None of these ideas are the stuff of great geopolitical doctrines; but the age of accelerations will be a graveyard for fancy big ideas. When the necessary is impossible but the impossible is necessary, when no power wants to own the World of Disorder but, increasingly, no power can ignore it, it is going to take these hybrid combinations of drones and walls, aircraft carriers and Peace Corps volunteers, plus chickens, gardens, and Webs, to begin to create stability in the age of accelerations.
Since we began this chapter with a TV sitcom that foreshadowed the future, let’s end with a movie that highlights the present—and with any luck doesn’t foreshadow the future. It’s the film Captain Phillips, which was based on the very real 2009 hijacking of the unarmed U.S. container ship Maersk Alabama by a gang of Somali pirates in a speedboat. The film centers around the struggle between the Alabama’s commanding officer, Captain Richard Phillips, played by Tom Hanks, and the Somali pirate captain, Muse—played by Barkhad Abdi, a Somali actor who was living as a refugee in Minnesota—who takes Phillips and his ship hostage. The Somali pirates seize the ship while it is transiting the Indian Ocean off East Africa. While interrogating the Boston-bred Phillips and learning of his background, Muse nicknames him “Irish.”
In a critical scene, Phillips tries to reason with the Somali hijacker, but in doing so only displays his ignorance of the depth of despair haunting the World of Disorder today. At one point he says to the pirate: “There’s got to be something other than being a fisherman or kidnapping people.”
To which Muse replies, “Maybe in America, Irish. Maybe in America.”
Muse’s musing is deeply poignant, and our goal should be to both rewrite it and appreciate it. We need to rewrite the notion that the only way for some people in parts of the World of Disorder to sustain themselves is by either fishing or kidnapping—that will no longer suffice. That would lead to a nightmarish world. A policy of amplify, deter, and degrade is intended to facilitate an alternative.
At the same time, Americans need to appreciate just how much their country is the last, best hope for a lot of people and an irreplaceable source of order. Just one tiny recent example: In 2014, when the Ebola virus broke out in West Africa, it was the American military that sent in three thousand troops and $3 billion to wipe it out. There was no Russian or Chinese aid mission that jumped into the breach. Yes, I am glad there is a United Nations, a World Bank, and global flows that are knitting the world together through Facebook and Google. But at the end of the day they all depend on a healthy American economy, a strong American military able to project power and deter autocracies, and an unwavering willingness to defend the values of pluralism and democracy against those who would threaten them from abroad or within. With the European Union, the other great center of democracy and free markets, weakening in recent years, America’s pivotal role in upholding those values globally becomes even more important.
Lately, many Americans have lost sight of both their country’s achievements and its vital role in stabilizing the global commons. An immigrant friend of mine from Zimbabwe, Lesley Goldwasser, once remarked to me, “You Americans kick this country around like it’s a football. But it’s not a football. It’s a Fabergé egg. You can break it.” She is right. We can break it. And in an era when liberty, free markets, pluralism, and the rule of law—all the pillars of a stable society—will be challenged by breakers, bullies, and disorder, we do so at our own peril.
TEN
Mother Nature as Political Mentor
Charles Darwin is often quoted as saying that it is not the strongest species that survives but the most adaptable. But according to QuoteInvestigator.com (QI), he did not write that in his classic On the Origin of Species—and there’s no evidence that he even said it somewhere else. QI’s research suggested that the quote emerged over time from a speech delivered by a Louisiana State University business professor, Leon C. Megginson, at the convention of the Southwestern Social Science Association in 1963.
Megginson reportedly said:
Yes, change is the basic law of nature. But the changes wrought by the passage of time affect individuals and institutions in different ways. According to Darwin’s Origin of Species, it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is able best to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself. Applying this theoretical concept to us as individuals, we can state that the civilization that is able to survive is the one that is able to adapt to the changing physical, social, political, moral, and spiritual environment in which it finds itself.
Thank you, Professor Megginson!
That is so well said—whether Darwin said any of it or not. To paraphrase, it’s not the strongest quote that survives, it’s the most adaptable! And this one is so relevant for our times. In the first decade and a half of the twenty-first century, we went through a major technological inflection point—connectivity became fast, free, easy for you, and ubiquitous, while complexity became fast, free, easy for you, and invisible. And this has unleashed flows of energy that, in combination with climate change, have, as we’ve already explored, reshaped the workplace and geopolitics and prompted us to reimagine how we approach both. But that reimagining cannot succeed in isolation. It also requires us to reimagine our domestic politics—both in order to deliver the kinds of specific policy fixes we need in the workplace and in geopolitics, and also more generally to create a society with the kind of resilience we’ll need to thrive when the Market, Mother Nature, and Moore’s law are all accelerating. This is going to require some very different approaches to politics generally, and that political realignment appears to already be under way.
