Blink and you'll miss it

Someone from work was telling me about what makes a good camera good. Apparently it has to do with a lens having multiple points of focus. This allows there to be a very sharply defined section of a photo while the rest remains in the background out of focus. The example used was a bird perched on a tree in some jungle where the bird is in great relief and the rest is just a sea of green around it. There is an art, I'm told, to using a good camera like this. Just having one does not grant you a good shot. The skill is in seeing where the good subject is and more-so even being able to manipulate these points of focus to good effect. I immediately picture looking through the camera and pullout out and in as I turned the lens clock and counter. The image in my mind is when I use the zoom back and forth with my cam-corder. The key seems to be where to stop so the picture is just right.

The podcast I listened to on a plane to Rochester New York spoke about ants and the concept of emergence. Emergence is the idea, in this context, that order or intelligence seems to come out of chaos and disorder in some way that is not fully comprehended. It "emerges" from what seems to be nothing. The examples at work in the show were many, but it was the ants which caught me. Ants farm, have cattle, build bridges, dams and do other very human sounding things. I knew that. What I never thought much about was how they knew how to. Any given ant is dumb as a rock. This includes the queen. There also appears to be no means by which ants explicitly communicate. One ant does not tell another ant what it has learned, moreover it seems impossible that any ant learns anything at all. However, as a colony, they do all those human sounding things. How? Where does that knowledge and skill come from? Where does it emerge from? And, the question I have, where do you focus to see it? Is it the species? The colony? Some grouping or order of magnitude larger or smaller? All we know is that one ant can't, but the colony can. Where does the "can" come from?

Moments in history have a way of connecting to form chains. The expression "hind sight is 20/20" comes from the idea that the chains are easy to see when you have benefit of knowing the effects of the causes. Churchill has a Naval defeat in the Mediterranean, and decades later he shows an obvious prejudice that leads to Israel and Palestine being locked together for what seems like may be forever. Who could have said that it would be that way? Is there a hope that if there had been a dedicated and unblinking rational mind in the mix that they could have seen giving Churchill the kind of sway he had over the middle east was ill-advised? Ahmadinejad comes to Columbia and these learned folks forget the Persian traditions of hospitality. He walks away a winner where it counts in his Islamic world and we lose more points with the heats and minds we know we need to win.

Of course, there are other opinions here. Others think these events are very different. Even in hind sight, where does one focus? When does one break the chain of cause and effect to snap a photo? From what place does the meaning emerge to give history context and inform those who would not like to repeat it. That place of focus, that loci of wisdom is too fine for words to capture. Blink, and you will miss it.

To lament an old lament: even those who learn from history are surrounded by those doomed to repeat it.