Friday, March 1, 2024

A Great Shift

Navalny’s funeral service in Moscow was unfolding as I wrote this. Putin apparently didn’t allow enough of a tiny crack of compassion in the shell of his peanut-sized heart to permit Navalny’s widow Yulia and their two children to attend. What many of us hoped for—a mass sustained pouring into the streets of Russian citizens all over the country—doesn’t look as if it will happen either, though many thousands did risk possible jail to gather outside the service. Yesterday Putin gave his annual State of the Nation address and threatened to use his nuclear arsenal if foreign troops are deployed to Ukraine.

 

In the United States, we don’t need dictators telling us what’s what (though we certainly have plenty of aspirants). We have our own self-imposed blinkers on truth—what Noam Chomsky calls “manufactured consent.” We happily go along with the presumption that our way of life will dissolve unless we keep the military-industrial-political-journalistic-full-spectrum-dominance juggernaut moving “forward.”

 

Though at the moment the U.S. appears to be experiencing some isolationist confusion. I’m confused about the Ukraine war—did NATO’s eastward expansion help cause it? What can the international community do preserve Ukraine’s sovereignty without blowing up the world? What can be done, even perhaps in the poor old United Nations, to prevent the next Ukraine?  Are we not complicit when we send weapons to Israel to continue the appalling Gazan slaughter and equally complicit in the opposite way when Speaker Johnson, kissing Trump’s behind, refuses to send weapons to Ukraine to resist the equally appalling Russian slaughter of Ukrainian civilians?

 

The condition of international affairs as a whole remains bizarre. On the one hand, as the decades pass since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the fact that nuclear weapons have not been used upon people since 1945 seems to reinforce establishment thinking that deterrence works. The truth is, as Robert McNamara said, we’ve just been astonishingly lucky. When one recalls the Cuban crisis in which he participated, and concedes the growing complexity of present computer systems, warheads and delivery systems interacting with thousands of fallible humans, one’s heart sinks.

 

Every day we get past without nuclear catastrophe seems a miracle further overlaying the miracle of existence itself. We have been waiting to be blown up for so long that it has to be having an unconscious effect upon our animal optimism, our appreciation of the miracle of our momentary existence in this universe of ordinary wonders like sunlight, sight, snow, flowers, stars, grandchildren, Brandenburg Concertos . . .

 

But a further miracle is not only possible but is even now unfolding. We humans do have the option to begin to look beyond war and political hatred and the endless sowing of fear and mistrust of the “other.” We can begin to embrace the potential of our other biggest challenge, environmental sustainability. This recognition will jump-start us beyond the illusion of “us versus them” that animates war and the manufacture of weapons of mass (which means self-) destruction.

 

We live on a planet where authoritarian forces are again on the march. But an infinitely more powerful force, the degradation of the environment, opposes the clinging to power of frightened leaders. In an odd but genuine sense this opposing force is, equal-opportunity, bottom-up, democratic. The breathability of the air makes zero hierarchical distinctions between dictators and ordinary citizens. Ultimately the ability of Putin or Xi or Trump to govern will not depend on the size of nuclear arsenals. It will hinge upon the ability of all of us to work together to clear the air, sustain nutrients in the soil sufficient to grow healthy food, manage the leakage of methane from the Siberian tundra, keep plastics out of the ocean, bend downward the ominous upward slant of global average temperature—and stand down the weapons which are themselves a major threat to environmental sustainability. Alongside these challenges that demand a different degree of international cooperation, the hate, fear and greed that motivate too many of us start to look absurdly irrelevant.

 

Will we wake up to this involuntary change of paradigm that has silently become the most important condition of our existence? Everything I do or don’t do affects you, and everything you do or don’t do affects me—authoritarians and would-be authoritarians included. That’s a wrenchingly positive enlargement of our conception of true self-interest. As a Peace Corps volunteer once said, and it cannot be repeated too often: “The earth is a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side.”

