[Values-ethics] NY Times OPED article

[Bahiyyih Chaffers]

NYTimes OPED on Globalization and Sept 11 and our interdependance.

The New York Times, p A27
September 11, 2003
Two Years Later, a Thousand Years Ago
By ROBERT WRIGHT

Among the ideas that seemed to collapse along with the twin towers two years
ago was a view of globalization as a kind of manifest destiny. Unlike the
19th-century version of manifest destiny, this vision didn't involve
expanding America's borders. Rather, America's values — notably economic and
political liberty — would spread beyond those borders, covering the planet.
And this time around America's mission didn't have the widely assumed
blessing of God. But it had the next best thing: the force of history.
Globalization was seen by some as a nearly inevitable climax of the human
story — destiny of a secular sort.

In some versions of this scenario, like neoconservative ones, tough American
guidance might be needed — coercing China, say, toward democracy. In other
versions, international economic competition would do the coercing. After
all, microelectronics was making free markets a more essential ingredient in
prosperity, and free markets work best with free minds. As some libertarians
saw things, all you had to do was end trade barriers and then sit back and
enjoy the show.

Some show. As commentators started noting around Sept. 12, 2001, the
terrorists had turned the tools of globalization — cellphones, e-mail,
international banking — against the system. What's more, their grievances
had grown partly out of globalization, with its jarringly modern values. It
started to seem as if globalization, far from being a benign culmination of
history, had carried the seeds of its own destruction all along.

Two years later, that view is still defensible. Though the United States has
been free from serious terrorism, anti-American terrorist networks are
intact — and the war in Iraq has given them both a new rallying cry and
conveniently located targets. Further, Islamist terrorism is assuming more
global form; one can imagine a chain of attacks setting off a worldwide
economic tailspin. With biotechnology and nuclear materials emphatically not
under control, out-and-out collapse in some future decade is possible.

Still, viewed against the backdrop of history, the case for a kind of
manifest destiny is stronger than ever. In this version, America's mission
is different from the ones libertarians and neoconservatives have in mind —
passive role model or aggressive evangelizer, respectively. It is in some
ways a grander mission, carrying a deep and subtle moral challenge. Indeed,
the challenge is so deep, and so natural an outgrowth of history, that the
idea of destiny in some nonsecular sense isn't beyond the pale. In any
event, Sept. 11, 2001, illustrates the challenge in painfully vivid form.

Globalization dates back to prehistory, when the technologically driven
expansion of commerce began. Early advances in transportation — roads,
wheels, boats — were used to do deals (when they weren't used to fight
wars). So too with information technology. Writing seems to have evolved in
Mesopotamia as a recorder of debts. Later, in the form of contracts, it
would lubricate long-distance trade.

All this is grounded in human nature. People instinctively play nonzero-sum
games — games, like economic exchange, in which both players can win. And
technological advance lets them play more complex games over longer
distances. Hence globalization.

What makes globalization precarious is that nonzero-sum relationships
typically have a downside: both players can lose as well as win. Their
fortunes are correlated, their fates partly shared, for better or worse. As
a web of commerce expands and thickens, this interdependence deepens. The
ancient world saw prosperity spread but also saw vast downturns — like
collapse across the eastern Mediterranean around 1200 B.C.

One reason trouble can spread so broadly is that it often uses the economic
system's conduits of transportation or communication. The collapse of 1200
B.C. seems to have been abetted by raiders who exploited shipping lanes. In
the Middle Ages, the bubonic plague moved from city to city along avenues of
commerce. Today a bioweapon could spread death globally the same way. And
support for terrorism proliferates via the very satellites that convey stock
prices, as appeals from Osama bin Laden, or images of civilian casualties in
Iraq or Gaza, are beamed around the world.

One way to protect an expanding realm of interdependence is through expanded
governance. The Roman Empire, in its heyday, kept vast trade routes secure.
But governance needn't come in the form of a full-fledged state. In the late
Middle Ages, merchants in German cities formed the Hanseatic League to repel
pirates and brigands.

