In Ontario, over the weekend, 17 men were arrested. The charge against them: "plotting to attack targets…with crude but powerful fertilizer bombs."

In the world of counter terrorism, this group must represent a "mixed signal."

The "Ontario 17" were sophisticated enough to recruit widely and train in camps. Plus, they had the wherewithal to purchase 3 tons of ammonium nitrate. Apparently, this was a group to reckon with, and not merely loudmouthed hotheads at the Mosque.

On the other hand, 17 people is a very large group, almost certain to leak (or otherwise "give off") the group’s intentions.   Seventeen people produce a lot of ripples.  Plus, one member of the group, Qayyum Abdul Jamal, 43, was a hot head and a loudmouth, and, as the imam-like figure in the Ar-Rahman Quran Learning Center, a vitriolic presence widely known to the South Asian community in Toronto and the RCMP.  Apparently, the Ontario 17 hadn’t quite worked out the "stealth" part of the terror equation. 

But here’s what makes the Ontario 17 unmistakably scary: they have no ties to Al Qaeda.

In the great sandstorm of information with which counter terrorism must deal, spontaneous combustion must be the biggest threat. With enough time, talent and money, it should be possible to pick up the connected players. But what if we must also deal with rogue groups, people without ties to Al Qaeda, people who are self defining, self funding, self organizing, self motivating? Then the "threat universe" grows larger and less scrutable.

Anthropology and economics to the rescue? Those of us who loiter at the intersection of anthropology and economics may be qualified to make a contribution here.

The economics side of the investigation is probably well mapped. I bet, for instance, that every ammonium nitrate sale is now scrutinized by man and machine. What about the anthropological side? I would guess that we are now assuming that no one or group not connected to active, public, mosque-based worship represents a threat.

This is probably true. But what if it isn’t? Is there a group out there which is not only not connected to Al Qaeda AND not connected to a public place of worship? With the ethnography in hand, an anthropologist could help decide this question, and, enabled the pattern recognition of which economics is capable, identify what we should be looking at, if indeed an additional threat exists. (This would be an exercise in anthropological profiling.)

But as usual, I have made the anthro and the econ mutually exclusive, when the point of the undertaking is to bring them together. And this is indeed where it gets interesting. If we have the ideological, social, cultural, religious signals that the anthropologist can identify, brought together with all the transactional data and pattern recognition that the economist controls, and we make these fully iterative and interactive, zounds, this would be sensational. Now we can ask our anthropological questions on the strength of economic data, and the economic questions on the strength of anthropological data. (If only all the world worked like this.)

Now I know this is beginning to sound like an episode of Numb3rs where the older brother (Rob Morrow) gives the younger brother (David Krumholtz) a mountain of data, and after a couple of days of dreamy reflection with a kooky colleague (Peter MacNicol) and unbelievably beautiful research assistant (Navi Rawat), the younger brother returns with the criminal’s defining characteristics, favorite movies, and home address.

It could work like that, but I imagine it would be more like Bletchley Park, the English code breaking operation in World World II, lots of really smart people sitting around, searching the world of terror for signals both qualitative and quantitative, for patterns both anthropological and economic. There would be lots of beauty, brains, dreaminess and acuity in our Bletchley Park, but the exercise would have not an episodic character but a cumulative one, so that as anthropology and economics worked together over many months, the data, the analysis and the understanding would take on real power and precision.

Eventually, one would hope, we would know what the terrorists were having for breakfast (to paraphrase Field Marshall Montgomery’s praise for Bletchley Park). More important, we would be in a position to anticipate the "unknown unknowns," the threats that exist out there, but throw off no conventional signals to identify their existence and intentions. The very world of unknown unknowns would be smaller and less unknowable.

Post script

If you had asked me to predict whether a show about mathematics (a kind of CSI where math replaces science) would prosper, even after you had quaranteed big stars, big money, and big talent (the Scott brothers), I would have said you were dreaming. Which tells us, once more, that this culture is a lot like the weather in Ireland.  Don’t like it? Give it 5 minutes, and everything  will change.

