A FLAG TO FLY IN WAR ON COMPLEXITY

SECTION: IDEAS; Pg. H3; EDWARD CONE

It's a simple image that challenges simplistic answers, a picture of the American flag with one word beneath it: Think!

The Think! flag was created by the writer and software developer Dave Winer in the days after 9/11. "It's the combination of love, strength and thought, which is the best of the USA," Winer wrote at the time on his Internet journal, Scripting News. The image is unabashedly pro-American, and the challenge to exercise our brains and our freedom to use them is bracing. It ought to become the symbol of our national commitment to complexity.

But that hardly seems to be the trend. Instead, Americans use a lot of other words to go with the flags they wave, words with meanings that come down to "Believe" or "Obey" or, simply, "Don't Think." If truth is the first casualty of war, then oversimplification has been a weapon of choice since last September. It was the weapon deployed in the emotional aftermath of 9/11, when John Ashcroft cowed Congress by equating dissent with disloyalty, and brandished by Bill O'Reilly to make himself a television star. And still people keep rolling it out.

Listen to Bill Bennett, erstwhile commander of the failed drug war turned professional moralist, who opined earlier this month to National Review Online that pacifism is "nothing more than anti-Americanism." Most Americans, even those of us who grew up in Quaker-influenced Guilford County, recognize pacifism as an ideal that works only if everybody participates; we fight when we must, and we are happy to live in a country where the prudent use of military force protects the rights of the protesters outside the courthouse in downtown Greensboro.

But to dismiss the ideal of pacifism as anti-Americanism is crude and ahistorical, an act of intimidation for political purposes. A lot of people have a sincere religious belief in nonviolence or see it as a goal of practical and patriotic value. In any case, it is poor strategy to wish away this necessary counterweight to reflexive militarism and to eliminate the kind of intellectual friction that can produce breakthrough ideas.

Bennett also lambasted critics of President Bush's phrase "axis of evil," as if questioning that highly questionable formulation is a subversive activity. Categorizing our enemies as "evil" and "evildoers" is briefly satisfying at best, even when it is accurate, and moral clarity about the wickedness of particular deeds is no substitute for a coherent strategy that deals with their several causes. Once we punish the perpetrators of terrorist acts and remove their short-term ability to strike again, we are still confronted with the layered reality of a post-colonial, post-Cold War world.

(A research project known as the Correlates of War database, now under way at several U.S. universities, uses big computers to analyze the common factors behind every substantial armed conflict in the world since the end of the Napoleonic era. "Evil" has not turned up yet in the empirical survey, although it has surely been present at times. Social scientists are trying to understand geopolitics as a complex system of systems, like the weather or plate tectonics, rather than a Manichaean contest between lightness and dark.)

Meanwhile, a Democratic congresswoman from Georgia named Cynthia McKinney has contrived to make Bill Bennett sound like a master of subtlety and nuance. She insinuated in a recent radio interview that the Bush administration knew about 9/11 in advance, but allowed the attacks to happen anyway in order to enrich friends and family in the defense business. Beyond the offensiveness of McKinney's remarks, her simplistic take on national security isn't going to make us any safer - by her logic, our intelligence and domestic security mechanisms are just fine and don't need to be improved.

Recognizing that we do not live in a binary universe doesn't mean we don't understand the difference between right and wrong, or even between our national interests and those of our rivals. It's not a strategy in and of itself. That is all the more reason we need the Think! flag, to remind us that reductive reasoning is not just dumb but also dangerous in a complex world.

At least that's my take on it. Winer, a pioneer of the self-published Internet journals known as Weblogs (or simply Blogs), probably would put it differently or at least provide arguments from his own political viewpoint. That much is basic to the Think! flag's meaning. "It's OK to use it anywhere you want because it's an important idea," Winer e-mails from California. "So much Americanism has been thoughtless, but our strength is that we have minds. Let's use 'em."

Edward Cone (efcone@mindspring.com), a magazine journalist and Greensboro native, contributes a column to the News & Record each Sunday.

Last update: 4/7/2003; 11:09:56 AM.