Humanity’s Putin Problem

It’s time to start thinking clearly about Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. It’s time to view his foul deeds accurately, without wishful thinking, his many deceptions, or self-delusion. Then it’s time to conceive and implement a practical solution.

Here, in two paragraphs, is what he’s done. Over the 22-some years of his rule of Russia, he’s invaded and annexed Crimea, the Donbas, and Chechnya, plus parts of Georgia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria. In Crimea, the annexation was peaceful, involving subterfuge (the “Little Green Men”), a large pro-Russian population, and the threat of overwhelming force. In every other case, the annexation was achieved by force and violence. In the cases of Chechnya and the Donbas, the violence was extreme, involving large-scale killing, jailing and deportation of civilians and devastation of civilian infrastructure. The same is true of the other parts of Ukraine that Putin has annexed this week: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. In all this gratuitous devastation—especially recently—there have been extrajudicial killings, wanton destruction of civilian infrastructure, torture, rape, and other war crimes.

The “justifications” for these acts of aggression and brutality ranged from plausible to delusional. Crimea’s “capital” of Sevastopol was and is majority-Russian and the home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet for centuries. (In a blog post that I now much regret, I once likened it to San Diego and Guantánamo.) In Georgia, South Ossetia and Transnistria, there were arguable claims of discrimination, if not violence, against ethnically Russian residents. Yet today, once-plausible excuses for violence have become patently delusional: (1) so-called “Nazis” in Ukraine, a nation that once lost millions to Hitler and Stalin and is now run—quite well and courageously, thank you!—by a Jew, (2) the so-called “brotherhood” between Russia and Ukraine, refuted wordlessly by the devastation of Ukraine, its millions of refugees, and the noble sacrifices of its people in Putin’s war; and now (3) the “eagerness” to join Russia of people who have been fighting a brutal war against Russia since 2014 (Donestsk and Luhansk), or since Putin’s unprovoked invasion in February (the rest of Ukraine, including Kherson and Zaporizhzhia).

In the age of modern warfare, let alone nuclear weapons, we have seen this only once before. For all their depredations and crimes against their own people—and there were many—neither Mao nor Stalin brutally invaded and annexed neighboring sovereign nations without provocation. Since its founding in 1949, modern China has never invaded and annexed a neighboring nation. (Tibet and the Uighurs are inside its territory.) The only significant foreign wars in which China participated, in Korea and Vietnam, were proxy wars begun and escalated by foreign powers. Similarly, Stalin’s “invasion” of Europe and the Baltics was triggered by Hitler’s gratuitous invasion of the Soviet Union, in violation of a non-aggression pact.

So there is only one analogue to Putin in modern history: Adolf Hitler. Just as Hitler annexed Austria and the Sudetenland in what was then Czechoslovakia “peacefully,” so Putin annexed Crimea. Just as Hitler used troops and blitzkrieg to annex the rest of Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Poland, and parts of France, so Putin has annexed—or tried unsuccessfully to annex— the other parts of his growing stable of violently subject peoples.

It’s slowly dawning on our global leaders that Putin poses a direct threat to every human being on our planet. The mere use of tactical nuclear weapons in or around Ukraine could poison the air in Greater Europe with radioactivity and disrupt one of the world’s biggest breadbaskets for years, if not decades. In the worst case, it could lead to a strategic nuclear war that mains or extinguishes our species. The very least it would do is distract us, for years, from the principal and direst threat to our species: runaway global warming. That’s why global leaders, including Xi Jinping and Narendra Modi, have given Putin’s war the cold shoulder, despite contrary economic interests.

And yet there are those in the West who would cede more of Ukraine in the name of “peace.”

Have we learned nothing from Neville Chamberlain and World War II? Can we not see that aggression unanswered just grows and grows? Did the most terrible war in history, in which a years-long arms buildup and naked aggression were answered far too late, teach us nothing? Did the not-so-slow progression from Crimea and Georgia to today’s atrocities in most of Ukraine not provide ample warning?

Today, of course, the “wild card” is nuclear weapons. Putin has spooked the world with repeated threats to use them in Ukraine, and perhaps elsewhere, if the West thwarts his imperial dreams. But the human point is exactly the same: if you bow before a bold aggressor, catastrophe can ensue. Human psychology has not changed during our long trek from knives and spears to nuclear missiles.

At a basic human level, catastrophe is coming nearer. Bowing to an aggressor only encourages him. The fact that now the catastrophe, in the worst case, could be the self-extinction of our species doesn’t change human nature. Human male psychology dictates that violent aggression receive a swift and effective response.

So what to do? Isn’t it obvious? When a single man threatens not just global peace and security, but the survival of our entire species, he must be taken out by any means necessary. The needs and survival of our species outweigh the delusions of one man, no matter who and where he may be. (I write “man” deliberately. Can anyone imagine a woman acting as Putin has done?)

“What about sovereign immunity?” you ask. That’s the legal doctrine, long set in international law, that leaders of sovereign nations cannot be made deliberate targets in wartime. The rationale is simple and practical: if we do it to them, they’ll do it to us, and warring nations will become leaderless in the midst of chaos.

Let’s leave aside the practical point that “losing” leaders who force millions of otherwise peaceful and reluctant people into a brutal war might, in general, not be a bad thing. Let’s just focus on the present facts. Every rule has an exception, and Putin’s case (if he uses nukes) will be as extreme as one can imagine.

Our species and other leaders can live with an exception based on the facts of this case. President Biden, too, might become a target if he forcefully and gratuitously invaded Canada or Mexico, vowing to annex neighboring parts of them, on the pretext of “Nazis” or “socialists” gaining power there and, when his invasion bogged down, nuked them if they didn’t surrender.

I, too, may be delusional. But somehow I think President Biden, or any plausible successor (even the Demagogue), would stay safe under such a narrow exception to sovereign immunity. And Canada and Mexico would feel safer still.

There are stronger general reasons for this exception. First, we humans have reached a threshold of unprecedented danger. Our technology has become so powerful that we could—and we well might—extinguish ourselves with nuclear fire or runaway global warming of our own making. So the governance model of our ape ancestors, in which an alpha male ruled the tribe or clan absolutely, no longer works for us. We can’t allow one individual to lead us down the path toward extinction.

Second, the rule of sovereign immunity is an extension of the most egregious inequality of all. In the old days, just two centuries ago, the common soldier was left to die in agony on the field of battle while defeated kings, dukes and earls—as long as their wounds in battle were not immediately fatal—were led to safety and taken care of as prisoners. Later, while the common folk buried their dead, those leaders were exchanged for concessions of wealth and territory, then sent back to their estates and castles to live happily ever after. Or to make war again at their whim. Isn’t this picture a bit antiquated in the twenty-first century?

So if sovereignty doesn’t immunize the second coming of Adolf Hitler, the next question is a practical one. How? How can we rid ourselves of this meddlesome despot without letting him take as much of the rest of us down with him as he can?

The answer, I think, lies in a concept that is just now gaining traction in our collective minds: accurate weapons. I have written several essays on this subject, including this post for general theory, and this post with relevant examples. Accurate weapons might be our species’ salvation.

Ever since warfare began, our species’ weapons have become progressively more powerful and less discriminating in their victims. Each advance in defense—castles, tanks, armored ships, etc.—demanded more powerful weapons of offense—cannon, aerial bombing, submarines, etc. During the last century, war factories and eventually civilians became targets, at least in cities, as the ever-logical Germans developed the concept of “total war.” After all, don’t even farmers advance the enemy’s war effort by feeding the troops?

