Ideas
matter, and sometimes they can be dangerous.
With this simple conviction, FOREIGN POLICY asked eight leading thinkers to
issue an early warning on the ideas that will be most destructive in the coming
years. A few of these ideas have long and sometimes bloody pedigrees. Others
are embryonic, nourished by breakthroughs in science and technology. Several
are policy ideas whose reverberations are already felt; others are more
abstract, but just as pernicious. Yet, as the essays make clear, these
dangerous ideas share a vulnerability to insightful critique and open debate.
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WAR ON EVIL
By Robert Wright
Evil has a reputation for resilience. And rightly so. Banishing it from Middle
Earth alone took three very long Lord of the Rings movies. But equally
deserving of this reputation is the concept of evil-in particular, a conception
of evil that was on display in those very movies: the idea that behind all the
world's bad deeds lies a single, dark, cosmic force. No matter how many
theologians reject this idea, no matter how incompatible it seems with modern
science, it keeps coming back.
You would have thought St. Augustine rid the world of it a millennium and a
half ago. He argued so powerfully against this notion of evil, and against the
whole Manichaean theology containing it, that it disappeared from serious
church discourse. Thereafter, evil was not a thing; it was just the absence of
good, as darkness is the absence of light. But then came the Protestants, and
some of them brought back the Manichaean view of a cosmic struggle between the
forces of good and evil.
The philosopher Peter Singer, in his recent book The President of Good &
Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush, suggests that the president is an heir to
this strand of Protestant thought. Certainly Bush is an example of how hard it
is to kill notions of evil once and for all. On the eve of his presidency, in a
postmodern, post-Cold War age, "evildoers" had become a word reserved
for ironic use, with overtones of superhero kitsch. But after September 11,
Bush used that word earnestly, vowed to "rid the world of evil," and
later declared Iran, Iraq, and North Korea part of an "axis of evil."
So what's wrong with that? Why do I get uncomfortable when he talks about
evil? Because his idea of evil is dangerous and, in the current geopolitical
environment, seductive.
Some conservatives dismiss liberal qualms about Bush's talk of evil as
knee-jerk moral relativism. But rejecting his conception of evil doesn't mean
rejecting the idea of moral absolutes, of right and wrong, good and bad. Evil
in the Manichaean sense isn't just absolute badness. It's a grand unified
explanation of such badness, the linkage of diverse badness to a single source.
In the Lord of the Rings, the various plainly horrible enemy troops-ores,
ringwraiths, and so on-were evil in the Manichaean sense by virtue of their
unified command; all were under the sway of the dreaded Sauron.
For the forces of good-hobbits, elves, Bush-this unity of badness greatly
simplifies the question of strategy. If all of your enemies are Satan's
puppets, there's no point in drawing fine distinctions among them. No need to
figure out which ones are irredeemable and which can be bought off. They're all
bad to the bone, so just fight them at every pass, bear any burden, and so on.
But what if the world isn't that simple? What if some terrorists will settle
for nothing less than the United States' destruction, whereas others just want
a nationalist enclave in Chechnya or Mindanao? And what if treating all
terrorists the same-as all having equally illegitimate goals-makes them more
the same, more uniformly anti-American, more zealous? (Note that President
Ronald Reagan's "evil empire" formulation didn't court this danger;
the Soviet threat was already monolithic.)
Or what if Iran, Iraq, and North Korea are actually different kinds of
problems? And what if their rulers, however many bad things they've done, are
still human beings who respond rationally to clear incentives? If you're truly
open to this possibility, you might be cheered when a hideous dictator, under
threat of invasion, allows U.N. weapons inspectors to search his country. But
if you believe this dictator is not just bad but evil, you'll probably conclude
that you should invade his country anyway. You don't make deals with the devil.
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And, of course, if you believe that all terrorists are truly evil, then you'll
be less inclined to fret about the civil liberties of suspected terrorists, or
about treating accused or convicted terrorists decently in prison. Evil, after
all, demands a scorched-earth policy. But what if such a policy, by making lots
of Muslims in the United States and abroad feel persecuted, actually increases
the number of terrorists?
Abandoning such counterproductive metaphysics doesn't mean slipping into
relativism, or even, necessarily, dispensing with the concept of evil. You can
attribute bad deeds to a single source-and hence believe in a kind of
evil-without adopting the brand of Manichaeism that seems to animate Bush. You
could believe that somewhere in human nature is a bad seed that underlies many
of the terrible things people do. If you're a Christian, you might think of
this seed as original sin. If you're not religious, you might see it in secular
terms-for example, as a core selfishness that can skew our moral perspective,
inclining us to tolerate, even welcome, the suffering of people who threaten
our interests.
This idea of evil as something at work in all of us makes for a perspective
very different than the one that seems to guide the president. It could lead
you to ask, If we're all born with this seed of badness, why does it bear more
fruit in some people than others? And this question could lead you to analyze
evildoers in their native environments, and thus distinguish between the causes
of terrorism in one place and in another.
