I would like to announce the publication of a book, which deals with the world's failure to adequately address the existential danger of catastrophic climate change. The book consists mainly of book chapters and articles that I have previously published, although a considerable amount of new material has been added. It can be freely downloaded and circulated from the following link:
“Our house is on fire!”, says Greta Thunberg, and she is right. The year 2019 saw a rise in wildfires across the globe. Bush fires in Australia are threatening Sydney and have caused the Australian government to declare a state of emergency. But Australia's politicians continue the policies that have made their nation a climate change criminal, exporting vast quantities of coal and beef. The Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack said, of the fire victems: “They don't need the ravings of some pure enlightened and woke capital city greenies at this time when they are trying to save their homes.” In other words, let's not talk about climate change.
In the Arctic, wildfires raged, producing plumes of smoke the size of the European continent. In the Amazon, fires were deliberately set by greedy mining interests and beef farmers, illegally, but condoned by the government of Jair Bolsinaro, the “Trump of the Tropics”. In Indonesia, plumes of smoke from burning forests darkened the skys over many nearby countries. Again, the deliberately set fires were illegal, but they were condoned by corrupt politicians, receiving money from the hugely profitable palm oil business.
Extraction of fossil fuels must stop!
A United Nations report released Wednesday, 20 November, 2019, warned that worldwide projections for fossil fuel production over the next decade indicate that the international community is on track to fail to rein in planet-heating emissions and prevent climate catastrophe.
The Production Gap is an 80 page report produced by a collaboration between the UN Environmental Programme and a number of academic institutions. It examines the discrepancy between countries' planned fossil fuel production and global production levels consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees C or 2 degrees C, and concludes that the necessary policy changes are currently not being made.
The famous economist, Lord Nicholas Stern, has stated that “This important report shows that governments' projected and planned levels of coal, oil, and gas production are dangerously out of step with the goals of the Paris agreement on climate change. It illustrates the many ways in which governments subsidize and otherwise support the expansion of such production. Instead, governments should implement policies that ensure existing production peaks soon and then falls very rapidly.”
COP25 was sabotaged by greed
At the COP25 in Madrid, delegations from the United States, Australia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia worked actively to prevent meaningful progress, and they prevented it. In the words of Alden Meyer, director of strategy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, “I've been attending these climate negotiations since they first started in 1991, but never have I seen the almost total disconnect we've seen here at COP25 in Madrid between what the science requires and the people of the world demand, and what the climate negotiations are delivering in terms of meaningful action”.
We need a new economic system
Economists are not used to thinking of the long-term future. We can see this in their attitude to economic growth, a concept which mainstream economists support with almost-religious fervor. But the unlimited growth of anything physical on a physically finite planet is a logical impossibility. To avoid this logic, mainstream economists, with self-imposed shortsightedness, willfully limit their view of the future to a few decades. However, the climate crisis is a long-term multi- generational issue. Young people throughout the world are rightly protesting that their long-term future is being blighted by today's greed.
A few far-sighted economists outside the mainstream, for example Herman Daly, have made extensive studies of Steady-State Economics. Logic tells us that this must become the economics of the future, replacing the growth-worshiping and greed-sanctioning economics of today.
Other books and articles about global problems are on these links
I hope that you will circulate the links (as well as the link at the start of this article) to friends who might be interested.
Prof John Scales Avery, PhD
was part of a group that shared the 1995Nobel Peace Prize for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
John Scales Avery is a theoretical chemist, Associate Professor Emeritus, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is noted for his books and research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and history of science. His 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution set forth the view that the phenomenon of life, including its origin, evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its background situated in the fields of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory.
"Only immediate climate action can save the future. If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon."
A new book
I have written a 396-page book about the steps that are urgently needed in order to save the future for our children and grandchildren. The book makes use of articles and book chapters that I have previously written on our current crisis, but much new material has been added. I urge readers to download and circulate the pdf file of the book from the following link:
Immediate action is needed to save the long-term future
Here is a recent statement by Jakob von Uexküll, founder of the World Future Council:
“Today we are heading for unprecedented dangers and conflicts, up to and including the end of a habitable planet in the foreseeable future, depriving all future generations of their right to life and the lives of preceding generations of meaning and purpose.
“This apocalyptic reality is the elephant in the room. Current policies threaten temperature increases triggering permafrost melting and the release of ocean methane hydrates which would make our earth unliveable, according to research presented by the British Government Met office at the Paris Climate Conference.
“The myth that climate change is conspiracy to reduce freedom is spread by a powerful and greedy elite which has largely captured governments to preserve their privileges in an increasingly unequal world.”
Similarly, 15-year-old Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, described our present situation in the following words:
“When I was about 8 years old, I first heard about something called ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming’. Apparently, that was something humans had created by our way of living. I was told to turn off the lights to save energy and to recycle paper to save resources. I remember thinking that it was very strange that humans, who are an animal species among others, could be capable of changing the Earth’s climate. Because, if we were, and if it was really hap-pening, we wouldn’t be talking about anything else. As soon as you turn on the TV, everything would be about that. Headlines, radio, newspapers: You would never read or hear about anything else. As if there was a world war going on, but no one ever talked about it. If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before? Why were there no restrictions? Why wasn’t it made illegal?”
Why do we not respond to the crisis?
Today we are faced with multiple interrelated crises, for example the threat of catastrophic climate change or equally catastrophic thermonuclear war, and the threat of widespread famine. These threats to human existence and to the biosphere demand a prompt and rational response; but because of institutional and cultural inertia, we are failing to take the steps that are necessary to avoid disaster.
Only immediate action can save the future
Immediate action to halt the extraction of fossil fuels and greatly reduce the emission of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses is needed to save the long-term future of human civilization and the biosphere.
At the opening ceremony of United Nations-sponsored climate talks in Katowice, Poland, (COP24), Sir David Attenborough said “Right now, we are facing a man-made disaster of global scale. Our greatest in thousands of years. Climate change. If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon. The world’s people have spoken. Their message is clear. Time is running out. They want you, the decision-makers, to act now.”
Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary-General, said climate change was already “a matter of life and death” for many countries. He added that the world is “nowhere near where it needs to be” on the transition to a low-carbon economy.
Swedish student Greta Thunberg, is a 15-year-old who has launched a climate protest movement in her country. She said, in a short but very clear speech after that of UN leader Antonio Guterres: “Some people say that I should be in school instead. Some people say that I should study to become a climate scientist so that I can ‘solve the climate crisis’. But the climate crisis has already been solved. We already have all the facts and solutions.”
She added: “Why should I be studying for a future that soon may be no more, when no one is doing anything to save that future? And what is the point of learning facts when the most important facts clearly mean nothing to our society?”
Thunberg continued: “Today we use 100 million barrels of oil every single day. There are no politics to change that. There are no rules to keep that oil in the ground. So we can’t save the world by playing by the rules. Because the rules have to be changed.”
She concluded by saying that “since our leaders are behaving like children, we will have to take the responsibility they should have taken long ago.”
Institutional inertia
Our collective failure to respond adequately to the current crisis is very largely due to institutional inertia. Our financial system is deeply embedded and resistant to change. Our entire industrial infrastructure is based on fossil fuels; but if the future is to be saved, the use of fossil fuels must stop. International relations are still based based on the concept of absolutely sovereign nation states, even though this concept has become a dangerous anachronism in an era of instantaneous global communication and economic interdependence. Within nations, systems of law and education change very slowly, although present dangers demand rapid revolutions in outlook and lifestyle.
The failure of the recent climate conferences to produce strong final documents can be attributed to the fact that the nations attending the conferences felt themselves to be in competition with each other, when in fact they ought to have cooperated in response to a common danger. The heavy hand of the fossil fuel industry also made itself felt at the conferences.
Until the development of coal-driven steam engines in the 19th century humans lived more or less in harmony with their environment. Then, fossil fuels, representing many millions of years of stored sunlight, were extracted and burned in two centuries, driving a frenzy of growth of population and industry that has lasted until the present. But today, the party is over. Coal, oil and gas are nearly exhausted, and what remains of them must be left in the ground to avoid existential threats to humans and the biosphere. Huge coal and oil corporations base the value of their stocks on ownership of the remaining resources that are still buried, and they can be counted on to use every trick, fair or unfair, to turn those resources into money.
In general corporations represent a strong force resisting change. By law, the directors of corporations are obliged to put the profits of stockholders above every other consideration. No room whatever is left for an ecological or social conscience. Increasingly, corporations have taken control of our mass media and our political system. They intervene in such a way as to make themselves richer, and thus to increase their control of the system.
Polite conversation and cultural inertia
Each day, the conventions of polite conversation contribute to our sense that everything is as it always was. Politeness requires that we do not talk about issues that might be contrary to another person’s beliefs. Thus polite conversation is dominated by trivia, entertainment, sports, the weather, gossip, food, and so on, Worries about the the distant future , the danger of nuclear war, the danger of uncontrollable climate change, or the danger of widespread famine seldom appear in conversations at the dinner table, over coffee or at the pub. In conversations between polite people, we obtain the false impression that all is well with the world. But in fact, all is not well. We have to act promptly and adequately to save the future.
The situation is exactly the same in the mass media. The programs and articles are dominated by trivia and entertainment. Serious discussions of the sudden crisis which civilization now faces are almost entirely absent, because the focus is on popularity, ratings and the sale of advertising. As Niel Postman remarked, we are entertaining ourselves to death.
Further growth implies future collapse
We have to face the fact that endless economic growth on a finite planet is a logical impossibility, and that we have reached or passed the the sustainable limits to growth.
In today’s world, we are pressing against the absolute limits of the earth’s carrying capacity, and further growth carries with it the danger of future collapse. In the long run, neither the growth of industry nor that of population is sustainable; and we have now reached or exceeded the sustainable limits.
The size of the human economy is, of course, the product of two factors: the total number of humans, and the consumption per capita. Let us first consider the problem of reducing the per-capita consumption in the industrialized countries. The whole structure of western society seems designed to push its citizens in the opposite direction, towards ever-increasing levels of consumption. The mass media hold before us continually the ideal of a personal utopia, filled with material goods.
Every young man in a modern industrial society feels that he is a failure unless he fights his way to the “top”; and in recent years, women too have been drawn into the competition. Of course, not everyone can reach the top; there would not be room for everyone; but society urges us all to try, and we feel a sense of failure if we do not reach the goal. Thus, modern life has become a competition of all against all for power and possessions.
When possessions are used for the purpose of social competition, demand has no natural upper limit; it is then limited only by the size of the human ego, which, as we know, is boundless. This would be all to the good if unlimited industrial growth were desirable; but today, when further industrial growth implies future collapse, western society urgently needs to find new values to replace our worship of power, our restless chase after excitement, and our admiration of excessive consumption.
If you turn on your television set, the vast majority of the programs that you will be offered give no hint at all of the true state of the world or of the dangers which we will face in the future. Part of the reason for this willful blindness is that no one wants to damage consumer confidence. No one wants to bring on a recession. No one wants to shoot Santa Claus.
But sooner or later a severe recession will come, despite our unwillingness to recognize this fact. Perhaps we should prepare for it by reordering the world’s economy and infrastructure to achieve long-term sustainability, i.e.steady-state economics, population stabilization, and renewable energy.
Our responsibility to future generations and the biosphere
All of the technology needed for the replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energy is already in place. Although renewable sources supplied only 9 percent of the world’s total energy requirements in 2015 , they supplied 23 percent of ekectrical generation energy in 2016, and they are growing rapidly. Because of the remarkable properties of exponential growth, this will mean that renewables will soon become a major supplier of the world’s energy requirements, despite bitter opposition from the fossil fuel industry.
Both wind and solar energy can now compete economically with fossil fuels, and this situation will become even more pronounced if more countries put a tax on carbon emissions, as Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Costa Rica, the United Kingdom and Ireland already have done.
Much research and thought have also been devoted to the concept of a steady-state economy. The only thing that is lacking is political will. It is up to the people of the world to make their collective will felt.
History has given to our generation an enormous responsibility towards future generations. We must achieve a new kind of economy, a steady-state economy. We must stabilize global population. We must replace fossil fuels by renewable energy. We must abolish nuclear weapons. We must end the institution of war. We must reclaim democracy in our own countries when it has been lost. We must replace nationalism by a just system of international law. We must prevent degradation of the earth’s environment. We must act with dedication and fearlessness to save the future of the earth for human civilization and for the plants and animals with which we share the gift of life.
Hope
Here is what Greta Thunberg says about hope:
“And yes, we do need hope. Of course, we do. But the one thing we need more than hope is action. Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then and only then, hope will come today.”
Prof John Scales Avery, PhD
was part of a group that shared the 1995Nobel Peace Prize for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
John Scales Avery is a theoretical chemist, Associate Professor Emeritus, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is noted for his books and research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and history of science. His 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution set forth the view that the phenomenon of life, including its origin, evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its background situated in the fields of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory.
After the unspeakable horrors of World War II, delegates from 50 Allied nations met in San Francisco California. The purpose of the conference, which took place between 25 April and 26 June, 1945, was to set up an international organization that would be able to abolish the institution of war. However, the Charter which the delegates produced was too weak to achieve this goal.
In many respects the United Nations has been highly successful. During the 73 years that have passed since its establishment, a world war has been avoided. The agencies of the United Nations, such as the World Health Organization, the Food and Agricultural Organization, UNESCO and the IPCC, have provided urgently-needed services to the international community. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Millennium Development Goals have set up norms towards which we can and should aim. Further-more, the UN has provided a place where representatives from many nations can meet for informal diplomacy, through which many dangerous conflicts have been avoided.
Nevertheless, the United Nations, with its present Charter, has proved to be too weak to achieve the purpose for which it was established – the complete abolition of the institution of war. If civil wars are included, there are, on any given day, an average of 12 wars somewhere in the world. The
task of abolishing war has become extremely urgent since the advent of thermonuclear weapons. The danger that these weapons will be used, through accident, technical or human error, or through uncontrollable escalation of a war with conventional weapons, poses an existential threat to human civi-lization and the biosphere.
The Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955 described our present situation in the following words:
“Here then is the problem that we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war?... There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death becauswe cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.”
Why call war an “institution”?
Because the world spends almost two thousand billion dollars each year on armaments, it follows that very many people make their living from war. This is the reason why it is correct to speak of war as a social institution, and also the reason why war persists, although everyone realizes that it is
the cause of much of the suffering that inflicts humanity. We know that war is madness, but it persists. We know that it threatens the future survival of our species, but it persists, entrenched in the attitudes of historians, newspaper editors and television producers, entrenched in the methods by which politicians finance their campaigns, and entrenched in the financial power of arms manufacturers, entrenched also in the ponderous and costly hardware of war, the fleets of warships, bombers, tanks, nuclear missiles and so on.
Military-industrial complexes, throughout the world, drive and perpetuate the institution of war. Each military-industrial complex involves a circular flow of money. The money flows like the electrical current in a dynamo, driving a diabolical machine. Money from immensely rich corporate oligarchs buys the votes of politicians and the propaganda of the mainstream media. Numbed by the propaganda, citizens allow the politicians to vote for obscenely bloated military budgets, which further enrich the corporate oligarchs, and the circular flow continues.
