July 12, 2022

On Tuesday July 12, as the horrors of war in Ukraine ground on, chewing up soldiers and civilians alike in its indifferent maw, the January 6 Committee held yet another hearing that tied the pathologically narcissistic Mr. Trump ever closer to a conscious conspiracy to violently subvert our election process, a conspiracy that resulted at least seven deaths and many more injuries and ruined lives.

But if we saw Putin and Trump each misusing power that unleashed unnecessary death and havoc, on that same ordinary day we also saw humans at their extraordinary best. Approximately 20,000 scientists from all over the world celebrated as they shared with us some of the first images downloaded from the Webb telescope, or, as they would like it called, either the JWST (James Webb Space Telescope) or the Webb Observatory.

It took a quarter of a century of highly technical creative work, involving 14 countries, $9.7 billion, and most of all a scientific spirit of cooperation that sadly feels far rarer than it ought to be on our small planet, to put those microscopically aligned mirrors millions of miles out beyond the distortions of our atmosphere. Three hundred forty-four procedures, “points of failure,” any one of which gone wrong would have completely halted the mission, had to go exactly right over the deployment period of 30 days. And every one of them did, including the launch of the reliable Arianne rocket, the intricate unfurling of the layers of protective foil that keep the instruments from overheating, and the mind-bogglingly complex imaging technology that has now begun to send back crystal-clear images of the early universe, a gift to all of us on earth.

Clearly the universe brought to us by the Hubble and now the Webb is so huge and so numberless in its stars and galaxies that it is impossible that we are alone here. There are 400 billion planets just in our own galaxy,  among which are six billion that appear to have earth-like qualities, asserts the physicist Brian Thomas Swimme of the Human Energy Project. It is only a matter of time until contact happens between us and other forms of sentient life somewhere out there. Given the dire state of our planet, it is tempting to indulge the fantasy that a benign advanced alien civilization might communicate to us some pointers about sustainability and war-prevention.

But we can already intuit the kind of advice we might receive from these hypothetical aliens, over and above any magical new energy technology they might provide. Surely such advice is perfectly modeled by the cooperative spirit that made the Webb a reality: the aliens would tell us that we are pouring money into the useless sinkhole of a nuclear arms race that will render us extinct unless we stop. That we are quibbling about who should bear the burden of changing to sustainable forms of energy. That we are denying that we occupy a single ecological system of ocean, air, and soil. That our leaders are stuck in obsolete fantasies of power and control. That we need to redefine self-interest beyond pointless nationalism, learn to get along, and share the finite resources our small planet, because our fates are radically interdependent.

There is a valid moral argument to be made that the $10 billion it took to design, build and deploy the Webb could have been spent to ameliorate the many forms of suffering endured down here on earth. But the counter-argument is that we desperately need living examples of high-risk/high-gain cooperation toward common goals that point the way toward how realistic and feasible it is for us to ease our global suffering. The resources are available to do both the Webb and feed the starving, but we continue to siphon them off into ill-conceived projects like the Lockheed F-35 Joint Strike Fighter ($1.7 trillion) or the renewal of the American nuclear arsenal over 10 years ($634 billion)—or the brutal vanity of Russian imperial delusions.

In the light of the stupendous achievement of the Webb, Trump’s screaming fits as he refused to relinquish power or Putin’s ridiculous dreams of restoring Russia to 17th century glory look primitive, infantile, grossly detached from reality.

Putin with his state terror and Trump with his pathetic but dangerous schemes operate in a context of grievance, fear, and hate. The line from the song from “South Pacific,” “You’ve got to be carefully taught to hate and fear,” implies that this infection is hard to catch. Not so; we are far more vulnerable to it than the most contagious Covid variant. I have to inoculate myself constantly against it, as perhaps this column already demonstrates. These self-centered leaders give me raving fits of indignation. The Webb story on the other hand is, refreshingly, one of detached, open curiosity. Does this open and curious attitude have any implications for our political culture? I hope so.

