I'd be interested in one or more articles pointing us towards those in government, academia or elsewhere who are looking beyond particular conflicts to the larger picture. Something along these lines...
CLAIM: I'm persuaded that a focus on particular conflicts one by one by one as they arrive will ultimately be a path to failure given that it only takes one geopolitical conflict to spin out of control to bring the game to an end. We may very well successfully manage a number of conflicts such as the war in Ukraine, but it's not credible to me that we will successfully manage them all forever.
QUESTION: If the above is true, then somebody should be asking, how do we break out of this pattern of geopolitical conflict? Who thinks and writes about this?
I agree that this question is very ambitious, and that most people will find it unrealistic. Fair enough. But if my claim above contains any truth, then like it or not, answering this question isn't optional.
To provide an example of what what I'm looking for, I'm making an amateur attempt to address this question in the world peace section of my blog. The particular solution I suggest isn't that important. What I'm hoping to convey is the scale of thinking that the 21st century will require.
If we're going to insist on supercharging the modern world with revolutionary new technologies like nuclear weapons, AI, and genetic engineering, bigger and bigger, faster and faster, the way we think has to undergo revolutionary change too.
Yes, we have to defeat Putin. But more importantly we have to escape his 20th century mindset.
You are asking one of the most perplexing questions of the age.
The difficulties you present are so complex and, frankly, insidious in many cases that I think they will be very hard to change in order to avoid the difficulties you outline.
The forces you outline are national, ethnic, religious, technological, economic, etc. in nature... It seems that these forces and others are nearly impossible to stop.
However, there might be an answer to this question that appears old-fashioned, but it might work.
We collectively have to prepare a population to defend itself from the onslaught of destructive forces that could lead to disaster. I would argue that the key to this is an education. I do not mean training for jobs. I just retired (early) as a history professor (even though I still teach as an adjunct) and it is clear to me that K-12 and even higher education has gone away from preparing citizens to understand the world in which they live. It will also prepare people to defend themselves and others from the assaults you mention. I would argue that we can’t stop what you fear, but rather we all have to engage in the ongoing process of combating it when it does. The struggle against these forces will never end.
However, people need to be “armed” properly to combat it themselves. I joked for decades that my history classes should be cross listed with self-defense classes at my college. Students looked confused. I explained that history is a weapon that can justify so many things, it overwhelms people. However, history as an academic discipline is not only under attack, it is also in a steep decline as a major-like many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Why? Mostly it is because they teach people to think for themselves and many find that dangerous. If we do not teach history and these other disciplines properly, a new reality will be created. This is why history and related areas are under attack. Just create a new past to justify anything. I just saw what Tucker Carlson created from the Jan. 6 videos. The impact of this will be devastating... it is clearly a fraud, but 25-30% of the country will believe it because of who said it.
To be clear, though, there are many forces that cause this problem. To address this properly, we have to address a myriad of forces... one here in the US that has become insidious is the nature of corporations. This is a line that most Americans do not want to cross and/or they believe in some kind of sanctity in the privacy businesses enjoy. Their invisible influence on all of your earlier concerns is so entrenched that I doubt there is any political leader with the courage or clout who can unravel this.
Take the sanctions against Russia over the past year... why are not they more devastating? McDonald’s pulled out, right? Russia should fall immediately! Excuse my sarcasm. We look now at countries still helping Russia. It would be great to see what American/Western companies are involved in this activity behind the scenes. We don’t know because it is private.
I will stop, this is too long. I could write a similar paragraph about technology, religion, etc.
Yes, the 21st challenge I tried to outline above is huge. And so the response to this challenge will have to be huge as well. And whatever such a response might be, if it is of sufficient scale to have any hope of succeeding, then lots of people aren't going to like it.
You know, if there was a way to escape geopolitical conflict that was considered reasonable, realistic, generally acceptable, and sanctioned by experts, then the job would most likely already be done. Thus, we should probably looking at ideas which are outside the status quo.
I'm all for education, and you are right to bring that up. However, I'll admit to being somewhat skeptical that any amount of reason and information will be sufficient to meet this challenge. As example, reason and information have utterly failed to make us safe from nuclear weapons for 75 years.
If a solution to this challenge can be found, my guess is that it will depend heavily on some tragic real world event to do most of the educating. Perhaps history professors could remind us of times in the past when such events have dramatically changed how we think?
I agree that escaping geopolitical conflict is a huge challenge, but I'm not sure that it is fundamentally necessarily that complicated. One very simple fact explains the overwhelming majority of violence in the world at every level of society. Almost all of it is committed by men. My mind and blog has been captured lately by the vision that we could actually have world peace, if we could figure out how to get rid of violent men, which might require having no men.
A world without men is a VERY unpopular idea, and it may indeed be a bad idea too. But I think it serves the purpose of illustrating the scale of thinking that meeting the geopolitical violence challenge will require.
If you can point us towards any experts who are thinking boldly about world peace as a realistic possibility please do, thanks.
