[Note: I am in the process of putting together a journal article on asymmetric warfare and I will be using the next few posts to help me think abut it.]

Competition appears to be an inevitable consequence of our natural (read biological) state. Darwin termed this “natural selection”. But, as with most species, we are not, on the whole, so insane as to equate “competition” with “conflict” in all settings. Indeed, if Sahlins is correct, then one of the key roles played by culture is as a mitigation against or “channeling of” the potential for conflict. Indeed, one of the great major fallacies of thought in the area, Spencer’s concept of Survival of the Fittest which led to some of the worst episodes in human history, completely missed this point: culture channels and defines competition.

Culture as the container of competition

If we take this as a starting point for an analysis, several interesting points appear. First of all, culture is not static, although it probably is homeostatic. The boundaries of a homeostatic system of conflict containment are defined not only by individual societies but, also, by a culture and/or sub-cultural area (e.g. class, profession, etc.). These boundaries serve to define “acceptable” and “unacceptable” forms of competition, including conflict and, as with all components of culture, these forms are constantly being (re)negotiated.

Second, Within these boundaries, I have found it useful to treat the various forms of competition as “games” (i.e. rules governed interactions) with definite win, lose and draw endstates and specific “roles” which are socially and culturally defined. This formulation of competition as a series of “games” has two major advantages:

1. it strips away much of the highly polarized emotional connotations associated with such terms as “conflict” and “warfare”, and
2. it allows us to examine the laws that govern the creation and maintenance of patterns of action that are not usually included as “conflict” and “warfare” (e.g. mating practices, business practices, job search practices, etc.).

“Games”?

I started to use the term “game” during the process of writing my dissertation as a way of presenting the much more complex concept of a “process-event”; a homeostatically stable and culturally recognized form of interaction (see section 5.3 in my dissertation). In part, the choice to use “games” stemmed from Victor Turner’s observations about the nature of the relationship between “play” and “work” in pre-industrial societies (see From Ritual to Theatre and The Anthropology of Performance). In these works, Turner argues that the categories of “work” and “play” have been artiuficaly separated as a result of industrialization, and the immediate linkages between them that are obvious in “traditional” societies are much less so in “modern” societies.

A second reason for choosing “games” was the work of Csikzentmihalyi on “Flow” (see Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience). Amongst other things, Csikzentmihalyi provides a compelling argument that humans have an evolved psychological mechanism that reinforces our desire to play “games” by trading off anxiety and enjoyment, with the “flow experience” as the optimal psychological experience of engaging in a “game” (think about phrases like “performance high” or “being in the grove” as examples). Csikzentmihalyi’s work appears to indicate that humans have evolved this mechanism as part of our species use of culture as our primary form of environmental adaptation.

The third reason for using “games” is that it works out very nicely as an analytic unit and, perhaps most importantly, one that can be analyzed using neo-Darwinian theory. The reason why neo-Darwinian theory can be used to analyze it s simple: “games” are patterns of information that “mutate” with fairly specific rules, rules which just “happen” to match those identified by Darwin as the opearting rules for natural selection.

Neo-Darwinian theory

There have been a lot of changes, refinements and arguments about evolutionary theory since Darwin’s day. It has been misapplied, misunderstood, and attacked by people who have no concept of what a theory is. Throughout the 150 years that it has been in intellectual play, however, it has proven to be the most robust theoretical explanation we have for change over time.

Evolutionary theory is composed of three main sub-theories:

1. Natural selection: a theory about how competition operates and how groups operate within their environment.
2. Mutation (or change): how does a pattern of information, such as a genetic code, change?
3. Inheritance: how does a member of a population acquire a pattern of information?

Now, you will notice that I am using the phrase “pattern of information” and this is for a very specific reason. Back in 1997, William Calvin wrote what I consider to be a brilliant article called THE SIX ESSENTIALS? Minimal Requirements for the Darwinian Bootstrapping of Quality. In this article, Calvin laid out six minimal qualifications for any system to be considered as “Darwinian” (I have edited out his explanatory notes for brevity).

1. There must be a pattern involved.
2. The pattern must be copied somehow
3. Variant patterns must sometimes be produced by chance
4. The pattern and its variant must compete with one another for occupation of a limited work space.
5. The competition is biased by a multifaceted environment.
6. New variants always preferentially occur around the more successful of the current patterns.

One of the basic points that Calvin notes in the article is that selection pressure operates on patterns of information. In biology, the classic “pattern of information” is DNA sequences using a quaternary coding system. But there is no inherent restriction of either the coding sequence composition of a “pattern of information” or the scope of the theory; it may include any pattern of information governed by the six minimal requirements, and this specifically includes the rather complex patterns of information I call process-events or “Games”.