The reductio ad absurdum of this logical but inhumane reasoning was the 50-megaton hydrogen bomb. It can take out an entire city or county in mere seconds, with an ever-widening ring of radiation sickness and radiation-caused cancers expanding for decades thereafter. In the aggregate, this kind of weapon, along with its smaller nuclear counterparts, can extinguish our entire species by causing a “nuclear winter” and consequent crop failures for years, worldwide.

So the search for ever-more-powerful weapons has become a recipe for self-extinction. We cannot survive, let alone conquer, by inventing ever-more-ingenious machines capable of killing millions of us at once.

Salvation lies in the opposite direction, making smaller weapons that better discriminate among victims. If we want weapons to save us, we have to have accurate ones that can eliminate the homicidal, delusional and dangerous among us, whoever and wherever they may be. Enter small, stealthy nukes.

I’m not privy to US military secrets, so I don’t know for sure whether we have them. But we should. We have had stealthy aircraft since 1983, nearly four decades ago. Not to have applied that technology to missiles would have been military malpractice. And it has been at least eight years already since President Obama (wisely, in my view) funded a program to develop small nuclear weapons, including “dial-a-yield” (variable power) ones—a program that seems to have disappeared from our news without a trace.

If we did have such weapons, or a crash program to develop them, it would have been diplomatic malpractice not to have kept the entire program as secret as the Manhattan Project was in its day. Otherwise, it would have sparked a global arms race and undermined the progress of mutual nuclear disarmament going back to Reagan and Gorbachev. So if we do have such weapons, we can assume they are among the most closely guarded secrets in our nation’s history.

If we did have small, stealthy nukes, what could we do with them? Some would, of course, be designed for busting bunkers, a task for which they would be more effective than any conventional explosive. We could also design them to produce minimal radioactive fallout.

These weapons would be perfect for taking out the entire Kremlin, but leaving most or all of the rest of Moscow intact. They could obliterate Putin’s grotesquely opulent palace on the Black Sea coast in less than a second. In other words, they could take out the single individual who, by controlling a world-destroying arsenal of nukes and using some of them to realize delusional imperial dreams, poses the greatest threat to mankind’s survival and happiness in human history. And they could do so without much “collateral damage,” let alone the kind of worldwide suffering and devastation that our species endured in World War II. We ought not have to engulf the world in the flames or war, or even most of Europe, in order to rid ourselves of one meddlesome despot.

When would/should we use these weapons, if we have them? Mere threats, I think, should not be enough. With the capacity to take him out, we should treat Putin’s threats to use nukes as what they are, mere words. But if he steps over the line and actually uses nukes in warfare, that’s the time to use our arsenal of small, accurate weapons to eradicate this clear and growing threat to our species’ survival.

The alternative of giving Ukraine its own tactical nukes for use on the battlefield is unattractive for two reasons. First, it would only increase that part of Ukraine (and/or Russia!) lost to nuclear devastation and consequent radioactivity. Second, and most important, it might lead to a wider nuclear war, thereby contradicting the principle that individuals behind great evil should pay for it, not masses of relative innocents, including hapless conscripted soldiers. Wasn’t that the very principle that our trying Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg after World War II sought to establish?

If we don’t yet have small, stealthy nukes, we should develop them now, with the same energy and sense of urgency that underlay the Manhattan Project. The mere knowledge of their existence could stop individual leaders from taking evil, delusional actions that threaten species decimation or extinction. (So might mere credible threats of their use now.)

A small, slightly radioactive hole where the Kremlin sits now, or where now stand Putin’s near-Moscow dacha or Black Sea palace, would be a small price to pay for salvation from this maniac. It would serve as an epochal warning to other would-be perpetrators of great evil. It truly is past time for individual responsibility to replace the kind of brutal wars in which, throughout human history, millions of people have suffered and died for the the desperate ambitions of demented leaders.

End Note: How might nuking the Kremlin work? The sole purpose of this fateful act would be to insure the removal of Putin from power, permanently, with minimal collateral damage. If done properly, it ought not to trigger a species-extinguishing general exchange of strategic nuclear weapons.

There are several reasons why. First, if truly stealthy, even a few small nukes might pass unnoticed by Russian radar until just a minute or two before detonation. Second, so few nukes, so stealthy, would never produce the same radar signature as a hypothetical general exchange of dozens of strategic nuclear weapons. Third, the US could minimize the risk of triggering a strategic exchange by giving key military and political figures in Russia notice, either just before or immediately after impact, of the intent of the strike and its limitations.

Those warnings, plus immediate after-the-fact notice to Putin-skeptical Russian leaders and diplomats, could make several points clear: (1) the strike would entail no demand for territory or other concessions beyond a cease-fire in, and eventually orderly withdrawal from, Ukraine; (2) no one in the West wants a wider war, or to “take over” Russia or impair its sovereignty within its own territory, and (3) how Russia manages the aftermath and restructures its society is entirely up to Russians, preferably without the corrupt Mafia that has coalesced around Putin. Remaining Russian military leaders could verify, through satellites and other means intelligence, the lack of any strategic strike, unusual deployment of nuclear arms, or general mobilization of troops on the part of the US or the West. And the West might even offer to compensate the Russian state for the physical damage and the cost of the cleanup.

The goal would be to convince remaining Russian leaders that the sole purpose of the strike was to take out Hitler redux, leaving resolution of the Ukrainian conflict and Russia’s future to more reasonable leaders and its people. Who knows? The right people inside Russia might take the third chance to restructure Russian society for the benefit of all Russians, after their predecessors failed twice, once in the bloody 1917 Revolution and again after Mikhail Gorbachev’s much more peaceful perestroika.

By now it should be obvious that every human being on our planet has a stake in Russia’s transition to a successful, democratic and peaceful country, or at least to the “normal” country of which Yeltsin dreamed. If it takes a targeted assassination by high-tech means to reach this safe end, so be it. The survival and well-being of our species outweigh the delusions of one.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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Can Women Save Us?

Our human species faces two existential threats. The first is accelerating climate change of our own making. It appears to be reaching a tipping point (see this post, or this one for more detail). Beyond that point, it could become self-sustaining, even if and after we cut our carbon-dioxide emissions to zero.

The second existential threat is nuclear war. As nuclear technology and weapons proliferate, this threat is growing. Putin’s current nuke brandishing and North Korea’s and Iran’s rushes to grab nuclear weapons make this threat clear.

Both threats are unique in our species’ evolution and our recorded history. Both could decimate, if not exterminate, us by our own hands. Planetary heating and the weather catastrophes it causes know no national boundaries. Likewise, the consequences of nuclear war, including wind-driven fallout and “nuclear winter,” don’t stop at national frontiers.

So, as these threats mature, the victims won’t be just one nation or group or another, as in the past, but all of us. Both threats are species-wide: they do not discriminate among nations, tribes, races, or political ideologies.

A natural question then arises. Throughout history, men—nearly always—have run everything: tribes, nations, armies, businesses, churches, mosques, synagogues, schools, hospitals and first responders. It exaggerates nothing to say that men, as leaders, voters, and followers, have brought us to where we are. So, as women rise to not just to work in, but to lead, our various institutions, can they save us from our growing existential threats? Can they save us from our male selves?

Women have saved American democracy, quite recently. The “gender gap” in the 2020 presidential election was at least 9 percentage points. At least nine percent more women voted for Biden than the Demagogue. That’s over 4.5% of all voters.

In an election in which key states turned on low single-digit leads, that made the difference. Had the several States not ratified the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the vote, we might now be in the second year of the Reign of Donald I, Emperor of America, with Don Jr. and maybe Eric to follow, by right of heredity.