A World Federation
In order to save the world from destruction in a thermonuclear World War III, the United Nations Charter must be reformed and strengthened. At present, the UN is a confederation of absolutely sovereign nation-states. But in a world of all-destroying modern weapons, instantaneous global communi-cation, and economic interdependence, the absolutely sovereign nation-state has become a dangerous anachronism.
Furthermore, history has shown confederations to be fatally weak. For example, the original United States Constitution was a confederation; but it soon became apparent that this form of governance was too weak. Instead, a federation was needed. In his Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton wrote: “To coerce the states is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised... Can any reasonable man be well disposed towards a government which makes war and carnage the only means of supporting itself, a government that can exist only by the sword? Every such war must involve the innocent with the guilty. The single consideration should be enough to dispose every
peaceable citizen against such government... What is the cure for this great evil? Nothing, but to enable the... laws to operate on individuals, in the same manner as those of states do.”
George Mason, one of the drafters of the Federal Constitution, believed that “such a government was necessary as could directly operate on individuals, and would punish those only whose guilt required it”, while another drafter, James Madison, wrote that the more he reflected on the use of force, the more he doubted “the practicality, the justice and the efficacy of it when applied to people collectively, and not individually.”
At present, the United Nations attempts to coerce states through sanctions; but sanctions are a form of collective punishment, and collective punishment is expressly forbidden by the Geneva Conventions. The worst effects of sanctions are usually felt by the weakest and least guilty of the citizens, while the guilty leaders are usually unaffected. Besides being a violation of the Geneva Conventions, sanctions are ineffective, their only effect being to unite the people of a country behind its guilty leaders.
The success of federations
A federation is a union of organizations to which specific powers are granted, all other powers being retained by the subunits. Historically, federations have proved to be highly successful and durable.
Besides political federations, many other kinds exist, examples being Universal Postal Union, established by the Treaty of Bern in 1874, and the International Tennis Federation (ITF), founded in 1913.
Examples of political federations include the European Union, the Federal Republic of Germany, the Swiss Federation, the Russian Federation, the Federal Government of the United States, and the governments of Australia and Brazil.
Laws binding on individuals
In general, political federations have the power to make laws which are binding on individuals, thus avoiding the need to coerce their member states. An effective World Federation would need to have the power to make laws that act on individuals. The International Criminal Court is an important step towards the establishment of a system of international law that acts on individuals rather than on states, and the ICC deserves our wholehearted support.
Greatly increased financial support for the UN
A very important step towards strengthening the United Nations would be to give it at least 50 times the financial support that it has today. At present the entire yearly budget of the UN is only 2.7 billion US dollars, a ridiculously low figure, considering the organization’s duty to ensure peace, law. human rights, social justice, respect for the environment, human health, and a safe food supply for the entire world. If the financial support of the United Nations could be greatly increased, its agencies could perform their vitally important duties much more effectively. This would give the UN increased prestige and authority, and the UN would thus be better able to resolve political disputes.
Various method for increasing the money available to the UN have been proposed. For example, James Tobin, who was Sterling Professor of Eco-nomics at Yale University, and Nobel Laureate in Economics, proposed that international currency transactions be taxed at a small fraction of a percent. He believed that even this extremely small tax would make exchange rates much more stable. When asked what should be done with the proceeds of the tax, Tobin added, almost as an afterthought, “Give it to the United Nations”. In fact, the volume of international currency transactions is so enormous that even the tiny tax proposed by Tobin would be sufficient to solve all the UN’s financial problems.
A standing UN Emergency Force
The United Nations is often called on to act quickly in emergency situations, an example being the call for the UN to stop the Rwandan genocide. It would be helpful if the UN had a standing armed force which could act quickly in such emergency situations. The force could consist of volunteers from around the world, pledged to loyalty to humanity as a whole, rather than loyalty to any nation.
A reformed voting system
In the present UN General Assembly, each nation is given one vote regardless of size. This means that Monaco, Liechtenstein, Malta and Andorra have as much voting power as China, India, the United States and Russia combined. For this reason, UN resolutions are often ignored.
The voting system of the General Assembly should be reformed. One possible plan would be for final votes to be cast by regional blocks, each block having one vote. The blocks might be. 1) Latin America 2) Africa 3) Europe 4) North America 5) Russia and Central Asia 6) China 7) India and Southeast Asia 8) The Middle East and 9) Japan, Korea and Oceania.
In a reformed, democratized and possibly renamed Security Council, the veto power would be absent, and final votes would be taken between regions of roughly equal populations.
Hope for the future
Can we abolish the institution of war? Can we hope and work for a time when the terrible suffering inflicted by wars will exist only as a dark memory fading into the past? I believe that this is really possible. The problem of achieving internal peace over a large geographical area is not insoluble. It has already been solved. There exist today many nations or regions within each of which there is internal peace, and some of these are so large that they are almost worlds in themselves. One thinks of China, India, Brazil, the Russian Federation, the United States, and the European Union. Many of these enormous societies contain a variety of ethnic groups, a variety of religions and a variety of languages, as well as striking contrasts between wealth and poverty. If these great land areas have been forged into peaceful and cooperative societies, cannot the same methods of government be applied globally?
Today, there is a pressing need to enlarge the size of the political unit from the nation-state to the entire world. The need to do so results from the terrible dangers of modern weapons and from global economic interdependence. The progress of science has created this need, but science has also given us the means to enlarge the political unit: Our almost miraculous modern communications media, if properly used, have the power to weld all of humankind into a single supportive and cooperative society.
We live at a critical time for human civilization, a time of crisis. Each of us must accept his or her individual responsibility for solving the problems that are facing the world today. We cannot leave this to the politicians. That is what we have been doing until now, and the results have been disastrous. Nor can we trust the mass media to give us adequate public discussion of the challenges that we are facing. We have a responsibility towards future generations to take matters into our own hands, to join hands and make our own alternative media, to work actively and fearlessly for better government and for a better society.
We, the people of the world, not only have the facts on our side; we also have numbers on our side. The vast majority of the worlds peoples long for peace. The vast majority long for abolition of nuclear weapons, and for a world of kindness and cooperation, a world of respect for the environment.
No one can make these changes alone, but together we can do it. Together, we have the power to choose a future where international anar-chy, chronic war and institutionalized injustice will be replaced by democratic and humane global governance, a future where the madness and immorality of war will be replaced by the rule of law.
We need a sense of the unity of all mankind to save the future, a new global ethic for a united world. We need politeness and kindness to save the future, politeness and kindness not only within nations but also between nations.
To save the future, we need a just and democratic system of international law; for with law shall our land be built up, but with lawlessness laid waste.
A new 418-page book entitled “A World Federation” may be downloaded and circulated gratis from the following link:
was part of a group that shared the 1995Nobel Peace Prize for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
John Scales Avery is a theoretical chemist, Associate Professor Emeritus, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is noted for his books and research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and history of science. His 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution set forth the view that the phenomenon of life, including its origin, evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its background situated in the fields of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory.
Social critic Neil Postman contrasted the futures predicted in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death”. He wrote:
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”
Niel Postman’s book, “Amusing Ourselves To Death; or Public Discourse in an Age of Show Business” (1985), had its origins at the Frankfurt Book Fair, where Postman was invited to join a panel discussing George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four”. Postman said that our present situation was better predicted by Huxley’s “Brave New World”. Today, he maintained it is not fear that bars us from truth. Instead, truth is drowned in distractions and the pursuit of pleasure, by the public’s addiction to amusement.
Postman sees television as the modern equivalent of Huxley’s pleasure-inducing drug, soma, and he maintains that that television, as a medium, is intrinsically superficial and unable to discuss serious issues. Looking at television as it is today, one must agree with him.
The wealth and power of the establishment
The media are a battleground where reformers struggle for attention, but are defeated with great regularity by the wealth and power of the establishment. This is a tragedy because today there is an urgent need to make public opinion aware of the serious problems facing civilization, and the steps that are needed to solve these problems. The mass media could potentially be a great force for public education, but in general their role is not only unhelpful - it is often negative. War and conflict are blatantly advertised by television and newspapers.
Newspapers and war
There is a true story about the powerful newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst that illustrates the relationship between the mass media and the institution of war: When an explosion sank the American warship USS Maine in the harbor of Havana, Hearst anticipated (and desired) that the incident would lead to war between the United States and Spain. He therefore sent his best illustrator, Fredrick Remington, to Havana to produce drawings of the scene. After a few days in Havana, Remington cabled to Hearst, “All’s quiet here. There will be no war.” Hearst cabled back, “You supply the pictures. I’ll supply the war.” Hearst was true to his words. His newspapers inflamed American public opinion to such an extent that the Spanish-American War became inevitable. During the course of the war, Hearst sold many newspapers, and Remington many drawings. From this story one might almost conclude that newspapers thrive on war, while war thrives on newspapers.
Before the advent of widely-read newspapers, European wars tended to be fought by mercenary soldiers, recruited from the lowest ranks of society, and motivated by financial considerations. The emotions of the population were not aroused by such limited and decorous wars. However, the French Revolution and the power of newspapers changed this situation, and war became a total phenomenon that involved emotions. The media were able to mobilize on a huge scale the communal defense mechanism that Konrad Lorenz called “militant enthusiasm” - self-sacrifice for the defense of the tribe. It did not escape the notice of politicians that control of the media is the key to political power in the modern world. For example, Hitler was extremely conscious of the force of propaganda, and it became one of his favorite instruments for exerting power.
With the advent of radio and television, the influence of the mass media became still greater. Today, state-controlled or money-controlled newspapers, radio and television are widely used by the power elite to manipulate public opinion. This is true in most countries of the world, even in those that pride themselves on allowing freedom of speech. For example, during the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the official version of events was broadcast by CNN, and criticism of the invasion was almost absent from their transmissions.
The mass media and our present crisis
Today we are faced with the task of creating a new global ethic in which loyalty to family, religion and nation will be supplemented by a higher loyalty to humanity as a whole. In case of conflicts, loyalty to humanity as a whole must take precedence. In addition, our present culture of violence must be replaced by a culture of peace. To achieve these essential goals, we urgently need the cooperation of the mass media.
The predicament of humanity today has been called “a race between education and catastrophe”: Human emotions have not changed much during the last 40,000 years. Human nature still contains an element of tribalism to which nationalistic politicians successfully appeal. The completely sovereign nation-state is still the basis of our global political system. The danger in this situation is due to the fact that modern science has given the human race incredibly destructive weapons. Because of these weapons, the tribal tendencies in human nature and the politically fragmented structure of our world have both become dangerous anachronisms.
After the tragedies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Albert Einstein said, “The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything except our way of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophes.” We have to learn to think in a new way. Will we learn this in time to prevent disaster? When we consider the almost miraculous power of our modern electronic media, we can be optimistic. Cannot our marvelous global communication network be used to change anachronistic ways of thought and anachronistic social and political institutions in time, so that the system will not self-destruct as science and technology revolutionize our world? If they were properly used, our instantaneous global communications could give us hope.
The success of our species is built on cultural evolution, the central element of which is cooperation. Thus human nature has two sides, tribal emotions are present, but they are balanced by the human genius for cooperation. The case of Scandinavia - once war-torn, now cooperative – shows that education is able to bring out either the kind and cooperative side of human nature, or the xenophobic and violent side. Which of these shall it be? It is up to our educational systems to decide, and the mass media are an extremely important part of education. Hence the great responsibility that is now in the hands of the media.
How do the mass media fulfill this life-or-death responsibility? Do they give us insight? No, they give us pop music. Do they give us an understanding of the sweep of evolution and history? No, they give us sport. Do they give us an understanding of need for strengthening the United Nations, and the ways that it could be strengthened? No, they give us sit-coms and soap operas. Do they give us unbiased news? No, they give us news that has been edited to conform with the interests of the military-industrial complex and other powerful lobbys. Do they present us with the need for a just system of international law that acts on individuals? On the whole, the subject is neglected. Do they tell of of the essentially genocidal nature of nuclear weapons, and the urgent need for their complete abolition? No, they give us programs about gardening and making food.
A consumer who subscribes to the “package” of broadcasts sold by a cable company can often search through all 100 or so channels without finding a single program that offers insight into the various problems that are facing the world today. What the viewer finds instead is a mixture of pro-establishment propaganda and entertainment. Meanwhile the neglected global problems are becoming progressively more severe. In general, the mass media behave as though their role is to prevent the peoples of the world from joining hands and working to change the world and to save it from thermonuclear and environmental catastrophes. The television viewer sits slumped in a chair, passive, isolated, disempowered and stupefied. The future of the world hangs in the balance, the fate of children and grandchildren hang in the balance, but the television viewer feels no impulse to work actively to change the world or to save it. The Roman emperors gave their people bread and circuses to numb them into political inactivity. The modern mass media seem to be playing a similar role.
Our duty to future generations
The future of human civilization is endangered both by the threat of themonuclear war and by the threat of catastrophic climate change. It is not only humans that are threatened, but also the other organisms with which we share the gift of life. We must also consider the threat of a global famine of extremely large proportions, when the end of the fossil fuel era, combined with the effects of climate change, reduce our ability to support a growing global population.
We live at a critical moment of history. Our duty to future generations is clear: We must achieve a steady-state economic system. We must restore democracy in our own countries when it has been replaced by oligarchy. We must decrease economic inequality both between nations and within nations. We must break the power of corporate greed. We must leave fossil fuels in the ground. We must stabilize and ultimately reduce the global population. We must eliminate the institution of war; and we must develop new ethics to match our advanced technology, ethics in which narrow selfishness, short-sightedness and nationalism will be replaced by loyalty to humanity as a whole, combined with respect for nature.
Inaction is not an option. We have to act with courage and dedication, even if the odds are against success, because the stakes are so high.
The mass media could mobilize us to action, but they have failed in their duty.
Our educational systems could also wake us up and make us act, but they too has failed us. The battle to save the earth from human greed and folly has to be fought in the alternative media.
The alternative media, and all who work with them deserve both our gratitude and our financial support. They alone, can correct the distorted and incomplete picture of the world that we obtain from the mass media. They alone can show us the path to a future in which our children, grandchildren, and all future generations can survive.
A book discussing the importance of alternative media can be freely downloaded and circulated from this address:
was part of a group that shared the 1995Nobel Peace Prize for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
John Scales Avery is a theoretical chemist, Associate Professor Emeritus, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is noted for his books and research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and history of science. His 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution set forth the view that the phenomenon of life, including its origin, evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its background situated in the fields of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory.
I would like to announce the publication of a new book entitled “The Information Explosion”. This book discusses the role of information in evolution, and especially in the evolution of human culture. Articles and book chapters that I have previously written on this subject are incorporated in the text in modified forms, but more than half of the material is new. The book may be freely downloaded and circulated from the following link:
Human nature has two sides: It has a dark side, to which nationalism and militarism appeal; but our species also has a genius for cooperation, which we can see in the growth of culture. Our modern civilization has been built up by means of a worldwide exchange of ideas and inventions. It is built on the achievements of many ancient cultures. China, Japan, India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, the Islamic world, Christian Europe, and the Jewish intellectual traditions all have contributed. Potatoes, corn, squash, vanilla, chocolate, chilli peppers, and quinine are gifts from the American Indians.