Today the globalization of commerce, and of threats to it, has created the
rudiments of international governance, from the World Health Organization to
arrangements for policing nuclear weapons. Global governance sounds radical,
but it's just history marching on — commerce making the world safe for
itself.

In light of 9/11, there is room for improvement. For starters, we need more
routine and forceful means of policing the world's nuclear materials and,
more challenging still, its biotechnology infrastructure. This will involve
rethinking national sovereignty — for example, accepting visits from
international inspectors in exchange for the reassuring knowledge that they
visit other countries, too. But we have little choice. The aftermath of the
Iraq war suggests that even a superpower can't afford to invade every
country that may have illicit weapons.

History's expansion of commerce has entailed the growth not just of
governance, but of morality. Doing business with people, even at a distance,
usually involves acknowledging their humanity. This may not sound like a
major moral breakthrough. But prehistoric life seems to have featured
frequent hostility among groups, with violence justified by the moral
devaluation, even dehumanization, of the victims. And recorded history is
replete with such bigotry. The modern idea that people of all races and
religions are morally equal is often taken for granted, but viewed against
the human past, it is almost bizarre.

Can moral enlightenment really be rooted in crass self-interest as mediated
by the nonzero-sum logic of expanding economic interdependence? Certainly
that would explain why an ethos of ethnic and religious tolerance is most
common in highly globalized nations like the United States. And it would
help explain why, in contrast, open hatred of Christians or Jews is found in
some Muslim countries that aren't deeply, organically integrated into the
global economy.

Some favor a different explanation, blaming belligerent passages in the
Koran for radical Islam's intolerance. But during the Middle Ages, when
Islamic civilization was at the forefront of globalization, and co-existence
with Christians and Jews made economic sense, Islamic scholars devised the
requisite doctrines of tolerance. Muslims can read Scripture selectively
when conditions warrant, just as many cosmopolitan Christians and Jews are
profitably unaware of the jihads advocated in Deuteronomy.

Globalization, then, might eventually dampen the appeal of radical Islam,
especially if economic liberty indeed tends to bring political liberty. In a
world of economically intertwined free-market democracies, not only will
more Muslim elites rub elbows with non-Muslims in business class, but also
more young Muslims will have nonlethal outlets for their energies, thanks to
new avenues for political activism and economic ambition.

Sounds great — and, in fact, it's a prospect that has been hopefully invoked
by many, including some hawks in advocating war with Iraq. But before
deciding how to get from here to there, we might ponder one of history's
lessons: bursts of technological progress can bring great instability. A
particularly unsettling parallel with the current moment lies in a previous
revolution in information technology, the coming of the movable-type
printing press to Europe in the 15th century.

When transmitting information gets cheaper, groups that lack power can gain
it. Within weeks of Martin Luther's unveiling his 95 Theses in 1517, German
printers in several cities took it upon themselves to sell copies. An
amorphous and largely silent interest group — people disenchanted with the
Roman Catholic Church — crystallized and found its voice. Protest was now
feasible. (Hence the term Protestant.)

The ensuing erosion of central authority went beyond the church. The "wars
of religion" that ravaged Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries were
about politics, too, and by their end the Hapsburgs, not just the pope, had
lost possessions. If Europe's powers had adjusted more gracefully to the
decentralizing force of print, much bloodshed might have been averted.

Today, similarly, new information technologies allow previously amorphous or
powerless groups to coalesce and orchestrate activities, from peaceful
lobbying to terrorist slaughter. And the revolution is young. As the
Internet goes broadband, Osama bin Laden's potent recruiting videos will get
more accessible — viewable on demand from more and more parts of the world.
Other terrorist televangelists may spring up, too. As in the age of print,
far-flung discontent will grow more powerful — often through peaceful means,
but sometimes not.