Let that sink in for a moment. Then think of the election to come. If we avoid a GOP takeover of Congress—or a gridlocked Congress with House and Senate divided—women will have made that happen. They are more motivated now, after the Demagogue-packed Supreme Court ripped away their rights to bodily autonomy.

Maybe the Demagogue wouldn’t actually call himself Emperor. But that’s what he would be in fact. Having learned well from his first term, he would have packed the federal bureaucracy, the courts and our military leadership with loyalists, ideologues and sycophants, ignoring credentials, character, expertise and basic competence. The only “character” our Demagogue values is loyalty, to him.

Over the past two years, our government would have come to resemble nothing so much as Vladimir Putin’s. And what demented soul could ever conceive of Putin as a woman, or a woman as doing what he’s done? Everything about him, from his consistent, calculated deception, through the little-man’s urge to stretch his height with gratuitous violence and terror, to his brutal war against decency and ordinary people in Ukraine, all scream “Macho Man." Putin is a modern Napoleon, with lots of nukes but without the original’s conscience or empathy for ordinary subjects.

But this essay is not about what or how. It’s about why. Why would fewer women than men vote for the Demagogue, whose self-evident goal was and is to rule by decree, by Tweet, and in his own interest. Why would they refuse, in greater numbers, to genuflect toward a man who would cure Covid with bleach and declassify documents by thinking about them? Why would so many more men than women vote for a man who (to resort to Obamanian understatement) has so many serious defects in character and competence? Bear with me: I have a theory.

The most dangerous substance in the Universe, I submit, is neither plutonium nor enriched uranium. It’s testosterone. Both males and females have it, but men have more, and their bodies use it in different ways. In men, testosterone promotes extraordinary physical effort, aggression and risk taking. It seems to promote action over caution and consideration.

Don’t just think of Putin. Think of his predecessors, going back to Genghis Khan: Ivan the Terrible, Henry VIII, Louis XIV, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and the Kims of North Korea. All have been willing, if not eager, to sacrifice human beings, even by the millions, for their personal power, dominance, ideology, crackpot schemes, or even vanity. How many similar female leaders in history can you name?

Next consider the great British Queens. Queen Elizabeth I took the reins of a small island nation riven by internecine warfare and assassination. In her reign as monarch, she transformed England into a (relatively) peaceful and prosperous paragon of learning, Enlightenment, exploration, commerce, trade, technology, science and industry.

The cultural changes that QEI supervised and promoted made Britain the shining light of human civilization for three centuries. We in America inherited the culture she nurtured, and it gave us our “American Century” and basic values, including the Bill of Rights. And that Queen’s late namesake, Queen Elizabeth II, has kept the flame of Enlightenment alive for most of a brutal century by her example alone, without any real political power at all, and with no direct way to ameliorate residual colonial nastiness. That’s why so many around the world are grieving her loss.

During the century or so of “women’s liberation,” it’s been fashionable to focus on how women can do all that men can, in civilizations where size and strength no longer matter outside of sports. But are there differences between women and men that matter, too? Might those differences actually confer advantages in leadership, promoting the survival of our species? Let’s analyze.

Women’s biological evolution has given them a different profile of risk and aggression. For at least several months in pregnancy, they suffer physical conditions that men would consider a disability, if not a disease. For years afterward, they bear primary responsibility for feeding, nurturing, caring for, and protecting infants as they grow into toddlers and children still too young to care for and protect themselves. So women’s biological role, which men can never completely fulfill, requires stability and continuity, if not peace, for over a decade. At a very basic level, women ensure the continuity of our species and our community life.

I know, I know. No two women are alike, and all deserve the right to choose for themselves what they do in life. An increasing number never have children, especially in developed nations. That’s probably a good thing: there are far too many of us already, so accelerating climate change may cut our human population the hard way. Women’s collective personal decisions to have fewer and smaller families may help avoid that fate.

Nevertheless, women’s chief biological role remains clear and unchanged. Men cannot bear children, and “test-tube babies” are too expensive and risky a thing to pin our species’ survival on.

There is another, more subtle consequence of child bearing and child rearing. Every day, women see and must manage conflicts of rival siblings as they grow. Women get practice at loving, caring for and managing all their children, even the weak, whimsical, wacky and warlike.

Perhaps that skill has waned a bit as families have gotten get richer and smaller, at least in developed nations. But it’s still a vital part of the biological role. Might that experience and skill have value as human tribes vie for space and survival on a planet whose habitable space is declining, and on which nuclear weapons threaten catastrophe?

The point here is not to put women in a cage disguised as a pedestal, as the late Justice Ginsburg once lamented. Nor is it to categorize them as all the same. It’s simply to recognize that biological inheritance and imperatives may make women less likely to take on potentially fatal risks like making war in the nuclear age, letting global warming run way past its tipping point just to squeeze every dollar out of fossil fuels, or unmasking in the middle of a pandemic.

Men, on the other hand, seem more inclined to take risks and be “decisive.” That’s especially so when the decision involves intense physical effort, like striking a tormentor, running into battle, cutting down a tree, crossing a raging river, or parachuting from a moving plane. Testosterone helps motivate and power physical feats of courage.

But here’s the rub. At our current level of civilization, “decisiveness” in physical feats is rapidly losing importance outside of sports. In everything else, we have to think and plan and calculate carefully in order to get things right.

That’s why environmental impact statements are so long. That’s why it’s taking years, if not decades, to solve our chronic housing shortage, clean up our air, and slow the acceleration of global warming. That’s why we have—and why we need—so many more scientists, engineers, planners, accountants, and arbiters, and so many fewer fighters and weight-lifters. There’s a lot of stuff to consider, and off-the-cuff decision making doesn’t work so well. Testosterone can be an impediment, except in “pumping iron.” (Sorry, Arnold!)

Maybe that’s why sports of all kinds—even women’s sports—are becoming so popular. They’re the only field of modern human endeavor in which the “decisiveness” and quick action that we evolved for individual survival have such obvious and enduring relevance. They’re the only field in which quick and decisive action, the quicker the better, is unambiguously good.

So we relish sports because they feel good. But woe unto us if our natural love of sports leads us to pick the slow-witted football hero Herschel Walker over the brilliant and empathetic Reverend Warnock as a legislator or cultural leader.

Outside of sports, testosterone-fueled “decisiveness” can be dangerous or deadly. Rudy Giuliani’s “manliness” in refusing to wear a mask when he appeared right after 9/11 motivated many first responders to do the same. (This was just the first of his many transgressions against science and common sense.) Many of the first responders who aped his machismo eventually suffered and died from various lung diseases. The same thing happened to military “burn-pit” victims whose commanders “decisively” ordered enormous quantities of toxic substances burned next to soldiers’ lodgings, just to “clean things up” and decisively deny the enemy unused property and the information in it.

The whole history of global warming, including its current acceleration, illustrates much the same point. In a “decisive” rush to exploit fossil fuels before they run out, we have lost decades in the race against time and warming. That crucial delay has made our species’ happiness and survival much more precarious, as we confront an irrevocable, planet-wide, climatological tipping point.

Men have been leaders throughout history for a simple biological reason. On the average, they are bigger and stronger physically than women. But that strength and size matter little in today’s human civilization. We no longer have significant animal predators. We no longer have to catch our food on the run: we grow it, both meat and plants. And strength and size matter little in modern mechanized warfare, let alone the nuclear kind. So you might say that men’s self-evident physical advantages are obsolete.

