< meta name="DC.Date.Valid.End" content="20050825"> Amendment Nine: Good Thoughts on Globalization

Monday, November 21, 2005

Good Thoughts on Globalization

Dan at tdaxp has more on globalization. I highly recommend reading the post from start to finish several times. It is worth it.

Personally, I like this post better than most. Like all knowledge worthy of the title, he boils the somewhat long and dense thought down into a slogan: "Globalization is Water". It can be frozen. It can be heated to the point of evaporation. It can stay fluid. I'm still not completely in the magic cloud camp, at least not insofar as its used to describe the orientation phase of OODA. The cloud doesn't admit of an opposite, which only impedes the dialectic in my opinion.

Having said that though, there is this intriguing possibility. Dan starts his post out with a walk through fuzzy logic (a 1960s convention which processes data on partial set membership instead of "crisp" or "rigid" set membership). While he doesn't take it past its native statistical heritage he does at admit this nice analogy...

fuzzy logic : numerical precision :: magic clouds : procedural precision.

Let's expand on that for a second. Don't just apply fuzzy logic to data processing. And don't merely analogize the principles it uses to those used in process management. Any physicist will tell you there is some pretty good relevance of fuzzy logic to quantum mechanics. Partial electron/partial wave. You get the picture. Everything we think is so infused with modern rationalism that we sometimes forget its an epoch like everything else. Take the fuzzy / cloud / chaotic quantum view of the world and set it against the mathesis universalis. Now you've got your opposite. A pretty nasty one at that. Anti-rationalism. But that sounds scarier than it really is, and if you consider many of the Straussian based views at play in the world today, it isn't at all crazy that we're moving towards this description...

fuzzy/chaotic world view : modern rationalism :: locke's empiricism : mathesis universalis

Dan doesn't take it this far, but I think he should. I realize the Hegelian hackles I often show here are out of the mainstream. Just last year I attended a conference filled with the English speaking world's greatest Hegelians... filling a small conference room in the back of a small fellowship hall in New York City. But that is changing. Tempo has increased, and we could use some rules with which to navigate the new framework of anti-rationalism.

The globlization epoch is a new game where beating the opponent is no longer the goal, instead, anticipating the next phase is the prize.

Dan: Globalization is not water.