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Monday, August 22, 20051124690971
The Beautiful Music of War
I love grad school.
I had a fascinating and epic conversation today with a brilliant student of music. Beginning slowly enough with a litany of obscure vocab and strange names, I soon discovered
As Mark Safranski might say, we had some serious leveraging of vertical domain knowledge through horizontal concept transfer. That so many concepts -- methodical warfare, super-empowerment, deconfliction, the importance of quickly cycling the OODA loop and fast transients (whether through instinct or fingertip-feeling). It was as if the young (and breath-takingly beautiful) music student was John Robb or Nellie Lide, but was expressing the exact same thoughts in music theory instead of warfare theory or marketing theory.
Over the past week
- I have nailed down my research interest (Early Christianity as an example of asymetrical warfare)
- Identified how different specialities of political science are able to support the thesis
- Now have concrete examples of how every "humanity" is just the study of human struggle, except it uses different words
(And let's not forget Larry's comments, which bridge humanities and hard sciences.)
I love grad school.
01:09 Posted by Dan tdaxp in Doctrine, UNL, Vanity | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this
Comments
I can't help but ask as I'm rather curious. Your interest in early christianity as asymmetrical warfare, did that arise from our postings on the subject?
Posted by: chirol | Monday, August 22, 2005
Short answer: yes.
I first appreciated early Christianity as a human movement after reading Thomas Cahill's "Desire of the Everlasting Hills." (He also wrote "How the Irish Saved Civilization" and "The Gift of the Jews" -- his book is at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385483724/103-8436277-9470263?v=glance). He used critical analysis to flesh out the major characters of the New Testamant in a way harmonious to his (and my) Catholicism.
But the idea of looking at it as an asymmetrical movement came from our blog discussion that Mark started with his first post on 5GW.
(Younghusband mentioned to me that he may focus on 5GW for his thesis at the war college, so if he hurries up I can use him as a source ;) )
I've intellectually grown a lot because of the blogs. I love this tech! :)
Posted by: Dan tdaxp | Monday, August 22, 2005