 

 

 

 

 

Monday, February 19, 2024

Navalny’s Value

 

What is the exact length of an inch, or the weight of an ounce? In this world of relativity, how do we gauge absolute standards? Nations employ whole bureaus with sophisticated methods of calibrating the measurement of a meter, or the weight of some discrete quantity of atomic particles, as we raid the relative in our attempts to define and quantify the absolute.

 

In the realm of the moral, we continue to toss on a sea of relativity. We cringe at Hamas’s violence of October 7, at what the Israeli government has done to Gazan civilians in reaction, and at the reality that some fraction of the taxes we pay supports Netanyahu’s unhinged campaign of vengeance.

 

Aleksei Navalny, to all effects murdered by Putin, represented by contrast about as absolute a standard of what might constitute a morally honest life as humanly possible. He was not perfect; nobody is. In his early political life he dallied with racist forms of nationalism, which he outgrew.

 

Navalny didn’t have to make the final trip back to Russia in 2021 that led three years later to his death in an Arctic prison, but any other course seemed to him like ducking the issue. His laughter, right up to the end, in the face of grossly unjust treatment gives an intimation of what the immense charisma of someone like Jesus must have been like.

 

Evil may or may not be banal, but Navalny took the measure of the petty, mean-spirited banality of Putin, and decided he didn’t need to let it loom over the narrowed scope of his possibilities. He not only stood up to a murderous autocrat but reveled in his own wit and strength while doing it. How many can say they were still smiling and still in good spirits at the very hour of their death? Such an example cannot be so easily dissolved out of history. Navalny will haunt the hapless Putin to his own grave.

 

The critic R.P. Blackmur said that great poetry “adds to the stock of available reality.” Likewise the arc of Navalny’s life and death adds to the stock of moral reality. It leaks the air out of Putin’s callous hubris—and Trump’s for that matter. Our own moral courage is put in the dock, and almost all of us, by the Navalny standard, are whited sepulchers, including so many spineless officials in Russia and the U.S. and elsewhere who demonstrate what passes for service and justice in today’s transactional political culture.

 

Different contexts bring forth different varieties of moral courage. For John Kennedy it was relying on diplomacy and resisting the warmongers during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Martin Luther King Jr. called out American materialism, militarism and racism. Daniel Ellsberg exposed intolerable government lies about the Vietnam war and the terrifying immorality of nuclear weapons. Mandela magnanimously forgave his captors for the sake of building a new country. Navalny tirelessly critiqued corruption in high places in the Russian government.

 

Navalny never had the opportunity to become immersed in the inevitable compromises of actual governing, and so his life may more easily lend itself to facile myth-making. But his courage and wit are clearly recorded, including in the documentary about him, which no one should miss.

 

If there is helplessness, demoralization and despair in the Russian opposition at the moment, they can take heart from the words of historian Howard Zinn:

 

“ . . . the most striking fact about these superpowers [the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.] was that, despite their size, their wealth, their overwhelming accumulation of nuclear weapons, they were unable to control events, even in those parts of the world considered to be their respective spheres of influence . . . Apparent power has again and again proved vulnerable to those human qualities less measurable than bombs and dollars: moral fervor, determination, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience . . . Political power, however formidable, is more fragile than we think (Note how nervous are those who hold it.)”

 

We are herding animals, so outliers like Navalny will always remain rare. But we all have that awareness of a gold standard in us, often deeply buried but still there, something that tells us where we may be falling short.

 

Even should Putin “win” the war with Ukraine, day by day his emasculation of his people has taken them ever further from Navalny’s expansive vision of a democratic Russia. But his martyrdom has already planted the seeds of the inevitable counter-revolution. His example will energize that creative response in followers old and new.

 

As Secretary of War Stanton said right after Abraham Lincoln succumbed to an assassin’s bullet, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

 

 

Thursday, February 15, 2024

Beyond Delusion

In memory of Aleksei Navalny 

Putin demonstrated in his “interview” with Tucker Carlson the delusional version of Russian history that rationalizes his brutality. Hamas and Netanyahu continue to demonstrate Auden’s classic line: “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.” It often seems as if vast swaths of the Middle East operate under the collective delusion that the various parties, state or non-state, can kill their way out of insecurity and injustice.

