Unprepared!

“Be prepared.” — The Boy Scout Motto

Some 31 years ago, an American political philosopher named Francis Fukuyama published a book about the “end of history.” The Soviet Union had just collapsed of its own dead weight, and he predicted the dominance of democracy. He saw our entire human species as sailing into a golden sunset of global peace, cooperation and progress in science and the arts.

Unfortunately, things didn’t work out that way. Today, our species’ condition and prognosis exemplify the biblical injunction: “Time and chance happeneth to them all.”

Today we face a new era of global conflict. We see an unfolding Russian imperialism like that of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But this time we face a stronger tyrant with nuclear weapons.

If the truth be told, even that menace is not the worst we face. The consequences of runaway global warming and a really deadly pandemic could be a lot worse. Indeed, mass displacement, migration and decimation caused by a climate change or a new pandemic could trigger the final Armageddon among Matthew Arnold’s “ignorant armies clash[ing] by night.”

How can we rank our existential threats? It’s not easy. Any one could maim or decimate us. And by “us” I mean our entire human species, not just us Americans.

Only a general nuclear exchange could totally extinguish us. That’s more probable now than at any time since October 1962. The threat of artificial intelligence controlling weapons makes even science-fiction’s doomsday scenarios possible. But we can hope that that’s the least probable menace, if only because it’s totally within our control. The others are not.

So let’s not presume to rank our existential threats. Let’s just list them.

I would put runaway global warming at the very top. It’s not merely probable: it’s happening right now and appears to be accelerating. We don’t know how it might end, but an Earth made habitable only poleward of the Arctic and Antarctic Circles is entirely possible. Imagine the horrors of migration, famine, disease, and wars required to reach “equilibrium” as that awful outcome unfolds, not to mention the vastly increased risk of nuclear war along the way.

Second is a new pandemic, perhaps a variant of the H5N1 avian flu now killing tens of millions of birds around the world. Imagine an airborne virus, capable of infecting humans, with an 80% mortality rate, transmitted around the world by aircraft in days or weeks. With mRNA technology, we have the means to create genetically “programmed” vaccines in record time, perhaps even months. But we have done nothing at all (so far as I’m aware) to create a plan to prevent our air travel from becoming the fastest and most effective viral vector ever to maim any species on our planet.

Third is the new imperialism. With all the progress in democratic theory, we humans have yet to give up our evolutionary bent toward alpha male rule. And so, just ninety years after the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazis, we have a Russian leader whose unprovoked aggressions and military atrocities are indistinguishable from Hitler’s. Even his justifications are much the same, although (in a case of pure projection) he accuses his victims—led by a Jew!—of being Nazis.

One especially vile aspect of this Russian bestiality has gotten little notice. Russia’s most effective fighting force is a band of tens of thousands of mercenary soldiers (The exact number is unknown.) led by a Russian oligarch named Yevgeny Prigozhin. His mercenaries come in part from prisons, penal colonies, and marginalized Russian minorities. They are in the thick of the brutal crimes against civilians and civil infrastructure in Ukraine. And Prigozhin himself reportedly claims to be responsible for the relentless Russian cyber-assaults that helped our Demagogue gain our presidency, and nearly to keep it despite losing the election.

Prigozhin is nothing less than Russia’s sole and most powerful warlord. Apparently, he’s a power unto himself. He operates independently of whatever “law,” apart from tsarist decrees, still exists in Russia. He seems to act outside the normal chain of command. What happens if he turns on Putin himself, or if he “takes charge” after Putin falls ill or dies? Might we have a lawless, half-demented, brutal warlord in charge of the world’s biggest arsenal of nuclear weapons?

Next to this, it’s hard to see anything in Xi Jinping’s China as posing a greater menace, notwithstanding China being far richer, smarter and more populous. The Chinese are a practical people, whose unique system of writing (I believe) does not lend itself to wild, let alone crazily brutal, abstractions. While dealing harshly with internal minorities, China has not staged a major invasion of a recognized foreign power since the “divine wind” (Japan’s words) of tropical cyclones sunk Mongol fleets intent on invading Japan in the thirteenth century.

