TheMillerCircle.org

Nobel prize winner Lord Edgar Adrian (1932) talked about the great advantage of distance receptors, referring to our receptivity for sight and sound and emphasizing their sensory advantages over other senses like touch and pain, to give us advanced warning and knowledge of the objects around us; of course vision is the supreme receptor system in this regard, not only because light is fast and gives us visual information about objects far away, but also because our remarkable visual system can detect things under extreme conditions of light and dark allowing us to have at least some visual capacity for the environmental light excursions cyclically present on the surface of the earth. But vision has another meaning which we use regularly, when we say someone had enough vision to put these principals into our constitution. The vision we refer to describes our perceptive skills and obviously reflects not just our intrinsic visual skills, but our capacity to reason, plan and execute, a kind of longitudinal vision or a special line of sight. Just as our survival from a predator requires quick and immediate action and depends on our distance receptors, our vision and perception of issues and circumstances are no less important for survival of our culutre, no less predictive of our future as a society, yet it demands from us a more contemplative approach, a different kind of vision. But vision, capturing quanta, here too plays a role, but more as visual memory, an indelible part of our brain architecture that forces on us a construct of the world, one with a visual, identifiable component. Half our brain cells can be activated by light, so our memory is rich in visual context. When we say we are visual animals, in reality we mean that we have more than just the powers of detecting light. We do more than see, we can foresee too.

I remember as a kid buying an ant farm through the mail. It came with the ant farm "hill," consisting of two panes of glass or plastic separated by a small space, "tunneling sand," ants, food and a little eye dropper to add water. Once you put the tunneling sand into the farm, you sent back a mail receipt and they mailed you the ants in a small box which you poured on top of the farm sand and then sealed it so they couldn’t get out. The ants proved to be highly industrious and you could see their daily progress in creating little tunnels which could be seen through the transparent walls as the farm got more complex and sophisticated.

One day, in a kind of impulsive gesture, I decided that there weren’t enough ants to work the little farm properly. I thought that the farm needed more bodies, more workers. This was no problem. We had moved into a new neighborhood where there were lots of empty lots and those fields had lots of little ant hills filled with red ants. So I went to a field across the street, scooped up some ants, brought them back and placed them in the farm. To my horror, instead of the new ants working alongside the old ones, picking up the slack, the new ants began attacking the old ones, killing them in a ferocious battle. Looking close I could see a difference now between the new and old ants. The new ones were very aggressive, larger and deeper red in color. Up close, comparing one to another, the new ants had many differences compared to the mail order ants and I realized that I had made a big mistake by not taking these differences into account. I should have given a more microscopic examination to the two ant colonies to make a more detailed comparison of their features. I should have consulted people with more expertise or perhaps gone to the library and learned more about ants. Perhaps if I had taken that more cautionary, studied approach I would never have added the aggressors to the ant farm. It was for me, an important lesson in life, one that I never forgot. I was not sophisticated or even remotely educated enough about ants to avoid my little version of a cultural disaster, precipitating and act of ant genocide.  Yet, while up close my ant farm was a horror show, like a minor version of the sacking of Rome, if you stood back about ten feet or so, you were struck less by the violence taking place in the ant farm, which was no longer quite so apparent and far less visual, and you appreciated more how little things had changed and how much things seemed to be going on without interruption. The new ants, the conquerors, as they were disposing of the old ones, began to develop the tunnels and carried on in a manner not unlike that of the mail order ants, although the tunnel system seemed to be a little different and some previous tunnels seem to have been rejected in favor of new ones. So standing back, it seemed like business as usual in the ant farm.

I am struck by my ant farm experience when I think about the war in Iraq. If Bush and Cheney had studied the history of Iraq, got to know more about its people before acting impulsively, things might have turned out very different. Where was Tony Blair who might have conveyed the British experience in Iraq, in which they purposely setup a fractured country after WW I, to make it easier to rule and dominate, thus securing easy access to their crown jewel, India. But of course we live in the age when Washington doesn’t have to learn history, because they are writing it, their own version, so what went on before is irrelevant. You wonder whether the family and friends of the ~3500 dead soldiers think that history was irrelevant and you wonder too if our children and grandchildren, who will have to pay for this hugely expensive war effort, will agree that history means and meant nothing.

But the ant farm has relevance for another element to this war, the one in which the proponents of today tell us that if those of us opposed to the war, who believe that the best chance for peace in the region is to withdraw our troops, if we could only visit Iraq and see the progress, the benefits of "the surge" we might change our minds and begin to view the war as they do, a winnable adventure with many benefits awaiting us in the form of a stable oil supply and a permanent place in the table of the Middle East. Safety for Israel, containment of Iran and stabilization of the World’s oil supply. Of course to accept this idea, one has to appreciate that the numbers they are talking about, which they claim support progress in Iraq have been refuted by the real data, as summarized by Juan Cole, and Tom Englehardt where the U.S. military deaths and the deaths of Iraqi citizens are at an all time high. If you adjusted for July alone, the reported Iraqi deaths of civilians would be the equivalent of 18,000 U.S. citizens from just one month of war using numbers that probably underestimate the carnage. The Maliki government is in a state of near collapse, the middle class, those sectarians that we might best identify with have disappeared and we are faced with a humanitarian crisis for the Iraqis displaced within Iraq of nightmare proportions.

But putting aside all of those "realities," to understand how best to deal with Iraq, is in fact best done, not by those who are in the trenches looking at neighborhoods and markets and corners of trouble, but by those not there, those who are in a position to have a longitudinal vision about our impact on the country and our future there and concerned less about what tomorrow will be like and more concerned about next year or the year after. Those of us who are not in Iraq and may never see the country, know from experience that the critical failure of all of America’s misadventures, from Korea to Vietnam to Grenada to Iraq and then back to Iraq yet again, is our complete inability, driven by a grand naivety about war, to understand that indigenous people do not want outsiders telling them how to run their country. We can do great things in the World and probably get our way more often than not by supporting legitimate growth and assisting in the development of stable societies rather than the dictatorships we are prone to developing and supporting because only then will we have support of our mission of American hegemony. You can’t see blowback in the ant farm, but you can imagine how and what you might have done to avoid it. And then, having learned that lesson, you might modify your strategy with new learning and the creation of new knowledge that could aid you in the next ant farm if there ever is one. Bush and Cheney have led us to the precipe of our destruction and they have exploded the myth of our invincibility, without themselves understanding quite what they have done. All of this was done because they either never had an ant farm or never learned anything about ants. Lack of knowledge of ants and lack of willingness to learn about ants is ruining our future and our ability to deal with the domestic issues that will break us if we try to war on the world while trying to provide health care and social justice here at home.