We need to reform our educational systems, particularly the teaching of history. As it is taught today, history is a chronicle of power struggles and war, told from a biased national standpoint. We are taught that our own country is always heroic and in the right. We urgently need to replace this indoctrination in chauvinism by a reformed view of history, where the slow development of human culture is described, giving credit to all who have contributed. When we teach history, it should not be about power struggles. It should be about how the human culture was gradually built up over thousands of years by the patient work of millions of hands and minds. Our common global culture, the music, science, literature and art that all of us share, should be presented as a precious heritage - far too precious to be risked in a thermonuclear war.
Many areas of science can be thought of as history:
Cosmology is history: It is the history of our entire universe.
Geology is history: It is the history of our Earth, its continents and its oceans.
Evolutionary biology is history: It is the history of all living creatures. It is the history of our own species and our place in nature.
Paleoanthropology is history: It is the history of how hominids became humans. The study of languages is history.
Relationships between languages allow us to trace the spread of humans from their origin in Africa to other parts of the earth.
Modern genetics contributes to history: The study of mitochondrial DNA and Y-chromosomal DNA allows us to trace the pathways that our ancestors followed in populating the earth.
Two sides of human nature: Compassion and Greed
Humans are capable of great compassion and unselfishness. Mothers and fathers make many sacrifices for the sake of their families. Kind teachers help us through childhood, and show us the right path. Doctors and nurses devote themselves to the welfare of their patients.
Sadly there is another, side to human nature, a darker side. Human history is stained with the blood of wars and genocides. Today, this dark, aggressive side of human nature threatens to plunge our civilization into an all-destroying thermonuclear war.
Humans often exhibit kindness to those who are closest to themselves, to their families and friends, to their own social group or nation. By contrast, the terrible aggression seen in wars and genocides is directed towards outsiders. Human nature seems to exhibit what might be called ``tribalism": altruism towards one's own group; aggression towards outsiders. Today this tendency towards tribalism threatens both human civilization and the biosphere.
Greed, in particular the greed of corporations and billionaire oligarchs, is driving human civilization and the biosphere towards disaster.
The greed of giant fossil fuel corporations is driving us towards a tipping point after which human efforts to control climate change will be futile because feedback loops will have taken over. The greed of the military industrial complex is driving us towards a Third World War that might develop into a catastrophic thermonuclear war. The greed of our financial institutions is also driving us towards economic collapse.
Until the start of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, human society maintained a more or less sustainable relationship with nature. However, with the beginning of the industrial era, traditional ways of life, containing elements of both social and environmental ethics, were replaced by the money-centered, growth-oriented life of today, from which these vital elements are missing.
According to the followers of Adam Smith (1723-1790), self-interest (even greed) is a sufficient guide to human economic actions. The passage of time has shown that Smith was right in many respects. The free market, which he advocated, has turned out to be the optimum prescription for economic growth. However, history has also shown that there is something horribly wrong or incomplete about the idea that self-interest alone, uninfluenced by ethical and ecological considerations, and totally free from governmental intervention, can be the main motivating force of a happy and just society. There has also proved to be something terribly wrong with the concept of unlimited economic growth. Limitless growth of population or industry on a finite planet is a logical impossibility.
Culture, education and human solidarity
Cultural and educational activities have a small ecological footprint, and therefore are more sustainable than pollution-producing, fossil-fuel-using jobs in industry. Furthermore, since culture and knowledge are shared among all nations, work in culture and education leads societies naturally towards internationalism and peace.
Economies based on a high level of consumption of material goods are unsustainable and will have to be abandoned by a future world that renounces the use of fossil fuels in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, a world where non-renewable resources such as metals will become increasingly rare and expensive. How then can full employment be maintained?
The creation of renewable energy infrastructure will provide work for a large number of people; but in addition, sustainable economies of the future will need to shift many workers from jobs in industry to jobs in the service sector. Within the service sector, jobs in culture and education are particularly valuable because they will help to avoid the disastrous wars that are currently producing enormous human suffering and millions of refugees, wars that threaten to escalate into an all-destroying global thermonuclear war.
Culture is cooperative, not competitive!
Our modern civilization has been built up by means of a worldwide exchange of ideas and inventions. It is built on the achievements of all the peoples of the world throughout history. The true history of humanity is not the history of power struggles, conflicts, kings, dictators and empires. The true history of humanity is a history of ideas, inventions, progress, shared knowledge, shared culture and cooperation.
Our cultural heritage is not only immensely valuable; it is also so great that no individual comprehends all of it. We are all specialists, who understand only a tiny fragment of the enormous edifice. No scientist understands all of science. Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci could come close in his day, but today it is impossible. Nor do the vast majority people who use cell phones, personal computers and television sets every day understand in detail how they work. Our health is preserved by medicines, which are made by processes that most of us do not understand, and we travel to work in automobiles and buses that we would be completely unable to construct.
The sharing of scientific and technological knowledge is essential to modern civilization. The great power of science is derived from an enormous concentration of attention and resources on the understanding of a tiny fragment of nature. It would make no sense to proceed in this way if knowledge were not permanent, and if it were not shared by the entire world.
Science is not competitive. It is cooperative. It is a great monument built by many thousands of hands, each adding a stone to the cairn. This is true not only of scientific knowledge but also of every aspect of our culture, history, art and literature, as well as the skills that produce everyday objects upon which our lives depend. Civilization is not competitive. It is cooperative!
Please help to spread the links.
I hope that in addition to downloading and spreading the pdf file of “The Information Explosion”, readers will also spread the following link, where my other books and articles on global problems are available:
was part of a group that shared the 1995Nobel Peace Prize for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
John Scales Avery is a theoretical chemist, Associate Professor Emeritus, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is noted for his books and research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and history of science. His 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution set forth the view that the phenomenon of life, including its origin, evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its background situated in the fields of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory.
I would like to announce the publication of a new book entitled “The Devil's Dynamo”. It is a collection of articles and book chapters that I have written about the way in which military-industrial complexes throughout the world drive and perpetuate the institution of war. A considerable amount of new material has also been added. The book can be freely downloaded and circulated from the following link:
Why call a book about military-industrial complexes “The Devil's Dynamo"?
A military-industrial complex involves a circular flow of money. The money flows like the electrical current in a dynamo, driving a diabolical machine. Money from immensely rich corporate oligarchs buys the votes of politicians and the propaganda of the mainstream media. Numbed by the propaganda, citizens allow the politicians to vote for obscenely bloated military budgets, which further enrich the corporate oligarchs, and the circular flow continues.
The Devil's Dynamo of today has lead to a modern version of colonialism and empire. It is therefore interesting to look at the first global era of colonialism: In the 18th and 19th centuries, the continually accelerating development of science and science-based industry began to affect the whole world. As the factories of Europe poured out cheap manufactured goods, a change took place in the patterns of world trade: Before the Industrial Revolution, trade routes to Asia had brought Asian spices, textiles and luxury goods to Europe. For example, cotton cloth and fine textiles, woven in India, were imported to England. With the invention of spinning and weaving machines, the trade was reversed. Cheap cotton cloth, manufactured in England, began to be sold in India, and the Indian textile industry withered, just as the hand-loom industry in England itself had done a century before.
As Europe became industrialized, European armaments allowed colonial expansion, until ultimately as much as 85% of the world's land surface fell under the colonial domination of the industrialized nations. Colonialism can be thought of as an early example military-industrial complexes. At this early stage of industrialism, we can already see wars conducted for the sake of resources. We can already see a circular flow of money from the profits of arms manufacturers to politicians and their newspaper supporters, and back to the arms manufacturers. We can already see the Devil's Dynamo at work. Chapter 2 reviews the history of these events.
Industrial and colonial rivalry contributed to the outbreak of the First World War, to which the Second World War can be seen as a sequel. The Second World War was terrible enough to make world leaders resolve to end the institution of war once and for all, and the United Nations was set up for this purpose. Article 2 of the UN Charter requires that “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political
independence of any state." Chapters 3 and 4 discuss the events leading up to World Wars I and II, and to today's arms race. Chapter 9 discusses the growth of international law and proposals for UN Charter reform.
The Nuremberg principles, which were used in the trial of Nazi leaders after World War II, explicitly outlawed “Crimes against peace: (i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; (ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i)."
With the founding of the United Nations at the end of the Second World War, a system of international law was set up to replace the rule of military force. Law is a mechanism for equality. Under law, the weak and the powerful are in principle equal. The basic purpose of the United Nations is to make war illegal, and if war is illegal, the powerful and weak are on equal footing, much to the chagrin of the powerful. How can one can one construct or maintain an empire if war is not allowed? It is only natural that powerful nations should be opposed to international law, since it is a curb on their power. However, despite opposition, the United Nations was quite successful in ending the original era of colonialism, perhaps because of the balance of power between East and West during the Cold War. One by one, former colonies regained their independence. But it was not to last. The original era of colonialism was soon replaced by neocolonialism and by “The American Empire".
The two world wars of the 20th Century involved a complete reordering of the economies of the belligerent countries, and a dangerous modern phenomenon was created - the military-industrial complex.
In his farewell address (January 17, 1961) US President Dwight David Eisenhower warned of the dangers of the war-based economy that World War II had forced his nation to build: ``...We have been compelled to create an armaments industry of vast proportions", Eisenhower said, ``...Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in American experience. The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city, every state house, every office in the federal government. ...We must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. ... We must stand guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted."
This farsighted speech by Eisenhower deserves to be studied by everyone who is concerned about the future of human civilization and the biosphere. As the retiring president pointed out, the military-industrial complex is a threat both to peace and to democracy. It is not unique to the United States but exists in many countries. The world today spends roughly 1.7 trillion (i.e. 1.7 million million) US dollars each year on armaments. It is obvious that very many people make their living from war, and therefore it is correct to speak of war as a social, political and economic institution. The military-industrial complex is one of the main reasons why war persists, although everyone realizes that war is the cause of much of the suffering of humanity.
The military-industrial complex needs enemies. Without them it would wither. Thus at the end of the Second World War, this vast power complex was faced with a crisis, but it was saved by the discovery of a new enemy: communism. The United States emerged from the two global wars as the world's dominant industrial power, taking over the position that Britain had held during the 19th century. The economies of its rivals had been destroyed by the two wars, but no fighting had taken place on American soil. Because of its unique position as the only large country whose economy was completely intact in 1945, the United States found itself suddenly thrust, almost unwillingly, into the center of the world's political stage.
The new role as “leader of the free world" was accepted by the United States with a certain amount of nervousness. America's previous attitude had been isolationism, a wish to be “free from the wars and quarrels of Europe". After the Second World War, however, this was replaced by a much more active international role. Perhaps the new US interest in the rest of the world reflected the country's powerful and rapidly growing industrial economy and its need for raw materials and markets (the classical motive for empires). Publicly, however, it was the threat of Communism that was presented to American voters as the justification for interference in the internal affairs of other countries.
Today, after the end of the Cold War, it has become necessary to find another respectable motivation that can be used to justify foreign intervention, and the “Crusade Against Communism" has now been replaced by the “War on Terror".
Despite the fact that initiating a war is a violation of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Principles, the United States now maintains roughly 1000 military bases in 150 countries, According to Iraklis Tsavdaridis, Secretary of the World Peace Council, “The establishment of US bases should not of course be seen simply in terms of direct military ends. They are always used to promote the economic and political goals of US capitalism. For example, US corporations and the US government have been eager for some time to build a secure corridor for US controlled oil and natural gas pipelines from the Caspian Sea in Central Asia through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arabian Sea. This region has more than 6 percent of the world's proven oil reserves, and almost 40 percent of its gas reserves. The war in Afghanistan and the creation of US military bases in Central Asia are viewed as a key opportunity to make such pipelines a reality."
Since World War II, the United States has interfered either militarily or covertly in the internal affairs of very many countries. These include China, 1945-49; Italy, 1947-48; Greece, 1947-49; Philippines, 1946-53; South Korea, 1945-53; Albania, 1949-53; Germany, 1950s; Iran, 1953; Guatemala, 1953-1990s; Middle East, 1956-58; Indonesia, 1957-58; British Guiana/Guyana, 1953-64; Vietnam, 1950-73; Cambodia, 1955-73; The Congo/Zaire, 1960-65; Brazil, 1961-64; Dominican Republic, 1963-66; Cuba, 1959-present; Indonesia, 1965; Chile, 1964-73; Greece, 1964-74; East Timor, 1975-present; Nicaragua, 1978- 89; Grenada, 1979-84; Libya, 1981-89; Panama, 1989; Iraq, 1990-present; Afghanistan 1979-92; El Salvador, 1980-92; Haiti, 1987-94; Yugoslavia, 1999;'and Afghanistan, 2001-present. Of the interventions just mentioned, the Vietnam War, the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, and the invasions of of Iraq and Afghanistan were particularly terrible, resulting in many millions of dead, maimed or displaced people, most of them civilians.
When the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, a Washington-based think tank called “Project for a New American Century" maintained that a strategic moment had arrived: The United States was now the sole superpower, and it ought to use military force to dominate and reshape the rest of the world. Many PNAC members occupied key positions in the administration of George W. Bush. These included Dick Cheney, I. Lewis Libby, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wulfowitz, Eliot Abrams, John Bolton and Richard Perle.
Today, the US government is taking actions that seem almost insane, risking a nuclear war with Russia and simultaneously alienating China. In the long run, such hubris cannot succeed. Overspending on war will lead to economic collapse.
As we start the 21st century and the new millennium, our scientific and technological civilization seems to be entering a period of crisis. Today, for the first time in history, science has given to humans the possibility of a life of comfort, free from hunger and cold, and free from the constant threat of infectious disease. At the same time, science has given us the power to destroy civilization through thermonuclear war, as well as the power to make our planet uninhabitable through pollution and overpopulation. The question of which of these alternatives we choose is a matter of life or death to ourselves and our children.
Science and technology have shown themselves to be double-edged, capable of doing great good or of producing great harm, depending on the way in which we use the enormous power over nature, which science has given to us. For this reason, ethical thought is needed now more than ever before. The wisdom of the world's religions, the traditional wisdom of humankind, can help us as we try to insure that our overwhelming material progress will be beneficial rather than disastrous.
The crisis of civilization, which we face today, has been produced by the rapidity with which science and technology have developed. Our institutions and ideas adjust too slowly to the change. The great challenge which history has given to our generation is the task of building new international political structures, which will be in harmony with modern technology. At the same time, we must develop a new global ethic, which will replace our narrow loyalties by loyalty to humanity as a whole.
In the long run, because of the enormously destructive weapons, which have been produced through the misuse of science, the survival of civilization can only be insured if we are able to abolish the institution of war.
I hope that in addition to downloading and spreading the pdf file of “The Devil's Dynamo”, readers will also spread the following link, where my other books and articles on global problems are available:
was part of a group that shared the 1995Nobel Peace Prize for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
John Scales Avery is a theoretical chemist, Associate Professor Emeritus, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is noted for his books and research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and history of science. His 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution set forth the view that the phenomenon of life, including its origin, evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its background situated in the fields of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory.
