Annihilation from Within

by Fred Charles Iklé

  How much longer can the political foundations of the international order remain largely unchanged while science and technology keep transforming the world? So far, we do not feel the full impact of mankind’s cultural split. But we anxiously watch harbingers of things to come: the resurgent spread of mass destruction weapons, rumored dangers of nanotechnology, worried speculations about altering the human species. The accelerating momentum of scientific discoveries and technological advances has become like a resistant infectious agent that contaminated the human race some time ago. Today, we still live in the quiescent incubation period. But beware! The full virulence of this “infection” might not be far away.

  To be sure, national governments, international organizations, and legions of ethicists will try to rein in the deleterious effects of technology. On the evidence thus far, their efforts—whether in the form of legal regulations, arms control treaties, or appeals to moral restraint—have largely failed. The accelerating dynamic of science and technology is so perilous because the cultural split has separated it from effective political control.

  This unprecedented human predicament is the theme that overarches my book.

  A World of Two Souls

  Even though the predicament is unprecedented, it was anticipated. Before the Industrial Revolution had reached its full strength, poets, writers, and artists had premonitions about the new historic force and the unfathomable changes it might bring. There is much in the Romanticist art of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the music, paintings, and fiction—that speaks to the calm before the storm and reflects the tension between evanescent enjoyment and anxious anticipation. Examples are Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings, Schubert’s songs, John Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” the paintings of still-pristine American landscapes by Albert Bierstadt or Thomas Cole, and of course many passages in Goethe’s Faust.

  Some writers used metaphorical stories to express their dark foreboding. In 1797, Goethe wrote The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a ballad about the irresponsible unleashing of a robot whose unstoppable energy spreads havoc all around. Two centuries later, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice resonates with our concerns about the proliferation of nuclear technology. In 1816 Mary Shelley wrote the novel Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (published 1818), which became a highly popular book that spoke to the then-emerging fear that scientists might create humanlike beings who could inflict monstrous harm on society. To this day, the fear of future Frankensteins lives on in people’s imagination—a fascinating story told well by Jon Turney.1

  It is as if mankind now has two souls—“the one strives to forsake the other.” One soul guided human development for millennia, inspiring people with religious faith, social sentiments, and cultural traditions. It embraces religions thousands of years old and political principles that had gained acceptance several hundred years ago. The other soul seeks scientific knowledge to expand the human conquest of nature. It reaches out to a horizon that is forever receding. During the past two hundred years, this second soul has inspired mankind to gain unprecedented power over natural forces. These advances, however, have not been matched in the political, social, and religious sphere. Our culture has become deeply divided.

  Once we have come to understand this cultural split of the modern age, we need not look far to see examples. Consider, for instance, the American duality: the disjunction between the political foundations of the United States and its global role since World War II. What has endowed America’s military and economic power with a global reach beyond that of any other nation is the vigorous development and exploitation of new technologies. What gives the United States its internal strength, pride, and cohesion, all essential for political and military influence abroad, are its Constitution and political traditions. The constitutional provisions critical for the values and functioning of the American republic are more than two hundred years old, save for a few vital amendments (above all, the amendments to abolish slavery and, also, the amendment on female suffrage). It seems fair to say that the essence of America’s political order—its political soul—was created by a nation of fewer than four million inhabitants, more than two-thirds of whom worked on farms. After two hundred years, this “soul” still serves the nation splendidly, despite a 75-fold increase in the number of inhabitants, a huge expansion of the national territory, a vast transformation of the economy, and many other far-reaching changes. How long can America’s two cultural spheres harmoniously sustain each other?

  Before the cultural split, all civilizations had been unitary. Religious faiths, societal traditions, political thought, artistic and scientific endeavors, all were intimately connected and dominated the entire culture. This cultural dominion left little freedom for revolutionary technological advances. The exceptions—such as the exploitation of scientific discoveries to design navigation instruments, develop metallurgy, and improve calendars and clocks—are well remembered because they were so rare. Only a few scientists of extraordinary courage and intellectual strength ventured beyond the accepted norms of interpreting nature.

  Until the eighteenth century, religious and political beliefs, and the ways of thinking about nature fostered by these beliefs, determined the flow of history. The belief systems ruled over the evolution of all civilizations and illuminated the horizon of human creativity. They forced the early manifestations of man’s scientific and technological prowess to move in harmony with religion and the political order. They kept science in step with the evolution of society, instead of allowing it to race ahead. Being so closely intertwined, the two sides of human creativity shared their periods of flowering, times of stagnation, and periods of decline.

