Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

counter-culture. He had read several works by Alan Watts, who taught a Zen Basedpsychotherapy 14 . This cultural wave cohered in post-modernism.Scientific waves were equally unsettling. The Big Bang Theory was widely discussedwhen Steven Weinberg published The First Three Minutes in 1977. Genetic engineering becamea feasible option after new discoveries from 1972 to 1978 in microbiology which madecloning and sequencing of DNA possible. E.O. Wilson, a Harvard zoologist, made the linkbetween genes, social organization and human nature when he published Sociobiology: The NewSynthesis in 1975 and argued that social behavior is governed by biology, by genes 15 . One yearlater, Richard Dawkins advanced the idea in The Selfish Gene that we must think of the centralunit of evolution and natural selection as the gene. Watson explains this in almost Boydianterms as ‘the gene, the replicating unit, is “concerned” to see itself survive and thrive, andonce we understand this, everything else falls into place: kinship patterns and behavior ininsects, birds, mammals and humans are explained, altruism becomes sensible, as do therelations of non-kin groups (such as race) to one another’ 16 . These books were foreshadowedby Jacques Monod’s Chance and Necessity (1971). Monod felt that ideas, culture, and languageare survival devices 17 .Importantly for the study of Boyd, they also sparked a highly publicized resurgenceof Darwinian thinking that characterized the last quarter of the century, a process that metwith a ferocity that was unusual even by the standards of academic invective. As StevenPinker notes, E.O. Wilson was doused with a pitcher of ice water at a scientific convention,14 This influence should not be underestimated. First of all, Robert Persig's book was a bestseller inBoyd's time and a manifestation of the sense of crisis of the rational (Western) mode of thinking. It isalso highly philosophical. The character, Phaedrus (who also fought during the Korean Warinterestingly), rallies against this “church” for very fundamental reasons for he sees the social crisis ofthe ‘most tumultuous decade of this century’ as the result of Western reductionist and analyticalmindset which has lost sight of the elements of quality and wholeness. It discusses the impact ofRelativity Theory as well as problems of Euclidian mathematics. It contains extensive section ofdialogue and critique on Western philosophers from Aristoteles, to Hume, Kant and Hegel uptoHenry Poincaré who noted already in the nineteenth century the relevance of the act of observationand selecting facts for observation in the scientific enterprise, thus negating the existence ofobjectivity. The book that offers the way out for Phaedrus is the ancient Chinese book the Tao I Chingof Lao Tzu, a book also on Boyd's list of personal papers. Second, as one noted military historianrecently noted that ‘life, according to Zen teaching, is too variable and unpredictable to be anticipatedby fixed doctrine and must be engaged as it comes with flexible judgment rather than conformationwith rigid prior instruction. Zen decision-making is about decisiveness and quickness that reflects andindividual's authentic sense of reality[…]’. He asserts that the masters of Zen are concerned with thecreation of a disciplied yet flexible sensibility that would be capable of quick and sound judgement inspite of incomplete or misleading knowledge and risk of serious consequences in the event of error.See Jon Tetsuro Sumida (1997), pp.xvi, xviii. This relates to the third reason: Boyd’s inspiration by SunTzu. As an aside, it may be a coincidence, still it is interesting to note that the Bantam New Age Booklist of publications included in the 1984 edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance mentionssome other books Boyd has read (some of which were Bantam publications) such as Heinz Pagels' TheCosmic Code, Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, Jeremy Rifkin's Entropy, Rudy Rucker's Inifnityand the Mind, Gregory Bateson's Mind and Nature, Ilya Prigogine's Order Out of Chaos and Fritjof Capra'sThe Tao of Physics: An Exploration of the Parallels Between Modern Physics and Eastern Mysticism and TheTurning Point.15 Ibid, p.618.16 Ibid.17 Monod's book too is on Boyd's list. Interestingly Monod's book includes the idea that living things,as isolated, self-contained energetic systems, seem to operate against entropy, an idea included inBoyd's work.82