The
infrastructure of modern society (electrical grids, rail lines, highways, the
internet, etc., etc.,) was all designed and put in place before the reality of
terrorism.
As we
replace infrastructure, design criterial will have to take into account the
reality of the "new" war.
arthur
-----Original Message-----755. London terrorism and the Bonaparte syndrome
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]On Behalf Of Keith Hudson
Sent: Friday, July 8, 2005 2:58 AM
To: futurework@fes.uwaterloo.ca
Subject: [Futurework] London terrorism and the Bonaparte syndrome
Yesterday's terrorist attacks in London and the immense economic consequences to this country that will follow -- never mind the human suffering -- really bring us to the nub of the problem in today's world.
This is that, despite all our modernity and technologies, we are as tribalistic as we ever were in the earliest days of man because the proclivity is still within our genes. We are very much at the mercy of the decisions of single individuals such as President Bush or Prime Minister Blair -- or at least of small cliques around them -- when they decide to make war, despite the fact that the respective countries are supposed to be democracies. They are the most recent manifestation of whole nations being manipulated. This occurred in the last century when we think of the Soviet Union, Germany and China, or a century before when we think of the earliest of the modern sort of tribal chiefs, Napolean Bonaparte.
Coming back from a touring holiday in France recently I can still remember the hundreds of miles of straight, poplar tree-lined roads we drove along. These were built two centuries ago by Bonaparte in order to get his vast regiments around the country quickly. This was yet another reminder that the modern nation-state arose side by side with the modern artillery regiment. Our forms of governance and the civil services behind them were moulded into the same hierarchical form of governance as armies. However democratic Western nations are supposed to be, and despite the holding of elections from time to time, we still end up with a system whereby a very small number of individuals at the top of the pyramid can either forcefully direct, or manipulate, millions of other people.
Last night on BBC Newsnight, its diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, who probably has more brains than the whole of our secret services put together, gave his opinion that the London terrorist attacks were probably carried out by a small group which planted bombs within a few minutes on underground trains that radiated along different lines from the nexus of King's Cross Underground Station and then, within a few minutes' walk, accessed the tourist bus on which another bomb was planted. It could, of course, have been a single person, just as it has been a single person, Osama bin Laden, who initiated the whole wave of current terrorism, due to the repression of millions of his fellow subjects by the hierarchical powers of the Saudi Arabian royal family (only two generations from outright camel-borne tribalism in the Arabian deserts) in association with Wahhabi religious interests on the one hand and American interests, political and commercial, on the other.
The end of the nation-state in its present pyramidal mode, was prefigured by the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Today, a nuclear bomb could easily be smuggled into a country -- as are hard drugs and illegal immigrants -- inside freight containers. Whole governments, as in Washington, London, Moscow or Beijing, because they are so centralised and hierarchical, could be completely destroyed by terrorists and whole nations could be thrown into disarray. During the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union all developed governments built underground facilities whereby centralised governance could continue, but today such duplicate systems have been neglected. They would be impossible to recreate now due to the increased complexity of modern life, the dumbing-down of politicians and those in government service, and the sheer cost and operability of such systems.
Due to our genetic make-up, shaped as it has been by millions of years of ancestors living in small groups and requiring leadership and rank ordering in order to survive in difficult environments, we cannot avoid the constant urge to yield our collective judgement to individuals or small numbers of individuals. But in those small groups of our predecessors, leadership was always accessible, the knowledge on which they acted was always transparent to all, and rank ordering was always in a constant state of flux as young adults reached maturity with new ideas and skills.
The nearest form of small group 'governance' in modern life to our tribal-prehistory is the peer review system in scientific research whereby reputation -- and thus natural authority -- is reached by competition of the best minds available in a particular discipline. This doesn't always work smoothly because outdated ideas have a habit of sticking for quite long periods but it certainly produces a more continuous process of adaptation than our present mode of repeated warfare between this culture and that, between this nation and that.
The notion of democracy is a fine thing, so long as everybody takes an interest in policy-making and has the capacity to understand what is involved and to contend in a rational, peaceful way with those who have other views. This is supposed to be what happens within Congress or the House of Commons but, as we know, they were both led by the nose by President Bush and Prime Minister Blair in the decision to invade Iraq which, as sensible people foretold, has led to a vast increase in terrorism and world insecurity. The Middle East is now a tinder-box.
I am quite sure that if mankind is to survive then we will need to develop a type of forum governance in many different policy areas whereby everybody can be involved if they want to be and have the intellectual apparatus and willingness to thoroughly understand what a particular problem involves. We can begin to see this in the spectacular rise of thousands of specialised groups and non-governmental organisations in recent decades in developed countries. They have a particular attraction for the young who are increasingly turning away from any sort of respect or admiration for our present political set-ups and politicians. In these, as in scientific peer review, I think we can dimly see the beginnings of new forms of governance. But all this, as was the rise of the modern nation-state, will probably take a couple of centuries to unfold.
Keith Hudson
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
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