Rotary International—a Model for Statecraft

The established paradigm of nation-states formulating their policies on the basis of a limited vision of self-interest is dissolving on every level. Games of chicken test the limits of deterrence, any breakdown of which could be fatal in the nuclear age. Many of our challenges, the climate emergency first among equals, are no longer solvable by individual nations, no matter how powerful.

This radical interdependency points to the need for international laws which, even as they seem to challenge the sovereignty of all countries, will also strengthen the common good. Today nations go to war because we feel the menace of aggression along borders, pressure into spheres of influence, or threats against resource interests—leaving aside the many civil conflicts within nations. Tomorrow a more authentic cause for war might become a given nation failing to maintain ecological resources, like the rain forests which are the lungs of the planet, because that would become a security issue for all—though one might likely assume that a nation or nations inclined to so powerfully punish agents of climate chaos would also realize that war worsens our climate emergency and that might restrain the warmaker.

Indeed, war with such a radically different motivation could, like our ongoing wars today, end up costing more than any expected positive result. If all-out nuclear war is clearly obsolete, so is conventional war, not only because it is a step toward escalation into nuclear war, but also because the disintegration of war (viz. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen) compounds social and ecological chaos, setting up the context for further war.

Are there other models for strengthening security? One is the Marshall Plan. The United States had the hindsight to realize that a second world war had emerged out of our harsh treatment of Germany at the end of World War I and the foresight to obviate that with a generous peace toward Germany. Might it be in the self-interest of nations not only to talk to adversaries, but to jiu-jitsu all parties out of the paradigm of threat and counter-threat by offering Marshall Plan equivalents as a substitute for war rather than something to follow a chimerical “victory”?

Vast regions of Iran suffered major flooding back in April. How might it have changed the present dynamic of high tension if the U.S. had made aggressive offers to help rescue and feed the desperate across rural Iran? Our military represents an enormous logistical potentiality. My friend Adam Cote, a candidate for governor of Maine, managed to be a platoon leader while spearheading the "Adopt an Iraqi Village" program to distribute school supplies, kitchen and household items, toys, clothes and blankets to destitute Iraqis. Generating goodwill rather than fear changes responses, plans, and attitudes.

Another alternative is citizen initiatives. The vast majority of Iranians like and admire America, even as we continue to squeeze them mercilessly on the basis of the U.S. having bailed from a treaty the conditions of which Iran was by all accounts meeting. Iran writ large is not the Revolutionary Guard, just as the United States writ large is not the fever dreams of John Bolton. We desperately need to build relationships on the basis of common interests. It can be done. In the frigid depths of the Cold War, a small group of private citizens, working with the full knowledge of the State Department, successfully arranged a conference of leading Soviet and American scientific experts on accidental nuclear war. Much unforeseen good came out of this exercise, and it played a significant role in easing dangerous tensions.

 With the failure of our gigantic military forces to achieve the vaunted “full-spectrum dominance,” there is an urgent need to make much greater use of non-military structures to meet on-the-ground challenges like literacy, clean water, and peaceful understanding between tribal and religious adversaries. One obvious model is Rotary International.

With 30,000 clubs distributed across 190 countries, Rotary is a planet-wide network of people who are building priceless relationships of friendship and mutual understanding on the basis of six crucial areas of focus: promoting peace, fighting disease, providing clean water, sanitation and hygiene, saving mothers and children, supporting education, and growing local economies.

It has for all practical purposes achieved its current goal number one, pursued doggedly for 20 years in cooperation with the Gates Foundation and others, of eliminating polio from the entire planet. Polio is now down to a few cases in rural Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria. Through models like Rotary a world beyond war is assuming shape, step by slow step.

The superpowers, blessed with apparently unlimited resources to spend on ships and submarines and missiles and bases around the world, irrelevantly jostle for dominance as the planet continues to wither ecologically. Surely a question worth asking is why the United States will not take on the Rotary model as primary, allowing military force to take its place as truly a last resort. Please don’t argue that we can’t afford it. We have explored the moons of Jupiter and the deepest depths of the Pacific, but the Pentagon budget remains a black hole that sucks into itself the very light that accountants try to shine upon it. If we could rewind the tape and could choose between giving the U.S. government the 5 trillion we have spent in Iraq and Afghanistan or giving it to Rotary, I would bet the latter could have provided massively more in real security.

For thousands of years war has been rationalized as unavoidable, worth the risk, a necessary fallback if we don’t get our way or if attacked. War has been used to exploit, to dominate, to exterminate, to acquire, to defend, to expand, to impose, to preserve, to preempt, even as sages keep advocating for the realism and practicality of the golden rule. The United States is strong enough to lead the way into a new paradigm of self-interest, where dominance is replaced by a global network attuned directly to meeting human and ecosystem needs. Anything less threatens everyone’s survival. If we can offer help to our adversaries because we see it as self-interest, a different world is possible.

True Self-Interest

A talk at the Boothbay Harbor Yacht Club

July 9, 2019

Vasili Archipov was an officer on a Soviet submarine near Cuba during the missile crisis of October 1962. American ships were dropping signaling mines on the sub, trying to get it to surface. The Soviets found themselves at too great a depth to communicate with Moscow. They suspected that war might have already broken out. Two officers aboard the sub urged the firing of a nuclear torpedo at the nearby American fleet, which included ten destroyers and an aircraft carrier.

Soviet naval regulations required the full agreement of all three commanding officers to go nuclear. Archipov said no. So here we are, 57 years later, possibly owing our very existence to an almost forgotten moment of stupendous restraint.

