Quickthink

Let’s assume for a moment that the two Tsarnaev brothers actually did the Boston Marathon bombing.  So why did they do it?

The bombing seems to have no logic. I can’t think of any goal that would match the consequences that they must have anticipated — to others and to themselves. But who knows? The post arrest investigation might reveal a logical motive (some sort of reward, for example - a “Day of the Jackal” type of thing).

But what if investigators don’t find anything that solves the riddle? What if they just find anger? That is another scenario. It is one that Dostoevsky would recognize — people reduced to committing terror for terror’s sake. Oliver Bullough offers his thoughts about this at NYT. He and others wonder how much the Chechen nightmare influenced the two brothers. Or was it more being isolated in the US? Whatever it was, something “reduced” the two so that they lost the ability to empathize with the people that they hurt.

Dave Logan’s thinking about “level 1″ groups comes to mind - people gravitate to join level 1 groups when the world loses its meaning. As Dave said, the predominant shared idea in such groups is that “life sucks”. And if life sucks, nothing good will come out of it no matter what. So people at level 1 lose the ability to care what effects their actions have. They just do stuff to demonstrate their anger. And they do them in groups of like minded nihilists.

This is scary stuff because, as Bruce Schneier warns, it is getting easier and easier for such folks to do seriously deadly stuff on a large scale. And they are doing it. How do we contend with this? That is a very good question and right now, we have no good answers.

FOLLOW -  After posting this I heard from Rachel Maddow that the older of the two brothers took a trip to Russia around a month before the bombing. Surely investigators will want to know more about that trip. And no doubt, the interrogation of the younger brother (who was captured alive) will focus on what connections the two had with terrorist groups and what drove them to undertake this violent act. One way or another, there is a pretty scary story behind this.

2d FOLLOW -  For a moment, let’s entertain the possibility that the Tsarnaev’s acted in concert with international jihadist groups. Let’s assume that in some way they were “sponsored”. If so, this was a strange sort of sponsorship. The whole operation was low rent. For example, after the bombing, it appears that the brothers had no cash and no getaway vehicle.There was no escape plan. They were stuck.

What did they expect? It is possible that they thought that no escape would be needed. Perhaps they thought that in such a crowd they could not be detected. Well, if so, this was pretty stupid. Alternatively, they may have been well aware that they would be identified, and accepted that this could not be avoided. Perhaps they also concluded that escape would be impossible and their plan was just to stretch out the chase hoping to cause as much fear as they could until they were caught and perhaps killed.

Any thoughts on that one? Here is my take - scenario 2 implies a high dedication to a cause and/or extremely low instinct for self-preservation. Perhaps this is what it was. But my bet is on scenario 1. My bet is that these guys were killers without a clue. They thought that they could get away with it and panicked when they began to realize that the police had or would identify them. That is when they tried to figure out how to escape with no cash and no transport and with nowhere to go. A classic level 1 endgame. Ooops.

3rd FOLLOW -  I wonder why the younger brother chose to wear that white baseball cap on that day the way he did. Having the hat on backwards made it easy to identify his face. And with the collage of images turned in, police could follow him walking with the backpack and then suddenly without it after he put it down. Ooops.

Once again, was this as an arrogant gesture (sort of a “come and get me!” type of thing) or sheer stupidity? I guess we will find out. For the time being, I will stick with my “killers without a clue” theory - and speculate that these guys had no idea how much film would be taken of them at the scene of the crime. They were not up on what smart phones and video surveillance cameras do. So they blundered forward thinking that they were blending into the crowd. That they had things under control. That they could wreak havoc and fade away.

Let’s see if I am right. In closing this thread, thank the Lord that this is over. Thank the Lord that Boston can get back to normal. And thank the highly professional law enforcement folks for doing an amazing job to bring this to a quick close! You are amazing.

But let’s also heed Bruce Schneier’s warning. We are likely to see ugly stuff like this from time to time. And it might get worse. We need to defend against it, but we also need to find a better way to get at the root of the problem - and that will require more than just killing off the bad guys with drone strikes. We are not there yet.

