Heat—or Light?

 Civil disobedience, the willingness to break a law and endure the consequences for the sake of a greater moral good, enjoys a pedigree extending back through King’s civil rights movement, Gandhi’s passive resistance to India’s British colonizers, and even back to Thoreau, who went to jail for a night rather than pay a tax that was being used to fund the Mexican war of 1846-48.

Students risking arrest for calling their institutions to stricter account should be commended.

University endowments can grow quite nicely without investment in the arms trade or fossil fuels.

 

But universities are mostly wasting opportunities to fulfill that part of their mission centered upon dispassionate inquiry. Those Jewish and Palestinian college students shouting slogans that some of them might not even understand generate plenty of heat, but as to light—not so much.

 

Absent the active listening that ought to be a skill that colleges require of all students, angry shouting itself, though a quantum leap better than shooting, is a form of futile violence. The same fanatic certainty, self-righteousness and lack of humility we deplore in both Netanyahu and the Hamas leader Yahyah Sinwar can be seen in the faces of some of the students making non-negotiable demands of hapless college administrators—who are themselves caught between the unqualified student rage and faux-indignant demagogues like Congressperson Stefanik.

 

For decades Len Traubman, a California pediatric dentist, and his spouse Libby, a social worker, invited small groups of American Palestinians and Jews to sit down together over a meal and share their stories. Len is gone, but Libby, in her 80s, persists. Participants welcome the opportunity to experience each other in their full human dimension rather than as oversimplified caricatures of the ‘enemy.’ Other equally significant initiatives continue both on and off American campuses. Out of such efforts will come the servant leaders of tomorrow, armed with an experience of open dialogue that goes beyond easy side-taking.

 

The model of ordinary Jewish and Palestinian citizens sitting down to a meal and respectfully sharing each other’s concerns would not appear to have much success in the Middle East itself right now (though crucial initiatives continue to exist there). The idyllic campuses of American universities are surely a far easier venue for peaceful dialogue. But it won’t happen without a concerted effort by students, faculty and administrators to agree to its value—an exposure to ambiguities which, were their solution as simple as who can shout the loudest or kill the most, would have been resolved long ago.

 

It is hard not to contrast the self-certainty of the most strident students with the poignant exhaustion of the soft-spoken U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken  (doing his difficult work as the representative of an imperial superpower also divided within itself at the highest level), who shuttles endlessly from country to country trying to try to build coalitions for ending a brutal conflict with a long history of injustice and bad faith on all sides. Far easier for students, faculty and administrators, who only have to shuttle across campus, to try to forge understanding and connection on the basis of our shared humanity.

 

The Nuclear Age Is Already Over

 

 

Either nuclear weapons kill us or we move beyond them, soon. Via mass death or the building a new security system, the nuclear age is finished. The nuclear deterrence system that the world presently relies upon for its security is rotten, evil, completely unworkable, and obsolete. It is nuclear war waiting to happen, a war no one can or would win. But we remain ostriches with heads deep in sand, waiting passively for an inevitable holocaust apparently too big to prevent.

 

Somebody somewhere on this small planet has got to begin the process of leading the way out of this morass

 

•of paradox: the assumption that mutual assured destruction can preserve life forever.

 

•of hypocrisy: our nuclear weapons are good and necessary but yours are bad and we will not allow you to possess them.

 

•of illusion: the experts will somehow prevent nuclear war from ever happening.

 

•of collective insanity: our launch-on-warning policy allows our leaders only minutes to decide our collective fate. And to retaliate against a bolt-from-the-blue attack by North Korea, for example, the U.S. would have to fly its ICBMs over the land mass of Russia, presently our mortal adversary. But even without nuclear weapons, the armed forces of the United States could utterly obliterate North Korea, and Kim Jung Un knows it.

 

The United States, based in core principles like the value of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, should make a precious gift to the world and sign the United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. It would be the first of the nine nuclear powers to sign and the initiative would be welcomed with relief and jubilation by the vast majority of the world’s citizens.

 

Then what? Rapid and destabilizing American unilateral disarmament? No. Begin instead with well-advertised gestures over time. Have the generals and political leaders admit freely in an international forum like the United Nations that military advantage via nuclear war is impossible, that the nuclear arms race toward ever faster delivery vehicles leads nowhere good, and that resources presently expended on nuclear weapons programs are desperately needed for meeting the global climate emergency. 

 

Pledge no-first-use, and no nuclear retaliation against aggression, on the basis of the potential of nuclear winter as planetary suicide. Bring home five nuclear-armed submarines. Shut down one of our programs of nuclear weapons modernization. Aggressively initiate arms control proposals, which, combined with an ongoing series of gestures, would add credibility to our overall stance.

 

Then watch for mutual responses from the other nuclear powers. Worst case scenario, there would be none, in which case we can always reverse course, either gradually or rapidly as the situation may demand. What are we so afraid of?

 

It is an important fact that Putin, a leader as ruthless in his own way as Hitler, has more nuclear weapons at his disposal than any other nation, but so far, and may it continue, he has not used them. Why? Is it because he fears our nuclear weapons? Or is it because in spite of his gross deficit of compassion for Ukraine, he knows that turning swaths of that nation into radioactive desert does not fit any sane conception of military conquest?

 

Of course “conventional” war itself is equally insane. The October 7^th Hamas attack and what has followed is a tragic case in point. The immense loss of life in the Israeli military’s “conventional” response can only concentrate our minds upon what the massive loss of life in a nuclear war would look like.