What matters now is almost entirely a matter of psychology and sociology. Job one is working together to curtail our emission of greenhouse gases as soon possible, as the habitable parts of our planet relentlessly retreat. Job two is accommodating and caring for—as humanely as possible—all the climate refugees that even now are becoming stateless migrants. Job three is learning to share the pain and pull the oars together in this greatest existential challenge of our species’ evolutionary history. And job four is, at a minimum, avoiding nuclear conflict as we adjust to the stress and suffering from all the above.

All these jobs require consummate pragmatism: putting practical progress way ahead of nationhood, ethnocentricism, xenophobia, partisanship, ideology and all the other irrelevant abstractions that men are so good at conceiving, debating and getting their fellow men to die for. In families, women don’t worry about these abstractions as much as about whether the kids are fed and well.

As for conflict, women have learned to resolve it and foster cooperation in families from time immemorial. We now have enough evidence that they are better than men at de-escalating personal conflicts in our neighborhoods and on our streets. Enlightened police departments across our nation are acting on that knowledge, hiring more women to serve as de-escalators before street conflicts sink to the level of police killings. And this approach seems to be working.

It’s ironic that it’s taken an epidemic of police killings—even outright murders—for Americans to recognize the value of women as peace-makers, organizers and leaders. It’s even more ironic that it took gross deprivation of their rights to bodily autonomy—not the evolutionary advantages of their gender—to get more of them to vote. But the fact is that the things at which women excel are essential to our species’ survival today: cooperation, peace-making, valuing practical progress over abstractions, and subordinating one’s individual ego to the common good. Male empire-building could literally kill us, just as it’s doing in Ukraine.

Even the best of our nearly-all-male oligarchs can’t save us. The billions they donate to curing disease and retarding global warming’s acceleration won’t be enough. The hundreds of millions that they donate to mindless political attack ads designed to maintain their social and economic advantages undermine, with one hand, the good they do with the other. More than ever, we need leaders that epitomize “feminine” values and mindsets. Our species’ happiness, even survival, now may depend on women realizing their full potential and gently taking charge.

A Counterexample: Liz Truss. For every accurate generalization, there are counterexamples. One relevant in this case appears to be Liz Truss, Britain’s new Prime Minister. I can’t decide whether she’s a cheap copy of Margaret Thatcher or Marjorie Taylor Greene with an IQ boost and a British accent.

But one thing about Truss is clear. Her ideas for “progress“—cutting taxes and regulation and cutting welfare benefits—are proven failures from the worst days of Reagan and Thatcher. Don’t take my word for it; take the word of Nobel-Prize-winning pundit Paul Krugman. He calls them “zombie Reaganomics”—ideas long killed by hard experience that keep rising from the dead.

So Truss’ choice by the British Tories—not the entire British electorate—proves only one thing: no generalization is completely accurate. Like Thatcher, Truss errs in trying to play the male, this time in elevating false and discredited abstract generalizations over practical reality. The last thing human civilization needs, as it fights the twin threats of nuclear extinction and accelerating global warming, is to fight an army of zombie ideas, too. In the end, all Truss’ selection proves is that neither gender is perfect or infallible. Both are susceptible to groupthink.

Instant Confirmation? I love it when mainstream pundits and/or news provide what appears to be quick confirmation of my views. Today, as I revised and finalized this post for publication, op-ed pieces by two of the New York Times’ most thoughtful commentators did just that.

Tom Friedman—he of the “Earth is getting flatter” persuasion—described how the two existential threats of our time interact. Putin’s atrocity in Ukraine, which today poses the greatest risk of nuclear escalation, is causing worldwide food, energy and material shortages, especially in the third world. Those shortages, in turn, are causing people to despoil the Earth’s remaining intact forests, one-third of which are protected by Indigenous people. So the macho-man’s vile personal crusade not only threatens nuclear war. It also helps accelerate climate change by destroying the forests that remove carbon dioxide from our warming atmosphere. The title of Friedman’s analysis is, “Putin’s War Is a Crime Against the Planet.”

The second bit of confirmation was more direct. Its author is Bret Stephens, a conservative, a Demagogue-loather and often a compellingly thoughtful writer. He described how women, driven by gratuitous assaults on their own and their families’ personal autonomy, are leading protests against leaders’ insanity in both Iran and Russia. Albeit a bit dismissive in our American case, his peroration suggests the extent to which women’s leadership is needed and effective worldwide:

“The West has had a women’s movement and a Women’s March. Now is the time for a Women’s Revolution in Iran and a Women’s Peace in Russia.”

The title of his op-ed is “Bring On the Women’s Revolutions.” As long as you include our far-from-complete revolution here at home, I couldn’t agree more.


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

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How Things Are (a Scientist’s View)

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.” — Pogo (main character from a long-forgotten late-twentieth-century comic strip)

Today our species faces two existential crises. The first is climate change that we ourselves are causing, and that seems to be entering a self-reinforcing positive-feedback phase. The second is our latest flirtation with nuclear war, sparked by Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine.

As we consider these twin risks of species decimation or self-extinction, I thought it might be useful, or at least interesting, to read how a person (me) whose “religion” is really science views the big issues.

There is no God. There is no kind father (or mother) in the sky. There is no one to answer our prayers. There is no one but us to save us from global warming and our warlike side.

How can we know? Well, would a kind, all-powerful mother or father urge us to kill each other in his/her name? The history of religion has been a tale of horrible wars: Christian against Jew, Muslim against Christian, Protestant against Catholic, all against non-believers. If our god were kind, just and smart, would he or she promote all that killing? revel in all that gore and untimely death? Or is “god” at times no more than another tribal excuse to fight, a good motivator to drive soldiers into mindless battle?

“God” is wishful thinking. It would be nice to have an all-powerful father or mother to look after you. But that’s a child’s dream.

We are grown up now. (Or if we don’t grow up soon we may die as children.) We can think on our own. Only we can fix our collective fate.

We are not at the center of the Universe. Pre-verbal children think they are the center of the Universe. They know only their own needs and pain. But as they acquire language, as their brains grow, and as they begin to socialize, they see that there are others like them.

It’s a slow process. It doesn’t end when we are adults. It continues for all our lives. Our inner life is a long struggle between our own needs and our consciousness of others’ needs. A strong awareness of others is what divides us from all other living species. We are a social species, more so than any other on our planet.

So now that we are grown, we can face a fact. We are nowhere near the center of the Universe. We live on a small planet, third from our medium-sized Sun, in an unremarkable solar system way at the end of a minor spiral arm of a rather small galaxy. There are billions of other galaxies, most bigger than ours, filled with trillions of stars like our Sun. We, our Earth, our Sun, and even our solar system are tiny specks in an unimaginably vast, ever-expanding Universe.

So in the grand scheme of things, we are utterly insignificant, an evolutionary blip in an ever-changing global biosphere on a tiny, inconsequential planet. We matter only to us.

We are alone. In such a vast Universe, there must be others like us. But, almost certainly, we will never know them.

Why? Light is the fastest thing in the Universe. It obeys a universal speed limit. It takes four years to get from our Sun to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, or vice versa. It has taken over thirteen billion years to get to us from the farthest stars and galaxies that we can see with the new James Webb (infrared) Telescope. So anything we could see from alien civilizations at that distance will be thirteen-billion-year-old history. It would make our own ancient archaeology look like live news.

Faster-than-light travel is fiction. It’s just a wish of childhood, like that big Mom or Dad in the sky. Never say never, of course. But all that we know now says that there’s no such thing. Nothing moves faster than light.