[pullquote align=”normal” cite=”an excerpt from an appendix on the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize”]The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, abbreviated ICAN, is a coalition of 468 NGO’s in 101 countries. The purpose of ICAN is to change the focus in the disarmament debate to “the the humanitarian threat posed by nuclear weapons, drawing attention to their unique destructive capacity, their catastrophic health and environmental consequences, their indiscriminate targeting, the debilitating impact of a detonation on medical infrastructure and relief measures, and the long-lasting effects of radiation on the surrounding area.”[/pullquote]
On July 7, 2017, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was adopted by an overwhelming majority, 122 to 1, by the United Nations General Assembly. The adoption of the treaty, a milestone in humanity’s efforts to rid itself of nuclear insanity, was to a large extent due to the efforts of ICAN’s participating organizations.
On December 10, 2017 ICAN’s efforts were recognized by the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. Part of the motivation for the award was the fact that the threat of a thermonuclear global catastrophe is higher today than it has been at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Because of the belligerent attitudes and mental instability of Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, the end of human civilization and much of the biosphere is, in the words of ICAN's Executive Director Beatrice Fihn, “only a tantrum away”.
Here are some excerpts from the Introduction to my book on nuclear weapons:
The threat of nuclear war is very high today
This book is a collection of articles and book chapters that I have written advocating the abolition of nuclear weapons. Some new material has also been added, for example a discussion of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which has recently been adopted by an overwhelming majority vote at the United Nations General Assembly.
Today, because of the possibility that U.S. President Donald Trump will initiate a nuclear war against Iran or North Korea, or even Russia, the issue of nuclear weapons is at the center of the global stage. I strongly believe that the time has come for all countries to take a united stance on this issue. Most of the world’s nations live in nuclear weapon free zones. This does not give them any real protection, since the catastrophic environmental effects of nuclear war would be global, not sparing any nation. However, by supporting the Nuclear Weapons Convention and by becoming members of NWFZ’s, nations can state that they consider nuclear weapons to be morally unacceptable, a view that must soon become worldwide if human civilization is to survive.
We must take a stand, and state clearly that nuclear weapons are an absolute evil; that their possession does not increase anyone’s security; that their continued existence is a threat to the life of every person on the planet; and that these genocidal and potentially omnicidal weapons have no place in a civilized society.
Nuclear warfare as genocide
On December 9, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a con-vention prohibiting genocide. It seems appropriate to discuss nuclear warfare against the background of this important standard of international law.
Cannot nuclear warfare be seen as an example of genocide? It is capa-ble of killing entire populations, including babies, young children, adults in their prime and old people, without any regard for guilt or innocence. The retention of nuclear weapons, with the intent to use them under some cumstances, must be seen as the intent to commit genocide. Is it not morally degrading to see our leaders announce their intention to commit the “crime of crimes” in our names?
The continuity of life is sacred
In 1985, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War received the Nobel Peace Prize. IPPNW had been founded in 1980 by six physicians, three from the Soviet Union and three from the United States. Today, the organization has wide membership among the world’s physicians. Professor Bernard Lowen of the Harvard School of Public Health, one of the founders of IPPNW, said in a recent speech:
“...No public health hazard ever faced by humankind equals the threat of numake this planet uninhabitable... Modern medicine has nothing to offer, not even a token benefit, in the event of nuclear war...”
“We are but transient passengers on this planet Earth. It does not belong to us. We are not free to doom generations yet unborn. We are not at liberty to erase humanity’s past or dim its future. Social systems do not endure for eternnity. Only life can lay claim to uninterrupted continuity. This continuity is sacred.”
Mr. Javier P ́erez de Cu ́ellar, former Secretary-General of the United Nations, emphasized the same point in one of his speeches: “I feel”, he said,Mr. Javier P ́erez de Cu ́ellarMNuclear weapons are criminal! Every war is a crime!
War was always madness, always immoral, always the cause of unspeakable suffering, economic waste and widespread destruction, and always a source of poverty, hate, barbarism and endless cycles of revenge and counter-revenge. It has always been a crime for soldiers to kill people, just as it is a crime for murderers in civil society to kill people. No flag has ever been wide enough to cover up atrocities.
But today, the development of all-destroying modern weapons has put war completely beyond the bounds of sanity and elementary humanity. Today, war is not only insane, but also a violation of international law. Both the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Principles make it a crime to launch an aggressive war. According to the Nuremberg Principles, every soldier is responsible for the crimes that he or she commits, even while acting under the orders of a superior officer.
Nuclear weapons are not only insane, immoral and potentially omnicidal, but also criminal under international law. In response to questions put to it by WHO and the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice ruled in 1996 that “the threat and use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, and particularly the principles and rules of humanitarian law.” The only possible exception to this general rule might be “an extreme circumstance of self-defense, in which the very survival of a state would be at stake”. But the Court refused to say that even in this extreme circumstance the threat or use of nuclear weapons would be legal. It left the exceptional case undecided. In addition, the Court added unanimously that “there exists an obligation to pursue in good faith and bring to a conclusion negotiations leading to nuclear disarmament in all its aspects under strict and effective international control.”
Can we not rid ourselves of both nuclear weapons and the institution of war itself? We must act quickly and resolutely before everything that we love in our beautiful world is reduced to radioactiive ashes.
For reading book, please scroll down.
Prof John Scales Avery, PhD
was part of a group that shared the 1995Nobel Peace Prize for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
John Scales Avery is a theoretical chemist, Associate Professor Emeritus, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is noted for his books and research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and history of science. His 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution set forth the view that the phenomenon of life, including its origin, evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its background situated in the fields of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory.
He is an international consultant of the UN — FAO and international consultant for sustainable development and sustainable future of humankind of Universal State of the Earth — USE.
On 8th October 2016 he was appointed as The Chairman of the Humanity, Nature, Space, and Environment Protection Committee of the USE, the Supreme Council of Humanity — SCH from Athens, Greece and London, UK.
He is a researcher working on: Nature; the Nature, Space, and Environment protection; the Climate change system; System thinking; Globalization and global studies; Networking, Complexity and Swarm research: Sustainable Development and Sustainable Future of Humankind. He was among the pioneers' researchers (1986 – 1994) to apply for nature, space, and environment protection in a local community by activities we call today Local Agenda 21 Processes — a holistic program for the survival of our civilization under new challenges of the third millennium.“Commencing from Local Community Sustainable Future and moving towards Sustainable Future of the Global Community of Humankind”.
He is independent researchers with many domestic and international publications and talks. Together with many researchers in co-operation worldwide within philosophy, operational research, global studies, case studies and complex problem solving research, system thinking, requisitely holism, networking and complexity, swarm research, integration and disintegration of matter and energy and universal upbringing, education and lifelong learning. He is contributing a systemic, requisitely holistic and a better understanding of the present. His latest research within the system theory, system thinking, networking, complexity and swarm research may provide a possible answer enabling people to better understand our world of humans.
During 2014 he completed 50 years of research work (1964 - 2014). This year he completed 50 years of been Dr. Vet. Med. Since 1986 he worked on the protection of Humanity, Nature, Space, and Environment and completed 30 years of research.
For research on the climate change system and the book “System Thinking and Climate Change System (Against a big “Tragedy of Commons” of all of us), Ecimovic, Mayur, Mulej and co-authors, 2002, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize 2003. His work on “The Information Theory of Nature” was his second nomination for The Nobel Prize during 2007 in Physics. His third nomination for The Nobel Prize in Physics 2010 was for “The Environment Theory of the Nature”, published in the book “Three Applications of the System Thinking”, Ecimovic, 2010. Within last 10 years he has contributed trilogies: “The Nature”, “The Sustainable Future of Mankind” and “The Life 2017” – please see at: www.institut-climatechange.si
Prof Leo M. Semashko
State Councillor of St. Petersburg, Russia.
Founding President, Global Harmony Association (GHA) since 2005.
Honorary President, GHA since 2016.
Director: Tetra-sociology Public Institute, Russia.
Philosopher, Sociologist, and Peacemaker from Harmony.
Author of more than 400 scientific publications, including 18 books in 1-12 languages.
Author of Tetrism as the unity of Tetra-philosophy and Tetra-sociology — science of social harmony, global peace and harmonious civilisation.
Initiator, Manager, Co-author, and Editor-in-Chief of the book project “Global Peace Science” (GPS).
Prof John Scales Avery, PhD
was part of a group that shared the 1995Nobel Peace Prize for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
John Scales Avery is a theoretical chemist, Associate Professor Emeritus, at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is noted for his books and research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and history of science. His 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution set forth the view that the phenomenon of life, including its origin, evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its background situated in the fields of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory.
I’m at the home of one of the greatest living intellectuals on earth. In the cold, windy Copenhagen weather as we ring the bell John Scales Avery opens the door and welcomes me and my friend John Graversgaard warmly into his home. He serves us coffee and we talk. I’m stunned by his humility and breadth of knowledge.
John Avery is someone who is an academician but not restrained by the rigidity of the academic community. He is a scientist but not constrained to his area of study. He is someone who connects the dots. With his deep knowledge and vast experience he surmises human destiny scientifically. No, he is someone who is worried about the fate of all life forms on earth. His book “Information Theory And Evolution” is a seminal classic. He is coming out with a book “Civilization’s Crisis: A Set of Linked Challenges” which will be published by the World Scientific.
John Avery is not just an academician and scientist. He is also an active peace activist who campaigns vigorously against nuclear proliferation. Since 1990 he has been the Contact Person in Denmark for Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. In 1995, this group received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. He was the Member of the Danish Peace Commission of 1998. Technical Advisor, World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe (1988- 1997). He was also Chairman of the Danish Peace Academy. More than everything else he is an intellectual who sees through the miasma that clouds our vision by ideological rigidity and mass media obfuscation.
I have a fascination to know how life evolved on this earth, and what’s it’s future. Your wonderful book, “Information Theory and Evolution” answers almost all these questions. What prompted you to write the book?
During the summers of 1960 and 1961, while I was still a postgraduate student in theoretical physics at the University of Chicago, I had the privilege of spending two summers working in the laboratory of the great Hungarian-American physiologist and biochemist, Albert Szent-Györgyi. He was famous for isolating vitamin C and for discovering the molecular mechanism of muscle contraction. But more importantly, he founded a new field of study: Bioenergetics.
Prof John Scales Avery
Szent-Györgyi wondered how the chemical energy from food is harnessed to do mechanical work or to drive our metabolisms. He reasoned that there must be structures in living organisms which are analogous to the structures of engines. If you pour gasoline onto the street and set fire to it, no useful work results, only heat, but if you burn it inside an engine, the chemical energy of the gasoline can be converted into useful mechanical work. Following this line of thought, Szent-Györgyi looked for energy-transducing structures in the tissues of living organisms.
Among the structures that caught Szent-Gtörgyi’s attention were mitochondria, which power the metabolism of all animals, and he also studied the microscopic photosynthetic unit (thylakoids) in plants. After some years of work, he became convinced that quantum theory was needed in order to gain a complete understanding of how these microscopic engines work. Therefore he spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he learned quite a lot of quantum theory.
Although he knew enough quantum theory to understand what physicists were talking about, he nevertheless thought that for the research which he wanted to undertake, he needed to collaborate with people whose whole education was in that field, and he brought some theoretical physicists (including me) to his laboratory. During the time that I was there, we worked to obtain a quantum theoretical understanding of the mechanism of the primary process in photosynthesis, where the energy of a photon is stabilized and trapped, ready to drive the synthests of sugars.
In 1969, after I had obtained a Ph.D. in theoretical chemistry from Imperial College, University of London, and was teaching there, Plenum Press invited me to start a new journal and to become its first Managing Editor: It was called “The Journal of Bioenergetics and Biomembranes”. (I think that Szent-Györgyi must have recommended me for this task). I served as editor until 1980. During that time, I am proud to say, our authors included Peter Mitchell and Jens C. Skou, whose papers were being refused by other journals at the time, but who each later won a Nobel Prize.
In 1973, for family reasons, I moved permanently to the University of Copenhagen, One of the courses I helped to teach there was on “Statistical Mechanics from the Standpoint of Information Theory”. What a title! My Copenhagen colleague, Dr. Knud Andersen, who had initiated this course, was really ahead of his time! I learned a great deal from helping him to teach the course.
Also, for many years, I taught physical chemistry to biologists. In this field, the concept of Gibbs free energy is very central. In a chemical reaction, the entropy (i.e. disorder) of the universe must always increase, as is required by the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is a measure of disorder, and the universe always moves towards a state of greater disorder. To say this is the same as saying that the universe always moves from less probable configurations to states of greater and greater probability. We can create local order, but only by exporting disorder to the universe as a whole. In chemical thermodynamics, the requirement that Gibbs free energy must always decrease in a spontaneous chemical reaction is equivalent to saying that the entropy of the universe must always increase, but it allows us to take into account the fact that chemical reactions usually occur at constant temperature and pressure.
In addition to teaching courses in chemistry and physics, I also taught a course on “Science and Society”. This was a history of science and its enormous social impact. An enlarged and updated version of the book that I wrote for this course has recently been published by World Scientific. One of the features of my Science and Society course was that we had many exciting guest lecturers. Among these were Dr. Claus Emmeche and Dr. Luis Emilio Bruni, both of whom were experts in the new field of Biosemiotics, which regards information as the central feature of living organisms. Listening to their wonderful lectures, I found a criticism forming in my mind: They did not distinguish between cybernetic information and thermodynamic information. In other words, they did not distinguish between the information contained in messages, and the information content of Gibbs free energy. I decided that I would try to write a book which would make this distinction clear, but the project was left “on the back burner”, and I too no steps towards starting it.
However, a few years later, when I was visiting the Harvard laboratory of the famous chemical physicist Professor Dudley R. Herschbach, he took me to lunch with his postgraduate student, Anita Goel. She was in a special Harvard-MIT program where she was simultaneously obtaining both her Ph.D. in chemical physics and her M.D.
After lunch, I spent the afternoon talking with Anita, and I told her about the information theory book that I was vaguely planning to write. Listening to her reaction, I realized that this was an extremely hot topic. Anita told me that there were many other people working hard on these questions, although they perhaps did not have exactly my angle of approach. I decided to start writing immediately.
Anita was very good at asking questions, and during the whole afternoon she asked me more and more about how my planned book would be organized. How would I explain this, and how that? Which topics should come first and which afterwards? Her excellent questions forced me to find answers. At the end of the afternoon, I returned to my lodgings and wrote down in detail my whole conversation with Anita.
By a coincidence, when I returned to Copenhagen, I found on my desk a letter from the World Scientific Publishing Company asking whether I had any writing plans in which they might be interested. I immediately formalized the outline that I had written at Harvard, and sent it to them; but I did not think that they could find a reviewer who had a background both in information theory and in biology.
To my amazement, World Scientific found a Swedish professor with a background in both fields. He wrote an extremely long review of my book proposal, many times the usual length, criticizing some aspects of my proposed outline, suggesting improvements, and finally recommending publication.
When the book came out, I expected some harsh criticism from the Biosemiotics experts like Claus and Luis, but in fact they liked what I had written. Recently World Scientific asked me to produce a new edition, incorporating the latest research. Today, if one includes topics like artificial life and computer technology inspired by mechanisms of the brain, the field is developing with great speed. MIT, where I graduated with a B.Sc. in 1954, now has a Department of Cognitive Science, in which half the researchers are looking more and more deeply at how the brain works, while the other half are producing hardware and software that mimic the functions of the brain, including learning and intuition.