References

Austen, Ian and Johnston, David.  2006.  17 held in plots to bomb sites in Ontario.  The New York Times.  June 4, 2006. here.

We all remember Malcolm Gladwell’s influential article on cool hunters, the one he wrote in 1997.  And the late 1990s did seem to be the hay day of the species. 

It’s not mysterious.  Popular culture was becoming more productive, more interesting and more influential.  Corporations suddenly had to start paying attention, and as long as the only person truly in touch with popular culture was the 20 year old temp down the hall, the corporation was obliged to hire this expertise in.  (Cause who listens to temps.)

It was pretty horrific.  I remember listening to the consultant simultaneously wow and demean the marketers in the room with salacious stories of what the kids were up to.  There was always something deeply self-congratulatory and other-condemnatory about the exercise.  The cool hunter claimed glory for knowing what running shoes the kids were wearing.  He might have divined this from the window of the limo on the way in from the airport, but hey. 

Even this simple understanding raised the cool hunter in the larger of  scheme of things, and from this great height he saw the marketer and saw that he was clueless.  Always there was, on the part of the cool hunter, a fatal confusion between knowing cool and being cool, and you couldn’t help feeling that however much the coolhunter was being paid by the corporation, he prized his knowledge more.  He wasn’t in it for the money.  He was in it for the status. 

This assumption/presumption of cool lead to shocking abuses of trust and privilege and more than once I heard cool hunters make things up that were not true.  (Not, God knows, that I had a clue myself.)

So it was gratifying when we were treated to this recantation in the pages of Time Magazine in 2003. 

The trouble was, it turned out that cool hunting didn’t work.  “As hip as it was, as exciting as it was, very few people were able to monetize anything that came out of that,” [Irma] Zandl explains.  “People were fed this line that if the cool hunter found it, then six months from now you would have a rip-roaring business.  And I think a lot of people got burned by that.”

How humiliating!  Time Magazine!  Flat footed, lumbering, always the last to know.  And here was it was playing taps for the cool hunters who were supposed to put it out of business. 

So what killed the cool hunting?   Certainly, as Grossman pointed out, it didn’t work.  But, as we all know, not working has done nothing to discourage several consulting juggernauts.  So that can’t be it.

Three things, possibly.  The corporation developed its own internal resources.  Knowing and caring about popular culture ceased to be something to be ashamed of.  Everyone got smarter about it, and some of them worked out for the corporation.  Certainly, each successive generation coming into the corporation carried a still finer knowledge and a still greater love.  The corporation would get smarter by simply standing still. 

Second, the journalistic resources got steadily better.  With the likes of Entertainment Weekly, the New York Times, The New Yorker, and even Time Magazine (not least in the person of James Poniewozik), suddenly there was intelligence with intelligence, and the corporation always prefers this especially when it can be had for the price of a subscription.

Third, I think contemporary culture just got too complicated for any individual to claim comprehensive knowledge or systematic insight.  Yes, we now have websites like PSFK and Agenda, and these do a great job. And they are wise enough not to claim to divine the source, trajectory or advent of cool, as the cool hunters often did.  They give us lots and let us choose.

Who killed the cool hunter?  I think contemporary culture did.  It got more complicated, in the process outstripping the cognitive abilities of even those who claimed guru status.  And the knowledge of contemporary culture became more distributed.  Increasingly, even the corporation had a clue. 

Useful in their brief moment, cool hunters would eventually be remaindered by historical forces beyond their control.  Those who live by the trend, apparently also die by it.  And somehow I think that’s fair.  Surely contemporary culture is too interesting, important and difficult to be represented by catching phrases, exclamatory declarations and a haughty self importance.  Cool hunters, you are now removed from fashion. 

References

Gladwell, Malcolm. 1997. The Coolhunt. The New Yorker. March 17, 1997:78-88.

In Grossman, Lev. 2003. The Quest For Cool. Time Magazine. Vol. 48: September 8, 2003

This little blog is supposed to be an intersection of Anthropology and Economics but too often I treat these as incommensurate worlds that must run like railroad tracks in parallel without hope of intersection. 

