The Complexity of the Syrian Situation

As I said when I posted this on Facebook, I hate these repetitious pictures that show up with different quotes on them (and here I add: especially the Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka one). But this one poses an interesting, if reductionist (as it was pointed out) question about the logistics of the Syrian situation.

My friend Ray Harris responded with this:

Ah jeez - if it were as simple as this the US, NATO would have intervened earlier. The use of chemical weapons breaches international law and it is up to the international community to act, otherwise international law is meaningless.

Nor would the US necessarily be fighting on the same side as al Qaeda. They would simply be punishing one side for a clear violation of international law.

The rebel side also includes people interested in a democratic Syria - unless you forgot that Assad is a Ba'athist dictator.

Ray also posted this and tagged me on it so that I would see it:

I am getting massively bored with all the simplistic, reductionist responses to the situation in Syria. It is extremely complex people. It is NOT like Iraq. It is NOT like Afghanistan. It is like Syria. It is NOT only because of a gas pipeline (although resources are always a factor). Nor does the US have any specific interest in Syria. But in case you have forgotten. Someone did use chemical weapons (both Hussein and Assad belong to the Ba'athist party and Hussein used chemical weapons on Kurds). And the use of chemical weapons is a clear breach of international law and someone has to police international law, otherwise it is meaningless.

Are the US hypocrites? Of course, but everyone is hypocrite. What of the Russians and Chinese?

There is a lot of propaganda flying around at the moment. Pro-Assad propaganda, pro-rebel propaganda, Iranian propaganda blaming Israel, socialist alliance propaganda blaming US imperialism, and so on and on.

After a bit of thought, this is my reply and my current (muddled) understanding of the complexity of the situation:

Ray, I get your perspective and I think, at the same time, that the situation is so absurd that is requires mockery to avoid simply giving up.

It's clearly NOT simple - if it were, there would be no hesitation on the part of Obama in launching a "punishment" - and the fact that both Britain and Germany, among others I presume, have opted out of a NATO attack, or even a "coalition" attack, is telling.

Obama has effed this up so thoroughly with his line in the sand nonsense and then his refusal to launch a strike that it is laughable. At the same time, he has good reason not to launch a strike - it likely will bring in Iran and probably Russia (who has already sent a fleet of warships into the Persian Gulf) - then we have WWIII in the Middle East.

The Syrian Rebels are also a mixed bag - some who want democracy, some who want Islamic law, some who are al Qaeda, and probably some other groups as well. We are probably supporting the rebels covertly at this point, but what will we end up with if they succeed in toppling Assad? Will we get Syria's version of the Muslim Brotherhood, and then have a messed up situation like Egypt, where we support the military in staging a coup to oust the first truly democratically elected president in decades?

That whole region is an example of what happens when we impose somewhat arbitrary lines and values (unsuccessfully) where there had been none prior, or at least not in the same way. It is ludicrous to think that creating nations at a bargaining table will put to an end to centuries of tribal hatred and a general sense among most Arab peoples of having been the oppressed - same thing happened on the African continent when the European territories demanded and took their independence. Witness Sudan - one tribe gains political and military power and then sets about eliminating the opposing tribe(s).

There is a huge difference between the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire following WWI [Ray mentioned this in a comment] and what we are seeing now. Those European nations were already developed and they (mostly) were not a collection of tribes and/or religious sects. More importantly, the West kept military bases in many countries as a kind of reminder not to get out of line (weak colonialism), but this did not happen when the European nations carved up the Middle East.

The complexity of the situation, which I suspect you get much more than I do, is well over the capacities of our current elected leaders to deal with effectively. This is obvious.

International law, by the way, IS meaningless in a practical sense. As long as Russia and China are permanent members of the Security Council at the UN (with veto power), things like this will never be punished by the UN. The US cannot be the policeman of the planet - and the American citizens are overwhelmingly opposed to our trying to do so.

After all the words I have just typed, I have barely scratched the surface of the complexity of this situation.

The reality here on Facebook is that Americans think in sound bites, so it's no wonder we post simplistic, reductionist statements about complex events - it's what our media has trained us to do. I'll bet very few people will have read this far . . . a picture with a trite quote is much easier to digest and simply agree/disagree. But this part of it is a whole other discussion . . . .

John Bunzl - Discovering an Integral Civic Consciousness in a Global Age

This Integral Post from Integral Life - an article by John Bunzl that originally appeared in the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice - takes an interesting look at the relative absence of an "integral civic consciousness" in the current cultural landscape. This becomes an especially relevant issue in light of Terry Patten's project to collect all integrally-informed Obama supporters into one donation block (Integral Obama), essentially creating another "special interest group" that by contributing money hopes to have access to the president in some small way. This is how the game is played, of course.