 

Then along comes Trump with his loose talk about allied obligations to NATO, provoking outrage across Western capitals. He leaves us feeling as if Biden, elderly or not, is one of the few adults in the room, and U.S. power remains the ultimate backstop for the maintenance of democratic ideals against waves of authoritarianism in Russia, Iran, China, North Korea, Hungary and elsewhere.

 

Ukraine’s agony, with its echoes of Hitlerian aggression, calls into question the deepest convictions of those of us who are convinced there must a more robust way to constrain, or at least disincentivize, the Putins of this world.

 

Still, the context of unfolding time casts a shadow over even the most well-intentioned attempts at a viable international security system built upon superiority of arms. The arms race, further extending into space as we have recently seen with the alarm in the U.S. Congress over a Russian satellite killer weapons, moves ever more in one direction: toward greater complexity, computerization, and speed of decision. Now A.I. is ominously entering the mix.

 

Meanwhile more and more citizens from chaotic parts of the world, under pressure from both dysfunctional governance and the droughts and floods of climate instability, are forced into the desperate flight to nowhere of the refugee.

 

The foreign policy establishment in the Western nations is in its own way just as deluded as Putin or Trump or Netanyahu in their over-reliance on the unworkable paradigm of deterrence by force of arms, especially weapons of mass-murder. 70 nations have acknowledged the reality that the arms race is a cure worse than the disease by ratifying the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

 

To once again indulge Thomas Kuhn’s over-used characterization of fundamental shifts in world-view, what is required is a paradigm shift. Only a less delusional motivation, a larger conception of self-interest, can move the world in a less delusional direction. The shift is from seeing security as a function of competition to seeing it as a function of interdependence.

 

Endangered planetary ecosystems become the ultimate reason nations need to not only cease to fight each other but cooperate on a new level. To indulge in an unnecessary war of choice, as Putin has and as most agree the U.S. did in the Second Gulf War, is to plunge the whole world into taking sides where obsolete “us and them” thinking is reinforced. More Russian citizens know this than we think. An antiwar candidate named Boris Nadezhdin has been kicked off the ballot in their presidential “election” because Russian officials noted with alarm that he was polling in the double digits.

 

Planetary interdependence, with its inevitable implication that what I do affects everybody else and vice versa, is an idea that shakes the foundations of the status quo in a positive way, including shaking the establishment delusion that, by tragic necessity, war will always be with us, when in fact war will sooner or later do us in.

 

Where there is no vision, as the prophet said, the people perish. As average citizens realize that wars and arms races are a con and nothing good will come of them, but environmental cooperation is very much in everyone’s mutual interest, the paradigm will begin to change. When this shift seeps into political discourse and ultimately even into the well-fortified sanctuaries of the dictators, a new world might emerge. It will give renewed life to already significant initiatives like Rotary International and the moribund United Nations itself.

 

One feels as if elements of the diplomatic world already are trying to operate out of this new paradigm—we see it in Anthony Blinken’s tireless efforts, with the help of his counterparts in places like Qatar, to bring about a cease-fire in Gaza and begin to lay the conditions at last for a Palestinian state. At the same time there are regressive forces, such as U.S. Senators who shout loudly about “avenging” the deaths of our soldiers at the hands of Iranian-built drones. Vengeance, leading nowhere, does not a foreign policy make.

 

There are scientific resources available to reinforce the hard new truths of our interdependence, but it feels as if military thinking and ecological thinking are siloed from each other just when these distinct realms need to be in conversation. What are the biggest threats facing this planet? Militarism itself, with its vast sucking away of resources and equally vast environmental footprint. Degradation of air, water and soil. Food insufficiency. Refugees by the millions.

 

When ordinary people see beyond the delusions of the war paradigm, they will begin to think and act together in their own true self interest. While there are mighty forces arrayed in favor of the status quo, we have to ask ourselves, if we don’t begin to push such a change of thinking into our politics, how else will it happen?

 

Saturday, January 20, 2024

Absurd!