Very well. Here’s another way to make the difference. Anthropologists trade in indignation. Economists do not.

Trade in indignation? Anthropology is now deeply preoccupied with the production of indignation. To take an undergraduate course in anthropology is to be inducted into the arts and science of indignation. To take a graduate degree is to be made an officer of indignation, appointed by the court of scholarly opinion to hold forth loudly and often in defense of any idea, group or institution that appears to suffer affront.  Economists, on the other hand, are dispassionate to be point of being bloodless and entertain, apparently, a glassy indifference to what the world will.

So if you have to choose one, blindly, in that evolutionary way, which is better? The anthropologist’s indignation? Or the economist’s calm? I am shocked (shocked!) you should have to ask such a question. Clearly, unmistakably, calm is better. Because calm does not anticipate itself. It does not require anything to be true. When confronted with reality, it does not prostletize. Glassy as in transparent, the light of the world can actually penetrate this academy. 

Anthropology shares its affliction with many people in the humanities and the social sciences. Tom Wolfe, in a recent interview, treats indignation as the great affliction of the intellectual. He says,

An intellectual feeds on indignation and really can’t get by without it. (p. 8)

One of the problems with indignation is that it eventually gives way to self absorption.  When one investigates the world in order to be outraged by it, discourse turns inward.  Academic deliberation becomes, to steal a term from Gitlin, a kind of identity scholarship.  It is not about the world, it is about the investigator.  Postmodernism was especially troubled by this tendency.  Every book and article, whatever it’s title or topic, ended up being about the plucky little investigator carrying on in the face of epistemological difficulties that would crush an ordinary mortal.  Author, author! 

Tom Wolfe is good on this theme as well.  He says the "psychological novel [] is mainly the novel of yourself at home…  Your own experience is the only valid experience that you can draw from." 

The novel will become a worthy but unpopular pursuit unless the novelists get outside their own lives, depart their comfortable little studies, … and do what writers did in the great period of American literature, which was the first half of the twentieth century.  Everybody from Stephen Crane to John Steinbeck quite intentionally went outside of his own experience. (p. 35)

Wolfe says that he is a "chronicler," someone who "keeps tabs on what is happening in society, in the sense of social mores as a well as just "society" with a small s."  This is precisely the way an anthropologist or sociologist could make him or herself useful. 

Useful?  What an antique idea.  Social scientists, many of them, are too busy posturing, turning their scholarship into acts of identity construction, to do anything so ordinary, so coarse, so banal as making themselves useful.  Good thing, perhaps.  I have a very strong feeling that many of them are not fit for the real world, and could not make themselves useful even if they really wanted to.  (Finally, this is a evolutionary process of self selection where the incompetent remove themselves from harm’s way, there to nurse wounded self esteem with the septic salve called tenure.)

This should be good news for economists.  With anthropologists engaged in amateur dramatics, the field is wide open.  Steven Levitt has stepped up and offered novel and illuminating approaches.  But generally, economists police their disciplinary limitations every bit as assiduously as anthropologists do, and won’t come out to play.

Opportunity goes neglected.  A contemporary world filled with its eddies of innovation and sudden, unapologetic dynamism that makes January 2000 now almost impossible to restore from memory.  Imagine.  6 years.  Substantial parts of the world are unrecognizable.  Who is standing this watch?  Who is there to chronicle what is happening to us? 

Tell me it’s more than Tom Wolfe.  He is a wonder.  Our Dickens, our Balzac, our Zola.   That much is clear.  But he cannot be enough.  But as long as the economists continue to ask the wrong questions and anthropologists to supply the wrong answers, Wolfe’s the man. 

References

Cole, Bruce. 2006. A conversation with Tom Wolfe. Humanities. May/June, pp. 6-9, 35-37.

Gitlin, Todd.  1993. The Rise of Identity Politics.  Dissent.  Spring.  pp. 172-177.

McCracken, Grant. 2004.  Dr. O’Neill, may I present Dr. Boudreaux?  This Blog Sits at… May 31, 2004. here.

Wolfe, Tom.  1998.  A Man in Full.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.