June 26, 2008
Thursday
Sa Bahay
MUSLIMS NOTE VERY WELL...
(Birth anniversary of my late Aunt Salud/Sally who was born June 26, 1917...)
Just to report the latest on my personal life... A lot of things have transpired only a few days after my last post... I've forgotten when that was... I really am losing count of the days!... Only shows that STRUCTURED TIME as in clocks, watches & calendars & schedules are just a learned/acquired habit"... Not really "OBJECTIVE"?! BUt this TOO philosophical...
-Noticed the GOLDEN MASJID in QUIAPO had lost its metal MINARET... Sold off to MAGBABAKAL!!! ASTAGH... Paging GENUINE/REAL MUSLIMS... WHAT'S HAPPENING TO YOUR MOSQUE??? Do COl. Khaddafy & Imelda M. know about this?
-The scanner broke down & so I cannot post the latest old pics in my life's blog...
-A few days back my brother got held up at gunpoint inside an air-con bus & he lost his expensive watch & cellphone - in broad daylight! I notice he has lost some of his "hot-air" or self-confidence... I always insist to him that we are all being "manipulated" & not the real masters of our lives... Of course, this is CONSTHEO & NOT ISLAAMIC... My immediate verdict: "POLICE ASSETS" posing as criminals - I noticed the visibility of police cars lately - Alert for WHAT? My main SUSPECT is the POLICE although possibly criminal gangs in the style of Italian MAFIA or Japanese YAKUZA or Chinese TRIADs might be involved... But in CONSTHEO, the LEFT & the RIGHT, the CAPITALISTS & THE COMMUNISTS, the GLOBALISTS & the "ISLAMISTS", the POLICE & the CRIMINALS, the PDEA & THE DRUG LORDS, the THE GOOD & THE BAD are ultimately TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN... (ULTIMATELY IN CAHOOTS...)
Might even be the same group that snatched my cellphone in Divisoria... But his case was hold-up, a more complicated operation. All three males in our home have lost a cellphone to criminals. I wonder how high is the STAT on criminality in the metropolis. A U.P. prof-friend told me a lady professsor of the Ateneo who was our common friend also lost her cellphone to snatchers. The POLICE way of gathering INTELLIGENCE about the populace? Is this the local implementation of the GLOBAL PLAN of MR. WHITE POLICEMAN (BUSH)? Then it is time for the ordinary citizens to organize new REBEL/REVOLUTIONARY groups... Where are our rebels & revolutionaries? OR have they all been BOUGHT off?
Of course in CONSTHEO, "THEY" are also behind the POPULAR rebel/revolutionary groups! HAR!
June 24 Araw ng Manila... Went to the real/original MANILA - the WALLED CITY within INTRAMUROS. According to HISTORY books this is the site of RAJAH SULAYMANS's Malay Settlement... Went first to FORT SANTIAGO De Vera (I thought there was some HAPPENING" to see/watch & might even get FREE LUNCH HAR!) But P50 entrance fee according to a "KATIPUNERO" guard... Overheard a vendor saying "Sino bang nilalang yan?...)
[Anyway/how, that's just a "PETTING/NECKING" place nowadays...] So just went straight to Palacio del Gobernador, Manila Cathedral, old Knights of Columbus building (REMINDS ME OF ANOTHER GHOST STORY INVOLVING CHESS - PAGING TORRE, CAMPOMANES, & OTHER OLD/SENIOR PHILIPPINE CHESS PEOPLE. - BANTAYAN NINYO ITONG GHOST STORY KO DITO... If you do not believe in SPIRITS, then this might change your minds...), RED CROSS, CBCP, new K of C bldg, NYK-FIL office, San Agustin church with sign "437th Founding Anniversary-Mayor Lim-Miguel Lopez de Legazpi"... & straight to ASEAN garden but only saw a Chinese couple, cleaners/janitors, vendors & child prostis... An unproductive & tiring walk... Am losing my stamina...
A SULPICIO LINES SHIP sank & still in the MEDIA headlines... An ILONGGO U.P. employee friend was very angry at what had happened... MEDIA questioning the presence of US WARSHIPS... TYPHOON FRANK (FRANK/FERINGGI - the white European adversaries of the MUSLIM SARACENS back in the CRUSADER days)... HEY, I have a half-FIlipino- half-American FIRST COUSIN named FRANKIE... I'll introduce him to you if ever we get back the HP scanner... AM suspicious about the weather changes... I have a feeling scientists can already MANIPULATE the weather & produce typhoon, cyclones, hurricanes & tornadoes...
CONPIRATORIAL THINKING that is very UNISLAAMIC but with SCIENTIFIC basis... It's a dilemma (MA, Ang DILEM!) to choose between religion & science... One needs to take Kierkegaard's LEAP OF FAITH...
-Am really trying to get back to CHESS-PLAYING... Contacted some personalities in PHILIPPINE CHESS... Old friends & acquaintances who could no longer recognize me in my latest appearance as a REVERT... (One even asked me if I was a member of a ROCK BAND! HAR! HAR! HIPPIE NA USTAZ) I INSIST AJEDREZ/CHATUR/CHESS is NOT HARAAM... CHESS is combined THINKING & FIGHTING... If you do not like CHESS then you do not like to THINK & FIGHT... Sh how can you be a "BELIEVER" as in MUHAMMAD's FOLLOWER??? A Malaysian-trained Ustadz told me a few days back it was NOT as long as it did not interfere with prayers... In fact, I prayed DHUHR yesterday with a MUSLIM CHESS MASTER... I WAS REALLY SURPRISED HE COULD COMBINE RELIGIOUS PRAYERS & MASTERFUL CHESS-PLAYING!!! TERRIFIC!!! NAKAKABILIB TALAGA mga UTOLS! For the first time I felt I was in the company of a GENUINE MUJAHEED!!! Kidded him about his secret knowledge on contacting JINNS to assist in chess-playing... And guess what? - He receives ZERO/SIFR support from our RICH BROTHERS in his ENDEAVOR... Paging MISUARI, ABU HAIDER, Mayor SEMA, GEN. MURAD, the OMA, the IRANIAN SHIAs (Just attended their U.P. SYMPO organized by their cultural office, U.P.'s IIS & CSSP), & other MUSLIM "LEADERS" BOTH FAKE/COOPTED & GENUINE ETC ETC ETC [NEVER MIND THE SAUDI EMBASSY] HOY, MGA KUMPARE... WHERE ARE YOU NOW? (Dehins ito kanta hah!) Do you know or are you aware that a representative of the MUSLIM WORLD is STRIVING ALONE to raise the FLAG OF ISLAAM in the INTERNATIONAL GAME of CHATUR??? OR are you ALL CONFUSED about the situation obtaining in the WORLD today just as you & I have NEVER REALLY UNDERSTOOD the TRUE ISLAAM like those STOOP... ARABuhoks in KSA & elsewhere... I reminded this TAUSUG NATIONAL MASTER (with at least 2200 ELO RATING) that the BEST MUSLIM after the PROPHET (S.A.W.) was the KURD SALAHUDDIN AL-AYYUBI [SALADIN], a famous leader of the MUSLIM WORLD (& chess-player!) who defended Jerusalem's MASJID AL-AQSA & QUBBAT-US-SAKRA from the SALIBIYYIN...
CHECKMATE, SHAHMAT...
[My move: K-K9 (King to King 9)
meaning: BO-TAKS NA KO-AKS -> WAG-DU KAW! HAR! HAR!]
TMNP
ADDENDUM: THOUGHT IT'S ONLY WEDNESDAY TODAY COMPUTER SHOWS IT'S THURSDAY AGAIN I'm LOSING ONE DAY OFF... TELL ME IF THIS IS PURE INSANITY ON MY PART OR A SIGN OF THE TIMES... Ask BELIEVERS about the signs of the END of DAYs
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Sunday, June 15, 2008
FOR EVERYONE
THEY SAY THAT JESUS'S LANGUAGE WAS ARAMAIC.
=========================
ARAMAIC OUR LORD'S PRAYER
=========================
ABWOON D'BWASHMAYA
NETHQADASH SHMAKH
TEYTEY MALKUTHAKH
NEHWEY TZEVYANACH AYKANNA D'BWASHMAYA APH B'ARHA.
HAWVLAN LACHMA D'SUNQANAN YAOMANA.
WASHBOQLAN KHAUBAYN (WAKHTAHAYN)
AYKANA DAPH KHNAN SHBWOQAN L'KHAYYABAYN.
WELA TAHLAN L'NESYUNA
ELA PATZAN MIN BISHA.
METOL DILAKHIE MALKUTHA WAHAYLA WATESHBUKHTA L'AHLAM
ALMIN.
AMEYN.
KING JAMES ENGLISH VERSION
OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN
HALLOWED BE THY NAME.
THY KINGDOM COME.
THY WILL BE DONE IN EARTH, AS IT IS IN HEAVEN.
GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD.
AND FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS, AS WE FORGIVE OUR DEBTORS.
AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION, BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL.
FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM, AND THE POWER, AND THE GLORY, FOR
EVER.
AMEN.
(MATTHEW 6:9-13, KING JAMES VERSION)
==============================================================
AS COPIED EXACTLY FROM A BOOK BROUGHT FROM THE STATES BY A FRIEND
==============================================================
TAGALOG VERSION AMA NAMIN (THE WAY I LEARNED & MEMORIZED IT AS A CHILD)
AMA NAMIN SUMASALANGIT KA
SAMBAHIN ANG NGALAN MO
MAPASAAMIN ANG KAHARIAN MO
SUNDIN ANG LOOB MO DITO SA LUPA, PARA NANG SA LANGIT
BIGYAN MO KAMI NG AMING KAKANIN SA ARAW-ARAW
AT PATAWARIN MO KAMI SA AMING MGA PAGKAKAUTANG
GAYA NG PAGPAPATAWAD NAMIN SA MGA NAGKAKAUTANG SA AMIN
AT HUWAG MO KAMING IPAHINTULOT SA TUKSO
BAGKUS IADYA MO KAMI SA DILANG MASASAMA
AMEN.
===============
SURATUL FATIHAH
===============
(ROUGH ROMAN ALPHABET TRANSLITERATION OF ARABIC ORIGINAL)
I USE "GOD" INSTEAD OF THE PERSONAL NAME IN ARABIC
TO MAKE IT FAMILIAR TO CHRISTIANS/NON-MUSLIMS
[N.B.: SOME VERY STRICT MUSLIMS WOULD DISAGREE
THAT THIS IS IDENTICAL WITH OR THE SAME AS
THE ORIGINAL WRITTEN IN THE ARABIC SCRIPT]
BISMILLAH HIR RAHMAAN NIR RAHEEM
ALHAMDULLILAH HIR RABBIL AL AMEEN
AR_RAHMAAN NIR RAHEEM
MAALIKI YAUMMIDDEEN
IYYAKA NA'BUDU WA IYYAKA NASTA'EEN
IHDINAS SIRAATAL MUSTAQEEM
SIRAATAL LA ZHINA AN'AMTA 'ALAYHIM
GHAIRIL MAGHDHUBI 'ALAIHIM
WALADHDHALEEN
AMEEN
ROUGH ENGLISH TRANSLATION:
IN THE NAME OF GOD THE MOST BENEFICENT THE MOST MERCIFUL
PRAISE BE TO GOD THE LORD OF THE WORLDS
THE MOST BENEFICENT THE MOST MERCIFUL
MASTER OF THE DAY OF JUDGMENT
TO THEE DO WE WORSHIP & TO THEE DO WE SEEK HELP
GUIDE US TO THE STRAIGHT PATH
THE PATH OF THOSE UPON WHOM THOU HAVE BESTOWED FAVOR
NOT OF THOSE WHO HAvE EVOKED THINE ANGER
OR THOSE WHO HAVE GONE ASTRAY
AMEEN
===================================================================
NOTE THE STRIKING SIMILARITY IN SUBJECT MATTER/THEME, LENGTH, TONE, ETC
BETWEEN THE LORD'S PRAYER OF CHRISTIANITY & THE AL FATIHAH OF ISLAAM. THIS LENDS SUPPORT TO THE MUSLIM'S POSITION REGARDING JESUS - MUSLIMS CONSIDER JESUS THE CHRIST OF NAZARETH, SON OF MARY, TO BE A PROPHET & ALSO A MUSLIM!!! NOTE HIS ALLEGED "ELI, ELI LAMA SABACHTHANI" UTTERED WHILE ON THE CROSS. (MUSLIMS DO NOT BELIEVE THAT HE WAS CRUCIFIED.) THIS PHRASE IS TRANSLATED AS "MY GOD, MY GOD WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME?" SO IF THIS IS THE CASE THEN JESUS'S WORD FOR GOD WAS "EL" OR "ELE" OR "ELI" (SOME WRITERS CLAIM GOD'S NAME IS ELOHIM (CLOSE BECAUSE OF "EL") OR "EL SHADDAI" BUT "JEHOVAH" OR "YAHWEH" IS NOT QUITE THE SAME/SEEMS OFF THE MARK AS COMPARED WITH JESUS'S ALLEGED UTTERANCE... BUT NOTE THE SIMILARITY OF "EL/ELI/ELE" WITH "ALA/ALLA/ALLAH"...
ONE MUST BE AWARE THAT "CHRISTIANITY" IN ITS PUREST FORM AS IDENTIFIED WITH ITS "FOUNDER" ORIGINATED IN THE VERY HEART OF THAT PART OF THE WORLD CALLED THE "MIDDLE EAST". PROPHET EESA, (ESAU), AS A HISTORICAL BEING WITHIN TIME & SPACE, WAS DEFINITELY NOT A BLONDE, BLUE-EYED & WHITE-SKINNED EUROPEAN BUT MORE & MOST LIKELY A DARK OR BLACK-HAIRED, SWARTHY MIDDLE EASTERNER!!!!!!!
=========================
ARAMAIC OUR LORD'S PRAYER
=========================
ABWOON D'BWASHMAYA
NETHQADASH SHMAKH
TEYTEY MALKUTHAKH
NEHWEY TZEVYANACH AYKANNA D'BWASHMAYA APH B'ARHA.
HAWVLAN LACHMA D'SUNQANAN YAOMANA.
WASHBOQLAN KHAUBAYN (WAKHTAHAYN)
AYKANA DAPH KHNAN SHBWOQAN L'KHAYYABAYN.
WELA TAHLAN L'NESYUNA
ELA PATZAN MIN BISHA.
METOL DILAKHIE MALKUTHA WAHAYLA WATESHBUKHTA L'AHLAM
ALMIN.
AMEYN.
KING JAMES ENGLISH VERSION
OUR FATHER WHICH ART IN HEAVEN
HALLOWED BE THY NAME.
THY KINGDOM COME.
THY WILL BE DONE IN EARTH, AS IT IS IN HEAVEN.
GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD.
AND FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS, AS WE FORGIVE OUR DEBTORS.
AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION, BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL.
FOR THINE IS THE KINGDOM, AND THE POWER, AND THE GLORY, FOR
EVER.
AMEN.
(MATTHEW 6:9-13, KING JAMES VERSION)
==============================================================
AS COPIED EXACTLY FROM A BOOK BROUGHT FROM THE STATES BY A FRIEND
==============================================================
TAGALOG VERSION AMA NAMIN (THE WAY I LEARNED & MEMORIZED IT AS A CHILD)
AMA NAMIN SUMASALANGIT KA
SAMBAHIN ANG NGALAN MO
MAPASAAMIN ANG KAHARIAN MO
SUNDIN ANG LOOB MO DITO SA LUPA, PARA NANG SA LANGIT
BIGYAN MO KAMI NG AMING KAKANIN SA ARAW-ARAW
AT PATAWARIN MO KAMI SA AMING MGA PAGKAKAUTANG
GAYA NG PAGPAPATAWAD NAMIN SA MGA NAGKAKAUTANG SA AMIN
AT HUWAG MO KAMING IPAHINTULOT SA TUKSO
BAGKUS IADYA MO KAMI SA DILANG MASASAMA
AMEN.
===============
SURATUL FATIHAH
===============
(ROUGH ROMAN ALPHABET TRANSLITERATION OF ARABIC ORIGINAL)
I USE "GOD" INSTEAD OF THE PERSONAL NAME IN ARABIC
TO MAKE IT FAMILIAR TO CHRISTIANS/NON-MUSLIMS
[N.B.: SOME VERY STRICT MUSLIMS WOULD DISAGREE
THAT THIS IS IDENTICAL WITH OR THE SAME AS
THE ORIGINAL WRITTEN IN THE ARABIC SCRIPT]
BISMILLAH HIR RAHMAAN NIR RAHEEM
ALHAMDULLILAH HIR RABBIL AL AMEEN
AR_RAHMAAN NIR RAHEEM
MAALIKI YAUMMIDDEEN
IYYAKA NA'BUDU WA IYYAKA NASTA'EEN
IHDINAS SIRAATAL MUSTAQEEM
SIRAATAL LA ZHINA AN'AMTA 'ALAYHIM
GHAIRIL MAGHDHUBI 'ALAIHIM
WALADHDHALEEN
AMEEN
ROUGH ENGLISH TRANSLATION:
IN THE NAME OF GOD THE MOST BENEFICENT THE MOST MERCIFUL
PRAISE BE TO GOD THE LORD OF THE WORLDS
THE MOST BENEFICENT THE MOST MERCIFUL
MASTER OF THE DAY OF JUDGMENT
TO THEE DO WE WORSHIP & TO THEE DO WE SEEK HELP
GUIDE US TO THE STRAIGHT PATH
THE PATH OF THOSE UPON WHOM THOU HAVE BESTOWED FAVOR
NOT OF THOSE WHO HAvE EVOKED THINE ANGER
OR THOSE WHO HAVE GONE ASTRAY
AMEEN
===================================================================
NOTE THE STRIKING SIMILARITY IN SUBJECT MATTER/THEME, LENGTH, TONE, ETC
BETWEEN THE LORD'S PRAYER OF CHRISTIANITY & THE AL FATIHAH OF ISLAAM. THIS LENDS SUPPORT TO THE MUSLIM'S POSITION REGARDING JESUS - MUSLIMS CONSIDER JESUS THE CHRIST OF NAZARETH, SON OF MARY, TO BE A PROPHET & ALSO A MUSLIM!!! NOTE HIS ALLEGED "ELI, ELI LAMA SABACHTHANI" UTTERED WHILE ON THE CROSS. (MUSLIMS DO NOT BELIEVE THAT HE WAS CRUCIFIED.) THIS PHRASE IS TRANSLATED AS "MY GOD, MY GOD WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME?" SO IF THIS IS THE CASE THEN JESUS'S WORD FOR GOD WAS "EL" OR "ELE" OR "ELI" (SOME WRITERS CLAIM GOD'S NAME IS ELOHIM (CLOSE BECAUSE OF "EL") OR "EL SHADDAI" BUT "JEHOVAH" OR "YAHWEH" IS NOT QUITE THE SAME/SEEMS OFF THE MARK AS COMPARED WITH JESUS'S ALLEGED UTTERANCE... BUT NOTE THE SIMILARITY OF "EL/ELI/ELE" WITH "ALA/ALLA/ALLAH"...
