The price of oil right now is sixty percent off its July record price. Speculation certainly played its role in the rising prices of the last few years, as Amy Myers Jaffe (with whom I had an exchange in the journal Survival last August) pointed out-and I agree that the abandonment of oil by the speculators played its role in the recent drop. So did the smothering of the earlier, strong demand growth by the stiff $150 a barrel price tag (and a global economic crisis).
Nonetheless, while providing some much-needed relief, these developments do not change the essential picture. Even if demand is slightly down in 2008-9 from earlier years, this will not last forever. Indeed, the lowered prices are setting the stage for new consumption growth-just as world demand grew again in the 1980s (though, as the current economic crisis demonstrates, there are plenty of reasons to think the road ahead is going to be a rocky one, the availability of energy supplies only a part of that). And barring unlikely regulatory measures, the speculators will be back.
More importantly, the old causes for concern that got another, long overdue hearing during the price rises of 2003-08 remain. Known oil supplies continue to be used up much more quickly than new supplies are being discovered, and the process of getting production up and running at new fields (a decade or more) remain as long as before. No new reason has appeared to think that the reserves of the OPEC countries have not been significantly overstated. The theory of peak oil is no less (or more) valid than it was back in July. And the potential for unconventional oil to fill the gap between supply and demand that peak theorists have long expected to emerge in the next decade is unchanged from what it was not too long ago (10 or 11 million barrels a day, no more).
This makes the question, as I put it in August, not whether the price of oil will drop (as it already has), but how far, and for how long? And when it starts going up again, as it almost certainly will, how far and how long will that go on too? The end of the oil age was never going to be a linear thing, and the worst mistake we can make at this moment is to pretend that things were really fine all along, that the calls for sounder energy policy in the last few years were nothing but hysteria, and abandon conservation efforts and the development of alternative energy sources-the way we did in the 1980s, when R & D and other efforts in this area fell off, resulting in a pattern of underinvestment that set us back decades, particularly in the U.S., but internationally as well.
Those mistakes, which set us up for later difficulties, must not be forgotten by anyone purporting to guess at the future. I only hope they will not be repeated.
Wednesday, November 26, 2008
Friday, November 14, 2008
Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism & Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq, by William R. Polk
New York: HarperCollins, 2007, pp. 304.
As readers of the recent literature on guerrilla warfare, this is a highly contentious subject. It may be a mistake to overlook the role of non-material factors like politics and morale in any type of warfare, but in interstate conflicts, wealth, technology and numbers make themselves felt in a way that is not the case with guerrilla warfare, which frequently sees the weak defeat the strong. Additionally, what constitutes "victory" tends to be more ambiguous, so that there is profound disagreement over what to make of particular campaigns. For instance, is one to chalk up Britain's counterinsurgency efforts in Malaya as a victory or a defeat? (The Communists were prevented from taking over the country--but the British also departed.)
Accordingly some writers present the guerrilla as virtually invincible, others as inherently futile. Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace, a self-described history of America's "small wars," for instance, depicts a few thousand American soldiers, sailors and marines venturing out, pacifying a country in short order, and going home time and time again, with the implication that counterinsurgency is a relatively simple matter, and success historically routine. By contrast, when Martin Van Creveld's books address the subject, they tend to read like listings of great power humiliations. His latest, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat From the Marne to Iraq, is no exception.
William R. Polk's recent study, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism & Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq, leans strongly toward the latter view, albeit with important qualifications having to do with the fundamental assessment of the problem. Polk's book characterizes guerrilla warfare as a nationalistic response to the presence of a foreign occupier.
Unchecked, this response proceeds through three phases. In the first phase the insurgency, tending to begin with what may seem like a preposterously small number of active combatants "fight as terrorists" because they are "too few to fight as guerrillas." The actions they take may attract others alienated by the situation to them, and certainly generate government repression, reinforcing the process as embittered citizens also sign up. A successful outcome of this phase (for the insurgents) is their attaining a "critical mass for extended operations and achiev[ing] recognition as a national champion."