Our entire recorded history as a species is about 5,000 years long. And we are on the verge of killing ourselves off, in at least the two ways named in my introduction.

So you do the math. If we can survive as long again as our recorded history, what’s the chance that we can contact another species like us, at a similar point of social development, within 5,000 light years, when the Universe, as far as we know, is nearly 14 billion light-years wide? What’s the chance that another intelligent species, at or beyond our own stage of development, would notice us and spend decades or centuries—not to mention prodigious amounts of energy—just to visit us? Not big.

So while there may be others like us in fact, it’s improbable that we will ever see them. For all practical purposes, we are on our own. There is no intelligent, alien life form ready to invade our planet, or able and willing to save us from our own folly.

We are not as smart as we think we are. Albert Einstein was so smart they preserved his brain for study after he died. When they examined it, they saw something strange. In the rest of us, the groove that divides the brain’s left and right hemispheres is empty. (It’s a groove, called the “sulcus.”) In Einstein’s brain, it was full of neurons, so his left brain and right brain were more fully connected. So far as we know, no other person, living or dead, ever had such a brain.

So Einstein’s brain was a freak of Nature, a mutation, one of a kind. He alone was able to conceive of gravity as the curvature of spacetime, in four dimensions, perhaps because he alone could visualize anything over our usual three. Yet even Einstein didn’t understand quantum mechanics—a fact he readily admitted. At one time, he even rejected its probabilistic nature, declaring, “God does not play dice[.]”

Sure, we are working with quantum mechanics. Americans are racing the Chinese to build quantum computers. But we don’t understand it in anything like the same way that we “ken” gravity. It’s not “intuitive.” We can’t see it. We can’t feel it. And we certainly didn’t need to know it the same way we needed to know gravity, speed and acceleration to escape saber-tooth tigers and survive.

So we didn’t evolve to understand quantum mechanics. We’ll never ken it the same way that we do our artificial satellites revolving around our Earth as does the Moon. We need mental prostheses, aka “computers,” to collect, record and make sense of the otherwise incomprehensible results of our experiments. We have to feel it out from different angles, like the ten proverbial blind men touching different parts of an elephant. That makes learning slow and difficult.

The same is true of microbiology. Our own genome—our DNA—has about three billion base pairs. No one can remember a sequence that long. No one can even count that high. If we hadn’t already developed digital computers that can, genomic medicine would be out of our reach. But with our digital prostheses, our grapefruit-sized brains can make progress working with our genomes to cure disease. Maybe someday we can even improve ourselves.

“Artificial Intelligence” (AI) won’t help as much as we hope, or hurt as much as we fear. We don’t really have anything like “artificial intelligence” now. What we have is “simulated intelligence.” No computer has anything like the incredibly massively parallel structure of the human brain.

Each brain of ours has 86 billion neurons, each of which can connect directly to 10,000 others. (Some say up to 100,000, so apparently this number is not yet well known.) No computer has anything like that structure. Computers can “look” intelligent because they operate so much faster than biological systems like us. But they aren’t now—and they may never be—anything like our brains. They won’t, and probably can’t ever, give us an intuitive “feel” for how the submicroscopic world works, like the “feel” we have for motion on our own scale. They won’t ever make quantum mechanics intuitive.

The threat of AI is real, but it’s mostly under our control. As long as we don’t put AI in charge of weapons or life-critical systems, without human supervision in real time, we will probably be safe.

But “in real time” is an important condition. In the “2010 flash crash” in American stock markets, dueling automated trading algorithms caused the Dow to crash over 1,000 points before anyone could do anything. Automated stops required by regulation halted the crash. Real people had to unwind the millions of bizarre transactions, slowly and laboriously, after the fact. If lives had been at stake, rather than share prices, a lot of people would have died.

How we use AI is up to us. If we use it with care, as yet another mental prosthesis, it can help us manage parts of our world that we can never “get” intuitively. Already it is helping with things like making cancer diagnoses from medical images in ways our limited eyes and brains can’t manage. It can help us use, but not understand, quantum mechanics.

But if we let it control life-critical functions in real time, we can bring unimaginable disaster upon ourselves. Letting AI-driven cars loose on our roads at this stage of AI’s development would fall into the disaster category.

There are far too many of us already. The central fact of our species now is overpopulation. We are changing our world with global warming. We are wiping out other species at an unprecedented rate, even as we depend on many for food, clothing, shelter, companionship and pleasure. We are polluting the world we have, not just with greenhouse gases, but with ever-present chemicals that don’t appear in nature and that can last far longer than any biological organism.

We have no idea how much our plastic particles and hidden chemicals (such as BPA and the PFAS) are affecting our own biology and the biology and survival of other creatures. Some of these chemicals, we now know, have strong effects on our own biology, including critical hormone systems. So we are rolling the dice with health and global evolution, including our own.

None of these problems would magically go away, even if, by some sort of magic, we cut our global population to one-half or one-quarter. But we are rushing headlong in the wrong direction. China has given up its one-child policy. The US Supreme Court has ruled that women can be forced, willy nilly, to become baby machines. Economists worldwide are urging nations with aging populations to have more babies and grow in number, the better to maintain their workforces.

The biblical injunction to “go forth and multiply” was good when our species was young. It’s suigenocide (species-wide suicide) today. Yet on it goes.

We are making our world smaller. No, we can’t change the Earth’s physical size, no matter what we do to destroy it. Even a general nuclear war wouldn’t change that.

But the part of our Earth we can live on is another story. One-third of Pakistan was recently under water. If the floods that made it so recur every year, or even every other year, that part will be practically uninhabitable. So may large parts of southern China, which this year had drought severe enough to cause massive crop failures. (Together with Russia’s war in Ukraine, this part of the climate crisis is likely to cause global food shortages next year.) This summer, large parts of the Arabian peninsula experienced extended periods of over-125°F days; that’s over 51.7 °C.

I could go on and on. But the point is simple. Climate change is already here. Its effects are growing, and it appears to be accelerating. The theory of positive feedback tells us that it could continue to accelerate, even if we stopped pumping out carbon dioxide tomorrow, something that will not happen. So we are probably doomed to having large parts of our planet become uninhabitable within decades.

We are approaching a Big Die-Off. We are already too many for our small planet. What happens when the parts we can live on get smaller, in a random and possibly sudden way?

Biology has answers when species outgrow their habitats. We’ve seen the same results over and over again. A population “crash” follows, usually quite suddenly. The immediate causes can be famine, predation by other species, disease, or internal struggle within the species. These things continue until the population shrinks into equilibrium with its habitat.

In the case of us humans, predation is out. We have no predators, at least none that threaten our numbers or exponential population rise. But we have disease. We will soon have famine. And our own internal struggles, aka “wars,” are so much fiercer than other species’. They could decimate our global population or, if nuclear, even extinguish us entirely.

All of these catastrophes are possible, and some are already happening. We are just (we hope) emerging from a relatively light pandemic. But we were lucky. The Black Plague in the Middle Ages killed off an estimated one-third of the entire population of Europe. That fraction would mean 110 million Americans today.

The Black Plague spread slowly because horseback was the quickest means of travel then. Today, airplanes can travel halfway around the globe in less than a day. (Airplanes are unprecedented disease vectors. They have flown long distances only for about a century.) So if a deadly viral pandemic evolves with an incubation period longer than a day, it can cover the entire globe in just a few days. Our global population could crash the hard way.

Wars are nothing new to us. Putin’s atrocious war in Ukraine is going on right now. And our species’ exploding population provides a practical motivation for it: Ukraine has lots of iron and other minerals and is the traditional “breadbasket” of Western Eurasia. So Putin’s imperial dreams are the same that have motivated aggressors throughout history. The excuses of Slavic “brotherhood” and fictional “Nazism” in modern Ukraine are just distracting lies.

