Words for a No-Bull Inaugural

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My fellow citizens, I have just sworn to uphold the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic, but what does that mean? Our earth has become so small, national economies so interdependent, global ecological problems so transcendent of nationality, that it would be an abdication of my leadership responsibilities to pretend otherwise. A new world has dawned, and the United States must begin to honestly redefine its interests within it.

After sixty-plus years of maintaining the peace by means of our overwhelming nuclear strength, we are confronted with a series of paradoxes that cannot be resolved merely by increasing that strength—because the very meaning of “strength” has totally changed.  Even a small number of our nuclear weapons—or those of any other nation for that matter—cannot be detonated without raising enough dust and soot into the atmosphere to fatally affect world agriculture for a decade.

In addition, we must reluctantly admit that our own nuclear weapons no longer possess the deterrent effect that was intended by their triadic deployment on land, sea and air—let alone the fact that no leader can guarantee that command and control systems, either our own or those of other nuclear powers, can forever restrain their inadvertent or accidental misuse. It is past time to cooperate with our allies and as much as possible with our adversaries to create nuclear-free zones, to batten down nuclear materials so that they do not fall into the wrong hands, and to aggressively conclude new treaties for gradual reciprocal reductions of nuclear warheads around the world. We know from the Cuban Missile Crisis, now a half-century behind us, exactly where any nuclear confrontation inevitably leads, and how potential misunderstanding can push adversaries into a catastrophe that fails to resolve any conflict of interests, no matter how fundamental.

Nuclear weapons, useless for conducting rational foreign policy, must now take their place in the context of all our other ecological challenges.  I am convinced that not only have nuclear weapons forever changed our world, but also that the scientific evidence is overwhelming that the earth is undergoing serious climatic changes that we must plan for rather than further denying. While no one can state with certainty that any given weather event, any storm or tornado or hurricane, is attributable purely to human activity, trends are emerging that cannot be ignored. At least we know for certain that military superiority, nuclear or conventional, will not be able to address the unfolding economic and ecological crises that loom over us. The quality of air we breathe in our own country is dependent upon policies that the Chinese adopt to satisfy their energy demands, and vice-versa. Authentic security now means cooperating with the Chinese and others to transition toward sources of clean, sustainable energy. Competition for military or territorial advantage on land or sea has become irrelevant to this transcendent goal.

We cannot afford both to take the steps that mitigate climate instability and prevent future wars over scarce resources, and also continue to be resented, and often confronted, in our role as self-appointed world policeman. Therefore the moment has come to prudently but swiftly transition out of our strategic emphasis upon maintaining an American military presence around the world and into partnerships with other nations that address root causes. It is clear that it is infinitely less expensive to supply food, shelter, safe water drinking water, education, medicine, reproductive services and sustainable energy to the entire world than it is for the United States to try maintain global military superiority. Further, addressing human needs directly is the only long-term structural solution to terrorism.

Further, our Constitution, written with the best intentions two and a quarter centuries ago, needs, like that of Ecuador, to extend rights not only to people but to the living systems which support our own well-being. Ecuador’s citizens and leaders accept that their own health depends upon animals that have genuine rights to viable habitats and rivers that have rights to run clean within their banks. We humans cannot be any healthier than the oceans, the soil, the coral reefs, the fish and the plants that make up the common resource that sustains us. Our economic principles cannot avoid taking this reality into account as a fundamental working truth. The ecological wholeness of the earth is the only ultimate “corporation” and the final source of available capital. Any investment that fails to take into account mutual earth-human relations will inevitably become a net loss for everyone, no matter how much a privileged few seem to benefit in the short-term.

This recognition of interdependence represents an enormous shift in our conventional cultural assumptions about military strategy, economics, and international and domestic politics, but the necessity for this shift has been creeping up on us for a generation. I know full well that for many of my fellow citizens, the notion of military strength contradicting itself, or of non-human creatures having rights to life and health analogous to our own, will appear to be deeply uncomfortable, even threatening, concepts. But my task is not merely to reflect our existing state of mind, it is to help lead us all toward the light as far as we can discern it. This world, and therefore this nation, will be infinitely safer if no one has nuclear weapons than it would be if everyone had them—just as true security for all lies in an authentic ecological stewardship in which all nations participate. We can renew our own special strengths as Americans by realizing that our own self-interest is bound up in what is best for the whole. This will open up new opportunities for world leadership as we search together for creative solutions. 