Patten received a lot blowback on this initiative. He ended up having to post a justification for his project. If it seems challenging to get liberals all on the same page to support a small selection of important issues, rather than their own pet issues, getting the integral community (such as it is) together into one voice is about as likely as herding cats.

Personally, I do not see ANY likelihood of an integral or worldcentric global governance in the near future of human life on this planet. Perhaps that is why there is no civic efforts in that direction - because it is not a realistic ideal, even if Ken Wilber and others (Wilber, 2000; McIntosh, 2007; Stewart, 2000) have said that such governance is our species' only hope of survival.

With that bit of context, here is Bunzl's article.

 

 

Discovering an Integral Civic Consciousness in a Global Age

September 18th, 2012

 

This essay was originally published in the March 2012 issue of the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice. Click here to purchase the full issue.

  This article asks why, in an age of global crisis, global governance still remains a low priority for the integral community. It posits a civic line of development, suggesting only those possessing a worldcentric level of civic awareness can fully comprehend global problems and the need for binding global governance. I argue that modern (orange altitude), postmodern (green altitude), and even low vision-logic (teal altitude) worldviews still see global problems nationcentrically rather than worldcentrically. I explore this limitation in light of destructive international competition; a key and potentially catastrophic phenomenon that, it is argued, shows why only a worldcentric, late vision-logic (turquoise altitude) civic consciousness can disclose solutions to the global crisis. Ways in which green and teal altitude split off these realities are suggested, providing clues to how turquoise civic consciousness may be accessed and how the integral community may thus play a fuller, more effective role in global transformation.

Civics entails the rights and duties of citizenship and the role citizens have in establishing, shaping, and overseeing government at any level (Altinay, 2010). Civics is founded on citizens’ perception that governance is actually necessary; that it is functionally required to solve societal, environmental or economic problems at a particular level, be it local, national, or global.

If, for example, a citizen could not perceive national-scale problems, or mistook them as being of a merely local nature, she would see no need for national governance at all. Her civic consciousness would be merely local or ethnocentric. Such a citizen would recognize only their local authority or tribe as functionally required and would likely see any higher levels of government as superfluous, wasteful and suspicious. Those at orange altitude or higher, on the other hand, recognize national government to be required in addition to local governance. Their depth of civic consciousness thus has two levels. Yet, in an age when our problems are increasingly global and threaten our civilized survival, it is notable that very few citizens see any need for a third level, that being global governance. Indeed, for the vast majority of people, including those up to teal altitude, civic consciousness remains, as I will be arguing, at best nationcentric. The emphasis on global civics indicates that global problems must first be perceived as such; a worldcentric perception that indicates that merely technical solutions or national (or local) politics cannot suffice. Instead, a vertical transformation toward a form of binding global governance is necessary.

I distinguish the civic from the political line of development in the Lower-Right (LR) quadrant by noting that civics is fundamentally about the perception, by citizens, of a need for governance. Politics, on the other hand, is what happens after governance (or formal government) has been established. Civics, in that sense, is prior to politics.

The Civic Holarchy

Like all lines of development, the proposed civic line tetra-evolves and manifests in all four quadrants. Civic holons are most obvious in the LR quadrant, in what I will be referring to as “the civic holarchy.” This is the holarchy of our institutions of governance that has evolved and bonded together human societies from the earliest hunter-gatherer bands, through to Middle-Age city and small-states, and up to present-day institutions of national and global governance (Wilber, 2000; Wright, 2001).

Across a wide variety of cultures, the civic holarchy typically comprises, in the LR, the following levels: Local Authority → State → Nation-state. That is, the smallest civic holon is generally a local authority of some kind; an authority that determines local taxes and regulations. In some countries, local authorities form the parts that make up the larger whole of a state; an intermediate level of government which is itself part of a larger nation-state. In other countries, local authorities directly form the parts of the nation-state. In either case, each is a whole/part and each subsequent level transcends and includes its predecessor.

I end the civic holarchy with nation-states because although there may be many supra-national institutions of governance, such as the European Union, the United Nations (UN), and others, these institutions remain, for reasons elucidated later, heavily influenced by nation-states and their differing national interests. It is thus nation-states that today remain the key class of actors on the world stage, the most senior level in the civic holarchy.

Democracy and civics are closely intertwined wherever individuals have a legally binding vote. Thus, in democratic countries, individual citizens can be said to represent the Upper-Right (UR) quadrant correlate of civic holons at each level. Meanwhile the civic consciousness of an individual citizen represents the Upper-Left (UL) quadrant correlate. Similarly, the civic culture of a society will manifest in the Lower-Left (LL) quadrant and will be reflected by its institutions of governance in the LR. This is not to suggest an absence of civic consciousness in non-democratic nations; only that it is not mediated by democracy.

Read the whole article.