Absurd  ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, or incongruous (Merriam-Webster)

 The condition of absurdity has been examined in depth by such heavy-duty philosophers as Kierkegaard and Camus, let alone by countless undergraduates in common-room bull sessions. 

Without doubt there is a random element to life where bad things happen to good people and vice versa. Absurdity is built into reality. The ultimate absurdity of death awaits us all. But Camus opposed the absurd by arguing that we can create meaning through a noble defiance of our condition, by responding constructively, rather than reacting reflexively, to inevitable limits, bad luck, and chaos. 

Much ink has been spilled about the violence and cruelty of the Russian aggression into Ukraine, and now the Israeli scorched earth response to Hamas’s sadistic incursion. Less has been written about the absurdity of war, its unworkability and total waste, accelerated by leaders who misuse war to consolidate their own power. 

Netanyahu’s “strategy” of bouncing the rubble in Gaza and catering to his right flank’s refusal of a Palestinian state seems to be a major part of his desperate effort to remain in power and unscathed by charges of corruption. Netanyahu is an absurdist cousin of Trump, who with pugilistic glee turns even his court appearances into campaign rallies.

          A theologian once suggested that Satan is an abstraction personified in a human being aggressively pursuing a self-centered agenda. By undertaking an incongruously absurd war, Putin has put himself in a cage for the rest of his life. He can never for a moment be free of the suspicion that one of his own retinue, or a vengeful Ukrainian, or another loose cannon like Prigozhin, could manage to get past all his layers of protection and do him in.

One absurdity of the cult of Trump (Putin too for that matter) is that his admirers assume his authentic manliness. In the case of Trump, this manliness is paradoxically rooted in a bottomless, insecure need to be approved and fawned over that apparently originated in a childhood lack of paternal love. Tragically, this need will never be satisfied. Win or lose, leaders like Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu will try to paper over their pseudo-confidence with empty bravado. Authoritarians devoid of an understanding of servant leadership stand a good chance of coming to the end of their lives bitter and unfulfilled. 

          Nothing says absurdity like the Iowa voter, apparently speaking for all too many others, who said of Trump: “They’re doing to him what they did to Jesus.” That is the language of someone immersed in a cult.

Ordinarily sensible people are vulnerable to be sucked into the vortex. Recently New Hampshire Governor Sununu demonstrated the strain of naked absurdism running through our domestic politics when, in an interview with PBS journalist Judy Woodruff, he catalogued all the reasons why Trump must at all costs be denied the Republican nomination—and then finished by saying he would still support Trump were he to be nominated! 

Netanyahu assumes that if the Israeli Defense Forces can wipe out Hamas entirely (itself an almost impossible task), they can also wipe out the rage that energizes all Palestinians without negotiating Palestinian statehood (absurdly beyond the possible). Putin’s mind-set toward Ukraine is similar. So far Trump may not have begun a shooting war, but his approach to the diversity of people and ideas is identical to Putin’s and Netanyahu’s: ruthless intolerance of any force opposing his domination.

All three profoundly insecure leaders (at least if Trump gets re-elected), along with others of their type like Kim Jung Un, have the power to use nuclear weapons and hold the fate of the earth in their hands. Tragically—absurdly—the pseudo-confidence of these leaders is matched by the pseudo-security of the deterrence system upon which we all have come to rely for our “security.” Nuclear weapons of course contain enough destructive power to rebound upon anyone who might be foolish enough to think of them as a solution to conflict. Imagine Israel obliterating Tehran, or North Korea destroying South Korea, only to have a fatal cloud of radioactive dust blow back upon Jerusalem or Pyongyang or, worse, cause a worldwide thickening of cloud cover that does us all in by way of nuclear winter and subsequent agricultural catastrophe.

Even as we risk drifting into wider war in the Middle East, the nine nuclear powers, including the United States, still insist that possession of the weapons confers advantages too great to forego, in spite of the fact that the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has rendered nuclear weapons illegal under international law. 

War became obsolete with the invention of weapons of mass destruction. In 2023, parties to complex international conflicts have still not recognized this reality. 