This conception of evil could also lead to a bracing self-scrutiny. It could
make you vigilant for signs that your own moral calculus had been warped by
your personal, political, or ideological agenda. If, say, you had started a war
that killed more than 10,000 people, you might be pricked by the occasional
doubt about your judgment or motivation-rather than suffused in the assurance
that, as God's chosen servant, you are free from blame.
In short, with this conception of evil, the world doesn't look like a Lord
of the Rings trailer, in which all the bad guys report to the same headquarters
and, for the sake of easy identification, are hideously ugly. It is a more
ambiguous world, a world in which evil lurks somewhere in everyone, and
enlightened policy is commensurately subtle.
Actually, there are traces of this view even in the Lord of the Rings films.
Hence the insidious ring, which can fill all who gaze on it with the desperate
desire to possess it, a desire that, if unchecked, leads to utter corruption.
The message would seem to be that, thanks to human frailty, anyone can play
host to evil-hobbits, elves, even, conceivably, the occasional American.
UNDERMINING FREE WILL
By Paul Davies
You don't have to read this article. But if you do, could you have chosen
otherwise? You probably feel that you were free to skip over it, but were you?
Belief in some measure of free will is common to all cultures and a large
part of what makes us human. It is also fundamental to our ethical and legal
systems. Yet today's scientists and philosophers are busily chipping away at
this social pillar-apparently without thinking about what might replace it.
What they question is a folk psychology that goes something like this:
Inside each of us is a self, a conscious agent who both observes the world and
makes decisions. In some cases (though perhaps not all), this agent has a
measure of choice and control over his or her actions. From this simple model
of human agency flow the familiar notions of responsibility, guilt, blame, and
credit. The law, for example, makes a clear distinction between a criminal act
carried out by a person under hypnosis or while sleepwalking, and a crime
committed in a state of normal awareness with full knowledge of the
consequences.
All this may seem like common sense, but philosophers and writers have
questioned it for centuriesand the attack is gathering speed. "All theory
is against the freedom of the will," wrote British critic Samuel Johnson.
In the 1940s, Oxford University philosophy Professor Gilbert Ryle coined the
derisory expression "the ghost in the machine" for the widespread
assumption that brains are occupied by immaterial selves that somehow control
the activities of our neurons. The contemporary American philosopher Daniel
Dennett now refers to the "fragile myth" of "spectral
puppeteers" inside our heads.
For skeptics of free will, human decisions are either determined by a
person's preexisting nature or, alternatively, are entirely arbitrary and
whimsical. Either way, genuine freedom of choice seems elusive. Physicists
often fire the opening salvo against free will. In the classical Newtonian
scheme, the universe is a gigantic clockwork mechanism, slavishly unfolding
according to deterministic laws. How then does a free agent act? There is
simply no room in this causally closed system for an immaterial mind to bend
the paths of atoms without coming into conflict with physical law. Nor does the
famed indeterminacy of quantum mechanics help minds to gain purchase on the
material world. Quantum uncertainty cannot create freedom. Genuine freedom
requires that our wills determine our actions reliably.
Physicists assert that free will is merely a feeling we have; the mind has
no genuine causal efficacy. Whence does this feeling arise? In his 2002 book,
The Illusion of Conscious Will, 
Harvard
University psychologist Daniel Wegner appeals to ingenious laboratory
experiments to show how subjects acquire the delusion of being in charge, even
when their conscious thoughts do not actually cause the actions they observe.
The rise of modern genetics has also undermined the belief that humans are
born with the freedom to shape their individual destinies. Scientists recognize
that genes shape our minds as well as our bodies. Evolutionary psychologists
seek to root personal qualities such as altruism and aggression in Darwinian
mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection. "We are survival
machines-robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules
known as genes," writes Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins.
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Those aspects of the mind that are not predetermined by genetics lie at the mercy
of "memetics." Memes are the mental equivalent of genes-ideas,
beliefs, and fashions that replicate and compete in the manner of genes.
British psychologist Susan Blackmore recently contended that our minds are
actually nothing but collections of memes that we catch from each other like
viruses, and that the familiar sense of "I" is some sort of fiction
that memes create for their own agenda.
These ideas are dangerous because there is more than a grain of truth in
them. There is an acute risk that they will be oversimplified and used to
justify an anything-goes attitude to criminal activity, ethnic conflict, even
genocide. Conversely, people convinced that the concept of individual choice is
a myth may passively conform to whatever fate an exploitative social or
political system may have decreed for them. If you thought eugenics was a
disastrous perversion of science, imagine a world where most people don't
believe in free will.