Strangers in a Strange Land

Our political culture becomes surreal when one views it like an alien from another galaxy homing in for an overview.  The third presidential debate was meant to examine differences in approach to foreign policy. Like everyone I have a genuine investment in the character of the person upon whose desk sits a telephone wired directly to the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.  In the event, there were few differences between Governor Romney and President Obama, because polarization works like a vise upon creativity. No one can risk thinking aloud outside the box.

What neither candidate could say, because it would cost them the election, is that rational foreign policy cannot be conducted with nuclear weapons (Kissinger so stated in no uncertain terms once he was out of office). Nor could Romney and Obama admit that the meaning of security in the nuclear age has utterly changed. Nor could they admit that it may be impossible to keep nuclear weapons entirely in the hands of the “good guys,” and out of the hands of the “bad guys.” Nor that deterrence in the age of terrorism has become obsolete. Nor that the “nuclear winter” that would ensue from even a “regional” nuclear war, say between India and Pakistan, could shut down agriculture worldwide—in essence, omnicide. Nor that global climate change is a challenge that requires a level of cooperation between nations that renders all arms races, conventional or nuclear, irrelevant.

Instead, in order to acquire votes, our leaders mouth pieties about Israel or Iran and refrain from discussing human-caused global warming,. A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize must ratify his cojones by extra-judicial killings of Osama bin Laden and other leaders of Al-Quaeda—when proper criminal trials might have been a light to the world.

The human species is a couple of millennia beyond the so-called Axial Age, when the wisdom of religious geniuses like Jesus and the Buddha ripened and began to spread the notion of radical interdependence as expressed in the various forms of the Golden Rule. And still we do not see the all-too-practical point in the age of climate instability and world-destroying weapons of loving our enemies.

Fifty years beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis, seventy-three years beyond Auden’s writing “we must love one another or die,” we know that a nuclear arms race leads only to catastrophe. I may not feel love for Ahmadinejad or Netanyahu. But at least I can see with a compassionate eye the karmic causation of history that informs their complementary paranoia. Germany, crushed by vengeful terms of surrender after World War One, became vulnerable to Hitler’s demagoguery and attempts to wipe out the Jews, leading to the need to create a Jewish homeland, which in turn resulted in a state partially occupying the lands of others, eliciting the enmity of the Persian/Arab world (Auden, same poem: “Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.”). Ahmadinejad’s perspective is informed by the fact that the U.S., Israel’s knee-jerk ally, messed with Iranian politics in the 1950s, tilted toward Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war, and dispatched, perhaps with Israel’s help, a computer virus to sabotage Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges.

What nations have to do together, faced with no alternative but mass death, is collaborate on the basis of the common survival goals of the millions of citizens whose lives are at stake. “Collaborate” is a word with severe negative connotations—collaborators were shot after World War Two. French women who had fraternized with German soldiers were forcibly shorn of hair. But what is intended here by the word “collaborate” is the highest form of conflict resolution for the good of the whole, on the basis of Auden’s truth, the truth of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the truth that we can only solve our climate challenges together.

Were I president, far from saying as Governor Romney did that sitting down with the likes of Ahmadinejad showed weakness, I would be on a plane to Tehran so fast it would make Mitch McConnell’s head spin. I would acknowledge our past meddling in Iran’s internal affairs. I would try to be an honest broker across the Israeli-Palestinian divide—for Israeli’s sake as well as Palestine. I would admit that we’re deeply apprehensive about where the nuclear arms race could lead, that we know cyberwar can work both ways and probably already has, and that we have to break the cycle and find a way where everybody wins, whether that might be a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, or even better, Earth-wide.