Instead, vast sums, aggregating over time into the trillions of dollars, continue to be spent on the expansion and renewal of apocalyptic weapons. One misinterpretation or belligerent overstep by an insecure leader could end the human experiment altogether. 

Meanwhile the community of nations cannot seem to address with equivalent urgency, funds, and cooperation the most likely cause of future chaos and war: the global climate emergency. 

That is truly absurd . . .

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Crisis and Opportunity on Campus

 

The war in Gaza has generated far more heat than light on American college campuses. Students shout past each other as they bear helpless witness to the injustice and absurdity of the latest spasm of violence in the Middle East.

 

The protests provided an opening for politicians to examine challenging questions about bias, free speech, and student safety. Instead there was superficial posturing and playing “gotcha” with college presidents who are doing a difficult job.

 

Larger questions around the ultimate purpose and value of a college education remain insufficiently examined. The ivory tower cannot presume isolation from the world crisis of values of which the Hamas-Israeli conflict and the wars in Ukraine or the Sudan or elsewhere are a festering symptom—students sense this more than anyone.

 

For both Hamas and the present Israeli government, the deaths of so many innocents have been a means to exercise raw power rather than move toward genuine resolution of a fiendishly difficult conflict. In Israel’s case, the immediate goal seems to be to re-establish deterrence, and in Hamas’s, to disrupt the gradual accommodation of surrounding Arab nations to the legitimacy of Israel’s existence.

 

Violent and cynical means on both sides are themselves at war with the ends of authentic resolution. The indiscriminate nature of Hamas’s attack and the equally indiscriminate Israeli response has only set back long-term security in the region.

 

Unfolding events provide an opportunity for dialogue on college campuses, including between Jewish and Palestinian students. To ask Palestinians and Israelis sheltering in-country from bombs and rockets to sit down together in small groups and share food and stories in order to build mutual understanding would be a bridge too far in the present chaos—yet it has been done effectively here in the U.S. And colleges could, and sometimes do, provide occasions for something similar to happen on campus.

 

The education of the complete person, the enlargement of what was once called character, by a combination of formal curriculum and the informal experience of campus culture will always remain challenging.

 

For decades there has been talk about a crisis of the humanities. As students flee the liberal arts, classes in the business and computer fields expand. College is expensive, and students want to be able to monetize their learning, or at least have a fighting chance to pay down burdensome loans. It is hard for college administrators to resist trends that, left unaddressed, could shut down their institutions altogether.

 

Still one can’t examine too often what ought to be some of education’s bedrock goals, including how to mold active citizens, people who are informed, responsive, authentic, present, inclusive, and responsible. Education in that larger sense is a good in itself, a means toward a good life, beyond just making a good living.

 

This is a challenge not just for the humanities, but for education as a whole, including STEM, as indicated among other things by apathetic and misinformed voters, shallow politicians unequipped to cope with huge challenges like AI, leaders who choose authoritarianism and war over the difficulties of building peaceful democratic structures, and a materialist culture which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

 

Pure scientific research for its own sake, like threatened humanist disciplines, faces its own need to demonstrate its utility. But there are projects which speak to such a depth in us that no justification is needed. The Webb observatory, which simultaneously looks outward into deep space and backward in time, because of the time it takes for the light of stars and galaxies to reach it, was designed by engineers from fourteen countries. The Webb shows what we can do when we cooperate toward larger ends rather than warring with each other.

 

The Webb brings into even greater focus the magnificent unfolding of the universe through a series of emergent stages, from pure energy, to matter, to life, to conscious life reflecting upon itself. The universe story confirms the reality that all of us, including Arabs and Jews, come from a single origin. The story also magnificently confirms the resilience of life on earth, which has persisted through billions of years of challenges.

 

Albert Einstein said that we cannot solve a problem on the same level of consciousness that created the problem. The connective tissue across all time and space revealed by the Webb points toward this new level of consciousness, a world where “us” against “them” is subsumed by the truth of interdependence. It will become the task of education to help students explore this larger context and apply its implications practically to all our problems.