In the previous chapter I argued that in the age of accelerations some weak states would explode. What seems to be happening to strong states is that their politics implodes—that is, their borders hold but their political parties begin to crack up, because in their present forms they cannot adequately and coherently respond to the simultaneous and interrelated changes in technology, globalization, and the environment. In America and Europe, the major political parties have been locked in backward-looking agendas developed in response to the Industrial Revolution, the New Deal, the Cold War, civil rights movements, and the early information technology revolution. Their current coalitions and internal compromises may not be able to deal with the age of accelerations. The crack-up has already begun within the Republican Party, which, among other things, denies even the reality of climate change. But Bernie Sanders’s success in attracting many young Democrats suggests that the Democratic Party will not be immune to fracture, either. The same process is under way in Europe. The United Kingdom’s vote to withdraw from the European Union has opened deep cracks in both the Conservative and Labour Parties, and the rising challenge of immigration from the World of Disorder is stressing other long-established parties everywhere on the continent.
As I noted earlier, after 2007, citizens in America and so many other industrial democracies felt they were being hurtled along into the future so much faster—their workplaces were rapidly changing under their feet, social mores were rapidly changing around their ears, and globalization was throwing so many new people and ideas into their faces—but governance in places such as Washington and Brussels got either bogged down in bureaucracy or gridlocked. So no one was giving people the right diagnosis of what was happening in the world around them, and most established political parties were offering catechisms that were simply not relevant to the age of accelerations. Into this vacuum, this empty room, stepped populists with easy answers—the Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders promised to make it all right by taking down “the Man,” and Donald Trump promised to make it all right by personally holding back the hurricane of change because he was “the Man.” Neither the center-left nor the center-right in America or Europe had the self-confidence required for the level of radical rethinking and political innovating dem
anded by the age of accelerations.
On May 16, 2016, The New York Times carried a story about a divisive Austrian election, featuring two quotes that spoke for so many voters across the industrialized world. One was from Georg Hoffmann-Ostenhof, a columnist for the liberal weekly magazine Profil. “We are in a situation where people don’t understand the world anymore, because it is changing so fast. And then came the migrants, and people were told that politicians had lost control of the borders. That just heightened the overall sense that control was gone.” The other quote was from Wolfgang Petritsch, a veteran diplomat and former chief aide to Austria’s erstwhile center-left chancellor Bruno Kreisky: “Social democracy was always driven by ideas,” he said. “But the ideas have gone missing.”
This vacuum could not be happening at a worse time—at a time when we are, in effect, experiencing three “climate” changes at once: a change in the climate of technology, in the climate of globalization, and in the actual climate and environment, thanks to their simultaneous accelerations. If ever there was a time when the major industrial democracies needed to pause and rethink and reimagine politics anew, it is now.
This chapter is my contribution to that rethinking. I set myself the task of starting with a blank sheet of paper and asking not what it means to be a “conservative” or a “liberal” today (frankly, who cares?) but rather how we maximize the resilience and self-propulsion of every citizen and community in America—that is, their ability to both absorb shocks and keep progressing in this age of accelerations. It is a different approach to politics—a necessary one, I believe—and it yields a political agenda unlike anything on offer in America today.
Mother Nature’s Killer Apps
Before taking out my blank sheet of paper, though, I did one vitally important thing: I looked for a mentor. I asked myself, who is the “person” with the most experience absorbing climate changes and retaining resilience and continuing to flourish? The answer came easily: I know a woman who has been doing that for about 3.8 billion years. Her name is Mother Nature.
I can think of no better political mentor today than she. As Johan Rockström noted, Mother Nature is not a living being, but she is a biogeophysical, rationally functioning, complex system of oceans, atmosphere, forests, rivers, soils, plants, and animals that has evolved on Planet Earth since the first hints of life emerged. She has survived the worst of times and thrived in the best of them for nearly four billion years by learning to absorb endless shocks, climate changes, surprises, and even an asteroid or two. That alone makes Mother Nature an important mentor. But she is even more relevant today because we human beings have now built—with our own hands, brains, muscles, computers, and machines—our own complex global system of networks. These networks have become so interconnected, hyperconnected, and interdependent in their complexity that, more than ever, they’ve come to resemble the complexity of the natural world and how its interdependent ecosystems operate.
“If we are evolving to be more like nature, we better damn well get good at it,” observed the physicist and environmentalist Amory Lovins.
I agree. So let’s first try to understand the basic strategies that Mother Nature employs to build resilient ecosystems that can absorb shocks and still move forward, and then try to translate that into policies that a party would advocate to help Americans better navigate this age of accelerations.
I am hardly the first to highlight the virtue of using nature as a metaphor. Janine Benyus, considered the mother of the biomimicry movement, likes to speak about nature as a “model,” “measure,” and “mentor.” It is that model and mentor role that I am most interested in today. To be sure, everything that Mother Nature does is done unconsciously, and has evolved over millennia, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from and mimic her by choice. So, if Mother Nature could describe her killer apps for building resiliency to thrive in periods of climate change, what would she say?
