On technology and freedom

Charles Krauthammer's year-end observation, "Are We Alone In The Universe" prompted me to recall for how long I have seen humanity's tenuous grip on high technology-- including the means to destroy itself by nuclear weapons-- as inextricably linked to human freedom, and democracy in particular.  I developed my view during the Cold War era that nation-states that did not derive legitimacy from a politically free people did not have the right to possess the technological means to destroy civilization, even in self-defense.  The right to amass a nuclear arsenal, my assertion went, belonged only to democracies whose national powers were subject to the consent of the governed.

The "corollary" to my theorem proved it so: When the Soviet Union collapsed under, among other things, the sheer weight of technological advances in the West's anti-ballistic missile arsenal and its government realized that it no longer could no longer keep pace without trusting its scientists to work independently, the necessity for democracy seemed airtight.  In other words, without freedom, a society's technological advancement would hit a wall, making it incapable of defending itself militarily.  I recall thinking how Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost (openness they could survive without) was a risky prerequisite for perestroika (restructuring they could not survive without).

When I met Microsoft founder Bill Gates in 1995, I thanked him for ending the Cold War, quickly explaining my theory that the personal computing revolution forced the Soviet military industry to either trust their own people (and decentralize computational power) or surrender.  Gates responded he had not thought about the impact of his products quite this way, but he accepted my thanks.

In Krauthammer's piece, he argues that while politics is derided in the media and politicians might be intellectual midgets as compared to, say, nuclear physicists, it's the art of statecraft that has prevented humanity from letting its technological ingenuousness destroy itself.  (Score one for reading over math!)  But when I see technology and innovation more broadly, I am less equivocal; human freedom is why a civilization thrives economically, not how (e.g., free markets), but by feeding and protecting open thought and putting a premium on creativity above all else.

[Ahem: That's why I say it is freedom's ultimate duty to either remove nuclear weapons from non-democracies, or proliferate freedom and democracy to any country that dares to possess them.]

In the case of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon, there is no apparent political legitimacy to match such power.  If we were to go down the list, Russia, China, North Korea, Pakistan, and others would be morally excluded from the nuclear club, too, because they are not capable (for their lack of freedom) to meet future technological requirements to safeguard them.  The US has itself diverted enough engineering and scientific talent to keep and maintain its arsenal, but truth be told, it struggles to maintain its technological edge because America's "best and brightest" would rather make iPad and Android apps than guns.

The global borderless Internet and all its derivative open-source exchange of opinion and technological toys and tools-- which sprang 100% from the inextricable marriage between freedom of expression and technological prowess itself, has unalterably changed the measure of freedom on the planet.  (Thump our free, hairy chests on that!)  One can now truly hope the power of this global, backbone "utility" will only cause global freedom to exponentially expand and increase.

Yet in places like Syria, Egypt, or Yemen or Libya, this ultimate technological platform for freedom and free expression has just been used to launch an unthinkable1000-year biblical march backwards, against individual freedom and expression throughout the Muslim world.  I can only explain the paradox by saying that my cherished inextricable link between technology and freedom is broken, unchained temporarily. How else to explain the use of Enlightenment means to achieve Dark Ages ends?

Until every nation state sees their economic fortunes tied to technological advancement, and devotes the necessary support for freedom to sustain it, the threat of war over lesser, albeit important resources (energy supplies, minerals, etc.) will persist-- and the duty of free nations like the US will be to win.

But if Krauthammer's provocation is true-- that humanity is alone, abandoned by failed exoplanetary civilizations that destroyed themselves at the peak of their technological advancement-- know that we human folk have a vast undeveloped frontier called "freedom" untapped here on Earth, so ripe and rich, to explore and exploit.

Krauthammer Profound - (My take to follow)

Are we alone in the universe?

By Charles Krauthammer, Published: December 29

Huge excitement last week. Two Earth-size planetsfound orbiting a sun-like star less than a thousand light-years away. This comes two weeks after the stunning announcement of another planet orbiting another star at precisely the right distance — within the “habitable zone” that is not too hot and not too cold — to allow for liquid water and therefore possible life.

Unfortunately, the planets of the right size are too close to their sun, and thus too scorching hot, to permit Earth-like life. And the Goldilocks planet in the habitable zone is too large. At 2.4 times the size of Earth, it is probably gaseous, like Jupiter. No earthlings there. But it’s only a matter of time — perhaps a year or two, estimates one astronomer — before we find the right one of the right size in the right place.
And at just the right time. As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.

That silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic isolation, but because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence — no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?
It’s called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti- isocentrism, assures us that we are not unique — that they must be there. And yet we do not see them.”

How many of them should there be? The Drake Equation (1961) tries to quantify the number of advanced civilizations in just our own galaxy. To simplify slightly, it’s the number of stars in the galaxy . . .
 
multiplied by the fraction that form planets . . .
multiplied by the average number of planets in the habitable zone . . .
multiplied by the fraction of these that give birth to life . . .
multiplied by the fraction of these that develop intelligence . . .
multiplied by the fraction of these that produce interstellar communications . . .
multiplied by the fraction of the planet’s lifetime during which such civilizations survive.

Modern satellite data, applied to the Drake Equation, suggest that the number should be very high. So why the silence? Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the answer is to be found, tragically, in the final variable: the high probability that advanced civilizations destroy themselves.

In other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, nearly instantly so.

This is not mere theory. Look around. On the very day that astronomers rejoiced at the discovery of the two Earth-size planets, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity urged two leading scientific journals not to publish details of lab experiments that had created a lethal and highly transmittable form of bird flu virus, lest that fateful knowledge fall into the wrong hands.

Wrong hands, human hands. This is not just the age of holy terror but also the threshold of an age of hyper-proliferation. Nuclear weapons in the hands of half-mad tyrants (North Korea) and radical apocalypticists (Iran) are only the beginning. Lethal biologic agents may soon find their way into the hands of those for whom genocidal pandemics loosed upon infidels are the royal road to redemption.

And forget the psychopaths: Why, a mere 17 years after Homo sapiens — born 200,000 years ago — discovered atomic power, those most stable and sober states, America and the Soviet Union, came within inches of mutual annihilation.

Rather than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.

There could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics right, everything else risks extinction.

We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.
Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.
letters@charleskrauthammer.com

© The Washington Post Company

A dissrevice to Iowa

For most newspaper-reading folk, the highly-anticipated Iowa Caucuses on January 3 sure sound important.  For the GOP candidates for president, they surely are.

But why?

No offense, Iowans, but the more attention these delegate selection caucuses get, the less they mean to me.  Moreover, the Iowa I know from living next-door in Wisconsin (and having organized caravans of College Republicans to cross the Mississippi to campaign for Iowa Republican candidates) is barely recognizable in the heat of this particular winter.  From the coverage in national news outlets, Iowa sounds like it's full of narrow-minded people who will render an especially harsh judgement on the fate of each GOP candidate.

In the Iowa I remember, pork roasts and farm dinners were happy affairs that joined like-minded conservatives in the excitement of grass-roots politics.  On TV, it's as though the GOP candidates are bowing to Ku Klux Klan, or at least the evangelical wing of such, in order to prove their purity and chastity.  But, I digress, dear Iowa; all this is not of your making.  No, the blame goes to none other than the candidates themselves.

True, perhaps Iowa is more conservative or more "family values" than other places, but to watch the GOP primary boil down to pandering to what its candidates think Iowans want does Iowa a bad deed.  While it's understood that a loss in Iowa will end the campaigns of Rick Santorum and Michelle Bachmann, and I understand how hard it must be for a candidate to have, essentially, a one-state strategy, their recent statements have begun to make me wonder just how much, deep down, they actually hate Iowans.

When Mr. Santorum treads water proclaiming the size of his family and his political purity on social issues makes him the only logical choice for Iowans, he is discounting their intelligence.  When Mrs. Bachmann insists that her simpleton's meshing of scripture with the US Constitution makes her a better president, Iowans are smart enough to cringe, too.

Coalition politics is not the same as party politics and is twice-removed from governing.  Iowa might have tons of conservatives and simple folk to appeal to, but none of them are dumb or simple-minded.  Despite the economic boost from having so many politicians running around the state every four years, Iowans might consider what all this pandering-- or a particularly strong showing by Ron Paul in the caucuses-- does to its citizens' reputation.

It might be worth it for most Iowans to take a step back from being the first delegate-nominating state and let all the base pandering go on someplace else.  Then again, if I remember them, Iowans just don't give much thought to how they look to the rest of the country in the first place.