This quote got my attention

That life for all mankind here on this earth can be better - that all can be happier, richer, better adjusted - is, at least as a generally shared belief or hope among the mass of mankind, only a few centuries old.

From Crane Brinton on The Enlightenment.

It is incredible that for roughly 99.9% of our time on this planet, we did not share this idea. Indeed, up until around 5,000 years ago (98% of our time here), we might not have been able to see mankind as joined together in a global adventure at all. That requires certain abstract reasoning tools that had not yet been invented.

It is perhaps even more incredible that after only 300 years (0.15% of our time on the planet), it has come out of nowhere to become the predominant view, at least in the west. That we all play a game called progress.

It would seem that this game is just getting underway.

I return today to a theme that I enjoy writing about - how the 21st century will be different than the 20th. Here is the core idea

One might argue that from the 18th century onward, western man has been plagued by a character flaw. This was not our fault. We inherited this flaw from prior generations. What was the flaw? Read on!

First some theoretical background - When man is in danger, he craves certainty. It is instinctive. So we don’t like to take even small risks when the downside is significant. It takes a tremendous amount of training, for example, before one sticks his head in the lion’s mouth or walks a tightrope without a net or flies an airplane or parachutes to earth.

Now some history - For much of man’s time here on the planet, he faced significant risks. From predators, from nature, from other men, from time. These risks were often life threatening and apparent. so is it a surprise that man craved ultimate certainty — the type that religion purports to offer? An ultimate explanation for all things that happen, both good and bad? I think it is quite normal. And our history shows how strong it has been.

Now the argument - The belief that there is an ultimate answer to all questions produces arrogance in the man who nurtures it. And this is a dreadful character flaw.  I argue that religious man gave scientific man this belief that finding and offering ultimate answers is needed and possible. And so we get the arrogance of science.The idea that scientific method is somehow like a religion. An absurdity if there ever was one.

So here is the question - can we overcome this character flaw in the 21st century? Perhaps. It will be one of the great adventures that we face. And here is an article that gives a bit of flavor of the possibilities.

Enjoy!

Over the last years, we have begun to understand a few important things about the brain. The first is that our mental capacities are all about the same. But that does not mean we have the same capabilities in life. That depends on how we use the capacities that we have. There is a lot one can say about how to do that. But one of the most important is that using them well requires a certain amount of “creativity”. And the second thing is that we know a bit more about how creativity works — and doesn’t work.

It turns out that part of being creative depends on how whether we allow ourselves that opportunity. We need to allow ourselves because the brain has a powerful filtering tool in the left prefrontal cotex. This tool gives us the stability we need to retain “cognitive control”. It tells us that a baseball bat is for playing baseball - and that is that. But research shows that if we want to use the baseball bat for other stuff, we need to turn off the filter, at least temporarily. Turning off the filter allows us to see the baseball bat in a new light. It allows us to make new associations.

That brings me to the topic of beer. Jeff Kahn argues that beer was the tools that made civilization possible. You got it. Beer (first developed around 2,000 years ago) is a convenient filter lowering device.

So should we all be drinking more? Not at all. Beer is not the only way to de-filter the brain. The first step in learning how to de-filter is to realize that we need to do it sometimes. The second step is building trust that it works. In other words, we dare not leave the creative work to the artists. We are all artists now in life’s great adventure.

A factoid

When American settlers started to go west beyond the Arkansas river in the 1820’s they encountered a very different landscape that was populated with very different types of people. They learned to cope with the landscape, but the people were a problem.

Those people were the plains Indians, who were prone to attack settlers and wipe them out. Here comes the weird factoid. The settlers were not oblivious to the danger and brought with them the latest weapon technology that they had - the breach loading rifle. The plains Indians used their bows and arrows. Which technology worked better?

By far it was the bow and arrow. The breach loader was the more powerful of the two, but it only fired one shot a minute (a trained soldier might be able to do 2 or in rare cases 3). The fast moving Indian on horse back was hard to hit and with his bow and arrow, he could fire up to 20 rounds a minute. Wow! That is a lot of arrows per bullet.

In the early days, it was no contest, The Indians were routinely winning the battles. And they learned that if they could get the settlers to fire first, the game was essentially over.