 

Students face a future of environmental, demographic and disarmament crises laid on them (sorry) by previous generations.  The quality of their collective response will depend upon their seeing that all the wars on the planet, including the present horror in Gaza, are an absurd distraction from listening, sharing, working things out with each other and stewarding the natural systems that sustain us.

 


 

 

 

Wednesday, December 6, 2023

Watching, with Despair and Hope


 

It’s a queasy feeling to experience up close on the nightly news the further turn of a 70-year-old futile cycle of violence. We sit in our comfortable armchairs in front of the television, voyeurs of the living hell that Hamas and the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) have brought down upon innocent citizens in Israel and Gaza.

Intrusive cameras take us right to the heart of the agony, the rubble of blasted concrete, the blood of children smeared across hospital floors, the shrieks of matriarchs on both sides mourning the death or kidnapping of whole families. The world is so interconnected that we news junkies cannot help feeling—complicit. My tax dollars help to pay for the avalanche of undiscriminating vengeance unleashed by the Israeli Defense Forces.

When spokespeople for the IDF present their rationalizations for the bombing, there’s something a little strange in their eyes. They don’t seem altogether in their right mind, as maybe we Americans weren’t either in the weeks following 9/11. The trauma of October 7, followed by the conundrum of trying to defeat an enemy that holds so many Israelis hostage, along with the embarrassing failure to heed the signs of what was coming—these seem to have narrowed the Israeli military vision of strategic self-interest to a ruthless, helpless lashing out, even as Netanyahu urges his allies to “stand with civilization.” 

American officials also seem slightly off and over-scripted when they do their best to rationalize a form of “civilization” that has become supremely uncivilized. 

Our well-intentioned officials and well-informed pundits caution restraint and creative thinking, only to be ignored almost completely by the Israeli government. It is wrenching to watch descendants of those who lived through or died in the Holocaust begin to travel down a similar near-genocidal road for the sake of re-establishing the vaunted Israeli reputation for ironclad deterrence.    

Meanwhile Israel writhes in its apparent straitjacket of alternatives. Why would one not expect to see a certain nervous paranoia in the eyes of their generals after what Hamas did? As the late not-so-great Henry Kissinger said, even paranoiacs have real enemies. 

Whether as participants or spectators, we have all known since we were schoolchildren exactly what a cycle of violence is, why it happens, and how it perpetuates and never resolves underlying conflict. Inevitably woven into the cycle is a failure to see the “other” as just as human as ourselves. 

Extremists on both sides contesting the same land carry dehumanization to the end point, the intent to utterly annihilate the other. Simplistic bumper stickers like “from the river to the sea” become the same battle-cry for both settlers and those who deny Israel the right to exist. The extremes end up resembling each other all too closely.

But the familiarity of such cycles shows that a way out, however difficult, must be possible: it begins with a realization that what both sides are doing, however different their motivations and self-justifying rationales, is not working and will never work. Hamas cannot destroy Israel; Israel cannot wipe out Hamas. 

Hamas represents an abhorrent idea—the end of Israel altogether. But the idea itself cannot be killed; it can only be transcended by some less nihilist idea—such as a two-state solution or some creative new arrangement yet unarticulated. 

Talk of humans as “animals” is not helpful. Listening for the common humanity in the stories of the “other” is the only way through—people who initiate connections across boundaries that marginalize the extremes, people who resist becoming identical in fruitless violence. 

For many years an indefatigable California activist, Libby Traubman, has been inviting American Jews and Palestinians to break bread together and share stories.

Millions of Israeli citizens—and Jews elsewhere like Libby—try to maintain this good will in spite of their legitimate fears. 

Palestinians too—like Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish, who lost three daughters and a niece at once to a shell fired by an Israeli tank in 2009, but who goes on working tirelessly for peace. His book is entitled I Shall Not Hate. As a doctor, he says he doesn’t distinguish between the Muslim, Jewish and Christian babies he delivers. The world is starved for that larger identification with all humanity. 

Those who watch the horror from a distance at least have a responsibility to forego taking sides and to do what we can to make both Jews and Palestinians feel safe from hate, wherever they are on this small planet we share.