At this point you may be wishing you had invited me to talk about bicycling in Tuscany! But I’m here on the basis of a little book I wrote that was published back in 2009. The book chronicles the working methods of a group of dedicated volunteers who participated in a non-political movement called Beyond War. We did important work in the United States, Canada, and the former Soviet Union for about ten years, starting in the early 1980s. Our mission was to educate people on the obsolescence of war as a solution to conflict in the nuclear age.

The book’s cover depicts an atomic explosion turning into a tree. At the time we designed the cover we were simply thinking of the bomb as death and the tree as life. In the last few decades anxieties about nuclear war have decreased as anxieties about the environment have increased. A nuclear explosion changing into a tree suggests a connection between these two overarching issues, the prevention of global war and the achievement of environmental sustainability.

It can feel like the skunk at a garden party to bring up once again the nuclear sword that hangs over us still. Because I taught his children, I knew the publisher of the newspaper that printed my first op-ed piece on nuclear war in the early 1980s. He groused that if people like me didn’t keep bringing it up, nobody would worry about it. This kind of absurd no-nothingism—from a newspaper publisher no less!—made me want to write yet another editorial, and I haven’t stopped since.

Jonas Salk said that our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors. Now that I have five grandchildren and one on the way, they have become my deepest motivation for writing and speaking.

The nuclear weapons issue and the climate issue have been linked from the beginning. Even the very first test of a nuclear bomb contained a climate aspect: some of the Los Alamos physicists were concerned that the first test could actually  ignite the entire atmosphere of the earth. Nevertheless, they persisted.

Then we have the possibility of nuclear winter, the total overlap of the nuclear and climate issues. If one nuclear nation launched an attack of sufficient size to cause nuclear winter, as few as one hundred detonations according to computer models, the attackers themselves would effectively be committing suicide. Retaliation would only double the fatal effects already in play.  

Even conventional war poses grave dangers. A global firestorm would probably begin with a small brushfire—like the Kashmir conflict on the border of India and Pakistan, both nuclear-armed nations, or recent events in the Gulf of Oman.

A Trident sub contains 24 multiple warhead nuclear missiles with a greater combined firepower than all the ordnance detonated in both world wars. It could cause nuclear winter all by itself.

I had a yachting friend, a successful businessman named Jack Lund, who owned a Concordia yawl with varnished topsides. When Jack showed up at one of our seminars, he said he wasn’t worried about nuclear war. He’d simply drive down to South Dartmouth where he kept his boat, and sail off into the sunset. After we sadly set him straight that he would never reached the coast because both he and his beautiful boat would be toast, he thought about it, and became a generous supporter of our organization.

If nuclear war is nuts, deterrence, in the form of the Trident submarine for example, has been our go-to preventive strategy. People say deterrence has prevented World War 3. But it may be more accurate to say deterrence has prevented world war 3 so far. Deterrence seems reliable, but it is a devil’s bargain, because of two serious flaws. 

The first is familiar: the arms race is inherently unstable. Rivals are always competing in a childish game of catch-up. The beat goes on. Various nations are developing hypersonic missiles that can travel halfway around the world in fifteen minutes, or drones capable of tracking down and killing an individual using the location of his cell phone.

The second flaw in deterrence is its fatal contradiction: in order that they never be used, everyone’s weapons must be kept ready for instant use. No errors, misinterpretations, or computer hacks can be tolerated.  Forever.

We have to pretend that events like the failure of the Challenger, Chernobyl, crashes like the two Boeing 737-max 8s, or the Cuban missile crisis itself—never happened and never could.

And it rarely occurs to us that our security interdependence with our fellow nuclear powers like Russia or Pakistan or North Korea means that we are only as secure as their screening out of psychopaths, the reliability of the safety devices on their weapons, the willingness of their soldiers to sequester warheads from theft by non-state actors.

Meanwhile nuclear deterrence doesn’t deter conventional war or acts of terror. Nuclear deterrence didn’t deter 9-11. Russian nukes didn’t deter NATO from moving eastward and trying to recruit countries like Georgia in the Russian sphere of interest. American nukes didn’t deter Putin from moving into Crimea. And many leaders have seriously contemplated the first use of nuclear weapons, as Nixon did when we were losing in Vietnam, or even Britain in the Falklands Islands conflict.

The word “security” contains within it the word “cure,” but there is no cure for nuclear war. There is only prevention.

A further illusion that perpetuates our paralysis is the sense that all this seems far too big to do anything about.

In the early 1980s, NATO and the Soviet bloc were both deploying short and medium range nuclear missiles in Europe. Military personnel were going to have to make fateful tactical decisions within ridiculously short time frames, minutes at most.

My organization refused to tolerate these hair-trigger conditions. Using State Department connections, we reached out to counterparts in the Soviet Union and organized a seminar for high-level Soviet and American scientific experts.

The Wall Street Journal wrote a scathing op-ed asserting that Beyond War was a naive dupe of the KGB.  Nevertheless, we persisted. The scientists from the two superpowers hammered out a series of papers together on accidental nuclear war that became “Breakthrough,” the first book published simultaneously in U.S. and the U.S.S.R. 

Because one of the Soviet scientists became a Gorbachev advisor, Gorbachev himself read the book. Reagan and Gorbachev went on to sign the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, greatly reducing East-West tensions in Europe—the same treaty which Washington and Moscow are now sadly in the process of abolishing.

