What's that, Mr. Bones, am I elaborately calling the journalist gentleman a simpleton? Not at all, sir, not at all, was the late M. Nabókov a butterfly, plain or elaborated? Even in his own self-conception? (Hmm, perhaps that last query needs some additional research....)
No, Mr. Slackman is not a simpleton himself, because any anthology of two or more simplisms is at once a complex. Even e(n)tymologists know that. And before you ask, sir, allow me to point out that simplisms are not necessarily lies or mistakes or self-deceptions -- or even ignorance plus self plus self-ignorance mishmashed together modo Crawfordiano. The reason simplisms have a faint cloud over their reputation in some circles is, as I conjecture, that outside of Nat. Sci., they invariably omit some ingredient that clamors (figuratively) to be included. Mr. Slackman is not deaf to this silent clamor, and so he surveys a lot more than simplism A, namely simplisms B through Z.
Once established and endowed, or rather vice versa, Simple Science as I conceive it will have a border with Political Science, and some of the issues Mr. Slackman touches upon in his news analysis, or at any rate brings to mind, are probably located on the other side of that educationalist fence. Simplisms are like electrons, for instance, they repel one another. When one team starts bellowing "All you need to know is A!", the devotees of B are likely to modify their own banner to make it more clearly imply or proclaim that A is negligible or contemptible, over and above neutrally being one not-B option out of thousands or billions. The fact of mutual repulsion undoubtedly belongs to Simple Science, but the causes of it may well belong to the province of Pol. Sci.
Dr. Marx and some others used to claim that Economics was sole proprietress of these causes, but his view is obsolete or obsolescent and certainly has no resonanace at the NYTC. This is rather a pity, since it would be a pleasure to encounter a lucid exposition of the current Fatáh/Hamás/TelAviv/Crawford/Cairo/Riyádh shindig viewed as the struggle of economic classes. I have trouble at once attempting to guess how it would go: at the moment a wide variety of simplists seem to have coincided on the practical position that the immediate thing to do is make Gaza poorer and East Palestine wealthier. Whatever its merits as a policy suggestion, that approach looks like almost a deliberate parody of the former Scientific Socialism; it announces as a "solution" to be implemented in the future what ought to have been, according to Marx, an antecedent condition required to get struggle started in the first place. Even if SS is reduced to an extremely vague claim that economic factors are "in the last resort" dispositive, nothing comes of it (that I've noticed) more than chatter about a "war for oil," despite the fact that the Fatáh and the Hamás and the Qadima and the Likud taken together are geologically invisible by contrast with the Gulf of Petroleum. One might go on from that difficulty to notice that the economics of the Great Cardboard Kingdom and all the lesser Gulfies scarcely resembles anything that Dr. Marx ever mentioned, not even the mysterious "Asiatic mode of production."
Now "simple" as an attribute of the projected Simple Science means "not complex." To take it as "not difficult" would fall far short of the ideal dignity of tertiary education, which concerns itself with matters of lofty speculation rather than of banausic implementation. Once the pure science has been endowed and formulated and established, presumably a technology based upon it will come into existence as well, but meanwhile let us not get ahead of ourselves. The fact that it is anything but easy to imagine a Scientific Socialist account of the current troubles in the Levant does not preclude the possibility that the former Marxism was itself a first draft of the Simple Science. Given the theoretical problems noted, however, it can hardly be the final draft.
Distinguishing "not difficult" from "not simple" reminds one immediately of General von Clausewitz, who stressed that distinction more than any theorist ever did before or since. "War" is utterly simple, yet everything in it is almost infinitely hard to accomplish. As every schoolboy knows, the technical name inside the Clausewitzian system for the cause (?) of this difficulty of martial accomplishment is "friction." General von Clausewitz, like Dr. Marx, has some claim to have founded the Simple Science already, in which case Daddy Warbucks need not fund Mr. Michael Slackman to do so in A.D. 2007. However, as you will have inferred from my punctuation, there are some questions as to whether "war" in the celebrated book sufficiently corresponds to what violence professionals actually do in the field, either to what they have done all along or what they have started to do since the 1830's. It also seems mildly displeasing to imagine that Kriegswissenschaft should turn out to be the universal science of simplicity. That is not a speculative objection, to be sure, only a sentimentalism, yet General von Clausewitz ought to take account of it all the same, for surely this, too, must count as a species of friction?
