Note: see the blog
post for Monday, October 3, 2016, for an explanation of how and why this
manuscript came about. You are welcome to copy this material, use it for any
non-commercial purpose, and distribute it as widely as you want, so long as you
give me author’s credit and indicate the copyright date. The chapters will be
posted periodically, I hope once every week or two, but a couple of them might
take a little bit longer. Thanks for reading this material; it’s my personal
response to the political craziness that seems to have swept our great nation.
JJJr
__________
IF I WERE A TERRORIST
John Janovy, Jr. ©
2016
Foreword
1. Why I Wrote This Book
2. Evolution: The Most Effective Weapon
3. Women: The Most Feared of All Natural Disasters
4. Energy: The Achilles Heel
5. The Human Factor: The Individual vs. The Mob
6. Hero Worship: Stupidity in High Places
7. Fear: The Mother of Fundamentalism
8. Distractions
9. American Vulnerability
10. The Ultimate Fate of the United States of America
11. Solutions and Options
Appendix:
I. Evolutionary Principles Summarized
II. How to study evolution
III. Sources and Resources
Foreword – See blog
post for October 10, 2016
Chapter 1. Why I
Wrote This Book – See blog post for October 10, 2016
Chapter 2. Evolution:
The Most Effective Weapon
. . . frisbee, volleyball, and yo-yo’s [sic] are examples of “innovations” that have spread rapidly through whole
countries or continents.
—Luigi
Cavalli-Sforza and Marcus Feldman (Cultural
Transmission and Evolution: A Quantitative Approach, 1981)
Why is evolution the most
effective weapon for canceling the Great American Experiment in freedom and
democracy? The answer to this question is, strangely enough, both simple and
complex. The simplicity is to be found in one definition of the word
“evolution”: irreversible change from a
set of boundary conditions. According to this definition, whatever
evolutionary changes occur cannot be reversed. In addition, these changes
always occur from conditions that exist at a particular time in history (the
boundary from which change must begin), not from some beginning or ideal conditions
that were present decades before.
Social Security is an excellent
example of an evolving entity. If Social Security is to be “reformed,” as
politicians are wont to say, then such reformation must proceed from current
structure, practices, and situation, not from whatever Social Security was in
the 1930s. Everyone should also accept the fact that Third Millennium changes
in Social Security will be permanent. These same statements could be made about
all institutions, corporations, and religious organizations, American and
otherwise. This fact alone should make us want to deal with evolution as a
serious scientific and citizenship matter, not a battlefield in the culture
wars.
The complexity of our answer is
to be found in the ubiquity and diversity of evolutionary events. In other
words, the Theory of Evolution applies not only to dinosaurs, their modern
descendents the birds, and disease-causing organisms that infect your children,
but also—at least in part—to your local fast food or convenience store chain,
your church, your state legislature, and the company that supplies your cable TV
and Internet service. This list could go on for pages, and indeed if you’ll
pick up your telephone book, the yellow pages come pretty close to being a list
of all those agencies, organizations, and businesses that evolve. If your phone
book is anything like mine, then it also has blue pages of government agencies
at all levels, from city to national; all the listings in those pages, too,
obey the laws of evolution. In summary, in all matters of life on Earth, the
only constant is constant change. In general, people hate change even as the
world is changing, irreversibly, around them, usually because of events over
which the people who hate such change have little control. That is why
evolution is a terrorist’s most powerful weapon and also, according to writers
such as Karen Armstrong (The Battle for
God), the rise of fundamentalism as a futile defense against change..
For strictly pedagogical reasons,
I am repeating, almost verbatim, two paragraphs from the first chapter,
paragraphs that addresses the matter of variability (options) and selectivity,
especially the source of each. These paragraphs can be considered a brief
theory of social evolution. Here they are (in part, and reworded slightly):
Although changes that occur in human
societies are not strictly analogous to the type of natural selection envisioned
by Darwin and his intellectual descendents, the term “evolution” is
nevertheless an appropriate one because it invokes the interactions between
some entity—in our case a nation—and the environment that . . . enables . . .
its existence. In much the same way as a population of plants or animals
“experiments” with various options—in their case genetic variants—nations also
“experiment” with options—but in this case I’m referring to political actions,
policies, and group behaviors, selected by people from a diverse array of such
possible actions and behaviors.
