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.

 

 

 

 

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.’”

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 7^th 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?”

 

Gaza and Maine

             I live a couple of counties away from where the mentally ill Robert Card, apparently hearing voices inside his head that sounded as if people were putting him down, shot up a bar and a bowling alley and forever changed the lives of too many of the good citizens of Maine. 

The horror in what has been statistically the safest state in the nation competed for headlines with the exponentially larger agony of the brutal Hamas attack and Israel’s decimation of Gaza. 

The tragedies in Maine and Israel are cousins, however different in scale they appear. But are they in fact so different in scale? 48,000 Americans suffered gun-related deaths in 2021, the last year for which reliable statistics were available. 

Our newly minted Speaker of the House offered the usual contemptible dodge of thoughts and prayers, confirming the outrageous inability of our political system to address the gun violence epidemic. After the massacre, by contrast, one member of Congress, Lewiston-born Jared Golden, had the courage to change his mind toward favoring an assault rifle ban.

Ironically, there are very strict gun laws for civilians in the state of Israel. They must demonstrate good reason for gun ownership and obtain a permit, and people who are caught with an unlicensed gun receive strict sanctions, often a year in prison. The result has been far less gun deaths per capita there than here—at least until October 7.

To get and to stay elected in the U.S., politicians have had to augment their campaign funds with the blood money of the NRA, tenaciously ignoring the clear wishes of the American people for sensible reforms like universal background checks. 

The U.S. Congress along with a majority on the Supreme Court stubbornly adheres to obsolete interpretations of an amendment that was written hundreds of years before the AR-15 perversely became “America’s gun.” Nick Kristof, in an excellent article the New York Times keeps republishing after each new mass shooting, makes a case for the “whys” of our appalling statistics (for one, the crystal-clear correlation between numbers of guns and gun deaths). Kristof also lays out the common-sense changes we could make that would save a whole bunch of lives. 

Liberals blame the conservative obsession with the Second Amendment while conservatives advocate beefing up mental health initiatives. But real solutions will not emerge from blaming and either/or polarities. 

A similar political refusal to address root causes has come back to haunt Israeli politicians—and massacre the innocent by the thousands in both Israel and Gaza. Netanyahu maintains his power with a coalition that ignored the longing of great numbers of Israeli citizens for a peace that can only come by looking into the mirror of equivalent Palestinian longings.

While a subtle anti-Semitism often holds Israel to a higher standard than other nations, its reputation will take a tremendous hit from its military’s vain attempt to stamp out an idea, or an attitude, by collective punishment. The catastrophic destructiveness of Israel’s reaction, far from eliminating the cynical and nihilistic Hamas, will ensure a further generation of young men who see no alternative to murder and martyrdom. Hamas is playing Mr. Netanyahu like a violin.

There are plenty of wise citizens of Israel who, in spite of their tears and rage, have not been swept away by the siren voices of violent revenge. New Yorker editor David Remnick’s recent on-site report cites a retired army general named Yair Golan, who told Remnick: 

“When you have a crisis, like Pearl Harbor or September 11th, it is a multidimensional crisis, a multidimensional failure. [Netanyahu] wanted quiet. So, while Hamas was relatively quiet, Netanyahu saw no need to have a vision for the larger Palestinian question. And since he needed the support of the settlers and the ultra-Orthodox, he appeased them. He created a situation in which, so long as the Palestinian Authority was weak, he could create the over-all perception that the best thing to do was to annex the West Bank. We weakened the very institution that we could have worked with, and strengthened Hamas.”

The cycle of violence is clearly systemic and cyclical, with mistakes, missed chances, and the inability of some to take “yes” for an answer. The righteous assertions of blame churned out by all sides becomes so much static, irrelevant to the copious flow of innocent blood. 

In like fashion, the U.S. head-in-the-sand fetish of gun rights guarantees an equivalent flow of blood will continue here. Robert Card lost the capacity to see his victims as fully human. Mr. Netanyahu heeds a voice within that tells him that only more violence can save his nation. He has been unable to see Palestinians as fully human, just as Hamas refuses to see Jews as fully human. 

The paralysis that continues this cycle of mutual dehumanization engulfing thousands of families and children in the Middle East may be different from the paralysis in the U.S. that failed to prevent yet another troubled man with a gun from mass murder and suicide. But the two tragedies are not only indistinguishable in their heartrending pain and loss. 

