Springtime, Weeds, Computers, and Defense Policy
Eastertide notes on the plasticity of thought, plus flowers and March Madness
Greetings, pilgrims.
Since the last Signal, for a family event, we rented a house on a lake. From the deck, we watched a pair of eagles swirling and courting, their heads not yet fully “bald.” Teenagers. On another deck a few days later, I drank beer and watched two tiny wrens doing much the same thing, cooing and melodically rasping, odd though that sounds, in the pear trees a few feet in front of my face. It is springtime.
I’ve been reading quite a lot of criticism lately, criticism of technology (which is slowly getting better, the criticism, that is), of the military, of modernity generally. Declines of this and that, notably the United States and Europe, though things look bad elsewhere, too. Ukraine, Gaza. Places we should be paying more attention to, but are not. Moral aspersions follow. Plus ca [climate] change. Some of this writing is quite well done, but there is a sort of sameness, too, especially if you step back a bit. It’s all alienation, once more, with feeling. Ritual mourning, which does not mean the sadness isn’t real, just that it is important to perform it. The mood is certainly sour. People quoting Yeats, aptly, about the best lacking all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
I am generalizing, of course, and do not entirely disagree, and have done a fair (inexcusable?) amount of “critical” writing myself. Max Weber is a friend of mine, and I don’t like the word “bored,” but . . . You get the picture.
It’s much easier to think and so write about tragedy, aging, death than comedy, youth, birth. Things in decline exist, and provide matter for the knife of analysis to cut. When we confront the emergent, the not yet there and often quite uncertain, we are mostly left to speculate. And speculation is harder to do well than analysis. Would be intellectuals are therefore almost reflexively negative. It’s easier, safer for them. For me.
For Eastertide (hence Divine Comedy) I’ve been wondering about thinking in a more comic and speculative, as opposed to tragic and analytical, fashion. In my late fifties, it now appears to me that I have been misguided, a bit lost in the wood, to stick with Dante. If I’m right(ish), such redirected thinking would matter not only for critical thinking, by the lake, in the garden, or on the mountaintop, but for those of you in management, who get things done in the world. Boeing, Complexity, Culture
To put my problem slightly differently, if you have time, space, and inclination to consider “think” as a verb, then questions of how to think, method, even style, arise. [“Philosophy is the ability to watch yourself thinking,” a quote (?) I cannot place.] Have I been thinking in bad style? I suspect so, or to be more forgiving, I’ve indulged too much in certain kinds of thought, and perhaps not enough in others. “Comic” is perhaps too familiar yet precious a word for what I’m trying to get at, and yes I’m playing with eros and dreaming, but the other words that spring to mind seem worse.
I don’t delude myself that I will change my mind, to say nothing of yours, in a short essay. And it is not just springtime and birds that give me hope, or exasperation with the social criticism/punditry/moral categorization that comprises so much contemporary public discourse that causes me to think anew. What seem to me new ways of thinking, or new to me at any rate, are being called forth in unexpected places. By way of sneaking up on what I’m trying to say, let me talk about weeds, computer programs, and security.
One of our children is a brilliant agricultural ecologist, so sometimes I read a little bit about plants. At a quick read, Stefano Mancuso’s The Incredible Journey of Plants is a set of charming stories of plants, their movements, their overcoming of obstacles, their evolution. For Mancuso, an Italian neurobiologist, plants are highly mobile, colonizing every ecosystem on earth, often with the help of other species, especially humans. Plants also cooperate with members of their own, and other, species, to share nutrients – especially important for nurturing offspring.
On a slower read, the stories are philosophical errands. The Incredible Journey of Plants aspires to nothing less than changing the way I and perhaps you think about plants, and for that matter, evolution. Too baldly put, Mancuso argues that we should see plants not in isolation, as individuals, and not even as distinct species, but in collective and communal fashion, in dynamic relation to their environment, the living and the not. We humans are key parts of that environment. Because plants tend to interact by growth, propagation, chemically – in short, relatively slowly – we humans have generally failed to see the relations, and our multitudinous roles. We have comprehended plants as somewhat inert, lesser versions of animals, that is, we have failed to understand our pulsating, dynamic world, where plants make life, including our lives, possible.
As an aside, for all its erudition, this text is charmingly light, which is so hard. I am reminded of Italo Calvino, whom I also read in English. Maybe it is just coincidence, maybe it is translating from the Italian, maybe it is Gergory Conti’s translation. I do not know. And the book is illustrated with watercolors by Grisha Fischer, fittingly also light.
