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2. HOW AL-QAEDA CAN WIN (Sept. 2002)
Allow me a detour. In the debate over whether intelligent life exists
in this galaxy, one common argument against is this: After all these
billions of years, all this time to evolve, the galaxy should be
filled, busy, clotted with intelligent beings. So where are they?
Why haven't we been visited, or at least signaled (easy, once a modern
technology is achieved)? And so the againsters draw this profoundly pessimistic
conclusion: We are alone. And there has never been another. The sole champion of
intelligence in the Milky Way. One spear, and but one carrier.
Let me counter this deep pessimism with an alternative: a further dark
vision, in some ways even more depressing: Life has always been common in our
vast shiny Milky Way, even intelligent life. Life, in fact (in my vision) exists
around 1 star in 10, a reasonable conclusion, microlife. Around 1 in 100 it
evolves higher, to the level, say, of sponges or jellyfish. Around 1 in 1,000
higher yet, to the level of fish. 1 in 10,000: highly intelligent
mammal-equivalents, like apes or dolphins. 1 in
100,000: intelligent beings with some tool use, and a sense of things beyond
mere eat-grunt-and-die. Like the Neanderthals. 1 in 1,000,000: true intelligent
civilizations of varying depth: the rough equivalents of ancient Rome, or
Sumeria, or the Mayans, or Renaissance Italy. Still, far from being able to
space-travel, or signal. And then the star that is the 1 in 10,000,000: proud
parent to a civilization like ours, with nuclear power, bio-engineering,
spaceships, and the rest. There are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, so
10,000 High Civilizations. Say the first appeared 10 billion years ago, the
prodigy. So a new one has appeared every million years.
Alas, none has lasted more than a few centuries, and then the Milky
Way waits nearly a million years for the next to appear, and it too blinks out
instantly. (On a cosmic scale a few centuries is an instant.) One never has
contact with another, and probably thinks it is all that has ever been. When the
last one existed, on Earth homo sapiens hadn't even been born.
Now it is our turn. Is it?
On the morning of September 11, after seeing off my then-wife on her
United Airlines flight to Los Angeles, I returned to our apartment in New
York City, sat down to the salad and dressing she had prepared for me, and
turned on the Washington Post's website, to see what was going on in the world.
A plane had crashed into a World Trade Center tower.
A terrible accident.
I ran to the bedroom window, and my god there was the tower with its
flaming head, and vast streaming smoke.
I went back-and-forth, from the computer to the window to
the computer, with the radio too, occasionally to the phone (to the extent it
worked that day) (as a matter of principle, I generally refuse to watch TV, even
on a September 11) and saw the towers flame and fall.
My then-wife's flight was safe, taking off from JFK, though no doubt
it was one Al-Qaeda had scouted out.
Here is the sad news I bring: We too have now reached the moment when
our technology makes our divisions fatal.
What killed the previous 10,000 civilizations? It must be that magic
technologies can be achieved by only a few beings, a few geniuses backed by some
talents, but that to preserve the civilizations such technologies create
requires an all-united-together resolve.
Because if you are divided someone in the division will grab the
immense new magic and use it.
We are divided. As those 10,000 diversity-filled worlds (the only
kind that can achieve modernity) were. Deny it as some may, a Clash Of
Civilizatons is at hand, though it is not fundamentally a clash of Islam vs. the
West, not really, much as it seems on the surface. A new alternative order
exists in both camps.
Called the One World Order, as this unique mix of High Technology,
Globalization, Hijinks, Irony, Democratism, Predator Capitalism, Merry Decadence
and Attentuated Islamo/Judeo/Christianity has flowed on, it has flowed on (till
recently) with apparently little or no idea that there are human beings on this
planet who hate it with such fury they would rather die than see it triumph.
I have always wondered where the historically inevitable challenge
to the One World Order would come from, and it turns out it has most strongly
emerged from the Islamic world, or rather from a committed minority within
Islam. But then, history is the work of elites, successfully dragging the masses
behind them. And Al-Qaeda is the elite of the elite, the tip of the spear.
It is not that Al-Qaeda offers an alternative civilization that can
interest many. The two recent experiments in quasi-medieval Islamic fascism in
Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, Iran, have proven stomach-turning even to
most Muslims (and to an overwhelming majority of Islamic women). No, what Al-Qaeda
offers is the sudden, true legitimate possibility of destruction of a
civilization hated by millions, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. And after that---
who knows what? First let a League of Fire sweep the world. For many,
destruction will work as the immediate goal.
9/11 was a stunning strike, killing 3,000, wounding the economy,
perhaps dooming the airline industry as private enterprise, stealing away
(permanently?) civil liberties that seemed carved in stone, hurtling America
into war, darkening the national mood--- its impact keeps rippling out, not as
from a rock hurled into a pond but as an asteroid screaming into an ocean.
And yet the weapons used in this attack--- four planes--- are small
stuff compared to what's potential.
A whole mess of humans have been stewing in rage and disgust and
impotence at the seemingly inevitable triumph of modernity over all other
possibilities. Now, all over the world, a light is going on in their heads. This
triumph isn't inevitable at all. In a universe of magic energies humankind has
grasped some big enough to explode its whole enterprise. Consider these
possibilities: Atomic weapons as common as rifles. Backyard or basement "dirty
bombs". (One exploded in downtown Manhattan could render it uninhabitable for
years or decades.) Smallpox reborn. Bio-engineering of existing viruses to
infinitely greater lethality. Want to destroy the human race? An HIV that's
spread through coughing and sneezing is just the tonic. The creation of entirely
new viruses. Or even simpler ideas. Here's two. 1,000's of arsonists setting
coordinated forest fires across the U.S. during droughts. Inoculating suicidal
Don Juans with the strains of HIV that haven't made it to America (including the
Cameroon strain and little-known HIV-2) and setting them loose on America's
slutty and love-starved female population. The list is endless.
Al-Qaeda has natural allies all across America and the world, as
long as it doesn't push its own particular Islamic fundamentalist agenda on
them, but simply offers its services as teacher, supplier, financier or
occasional brother-in-arms. Conservative Christians who have more in common with
Al-Qaeda than with MTV. Radical ecologists who've finally woken up to the fact
that Global Capitalism cannot be reasoned with, only defeated. Militia types, of
course. (Maybe even McVeigh and Nichols.) Those men who are inevitably losers
with women in a world of Darwinian hedonism: "nice" men, shy men, too-good men,
reserved men, awkward men, misogynistic men. All the Mohammed Attas and Timothy
McVeighs of the world. Romantics who dream of a pre-modern world restored.
People with a naturally strong religious bent for whom Islam has deeper
attraction than a now-attenutated Christianity. Fathers and mothers embittered
that their sons are drug-sodden and obsessed with filth and their daughters
dress and act in ways only prostitutes once did, and a society won't support
them, instead it encourages the children. People who do not want to
live in a
world of clones and half-robots and bio-engineered monstrosities and chimeras
and humans with chips implanted in their brains and other onrushing and
otherwise inevitable horrors. Drug dealers
and druglords who'll welcome more muscle, the muscle welcoming the death and
decadence drugs bring to a hated civilization. And all across the world, the
billions in the shantytowns and favelas and slums who know that to the One
World Order in its frenzied "race to the bottom" they are little more than raw
material, to be burned up, so that 5% or 10% of the human race can live like gods.
There is an army of humanity ready to assail the walls of civilization,
and it doesn't matter that Al-Qaeda in the end offers no real alternative for
them. Its vision of destruction is enough. After all is ash--- we'll see what's
up.
Here is Al-Qaeda's army-in-waiting, its multiplier. If it isn't too
proud, too ideologically - or religiously - rigid to accept it.
How to defeat Al-Qaeda? Only with a vision inspiring beyond mere
materialism. A civilization not just powerful but magnificently good. A
civilization that can somehow step backward with respect even as it hurtles
forward with energy. Perhaps this is impossible, since the essence of modernity
has been "creative destruction" and transcendence through subversion of most of
what was, processes often deeply painful and horrible that nonetheless can
benefit a minority.
And so we rush with a gasp into the 21st Century, which is going to
be halluconogenic beyond imagining, and into the 3rd Millenium, which is not
likely to end well. 10,000 times before it did not.
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