Gaza and Maine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Earth, One Humanity, One Spirit

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Two in One

 

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

 

A few examples:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Security Dilemma

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

 

Oppenheimer’s Truth

 

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

Lahaina and Global Reality

Rotarian Al Jubitz, founder of the War Prevention Initiative, has pointed out an ill-starred coincidence: the town of Lahaina was burning on the anniversary day, even at the very hour (11:02 a.m. in Japan is 4:02 p.m. in Maui) that the United States dropped its second nuclear weapon on the people of Nagasaki back in 1945. 

We have no need to rehash the controversy over whether Japan was ready to surrender even before President Truman decided to use those two city-extinguishing “gadgets” (as Oppenheimer and his team called them in an initial euphemism, one followed by many others, including “peacekeeper”) to quicken the end of a brutal war. 

What is infinitely more significant for us is what events like the Lahaina holocaust portend for the looming history of our future on Planet Earth. If Lahaina carries an echo of Pearl Harbor, the fire-bombing of Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, it also ties together the two largest challenges our species faces together, nuclear war and climate catastrophe. 

The two crises are unavoidably and intimately linked. The nine nuclear powers are plunging headlong into the renewal of their nuclear arsenals at just the moment they need to be finding novel ways to cooperate to mitigate global warming. The money and scientific brainpower desperately needed for the conversion to sustainable energy continue to be drained into an international deterrence system which, as we have seen in Ukraine, does nothing to deter the scourge of war. And should deterrence break down completely, no victory is possible for anyone. 

In the case of both challenges, there is no impediment to workable solutions other than the lack of sufficient political will and the resistance of powerful special interests—though these are more than enough to accelerate our drift toward a twin apocalypse. This drift is perpetuated by a media environment where the indictment of a clownish conman for a dangerous but ultimately banal conspiracy to steal an election takes up a quantum more space in the press than more hopeful stories appearing at the same time, such as the children, exercising political will at its finest, demanding that the state of Montana live up to its constitutionally guaranteed environmental protections.

Even as we drift, a new idea has been pressing into our collective mind for almost a century: the fates of everyone on the planet are intertwined. This was always true, but now we know it both through the science of ecology, and through the poetry of seeing the curve of Earth from space. We’re all in this together. We have only one small home, in the shape of a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side.

What I do to conserve energy, or waste it, in my local situation affects everyone else globally, and vice versa. My security is only as strong as the reliability of the circuits and wires in all the nuclear bombs out there, only as strong the training and restraint of the people who maintain them at the ready, only as sure as the communication systems that may be vulnerable to error or misinterpretation, only as healthy as Montana’s willingness to phase out coal. The Golden Rule that appears in all the major world religions turns out to have deep practical, logical, and scientific implications that call for a profound change in the way we think and act.

Our radical interdependence has been reinforced by our explorations of deep space by the Hubbell and Webb telescopes. Everything on earth, human, plant, rock, or the miracle of water, derives from atoms forged in the furnaces of stars. Everything is part of the same emergent story that is 26.7 billion years old. We all come from the same place and face the same fate together.

But our thinking has not caught up to such fundamental principles. We remain religiously sectarian and politically factional, blind to a more planetary vision of our self-interest. The hollowness of our avoidance has become a cavern in which we all sit passively, waiting for experts to find us a way out. 

And there are experts. We know a lot about how to resolve our conflicts nonviolently. We know more than we ever did about how to communicate clearly, how to share our separate assumptions across languages and cultures to ensure understanding. We can model possible futures with our computers. With their help we can see how the potential of nuclear winter renders the whole enterprise of the nuclear arms race irrelevant at best, malevolent in fact.

But even the most knowledgeable and experienced establishment experts (as one of the most revered, Henry Kissinger, admits) have no idea what will unfold once the chaos of conventional war, say, between the United States and China over Taiwan, escalates to the nuclear level. There isn’t a single general or statesman on Earth who can predict what will happen, let alone control it to any one party’s advantage. This reality in itself points to the only solution: survival requires us to go to war against war itself.

In the same way the global climate emergency also invites us to go to war against real enemies like rising levels of greenhouse gases and ocean temperatures, and to mobilize on the level of urgency that the allied powers did during World War II, when our leaders knew that citizens were waiting to be called to sacrifice for a larger cause. The decimation of Lahaina has brought out that spirit of cooperative good will—can we summon a similar spirit to prevent global conflagration and build a world where children can flourish?

Mobilize and Live

 

 

“We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.”  —Kurt Vonnegut

 

One summer when I was in college I boarded a so-called “student ship” for Europe. This slightly down-at-the-heels craft was called the “Groot Beer” (big bear), run by the Holland-America line, and it took eight days to cross the Atlantic. The “Groot Beer” had been built as a so-called “Liberty Ship” during World War II, one of 2700 such vessels designed to keep arms, men and goods crossing to Europe in spite of the deadly depredations of German U-Boats. The average time to construct these 450-foot steel ships was thirty days, and the fastest time was four and a half days! Imagine the urgency, the round-the-clock teamwork of the designers, welders and riveters, tying together the modular sections, slapping on paint, and letting another steel giant slip down the runway into desperately needed service.

 

This is only one example of the extraordinary mobilization of resources, talent and will that defeated the Axis powers. Is there something about us humans 85 years later that prevents a similar mobilization against our real enemies? We possess vastly faster and more efficient productive capabilities than those that were available to Franklin Roosevelt.

 

But the reality of our personal and global interdependence has not yet penetrated our minds deeply enough for us to undergo a similar, now worldwide, mobilization.

 

Fly over any major city at night, and you will see lights burning in hundreds of skyscrapers as if global warming did not exist. Examine the military budgets of the nuclear powers and you will see trillions of dollars pouring into the renewal of nuclear arsenals—weapons for a war no one can win. Establishment foreign policy journals are full of articles about the Ukraine war and its implications for possible hot conflict with China—themselves also wars no one can win, except maybe the arms dealers. In the board rooms of the giant fossil-fuel companies and in the halls of Congress, executives and lobbyists rationalize slowing the inevitable transition to renewables on the basis of their obligation to maximize benefits to shareholders. Our chaotic political-media complex masks the dysfunctional juggernaut of economic and military competition with their own competition for ratings.

 

We humans are an odd species. In spite of all our accomplishments, there seems to be a near-fatal lag between the conditions that threaten us and the actions required for survival.

The future always belongs to the species that can adapt successfully to the conditions that surround them. These conditions now include world-ending weapons and world-stressing heat, floods and storms. Such transnational challenges dictate the nature of the changes we must make. No exceptions for any life form on earth, very much including people, rich or poor.

 

President Biden showed his understanding that we were in a new world when he said in Vilnius a few weeks ago: “When others do better, we do better as well—where we understand that the challenges we face today, from the existential threat of climate change to building a global economy where no one gets left behind, are too great for any one nation to solve on their own, and that to achieve our goals and meet the challenges of this age, we have to work together. The world is changing.  We have a chance to change the dynamic.”

The eco-philosopher Thomas Berry insisted that the earth cannot be saved in pieces. Anyone who puts solar panels on their roof benefits the planet as a whole. Anyone who builds more coal-fired plants to generate electricity degrades the planet as a whole. My survival and yours depends upon both of us, all of us together, doing what is necessary for the survival of all, including trees, fish, bees, plants and rivers, whether you are my adversary or my ally.

 

Military strategists warn generals not to fight the last war—in other words, to adjust their thinking to actual present conditions. But in every war around the world, the reality is we are fighting that last war, and, to an ever-increasing absurd degree, it is completely the wrong war. So how do we start to fight the right war against the right enemy—war against war itself and against global climate catastrophe?

 

A Peace Corp volunteer once said something that sounds like the merest bromide but is profoundly true: “The earth is a sphere, and a sphere has only one side. We are all on the same side.”  Pogo said something similar: “We have met the enemy and he is us.” These snippets of folk wisdom point the way to survival. Because we are all in the same leaky boat, the right war begins with a global climate change in the way we think. Heeding Vonnegut, we can realize the true cost-effectiveness of mobilizing against our real adversaries in a way that leads to survival and even a new flourishing.