On the 21st anniversary of 9-11, I’m confident that my remembrance
of that horrific day is significantly different than most others. And extremely frustratingly and disappointing. It remains so two decades later.
Today is exactly the 20th anniversary of the day
I was fired as Issues Director for the World Federalist Association. I was
ordered to leave the office by end of the day by its newest ED who wanted to change
the focus of WFA away from abolishing war to focus on protecting the environment. He didn’t know, or simply dismissed the fact that
no one in the office or the organization’s membership at that time - was more
of a practicing environmentalist and knowledgeable at framing the connections
between environmental health, human health, and most national security issues. As former Issues Director at the Global Health
Council, I’d given Congressional testimony 3 times in four years. Written testimony centering on the growing risks
to our nation’s freedom, security, and prosperity from the accelerating threat
of “new and reemerging” pathogens. About
half of these were coming from increasing human intrusions into virgin forests
and microbial changes caused by mutagenic chemicals, abuse of antibiotics,
and poverty. Poverty being a massive driver
of preventable wars, infectious diseases, and environmental degradations.
The origin of WFA was inspired by and personally linked to Albert
Einstein’s realization that a world lacking a global federation would be unable
to stop wars and the accelerating evolution of weaponry that would inevitably
end catastrophically for our species. After the use of nuclear weapons on Japan a journalist
asked Einstein if he knew what weapons WWIII would be fought with. Einstein answered “I don’t know. But I know WW-IV will be fought with sticks
and stones.”
On the morning of the 9-11 attacks, I was sleeping in to
avoid my mental depression. It was wearing
on me because the WFA leadership had been routinely rejecting my sensible attempts
to have the organization return to its original purpose. I had been there for three years as Issues
Director. The new CEO too WFA further
off course leaning toward the need for environmental protection but intentionally
avoiding the need for the prevention of terrorism and the fundamental need for
a global legal means of addressing root causes, instead of the war meme in
fighting it.
WFA had abandoned that core purpose nearly two decades
earlier. It was driven by our nation’s Cold
War anti-communism fever. WFA chose instead
to prioritize “outlawing nuclear weapons” and ‘cuts in US defense spending’ than
call for a sustainable world order via protection of human rights instead of
national sovereignty. In other terms advancing
the global ‘rule of law’ instead of the increasingly chaotic global ‘law of force”
that was enabled under the UN paradigm of unenforceable international law – ie the
supremacy of national sovereignty over human rights. This inherent
flaw in the global governance system had been warned about even before WWII.
WFA leaders however lost their nerve but joined the ‘peace’
movement and ignored the fundamental principle that Emery Reves had offered in
his foundational WFA book “The Anatomy of Peace”. Briefly
after WWII it was listed as one of the ten most important books of that time. It was written during WWII and published in
1945.
Mr. Reves wrote “Once the mechanics and the
fundamental causes of wars – of all wars – are realized, the futility and childishness of the passionate
debates about armament and disarmament must be apparent to all. If human society were organized so that
relations between groups and units in contact were regulated by democratically
controlled law and legal institutions, then modern science could go ahead,
devise and produce the most devastating weapons, and there would be no
war. But if we allow sovereign rights to
reside in the separate units and groups without regulating their relations by
law, then we can prohibit every weapon, even a penknife, and people will beat
out each other’s brains with clubs.”
Both the CATO institute and Reuters News Service warned against a war on terrorism...given the lack of a functional definition of that word and
associated words like “terrorist”. Mass
murderers or war criminals would have been a more functional context for
undermining the evolution of war by other means.
Even after the attacks on 9-11 WFA leaders continued to ignore
the uncontested warnings of a bi-partisan Presidential Commission on National Security
Threats in the 21st century. It was initiated by President Clinton three years
earlier when it became obvious to him and a few others that the evolution of
technology would mean the future would not be like the past. The Commission issued its third and final
report in March of 2001. They unanimously
agreed that “terrorism” was most likely our nation’s greatest threat. They warned that Americans should “prepare to
die in large numbers on American soil.”
Tragically, Congress, the media, the American people, WFA
leaders, and most of its disarmament-oriented members chose to ignore this uncontested
warning.
WFA followers were some of the most intelligent and deeply committed
people I had ever had the privilege of working for over the previous 20
years. Wisdom was among them, but not in
the majority.
Today the Washington Post printed my latest “Letter to the Editor”
in response to an op-ed on the benefits and threats associated with AI. I made the case of a hypothesis I’ve been collecting
evidence for over the last 4 decades.
Opinion
What humans could learn from artificial
intelligence.