The scientific assault on free will would be less alarming if some new legal
and ethical framework existed to take its place. But nobody really has a clue
what that new structure might look like. And, remember, the scientists may be
wrong to doubt free will. It would be rash to assume that physicists have said
the last word on causation, or that cognitive scientists fully understand brain
function and consciousness. But even if they are right, and free will really is
an illusion, it may still be a fiction worth maintaining. Physicists and
philosophers often deploy persuasive arguments in the rarified confines of
academe but ignore them for all practical purposes. For example, it is easy to
be persuaded that the flow of time is an illusion (in physics, time simply is,
it doesn't "pass"). But nobody would conduct their daily affairs without
continual reference to past, present, and future. Society would disintegrate
without adhering to the fiction that time passes. So it is with the self and
its freedom to participate in events. To paraphrase the writer Isaac Bashevis
Singer, we must believe in free will-we have no choice.
BUSINESS AS USUAL AT THE U.N.
By SamantHa Power
For the United Nations, relevance may be almost as perilous as irrelevance.
In the span ri, of a year, the Bush administration went from taunting the world
body to begging for its help. A beefed-up U.N. team will soon arrive in Baghdad
to advise the Iraqi government on reconstruction, social services, and human
rights and directly assist with elections. At the same time, U.N. peacekeeping
missions are sprouting or expanding in Burundi, Democratic Republic of the
Congo, Haiti, and Ivory Coast. Indeed, by the end of 2004, more blue helmets
will likely be in action than at any time in history.
Although some U.N. backers revel in the growing global reliance on the world
body, now is no time to get smug. These weighty responsibilities are landing on
the shoulders of an organization that national governments have deliberately
kept weak. The United Nations' 60-year-old machinery has never seemed so
ill-equipped for its work, and its credibility has plummeted. As the major
powers fight terrorism and dwell on homeland security, they will hand the
United Nations essential but thankless tasks they might once have tackled
themselves (or just ignored). Without major changes, the United Nations may
well buckle under the growing strain.
The idea that the United Nations can stumble along in its atrophied
condition has powerful appeal in capitals around the world-and even in some
offices at U.N. headquarters. But believing that the status quo will suffice is
dangerous.
Regrettably, most of those who could change the organization have an
interest in resisting reform. None of the permanent security Council members
wants to give up its veto; smaller powers delight in their General Assembly
votes, which count as much as those of the major powers; repressive regimes
cherish participation in United Nations' human rights bodies, where they can
scuttle embarrassing resolutions; and the Western powers whose troops and
treasure are needed to strengthen U.N. peacekeeping have other priorities. Even
within the U.N. bureaucracy, many veterans shy away from dramatic reform-it has
taken them decades to become masters of the old procedures, and change is
risky. And while U.N. officials, including the secretary-general, are quick
(and correct) to blame the member states for the constraints they face, they
too rarely find the courage to spotlight those specific states whose obstinacy,
stinginess, and abuses undermine the principles behind the U.N. Charter.
Much U.N.-bashing is, of course, unfair. The United Nations is in many
respects just a building. It is a place for states to butt heads or to
negotiate as their national interests dictate. And, on the operational side,the
organization performs many indispensable tasks-feeding, sheltering, and
immunizing millions, and even disarming the odd Iraqi dictator. But the
organization's reputation rises and falls these days based on the performance and
perceived legitimacy of three of its most visible components-the Security
Council, the Commission on Human Rights, and the peacekeepers in the field.
Each is in dire need of reform or rescue.
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Permanent membership on the Security Council-granted to the Second World War
victors (plus France)-is woefully anachronistic. Britain and France can't
fairly claim two fifths of the world's legal authority. The permanent five
members once spoke for close to 40 percent of the world's population. They now account
for 29 percent. The world's largest democracy (India) is excluded; so are
regional powerhouses such as Nigeria and Brazil, not to mention the entire
Islamic world. It is the permanent members who decide when atrocities warrant
humanitarian intervention, but this decision is made by two of the planet's
worst human rights abusers (Russia and China) and one country (the United
States) that exempts itself from most international human rights treaties.
While still coveted in some cases, the council imprimatur is fast losing its
sheen.
The Commission on Human Rights, the 53-state forum based in Geneva, has
become a politicized farce. Because the commission takes all comers (seats are
allocated on a regional basis), some of the world's most vicious regimes are
members. Libya chaired the 2003 commission, and this year's commission extended
membership to Sudan, which is busy ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands
of Africans in Darfur. Until membership comes with responsibilities, the
commission will shelter too many human rights abusers and condemn too few.
When the states on the Security Council tell the secretary-general to put
boots on the ground, his peacekeepers often face impossible assignments. They
march into some of the world's most treacherous conflict zones, but only those
where major Western economic and security interests are not at stake. Not
coincidentally, the peacekeepers invariably lack the wherewithal to actually
keep peace. In the 1990s, peacekeepers who were chained to Serbian lampposts became
poster boys for the international community's impotence, as Western powers
dispatched lightly armed troops to Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia without the
mandate or means to stop genocide. To accommodate the unexpected surge in
demand for peacekeeping in the last year, Secretary-General Kofi Annan (who
likes to joke that "S.G." stands for "scapegoat") has
appealed for more troops, intelligence resources, and logistical support-and
the ability to call upon reinforcements if needed.