I also have a fascination for the second law of thermodynamics, and how it affects every aspect of our life. You’ve wonderfully connected the evolution of life and the second law of thermodynamics. Can you explain briefly for CC readers how both these phenomena are connected?
The second law of thermodynamics states the the entropy (disorder) of the universe constantly increases. This follows from the fact that disorder is more statistically probable than order. For example, if we put a completed jigsaw puzzle into the bottom of a box, and shake the box, a disordered jumble of pieces results. The reverse process is virtually impossible. We could never, or almost never, put disordered pieces of a puzzle into a box, shake it, and then to find the completed puzzle in the bottom,
Since disorder (entropy) always increases, how is it possible that the world we see around us so highly ordered? How is life possible? How is the Taj Mahal possible? How is the internet possible?
The answer is that the earth is not a closed system. A flood of information-containing free energy reaches the earth’s biosphere in the form of sunlight. Passing through the metabolic pathways of living organisms, this information keeps the organisms far away from thermodynamic equilibrium, which is death. As the thermodynamic information flows through the biosphere, much of it is degraded to heat, but part is converted into cybernetic information and preserved in the intricate structures which are characteristic of life. The principle of natural selection ensures that when this happens, the configurations of matter in living organisms constantly increase in complexity, refinement and statistical improbability. This is the process which we call evolution, or in the case of human society, progress.
In his 1944 book “What is Life” Erwin Schrödinger (one of the main founders of quantum theory) showed that, even at that early date, he was already aware of how life and entropy are related. He wrote: “What is that precious something contained in our food which keeps us from death? That is easily answered. Every process, event, happening, call it what you will; in a word, everything that is going on in Nature means an increase of the entropy of the part of the world where it is going on. Thus a living organism continually increases its entropy, or if you will, produces positive entropy., which is death. It can only keep aloof from it, i.e. alive, by continually drawing from its environment negative entropy…”
“Entropy, taken with a negative sign, is itself a measure of order. Thus the device by which an organism maintains itself at a fairly high level of orderliness (= a fairly low level of entropy) really consists in sucking orderliness from its environment.”
The information revolution has made life easier for many of us humans, even helping us to be born. But it has also destroyed our ecosystems, putting our own life, and the life of our fellow species into peril. Can we use the information revolution to our advantage to save the planet?
Cultural evolution depends on the non-genetic storage and transmission, diffusion and utilization of information. The development of human speech, the invention of writing, the development of paper and printing, and finally in modern times, mass media, computers and the Internet: all these have been crucial steps in society’s explosive accumulation of information and knowledge. Human cultural evolution proceeds at a constantly accelerating speed; so great in fact that it threatens to shake society to pieces.
Within rapidly-moving cultural evolution, we can observe that technical change now moves with such astonishing rapidity that neither social institutions, nor political structures, nor education, nor public opinion can keep pace. The lightning-like pace of technical progress has made many of our ideas and institutions obsolete. For example, the absolutely sovereign nation-state and the institution of war have both become dangerous anachronisms in an era of instantaneous communication, global interdependence and all-destroying weapons.
In many respects, human cultural evolution can be regarded as an enormous success. However, at the start of the 21st century, most thoughtful observers agree that civilization is entering a period of crisis. As all curves move exponentially upward, population, production, consumption, rates of scientific discovery, and so on, one can observe signs of increasing environmental stress, while the continued existence and spread of nuclear weapons threaten civilization with destruction. Thus, while the explosive growth of knowledge has brought many benefits, the problem of achieving a stable, peaceful and sustainable world remains serious, challenging and unsolved.
The achievements of modern society are achievements of cooperation. We can fly, but no one builds an airplane alone. We can cure diseases, but only through the cooperative efforts of researchers, doctors and medicinal firms. We can photograph and understand distant galaxies, but the ability to do so is built on the efforts of many cooperating individuals.
Looking at human nature, both from the standpoint of evolution and from that of everyday experience, we see the two faces of Janus: one face shines radiantly; the other is dark and menacing. Two souls occupy the human breast, one warm and friendly, the other, murderous. Humans have developed a genius for cooperation, the basis for culture and civilization; but they are also capable of genocide; they were capable of massacres during the Crusades, capable of genocidal wars against the Amerinds, capable of the Holocaust, of Hiroshima, of the killing-fields of Cambodia, of Rwanda, and of Darfur.
This being so, there are strong reasons to enlist the help of education and religion to make the bright side of human nature win over the dark side. Today, the mass media are an important component of education, and thus the mass media have a great responsibility for encouraging the cooperative and constructive side of human nature rather than the dark and destructive side. Our almost miraculous means of communication, if properly used, offer us the possibility of welding humanity into a single cooperative society.
Like every activity on earth, economic activity also is a dissipative form of energy flow. Why is so much income disparity taking place? According to a recent Oxfam report, eight people own as much wealth as the poorest half of humanity. How do you explain it? Do you think that the second law of thermodynamics should be made an essential part of our educational system, especially in economics?
With your permission, I will try to answer your last question first. I absolutely agree with you that the concept of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics ought to be made an essential part of our educational system, especially in economics. Although classical economic theory leaves it out entirely, a few pioneers of economic thought have realized that entropy and dissipation need play a central role in any correct theory.
One of the first people to call attention to the relationship between entropy and economics was the English radiochemist Frederick Soddy (1877-1956). Soddy won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1926 for his work with Ernest Rutherford, demonstrating the transmutation of elements in radioactive decay processes. His concern for social problems then led him to a critical study of the assumptions of classical economics. Soddy believed that there is a close connection between free energy and wealth, but only a very tenuous connection between wealth and money.
He was working on these problems during the period after World War I, when England left the gold standard, and he advocated an index system to replace it. In this system, the Bank of England would print more money and lend it to private banks whenever the cost of standard items indicated that too little money was in circulation, or conversely destroy printed money if the index showed the money supply to be too large.
Soddy was extremely critical of the system of “fractional reserve banking” whereby private banks keep only a small fraction of the money that is entrusted to them by their depositors and lend out the remaining amount. He pointed out that, in this system, the money supply is controlled by the private banks rather than by the government, and that profits made from any expansion of the money supply go to private corporations instead of being used to provide social services. When the economy is expanding, this system is unjust but not disastrous. However, when the economy contracts, depositors ask for their money; but it is not there, having been lent out; and the banks crash. Fractional reserve banking exists today, not only in England but also in many other countries. Soddy’s criticisms of this practice cast light on the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 and the debt crisis of 2011.
As Soddy pointed out, real wealth is subject to the second law of thermodynamics. As entropy increases, real wealth decays. He contrasted this with the behavior of debt at compound interest, which increases exponentially without any limit, and he remarked: “You cannot permanently pit an absurd human convention, such as the spontaneous increment of debt [compound interest] against the natural law of the spontaneous decrement of wealth [entropy]”. Thus, in Soddy’s view, it is a fiction to maintain that being owed a large amount of money is a form of real wealth.
Frederick Soddy’s book, Wealth, virtual wealth and debt: The solution of the economic paradox, published in 1926 by Allen and Unwin, was received by the professional economists of the time as the quixotic work of an outsider. Today, however, Soddy’s common-sense economic analysis is increasingly valued for the light that it throws on the instability of our fractional reserve banking system as economic growth falters.
The incorporation of the idea of entropy into economic thought also owes much to the mathematician and economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906- 1994), the son of a Romanian army officer. Georgescu-Roegen’s talents were soon recognized by the Romanian school system, and he was given an outstanding education in Mathematics, which later contributed to his success and originality as an economist.
In Georgescu-Roegen’s words, “The idea that the economic process is not a mechanical analogue, but an entropic, unidirectional transformation began to turn over in my mind long ago, as I witnessed the oil wells of the Plosti field of both World Wars’ fame becoming dry one by one, and as I grew aware of the Romanian peasants’ struggle against the deterioration of their farming soil by continuous use and by rains as well. However it was the new representation of a process that enabled me to crystallize my thoughts in describing the economic process as the entropic transformation of valuable natural resources (low entropy) into valueless waste (high entropy).”
After making many technical contributions to economic theory, Georgescu-Roegen returned to this insight in his important 1971 book, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1971), where he outlines his concept of bioeconomics.
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s influence continues to be felt today, not only through his own books and papers but also through those of his student, the distinguished economist Herman E. Daly, who for many years has been advocating a steady-state economy. As Daly points out in his books and papers, it is becoming increasingly apparent that unlimited economic growth on a finite planet is a logical impossibility. However, it is important to distinguish between knowledge, wisdom and culture, which can and should continue to grow, and growth in the sense of an increase in the volume of material goods produced, which is reaching its limits.
Daly describes our current situation as follows: “The most important change in recent times has been the growth of one subsystem of the Earth, namely the economy, relative to the total system, the ecosphere. This huge shift from an “empty” to a “full” world is truly ‘something new under the sun’… The closer the economy approaches the scale of the whole Earth, the more it will have to conform to the physical behavior mode of the Earth… The remaining natural world is no longer able to provide the sources and sinks for the metabolic throughput necessary to sustain the existing oversized economy ・ much less a growing one. Economists have focused too much on the economy’s circulatory system and have neglected to study its digestive tract.”
Let me now turn to your question about enormous economic inequality. This exists today both within nations and between nations. Part of the explanation for this intolerable economic inequality can be found in the remarkable properties of exponential growth. If any quantity, for example indebtedness, is growing at the rate of 3% per year, it will double in 23.1 years; if it is growing at the rate of 4% per year, the doubling time is 17.3 years. For a 5% growth rate, the doubling time is 13.9 years, if the growth rate is 7%, the doubling time is only 9.9 years. It follows that if a debt remains unpaid for a few years, most of the repayments will go for interest, rather than for reducing the amount of the debt.
In the case of the debts of third world countries to private banks in the industrialized parts of the world and to the IMF, many of the debts were incurred in the 1970’s for purposes which were of no benefit to local populations, for example purchase of military hardware. Today the debts remain, although the amount paid over the years by the developing countries is very many times the amount originally borrowed. Third world debt can be regarded as a means by which the industrialized nations extract raw materials from developing countries without any repayment whatever. In fact, besides extracting raw materials, they extract money. The injustice of this arrangement was emphasized recently by Pope Francis in his wonderful encyclical “Laudato Si’ ”
Another part of the explanation lies in “resource wars”, conducted by militarily powerful countries to put in place or maintain unfair trade relationships with resource-rich nations in the third world.
Finally, our present economic system favors concentration of wealth. “The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer”, or “To him who hath, it shall be given, but from him who hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away”. At present, powerful oligarchs use their wealth to control governments. Democracy decays, tax loopholes are found for the rich, and inequality increases. This situation, and the impossibility of perpetual growth on a finite planet, point to the need for a new economic system, a system where cooperation plays a greater role; a system with both a social conscience and an ecological conscience.
The nuclear bomb is the greatest concentration of man-made energy on earth. Why peace is the only software capable of diffusing this dangerous concentration of energy?
Let me begin to try to answer your question by quoting Albert Szent Györgyi: I have always found these words very enlightening and inspiring:
“The story of man consists of two parts, divided by the appearance of modern science…In the first period, man lived in the world in which his species was born and to which his senses were adapted. In the second, man stepped into a new, cosmic world to which he was a complete stranger…. The forces at man’s disposal were no longer terrestrial forces, of human dimension, but were cosmic forces, the forces which shaped the universe. The few hundred Fahrenheit degrees of our flimsy terrestrial fires were exchanged for the ten million degrees of the atomic reactions which heat the sun.”
“This is but a beginning, with endless possibilities in both directions; a building of a human life of undreamt of wealth and dignity, or a sudden end in utmost misery. Man lives in a new cosmic world for which he was not made. His survival depends on how well and how fast he can adapt himself to it, rebuilding all his ideas, all his social and political institutions.”
“…Modern science has abolished time and distance as factors separating nations. On our shrunken globe today, there is room for one group only: the family of man.”
I would also like to quote from the Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955, the founding document of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. The Manifesto ends with the words, “Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable. Shall we put an end to the human race, or shall mankind renounce war?… There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge and wisdom. Shall we instead choose death because we cannot forget our quarrels? .. We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity and forget the rest. If you can do so, there lies before you a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the threat of universal death.”
The human tendency towards tribalism evolved when our remote ancestors lived in small, genetically homogeneous tribes, competing for territory on the grasslands of Africa. Because marriage within a tribe was much more common than marriage outside it, genes were shared within the tribe. The tribe as a whole either survived or perished. The tribe, rather than the individual was the unit upon which the Darwinian forces of natural selection acted.
Although it was a survival trait 100,000 years ago, tribalism threatens our human civilization of today with thermonuclear annihilation. As Konrad Lorenz put it, “An impartial visitor from another planet, looking at man as he is today, in his hand the atom bomb, the product of his intelligence, in his heart the aggression drive, inherited from his anthropoid ancestors, which the same intelligence cannot control, such a visitor would not give mankind much chance of survival.”
Today, at the start of the 21st century, we live in nation-states to which we feel emotions of loyalty very similar to the tribal emotions of our ancestors. The enlargement of the fundamental political and social unit has been made necessary and possible by improved transportation and communication, and by changes in the techniques of warfare.
The tragedy of our present situation is that the same forces that made the nation-state replace the tribe as the fundamental political and social unit have continued to operate with constantly increasing intensity. For this reason, the totally sovereign nation-state has become a dangerous anachronism.
Although the world now functions as a single unit because of modern technology, its political structure is based on fragments, on absolutely sovereign nation-states . They are large compared to tribes, but too small for present-day technology, since they do not include all of mankind.
The elimination of war, and the elimination of the threat of nuclear annihilation, will require effective governance at the global level. In 1995 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs and to its leader, Sir Joseph Rotblat. In his acceptance speech, Sir Joseph said, “We have to extend our loyalty to the whole of the human race… A war-free world will be seen by many as Utopian. It is not Utopian. There already exist in the world large regions, for example the European Union, within which war is inconceivable. What is needed is to extend these.”
How can information theory play a role in peace politics?
Biosemiotics regards information as being the central feature of living organisms- Societies can be regarded as super-organizme. One might think of extending Biosemiotics to the study of the way in which information is the central feature of the development and function of societies. Such a field of study might be called Sociosemiotics. Information theory is certainly essential to an understanding of history and to an understanding of the crisis of civilization that has been produced by the information explosion.
Do you see any connection between the rise of populist and even fascist leaders around the world and information theory and thermodynamics?
When the earth’s human population is plotted as a function of time over a period of 10,000 years, the simple mathematical function that best fits the data is not an exponentially increasing curve but a hyperbola, P=C/(2025-t), where P is the population, C is a constant, and t is the time, measured in years. If population continued to follow this curve, it would become infinite in the year 2025, which, of course, is impossible. In fact, global population has already begun to fall below the curve.
Why is the empirical curve a hyperbola rather than an exponential? We can understand this if we see the growth of population as being driven by the information explosion. According to Malthus, population always presses against its food supply. As human knowledge and control of nature increased, the food supply also increased, leading to an increase in population. But today, we are facing a crisis. Our global food supply may be hit severely by the end of the fossil fuel era, and by climate change. These factors have already produced a flood of refugees fleeing environmental catastrophes in Africa. Added to this are millions of refugees from wars in the Middle East.