Did “Breakthrough” play a role in ending the cold war? Most people would find the book itself rather dry and boring. What did make a difference was the warm and lasting relationships built among those Soviet and American scientists as they worked together on a shared challenge.

In 1989 beyond war gave its prestigious yearly award to Reagan and Gorbachev for improving the relationship between the superpowers. It was the one peace award Reagan ever accepted, and he was only willing to receive it in the privacy of the oval office. The award to Reagan cost Beyond War significant financial support from the progressive left, but Reagan deserved it.

Thirteen years after the Wall Street Journal mocked Beyond War’s initiatives, they published an op-ed written by Kissinger, Shultz, Nunn and Perry, not exactly your average peaceniks, advocating for the strategic uselessness of nuclear weapons and for their total abolition. In 2017, 122 nations endorsed a U.N. treaty outlawing all nuclear weapons. None of the nine nuclear powers have signed.

Sensible international policy would convene generals and diplomats from these nine nations to begin permanent talks, because the issue is not bad North Korean nuclear weapons versus good American nuclear weapons.The weapons themselves are the real enemy. Nuclear winter would make an excellent conversation-starter for the assembled military leaders.

Former Secretary of Defense Perry even argues that we would be more, not less, secure if we completely eliminated one whole leg of our nuclear triad—the antiquated missiles in silos in the Midwest. If that sounds imprudent, see if you can guess whose obituary this comes from:

“As the Soviet Union imploded, the Nuclear Threat Reduction Program provided millions of American tax dollars to secure and dismantle weapons of mass destruction and related technology inherited by the former soviet states of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. 

More than 7,500 strategic nuclear warheads were deactivated, and more than 1,400 ballistic missiles that could be launched by land or submarine were destroyed.

This reduced the chances that terrorists could buy or steal a weapon and provided jobs for soviet nuclear scientists who otherwise might have gone to work for Iran or another state eager to develop a nuclear program.” 

This is from an obituary for Richard Lugar, Republican senator from Indiana. With Sam Nunn he sponsored the Nunn-Lugar Nuclear Threat Reduction Program. Nunn-Lugar is what authentic peace looks like—actively, doggedly pursuing better alternatives than war. Richard Lugar demonstrated in hard-nosed practical terms the reversibility of the arms race.

The ultimate model for this kind of enlightened self-interest was of course the Marshall Plan to restore the European economy after the devastation of World War 2. The bank which makes it possible for Germany today to undertake its aggressive conversion to renewable energy was modeled on FDR’s Reinvestment Finance Corporation, which enabled most of the New Deal’s major projects. The German bank’s initial capital was financed by—the Marshall Plan.

What if the U.S. had thought in Marshall Plan terms right after 9-11? Suppose we had kept our heads—for sure, very difficult to do under such horrific circumstances—and instead of giving in to a crude impulse for vengeance, we pledged to do something to directly lessen the suffering and chaos in the Middle East?

The conservative estimate of what the U.S. may already have spent on our hapless military stalemates in Iraq and Afghanistan is 5.5 trillion dollars.Five trillion dollars is far more than enough to solve all the basic human needs challenges on earth. We could feed, educate, and provide clean water and health care to all, with plenty left over to build a 100% carbon-neutral energy system worldwide.

At my Rotary Club, we constantly hear inspiring stories from small groups of dedicated volunteers making heroic efforts to scrape together enough funds to build an orphanage in Cambodia, or a single clean water well for a hospital in Haiti.  Imagine what Rotary, with 30,000 clubs in 190 countries, could do with five trillion dollars.

Nuclear weapons will do nothing to resolve either the refugee crisis, or the global climate emergency, which together will be the most probable causes of future conflict. Instead of our addiction to runaway military spending and unworkable military initiatives, what if we gave some thought to how to do Marshall Plans while skipping the war that usually comes first?

What does it mean to be adversaries on a small planet vulnerable to self-destruction by war or environmental catastrophe? The only way to break the chain of the endless arms race is to completely reverse it like Senator Lugar and use our abundant resources to work with and do good for our adversaries. What country will begin this if not our own?

War today feels like two people fighting in a building that’s on fire—or half-underwater. Iran was hit by terrible nationwide flash floods this year. Why not use the powerful logistical capacities of the U.S. military to offer help, confounding the hard-liners in Tehran? Please don’t say we can’t afford it. We have explored the depth of the Mariana trench and the outer moons of Jupiter, but the Pentagon budget remains an impenetrable black hole.

Nations often need to pose enemies in order to feel good about themselves—we identify ourselves as righteous and exceptional, in contrast to  some convenient “other,” who gets stereotyped and dehumanized, ultimately justifying war. Hard-liners in adversarial countries bring out the worst in each other, in a closed echo-chamber of threat and counter-threat.

Our experience with Beyond War confirmed that the best antidote of all to us-and-them tendencies is working with others, including adversaries—especially adversaries—toward shared goals. The mother of all shared goals is restoring and sustaining the ecological health of our small planet.

The astronomer Fred Hoyle said that once a photograph of the whole earth from outside becomes available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose. Hoyle’s idea was a way of restating in universal terms the working principle behind the Marshall Plan—the possibility of enlarging our sense of true self-interest clear out to the planetary level.

Astronauts from many nations have had their conception of self-interest mystically enlarged by viewing the earth from space. There are a couple of ways we could all replicate the rarified experience of the astronauts.

One would be if we learned that a large asteroid was on a collision course with earth. Instantly we would understand what has always been true—that we’re all in this together. Our nuclear weapons might even finally become useful to deflect such a body. 

