Why should we care about what is happening in India? Isn’t it just a backward country with too many people? In the introduction to an earlier article about Sea Captain Paul Watson, I wrote:

One of the problems with a belief in Human Neutrality is that it causes great apathy. If I am truly independent, then I have no duty to family, community,  Life or the Earth itself.

Those humans who are waking up to the knowledge of their interdependence are putting away the illusion of neutrality along with its apathy and indifference. But to do so sometimes takes great courage. 

Arudhati Roy is another human who is waking up and standing up.

The Greater Common Good

Arundhati Roy

To slow a beast, you break its limbs. To slow a nation, you break its people. You rob them of volition. You demonstrate your absolute command over their destiny. You make it clear that ultimately it falls to you to decide who lives, who dies, who prospers who doesn’t. To exhibit your capability you show off all that you can do, and how easily you can do it. How easily you could press a button and annihilate the earth. How you can start a war, or sue for peace. How you can snatch a river away from one and gift it to another. How you can green a desert, or fell a forest and plant one somewhere else. You use caprice to fracture a people’s faith in ancient things – earth, forest, water, air. Once that’s done, what do they have left? Only you. They will turn to you, because you’re all they have. They will love you even while they despise you. They will trust you even though they know you well. They will vote for you even as you squeeze the very breathe from their bodies. They will drink what you give them to drink. They will breathe what you give them to breathe. They will live where you dump their belongings. They have to. What else can they do? There’s no higher court of redress. You are their mother and their father. You are the judge and the jury. You are the World. You are God.

Power is fortified not just by what it destroys, but also by what it creates. Not just by what it takes, but also by what it gives. And Powerlessness reaffirmed not just by the helplessness of those who have lost, but also by the gratitude of those who have (or think they have) gained.

This cold, contemporary cast of power is couched between the lines of noble-sounding clauses in democratic-sounding constitutions. It’s wielded by the elected representatives of an ostensibly free people. Yet no monarch, no despot, no dictator in any other century in the history of human civilisation has had access to weapons like these.

Day by day, river by river, forest by forest, mountain by mountain, missile by missile, bomb by bomb – almost without our knowing it, we are being broken.

Big Dams are to a Nation’s ‘Development’ what Nuclear Bombs are to its Military Arsenal. They’re both weapons of mass destruction. They’re both weapons Governments use to control their own people. Both Twentieth Century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They’re both malignant indications of civilisation turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link – the understanding – between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life and the earth to human existence.

Can we unscramble it?

Maybe. Inch by inch. Bomb by bomb. Dam by dam. Maybe by fighting specific wars in specific ways. We could begin in the Narmada Valley.

This July will bring the last monsoon of the Twentieth Century. The ragged army in the Narmada Valley has declared that it will not move when the waters of the Sardar Sarovar reservoir rise to claim its lands and homes. Whether you love the dam or hate it, whether you want it or you don’t, it is in the fitness of things that you understand the price that’s being paid for it. That you have the courage to watch while the dues are cleared and the books are squared.

Our dues. Our books. Not theirs.

Be there.

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Read the full essay

 

 

The End of Imagination

Arundhati Roy

May 1998. It’ll go down in history books, provided, of course, we have history books to go down in. Provided, of course, we have a future.

There’s nothing new or original left to be said about nuclear weapons. There can be nothing more humiliating for a writer of fiction to have to do than restate a case that has, over the years, already been made by other people in other parts of the world, and made passionately, eloquently and knowledgeably.

I am prepared to grovel. To humiliate myself abjectly, because, in the circumstances, silence would be indefensible. So those of you who are willing: Let’s pick our parts, put on these discarded costumes and speak our secondhand lines in this sad secondhand play. But let’s not forget that the stakes we’re playing for are huge. Our fatigue and our shame could mean the end of us. The end of our children and our children’s children. Of everything we love. We have to reach within ourselves and find the strength to think. To fight.

Once again we are pitifully behind the times–not just scientifically and technologically (ignore the hollow claims), but more pertinently in our ability to grasp the true nature of nuclear weapons. Our Comprehension of the Horror Department is hopelessly obsolete. Here we are, all of us in India and in Pakistan, discussing the finer points of politics, and foreign policy, behaving for all the world as though our governments have just devised a newer, bigger bomb, a sort of immense hand grenade with which they will annihilate the enemy (each other) and protect us from all harm. How desperately we want to believe that. What wonderful, willing, well-behaved, gullible subjects we have turned out to be. The rest of humanity may not forgive us, but then the rest of the rest of humanity, depending on who fashions its views, may not know what a tired, dejected, heartbroken people we are. Perhaps it doesn’t realize how urgently we need a miracle. How deeply we yearn for magic.

If only, if only, nuclear war was just another kind of war. If only it was about the usual things–nations and territories, gods and histories. If only those of us who dread it are just worthless moral cowards who are not prepared to die in defense of our beliefs. If only nuclear war was the kind of war in which countries battle countries and men battle men. But it isn’t. If there is a nuclear war, our foe will not be China or America or even each other. Our foe will be the earth herself. The very elements–the sky, the air, the land, the wind and water–will all turn against us.

Our cities and forests, our fields and villages, will burn for days. Rivers will turn to poison. The air will become fire. The wind will spread the flames. When everything there is to burn has burned and the fires die, smoke will rise and shut out the sun. The earth will be enveloped in darkness. There will be no day. Only interminable night. What shall we do then, those of us who are still alive? Burned and blind and bald and ill, carrying the cancerous carcasses of our children in our arms, where shall we go? What shall we eat? What shall we drink? What shall we breathe?

The head of the Health, Environment and Safety Group of the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre in Bombay has a plan. He declared that India could survive nuclear war. His advice is that if there is a nuclear war, we take the same safety measures as the ones that scientists have recommended in the event of accidents at nuclear plants.

Take iodine pills, he suggests. And other steps such as remaining indoors, consuming only stored water and food and avoiding milk. Infants should be given powdered milk. “People in the danger zone should immediately go to the ground floor and if possible to the basement.”

What do you do with these levels of lunacy? What do you do if you’re trapped in an asylum and the doctors are all dangerously deranged?

Ignore it, it’s just a novelist’s naÔvetÈ, they’ll tell you, Doomsday Prophet hyperbole. It’ll never come to that. There will be no war. Nuclear weapons are about peace, not war. “Deterrence” is the buzzword of the people who like to think of themselves as hawks. (Nice birds, those. Cool. Stylish. Predatory. Pity there won’t be many of them around after the war. Extinction is a word we must try to get used to.) Deterrence is an old thesis that has been resurrected and is being recycled with added local flavor. The Theory of Deterrence cornered the credit for having prevented the cold war from turning into a Third World War. The only immutable fact about the Third World War is that if there’s going to be one, it will be fought after the Second World War. In other words, there’s no fixed schedule. In other words, we still have time. No, the Theory of Deterrence has some fundamental flaws.