Funding for peacekeeping missions has increased somewhat, but another $1
billion is needed. Even more important, the United Nations must be able to
recruit soldiers from the major powers, which have coughed up only a few
hundred troops in recent years. The countries that do contribute significant
forces-including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uruguay, and Nigeria-are often lured by
the cash and military hardware they receive just for turning up. No wonder
command and control of these forces often melts down. If the major powers continue
to deploy peacekeepers on the cheap, the Security Council will again set up the
United Nations for failure-and endanger the millions of desperate civilians who
have no choice but to rely on the baby blue flag.
To a large extent, the United States and other member states get the United
Nations they want and deserve. But proponents of U.N. reform should view the
quagmire in Iraq as a moment of opportunity. Rather than regarding the United
Nations' new centrality as evidence of success, the secretary-general must talk
some sense into the member states, who stubbornly persist in believing that a
hobbled United Nations can meet the 21st century's deadly transnational
challenges.
Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations' second secretary-general, liked to say
that the United Nations was not created to take humanity to heaven but to save
it from hell. Even escaping hell requires an international organization that is
up to the job.
SPREADING DEMOCRACY
By Eric J. Hobsbawm
We are at present engaged in what purports to be a planned reordering of the
world by the powerful states. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are but one part
of a supposedly universal effort to create world order by "spreading
democracy." This idea is not merely quixotic-it is dangerous. The rhetoric
surrounding this crusade implies that the system is applicable in a
standardized (Western) form, that it can succeed everywhere, that it can remedy
today's transnational dilemmas, and that it can bring peace, rather than sow
disorder. It cannot.
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Democracy is rightly popular. In 1647, the English Levellers broadcast the
powerful idea that "all government is in the free consent of the
people." They meant votes for all. Of course, universal suffrage does not guarantee
any particular political result, and elections cannot even ensure their own
perpetuation-witness the Weimar Republic. Electoral democracy is also unlikely
to produce outcomes convenient to hegemonic or imperial powers. (If the Iraq
war had depended on the freely expressed consent of "the world
community," it would not have happened.) But these uncertainties do not
diminish the appeal of electoral democracy.
Several other factors besides democracy's popularity explain the dangerous and
illusory belief that its propagation by foreign armies might actually be
feasible. Globalization suggests that human affairs are evolving toward a
universal pattern. If gas stations, iPods, and computer geeks are the same
worldwide, why not political institutions? This view underrates the world's
complexity. The relapse into bloodshed and anarchy that has occurred so visibly
in much of the world has also made the idea of spreading a new order more
attractive. The Balkans seemed to show that areas of turmoil and humanitarian
catastrophe required the intervention, military if need be, of strong and
stable states. In the absence of effective international governance, some
humanitarians are still ready to support a world order imposed by U.S. power.
But one should always be suspicious when military powers claim to be doing
favors for their victims and the world by defeating and occupying weaker
states.
Yet another factor may be the most important: The United States has been
ready with the necessary combination of megalomania and messianism, derived
from its revolutionary origins. Today's United States is unchallengeable in its
techno-military supremacy, convinced of the superiority of its social system,
and, since 1989, no longer reminded-as even the greatest conquering empires
always had been-that its material power has limits. Like President Woodrow
Wilson (a spectacular international failure in his day), today's ideologues see
a model society already at work in the United States: a combination of law,
liberal freedoms, competitive private enterprise, and regular, contested
elections with universal suffrage. All that remains is to remake the world in
the image of this "free society."
This idea is dangerous whistling in the dark. Although great power action
may have morally or politically desirable consequences, identifying with it is
perilous because the logic and methods of state action are not those of
universal rights. All established states put their own interests first. If they
have the power, and the end is considered sufficiently vital, states justify
the means of achieving it (though rarely in public)-particularly when they
think God is on their side. Both good and evil empires have produced the
barbarization of our era, to which the "war against terror" has now
contributed.
While threatening the integrity of universal values, the campaign to spread
democracy will not succeed. The 20th century demonstrated that states could not
simply remake the world or abbreviate historical transformations. Nor can they
easily effect social change by transferring institutions across borders. Even
within the ranks of territorial nationstates, the conditions for effective
democratic government are rare: an existing state enjoying legitimacy, consent,
and the ability to mediate conflicts between domestic groups. Without such
consensus, there is no single sovereign people and therefore no legitimacy for
arithmetical majorities. When this consensus-be it religious, ethnic, or
both-is absent, democracy has been suspended (as is the case with democratic
institutions in Northern Ireland), the state has split (as in Czechoslovakia),
or society has descended into permanent civil war (as in Sri Lanka).