The result of the refugee crisis has been a loss of human solidarity, and the rise of fascism. In this difficult situation, we need to regain our human solidarity. We need to fight against fascism, and to regain democratic government. We need to end the wars, which are producing many millions of refugees. We need to avoid catastrophic climate change.
“Post-truth” was the word of the year of 2016. Why such a word now? Was there a “pre-truth “ or “truth” era? Or is there ever truth?
Let me again quote Albert Szent-Györgyi. One of his remarks that I remember from the time that I worked in his laboratory was this: “The human mind was not designed by evolutionary forces for finding truth. It was designed for finding advantage”.
Napoleon Bonaparte, quoting Fontanelle, said “History is a set of agreed-upon lies”.
Members of tribe like groups throughout history have marked their identity by adhering to irrational systems of belief. Like the ritual scarification which is sometimes used by primitive tribes as a mark of identity, irrational systems of belief also mark the boundaries of groups. We parade these beliefs to demonstrate that we belong to a special group and that we are proud of it. The more irrational the belief is, the better it serves this purpose. When people tell each other that they believe the same nonsense, a bond is forged between them. The worse the nonsense, the stronger the bond.
Sometimes motives of advantage are mixed in. As Szent-Györgyi observed, evolution designed the human mind, not for finding truth, but for finding advantage. Within the Orwellian framework of many modern nations, it is extremely disadvantageous to hold the wrong opinions. The wire tappers know what you are thinking.
But truth has the great virtue that it allows us to accurately predict the future. If we ignore truth because it is unfashionable, or painful, or heretical, the future will catch us unprepared.
What do you think of fake news, and the discussions going on the mechanisms to control it?
Throughout history, art was commissioned by rulers to communicate, and exaggerate their power, glory, absolute rightness, etc. to the population. Modern power holders are also aware of the importance of propaganda. Thus the media are a battleground, where reformers struggle for attention, but are defeated with great regularity by the wealth and power of the establishment. This is a tragedy, because today, there is an urgent need to make public opinion aware of the serious threats that are facing civilization, and the steps that are needed to solve these problems. The mass media could potentially be a great force for public education, but in general, their role is not only unhelpful: it is often negative.
Today we are faced with the task of creating a new global ethic in which loyalty to family, religion and nation will be supplemented by a higher loyalty to humanity as a whole. In addition, our present culture of violence must be replaced by a culture of peace. To achieve these essential goals, we urgently need the cooperation of the mass media.
How do the media fulfill this life-or-death responsibility? Do they give us insight? No, they give us pop music. Do they give us an understanding of the sweep of evolution and history? No, they give us sport. Do they give us an understanding of need for strengthening the United Nations, and the ways that it could be strengthened? No, they give us sit-coms and soap operas. Do they give us unbiased news? No, they give us news that has been edited to conform with the interests of the military-industrial complex and other powerful lobbies. Do they present us with the need for a just system of international law that acts on individuals? On the whole, the subject is neglected. Do they tell of the essentially genocidal nature of nuclear weapons, and the need for their complete abolition? No, they give us programs about gardening and making food.
In general, the mass media behave as though their role is to prevent the peoples of the world from joining hands and working to save the world from thermonuclear and environmental catastrophes. The television viewer sits slumped in a chair, passive, isolated, disempowered and stupefied. The future of the world hangs in the balance, the fate of children and grandchildren hang in the balance, but the television viewer feels no impulse to work actively to change the world or to save it. The Roman emperors gave their people bread and circuses to numb them into political inactivity. The modern mass media seem to be playing a similar role.
Because the mass media have failed us completely, the work of independent editors like yourself has become enormously important for the future of humanity and the biosphere.
Do you think that humanity can tackle climate change? Do you have any suggestions?
Solar power and wind energy are already much cheaper than fossil fuels if the enormous subsidies given to fossil fuel corporations are discounted. The main thing that the world needs to do is to abolish these subsidies, or, better yet, shift them to the support of renewable energy infrastructure. If this is done, then economic forces alone will produce the rapid transition to renewable energy which we so urgently need to save the planet.
Oil Change International, an organization devoted to exposing the true costs of fossil fuels, states that “Internationally governments provide at least $775 billion to $1 trillion annually in subsidies, not including other costs of fossil fuels related to climate change, environmental impacts, military conflicts and spending, and health impacts.”
Hope that catastrophic climate change can be avoided comes from the exponentially growing world-wide use of renewable energy, and from the fact prominent public figures, such as Pope Francis, Leonardo DiCaprio, Elon Musk, Bill McKibben, Naomi Klein and Al Gore, are making the public increasingly aware of the long-term dangers. This awareness is needed to counter the climate change denial propaganda sponsored by politicians subservient to the fossil fuel industry.
Short-term disasters due to climate change may also be sufficiently severe to wake us up. We can already see severe effects of global warming in Africa, in parts of India and in island nations threatened by rising sea levels.
What do you think of the attitude of people like James Lovelock, who say “enjoy life while you can”?
I believe that this is a betrayal of our responsibility to our children and grandchildren and to all future generations of humans. It is also a betrayal of all the other species with which we share our beautiful planet.
We give our children loving care, but it makes no sense do so and at the same time to neglect to do all that is within our power to ensure that they and their descendants will inherit an earth in which they can survive.
Inaction is not an option. We have to act with courage and dedication, even if the odds are against success, because the stakes are so high.
The mass media could mobilize us to action, but they have failed in their duty. Our educational system could also wake us up and make us act, but it too has failed us. The battle to save the earth from human greed and folly has to be fought in the alternative media.
We need a new economic system, a new society, a new social contract, a new way of life. Here are the great tasks that history has given to our generation: We must achieve a steady-state economic system. We must restore democracy. We must decrease economic inequality. We must break the power of corporate greed. We must leave fossil fuels in the ground. We must stabilize and ultimately reduce the global population. We must eliminate the institution of war. And finally, we must develop a more mature ethical system to match our new technology.
What do you think of a world 50 years from now?
The future looks extremely dark because of human folly, especially the long-term future. The greatest threats are catastrophic climate change and thermonuclear war, but a large-scale global famine also has to be considered. Nevertheless, I hope for the best, and I think that it is our collective duty to work for the best. The problems that we face today are severe, but they all have rational solutions.
It is often said that ethical principles cannot be derived from science, and that they must come from somewhere else. However, when nature is viewed through the eyes of modern science, we obtain some insights which seem almost ethical in character. Biology at the molecular level has shown us the complexity and beauty of even the most humble living organisms, and the interrelatedness of all life on earth. Looking through the eyes of contemporary biochemistry, we can see that even the single cell of an amoeba is a structure of miraculous complexity and precision, worthy of our respect and wonder.
Knowledge of the second law of thermodynamics, the statistical law favoring disorder over order, reminds us that life is always balanced like a tight-rope walker over an abyss of chaos and destruction. Living organisms distill their order and complexity from the flood of thermodynamic information which reaches the earth from the sun. In this way, they create local order; but life remains a fugitive from the second law of thermodynamics. Disorder, chaos, and destruction remain statistically favored over order, construction, and complexity.
It is easier to burn down a house than to build one, easier to kill a human than to raise and educate one, easier to force a species into extinction than to replace it once it is gone, easier to burn the Great Library of Alexandria than to accumulate the knowledge that once filled it, and easier to destroy a civilization in a thermonuclear war than to rebuild it from the radioactive ashes.
Knowing this, we can use the second law of thermodynamics to form an almost ethical insight: To be on the side of order, construction, and complexity, is to be on the side of life. To be on the side of destruction, disorder, chaos and war is to be against life, a traitor to life, an ally of death. Knowing the precariousness of life, knowing the statistical laws that favor disorder and chaos, we should resolve to be loyal to the principle of long-continued construction upon which life depends.
In his famous farewell address, US President Dwight Eisenhower eloquently described the terrible effects of an overgrown military-industrial complex. Here are his words:
“We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions…. This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence, economic, political, even spiritual, is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government…[and] we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military
industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
In another speech, he said: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. “
The Devil’s Dynamo
The military-industrial complex involves a circular flow of money. The cash flows like the electrical current in a dynamo, driving a diabolical machine. Money from immensely rich corporate oligarchs buys the votes of politicians and the propaganda of the mainstream media. Numbed by the propaganda, citizens allow the politicians to vote for obscenely bloated military budgets, which further enrich the corporate oligarchs, and the circular flow continues.
Today the world spends more than 1.7 trillion dollars ( $1,700,000,000,000) every year on armaments. This vast river of money, almost too large to be imagined, is the “devil’s dynamo” driving the institution of war. Politicians notoriously can be bought with a tiny fraction of this enormous amount; hence the decay of democracy. It is also plain that if the almost unbelievable sums now wasted on armaments were used constructively, most of the pressing problems now facing humanity could be solved.
Because the world spends almost two thousand billion dollars each year on armaments, it follows that very many people make their living from war. This is the reason why it is correct to speak of war as an institution, and why war persists, although we know that it is the cause of much of the suffering that inflicts humanity.
We know that war is madness, but it persists. We know that it threatens the survival of civilization, but it persists, entrenched in the attitudes of historians, newspaper editors and television producers, entrenched in the methods by which politicians finance their campaigns, and entrenched in the financial power of arms manufacturers, entrenched also in the ponderous and costly hardware of war, the fleets of warships, bombers, tanks, nuclear missiles and so on.
The Military-Industrial Complex Needs Enemies
The military-industrial complex needs enemies. Without them it would wither. Thus at the end of the Second World War, this vast power complex was faced with a crisis. It was saved by the discovery of a new enemy: Communism.
This new enemy saved the military-industrial complex for a long time, but at the end of the Cold War, there was another crisis: the threat that arms profits would be converted into a “peace dividend”. Would this be the end of unlimited corporate greed? Heaven forbid! There was a desperate search for a new enemy. What about Islam? The Crusades could be revived, and all would be well. This seemed, for a long time to be a good solution.
But recently, with the Middle East in flames, Islam no longer seemed to be a sufficiently strong enemy justify the colossal budgets of armaments industries. A new enemy was urgently needed. One look at our mass media tells us the solution that our military-industrial complex has come up with: Revival of the Cold War!
Nuclear War by Accident or Miscalculation
As a consequence of our oligarchy’s decision to revive the Cold War, we are witnessing increasing demonization of Russia as well as flagrant provocations, such as the recent massive NATO maneuvers on Russia’s borders.
With unbelievable hubris and irresponsibility, western politicians are risking the destruction of human civilization and much of the biosphere through a thermonuclear war. Such a cataclysmic war could occur through technical or human error, or through escalation. This possibility is made greater by the fact that despite the end of the Cold War, thousands of missiles carrying nuclear warheads are still kept on a “hair-trigger” state of alert with a quasi-automatic reaction time measured in minutes.
A number of prominent political and military figures (many of whom have ample knowledge of the system of deterrence, having been part of it) have expressed concern about the danger of accidental nuclear war.
Colin S. Grey, Chairman of the US Institute for Public Policy, expressed this concern as follows: “The problem, indeed the enduring problem, is that we are resting our future upon a nuclear deterrence system concerning which we cannot tolerate even a single malfunction.”
General Curtis E. LeMay has written, “In my opinion a general war will grow through a series of political miscalculations and accidents rather than through any deliberate attack by either side.”
Bruce G. Blair of the Brookings Institute has remarked that “It is obvious that the rushed nature of the process, from warning to decision to action, risks causing a catastrophic mistake.”… “This system is an accident waiting to happen.”
The Duty of Civil Society
Civil society must make its will felt. A thermonuclear war today would be not only genocidal but also omnicidal. It would kill people of all ages, babies, children, young people, mothers, fathers and grandparents, without any regard whatever for guilt or innocence. Such a war would be the ultimate ecological catastrophe, destroying not only human civilization but also much of the biosphere. Each of us has a duty to work with courage and dedication to prevent it.
When I was 7 years old, and in the third grade of school, my teacher described human behavior in a way that has stuck in my mind for three quarters of a century: She said “A drop of good sense, in a sea of emotion!”
Our emotional nature is very ancient. Many human emotions can be traced back to our remote ancestors in the animal kingdom. These emotions are not necessarily appropriate in the complex society of today. The Nobel-laureate physiologist Albert Szent-Gyorgyi once wrote:
“The story of man consists of two parts, divided by the appearance of modern science…. In the first period, man lived in the world in which his species was born and to which his senses were adapted. In the second, man stepped into a new, cosmic world to which he was a complete stranger… The forces at man’s disposal were no longer terrestrial forces, of human dimension, but were cosmic forces, the forces which shaped the universe. The few hundred Fahrenheit degrees of our flimsy terrestrial fires were exchanged for the ten million degrees of the atomic reactions which heat the sun.
“This is but a beginning, with endless possibilities in both directions, a building of a human life of undreamt of wealth and dignity, or a sudden end in utmost misery. Man lives in a new cosmic world for which he was not made. His survival depends on how well and how fast he can adapt himself to it, rebuilding all his ideas, all his social and political institutions.
“…Modern science has abolished time and distance as factors separating nations. On our shrunken globe today, there is room for one group only: the family of man.”
Tribalism
Tribalism is closely related to nationalism and fascism. Today it is our most inappropriate behavioral tendency. It is the tendency of humans to be kind, loyal and supportive to members of their own group, but sometimes murderous towards outsiders.
The human tendency towards tribalism evolved when our remote ancestors lived in small, genetically homogeneous tribes, competing for territory on the grasslands of Africa. Because marriage within a tribe was much more common than marriage outside it, genes were shared within the tribe. The tribe as a whole either survived or perished. The tribe, rather than the individual was the unit upon which the Darwinian forces of natural selection acted.
Although it was a survival trait 100,000 years ago, tribalism threatens our human civilization of today with thermonuclear annihilation. As Konrad Lorenz put it, “An impartial visitor from another planet, looking at man as he is today, in his hand the atom bomb, the product of his intelligence, in his heart the aggression drive, inherited from his anthropoid ancestors, which the same intelligence cannot control, such a visitor would not give mankind much chance of survival.”
Nationalism
Today, at the start of the 21st century, we live in nation-states to which we feel emotions of loyalty very similar to the tribal emotions of our ancestors. The enlargement of the fundamental political and social unit has been made necessary and possible by improved transportation and communication, and by changes in the techniques of warfare.
The tragedy of our present situation is that the same forces that made the nation-state replace the tribe as the fundamental political and social unit have continued to operate with constantly increasing intensity. For this reason, the totally sovereign nation-state has become a dangerous anachronism.
Although the world now functions as a single unit because of modern technology, its political structure is based on fragments, on absolutely sovereign nation-states . They are large compared to tribes, but too small for present-day technology, since they do not include all of mankind.
Gross injustices mar today’s global economic interdependence, and because of the development of thermonuclear weapons, the continued existence of civilization is threatened by the anarchy that exists today at the international level.
Fascism
Fascism appeals directly to the lowest human emotions. Fascism calls up the devils of tribalism and nationalism. Therefore it is fundamentally antisocial and destructive. At the same time, the low, emotional appeal of fascism has led to its political success. The fanatical crowds that cheered Hitler, Franco and Mussolini in the 1930’s are worryingly similar to the crowds that cheered Donald Trump during the disastrous 2016 US presidential election.