I'd be interested in one or more articles pointing us towards those in government, academia or elsewhere who are looking beyond particular conflicts to the larger picture. Something along these lines...
CLAIM: I'm persuaded that a focus on particular conflicts one by one by one as they arrive will ultimately be a path to failure given that it only takes one geopolitical conflict to spin out of control to bring the game to an end. We may very well successfully manage a number of conflicts such as the war in Ukraine, but it's not credible to me that we will successfully manage them all forever.
QUESTION: If the above is true, then somebody should be asking, how do we break out of this pattern of geopolitical conflict? Who thinks and writes about this?
I agree that this question is very ambitious, and that most people will find it unrealistic. Fair enough. But if my claim above contains any truth, then like it or not, answering this question isn't optional.
To provide an example of what what I'm looking for, I'm making an amateur attempt to address this question in the world peace section of my blog. The particular solution I suggest isn't that important. What I'm hoping to convey is the scale of thinking that the 21st century will require.
If we're going to insist on supercharging the modern world with revolutionary new technologies like nuclear weapons, AI, and genetic engineering, bigger and bigger, faster and faster, the way we think has to undergo revolutionary change too.
Yes, we have to defeat Putin. But more importantly we have to escape his 20th century mindset.
Hi Phil-
You are asking one of the most perplexing questions of the age.
The difficulties you present are so complex and, frankly, insidious in many cases that I think they will be very hard to change in order to avoid the difficulties you outline.
The forces you outline are national, ethnic, religious, technological, economic, etc. in nature... It seems that these forces and others are nearly impossible to stop.
However, there might be an answer to this question that appears old-fashioned, but it might work.
We collectively have to prepare a population to defend itself from the onslaught of destructive forces that could lead to disaster. I would argue that the key to this is an education. I do not mean training for jobs. I just retired (early) as a history professor (even though I still teach as an adjunct) and it is clear to me that K-12 and even higher education has gone away from preparing citizens to understand the world in which they live. It will also prepare people to defend themselves and others from the assaults you mention. I would argue that we can’t stop what you fear, but rather we all have to engage in the ongoing process of combating it when it does. The struggle against these forces will never end.
However, people need to be “armed” properly to combat it themselves. I joked for decades that my history classes should be cross listed with self-defense classes at my college. Students looked confused. I explained that history is a weapon that can justify so many things, it overwhelms people. However, history as an academic discipline is not only under attack, it is also in a steep decline as a major-like many other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Why? Mostly it is because they teach people to think for themselves and many find that dangerous. If we do not teach history and these other disciplines properly, a new reality will be created. This is why history and related areas are under attack. Just create a new past to justify anything. I just saw what Tucker Carlson created from the Jan. 6 videos. The impact of this will be devastating... it is clearly a fraud, but 25-30% of the country will believe it because of who said it.
To be clear, though, there are many forces that cause this problem. To address this properly, we have to address a myriad of forces... one here in the US that has become insidious is the nature of corporations. This is a line that most Americans do not want to cross and/or they believe in some kind of sanctity in the privacy businesses enjoy. Their invisible influence on all of your earlier concerns is so entrenched that I doubt there is any political leader with the courage or clout who can unravel this.
Take the sanctions against Russia over the past year... why are not they more devastating? McDonald’s pulled out, right? Russia should fall immediately! Excuse my sarcasm. We look now at countries still helping Russia. It would be great to see what American/Western companies are involved in this activity behind the scenes. We don’t know because it is private.
I will stop, this is too long. I could write a similar paragraph about technology, religion, etc.
Hi Ben, thanks for engaging, much appreciated.
Yes, the 21st challenge I tried to outline above is huge. And so the response to this challenge will have to be huge as well. And whatever such a response might be, if it is of sufficient scale to have any hope of succeeding, then lots of people aren't going to like it.
You know, if there was a way to escape geopolitical conflict that was considered reasonable, realistic, generally acceptable, and sanctioned by experts, then the job would most likely already be done. Thus, we should probably looking at ideas which are outside the status quo.
I'm all for education, and you are right to bring that up. However, I'll admit to being somewhat skeptical that any amount of reason and information will be sufficient to meet this challenge. As example, reason and information have utterly failed to make us safe from nuclear weapons for 75 years.
If a solution to this challenge can be found, my guess is that it will depend heavily on some tragic real world event to do most of the educating. Perhaps history professors could remind us of times in the past when such events have dramatically changed how we think?
I agree that escaping geopolitical conflict is a huge challenge, but I'm not sure that it is fundamentally necessarily that complicated. One very simple fact explains the overwhelming majority of violence in the world at every level of society. Almost all of it is committed by men. My mind and blog has been captured lately by the vision that we could actually have world peace, if we could figure out how to get rid of violent men, which might require having no men.
https://www.tannytalk.com/p/world-peace-table-of-contents
A world without men is a VERY unpopular idea, and it may indeed be a bad idea too. But I think it serves the purpose of illustrating the scale of thinking that meeting the geopolitical violence challenge will require.
If you can point us towards any experts who are thinking boldly about world peace as a realistic possibility please do, thanks.