I don't think Clausewitzianity actually constitutes the Simple Science any more than Marxism does, yet in one respect the Prussian general's claims to partial recognition are even stronger than the Prussian philosopher's: lumping a zillion different impediments together as "friction" and then lecturing about that looks primâ facie like a masterstroke of methodological decomplexification. Perhaps detailed scrutiny will show that it is nothing of the sort, yet all the same, the true Simple Science of times to come will be bound to discuss this bold attempt and how it miscarried, even as thorough instruction in modern chemisty must mention the word "phlogiston" and explain how speculative men concluded at last that it is no more than a word. (Marx fans may nominate "alienation" for their guy as being comparable, but if so, they only pronounce themselves no true aficionados of simplicity. Not much reflection is required to notice that "alienation" is headed towards complexity, not away from it. It may be quite as important as "friction" is, but study of it plainly belongs over in the Department of Complexity Science. [1])
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The Simple Science being uninvented as yet, or if invented, unknown to ourselves, we can only stroll through Mr. Slackman's collection and make a few random unsystematic observations.
[A] The simplism he detected with the words quoted in the title above goes like this:
| “Abbas is accepted by all the Arabs,” said Muhammad Abdullah al-Zulfa, a member of Shura Council of Saudi Arabia, an advisory body with no legislative authority. “I think all the Arabs are with Abbas because all Arabs are with the peace initiative. The whole world is behind Abbas.” |
Pretty clearly that is the simplism of the Arab Palace People, the ones in the real cardboard-kingly or barracks-based-republican palaces. Neocomrade Prof. Dr. F. ‘Ajamí's "dream palace of the Arabs" is rather a diferent story.
[B] Naturally the Street Arabs have a simplism of their own:
| “Imagine if the U.S. did not support President Abbas, would the international community and the Arab governments have taken this position?” said Muhammad Habib, the deputy leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is banned in Egypt. “This is what bothers the Arab people. The U.S. announces a position and immediately Arab governments adopt it. This is what creates a split between people and their leadership, this subordination to the West.” |
(Analogy with the mutual repugnance of electrons is not far to seek.)
[C] Mr. Slackman reserves the Dream Palace simplism to end his news analysis with:
| "“Life in the West Bank at least economically, will improve and, we hope, politically will improve,” said Taher Masri, a former prime minister of Jordan. “Hamas in Gaza will look to this positive developments and wish they can join, which will lead elements outside Hamas in Gaza to moderate their position and to join the legitimate government. “That might be wishful thinking,” he said. “I don’t know.” |
[D] Does the journalist himself agree with the pol he allots the last word to? I don't believe he does, I think he chose to begin with the simplism he likes best:
| The conquest of the Gaza Strip by Hamas has frightened Arab leaders because it was characterized by the same dynamics that have been agitating the region. Once again, as in Lebanon last summer, the fight pitted a Western-backed government against a newly empowered, radical Islamist group aligned with Syria and Iran. And, once again, the Western-backed group lost and the Iranian-Syrian group won. The outcome demonstrated the rising threat to the status quo in places like Cairo; Amman, Jordan; and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, posed by political Islam. And it gave Iran yet another foothold on Arab borders. |
I beg your pardon, "he likes best" need not be the case, the great thing is that simplism [D] is what consumers of The New York Times are anticipated to like best. Or so I conjecture.
[E] Finally there is this one, which follows [D] immediately and might be thought of as a sort of simplism [D1]:
| “We have a big problem here that is much deeper,” said Abdel Moneim Said, director of the state-financed Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies. “It is related to the bankruptcy of the shape of the modern Arab political entity and its inability really to convince the people with where they are going. Then you have the success of the other side, like Hamas, in making a clearer, simpler message.” |
(Dear Mr. Translator, how can the "shape" of an "entity" be "bankrupt"? Perhaps there might have been a diagram?)
But seriously, that one is worded so spiffy that you might even be fooled into taking for not a simplism at all. Well, classify it as you like, but myself I'll label it the "Dream Palace of Tertiary Education" simplism provisionally, and disconnect it from the NYTC readership simplism, considering that there is no clear sign in it of Damascus and the evil Qommies. True, "the other side, like Hamas" could be taken to mean "the other side, like the Hamás and the Hizballáh and Syria and Iran." But I'm pretty confident that if M. Sa‘íd had been allowed to get in a few more words he'd have made it unmistakable that "the other side" is Street Arabs as against Palace Arabs.
"State-financed" or not as regards its source, [E] is a different simplism from [A]. Unless I am mistaken, Prof. Dr. Sa‘íd stands above the Street-Palace clash, viewing it afar from atop a pyramid or an ivory tower. He notes that Tweedledum and Tweedledee are mutually "other," but both of them are other than himself.
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[1] To digress from a digression as briefly as possible, the DCS seems to me to exist already, but it is, quite suitably if one considers, dispersed amongst a number of other disciplines. Attempts to pull Complexity Studies all together have been made which Mr. Bones and I have classified under the rubric "Postwhateverism." It is once again suitable that the pullers-together do not have any one name for it themselves: some of them even dispense with the "post" prefix.
do you have trouble sleeping?
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