Our presumed security sits shakily atop a house of nuclear cards, where one misinterpretation within the command-and-control systems of India or Pakistan or Israel or the U.S. or Russia or France or China, could lay waste all that we love. From the perspective of the stars, who is the “enemy”? Is it not the awesome destructive power of these weapons, our stubborn insistence on obsolete notions of national pride, war itself? If an alien were looking down upon us she would shake her head in perplexity, raise a delicate tentacle to her puckered brow, and blink her six eyes in astonishment. Her strangeness would be nothing next to our own.

The Dance of "Enemies":Half a Century Beyond the Cuban Missile Crisis

 

Albert Einstein, the full measure of whose prophetic stature still has not been taken, wrote in a telegram in 1946: “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

Einstein was implying that we need a new mode of thinking where we see clearly that a security program based in the possession of nuclear weapons leads nowhere—exactly the conclusion to which foreign policy establishment heavyweights Kissinger, Schultz, Nunn and Perry came in their famous 2007 Wall Street Journal editorial.

An authentic paradigm shift always requires time to accomplish itself, but the hour is getting late. The family of nations goes on insisting in its various ways that rational security goals can still be achieved with nuclear weapons. India and Pakistan have fought three wars over Kashmir, and each has made nuclear threats against the other as if one of the parties could “win.” Smaller nations assume that nuclear weapons will equalize their relations with their more powerful neighbors. Dictators hope to secure their political longevity with nukes. And non-state entities cling to the illusion that they could accomplish some redress of injustice if they could only get hold of one.

The reality that the murderous chaos in Syria has begun to spread over the border into Turkey reminds us not only that enemy-posing and vicious cycles of paranoia have always been with us independent of nuclear weapons, but also that small sparks have set off gigantic conflagrations in the past.

Nuclear weapons not only ratchet up the consequences of accident or misinterpretation; they distort and confuse our current “modes of thinking.” Mutual enemy-images become a dance of self-fulfilling paranoia that is stoked up to white heat by real or potential weapons. One nexus of distortion is the enemy dance between Iran, the U.S., and Israel.  The United States grossly interfered in Iran’s internal affairs in the 1950s to install the Shah, took sides with Iraq in the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, and more recently sabotaged Iranian computers attached to uranium enrichment centrifuges—and then it wonders why Iranian leaders remain hostile and suspicious. As Auden famously wrote, “those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.” Meanwhile “enemy” is such a flexible thought-form. When the Iranian people went into the streets in massive numbers a few years ago to protest the corruption of their democratic process, were they our enemy?  Or an early, Persian manifestation of the Arab Spring?

No leader can remain in power by acting credulous, but nuclear paranoia has no limits. Fear, hate, and separation become the stock in trade of world leadership. The Iranian leaders, fearful of Israel’s presumed 300-odd nuclear weapons, mouth self-destructive anti-Semitic clichés on the international stage. Israel, possessing an overwhelming nuclear “advantage,” draws lines in the sand on the basis of Iran’s mere potential. The distinction between good guys who can be trusted with nuclear weapons and bad guys who cannot becomes futile when the combination of the weapons themselves, their fallible command and control systems, and the sleepy assumption that they will keep us safe are the real enemy. 

When the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. came within a hair’s breadth of destroying the planet in 1962, who was the enemy? Wasn’t it war itself? If a Muslim extremist detonated a nuclear weapon in any large city on the planet, how many of their co-religionists would they obliterate? It’s not enough to argue that “they” don’t care who or how many they kill. If the U.S. ever used even a small portion of its arsenal, no matter against whom, the holocaust would be equally indiscriminate.

We forget that the cold war ended when Russians and Americans realized that they had a mutual interest in survival, and that this mutual interest is performatively universal—meaning it applies in every future case of nuclear confrontation around the globe. There are only two possible outcomes: eventual catastrophe, or the goals to which Einstein calls us on the other side of a radical shift in our modes of thinking: a nuclear-free Middle East and a nuclear-free planet.

Einstein also wrote that you cannot solve a problem on the same level of thinking that created the problem—another way of saying what he telegraphed so long ago. We have arrived at an astonishing place in the history of our planet where it has become a matter of life and death to initiate not further cyberwar with our adversaries, but dialogue in a spirit of good will on the basis of what is best for Jewish, American, Iranian, and everyone else’s grandchildren.