The conventional wisdom is that this "political" phase is eighty percent of the conflict, and Polk does not differ on that point. However, Polk offers a more nuanced view of the remaining twenty percent, which other authors often characterize as simply a military component, in his characterization of the next two phases.
In phase two-which accounts for another fifteen percent of the conflict-the guerrillas act to disrupt the functioning of the state as such, and substitute their own "counter-state" for it. They keep the government from being able to maintain order, collect taxes or operate basic services while the guerrillas may attempt to do some or all of these things. This is not a matter of holding ground for the guerrillas, the objective rather to "take control and win over the people."
The third phase-a mere five percent, though also entailing the bulk of the fighting-involves a turn to larger-scale military operations on the part of the guerrillas. This means an end to "small-scale, hit-and-run" and a shift toward regular warfare.
Polk's analysis is much stronger in its consideration of the first two phases than the third, and in particular what makes for a successful phase three. The selected historical examples do not clarify that part of the issue. Where many of these insurgencies met with success, as in the Spanish struggle against Napoleon, or the Yugoslav and Greek resistance during World War II, the guerrillas were often players inside of a much larger context of interstate conflict. (The same might also be said of the American Revolution, or the insurgency in South Vietnam.) In other cases, an exhausted and collapsing empire was fighting a rear-guard battle to hold on to its colonies (as with the Spanish in the Philippines, the French in Algeria and post-World War II Vietnam, or the British in Kenya). Little explanation is offered as to why post-World War I Ireland and Afghanistan-where in the 1980s, massive foreign support was certainly a factor-constitute exceptions to that pattern. (In the case of Ireland, a brief word about public opinion is presented as the decisive difference.)
Additionally, while this book's emphasis is on long-standing historical patterns, some more consideration would have been due the changes that have occurred during the two centuries of history this book surveys. There is virtually no discussion of the impact of urbanization, which has been strongly correlated with the prospects for rebellion and revolution occurring (as in Jack Goldstone's Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World), but which in the analysis of some observers, makes it almost impossible for guerrillas to win (as Anthony James Joes contends in his recent study, Urban Guerrilla Warfare).
Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to linger on these shortcomings, because of the importance of what the book does get right, in particular its recognition that combat operations constitute a relatively small part of the conflict. In this, Polk's study echoes the assessment of contemporary conflict advanced by General Rupert Smith in his book, The Utility of Force (my review of which for Strategic Insights you can read here). Phase One is ultimately where the war is won or lost, the rest just a matter of putting off defeat-and so to be avoided barring a readiness to fight such a war indefinitely.
As readers of the recent literature on guerrilla warfare, this is a highly contentious subject. It may be a mistake to overlook the role of non-material factors like politics and morale in any type of warfare, but in interstate conflicts, wealth, technology and numbers make themselves felt in a way that is not the case with guerrilla warfare, which frequently sees the weak defeat the strong. Additionally, what constitutes "victory" tends to be more ambiguous, so that there is profound disagreement over what to make of particular campaigns. For instance, is one to chalk up Britain's counterinsurgency efforts in Malaya as a victory or a defeat? (The Communists were prevented from taking over the country--but the British also departed.)
Accordingly some writers present the guerrilla as virtually invincible, others as inherently futile. Max Boot's The Savage Wars of Peace, a self-described history of America's "small wars," for instance, depicts a few thousand American soldiers, sailors and marines venturing out, pacifying a country in short order, and going home time and time again, with the implication that counterinsurgency is a relatively simple matter, and success historically routine. By contrast, when Martin Van Creveld's books address the subject, they tend to read like listings of great power humiliations. His latest, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat From the Marne to Iraq, is no exception.