In “One potential side effect of AI?
Human extinction” [Thursday Opinion, Sept. 1], Émile P. Torres
delineated the fears and benefits of artificial intelligence: That “artificial
super intelligence” (ASI) could develop wisdom. Human intelligence has mostly
been applied to ignoring it. It is possible ASI could teach humans the survival
value of being held immediately accountable for our freedoms and actions. ASI
could discover basic “truths to be self-evident.” Such as all people are
created equal and endowed with certain rights. Such as being free to do
whatever we want, but never being free of violating “the Laws of Nature and
Nature’s God.”
These
fundamental law sets were acknowledged in the first paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence.
Both are extremely simple to understand. Take care of nature and be kind to one
another. Unfortunately, even with a high level of intelligence, these are
difficult to obey. And most humans persist in resisting this fundamental level
of understanding on how to survive and thrive as a species on this remarkable
planet that has been blessed with everything we would ever need for a billion
years.
Chuck Woolery, Rockville
**************************
Below is a
review of a new book that supports my hypothesis that human intelligence is our
greatest earthly threat. Profoundly dangerous...if not humorous at times.
But also vital to humans moving beyond this solar system... if we
can adapt...and adopt some wisdom.
‘If
Nietzsche Were a Narwhal’ Review: Big Brains, Big Problems - WSJ
(Within this News post there is a choice to listen to it – a slightly expanded
version of the words below)...so you can do some chores while gaining some
pearls of wisdom. 😉)
Okay,
let’s clear things up, right from the get-go. Friedrich Nietzsche was not a
narwhal, and never will be. But according to Justin Gregg, adjunct professor of
biology at St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia, Canada, the gloomy
19th-century German philosopher would have been happier if he were. Despite its
puckish title, Mr. Gregg’s book “If Nietzsche Were A Narwhal: What Animal
Intelligence Reveals About Human Stupidity” makes some extraordinary and
thought-provoking points. It is not only engagingly written, but its
controversial thesis is worth taking seriously.
The
following bit of black humor isn’t drawn from Mr. Gregg’s book but summarizes
much of its argument. After a worldwide nuclear holocaust, the few surviving
amoeba-like creatures hold a meeting at which they decide to try evolving
again. But before they do so, they together make a solemn vow: “This time,
no brains! ”
“If
Nietzsche Were a Narwal” begins, appropriately enough, with the great
depressive himself, who had plenty of brains. “Nietzsche,” Mr. Gregg writes,
“both wished he was as stupid as a cow so he wouldn’t have to contemplate
existence, and pitied cows for being so stupid that they couldn’t contemplate
existence.” Mr. Gregg then maintains that if Nietzsche had been graced with the
brain of, say, a narwhal (one of the author’s favorite marine mammals), he
wouldn’t have suffered his devastating Weltschmerz. Of course, his
complexity of thought, along with his written output, would have been, well,
somewhat limited, but . . . From here on, Mr. Gregg’s book becomes far more
serious, demanding our attention and challenging our presuppositions.
Mr.
Gregg maintains, for example, that death awareness—widely considered a hallmark
of human intelligence—isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. While the human
understanding of time and the gift of foresight have their perks, when it comes to
death, is ignorance bliss? Mr. Gregg thinks so. “The day-to-day consequences of
death wisdom”—grief, dread, nihilism, mental and emotional anguish—“really do
suck,” he writes. “I believe that animals . . . do not suffer as much as we do
for the simple reason that they cannot imagine their deaths.”
Not
surprisingly, the author strongly suggests that we reconsider our “unshakable
belief” that intelligence, however, we define it, is a good thing, “a magic
ingredient that you can sprinkle onto a boring old monkey, or a robot, . . .
and create something better.” Should we really be so confident as to the added
value? His answer is a resounding No. “We can, and often do, use our human intellect
to divine the secrets of the universe and generate philosophical theories
predicated on the fragility and transience of life. But we also can, and often
do, harness those secrets to wreak death and destruction, and twist those
philosophies to justify our savagery. With an understanding of how the world
has been built comes the knowledge to break it. Humans have both the capacity
to rationalize genocide and the technological competence to carry it out.”
We, humans, are besotted by intelligence, especially our own. And yet “intelligence
is not the miracle of evolution we like to think it is. We love our little
accomplishments—our moon landings and megacities—like parents love their
newborn babies. But nobody loves a baby as much as the parents. The planet does
not love us as much as we love our intellect.” In fact, “our many intellectual
accomplishments are currently on track to produce our own extinction, which is
exactly how evolution gets rid of adaptations that suck.”