For example,
whereas the thousands of individual flowers in a field might display a dozen or
more different varieties for the environment to act upon, i.e., to “select”
individuals from this pool for ultimate survival and disproportionate
reproductive success, a nation made up of people typically does the selection
before presenting itself to the environment. So in the case of social or
cultural evolution, humans try, sometimes successfully, to pre-empt the
environment’s role in the evolutionary process. The result is that societies
find themselves locked into a trajectory of change from which it is exceedingly
difficult to escape. The United
States of America is not immune to this
principle. We are locked into a relationship between our selected behaviors and
the environment that we look to for sustenance. This relatively binding
relationship, a sort of socio-ecological contract that establishes the
direction of a nation’s evolutionary change, is the basis for Beth Hain’s fear
expressed in the Chapter 1 epigraph.
Evolutionary change is also
maddeningly neutral regardless of the fact that some modern philosophers try to
see God’s plan in the sequence of species occupying this planet. In other
words, the fact that there are now people on Earth, instead of dinosaurs and
woolly mammoths, means to these folks that God intended for us to happen now
(“now” = the past million years, if you read the scientific literature, or 6000
years if you listen to some preachers). The fact that we have the intellectual
power to contemplate a God might well be the basis for such a “plan” but we
have no way of knowing even whether there is a God outside of our minds,
regardless of how fervently we might believe in one. In general, we like plans
because they provide a certain structure for our lives and, consequently, a feeling
of security. Thus we tend to see anything that alters or contradicts the “plan”
as being an intrusion, i.e., “bad,” or at least unwelcome. This tendency to
view change or difference as bad is, I believe, one of the reasons why
“evolution,” as defined by the creationists, is evil and God-less.
But evolutionary change is, by
itself, neither good nor evil. Only the people involved in such change can
define it as good or evil by their behavior and their reaction to it. “People
defining conditions as good or bad” is also one of the definitions of the word
“politics.” Back in the post-war late 1940s, if I had been a child prodigy able
to see into the future, for example, and had said something like “Spanish will
soon become the second most spoken language in this country, music will become
rap and hip-hop (remembering that in the 1940s there were no words to describe rap and hip-hop and no definitions of the terms as we now understand them),
and despite its unparalleled military might the United States will lose every
war for the next half century” people would have thought I was crazy. Of course
history abounds with examples of social evolution that are, by all standards,
bad: Nazi Germany is one, although prior to the outbreak of WWII in Europe a
lot of people in Germany defined whatever Hitler was doing as good, even
necessary. We also have plenty of examples of change (from a set of boundary
conditions) that are good—constitutional amendments prohibiting legislative
bodies from establishing a state religion being one—although again not everyone
agrees that this particular phenomena is “good.” Remember that the very word
“amendment” implies permanent change, although technically constitutional
amendments can be removed.
United States culture is rapidly
evolving into something that will be quite unrecognizable in a couple of
generations, and, indeed, is likely to be little more than a caricature of its
former self, as it presently is if “former self” is considered pre-WWII. The
more pessimistic among us believe that the balance has already been tipped, and
as a nation we are falling into dissolution. The more optimistic Americans
believe there is a light at the end of the terrorism tunnel, and that our
present efforts to bring democracy, civil rights, liberties, and economic
stability to the rest of the world—i.e., establish a Pax Americana—will, in the foreseeable future, be successful. Somewhere
between the optimists and the pessimists are the evolutionary biologists who
know their stuff and believe strongly that we will, before long—in cultural
evolutionary time—take our place on that list of former great powers—e.g. the
Roman and British Empires—that now populate the pages of world history
textbooks.
Then there are those folks we
call “terrorists.” They know how to blow up a train and the people in it, but
really don’t understand how they, too, are swept up in a human species’
experience that, in a manner similar to the experience of beetles, butterflies,
and starfish, is shaped more by evolution than by explosives. Because they are
the most influential of our minorities, indeed co-opting massive attention,
resources, and time that really ought to be spent on more important things like
population control and energy conservation, I personally believe they need to
be taught a lesson. Of course that’s a professorly reaction to whatever is
perceived as wrong: teach somebody a lesson, not in the spank-‘em-with-a-belt
sense so often favored by elected officials, but in the
sit-‘em-down-with-a-lecture-and-a-textbook sense so derided by conservative
self-proclaimed patriots. And what would be this lesson? It would be a
relatively simple one, appropriate for many settings ranging from an Al-Qaeda
cave to the Oval Office, expressed in plain language by a good friend of mine
one time at a social gathering where we were discussing world events.