A second way to rapidly expand our notion of self-interest would be if alien beings made contact with us. As with the asteroid, we would know ourselves as one human species.Instead of Shia and Sunni, Arab and Jew, it would be instant planetary patriotism.

But there’s a third way we could become planetary citizens, and that is through what is actually happening to us right now. It’s hardly news that we’re facing a group of challenges that simply cannot be addressed by any one nation, no matter how powerful. We can each make our own list—coral dying, ocean waters rising and warming, the Gulf of Maine heating up more rapidly than anywhere else on earth, tropical rain forests decimated, whole cities flooded or whole towns burned to the ground, viruses that catch a ride between continents on airplanes, micro-plastics ingested by fish and moving up the food chain.

Many of these challenges are so interrelated that the ecophilosopher Thomas Berry argued that the planet cannot be saved in pieces. It is hard to imagine a more challenging assertion. The latest on this front is the U.N. report on biodiversity threats, which are serious and worldwide. The ongoing extinction of many species of birds, insects and frogs is a function of total planetary change and must be addressed with a total planetary response.

The planet cannot be saved in pieces. The moribund, yet potentially indispensable, United Nations sits there, waiting to be reformed and revitalized for the transcendent levels of international cooperation that will be required.

Workers in India are suffering heatstroke merely by remaining outdoors for a few hours in temperatures above 125 degrees. To survive, the worker in Mumbai must take refuge in an air-conditioned space, and his air-conditioners are throwing carbon into the atmosphere which will in turn raise temperatures in Scottsdale, Arizona.

What is dawning on us as a species is that, like Vasili Archipov during the missile crisis, each one of us bears responsibility for the whole, not only the whole planet, but the whole planet through all future time. There’s no way not to make a difference. Just by existing we make a difference. The real question is what kind of difference do we want to make?

Technical solutions to global sustainability challenges are available and ready to scale up, including capturing carbon from the atmosphere.Yes they will cost a boatload of money—but perhaps less than five trillion dollars.

Patti and I drove to this talk in an all-electric Chevrolet  with a 300-mile range. We recharge it with the solar panels on the roof of our house. Auto manufacturers stand to make a bundle on electric cars. Far from being in conflict, sustainability and aggressive entrepreneurship await the making of vast fortunes in solar, wind, battery technology, drip irrigation agriculture, or the renewal of our railroads. But the changed context of profitability is profound: we cannot achieve a healthy economy on a withering planet.

The Ecuadorean constitution gives rights formerly restricted to human beings to rivers and mountains and wildlife, because if they don’t flourish we won’t either. If corporations can be people, why can’t rivers?

Costa Rica will be using 100% renewable energy in a few more years. The states of California and New York are heading in a similar direction.  Countries like Bhutan and Belize have set aside half their land mass as natural preserves. The green party in Germany, once on the fringe, is now the dominant party there.

What feels politically, economically and technologically improbable today will transform rapidly into the inevitability of tomorrow—a tomorrow in which not only corporate charters, but every share in our equity portfolio will have a green factor built right in as its primary measure of value.

I once asked the headmaster of the elite school where I taught if I could give a course on cosmology. A few days later he told me awkwardly—and snobbishly—I’m awfully sorry but cosmetology just doesn’t quite fit in with the image of our school.

Cosmology is a hifalutin word for worldview. The consumerist and competitive cosmology of the developed world is paradoxical, because of course market systems have done enormous good, enlarging prosperity and reducing hunger and poverty. And more people reaching the middle class leads to the desirable global outcome of families having less children. 

The downside is that a consumerist cosmology that measures rising aggregate prosperity only in terms of gross domestic product, leads only to more environmental degradation, and finally to less overall prosperity—unless our definition of prosperity undergoes a profound evolution.

Now that the power to blow things up has become obsolete, nations will have to measure their security and wealth by the degree of their contribution to the total well-being of the earth system. This is what Thomas Berry calls the Great Work, the great next step. This is the most crucial philosophical idea of the 21^st century, because it represents both our path to survival and an optimistic redefinition of our human function in the 5 billion-year-old unfolding story of our planet.

Our primary function as humans will be to steward and celebrate the extraordinary beauty and intelligence of the natural system out of which we emerged. As we learn how to restore the planet, it’s easy enough to picture cleaner air and stabilized oceans. But it’s harder to see how we ourselves might evolve if we succeeded. Wouldn’t this strengthening of the living system also strengthen the strengtheners? Wouldn’t it give our children increased energy to tackle any challenge together? We have been living under sentence of death for 75 years, first with the existential threat of atomic weapons and now with the gradually looming threat of climate catastrophe. We have only the vaguest idea to what extent these looming challenges have affected our individual and collective psyches, and what joy could enter our childrens’ lives if such anxieties diminished.

Learning to measure our true wealth in terms of our contribution to the health of the living system is similar to the slave-owning founding fathers daring to say out loud “all men are created equal.” They had no idea of the explosively far-reaching implications of that assertion.

Same with this new way of measuring our wealth and power. We will simply have to marinate in it and watch its implications unfold in all our institutions, our churches, our politics, our universities, our corporations.

I‘ll finish with one other little sea story.

In my work with Beyond War, I had the privilege of becoming friends with a gentle Yankee aristocrat named Albert Bigelow. Bert was a Harvard graduate, a blue water sailor and a former United States Naval Commander. In 1958, Bert and four other men tried to sail their ketch, aptly named the Golden Rule, into the U.S. Pacific proving grounds in the Marshall Islands, to witness against atmospheric nuclear testing.