The Family of Humankind
On our shrunken globe, there is room for one group only, the family of humankind. We face a difficult future. Climate change threatens to make large parts of the world uninhabitable. Fossil fuels must be kept in the ground if we are to have any chance of avoiding catastrophic global warming. Climate change, the end of the fossil fuel era, and rapid population growth threaten to produce famine on a scale that has never previously been witnessed.
To face the severe challenges successfully, to avoid a political drift towards fascism and war, we need human solidarity.
Individual citizens of the world must join hands and work together with dedication to overcome the threats of tribalism, nationalism and fascism.
We must build a new global ethical system where we recognize that we are all members of a single family. We must save the future for our children and grandchildren and for all other creatures in our beautiful world.
who was part of a group that shared the 1995Nobel Peace Prize for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network and Associate Professor Emeritus at the H.C. Ørsted Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
He is chairman of both the Danish National Pugwash Group and the Danish Peace Academy andreceived his training in theoretical physics and theoretical chemistry at M.I.T., the University of Chicago and the University of London.
He is the author of numerous books and articles both on scientific topics and on broader social questions.
Today human civilization and the biosphere face two existential threats: catastrophic climate change, and thermonuclear war. Each of these disasters could cause mass extinctions, and each could make large portions of the earth permanently uninhabitable. The hubris of oligarchic leaders in the United States is leading the world directly towards both these threats; and this is particularly true after the nightmarish 2016 November election, which brought an unstable, violence-advocating, racist, narcissistic, climate change denier to the White House.
Donald Trump’s proposed Cabinet is heavy with aggressive retired generals, and for Secretary of State, he has picked Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson. In his campaign speeches, Trump promised that of elected, he would pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement. As President-Elect he has said that he would end NASA’s climate research, and he has threateningly demanded a list of all scientists who worked with the Obama Administration on the issue of climate change.
Meanwhile, the Arctic is warming at a completely unprecedented rate. If the shallow polar seas become ice-free in the summers, there is a danger that the enormous amounts methane, stored on sea floors in the form of hydrate crystals, will be released into the atmosphere, triggering a feed-back loop leading to even more rapidly accelerated warming. If Arctic warming continues, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet will produce sea level rises that will eventually drown coastal regions throughout the world.
In the long run, feedback-driven climate change could lead to a massive loss of life, comparable to the Permian-Triasic Extinction, during which 90% of all marine species and 70% of all land-based vertebrate species vanished forever.
Equally worrying are the hubristic attempts of US oligarchs to dominate the world through military force. Both Russia and China are seen as threats to US military and economic dominance, and each of these enormous nuclear-armed countires has been surrounded by threatening rings of US bases, themselves armed with nuclear weapons. It is doubtful that leaders of any country actually wish to initiate a catastrophic nuclear war, but when such omnicidal weapons are used as threats in the power games of governments, there is a grave danger that they will actually be used. The documentary film maker John Pilger has recently released a film entitled “The Coming War With China”, which will hopefully make the public more aware of these dangers.
If we wish to understand how the Russians and Chinese feel when surrounded by aggressive nuclear-armed US bases on their very doorsteps, we can remember the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when the Kennedy Administration was thrown into a panic by the fact that nuclear missiles had been brought close to the United States. Do not the Russians feel similarly threatened by the US-supported coup in Ukraine, and by massive NATO military exercises on their borders? Does not China feel threatened by the US bases and naval buildup in the South China Sea?
European countries have been in the habit of blindly following US leadership. This habit dates back to World War I and especially to II, when Europe owed its deliverance from fascism to American military and economic power. Today, however, the United States itself has a government that might be described as neofascist; and the old habit has become a very bad habit indeed. We must declare our independence. Europe must not be a vassal to Trump’s USA!
was part of a group that shared the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize for their work in organizing the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
Member of the TRANSCEND Network.
Associate Professor Emeritus at the H.C. Ørsted Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Chairman of both the Danish National Pugwash Group and the Danish Peace Academy.
Received his training in theoretical physics and theoretical chemistry at M.I.T., the University of Chicago and the University of London.
The author of numerous books and articles both on scientific topics and on broader social questions. His most recent book is “Civilization’s Crisis in the 21st Century”.
Prof John Scales Avery
Today, human greed and folly are destroying the global environment. As if this were not enough, there is a great threat to civilization and the biosphere from an all-destroying thermonuclear war. Both of these severe existential threats are due to faults in our inherited emotional nature.
From the standpoint of evolutionary theory, this is a paradox. As a species, we are well on the road to committing collective suicide, driven by the flaws in human nature. But isn’t natural selection supposed to produce traits that lead to survival? Today, our emotions are not leading us towards survival, but instead driving us towards extinction. What is the reason for this paradox?
Some Stories from the Bible
The Old Testament is the common heritage of the three Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Some of the stories which it contains can be seen as attempts to explain the paradoxes of human emotional nature: Why are we born with emotions that drive us to commit the seven deadly sins? Why are pride, envy, wrath, gluttony, lust, sloth and greed so much a part of human nature? The story of Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden attempts to answer this question, as do stories about the role of Satam in the world.
According to the biblical account, Adam and Eve ate apples from the Tree of Knowledge and were therefore expelled from the Garden of Eden. This story can be seen as containing elements of historical truth.
Humans were originally hunter-gatherers. Populations were so sparse that gathering roots, berries and fruits from their environment gave them enough to eat. Occasionally they obtained additional protein from the meat of animals that they were able to kill. Then agriculture was invented. Populations rapidly became so dense that humans were no longer able to live simply by gathering fruit from the Garden of Eden. Expelled from the garden, they were henceforth forced to sweat for their daily bread.
What about “original sin” and the role of the Devil in the world? In the Bible, the Devil, or Satan, appears as a fallen angel who tempts humans to commit sins, i.e to break the rules of their societies. The existence of Satan is the biblical explanation of the presence of evil in the world. An alternative explanation is given by the doctrine of “original sin”, which maintains that humans are born with a sinful nature.
Like the story of the Garden of Eden, these biblical concepts may also cronicle true historical events in human evolution. A sinful human is sometimes described as “behaving like an animal”. In fact. what is regarded a sin in humans can be a necessary survival trait in an animal. It would be ridiculous to say “Thou shalt not steal” to a mouse or “Thou shalt not kill” to a tiger.
Our emotions have an extremely long evolutionary history. Both lust and rage are emotions that we share with many animals. However, with the rapid advance of human cultural evolution, our ancestors began to live together in progressively larger groups, and in these new societies, our inherited emotional nature was often inapproppriate. What once was a survival trait became a sin which needed to be suppressed by morality and law.
Today we live in a world that is entirely different from the one into which our species was born. We face the problems of the 21st century: exploding populations, vanishing resources, and the twin threats of catastrophic climate change and thermonuclear war. We face these severe problems with our poor cave-man’s brain, with an emotional nature that has not changed much since our ancestors lived in small tribes, competing for territory on the grasslands of Africa.
The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals
In the long run, because of the terrible weapons that have already been produced through the misuse of science, and because of the even more terrible weapons that are likely to be invented in the future, the only way in which we can ensure the survival of civilization is to abolish the institution of war.
But is this possible? Or are the emotions that make war possible so much a part of human nature that we cannot stop humans from fighting any more than we can stop cats and dogs from fighting? Can biological science throw any light on the problem of why our supposedly rational species seems intenton choosing war, pain and death instead of peace, happiness and life? To answer this question, we need to turn to the science of ethology: the study of inherited emotional tendencies and behavior patterns in animals and humans.
In The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin devoted a chapter to the evolution of instincts, and he later published a separate book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals”. Because of these pioneering studies, Darwin is considered to be the founder of ethology, the study of inherited behavior patterns.
Behind Darwin’s work in this field is the observation that instinctive behavior patterns are just as reliably inherited as morphological characteristics. Darwin was also impressed by the fact that within a given species, behavior patterns have some degree of uniformity, and the fact that the different species within a family are related by similarities of instinctive behavior, just as they are related by similarities of bodily form. For example, certain elements of cat-like behavior can be found among all members of the cat family; and certain elements of dog-like or wolf-like behavior can be found among all members of the dog family. On the other hand, there are small variations in instinct among the members of a given species. For example, not all domestic dogs behave in the same way.
“Let us look at the familiar case of breeds of dogs”, Darwin wrote in The Origin of Species, “It cannot be doubted that young pointers will sometimes point and even back other dogs the very first time they are taken out; retrieving is certainly in some degree inherited by retrievers; and a tendency to run round, instead of at, a flock of sheep by shepherd dogs. I cannot see that these actions, performed without experience by the young, and in very nearly the same manner, without the end being known (for the young pointer can no more know that he points to aid his master than the white butterfly knows why she lays her eggs on the leaf of the cabbage) I cannot see that these actions differ essentially from true instincts…”
“How strongly these domestic instincts habits and dispositions are inherited, and how curiously they become mingled, is well shown when different breeds of dogs are crossed. Thus it is known that a cross with a bulldog has affected for many generations the courage and obstinacy of greyhounds; and a cross with a greyhound has given to a whole family of shepherd dogs a tendency to hunt hares.”
Darwin believed that in nature, desirable variations of instinct are propagated by natural selection, just as in the domestication of animals, favourable variations of instinct are selected and propagated by kennelmen and stock breeders. In this way, according to Darwin, complex and highly developed instincts, such as the comb-making instinct of honey-bees, have evolved by natural selection from simpler instincts, such as the instinct by which bumble bees use their old cocoons to hold honey and sometimes add a short wax tube.
In the introduction to The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Darwin says “I thought it very important to ascertain whether the same expressions and gestures prevail, as has often been asserted without much evidence, with all the races of mankind, especially with those who have associated but little with Europeans. Whenever the same movements of the features or body express the same emotions in several distinct races of man, we may infer with much probability, that such expressions are true ones, – that is, are innate or instinctive.”
To gather evidence on this point, Darwin sent a printed questionnaire on the expression of human emotions and sent it to missionaries and colonial administrators in many parts of the world. Darwin received 36 replies to his questionnaire, many coming from people who were in contact with extremely distinct and isolated groups of humans.
The results convinced him that our emotions and the means by which they are expressed are to a very large extent innate, rather than culturally determined, since the answers to his questionnaire were so uniform and so independent of both culture and race. In preparation for his book, he also closely observed the emotions and their expression in very young babies and children, hoping to see inherited characteristics in subjects too young to have been greatly influenced by culture.
Darwin’s observations convinced him that in humans, just as in other mammals, the emotions and their expression are to a very large extent inherited universal characteristics of the species.
Ethology
The study of inherited behavior patterns in animals (and humans) was continued in the 20th century by such researchers as Karl von Frisch (1886-1982), Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907-1988), and Konrad Lorenz (1903-1989), three scientists who shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology in 1973.
Karl von Frisch, the first of the three ethologists, is famous for his studies of the waggle-dance of honeybees. Bees guide each other to sources of food by a genetically programmed signalling method, the famous waggle dance, deciphered in 1945 by von Frisch.
Among the achievements for which Tinbergen is famous are his classic studies of instinct in herring gulls. He noticed that the newly-hatched chick of a herring gull pecks at the beak of its parent, and this signal causes the parent gull to regurgitate food into the gaping beak of the chick.
Tinbergen wondered what signal causes the chick to initiate this response by pecking at the beak of the parent gull. Therefore he constructed a series of models of the parent in which certain features of the adult gull were realistically represented while other features were crudely represented or left out entirely. He found by trial and error that the essential signal to which the chick responds is the red spot on the tip of its parent’s beak. Models which lacked the red spot produced almost no response from the young chick, although in other respects they were realistic models; and the red spot on an otherwise crude model would make the chick peck with great regularity.
In other experiments, Tinbergen explored the response of newly-hatched chicks of the common domestic hen to models representing a hawk. Since the chicks were able to recognize a hawk immediately after hatching, he knew that the response must be genetically programmed. Just as he had done in his experiments with herring gulls, Tinbergen experimented with various models, trying to determine the crucial characteristic that was recognized by the chicks, causing them to run for cover. He discovered that a crude model in the shape of the letter T invariably caused the response if pulled across the sky with the wings first and tail last. (Pulled backwards, the T shape caused no response.)
In the case of a newly-hatched herring gull chick pecking at the red spoon the beak of its parent, the program in the chick’s brain must be entirely genetically determined, without any environmental component at all. Learning cannot play a part in this behavioral pattern, since the pattern is present in the young chick from the very moment when it breaks out of the egg. On the other hand (Tinbergen pointed out) many behavioral patterns in animals and in man have both an hereditary component and an environmental component. Learning is often very important, but learning seems to be built ona foundation of genetic predisposition.
To illustrate this point, Tinbergen called attention to the case of sheepdogs, whose remote ancestors were wolves. These dogs, Tinbergen wrote, can easily be trained to drive a flock of sheep towards the shepherd. However, it is difficult to train them to drive the sheep away from their master. Tinbergen explained this by saying that the sheep-dogs regard the shepherd as their “pack leader”; and since driving the prey towards the pack leader is part of the hunting instinct of wolves, it is easy to teach the dogs this maneuver.
Driving the prey away from the pack leader would not make sense for wolves hunting in a pack; it is not part of the instinctive makeup ofwolves, nor is it a natural pattern of behavior for their remote descendants, the sheep-dogs.
As a further example of the fact that learning is usually built on a foundation of genetic predisposition, Tinbergen mentions the ease with which human babies learn languages. The language learned is determined by the baby’s environment; but the astonishing ease with which a human baby learns to speak and understand implies a large degree of genetic predisposition.
On Aggression
The third of the 1973 prizewinners, Konrad Lorenz, is more controversial, but at the same time very interesting in the context of studies of the causes of war and discussions of how war may be avoided. As a young boy, he was very fond of animals, and his tolerant parents allowed him to build up a large menagerie in their house in Altenberg, Austria.
Even as a child, Lorenz became an expert on waterfowl behavior, and he discovered the phenomenon of imprinting. He was given a one day old duckling, and found, to his intense joy, that it transferred its following response to his person. As Lorenz discovered, young waterfowl have a short period immediately after being hatched, when they identify as their “mother” whomever they see first. In later life, Lorenz continued his studies of imprinting, and there exists a touching photograph of him, with his white beard, standing waist-deep in a pond, surrounded by an adoring group of goslings who believe him to be their mother. Lorenz also studied pair bonding rituals in waterfowl.
It is, however, for his controversial book On Aggression that Konrad Lorenz is best known. In this book, Lorenz makes a distinction between intergroup aggression and intragroup aggression. Among animals, he points out, rank-determining fights are seldom fatal. Thus, for example, the fights that determine leadership within a wolf pack end when the loser makes a gesture of submission. By contrast, fights between groups of animals are often fights to the death, examples being wars between ant colonies, or of bees against intruders, or the defense of a rat pack against strange rats.
Many animals, humans included, seem willing to kill or be killed in defense of the communities to which they belong. Lorenz calls this behavioural tendency a “communal defense response”. He points out that the “holy shiver”, the tingling of the spine that humans experience when performing an heroic act in defense of their communities, is related to the prehuman reflex for raising the hair on the back of an animal as it confronts an enemy, a reflex that makes the animal seem larger than it really is.