In Maine and in Gaza, violence became the last best way to subdue the “other.” Robert Card didn’t get adequate help for his illness, and acquired a gun far too easily. It could have gone another way. Hamas and Netanyahu each chose mindless revenge. It could have gone another way.

One Earth, One Humanity, One Spirit

 The immensity of the carnage in Ukraine, Sudan, and now Israel and Gaza, makes it seem as if the community preached by religious prophets old and new feels beyond the capacity of our species.

 

For “those to whom evil is done,” war becomes the pragmatic, necessary, and reflexive counter-response to an “initial” act of violence—or a response to some previous move in an extended cycle of retaliation, heartless vengeance, and brute strength vainly designed to intimidate.

 

Hamas’s cynical cruelty, in response to the Netanyahu government’s years of playing off the Palestinian Authority against Hamas while expanding the settlements in the West Bank, may have condemned both Israel and Palestine to decades more chaos and civilian death.

 

For Palestinians, the U.S.-Israeli alliance taints our fitness to be an honest broker, further intensifying helpless despair and rage. President Biden is a decent fellow. Behind our government’s rote statements of unqualified support for Israel he is surely urging the Israeli military to learn from the U.S. overreaction to 9/11. He’s also pushing Netanyahu to move beyond an unworkable status quo toward revival of the presently comatose dream of a two-state solution. Clearly Biden wants to deter wider conflict in the region,  which could all too easily draw the superpowers into WW3.

 

To simplify, humanity the world over could be divided roughly into three groups, two smaller and a third comprising the vast majority of us.

 

One minority are those who believe that killing is the only way to redress injustice. Given the barbarity of the Hamas attack, it is understandable that the Israeli army is possessed for the moment by the delusion that the very idea of Hamas can be flattened into extinction by enough air strikes. But this will only create a new generation of young men who believe their only option is violence.

 

A second smaller group are those who heroically put non-violence into action. An example would be the village of Wahat al Salam/Neva Shalom (“Oasis of Peace”) in Israel. Since 1970 Christians, Jews and Muslims have lived together and run a school where their children learn each other’s beliefs and customs while adults work through their occasionally difficult conflicts peacefully. There is a wait list for people to live there. However rare, the model proves that desirable alternatives to violent conflict are possible and in fact the only long term way out of a morass of paranoia and violence. Many other such initiatives have flourished in spite of the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Poignantly, peace activists were among those kidnapped by Hamas.

 

Is it so far-fetched to imagine at least parts of the Israeli settlement project imbued with a spirit of inclusiveness similar to Neva Shalom? Could activists plan settlements that welcomed Palestinians of similar good will, living together in the truth that Arab and Jewish blood is equally red? Clearly not now, but perhaps eventually.

 

A third grouping besides the fanatics and the peacebuilders could be called the great middle, the vast majority of the world’s populations who want only a secure existence and a fulfilling life for themselves and their children.

 

Though scant comfort to those innocents upon whom bombs are falling like rain, most of us most of the time do manage to get along. Sweden and Norway do not fight, nor do Massachusetts and Connecticut. As of the commencement of the European Union in 1993, former combatants like Germany and France no longer need to resolve their differences by what became global war.

 

The mass of the world’s citizens, though many adhere to one or another of the great religions, may not feel the unconditional love and compassion for one another urged by Jesus and Buddha and Muhammed, but they get the practicality of the Golden Rule: treat others in the same way you would wish to be treated. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes. You may not love them or even like them, but they are as human as you are. Getting along is the glue that makes every day civilized life possible. For most people most of the time, this is part of our ordinary cultural DNA, which is what makes what has unfolded on both sides of the border between Gaza and Southern Israel so horrifying.

 

Definitions of extremism may be changing in a good way, isolating and marginalizing those who put all their eggs in the basket of violence. For example, there is the growing global recognition, expressed in the number of nations which have ratified the United Nations Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons, that such weapons are in fact useless instruments of terror and mass dehumanization.

 

We are moving, too slowly, toward a world where threatening to use these weapons, or possessing them as the basis of a shaky, unstable deterrence, is itself a demonic, delusionary form of extremism, even though at the moment deterrence remains at the core of “establishment” values for both democratic and totalitarian governments. As long as this potential doom hangs over us, we are all Israelis and Palestinians under the gun, having to learn the apparently impossible task of getting along.

