Every society that ever got rich developed and adopted the concepts of personal freedom and representative government. No society that was not rich ever did.
Every society that ever got rich emancipated its women, minorities and other untouchables. No society that was not rich ever has.
Every society that ever got rich soon began legislating religious freedom. No society that was not rich ever has.
What is it the Dalai Lama doesn’t get?
Humans always overpopulate, then kill each other fighting over scraps…unless they manage to build (or stumble into) a society so wealthy it can afford the luxury of people who’ve decided to limit their birthrate for the sake of Mother Gaia. You’ll rarely find anyone not rich who gives a damn about her: a starving man hasn’t the luxury. Loving the whole biosphere would be utterly incomprehensible to the average human throughout history: a hungry terrified diseased savage whose only hope of an endurable old age (one’s forties, that is) is to have fifteen kids, of whom, if he/she is lucky, as many as two males may survive to adulthood.
If we keep industrial civilization going, and growing, until we’re all rich, then at that point, whatever it is, the population will level off. Or even decrease. And not one member of it will go to bed hungry.
On that day I won’t give a flying fart what’s gone extinct in the process, or whether there are fewer pristine parklands for environmentalists (only) to hike through. At that point, we will disassemble every bit of pollution on this planet, atom by atom, and make it into anything we think we’d rather have instead. We will make as many trees as it pleases us to look at. We will recreate every extinct species we had the goddamn brains to preserve a DNA sample from. (Now there’s a practical task for ecowarriors…who aren’t parlor poseurs.) We’ll invent new species Mother Gaia never dreamed of: really cool, fun ones.
Can we crank industrial civilization that high? Is it really possible to make everybody that rich? Yep. It’s called nanotechnology, and it’s less than a century away. Maybe way less. Your grandchildren will be able to literally do anything they can imagine, and have anything they desire that they can describe. Their children’s hardest feat of imagination will be trying to picture a world in which people used to need stuff. And sometimes didn’t get it. For details see The Engines of Creation by C. Eric Drexler.
The human race must pursue that glorious vision: die trying if necessary. We dare not throttle back the machine at this point. It’s a cranky old machine, jerry-built, run by committee and very low on fuel. If we permit it to so much as stall, we’ll never get it running again: there just aren’t enough metals and fossil fuels left in the ground to start over. All we can do is pray the furshlugginer machine will run on fumes long enough to get us to nanotech, the Ultimate Gas Station.
If it doesn’t—and it may not—billions may die. But if we don’t try those billions will certainly die. The die was cast centuries ago, when we committed, irrevocably, to the Industrial Revolution. It’s way too late to change our minds.
Until nanotech arrives, people will shit and machines will produce exhaust, and that’s not sufficient reason to either shut off all the machines or kill even one of the people. Instead we must learn how to turn shit into fertilizer, and waste into assets. (“nuclear waste product” = popular nonsense term for a priceless irreplaceable resource for which no practical commercial use presently exists, i.e. something that won’t need to be stored for ten thousand years…) And you don’t do that with less technology, but with more and better technology.
The ultimate fate of mankind will depend on the outcome of a contest between two incompossible mindsets. Here’s the antinomy: suppose you must choose between one of two imaginary futures.
2100 A.D., VERSION A: Mankind, cats, dogs, horses and dolphins are the only creatures still alive on earth. They’re all thriving, well fed on synthetics, and there’s copious cheap energy around…but every single other species that lived 100 years ago is now extinct. (Really extinct: all the preserved DNA got accidentally defrosted.) There isn’t a blade of grass anywhere that isn’t a Disney fake; all the songbirds are robots; there are no germs, because there’s nothing they could eat that they’re allowed to. Grim, eh?
2100 A.D., VERSION B: Every species of life that was alive in 2001 is not only alive but thriving, every species that vanished since the Industrial Revolution has been restored and fascinating new ones are appearing daily. Gaia is blooming. But: there are no human beings, anywhere. Nor ever will be again. They all died.
That’s not the choice, but imagine it were. Which do you pick?
That’s a question like “are you for or against slavery?” One which can—and I believe should—divide households and set brother against brother.
I say anybody who picks Future B is profoundly ill. In mind, or soul, or both. I’m a human. In a crunch, I vote for humans. Sure, some are jerks…but some are Dalai Lamas. Any animal too sick or ashamed of itself to stick up for its own kind is not only a fool, it must be a human being. No other species produces members that dumb.
Ain’t That a Shame
FIRST PRINTED AUGUST 2001
STAND CLEAR, PLEASE; I feel a rant coming on. I’ve just heard for the nth time, and once too often, some smug Pharisee on a TV talk show use the word “consumer” as a term of opprobrium. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves, was his point, because we deliberately permit a “consumer society” to exist even though everyone knows that it is an evil thing.
But I’m grateful to him for leading me to an interesting insight. Even subtracting the ten pounds they say the camera adds, I could see that he himself had not missed any meals recently…and musing on that, I suddenly reached a better understanding of why there’s so much psychotic pressure placed on us all to be scrawny these days.