They were stopped at sea not far from Honolulu and served sixty days in jail for their act of civil disobedience.

Five years later President Kennedy, Premier Khrushchev and Prime Minister Macmillan signed the atmospheric test ban treaty, since ratified by 123 nations. I mention Bert in order to make a final connection between nuclear weapons and our climate emergency. The Marshall Islands were rendered almost uninhabitable by the atomic testing that Bert was attempting to stop back in the 1950s. Now these same Marshall Islands are in danger of disappearing altogether as the Pacific gradually rises. Their people have been brought nearly to destruction first by one, and then by the other, of the two great challenges we’ve been pondering.

Will we—we as Americans, and we as one species on one planet—rise to both challenges?

All Good Art is Protest Art

The original meaning of the word ‘protest’ in old French was: to make a solemn declaration, and even before that, going back to Latin, to witness, to declare publicly.

I like the idea of protest as a solemn declaration and witness, because that leaves us free to distinguish protest from anger. We can protest with a spirit of good will, even with love.

It’s also true that at the solitary end of the continuum of protest are single human cries of helpless outrage, the hotel maid being molested by Harvey Weinstein, the Muslim refugee assaulted by a mob of white nationalist thugs.

Expanding from individual to the group takes us into the controversial realm of identity politics, where each separate religious or ethnic or racial category asserts its justification for protesting threats to its essential dignity.

For example, Black Lives Matter. In the light of the deep structural racism in the United States, it’s impossible, for me at least, not to identify and sympathize deeply with the Black Lives Matter movement.

Whether we subscribe to identity politics or not, every time the police shoot a black man or boy under murky circumstances, it gives a new lease to the polarization between races that has been a fundamental theme of American history from slavery forward.

Meanwhile we remain in this awkward in-between state in race relations where Black Lives Matter is often countered with the obvious bromide that All Lives Matter—as if Black Lives Matter and All Lives Matter were somehow in conflict.

What’s really in conflict seems to be various modes of identification. Am I an American citizen first and only then someone of a particular race? Of course it would be healthier if we got to the point where all of us could identify first of all as Americans. This was clearly the vision of Martin Luther King.

An even larger context of identification is available, and necessary at this moment in time—the indisputable fact that we are one humanity, living on one small planet—where, someday, racism will be seen as a tragic illusory social construct that obscured this deeper unity.

Going even beyond the human, we might ask, who will protest for natural phenomena, for rivers that have become polluted? In Ecuador and elsewhere, rivers are now given constitutional rights to flow freely and cleanly.

Our biggest international challenge has become climate. Even nuclear war has been redefined, by nuclear winter, as a way to effect climate change suddenly rather than gradually.

In the case of our own heavy use of resources in the advanced industrial countries, as Pogo said, we have met the enemy and he is—us. Our own choices are intimately involved in solutions. How do I protest the size of my own ecological footprint? And how, or where, do we protest overpopulation in the advanced nations, where each person uses multiple times the resources of people in developing countries?

In any case it is becoming clearer every day that our materialist, consumerist values are not working for us. They are unsustainable.

In his watershed 1967 speech at Riverside Church shortly before he was assassinated, Dr. King took the considerable risk of connecting domestic conditions in the United States with the Vietnam war, which allowed him to show the interrelationship of racism, militarism and materialism—our nation’s continuing trefecta of original sin.

King dared to connect American racism toward blacks with racism against Asians. This continues in the racism of western cultural attitudes toward peoples in places like Iraq, Afghanistan or Yemen.

50 people blown up by terrorists in western countries is front-page news for weeks. 50 people blown up in Afghanistan elicits a shrug and a yawn in the western press. Here might be a good place to apply the slogan “All Lives Matter.”

King was inspired by Gandhi, and Gandhi’s civil disobedience tactics in turn by Thoreau and so on back to Magna Carta-type moments when the absolute rights of kings and emperors were first called into question, all the way back to strikes of workmen building the pyramids.

The mansion of protest has many rooms, depending upon whether one grows up as male or female, or privileged white, or not so privileged black, poor or hungry or wheelchair-bound or transgender or Muslim.

So many contentious issues and questions arise. Should abortion be restricted? Who decides that? Are corporations people? Is money speech? Is the supreme court above politics? In each case one’s personal spectrum of indignation, or loving activism and witness, is going to be different.

There was a recent controversy over whether the white female artist Dana Schutz has the right to make a painting of the black civil rights martyr Emmett Till.  It is difficult to understand why people spend energy on such a seemingly artificial controversy.

In the Marlon Brando film about biker gangs, “The Wild Ones” someone asks him what he is rebelling against. He replies “Whaddaya got?”

My own primary issue for the past fifty years has been nuclear war prevention.

If one is going to protest something, I would assert this is just a touch more significant than whether a white artist has the right to paint a painful event in black civil rights history.

Brian Swimme’s “Journey of the Universe” addresses the great story that is the context for our human presence, the 13.85 billion year story of the evolution of stars and galaxies, planets, life, and self-conscious life that now has brought such dire peril upon itself.

From the perspective of this story, self-aware life arriving at a level of technological sophistication where they can utterly destroy themselves constitutes an event of cosmological significance.

I’d like to advance the notion of the Trident submarine as a quasi-cosmological event, which might seem an odd way to think about it.