ONE MUST BE AWARE THAT "CHRISTIANITY" IN ITS PUREST FORM AS IDENTIFIED WITH ITS "FOUNDER" ORIGINATED IN THE VERY HEART OF THAT PART OF THE WORLD CALLED THE "MIDDLE EAST". PROPHET EESA, (ESAU), AS A HISTORICAL BEING WITHIN TIME & SPACE, WAS DEFINITELY NOT A BLONDE, BLUE-EYED & WHITE-SKINNED EUROPEAN BUT MORE & MOST LIKELY A DARK OR BLACK-HAIRED, SWARTHY MIDDLE EASTERNER!!!!!!!
FOR MUSLIMS
Monday Morning
I QUOTE/COPY IN TOTO THE FOLLOWING EXCELLENT/WELL-WRITTEN ARTICLE
OR ESSAY. I WISH I WUZ THE ONE WHO WROTE IT IN THE ORIGINAL!
THE BREADTH IN SCOPE & EVEN DEPTH IS TO MY LIKING...
THIS IS THE KIND OF WRITING I EXPECT "MUSLIMS" TO BE PRODUCING...
================================================================
http://www.e-resaneh.com/English/Political/THE%20CONSPIRACY%20OF%20THE.htm
THE CONSPIRACY OF THE WEST AGAINST ISLAM: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful
INTRODUCTION
Allah (SWT) has assured us in the Qur'an that He is the best Protector, the best Guardian and the most Mercifulof all merciful. (Qur'an 2:257; 3:150). Islam is under siege in the contemporary world. Siege is a war tactics, an offence and an attack. In the repertoire of war, both as strategy and tactics, to be under siege is to be hemmed in. It connotes a situation whereby the enemy has surrounded the frontiers, the access has been blocked and there is no coming in and no going out. It is meant to snuff out the enemy unless he (the General) or they (the city and its people and all) are ready to surrender. It is either they are enslaved or in most cases they are eliminated. In the alternative, they have to fight back. It is a dire situation! Apparently, a formidable force hems in the besieged. In most cases it is not a single enemy. Enemies come together in their various forms. Different armies or their states conspire to see the end of a common enemy, to neutralize its forces, to remove or reduce the menace, which it has constituted to them. Conspiracy therefore is a strategy, a preconceived plan to execute on the terrain, as tactics on grounds, in the execution of the war. So, if the battlefield manifests the siege, which is the tactics, the war headquarters of the besieging army/armies conceive the plan, the conspiracy, which is the strategy. And in the Clausewitzian tradition, "the battle... the bloody solution of the crisis, the effort for the destruction of the enemy's forces, is the first born son of war" (0 'Sullivan and Miller Jr 198:52).
The war itself, in Clausewitz's own phrase, "is politics through other means" (Clausewitz 1963:494). This incursion into strategic analysis is to accentuate the gravity of the problem at hand. If we can agree that Islam is under siege, then we will have to agree that we are in a war situation. And if there is a conspiracy, it means we are not talking about a single enemy but about many. And their method must be manifold. The question that follows is who are the enemies, the West, who conspire, to do what, against Islam? What threats does Islam constitute to what interest or interests (of theirs) to warrant this gang up? What are the methods used in this conspiracy and how do they execute the plan? What are the implications of the siege? Is Islam in a position to lift the siege? In one word, if Islam is under attack, it means Islam is on the defensive. What (war) tactics are required to lift the siege, (the attack)? Is Islam doing the right thing, in the right way? Does Islam appreciate the precariousness of its situation? Who are the generations and the decision-makers in this situation? Are the people carried along? These are the issues to be addressed in this discourse.
THE CONDITION
It was Napoleon Bonaparte, the French General who once said that God is on the side of the better battalion. How can we explain the siege that Islam is under? Historically, as the Qur'an has declared, the Truth has come in the advent of Islam, falsehood has collapsed, as it is bound to (Qur'an 3:80). The phenomenal success of Islam in all lands and climes gradually, through time, ended up with the condition, in various Muslim lands, of their outright defeat by the enemies who hitherto had cringed "in the face” of the might of the valiant Muslims. When the Muslim Arabs marched out in hordes immediately after the Prophet’s (SAWA) death in mid 7th century,
the whole world jittered. Great empires collapsed one after another under the waves of Muslim armies, in Persia (Qadisiyya, 635;Ctesiphon,637), in Chaldea and Mesopotamia (635), in Egypt (Alexandria, 641) in the Maghrib (Qayrawan,670; Western Maghrib, 704-711, Spain, 711). In these places and other various places the conquests of Islam led to the establishment of Muslim rule and Islamic law. In the words of Professor Gibb, the spread of Islam led the way to a new integration of peoples and cultures (Gibb 1975:3). Soon after, the cracks appeared in the center of the Islamic Empire starting early in the Battle of Siffin (It seems we cannot escape the military analogy). Siffin symbolized the clash, as Malek Bennabi puts it, of the Qur'anic spirit -represented by Imam Ali (AS)- with the Jahiliy spirit -represented by Mu’awiya the son of the Prophet’s archenemy Abu Sufiyan. In any case, as Islamic civilization flourished in various Muslim lands, an almost imperceptible internal decay developed. Dynasties were formed, mutual antagonism, rivalry and unhealthy competition flourished.
The Muslims lost sight of the elan, the very dynamism of their call that had seen them triumph over others. Muslims, as it were, rested on their oars, the sea ride slowed down, Muslims neglected their arsenal, they took their enemies for granted. To borrow the phrases of the Father of sociology, Ibn khaldun, the Muslims like city dwellers became effete population luxuriating in their achievements until the hordes of primitive tribes descended on them. Islam has, for centuries, had to grapple with this problem. The Crusades, from late 11th century marked the beginning of formidable attempts by Christendom (the Christian West) to offset the Muslim dominance of the world. It was an invasion, it was a siege and it was effected by a gang-up of all Christendom in a conspiracy against Islam. It is in the career of a Muslim Sultan and General that we can appreciate the enormity of this problem for the Muslim world. It is also in this one Muslim's leadership that we can encompass the commitment needed by Muslims from their leaders to offset the menace of the West. Lane-Poole has captured the gravity of the daring and determination of the West in the treatment of the career of Salahuddin al-Ayyubi (Saladin to the Christian West). A quote from this account is illustrative of our point:
In 1096 the first Crusade began its eastward march; in 1098 the great cities of Edessa and Antioch and many fortresses were taken; in 1099 the Christians regained possession of Jerusalem itself. In the next few years the greater part of Palestine and the coast of Syria, Tortosa, 'Akka, Tripolis, and Sidon (1110) fell into the hands of the Crusaders, and the conquest of Tyre in 1124 marked the apogee of their power. It was the precise moment when a successful invasion from Europe was possible. A generation earlier, the Seljuq power was inexpugnable. A generation later, a Zengi or a Nur-ed-din, firmly established in the Syrian seats of the Seljuqs, would probably have driven the invaders into the sea. A lucky star led the preachers of the first Crusade to seize an opportunity of which they hardly realized the significance. Peter, the Hermit and Urban II chose the auspicious moment with sagacity as- unerring as- if they had made a profound study of Asiatic politics. The Crusade penetrated like a wedge between the old wood and the new, and for a while seemed to cleave the trunk of Mohammadan Empire into splinters (Lane-Poole 1968:163-164).
Starting with Salahudin al-Ayyubi, and followed by other valiant Muslim warriors after him, the Christian successes were reversed; The Second Crusade (1130) was defeated, the Third (1189) was defeated as the "Siege of the Besiegers"; the Children Crusade (1212) ended in disaster. The Hungarian-led Crusade (1217) was a failure, even the crusade led by Frederick the Great (1228) still was a failure. In 1239, the Crusade led by the king of Navarre was defeated, so also did the one led by King Louis IX of France (1249) end in disaster (Lane - Poole 1968; 163-165, 173; 174; 209-211; 218; 225-229; 230,31, 231,239, 256). One great fall-out of the Crusades was the realization by Christendom of the profound literary, cultural and scientific achievements of the Muslims. They learnt from and borrowed ideas from the Muslims. The contact of the West with the East inspired in Christendom the determination to improve itself. No less a phenomenon than the Renaissance was inspired by this contact between Islam and Europe (lzetbegovic 1999: 143).
It must be realized that Christendom did not give up on its hope of undermining Islam. Following the defeats of the West in the Crusades, Islam passed through a doldrum. But even in the century of the final defeat of the Crusaders, the Ottoman State was founded (1299). By the next century, the Ottoman Empire had become a formidable power. With its conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Empire had established itself astride Europe by mid-15th Century. In fact, for the next three centuries after its founding, (14th to 16th Centuries), the Ottoman Empire became the ‘’Menace of Europe" and in fact, "the present Terror of the World’’ (Lewis 1974:198-199). The Turks became 'Infidel Turks' to Europe and the embers of enmity grew between the East and the West. Just as it happened to Islamic Empires before it, the Ottoman Empire was soon to rest on its oars. Internal decadence set in and for the next three centuries (17th to 19th Centuries), the great Ottoman Empire decayed. And this decadence culminated in its defeat (in war) in early 20th century in the First World War. So, internal decadence attracted external aggression (Oluwatoki 2001 :29). It must be noted that the West that was defeated by Islam in the Crusades learns its lessons. Inspired by the achievements of Islam, it turned inward, went through the Renaissance and then through the Enlightenment. At the Age of Reasoning, and discarding the predominance of religion, this West came out with superiority of scientific and technological knowledge. It was this west, this Christendom that now took the shape of imperialism to conquer the world. It was in the 19th century at the height of the decadence of the Ottoman Empire. By 1830, Colonialist France had occupied Algiers (Abun-Nasr 1973:311) and the height of it was the Balfour declaration (1917) that promised Palestine to the European Jews(or more properly the raciest Zionists) for the creation of a supposedly ‘National’ Home for them. In 1948, the illegal Zionist entity, Israel, was declared and since then the Palestinian Question had become the Arab-Israeli conflict. So, through imperialism, colonization and then neo-colonialism the World of Islam had been besieged by Christendom, which for centuries had been the underdog. The great lesson of all this is that the Muslims has fallen into a condition that made them vulnerable. This, in the words of Malek Benabbi, is "colonisibility". In other words, a people are colonisable only if they have put themselves in the condition.
II THE CONSPIRACY AND ITS CORRELATES
I am sure we have established the Conspiracy of the West against Islam. What remains is to enumerate the various manifestations of this conspiracy. Apart from the military efforts, which failed woefully (Oluwatoki 2001: 16), other areas of the manifestation of the conspiracy are in the following:
1. EDUCATION
Through colonization the West attempts to acculturate the Muslims by way of its education system, which plays down the Islamic principles and inculcates Euro-American ethos. This is one avenue through which the West has created the westernized elite in various Muslim countries who have become vanguards of European cultural penetration into Muslim lands. Just like it happened in many colonies, this education, to start with, started and ended with the three R's - writing, reading and arithmetic. It was a restricted education but through the Missionaries, it was meant to be an instrument of conversion to Christianity and a means of creating a Europeanized and later Americanized natives. It is perhaps the strongest weapon of the West.
2. LEGAL SYSTEM
In various Muslim lands where the West had a foothold, it eroded the legal Principles of Islam by the abrogation of the aspects of the penal Justice of the shari'ah and imposed its own, criminal code. It has always grudgingly allowed the civil aspect of the shari'ah. This erosion of the shari'ah is systematically aimed at a neutralization of the all-pervading influence of Islam in the Muslim life. With its (western) education and the inculcation of its civilization, the West presents anything western as best. Its man-made law with all its natural deficiencies is supposed to be superior. And with all its contradictions and its unabashed protection of the power that is and the establishment, canon law is imposed on Islamic law. The problems associated with this imposition are the sources of contention in many Muslim lands today.
3. FINANCIAL SYSTEM
Since the ultimate aim of imperialism is creating the enabling environment for the development of capitalism, colonization is the highest level of imperialism. The main thrust is integrating various parts of the World into world capitalism. Usury and profiteering are main features of capitalism, and they are a negation of the Islamic financial system. After the era of the monopolistic practices of the oligopolies (The multinational corporations), we are now in the era of globalization where the frontiers of states are brought down to allow for the penetration of transnational capital. It is the 'conspiracy' of the transnational elite of the West with their collaborators in other parts of the world to concentrate the greatest part of the wealth of the world in the hands of the smallest part of the population of the world. AB Robinson points out, the Human Development Report 1992 has more than illustrated the perpetual imbalance that is created by the contradiction between neo-liberalism and polyarchy (American brand of democracy specially meant for the Third World. Actually, the report shows that the richest 20% of the world population receive 82.7% of the world's total- income. The poorest 20% of the world population receive 1.4% of the world total income. This is coupled with the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots in the individual countries. Nothing can negate Islamic social organization more than this (Robinson 1996: 340-341). The Muslims have been victims like others. Suffice it to say that this economic imperative informs western intervention in various parts of the World since the 19th Century. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the West endeavored to entrench its financial system in Breton Wood institutions - the World Bank, International Monetary Fund etc. Globalization is its apogee in the 21st century.
4. INFORMATION
Starting with the Radio, then the Television, then the Cinema, then the Computer and now with the Internet, Information Technology has succeeded in transforming the so-called global village into the global sitting room. Events from the remotest parts of the world are reported to you instantly through the tube. So also are cultural influences in all ramifications passed on to you and your wards, challenging age-long values and practices and jeopardizing important institutions? One big target of this instrument is in the area of dressing (especially for women), drinking, (of alcohol), gambling and a myriad of other distinct cultural values on which Islam put much premium. The rate at which the West disseminates vices to the youth and even to all and sundry is alarming. In the tabloid, on the television, in the cinema and now on the internet, readers, viewers and browsers are free to 'suck in' into their system, such daunting negative influences like violence, pornography, drinking (of alcohol), gambling and a host of others. All these are taken for granted. But the fact is that the media of communication make the individual subscriber almost helpless. Communication has also afforded the West a press war on Islam especially in the area of spreading negative reportage on the Faith. We are all familiar with the negative connotation given to "fundamentalism" as an attribute of Islam and its movements.
5. NEO-COLONIALISM
On the political plane, countries of the West led by the USA continue to predominate in Muslim countries where they could influence policies, executing development projects and affecting the lives of Muslim peoples. Saudi-American relations are illustrative of this. Any Muslim state where this Euro-American domination has been resisted has been dealt with out-rightly through invasion, military bombardment, regime change and other means. Or such states become targets of negative propaganda. Illustrative of this point are Imam Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, Iraq, Nasser’s Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, to mention but a few.
6. PALESTINE
Palestine remains the quintessence of Western conspiracy against Islam and an eternal indictment of the West in its double play. In the execution of the first World War, Britain (the then World Greatest Power), promised the Arabs independence if they would fight against the Ottoman Empire, their overlords. This promise applied as well to Palestinian Arabs (Muslims and Christians). At the same time and in Western characteristic double-face, Britain promised the European Jews the creation of what it called a Jewish National Home in Palestine. This was in 1917 (Hence, the 1917 Balfour Declaration). This promise, it must be noted, was given in response to the pressure of International Zionism, which was the response of the Jews in the Diaspora to the inhuman treatments they have had from Europe, the West. So, the inadequacy of the Judeo-Christian civilization, the failure of Christendom to be its brother’s keeper must be ameliorated by denying Islam, the Muslim peoples, their own rights.
III CONSEQUENCE AND CAUSE
The consequence of the two centuries of Western domination of the Muslim peoples; subjugation of their lands and onslaught on their cultural values is very obvious. The Muslims have lost confidence in themselves. They erroneously attribute the successes of the West to science and technology. They succumb to the temptation and the trapping of materialism, which is the cardinal philosophy that drives Western civilization. They fall for the unrestrained freedom entrenched in individualism and liberal democracy, which promises capitalist prosperity throughthe economics of the free market. The Muslims began to doubt the superiority of their Islamic culture and the profound achievements of their Islamic civilization in the sciences, in literature, in politics, in military strategy, in family relations, in social cohesion and in collective effort. More devastating is their helpless acquiescence to the Westphalian nation-statism jettisoning once and for all the universal state of Islam. This consequence has been grave and it has demobilized the Muslims, deadening their sinews so much that they seem not to know what to do.
Yet, the seriousness of the situation is such that it has imposed on the Muslims the need to wake up to the cause of Allah for their own sake. It is a call for Jihad in the cause of Allah. Muslims need to wake up to their duty to defend their stronghold from the formidable attack of the West. This cause should be on all fronts. The Education system in all Muslim lands should be consciously guided by a policy that sets out to create true Muslim educated citizens who are mindful of their responsibilities to Allah. Education is a serious matter. It is a cardinal principle of socialization. Through education, the cultural values of a people are transmitted down the generations. Any people that neglect education and allow the dissemination of just any ideas to its youth is gravely endangered. Muslims cannot afford to be despondent. Islam has always put a great premium on education. The present generation is being careless by leaving the education of its younger generation to whatever comes up from its adversaries. The shari'ah should be entrenched in all Muslim lands as the supreme law. There is a need to be cautious in those states like Nigeria, where a substantial part of the population is Muslim, but where anti-Islamic sentiments are strong from the Christian members of the population. But we cannot give up the struggle until the rights of the Muslims to their own legal system within the purveyors of the Constitution are realized. Muslims should endeavor to entrench their own Islamic financial system. They should showcase the possibility of running an interest-free banking system. The JAIZ endeavor is a step in the right direction in Nigeria. Islam and Muslims must of necessity exploit the possibilities inherent in Information Technology. Every Muslim must be computer literate and participate actively in the dynamic world of Information Technology. The cyber-world is open to everybody. Muslims should harness its potentials to further the cause of Islam, disseminate Islamic ideas and ideals and promote Islamic cultural values. Muslims should conscientiously participate actively in politics. This they should do with a mind to better the lots of the people, to show that through their attitudes Islamic precepts of governance are possible. In any case, Muslims must be empowered politically and economically to be able to withstand the problems inherent in neo-colonialism and the questionable "promotion of democracy", which is the vogue in the world today. There is no gain saying it that the USA is actually promoting 'polyarchy' in its so-called promotion of democracy (Robinson 1996). Muslims have it as an obligation to identify with the Palestinian Arabs who have been under siege of West-supported and West-sponsored Zionism since 1917. This is a problem we cannot afford to abandon to our Arab brethren. They are divided well enough. The West has put a strong wedge in the Arab line of resistance. Moreover, Muslims all over the World have the duty as an Ummah to do something about the Question of Palestine. It is a task that must be done! If all Muslim peoples in all lands will let their governments know that they are serious about the Question of Palestine, these governments will consider the Question in their respective foreign policies.