  This harmony is marvelously illuminated by the fate of science and technology in China. Despite China’s many astonishing scientific discoveries during and before Europe’s Dark Age, it was to be more than a century after the scientific-technological revolution had swept through Europe, America, and Japan that Chinese science became emancipated from the constraining cultural sphere, and then only because of the impact of the West. In the early fifteenth century, China had acquired the knowledge and technical capabilities to navigate distant oceans. It could have become a major naval power. But in 1433 an edict by the Emperor Zhu Di put an abrupt end to any such adventures. Several scholars have sought to explain why the modern scientific-industrial age reached China so late—well after it had impacted Japan and Russia—when many scientific discoveries and masterful technical applications had blossomed in China so early. Wen-yuan Qian of the University of California in Los Angeles points to the “ideology of hierarchism” by which China “was shackled” for two hundred years, a way of conceptualizing the world that “explicitly endorses an obedient attitude, a self-contented outlook, and a pacifist stand to deal with an allegedly changeless world.” Donald J. Munro of the University of Michigan’s Center for Chinese Studies argues that even in the twentieth century, there remained traces of “old philosophical ideas about knowledge and inquiry … ideas rooted in neo-Confucian doctrines.” In Munro’s words, what diverted attention from the pursuit of scientific inquiry were “ideas about a totalistic world and about the style of inquiry derived from it.” It seems that China’s commitment to a “totalistic world” delayed the cultural split.2

  So it happened that Western Europe was the first region of the world in which the pursuit of science began to diverge from religious beliefs and societal norms. This emancipation began stealthily, but in the seventeenth century it was increasingly accepted. Before that time, several of the intellectual pioneers—Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei—notoriously suffered death or imprisonment for their rebellion against the cultural unity that allowed religious teachings to circumscribe humanity’s spiritual existence. The guardians of the religious and political order in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries resisted the initial efforts of scientists to break away from the unitary culture.

  Although it is now st
andard practice to deride this suppression of scientific discovery, the European authorities of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance surely deserve some credit for understanding what was at stake. They intuitively foresaw that a cultural schism would have revolutionary and dangerous consequences. Yet their unsuccessful and at times oppressive attempt to avert the schism now has few defenders. Even the Roman Catholic Church has felt obliged to express second thoughts, 350 years after it had sought to keep Galileo from opening one of the many fissures that eventually led to a world of two souls. In 1992, Pope John Paul II endorsed the findings of a lengthy investigation by the Pontifical Academy of Science that concluded Galileo Galilei had been wronged.

  An extraordinary confluence of religious and political upheavals in Western Europe forced the early hairline fissures in European culture wide open and liberated science from political control. Prominent among these developments was the philosophy of the Enlightenment, which diminished the influence of religious belief on people’s lives and thinking, and which in part was a delayed consequence of the Protestant Reformation. Additional blows to the unitary culture were delivered by new government policies, especially in Western Europe and the United States, that allowed the free market to promote and reward technological innovation.

  Long before mankind’s cultural divergence had reached its full scope and conquered the whole world, political philosophers and historians began to recognize its profoundly revolutionary character. Early in the nineteenth century, its most visible manifestations first emerged in England and became known as the Industrial Revolution—a term that John Stuart Mill had used already in 1848 and that became popularized in 1888 through lectures by the English economist Arnold Toynbee (the uncle of the historian Arnold J. Toynbee). There is wide agreement among historians that, in addition to scientific discoveries, the necessary precursors of the Industrial Revolution included changing attitudes toward religion, new ideas in political philosophy, and innovations in governmental practices and law.3

  Although the scientific-industrial upheaval began in Western Europe, science and technology are not something intrinsically “Western.” One might classify the Bill of Rights, classical music, and Protestantism as cultural contributions that are specifically Western. And one might note that from the seventeenth century onward, West European scholars were disproportionately represented among the titans of science. But empirical science is no more “Western” than mathematics is “Arab” because of the geographic provenance of algebra and Arabic numerals.4 The fact is that any nation, regardless of how “non-Western” it is, can now carry out projects employing advanced scientific theories and technology if it has a sufficiently large educated class and the political will to marshal the requisite human and economic resources.

  The cultural split is not linked to geographic location. All societies, wherever located, have by now experienced this split to varying degrees, as the scientific-technological mode of human thought has spread to all civilizations. The influential French historian Fernand Braudel—based on his useful distinction between “culture” and “civilization”—explained that “civilizations, vast or otherwise, can always be located on the map. An essential part of their character depends on the constraints or advantages of their geographical situation.”5 But in the cultural realm, such geographic constraints are no longer relevant to the scientific and technological mode of human activity. Since so many technological advances brought all civilizations immense economic benefits and vast improvements in health care, few people are concerned about the widening divergence between mankind’s political culture and its scientific achievements. Zbigniew Brzezinski foresaw the political problems of this divergence thirty-five years ago: “On the one hand this [technological] revolution marks the beginning of a global community; on the other hand, it fragments humanity and detaches it from its traditional moorings.” Somewhat similar ideas were expressed by Jacques Ellul (who gained many admirers in the 1970s and 1980s); but he failed to see the dangerously widening divergence between the two modes of human thought.6