We can look upward and outward from the echo-chamber of despair, greed, fear, and cynicism that mark our era. We can dare to set new planetary goals—feeding all the hungry, finding homes and work for refugees, demonstrating the advantages of representational government, and deploying the technologies of wind, solar, and battery to move beyond fossil fuels. The scientists that pulled off the Webb have provided the most powerful possible example of setting a high goal and then learning how to work together to achieve it.

The Nuclear Superpowers and True Self-Interest

 

 

 

A number of nuclear strategy experts have agreed that the only sensible response to China’s alarming new buildup of nuclear weapons is for the U.S. itself to build more and better weapons. The apparent purpose of this buildup on our part is first to ensure that our deterrent is ironclad, and second it is argued as the only viable way to force the Chinese (and perhaps even the Russians, eventually) to the arms control table. After all, it worked before, when President Reagan outspent the Russians and helped end the first cold war.

 

There are three factors suggesting that this supposedly thoughtful establishment policy is performatively contradictory and growing more so year by year, decade by decade.

 

First, there is the dark paradox of having the weapons at the ready on hair-trigger precisely so that they will never be used. It is already a kind of miracle that we have been able to make it through decades of nuclear confrontation without making a fatal mistake (though the catalog of known near-misses is profoundly sobering); how much longer can our good fortune last? As the delivery vehicles move from supersonic to hypersonic, windows of decision become ever smaller and opportunities for misinterpretation ever larger.

 

Second, nuclear winter. Carefully designed computer models predict that it would only take about a hundred detonations over large cities to raise tons of soot into the upper atmosphere sufficient to cause a global freeze that would destroy most agriculture for a decade. This inconvenient truth not only cancels out any advantage afforded by competitive numbers of warheads but also throws deterrence strategy in general into disarray. If one hundred weapons can kill the planet, what’s the point of thousands more?

 

And third, opportunity costs. Together, the three superpowers are planning trillions in spending to upgrade their arsenals both in terms of quantity and “quality” (reliability, speed, ease of launch, variety, precision etc.) when the world is crying out for funds to feed the starving, find homes for refugees, vaccinate against Covid, get beyond fossil fuels, and heal a degraded environment.

 

If nuclear weapons could resolve the present tensions over Taiwan and in Ukraine, someone would presumably already have used them. But we all know that these weapons are completely useless as part of a winning military strategy. The game is up, but because of the international obsession with credibility, the game continues, no matter how meaningless, crazy, immoral, criminal, silly, and stupid ordinary citizens around the globe are convinced that it is.

 

From the institutional perspective of nuclear nations, obviously the system of nuclear deterrence is not seen as stupid, because each nuclear power is certain it would be subject to blackmail if it showed weakness by any unilateral disarmament initiative. Without the U.S. nuclear deterrent, perhaps the Chinese would more likely risk invading and subsuming Taiwan, or Putin would be even less restrained in his push for empire than at present. These suppositions do not even include the self-perpetuating momentum provided by the profit motive of the arms manufacturers.

 

The nuclear nations are stuck in a system which has no exit, no good outcome—unless they realize their common interest in change. As of today 66 nations have comes to their senses and ratified the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, good news for all of us.

 

What will drive the 9 nuclear nations toward the realization that they and their citizens share together a probability of annihilation unless they move together toward reciprocal, verifiable arms control? But someone must make the first move that initiates a possible virtuous circle. Why not the U.S.? As former Secretary of Defense Perry suggests, we could retire our entire land-based fleet of ballistic missiles without any loss of security.

 

The Chinese are said to be unwilling to engage in disarmament talks at the moment. But things can change as the self-interest of nations changes. For example, the Chinese have a demographic problem: their rate of population increase is falling fast due to their one child policy a generation back. How might that reality affect their strategic priorities?

