When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?
— John Maynard Keynes
When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?
— John Maynard Keynes
smarties — Monday, 2 April 2007
by Donald W. Taylor II
In recognition of the dawn of the second nuclear age now upon us, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved its Doomsday Clock up two minutes so that it now stands at five minutes to midnight.
In macaw celebration, the January / February 2007 issue (vol. 63, no. 1) contains a host of authors discussing terrible fate. Jonathan Schell makes an insightful distinction for those who think nuclear weapons just another device on the sequence of technological advances in war ("Genesis in Reverse," pp. 27-29):
The antecedents to the events of 1945, the event itself [the advent of the nuclear bomb], and the sequel exhibit a common theme. All are acts of extermination, which is something quite specific, something quite new, that needs to be clearly distinguished from other evils.
...
For a species or an ecosystem, like a human society, is an immortal body composed of mortal beings. To be mortal is not to be at risk of death, it is to be fated to die, which is why some pessimistic philosophers have said that life is an illness from which no one recovers; but the immortal bodies, though killable, are exempted from this fatality.
It is the immortal bodies, in all their tremendous yet finite variety, that acts of extermination destroy. In doing so, extermination attacks life at a level that killing, even mass killing, does not reach. Killing removes a sentient individual from life. Acts of extermination mutilate, deform, reduce or destroy the living world from which killing removes the individual ... None of this is to say that extermination is necessarily more awful than unsystematic killing. It is only to say that it is new and different, that it damages life on a new scale and at a new level, and therefore demands new thought and a new response.
I'm sympathetic to the point and it is a useful distinction, one so subtle as to be difficult to draw. However, I am one of those pessimists of which Mr. Schell writes.
The imagined eternity of ecosystems, societies and the life-world are the shattered illusion of immortality of those who come after the death of god. They are the homily delivered at the funeral.
These things are not immortal. Nothing is. They are fated to die every bit as much as one of their members. It is just that their fates play out on an arc beyond our comprehension. If nothing else, the Earth is tethered to a time bomb. A few billion years hence, the sun, its nuclear fuel expended, will huff up and consume the Earth. It will slough off its outer layers in waves of scorching plasma. It will be a wonder if so much as a blackened rock remains as our tomb stone.
But the sun's death will be unsuffered as it will consume a long dead Earth. Well before the final days of the sun the Earth's core will cool and its electromagnetic dynamo will shut down. Deprived of an electromagnetic field, the solar wind will strip the planet of its atmosphere. Habitable planets are only so for a certain period. They are mortal.
But that is a few billion years. Long before that something, most probably of our own making, will get us: global warming, nuclear war, plague, the nanotech ice nine, the robot armies. For any one of these a wait of only a century or so will be required. All species eventually go extinct and I don't believe we have any reason to believe ourselves the exception.
It is well observed at this point that our capacity for destruction has advanced considerably faster than our capacity for ethical reasoning or our organization acumen. Some would say that the later haven't advanced one iota in a hundred-thousand years of evolution. The outcome of this trend cannot be mistaken, only put out of mind.
Recognizing at some level beneath recognition that solutions are not forthcoming, and yet unable to follow the thought through to its inevitable conclusion — we are mortal, our civilization is mortal, all structures, records and information are ephemeral, species go extinct, worlds pass away, stars turn to embers and meaning is an illusion — we turn to fantasy. New thinking! Nothing in the human ethical constellation has budged in a hundred-thousand years, but necessity will call forth new thinking! What this will be, no one has a stitch of an idea, but it will come.
As for nuclear war, given time everything is possible. Nothing lasts forever. I suggest that we learn to stop worrying and love the Bomb.
URL for this article: http://www.goodleaf.net/smarties/?eid=350
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Donald W. Taylor II Washington, D.C. United States of America taylordw@goodleaf.net |