“You don’t solve any problems by
killing people,” he said. He was a deeply respected and scholarly minister of a
local large and successful mainline denomination church and I agreed with him. He’s
the same minister that told me one time that “man made God, not the other way
around.” This particular statement was based on a lifetime’s study of theology,
comparative religion, and his congregations.
Personally I’m sick of all the
killing. Every day I read about people getting blown to smithereens or shot or
maimed, and these people are not only the “good guys” (~American military
personnel and American citizens, especially white Christian ones) but also
plenty of “bad guys” (~anyone who is not either American military personnel or not
closely allied in a recognizable way with the Pax Americana idea.) So when I write a book that could easily be considered
a lab manual for terrorists, exalting them to quit killing people and start
studying evolution, that’s a rather self-serving, professorly, bit of advice. If
these terrorists felt like they had more time, they might listen to someone
like me telling them just to get out of the way and let their long-term goals
achieve themselves, as long-term changes tend to do according to evolutionary
principles. In other words, the factors that sustain classical American-style
democracy—not the fact of it, but the approximation and dream of it, which is
about as close as we have ever come—are rapidly working against all of
humanity, but especially against the United States.
So I say to the terrorists: go
home to your families and enjoy the time together and companionship while you
can. Go play soccer with your kids or your friends. The Great Satan, i.e., the United States of America,
is destroying itself from within and all you have to do is stand back and watch.
Or, you can read this book and speed up the process, but in a manner that still
leaves plenty of time for you to spend with your wife and kids or, if you’re
not married, with your buddies just hanging out and drinking strong tea or
doing whatever terrorist buddies do when they’re not actually plotting disaster.
You don’t need dirty bombs; all you need are some dirty words. Among the
dirtiest words in the current American lexicon are “evolution,” “abortion,” “illegal
immigration,” and “gay” or “lesbian,” although if the 2012 national elections,
associated rhetoric, and subsequent state-level political actions are any
indication of our cultural changes, you can probably add “female” to the list
(also, see Chapter 3). “Liberal” is not quite as blatantly dirty, but it’s
close, implying as it does support for abortion and gay rights, and “taxes”
runs a close fifth. These filthy and disgustingly soiled words can also be used
in combination to multiply their effects. And if they are not enough firepower
for you in early 21st Century America, then link them somehow to
“Hillary Rodham Clinton,” “Barack Obama,” or “Nancy Pelosi.” Now stand back and
watch.
What are the important
evolutionary changes occurring today in the United States? A second and related
question is: how will these changes play out if allowed to run their course? The
answer to the first of these questions is relatively easy to obtain; all you
have to do is get your hands on statistical summaries of public health,
education, income, energy usage, and a long list of other social and economic
indicators. That task will take some time, but government and business people
do it routinely and a massive supply of such information is freely available on
the Internet. The Sources and Resources appendix at the end of this book
provides a chapter-by-chapter list of the Web pages and other sources I
consulted while writing If I Were a
Terrorist. Furthermore, every decade the United States government conducts a
census and those results are also readily available. Although it’s now nearly
20 years old, I strongly suggest Sam Roberts’ (1993) Who We Are: A Portrait of America Based on the Last US Census.
What you’ll discover from Who We Are is
that even the 1990 census showed us all we needed to predict every
socio-economic issue that is ripping at the American fabric today. By 2020,
those rips will be significantly large, if not outright destructive.
There also are a number of more
recent and equally well-documented books on this subject, books that are probably
available at any reasonably-sized library. I suggest starting with Robert
Merry’s The Sands of Empire:
Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and
the Hazards of Global Ambition (2005). For
years Merry was editor of The
Congressional Quarterly, probably the most reliable source of information
about your government’s activities that is readily available to, and
understandable by, the American public. In fact if there is a better lab manual
than If I Were a Terrorist for the
dismantling of our United States it would be Sands of Empire, with its careful and historical analysis of the
trap we have fallen into, namely, a combination of idealism, ideology and
ignorance—the quasi-utopian idealism of Woodrow Wilson, ideology based on a
provincial born-again Christian vision of humanity, and ignorance of almost
everything else, especially nature, science, and Islam.