Xi’s “zero Covid” policy was oppressive, inept and ultimately ineffective. But he reversed it when his people began to rebel. Unless senility sets in (as it did with Mao), it’s hard to see him destroying Taiwan and its world-leading chip factories in order to “save” them, as Putin is self-evidently doing with Ukraine. Unlike Putin, Xi considers cause and effect and does not appear to consider wanton destruction and murder as sound means to an end.

Nevertheless, China’s rising might and increasingly erratic one-man rule presents an existential risk of its own. How might Xi react if global warming extends last summer’s crop failures in Southern China? What will he do about massive migration from warmer countries as they become less habitable? Will Chinese “discipline” produce more effective, let alone more “humane,” solutions to coming disasters than those in the West, let alone Russia?

The final existential threat is a wild card. Will the Internet’s lies, misinformation and disinformation destroy our species by first making us mad, à la Euripides? In the US alone, unrestrained social-media firms have given us: (1) the Demagogue’s presidency; (2) his Big Lie; (3) some one-third of our population who follow him blindly and believe his Big Lie; and (4) a majority of our electorate who fight—like ignorant armies clashing by night—for and against “wokeness,” while ignoring or minimizing all the existential threats listed above.

Our Supreme Court just heard oral arguments in a case that could cut social media’s carte blanche to spread lies. We won’t know its ruling until June. Meanwhile, Congress seems split along party lines on requiring social media to bear any responsibility for spreading the lies that are busy drowning American democracy in a sea of false charges, paranoid fantasies, and “fake news.”

In closing, let’s narrow our focus from our entire species to our own United States of America and its government. What’s our “report card,” so far, as the “leader of the free world” in facing our whole species’ four existential threats?

In facing runaway global warming, we just passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which contains $369 billion for clean energy projects. But that’s against a background of consistent denial and doubt-sowing about the very fact and cause of global warming, for over half a century. A late start is better than none. So I would give us a C+, assuming all the IRA money gets properly spent, and not wasted or defrauded away.

In facing the growing threat of yet more deadly pandemics, we have done nothing even to consider, let alone prepare, a plan for protecting air traffic, or even shutting it down temporarily. Along with Germany, we developed the mRNA vaccines, which have the unique ability to be “programmed” for new viruses at “warp speed.” But we’ve done little to wrench vitally needed vaccine development free of commercial motivation, let alone to aid robust vaccine production among the 95% of global population that doesn’t live in the US.

So as our President declares the Covid-19 “emergency” ready to end in May, we’ve done virtually nothing to prepare for the next pandemic. This is so even as bird flu has infected the same order of magnitude of organisms that, in humans, caused nearly a dozen variants of Covid to emerge in a mere three years. So I’d give us a C-, at best, for being prepared for the next pandemic.

In facing the threat of revived bestial imperialism, coming mostly but not exclusively from Russia, we’ve done pretty well. We’ve devoted a significant part of our military budget, and we’re planning for more, to stop Russia’s Nazis in or at Ukraine.

We need to send more weapons and ammunition, including better and longer-range ones, in much greater quantities. But we’re doing a lot already, and we’ve goaded and encouraged our allies to do more. President Biden’s recent impromptu, secret visit to Kyiv was an extraordinary propaganda coup, not to mention a huge morale boost for Ukraine’s defenders. It also put to rest, for the moment, fears of Biden’s senility, as did his adroit ad-libbing defense of Social Security and Medicare during his State of the Union Address. Here we earn a B+, I would think, although we still need to do more and to stay the course.

In facing the threat of the Internet and social media making us crazy, the jury is still out. No nation, even ours, can succeed in difficult times by letting large segments of its population believe dark fantasies concocted for partisan gain and spread for profit.

So far, Congress, in Section 230, has given Internet media carte blanche to lie, cheat and propagandize without consequence. And so far, our Supreme Court has given our oligarchs carte blanche to use their money, in the name of “speech,” to drive the propaganda. We can hope for better decisions in the future. But so far our government institutions rate a grade of F in ensuring close popular contract with reality, without which no organism or nation can survive.

So how well are we prepared, in sum, to face the existential threats that we know to be here, perhaps with more to come? On average, we’re below a C grade, i.e., below rank average. For the so-called “leader of the free world,” that’s not good enough. In my next essay, I’m going to analyze what kind of leadership we Americans need, at the national level, to improve this dismal picture.


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