isen.blog

It was a delight to hear from former Bell Labs colleague, Tom Anderson, who sent me this long, wise letter, which I've tried to shorten without blunting its wisdom.

I have enjoyed reading your smart letters over the years but have not actually emailed any comments until now.  Although I'm sure some would disagree, I was glad to see your commentary regarding the war in Iraq in your SMART Letter #95.  I couldn't agree with you more. 
 
The general assumption in a stupid network is that the intelligence is at the edge.  We would hope that this intelligent edge includes the people actually using the network edge devices.   Thus, my first reaction to commentary on the war with Iraq is, "how could these people be so stupid."  However, upon further reflection, I realize that intelligence has little to do with this situation.  The architects of the Iraq war are intelligent people.  The issue has more to do with their level of consciousness.
 
When we are born, we are conscious of our primary care giver - our mother or father.  These care givers meet our survival needs for food, water, rest time, love, ...   As babies, we are not conscious of the world outside the sphere of these care givers.  As a baby, we are not aware of others until they come into our narrow sphere of consciousness, when they pinch our cheeks or pat our heads.  As we grow older, our sphere of consciousness increases.  We first associate with "our" family, then "our" school, then "our" team, "our" town, "our" state, "our" country, ...   As we grow up, we learn to differentiate between what is, "me", what is "mine" and what is "other".   Thus our sphere or level of consciousness continues to expand, taking in a broader world that we label as "mine".  As we grow, we learn what is "mine" and all that is outside of "mine" is the "other."   We care much less about the "other" as they may be our enemy, our competitor, the "other" side ... they are not like us and certainly not as good as "we" are, not as smart as we are, not as human as we are.  At any level of consciousness, there is "mine or us" and "them" or the "other".  At higher levels of consciousness, the set of others gets smaller and smaller.    At higher levels of consciousness, we associate with and empathize with the larger environment.

*snip*

It is important to note that religious traditions have always embraced inclusivism in theory.  For example, Christ said, "love thy neighbor as thy self".  The question is, who exactly is your neighbor.  For the modernist, the neighbor is the guy next door (as long as he cheers for the same baseball team and drinks the same beer) or the person in the next pew at church - people within our level of consciousness - people we call our own.  For the homonoeticus, the neighbor is the man in China, or India, or Iraq struggling to make a living and support their family - just like us.  The homonoeticus takes Christ's charge to "love thy neighbor" seriously where all of mankind are our neighbors.  This is really a movement toward unity consciousness.
 
*snip*
 
As we grow and evolve as human beings, our consciousness naturally increases.  Unfortunately, we have a current administration that is deeply rooted in a modernist and limited sphere of consciousness.  Consider the Iraq conflict.  It would be very hard to convince the 10s, maybe 100s of thousands of Iraq's killed by the US in the past 1½ years that our president is somehow Pro-Life.  Exactly whose life are we talking about?  How can we, as a nation, justify the deaths of so many in Iraq when Iraq:
• Had no weapons of mass destruction,
• Did not participate in 9/11 and
• Was not affiliated with Al Queada?
Exactly what did these people do to deserve this fate?  And how can we justify spending over $200B in doing this when there are so many positive causes that go unfunded (and in the process, creating one of the largest deficits in the history of the US)?   It is also interesting to note that the US government keeps track of each to the 1200+ US deaths in Iraq, but does not count the Iraq deaths.  If they are not counted, how can they count??  This is an excellent example of the modernist "radical ignorance of the other" way of thinking. Each of these Iraqis were living, breathing people, with mothers and fathers.  They were children and parents alike. They, however, did not seem to matter to an administration which was operating with a primitive, survival mode consciousness.
 
Indeed, the primary message of this administration is one of fear of the "other" ... "we must kill all of the terrorists" ... "you're either for us or against us".  To a very large extent, the Bush administration has justified its actions based on "fear" - a fear of survival, representing a rather low level of consciousness - the consciousness of an infant struggling to survive.
 
Intuitively, we all know that "killing all the terrorists" is not a practical solution - especially when whole nations are defined to be terrorists.  For each one you kill, you create, by that very action, logarithmically more terrorists with a new cause.  On 9/11, 3000 people were killed by the terrorists.  This event evoked great emotion from the 300,000,000 people in the US who vowed - "We Will Not Forget".  But how can we expect the 20,000,000 people of Iraq to forget the 100,000 or so deaths by actions of the US??  We lost two buildings in 9/11, Iraq lost their entire infrastructure with a reign of bombs.  How can they not forget??  Our actions of "force" have created a large pool of new terrorists ... and that is not so easy to fix.  Contrary to Bush's cry that we must "kill all of the terrorists" - unless he intends genocide on the scale of Hitler ... his pitch makes no sense.
 
Alternatively, an inclusivism perspective is strikingly different.  When a couple comes into therapy, the therapist would never recommend that the wife hire a hit man to kill the spouse because he was a "bad guy".  Rather, the therapist would counsel the couple to "see the other's point of view" and to consider how their own behavior affects the situation.  Unfortunately, for the 100,000 Iraq's who died, Bush and Hussein never made it to therapy - though many of the world powers tried.  Certainly, given $200B, there were many, many other ways to deal with Iraq without killing people.
 
It is important to note that all of the major cultural revolutions in the last 50 years came about without dropping bombs.  The fall of the Berlin wall and communism occurred without a shot, the fall of apartidism in South Africa, the civil rights movement in the US, ....   These were transitions made as a result of an elevation in the group consciousness of those affected.  For example, in the USSR, they figured out that the "other" (the western world) was doing well and they decided that they must  "include" some of these "other" philosophies in the governing of their own domain.
 
*snip*
 
The failure of this administration is a failure in consciousness.  They have drawn clear and fortified boundaries between "us" and "them" ... where "them" seems to be the 49% of the US and the rest of the world.  The administration then contends that the evil "other" must be killed.  This radical ignorance of the other takes no consideration of the bigger picture, the causes of discontent, the solutions to world issues. 

*snip*
 
The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of endpoints.  Thus, the network is most valuable and most powerful when it is inclusive of all - taking in all endpoints regardless of the color of the IAD, the manufacturer of IP Phone, the "preferences" of the hand held device.  We should do well to apply the network principles that we know so well to our politics.
 
Thomas W. Anderson

It certainly seems like a reasonable analysis to me. Lately I've noted that (e.g.) China and Iraq are closer to where I am now than Illinois was 100 years ago. Today we don't think of the people in Illinois as "other" -- for the most part, "their" interests are "our" interests. Maybe some day we'll feel the same about the rest of the world's peoples.

Note: I told Tom about Reed's Law, and he agrees that the value of networks can grow faster than N^2.