Annihilation from Within Fred Iklé (cool books to read .txt) 📖

Annihilation from within is not a temporary peril, but the end point and ultimate impact of this elemental historic force that has gained ever more strength over two centuries. Military history offers no lessons that tell nations how to cope with a continuing global dispersion of cataclysmic means for destruction. Because of the cultural split some 250 years ago, the threat of annihilation from within is now woven into the fabric of our era.

Let us admit it: mankind became entrapped in a Faustian bargain. In the famous medieval legend, Faust sells his soul to the devil in exchange for the magical powers of science (or rather the imagined powers of alchemy in those days). There is much that we can do to avert the worst disaster. But as we begin to discern the trials that lie ahead, our exuberance about unending progress is tempered by a premonition that our “bargain with the devil” might end badly.

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MANKIND’S CULTURAL SPLIT

Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast, the one strives to forsake the other.

—GOETHE

WE LIVE AT A TIME OF OMINOUS CONTRADICTIONS. Our age is unceasingly revolutionary; yet the human race remains moored to ancient traditions. Technological advances bring us ever more wealth and longer lives; yet they also enable evildoers to inflict cataclysmic destruction. Weapons of mass destruction are feared by all nations; yet the scientific knowledge and wherewithal to make such weapons keeps proliferating across our planet. Every country counts on economic growth and wants to benefit from technological progress, yet this common interest neither blunts the clash of religions nor alleviates enmities between nations. Every one of these fateful contradictions is manmade, yet we do not know how to overcome them. We begin to apprehend with horror that we are trapped in our Faustian bargain.

To learn how to cope with this conflicted age, we first need to understand the historic forces that brought it about. Some 250 years ago, science began to pull apart from the other domains of human activity. This split in human culture allowed science and technology to move ahead at an accelerating pace. It thus unleashed a relentless dynamic that transformed the face of the earth. It bestowed unprecedented wealth and military strength upon many nations. And it brought us to a pass in which two essentially incompatible modes of thinking now dominate our lives.

One mode is imbued with religious beliefs, ethnic customs, social and political values, and communal or national traditions. This mode remained the way it had been since the beginning of human civilization. As in the past, it still shapes the basic structure of human society. It provides the sense of obedience, power, and pride that makes governments function. It is the wellspring of common loyalty and shared memories that motivate religious movements, tribes, and nations—in war and peace. Political convictions that are anchored only in the intellect are blown away by the first ill wind, but convictions that are rooted in ancestral memories will survive adversity.

In the other mode of thinking, people became guided by scientific concepts and theories, and the truth is sought via empirical verification rather than tradition and faith. This kind of thinking and action has enabled mankind to transform its natural environment and to achieve enormous material gains. It is the reason why our world has changed more profoundly and more rapidly during the last two centuries than any time in the past. It explains why the population living on our planet has grown more than eightfold, why the world’s economic production has increased 40-fold, why the life expectancy of young adults has doubled, and why distance as an impediment to travel, trade, and communication has been greatly reduced.

While this global transformation wrought by science and technology has drastically changed many aspects of the human condition, it left others nearly untouched. During the last two centuries, the basic architecture and building blocks of the political order of the world remained largely the same. The nation-state is the dominant political force in the world today, just as it was two hundred years ago. For all the chatter about globalization, despite all the ebullient visions of mankind’s universal interdependence, no alternative has emerged to replace this familiar old structure. The United Nations, the World Bank, and so far even the European Union are no substitutes. Without the support of national governments, these organizations lack the political power and physical resources to collect taxes for major economic projects or to provide economic aid, let alone to carry out a military campaign. To this day, only sovereign nations can defeat a well-armed terrorist organization or marshal the military forces for “United Nations” peacekeeping. Only nations can maintain the ideals and achievements of democracy.

And so the planet’s land masses remain partitioned into national territories. This mosaic reflects many layers of history: peace treaties signed long ago, conquests by cavalry forces and sailing ships, the jigsaw maps that the colonial powers imposed on Africa and the Middle East. The floor plan for the contemporary world order is like a palimpsest of old deeds and misdeeds whose lines have been erased and redrawn many times. Yet its organizing concept—separate territorial sovereignties—has survived all the scientific, technological, and demographic revolutions of the past two centuries.

How much longer can the political foundations of the international order remain largely unchanged while science and technology keep transforming the world? So far, we do not feel the full impact of mankind’s cultural split. But we anxiously watch harbingers of things to come: the resurgent spread of mass destruction weapons, rumored dangers of nanotechnology, worried speculations about altering the human species. The accelerating momentum of scientific discoveries and technological advances has become like a resistant infectious agent that contaminated the human race some time ago. Today, we still live in the quiescent incubation period. But beware! The full virulence of this “infection” might not be far away.

To be sure, national governments, international organizations, and