The Age of the Unthinkable (3 page)

Complex-systems scientists, when asked, “What’s a complex system?” usually just reply: “Look out the window!” Clouds, mountains,
rivers, the whole jumbled and surprising landscape of our world, are expressions of what results from unpredictable interactions.
Per Bak, a magnificent scientist whom we’ll meet in a bit, once explained the importance of complexity by saying, “Most phenomena
around us seem rather distant from the basic laws of physics.” He meant that what you see out your window usually can’t be
explained by the rules of energy or motion that most physicists rely on. They require a leap into a more complex, buried logic.
Bak used to tell a joke popular among more rebellious scientists, about the dairy farmer who hired a theoretical physicist
for help raising cows that would produce more milk. The physicist came to the farm, spoke with the farmer, disappeared for
several years, and then returned with the good news that he had found an answer. “Imagine,” he began, “a spherical cow . .
.” Bak’s frustration with old ways of seeing the world in science was that they too often began with these sorts of assumptions
and simplifications. We’ll spend more time with complex systems as this book progresses, so there’s no need to be exhaustive
here, but keep in mind that their most marked feature is a departure from the idea that our world can be reduced to simple
models, that the real dynamics of the world make prediction nearly impossible and demand a different way of thinking. They
demolish poor Alan Greenspan’s hope that even forty years of experience is a reliable guide to the future.

“Complex systems,” as Bak wrote, “can exhibit catastrophic behavior where one part of the system can affect many others by
a domino effect. Cracks in the earth’s crust propagate this way to produce earthquakes, sometimes with tremendous energies.”
That is our world now, filled with propagating cracks and surprising energy. Radical change in one area produces radical change
elsewhere. Simple interactions, easy-to-map dynamics — they are as common as spherical cows. But this infectious energy of
change now exploding around us
can
be harnessed. In fact, it can be understood and used by each of us. It’s true that we can no longer rely only on our nations
or companies or armies to guarantee our security, that we have to take this responsibility at least partly into our own hands.
But as we’ll see, such a shift also offers a chance for a profound improvement in how we live and in the sort of planet we’ll
leave behind. I’m guessing that if you’ve felt nervous about how little comprehension our leaders seem to have of our financial
or security order, you’ve also felt at least a twinge of moral worry as well: how is it that the most basic problems of human
decency are so hard to solve? Well, as we will see, a really dynamic and accurate view of power now can offer a way to engage
our world that is not only more reliable but also — and this is crucial — more decent.

Before making this jump to a new model, I want to turn to the underlying physics of our world. We’ll begin with a look at
where our old ideas about power come from and where they have led us and then move to a different model, one that better incorporates
inevitable dynamism and newness. With that done, we’ll look around to get a clearer picture of the dangers and possibilities
that suddenly become visible, the
unthinkable
made
thinkable.
Then we’ll turn, in the second half of the book, to an approach to our future I call “deep security.” This is a way of seeing,
thinking, and acting that takes the best ideas from the playbook of revolutionary forces and combines them with the demands
and responsibilities that our established power places on us. It is a revolutionary approach for a revolutionary age, one
whose goal is a return to real safety and prosperity. What we need now, both for our world and in each of our lives, is a
way of living that resembles nothing so much as a global immune system: always ready, capable of dealing with the unexpected,
as dynamic as the world itself. An immune system can’t prevent the existence of a disease, but without one even the slightest
of germs have deadly implications. The idea of deep security as an immune system is useful also because the stakes here could
not be higher. The problems we are failing to confront now, from nuclear proliferation to global climate change to the rise
of new and angry powers, are on a historic scale, and their cost will ultimately be weighed in the lives and deaths of tens
of millions of people.