 

This begins when we acknowledge that while we claim identities as Jews, or Arabs, or citizens of the U.S. or the Congo or Shri Lanka or China, the core reality of our identity is as a citizen of one small planet, each of us equally unique and precious. Whenever my partner is asked on some bureaucratic form for her race, in a tiny protest against arbitrary categories, she always writes “human.”

 

This larger context of our quarrels can get lost in the bloody headlines. While Putin pursues his absurd visions of Russian grandeur at heinous cost to his own country and to Ukraine, the tundra in Siberia is melting and releasing methane that accelerates global warming. Everything everyone does or neglects to do affects everyone else. In the context of biosystems that are stressed or even dying, all the wars across this small planet are a double distraction, a double delusion, a double death. The need to sustain the life systems that in turn sustain us may be the ultimate self-interested motive for us to put up our swords and learn to live and work together—including Israelis and Palestinians.

Two in One

 

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”                       —F. Scott Fitzgerald.

 

A few examples:

 

1.  Historical: The atomic bomb brought the war with Japan to a close more quickly AND the atomic bomb may have had much less effect upon Japan’s surrender than the Soviet declaration of war against Japan at about the same time (historians still have not resolved this difference of interpretation).

 

2.  Psychological: Human nature is fundamentally flawed, often violent, and subject to dark unconscious impulses AND Anne Frank was not wrong to believe that people are often really good at heart.

 

3.  Strategic: No less an authority than George Kennan asserted that pushing NATO eastward was the greatest foreign policy mistake of our time, causing Russia to feel once again mortally threatened AND Putin is a brutal dictator with delusions of imperial grandeur that have led to enormous unnecessary suffering in Ukraine.

 

4.  Political: America is a bulwark for democracy and against tyranny globally AND America often embroils itself in conflicts that end up creating far more chaos and death than if the US. had exercised more restraint and humility.

 

5.  Economic: The free market system has lifted millions out of poverty AND the same system continues to be a major factor as planetary ecosystems fray.

 

6.  A variation on 5.: The capitalist system has been a major factor in the fraying of planetary ecosystems AND the technologies provided by that same system (solar, wind, batteries—fusion? ) will be crucial to sustaining both people and the living systems of the planet.

 

7.  Strategic: Nuclear deterrence may have prevented a third world war for 75 years AND the system of nuclear deterrence could dissolve at any moment by accident or miscommunication into a planetary catastrophe.

 

8.  Philosophical/Strategic (a three-in-one): War is a tragic and inescapable condition that has gone one for thousands of years AND we now have the knowledge of conflict resolution tools and international law to prevent war AND nuclear weapons have rendered “victory” in all-out war meaningless—to survive we must wage a preventive war against war.

 

9.  Cultural/Political: Osama bin Laden perpetrated one of the cruelest terrorist acts in modern history AND articulated a set of demands that from his perspective as a committed Islamist were reasonable: these demands included that the U.S. should cease to support Israel against Palestine and that it withdraw its troops from Islamic territories. Did these demands justify the murder of 3000 innocent Americans? Not on your life. But surely such demands are worth examining in terms of learning about a certain Islamic mind set, if only to prevent the next 9-11.

 

10.Moral/Aesthetic: Picasso was a self-centered moral monster AND his genius has made invaluable contributions to our culture. T.S. Eliot was reflexively anti-Semitic until he regretted it, but still wrote Nobel prize-winning poetry.

 

11.Political: The appeal of the 45^th President is a mystery, but not to the MAGA millions who see him a charismatic leader. AND for millions of others he represents uncontrolled chaos and a mortal threat to our democratic system.

 

12.Political/Cultural: China has a uniquely controlling and cruel top-down system that oppresses minorities like the Uighurs AND China has done a remarkable job of pulling millions of their citizens out of poverty.

 

13. Philosophical: Each human is unique AND each human is like every other human. 

14. We are alive for only this tiny discrete moment in all of tie AND we emerged from and are completely connected to the story of a 29 billion-year-old Universe. 

15. A living example of the ability to hold opposed ideas in mind at the same time: Neva Shalom Wahat-al-Salaam is a village in Israel where Jewish, Christian and Muslim families have co-existed for decades, not always easily, but there is a wait list to get in. It’s a remarkable cultural environment for the children of the village, who all attend the same school and celebrate each other’s beliefs, customs and rituals.