But war’s economic effects are far more consequential and devastating today than ever before, in part because our entire species, worldwide, is far more connected and interdependent economically. Already Putin’s war in Ukraine is causing food shortages and famine in Africa and parts of Eurasia. China’s climate-change-caused crop failures will undoubtedly increase the misery and its geographic reach.

Today, war is far more brutal, because our weapons are far more powerful, than ever before. War is, to put it mildly, inhumane. A war like Putin’s terrorizes innocent civilians and destroys their lives, homes and infrastructure as a matter of “strategy.” That’s why fence-sitters and coddlers of Russia, like the leaders of China, India and Turkey, all have condemned it, at least by implication.

Meeting with Putin, India’s Narendra Modi put it most succinctly: “Today’s era is not an era of war.” Why? Because we are going to need all our species’ strength, intelligence and attention to limit the damage from the catastrophe of accelerating global warming.

War may be a practical means of adjusting population to habitat. But so was the Holocaust, as Ken Burns brilliant series on it reminds us.

Both methods are inhumane and inhuman. Both miss the point: if our species is to survive at our present level of civilization or anything like it, we are going to have to find better means to reduce populations. We must learn to work together.

We are all the same. Modern science leaves no doubt. Biologically, we humans are all virtually the same. Our DNA is 99.6% identical. The biggest differences we have as groups are the results of language, culture, nutrition, education and upbringing. Nurture matters far more than nature: that’s why early-childhood nutrition and education are vital not just to national strength, but to equality of opportunity.

The notion of “race” is a myth. It may be the most pernicious myth in human history. There is no “race.” There are only infinite variations in the 0.4% of our DNA that differ from individual to individual.

We have much, much larger differences in nutrition, education, culture, language, medical care, and upbringing. The more we level the playing field in those practical things—which are under our control—the more we can exploit all of our human talent to solve our common global problems. Despite the naysayers, the melting pots that both England and the US have become vividly demonstrate the practical advantages of biological diversity, which all ecologists know.

In the global crisis that we ourselves have made, tribalism is our greatest enemy. It seems to be innate in us. Social scientists have been able to “divide” three-year-olds into entirely artificial rival “tribes” by giving them orange or green T-shirts. Once that is done, kids from one “tribe” start to make invidious assumptions about kids from the “other,” based on pictures showing ambiguous situations.

We can overcome this apparently species-wide defect by exploiting our chief evolutionary advantages: cooperation and intelligence. This is our species’ chief test, for now and the foreseeable future. If we split into tribes and act as such, wars, genocides and future holocausts are virtually inevitable as the habitable parts of our globe diminish. Species self-extinction is entirely possible, if not likely.

There is no God but Jesus was real. And so we come to the bottom line: we can reduce the acceleration of global warming and adjust our population to our globe’s declining habitable space in several ways. We can wait for a deadly pandemic to cull us. We can wait for inevitable famine and displacement to do their worst, with all the mass migration, struggle and probable wars that global-scale famine and displacement will cause. Or we can do the job directly, with gratuitous wars like Putin’s or repeating something like the Nazis’ Holocaust, with all the ensuing suffering, moral degradation, and the risk of nuclear conflict and species self-extinction.

But there is a better alternative. We can take the smarter path, and work together. We can exploit our species’ most important evolutionary advantage. It’s not our puny, slow and weak bodies that made us masters of this planet. It’s not our grapefruit-sized brains: whales’ and elephants’ are bigger. It’s our ability to communicate in detail, cooperate and empathize, far more than other species.

We don’t really know who Jesus was. Recorded only centuries later, the words we think he said were likely a product of massaging and messaging by monks over generations. But his reported bumper-sticker advice is sound. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” “Love thy enemy.”

We can translate these New-Testament words into modern biological terms. Then they would read: “Use thy chief evolutionary advantages as much as possible, and do it so thyself and thy neighbor both are highly motivated (and able) to survive the worst to come.”

Expressed that way, Jesus’ advice is practical and scientific. We can fight overpopulation, pandemics, the warmongers among us, and climate change if we cooperate, share the pain, and share the success. No other way promises more success with less pain, less devastation, and less risk of species self-extinction.

If we all work together, globally, as one species, we can get through this crisis with a minimum of pain and harm. We don’t have to believe that Jesus ever lived—let alone that he was the Son of God—to see that his advice, as reported, is the best and only practical way forward.


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The Great Black Rescue

It’s an ironic twist of history that only a writer of fiction could dream up. But it’s real. We are living the Great Black Rescue.

No, I don’t mean a rescue of Black people, although that eventually might be part of it. I mean a rescue of our Republic, and therefor of all of us, by a small number of Black Democrats.

These Black Democrats are leading the fight to save our democracy, our rule of law, and order and decency in our land. They are doing so with intelligence and finesse. As they work, they distinguish themselves from the rank-and-file of both parties, who seem incapable of doing more than complain about what the opposition does.

How so? Let me count the ways. First, consider the House Committee investigating the January 6 Insurrection. Who leads it? Bennie Thompson, Congressman from Mississippi for 29 years. Yes, he famously has help from Republicans Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, but he’s the Chair and sets the agenda. The story of his and his Committee’s work is still being told. Perhaps it will produce an October surprise.

Who are the only government attorneys yet to lead serious investigations into the other transgressions of our unrepentant and still-defiant Demagogue? There’s Fani Willis, District Attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, which contains Atlanta. She’s investigating the Demagogue’s 2020 order to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn Georgia’s election of President Biden. That call was taped.

Then there’s Alvin Leonard Bragg, Jr., the District Attorney of New York County. While (so far) refusing to open a criminal investigation, he’s investigating the Demagogue and his cronies for civil offenses, including massive fraud.

Some bemoan Bragg’s refusal (so far) to bring criminal charges, but here’s the deal. Criminal convictions require proof “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Civil charges require proving only that the offense was “more likely than not.” That’s why OJ Simpson won acquittal for his wife’s murder but lost a civil suit, big time. Wouldn’t it be poetic justice to apply that same principle to bring the Demagogue down?

More than that, in New York State juries need not be unanimous in civil cases. Only ⅚ of the jurors need concur. So whereas a single, secret admirer of the Demagogue on a criminal jury could force a retrial of a criminal charge, it would take three to do so in a civil case.

So maybe there’s method in Bragg’s seeming timidity. If all criminal charges founder on the rocks of reasonable doubt and non-unanimous juries, Bragg might still succeed in bankrupting the Demagogue and destroying his phony reputation as a business genius. And don’t forget that civil juries can award punitive damages, without meeting the criminal standard of proof.

Giving the Demagogue his just desserts is only the tip of the iceberg. Our nation’s most important task is reforming our government, especially the Senate, to make it more, not less, democratic (with a small d). We can’t do that without keeping the Senate in Democratic (big D) hands and killing the filibuster. And we can’t kill the filibuster without electing two more Democratic senators and so making Senators Manchin and Sinema irrelevant.

Here’s where the Great Black Rescue shines like the rising sun. Four superbly qualified Black Democrats are running solid, close races for Senate seats, three in the Deep South. The Reverend Raphael Warnock is running in Georgia as the incumbent, having won a special election in 2020. Cheri Beasley is running for an open seat in North Carolina, and Mandela Barnes is running in Wisconsin against Ron Johnson, who beat progressive Russ Feingold in 2010. As once the Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, Beasley is well placed to restore and uphold the rule of law and to make positive change that will survive legal challenge. Barnes is now Lieutenant Governor and a Wisconsin progressive affiliated with the Working Families Party. And Val Demings is running to defeat Marco Rubio in Florida.