The first question—What are the
important evolutionary changes occurring today in the United States?—can be
answered thusly: massive demographic changes are occurring, manifested in the
ethnic makeup of our nation, the dropping educational levels of the workforce,
the growing fraction of our citizens in direct contact with the legal system,
deteriorating infrastructure at all levels, a shifting theological landscape,
extreme indebtedness, spiraling entitlement obligations, a combination of
exponentially increasing medical costs and rapidly deteriorating quality of the
health care delivery system, an increasingly restrictive regulatory climate
that squelches innovation, military engagement in wars that have no obvious end
point, an increasingly uncivil civil discourse, and a rapidly expanding gap
between the haves and have-nots, just to pick a few high points. These changes
are all occurring, in a manner analogous to a termite infestation, beneath a
thick veneer of honest, hard-working people who, in order to maintain their
life styles, consume—among other things—large quantities of automobiles,
electronic gadgetry, recreational equipment and opportunities, houses, energy,
television, the Internet, pornography, alcohol, and food. We are not an Ozzie and Harriet nation; we are a United States
of the Third Millennium, awash in an angry sea of global change.
The second question—How will
these evolutionary changes play out if allowed to run their course?—is the
difficult one to answer. Various pundits seem to try their hands at this task
regularly if not daily, but any half-way educated evolutionary biologist is
probably at least as qualified as your average cable news commentator to supply
such an answer. What would our evolutionary biologist answer in response to
this second question? Like all evolutionary biologists everywhere, this one
would look first to resources, next to reproduction rates, and finally to the
manner in which we, as a cultural “species” tend to use our resources to
sustain our fecundity. Of course in this context, reproduction means the spread
of American dream type “democracy” or representative government in which
opposition parties flourish, criticism of leaders is routine, and everyone
above a certain age has the legal right to vote whether they do so or not, all
freedoms flourishing in a [theoretically] free-market system, not only within
our borders but elsewhere.
Those are the fundamental
properties of American “democracy.” All who are citizens of this nation possess
the right, by virtue of citizenship, to oppose elected officials verbally and
politically, to criticize those same officials, often unmercifully and
publicly, to try and influence politicians at all levels with letters, e-mails,
and hired lobbyists, to run for office against incumbents if we desire, and to
vote. We may not accomplish much by doing any of these activities, but at least
we don’t routinely get arrested and/or shot. As of this writing, this type of
“democracy” is not reproducing itself very successfully anywhere in the world. The
Pax Americana is proving itself to be
a weak competitor for the hearts and minds of humans, especially those in what
we call the “developing world.” In fact it is struggling to sustain itself in
its own heartland. In an ideal America,
none of these fundamental properties could be subverted by people participating
in the system. The brutal truth is that anywhere the Republican Party is in
power, it is likely to be working overtime to subvert the system through
gerrymandering, intimidation of appointed officials, ignoring scientific
evidence when it contradicts ideology, promoting scientific illiteracy, working
overtime to establish requirements for difficult-to-get voter IDs, and spying
on its own citizens illegally.
In other words, we are evolving
noticeably, if not relatively quickly, toward a totalitarian state, and that
evolution is slowed mainly by some institutions that are constantly under
attack from a variety of directions, but mostly from the political right. Public
schools, libraries, universities, museums, various arts organizations, and the
entertainment industry are all routine targets for conservative elected
officials. In some cases these officials use budgetary power; in others their words
are sufficient to marginalize, if not demonize, a segment of our society. An
excellent example of our cultural evolution is provided a few years ago by a Republican
candidate for United States Senate from Nebraska, Pete Ricketts, now governor
of Nebraska, and heir to the Ameritrade fortune, much of which he spent on his
own campaign. Mr. Ricketts is not particularly important on global scale; I’m
using him as an example because he’s handy, illustrative, and of a rather
common type. Furthermore, information about him is public and readily available.
In the spring of 2006, Mr.
Ricketts won the Republican primary election for a candidate to oppose Sen. Ben
Nelson (D); Ricketts’ campaign rhetoric consisted primarily of variations on
the theme of “faith, family, and hard work . . . values taught and shared in my
home.” He swept us in by continuing “Those are my values, our values, Nebraska values that I
will take to Washington.”
Of the five videos you could access through his web site at the time
(www.petericketts.com), one was entitled “Believe” and another was “Mom.” You
were also invited to contribute to the Nebraska Families for Pete Ricketts pool.
That was the extent of the civics discourse contributed by Mr. Ricketts. The
family values candidate also contributed $4.5 million of his own money to this
pool before May 8, 2006.
