By THOMAS
HOMER-DIXON
Wednesday, September 11,
2002 – Print Edition, Page A11
The attacks of last Sept. 11 tore a ragged hole in the fabric of our
reality. Through that hole we glimpsed something hideous. As in our worst
nightmares, it was indistinct and incomprehensible. We couldn't see its
beginning, its end, or its true form. But we knew immediately that this
thing -- whatever it was -- was both profoundly dangerous and utterly
terrifying.
Our first response was to back away, shield our eyes, and try to return
our world to normal as quickly as possible. We did this, partly by using
well-worn categories, distinctions and theories to explain the horror:
moral categories of good and evil, psychological distinctions between
sanity and madness, and crude stereotypes about the character of
Islam.
To the extent that we could see the attacks through these existing
lenses, we could understand and discount them. They were just extreme
forms of phenomena we already grasped; they were appalling and wrenching,
to be sure, but we didn't have to question our basic assumptions about the
world.
We also turned for help to people with power and knowledge -- that is,
to our leaders and experts. We asked our political leaders to develop
policies to protect us without requiring great change in our lives. We
sought out experts of all types -- on terrorism, on the Middle East and
the Arab world, and on the economic effects of the attacks. Their
incessant background prattle was reassuring, because it helped us believe
that someone, somewhere, knew what was going on.
In these ways, we've busily stitched over the tear in reality's fabric.
Alas, the stitches aren't strong. Events are multiplying that our
conventional categories and theories can't easily explain. Moreover, our
leaders' pronouncements and our experts' prattle seems less and less
reassuring, because it's dawning on us that, much of the time, these
people don't really know what's going on at all. Most importantly, they
rarely have clear or useful solutions to the truly tough problems.
The Middle East is aflame and no one really has a clue any more how to
bring durable peace to the region. India and Pakistan remain on the brink
of a war that could escalate into a nuclear exchange; again, there's a
dearth of credible solutions to the underlying crisis in Kashmir. The
United States is planning to attack Iraq, but its plans are widely
opposed, even by staunch allies, largely because no one can really predict
the downside risk. (Will oil prices go through the roof? Will Saddam
Hussein release smallpox when U.S. forces are at the gates of
Baghdad?)
On the economic front, the world is a mess, and critical economic
policymakers -- such as the heads of national central banks, the
International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank -- seem flummoxed. Many of
the richest economies are stagnating, while in poor countries nearly three
billion people still live on less than $2 a day. The U.S. economy --
critical to world growth -- is sliding sideways. European growth is also
almost non-existent, and Germany's unemployment rate is nearing double
digits. The Japanese Nikkei Index has dropped to levels unseen in two
decades, with renewed doubts about the stability of the country's banking
system. Latin America is in financial crisis; a decade of market
liberalization on the continent has produced growth rates half those of
the 1960s and a rise in the number of poor people. Africa and its 700
million inhabitants aren't even on the economic map.
But it's on environmental issues that our leaders and experts have
proved most inadequate. In the last century, humankind's total impact on
the planet's environment (measured, principally, by the flow of materials
through our economies and our output of wastes) has multiplied about
16-fold. We're now disrupting fundamental flows of energy and materials
within the biosphere -- that layer of life on Earth's surface as thick,
proportionately, as an apple's skin -- and we're producing profound
changes in cycles of key elements, like nitrogen, sulfur and carbon.
These changes will have immense consequences for life, industry and
agriculture across the planet. Yet, just when we need, more than ever,
aggressive policies to deal with our common environmental challenges, the
recent summit in Johannesburg produced a pathetic spectacle of cacophony
and global gridlock.
This combination of intractable political, economic, and environmental
challenges is not a recipe for a humane and peaceful world society.
Looking at them together, one gets the dismaying sense that deep and
inexorable forces are building within the global system. At some point,
these forces could combine in unforeseeable ways to cause a sharp
breakdown of world order.
Then, once again, we'll suddenly see through the fabric of security and
regularity that we've so carefully woven for ourselves: It will be torn
away, we'll be naked, and we'll feel that dreadful terror once more. Only
this time, our leaders and experts won't be able to help us at all.
How can we choose a different future? First, we need to recognize that
the relationship between us, on one hand, and our leaders and experts, on
the other, is entirely symbiotic: We provide these people with the perks
of authority and ego-gratification; they provide us with the illusion that
somebody knows what's going on and that we'll be safe. But our leaders and
experts increasingly can't fulfill their part of the bargain, because the
systems we want them to explain and manage (from the international economy
to our relationship with the biosphere) are too complex and opaque and are
changing too fast.
Second, we have to extract ourselves from this false bargain and
reassert our responsibility for our own future. In other words, if we
can't count on our leaders and experts, we have to get more involved in
making critical decisions ourselves. And this change will itself require
two others: a revitalization of our democratic institutions (perhaps
through the creative use of Internet-based debate and voting procedures)
so that the average citizen can participate more effectively in
governance; and, most importantly, a dramatic improvement in the average
citizen's knowledge of current affairs and of the technical and scientific
facts that these days bear on our lives.
How can societies make responsible and democratic decisions about
climate change, for example, when nearly half their citizens -- as a
recent National Science Foundation poll found in the United States -- are
so ignorant of basic science that they don't know it takes a year for
Earth to go around the sun? How can we decide whether we should go to war
with Saddam Hussein when so few of us know the difference between
plutonium and enriched uranium as the basic material for atomic bombs?
(Both are really bad, but we should be much more worried if Mr. Hussein
has a lot of the latter rather than the former.)
Citizen knowledge is something that we can start improving right away.
Better knowledge won't necessarily help us come up with better solutions
to our complex problems than those proposed by our current leaders and
experts. But it will help us discriminate, collectively and
democratically, between those problems where we know enough to promote
decisive solutions, and those where solutions are difficult to find, the
risks of mistake are large, and prudence and caution are in order until we
know more.
Thomas Homer-Dixon is author of
The Ingenuity Gap and director of the Centre for the Study of Peace
and Conflict at the University of
Toronto. |
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