Give me scarier bogey-men!
Friday, May 26, 2006 at 2:32PM Chirol (of Coming Anarchy)emailed me to point out a post on Sun Bin, What if the Gap consumes the Core? (Incidentally, Sun Bin also linked Tom yesterday.)
Sun Bin begins (linking to Joseph Wang):
Joseph Wang believes there may be tremendous lack of imagination for us to not visualizing the scenario of gap consuming the core in the Barnett theory.
First of all, without being defensive, of course Tom can imagine or visualize the Gap consuming the Core. However, 1. He does not think it is likely, given the economic trends he details, and 2. He chooses not to focus on the pessimistic. He leaves that to guys like Peters and Kaplan.
Tom recognizes the dangers we face, saying we need to firewall the Core off from the Gap's worst exports.
Sun Bin quotes from Wang's post:
The one thing that bin-Laden understands that unfortunately most people don't is the central nature of the economic front on the war on terror. Put simply, if we get to 2100, and most of the world is living in decent middle class conditions, then bin-Laden will lose. If we get to 2100, and most of the world isn't living in decent middle class condition, then bin-Laden or someone like him will win.
I think Tom would generally agree with this statement, though even in the case of a 'loss' when we get to 2100, the war still wouldn't be over.
As to the nightmare scenarios Wang mentions, Tom does not normally try to account for sheer global catastrophe in his theory. If:
- enough Americans and Chinese are stupid enough to go to war against each other;
- there is a global epidemic;
- Saudi oil fields are destroyed;
- something goes horribly wrong, like one of Bill Joy's bugbears (genetics, nanotech, or robots) gets loose;
- a meteor hits the earth;
Not to say that we simply sit back and wait for those things to happen. In fact, Tom's Blueprint for Action, especially, gives all sorts of prescriptions for creating a stronger globalization that will militate against the conditions that give rise to disasters like these (except for the meteor ;-).
This is where Wang ends up, with a few strategies to 'rage against the dying of the light' that line up with Tom's ideas.
Back to Sun Bin's post. He argues the seriousness of this possibility of the Gap consuming the Core with histories of cultural collapse. I read Tom's hope as being that we can rise above these cycles because of all the ways the world is different today, but I'll leave the specifics to him, should he care to address them.
Entropy is a sure bet. But I'm still with Tom, that the optimistic futurists usually beat the pessimistic futurists. For all their grousing, the world has not turned out like Malthus or Orwell or Marx feared.
I emailed this post to Tom, and here are his comments:
1) Never bet against human--much less American--ingenuity and perseverance in response to calamity. There is the "ugly American," but the "unimaginative" or "lazy" American is an Occidentalist myth. I don't eschew fantastically dark scenarios to keep my vision elegant. I simply believe that bottom-up and horizontally networked societies like ours will trump top-down elite-driven vertically -chained political and ideological movements/societies. We simply underestimate our own resiliency. My first great glimpse of this came in my Y2K work. Nothing I see since tells me otherwise--just the opposite.2) the smart warriors find a way to make their opponents feel like their losing is actually winning. Integration forces a certain loss of identity, so to do it successfully, those integrated need to feel like they're "conquering" or changing the host more than vice versa. Done well, the line between illusion and reality is meaningless. So yeah, sure, the "Gap will consume the Core," just like Latin America will "consume" North America through the Hispanicization of America. Big deal! I don't care who's perceived to be on top, because the "sex" is the same.
Give me scarier bogey-men! I grew up in the Cold War and frankly find all these "new" ones rather weak. The "buy-out" or co-optation gets cheaper with each passing decade.
Reader Comments (5)
Thanks for linking to my post.....
Just to be clear. I think that in the end we are going to beat the crap out of bin-Laden and his ilk. The reason is that deep down, we are good and he is evil. Good triumphs over evil.... Usually....