Excited by my first reading of Lives of Weeds: Opportunism, Resistance, Folly, by John Cardina, I wrote to friends:
At first cut, Lives of Weeds is a series of charming essays on “weeds,” (the first is dandelions!) and what “weed” might mean, which turns out to be a question along the lines of what is “art.” Taken together, however, something much more general emerges. Cardina articulates a shifting understanding of evolution, perhaps not quite a paradigm shift, and what used to be called natural and human history. And engineering, chemical and otherwise, to say nothing of “innovation.” It’s changing the way I think through not only agriculture and environmentalism, but technology in general. I know of other, but no better, place from which to begin a [natural philosophy?] of the Anthropocene. Profound and highly recommended.
Cardina starts out talking about cultivating, in which humans clear, till, plant, fertilize, irrigate, in order to make a place hospitable for the plants we wish to see flourish, generally for food. But much of the effort is spent keeping out the plants we do not want, by burning, clearing, tilling, mowing, weeding, and of course pesticides. From our perspective, we are doing something, like growing food. From the plants’ perspective, crops and weeds alike, their environment changes, and they evolve accordingly.
The subtitle, “Opportunism, Resistance, Folly” contains the germ of the book, pun intended. As Mancuso also stressed, plants are opportunists, even pioneers, struggling to extend life wherever they can. Only a tiny fraction of plants are considered to be weeds. Although no firm definition exists, plants called weeds tend to be easily dispersed, grow fast, and plastic – they can change forms relatively easily. Agricultural resistance such as a herbicide tends to be relatively successful at first, killing most but not all of the weeds. Those that are left, however, tend to be resistant, and they have few competitors, often in a fertilized field. Much of the book details different ways “weeds” resist, including but not limited to tolerance for the poison du jour. The survivors propagate quickly. Subsequent efforts to eradicate the weeds are less successful against the new, resistant weeds. This brings us to folly: more herbicide, more poison, which is successful in a way, but also kills a lot of things, is inherently unhealthy. Herbicide does not, cannot solve the farmer’s problem, make it go away. And from the weed’s perspective, the farmer is a driver of evolution. (And you thought you were growing soybeans).
Vis-à-vis “agricultural,” Cardina uses “agrestal,” which means a plant growing wild in a cultivated space. Perhaps “unbidden” would be better than “wild.” Plant, farmer, weed (and it gets worse, other plants, pollinators and pests, etc.) are all bound together, dynamically affecting one another and shaping one another. But it is hard to think in such circular fashion. We want to think more linearly. Get rid of the weeds. Solve the problem. Instead, we find ourselves wondering what weeds will come to look like, at what costs. We are left speculating, managing, waiting. What should we do? It’s unsatisfying.
As I wrote to Cardina, there are strange resonances between “agrestal” and “security,” even in what is euphemistically called kinetic security (killing people). Every effort to secure the castle, against a threat real or imagined, calls forth a new cannon, which may emerge in fact, or might just be a theoretical possibility (until it isn’t). The airport (or the country) is never finally, definitively secure, because new threats are always imaginable. Mark Maguire and I, misappropriating from my buddy George Marcus, call this cycle, this rabbit hole, “paranoia within reason.” Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern.
I’ve been spending more time with computer scientists and adjacent scholars (yeah, another kid), and despite some background in math, I soon began to realize that I did not really understand computing, even abstractly. Or, to be fair, I had the perspective of a user with some math who had taken a few classes, “Hello World” rings a bell, that sort of thing. A guy with an armful of cookbooks, several read, in a serious restaurant kitchen. High school civics. Not wrong, but. More specifically, my imaginary of computing is linear, as if begun anew, on a clean whiteboard. My friends in formal systems, many worried about “high assurance” applications, kept impressing me with how messy actual code is, which gets immeasurably (literally) messier when operating, or worse, networked. Where I see a whiteboard, they see a few thousand acres of Texas scrub with a game fence around it, rough ideas of what is inside. If it runs, for most purposes, that was enough. But it’s messy, like DNA, not clear what lots of code does, if anything. (What?) That is to say, where I subconsciously expected clean discrete spaces, where linear necessity reigned, they are dealing with a messy and dynamic environment. And all of this is before we get to stacks, and loops, and various levels of abstraction, and Turing and Goedel converge. I was shocked to learn that we cannot know what the Solarwinds bug infected. (Bugs are like weeds?)
And now we have new problems raised by probabilistic (and inherently circular) machine learning, LLMs and the like, in which the machine’s internal representations, and hence the epistemological status of the outputs (beyond “output”) are opaque. I could go on, and may do this more professionally later, but art long, life short, and most of you won’t read the professional version, anyway. For now, let me say that computers don’t play chess, for the simple reason that computers are not playful. We tend to confuse outputs for activity, nouns for verbs. This is probably inevitable in a capitalist society, but we might also blame Turing. The famed Turing test turns on a machine output indistinguishable from the output of a human. Hence, “intelligence” is now routinely understood as work product. Thinking as noun rather than verb.