CONCLUSION
This paper has attempted to establish the fact of the conspiracy of the West against Islam in the military, education, legal, financial, information, and national political and international political systems. We have also tried to proffer solutions to these problems for us as Muslims to regain our dignity and lift the siege, which has been used to hem us in. Like Salahuddin al-Ayyubi before us, all that we need is a "Siege of the Besieger". Doing this we shall triumph and regain our freedom. But it requires dedication, determination and diligence. We should remember, "Allah does not change the condition of a people unless and until they changed the condition of their souls". In the same vein, "Allah does not change His blessing that He has bestowed on a people until they changed what is in their souls’’ (Qur'an 8:53).
REFERENCES
1. Abun-Nasr, Jamal. A History of the Maghrib. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
2. Ali, Abdallah Yousuf. The Glorious Kur'an: Text, Translation and Commentary. Beirut, Dar aI-Fikr, n.d.
3. Asad, Muhammad. Islam and Western Civilization. n.p,n.p,n.d.
4.Bennabi, Malek. Islam in History and Society (Trans. from French and Annotated by Asma Rashid). Islamabad, Islamic Research Institute,1988. .
5. Clausewitz, Otto von. On War. In Hutchins, Robert M. and Adler, Mortimer J; (Eds.), Gateway to the Great Books. vol. 7., Man and Society. Chicago, William Benton, 1963.
6. Gibb, H.A.R. Islam: A Historical Survey (2nd Edition). Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975.
7.Hitti, Philip K. History of the Arabs from the Ancient Times to the Present (10th Edition). London: Longman, 1973.
8.Izetbegovic, A.A. Islam Between East and West. Indianapolis, American Trust Publications, 1999.
9. Lane-Poole, Stanley. A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages. London, Frank Cass, 1968.
10. Lewis, Bernard, "War and Politics." in Schacht, Joseph with Bosworth, C.E. (Ed.), The Legacybof Islam. Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1974.
11. Lewis, Bemard. The Arabs in History. London, Hutchison University Library, 1966.
12. Oluwatoki, Abu Sayf J.A. Islam, the West and Terrorism. Ado-Ekiti, Idris Oluwatoki Islamic Foundation, 2001.
13. Oluwatoki, J.A., "Institutions and State Building: An Overview of the Asiatic Ottoman Civilization." In AI-Hadarah: LASU Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies. vol. 4, June, 2001.
14. O'Sullivan, Patrick and Miller Jr., Jesse W. The Geography of Warfare. London, Croom Helm, 1983.
15. Robinson, William I. Promoting polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
http://www.e-resaneh.com/English/Political/THE%20CONSPIRACY%20OF%20THE.htm
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END OF ARTICLE
I QUOTE/COPY IN TOTO THE FOLLOWING EXCELLENT/WELL-WRITTEN ARTICLE
OR ESSAY. I WISH I WUZ THE ONE WHO WROTE IT IN THE ORIGINAL!
THE BREADTH IN SCOPE & EVEN DEPTH IS TO MY LIKING...
THIS IS THE KIND OF WRITING I EXPECT "MUSLIMS" TO BE PRODUCING...
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THE CONSPIRACY OF THE WEST AGAINST ISLAM: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful
INTRODUCTION
Allah (SWT) has assured us in the Qur'an that He is the best Protector, the best Guardian and the most Mercifulof all merciful. (Qur'an 2:257; 3:150). Islam is under siege in the contemporary world. Siege is a war tactics, an offence and an attack. In the repertoire of war, both as strategy and tactics, to be under siege is to be hemmed in. It connotes a situation whereby the enemy has surrounded the frontiers, the access has been blocked and there is no coming in and no going out. It is meant to snuff out the enemy unless he (the General) or they (the city and its people and all) are ready to surrender. It is either they are enslaved or in most cases they are eliminated. In the alternative, they have to fight back. It is a dire situation! Apparently, a formidable force hems in the besieged. In most cases it is not a single enemy. Enemies come together in their various forms. Different armies or their states conspire to see the end of a common enemy, to neutralize its forces, to remove or reduce the menace, which it has constituted to them. Conspiracy therefore is a strategy, a preconceived plan to execute on the terrain, as tactics on grounds, in the execution of the war. So, if the battlefield manifests the siege, which is the tactics, the war headquarters of the besieging army/armies conceive the plan, the conspiracy, which is the strategy. And in the Clausewitzian tradition, "the battle... the bloody solution of the crisis, the effort for the destruction of the enemy's forces, is the first born son of war" (0 'Sullivan and Miller Jr 198:52).
The war itself, in Clausewitz's own phrase, "is politics through other means" (Clausewitz 1963:494). This incursion into strategic analysis is to accentuate the gravity of the problem at hand. If we can agree that Islam is under siege, then we will have to agree that we are in a war situation. And if there is a conspiracy, it means we are not talking about a single enemy but about many. And their method must be manifold. The question that follows is who are the enemies, the West, who conspire, to do what, against Islam? What threats does Islam constitute to what interest or interests (of theirs) to warrant this gang up? What are the methods used in this conspiracy and how do they execute the plan? What are the implications of the siege? Is Islam in a position to lift the siege? In one word, if Islam is under attack, it means Islam is on the defensive. What (war) tactics are required to lift the siege, (the attack)? Is Islam doing the right thing, in the right way? Does Islam appreciate the precariousness of its situation? Who are the generations and the decision-makers in this situation? Are the people carried along? These are the issues to be addressed in this discourse.
THE CONDITION
It was Napoleon Bonaparte, the French General who once said that God is on the side of the better battalion. How can we explain the siege that Islam is under? Historically, as the Qur'an has declared, the Truth has come in the advent of Islam, falsehood has collapsed, as it is bound to (Qur'an 3:80). The phenomenal success of Islam in all lands and climes gradually, through time, ended up with the condition, in various Muslim lands, of their outright defeat by the enemies who hitherto had cringed "in the face” of the might of the valiant Muslims. When the Muslim Arabs marched out in hordes immediately after the Prophet’s (SAWA) death in mid 7th century,
the whole world jittered. Great empires collapsed one after another under the waves of Muslim armies, in Persia (Qadisiyya, 635;Ctesiphon,637), in Chaldea and Mesopotamia (635), in Egypt (Alexandria, 641) in the Maghrib (Qayrawan,670; Western Maghrib, 704-711, Spain, 711). In these places and other various places the conquests of Islam led to the establishment of Muslim rule and Islamic law. In the words of Professor Gibb, the spread of Islam led the way to a new integration of peoples and cultures (Gibb 1975:3). Soon after, the cracks appeared in the center of the Islamic Empire starting early in the Battle of Siffin (It seems we cannot escape the military analogy). Siffin symbolized the clash, as Malek Bennabi puts it, of the Qur'anic spirit -represented by Imam Ali (AS)- with the Jahiliy spirit -represented by Mu’awiya the son of the Prophet’s archenemy Abu Sufiyan. In any case, as Islamic civilization flourished in various Muslim lands, an almost imperceptible internal decay developed. Dynasties were formed, mutual antagonism, rivalry and unhealthy competition flourished.
The Muslims lost sight of the elan, the very dynamism of their call that had seen them triumph over others. Muslims, as it were, rested on their oars, the sea ride slowed down, Muslims neglected their arsenal, they took their enemies for granted. To borrow the phrases of the Father of sociology, Ibn khaldun, the Muslims like city dwellers became effete population luxuriating in their achievements until the hordes of primitive tribes descended on them. Islam has, for centuries, had to grapple with this problem. The Crusades, from late 11th century marked the beginning of formidable attempts by Christendom (the Christian West) to offset the Muslim dominance of the world. It was an invasion, it was a siege and it was effected by a gang-up of all Christendom in a conspiracy against Islam. It is in the career of a Muslim Sultan and General that we can appreciate the enormity of this problem for the Muslim world. It is also in this one Muslim's leadership that we can encompass the commitment needed by Muslims from their leaders to offset the menace of the West. Lane-Poole has captured the gravity of the daring and determination of the West in the treatment of the career of Salahuddin al-Ayyubi (Saladin to the Christian West). A quote from this account is illustrative of our point:
In 1096 the first Crusade began its eastward march; in 1098 the great cities of Edessa and Antioch and many fortresses were taken; in 1099 the Christians regained possession of Jerusalem itself. In the next few years the greater part of Palestine and the coast of Syria, Tortosa, 'Akka, Tripolis, and Sidon (1110) fell into the hands of the Crusaders, and the conquest of Tyre in 1124 marked the apogee of their power. It was the precise moment when a successful invasion from Europe was possible. A generation earlier, the Seljuq power was inexpugnable. A generation later, a Zengi or a Nur-ed-din, firmly established in the Syrian seats of the Seljuqs, would probably have driven the invaders into the sea. A lucky star led the preachers of the first Crusade to seize an opportunity of which they hardly realized the significance. Peter, the Hermit and Urban II chose the auspicious moment with sagacity as- unerring as- if they had made a profound study of Asiatic politics. The Crusade penetrated like a wedge between the old wood and the new, and for a while seemed to cleave the trunk of Mohammadan Empire into splinters (Lane-Poole 1968:163-164).
Starting with Salahudin al-Ayyubi, and followed by other valiant Muslim warriors after him, the Christian successes were reversed; The Second Crusade (1130) was defeated, the Third (1189) was defeated as the "Siege of the Besiegers"; the Children Crusade (1212) ended in disaster. The Hungarian-led Crusade (1217) was a failure, even the crusade led by Frederick the Great (1228) still was a failure. In 1239, the Crusade led by the king of Navarre was defeated, so also did the one led by King Louis IX of France (1249) end in disaster (Lane - Poole 1968; 163-165, 173; 174; 209-211; 218; 225-229; 230,31, 231,239, 256). One great fall-out of the Crusades was the realization by Christendom of the profound literary, cultural and scientific achievements of the Muslims. They learnt from and borrowed ideas from the Muslims. The contact of the West with the East inspired in Christendom the determination to improve itself. No less a phenomenon than the Renaissance was inspired by this contact between Islam and Europe (lzetbegovic 1999: 143).
It must be realized that Christendom did not give up on its hope of undermining Islam. Following the defeats of the West in the Crusades, Islam passed through a doldrum. But even in the century of the final defeat of the Crusaders, the Ottoman State was founded (1299). By the next century, the Ottoman Empire had become a formidable power. With its conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman Empire had established itself astride Europe by mid-15th Century. In fact, for the next three centuries after its founding, (14th to 16th Centuries), the Ottoman Empire became the ‘’Menace of Europe" and in fact, "the present Terror of the World’’ (Lewis 1974:198-199). The Turks became 'Infidel Turks' to Europe and the embers of enmity grew between the East and the West. Just as it happened to Islamic Empires before it, the Ottoman Empire was soon to rest on its oars. Internal decadence set in and for the next three centuries (17th to 19th Centuries), the great Ottoman Empire decayed. And this decadence culminated in its defeat (in war) in early 20th century in the First World War. So, internal decadence attracted external aggression (Oluwatoki 2001 :29). It must be noted that the West that was defeated by Islam in the Crusades learns its lessons. Inspired by the achievements of Islam, it turned inward, went through the Renaissance and then through the Enlightenment. At the Age of Reasoning, and discarding the predominance of religion, this West came out with superiority of scientific and technological knowledge. It was this west, this Christendom that now took the shape of imperialism to conquer the world. It was in the 19th century at the height of the decadence of the Ottoman Empire. By 1830, Colonialist France had occupied Algiers (Abun-Nasr 1973:311) and the height of it was the Balfour declaration (1917) that promised Palestine to the European Jews(or more properly the raciest Zionists) for the creation of a supposedly ‘National’ Home for them. In 1948, the illegal Zionist entity, Israel, was declared and since then the Palestinian Question had become the Arab-Israeli conflict. So, through imperialism, colonization and then neo-colonialism the World of Islam had been besieged by Christendom, which for centuries had been the underdog. The great lesson of all this is that the Muslims has fallen into a condition that made them vulnerable. This, in the words of Malek Benabbi, is "colonisibility". In other words, a people are colonisable only if they have put themselves in the condition.
II THE CONSPIRACY AND ITS CORRELATES
I am sure we have established the Conspiracy of the West against Islam. What remains is to enumerate the various manifestations of this conspiracy. Apart from the military efforts, which failed woefully (Oluwatoki 2001: 16), other areas of the manifestation of the conspiracy are in the following:
1. EDUCATION
Through colonization the West attempts to acculturate the Muslims by way of its education system, which plays down the Islamic principles and inculcates Euro-American ethos. This is one avenue through which the West has created the westernized elite in various Muslim countries who have become vanguards of European cultural penetration into Muslim lands. Just like it happened in many colonies, this education, to start with, started and ended with the three R's - writing, reading and arithmetic. It was a restricted education but through the Missionaries, it was meant to be an instrument of conversion to Christianity and a means of creating a Europeanized and later Americanized natives. It is perhaps the strongest weapon of the West.
2. LEGAL SYSTEM
In various Muslim lands where the West had a foothold, it eroded the legal Principles of Islam by the abrogation of the aspects of the penal Justice of the shari'ah and imposed its own, criminal code. It has always grudgingly allowed the civil aspect of the shari'ah. This erosion of the shari'ah is systematically aimed at a neutralization of the all-pervading influence of Islam in the Muslim life. With its (western) education and the inculcation of its civilization, the West presents anything western as best. Its man-made law with all its natural deficiencies is supposed to be superior. And with all its contradictions and its unabashed protection of the power that is and the establishment, canon law is imposed on Islamic law. The problems associated with this imposition are the sources of contention in many Muslim lands today.
3. FINANCIAL SYSTEM
Since the ultimate aim of imperialism is creating the enabling environment for the development of capitalism, colonization is the highest level of imperialism. The main thrust is integrating various parts of the World into world capitalism. Usury and profiteering are main features of capitalism, and they are a negation of the Islamic financial system. After the era of the monopolistic practices of the oligopolies (The multinational corporations), we are now in the era of globalization where the frontiers of states are brought down to allow for the penetration of transnational capital. It is the 'conspiracy' of the transnational elite of the West with their collaborators in other parts of the world to concentrate the greatest part of the wealth of the world in the hands of the smallest part of the population of the world. AB Robinson points out, the Human Development Report 1992 has more than illustrated the perpetual imbalance that is created by the contradiction between neo-liberalism and polyarchy (American brand of democracy specially meant for the Third World. Actually, the report shows that the richest 20% of the world population receive 82.7% of the world's total- income. The poorest 20% of the world population receive 1.4% of the world total income. This is coupled with the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots in the individual countries. Nothing can negate Islamic social organization more than this (Robinson 1996: 340-341). The Muslims have been victims like others. Suffice it to say that this economic imperative informs western intervention in various parts of the World since the 19th Century. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, the West endeavored to entrench its financial system in Breton Wood institutions - the World Bank, International Monetary Fund etc. Globalization is its apogee in the 21st century.
4. INFORMATION
Starting with the Radio, then the Television, then the Cinema, then the Computer and now with the Internet, Information Technology has succeeded in transforming the so-called global village into the global sitting room. Events from the remotest parts of the world are reported to you instantly through the tube. So also are cultural influences in all ramifications passed on to you and your wards, challenging age-long values and practices and jeopardizing important institutions? One big target of this instrument is in the area of dressing (especially for women), drinking, (of alcohol), gambling and a myriad of other distinct cultural values on which Islam put much premium. The rate at which the West disseminates vices to the youth and even to all and sundry is alarming. In the tabloid, on the television, in the cinema and now on the internet, readers, viewers and browsers are free to 'suck in' into their system, such daunting negative influences like violence, pornography, drinking (of alcohol), gambling and a host of others. All these are taken for granted. But the fact is that the media of communication make the individual subscriber almost helpless. Communication has also afforded the West a press war on Islam especially in the area of spreading negative reportage on the Faith. We are all familiar with the negative connotation given to "fundamentalism" as an attribute of Islam and its movements.
5. NEO-COLONIALISM
On the political plane, countries of the West led by the USA continue to predominate in Muslim countries where they could influence policies, executing development projects and affecting the lives of Muslim peoples. Saudi-American relations are illustrative of this. Any Muslim state where this Euro-American domination has been resisted has been dealt with out-rightly through invasion, military bombardment, regime change and other means. Or such states become targets of negative propaganda. Illustrative of this point are Imam Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, Iraq, Nasser’s Egypt, Libya, Afghanistan, to mention but a few.
6. PALESTINE
Palestine remains the quintessence of Western conspiracy against Islam and an eternal indictment of the West in its double play. In the execution of the first World War, Britain (the then World Greatest Power), promised the Arabs independence if they would fight against the Ottoman Empire, their overlords. This promise applied as well to Palestinian Arabs (Muslims and Christians). At the same time and in Western characteristic double-face, Britain promised the European Jews the creation of what it called a Jewish National Home in Palestine. This was in 1917 (Hence, the 1917 Balfour Declaration). This promise, it must be noted, was given in response to the pressure of International Zionism, which was the response of the Jews in the Diaspora to the inhuman treatments they have had from Europe, the West. So, the inadequacy of the Judeo-Christian civilization, the failure of Christendom to be its brother’s keeper must be ameliorated by denying Islam, the Muslim peoples, their own rights.
III CONSEQUENCE AND CAUSE
The consequence of the two centuries of Western domination of the Muslim peoples; subjugation of their lands and onslaught on their cultural values is very obvious. The Muslims have lost confidence in themselves. They erroneously attribute the successes of the West to science and technology. They succumb to the temptation and the trapping of materialism, which is the cardinal philosophy that drives Western civilization. They fall for the unrestrained freedom entrenched in individualism and liberal democracy, which promises capitalist prosperity throughthe economics of the free market. The Muslims began to doubt the superiority of their Islamic culture and the profound achievements of their Islamic civilization in the sciences, in literature, in politics, in military strategy, in family relations, in social cohesion and in collective effort. More devastating is their helpless acquiescence to the Westphalian nation-statism jettisoning once and for all the universal state of Islam. This consequence has been grave and it has demobilized the Muslims, deadening their sinews so much that they seem not to know what to do.
Yet, the seriousness of the situation is such that it has imposed on the Muslims the need to wake up to the cause of Allah for their own sake. It is a call for Jihad in the cause of Allah. Muslims need to wake up to their duty to defend their stronghold from the formidable attack of the West. This cause should be on all fronts. The Education system in all Muslim lands should be consciously guided by a policy that sets out to create true Muslim educated citizens who are mindful of their responsibilities to Allah. Education is a serious matter. It is a cardinal principle of socialization. Through education, the cultural values of a people are transmitted down the generations. Any people that neglect education and allow the dissemination of just any ideas to its youth is gravely endangered. Muslims cannot afford to be despondent. Islam has always put a great premium on education. The present generation is being careless by leaving the education of its younger generation to whatever comes up from its adversaries. The shari'ah should be entrenched in all Muslim lands as the supreme law. There is a need to be cautious in those states like Nigeria, where a substantial part of the population is Muslim, but where anti-Islamic sentiments are strong from the Christian members of the population. But we cannot give up the struggle until the rights of the Muslims to their own legal system within the purveyors of the Constitution are realized. Muslims should endeavor to entrench their own Islamic financial system. They should showcase the possibility of running an interest-free banking system. The JAIZ endeavor is a step in the right direction in Nigeria. Islam and Muslims must of necessity exploit the possibilities inherent in Information Technology. Every Muslim must be computer literate and participate actively in the dynamic world of Information Technology. The cyber-world is open to everybody. Muslims should harness its potentials to further the cause of Islam, disseminate Islamic ideas and ideals and promote Islamic cultural values. Muslims should conscientiously participate actively in politics. This they should do with a mind to better the lots of the people, to show that through their attitudes Islamic precepts of governance are possible. In any case, Muslims must be empowered politically and economically to be able to withstand the problems inherent in neo-colonialism and the questionable "promotion of democracy", which is the vogue in the world today. There is no gain saying it that the USA is actually promoting 'polyarchy' in its so-called promotion of democracy (Robinson 1996). Muslims have it as an obligation to identify with the Palestinian Arabs who have been under siege of West-supported and West-sponsored Zionism since 1917. This is a problem we cannot afford to abandon to our Arab brethren. They are divided well enough. The West has put a strong wedge in the Arab line of resistance. Moreover, Muslims all over the World have the duty as an Ummah to do something about the Question of Palestine. It is a task that must be done! If all Muslim peoples in all lands will let their governments know that they are serious about the Question of Palestine, these governments will consider the Question in their respective foreign policies.
CONCLUSION
This paper has attempted to establish the fact of the conspiracy of the West against Islam in the military, education, legal, financial, information, and national political and international political systems. We have also tried to proffer solutions to these problems for us as Muslims to regain our dignity and lift the siege, which has been used to hem us in. Like Salahuddin al-Ayyubi before us, all that we need is a "Siege of the Besieger". Doing this we shall triumph and regain our freedom. But it requires dedication, determination and diligence. We should remember, "Allah does not change the condition of a people unless and until they changed the condition of their souls". In the same vein, "Allah does not change His blessing that He has bestowed on a people until they changed what is in their souls’’ (Qur'an 8:53).
REFERENCES
1. Abun-Nasr, Jamal. A History of the Maghrib. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.
2. Ali, Abdallah Yousuf. The Glorious Kur'an: Text, Translation and Commentary. Beirut, Dar aI-Fikr, n.d.
3. Asad, Muhammad. Islam and Western Civilization. n.p,n.p,n.d.
4.Bennabi, Malek. Islam in History and Society (Trans. from French and Annotated by Asma Rashid). Islamabad, Islamic Research Institute,1988. .
5. Clausewitz, Otto von. On War. In Hutchins, Robert M. and Adler, Mortimer J; (Eds.), Gateway to the Great Books. vol. 7., Man and Society. Chicago, William Benton, 1963.
6. Gibb, H.A.R. Islam: A Historical Survey (2nd Edition). Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1975.
7.Hitti, Philip K. History of the Arabs from the Ancient Times to the Present (10th Edition). London: Longman, 1973.
8.Izetbegovic, A.A. Islam Between East and West. Indianapolis, American Trust Publications, 1999.
9. Lane-Poole, Stanley. A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages. London, Frank Cass, 1968.
10. Lewis, Bernard, "War and Politics." in Schacht, Joseph with Bosworth, C.E. (Ed.), The Legacybof Islam. Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1974.
11. Lewis, Bemard. The Arabs in History. London, Hutchison University Library, 1966.
12. Oluwatoki, Abu Sayf J.A. Islam, the West and Terrorism. Ado-Ekiti, Idris Oluwatoki Islamic Foundation, 2001.
13. Oluwatoki, J.A., "Institutions and State Building: An Overview of the Asiatic Ottoman Civilization." In AI-Hadarah: LASU Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies. vol. 4, June, 2001.
14. O'Sullivan, Patrick and Miller Jr., Jesse W. The Geography of Warfare. London, Croom Helm, 1983.
15. Robinson, William I. Promoting polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
http://www.e-resaneh.com/English/Political/THE%20CONSPIRACY%20OF%20THE.htm
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END OF ARTICLE
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
INDEPENDENCE DAY
June 12, 2008Manila
PHILIPPINE INDEPENDENCE DAY
Ilang mga kuro-kuro, opinyon, haka-haka...
Isa sa maaaring gawing panimula sa isang debate ay ang isyu hinggil sa bandila (bendera) o watawat (DEHINS watiwat!) ng "Bansang Pilipinas". Ang sikat na "simbolo" ("symbol" - what is
it? How does it "symbolize, What does it "symbolize"?...)
Philippine Flag, kinatok mula sa Wikipedia
"OLD PHILIPPINE FLAG" VINTAGE 1898
Mayroon akung sariling ideya na baguhin na ito. Ito ang bandila ni Aguinaldo sa Kawit.
Subali't may mga naniniwala na hindi ito ang dapat naging simbolo... Elitistang grupo daw na nang-agaw ng kapangyarihan si Aguinaldo... Para umikli ang istorya: May tatlong "paksyon" o posisyon hinggil sa isyu ng araw at simbolo ng "kasarinlan":
July 4, SAME FLAG
June 12 (ORTHODOX) SAME FLAG
August 24, IBANG BANDILA
PARA SA AKIN ANG KASALUKUYANG BANDILA AY "OLD PHILIPPINE FLAG"
Kung rebolusyounaryo nga ang tatanungin ay dapat ang tamang posisyon nito ay PABALIGTAD
(RED COLOR ON TOP) meaning, still in state of STRUGGLE...
ALSO: "PILIPINAS KONG MAHAL" HAS TWO MEANINGS OR ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS:
"PHILIPPINES, MY BELOVED"
OR
"MY EXPENSIVE PHILIPPINES"! HAR!
E-2-2-LOY NO GOOD ANG COMPUTER NA GINAGAMIT KO EH...
Sunday, June 1, 2008
53rd POST
May 31, 2008
NOW WHAT?.... WHAT TO POST NEXT???
SOME INTERESTING LINKS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udk0vRXGLlA
ALBERT CAMUS THE ABSURD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_7F8pTTeTg
Albert Camus - Photos rares
By selecto16
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLNM-NZuQxI
Camus, Eres Tu?
By OpenHEadProductions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvLAv30pWz8
The Stranger
TTTRock
PRODUCING/PRESENTING A DRAMA/PLAY ADAPTATION OF CAMUS'S THE STRANGER IS INDEED A CHALLENGING TASK FOR PLAYWRIGHTS & DIRECTORS & SHOULD BE A GOOD PROJECT FOR SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS THOUGH EXISTENTIALISM IS BAD PHILO FOR YOUNG PEOPLE. I WOULDN' TEACH OR INTRODUCE IT TO YOUNG MINDS FOR THEY MIGHT LOSE THEIR ZEST FOR LIFE. IT IS EASIER TO MISunderstand IT...
=========
COMPETITION/STRUGGLE/CONTEST
A 16TH CENTURY CATHOLIC TREATISE
"Lorenzo Scupoli Spiritual Combat"
Unseen Warfare
SOME SCHOLARS OF WHATEVER FAITH SHOULD MAKE A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THIS WORK WITH ISLAAM'S JIHAAD
========
COMPUTER CHESS CONSPIRACY THEORY
An interview with aDEEP BLUE team member
Campbell: Not everybody plays but everybody knows that chess is a very difficult game -- you can devote your whole life to playing chess and still have room for improvement. So it's understood that chess is a game which requires intelligence and so for a machine to play at the level of the world champion is a sign that computers have progressed further than maybe some people had thought they had. In one sense, it's just one milestone among many along the way, but it's one that the general public could understand more easily.
WN: Some conspiracies emerged that say the computer was being controlled by human grand masters behind the scenes. Your response?
Campbell: In my mind, they're ridiculous. One of the things about conspiracy theories is that, really, you should present some evidence rather than just make a theory up. In the 10 years since the match, I have yet to see any evidence of cheating.
COMMENT: SOME CONSPIRACY THEORIES ARE ACTUALLY "RUMORS OR MERE SUPPOSITIONS" PASSING OFF AS CONSTHEO. THE LEGITIMATE CONSTHEORISTS SHOULD HAVE STRONG GROUNDING IN SCIENCE & PHILOSOPHY & CAN IDENTIFY PSEUDO-SCIENCE OR WEAK HYPOTHESES...
CHESS COMPUTERS ARE SO STRONG IT MUST NOW BE ADMITTED THAT MACHINES CAN NOW BEAT HUMANS IN THE "THINKING GAME". IN THIS SENSE CHESS IS PRACTICALLY A "SOLVED" GAME. (YET THERE ARE HOT DEBATES BY EXPERTS ON ISSUES REGARDING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) PARTICULAERLY COMPUTER CHESS (JUST SEARCH ON "P-NP PROBLEM" & BLOGS ON COMPUTER CHESS)
=======
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6jkESf0oVE
Chess Beauties
By AQJ
=======
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF8bT5DV3is
Stoopid Arabs who betrayed the Ottoman Caliphate (1917)
By wheestle
The Fall of the Ottoman Empire 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr7oBJIWyBc
troshan
ALSO: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire 2
Fall of Ottomon Caliphate A BRIEF HISTORY [4/5]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gy_msyFWZ0
azibuddin
ALSO: PARTS 1,2,3 & 5
=======
A GADGET, or thingamajig New TOY INVENTION
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/01/khet_laser_ches.html
(Next Post: TOYS)
NOW WHAT?.... WHAT TO POST NEXT???
SOME INTERESTING LINKS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udk0vRXGLlA
ALBERT CAMUS THE ABSURD
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_7F8pTTeTg
Albert Camus - Photos rares
By selecto16
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLNM-NZuQxI
Camus, Eres Tu?
By OpenHEadProductions
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvLAv30pWz8
The Stranger
TTTRock
PRODUCING/PRESENTING A DRAMA/PLAY ADAPTATION OF CAMUS'S THE STRANGER IS INDEED A CHALLENGING TASK FOR PLAYWRIGHTS & DIRECTORS & SHOULD BE A GOOD PROJECT FOR SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS THOUGH EXISTENTIALISM IS BAD PHILO FOR YOUNG PEOPLE. I WOULDN' TEACH OR INTRODUCE IT TO YOUNG MINDS FOR THEY MIGHT LOSE THEIR ZEST FOR LIFE. IT IS EASIER TO MISunderstand IT...
=========
COMPETITION/STRUGGLE/CONTEST
A 16TH CENTURY CATHOLIC TREATISE
"Lorenzo Scupoli Spiritual Combat"
Unseen Warfare
SOME SCHOLARS OF WHATEVER FAITH SHOULD MAKE A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THIS WORK WITH ISLAAM'S JIHAAD
========
COMPUTER CHESS CONSPIRACY THEORY
An interview with aDEEP BLUE team member
Campbell: Not everybody plays but everybody knows that chess is a very difficult game -- you can devote your whole life to playing chess and still have room for improvement. So it's understood that chess is a game which requires intelligence and so for a machine to play at the level of the world champion is a sign that computers have progressed further than maybe some people had thought they had. In one sense, it's just one milestone among many along the way, but it's one that the general public could understand more easily.
WN: Some conspiracies emerged that say the computer was being controlled by human grand masters behind the scenes. Your response?
Campbell: In my mind, they're ridiculous. One of the things about conspiracy theories is that, really, you should present some evidence rather than just make a theory up. In the 10 years since the match, I have yet to see any evidence of cheating.
COMMENT: SOME CONSPIRACY THEORIES ARE ACTUALLY "RUMORS OR MERE SUPPOSITIONS" PASSING OFF AS CONSTHEO. THE LEGITIMATE CONSTHEORISTS SHOULD HAVE STRONG GROUNDING IN SCIENCE & PHILOSOPHY & CAN IDENTIFY PSEUDO-SCIENCE OR WEAK HYPOTHESES...
CHESS COMPUTERS ARE SO STRONG IT MUST NOW BE ADMITTED THAT MACHINES CAN NOW BEAT HUMANS IN THE "THINKING GAME". IN THIS SENSE CHESS IS PRACTICALLY A "SOLVED" GAME. (YET THERE ARE HOT DEBATES BY EXPERTS ON ISSUES REGARDING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) PARTICULAERLY COMPUTER CHESS (JUST SEARCH ON "P-NP PROBLEM" & BLOGS ON COMPUTER CHESS)
=======
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6jkESf0oVE
Chess Beauties
By AQJ
=======
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF8bT5DV3is
Stoopid Arabs who betrayed the Ottoman Caliphate (1917)
By wheestle
The Fall of the Ottoman Empire 1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr7oBJIWyBc
troshan
ALSO: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire 2
Fall of Ottomon Caliphate A BRIEF HISTORY [4/5]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gy_msyFWZ0
azibuddin
ALSO: PARTS 1,2,3 & 5
=======
A GADGET, or thingamajig New TOY INVENTION
http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/01/khet_laser_ches.html
(Next Post: TOYS)
Monday, May 26, 2008
52th POST
NOT ABOUT JUST CHESS BUT THINKING, LEARNING
& EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY IN GENERAL
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ARTICLE
Available in its website
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN JULY 2006
The Expert Mind
Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well
By Philip E. Ross
EFFORTFUL STUDY
Effortful study is the key to achieving success in chess, classical music, soccer and many other fields. New research has indicated that motivation is a more important factor than innate ability. ETHAN HILL
A man walks along the inside of a circle of chess tables, glancing at each for two or three seconds before making his move. On the outer rim, dozens of amateurs sit pondering their replies until he completes the circuit. The year is 1909, the man is Jose Raul Capablanca of Cuba, and the result is a whitewash: 28 wins in as many games. The exhibition was part of a tour in which Capablanca won 168 games in a row. How did he play so well, so quickly? And how far ahead could he calculate under such constraints? "I see only one move ahead," Capablanca is said to have answered, "but it is always the correct one."
He thus put in a nutshell what a century of psychological research has subsequently established: much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well. Just as a master can recall all the moves in a game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once. And just as the chess master often finds the best move in a flash, an expert physician can sometimes make an accurate diagnosis within moments of laying eyes on a patient.
But how do the experts in these various subjects acquire their extraordinary skills? How much can be credited to innate talent and how much to intensive training? Psychologists have sought answers in studies of chess masters. The collected results of a century of such research have led to new theories explaining how the mind organizes and retrieves information. What is more, this research may have important implications for educators. Perhaps the same techniques used by chess players to hone their skills could be applied in the classroom to teach reading, writing and arithmetic.
The Drosophila of Cognitive Science
The history of human expertise begins with hunting, a skill that was crucial to the survival of our early ancestors. The mature hunter knows not only where the lion has been; he can also infer where it will go. Tracking skill increases, as repeated studies show, from childhood onward, rising in "a linear relationship, all the way out to the mid-30s, when it tops out," says John Bock, an anthropologist at California State University, Fullerton. It takes less time to train a brain surgeon.
The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born.
Without a demonstrably immense superiority in skill over the novice, there can be no true experts, only laypeople with imposing credentials. Such, alas, are all too common. Rigorous studies in the past two decades have shown that professional stock pickers invest no more successfully than amateurs, that noted connoisseurs distinguish wines hardly better than yokels, and that highly credentialed psychiatric therapists help patients no more than colleagues with less advanced degrees. And even when expertise undoubtedly exists --as in, say, teaching or business management--it is often hard to measure, let alone explain.
Skill at chess, however, can be measured, broken into components, subjected to laboratory experiments and readily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall. It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest single test bed for theories of thinking --the "Drosophila of cognitive science," as it has been called.
The measurement of chess skill has been taken further than similar attempts with any other game, sport or competitive activity. Statistical formulas weigh a player's recent results over older ones and discount successes according to the strength of one's opponents. The results are ratings that predict the outcomes of games with remarkable reliability. If player A outrates player B by 200 points, then A will on average beat B 75 percent of the time. This prediction holds true whether the players are top-ranked or merely ordinary. Garry Kasparov, the Russian grandmaster who has a rating of 2812, will win 75 percent of his games against the 100th-ranked grandmaster, Jan Timman of the Netherlands, who has a rating of 2616. Similarly, a U.S. tournament player rated 1200 (about the median) will win 75 percent of the time against someone rated 1000 (about the 40th percentile). Ratings allow psychologists to assess expertise by performance rather than reputation and to track changes in a given player's skill over the course of his or her career.
Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well
Another reason why cognitive scientists chose chess as their model--and not billiards, say, or bridge-- is the game's reputation as, in German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's words, "the touchstone of the intellect." The feats of chess masters have long been ascribed to nearly magical mental powers. This magic shines brightest in the so-called blindfold games in which the players are not allowed to see the board. In 1894 French psychologist Alfred Binet, the co-inventor of the first intelligence test, asked chess masters to describe how they played such games. He began with the hypothesis that they achieved an almost photographic image of the board, but he soon concluded that the visualization was much more abstract. Rather than seeing the knight's mane or the grain of the wood from which it is made, the master calls up only a general knowledge of where the piece stands in relation to other elements of the position. It is the same kind of implicit knowledge that the commuter has of the stops on a subway line.
The blindfolded master supplements such knowledge with details of the game at hand as well as with recollections of salient aspects of past games. Let us say he has somehow forgotten the precise position of a pawn. He can find it, as it were, by considering the stereotyped strategy of the opening --a well-studied phase of the game with a relatively limited number of options. Or he can remember the logic behind one of his earlier moves--say, by reasoning: "I could not capture his bishop two moves ago; therefore, that pawn must have been standing in the way...." He does not have to remember every detail at all times, because he can reconstruct any particular detail whenever he wishes by tapping a well-organized system of connections. Of course, if the possession of such intricately structured knowledge explains not only success at blindfold play but also other abilities of chess masters, such as calculation and planning, then expertise in the game would depend not so much on innate abilities as on specialized training. Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot, himself a chess master, confirmed this notion in 1938, when he took advantage of the staging of a great international tournament in Holland to compare average and strong players with the world's leading grandmasters. One way he did so was to ask the players to describe their thoughts as they examined a position taken from a tournament game.
He found that although experts--the class just below master--did analyze considerably more possibilities than the very weak players, there was little further increase in analysis as playing strength rose to the master and grandmaster levels. The better players did not examine more possibilities, only better ones--just as Capablanca had claimed.