In a wise and funny anecdote in one of his books Erik Erikson writes: 

“Rabbi Hillel once was asked by an unbeliever to tell the whole of the Torah while he stood on one foot. I do not know whether he meant to answer the request or to remark on its condition when he said: ‘What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah and the rest is but commentary.’” 

In a wise and funny anecdote in one of his books Erik Erikson writes: “Rabbi Hillel once was asked by an unbeliever to tell the whole of the Torah while he stood on one foot. I do not know whether he meant to answer the request or to remark on its condition when he said: ‘What is hateful to yourself, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole of the Torah and the rest is but commentary.’”

Thursday, November 23, 2023

Old and New Thinking

 

“These machines will eventually need to have the power to take lethal action on their own, while remaining under human oversight in how they are deployed. Individual decisions versus not doing individual decisions is the difference between winning and losing — and you’re not going to lose. I don’t think people we would be up against would do that, and it would give them a huge advantage if we put that limitation on ourselves.” —U.S. Secretary of the Air Force

This fascinating quotation about the military potential of A.I. is deeply revealing of how an obsolete way of thinking works. The Secretary of the Air Force is not an evil person, only someone trapped inside his limited perspective. There are too many like him in Russia, in China—and in Israel and Gaza.

 

The quotation allows a direct stare into the heart of evil, not the evil of malign intent, but of the blind futility of violence accelerated by technological “progress.” It foretells a perverse refusal of possibilities other than dehumanizing our adversaries so completely that we are willing to kill them with machines that are already frighteningly lethal even without the capacity to make their own decisions.

 

I don’t think people we would be up against would do that.” Of course the Secretary means that our adversaries would be unable to refuse any possible military advantage available through A.I. Isn’t this projecting our own proven capacity for depravity (think Vietnam, Iraq etc.) onto our adversaries? And isn’t it also an admission that we have no other option but to continue the we-build-they build cycle, already nuclear, on the A.I. level, a path that leads at best to some variation of war as depicted in the Terminator films?

 

Also implicit in the Secretary’s old thinking is that sacred cow of establishment thinking, deterrence. As long as we have more of the latest, fastest, most intelligent and most destructive weapons, we will not need to use them, because that will be sufficient to make our enemy think twice before taking us on. But contemporary asymmetric warfare (think 9-1l-2001, 10-7-2023), let alone the likelihood of either human or A.I. error,  effectively undermines deterrence theory.

 

The truth of the obsolescence of war has been demonstrated for all to see by the events unfolding from the October 7th pogrom. Hamas, seeking to slow or stop any larger peace process, has only ensured that a further cycle of violence will eat its own young along with those of Israel.

 

Conventional war doesn’t resolve the underlying conflict that initiated it. Nuclear war even less so (think nuclear winter). Variations on nuclear or chemical or biological war with the added dimension of A.I. will become doubly, triply world-destructive—in other words, obsolete.

 

Because everyone’s security and survival is a shared problem, the need is to re-humanize our adversaries—to perceive the me-semblance of the “other” even if they seem hateful to us and toward us. We need our military people on all sides to gather and peer together down the time-stream at a future which holds only two possibilities: either adversaries spend infinite treasure and resources to arrive at stalemate on a new, even more hair-trigger level—or we destroy ourselves. When we agree that these will be the outcomes unless we change, we can work together to apply A.I to common challenges, including the prevention of wars no one can win.

 

Because there is no doubt Artificial Intelligence can do remarkable things for us. It could point the way toward pragmatic climate solutions where everyone wins. It is already revolutionizing medical diagnoses and treatments. But ordinary unenhanced intelligence provides an indispensable perspective still in short supply, such as that articulated by almost every astronaut who has had the privilege of seeing the Earth from space—Russell Schweikart for example:

 

“And you look down there, and you can’t imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross, again and again and again. And you don’t even see them.   . . . there you are—hundreds of people killing each other over some imaginary line that you’re not even aware of, that you can’t see. And from where you see it, the thing is a whole, and it’s so beautiful. And you wish you could take one in each hand and say, “Look!” You know? One from each side. “Look at it from this perspective! Look at that! What’s important?”