60 in 60: #22 - Sun-tzu's The Art of War (Penguin's Great Ideas)

This blog post is part of my ongoing "60 Books in 60 Days" encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series, which was the Guardian's book site of the week and mentioned on the Penguin blog. (Their latest post comments on the first 20.) From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin's page about the books.The Art of Warby Sun-tzu (551-496 BC)Memorable Line"The Way of War is a Way of Deception. When able, feign inability. When deploying troops, appear not to be. When near, appear far. When far, appear near. Lure with bait; strike with chaos."The SkinnyAncient wisdom on the strategies and tactics of war applied to modern times in ways similar to the deployment of Machiavelli’s The Prince.Relevance? Argument?From research on the internet, it's clear that a crossbow can completely penetrate a body part, if it isn't too thick. A crossbow bolt will stick in a torso, but may sever a wrist or strike the shoulder and come out the other side. In addition to the shock of impact, blood and tissue may erupt out of your back. The pain would be excruciating. In its most perfect context, this crossbow would be one of many, and you would be one of its many victims--perhaps on a plain, perhaps in the mountains, perhaps beside a lake. Standing there with a shield, perhaps with spears, maybe even with your own crossbows. Facing another army. The wounded would be screaming in the ditches. The dead would be red pieces of meat wearing clothes, already attended to by flies.We think of modern weapons as more deadly, and perhaps see ancient war in the same way we see the 1800s in period costume dramas: as somewhat stilted, and, in the way of ghosts sent from the past, more polite than people in our current times. But there's nothing polite about a crossbow--and there's nothing quaint about Sun-tzu's The Art of War. By removing The Art of War from its original context and transplanting it to the board room, we have made bloodless what is bloody, brutal, and physical , but I think you have to imagine the physicality of what he discusses to fully appreciate the text. If you do, you can then better appreciate the mental havoc wreaked by using The Art of War in a modern white-collar context. There are crossbow wounds and then there are crossbow wounds.*I love Sun-tzu, even while visualizing such things, but I most appreciate him on a high level, such as when he describes the elements of the five fundamentals: The Way, Heaven, Earth, Command, and Discipline. Earth is particularly interesting: "Height and depth,/Distance and proximity,/Ease and danger,/Open and confined ground,/Life and death." Followed closely by Command: "Wisdom/Integrity/Compassion/Courage/Severity." Of course, these fundamentals can be applied to life, but I'm drawn to them because they have a kind of calming effect (like watching river water move over a smooth stone).Perhaps too it's the simplicity of the format, these almost-poems, that makes me like them more than Confucius. There's a stripped-down quality that feels hard-won, as if in rough draft Sun-tzu wrote things like "Command is when you combine wisdom, which is knowledge of the battlefield, with integrity, including the integrity of standing by your decisions, and, uh, you know, compassion and all that." (Sun-tzu has no interest in using examples to support his positions, unlike Machiavelli, and thus in some ways the two texts complement each other.)But reading The Art of War in the original is also to acknowledge that Sun-tzu veers between the specific (and tactical) and the general (and strategic). There's no real parallelism in chapters titled variously "Waging of War," "Strategic Offensive," "Forms of Terrain," and "Attack by Fire." One chapter will be advising on the number of oxen, catapults, and, yes, crossbows an army should stock, and the next will be rhapsodizing in a poetic manner about the ways of making armies into formless shadows that cannot be easily attacked by the enemy.Compare, for example, this rather abstract and mysterious adviceThe highest skillIn forming dispositionsIs to be without form;FormlessnessIs proof against the pryingOf the subtlest spyAnd the machinationsOf the wisest brain....with this much more specific advice that reads more like a public service announcement:If fire breaks outBut the enemy remains calm,Wait,Do not attack.Let the fire reachIts height,And follow upIf at all possible;If not,Wait.Such contrasts drive home the point that Sun-tzu waged actual war, and that he did so perhaps honorably but also mercilessly. It might be a model for business--and perhaps less harmfully than I've portrayed it here--but the less bloody sections might also be useful for internet communications. When Sun-tzu writes "Invulnerability is/Defence;/Vulnerability is/Attack", he might as well be saying "Someone who attacks X in the comments section of X's own blog is actually expressing weakness, or exposing him/herself to attack."There's also humor, of an unintended kind, in The Art of War, as in this section of "Espionage":There are Five Sorts of Spies:Local,Internal,Double,Dead, andLive.Dead spies, it turns out, are not actually dead, at least not when deployed: they are spies given false information to pass on to the enemy. There's not much false information in Sun-tzu's text, but there is much that must be unpacked and internalized before you can use it.However, some details in The Art of War delight me simply because they are interesting, like these words about dust:Dust high and peakingIs a signOf chariots approaching;Dust low and spreadingIs a signOf infantry approachingDust in scattered strandsIs a signOf firewood's being collected;Dust in drifting pocketsIs a signOf an army encamping.Suddenly, I am in a Lee Van Cleef spaghetti Western combined with an old Kung Fu movie. Suddenly, I am wondering what kinds of modern dust or smoke would lend itself to an updated The Art of War.Sun-tzu's text is somewhat like the warrior skilled in indirect warfare, whoIs infiniteAs Heaven and EarthInexhaustibleAs river and sea,He ends and begins againLike sun and moon,Dies and is born againLike the Four Seasons.* If we were to wear splotches of red paint to reflect psychic distress caused by interpersonal war waged within companies, many of us would be drenched in the stuff.ConclusionAlthough you may not need to know how many ox carts you require to wage war figurative or literal, the theoretical aspects of Sun-tzu’s book work well for the modern era.Question for ReadersIn what ways do you wage figurative war?Next up, Plato's The Symposium...