But the reason I wrote the article was that I do not believe history is made by deterministic laws but rather by the individual choices that people make. People can do very stupid things and make some very stupid decisions, and (World War I, the decision to bomb Pearl Harbor, and the Cultural Revolution). I just wanted to make clear what the consequences are of making stupid decisions, in the hopes that scaring the living daylights out of people will focus the mind against making stupid decisions. One bit of self-destructive stupidity (which I've thankfully seen a lot less of recently) is viewing China as the main long term enemy of the United States and vice versa.
If anything seriously bad happens between the US and China, the whole world is going to go over the cliff.
We probably will win the Long War. We certainly should win it. But victory is determined by the decisions of individuals and is not by any means guaranteed, and one's chances of winning are greatly increased by thinking of all of the ways that one could lose.
I agree with you and tom's believes.
I think my conclusion/takeaway of looking at the wrose case is that it helps us to think about (a line hidden in my original post) "how we anticipate the challenges and discover a pragmatic solution to prevent it from happening", i.e., the real benefit of playing out such scenario is to get an opporutnity to find potential solutions.
in fact, one of the takeaway for me is that it becomes very clear that we cannot win if we simply play Dubya's reactive strategy which focuses almost entirely on the symptom but not the source of the problem(s)-- surprise :)
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"For all their grousing, the world has not turned out like Malthus or Orwell or Marx feared."
We can explain this also with an analogy in physics. i.e. if you give a push to a pendulum every time it passes the central point, the pendulum's swing will be bigger, and eventually the amplitude will be calamitously large and out of control. however, if there is a damping force (friction/air resistance/etc, typically proportional to velocity), even if such force is extremely small in small amplitudes, it will act as a balance force and the amplitude will stabilize at certain size. the correction(damping) force becomes a lot larger than we can envision today if the inducing force (catastrophe) becomes larger. this is probably the reason malthus did not happen.
-- The other side of the story: Jared Diamond thought malthusian scenario did happen, in the speculative case of Easter Island, and may happen again if we are not vigilant enough. Some Chinese scholars also believe the dynastic cycles in China (every 400-500 year there were major peasant uprisings triggered by famine and followed by war and population reduction) was sort of malthusian.
However, a malthus scenario in large scale will most likely be preceded by a minor one, the result could reduce the situtaion of the sub-society back to pre-catastrophic values and the lesson would help to minimize the possibility of the larger society's suffering.
Joseph: while i believe, like you, in the importance of individual choices, i also find Tom's 'economic determinism' to be very predictive. maybe economics largely determines individual choices ;-)
stupidity happens, you're right. we must remain vigilant against it and speak out and try to educate others.
Tom has said, like you, that the surest way to kill globalization, and the future worth creating with it, is for the US and China to line up against each other.
victory is certainly not guaranteed. thinking about 'worst cases' can be helpful. in fact, that's where Tom developed a lot of the core of his theory, doing early work on 9/11.
but, as Tom says, we want to spend the bulk of time on inevitabilities. when our own congresspeople don't seem to get the obvious - like the great harm that could be done getting into a trade or cold war with China - it makes gaming worst cases seem far less important...
sun bin: yes, i think we all agree. we must be the smart ones ;-)
i actually quoted your 'hidden line' in my original draft of the post, but cut it for brevity's sake. i agree.
while i LOVED Diamond's first book (Guns, Germs, and Steel) and agree with it wholeheartedly, i find his second book to be highly suspect (perhaps overly influenced by ideology). (Tom's take on Collapse.) we've made it up to 5 or 6 billion, and the reproduction trends look to be down after we get through this next bulge. i'm hopeful that we can leave Malthus in the dustbin of history.
The Gap consuming the Core is an unlikely negative scenario. I think that it's much more likely that there will be individual backsliders back into the Gap. The greatest risk would be seam states that never quite made it into the Core and then New Core states that recoiled in horror at some of the sacrifices necessary for further integration. I think dealing with the issue is important, especially for an optimist because it differentiates you as a realistic optimist.