Flaw Number One is that it presumes a complete, sophisticated understanding of the psychology of your enemy. It assumes that what deters you (the fear of annihilation) will deter them. What about those who are not deterred by that? The suicide bomber psyche–the “We’ll take you with us” school–is that an outlandish thought? How did Rajiv Gandhi die?

In any case, who’s the “you” and who’s the “enemy”? Both are only governments. Governments change. They wear masks within masks. They molt and reinvent themselves all the time. The one we have at the moment, for instance, does not even have enough seats to last a full term in office, but demands that we trust it to do pirouettes and party tricks with nuclear bombs even as it scrabbles around for a foothold to maintain a simple majority in Parliament.

Flaw Number Two is that Deterrence is premised on fear. But fear is premised on knowledge. On an understanding of the true extent and scale of the devastation that nuclear war will wreak. It is not some inherent, mystical attribute of nuclear bombs that they automatically inspire thoughts of peace. On the contrary, it is the endless, tireless, confrontational work of people who have had the courage to openly denounce them, the marches, the demonstrations, the films, the outrage–that is what has averted, or perhaps only postponed, nuclear war. Deterrence will not and cannot work given the levels of ignorance and illiteracy that hang over our two countries like dense, impenetrable veils.

India and Pakistan have nuclear bombs now and feel entirely justified in having them. Soon others will too. Israel, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Nepal (I’m trying to be eclectic here), Denmark, Germany, Bhutan, Mexico, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Burma, Bosnia, Singapore, North Korea, Sweden, South Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan–and why not? Every country in the world has a special case to make. Everybody has borders and beliefs. And when all our larders are bursting with shiny bombs and our bellies are empty (Deterrence is an exorbitant beast), we can trade bombs for food. And when nuclear technology goes on the market, when it gets truly competitive and prices fall, not just governments but anybody who can afford it can have their own private arsenal–businessmen, terrorists, perhaps even the occasional rich writer (like myself). Our planet will bristle with beautiful missiles. There will be a new world order. The dictatorship of the pro-nuke elite.

But let us pause to give credit where it’s due. Whom must we thank for all this?

The Men who made it happen. The Masters of the Universe. Ladies and gentlemen, the United States of America! Come on up here, folks, stand up and take a bow. Thank you for doing this to the world. Thank you for making a difference. Thank you for showing us the way. Thank you for altering the very meaning of life.

From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living.

It is such supreme folly to believe that nuclear weapons are deadly only if they’re used. The fact that they exist at all, their very presence in our lives, will wreak more havoc than we can begin to fathom. Nuclear weapons pervade our thinking. They are the ultimate colonizer. Whiter than any white man that ever lived. The very heart of whiteness.

All I can say to every man, woman and sentient child here in India, and over there, just a little way away in Pakistan, is: Take it personally. Whoever you are–Hindu, Muslim, urban, agrarian–it doesn’t matter. The only good thing about nuclear war is that it is the single most egalitarian idea that man has ever had. On the day of reckoning, you will not be asked to present your credentials. The devastation will be indiscriminate. The bomb isn’t in your backyard. It’s in your body. And mine. Nobody, no nation, no government, no man, no god, has the right to put it there. We’re radioactive already, and the war hasn’t even begun. So stand up and say something. Never mind if it’s been said before. Speak up on your own behalf. Take it very personally.

The Bomb and Me

In early May (before the bomb), I left home for three weeks. I thought I would return. I had every intention of returning. Of course, things haven’t worked out quite the way I had planned.

While I was away, I met a friend of mine whom I have always loved for, among other things, her ability to combine deep affection with a frankness that borders on savagery.

“I’ve been thinking about you,” she said, “about The God of Small Things–what’s in it, what’s over it, under it, around it, above it.”

She fell silent for a while. I was uneasy and not at all sure that I wanted to hear the rest of what she had to say. She, however, was sure that she was going to say it. “In this last year–less than a year actually–you’ve had too much of everything–fame, money, prizes, adulation, criticism, condemnation, ridicule, love, hate, anger, envy, generosity–everything. In some ways it’s a perfect story. Perfectly baroque in its excess. The trouble is that it has, or can have, only one perfect ending.” Her eyes were on me, bright with a slanting, probing brilliance. She knew that I knew what she was going to say. She was insane.

She was going to say that nothing that happened to me in the future could ever match the buzz of this. That the whole of the rest of my life was going to be vaguely unsatisfying. And, therefore, the only perfect ending to the story would be death. My death.

The thought had occurred to me too. Of course it had. The fact that all this, this global dazzle–these lights in my eyes, the applause, the flowers, the photographers, the journalists feigning a deep interest in my life (yet struggling to get a single fact straight), the men in suits fawning over me, the shiny hotel bathrooms with endless towels–none of it was likely to happen again. Would I miss it? Had I grown to need it? Was I a fame junkie? Would I have withdrawal symptoms?

The more I thought about it, the clearer it became to me that if fame was going to be my permanent condition it would kill me. Club me to death with its good manners and hygiene. I’ll admit that I’ve enjoyed my own five minutes of it immensely, but primarily because it was just five minutes. Because I knew (or thought I knew) that I could go home when I was bored and giggle about it. Grow old and irresponsible. Eat mangoes in the moonlight. Maybe write a couple of failed books–worstsellers–to see what it felt like. For a whole year I’ve cartwheeled across the world, anchored always to thoughts of home and the life I would go back to. Contrary to all the inquiries and predictions about my impending emigration, that was the well I dipped into. That was my sustenance. My strength.

I told my friend there was no such thing as a perfect story. I said in any case hers was an external view of things, this assumption that the trajectory of a person’s happiness, or let’s say fulfillment, had peaked (and now must trough) because she had accidentally stumbled upon “success.” It was premised on the unimaginative belief that wealth and fame were the mandatory stuff of everybody’s dreams.

You’ve lived too long in New York, I told her. There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible. Honorable. Sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth. There are plenty of warriors that I know and love, people far more valuable than myself, who go to war each day, knowing in advance that they will fail. True, they are less “successful” in the most vulgar sense of the word, but by no means less fulfilled.

The only dream worth having, I told her, is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead. (Prescience? Perhaps.)

“Which means exactly what?” (Arched eyebrows, a little annoyed.)

I tried to explain, but didn’t do a very good job of it. Sometimes I need to write to think. So I wrote it down for her on a paper napkin. This is what I wrote: To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try to understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.

I’ve known her for many years, this friend of mine. She too is an architect.

She looked dubious, somewhat unconvinced by my paper napkin speech. I could tell that structurally, just in terms of the sleek, narrative symmetry of things, and because she loves me, her thrill at my “success” was so keen, so generous, that it weighed in evenly with her (anticipated) horror at the idea of my death. I understood that it was nothing personal. Just a design thing.

Anyhow, two weeks after that conversation, I returned to India. To what I think/thought of as home. Something had died but it wasn’t me. It was infinitely more precious. It was a world that has been ailing for a while, and has finally breathed its last. It’s been cremated now. The air is thick with ugliness and there’s the unmistakable stench of fascism on the breeze.