 

Too many of us are uncomfortable with ambiguity. We want things cut-and-dried: who are the good guys and who are not. We silo ourselves tribally into “us” and “them,” with “us” being always right, or justified in any questionable behavior by rationalizing our “higher” goals in the name of a personal or national self-interest all too narrowly defined—“my country right or wrong.”

 

To wrestle with opposing points of view helps us walk in another’s shoes, preventing the dehumanizing of folks with whom we might be in conflict. This is going to be more and more important when, say, my use of energy affects the air quality in China, and their use of energy affects my own breathing.

 

All such twos-in-one take place in a context that is not two—it is a one that transcends deeply entrenched habits of narrow self-interest. We live on one earth and we are one species, dependent for life upon one interconnected biosystem. The planet is beginning to undergo a mental shift in this direction—not a deep change in "human nature," but at least a growing awareness of our dependence upon each other and the biosystem profound enough to affect global politics, economics, religion, education, and even the thinking of armed forces everywhere. Like it or not, our nuclear and ecological reality, that we’re all in this together, has become the foundational truth of our moment. 

 

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field. I'll meet you there.     —Rumi

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Security Dilemma

 

 

You probably couldn’t have asked for a more thoughtful Chair of the Joint Chiefs than Mark Milley, whose term ends on September 30. He was one of the good guys who repeatedly restrained President Trump from veering into dubious schemes—such as a war of choice with Iran.

 

But there is also no mistaking that Milley is a general, a military person through and through. From a recent interview in the Princeton Alumni Weekly (Milley graduated from Princeton in 1980):

 

“Milley and others believe that new technologies such as precision-guided munitions, global positioning systems, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, and hypersonic weapons are already transforming how militaries are trained, supported, and operate, and that the pace will only accelerate.

 

‘All these technologies are coming at us very, very quickly,’ Milley argues. ‘And we, the United States, need to be on the front side of that curve. We don’t have to be perfect, but we have to be better than our enemy.’”

In a world of hypersonic missiles tipped with nuclear warheads, what exactly does it mean to be “better than our enemy”? 

 

As Stephen Kinzer argues in an op-ed in the Boston Globe: “In the coming years, China and its partners will work intensely to strengthen their military power—only to counter American threats, of course. So will the United States and its partners—only to counter Chinese threats. Each side insists that it seeks only to defend itself. Neither believes the other, so both prepare for war. That makes war more likely.

 

“Because this spiral of mistrust is so common, it has a name: the security dilemma. It tells us that steps one country takes to increase its security often provoke rivals to take countersteps. That leads to competition that makes all parties less secure.”

 

The security dilemma puts generals, no matter how cautious and intelligent, in an ever more impossible position. Is there any other way out except for military officials in opposing camps to openly acknowledge the issue and begin to talk with one another about how to resolve their nations’ conflicts in ways other than mutual suicide?

Ultimately, the only way to be “better than our enemy” is to think in a new way: to accept that security is interdependent: mine depends on yours and yours depends on mine. And to accept that the way to rethink global security cannot be through technological competition, which will never end except in a general conflagration. And finally to turn to the cooperative realization of shared goals: survival and the transformation of energy sources in order to mitigate global climate change. This new way is also an old way: the way of the Golden Rule, an ethic shared by all the world’s major religions.

 

Of the hundreds of scientists who worked under Oppenheimer to develop the first atomic bomb, only one ceased his research and left Los Alamos on moral grounds once it became clear that Hitler had been unable to make a weapon. His name was Joseph Rotblat. He is not mentioned in the popular film about Oppenheimer. He went on to be instrumental in developing the Pugwash Conference, where scientists meet yearly to engage in a frank exchange of ideas—exactly as the militaries of the world’s superpowers ought to be doing. Rotblat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995, a half-century after the first nuclear bombs were dropped on Japan.

 

There are technologies necessary to confirm that arms control agreements have not been violated. And it remains crucial to further develop technologies that can help stop the illegal transfer of radioactive materials. But ultimately it is not technological advance, it is only people, like Rotblat or Mikhail Gorbachev, who will enable us to move beyond the security dilemma. I wonder if Mark Milley, ideally along with equivalent military leaders in China or elsewhere, as they lie awake pondering the paradoxes of military force in the nuclear age, will see the flashing “No Exit” sign before it is too late. There is still time, brother.