Two Cheers for the Two Party System

What Churchill said about democracy (“Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.”) might apply as well to our two-party system in the United States. It prevents the fragmentation we see in parliamentary systems that have to expend so much energy cobbling together coalitions. But at this moment of the first presidential debate, the Superbowl of American politics, it may be worth reminding ourselves about the potential distortions in our thinking that arise from the oversimplified twoness of Democrats versus Republicans.

First and most obvious, the twoness of politics replicates the twoness of our competitive athletics. The distortion here is to skew our thinking toward the primary goal of football or baseball, winning, and away from the ultimate and very different goal of democratic small-d politics, ideally a clarification of policy that might strengthen our nation as a whole. So carefully must candidates keep their distance from best practices that are not endorsed by their supporters, that we have the spectacle of Mr. Romney having to disavow the successful universal health care plan he himself instituted in Massachusetts.

Second, our Great Seal does not say “Out of Two, One.” It says “Out of Many, One.” This distinction affirms that our creative diversity allows for the likelihood that there are more than two valid points of view and more than two solutions for our many challenges. Twoness distills policy into contrasting alternatives, but oversimplifies in so doing. It creates an artificial middle, one that is stretched rightward and leftward—but not very far in either direction—as those seeking power search for the Great Middle in order to pander to it. Suppose, for example, that we find in another decade that global climate change has accelerated far more rapidly than we could have imagined today. At the moment, because the parties are still fighting about whether global warming even exists, the prevention/mitigation discussion cannot be found at all at the supposed “center” where the two parties might entertain some sort of agreement about something that will be crucial to their childrens’ well being.  Another artificial center has been created by our two-party class war between rich and poor. The notion of interdependence between corporate producers and a broad market to consume what they produce has apparently been lost. Long gone is the model of Henry Ford, who doubled his workers’ salaries with the understanding that they would have more money to buy his cars. Everyone wins!

Third, twoness encourages what is essentially a state of war between the two parties. True, people of different persuasions are not literally killing each other. But when someone like Senator McConnell remains so ruthlessly focused upon denying Mr. Obama a second term, the net effect is almost as destructive as war, because the nation’s important business is held hostage to a negative, self-limiting model of “victory.” As is so often the case in war, everyone loses.

Imagine a presidential debate built upon a set of premises and values opposite to competitive athletics, artificial centrism, or war. For example, one candidate could be asked to lay out a set of steps leading to progress in the Israeli-Palestinian impasse. The other candidate would be required to build on that idea in order to improve it, and prohibited from tearing the initial suggestion down. Then the first candidate would be required to build further on the improvements suggested by his opponent. Candidates would be judged on how skillfully they managed this creative process of actually dancing with each other toward potential agreement about what might constitute a workable policy—rather than trying to score debating points by mere opposition. If such a process—though it is really only a mild variation on the familiar ritual of brainstorming—sounds utterly bizarre, it is an indication of how far our politics have dissolved into gamesmanship, where the goal is not the articulation of creative ideas designed to benefit all, but the emptiness of exercising power for its own sake.

Conspiracies, Secret and Open

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On this eleventh anniversary of 9/11, I’m noticing that I have a number of friends whose energies remain possessed by deceptions by which either the government itself, or corporate interests in league with government, are bamboozling us all.

Statecraft and deception have long gone hand in hand. Terrible chains of causation have sprung from government lies; in my own lifetime the Gulf of Tonkin Declaration stands out. Lyndon Johnson apparently felt he needed a solid casus belli to justify a declaration of war upon North Vietnam, so he apparently arranged to pretend that our navy had been fired upon, plunging us into an ocean of blood and napalm.

Three major conspiracy theories that preoccupy my honorable friends are built around the assassination of President Kennedy, the true cause of the destruction of the twin towers and adjacent buildings on 9/11, and the possibility that someone is spraying aluminum powder into the clouds above us to change weather patterns. In the last of these three, the implication is that Monsanto or other powerful corporate/government entities will come to exercise mega-control over agricultural processes and rake in scads of money.