She would surely start by telling us that she is incredibly adaptive over time through a variety of mechanisms, beginning with evolution through natural selection. It is true, notes Lovins, that 99 percent of experiments that Mother Nature has tried didn’t work and “got recalled by the Manufacturer.” But the 1 percent that survived did so because they learned to adapt to a certain niche in the natural world and were able, therefore, to thrive and procreate and project their DNA into the future. Mother Nature also adapts “through social specialization,” or learned behavior. These adaptations evolve over millennia, Lovins explained to me: “Some ants go out and look for food and some stay home and take care of the young, and that enables those who look for food to cover bigger areas. Specialized ant colonies have foragers and nest-keepers. This, too, is an adaptation, a learned behavior. It is not in their DNA. You cannot sequence such differentiated behaviors, but you can observe and mimic them, and doing so over time can become so powerful and advantageous that the organisms that do it dominate everyone else in their niche, just as we do as mammals.” To put it in human terms, Mother Nature believes in lifelong learning; species that don’t keep learning and adapting disappear.
Oddly enough, one of the best ways to observe evolutionary adaptation via DNA is by visiting the desert. I say “oddly” because the desert would seem like the worst place to go on a safari. But in the hands of a good guide—whom my wife and I had when we visited the Serra Cafema Camp in the far northwest region of Namibia, overlooking the Kunene River on the border with Angola—not only do you discover that the desert is rich with biodiversity, but, because of how the smallest beetle stands out in the desert, you can see close up the genius of Mother Nature’s adaptation-design skills. You can see close up the tiny percentage of insects and plants that learned to survive in the harsh desert by evolving unusual ways to capture and conserve water.
Wired magazine ran a story on November 26, 2012, about an American start-up that was
developing a self-filling water bottle that sucks moisture from the atmosphere to create condensation, in the same way the humble Namib desert beetle does.
The beetle, endemic to Africa’s Namib desert—where there is just 1.3 cm of rainfall a year—has inspired a few proof-of-concepts in the academic community, but this is the first time a self-filling water bottle has been proposed. The beetle survives by collecting condensation from the ocean breeze on the hardened shell of its wings. The shell is covered in tiny bumps that are water attracting (hydrophilic) at their tips and water-repelling (hydrophobic) at their sides. The beetle extends and aims the wings at incoming sea breezes to catch humid air; tiny droplets 15 to 20 microns in diameter eventually accumulate on its back and run straight down towards its mouth.
NBD Nano, made up of two biologists, an organic chemist and a mechanical engineer, is building on past studies that constructed structurally superior synthetic copies of the shell.
Another way Mother Nature produces resilience is by being relentlessly entrepreneurial—always looking for new niches to exploit and fill and always experimenting to see which plants and animals best coevolve. “If there is an open space in nature, some plant or animal will find a way to adapt to it and make a living there, in a way that no other species is; some other plant or animal will eat those species and produce waste that some other plant or animal will be eager to eat as food or fertilizer,” remarks Lovins. “Nature is always innovating, creating new mutations as new opportunities arise.”
And those mutations are tested in the context of the whole system to see if they are a good idea—if they fit into the system and make the whole more resilient. If, instead, they produce inadvertent toxins that harm the system, Mother Nature will innovate a correction. Mother Nature is the opposite of dogmatic—she is constantly agile, heterodox, hybrid, entrepreneurial, and experimental in her thinking. “Nature is restless, always exploring, inventing, trying, and failing,” adds Tom Lovejoy, university professor in environmental science at George Mason University. “Each ecosystem, and each organism, is an answer to a set of pro
blems.”
In that sense another of Mother Nature’s killer apps is her ability to thrive on diversity—both nurturing it and rewarding it in all species of plants and animals. Mother Nature understands that the best way to evolve and advance the best ideas is to have a large pool of them, and see which ones can adapt to which niches and also serve the whole. And so she is very pluralistic: she understands that nothing enhances the resilience of an ecosystem, or healthy interdependencies, more than a richly diverse cornucopia of plant and animal species, each adapted to the other and to a specific environmental niche.
High biodiversity means every niche is filled and playing its part to keep the whole in balance. “Think of the slow loris,” says Lovins. “It’s a small nocturnal primate that oozes along the branch of a tree very smoothly and softly—it looks like someone doing slow tai chi—to eat the leaves off the most slender twigs on the farthest tips of the most slender branches,” and then converts those leaves into energy. Another, heavier loris specializes in leaves at the thicker part of the branch that can bear its weight. And other lorises eat still different things. Nature evolves organisms for every niche—and as long as there are physical niches to be filled, she will fill them with species that are ever better adapted and evolved for that niche, and the dynamic flux between all the units results in greater resilience, balance, and growth.
The University of Minnesota biologist G. David Tilman, one of the world’s leading experts on biodiversity, wrote an article in the May 11, 2000, issue of Nature entitled “Causes, Consequences and Ethics of Biodiversity,” which reviewed the main scientific field research on this subject. He stated:
On average, greater diversity leads to greater productivity in plant communities, greater nutrient retention in ecosystems and greater ecosystem stability. For instance, grassland field experiments both in North America and across eight different European sites, ranging from Greece in the south and east to Portugal and Ireland in the west and Sweden in the north, have shown that each halving of the number of plant species within a plot leads to a 10–20% loss of productivity. An average plot containing one plant species is less than half as productive as an average plot containing 24–32 species. Lower plant diversity also leads to greater rates of loss of limiting soil nutrients through leaching, which ultimately should decrease soil fertility, further lowering plant productivity.
Thank You for Being Late Page 35