But something came to the rescue of the settlers over time. That was an “accelerated learning capacity”. When the need was defined out west, back east, learning institutions (private companies) started working on a solution. And they found it. Pistols and rifles that could fire up to 20 rounds per minute.

Meanwhile, the Indians stuck with the bows and arrows. Oops. Later they took to capturing or buying rifles. But the idea of manufacturing them probably never entered their heads.

One culture was brave, resourceful and determined. But it was also relatively fixed in its ways. The other learned quicker.

Wonder who won?

As inevitable as death may be for all of us, it remains darkly mysterious. No one knows what happens to people after they die. We only know that their earthly remains begin to smell.

By the way, I was told that this is the reason for the descriptor “stinking rich”.  The rich could afford to pay to be buried under flagstones in the entrance way of churches. Hmmm … not deep enough, I guess.

Ooops! We know one other thing. No dead person has come back to reclaim their earthly identity. But this leaves wide open quite a lot about the process of dying and its effect on the identity of the deceased.

New medical procedures flummox us even more. At least one doctor notes that brain cells die rather slowly (hours after the heart stops). He knows because he has been successful in bringing people who have died from cardiac arrest … back to life. They were not “near death”. They were pronounced dead. Some of these people then described things that happened around their corpse accurately— even though they were flatlined, showing no signs of mental activity.

So — are the dead really dead? Or do they live on, beyond their physical life span? And if they do live on, do they care what we think of them and if we think of them? I wonder, for example, if Richard III cares whether his skeleton has been found.  Does he care that the people of Leicester are grateful and want to care for his memory? Or does he have other concerns? Or is he without concern at all?

A very good show! Check it out.

It has been clear for quite a while that the uprising in Syria would not be a quick or easy affair. Neither for the rebels nor for the government.  The government has high powered weapons, and strong alliances. The rebels are determined, have carved out shelter zones and found friends. Both sides have demonstrated a willingness to use brutal force to try to break the will of their opponent.

One of the key tactical issues is the government’s superiority in air power. With that, the rebels find it dangerous to seize and hold strategic locations. That is why news today that the rebels have successfully brought down a government helicopter with a surface to air missile is important. If the rebels start doing this more regularly, it could turn the tide of the war. NYT has the story.

BTW, one might keep in mind a report from a while ago that the government does not have huge air resources.

There is nothing like a Washington sex scandal that sells media content so well! And so it goes with General Patraeus et al. But is there a lesson here? I think so. The lesson is to beware the droll effects of the midlife crisis. None of us are immune, and these things often end badly.

But as the History Blog informs us, this is nothing new.

This quote (from the above link to an article about the great Maximilian) caught my eye

As one often sees today with midlife crisis Lamborghini purchases, Maximilian was overcompensating. His father Frederick III became the first Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor in 1452. Maximilian co-ruled the empire with his father for the last 10 years of his reign (1483-1493). With so fresh a link to the imperial throne, Maximilian made a point of emphasizing royal connections, real or fictional, in his family line. He traced his ancestry back to Hector, son of King Priam of Troy, Julius Caesar, King Arthur, Charlemagne and a number of saints. The point of this family tree liberally sprinkled with myth was to underscore that though the Habsburg dynasty might be technically brand spanking new to the throne, its long history of heroism, military genius, leadership, chivalric ideals and piety made it even more of an imperial line than some of the other families with royal claims.

As one also sees today with those midlife crisis Lamborghini purchasers, Maximilian’s mortality weighed heavily upon him. From 1514 on, he carried his coffin with him wherever he traveled, and he traveled a lot.

Hmmm … traveling with a coffin is very kinky.

I enjoyed Liesl Schillinger’s article about Susan Mary Alsop. In part because it advertises the importance of relationships over partisanship. But that is a message that echoes in the dark these days. More important, it brings me back to Georgetown in the 1970’s. I never met Susan Mary Alsop. But I was remotely connected to another Georgetown house and had the opportunity from time to time to watch Georgetown society work its charm. And charming it was. Indeed. Charm was its business. Something I have not seen managed with such care since then.