 

åBut if we must carry on with deterrence, think of it as a stage in moving beyond war altogether, and base it instead upon our conventional weapons, which are more than adequate for the job. Especially emphasize defensive weapons like those which protected Israel from Iran’s recent missile and drone attack, making possible the de-escalation which followed.

 

A world beyond war itself is possible. Viable alternative security systems have been elaborated in great detail. But we can take a sensible step in that ultimate direction quite safely, which is to unilaterally start backing off the nutty, silly, irrational hair-trigger nuclear system presently holding the whole world hostage.

 

Beyond Self-Extinction

 

Good that defensive anti-missiles worked against Iran’s barrage. Still, two elements were more suited to the playground than to international politics: face and revenge. One side bombs the other, and the other thinks that without revenge it will lose face. The October 7^th Hamas attack was vengeful, but so was the Israeli government’s doubling down reaction. Where does an-eye-for-an-eye end?

One of the uses of history is to chart the plasticity of friend into enemy and back into friend: the U.S. once went to war against enemies like Germany and Japan who are now fast friends. Russia was an ally of the U.S. against Hitler before it became an enemy during the Cold War, then during the Gorbachev era a friend, and now with Putin’s brutal invasion an enemy again. In South Africa and Rwanda, former mortal enemies have used truth and reconciliation processes to re-humanize adversaries.

As Robert Frost wrote, “Nature within her inmost self divides/To trouble men with having to take sides.”  On college campuses in the U.S., there has been far more reflexive taking sides around the Israeli-Palestinian issue than there have been attempts to sit down and listen to one another’s stories in a spirit of reconciliation, which may be impossible right now in the Middle East itself, but with a little faculty leadership ought not to be so difficult in academe.

Whether democratic or autocratic, governments seem to require enemies to reassure their citizens of their righteousness, power, and security against the convenient “other.” One of the clearest examples of this was the U.S. over-reaction to 9-11. The Cold War having ended, the U.S. apparently needed a new enemy, and Islamic extremism conveniently stepped up.

On the global level, troubled side-taking has assumed the form of more talk about an axis of evil autocracy in the combination of Russia, Iran, China and North Korea. Shared dictatorship implies they are working in concert to undermine democratic regimes. And there is some nefarious cooperation among them, such as Putin obtaining arms for his Ukraine misadventure from Kim Jung Un. President Biden is hardly wrong to say this is a moment where democracy and autocracy are in conflict—though many countries, including India, Turkey, Hungary, and even the U.S. itself, occupy a gray area between democracy and autocracy. National self-righteousness does not lend itself to sober policymaking.

War can start in many different ways, error, miscalculation, hubris, but all the ways share a dehumanization process, a hardening of the categories. The genocide in Rwanda apparently exploded as a result of appeals to hate over the radio. The war in Ukraine began with what some would call a nakedly imperial grab for land, and others would call Russia’s anxious response to having NATO on its borders, but Putin’s rationalizations also included stereotyping Ukrainian leaders as Nazis. When an Islamic State splinter group mowed down hundreds in a Moscow concert hall, Putin was able to say with a straight face that “the criminals in cold blood, purposefully went to kill and shoot at point-blank range our citizens and our children ”— nothing like bombing a Ukrainian maternity hospital or poisoning citizen Navalny, eh Vlad?

The Gaza conflict, a fresh existential threat to Israel and the worst loss of life for the Jews since the Holocaust, has only elicited more right-wing Israeli dehumanizing of Palestinians in both Gaza and the West Bank—another case in point of Auden’s poetic truism: “those to whom evil is done/do evil in return.”

Regional wars like those in Ukraine and Gaza take place within a context that includes two giant challenges: the presence of nuclear weapons and the global climate emergency. Both share a fateful interdependency. In the case of the weapons, no one will win if deterrence breaks down. The nuclear weapons states, depending upon deterrence to work forever, must rely upon the professionalism of each other’s military personnel, the accuracy of their computers, and strength of their safeguards. The system is set up to fail eventually because human error is inevitable.

Interdependency is also the operative context for climate: global systems like the warming process can only be slowed by means of what we all agree to do together to maintain the health of the whole. In both cases, nuclear and climate, my health and security depend upon what you do and vice versa. This is a paradigm shift that has not fully sunk in to mainstream thinking worldwide.

In this nuclear/climate moment it becomes crucial as never before to understand the psychological process of enemy-imaging. Dehumanizing our adversaries makes the inevitable eventual breakdown of nuclear deterrence that much more likely and international cooperation to mitigate climate effects that much more difficult. Our minds put things into boxes which are too abstract to fit reality: we brand Iran as evil, while their total population consists of 75 million men, women and children with similar aspirations for security and fulfillment.

2000 years ago an itinerant Jewish preacher reminded us that the rain falls on the just and the unjust (sort of like bombs). Solzhenitsyn famously wrote the best gloss on this: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains . . . an un-uprooted small corner of evil.”

Our situation asks that we combine two complementary thoughts: that good and evil exist in all of us; and that we are all in this together on a small planet. To live with such ambiguity is a process of discovery. In our new awareness of interdependency, refusal to open our thinking is the royal road to extinction. If only this were just New Age woo-woo. But it’s not—it’s existential, as real as the 14 thousand nuclear weapons deployed on the planet, as real as the significant uptick in ocean temperatures, an unprecedented threat to coral reefs that is alarming scientists.

New thinking motivates disarmament and accelerates new forms of sustainable energy. The opportunity is for everyone, citizens and leaders, to say no to obvious dead ends like the arms race and yes to new levels of cooperation—including reaching out with endless patience to our adversaries with a larger vision of self-interest that leads to life for all.