If only three of these four win, and if no other incumbent Democratic senator loses, Manchin and Sinema will no longer be able to save the filibuster. This horrible anti-democratic anachronism, which appears nowhere in our Constitution, and which Republicans have used at 142 times the historic rate, will fall into the wastebasket of history where it belongs.

And if the Dems keep control of the House, wholesale reform of our Democracy can ensue. The Dems can: (1) make voting easier for all and reduce gerrymandering nationwide; (2) fix our broken immigration system and bring DACA recipients some stability; (3) write women’s bodily autonomy and same-sex marriage into federal law; (4) impose fair taxes on corporations and the rich; (5) raise more of our children out of poverty; (6) double down on fighting climate change and bringing our national research establishment and industrial base into the twenty-first century; and (7) make our public-health system readier not just to subdue Covid-19, but to fight the next pandemic.

In other words, if the Dems extend their Senate majority by two votes and keep the House, we can have a whole new nation. Chronic minority rule will fade into history, and our majority can get on with the business of making America stronger, more democratic, more equal, and more free.

Last but by no means least, there’s Stacy Abrams. She works quietly and without fuss. Unlike so many Republicans, she doesn’t grandstand or mouth off. She’s developed an entire person-to-person “ground-game” in Georgia and neighboring states. Her work threatens to make social media in all its craziness obsolete: it bypasses cheap rage and resentment and gets people to educate themselves and solve real problems in small-group or individual settings. It can create a political system that raises everyone up, rather than keeping some on top and some down.

Abrams is a brilliant political strategist working in relative obscurity and counting on the element of surprise. She hails from Georgia, the heart of the Old South, and the focus of regional resentment since Sherman’s March to the Sea. If she becomes governor of Georgia—the first Black woman ever to lead that state—her victory alone will make a sea change in America.

From slavery, through Jim Crow, segregation, and economic marginalization to the present half-enlightened day, the South has always been the key to America’s success. When its legacy of racism and bossism prevailed, all Americans suffered. As that legacy wanes, we can all shine.

So Abrams’ victory in Georgia could presage a new era in American politics. That era won’t be wildly progressive because Abrams and other Democrats have to be moderate to win. But it will be fair, honest, open, forward-looking and (most of all) democratic with a small d. It can get things done.

That’s what’s at stake in this election. With Joe Biden as president, Republicans have to sweep the board to win. Even if they take both the House and Senate, their “victory” will be pyrrhic: they won’t be able to do much nationally against a presidential veto. They can only press on with their lies and propaganda. But the Dems have many ways to win, and brilliant candidates to lead them.

Just compare Reverend Warnock to his opponent, Herschel Walker, or Cheri Beasley to Ted Budd, to see how much the “brain gap” and “competence gap” favor the Dems. All their states must do is put aside their recidivism and football fervor for one election, and we can all enjoy a New South.

The vital question is how many of us are ready, even eager, to accept the Great Black Rescue and be part of it. How many of us want to see this nation transformed into what Jefferson’s words promised, but have never yet achieved? How many of us want to see our nation become a real democracy, rather than one in name only?

I do, and I hope you do, too. If you do, please contribute, help, and register and vote as if your future and your nation’s greatness depended on your doing so. They do.


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An Axis of Good

What nations today are the strongest and truest exponents of democratic and Enlightenment values?

The US is teetering on the brink of authoritarian government and theocracy, so it can’t qualify. Anyway, our Constitution perpetuates minority rule. Today it’s getting worse—much worse—with gerrymandering, voter suppression and the filibuster’s massive overuse. A democracy struggling to survive is hardly a shining example. (We won’t even mention the epidemic of gun violence that makes Americans feel unsafe.)

Latin America’s largest “democracy,” Brazil, is busy burning down the Amazon, the Earth’s lungs, under the toxic masculinity of Jair Bolsonaro. Britain left the solidarity of the EU under a buffoonish Boris Johnson, now gone. Under Liz Truss, it’ll apparently be walking backward toward a Reaganesque “trickle down” economy. India’s current Hindu nationalism and marginalization of its huge Muslim population (bigger than Pakistan’s!) hardly qualifies it. France has failed to stand up well against the world’s latest violent bully, Putin’s Russia. And Australia (the world’s coal baron), Canada and New Zealand each have too few people to carry much weight.

So, as ironic and strange as it may seem, the two strongest and truest champions of democratic values today may be the old “Axis” powers, which lost in World War II: Japan and Germany.

This truth hit me hard, while watching a recent PBS Newshour feature. It told the story of aging Jewish refugees from Ukraine, survivors of the Holocaust. They found refuge from Putin’s atrocities, a warm welcome, and temporary succor in Germany, of all places—the long-ago author of the Holocaust and the nation that had once massacred their relatives and most of their townspeople.

Historical ironies abound. But let’s look at the facts today, in Germany first. Under Angela Merkel, Germany completed its contrition for its wartime atrocities. It has monuments to the Holocaust. It teaches its children all the horrors of the Holocaust and makes it a crime to deny them. Gilded paving stones in every city and town mark the names and deportation dates of people sent to the Death Camps.

But contrition for past sins is only the beginning. Germany led Europe in accepting and successfully assimilating over a million migrants from Africa and the Middle East. Under its Energiewende (energy transformation) Germany leads Europe in moving toward renewable energy. Today, albeit after a slow start, it’s leading Europe, if not the world, in transitioning from Russian gas and oil to pressure Russia to stop its atrocities in Ukraine. As time goes on and fossil fuels begin running out and getting more expensive, these efforts will only increase the relative strength of Germany and the EU that it now leads.

Germany’s democratic strength extends to its workers. It has strong labor unions, which appoint directors to most of its major corporations. Those directors have real influence. As a result, the ratio of CEO to average-worker pay in Germany in 2018 was about half that in the United States, and the difference is even more striking today.

Germans have a justifiable fear of debt and inflation, stemming from the horrendous Weimar Inflation that motivated Hitler’s rise. Nevertheless, they’ve been going into debt to help keep their less fiscally sound partners in the EU afloat. Olaf Scholz may lack charisma, but he leads a powerful, wealthy, technologically advanced nation that daily promotes cooperation with its neighbors and other democratic and Enlightenment values.

Japan is less well known to most Americans but better known to me. While teaching law in Hawaii for eleven years (1986-1997), I traveled often to Japan. I even learned to read its two alphabets and about 300 of its unique Chinese characters (kanji). Three things stick in my mind.

First, Japan has a unique system for distributing goods internally. It has mostly resisted the inroads of big-box stores like Costco and Wal Mart, as well as online retailers like Amazon. In their places, Japan relies on a vast sea of small, local stores, at least one in every neighborhood. These are run and staffed by people who know their customers intimately and can give them personal service.

Japan has saved this seemingly outdated system for good and human reasons: it provides full employment for a large and aging population, and it serves the needs of customers on an intimate, personal level. Think about that the next time you’re on the telephone with a useless AI repeating the same useless “information” for the nth time and refusing to connect you to a human being.

In one of these stores, which sold stationery among other things, I once found a stack of brightly colored envelopes with colored fringes that folded over to close them. I asked the store owner, who spoke some English, what they were for. He explained that they are used to send cash through the mail, in crisp, new 10,000-yen notes (each worth about $100), as is the custom in Japan. The brightly-colored envelopes, he said, reveal their contents so that postal workers can take special care of them.