Day after day, in newspaper editorials, on the radio, on TV chat shows, on MTV for heaven’s sake, people whose instincts one thought one could trust–writers, painters, journalists–make the crossing. The chill seeps into my bones as it becomes painfully apparent from the lessons of everyday life that what you read in history books is true. That fascism is indeed as much about people as about governments. That it begins at home. In drawing rooms. In bedrooms. In beds.

“Explosion of Self-Esteem,” “Road to Resurgence,” “A Moment of Pride”–these were headlines in the papers in the days following the nuclear tests. “We have proved that we are not eunuchs anymore,” said Mr. Thackeray of the Shiv Sena. (Whoever said we were? True, a good number of us are women, but that, as far as I know, isn’t the same thing.) Reading the papers, it was often hard to tell when people were referring to Viagra (which was competing for second place on the front pages) and when they were talking about the bomb–”We have superior strength and potency.” (This was our Defense Minister after Pakistan completed its tests.)

“These are not just nuclear tests, they are nationalism tests,” we were repeatedly told.

This has been hammered home, over and over again. The bomb is India. India is the bomb. Not just India, Hindu India. Therefore, be warned, any criticism of it is not just antinational, but anti-Hindu. (Of course, in Pakistan the bomb is Islamic. Other than that, politically, the same physics applies.) This is one of the unexpected perks of having a nuclear bomb. Not only can the government use it to threaten the Enemy, they can use it to declare war on their own people. Us.

When I told my friends that I was writing this piece, they cautioned me. “Go ahead,” they said, “but first make sure you’re not vulnerable. Make sure your papers are in order. Make sure your taxes are paid.”

My papers are in order. My taxes are paid. But how can one not be vulnerable in a climate like this? Everyone is vulnerable. Accidents happen. There’s safety only in acquiescence. As I write, I am filled with foreboding. In this country, I have truly known what it means for a writer to feel loved (and, to some degree, hated too). Last year I was one of the items being paraded in the media’s end-of-the-year National Pride Parade. Among the others, much to my mortification, were a bomb-maker and an international beauty queen. Each time a beaming person stopped me on the street and said, “You have made India proud” (referring to the Booker Prize I won, not the book I wrote), I felt a little uneasy. It frightened me then and it terrifies me now, because I know how easily that swell, that tide of emotion, can turn against me. Perhaps the time for that has come. I’m going to step out from under the fairy lights and say what’s on my mind.

It’s this: If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain is anti-Hindu and antinational, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no flag. I’m female, but have nothing against eunuchs. My policies are simple. I’m willing to sign any nuclear nonproliferation treaty or nuclear test ban treaty that’s going. Immigrants are welcome. You can help me design our flag.

My world has died. And I write to mourn its passing.

Admittedly it was a flawed world. An unviable world. A scarred and wounded world. It was a world that I myself have criticized unsparingly, but only because I loved it. It didn’t deserve to die. It didn’t deserve to be dismembered. Forgive me, I realize that sentimentality is uncool–but what shall I do with my desolation?

I loved it simply because it offered humanity a choice. It was a rock out at sea. It was a stubborn chink of light that insisted that there was a different way of living. It was a functioning possibility. A real option. All that’s gone now. India’s nuclear tests, the manner in which they were conducted, the euphoria with which they have been greeted (by us), is indefensible. To me, it signifies dreadful things. The end of imagination. The end of freedom actually, because, after all, that’s what freedom is. Choice.

On August 15 last year we celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence. Next May we can mark our first anniversary in nuclear bondage.

Why did they do it?

Political expediency is the obvious, cynical answer, except that it only raises another, more basic question: Why should it have been politically expedient?

The three Official Reasons given are: China, Pakistan and Exposing Western Hypocrisy.

Taken at face value, and examined individually, they’re somewhat baffling. I’m not for a moment suggesting that these are not real issues. Merely that they aren’t new. The only new thing on the old horizon is the Indian government. In his appallingly cavalier letter to the US President (why bother to write at all if you’re going to write like this?) our Prime Minister says India’s decision to go ahead with nuclear tests was due to a “deteriorating security environment.” He goes on to mention the 1962 war with China and that “we have suffered three aggressions in the last fifty years [by Pakistan]. And for the last ten years we have been the victim of unremitting terrorism and militancy sponsored by it…especially Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir.”

The war with China is thirty-six years old. Unless there’s some vital state secret that we don’t know about, it certainly seemed as though matters had improved slightly between us. The most recent war with Pakistan was fought twenty-seven years ago. Admittedly, Kashmir continues to be a deeply troubled region, and no doubt Pakistan is gleefully fanning the flames. But surely there must be flames to fan in the first place? Kashmir, and for that matter, Assam, Tripura, Nagaland–virtually the whole of the Northeast–Jharkhand, Uttarakhand and all the trouble that’s still to come–these are symptoms of a deeper malaise. It cannot and will not be solved by pointing nuclear missiles at Pakistan.

Even Pakistan can’t be solved by pointing nuclear missiles at it. Though we are separate countries, we share skies, we share winds, we share water. Where radioactive fallout will land on any given day depends on the direction of the wind and rain. Lahore and Amritsar are thirty miles apart. If we bomb Lahore, Punjab will burn. If we bomb Karachi–then Gujarat and Rajasthan, perhaps even Bombay, will burn. Any nuclear war with Pakistan will be a war against ourselves.

As for the third Official Reason: Exposing Western Hypocrisy–how much more exposed can it be? What decent human being on earth harbors any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy with the blood of others. Colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons–they virtually invented it all. They have plundered nations, snuffed out civilizations, exterminated entire populations. They stand on the world’s stage stark naked but entirely unembarrassed, because they know that they have more money, more food and bigger bombs than anybody else. They know they can wipe us out in the course of an ordinary working day. Personally, I’d say it is more arrogance than hypocrisy.

We have less money, less food and smaller bombs. However, we have, or had, all kinds of other wealth. Delightful, unquantifiable. What we’ve done with it is the opposite of what we think we’ve done. We’ve pawned it all. We’ve traded it in. For what? In order to enter into a contract with the very people we claim to despise. In the larger scheme of things, we’ve agreed to play their game and play it their way.

All in all, I think it is fair to say that we’re the hypocrites. We’re the ones who’ve abandoned what was arguably a moral position, i.e.: We have the technology, we can make bombs if we want to, but we won’t. We don’t believe in them.

We’re the ones who have now set up this craven clamoring to be admitted into the club of Superpowers. For India to demand the status of a Superpower is as ridiculous as demanding to play in the World Cup finals simply because we have a ball. Never mind that we haven’t qualified, or that we don’t play much soccer and haven’t got a team.

We are a nation of nearly a billion people. In development terms we rank No. 138 out of the 175 countries listed in the UNDP’s Human Development Index. More than 400 million of our people are illiterate and live in absolute poverty, over 600 million lack even basic sanitation and about 200 million have no safe drinking water.

A nuclear bomb isn’t going to improve any of this.

We in India are an ancient people learning to live in a recent nation. The nuclear bomb and the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya are both part of the same political process. They are the hideous byproducts of a nation’s search for herself. Of India’s effort to forge a national identity. To define what being Indian means. The poorer the nation, the larger the numbers of illiterate people and the more morally bankrupt her leaders, the cruder and more dangerous the notion of what that identity is or should be.

The jeering, hooting young men who battered down the Babri Masjid are the same ones whose pictures appeared in the papers in the days that followed the nuclear tests. They were on the streets, celebrating India’s nuclear bomb and simultaneously “condemning Western Culture” by emptying crates of Coke and Pepsi into public drains. I’m a little baffled by their logic: Coke is Western Culture, but the nuclear bomb is an old Indian tradition?

Yes, I’ve heard–the bomb is in the Vedas. It might be, but if you look hard enough, you’ll find Coke in the Vedas too. That’s the great thing about all religious texts. You can find anything you want in them–as long as you know what you’re looking for.

But returning to the subject of the non-Vedic 1990s: We storm the heart of whiteness, we embrace the most diabolical creation of Western science and call it our own. But we protest against their music, their food, their clothes, their cinema and their literature. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s humor.

It’s funny enough to make a skull smile.

We’re back on the old ship. The SS Authenticity & Indianness.

If there is going to be a pro-authenticity/antinational drive, perhaps the government ought to get its history straight and its facts right. If they’re going to do it, they may as well do it properly.

First of all, the original inhabitants of this land were not Hindu. Ancient though it is, there were human beings on earth before there was Hinduism. India’s tribal people have a greater claim to being indigenous to this land than anybody else, and how are they treated by the state and its minions? Oppressed, cheated, robbed of their lands, shunted around like surplus goods. Perhaps a good place to start would be to restore to them the dignity that was once theirs. Perhaps the government could make a public undertaking that more dams like the Sardar Sarovar on the Narmada will not be built, that more people will not be displaced.

But, of course, that would be inconceivable, wouldn’t it? Why? Because it’s impractical. Because tribal people don’t really matter. Their histories, their customs, their deities, are dispensable. They must learn to sacrifice these things for the greater good of the nation (which has snatched from them everything they ever had).

OK, so that’s out.

For the rest, I could compile a practical list of things to ban and buildings to break. It’ll need some research, but off the top of my head, here are a few suggestions.

They could begin by banning a number of ingredients from our cuisine: chilies (Mexico), tomatoes (Peru), potatoes (Bolivia), coffee (Morocco), tea, white sugar, cinnamon (China)– they could then move into recipes. Tea with milk and sugar, for instance (Britain).

Smoking will be out of the question. Tobacco came from North America.

Cricket, English and democracy should be forbidden. Either kabaddi or kho-kho could replace cricket. I don’t want to start a riot, so I hesitate to suggest a replacement for English (Italian? It has found its way to us via a kinder route: marriage, not imperialism). We have already discussed (earlier in this essay) the emerging, apparently acceptable alternative to democracy.

All hospitals in which Western medicine is practiced or prescribed should be shut down. All national newspapers discontinued. The railways dismantled. Airports closed. And what about our newest toy–the mobile phone? Can we live without it, or shall I suggest that they make an exception there? They could put it down in the column marked “Universal.” (Only essential commodities will be included here. No music, art or literature.)

Needless to say, sending your children to university in the United States or rushing there yourself to have your prostate operated upon will be a cognizable offense.

It will be a long, long list. It would take years of work. I couldn’t use a computer because that wouldn’t be very authentic of me, would it?

I don’t mean to be facetious, merely to point out that this is surely the shortcut to hell. There’s no such thing as an Authentic India or a Real Indian. There is no Divine Committee that has the right to sanction one single, authorized version of what India is or should be. There is no one religion or language or caste or region or person or story or book that can claim to be its sole representative. There are, and can only be, visions of India, various ways of seeing it–honest, dishonest, wonderful, absurd, modern, traditional, male, female. They can be argued over, criticized, praised, scorned, but not banned or broken. Not hunted down.

Railing against the past will not heal us. History has happened. It’s over and done with. All we can do is change its course by encouraging what we love instead of destroying what we don’t. There is beauty yet in this brutal, damaged world of ours. Hidden, fierce, immense. Beauty that is uniquely ours and beauty that we have received with grace from others, enhanced, re-invented and made our own. We have to seek it out, nurture it, love it. Making bombs will only destroy us. It doesn’t matter whether we use them or not. They will destroy us either way.

India’s nuclear bomb is the final act of betrayal by a ruling class that has failed its people.

However many garlands we heap on our scientists, however many medals we pin to their chests, the truth is that it’s far easier to make a bomb than to educate 400 million people.

According to opinion polls, we’re expected to believe that there’s a national consensus on the issue. It’s official now. Everybody loves the bomb. (Therefore the bomb is good.)

Is it possible for a man who cannot write his own name to understand even the basic, elementary facts about the nature of nuclear weapons? Has anybody told him that nuclear war has nothing at all to do with his received notions of war? Nothing to do with honor, nothing to do with pride? Has anybody bothered to explain to him about thermal blasts, radioactive fallout and the nuclear winter? Are there even words in his language to describe the concepts of enriched uranium, fissile material and critical mass? Or has his language itself become obsolete? Is he trapped in a time capsule, watching the world pass him by, unable to understand or communicate with it because his language never took into account the horrors that the human race would dream up? Does he not matter at all, this man? Shall we just treat him like some kind of a cretin? If he asks any questions, ply him with iodine pills and parables about how Lord Krishna lifted a hill or how the destruction of Lanka by Hanuman was unavoidable in order to preserve Sita’s virtue and Ram’s reputation? Use his own beautiful stories as weapons against him? Shall we release him from his capsule only during elections, and once he’s voted, shake him by the hand, flatter him with some bullshit about the Wisdom of the Common Man and send him right back in?

I’m not talking about one man, of course. I’m talking about millions and millions of people who live in this country. This is their land too, you know. They have the right to make an informed decision about its fate and, as far as I can tell, nobody has informed them about anything. The tragedy is that nobody could, even if they wanted to. Truly, literally, there’s no language to do it in. This is the real horror of India. The orbits of the powerful and the powerless spinning further and further apart from each other, never intersecting, sharing nothing. Not a language. Not even a country.

Who the hell conducted those opinion polls? Who the hell is the Prime Minister to decide whose finger will be on the nuclear button that could turn everything we love–our earth, our skies, our mountains, our plains, our rivers, our cities and villages–to ash in an instant? Who the hell is he to reassure us that there will be no accidents? How does he know? Why should we trust him? What has he ever done to make us trust him? What have any of them ever done to make us trust them?

The nuclear bomb is the most antidemocratic, antinational, antihuman, outright evil thing that man has ever made.

If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is Man’s challenge to God. It’s worded quite simply: We have the power to destroy everything that You have created.

If you’re not (religious), then look at it this way. This world of ours is four thousand, six hundred million years old.

It could end in an afternoon.

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Arundhati Roy is the author of The God of Small Things (Random House, 1997), which won the Booker Prize, sold six million copies, and has been translated into forty languages. Here is link to an interview with Arundhati in the April 2001 issue of The Progressive Magazine.  More about Arundhati Roy.

Reposted from the archives of The Nation. A longer version of this essay appeared in India in the magazines Frontline and Outlook on July 27, 1998.

A week ago Sunday, I have featured an article by Sea Captain Paul Watson titled The Second Greenpeace Foundation.  As introduction for that article I wrote: 

One of the problems with a belief in Human Neutrality is that it causes great apathy. If I am truly independent, then I have no duty to family, community,  Life or the Earth itself.

As reported in yesterday’s GuardianUnlimited: 

Paul Watson Charged With Attempted Murder

Duncan Campbell

For a man under investigation for attempted murder on the high seas, Paul Watson seems remarkably calm. The veteran environmentalist, who has been arrested many times before but never convicted, believes the latest accusation is an example of how far powerful fishing interests are prepared to go in trying to neutralize conservation campaigners.

Mr Watson is the founder of Sea Shepherd, the conservation group based in Malibu, California, whose two ships patrol the seas challenging illegal fishing and whaling.

Recently, Sea Shepherd was asked by a number of Latin American governments to act on their behalf in protecting endangered marine species from poachers. Last month, it was invited by a Costa Rican environmental group and the Costa Rican government to assist in the protection of Cocos island, 320 miles off the coast.

On the way to the island last month on Sea Shepherd’s vessel, the Farley Mowat, group members came across a Costa Rican ship poaching. They contacted the authorities who told them to bring it in. As the poachers attempted to escape, Mr Watson used water hoses “to intimidate them” after which, he said, the two boats collided, doing some damage to the poachers ’13 vessel.

But when the Farley Mowat reached port in Costa Rica, Mr Watson was told by a judge and prosecutor that he was alleged to have rammed the other ship and tried to kill its captain. He was told he would be charged with attempted murder and destruction of property.

“I said, ‘first of all, if I had rammed him once, he would be sunk and if it was my intent to kill him, he’d be dead’,” said Mr Watson, now back in Malibu.

By chance a documentary team was on board his ship and had filmed the episode. When the video was shown to the prosecutor, the charges were dismissed. But a few days later, a new prosecutor – appointed under pressure, Mr Watson believes, from the fishing industry – made it clear that he should be held in jail pending charges. On the advice of his Costa Rican lawyer, Mr Watson returned to the US.

Read the full article

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As I have explained elsewhere, Progress + warfare = human extinction.  We are Time-binders and the mark of human power is everywhere. When knowledge is incorporated into matter-energy, it becomes a tool. As Andrew J. Galambos explained:

“Humans develop evermore powerful knowledge and therefore evermore powerful tools. When tools are used to harm other humans they are called weapons. Since human knowledge can grow without limit then tools themselves can be made without limit. And limitless tools can will produce limitless weapons.”

And, limitless weapons (progress) combined with leveraged adversity (warfare) must by all definitions and understanding of science produce human extinction. As our current political leaders move humanity towards ever increasing risk of extinction,  it has never been more important to understand politics.

The following three excerpts are from a longer paper by synergic scientist Peter A. Corning titled Synergy, Cybernetics, and the Evolution of Politics .

The Evolution of Politics

Peter A. Corning, Ph.D.

The tumultuous political events of the past decade or so have, among other things, compelled political scientists to rethink some of their long established concepts and analytical constructs. One example is “political development,” a term which has traditionally been associated with the optimistic post-World War Two scenario in which “developing nations” were said to be following “industrial societies” into a final stage of “post-industrial” history that would, presumably, be permanently embalmed in stable democracy and some variant of the traditional “balance of power” — or terror. That smug scenario has been deflated by a sequence of events which suggest that the modern nation-state may itself be a transient phenomenon, a stepping-stone on the way to something larger, or smaller, or both — or perhaps neither.

One indication of a sea-change in the discipline is a growing interest in the concept of “political evolution.” (See, for example, the report of a workshop on the subject edited by Modelski, 1994a.) This seemingly innocuous linguistic shift is not merely a fad, or a borrowed metaphor, but the reflection of a fundamental paradigm shift. It represents a revisioning of our conception of macro-level political change. In this nascent new paradigm — which has yet to be fully articulated, much less agreed upon — political development can be viewed as analogous to political “engineering” — the construction of a viable political process or structure more or less from pre-existing plans. Political evolution, on the other hand, is located at the creative cutting-edge, where old problems are solved with new techniques or new forms of organization, and where new problems are brought under political control. Also, following Charles Darwin’s broad definition of evolution as “descent with modification,” political evolution may include systemic reconfigurations, reorderings and even breakdowns. Accordingly, it can be said that political development is to political evolution as ontogeny is to phylogeny. (See Corning and Hines 1988.)

Some years ago, Kenneth Waltz (1975) drew a useful distinction between a political system and what he called a “political market,” the latter being a collection of independent actors in a “framework” of forces, with varying relationships and with varying degrees of interaction. For reasons that will become evident below, I prefer the term “political ecosystem.” But, in any event, the distinction is an important one, especially in international politics, because it highlights the fact that political evolution also involves irreversible historical changes in the character of the global system. However, it should also be emphasized that political evolution is not simply another name for political history. To the contrary, it connotes a patterned process whose causal dynamics are amenable to theoretical generalizations, to causal theories.

One implication of an evolutionary perspective is that short-range issues (say, the future of Eastern Europe or the prospects for European Union) can usefully be viewed within a much broader theoretical framework. An evolutionary framework can — and should — encompass, among other things, the evolution of other social species, the three-million-year process of human evolution and the evolution of complex human societies and polities over the past 10,000 years or so, long before the modern nation-state was even conceived. In addition, as we shall see, an evolutionary paradigm must take account of the propensities of “human nature” and the opportunities and constraints (and imperatives) in the natural environment, along with the traditional social, economic and political variables. Such a paradigm provides a far richer perspective for theorizing about political change in the immediate past, present or future. (I will elaborate on this contentious point below.)

Over the past two decades, a number of political scientists have become conversant with this broader evolutionary paradigm. (The full version of this paper included some 32 references.) Equally important, a variety of hypotheses have been advanced to explain the process of political evolution, either as a whole or in part. For example, Gary R. Johnson (1992) proposes what could be called a socio­biological hypothesis to account for the origin of human polities. Politics, in his view, is derivative of reproductive competition, and the advancement of various co-operative efforts is seen as secondary, in terms of the functional basis of government, to the containment of individual conflicts. Johnson also adopts the sociobiological assumption that there are only three bases for social organization, all of them derived from individual reproduc­tive interests, namely, altruism (or nepotism toward closely-related individuals), reciprocity and exploitation. Nepotistic “kin selection,” he argues, was the “primary force” responsible for establishing societies and polities.