I am no more able to know than any average citizen who killed JFK, how the towers were brought down, or whether global weather patterns are being deliberately altered by human agency. With horrified but also skeptical fascination, I have watched some of the documentaries and read some of the books and glanced at some of the websites. I certainly agree with my friends that it will be difficult to build a solid future for our republic on rotted structures of deception.

It is at least plausible that John Kennedy could have been killed by elements of the CIA that were unhappy with his supposedly dovish stance toward the Soviet Union. It is very far-fetched, but within the realm of remote possibility, that agents unknown carefully placed explosives within the World Trade Center buildings to doubly assure their fall. And it is possible that corporate/governmental agencies could be performing “geo-engineering” experiments in the atmosphere; the atomic tests in the West in the 1950s, done without the knowledge of ordinary people living downwind, suggest a familiar precedent. If Monsanto is indulging in the obscene hubris of seeding clouds, I’d certainly like to know about it.  Their genetic manipulation of seeds on earth seems unsettling enough. It’s my planet too.

The problem with conspiracy theories is that they can tempt our minds into a projective mechanism that leads ultimately to helplessness rather than healthy action. If we project into reality the existence of hidden forces that are so omniscient that they can act with impunity and completely hide their own tracks, our own motives and energy for positive change are subtly weakened. The more power we cede to the conspiracy, the greater can be our excuse to feel powerless and to do nothing other than stew.

Related to this willed helplessness is the wide-open conspiracy of our own complicity: today we live in a world where we can’t escape the fact that we ourselves are each responsible for the same changes that we might like to project onto dark uncontrollable forces: how each of us lives, in aggregate, is affecting the climate far more than any corporate great Satan. Because there are no international agreements—yet—for resolving many of our transnational challenges, we can become more vulnerable to anxiety and numbed paralysis.

Before we let secret conspiracies leach away our initiative, we ought to examine our complacent tolerance of fully daylit conspiracies that allow, for example, thousands of children to die each day unnecessarily of malnutrition and disease. Not a single child less would die if we knew for certain who killed JFK.

Calculations have been done to show that with a small fraction of the yearly defense budget of the United States, we could fund solutions to global problems that we clearly know will be the cause of future wars. We could get population growth under control, feed the hungry, transition out of the era of fossil fuels, mitigate C02’s effect upon our atmosphere, and supply clean water, basic health care, and education to everyone on earth. How much longer will we conspire with ourselves to maintain the illusion that military dominance alone can address these issues? It is our condition to be awash both in what we may never know—and what we know all too well.

The Trouble with Twoness

Nature within her inmost self divides

       To trouble men with having to take sides.

                                           —Robert Frost

The single most powerful idea that needs to be seeded into world culture as rapidly as possible is that we are one interdependent whole on this planet. Difficult as the implications may be for us to grasp, it will have only a salutary effect upon world politics, economics, cultural diversity, and religious practice.

Going further, it could be asserted that the internalization in the human mind and heart of this idea is the way evolution itself will manifest itself at this unfolding moment of history.

For relief from such headache-inducing abstractions, I often walk a path that takes me along a tidal river to a midden, a cliff-high mound of oyster shells left from the summer gatherings of indigenous Americans over millennia. The midden slopes to a beach where horseshoe crabs forage along the sandy shallows—a species so resilient that it has sustained itself unchanged for 445 million years.

The process that has allowed horseshoe crabs to flourish for so long has operated instinctually, on “automatic,” in a roller coaster ride up into breathtaking diversity and down into five vertiginous moments of mass extinction, as life-forms jostled for their place in the ecosystem. Those forms that adapted survived. Those that did not disappeared, leaving only their fossil remains. Scientists tell us we are into a sixth dizzying plunge as thousands of species go extinct around us. Natural selection continues to operate at full throttle.