"Spreading democracy" aggravated ethnic conflict and produced the
disintegration of states in multinational and multicommunal regions after both
1918 and 1989, a bleak prospect.
Beyond its scant chance of success, the effort to spread standardized
Western democracy also suffers from a fundamental paradox. In no small part, it
is conceived of as a solution to the dangerous transnational problems of our
day. A growing part of human life now occurs beyond the influence of voters-in
transnational public and private entities that have no electorates, or at least
no democratic ones. And electoral democracy cannot function effectively outside
political units such as nation-states. The powerful states are therefore trying
to spread a system that even they find inadequate to meet today's challenges.
Europe proves the point. A body like the European Union (EU) could develop
into a powerful and effective structure precisely because it has no electorate
other than a small number (albeit growing) of member governments. The EU would
be nowhere without its "democratic deficit," and there can be no
future for its parliament, for there is no "European people," only a
collection of "member peoples," less than half of whom bothered to
vote in the 2004 EU parliamentary elections. "Europe" is now a
functioning entity, but unlike the member states it enjoys no popular
legitimacy or electoral authority. Unsurprisingly, problems arose as soon as
the EU moved beyond negotiations between governments and became the subject of
democratic campaigning in the member states.
The effort to spread democracy is also dangerous in a more indirect way: It
conveys to those who do not enjoy this form of government the illusion that it
actually governs those who do. But does it? We now know something about how the
actual decisions to go to war in Iraq were taken in at least two states of
unquestionable democratic bona fides: the United States and the United Kingdom.
Other than creating complex problems of deceit and concealment, electoral
democracy and representative assemblies had little to do with that process.
Decisions were taken among small groups of people in private, not very
different from the way they would have been taken in nondemocratic countries.
Fortunately, media independence could not be so easily circumvented in the
United Kingdom. But it is not electoral democracy that necessarily ensures
effective freedom of the press, citizen rights, and an independent judiciary.
TRANSHUMANISM
By Francis Fukuyama
For the last several decades, a strange liberation movement has grown within
the developed world. Its crusaders aim much higher than civil rights
campaigners, feminists, or gayrights advocates. They want nothing less than to
liberate the human race from its biological constraints. As
"transhumanists" see it, humans must wrest their biological destiny
from evolution's blind process of random variation and adaptation and move to
the next stage as a species.
It is tempting to dismiss transhumanists as some sort of odd cult, nothing
more than science fiction taken too seriously: Witness their overthe-top Web
sites and recent press releases ("Cyborg Thinkers to Address Humanity's
Future," proclaims one). The plans of some transhumanists to freeze
themselves cryogenically in hopes of being revived in a future age seem only to
confirm the movement's place on the intellectual fringe.
But is the fundamental tenet of transhumanism-that we will someday use
biotechnology to make ourselves stronger, smarter, less prone to violence, and
longer-lived-really so outlandish? Transhumanism of a sort is implicit in much
of the research agenda of contemporary biomedicine. The new procedures and
technologies emerging from research laboratories and hospitals-whether
mood-altering drugs, substances to boost muscle mass or selectively erase
memory, prenatal genetic screening, or gene therapy-can as easily be used to
"enhance" the species as to ease or ameliorate illness.
Although the rapid advances in biotechnology often leave us vaguely
uncomfortable, the intellectual or moral threat they represent is not always
easy to identify. The human race, after all, is a pretty sorry mess, with our
stubborn diseases, physical limitations, and short lives. Throw in humanity's
jealousies, violence, and constant anxieties, and the transhumanist project
begins to look downright reasonable. If it were technologically possible, why
wouldn't we want to transcend our current species? The seeming reasonableness
of the project, particularly when considered in small increments, is part of
its danger. Society is unlikely to fall suddenly under the spell of the
transhumanist worldview. But it is very possible that we will nibble at
biotechnology's tempting offerings without realizing that they come at a
frightful moral cost.
The first victim of transhumanism might be equality. The U.S. Declaration of
Independence says that "all men are created equal," and the most
serious political fights in the history of the United States have been over who
qualifies as fully human. Women and blacks did not make the cut in 1776 when
Thomas Jefferson penned the declaration. Slowly and painfully, advanced
societies have realized that simply being human entitles a person to political
and legal equality. In effect, we have drawn a red line around the human being
and said that it is sacrosanct.
Underlying this idea of the equality of rights is the belief that we all
possess a human essence that dwarfs manifest differences in skin color, beauty,
and even intelligence. This essence, and the view that individuals therefore
have inherent value, is at the heart of political liberalism. But modifying
that essence is the core of the transhumanist project. If we start transforming
ourselves into something superior, what rights will these enhanced creatures
claim, and what rights will they possess when compared to those left behind? If
some move ahead, can anyone afford not to follow? These questions are troubling
enough within rich, developed societies. Add in the implications for citizens
of the world's poorest countries-for whom biotechnology's marvels likely will
be out of reachand the threat to the idea of equality becomes even more
menacing.