Shortly after World War II, George Kennan, arguably the greatest geostrategist of the last century, holed up at the National
War College for a year simply to sit and think and lecture. Kennan had a full, adventurous life, but he later said that no
time was as exciting as the year he spent in his Fort McNair office, looking out the window and trying to come to terms with
a world whose order was only just becoming apparent. “Today you cannot even do good unless you are prepared to exert your
share of power, take your share of responsibility, make your share of mistakes, and assume your share of risks,” he said in
one of the thirteen magnificent lectures he gave that year. He saw, he said, the phenomenal urgency of finding a new way to
think about power. This, in a sense, is where we sit again today, in need of fresh large-scale ideas. I don’t propose the
instant junking of ideas and institutions — such a move would yield yet more problems. But urgent, steady, ceaseless reform
and innovation must begin immediately so that in five years, or at most ten, we will have a new, revolutionary architecture
of financial, environmental, and national security built with fresh language and stocked with new minds. This is the most
exciting possible moment to be working in international affairs, to be thinking deeply about the forces now violently reordering
the globe, to try to change the corporations where we work or the communities where we live. Decades from now, much about
how we engage the world will be different as a result of the tsunami whose vibrations I was feeling that day sitting with
Fouad sipping coffee. Ahead of us is the invigorating possibility of discovery and reinvention.

There was a moment, sometime in the early spring of 1961 or 1962, when The Idea began to crystallize in Dean Babst’s mind
and he decided, with the kind of certainty that grabs a man sometimes, that he had to get it out into the world. If The Idea
seemed unlikely to Babst at first, it was even more unlikely coming
from
Babst, who was a criminologist at the New York State Narcotics Addiction Control Commission. The Idea needed to breathe in
more rarefied air than was usually found among criminologists. The Idea was nothing less than a notion designed to drift among
the highest rafters of the church of political philosophy, a place generally reserved for the immortal music of men like Immanuel
Kant and Niccolò Machiavelli, men who wrote hymns that broke nations, made history. Dean Babst spent his days worrying about
why Mexican heroin was weaving its way up the East Coast and into New York’s cities or explaining the statistical patterns
of marijuana use among hazy-brained rural teenagers. Babst was a man who believed in the power of science to explain the world
better than it had ever been explained before. Machiavelli, Kant — their ideas had roots spread back as far as the Athenian
agora. But The Idea emerged from a purely modern mindscape, a scientific view of life, and from ways of seeing and calculating
that surpassed what even the greatest minds of antiquity might have dreamed up.
We are living in a technological age,
everyone said. Shouldn’t that one unmissable fact of modern life, a fact that flavored CBS and Chevrolet and General Electric
and every other part of 1960s America, inform our philosophy as well?

As much as any other academic discipline, political philosophy, the work of thinking the grandest possible thoughts about
history and power, was a kind of aristocrats’ club. Hans J. Morgenthau, then America’s giant in theories of political and
international relations, occupied his office at the University of Chicago almost as if it were a birthright — which it pretty
nearly was. Morgenthau was a German-born intellectual whose eyes seemed to project the very spirit of Kant when he entered
a classroom. When he introduced himself, the very cadence of his name was like a hammer of European intellectual righteousness:
Hans. J. Morg-en-thau.
As comfortable quoting the Chinese philosopher Mencius as Machiavelli, he almost seemed to carry with him, like some precious
treasure, the last pure DNA of European intellectual history. He had sprinted out of Germany in 1935 as Hitler was rising,
and he had been, for decades, one phone call or telegram away from a dozen great statesmen who relied on his judgment. Dean
Babst, by contrast, was a forty-three-year-old statistician in midcareer, the kind of figure you’d have been more likely to
spot buying a round of Pabst Blue Ribbon at the local Elks club than staring down at you from a gold-rimmed portrait in some
library in Heidelberg.

None of this bothered Babst. It wasn’t that he didn’t know about Morgenthau and the gentlemen’s club. It was that he thought
they were out of date, like men using fourteenth-century maps to find their way to Ohio. Babst knew that The Idea, if he could
prove it with his criminologist’s tools, would be ideological magic. It offered an unimpeachable answer to the noise of the
Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s famous “We will bury you!” verdict on the question of whether American democracy or Soviet
communism, one hundred years hence, would rule the globe.