Meanwhile an “unnatural” factor, human consciousness, entered the scene. In what has been only an instant of evolutionary time, it became dominant—rather, it has assumed dominance over the system while in reality remaining totally subject to the system’s every law and principle. The “other” in the twoness of self and other is not only the perceived enemy or opposing viewpoint. The other is also the natural world that until now we have perceived as an infinite resource subject to our command and exploitation, rather than as the ground of our own sustained vitality. We can be no healthier than it.

If the Chinese continue to operate their coal-fired power plants, the largest single source of carbon emissions in the world, the military-economic competition between China and the United States will become at best irrelevant and at worst a potential disaster. If the United States continues to use up a third of all global resources, it will matter little whether Iran produces a nuclear weapon or not.

These ecological realities behind our conflicts rarely surface in political campaigns because we are entranced by obsolete competitive metaphors: our politics are not the civil contribution of workable ideas based in interdependency. Instead they are a Superbowl contest.

Superbowl twoness is the obsolete thought-paradigm that informs everything we do. We compete from birth to death. We compare ourselves endlessly with others.  We envy those who are wealthier or better looking or apparently happier, and look down upon those less fortunate than ourselves with a distancing pity or contempt. In a thousand daily ways, we take sides. Especially in the United States our politics, our legislatures and courts, executive leaders, and mass-media discourse are dominated by polarized allegiance to conservative or progressive opinion.

A Republican president and vice-president administer a torture program of global reach, a program that would subject them to potential criminal trial by Nuremburg standards, but they have enough support among both Republicans and Democrats—given our fear of the terrorist “other”—to receive a pass. A Democratic president supervises a drone program that violates the sovereignty of other nations and kills innocents at his personal command, also a program that could arguably subject him to potential criminal trial by Nuremburg standards. But he too enjoys enough support to receive a pass. We citizens whose collective will our leaders are sworn to enact continue in our moral ambivalence—our troubled twoness. Instead of the practical imperative of the Golden Rule, that bow toward the truth of interdependence found in all the major world religions, we live by the half-truth of “you’re either with us or against us.”

At the fateful moment in October 1962 when superpower competition, in the form of the Cuban Missile Crisis, brought the planet as close as it has been to thermonuclear annihilation, who was the enemy? Who was the “other”? Was it not war itself? Was it not ignorance itself? Why is this not equally true in every competitive confrontation from the international to the intimately personal?

We humans emerged from a uni-verse. This is the single context out of which came all our religions, all our cultural and ethnic diversity, our constantly calibrated sense of twoness. The great next step of the evolutionary process is from twoness to oneness, not as a New Age bromide but as an evolutionary necessity. This step can only take place in the way individual humans feel and think, as we, we upon whose decisions rests the fate of all life-forms on the planet, mature into willingness to look into how we can contribute to the health of the whole system.

Frost’s couplet distills the depth to which competition is structured into evolution. But we are awakening to the fundamental unity behind our twoness. As a Peace Corps volunteer once said, “The earth is a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side.” Muslims, Christians, Alawites, Sunnis, Iranians, Jews, fans of Limbaugh, fans of Maddow, horseshoe crabs—we’re all in this together.

Life Beyond War

The vision and possible shape of a world beyond war has modified since the lessening of superpower tensions between the United States and the now long-departed U.S.S.R. In the late 1980s, hopes for a peaceful world primarily involved the successful abolition of nuclear weapons. As Jonathan Schell has written, while inadvertent nuclear war is more probable than ever before, nuclear abolition begins to look relatively easy in the context of emerging global environmental challenges. Nuclear weapons themselves have become one more of our many ecological problems: even a small regional nuclear exchange could fatally affect agricultural production worldwide over decades, cancelling out the security benefits for any nation of possessing these weapons.

Glaciers melt and mean temperatures rise year by year. At what point do officials distracted by mutual nuclear threats start to take in the bigger picture—that the real “existential threat” to their security might be, say, the unleashing of an irreversible cycle in the thawing of methane gas presently frozen within the Arctic tundra, gas that could dangerously accelerate global warming trends? The issues that the planet faces in the second decade of the 21^st century, a population that has overshot available resources, fast-rising CO2 levels, the exhaustion of marine life or the pollution of oceans, can be resolved neither by war nor by the deterrent effect of massive arsenals of weaponry—though failure to address such challenges proactively could well lead to unimaginable violence. Time and again experts have testified how much more efficient it would be to prevent wars by directly addressing human needs. Vastly less money is required to preventatively solve worldwide population growth and medical care and equitable distribution of food than the present unsustainable cost of extended wars of uncertain outcome.