A second hypothesis has been suggested by Gebhard Geiger (1988). His theoretical focus is confined to the Weberian transformation of small face-to-face societies into large-scale, hierarchical, bureaucratic states (“macrostructures”). He is concerned with explaining the evolution of “political power” — i.e., specialized instruments of centralized control that are endowed with the ability to use force. Geiger argues that this transition requires a theory that goes beyond neo-Darwinian “inclusive fitness” models, because these explanations are not sufficient to account for various factors in real-world human polities. Specifically, he claims that hierarchical organizations in human societies are not an adaptation and are not designed to engender mutual benefits for their members. Accordingly, Geiger proposes that the explanation for such political macrostructures lies in an extension of the theory of “self-organizing” dynamical systems (see Footnote 2). That is, the properties of “natural self-organization” are postulated by Geiger to engender “structural stability” in a dynamical system, including large-scale polities.

A number of theorists have adopted a micro-level approach to political evolution. The pioneer in this area was biologist John Maynard Smith (1982), who was the first to apply classical “game theory” models to the problem of explaining social evolution. Maynard Smith’s focus was the strategies pursued by individuals in a population, and his objective was to identify co-operative strategies for the members of the population as a whole that could not be “invaded” or replaced by exploitative strategies. Such strategies were then characterized as being “evolutionarily stable.”

An important alternative to this approach, with direct implications for political evolution, was developed by political scientist Robert Axelrod and biologist William Hamilton (1981; also Axelrod 1984). It involved a revised version of the famous two-person “Prisoner’s Dilemma” game, incorporating a number of more realistic assumptions about the nature of the game and the players. Axelrod and Hamilton then conducted a tournament among a number of their colleagues. The winning strategy, submitted by Anatol Rapaport, was called “TIT FOR TAT” (co-operate initially then respond to whatever the other player does in subsequent rounds), and it proved to be remarkably robust as a generator of co-operative behaviors among individual players. Among other things, it was found that (1) co-operation can get started even in a world that may also favor “defectors”; (2) it can also thrive in an environment where many other strategies are also being tried; and (3) it can resist invasion by less co-operative strategies. “Thus,” Axelrod concluded, “the gear wheels of social evolution have a ratchet” (1984:20).

Other theorists have focussed on political evolution at the most inclusive macro-level. George Modelski is concerned with the evolution of the “global political system” over the past 1000 years. He is well-known for a theory of “Long Cycles” in world history, which he conceptualizes as a “learning process” (Modelski 1987). In his earlier work, he envisioned “waves of innovation” coupled with a recurrence of wars and periods of political hegemony in apparently repetitive patterns. More recently, Modelski (1994b) has more firmly embraced an evolutionary paradigm. He now characterizes global history as a process involving “structural change” and “directionality” along a steady “path”. He speaks also of the “mechanisms” of “variation, and innovation, co-operation and reinforcement.” Yet, at the same time, he envisions the global process as an “unfolding” according to an “inner logic,” and he quotes the systems theorist cum evolutionist Ervin Laszlo: “Evolution is not an accident but occurs whenever certain parametric requirements have been fulfilled” (1994:13).

There are also various “coercive theories” of political evolution. The so-called “warfare hypothesis” is a perennial favorite, dating back at least to Thucidides’ great History of the Peloponnesian War. Likewise, Clausewitz’s On War [1832] remains one of the classic statements on the subject. Darwin, Herbert Spencer and an assortment of 19th and early 20th century Social Darwinists also singled out the role of war in human evolution. (For a succinct review, see van der Dennen 1991.) More recently, anthropologist Robert Carneiro (1970) advanced a theory of war based on “environmental circumscription” — a refinement of pioneer sociologist William Graham Sumner’s “man/land ratio” — to account specifically for the formation of early states. The theory is concerned with the relationship between populations and resource constraints, particularly arable land.

There is also the “balance of power” hypothesis of, among others, Arthur Keith (1947), Robert Bigelow (1969) and sociobiologist Richard Alexander (1979). The core idea is that, over time, human polities have grown progressively larger primarily in order to strengthen themselves against other human groups. Alexander envisions a three-stage process, including: (1) the formation of multi-male bands mainly for protection against large predators, (2) a combination of defense against predation and group hunting, and (3) a combination of anti-predation, group hunting and competition/conflict with other human groups. Moreover, as populations grew, warfare with other groups came to predominate over other forms of co-operation. Warfare, he claims, is both the necessary and sufficient cause of large-scale human societies.

In contrast, Roger Masters (1989) has adopted an eclectic approach to political evolution, one which skillfully melds contemporary sociobiological models of individual interests (inclusive fitness), theories of intra-group co-operation and theories of inter-group conflict.

In this paper, I will offer a summary (and update) of a radically different theory of political evolution, one which dovetails with a larger, interdisciplinary enterprise focussed on the evolution of complexity in general. To be precise, this theory is a special case of a more general theory about the evolution of biological and social systems. It also involves a major shift in methodology and, it may not be too much to say, in our vision of how the world works. (For in-depth treatments, see Corning 1983, 1994; also see 1971a,b, 1974, 1977, 1987). The key features of this theory are the concept of synergy and the utilization of a cybernetic model of biological, social and political systems and processes.

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Explaining Political Evolution

How, then, do we account for the evolution of political systems, both historically and in the often puzzling contemporary cases? For example, how do we account for the collapse of the Soviet empire, which, as political scientist Kenneth Jowitt points out, “was not supposed to happen?” Or, for that matter, how can we account for the recent “Balkanization” of the Balkans?

In The Synergism Hypothesis (1983), a chapter was devoted to what was called an “Interactional Paradigm” (which was really a synthesis of various interdisciplinary paradigms that have been put forward over the past two decades). Here I can only provide a sketch of that causal framework. In brief, the pattern of causation in something as complex and variegated as the evolution of human societies requires a framework that is multidisciplinary, multi-leveled, “configural” (or relational), functional and cybernetic. It involves geophysical factors, biological and ecological factors, an array of biologically-based human needs — and derivative psychological and cultural influences — that must all be attended to, as well as organized economic activities and technologies (broadly defined) and, of course, political processes, all of which interact with one another in a “path dependent,” cumulative historical “flux” (see Figure I.).

This framework compels us to focus explicitly on the many co-determining factors that, in each case, interact synergistically — rather than trying to single out some monolithic causal variable that is ultimately destined to fall short. Also, it requires a recognition that the process of political evolution is always situation-specific, even when there may be recurrent patterns of covariance and invariances within the total configuration of factors. (The development of “evolutionary economics” over the past decade or so has introduced a similar, albeit not explicitly “bioeconomic,” perspective into economic theory.)

