalanches, sometimes
they can ride them for a while, and sometimes ?movements? emerge
spontaneously looking for a leader. You never know, and you?ll never know
unless you are prepared to look with much curiosity ? and the wisdom to
know when you better leave the hornet?s nest alone.

This being said, I agree that movements can have very old, or even
unfathomable origins, and that you have to study history in depth to
uncover these subterranean currents. E.g. it is my view that one of the
sources of the resonance GWB enjoys today with the common people
(particularly in the South) is the slavery experience. GWB did not know
that when he set out about preaching the lynching of the terrorists. He
stumbled upon this after 9/11. He saw that it worked. Like Hitler, he is
a sublime opportunist.

Since my youth my preferred toy was a kaleidoscope. No matter how much I
turned it, I could never get the same pattern back. I was enchanted and
frustrated at the same time.

See you in a world of kaleidoscopes.

Aldo

PS ? While waiting for Godot, what about a good shave with Occam?s razor?