Giving up war at this moment in history resembles an addict giving up his addiction, only to find he must face not only life without the crutch of drink or drugs, but also address the underlying life-challenges the drink or drugs allowed him to avoid. It involves a painful awakening from a trance, a giving up of resistance to reality as we come to see where and who we really are.

How bizarre that the most powerful nation on earth applies roughly 1800 different bureaucratic organizations to the admittedly serious problem of terrorism, yet it is not politically viable for the presumptive nominee of one of the two major parties to entertain the possibility that global climate change may be affected by human behavior. Even the incumbent is not leading aggressively on the issue. Meanwhile the United States military itself remains the single greatest source of environmental pollution on the planet, let alone the single greatest drain of monetary resources.

Simplistic, deeply distracting “either/or” thinking renders much our political discourse silly and unreal:  to be Christian or Jewish is to be closed to possible good ideas coming out of Islam; to be Democratic is to be closed to possible good ideas coming from Republicans, to be culturally liberal is to be closed to possible good ideas coming from cultural conservatives. The reality of our interdependence suggests instead that people on both sides of any supposed polarity, Arab or Jew, atheist or believer, gay or straight, conservative or progressive, needs to accept that the “other” may have something invaluable to offer as we all try to prevent our collapse as a species. In the energy we expend defining what we are against, we resemble all too closely the extremists we revile.

But even if we think of ourselves as progressive and open, we are mired involuntarily in an against paradigm. Those in the “developed” world who assume we live quite modestly still find ourselves among a 1% who are fortunate to have access to resources much less available to the other 99%. If everyone on earth used the same amount of energy and resources I use, it would take X number of planets to sustain us all, and we only have one.  Because there are too many of me, the way I live, in spite of my good intentions, my token gestures, my recycling, my refusal to use weed-killer, the sheer size of my ecological footprint keeps me stubbornly against the health and sustainability of the whole. I need help and maybe I can help you.

The so-called “advanced” countries can no longer function as “technocratic colonialists” who assume that “our” oil is under the sand of peoples undergoing development in their own unique way—especially if we want terrorism to end.

Life beyond war, so far from looking like a peaceable kingdom, will require the strengthening of global institutions based upon the reality of interdependence and the potential intensification of conflict over limited resources. This challenge will stretch our creativity and good will to the same limit that war has stretched our destructive powers and capacity to dehumanize adversaries.

In so many ways and places, the needful work has already begun, taking form in the millions of bottom-up organizations that are trying sustainable ways of farming, banking, or manufacturing processes that enhance rather than degrade the finite commons. But it is hard to avoid the sense that both leaders and citizens are still in denial about the kinds of transnational institutions and enforcements we will have to create in the next few decades in order to survive.

As long as we continue to participate by default in a Hobbesian war of each against all, as long as we, not only we in the U.S. but we in China and Russia and France and elsewhere refuse to surrender some of our national sovereignty, exceptionalism and entitlement, the total system will continue to degrade. What international body could possibly enforce mandates to mitigate global warming until we have massively internalized a new kind of consent to work together across cultural and economic boundaries for the good of the whole? Trying first to do no harm, we will have to assess our effect upon global systems of incommensurable complexity.

The vast majority of people on the planet are just trying to get through each day in one piece. But for anyone who is in a position of leadership, anyone who has the luxury of time and resources to be an agent of change, one of the most valuable things we can do is to encourage a searching dialogue, especially with people who hold views different from our own, about the utterly changed meaning of self-interest. Such initiatives as the Arab push for reform or the Occupy movement will ultimately fall short unless they are able to address structural change in the light of the new paradigm of interdependence. Perhaps some of the solutions will come from the worldwide military-industrial complex itself, as it begins to apprehend the many dimensions of security that lie beyond war.