Paradoxically, the increasing volatility of intense discontent puts
Americans in a more nonzero-sum relationship with the world's discontented
peoples. If, for example, unhappy Muslims overseas grow more unhappy and
resentful, that's good for Osama bin Laden and hence bad for America. If
they grow more secure and satisfied, that's good for America. This is
history's drift: technology correlating the fortunes of ever-more-distant
people, enmeshing humanity in a web of shared fate.

The architects of America's national security policy at once grasp this
crosscultural interdependence and don't. They see that prosperous and free
Muslim nations are good for America. But they don't see that the very logic
behind this goal counsels against pursuing it crudely, with primary reliance
on force and intimidation. They don't appreciate how easily, amid modern
technology, resentment and hatred metastasize. Witness their planning for
postwar Iraq, with spectacular inattention to keeping Iraqis safe, content
and well informed.

Nor do they seem aware, as they focus tightly on state sponsors of
terrorism, that technology lets terrorists operate with less and less state
support. Anarchic states — like the ones that may now be emerging in Iraq
and Afghanistan — could soon be as big a problem as hostile states.

Grasping the new challenge of terrorism doesn't render the problem simple or
undermine President Bush's entire terrorism strategy. Obviously, we can't
grow so concerned with grassroots opinion that we give in to specific
terrorist demands. And sometimes we may have to use force in ways that, in
the short run, inflame anti-Americanism. And so on.

Still, only if we see the growing power of grassroots sentiment will we give
due attention to the subject that hawks so disdain: "root causes." With
hatred becoming Public Enemy No. 1, a successful war on terrorism demands an
understanding of how so much of the world has come to dislike America. When
people who are born with the same human nature as you and I grow up to
commit suicide bombings — or applaud them — there must be a reason. And it's
at least conceivable that their fanaticism is needlessly encouraged by
American policy or rhetoric.

Putting yourself in the shoes of people who do things you find abhorrent may
be the hardest moral exercise there is. But it would be easier to excuse
Americans who refuse to try if they didn't spend so much time indicting
Islamic radicals for the same refusal. Somebody has to go first, and if
nobody does we're all in trouble.

Even if we dawdle, and make no progress on either the moral or governmental
fronts — fail to move toward a global norm of tolerance and toward sound
global governance — history will eventually concentrate our minds. A nuclear
explosion, or epic bioterrorism, will lead even some hardened unilateralists
to embrace arms control and other multilateral actions.

But it would be nice to avoid the million deaths. Besides, if we wait until
an American city is erased, by then hatred of America will be broad and
deep. One can imagine national and global policing regimes that could keep
us fairly secure even then, but they would be severe, with expanded
monitoring of everyday life and shrinking civil liberties.

In other words, the age-old tradeoff between security and liberty
increasingly involves a third variable: antipathy. The less hatred there is
in the world, the more security we can have without sacrificing personal
freedom. Assuming we like our liberty, we have little choice but to take an
earnest interest in the situation of distant and seemingly strange people,
working to elevate their welfare, exploring their discontent as a step
toward expanding their moral horizons — and in the process expanding ours.
Global governance without global moral progress could be very unpleasant.

As the world's most powerful nation, and one of the world's most ethnically
and religiously diverse nations, America is a natural leader of this moral
revolution. America is also well positioned to lead in shaping a judicious
form of global governance.

This role wasn't inevitable. But for a few quirks of history, some other
nation might be on top at this moment of challenge. What was more or less
inevitable, in my view, is the challenge itself. All along, technological
evolution has been moving our species toward this nonzero-sum moment, when
our welfare is crucially correlated with the welfare of the other, and our
freedom depends on the sympathetic comprehension of the other.

That history has driven us toward moral enlightenment — and then left the
final choice to us, with momentous stakes — is scary but inspiring. Some,
indeed, may see this as evidence of the higher purpose that was widely
assumed back in the 19th century. But a religious motivation isn't
necessary. Simple self-interest will do. That's the beauty of the thing.

Robert Wright, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, is
author or "The Moral Animal" and "Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny."