A qualitative change

There has been a qualitative change in the world, and we need to learn how to adapt to it. The change didn’t occur on 9/11/2001. That’s just the date on which we began to wake up to the fact that the change had occurred. We still haven’t really grasped the magnitude of the change, or the magnitude of the effort we need to adapt to that change.

There are two things which have changed.

We have always had violent maniacs, deranged fanatics, thugs, and ambitious and unprincipled leaders among us. We have always had a reservoir of deluded and misguided souls whom those leaders could manipulate to their own ends. And we have never lacked for pathological beliefs, or real or imagined grievances that are used to justify the most inhuman and outrageous acts. But until recently the damage such people could do to society was limited. With swords and machetes and even firearms there are only so many people an individual or small group can maim or kill. Even truck bombs or commandeered airplanes can only bring down one or two buildings at a time.

Up until now, to really destroy a nation or a civilization, to level their cities and salt the earth they stood on, required the resources and armies of a nation, or coalition of nations.

The first thing that has changed is the advent of nuclear and biological weapons. With these a small group, even a talented individual, now has the capability to destroy cities, perhaps nations, perhaps all life. It still takes the resources of a nation to produce weapons grade uranium or plutonium, but it only takes a small group to buy or steal those materials and assemble them into a crude but effective weapon capable of wiping any major city from the map, and to deliver that weapon in a truck or car or boat to its target.

Biological weapons are even harder to control. The raw materials exist in nature all around us, the knowledge can be found in any good university, and the required equipment can be bought from supply houses or on Ebay or even homemade from materials from a local hardware store. And the potential damage from releasing a highly infectious lethal disease on the world is immense.

The second thing that has changed is that our society is now much more vulnerable to disruption than it used to be. Even 250 years ago most of our ancestors could, if they had to, make do with what they could grow or find in nature. Much of the world still can, but not our first world economies. First world economies abound in critical bottlenecks – places where a single failure would cause extensive disruption. And the many facets of our civilization are so tightly interdependent that a single failure in one place can cause havoc throughout.

For example, we are wholly dependent on our electric grid. These days, if the power went down for days or weeks, much of our food supply would spoil. Even oil-powered transportation would halt, because the electric pumps needed to move the fuel wouldn’t work. The average store couldn’t even ring up a sale because their checkout computers would be down. The average home would have no heat, because electricity drives the oil or gas furnace blowers. Almost all business and finance would come to a halt, because computers and machines wouldn’t work. And so on. Just look around and see what our lives would be with no electricity. And yet our electric grid – thousands of miles of high tension lines running unprotected across remote parts of the country – is a highly vulnerable target.

Spend a few minutes thinking about this and one can think of dozens of other similar vulnerabilities in our high-technology first world civilizations.

So what has changed in the past few decades, and what we are just now beginning to really notice, is that small groups or even individuals now have the capability to do us massive harm, even to destroy us as a civilization, even to destroy us as a species. And we will never lack for individuals who want to do us such harm.

There is no easy answer to how we adapt to these changes, but adapt we must, and soon. The sort of token cosmetic changes the government has been putting in place to date – like more screeners at airports – simply shows that the political structure doesn’t yet recognize either the magnitude or the seriousness of the threat.