 

 

 

 

Oppenheimer’s Truth

 

 

After the Japanese surrender in 1945, Oppenheimer saw immediately that any nation with adequate resources would be eventually able to build a weapon, and that something as gargantuan as an H-bomb had no possible military function. It could only be a mechanism for genocide.

 

As he tried to use his immense stature to positively influence nuclear policy, he was quickly steamrolled by McCarthyism and national overconfidence. The Christopher Nolan film dramatizes Truman’s smug certainty that the U.S. had a monopoly on the bomb, including the soon to be built H-bomb. Almost immediately spies spirited the technical knowledge for both fission and thermonuclear weapons to the Soviets. The U.S. monopoly dissolved, and the arms race Oppenheimer feared had begun.

 

In 1959 my Princeton roommate and I were pressed into service in an odd effort to provide sufficient bodies for a birthday party for one of the Oppenheimer children.

 

Becoming aware of our interest in art, Oppenheimer invited us into a small windowless room to show off a radiant Van Gogh, one of the late paintings of the fields outside the asylum of St. Remy.

 

Was it possible that this soft-spoken reed of a man with melancholy eyes was the legendary force that had corralled a vast and fractious team of scientific egos into building (in one of the all-time great euphemisms) a world-ending “gadget”?

 

The birthday ended sadly. Oppenheimer’s wife Kitty, alcoholically blurry and drink in hand, descended from upstairs into the entryway as we were departing. “What the hell are you staring at?” she said to me, only she didn’t say “hell.” Hell was what the Washington establishment had visited upon her husband by removing his security clearance as the price for his misgivings about what he had wrought, including his refusal to fully assent to the H-bomb project. Kitty had been ravaged alongside him.

 

The biography on which the film is based quotes a section of an essay Oppenheimer published in the New York Times on June 9, 1946 laying out his ideas for the control of nuclear weapons:

 

“[Our plan] proposes that in the field of atomic energy there be set up a world government. That in this field there be a renunciation of sovereignty. That in this field there be no legal veto power.  That in this field there be international law.”

 

Idealistic? Perhaps. But if anyone then could have peered down the time stream, they might have given it a shot, to avoid what Oppenheimer knew loomed ahead. What do we see ahead of us? An accelerating drift toward a twin nuclear/ecological waterfall, the avoidance of which requires a spirit of cooperation equaling that of Oppenheimer’s team at Los Alamos.

 

Were he alive today, he would be appalled by  just how many nuclear weapons had been built by the early 1980s. But he would be happy that arms control treaties had reduced their numbers. He would be relieved that so far they have not been used on people again. He would rejoice in the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. And surely he would be over the moon about the success of the Webb telescope, a multinational scientific feat as positive as the bomb was negative.

 

Insufficiently acknowledged by sovereign powers, both authoritarian and democratic, nuclear and non-nuclear, is the fact that sovereignty has already eroded far more than it ever would have been through any international agreement to renounce nuclear weapons. Sovereignty is an administrative necessity that protects national identity, sometimes existentially (Ukraine does not belong to Putin), but is now increasingly transcended by the reality that we live on one small planet facing challenges that can only be solved transnationally.

 

Specific to weapons and war, sovereignty is growing more and more shaky in the context of inadvertent computer and human error. Our security depends upon the professionalism of the Russian military, and vice versa. So too with all the nuclear powers, even as they spend vast sums to renew their nuclear weapons. No expert or general, however tactically brilliant, would be in full control of a slide into the kind of catastrophe that nearly occurred during the Cuban crisis of 1962, and could happen again in a conflict with China over Taiwan. 

 

Even on the level of conventional war, Mr. Putin is discovering he will have to destroy Ukraine in order to “save” it. Let’s pray that he understands that escalating to nukes won't help him.

 

Our distracted political culture in the U.S. does not encourage dialogue around such difficult issues. The popularity of Nolan’s film is an opportunity for citizens to ask probing questions of the presidential candidates that spur fresh thinking on nuclear policy. For example, would standing down our entire aging fleet of land-based ICBMs be destabilizing “appeasement” of Russia and China, or a unilateral initiative that could elicit further positive responses?

 

The anguish of Robert Oppenheimer, who unleashed destruction beyond measure and then tried his best to stop its further spread, reminds us that America bears special responsibility for creating the kind of world he hoped for, where the nuclear curse is finally lifted.