Recent research has shown that de Groot's findings reflected in part the nature of his chosen test positions. A position in which extensive, accurate calculation is critical will allow the grandmasters to show their stuff, as it were, and they will then search more deeply along the branching tree of possible moves than the amateur can hope to do. So, too, experienced physicists may on occasion examine more possibilities than physics students do. Yet in both cases, the expert relies not so much on an intrinsically stronger power of analysis as on a store of structured knowledge. When confronted with a difficult position, a weaker player may calculate for half an hour, often looking many moves ahead, yet miss the right continuation, whereas a grandmaster sees the move immediately, without consciously analyzing anything at all.
De Groot also had his subjects examine a position for a limited period and then try to reconstruct it from memory. Performance at this task tracked game-playing strength all the way from novice to grandmaster. Beginners could not recall more than a very few details of the position, even after having examined it for 30 seconds, whereas grandmasters could usually get it perfectly, even if they had perused it for only a few seconds. This difference tracks a particular form of memory, specific to the kind of chess positions that commonly occur in play. The specific memory must be the result of training, because grandmasters do no better than others in general tests of memory.
Similar results have been demonstrated in bridge players (who can remember cards played in many games), computer programmers (who can reconstruct masses of computer code) and musicians (who can recall long snatches of music). Indeed, such a memory for the subject matter of a particular field is a standard test for the existence of expertise.
The conclusion that experts rely more on structured knowledge than on analysis is supported by a rare case study of an initially weak chess player, identified only by the initials D.H., who over the course of nine years rose to become one of Canada's leading masters by 1987. Neil Charness, professor of psychology at Florida State University, showed that despite the increase in the player's strength, he analyzed chess positions no more extensively than he had earlier, relying instead on a vastly improved knowledge of chess positions and associated strategies.
Chunking Theory
In the 1960s Herbert A. Simon and William Chase, both at Carnegie Mellon University, tried to get a better understand-ing of expert memory by studying its limitations. Picking up where de Groot left off, they asked players of various strengths to reconstruct chess positions that had been artificially devised--that is, with the pieces placed randomly on the board--rather than reached as the result of master play. The correlation between game-playing strength and the accuracy of the players' recall was much weak-er with the random positions than with the authentic ones.
Chess memory was thus shown to be even more specific than it had seemed, being tuned not merely to the game itself but to typical chess positions. These experiments corroborated earlier studies that had demonstrated convincingly that ability in one area tends not to transfer to another. American psychologist Edward Thorndike first noted this lack of transference over a century ago, when he showed that the study of Latin, for instance, did not improve command of English and that geometric proofs do not teach the use of logic in daily life.
Simon explained the masters' relative weakness in reconstructing artificial chess positions with a model based on meaningful patterns called chunks. He invoked the concept to explain how chess masters can manipulate vast amounts of stored information, a task that would seem to strain the working memory. Psychologist George Miller of Princeton University famously estimated the limits of working memory--the scratch pad of the mind--in a 1956 paper entitled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two." Miller showed that people can contemplate only five to nine items at a time. By packing hierarchies of information into chunks, Simon argued, chess masters could get around this limitation, because by using this method, they could access five to nine chunks rather than the same number of smaller details.
Take the sentence "Mary had a little lamb." The number of information chunks in this sentence depends on one's knowledge of the poem and the English language. For most native speakers of English, the sentence is part of a much larger chunk, the familiar poem. For someone who knows English but not the poem, the sentence is a single, self-contained chunk. For someone who has memorized the words but not their meaning, the sentence is five chunks, and it is 18 chunks for someone who knows the letters but not the words.
In the context of chess, the same differences can be seen between novices and grandmasters. To a beginner, a position with 20 chessmen on the board may contain far more than 20 chunks of information, because the pieces can be placed in so many configurations. A grandmaster, however, may see one part of the position as "fianchettoed bishop in the castled kingside," together with a "blockaded king's-Indian-style pawn chain," and thereby cram the entire position into perhaps five or six chunks. By measuring the time it takes to commit a new chunk to memory and the number of hours a player must study chess before reaching grandmaster strength, Simon estimated that a typical grandmaster has access to roughly 50,000 to 100,000 chunks of chess information. A grandmaster can retrieve any of these chunks from memory simply by looking at a chess position, in the same way that most native English speakers can recite the poem "Mary had a little lamb" after hearing just the first few words. Even so, there were difficulties with chunking theory. It could not fully explain some aspects of memory, such as the ability of experts to perform their feats while being distracted (a favorite tactic in the study of memory). K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University and Charness argued that there must be some other mechanism that enables experts to employ long-term memory as if it, too, were a scratch pad. Says Ericsson: "The mere demonstration that highly skilled players can play at almost their normal strength under blindfold conditions is almost impossible for chunking theory to explain because you have to know the position, then you have to explore it in your memory."
Such manipulation involves changing the stored chunks, at least in some ways, a task that may be likened to reciting "Mary had a little lamb" backward. It can be done, but not easily, and certainly not without many false starts and errors. Yet grandmaster games played quickly and under blindfold conditions tend to be of surprisingly high quality.
Ericsson also cites studies of physicians who clearly put information into long-term memory and take it out again in ways that enable them to make diagnoses. Perhaps Ericsson's most homely example, though, comes from reading. In a 1995 study he and Walter Kintsch of the University of Colorado found that interrupting highly proficient readers hardly slowed their reentry to a text; in the end, they lost only a few seconds. The researchers explained these findings by recourse to a structure they called long-term working memory, an almost oxymoronic coinage because it assigns to long-term memory the one thing that had always been defined as incompatible with it: thinking. But brain-imaging studies done in 2001 at the University of Konstanz in Germany provide support for the theory by showing that expert chess players activate long-term memory much more than novices do.
Fernand Gobet of Brunel University in London champions a rival theory, devised with Simon in the late 1990s. It extends the idea of chunks by invoking highly characteristic and very large patterns consisting of perhaps a dozen chess pieces. Such a template, as they call it, would have a number of slots into which the master could plug such variables as a pawn or a bishop. A template might exist, say, for the concept of "the isolated queen's-pawn position from the Nimzo-Indian Defense," and a master might change a slot by reclassifying it as the same position "minus the dark-squared bishops." To resort again to the poetic analogy, it would be a bit like memorizing a riff on "Mary had a little lamb" by substituting rhyming equivalents at certain slots, such as "Larry" for "Mary," "pool" for "school" and so on. Anyone who knows the original template should be able to fix the altered one in memory in a trice.
A Proliferation of Prodigies
The one thing that all expertise theorists agree on is that it takes enormous effort to build these structures in the mind. Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. Even child prodigies, such as Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music and Bobby Fischer in chess, must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier and working harder than others.
According to this view, the proliferation of chess prodigies in recent years merely reflects the advent of computer-based training methods that let children study far more master games and to play far more frequently against master-strength programs than their forerunners could typically manage. Fischer made a sensation when he achieved the grandmaster title at age 15, in 1958; today's record-holder, Sergey Karjakin of Ukraine, earned it at 12 years, seven months.
Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.
Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance--for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam--most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields.
Meanwhile the standards denoting expertise grow ever more challenging. High school runners manage the four-minute mile; conservatory students play pieces once attempted only by virtuosi. Yet it is chess, again, that offers the most convincing comparison over time. John Nunn, a British mathematician who is also a grandmaster, recently used a computer to help him compare the errors committed in all the games in two international tournaments, one held in 1911, the other in 1993. The modern players played far more accurately. Nunn then examined all the games of one player in 1911 who scored in the middle of the pack and concluded that his rating today would be no better than 2100, hundreds of points below the grandmaster level--"and that was on a good day and with a following wind." The very best old-time masters were considerably stronger but still well below the level of today's leaders.
Then again, Capablanca and his contemporaries had neither computers nor game databases. They had to work things out for themselves, as did Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and if they fall
below today's masters in technique, they tower above them in creative power. The same comparison can be made between Newton and the typical newly minted Ph.D. in physics.
At this point, many skeptics will finally lose patience. Surely, they will say, it takes more to get to Carnegie Hall than practice, practice, practice. Yet this belief in the importance of innate talent, strongest perhaps among the experts themselves and their trainers, is strangely lacking in hard evidence to substantiate it. In 2002 Gobet conducted a study of British chess players ranging from amateurs to grandmasters and found no connection at all between their playing strengths and their visual-spatial abilities, as measured by shape-memory tests. Other researchers have found that the abilities of professional handicappers to predict the results of horse races did not correlate at all with their mathematical abilities.
Although nobody has yet been able to predict who will become a great expert in any field, a notable experiment has shown the possibility of deliberately creating one. Laszlo Polgar, an educator in Hungary, homeschooled his three daughters in chess, assigning as much as six hours of work a day, producing one international master and two grandmasters --the strongest chess-playing siblings in history. The youngest Polgar, 30-year-old Judit, is now ranked 14th in the world.
The Polgar experiment proved two things: that grandmasters can be reared and that women can be grandmasters. It is no coincidence that the incidence of chess prodigies multiplied after Laszlo Polgar published a book on chess education. The number of musical prodigies underwent a similar increase after Mozart's father did the equivalent two centuries earlier.
Thus, motivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise. It is no accident that in music, chess and sports--all domains in which expertise is defined by competitive performance rather than academic credentialing--professionalism has been emerging at ever younger ages, under the ministrations of increasingly dedicated parents and even extended families.
Furthermore, success builds on success, because each accomplishment can strengthen a child's motivation. A 1999 study of professional soccer players from several countries showed that they were much more likely than the general population to have been born at a time of year that would have dictated their enrollment in youth soccer leagues at ages older than the average. In their early years, these children would have enjoyed a substantial advantage in size and strength when playing soccer with their teammates. Because the larger, more agile children would get more opportunities to handle the ball, they would score more often, and their success at the game would motivate them to become even better.
Teachers in sports, music and other fields tend to believe that talent matters and that they know it when they see it. In fact, they appear to be confusing ability with precocity. There is usually no way to tell, from a recital alone, whether a young violinist's extraordinary performance stems from innate ability or from years of Suzuki-style training. Capablanca, regarded to this day as the greatest "natural" chess player, boasted that he never studied the game. In fact, he flunked out of Columbia University in part because he spent so much time playing chess. His famously quick apprehension was a product of all his training, not a substitute for it.
The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert--in chess, music and a host of other subjects--sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study that will improve their reading and math skills? Roland G. Fryer, Jr., an economist at Harvard University, has experimented with offering monetary rewards to motivate students in underperforming schools in New York City and Dallas. In one ongoing program in New York, for example, teachers test the students every three weeks and award small amounts--on the order of $10 or $20--to those who score well. The early results have been promising. Instead of perpetually pondering the question, "Why can't Johnny read?" perhaps educators should ask, "Why should there be anything in the world he can't learn to do?"
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Philip E. Ross, a contributing editor at Scientific American, is a chess player himself
and father of Laura Ross, a master who outranks him by 199 points.
& EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY IN GENERAL
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN ARTICLE
Available in its website
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN JULY 2006
The Expert Mind
Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well
By Philip E. Ross
EFFORTFUL STUDY
Effortful study is the key to achieving success in chess, classical music, soccer and many other fields. New research has indicated that motivation is a more important factor than innate ability. ETHAN HILL
A man walks along the inside of a circle of chess tables, glancing at each for two or three seconds before making his move. On the outer rim, dozens of amateurs sit pondering their replies until he completes the circuit. The year is 1909, the man is Jose Raul Capablanca of Cuba, and the result is a whitewash: 28 wins in as many games. The exhibition was part of a tour in which Capablanca won 168 games in a row. How did he play so well, so quickly? And how far ahead could he calculate under such constraints? "I see only one move ahead," Capablanca is said to have answered, "but it is always the correct one."
He thus put in a nutshell what a century of psychological research has subsequently established: much of the chess master's advantage over the novice derives from the first few seconds of thought. This rapid, knowledge-guided perception, sometimes called apperception, can be seen in experts in other fields as well. Just as a master can recall all the moves in a game he has played, so can an accomplished musician often reconstruct the score to a sonata heard just once. And just as the chess master often finds the best move in a flash, an expert physician can sometimes make an accurate diagnosis within moments of laying eyes on a patient.
But how do the experts in these various subjects acquire their extraordinary skills? How much can be credited to innate talent and how much to intensive training? Psychologists have sought answers in studies of chess masters. The collected results of a century of such research have led to new theories explaining how the mind organizes and retrieves information. What is more, this research may have important implications for educators. Perhaps the same techniques used by chess players to hone their skills could be applied in the classroom to teach reading, writing and arithmetic.
The Drosophila of Cognitive Science
The history of human expertise begins with hunting, a skill that was crucial to the survival of our early ancestors. The mature hunter knows not only where the lion has been; he can also infer where it will go. Tracking skill increases, as repeated studies show, from childhood onward, rising in "a linear relationship, all the way out to the mid-30s, when it tops out," says John Bock, an anthropologist at California State University, Fullerton. It takes less time to train a brain surgeon.
The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born.
Without a demonstrably immense superiority in skill over the novice, there can be no true experts, only laypeople with imposing credentials. Such, alas, are all too common. Rigorous studies in the past two decades have shown that professional stock pickers invest no more successfully than amateurs, that noted connoisseurs distinguish wines hardly better than yokels, and that highly credentialed psychiatric therapists help patients no more than colleagues with less advanced degrees. And even when expertise undoubtedly exists --as in, say, teaching or business management--it is often hard to measure, let alone explain.
Skill at chess, however, can be measured, broken into components, subjected to laboratory experiments and readily observed in its natural environment, the tournament hall. It is for those reasons that chess has served as the greatest single test bed for theories of thinking --the "Drosophila of cognitive science," as it has been called.
The measurement of chess skill has been taken further than similar attempts with any other game, sport or competitive activity. Statistical formulas weigh a player's recent results over older ones and discount successes according to the strength of one's opponents. The results are ratings that predict the outcomes of games with remarkable reliability. If player A outrates player B by 200 points, then A will on average beat B 75 percent of the time. This prediction holds true whether the players are top-ranked or merely ordinary. Garry Kasparov, the Russian grandmaster who has a rating of 2812, will win 75 percent of his games against the 100th-ranked grandmaster, Jan Timman of the Netherlands, who has a rating of 2616. Similarly, a U.S. tournament player rated 1200 (about the median) will win 75 percent of the time against someone rated 1000 (about the 40th percentile). Ratings allow psychologists to assess expertise by performance rather than reputation and to track changes in a given player's skill over the course of his or her career.
Studies of the mental processes of chess grandmasters have revealed clues to how people become experts in other fields as well
Another reason why cognitive scientists chose chess as their model--and not billiards, say, or bridge-- is the game's reputation as, in German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's words, "the touchstone of the intellect." The feats of chess masters have long been ascribed to nearly magical mental powers. This magic shines brightest in the so-called blindfold games in which the players are not allowed to see the board. In 1894 French psychologist Alfred Binet, the co-inventor of the first intelligence test, asked chess masters to describe how they played such games. He began with the hypothesis that they achieved an almost photographic image of the board, but he soon concluded that the visualization was much more abstract. Rather than seeing the knight's mane or the grain of the wood from which it is made, the master calls up only a general knowledge of where the piece stands in relation to other elements of the position. It is the same kind of implicit knowledge that the commuter has of the stops on a subway line.
The blindfolded master supplements such knowledge with details of the game at hand as well as with recollections of salient aspects of past games. Let us say he has somehow forgotten the precise position of a pawn. He can find it, as it were, by considering the stereotyped strategy of the opening --a well-studied phase of the game with a relatively limited number of options. Or he can remember the logic behind one of his earlier moves--say, by reasoning: "I could not capture his bishop two moves ago; therefore, that pawn must have been standing in the way...." He does not have to remember every detail at all times, because he can reconstruct any particular detail whenever he wishes by tapping a well-organized system of connections. Of course, if the possession of such intricately structured knowledge explains not only success at blindfold play but also other abilities of chess masters, such as calculation and planning, then expertise in the game would depend not so much on innate abilities as on specialized training. Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot, himself a chess master, confirmed this notion in 1938, when he took advantage of the staging of a great international tournament in Holland to compare average and strong players with the world's leading grandmasters. One way he did so was to ask the players to describe their thoughts as they examined a position taken from a tournament game.
He found that although experts--the class just below master--did analyze considerably more possibilities than the very weak players, there was little further increase in analysis as playing strength rose to the master and grandmaster levels. The better players did not examine more possibilities, only better ones--just as Capablanca had claimed.
Recent research has shown that de Groot's findings reflected in part the nature of his chosen test positions. A position in which extensive, accurate calculation is critical will allow the grandmasters to show their stuff, as it were, and they will then search more deeply along the branching tree of possible moves than the amateur can hope to do. So, too, experienced physicists may on occasion examine more possibilities than physics students do. Yet in both cases, the expert relies not so much on an intrinsically stronger power of analysis as on a store of structured knowledge. When confronted with a difficult position, a weaker player may calculate for half an hour, often looking many moves ahead, yet miss the right continuation, whereas a grandmaster sees the move immediately, without consciously analyzing anything at all.
De Groot also had his subjects examine a position for a limited period and then try to reconstruct it from memory. Performance at this task tracked game-playing strength all the way from novice to grandmaster. Beginners could not recall more than a very few details of the position, even after having examined it for 30 seconds, whereas grandmasters could usually get it perfectly, even if they had perused it for only a few seconds. This difference tracks a particular form of memory, specific to the kind of chess positions that commonly occur in play. The specific memory must be the result of training, because grandmasters do no better than others in general tests of memory.
Similar results have been demonstrated in bridge players (who can remember cards played in many games), computer programmers (who can reconstruct masses of computer code) and musicians (who can recall long snatches of music). Indeed, such a memory for the subject matter of a particular field is a standard test for the existence of expertise.
The conclusion that experts rely more on structured knowledge than on analysis is supported by a rare case study of an initially weak chess player, identified only by the initials D.H., who over the course of nine years rose to become one of Canada's leading masters by 1987. Neil Charness, professor of psychology at Florida State University, showed that despite the increase in the player's strength, he analyzed chess positions no more extensively than he had earlier, relying instead on a vastly improved knowledge of chess positions and associated strategies.
Chunking Theory
In the 1960s Herbert A. Simon and William Chase, both at Carnegie Mellon University, tried to get a better understand-ing of expert memory by studying its limitations. Picking up where de Groot left off, they asked players of various strengths to reconstruct chess positions that had been artificially devised--that is, with the pieces placed randomly on the board--rather than reached as the result of master play. The correlation between game-playing strength and the accuracy of the players' recall was much weak-er with the random positions than with the authentic ones.
Chess memory was thus shown to be even more specific than it had seemed, being tuned not merely to the game itself but to typical chess positions. These experiments corroborated earlier studies that had demonstrated convincingly that ability in one area tends not to transfer to another. American psychologist Edward Thorndike first noted this lack of transference over a century ago, when he showed that the study of Latin, for instance, did not improve command of English and that geometric proofs do not teach the use of logic in daily life.