Konrad Lorenz and his followers have been criticized for introducing a cathartic model of instincts. According to Lorenz, if an instinct is not used, a pressure for its use builds up over a period of time. In the case of human aggression, according to Lorenz, the nervous energy has to be dissipated in some way, either harmlessly through some substitute for aggression, or else through actual fighting. Thus, for example, Lorenz believed that violent team sports help to reduce the actual level of violence in a society.
Although the cathartic model of aggression is now widely believed to be incorrect, it seems probable that the communal defense response discussed by Lorenz will prove to be a correct and useful concept. The communal defense mechanism can be thought of as the aspect of human emotions which makes it natural for soldiers to kill or be killed in defense of their countries. In the era before nuclear weapons made war prohibitively dangerous, such behavior was considered to be the greatest of virtues.
Generations of schoolboys have learned the Latin motto: “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” – it is both sweet and proper to die for one’s country. Even in today’s world, death in battle in defense of country and religion is still praised by nationalists. However, because of the development of weapons of mass destruction, both nationalism and narrow patriotism have become dangerous anachronisms.
In thinking of violence and war, we must be extremely careful not to confuse the behavioral patterns that lead to wife-beating or bar-room brawls with those that lead to episodes like the trench warfare of the First World War, or to the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first type of aggression is similar to the rank-determining fights of animals, while the second is more akin to the team-spirit exhibited by a football side. Heroic behavior in defense of one’s community has been praised throughout the ages, but the tendency to such behavior has now become a threat to the survival of civilization, since tribalism makes war possible, and war with thermonuclear weapons threatens civilization with catastrophe.
In an essay entitled The Urge to Self-Destruction, Arthur Koestler says: “Even a cursory glance at history should convince one that individual crimes, committed for selfish motives, play a quite insignificant role in the human tragedy compared with the numbers massacred in unselfish love of one’s tribe, nation, dynasty, church or ideology… Wars are not fought for personal gain, but out of loyalty and devotion to king, country or cause…”
“We have seen on the screen the radiant love of the Führer of the Hitler Youth… They are transfixed with love, like monks in ecstasy on religious paintings. The sound of the nation’s anthem, the sight of its proud flag, makes you feel part of a wonderfully loving community. The fanatic is prepared to lay down his life for the object of his worship, as the lover is prepared to die for his idol. He is, alas, also prepared to kill anybody who represents a supposed threat to the idol.”
The emotion described here by Koestler is the same as the communal defense mechanism (“militant enthusiasm”) described in biological terms by Lorenz. In On Aggression, Konrad Lorenz gives the following description of the emotions of a hero preparing to risk his life for the sake of the group:
“In reality, militant enthusiasm is a specialized form of communal aggression, clearly distinct from and yet functionally related to the more primitive forms of individual aggression. Every man of normally strong emotions knows, from his own experience, the subjective phenomena that go hand in hand with the response of militant enthusiasm. A shiver runs down the back and, as more exact observation shows, along the outside of both arms. One soars elated, above all the ties of everyday life, one is ready to abandon all for the call of what, in the moment of this specific emotion, seems to be a sacred duty.
All obstacles in its path become unimportant; the instinctive inhibitions against hurting or killing one’s fellows lose, unfortunately, much of their power. Rational considerations, criticisms, and all reasonable arguments against the behavior dictated by militant enthusiasm are silenced by an amazing reversal of all values, making them appear not only untenable, but base and dishonorable. Men may enjoy the feeling of absolute righteousness even while they commit atrocities.
Conceptual thought and moral responsibility are at their lowest ebb. As the Ukrainian proverb says: ‘When the banner is unfurled, all reason is in the trumpet’.”
“The subjective experiences just described are correlated with the following objectively demonstrable phenomena. The tone of the striated musculature is raised, the carriage is stiffened, the arms are raised from the sides and slightly rotated inward, so that the elbows point outward. The head is proudly raised, the chin stuck out, and the facial muscles mime the ‘hero face’ familiar from the films. On the back and along the outer surface of the arms, the hair stands on end. This is the objectively observed aspect of the shiver!”
“Anybody who has ever seen the corresponding behavior of the male chimpanzee defending his band or family with self-sacrificing courage will doubt the purely spiritual character of human enthusiasm. The chimp, too, sticks out his chin, stiffens his body, and raises his elbows; his hair stands on end, producing a terrifying magnification of his body contours as seen from the front. The inward rotation of the arms obviously has the purpose of turning the longest-haired side outward to enhance the effect. The whole combination of body attitude and hair-raising constitutes a bluff.
This is also seen when a cat humps its back, and is calculated to make the animal appear bigger and more dangerous than it really is. Our shiver, which in German poetry is called a ‘heiliger Schauer’, a ‘holy’ shiver, turns out to be the vestige of a prehuman vegetative response for making a fur bristle which we no longer have. To the humble seeker for biological truth, there cannot be the slightest doubt that human militant enthusiasm evolved out of a communal defense response of our prehuman ancestor.”
Lorenz goes on to say, “An impartial visitor from another planet, looking at man as he is today: in his hand the atom bomb, the product of his intelligence, in his heart the aggression drive, inherited from his anthropoid ancestors, which the same intelligence cannot control, such a visitor would not give mankind much chance of survival.”
There are some semantic difficulties connected with discussions of the parts of human nature that make war possible. In one of the passages quoted above, Konrad Lorenz speaks of “militant enthusiasm”, which he says is both a form of communal aggression and also a communal defense response. In their inspiring recent book War No More, Professor Robert Hinde and Sir Joseph Rotblat use the word “duty” in discussing the same human emotional tendencies. I will instead use the word “tribalism”.
I prefer the word “tribalism” because from an evolutionary point of view the human emotions involved in war grew out of the territorial competition between small tribes during the formative period when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers on the grasslands of Africa. Members of tribe-like groups are bound together by strong bonds of altruism and loyalty. Echoes of these bonds can be seen in present-day family groups, in team sports, in the fellowship of religious congregations, and in the bonds that link soldiers to their army comrades and to their nation.
Warfare involves not only a high degree of aggression, but also an extremely high degree of altruism. Soldiers kill, but they also sacrifice their own lives. Thus patriotism and duty are as essential to war as the willingness to kill. As Arthur Koestler points out, “Wars are not fought for personal gain, but out of loyalty and devotion to king, country or cause…”
Tribalism involves passionate attachment to one’s own group, self-sacrifice for the sake of the group, willingness both to die and to kill if necessary to defend the group from its enemies, and belief that in case of a conflict, one’s own group is always in the right.
Tribalism
If we examine altruism and aggression in humans, we notice that members of our species exhibit great altruism towards their own children. Kindness towards close relatives is also characteristic of human behaviour, and the closer the biological relationship is between two humans, the greater is the altruism they tend to show towards each other. This profile of altruism is easy to explain on the basis of Darwinian natural selection since two closely related individuals share many genes and, if they cooperate, the genes will be more effectively propagated.
To explain from an evolutionary point of view the communal defense mechanism discussed by Lorenz, the willingness of humans to kill and be killed in defense of their communities, we have only to imagine that our ancestors lived in small tribes and that marriage was likely to take place within a tribe rather than across tribal boundaries. Under these circumstances, each tribe would tend to consist of genetically similar individuals. The tribe itself, rather than the individual, would be the unit on which the evolutionary forces of natural selection would act.
The idea of group selection in evolution was proposed in the 1930’s by J.B.S. Haldane and R.A. Fisher, and more recently it has been discussed by W.D. Hamilton, E.O. Wilson and R. Dawkins. According to the group selection model, a tribe whose members showed altruism towards each other would be more likely to survive than a tribe whose members cooperated less effectively. Since several tribes might be in competition for the same territory, intertribal aggression might, under some circumstances, increase the chances for survival of one’s own tribe. Thus, on the basis of the group selection model, one would expect humans to be kind and cooperative towards members of their own group, but at the same time to sometimes exhibit aggression towards members of other groups, especially in conflicts over territory.
One would also expect intergroup conflicts to be most severe in cases where the boundaries between groups are sharpest where marriage is forbidden across the boundaries.
Tribal Markings, Ethnicity and Pseudospeciation
In biology, a species is defined to be a group of mutually fertile organisms.Thus all humans form a single species, since mixed marriages between all known races will produce children, and subsequent generations in mixed marriages are also fertile. However, although there is never a biological barrier to marriages across ethnic and racial boundaries, there are often very severe cultural barriers.
Irenäus Eibl-Ebesfeldt, a student of Konrad Lorenz, introduced the word “pseudospeciatyion” to denote cases in which cultural barriers between two groups of humans are so strongly marked tha marriages across the boundaries are difficult and infrequent.
In his book The Biology of War and Peace, Eibl-Eibesfeldt discusses the “tribal markings” used by groups of humans to underline their own identity and to clearly mark the boundary between themselves and other groups. One of the illustrations shows the marks left by ritual scarification on the faces of the members of certain African tribes. These scars would be hard to counterfeit, and they help to establish and strengthen tribal identity.
Seeing a photograph of the marks left by ritual scarification on the faces of African tribesmen, it is impossible not to be reminded of the dueling scars that Prussian army officers once used to distinguish their caste from outsiders.
Surveying the human scene, one can find endless examples of signs that mark the bearer as a member of a particular group, signs that can be thought of as “tribal markings”: tattoos; piercing; bones through the nose or ears; elongated necks or ears; filed teeth; Chinese binding of feet; circumcision, both male and female; unique hair styles; decorations of the tongue, nose, or naval; peculiarities of dress, kilts, tartans, school ties, veils, chadors, and headdresses; caste markings in India; use or nonuse of perfumes; codes of honour and value systems; traditions of hospitality and manners; peculiarities of diet (certain foods forbidden, others preferred); giving traditional names to children; knowledge of dances and songs; knowledge of recipes; knowledge of common stories, literature, myths, poetry or common history; festivals, ceremonies, and rituals; burial customs, treatment of the dead and ancestor worship; methods of building and decorating homes; games and sports peculiar to a culture; relationship to animals, knowledge of horses and ability to ride; nonrational systems of belief. Even a baseball hat worn backwards or the professed ability to enjoy atonal music can mark a person as a member of a special “tribe”. Undoubtedly there many people in New York who would never think of marrying someone who could not appreciate the paintings of Jasper Johns, and many in London who would consider anyone had not read all the books of Virginia Wolfe to be entirely outside the bounds of civilization.
By far the most important mark of ethnic identity is language, and within a particular language, dialect and accent. If the only purpose of language were communication, it would be logical for the people of a small country like Denmark to stop speaking Danish and go over to a more universally-understood international language such as English. However, language has another function in addition to communication: It is also a mark of identity. It establishes the boundary of the group.
Within a particular language, dialects and accents mark the boundaries of subgroups. For example, in England, great social significance is attached to accents and diction, a tendency that George Bernard Shaw satirized in his play, Pygmalion, which later gained greater fame as the musical comedy, My Fair Lady. This being the case, we can ask why all citizens of England do not follow the example of Eliza Dolittle in Shaw’s play, and improve their social positions by acquiring Oxford accents. However, to do so would be to run the risk of being laughed at by one’s peers and regarded as a traitor to one’s own local community and friends. School children everywhere can be very cruel to any child who does not fit into the local pattern. At Eton, an Oxford accent is compulsory; but in a Yorkshire school, a child with an Oxford accent would suffer for it.
Next after language, the most important “tribal marking” is religion. As mentioned above, it seems probable that in the early history of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, religion evolved as a mechanism for perpetuating tribal traditions and culture. Like language, and like the innate facial expressions studied by Darwin, religion is a universal characteristic of all human societies. All known races and cultures practice some sort of religion. Thus a tendency to be religious seems to be built into human nature. Otherwise, religion would not be as universal as it is.
Religion is often strongly associated with ethnicity and nationalism, that is to say, it is associated with the demarcation of a particular group of people by its culture or race. For example, the Jewish religion is associated with Zionism and with Jewish nationalism. Similarly Islam is strongly associated with Arab nationalism. Christianity too has played an important role in many aggressive wars, for example the Crusades, the European conquest of the New World, European colonial conquests in Africa and Asia, and the wars between Catholics and Protestants within Europe (notably the Thirty Years War).
Many of the atrocities with which the history of humankind is stained were committed in conflicts involving groups between which sharply marked have involved what Iren us Eibl-Eibesfeldt called “pseudospeciation”, that cultural barriers have made intermarriage difficult and infrequent. Examples include the present conflict between Israelis and Palestinians; “racial cleansing” in Kosovo; the devastating wars between Catholics and Protestants in Europe; the Lebanese civil war; genocide committed against Jews and Gypsies during World War II; recent genocide in Rwanda; intertribal massacres in the Ituri Provence of Congo; use of poison gas against Kurdish civilians by Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq; the massacre of Armenians by Turks; massacres of Hindus by Muslims and of Muslims by Hindus in post-independence India; massacres of Native Americans by white conquerors and settlers in all parts of the New World; and massacres committed during the Crusades. The list seems endless.
Religion often contributes to conflicts by sharpening the boundaries between ethnic groups and by making marriage across those boundaries difficult and infrequent. However, this negative role is balanced by a positive one, whenever religion is the source of ethical principles, especially the principle of universal human brotherhood.
Many of the great ethical teachers of history lived at a time when cultural evolution was changing humans from hunter-gatherers and pastoral peoples to farmers and city dwellers. To live and cooperate in larger groups, humans needed to overwrite their instinctive behavior patterns with culturally determined behavior involving a wider range of cooperation than previously.
This period of change is marked by the lives and ideas of a number of greatethical teachers – Moses, Buddha, Lao Tse, Confucius, Socrates, Aristotle, Jesus, and Saint Paul. Mohammed lived at a slightly later period, but it was still a period of transition for the Arab peoples, a period during which their range cooperation needed to be enlarged.
Most of the widely practiced religions of today contain the principle of universal human brotherhood. This is contained, for example, in Christianity, in the Sermon on the Mount and in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The Sermon on the Mount tells us that we must love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves.
When asked “But who is my neighbor?”, Jesus replied with the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which says that our neighbor may belong to a different ethnic group than ourselves, or may be separated from us by geographical distance. Nevertheless, he is still our neighbor and he still deserves our love and assistance. To this, Christianity adds that we must love and forgive our enemy, and do good to those who persecute us, a principle that would make war impossible if it were only followed. Not only in Christianity, but also in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, the principles of compassion and universal human brotherhood hold a high place.
The religious leaders of today’s world have the opportunity to contribute importantly to the solution of the problem of war. They have the opportunity to powerfully support the concept of universal human brotherhood, to build bridges between religious groups, to make intermarriage across ethnic boundaries easier, and to soften the distinctions between communities. If they fail to do this, they will have failed humankind at a time of crisis.
Human nature undoubtedly contains emotions of tribalism, which nationalist and facist leaders find it very easy to exploit. But education, ethics and law can overwrite primative and anachronistic emotional tendencies. Our astonishing scientific and cultural advances have been achieved through the cooperative efforts of all of humanity. In addition to the darker traits in human nature, our species also has a genius for cooperation; and it is this genius for cooperation that is the key to a happy future.