Our
braininess has enabled us to cure diseases, to write symphonies and books, to
invent science and develop complex ideas and societies. But it has
also—especially by way of our vaunted linguistic capacities—enabled us to
deceive ourselves and others. To be sure, animals sometimes lie (see the
broken-wing display of a piping plover), but when people do it, it’s a
different story. Literally. We’re smart and have language that allows us to
misrepresent the truth, all the time knowing full well that we’re lying.
As
for ethics and morality, Mr. Gregg notes that, while human cognitive skills
“have molded the human moral sense from the clay of animal normativity,” our
moral reasoning “often leads to more death, violence, and destruction than we
find in the normative behavior of nonhuman animals.” Animals, not unlike
humans, typically have norm-based systems, but deviations rarely result, as
they do with us, in mass death and suffering. For doubters he marshals an array
of egregious examples, each of which makes a case for human exceptionalism, though
not in a way to make anyone proud. Despite instances of infanticide or
within-group violence among some species (see especially our great-ape
cousins), animals do not commit genocide. So much for cognitive capacity.
Nonetheless,
some of the cognitive concepts introduced in “If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal” are
nothing less than brilliant. Take “prognostic myopia,” which Mr. Gregg defines
as “the human capacity to think about and alter the future coupled with an
inability to actually care all that much about what happens in the future. It’s
caused by the human ability to make complex decisions availing of our unique
cognitive skills that result in long-term consequences. But because our minds
evolved primarily to deal with immediate—not future—outcomes, we rarely
experience or even understand the consequences of these long-term decisions.”
Think nuclear weapons, greenhouse gases, long-term pollution for short-term
profit. Our “shortsighted farsightedness,” argues Mr. Gregg, is “an
extinction-level threat to humanity.”
It
is startling to consider that our very intelligence may have made humans no
better morally, even no better off physically, than other species. Indeed, by
many measures of evolutionary success (number of individuals, persistence over
time, likelihood of persisting into the future), Homo sapiens is
doing poorly compared to many other species. And not benefiting the Earth,
either.
Mr.
Gregg concludes, glumly but effectively, that “there’s good reason to tone down
our smugness. Because, depending on where we go from here, human intelligence
may just be the stupidest thing that has ever happened.”
******************
As a biologist, for the last four decades, I chose to study
the media’s views on troubling global trends and problematic conditions. In the late 1970s, I’d learned of the hidden but
easily preventable holocaust of 42,000 infant and child deaths each DAY from poverty-related hunger and infectious diseases. Over the next decade, my successes at
generating printed national news media linking US interests to our ending
hunger by the year 2000 led to my hiring as the first media director of RESULTS. A Washington DC-based national grassroots organization
committed to ending hunger by creating “Political Will” by the turn of the
century. One Washington Post columnist had
already called RESULTS “pound for pound’ the most effective lobby in Washington. What he didn’t write was it was also one of
the smallest.
While profoundly effective with its existing system and
structures of effective volunteer group meetings, RESULTS did an even greater focus on its second organizational priority. ‘Breaking through the thought”
that the general American had, that they
“don’t make a difference”. The bad news was obvioius and ignored. RESULTS had profoundly lacked the creativity needed for
achieving its primary goal. ‘Creating the
political will to end hunger”.
There was a global consensus that the only missing ingredient
in ending world hunger was “Political will” It was the uncontested conclusion of
one US bipartisan Presidential Commission, one comprehensive report by the US
National Academy of Sciences, and another by the global “Brandt Commission,
the first to make that assertion.
Humanity has all it needs. It just lacks the political will. The US Presidential Commission made the most stunning conclusion. ‘unless ending world hunger was put in the
context of national security, and it was accomplished by the year 2000, it probably
wouldn’t happen. And there would be consequences
we could not afford. Wars, environmental problems, infectious diseases,
refugees.... Yes. They give irrefutable logic to that American ‘self-interest’ need to end world hunger. And events
in the world today are largely a product of our collective failure at grasping
the fundamental truths predicted by that bipartisan Commission.
At the height of RESULTS in the early 1990s, it had about 120 US
chapters (more in roughly a dozen other nations). But US RESULTS fell far short of effectively covering
the 218 Congressional Districts needed for passing important legislation needed
to achieve its goal by 2000.