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Transhumanism's advocates think they understand what constitutes a good
human being, and they are happy to leave behind the limited, mortal, natural
beings they see around them in favor of something better. But do they really
comprehend ultimate human goods? For all our obvious faults, we humans are
miraculously complex products of a long evolutionary process-products whose
whole is much more than the sum of our parts. Our good characteristics are
intimately connected to our bad ones: If we weren't violent and aggressive, we
wouldn't be able to defend ourselves; if we didn't have feelings of
exclusivity, we wouldn't be loyal to those close to us; if we never felt
jealousy, we would also never feel love. Even our mortality plays a critical
function in allowing our species as a whole to survive and adapt (and
transhumanists are just about the last group I'd like to see live forever).
Modifying any one of our key characteristics inevitably entails modifying a
complex, interlinked package of traits, and we will never be able to anticipate
the ultimate outcome.
Nobody knows what technological possibilities will emerge for human
self-modification. But we can already see the stirrings of Promethean desires
in how we prescribe drugs to alter the behavior and personalities of our
children. The environmental movement has taught us humility and respect for the
integrity of nonhuman nature. We need a similar humility concerning our human
nature. If we do not develop it soon, we may unwittingly invite the
transhumanists to deface humanity with their genetic bulldozers and
psychotropic shopping malls.
RELIGIOUS INTOLERANCE
By Martha Nussbaum
Sometimes old ideas are the most dangerous, and few ideas are older than
those that undergird religious intolerance. Lamentably, these ideas are
acquiring new life. In 2002, Hindus in Gujarat, India, killed several hundred
Muslims, with the collaboration of public officials and the police. Europe has
recently seen a frightening rebirth of anti-Semitism, while the appeal of
radical forms of Islam appears to be increasing in the Muslim world. Prejudice
against Muslims and a tendency to equate Islam with terrorism are too prominent
in the United States. On and on it goes. Intolerance breeds intolerance, as
expressions of hatred fuel existing insecurities and permit people to see their
own aggression as legitimate self-defense.
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Two ideas typically foster religious intolerance and disrespect. The first
is that one's own religion is the only true religion and that other religions
are false or morally incorrect. But people possessed of this view can also
believe that others deserve respect for their committed beliefs, so long as
they do no harm. Much more dangerous is the second idea, that the state and
private citizens should coerce people into adhering to the "correct"
religious approach. It's an idea that is catching on, even in many modern
democracies. France's reluctance to tolerate religious symbols in schools and
the Hindu right wing's repeated claims that minorities in India must become
part of Hindu culture are disturbing recent examples. The resurgence of this
kind of thinking poses a profound threat to liberal societies, which are based
on ideas of liberty and equality.
The appeal of religious intolerance is easy to understand. From an early
age, humans are aware of helplessness toward things of the highest importance,
such as food, love, and life itself. Religion helps people cope with loss and
the fear of death; it teaches moral principles and motivates people to follow
them. But precisely because religions are such powerful sources of morality and
community, they all too easily become vehicles for the flight from
helplessness, which so often manifests itself in oppression and the imposition
of hierarchy. In today's accelerating world, people confront ethnic and
religious differences in new and frightening ways. By clinging to a religion
they believe to be the right one, surrounding themselves with coreligionists,
and then subordinating others who do not accept that religion, people can
forget for a time their weakness and mortality.
Good laws are not enough to combat this fundamentally emotional and social
problem. Modern liberal societies have long understood the importance of legal
and constitutional norms expressing a commitment to religious liberty and to
the equality of citizens of different religions. But, though codification is
essential, constitutions and laws do not implement themselves, and public norms
are impotent without educational and cultural reinforcement.
We need, then, to think harder about how rhetoric (as well as poetry, music,
and art) can support pluralism and toleration. The leaders of the U.S. civil
rights movement understood the need for this kind of support; the speeches of
Martin Luther King Jr. illustrate how rhetoric can help people imagine equality
and see difference as a source of richness rather than fear. During the recent
electoral campaign in India, leaders of the Congress Party, especially Sonia
Gandhi, effectively conveyed the image of an inherently pluralistic India. (The
words of India's national anthem, written by pluralist poet Rabindranath
Tagore, also celebrate India's regional and ethnic differences.) The current
U.S. administration has made useful statements about the importance of not
demonizing Islam, but the rhetoric of certain key officials has also
highlighted Christian religion in ways that undermine tolerance. Attorney
General John Ashcroft, for example, regularly asks his staff to sing Christian
songs. And while he was a sitting U.S. senator, Ashcroft characterized America
as "a culture that has no king but Jesus."
For centuries, liberal thinkers have focused on legal and constitutional
avenues to tolerance, neglecting the public cultivation of emotion and
imagination. But liberals ignore public rhetoric at their peril. All modern
states and their leaders convey visions of religious equality or inequality
through their choices of language and image. Writing to the Quaker community in
1789, then President George Washington said, "The conscientious scruples
of all men should be treated with great delicacy and tenderness." Such
delicacy is now in short supply. If leaders do not think carefully about how to
use public language to foster respect, human equality will remain vulnerable.
FREE MONEY
By Alice M. Rivlin
Fiscal irresponsibility is politically attractive, but it is equivalent to
believing in something for nothing. Basing the policy of the world's dominant
economy on the hope that the normal rules of fiscal prudence do not apply is an
exceedingly dangerous idea.
Large and sustained deficits in the United States threaten not only U.S.
prosperity but the world's economic health as well. Massive public borrowing in
the United States is already absorbing other nations' savings to finance the
world's richest country. And it may soon raise interest rates around the world and
slow global growth. U.S. profligacy could even invite an international
financial crisis that would bring enormous human costs everywhere.
Small countries cannot afford to behave irresponsibly for very long; their
currencies lose value and their governments cannot borrow money. But investors
give the United States more leeway. Its debt-the famed U.S. Treasury bonds-is
still regarded as a very safe place to park money. The persistent appeal of
U.S. bonds is leading politicians in the United States to believe that the
ordinary rules of global finance don't apply to them. When they realize that
rules are rules, it may be too late; the world could be caught in a financial
crisis that has escalated beyond control.
Sermons on fiscal rectitude often fall on deaf ears in the United States.
Everyone likes a free lunch if they can get it. Raising taxes and cutting
spending are always painful, and political leaders have to be convinced that
the pain is worth it. But a glance at the recent past should wake the slumbering
body politic.
In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration cut income tax rates and
increased defense outlays without restraining other spending. Supporters of
those tax cuts predicted they would stimulate economic growth so powerfully
that deficits would vanish. They claimed that deficits did not matter because
government borrowing did not raise interest rates. They were wrong on both
counts, and the free lunch proved expensive. Fortunately, the costs of high
deficits in the 1980s evoked a bipartisan response in the United States.
Politicians in both parties voted for tax increases and forced themselves to
restrain spending growth. Fiscal responsibility and a strong economy turned the
deficits into surpluses by the end of the 1990s.
Irresponsibility is back. Once again, a U.S. administration is touting huge
tax cuts as stimulants to economic growth and massively increasing military
spending. Once again, deficits initially blamed on recession persist even as
the economy recovers. If the United States does not quickly change course,
deficits will remain around 3.5 percent of gross domestic product for the next
decade and then escalate rapidly as an aging society forces more spending for
social security and health care.
In many ways, the current deficits are even more dangerous than those of the
1980s. The retirement of the baby boom generation is two decades closer.
Moreover, the United States has shifted from being the world's largest creditor
to being the world's largest debtor, and a far more substantial portion of U.S.
public debt is held by foreigners, especially Asian central banks. This
dependence makes the United States vulnerable to the shifting moods of
international investors. A day may come when wary foreign investors demand high
interest rates as compensation for holding their assets in U.S. dollars. Worst
of all, the political will to deal with deficits has evaporated. The spending
rules adopted in the 1990s have lapsed, and the bipartisan coalition to restore
fiscal discipline has splintered.
The most likely scenario is continuing deficits financed largely by
borrowing from the rest of the world. The principal victims of this fiscal
irresponsibility will be Americans, who will suffer higher interest rates,
slower growth, more of their tax money going to debt service, and higher
inflation. The larger debt will be passed on to future taxpayers, who will
simultaneously have to grapple with the burdens of a rapidly aging population.
Eventually, the government will raise taxes and cut spending by more than would
have been necessary if action were taken earlier. The weakness in the United
States will almost inevitably sap the strength of the world economy.
That's the best case. An even darker possibility is that investors
(including many Americans) will lose confidence in the ability of the United
States to handle its fiscal affairs and will move their funds elsewhere. Such a
massive migration of capital would precipitate a plunge in the dollar and
generate a spike in interest rates and inflation in the United States. This
tsunami in the world's largest economy would disrupt international markets and
devastate many developing countries.
Avoiding possible disaster, or even the more likely slow erosion of
prosperity, will test U.S. political leadership. Will elected officials
recognize that common-sense rules of fiscal responsibility apply to the United
States as well as to other countries? Will they make the tough choices needed
to restore fiscal sanity to the world's most important economy?
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HATING AMERICA
By Fareed Zakaria
On September 12, 2001, Jean-Marie Colombani, the editor of Le Monde,
famously wrote, "Today we are all Americans." Three years on, it
seems that we are all anti-Americans. Hostility to the United States is deeper
and broader than at any point in the last 50 years. The Western Europeans, it
is often argued, oppose U.S. foreign policy because peace and prosperity have
made them soft. But the United States faces almost identical levels of
anti-Americanism in Turkey, India, and Pakistan, none of which are rich,
postmodern, or pacifist. With the exception of Israel and Britain, no country
today has a durable pro-American majority.