The Russians were the first to combine a nuclear submarine with a nuclear ballistic missile. The American equivalent, the Ohio class Trident, is a 560 foot technological marvel. It contains 24 multiple warhead nuclear missiles with a greater combined firepower than all the weapons used in both world wars. In fact, it may be possible for one such submarine all by itself to cause a planetary nuclear winter. The British and the Russians and others have equivalent programs.

The theory behind such weapons is of course deterrence, which contains a built-in performative contradiction: so that they will never be used, they must be kept ready for instant use. This requires that we gloss over the reality that every weapon ever invented, including nuclear weapons, has ended up being used in war.

Not only global security, including our own, but all human existence, including our own, depends upon no one among the nine nuclear powers making a mistake, no one ever misinterpreting an incoming signal, no piece of electronic equipment malfunctioning or becoming vulnerable to cyber-attack.

Simple logic and basic probability theory tell us that such perpetual flawlessness is far too much to ask of complex systems and fallible humans. Nevertheless governments enthusiastically accept this devil’s bargain and we citizens passively put up with it.

My partner and I were showing our grandchildren around Washington D.C. the same week that Trump gave his bizarre speech to the boy scouts.

A congressional aide was giving us a tour of the Capital building. At one point he paused to confer with an aide to the president. I figured this was as close as I was ever going to get, and so I cast aside my inhibitions and risked asking the question that has been on a lot of minds: just how accessible are the nuclear codes to the President? 

The aide gave me a frozen stare and reminded me that Mr. Trump was the duly-elected head of state.

Later I happened to read Daniel Ellsberg’s great book about nuclear strategy, The Doomsday Machine.

It turns out it’s a myth that only the president can begin a nuclear war.  Deterrence could not possibly work if that were the case, so there have to be others down the chain of command who can retaliate if for any reason the president is unable to. This seems to be true with Pakistan’s battlefield nuclear weapons, which are under the autonomous command of field generals.

The fact is that no individual, no matter how sane and stable, and no matter where in the chain of command, should be put in the position of deciding to launch a nuclear war.

It is hard to believe the military in the various nations are not well acquainted with nuclear winter. On some level they must know the game is over—forever. Deterrence, with its endless dynamic of “we build—they build,” offers no way out of omnicide. The 122 nations that have signed the U.N. declaration against these weapons have accepted this.

In terms of the possibility of effecting change, it’s always helpful to remember that many nations have endured and continue to endure much worse than what we are facing now in our country.

At opportune moments small groups of trained non-violent activists obtain unexpected leverage as they merge with larger groups of protesters.

One of my mentors once told me that the actual translation from the Aramaic of “Blessed are the meek” from the Sermon on the Mount is: blessed are the trained.

Activists have won tremendous victories against oppression using some of the hundreds of non-violent strategies catalogued by the great contemporary tactician of non-violence, Gene Sharp. Very few Americans have heard of Gene Sharp, who was a professor of political science at U. Mass and lived in East Boston.

Sharp’s tactics have been a bible for many non-violent revolutions around the world, such as the People Power revolution in the Philippines against Marcos, or the mothers of the disappeared in Chile who helped to bring down Pinochet, or the womens’ movement that won non-violently in Liberia. The overall record of non-violent campaigns is as good or better as violent ones.

There’s another cosmologically-tinged event we can recall, complementary to the destructive capacity of a ballistic missile submarine.

On February 15, 2003, the largest protest march in the history of the world occurred in 600 cities around the globe.

Everyone knew that the United States had decided to invade Iraq, using the shaky rationale that there had to be weapons of mass destruction there somewhere.

Our government was about to choose a cynical,violent and confusing overreaction to the horrors of 9/11, the unintended consequences of which remain with us still. 

While that 2003 march failed to stop a misguided and unnecessary war, it demonstrated a fundamental impulse to unity and peace in people everywhere, a unity which may still be a dream, but is also a functional reality. This worldwide march was something new, not the German tribe or the French tribe or the American tribe, but the human tribe.

Mass marches can often be festive. Citizens discover to their delight and relief that many others share their views.My partner and I walked in Portland, Maine with her grandchildren in both the women’s march in January of 2017 and the march for sane gun regulation after the Parkland shootings.

Yes, after the marchers go home, the business of working for democratic change remains messy, slow, frustrating, and endless. But witnessing together can inspire us for the more mundane and necessary work.

Meanwhile many of our would-be kings and emperors around the world continue to be indifferent to or actively hostile toward the health of the earth and its billions of striving humans sharing universal hopes and fears. 

We are surrounded everywhere by the consequences of the violent misuse of power, in the callous slaughters in Syria, or Myanmar, or the Congo, or South Sudan.

Setting aside actual violence, when the President’s lawyer, Mr. Giuliani, asserts that white collar crime is victimless, something primal is revealed about the hypocrisy and rank injustice of established structures of power.

These structures mock the principle that all are created equal, with a perverse version of the Golden Rule: those with the gold make the rules.

Of course artists have always lent their gifts to clarifying such issues. Last year there was a large exhibition of protest art that went back centuries on display at the British museum.

Last year also we took in a retrospective at the Whitney of protest art in America in the sixties. It contained many provocative works documenting opposition to sexism in the art world, race prejudice, and our endless, futile wars. 

The exhibition also underlined the challenges of making art based upon a response to immediate events and discrete social issues.

Though sometimes amusing, it felt more like a thin documentation of an eventful time that artists were compelled to witness as best they could, rather than an expression of the whole personalities of gifted creative people.

Back in August, a group of British artists found out that a London museum exhibiting their works of protest art had held a reception for a defense company in order to raise cash. The artists protested by removing their work from the museum—a kind of self-cancelling protest . . .

