Planet of the Apes

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By Robert Wright
The New York Times

This week the mystery deepened: Why no space aliens?

On Tuesday, scientists reported finding the most “Earthlike” planet ever, Gliese 581c. Its sun is cooler than ours, but also closer, so Gliese is in that climatic comfort zone conducive to water — hence to life, hence to evolution, hence to intelligent beings with advanced technology. Yet they never phone.

It’s actually a serious question, long pondered by sci-fi types. Since a civilization whose technological evolution was ahead of ours by even a few centuries could contact us from far, far away (and certainly from Gliese, a mere 20 light-years away), what does it mean that we haven’t heard a thing from any corner of this vast universe?

That life got started on few or no other planets? That on other planets giant asteroids kept pressing evolution’s reset button? Or, distressingly, that when civilizations reach the technological level we’ve reached, they tend to wipe themselves out, or at least bomb themselves back into the Stone Age?

O.K., that last one is pretty wild speculation. But you have to admit that current events aren’t wildly at odds with it. There’s an apocalyptic vibe in the zeitgeist, and it’s not hard to imagine how the technological sophistication that got us to the brink of global civilization could be our undoing. Let us count the ways.

(1) Classic nuclear Armageddon. This threat is in remission. Economic interdependence dulls enmity among nuclear powers, and crisis-averting lines of communication have gotten stronger since the cold war. Still, things can change.

(2) Eco-apocalypse. Solving climate change and other global environmental problems is a political nightmare. Nations are tempted to play “free rider” and not join in the sacrifices, since they’ll share the rewards anyway. The good news is that past environmental problems have featured negative-feedback loops: when negligence makes the problem bad enough, political will appears.

(3) Terrorism. Alas, the negative-feedback loop — bad outcomes lead to smart policies — may not apply here. We reacted to 9/11 by freaking out and invading one too many countries, creating more terrorists. With the ranks of terrorists growing — amid evolving biotechnology and loose nukes — we could within a decade see terrorism on a scale that would make us forget any restraint we had learned from the Iraq war’s outcome. If 3,000 deaths led to two wars, how many wars would 300,000 deaths yield? And how many new terrorists?

Terrorism alone won’t wipe out humanity. But with our unwitting help, it could strengthen other lethal forces.

It could give weight to the initially fanciful “clash of civilizations” thesis. Muslim states could fall under the control of radicals and opt out of what might otherwise have become a global civilization. Armed with nukes (Pakistan already is), they would revive the nuclear Armageddon scenario. A fissure between civilizations would also sabotage the solution of environmental problems, and the ensuing eco-calamity could make people on both sides of the fissure receptive to radical messages. The worse things got, the worse they’d get.

So while no one of the Big Three doomsday dynamics is likely to bring the apocalypse, they could well combine to form a positive-feedback loop, a k a the planetary death spiral. And the catalyst would be terrorism, along with our mishandling of it.

Disheartened? There’s more: to avoid mishandling things, we may have to forsake our beloved evolutionary heritage.

We may more often have to resist the retributive impulse that worked fine in the environment where it evolved but now often misfires. We may have to appreciate how our moral condemnations — which can help start wars — are subtly biased by our primate brains in self-serving ways that, in some contexts, no longer serve our selves.

We may have to cultivate our moral imagination, putting ourselves in the shoes of people who hate us. The point wouldn’t be to validate the hate, but to understand it and so undermine it. Still, this understanding involves seeing how, from a certain point of view, hating us “makes sense” — and our evolved brains tend to resist that particular epiphany.

If salvation indeed means transcending engrained irrationality, then the odds may well be against us. But look at the bright side: if you do run into any space aliens, they’re likely to be reasonable creatures.

Robert Wright, author of “Nonzero,” is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and runs the Web site Bloggingheads.tv.

Photo Credit: Robert Wright (Wikipedia)

Technorati tags: Robert Wright, The New York Times, Social Conditions and Trends, Space, Terrorism, Atomic Weapons, news, commentary, op ed

The Neocon Paradox

By Robert Wright
The New York Times

Neoconservatives have been airing an explanation for the failure of the Iraq war that’s so obvious you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself: the war wasn’t neoconservative enough.

Last week Richard Perle, on “The Charlie Rose Show,” echoed what his fellow neocon John Bolton told the BBC last month: We should have turned Iraq over to the Iraqis much sooner. Then, presumably, the power of democracy to blossom pronto in even nutrient-depleted soil — the neocon élan vital — would have kicked in.

Nice try, but they’re just digging themselves in deeper. They’re highlighting a paradox within the neocon game plan that would have doomed this war even if it had been run competently (enough troops, a dollop of postwar planning, etc.).

On the one hand, we were going to bring democracy to Iraq. On the other hand, we were going to use Iraq as a platform for exercising military power. (Days after Baghdad fell, the neocon Weekly Standard festively titled an article “There’s No Place Like Iraq ... for U.S. Military Bases.”)

But wait. What if the Iraqi people, once empowered by democracy, decided they didn’t want their country to be a U.S. aircraft carrier? And isn’t that pretty likely? After all, America is bound to use bases on behalf of itself and key allies, and one key ally is Israel. What were the chances this would sit well with an Arab Muslim nation — not with the small ruling class of an authoritarian state like Saudi Arabia (our previous aircraft carrier) but with a whole electorate?

Maybe if we had resolved with miraculous speed the tensions besetting Israel — from Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran — U.S. troops could have stayed in the Iraqis’ good graces. But neocons weren’t exactly pushing for dialogue on those fronts. They were going to let their new aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Iraq, do the talking. And surely Iraq’s majority Shiites would applaud the use of their soil to threaten Shiite Iran, right?

Meanwhile, neocons, and the Bush administration broadly, were endorsing the policies of Ariel Sharon, whose assertive policing of the occupied territories was proving counterproductive, helping to radicalize both Palestinian opinion and, via Al Jazeera, Muslim opinion globally.

You can empower people through democracy if you want. You can systematically antagonize them if you want. Doing both at once is ill advised.

Critics murmur that neoconservatism is “all about Israel.” I wish! Then the damage might be confined to one region. Alas, the neocon paradox — empower people and enrage them — is global. Neocons want to make China democratic ASAP; meanwhile, they pass the time arousing anti-American Chinese nationalism with vestigial cold war rants. Fortunately, they won fewer intra-administration battles over China than over the Middle East.

Even if neocons weren’t bent on spreading democracy, their chronic inflammation of world opinion would be unhealthy, because much of the world is already democratic and more of it will probably become that way.

But leave democracy aside. There’s another reason grass-roots opinion matters crucially.

A confluence of technologies, from the Internet to biotechnology, is making it easier and easier for far-flung hatred to assume organized form, intersect with weapons technology and constitute unprecedently potent terrorism. This growing lethality of hatred may be the biggest long-term problem we face.

Here’s a response favored by many left-of-center and right-of-center thinkers. Address the “demand side” — the desire to obtain and use nuclear and biological weapons — by reducing the number of people who hate the U.S. and the West. Address the “supply side” by improving arms control.

Neocons take the opposite tack: degrade the arms control infrastructure (the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, etc.) and antagonize the masses.

You can even do both at once! President Bush undermined the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by agreeing to give nuclear technology to India, a nonsignatory. This ratcheted up anti-Americanism in Pakistan — a Muslim nation with nukes, jihadist recruiters and an unstable government.

Neocons have their own formula for controlling arms: invade countries you think may have them. Of course, this approach will have to grow more cost-effective on repeated application if America is to warm up to it. But — who knows? — maybe we just need to make the next few wars more neoconservative.

Robert Wright, author of “Nonzero,” is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and runs the Web site Bloggingheads.tv.

Photo Credit: Robert Wright (journalist) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Technorati tags: Robert Wright, The New York Times, Neo-Cons, US Foreign Policy, US International Relations, news, commentary, op ed