Simon explained the masters' relative weakness in reconstructing artificial chess positions with a model based on meaningful patterns called chunks. He invoked the concept to explain how chess masters can manipulate vast amounts of stored information, a task that would seem to strain the working memory. Psychologist George Miller of Princeton University famously estimated the limits of working memory--the scratch pad of the mind--in a 1956 paper entitled "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two." Miller showed that people can contemplate only five to nine items at a time. By packing hierarchies of information into chunks, Simon argued, chess masters could get around this limitation, because by using this method, they could access five to nine chunks rather than the same number of smaller details.
Take the sentence "Mary had a little lamb." The number of information chunks in this sentence depends on one's knowledge of the poem and the English language. For most native speakers of English, the sentence is part of a much larger chunk, the familiar poem. For someone who knows English but not the poem, the sentence is a single, self-contained chunk. For someone who has memorized the words but not their meaning, the sentence is five chunks, and it is 18 chunks for someone who knows the letters but not the words.
In the context of chess, the same differences can be seen between novices and grandmasters. To a beginner, a position with 20 chessmen on the board may contain far more than 20 chunks of information, because the pieces can be placed in so many configurations. A grandmaster, however, may see one part of the position as "fianchettoed bishop in the castled kingside," together with a "blockaded king's-Indian-style pawn chain," and thereby cram the entire position into perhaps five or six chunks. By measuring the time it takes to commit a new chunk to memory and the number of hours a player must study chess before reaching grandmaster strength, Simon estimated that a typical grandmaster has access to roughly 50,000 to 100,000 chunks of chess information. A grandmaster can retrieve any of these chunks from memory simply by looking at a chess position, in the same way that most native English speakers can recite the poem "Mary had a little lamb" after hearing just the first few words. Even so, there were difficulties with chunking theory. It could not fully explain some aspects of memory, such as the ability of experts to perform their feats while being distracted (a favorite tactic in the study of memory). K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University and Charness argued that there must be some other mechanism that enables experts to employ long-term memory as if it, too, were a scratch pad. Says Ericsson: "The mere demonstration that highly skilled players can play at almost their normal strength under blindfold conditions is almost impossible for chunking theory to explain because you have to know the position, then you have to explore it in your memory."
Such manipulation involves changing the stored chunks, at least in some ways, a task that may be likened to reciting "Mary had a little lamb" backward. It can be done, but not easily, and certainly not without many false starts and errors. Yet grandmaster games played quickly and under blindfold conditions tend to be of surprisingly high quality.
Ericsson also cites studies of physicians who clearly put information into long-term memory and take it out again in ways that enable them to make diagnoses. Perhaps Ericsson's most homely example, though, comes from reading. In a 1995 study he and Walter Kintsch of the University of Colorado found that interrupting highly proficient readers hardly slowed their reentry to a text; in the end, they lost only a few seconds. The researchers explained these findings by recourse to a structure they called long-term working memory, an almost oxymoronic coinage because it assigns to long-term memory the one thing that had always been defined as incompatible with it: thinking. But brain-imaging studies done in 2001 at the University of Konstanz in Germany provide support for the theory by showing that expert chess players activate long-term memory much more than novices do.
Fernand Gobet of Brunel University in London champions a rival theory, devised with Simon in the late 1990s. It extends the idea of chunks by invoking highly characteristic and very large patterns consisting of perhaps a dozen chess pieces. Such a template, as they call it, would have a number of slots into which the master could plug such variables as a pawn or a bishop. A template might exist, say, for the concept of "the isolated queen's-pawn position from the Nimzo-Indian Defense," and a master might change a slot by reclassifying it as the same position "minus the dark-squared bishops." To resort again to the poetic analogy, it would be a bit like memorizing a riff on "Mary had a little lamb" by substituting rhyming equivalents at certain slots, such as "Larry" for "Mary," "pool" for "school" and so on. Anyone who knows the original template should be able to fix the altered one in memory in a trice.
A Proliferation of Prodigies
The one thing that all expertise theorists agree on is that it takes enormous effort to build these structures in the mind. Simon coined a psychological law of his own, the 10-year rule, which states that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field. Even child prodigies, such as Gauss in mathematics, Mozart in music and Bobby Fischer in chess, must have made an equivalent effort, perhaps by starting earlier and working harder than others.
According to this view, the proliferation of chess prodigies in recent years merely reflects the advent of computer-based training methods that let children study far more master games and to play far more frequently against master-strength programs than their forerunners could typically manage. Fischer made a sensation when he achieved the grandmaster title at age 15, in 1958; today's record-holder, Sergey Karjakin of Ukraine, earned it at 12 years, seven months.
Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.
Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance--for instance, keeping up with one's golf buddies or passing a driver's exam--most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind's box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields.
Meanwhile the standards denoting expertise grow ever more challenging. High school runners manage the four-minute mile; conservatory students play pieces once attempted only by virtuosi. Yet it is chess, again, that offers the most convincing comparison over time. John Nunn, a British mathematician who is also a grandmaster, recently used a computer to help him compare the errors committed in all the games in two international tournaments, one held in 1911, the other in 1993. The modern players played far more accurately. Nunn then examined all the games of one player in 1911 who scored in the middle of the pack and concluded that his rating today would be no better than 2100, hundreds of points below the grandmaster level--"and that was on a good day and with a following wind." The very best old-time masters were considerably stronger but still well below the level of today's leaders.
Then again, Capablanca and his contemporaries had neither computers nor game databases. They had to work things out for themselves, as did Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, and if they fall
below today's masters in technique, they tower above them in creative power. The same comparison can be made between Newton and the typical newly minted Ph.D. in physics.
At this point, many skeptics will finally lose patience. Surely, they will say, it takes more to get to Carnegie Hall than practice, practice, practice. Yet this belief in the importance of innate talent, strongest perhaps among the experts themselves and their trainers, is strangely lacking in hard evidence to substantiate it. In 2002 Gobet conducted a study of British chess players ranging from amateurs to grandmasters and found no connection at all between their playing strengths and their visual-spatial abilities, as measured by shape-memory tests. Other researchers have found that the abilities of professional handicappers to predict the results of horse races did not correlate at all with their mathematical abilities.
Although nobody has yet been able to predict who will become a great expert in any field, a notable experiment has shown the possibility of deliberately creating one. Laszlo Polgar, an educator in Hungary, homeschooled his three daughters in chess, assigning as much as six hours of work a day, producing one international master and two grandmasters --the strongest chess-playing siblings in history. The youngest Polgar, 30-year-old Judit, is now ranked 14th in the world.
The Polgar experiment proved two things: that grandmasters can be reared and that women can be grandmasters. It is no coincidence that the incidence of chess prodigies multiplied after Laszlo Polgar published a book on chess education. The number of musical prodigies underwent a similar increase after Mozart's father did the equivalent two centuries earlier.
Thus, motivation appears to be a more important factor than innate ability in the development of expertise. It is no accident that in music, chess and sports--all domains in which expertise is defined by competitive performance rather than academic credentialing--professionalism has been emerging at ever younger ages, under the ministrations of increasingly dedicated parents and even extended families.
Furthermore, success builds on success, because each accomplishment can strengthen a child's motivation. A 1999 study of professional soccer players from several countries showed that they were much more likely than the general population to have been born at a time of year that would have dictated their enrollment in youth soccer leagues at ages older than the average. In their early years, these children would have enjoyed a substantial advantage in size and strength when playing soccer with their teammates. Because the larger, more agile children would get more opportunities to handle the ball, they would score more often, and their success at the game would motivate them to become even better.
Teachers in sports, music and other fields tend to believe that talent matters and that they know it when they see it. In fact, they appear to be confusing ability with precocity. There is usually no way to tell, from a recital alone, whether a young violinist's extraordinary performance stems from innate ability or from years of Suzuki-style training. Capablanca, regarded to this day as the greatest "natural" chess player, boasted that he never studied the game. In fact, he flunked out of Columbia University in part because he spent so much time playing chess. His famously quick apprehension was a product of all his training, not a substitute for it.
The preponderance of psychological evidence indicates that experts are made, not born. What is more, the demonstrated ability to turn a child quickly into an expert--in chess, music and a host of other subjects--sets a clear challenge before the schools. Can educators find ways to encourage students to engage in the kind of effortful study that will improve their reading and math skills? Roland G. Fryer, Jr., an economist at Harvard University, has experimented with offering monetary rewards to motivate students in underperforming schools in New York City and Dallas. In one ongoing program in New York, for example, teachers test the students every three weeks and award small amounts--on the order of $10 or $20--to those who score well. The early results have been promising. Instead of perpetually pondering the question, "Why can't Johnny read?" perhaps educators should ask, "Why should there be anything in the world he can't learn to do?"
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)
Philip E. Ross, a contributing editor at Scientific American, is a chess player himself
and father of Laura Ross, a master who outranks him by 199 points.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
PROMISE
May 26, 2008
MORE CHESS & EDUCATION
snippets of my & other people's ideas
ONE DOES NOT LEARN BY MEMORIZING ERRORS/MISTAKES.
ONE LEARNS BY MEMORIZING WHAT IS "CORRECT/TRUE/RIGHT".
NOTE: "MEMORIZE" WITHOUT EVEN UNDERSTANDING;
EVEN IF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEMORIZE BUT
IF YOU MEMORIZE ALL & ONLY THOSE THAT ARE "CORRECT" STILL THIS IS GOOD EDUCATION. THERE IS SUCH A FIELD OF KNOWLEDGE CALLED "ERROR ANALYSIS" (STAT., ENG'G) BUT GOOD LEARNING DOES NOT EVEN BOTHER ABOUT THE SLIGHTEST MISTAKE/ERROR. A SINGLE, TINY ERRONEOUS "INFO" IS A BURDEN ON ONE'S MEMORY WHICH IS A LIMITED RESOURCE. IF ONE LEARNS VIA MISTAKES THEN THAT'S LEARNING BY TRIAL & ERROR = Stupidity. OF COURSE IF YOU LEARN THRU OTHER PEOPLES' MISTAKES THAT'S BETTER.
(THERE'S ADVANTAGE IN JUST BEING A "MIRON")
EXPERIENCE IS WHAT WE CALL OUR MISTAKES IN LIFE.
I believe I have now gained enough "EXPERIENCE" or accumulated "wisdom"
to act as a useful guide or genuine teacher to young people....
CHESS ANECDOTE
Once in a lobby of the Hall of Columns of the Trade Union Center in Moscow a group of masters were analyzing an ending. They could not find the right way to go about things & there was a lot of arguing about it. Suddenly Capablanca came into the room. He was always fond of walking about when it was his opponent's turn to move. Learning the reason for the dispute the Cuban bent down to the position, said 'Si, si,' & suddenly redistributed the pieces all over the board to show what the correct formation was for the side trying to win. I haven't exaggerated. Don Jose literally pushed the pieces around the board without making moves. He just put them in fresh positions where he thought they were needed. Suddenly everything became clear. The correct scheme of things had been set up & now the win was easy. We were delighted by Capablanca's mastery. – Alexander Kotov
Comment - (CHESS PSYCHOLOGY)
This anecdote supports the view that masters rely on SCHEMATIC THINKING or PATTERN-RECOGNITION rather than CALCULATION of possibilities. Masters have an enormous database of POSITIONS stored in their memory. And they simply "weed out" what is not relevant/not needed. SELECTIVE simplification rather than BUILDING UP complication
I have known many chess players, but only one chess genius, Capablanca. – Emanuel Lasker
I think Capablanca had the greatest natural talent. – Mikhail Botvinnik
Capablanca was possibly the greatest player in the entire history of chess. – Bobby Fischer.
What others could not see in a month's study, he saw at a glance. – Reuben Fine (on Capablanca)
I see only one move ahead, but it is always the correct one. – Jose R. Capablanca
Capablanca invariably chose the right option, no matter how intricate the position. – Garry Kasparov.
Capablanca’s games generally take the following course: he begins with a series of extremely fine prophylactic maneuvers, which neutralize his opponent’s attempts to complicate the game; he then proceeds, slowly but surely, to set up an attacking position. This attacking position, after a series of simplifications, is transformed into a favorable endgame, which he conducts with matchless technique. – Aron Nimzowitsch
You cannot play chess unless you have studied his games. – Mikhail Botvinnik (on Capablanca)
[NOW I HAVE SOMETHING TO "WORK ON"!!!]
I did not believe I was superior to him. Perhaps the chief reason for his defeat was the overestimation of his own powers arising out of his overwhelming victory in New York, 1927, and his underestimation of mine.
– Alexander Alekhine (on Capablanca)
Capablanca is smart; Alekhine is clever. – Source Unknown
(So CLEVER beats SMART!)
COMMENT: Many overuse the term "genius" BUT if ONLY ONE person must be called such in CHESS, it was CAPABLANCA. (Alternative candidates: Morphy or Fischer. There are many "child prodigies" like Reshevsky)
===================================
From the American FOundation for Chess website:
WHY PLAY CHESS
* is fun
* is easy to learn
* is a game for everyone
* improves concentration
* develops critical thinking
* develops logical reasoning
* allows you to meet interesting people
* teaches independence and personal responsibility
* opens the world to you
* inspires self-motivation
* helps you plan ahead and foresee consequences
* develops calculating ability
* develops self-confidence
* develops memory
* is cheap
* promotes scientific thinking
* helps kids perform better and raise their grades
* helps you live a longer, healthier life
* promotes imagination and creativity
* teaches that success rewards hard work
* builds self-esteem
* increases patience
* encourages good sportsmanship
* encourages respect for ones self and others
* relates to Math, Reading, Writing,
Social Studies, Science, Technology and Art
Chess is powerful!
================================
CHESS inculcates CIRCUMSPECTION, PATIENCE, FORESIGHT, TENACITY OF PURPOSE, etc etc etc CHESS REQUIRES STRONG CHARACTER, TREMENDOUS WILL, COMPETITIVE URGE & STRONG HEALTH & MEMORY There exists THE BEST/CORRECT/PROPER way/method/technique of learning/teaching CHESS. But this knowledge is known only to an ELITE few & they can "mass produce" GRANDmasters! A child who learns the game at age 4-6 has great chances of becoming one.
My personal challenge is to train an 18-year old MOTIVATED ordinary person to become an EXPERT or even a MASTER or an older experienced player to add 100-200 points to her rating. - This includes ME! My prerequisite is she should LIKE/LOVE the GAME, really seek the GOAL & must REALLY WANT TO LEARN/IMPROVE "DO WHAT YOU LOVE LOVE WHAT YOU DO." For as long as a person LEARNS or SEEKS LEARNING there remains a chance for progress & improvement... Some claim learning ends at 18 but people like Korchnoi, von Humboldt, Fischer's mother, etc show otherwise
People are governed with the head;
kindness of heart is of little use in CHESS.
Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort
1741-1794, French Writer, Journalist, Playwright
Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time. – George Bernard Shaw
Chess, like mathematics and music, is a nursery for child prodigies.
Jamie Murphy
I'm like Bush, I see the world more like checkers than chess.
Dennis Miller
Compared to GO & SALPAKAN (GG), CHESS remains a more accurate MODEL of Struggle in Life for it involves the crucial TIME factor - everything we do involves TIME. (One cannot play BLITZ Go or GG.)
GO & SALPAKAN are STRATEGIC games. CHESS is fundamentally TACTICAL.
CHESS is "RACIST" because WHITE always moves first unlike in GO...
CHESS, GO, SALPAKAN, REVERSI (OTHELLO) are THINKING GAMES/EXCELLENT EDUCATIONAL TOOLS & can lead to SERIOUS combinatorial game theory for those interested in MATH & mathematical modelling/games programming in COMPSCI not to mention PSYCHOLOGY of thinking, Theory of Contests/War in POLITICS ECONOMICS ETC ETC
CHESS is a combined THINKING & FIGHTING game, a rare combination... The most efficient MODEL OF POWER PLAY???!!!
I cannot remember but the British have an EXACT English term for all these stuff: board games, puzzles, smart/quick thinking contests, etc (MENTAL CALISTHENICS?) I FORGOT...
"I LOVE THE VIGOR, THE HEALTHY VIGOR THAT RISKS THE UTMOST TO ATTAIN THE ATTAINABLE."
- LASKERR or BOGOLJUBOW??? I FORGOT!!!
PROMISE: THis is my LAST POSTING ON CHESS in this BLOG.
ADDENDA:
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. - Oscar Wilde
Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. "Yes" is the answer. - Swami X
The Trouble with Time
The trouble with time is that it only goes forward. -chessninja.com
"Life can only be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards." - Soren Kierkegaard
http://www.scribd.com/doc/186721/1940-H-G-Wells-The-New-World-Order
http://www.increasebrainpower.com/increaseiq.html
IF YOU DON'T USE, IT YOU LOSE IT. (i.e. THE COCONUT)
MORE CHESS & EDUCATION
snippets of my & other people's ideas
ONE DOES NOT LEARN BY MEMORIZING ERRORS/MISTAKES.
ONE LEARNS BY MEMORIZING WHAT IS "CORRECT/TRUE/RIGHT".
NOTE: "MEMORIZE" WITHOUT EVEN UNDERSTANDING;
EVEN IF YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU MEMORIZE BUT
IF YOU MEMORIZE ALL & ONLY THOSE THAT ARE "CORRECT" STILL THIS IS GOOD EDUCATION. THERE IS SUCH A FIELD OF KNOWLEDGE CALLED "ERROR ANALYSIS" (STAT., ENG'G) BUT GOOD LEARNING DOES NOT EVEN BOTHER ABOUT THE SLIGHTEST MISTAKE/ERROR. A SINGLE, TINY ERRONEOUS "INFO" IS A BURDEN ON ONE'S MEMORY WHICH IS A LIMITED RESOURCE. IF ONE LEARNS VIA MISTAKES THEN THAT'S LEARNING BY TRIAL & ERROR = Stupidity. OF COURSE IF YOU LEARN THRU OTHER PEOPLES' MISTAKES THAT'S BETTER.
(THERE'S ADVANTAGE IN JUST BEING A "MIRON")
EXPERIENCE IS WHAT WE CALL OUR MISTAKES IN LIFE.
I believe I have now gained enough "EXPERIENCE" or accumulated "wisdom"
to act as a useful guide or genuine teacher to young people....