There’s nothing intrinsically sexually undesirable about a normally fleshy person of either sex: if there were, the human race could hardly exist. An afternoon in any museum should demonstrate the proposition even to the logically-challenged. This generation of this society has chosen to find anorexia attractive and a normal body repulsive. But why? Why would any male pick a feminine ideal with hips unlikely to survive childbirth, undeveloped breasts and insufficient body fat to survive even the most transitory hard times? Why would a woman yearn for a mate whose status is so low that he needs to be in as good shape as a common laborer or warrior? Why would anybody seek sensual pleasure with someone who evidently has either no appetites or inhuman restraint?
The point, I now suspect, is that body fat is visible proof of having…whisper it…eaten.
Somewhere deep in all humans lies a powerful, perhaps irresistible need to be ashamed. In every culture or clime we always find or invent something to be mortally embarrassed about—ideally, something we absolutely cannot help. We need, God knows why, a good reason to second-guess the supposedly infallible God who made us in His image, an excuse to cringe every time we look in the mirror.
In contemporary Western society we recently gave up the ancient right to be ashamed of having genitalia and a need to use them. This lets us have lots more fun than our forebears, and since we’ve developed effective birth control we can (finally!) afford the indulgence. Unfortunately, it leaves us with little to really despise ourselves for except our equally disgusting digestive system: our unforgivable—and just incidentally, quite unavoidable—need to eat and excrete. This, if you’ve been wondering, is why sex comedies aren’t working anymore lately, and poo-poo wee-wee comedies are. So today we, the educated elite, are ashamed that we “consume,” and we are mortified that we “pollute our environment.” The way every other living thing does, happily and heedlessly.
We can, of course, always take shame in the fact that no matter what we do or how hard we police ourselves, in all times and cultures men and women seem to assay out at about five to ten percent homosexual. Finding the genitalia and sexual needs of the opposite sex to be acceptable doesn’t mean your own can’t be stomach-churningly disgus
ting. And we can also be somewhat ashamed that we’re racist. Far less so than any other known species, to be sure, and North Americans are probably the least racist humans that ever walked this planet. (Disagree? Ask a Carthaginian. Or a Korean…in Japan. Or a Chinese in Uganda, or an Indian untouchable at home.) But still, distrust of the strange is an inborn instinct we have not yet tamed utterly, so it’ll do for a proof that we don’t deserve to live.
We’re accustomed to lament the fact that we’re so bellicose. But a half century comparatively free of bloodshed—by historical standards—has begun to spoil that particular form of self-flagellation. We still have local skirmishes and civil wars, but with the end of the Cold War and the minting of the Euro, warfare is beginning to look like a game we’re finally learning to outgrow.
No, our best present excuse for frissons of horror at our own awfulness is consumption and its despicable result: this unforgivably comfortable technological civilization we’ve built for ourselves. Somehow—more or less by accident, as a result of billions of random selfish decisions interacting—we’ve cobbled together a truly astonishing machine: one which makes it possible for six billion people to survive, with an historically unprecedented minimum of warfare, famine and plague, to an average age exceeding sixty years; one which produces so much loot, most of us can get at least some without having to kill or die for it.
But this remarkable machine is imperfect. It does not share its wealth evenly. Instead it tends to discriminate in favor of those who thought it up, built it and keep it running. Worse, it produces exhaust, emits soot. Therefore it does not deserve to exist. It is…oh most damning of words, most withering of indictments…dirty. It should be throttled back sharply at once, if not shut down altogether, so that we may return to a superior state of harmony with nature which history has somehow neglected to record.
We know, for fact, that wind, water and sunpower are simply not enough to keep six billion people alive and happy—not even close. So our plan is to wish they were, very hard. Perhaps after a century or two of restored harmony with Mother Gaia, living like other animals—I mean Disney animals, of course—we’ll be able to live down the shame of having once tried to live longer or better than Mother intended.
Then we’ll have having-once-had-greatness-and-blown-it to be ashamed of, of course. But on the bright side: boy, will we all be thin.
Extreme Forms of Argument
Mass Destruction Isn’t Rocket Science
FIRST PRINTED JANUARY 2001
I’VE KEPT SILENT UNTIL RECENTLY on the subject of NMD—the controversial Nuclear Missile Defense shield that President Bush and Defense Secretary Powell intend to deploy over the United States by 2005. The subject is so complex I’ve had trouble making up my own mind.
An excellent, albeit greatly condensed, synopsis of the antinomy was given in an episode of The West Wing…and while fictional President Bartlet, predictably opposed to NMD, also predictably won the debate, I found it noteworthy that the opposing side was argued not by one of the callow youths around him, but by his most trusted adviser Leo, the character who’s always been presented as sane, wise and practical. Leo argued so passionately and intelligently for NMD that it seems even a flaming liberal like Aaron Sorkin, then still writer/producer, considers this a topic on which reasonable people may differ.
As I said, his synopsis necessarily suffered from the compression required in TV drama. But it helped clarify my own thinking enough that I now have an opinion. Let’s begin with the main arguments against NMD:
It doesn’t work. This is the mantra President Bartlet kept chanting to Leo, and he’s right: of three attempted missile interceptions to date, two have failed—badly—falling well short of the Pentagon’s own minimum criteria for deployment. The best test so far missed its target by miles. And they’ve been working on this since the Reagan Administration.