  Railroads As Nation-Builders

  The nations that first embraced the Industrial Revolution were richly rewarded with fabulous increases in wealth and military might. Great Britain, France, Germany, the United States, Russia, and Japan were empowered by their technological and economic progress to build steel mills and munitions factories, armored ships and artillery, telegraph lines and railroads. The railroads connected the major cities of these nations as if buckling the country together with their iron tracks. Railroad lines converging in London tied Scotland to England and England to Wales, the better to keep the Kingdom united. In Russia the spokes of the railroad system reached out from Moscow in every direction, even to the Pacific port of Vladivostok. In Germany, as Bismarck unified that country, the railroad lines began to clasp Berlin to Munich, Hamburg, Strasbourg. In the United States thousands of miles of railroads linked New York to New Orleans, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle. While physically uniting the countries that built them, railroads also helped protect the national territory. Unlike the horse cavalry (whose military role survived the end of World War I), railroad trains cannot seek out unguarded border crossings or charge through forests. Unlike the airplane, they cannot move onward without territory under friendly control. For the young nation-states of the nineteenth century, railroads were a splendid endowment received from the Industrial Revolution.7

  At the dawn of the railroad age, empires and nations were still fragmented by the “tyranny of distance”—the time and trouble of traveling and communicating by land and sea. Until the mid-nineteenth century, people who did not live in the same village or town could not communicate with each other save by messages traveling at the speed of horses or sailing ships, journeys that might take weeks or months to reach the addressee and bring back a reply.8 Thereafter, telegraph lines began to spread across Europe and the United States, and in 1866 even across the Atlantic Ocean. Such communications networks called for some international cooperation. In 1864 Napoleon III organized a conference among European governments to create an international telegraph system, which led to rules on codes and message routing. Political decisions were also required to synchronize time, within nations as well as worldwide. This had become urgent because the railroads, telegraph, and telephone all transcended the old mosaic of unregulated time zones. The task was accomplished by the United States and European governments between 1883 and 1912.9

  By the end of the twentieth century, the impediment of distance for communications had been essentially eliminated, and for travel it had shrunk ten- to a hundredfold. In 1946 the cost of transatlantic air travel (economy class) was nearly ten times higher than it is today. For long-distance communications, the extra costs of spanning distance have been totally erased by the Internet and other new technologies. A map that reflects social interactions at the beginning of the twenty-first century would bear little resemblance to the natural topography of the world. If such a map were scaled to represent travel times between cities, it would shrink the whole planet into a little web resembling a road map of Western Europe. If this map were drawn to show the time (or cost) of communicating between governments, businesses, and homes it would make our world look like an ink blot.

  Many scholars and pundits believe the shrinking of distance greatly enhances political and economic interactions throughout the world that are beneficial for all mankind. This might well be true for some individuals and groups—business elites, Internet entrepreneurs, nongovernmental organizations, intellectuals who embrace multiculturalism. Thus, for these sectors of society, the message of Thomas L. Friedman’s book, The World Is Flat, justifies its captivating title. But our world is not “flat” for nation-states that act as the ultimate arbiters of the political order and disorder on our planet. Most of these influential nations gained their strength and cohesion in the railroad age and must now cope with political problems that stem from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Th
e fought-over fragments of the Ottoman Empire—Iraq, Syria, Palestine—come to mind, or the unsettled relationship between China and Taiwan. Nothing “flat” about this world.

  Widening Divergence

  Ever since mankind’s cultural split, science and the political order have been marching to different drummers. This divergence will widen because the scientific-technological sphere has acquired its own dynamic with which the political order cannot keep up. Nourished by an apparently unlimited succession of discoveries, science advances at an accelerating pace. Of course, scientific theories remain subject to revisions, and acquired knowledge may later be lost in the welter of competing ideas. But from decade to decade, modern science produces new knowledge and technological advances that seem destined to accumulate without end. It has become a self-sustaining force that sets it apart from all other fields of human endeavor.

  No such momentum is discernible in the sphere of society, government, and international affairs. Developments in this realm travel a zigzag course, wherein improvement is often followed by deterioration, strife by pacification, rise by decline—all akin to the rhythms of history that prevailed for millennia. The power of governments grows and shrinks, their ability to control violent crime and corruption improves and deteriorates, the freedom of citizens expands and contracts, the same lessons have to be relearned from one century to the next. Man as a political animal moves on an erratic course. Man as the modern scientist moves onward, not without setbacks, but without ever changing the overall sense of direction.