CHESS ANECDOTE
Once in a lobby of the Hall of Columns of the Trade Union Center in Moscow a group of masters were analyzing an ending. They could not find the right way to go about things & there was a lot of arguing about it. Suddenly Capablanca came into the room. He was always fond of walking about when it was his opponent's turn to move. Learning the reason for the dispute the Cuban bent down to the position, said 'Si, si,' & suddenly redistributed the pieces all over the board to show what the correct formation was for the side trying to win. I haven't exaggerated. Don Jose literally pushed the pieces around the board without making moves. He just put them in fresh positions where he thought they were needed. Suddenly everything became clear. The correct scheme of things had been set up & now the win was easy. We were delighted by Capablanca's mastery. – Alexander Kotov
Comment - (CHESS PSYCHOLOGY)
This anecdote supports the view that masters rely on SCHEMATIC THINKING or PATTERN-RECOGNITION rather than CALCULATION of possibilities. Masters have an enormous database of POSITIONS stored in their memory. And they simply "weed out" what is not relevant/not needed. SELECTIVE simplification rather than BUILDING UP complication
I have known many chess players, but only one chess genius, Capablanca. – Emanuel Lasker
I think Capablanca had the greatest natural talent. – Mikhail Botvinnik
Capablanca was possibly the greatest player in the entire history of chess. – Bobby Fischer.
What others could not see in a month's study, he saw at a glance. – Reuben Fine (on Capablanca)
I see only one move ahead, but it is always the correct one. – Jose R. Capablanca
Capablanca invariably chose the right option, no matter how intricate the position. – Garry Kasparov.
Capablanca’s games generally take the following course: he begins with a series of extremely fine prophylactic maneuvers, which neutralize his opponent’s attempts to complicate the game; he then proceeds, slowly but surely, to set up an attacking position. This attacking position, after a series of simplifications, is transformed into a favorable endgame, which he conducts with matchless technique. – Aron Nimzowitsch
You cannot play chess unless you have studied his games. – Mikhail Botvinnik (on Capablanca)
[NOW I HAVE SOMETHING TO "WORK ON"!!!]
I did not believe I was superior to him. Perhaps the chief reason for his defeat was the overestimation of his own powers arising out of his overwhelming victory in New York, 1927, and his underestimation of mine.
– Alexander Alekhine (on Capablanca)
Capablanca is smart; Alekhine is clever. – Source Unknown
(So CLEVER beats SMART!)
COMMENT: Many overuse the term "genius" BUT if ONLY ONE person must be called such in CHESS, it was CAPABLANCA. (Alternative candidates: Morphy or Fischer. There are many "child prodigies" like Reshevsky)
===================================
From the American FOundation for Chess website:
WHY PLAY CHESS
* is fun
* is easy to learn
* is a game for everyone
* improves concentration
* develops critical thinking
* develops logical reasoning
* allows you to meet interesting people
* teaches independence and personal responsibility
* opens the world to you
* inspires self-motivation
* helps you plan ahead and foresee consequences
* develops calculating ability
* develops self-confidence
* develops memory
* is cheap
* promotes scientific thinking
* helps kids perform better and raise their grades
* helps you live a longer, healthier life
* promotes imagination and creativity
* teaches that success rewards hard work
* builds self-esteem
* increases patience
* encourages good sportsmanship
* encourages respect for ones self and others
* relates to Math, Reading, Writing,
Social Studies, Science, Technology and Art
Chess is powerful!
================================
CHESS inculcates CIRCUMSPECTION, PATIENCE, FORESIGHT, TENACITY OF PURPOSE, etc etc etc CHESS REQUIRES STRONG CHARACTER, TREMENDOUS WILL, COMPETITIVE URGE & STRONG HEALTH & MEMORY There exists THE BEST/CORRECT/PROPER way/method/technique of learning/teaching CHESS. But this knowledge is known only to an ELITE few & they can "mass produce" GRANDmasters! A child who learns the game at age 4-6 has great chances of becoming one.
My personal challenge is to train an 18-year old MOTIVATED ordinary person to become an EXPERT or even a MASTER or an older experienced player to add 100-200 points to her rating. - This includes ME! My prerequisite is she should LIKE/LOVE the GAME, really seek the GOAL & must REALLY WANT TO LEARN/IMPROVE "DO WHAT YOU LOVE LOVE WHAT YOU DO." For as long as a person LEARNS or SEEKS LEARNING there remains a chance for progress & improvement... Some claim learning ends at 18 but people like Korchnoi, von Humboldt, Fischer's mother, etc show otherwise
People are governed with the head;
kindness of heart is of little use in CHESS.
Sebastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort
1741-1794, French Writer, Journalist, Playwright
Chess is a foolish expedient for making idle people believe they are doing something very clever, when they are only wasting their time. – George Bernard Shaw
Chess, like mathematics and music, is a nursery for child prodigies.
Jamie Murphy
I'm like Bush, I see the world more like checkers than chess.
Dennis Miller
Compared to GO & SALPAKAN (GG), CHESS remains a more accurate MODEL of Struggle in Life for it involves the crucial TIME factor - everything we do involves TIME. (One cannot play BLITZ Go or GG.)
GO & SALPAKAN are STRATEGIC games. CHESS is fundamentally TACTICAL.
CHESS is "RACIST" because WHITE always moves first unlike in GO...
CHESS, GO, SALPAKAN, REVERSI (OTHELLO) are THINKING GAMES/EXCELLENT EDUCATIONAL TOOLS & can lead to SERIOUS combinatorial game theory for those interested in MATH & mathematical modelling/games programming in COMPSCI not to mention PSYCHOLOGY of thinking, Theory of Contests/War in POLITICS ECONOMICS ETC ETC
CHESS is a combined THINKING & FIGHTING game, a rare combination... The most efficient MODEL OF POWER PLAY???!!!
I cannot remember but the British have an EXACT English term for all these stuff: board games, puzzles, smart/quick thinking contests, etc (MENTAL CALISTHENICS?) I FORGOT...
"I LOVE THE VIGOR, THE HEALTHY VIGOR THAT RISKS THE UTMOST TO ATTAIN THE ATTAINABLE."
- LASKERR or BOGOLJUBOW??? I FORGOT!!!
PROMISE: THis is my LAST POSTING ON CHESS in this BLOG.
ADDENDA:
Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions,
their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. - Oscar Wilde
Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. "Yes" is the answer. - Swami X
The Trouble with Time
The trouble with time is that it only goes forward. -chessninja.com
"Life can only be understood backwards. But it must be lived forwards." - Soren Kierkegaard
http://www.scribd.com/doc/186721/1940-H-G-Wells-The-New-World-Order
http://www.increasebrainpower.com/increaseiq.html
IF YOU DON'T USE, IT YOU LOSE IT. (i.e. THE COCONUT)
Thursday, May 22, 2008
FRIDAY (MUSLIM)
CONSTHEOrists note the following very well:
NEWS MEDIA
MERALCO issue:
Manuel "Manolo" Lopez
My brother's & My first & a front neighbor's family NAMEs
ACCIDENT??? CHANCE??? CONSPIRACY???...
RCBC Massacre then Tanauan rubout surnamed Javier
Our Javier is La Union Ilocano NOT Batangueno...
"Javier" is a Spanish or Basque FIRST name NOT a family or clan name
Internet sources claim it is derived from "Etxabier", Basque for "owner of new house"
[= Spanish "Villanueva" or French "Villeneuve"?]
St. Francis Xavier, apostle of India, Xavier Cugat. Javier Solana, etc etc
MEDIA report on incident shows chessboard & CHECKERED design...
CHANCE? CONSPIRACY?
When I was a childl & whenever I gave my name the usual reaction was... "DON MANOLO!"
the titled name of a rich man or haciendero... [Unfortunately, I grew up hating MONEY...]
There are notable "Manolos" in Manila: Manolo "Butas-Butas"/"Butch-Butch" Favis, a radio commentator in the '70s [There used to be "Dis is Manolo" peanut vendor in Hi-Top supermarket at corner of Bohol Ave. & Quezon Ave.],
Sportswriter Manolo Inigo, even Manuel "Manolo" Quezon III
A Hispanic diplomat's wife undergrad classmate told me
that my name was simply the nickname of my brother's!
My brother remarked that was why I was only second in ability!...
[I asked my mother & she told me my first yaya proposed it.]
In the Philippines some natives sometimes sport absurd foreign
names: Males carrying female names or females with male names
Males named "Jennifer" or "Joy" Females named "Erwin" or "Tony"
The unwiitting victims (marked for Life) of their parents'
ignorance about names & their meanings
COLONIAL MENTALITY status-seeking by adopting foreign names
ending up with wrong choices & funny results...
Nobody liked native names like "Paraluman", "Diwata", "Amihan",
Fortunately nobody here has yet thought of naming babies "X-7" or "6662" HAR!
[COCA-COLA's secret formula is called "X-7" meaning, 7 SECRET ingredients.
caramel (sugar plus water), carbon dioxide (CO2) to provide "fizz",
I really don't know what accounts for the BLACK color... CRUDE OIL extract? HAR!
CONSTHEOrists suspect one key ingredient of this popular beverage is COCA/cocaine(?)
Is this the reason for the COLOMBIA Drug WarS??? So price of COKE should be affected...
I asked myself a long long time ago why nobody has conducted a decades-long scientific study
on the long-term effect of COKE drinking. I'm quire sure 99% of populatioh had drunk it...
["It's the real thing" jingle in the '70s]
My conclusion (based on no rational premise or experimental hypothesis) :
It causes CANCER... CANCER OF THE POCKET!!!
I was born at a time when Hispanic double names were popular/in vogue
Succeeding decades saw different trend: English, American names, Chinese, Japanese, Indian names Usual sources: celebrities, song/movie stars
More about NAMES & NAMING later...
Actually you can call me "Saddam" or "Bush" & this won't affect me a bit
(OF course I'd prefer "Usamah" or "Moqtada") But I might call back at you, "Cheney" or "Blair" HAR!
Wednesday, I went my usual roving exercise. [I really feel my brain is shrinking due to insufficient oxygenation.] In Katipunan Avenue there were PNP(?) or SAF(?) wearing their high-tech light-green camouflage uniform. This camouflage is worn by U.S & even Australian military as shown in MEDIA. This camouflage is different from usual ones - It has finer/more sophisticated design.
I remember years back in KSA when I was taken cared of by my good MORO friends when I fell ill with pneumonia. One of our simple pleasures there was of course, preparing delicious meals
& eating together at their "villa". We usually bought Coca-Cola litre (an allegedly Jewish product patronized in Muslim KSA See note below) that featured a VISUAL PUZZLE. A different puzzle for every few bottles. We competed as to who'll see the hidden image first. This was & is a new high-tech art [I forgot its name.] that should be available in the Internet.
It is actually based on scientific research findings on lasers & human vision which I believe
is also exploited in high-tech computer games.
The camouflage worn by these "anti-terrorist" small but highly-mobile forces is I believe also
based on the high-tech art form. It is scientifically-designed & therefore truly effective...
Again, I noticed many "For Rent" signs, closed business establishments, "For Sale" vehicles...
Economic Signs of the Times... Truly INTELLIGENT persons should know what to do/expect/plan for... Yet there are also new constructions: e.g. SM project along Katipunan Ave... I can no longer travel/rove far because of the increased transportation fares.
Years ago I could go as far as Rizal, BUlacan or Cavite & Laguna on a mere side-trip/spur-of-the-moment basis. One time in the late '80's while walking along Buendia or another main thoroughfare, I saw an incoming bus with sign "Cavite City". I felt the urge to flag the bus and there & then went to "Etivac Ytic" - to eat my lunch!
On the way I dropped first to Aguinaldo's Kawit house & saw his bowling alley, family tree
& other museum highlights & befriended elements of the Philippine Navy who were acting as museum caretakers. In the city I saw the main thoroughfare & noticed its similarity to Olongapo's - Sangley Point was also a former Spanish & US Naval Base.
Then, visited university classmates' homes but they were all either working abroad or in the metropolis...
Now (2008) at P100 peso budget I can only go as far as Pritil Tondo or Marikina public market to eat P15 HALU-HALO plus P5 Gulaman Sago or Buko juice... [Months ago I could afford P10 TAHO everyday + Buko Juice. Now I have to give this up!]
My usual hangouts a decade ago were air-conditioned malls. Now I only go to public markets!!! HAR! How does one explain my losing taste & form? Senility? Poverty?...
Can anyone blame me if I feel the price increases around me are designed to prevent me from moving about... or worse, that "THEY" are now out to GET ME???????!!!!!!!
Has anyone provided or given free to the public via website a simple-as-possible but accurate account of the POLITIX OF OIL? ALso POLITIX OF ELECTRIC POWER (WHO controls the hydroelectric dams in the world, or wind-powered generators, or solar panels?)
CONSTHEO would say only one core group controls DAM & POWER technology (Libya's Great River Project, China's Twin Rivers project etc, Communication Systems (ZTE!), I.T. devices etc etc CAPITALISM... CONSPIRACY...
I have my own proposed big-time project:
I imagine I am the Sole Proprietor Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of my private global corporation(?) masquerading as a humanitarian philanthropic NGO (& yet listed in all global stock markets: NY, Tokyo, London etc etc)
Its acronym: FGUGGTP - The FIRST GREAT UNIVERSAL GRAND GLOBAL TAG-GUTOM PROJECT!
Street-level Metro Manila implementation:
FREE lunch packs of GMO rice + fried TOKWA/TOFU + Munggo soup & BOTTLED Water
distributed to kilometer-long queues of hungry "PEOPLE"
Nobody should go hungry... I'm candidating(?) for PWESIDENT...
TMNP (Have to EAT)
TYPED THURSDAY EVENING
SENT FRIDAY, 11:18 A.M.
UP CAMPUS
NEWS MEDIA
MERALCO issue:
Manuel "Manolo" Lopez
My brother's & My first & a front neighbor's family NAMEs
ACCIDENT??? CHANCE??? CONSPIRACY???...
RCBC Massacre then Tanauan rubout surnamed Javier
Our Javier is La Union Ilocano NOT Batangueno...
"Javier" is a Spanish or Basque FIRST name NOT a family or clan name
Internet sources claim it is derived from "Etxabier", Basque for "owner of new house"
[= Spanish "Villanueva" or French "Villeneuve"?]
St. Francis Xavier, apostle of India, Xavier Cugat. Javier Solana, etc etc
MEDIA report on incident shows chessboard & CHECKERED design...
CHANCE? CONSPIRACY?
When I was a childl & whenever I gave my name the usual reaction was... "DON MANOLO!"
the titled name of a rich man or haciendero... [Unfortunately, I grew up hating MONEY...]
There are notable "Manolos" in Manila: Manolo "Butas-Butas"/"Butch-Butch" Favis, a radio commentator in the '70s [There used to be "Dis is Manolo" peanut vendor in Hi-Top supermarket at corner of Bohol Ave. & Quezon Ave.],
Sportswriter Manolo Inigo, even Manuel "Manolo" Quezon III
A Hispanic diplomat's wife undergrad classmate told me
that my name was simply the nickname of my brother's!
My brother remarked that was why I was only second in ability!...
[I asked my mother & she told me my first yaya proposed it.]
In the Philippines some natives sometimes sport absurd foreign
names: Males carrying female names or females with male names
Males named "Jennifer" or "Joy" Females named "Erwin" or "Tony"
The unwiitting victims (marked for Life) of their parents'
ignorance about names & their meanings
COLONIAL MENTALITY status-seeking by adopting foreign names
ending up with wrong choices & funny results...
Nobody liked native names like "Paraluman", "Diwata", "Amihan",
Fortunately nobody here has yet thought of naming babies "X-7" or "6662" HAR!
[COCA-COLA's secret formula is called "X-7" meaning, 7 SECRET ingredients.
caramel (sugar plus water), carbon dioxide (CO2) to provide "fizz",
I really don't know what accounts for the BLACK color... CRUDE OIL extract? HAR!
CONSTHEOrists suspect one key ingredient of this popular beverage is COCA/cocaine(?)
Is this the reason for the COLOMBIA Drug WarS??? So price of COKE should be affected...
I asked myself a long long time ago why nobody has conducted a decades-long scientific study
on the long-term effect of COKE drinking. I'm quire sure 99% of populatioh had drunk it...
["It's the real thing" jingle in the '70s]
My conclusion (based on no rational premise or experimental hypothesis) :
It causes CANCER... CANCER OF THE POCKET!!!
I was born at a time when Hispanic double names were popular/in vogue
Succeeding decades saw different trend: English, American names, Chinese, Japanese, Indian names Usual sources: celebrities, song/movie stars
More about NAMES & NAMING later...
Actually you can call me "Saddam" or "Bush" & this won't affect me a bit
(OF course I'd prefer "Usamah" or "Moqtada") But I might call back at you, "Cheney" or "Blair" HAR!
Wednesday, I went my usual roving exercise. [I really feel my brain is shrinking due to insufficient oxygenation.] In Katipunan Avenue there were PNP(?) or SAF(?) wearing their high-tech light-green camouflage uniform. This camouflage is worn by U.S & even Australian military as shown in MEDIA. This camouflage is different from usual ones - It has finer/more sophisticated design.
I remember years back in KSA when I was taken cared of by my good MORO friends when I fell ill with pneumonia. One of our simple pleasures there was of course, preparing delicious meals
& eating together at their "villa". We usually bought Coca-Cola litre (an allegedly Jewish product patronized in Muslim KSA See note below) that featured a VISUAL PUZZLE. A different puzzle for every few bottles. We competed as to who'll see the hidden image first. This was & is a new high-tech art [I forgot its name.] that should be available in the Internet.
It is actually based on scientific research findings on lasers & human vision which I believe
is also exploited in high-tech computer games.
The camouflage worn by these "anti-terrorist" small but highly-mobile forces is I believe also
based on the high-tech art form. It is scientifically-designed & therefore truly effective...
Again, I noticed many "For Rent" signs, closed business establishments, "For Sale" vehicles...
Economic Signs of the Times... Truly INTELLIGENT persons should know what to do/expect/plan for... Yet there are also new constructions: e.g. SM project along Katipunan Ave... I can no longer travel/rove far because of the increased transportation fares.
Years ago I could go as far as Rizal, BUlacan or Cavite & Laguna on a mere side-trip/spur-of-the-moment basis. One time in the late '80's while walking along Buendia or another main thoroughfare, I saw an incoming bus with sign "Cavite City". I felt the urge to flag the bus and there & then went to "Etivac Ytic" - to eat my lunch!
On the way I dropped first to Aguinaldo's Kawit house & saw his bowling alley, family tree
& other museum highlights & befriended elements of the Philippine Navy who were acting as museum caretakers. In the city I saw the main thoroughfare & noticed its similarity to Olongapo's - Sangley Point was also a former Spanish & US Naval Base.
Then, visited university classmates' homes but they were all either working abroad or in the metropolis...
Now (2008) at P100 peso budget I can only go as far as Pritil Tondo or Marikina public market to eat P15 HALU-HALO plus P5 Gulaman Sago or Buko juice... [Months ago I could afford P10 TAHO everyday + Buko Juice. Now I have to give this up!]
My usual hangouts a decade ago were air-conditioned malls. Now I only go to public markets!!! HAR! How does one explain my losing taste & form? Senility? Poverty?...