Even after we have witnessed against the horrors of militarism, or racial injustice, immutable aspects of reality remain, including disease, absurd ill-fortune, and death. 

This goes all the way back to Job. How do we protest the absurdity that is woven into reality at a level even deeper than potentially avoidable injustice? In the old religious language, God’s stern response to Job’s protestations was, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

To say it another way, our protests take place in the context of a power greater than ourselves, whether we end up calling it God or the Universe or the Tao or Jung’s synchronicity or the unnamable, a mystery so profound and humbling that the purpose of many of our religious and cultural rituals is to try to reduce it to something comprehensible.

The arts are one of the ways to acknowledge the mystery in all its incommensurability.

Artists often begin in a state of unease or vague dissatisfaction, what Freud called ‘ordinary unhappiness.’ We label the ordinary unhappiness of certified artistic geniuses ‘divine discontent’—a sublimation of outrage or wonder into the clarity of aesthetic form—like Beethoven composing his late string quartets in a state of total job-like deafness, illness, and solitude. Still he called the slow movement of the 15^th quartet “a holy song of thanks to the divinity.” In the greatest art protest and grateful affirmation become one.

Art emerges from the context of our strange birthright, the beauty and grace that suffuses the mystery along with absurdity and tragedy.

This beauty, most familiarly experienced in nature or in erotic or romantic or spiritual longing, can torment us as much as the worst injustice. At the very least beauty reminds us that the mystery of life is not defined only by death and ill-fortune.  

One of the judges in the Hague overseeing the trial of Slobodan Milosevic said that to recover his sanity after a day of listening to the catalog of atrocities he would go to the local museum and soak himself in the Vermeers.

W.H. Auden said—debatably— “poetry makes nothing happen,” but art in itself and by itself can protest aspects of reality that are intolerable.

Camus’s extraordinary polemic The Rebel includes a brief section on metaphysical rebellion and art, where he argues that great art protests the unsatisfactory elements of reality by correcting or completing them. He meant that art does that purely by means of art itself—by means of the closed system of the novel, the poem, the painting, where the artist can be totally responsible for the work.

So for Camus, every effective work of art is a kind of protest.

Perhaps the most complete response to the strange mix of the intolerable and the beautiful of life can be found in song.

The composers and songwriters are the most consoling companions when one needs art that does justice to life in all its paradox—in our own time songsters like that greatest of American protesters, Pete Seeger, or Leonard Cohen—or my contemporary Bob Dylan.

Even an early classic Dylan song like “With God on Our Side” remains timelessly universal and relevant, though Dylan quickly began to chafe under the limits of being labeled a mere commentator on the issues of the day. Dylan’s genius pushes restlessly to get beyond such a limited conception of his own possibilities.

You can see this happening at one of his early press conferences. A reporter asked the young Dylan how many other protest singers existed.

Dylan thought, then replied, "about 136." Dylan’s sardonic smile should have been a warning, but the reporter persisted. "You say about 136 -- or exactly 136?" "either 136 or 142," Dylan answers helpfully.

Dylan went on to write well over four hundred songs and counting over a lifetime. Dylan’s music and the poetry of his words consistently manage to integrate disparate realities, violence and peacefulness, politics and private life, innocence and corruption, loving kindness and rank hostility.

I thought the Nobel award to Dylan was inspired—though it was amusing to hear Philip Roth quip, with a nice edge of Rothian bitterness, shortly before he died: “Next year maybe it’ll be Peter, Paul and Mary.”

Fifty years later Dylan is still writing gorgeous pieces like “Mississippi,” “Not Dark Yet,” “Things Have Changed”— rueful musical protests of life’s inevitable outrages.

Simply presenting a new vision of what ought to be can be a powerful form of protest. We protest injustice and cruelty because we sense, by way of the truth, beauty and goodness in nature or the arts, or in the people we love and admire, that a more just world is possible.

The success this past summer of the documentaries about Fred Rogers and Ruth Bader Ginsburg testifies to this longing, which is especially strong right now.

No less than Jesus himself taught that we should “resist not evil, but overcome evil with good.”

In a similar vein, Buckminster Fuller thought it was as important to create an attractive new model than to tear down an obsolete or corrupt one. Don’t waste energy, he said, trying to destroy the dinosaur, but instead focus on creating the gazelle.

I volunteered for 30 years for Beyond War, an organization that believed that education and building relationships with adversaries was a better use of one’s time and energy than protest. Obviously protesting and building relationships with adversaries doesn’t have to be an either/or. It can be a both/and.

Beyond War used to get sniped at by both the left and the right. The left thought we weren’t angry enough, and the right thought we were a bunch of idealistic commie pinkos.

But I am proud of how, in the 1980s, Beyond War brought together teams of high-level scientists from both Russia and America to write a book about accidental nuclear war and how best to prevent it. The really important element of the book, called "Breakthrough," was that lasting relationships were formed between Russian and American scientists. The Russian team included Gorbachev’s science advisor, and so Gorbachev himself read it.

Wallace Stevens defined one of the subtlest forms of protest in art when he said in a poem called “Man Carrying Thing,” that “a poem should resist the intelligence almost successfully.”

What that might mean is that popular entertainment is full of formulaic manipulative tropes which confirm easy assumptions about violence, heroism, patriotism, and most of all love.

The world of authentic art challenges such assumptions with ambiguities, putting us back in touch with the depths of mystery by undermining our tendency to understand too quickly.