The third thing to note is an experiment I made on my last trip to Japan, just pre-pandemic, in the Meguro district of Tokyo. I wanted to see how Japanese pedestrians avoid bumping into each other on Tokyo’s jam-packed sidewalks. So I feigned being drunk or sick and stumbled around in random directions, avoiding eye contact with everyone.

No one touched me. No one bumped into me. The endless stream of fast-walking pedestrians parted for me as if they were the Red Sea and I was Moses. I concluded that Japanese look out for each other as an ingrained part of their culture, at least on the crowded sidewalks of Tokyo.

Two more incidents cemented my understanding of the Japanese sense of responsibility and accountability. In one, my heart sank as I left a crowded Japanese shinkansen (bullet train) only to realize that I had dropped my wallet inside. My heart rose again as a Japanese passenger—a complete stranger—emerged from the train, bowed, handed me my wallet, and went back in just as the doors closed. In the second, a clerk at a hotel accidentally broke the glass inside my insulated bottle while helping me put ice in. Asking me to wait a bit (“Chotto matte, kudasai!”), he literally ran across the street to a department store. He returned minutes later, bowing, with a larger, more expensive, brand new insulated bottle made entirely of stainless steel. Of course he would not think of being reimbursed. (In another similar incident, a taxi driver who had trouble finding my hotel wouldn’t let me pay.)

Perhaps we Americans can learn better from Japan’s uniquely Asian culture. But both Japan and Germany rely more on community and collective values, and less on individual ego, than we do. Maybe a culture that raises Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, the latest song or film star, and You Know Whom to the status of gods can learn something about democracy from both.

At the end of the day, it’s not hard to make the case for Germany and Japan as global bulwarks of democracy. After the US under Joe Biden, Germany is leading the resistance to Russian depredation in Europe. Japan is a bulwark against Chinese bullying in Asia. The two governments and their respective cultures are the antitheses of a brutal Russian autocracy and a Chinese totalitarian state that electronically “grades” its citizens on (among other things) whether they jaywalk and how reliably they charge their cell phones.

What I want to know is why, at this particular moment in history, if you had to choose national saviors of democracy, you would choose these two old Axis powers. What makes them special?

What are Germany and Japan both known for, worldwide? What has characterized both, about equally, since the War? Isn’t it the quality of their engineering and manufactured products? But why should that matter? I have a theory, so bear with me.

In another essay, I have outlined how the “financialization” of the US and Britain—i.e., their transitions to mostly-service-based economies, especially reliant on finance—is weakening them. Abandoning manufacturing to low-wage nations is hurting the Anglo-American “democratic” world economically, militarily, and practically. But there’s yet another facet of this weakness, in the mind.

When you work with tangible things with your own hands, tangible evidence of cause and effect, aka “responsibility,” is never far away. If you don’t wear your gloves, you can cut or burn your hands. If you don’t temper a metal piece after firing, it can grow soft. If you don’t tighten all the fasteners, a part can come loose or break. More generally, if you cut corners, things can go wrong.

Practical experience with things also teaches you about the relative likelihood of causes for effects. It teaches you about Occam’s Razor (the simplest reason is probably the right one) or what doctors tell themselves in diagnosing illness: “If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.”

If a joint is weak, it’s probably because of the screw whose threads you stripped but which you didn’t replace, not metal fatigue. If parts you make don’t fit together, it’s probably because you calculated or measured wrong, not because your tools or machines are defective. As you work to solve tangible problems that you see, you learn to distinguish real from bogus causes, and your ability to tell the difference gets better with time.

Working with practical, tangible stuff trains you to detect cause and effect automatically, by observation and experiment. It also trains you “see” with both your eyes and hands. It lets you estimate the likelihood of different possible causes for an effect and to eliminate proposed “causes” that are too exotic or don’t make sense.

Finally, working with tangible things keeps you honest with yourself. If your three-legged stool tilts, you can’t just wish or explain the tilt away; you have to shorten the offending leg. If your bicycle rattles, you have to find and eliminate the source of the noise.

In contrast, when you work with abstractions, as many do in a “service” economy, there’s no easy way to see when a cause for an effect is unlikely to be the right one. Does pandemic relief cause inflation, when it barely replaces lost salaries, if at all? “More money raises prices,” sounds plausible, but does it make sense when the money granted doesn’t replace even what was lost? Money doesn’t gain some special magic quality because it comes from the government.

There’s no tangible proof of the flaws in this sort of logic, like the tilting stool. And so economists and pundits neglected the elephant in the room: the fact that our Fed and the European Central Bank have been holding interest rates at historic lows (mostly fractions of a percent) for most of fourteen years. (Both the Fed and the ECB appear to be correcting this error by raising rates and promising to do so again.)

Unfortunately, software doesn’t help. The ongoing transition from mechanical control to controlling computers and devices with software only makes the problem of thinking worse. Why? Because software is nonlinear. It doesn’t work like tangible things. Errors are not proportional to the things that cause them. A single missing parenthesis in a line of code can make a whole program nonfunctional. An error in logic can produce bizarre results that take thousands of hours to diagnose and fix. An error in the theory underlying the logic may take even longer. (See Elon Musk’s Autopilot.)

Like our bodies, our brains evolved in a physical world. We can see and feel cause and effect there. When we move on to the abstractions that we have created in our writing and our software, discerning the right or even the most likely cause gets harder. And so we come to extreme views of causation like those in conspiracy theories about Jewish space lasers and Democratic pedophile rings. It could happen, right? And there’s nothing in the tangible, visible world to give it the lie.

My hypothesis here is that people who work with both their hands and their minds acquire a better, more sensible, grasp of cause and effect because our brains evolved to handle tangible things and escape from visible, tangible threats. People who only provide “services,” who live and work in a sea of abstractions, can come to, or passively accept, some really bizarre conclusions.

So maybe there’s a correlation between Japan’s and Germany’s reputations for excellent engineering and superior physical products and their current status as the world’s best exemplars of democracy and Enlightenment values. After all, democracy, full employment, workers’ rights and human rights are not just abstractions pulled out of the blue. People seem to work better in societies that give them a say in their governance and treat them with respect. Businesses seem to work better when they pay workers adequately and treat them as people, not inanimate factors of production or inputs to another abstraction called profit. Maybe people and cultures that actually make machines work better can understand these truths better than others. It sure seems that way.

Endnote: A Possible Linguistic Reason. There is another possible reason for Japan’s and Germany’s uniqueness as exemplars of democracy: their languages. To my knowledge, Japanese and German are unique languages (at least among major powers) in putting their verbs at the end of sentences. To me as a native speaker of English, that’s a case of delayed gratification, linguistically and culturally enforced.

In recent years, psychologists have proven that young children’s ability to delay gratification is highly predictive of their success in later life, in things as varied as school, career, lifetime earnings, marriage and family. (The testers give a child, alone in a room, one piece of candy with a promise to provide a second if the first has not been eaten when the tester returns after a few minutes.) If a child’s ability to delay gratification can predict later success throughout life, what about a culture whose language enforces a kind of delayed gratification in the very act of speaking, writing, and thinking?

Neither Japan nor Germany invented democracy. Neither had it in its early history; ancient Rome the ancient Greeks were first. Both Japan and Germany learned it late in their long histories, starting in the early twentieth century. Yet today the two are the strongest remaining exemplars of democracy in a very turbulent and troubled time. Can the facts that both are also seen as global leaders in engineering, and that both have languages uniquely incorporating delayed gratification, be mere coincidence?


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