 

Strategists know that the arms race and the unfolding of current events in general is an ever-surprising unstable state. But it is clearly difficult for them to look down the time-stream and see that unless we change the nuclear paradigm by aggressively building agreement around the futility of the game, there is a waterfall ahead toward which the world is drifting. Nuclear arms control will inevitably take place in a context of conflicts large and small, including apparent Chinese intransigence and continuing war in Ukraine. But once strategists disenthrall themselves of the supposed necessities of deterrence, a new picture of a shared self-interest in moving beyond the nuclear age may come into focus.

 

 

 

The Lost Conversation

 

 

Eight days of rafting down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon with my daughter promised to be an exceptional experience. Introducing myself to a fellow voyager, a Texan, I joked that surely Texas wasn’t really planning to secede, because it would be a pain to have to obtain a visa to visit Austin. This didn’t seem to go over very well.  Perhaps I had overreached. I retreated for the rest of the trip into an affable neutrality.

 

Turns out others did the same. There would be an occasional dig at Biden’s senility, or a whisper about Trump’s criminality, but soon a taboo began to govern the otherwise warm and caring sociability of our group. Even though we were a diverse assembly of thirty people, gay and straight, black and white, aged 9 to 81, a freewheeling dialogue about politics or religion in the group at large was strictly off the conversational table. In spite of us all being citizens of one country floating down wild rapids together in our country’s most magnificent national park, on a deeper level we remained as alienated as groundhogs and gardeners.

 

And that was fair enough as far as it went: people had paid for a challenging outdoor adventure, not a seminar on current events or conflicting epistemologies. Both of which continued to unfold at top speed without us. While we were without internet in the Canyon, Roe was overturned, and the poised young assistant to Mark Meadows tied the ex-President ever closer to the planning of the January 6^th insurrection.

 

Progressives opened political conversations among themselves and no doubt conservatives did also. But because I find loyalty to the ex-President or to gun rights so mysterious, as a progressive I would have welcomed some sort of dialogue with opposing views, though we all sensed it was a bridge too far.

 

What we did have in common was the experience of the river and the canyon. Sleeping outside in the dry 90 degree heat at night, we shared the closeness of the stars ringed by looming black towers of stone, stars that included a spiral arm of the Milky Way, a faint mist of light that feathered across the more familiar constellations.

 

One of our participants was heard to assert that creation began 6000 years ago. During a hike up a small side-canyon, our guides pointed out a visible manifestation of the Great Unconformity, where quartz-like crystals rested directly on schist, indicating a geological gap, an erosion of evidence of a billion and a half years of change. My daughter, a trained biologist, was over the moon to have found a small rock with fossil ancestors of sea stars compressed into it before there was even a canyon at all but only layers of sediment spread out under a vast shallow sea.

 

The scientific evidence of a 13.85 billion-year unfolding from matter to cellular life to mammals with a capacity to care for their offspring seems to erase a lot of unnecessary conflict between science and religion—again a rich possible theme for a dialogue that never was. The factions in our group seemed fatally inhibited, perceiving each other as an immovable “they.”

 

Still, there were unmistakable “we” experiences. Midway down the river came one that topped even the raft-swallowing green rapids and the mile-high stepped cliffs glowing in the morning sunlight. We had stopped at yet another dry side-channel. After a short hike up through narrowing walls of smooth stone, with no advance warning, we came upon a string quartet playing Elgar! Waterproofing their instruments, the musicians had arrived safely by raft to concertize in this most wildly improbable of venues.

 

The music drew us into the larger conversation of the universe with itself: an enigmatically self-organizing system had crushed and melted and swirled titanic masses of rock, which over hundreds of millions of years sank below and rose again above great seas, leaching out elements that combined into the first forms of cellular life—life that became self-sentient and sawed down other woody forms of life to fashion cellos to play notes derived from harmonies already built into the cosmos, harmonies drawn forth into distinct combinations by the mind of Bach or Elgar, now conveyed to insect-bitten, sweaty river voyagers by these generous performers.

 

Call this unfolding creative process God or Evolution or what you will, we were in it together, regardless of the lack of a conversation that might have led to some affirmation of our group’s interdependence as citizens of one country, or at least as humans on one planet. Secession from the universe is not an option—even for Texas.