Here’s a quotation by Lewis Hyde I like which corraborates my assertion that all good art is protest art.

“Art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power.

Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective . . .

So long as artists speak the truth, they will, whenever the government is lying, or has betrayed the people, become a political force whether they intend to or not.”

If I had to pick one novel that in my judgment paints an accurate picture of how things are in all their complexity, it might be Saul Bellow’s 1970 novel “Mr. Sammler’s Planet.” It satisfies both Lewis Hyde’s and Camus’s criteria for truthfulness.

As for the visual arts, the great flourishing of action painting and sculpture in the fifties and sixties in Manhattan—art which refused to be easy and accessible—was in part a response to the condition of potential atomic extinction with which most of us have been living since we were born.

The work of greats like Louise Nevelson and Jackson Pollock swept aside the leftist socially engaged art between the world wars in favor of all-out statements of artistic identity.

Mark Rothko asserted that only art on the level of a new myth could constitute an adequate response to the threat of nuclear annihilation.

This is where the heroic effort of a painter like Giorgio Morandi becomes interesting in its apparent unwillingness to become socially engaged. What could be more harmless, more utterly useless and irrelevant, than Morandi’s lifetime involvement with his pathetic cast-off bottles and bowls? And yet his work as a whole provides an immense spiritual reservoir—especially for his fellow artists.

A painter like the late Neil Welliver, one of the finest artists associated with the Maine landscape, was a protest artist in at least two senses. First, he endured a horrific series of personal tragedies that included loss of more than one of his children, and a fire that destroyed hundreds of his paintings.

After his son was apparently murdered in Thailand, Welliver did a series of eloquent late paintings of burnt-over woods—though he said he didn’t know whether the death of his son had influenced his choice of motif. The cogency and serenity of his work is an implicit protest against and creative response to his Job-like personal trials.

Welliver’s depiction of the power and beauty of untouched nature is also one long solemn declaration as to what’s at stake in the assault on the biological world, our environmental support system.

The art of visionaries like Morandi or Rothko or Nevelson or Welliver becomes valuable insofar as it speaks of worlds and possibilities that may be uncapturable by the headline news. The serenity of a Morandi painting protests the tiresome, banal drumbeat of historical catastrophe with a human wholeness.

To return to the political, there is one other form of solemn declaration, of protest, that fortunately is available to us, and that is to vote.

I’ll end with the last stanza of the great Auden poem of protest against fascism, “September 1, 1939.” Unfortunately, it remains all too relevant to our situation today:

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the just

Exchange their messages:

May i, composed like them

Of eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

What's Past is Prologue (?)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html?action=click&module=Trending&pgtype=Article&region=Footer&contentCollection=Trending

Dear Friends,

While we feel may feel vulnerable to Trump Derangement Syndrome for many reasons, it is important to keep our eyes upon the main event, a crucial chapter of which is laid out in this solidly written piece of historical reporting from the Times.

It is important because it is an accurate picture of who we are as a species in this era: short-sighted, deluded by a privileged sense of invulnerability, prone to denial and obstruction of truth, stubborn, indifferent if we are not directly affected, reluctant to consider the fate of fellow suffering humans, let alone our own progeny both in the near future and in the distant, almost unimaginable far future—and utterly dependent upon the special courage and heroism of a very small number of people, like the climate scientist James Hansen, who refused to be muffled or sidetracked. It is hard to look at ourselves in this picture, but necessary if we are going to act effectively, without giving in to the passivity of despair after decades of drifting in the passivity of indifference.

Though the article does not cover this, the issue of climate is inseparable from the issue of war, and the opportunity cost of expending vast funds on military equipment needed for the very mitigation of negative climate effects that will cause more wars.

The future foretold in this article has arrived. Along with fury at the criminal stupidity of pulling out of the Paris Accords, I also cannot help feeling uneasily complicit—can you?— in the fate of hundreds of millions of fellow humans who are drowning in the floods of Bangladesh, succumbing to heatstroke in the streets of Mumbai, or losing everything in the fires in California or Greece. The relationship between their fates and our own choices has become inescapable.

I recall a seminar, one which included climate in its themes, I attended some decades ago during the time of the events recounted in the article, where a participant, a man in his thirties, suddenly burst into tears. When asked by seminar leader Don Fitton what was troubling him, he sobbed, "The trees! What will happen to the trees!"  I remember thinking he was annoyingly over the top, a bit of a self-dramatist. Now I think his response was prophetic and deeply sane, at least in comparison to my own smug condescension. In fact, the trees are probably going to be fine, as they flourish on increased concentrations of carbon dioxide. Too many of our fellow humans, let alone our children and grandchildren, maybe not so much . . .

There is enormous solace and promise in the scientific story of the universe and distant past history of Earth, in which still-mysterious powers are guiding the direction of a further surprising unfolding. Life has come through so much, even if the changes were accompanied by cataclysmic destruction in such meta-events as the five major mass extinctions. We are in the midst of the sixth—20,000 species a year ghosting into nevermore. Industrial society has given us many boons, but we must now apply our immense mammalian creativity, our deep innate capacity to care, to figuring out what our role might be as humans in the total system, beyond consumerism—not only to stop degrading our only home but to bring forth the restorative powers that are already rooted in the gorgeous intelligence of the natural world, waiting to nourish us if we can work with and not against them. As Paul Hawken has pointed out, millions of committed people are participating in organizations whose mission aligns with those powers.

I urge you to send this link to the Times article to as many people as possible.

In hope,

Winslow