In this post-ideological age, anti-Americanism fills the void left by
defunct belief systems. It has become a powerful trend in international
politics today-and perhaps the most dangerous. U.S. hegemony has its problems,
but a world that reacts instinctively against the United States will be less
peaceful, less cooperative, less prosperous, less open, and less stable.
The wave of anti-Americanism is, of course, partly a product of the current
Bush administration's policies and, as important, its style. Support for the
United States has dropped dramatically since Bush rode into town. In 2000, for example,
75 percent of Indonesians identified themselves as proAmerican. Today, more
than 80 percent are hostile to Uncle Sam. When asked why they dislike the
United States, people in other countries consistently cite Bush and his
policies. But the very depth and breadth of this phenomenon suggest that it is
bigger than Bush. The term "hyperpower," after all, was coined by the
French foreign minister to describe Bill Clinton's America, not George W.
Bush's.
Anti-Americanism's ascendance also owes something to the geometry of power.
The United States is more powerful than any country in history, and
concentrated power usually means trouble. Other countries have a habit of
ganging up to balance the reigning superpower. Throughout history, countries
have united to defeat hegemonic powers-from the Hapsburgs to Napoleon to Kaiser
Wilhelm and Hitler.
For over 50 years, the United States employed skillful diplomacy to fend off
this apparently immutable law of history. U.S. administrations used power in
generally benign ways, working through international organizations, fostering
an open trading system that helped others grow economically, and providing
foreign aid to countries in need. To demonstrate that it was not threatening,
the United States routinely gave great respect and even deference to much
weaker countries. By crudely asserting U.S. power and disregarding
international institutions and alliances, the Bush administration has pulled
the curtain on decades of diplomacy and revealed that the United States' constraints
are self-imposed: America can, in fact, go it alone. Not surprisingly, the rest
of the world resents this imbalance and searches for ways to place obstacles in
America's way.
But an equally important force propelling anti-Americanism around the world
is an ideological vacuum. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama was right when
he noted that the collapse of the Soviet Union also meant the collapse of the
great ideological debate on how to organize economic and political life. The
clash between socialism and capitalism created political debates and shaped
political parties and their agendas across the world for more than a century.
Capitalism's victory left the world without an ideology of discontent, a
systematic set of ideas that are critical of the world as it exists.
There is always a market for an ideology of discontent-it allows those
outside the mainstream to relate to the world. These beliefs usually form in
reaction to the world's dominant reality. So the rise of capitalism and
democracy over the last 200 years produced ideologies of opposition from the
left (communism, socialism) and from the right (hypernationalism, fascism).
Today, the dominant reality in the world is the power of the United States,
currently being wielded in a particularly aggressive manner. Anti-Americanism
is becoming the way people think about the world and position themselves within
it. It is a mindset that extends beyond politics to economic and cultural
realms. So, in recent elections in Brazil, Germany, Pakistan, Kuwait, and
Spain, the United States became a campaign issue. In all these places,
resisting U.S. power won votes. Nationalism in many countries is being defined
in part as anti-Americanism: Can you stand up to the superpower?
Much has been written about what the United States can do to help arrest and
reverse these trends. But it is worth putting the shoe on the other foot for a
moment. Imagine a world without the United States as the global leader. Even
short of the imaginative and intelligent scenario of chaos that British
historian Niall Ferguson outlined in this magazine (see "A World Without
Power," July/August 2004), it would certainly look grim. There are many
issues on which the United States is the crucial organizer of collective goods.
Someone has to be concerned about terrorism and nuclear and biological
proliferation. Other countries might bristle at certain U.S. policies, but
would someone else really be willing to bully, threaten, cajole, and bribe
countries such as Libya to renounce terror and dismantle their WMD programs? On
terror, trade, AIDS, nuclear proliferation, U.N. reform, and foreign aid, U.S.
leadership is indispensable.
The temptation to go its own way will be greatest for Europe, the only other
player with the resources and tradition to play a global role. But if Europe
defines its role as being different from the United States-kinder, gentler,
whatever-will that really produce a more stable world? U.S. and European goals
on most issues are quite similar. Both want a peaceful world free from terror,
with open trade, growing freedom, and civilized codes of conduct. A Europe that
charts its own course just to mark its differences from the United States
threatens to fracture global efforts-whether on trade, proliferation, or the
Middle East. Europe is too disunited to achieve its goals without the United
States; it can only ensure that America's plans don't succeed. The result will
be a world that muddles along, with the constant danger that unattended
problems will flare up disastrously. Instead of win-win, it will be
lose-lose-for Europe, for the United States, and for the world.