Harmonizing the concepts

There are several bits of trimming that need to be done in order to properly craft a testable theory of asymmetric warfare out of these initial ideas. First of all, we need to properly define the unit of analysis, and this is somewhat problematic. Next, we need to consider what constitutes a “workspace” and “multifaceted environment” in Calvin’s terms in which competition takes place. As part of that consideration, we also have to consider exactly what is being competed for.

Units of Analysis

I would suggest that there are two primary units of analysis necessary, both of which are subject to natural selection. These two units of analysis are

1. individual “games”, and
2. tactics within an individual “game”.

What differentiates the two, amongst other things, is the source of the “rules” that control the definition of the “multifaceted environment” in which the pattern operates / competes: “tactics” are defined by the “games” in which they are operating, while “games” are defined by the “negotiations” of all potential “players” and the more general environment.

Workspaces and “environments”

At its heart, a “workspace” is a perceived sub-set of the total perceived operational environment. This emphasis on perception is crucial since no pattern of information is capable of perceiving the sum totality of its environment unless it is the sum totality of ts environment (the classic Map-Territory problem in epistemology). For humans, this is even more problematic for several reasons. First we, as a species, abstract and filter our perceptions through culturally created symbol systems such as language. Second, the act of parsing observable reality into discrete components (”naming”) tends to create biases in our perceptions (”the map is not the territory”) and we act upon those biased perceptions as if they actually conveyed our “operational reality” (”the map is the territory”).

Third, the action of parsing “reality” creates “symbol systems” or “systems of meaning”. These systems contain far more than mere signs that point towards identified and named components; they also contain predictive and/or explanatory mechanisms that describe the perceived relationships between various signs and an ever-shifting variety of emotional connotations ascribed to each sign. Perhaps most importantly, at least for humans, symbols are capable of being reified (turned in to “things”) and symbol systems, once reified, may also metastasize into perceiving “things” that do not exist or, at least, are not perceivable by people using another symbol systems.

How reality is parsed will define how a given culture defines workspaces through the act of creating taxonomies of potential action spaces and defining them as permissible, or impermissible (and under what circumstances a perceived action space will shift between those categories). These perceived action spaces or culturally defined workspaces if you will, not only define the permissibility of a given workspace but, also, the permissible rules of workspaces. In effect, the “rules of the game” as played within that workspace, along with specific responses for using non-defined “tactics” (i.e. for stepping outside pre-defined potential actions).

Returning to Calvin’s term of a “multifaceted environment”, then, we can see that this environment is composed of the perceptions of all affected cultures, sub-cultures and individuals as well as the actual operational environment (both “reality as perceived” and “reality as is” or, in Rappaport’s terms, the Cognized Environment and the Operational Environment; see Ecology, Meaning, & Religion). Different groups of people accept perceptions of different workspaces - “games” - within this broader environment. These games, in turn, include definitions of what is being competed for (i.e. the object[s] of competition).

Towards a consideration of warfare

As with any symbol, “warfare” is polysemic (i.e., it has multiple meanings and connotations). For the Western world, at least since the Peace of Westphalia, the general “rules if the game” have been established by general “agreement”, and these rules include both when the “game” may be “played” and the general form of acceptable game tactics (see Gomes, 2008). No surprisingly, these rules are grounded in Christian theology and cosmology. Wars fought within these general rules are “conventional”, at least in the sense that the conventions that compose the game rules are generally accepted by most of the players. And, even if specific rules are not accepted by one played, the underlying principles that structure the specific rules is assumed (i.e. the mapping convention). Thus, for example, while Japan did not accept many of the specific conventions relating towarfare in World War II, they did accept the principle that war was conducted between “states”, which is a core assumption contained in the Peace of Westphalia.

Within the broad definition of a game, i.e. the acceptance of underlying principles, any conflict where the “players” accept those principles (mapping conventions) and operate according to them will be, by definition, “symmetric” because of that agreement. Conflicts which a) do not accept those principles and b) include “battlespaces” beyond the “rules” are, by definition, “asymmetric”. Thus, for example, al Qaeda accepts a definition of media and symbol system regardless of geographic boundaries as the primary “battlespace” (workspace), while Coalition forces use the concept of bounded geography as the primary battlespace. This is a classic example of an asymmetric conflict; it is “asymmetric” because the players are using different workspaces and different game rules.

Next, part II