Babst began by categorizing every major war since the eighteenth century, conflicts as different as the 247-day First Schleswig-Holstein
War (6,000 dead) and World War II (2,176 days, 56 million dead). He filed the data in a computer program usually used to track
pot and heroin. And he reached this remarkable conclusion: “No wars have been fought between independent nations with elective
governments between 1789 [and] 1941.” Democracies, the results seemed to suggest, never went to war with one another. Although
often engaged in thrashing it out with totalitarian or authoritarian states, countries with elected governments banded into
alliances, worked out their problems over tabletops, not battlefields, and never went after each other. Thus, The Idea: democracy
equals peace. It was a notion that, in general terms, had roots going as far back as Kant, but until now, Babst thought, it
had not had
scientific proof.
Two years after he began his research, Babst put his conclusions into a paper he hoped would remake the debate about how
nations danced with one another on the stage of history, a paper that would use science to do to political philosophy what
it had already done to armies, to polio, and was even now, President Kennedy promised, about to do to space flight. But where
Babst had to publish his paper —
The Wisconsin Sociologist —
told you something about how seriously his ideas were taken in 1964, about how far it was from upstate New York to the corridors
of power. He might just as well have chosen the
Journal of the American Veterinary Society
. When, nearly a decade later, Babst reprised his argument in the only slightly less obscure pages of a journal called
Industrial Research
(a step up on the establishment ladder, the intellectual equivalent of a move from a windowless basement studio apartment
to one with a window), he was still on the fringes of foreign policy, light-years away from Hans J. Morgenthau.

Yet as political philosophy evolved into political science, something curious happened. The Idea, it turned out, had a quirk
that made its rescue from obscurity very nearly inevitable: the texture of real science. Babst had bypassed the usual slow,
foreign-accented routes to truth in political philosophy and reached instead for the American tools,
speed tools,
of science and technology. Starting with that list of wars Babst had compiled, it was possible to use computers and math
to press into a world of history that you could treat like algebra, to divide time and conflict in thousands of different
ways. History became data; the future became output. Political science and international relations could no more resist the
arrival of technology than the phone company or your local brain surgeon. All those doctors of political science needed patients
to operate on. Babst’s axiom was an ideal candidate, a perpetual source of Ph.D.s, offering limitless chances to explore an
essential debate. Budding political scientists, following a path well worn by data-happy economists, sociologists, and even
anthropologists, now split their time between history books and computer labs. They studied periods of war for all sorts of
twitches and spikes. Who started the war? How did it end? Were alliances involved? Could the computer tell you the answer?
Learning to program in Fortran became, in some corners, as essential as mastering German or Russian.

So, slowly at first, The Idea, born in Babst’s upstate New York home, advanced to the very center of the debate about international
affairs. Along the way, it acquired a new name, one sufficiently detached from its origins to make it credible in places like
Oxford and New Haven: Democratic Peace Theory. The “Theory” at the end was a nice touch, hinting at scientific rigor and evoking
a logical chain that bound Isaac Newton to Immanuel Kant to Albert Einstein to . . . well, if not Dean Babst, at least to
the halls of the universities where The Idea was in vogue. And when, twenty-five years after Babst proposed The Idea, the
Soviet Union collapsed, Democratic Peace Theory got a vital boost — one accelerated by the arrival at the highest levels of
the U.S. government of political scientists who had studied and admired The Idea. By 2002 Democratic Peace Theory, carried
along by what seemed to be the force of history, became the central premise of the foreign policy of the most powerful nation
in history. Speaking to an audience of West Point cadets in 2003, President George W. Bush equated American security with
global democracy, a theory he was about to test with their blood. America would be secure when the rest of the world became
democratic, the president said. (Or, barring that, when it was
made
to be democratic.) Condoleezza Rice, as Bush’s secretary of state, realigned the work of the State Department around the
mission of promoting democracy, turning American diplomats from mere representatives of their governments into enthusiastic
franchise peddlers for democratic revolution. The story of Dean Babst’s Idea rising up out of Albany played like a Disney
movie, in which the pudgy junior-high hockey coach is pulled out of retirement and begged to suit up for the Olympics, where
he leads his team to a gold medal.