Can anyone blame me if I feel the price increases around me are designed to prevent me from moving about... or worse, that "THEY" are now out to GET ME???????!!!!!!!
Has anyone provided or given free to the public via website a simple-as-possible but accurate account of the POLITIX OF OIL? ALso POLITIX OF ELECTRIC POWER (WHO controls the hydroelectric dams in the world, or wind-powered generators, or solar panels?)
CONSTHEO would say only one core group controls DAM & POWER technology (Libya's Great River Project, China's Twin Rivers project etc, Communication Systems (ZTE!), I.T. devices etc etc CAPITALISM... CONSPIRACY...
I have my own proposed big-time project:
I imagine I am the Sole Proprietor Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of my private global corporation(?) masquerading as a humanitarian philanthropic NGO (& yet listed in all global stock markets: NY, Tokyo, London etc etc)
Its acronym: FGUGGTP - The FIRST GREAT UNIVERSAL GRAND GLOBAL TAG-GUTOM PROJECT!
Street-level Metro Manila implementation:
FREE lunch packs of GMO rice + fried TOKWA/TOFU + Munggo soup & BOTTLED Water
distributed to kilometer-long queues of hungry "PEOPLE"
Nobody should go hungry... I'm candidating(?) for PWESIDENT...
TMNP (Have to EAT)
TYPED THURSDAY EVENING
SENT FRIDAY, 11:18 A.M.
UP CAMPUS
Monday, May 19, 2008
Saturday, May 17, 2008
LASKER BOOK
I'M VERY VERY SURE THIS IS FROM LASKER's BOOK MANUAL OF CHESS:
==========================================
FINAL REFLECTIONS ON EDUCATION IN CHESS.
Education in Chess goes on in a most haphazard fashion. Most Chess players slowly climb to a certain rather low level and stay there. Of players to whom a master can give odds of a Queen there are millions; players of greater skill number probably no more than a quarter of a million. If we reckon the number of Rook players as a hundred and fifty thousand, of Knight players as fifty thousand, of Pawn and two-move players as forty thousand, of pawn and move players as nine thousand, and the number of those to whom no master can allow odds, as one thousand, we are possibly not very far wrong. Now let us consider the efforts made to attain this result: a literature of many thousand volumes, hundreds, maybe thousands, of Chess columns in widely read newspapers and magazines, lectures, tournaments, tournament books, courses of instruction, matches in the clubs and between clubs and cities and countries, by correspondence, by telegraph and telephone, thousands of coffee - houses, where spectators, amid lively gossip, look on, make notes, analyze - truly an imposing expenditure.
One should not take these facts too easily. Certainly, in spite of its capacities, Chess is only a game and not to be classed with business, science, technology, not to speak of religion, philosophy or the arts. No one desires to see players devote to Chess such time as they need for serious purposes. The waste of time in Chess would not matter, were it not a symptom of a sickness that has befallen our culture.
We have learnt how to organise manufacturing plants, but our general education, our mental work, our economy of ideals are not better than our education in Chess.
I will here not wail. I will only illuminate a connection, even though rapidly. Chess, from its very inception, has had coherence with Life.
Let us assume that a master who follows a good method, say, the method of this book, strives to educate a young man ignorant of Chess to the level of one who, if conceded any odds, would surely come out the winner. How much time would the teacher need for this achievement? I think that I am correct in making the following calculation:
Rules of Play and Exercises 5 hrs.
Elementary Endings 5 hrs.
Some Openings 10 hrs.
Combination 20 hrs.
Position Play 40 hrs.
Play and Analysis 120 hrs.
Even if the young man has no talent at all, by following the above course he would advance to the class specified. Compare with this possibility, the reality. In fact, there are a quarter of a million Chess amateurs who devote to Chess at least two hundred hours ever year and of these only a thousand, after a lifetime of study, attain the end. Without losing myself in calculations, I believe I am safe in voicing the opinion that our efforts in Chess attain only a hundredth of one per cent of their rightful result.
Our education, in all domains of endeavour, is frightfully wasteful of time and values. In Mathematics and in Physics the results arrived at are still worse than in Chess. Is there a tendency to keep the bulk of the people stupid? For governments of an autocratic type the foolishness of the multitude has always been an asset. Possibly, also the mediocre who happen to be in authority follow the same policy. This motif, it is true, is not predominating in Chess. The bad state of education in Chess is due entirely to our backwardness.
Education in Chess has to be an education in independent thinking and judging. Chess must not be memorized, simply because it is not important enough. If you load your memory, you should know why. Memory is too valuable to be stocked with trifles. Of my fifty-seven years I have applied at least thirty to forgetting most of what I had learned or read, and since I succeeded in this I have acquired a certain ease and cheer which I should never again like to be without. If need be, I can increase my skill in Chess, if need be I can do that of which I have no idea at present. I have stored little in my memory, but I can apply that little, and it is of good use in many and varied emergencies. I keep it in order, but resist every attempt to increase its dead weight.
You should keep in mind no names, nor numbers, nor isolated incidents, not even results, but only methods. The method is plastic. It is applicable in every situation. The result, the isolated incident, is rigid, because bound to wholly individual conditions. The method produces numerous results; a few of these will remain in our memory, and as long as they remain few, they are useful to illustrate and to keep alive the rules which order a thousand results. Such useful results must be renewed from time to time just as fresh food has to be supplied to a living organism to keep it strong and healthy. But results useful in this manner have a living connection with rules, and these again are discovered by applying a live method: the whole of this organisation must have life, more than that -- a harmonious life.
This harmonious life stems from life; life is generated only by life. He who wants to educate himself in Chess must evade what is dead in Chess -- artificial theories, supported by few instances and unheld by an excess of human wit; the habit of playing with inferior opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief, everything that leads to a standstill or to anarchy.
Acquisition of harmonious education is comparable to the production and the elevation of an organism harmoniously built. The one is fed by blood, the other one by the spirit; but Life, equally mysterious, creative, powerful, flows through either. This comparison is no mere rhetorical imagery; it is a programme.
True, this programme, valid for all education, is in no way restricted to Chess; only a second postulate added to the above singles out Chess among all other things to be taught. It is this: to lead the pupil along the paths of the theory of Steinitz.
This theory has a history which the pupil should strive to understand because it lifts the veil a little from the mystery of human character; this theory has a meaning which became manifest after a hard contest with competing theories and won authority through a celebrated world's championship match; this theory has connections with profound problems; this theory asks the pupil to think for himself and to construct his own table of values and to keep it constantly, vigilantly, in order; this theory demands of him boldness and caution and force and economy and thus becomes to him a model for actions outside of Chess.
The road to this education requires good teachers -- masters of Chess who at the same time are geniuses of teaching. But it pays to go along this road for it leads to a country of men who judge independently, act boldly and aspire after noble ideals.
How should these teachers follow their avocation? In introducing young men into the game in the right manner by lectures, good books, by live play with their pupils, by assisting at matches of the pupils and making notes and comments on the good and weak points of the games played; in short, by thus facilitating the thinking of their pupil without doing violence to it. The ways in which a good teacher may do efficient work are manifold and varied.
The Chess world has the task of breeding such teachers and, as soon as this is accomplished, to support them in their efforts. Thus the Chess-world would ease the hard life of the Chess-masters who must make a profession of Chess provided they want to do their best for Chess. But who wants to stop half-way? Who would want these Chess-masters who have the capacity for excellent teaching in them to become mediocre in Chess only in order to make them mediocre in some other profession? The function of a Chess-master, who would be principally a Chess-teacher, is useful and pleasing. It is to the individual credit of Chess that in other domains of human activity, at least up to the present, teachers of the above type are not even possible.
On the Future of the Theory of Steinitz.
It is easy to mould the theory of Steinitz into mathematical symbols by inventing a kind of Chess, the rules and regulations of which are themselves expressed by mathematical symbols. The Japanese game of Go is very nearly what I mean. In such a game the question, whether thorough analysis would confirm the theory of Steinitz or not, presumably could be quickly solved because the power of modern mathematics is exceedingly great.
The instant that this solution is worked out, humanity stands before the gate of an immense new science which prophetic philosophers have called the mathematics or the physics of contest.
The contests fought nowadays by men -- war, diplomatic negotiation, competition in manufacture, disputes in the press, to name just a few -- are conducted very amateurishly. That wars should appear to us a necessity is proof of our stupidity. True, humanity has need of a test for progress, for right, for soundness of ethics in human affairs, but that need can be satisfied in other and more efficient ways than by war. To make this evident is difficult only because men do not want to know the truth. But this task will be an easy one as soon as the science of contest attains recognition.
To outlaw war will be possible because humanity has a wealth of efficient and useful means to fill the gap that would be left. The competition between research workers, inventors, discoverers, artists, statesmen causes the flow of blood in the body of culture. And this competition will retain its vigour till many centuries after the time that Victor Hugo pictures, when cannons will have been stored in museums alongside of the instruments of torture to serve as memorials of a vanished barbaric epoch.
The mathematics of Chess does not, it is true, solve the problem of comprehending the contests of Life, but it sets that problem in precise terms and points to a solution. There the leverage will be supported whence investigators will set scientific research into motion. The first step is always the essential one. With the law of the lever by Archimedes came statics, with the law of the falling stone by Galileo arose dynamics, and their course, though their entry into the world was so modest, led them to revolutionise all science and all modes of living irrespective of the obstacles that hatred and stupidity heaped into their path. The science of contest will progress irresistibly, as soon as its first modest success has been scored.
It is desirable that institutes to further these ends should be erected. Such institutes would have to work upon a mass of material already extant: theory of mathematical games, of organisation, of the conduct of business, of dispute, of negotiation; they would have to breed teachers capable of elevating the multitude from its terrible dilettantism in matters of contest; they would have to produce books of instruction and for reading as plain, as intelligible, as valuable as Knigge's _Social Intercourse Amongst Mankind_. (_Umgang mit Menschen_) or Labruyere's _Characters_.
Such an institute should be founded by every people who want to make themselves fit for a sturdier future and at the same time to aid the progress and the happiness of all humankind.
These plans are not at all fantastic; they will certainly be realised at some time. Why not now? Let us hope that also in these days of all-round mediocrity Reason is not wholly without partisans."
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FINAL REFLECTIONS ON EDUCATION IN CHESS.
Education in Chess goes on in a most haphazard fashion. Most Chess players slowly climb to a certain rather low level and stay there. Of players to whom a master can give odds of a Queen there are millions; players of greater skill number probably no more than a quarter of a million. If we reckon the number of Rook players as a hundred and fifty thousand, of Knight players as fifty thousand, of Pawn and two-move players as forty thousand, of pawn and move players as nine thousand, and the number of those to whom no master can allow odds, as one thousand, we are possibly not very far wrong. Now let us consider the efforts made to attain this result: a literature of many thousand volumes, hundreds, maybe thousands, of Chess columns in widely read newspapers and magazines, lectures, tournaments, tournament books, courses of instruction, matches in the clubs and between clubs and cities and countries, by correspondence, by telegraph and telephone, thousands of coffee - houses, where spectators, amid lively gossip, look on, make notes, analyze - truly an imposing expenditure.
One should not take these facts too easily. Certainly, in spite of its capacities, Chess is only a game and not to be classed with business, science, technology, not to speak of religion, philosophy or the arts. No one desires to see players devote to Chess such time as they need for serious purposes. The waste of time in Chess would not matter, were it not a symptom of a sickness that has befallen our culture.
We have learnt how to organise manufacturing plants, but our general education, our mental work, our economy of ideals are not better than our education in Chess.
I will here not wail. I will only illuminate a connection, even though rapidly. Chess, from its very inception, has had coherence with Life.
Let us assume that a master who follows a good method, say, the method of this book, strives to educate a young man ignorant of Chess to the level of one who, if conceded any odds, would surely come out the winner. How much time would the teacher need for this achievement? I think that I am correct in making the following calculation:
Rules of Play and Exercises 5 hrs.
Elementary Endings 5 hrs.
Some Openings 10 hrs.
Combination 20 hrs.
Position Play 40 hrs.
Play and Analysis 120 hrs.
Even if the young man has no talent at all, by following the above course he would advance to the class specified. Compare with this possibility, the reality. In fact, there are a quarter of a million Chess amateurs who devote to Chess at least two hundred hours ever year and of these only a thousand, after a lifetime of study, attain the end. Without losing myself in calculations, I believe I am safe in voicing the opinion that our efforts in Chess attain only a hundredth of one per cent of their rightful result.
Our education, in all domains of endeavour, is frightfully wasteful of time and values. In Mathematics and in Physics the results arrived at are still worse than in Chess. Is there a tendency to keep the bulk of the people stupid? For governments of an autocratic type the foolishness of the multitude has always been an asset. Possibly, also the mediocre who happen to be in authority follow the same policy. This motif, it is true, is not predominating in Chess. The bad state of education in Chess is due entirely to our backwardness.
Education in Chess has to be an education in independent thinking and judging. Chess must not be memorized, simply because it is not important enough. If you load your memory, you should know why. Memory is too valuable to be stocked with trifles. Of my fifty-seven years I have applied at least thirty to forgetting most of what I had learned or read, and since I succeeded in this I have acquired a certain ease and cheer which I should never again like to be without. If need be, I can increase my skill in Chess, if need be I can do that of which I have no idea at present. I have stored little in my memory, but I can apply that little, and it is of good use in many and varied emergencies. I keep it in order, but resist every attempt to increase its dead weight.
You should keep in mind no names, nor numbers, nor isolated incidents, not even results, but only methods. The method is plastic. It is applicable in every situation. The result, the isolated incident, is rigid, because bound to wholly individual conditions. The method produces numerous results; a few of these will remain in our memory, and as long as they remain few, they are useful to illustrate and to keep alive the rules which order a thousand results. Such useful results must be renewed from time to time just as fresh food has to be supplied to a living organism to keep it strong and healthy. But results useful in this manner have a living connection with rules, and these again are discovered by applying a live method: the whole of this organisation must have life, more than that -- a harmonious life.
This harmonious life stems from life; life is generated only by life. He who wants to educate himself in Chess must evade what is dead in Chess -- artificial theories, supported by few instances and unheld by an excess of human wit; the habit of playing with inferior opponents; the custom of avoiding difficult tasks; the weakness of uncritically taking over variations or rules discovered by others; the vanity which is self-sufficient; the incapacity for admitting mistakes; in brief, everything that leads to a standstill or to anarchy.
Acquisition of harmonious education is comparable to the production and the elevation of an organism harmoniously built. The one is fed by blood, the other one by the spirit; but Life, equally mysterious, creative, powerful, flows through either. This comparison is no mere rhetorical imagery; it is a programme.
True, this programme, valid for all education, is in no way restricted to Chess; only a second postulate added to the above singles out Chess among all other things to be taught. It is this: to lead the pupil along the paths of the theory of Steinitz.
This theory has a history which the pupil should strive to understand because it lifts the veil a little from the mystery of human character; this theory has a meaning which became manifest after a hard contest with competing theories and won authority through a celebrated world's championship match; this theory has connections with profound problems; this theory asks the pupil to think for himself and to construct his own table of values and to keep it constantly, vigilantly, in order; this theory demands of him boldness and caution and force and economy and thus becomes to him a model for actions outside of Chess.
The road to this education requires good teachers -- masters of Chess who at the same time are geniuses of teaching. But it pays to go along this road for it leads to a country of men who judge independently, act boldly and aspire after noble ideals.
How should these teachers follow their avocation? In introducing young men into the game in the right manner by lectures, good books, by live play with their pupils, by assisting at matches of the pupils and making notes and comments on the good and weak points of the games played; in short, by thus facilitating the thinking of their pupil without doing violence to it. The ways in which a good teacher may do efficient work are manifold and varied.
The Chess world has the task of breeding such teachers and, as soon as this is accomplished, to support them in their efforts. Thus the Chess-world would ease the hard life of the Chess-masters who must make a profession of Chess provided they want to do their best for Chess. But who wants to stop half-way? Who would want these Chess-masters who have the capacity for excellent teaching in them to become mediocre in Chess only in order to make them mediocre in some other profession? The function of a Chess-master, who would be principally a Chess-teacher, is useful and pleasing. It is to the individual credit of Chess that in other domains of human activity, at least up to the present, teachers of the above type are not even possible.
On the Future of the Theory of Steinitz.
It is easy to mould the theory of Steinitz into mathematical symbols by inventing a kind of Chess, the rules and regulations of which are themselves expressed by mathematical symbols. The Japanese game of Go is very nearly what I mean. In such a game the question, whether thorough analysis would confirm the theory of Steinitz or not, presumably could be quickly solved because the power of modern mathematics is exceedingly great.
The instant that this solution is worked out, humanity stands before the gate of an immense new science which prophetic philosophers have called the mathematics or the physics of contest.
The contests fought nowadays by men -- war, diplomatic negotiation, competition in manufacture, disputes in the press, to name just a few -- are conducted very amateurishly. That wars should appear to us a necessity is proof of our stupidity. True, humanity has need of a test for progress, for right, for soundness of ethics in human affairs, but that need can be satisfied in other and more efficient ways than by war. To make this evident is difficult only because men do not want to know the truth. But this task will be an easy one as soon as the science of contest attains recognition.
To outlaw war will be possible because humanity has a wealth of efficient and useful means to fill the gap that would be left. The competition between research workers, inventors, discoverers, artists, statesmen causes the flow of blood in the body of culture. And this competition will retain its vigour till many centuries after the time that Victor Hugo pictures, when cannons will have been stored in museums alongside of the instruments of torture to serve as memorials of a vanished barbaric epoch.
The mathematics of Chess does not, it is true, solve the problem of comprehending the contests of Life, but it sets that problem in precise terms and points to a solution. There the leverage will be supported whence investigators will set scientific research into motion. The first step is always the essential one. With the law of the lever by Archimedes came statics, with the law of the falling stone by Galileo arose dynamics, and their course, though their entry into the world was so modest, led them to revolutionise all science and all modes of living irrespective of the obstacles that hatred and stupidity heaped into their path. The science of contest will progress irresistibly, as soon as its first modest success has been scored.
It is desirable that institutes to further these ends should be erected. Such institutes would have to work upon a mass of material already extant: theory of mathematical games, of organisation, of the conduct of business, of dispute, of negotiation; they would have to breed teachers capable of elevating the multitude from its terrible dilettantism in matters of contest; they would have to produce books of instruction and for reading as plain, as intelligible, as valuable as Knigge's _Social Intercourse Amongst Mankind_. (_Umgang mit Menschen_) or Labruyere's _Characters_.
Such an institute should be founded by every people who want to make themselves fit for a sturdier future and at the same time to aid the progress and the happiness of all humankind.
These plans are not at all fantastic; they will certainly be realised at some time. Why not now? Let us hope that also in these days of all-round mediocrity Reason is not wholly without partisans."
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