So, let me shift gears again. Lately, I’ve been modestly involved with some training of senior managers in the security community, colonels and the equivalent across branches, and some civilians. One of the things I’ve come to know, in multiple ways, is that the attitude towards problems, the way problems are conceived, tends to be different. The military tends to see problems in terms of solutions. Adversaries are to be defeated. West Point was founded to teach engineering, building bridges and blowing them up. Both Clausewitz and later Lee (who does not seem to have read Clausewitz) thought of battles in terms of the decision. The point of strategy was to draw the enemy out into conditions favorable to you, so you could destroy him.
Since World War Two, however, the US has concerned itself with a global security order. The obvious expression of this is the United Nations, with NATO a close second. There are, of course, other alliances. But the national commitment to order extends far beyond just alliances and international institutions. There is not a part of the planet, as it moves through space and cyberspace (time?), that is not the responsibility of some coordinated combat command. Let me postpone for another day discussions of overreach – Thucydides is on many lips – and what a security order for the next generations might look like, given the world we think we know.
For salient example, thoughtful students of Russia believe that “security” and indeed “war” have fundamentally different meanings in Russian culture, and that informs the possibility of negotiation. Maybe that is true. Perhaps, as Americans traditionally believe, rights are universal and a liberal international order, such as articulated by the UN Charter, is possible, but it bears remembering that liberalism itself arose from the wars of religion. At any rate, until the sweet by and by, we must live in a world of profound, of deadly, differences, and indeed common problems. For now, it is enough to say that, as vast as the resources of the United States are, many problems cannot be decided. They must be contained, managed.
Put differently, the difference between diplomacy and arms is temporal: relations vis-à-vis violence, management vis-à-vis resolution. Insofar as we are talking about a security order, as distinct from defeating an adversary, we are compelled to conduct interminable, ongoing, relations. We are a can do nation, we like to “get ‘er done,” as the contractors say, be done with it (part of why we are not, really, an empire). So what I am suggesting is in some ways downright un-American. Deeply unsatisfying, like Afghanistan. Like bugs. Like weeds. But our world.
But there is hope here, too. In all these circular, reflexive, ecological situations we are part of the system. Inside. This, I think, marks a real turn in thought, maybe the dawn of a new era. As I suggested in the beginning, a great deal of contemporary thought understands modernity in terms of distance, alienation, exile of the human from the world. And certainly, one can tell a history of modernity in those terms. Copernicus decentered the earth, linear perspectives, Cartesian skepticism to say nothing of geometry, up to the great social critiques (everywhere in chains), and so forth. I read somewhere that our great explainer Harrari summarized the situation by saying something like we moderns have traded meaning in the world for power over the world, no doubt selling a few more million books. (Back, you green eyed monster!!!)
But suppose that was all wrong? Or, at least, a partial understanding, maybe a historical stage? We cannot think about farms, or computers, or security as closed systems, that we may control from the outside. These are opened ended systems, dynamic and referential, and we are within the system. Our agency is limited accordingly. Our predicaments are, in short, human.
* * *
If I get around to it, I should probably also say something about what I’m not saying. I’m not taking a sort of hippie stance, read Hesse and look East, or join a commune in Oregon. I’m not talking about satisficing, or second-best solutions. At least I don’t think so, though there are of course affinities. But this time, it feels different. For another day, maybe.
This Signal is perhaps too allusive, gnomic, quick, vague . . . my apologies. As you may have noticed, I’m using Intermittent Signal in part as a diary of my thinking, in a time when my mind is burning, obligations are many, and energy is limited. And audiences, in our polarized and professionalized world, are a real problem for thinking and writing.
* * *
The World Nature Photography Awards 2024 have been announced. They are unsurprisingly stunning. Dramatic, perfectly framed, hyperdetailed, vivid. Somehow liquid. We are told that the awards are intended to bring the wonders of nature, and the talents of photographers, to more people. Of course they are. As I said, unsurprising.
The future will be vivid, said the philosopher Borgman. Modernity is liquid, said the philosopher Bauman. “Why don’t I like these pictures more?” asked Bert. Names that start with “B” seem useful here. Seriously, see what you think. What you feel.
Speaking of what photography might do, an engagement with flowers, suburbia, breeding, mortality, and so forth is here: Flowers, Thoughts
* * *
We have a family, now somewhat extended, NCAA Mens Basketball pool, have for years. This year, the dogs and cats had brackets, too. The dogs’ strategy: pick every team with a dog mascot, and pick the opponent of every team with a cat mascot. Match ups that could not be decided with those rules, pick the team with the higher seed. The cat’s bracket was simply the opposite.
Everybody else made something up, although some of us know a lot about basketball. The dogs had the Huskies to win it all, and thus won the bracket, passing my almost equally ignorant bracket in the final. Bracketology tends to punish knowledge, and sometimes a bit of humility is a relief.
Safe travels, Pilgrims.
— David A. Westbrook
Perspective with a natural balance of equalized opposites fruitlessly purposed to discover and acquire harmony. in this age of mindless conflict thanks