As RESULTS' first Media Director and effective grassroots
regional leader, I persistently offered what I believe were valuable changes for the national grassroots organizing efforts. And, I was booted out
after only 10 months. About a year later the Chairman of the Board recognized my value and hired me to organize US health professionals to create the political will for basic
US aid projects funding child health and nutrition programs. After
two years of mobilizing this population using technology and “trim tabbing” with
a budget of about 1/10th of RESULTS, the US Alliance for Child Survival
was generating about the same number of legislative sponsors and cosponsors as
RESULTS. And about the same level of funding
appropriations for effective foreign aid programs.
After the year 2000 one RESULTS Regional coordinator moved beyond
the basic RESULTS model and created the Citizens Climate Lobby. Before he died CCL had an effective grassroots
lobby group in all 435 Congressional Districts.
But by the year 2020 hunger and infectious diseases were making a comeback.
And the US recently had the first case of
Polio in nearly 30 years. And the
emergence of Monkeypox. Great progress
was made with the Global Fund (AIDS, Malaria, and TB) but the Pandemic derailed
some of that. Add Russia’s war on Ukraine,
and extreme weather conditions...and
I believe a case can
be made that much of the increasing global chaos today is the result of “we the
people” and our elected leaders NOT abiding the conclusion of the 1980 Bipartisan
Presidential Commission on World Hunger. Or, our failure in the last twenty years in
failing to meet the promised, affordable and achievable 1990 World Summit for Children
goals for the year 2000. Or the Millennium
Development Goals targeted for the year 2015. And now our collective failures in making progress
from 2015 with the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development goals targeted for achievement
by the year 2030.
I recently stopped my intensity in monitoring printed news
media. And will soon start shedding
books, files, clippings, resorts, videos, taps... by the firewood cord (4’x4’ x
8’) around 3 of them.) My wife claims
they are a fire hazard. I justify them
as dead air space that our AC and Heating systems don’t need to contend with.
Hopefully, before the end of September, I’ll publish a pamphlet
listing 7 areas of our failure in doing what was needed, what we knew needed to
be done, but ignored just the same. All
will be ‘self-evident’ truths that I hope readers will challenge.
Below is a list of Washington Post articles printed this Sept
11th. Each deserves a Letter in response. Each is easy to link to our failure to heed
warnings or address root causes. Connections
between our lack of wisdom in what is needed for addressing many of the seemingly
unsolvable problems we now face. From
the continuing war on terrorism, the evolution of covid, the emergence of other
pathogens, the acceleration of extreme weather conditions, and the extinction
of various species...just to list the obvious.
“21 Years after 9-11, the war has not ended for anyone”
An Op-ed by one of the Post's best writers, David Von Drehle. He fails to provide any clue as to why we
were attacked on 9-11, or the attacks by Al-Qaeda leading up to 9-11. It’s true that “the human mind and soul are
not constituted for endless years of violence...” It’s odd that he fails to
mention that Arab and Persian minds are not constituted for ignoring decades of
violence our nation has funded and endorsed against them. Or the simple choice we have of not waging
war against an emotion...being terrorized.
Or working to codify a global rule of law in which any innocent person murdered
(think Collateral damage fighting terrorism” would be recognized as a crime. And someone or some leader held accountable
with a fair trial. What we owe those brave
American souls that lost their lives fighting the global war on terrorism...is
a commitment to ending it...by replacing it with a global rule of law that puts
the protection of human rights above the protection of national sovereignty.
“Revered CIA spy mourned as legend.” Metro section “Gary Schroen one of the first
Americans in Afghanistan after 9-11.” Why not canonize those on the bipartisan Presidential
Commission that warned us regarding terrorism being the greatest threat to
our nation...6 months prior to 9-11...but were ignored by the Bush presidency. Or, Richard Clarke’s 2017 book “Warnings... references eight other times our government has ignored expert warnings. And biosecurity warnings we were given before
the Pandemic, including the evolution of AI.
“The unsung virtues of the one-term presidency” in the Outlook section... could have documented the impossibility of any US president successfully addressing
any globally interdependent threat (terrorism, pandemics, climate change,
species extinctions, WMD proliferation...) relying on independent nations and agencies.
“In DC...fentanyl usurping heroin: Newer drug more powerful, lethal,” GOP claims poor border security is the source
of this problem. Not the demand ‘we the
people' have for wanting it.
“Juvenile curfew starts with Quite Night. Residents of PG County still debate whether
the measure will curb gun violence”. Not that fact that our nation's culture that
puts such a low value on education and an economic system that devalues human
life, justice for all, and livable wages...
Our nation can no longer afford reactionary policies. We need wisdom. We must address underlying issues/causes (systemic
flaws) and do what we know needs to be done.
Protect mother nature, ourselves, and each another by making health our
highest priority.