Some of these variables are obvious to political scientists. They involve the staples of conventional political analyses. But other variables are not always appreciated, or may be treated as constants. One case in point is fresh water resources, which have played a key role (necessary but not sufficient) in co-determining both the locations and the rise and decline of various civilizations — not to mention the conflicts between them. Thus, recent research has indicated that a major climate change precipitated the sudden collapse of the Akkadian empire in ancient Mesopotamia about 2200 B.C. (Weiss et al., 1993). Climate changes have also been implicated in the fall of the Mayan civilization and of Teotihuac·n.

In fact, a major challenge for any theory of political evolution is that it must be able to account not only for “progressive” innovations and complexifications but also for “regressive” changes, for the episodic rise and decline of political systems. Two examples, one of each kind, will perhaps suffice to illustrate the synergistic nature of such changes.

The rise of the Zulu nation in the nineteenth century provides an instructive example of the former process (see Gluckman 1940, 1969 and Morris 1965). Until the early 1800s, the people (mainly of Bantu origin) who had come to inhabit what became known as Zululand (a region of the South African province of Natal) consisted of a disorderly patchwork of cattle-herding and minimally horticultural clans that frequently warred on one another. The most common casus belli were disputes over cattle, rights to grazing lands, and water rights. The ensuing combat was usually brief, for the most part involving prearranged pitched battles at a respectable distance between small groups of warriors armed with assegai (a lightweight, six-foot throwing spear) and oval cowhide shields. Injuries and fatalities were usually low.

As the human and cattle populations increased over time, resulting in “environmental circum- scription” (in Carneiro’s term), there was a corresponding increase in the frequency and intensity of warfare among the clans until a radical discontinuity occurred in 1816, when a 29-year-old warrior named Shaka took charge of the Zulu clan. Shaka immediately set about transforming the pattern of Natalese warfare by introducing a new military technology involving disciplined phalanxes of shield-bearing troops armed with short hooking and jabbing spears designed for combat at close quarters.

Shaka’s innovation was as great a revolution in that environment as were the introduction of the stirrup and gunpowder into European warfare. After ruthlessly training his ragtag army of some 350 men, Shaka set out on a pattern of conquests and forced alliances that quickly became a juggernaut. Within three years Shaka had forged a nation of a quarter of a million, including a formidable and fanatically disciplined army of about 20,000 men — who were motivated in part by Shaka’s decree that they were not allowed to marry until they were blooded in battle. Shaka’s domain had also increased from about 100 square miles to 11,500 square miles. There was not a tribe in all of black Africa that could oppose the new Zulu kingdom, and in short order Shaka began to expand his nation beyond the borders of his peoples’ traditional lands.

The further evolution and ultimate downfall of the Zulu nation at the hands of the Europeans in the latter part of the century is another chapter. What is significant here is the profound structural and functional changes — changes involving the superposition of an integrated political system — which occurred among the Zulu by virtue of decisive political entrepreneurship stimulated by population pressures and coupled with synergistic changes in military techniques and organization. Again, the causal process was configural and interactional, with cybernetic control processes being an integral part of the synergies that resulted. Moreover, these synergies were positively “reinforcing”, as well as providing “positive feedback” in the strict cybernetic sense.

The classic example of political decline is the Roman empire, which recent scholarship suggests involved, among other things, a nexus of populational, economic and political causes. (For a more detailed analysis, see Corning 1983.) The explanation begins, ironically, with a population explosion. In 400 B.C., there were only about 150,000 adult citizens on the entire Italian peninsula. As late as 70 B.C., there were only about 500,000 citizens and about the same number of slaves and freemen in metropolitan Rome, according to the Roman census. But by 28 B.C., the number of Roman citizens had reached about four million, the majority of whom, it is thought, were living in the provinces.

Meanwhile, a profound shift was occurring in the Roman economy. The rapid population increases created a growing dependence on overseas food imports — especially grain from Sicily and Egypt — to a considerable extent independently of a conversion of “domestic” agriculture to large-scale, export-oriented, slave-based Latifundia. At the same time, Rome’s once thriving export markets for manufactured goods declined as the provinces learned to make Roman products more cheaply at home. Unfavorable trade balances eventually led to inflation and a debasement of the currency.

To cope with this imbalance, Rome began to place greater tax burdens on its empire, ostensibly to support the military legions and civil servants that were supposed to be out there to provide protection and maintain law and order but who ultimately came to be perceived as being there to support the tax collectors. The rest of the story is complicated, but this important configuration of changes (which were exacerbated by a stagnation of investment and enterprise, serious structural weaknesses in the political system and some other factors not mentioned here) fundamentally altered the cost-benefit calculus for many Roman subjects and thus undermined the synergies that had been responsible for Rome’s ascendancy.

There was nothing deterministic or orthogenetic about these two evolutionary episodes. Nor can any monolithic causal variable encompass them. The causal matrix in each case involved a dynamic mix of interacting factors located at several “levels” of causation — from geophysical to ecological, biological, technological and political. Numerous factors “worked together,” synergistically, in a relationship of mutual and reciprocal causation, to facilitate the rise of the Zulu nation and to bring about the destruction of the Roman empire. As the eminent classical scholar Charles Alexander Robinson observed: “The problem of the decline of the Roman Empire will probably be debated as long as history is studied, for it was a complex phenomenon in which many factors interacted, not one of which can be singled out as the prime cause” (1951:611).

It would appear that a similar configuration of factors worked together to undermine the Soviet empire. Ironically, a reduction in Russia’s historic sense of vulnerability to external attack was one of the factors that served to weaken the perceived need for the empire. When this was coupled with a disastrous war (Afghanistan), an upwelling of internal demands for dissolution and the need to reform a “sclerotic” internal economy (among other factors), the calculus of perceived costs and benefits was altered for those who had the power to defend the empire.

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Conclusion

Beyond such conditional predictions, does this paradigm have any heuristic value? For one thing, it implies the use of more expansive, multi-leveled, multi-variate (and multi-disciplinary) analyses, with a focus on the functional relationships among the variables and not merely on their additive statistical properties. For instance, the accumulating evidence that sudden, drastic climate changes were associated with the precipitous decline of many early civilizations impels a more systematic analysis of this variable as a cause of past, present and future political changes.

A second implication is that a more sustained effort should be devoted to elucidating the bio­economics (and economics) of synergy — the concrete, measurable consequences, or “payoffs”, of co-operative phenomena that may serve to sustain or undermine cybernetic (political) processes.

This paradigm also invites us to utilize the insights gained by the life sciences about the evolution of complexity. As noted earlier, two major modes of functionally-based complexification have been evident in the broader process of biological evolution: (1) symbiotic partnerships, or “mergers” of various kinds that have precipitated new forms of synergy and new functional capabilities, and (2) “autogenous” differentiation and special­ization, again resulting in new forms of functional synergy and new cybernetic processes. Indeed, if social organization based on an inclusive fitness model may provide an appropriate framework for explaining the earliest phase of human evolution, it may well be the case that a “Symbiogenesis model” (co-operative partnerships among unrelated individuals) best fits the revolutionary changes in human societies since the Paleolithic. One must, of course, avoid using facile analogies as a substitute for rigorous analysis. But in this case the biological analogy directs our attention to phenomena in human societies that may be viewed as variations on a basic evolutionary theme rather than as borrowed metaphors.