No journalist ever asked Mr. Ricketts how he
would have handled the low level radioactive waste storage site issue that has
plagued the state like a cancer, how, exactly, he would get us out of Iraq or
Afghanistan, what, exactly, he understood about global climate change, whether
he could even define the terms “demography” or “ethnic diversity,” whether he
ever took a course in a foreign language, what he understood about basic science
and technology, to what extent he understood the arts’ contribution to our
national economy and image, what he knew about the cost of producing ethanol
from corn (as opposed to sugar cane), to what extent drilling in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge would or could actually reduce gasoline prices and
guarantee our energy future, and just exactly how he would propose to handle
the health care delivery system problems faced by our nation. Needless to say,
Mr. Ricketts did not offer any answers to any of these questions on his own.
“Nebraska values” it turns out are
stereotypical neoconservative: anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-evolution,
suspicious, if not outright disdainful, of science in general (but not applied
science producing value-added discoveries involving agricultural products), and
deeply religious, mostly Catholic. Are these “Nebraska values” wrong or dangerous? No,
certainly not as held by free individuals in a truly democratic society. Whether
they are wrong or dangerous, or perhaps more properly inadequate as a basis for
making international decisions in the Third Millennium, that is an open, and
debatable, question.
But the most troubling question
of all is: Are these values, combined with a candidate’s careful failure to
reveal the extent to which he or she understands science and demographics,
unique to Nebraska?
If they are, then nobody should worry, or even care, about someone like Pete
Ricketts assuming an elective position with power to influence global events. If
they are not, then we have plenty to worry about because science and demography
will be our challenges in the future, the former because it is completely
re-defining what is meant by the term “human being,” the latter because
demographic changes determine the boundary conditions under which this new form
of human evolves.
The evolutionary changes
occurring within the United
States should be obvious to anyone who reads
a daily newspaper, watches cable television, and pays even minimal attention to
our increasingly strident and confrontational dialog on all public matters. As
mentioned above, these changes include: the ethnic and linguistic makeup of our
nation, dropping educational levels of our workforce, growing fraction of our
citizens in direct contact with the legal system, deteriorating infrastructure,
a shifting theological landscape, extreme indebtedness, spiraling entitlement
obligations, exponentially increasing medical costs, declining quality of the
health care delivery system, an increasingly restrictive regulatory climate in
which we attempt to foster innovation, and military engagement in wars that
have no obvious end point. Combined, along with environmental phenomena such as
global-level deforestation and climate change, these factors establish the
boundary conditions, i.e., the
constraints on our system, for a rapidly evolving species of human that is
instantly connected—electronically—not only to billions of other humans, but
also an almost infinite supply of information, little of which can be
immediately judged as to its veracity.
Evolutionary trajectories are not
always easy to project, but any population of living organisms needs, as a
minimum, food, water, shelter, protection from predators and disease. In the
case of very intelligent animals—e.g. elephants, porpoises, gorillas,
chimpanzees, humans—there is also a need for the young to learn social skills
essential necessary for group coherence. Such skills include how to be parents
themselves, how to gather food, and in the case of chimps, how to build simple
tools such as twigs to extract termites. These species evolved, however, in
relatively stable conditions; there was time, up to the late Stone Age, for
genetic adjustments to environmental change through selection and innovation
developed out of necessity. One of the leading questions of our present time
is: Are young humans, as a group, learning the skills necessary for survival,
especially in a rapidly changing demographic, linguistic, and cultural
environment? In other words, is global environmental change, considering all
factors, cultural as well as natural, occurring too fast for us Americans to
adjust? All the evidence suggests that the answer is “yes.”
A “yes” answer to this immediate
question of the relationship between the constraints on American culture (see
above) and the environment in which that culture, or the ideal version of it,
attempts to survive means that as a terrorist, evolution is my most effective
weapon. If I really wanted to end the American dream, then I’d work overtime to
increase the burden of those boundary conditions outlined above. But if all I
wanted to do is kill people then I’d build a bomb. If I wanted to destroy
America, I’d study the literature of sociology, politics, and history,
literature that is readily available to virtually all people who can read
English then use that education to increase the boundary condition burden. But
if I lived in the Middle East and wanted a job, and a healthy economy, money
for schools, an elevated standard of living, then I’d shut down all the violence,
get over my fear of art, music, and women, crank up the tourist trade, and suck
those coins out of Western pockets. But if all I wanted to do was kill someone,
I’d make a bomb.
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