Fucking douchebag. I
can’t believe how arrogant he is.
Today, the vast
majority of the world’s people do not have to worry about dying in war. Since1945, wars between great powers and developedStates have
essentiallyvanished, and since1991, wars in the rest of the world have become
fewer and lessdeadly.
But
how long will this trend last? Many people have assured me that it must be a
momentary respite, and that a[“]BigOne[“] is just around the corner.
Maybe they’re right.
The world has plenty of unknown unknowns, and perhaps some unfathomable
cataclysm will wallops us out of the blue. But since, by definition, we have no
idea what the unknown unknows are, we can’t constructivelyworry about them.
What, then about the
known unknowns? Are certain riskfactors numbering our
days of relative peace? In my view, most people are worrying about the wrong
ones, or are worrying about them for the wrong reasons.
Resourceshortages.
Will nations go to war over the last dollop of oil, water, or strategic
minerals? It’s unlikely. First, resourceshortages are selflimiting: As a
resource becomes scarcer and thus moreexpensive, Technologies for finding and
extracting it improve, or substitues are found. Also, wars are rarelyfought
over scarce physical resources (unless you subscribe to the unfalsifiable
theory that all wars, regardless of stated motives, are reallyabout resources,
Vietnam was about tungsten, Iraq was about oil, and so on). Physical resources
can be divided or traded, so compromises are alwaysavailable; not so for
psychological motives such as glory, fear, revenge, or Ideology.
Climatechange. There
are many reasons to worry about climatechange, but major war is probably not among
them. Most studies have failed to find a correlation between
environmentaldegradation and war; environmental crises can cause local
skirmishes, but a major war requires a politicaldecision that a war would be
advantageous. The1930sDustBowl did not cause an USCivilWar; when we did have a
civilwar, its causes were verydifferent. [What the fuck are you talking about?]
Drones. The whole point of drones is to minimise loss of life
compared to indiscriminate forms of destruction such as artillery, aerial bombardment,
tankbattles, and searchandestroymissions, which killed orders of magnitude more
people than droneattacks in-Afghanistan and –Pakistan.
Cyberwarfare.
No doubt cyberattacks will continue to be a nuisance, and I’m glad that experts
are worrying about them. But the cyberPearlHarbor that brings civilisation to
its knees may be illusory as theY2Kbugapocalypse. Should we really expect that
the combined efforts of Governments, universities, corporations, and
programmernetworks will be outsmarted for extended periods by some teenagers
inBulgaria? Or byGovernmentsponsored hackers in technologicallybackward
countries? Could they escape detection indefinitely, and would they provoke
retaliation for no strategic purpose? And even if they did muck up theInternet
for a while, could the damage reallycompare to being blitzed, firebombed, or
nuked?
Nuclearinevitability. It’s obviouslyimportant to worry about
nuclearaccidents, Terrorism, and proliferation, because of the magnitude of the
devastation nuclearweapons could wreak, regardeless of the probabilities. But
how high are the probabilities? The sixtyeightyearHistory of nonuse of
nuclearweapons casts dbout on the common narrative that we are still on the
brink of nuclear armageddon. That narrative requires two extraordinary
propositions. One, that leaders are so spectacularlyirrational, reckless, and
suicidal that they have kept the world in jeopardy of massannihilation, and
two, we have enjoyed a spectacularlyimprobable run of good luck. Perhaps. But
instead of believing in two riveting and unlikelypropositions, perhaps we
should believe in one boring and likely one, that worldleaders, although stupid
and shortsighted, are not that stupid and shortsighted and have taken steps to
minimise the chance of nuclearwar, which is why nuclearwar has not taken place.
[Great fucking timing.] As for nuclearTerrorism, though there was a window of
vulnerability for theft of weapons and fissilematerial after
theFallOfTheSovietUnion, most nuclearsecurityexperts believe it has shrunk and
will soon be closed (cf. JohnMueller’s AtomicObsession).
What the misleading
riskfactors have in common is that they contain the cognitivetriggers of fear
documented by Slovic, Kahneman, and Tversky. They are vivid, novel,
undetectable, uncontrollable, catastrophic, and involuntary imposed on their
victims.
In my view, there are threats to peace that we should worry about, but
the real riskfactors, the ones that actuallycaused catastrophicwars, such as
theWorldWars, wars ofReligion, and the major civilwars, don’t press the buttons
of our luric imaginations.
Narcissistic
leaders. The ultimate weapon of massdestruction is aState. When aState is taken
over by a leader with the classic triad of narcissistic symptoms, grandiosity,
needforadmiration, and lackofempathy, the result can be imperial adventures with
enormous human costs.
Groupism.
The ideal ofHumanRights, that the ultimateMoralgood is the flourishing of
individual people, while groups are socialconstructions designed to
further that good, is surprisinglyrecent and unnatural. People, at least in
public, are apt to argue that the ultimateMoralgood is the glory of the group,
the tribe, Religion, nation, class, or race, and that individuals are
expendable, like the cells of a body.
PerfectJustive.
Every group has suffered depredations and humiliations in its past. When
Groupism combines with the thrist for revenge, a group may feel justified in
exacting damage on some other groupk, inflamed by a Moralcertitude that makes
compromise tantamount to treason.
UtopianIdeologies.
If you have a religious or political vision of a world that will be
infinitelygood for ever, any amount of violence is justified to bring about
that world, and anyone standing in its way is infinitelyevil and deserving of
unlimited punishment.
Warfare as a normal
or necessary tactic. Clausewitz characterised war as “the continuation of
policy by other means.” Many political and religious Ideologies go a step
further and consider violent struggle to be the driver of dialectical progress,
revolutionary liberation, or the realisation of a messianic age.
The relative peace we have
enjoyed since1945 is a gift of values and institutions that militate against
these risks. Democracy selects for responsible
stewards rather than charismatic despots. The ideal ofHumanRights protects
people from being treated as cannonfodder, collateraldamage, or eggs to be
broken for a revolutionary omelet. The maximisation of peace and prosperity has
been elevated over the rectification of historicInjustices or the
implementation of utopianfantasies. Conquest is
stigmatised as “aggression” and becomes a taboo rather than a natural
aspiration of nations or an everyday instrument of policy. [Am I missing the
point?]
None of
these protections is natural or permanent, and the possibility of their
collapsing is what makes me worry. Perhaps some charismatic politician is
working his way up the chinese nomenklatura and dreams of overturning the
intolerable insult ofTaiwan once and for all. Perhaps an agingPutin will seek
historical immortality and restore russian greatness by swallowing a
formerSovietRepublic or two. [Therefore theUSGovernment and people like him
must stop them.] Perhaps a utopianIdeology is
fermenting in the mind of a cunning fanatic somewhere who will take over a
major country and try to impose it elsewhere.
It’s natural to
worry about physical stuff like weaponry and resources. What we should
reallyworry about is psychologicalstuff like Ideologies and norms. As theUNESCOslogan puts it, “Since wars begin in the minds of
men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed.”
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