Finally, there is the challenge of testing further the theory itself. A better causal theory of political evolution may in due course be established. But, in the meantime, I would hope that this one will be given serious consideration.

Copyright © 2001 ISCS. All rights reserved.

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Synergy, Cybernetics, and the Evolution of Politics

Peter Corning’s Website

As many of you know, I earn my living as a practicing physician. Our industry is in great trouble. The economics of practicing medicine, and this includes the entire health care system in the United States, is in the final stages of failure. If the health care system was a patient, we would be calling a priest.

This morning synergic scientist Peter Corning comments on these problems in our American health system, and a possible direction we might look for a solution.

Tinkering With Complex Systems
The U.S. Health Care ‘System’ as an Example

Peter A. Corning, Ph.D.

The current headlong rush into managed care provides yet another example of the pitfalls associated with introducing radical changes into a complex system when you don’t really understand either the system or what you are doing to it. You cannot fix a hemorrhage with a splint, or a broken bone with a tourniquet. And you can’t take power over health care decisions out of the hands of the health care providers and their patients and give it to profit-making insurance companies or private stock-holder ventures without ultimately causing a serious distortion in the outcomes produced by the system. The profit motive may be a way to create incentives for economic efficiency, but only if it is constrained, just as “free” markets are constrained by rules against unfair competition, monopoly practices and the like. This argument can be found even in Adam Smith, notably in his “The Theory of Moral Sentiments” (1759).

What’s to be done? Among other things: (1) exposure of “dysfunctional” behavior by HMOs (2) competition among HMOs wherever possible (3) well-policed laws and regulatory restrictions (e.g., “portability” for health insurance) (4) greater emphasis on developing measures of “outcomes” to evaluate performance. But perhaps the most promising longer-term solution (if it is not already too late) is an idea that has been piloted in a few communities. It involves a locally-financed and locally-controlled HMO — a not-for-profit joint venture between physicians, hospitals, other health care personnel and various community agencies, with broad community participation. With this model, most of the dollars and all of the control remain in the local community. In the past, such collaborative ventures were not politically possible. What makes them feasible now, quite simply, is the threat that some Wall Street for-profit chain might come in and gobble up a community’s health care system if the “players” don’t unite and take joint action. It is yet another example of the “common enemy” syndrome. 

Copyright © 2001 ISCS. All rights reserved.

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More by Peter Corning

Scott Meredith the moderator at Alas Babylon Yahoogroup asks a question, and Tom Robertson, moderator at the  Energy Resources Yahoogroup answers.

Making Sense of our Current Predicament 

Scott Meredith writes:

I still still still just don’t get it.

Yesterday for example, I was browsing the latest issue of Wired magazine. They had a full-bore cheerleading article about nano- technology. The future looks bright ! (At least if you consider a locked-down technoid diorama of ever expanding corporate and governmental handcuffing and pawcuffing of all sentient beings ‘bright’ …) The point is not whether Wired per se is this or that as a magazine, who cares. The deeper point is that every major publication, and all the more specialized research journals, etc. – just “everyone” is operating on the assumption that things are just fine, homo saps are getting better, learning more, growing more efficient, smarter, smoother and slicker as a species every day.

These people are not stupid ! First they are technically and organizationally brilliant, you can see that from the undeniable power of what they produce, however ultimately destructive and shortsighted it may turn out to be. They even show awareness of various ecological issues, for example, even oil finitude is sometimes acknowledged, water problems, etc. Yet they gloss and glide so easily to a sunny uplands of “solutions” offered “with newer technologies…” or whatever.

What I’m trying to say, either those mainstream guys are basically correct or “we” (Jay Hanson’s analysis buy-in type of people) are correct – for our respective views over the next 20 years of the human outlook.

It is possible to honestly disagree over the same set of facts. And nobody knows the actual future. Yet – still… the mind falters and hesitates…

I just feel such a TOTAL chasm between the viewpoints, I really really “don’t get it”. What’s going on ?

Any assistance with this conundrum appreciated.

 

Tom Robertson responds:

Its quite simple, and we were given a basis for understanding what is happening to us long ago, when Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955) struggled to describe the need for the world to deal with the new ideas that were breaking upon human society.

He summarized our continuing circumstances by saying:

“A perfection of means, and confusion of aims, seems to be our main problem.”

The world’s people, particularly those favored with access to abundant resources, found themselves able to create a “perfection of means,” which resulted in an increasing capacity to do things. Thus, “doing things,” from building great societies to waging great wars that tore things apart, became the highly rewarded mantra of much of human society over the past thousand years or so.

Those relatively abundant “doing things” rewards simply, pervasively, and almost perpetually got in the way of reducing our “confusion of aims.” As we as a society became more adept at “doing things” such success got in the way of knowing what we should be doing to advance our interests in secure and satisfying ways over time.

Complementing the above quote, Einstein also said:

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

In other words, we have an intellectual system that is mainly focused on and highly rewarded for “doing things.” This is the reason for the ways our universities are organized around disciplines and departments–all seeking increasingly smaller bits of the intellectual pie–with virtually no reward for synthesis, for making sense through the combination of parts toward any systemic whole. In fact, very little resources and often substantial penalties accrue for addressing the (mainly systemic) contextual circumstances which would let us know–of all the things we could do, which will best serve our interests over time–particularly as our world changes for reasons associated with the Money/Energy Transition.

Further, it is a waste of time trying to find fault for the way our “doing things” intellectual processes and associated institutions work. For the most part, they were doing what worked for them.

The problem–which is rapidly expanding and very threatening–is that the Money/Energy Transition means not only a transition in the way money, energy, and other resources are available to society, but also a transition in what will work best to advance our interests during and after the M/ET itself.

The events of 9-11, Enron/California, Argentina, Africa, Africa, Japan, etc., etc., are all glaring symptoms of the end of the “doing it” way of working.

Complementing a “A perfection of means” with a “Perfection of aims,” mainly through a judicious development and application of knowledge frameworks based on the best of the systems sciences, is the only path open to a at least sensible future.

And while there are no guarantees in any of this, we are most likely to find that continuing on with the “doing it” mindset will set actors and their constituencies to know increasing trauma, while those involved in building an adequate contextual understanding tightly linked to guiding what can and should be done, will increasingly find opportunities for a successful future, regardless of what that future may hold.

Finally, an inherent component of working in the “doing it” paradigm is the prevalence of “top down” management styles. We will find that increasingly during, and certainly after the Money/Energy Transition, the more successful systems over time will evolve to another mode of self-management, with the actors probably tending to find that the closer they are able to work within a democratic framework, the more beneficial to both leaders and their constituencies such systems are likely to be.