Even if they get it working, there are simple, effective counters—radar chaff composed of cheap mylar balloons, for example.
Its proponents say it’ll cost US$60 billion. In other words, it cannot possibly cost less than US$150 billion. Even for the US government, that’s…a bit pricey.
It’s illegal. It breaks America’s word, flagrantly violating the 1972 ABM treaty.
It’s vigorously opposed by Russia, China, Germany, France and several other nations, since it would theoretically permit a US first-strike attack. Some say NMD would “allow the US to militarize space.”
So far, the US has never asked for use of Canada’s radars, on which NMD utterly depends; they simply assume our obedience. Pardon me, I meant “our cooperation.”
Now the NMD camp’s rebuttal:
It will work. And soon. If we can pace a hurtling comet at 100 meters, or thread an orbital needle out by Jupiter—and we have—we can certainly manage to swat flies; it’s simply a matter of beating the engineers hard enough. We already know how to defeat far more sophisticated countermeasures than radar chaff.
It’ll give the US economy an infusion of (at least) $60 billion, creating jobs, profits, tax revenue down the line—plus plenty of new spin-off technologies. To date, every penny the US federal government ever spent on space technology has been repaid, in hard cash, thirteen times over.
The ABM Treaty is irrelevant in today’s world; it was signed twenty-nine years ago in a Cold War world with no Internet, where nuclear material was tightly controlled.
NMD opponents seem unaware that Russia already has a missile-shield of its own in place over Moscow. As for China, it opposes NMD but supports Pakistan’s ICBM (intercontinental ballistic missile) program; meanwhile it’s quietly building up its own nuclear capacity and a new antisatellite (ASAT) system which is vastly more destabilizing than NMD, since it’s clearly aggressive in purpose. “Militarize space”? Space has been militarized for decades, folks—do try and keep up. At least seven nations presently have or claim to have a nuclear ICBM program underway. There may be others that are simply more discreet.
NMD will provide work for the next generation of talented aerospace engineers and technicians—the ones who were forgotten when the voters got bored with space, after Apollo. It will help preserve skills, knowledge and hardware that cost billions to acquire and today are being lost or forgotten. This is my own favorite “pro” argument: I like anything that furthers space travel.
But now I’d like to raise two points I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere yet, though they seem to me glaringly self-evident.
Assume you want to nuke Manhattan. You’re obviously crazy—but no matter how crazy you are, why in God’s name would you choose a rocket-ship for your delivery vehicle? It’s immensely expensive, hard to build in secret, intrinsically unreliable, easy to see coming and everyone knows where it originated.
What’s wrong with a cigarette boat? Or a Cessna, or a truck?
In John McPhee’s book The Curve of Binding Energy, former H-bomb designer Theodore Taylor stated that a serious nuclear weapon requires only a few hundred pounds of uranium. Drug smugglers run that much dope across the US border every day with no apparent difficulty. (And uranium’s a much smaller package than an equal weight of heroin.) Once it’s in, who can say where it came from? And everything else you’ll need to make an atom bomb is freely available in the States. In my 1992 novel Lady Slings the Booze, I described how a moderately clever terrorist (or government) could kill nearly everyone in a large city with a single concealed nuke, triggered by radio signal…and still leave most of the city intact.
But forget all that. Everything I’ve said above may be beside the point. As usual, the generals are earnestly planning to win not the next world war, but the previous one.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ancient history. If there’s ever a military assault on the US, it probably won’t be nuclear…but biological.
You can’t fight measles with missiles. Biowar is far more efficient than rockets, immensely more cost-effective, leaves all the treasure and real estate intact…and who’s to say whe
ther those bugs are manmade, and if so by whom?
I fear that NMD may be simply irrelevant. As my colleague John Varley says, the world may well end—if we are all stupid enough to permit it to—not with a bang, but with a sniffle.
What Does It Mean to be Human?
FIRST PRINTED SEPTEMBER 2001
AS A SCIENCE FICTION WRITER, I’m probably best known for a series that began with the first story I ever published and twenty-eight years later has metastasized into nine books, all involving a fabulous tavern called Callahan’s Place. If I were forced to condense the entire million-word saga into a single word—and I can’t tell you how many journalists have asked me to do just that, over the years—the word would be tolerance. Specifically, tolerance of the weird. Mike Callahan ran the kind of bar where, if a pink gorilla walked in and ordered a beer, he’d be allowed to drink it in peace. Customers included a talking dog, a cyborg starkiller, the man who accidentally created AIDS and the Internet itself come alive. Callahan often said he didn’t insist his customers be human, as long as they had good manners.
Okay, science fiction boy: define “human” for us, in light of the World Trade Center Massacre.
Robert A. Heinlein’s classic Stranger in a Strange Land concerns a Martian named Valentine Michael Smith. The only survivor of the first human expedition to Mars, Mike is raised from infancy entirely by Martians…then, in his twenties, he is returned to Earth where he spends the bulk of the book being baffled by human beings and trying desperately to learn to become one.
The Crazy Years Page 16