William R. Polk's recent study, Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism & Guerrilla War, From the American Revolution to Iraq, leans strongly toward the latter view, albeit with important qualifications having to do with the fundamental assessment of the problem. Polk's book characterizes guerrilla warfare as a nationalistic response to the presence of a foreign occupier.
Unchecked, this response proceeds through three phases. In the first phase the insurgency, tending to begin with what may seem like a preposterously small number of active combatants "fight as terrorists" because they are "too few to fight as guerrillas." The actions they take may attract others alienated by the situation to them, and certainly generate government repression, reinforcing the process as embittered citizens also sign up. A successful outcome of this phase (for the insurgents) is their attaining a "critical mass for extended operations and achiev[ing] recognition as a national champion."
The conventional wisdom is that this "political" phase is eighty percent of the conflict, and Polk does not differ on that point. However, Polk offers a more nuanced view of the remaining twenty percent, which other authors often characterize as simply a military component, in his characterization of the next two phases.
In phase two-which accounts for another fifteen percent of the conflict-the guerrillas act to disrupt the functioning of the state as such, and substitute their own "counter-state" for it. They keep the government from being able to maintain order, collect taxes or operate basic services while the guerrillas may attempt to do some or all of these things. This is not a matter of holding ground for the guerrillas, the objective rather to "take control and win over the people."
The third phase-a mere five percent, though also entailing the bulk of the fighting-involves a turn to larger-scale military operations on the part of the guerrillas. This means an end to "small-scale, hit-and-run" and a shift toward regular warfare.
Polk's analysis is much stronger in its consideration of the first two phases than the third, and in particular what makes for a successful phase three. The selected historical examples do not clarify that part of the issue. Where many of these insurgencies met with success, as in the Spanish struggle against Napoleon, or the Yugoslav and Greek resistance during World War II, the guerrillas were often players inside of a much larger context of interstate conflict. (The same might also be said of the American Revolution, or the insurgency in South Vietnam.) In other cases, an exhausted and collapsing empire was fighting a rear-guard battle to hold on to its colonies (as with the Spanish in the Philippines, the French in Algeria and post-World War II Vietnam, or the British in Kenya). Little explanation is offered as to why post-World War I Ireland and Afghanistan-where in the 1980s, massive foreign support was certainly a factor-constitute exceptions to that pattern. (In the case of Ireland, a brief word about public opinion is presented as the decisive difference.)
Additionally, while this book's emphasis is on long-standing historical patterns, some more consideration would have been due the changes that have occurred during the two centuries of history this book surveys. There is virtually no discussion of the impact of urbanization, which has been strongly correlated with the prospects for rebellion and revolution occurring (as in Jack Goldstone's Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World), but which in the analysis of some observers, makes it almost impossible for guerrillas to win (as Anthony James Joes contends in his recent study, Urban Guerrilla Warfare).
Nonetheless, it would be a mistake to linger on these shortcomings, because of the importance of what the book does get right, in particular its recognition that combat operations constitute a relatively small part of the conflict. In this, Polk's study echoes the assessment of contemporary conflict advanced by General Rupert Smith in his book, The Utility of Force (my review of which for Strategic Insights you can read here). Phase One is ultimately where the war is won or lost, the rest just a matter of putting off defeat-and so to be avoided barring a readiness to fight such a war indefinitely.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
Are Territorial Military Occupations Becoming More Difficult?
By Nader Elhefnawy
Neoconservative Max Boot's 2002 book The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, a self-described history of America's "small wars" intended to sell the idea that empire is feasible and worthwhile, depicts a few thousand American soldiers, sailors and marines venturing out, pacifying a country in short order, and going home time and time again.
When I first read it, something seemed off about Boot's analysis. He made it seem too easy, and the events of recent years have helped clarify why that was. In the operations Boot describes, U.S. objectives were very limited, quashing an immediate, perceived threat, and otherwise leaving the countries much as they were, so that American forces were likely to return again in the not-too-distant future to do it all over again. By contrast, "proper" nation-building today entails the setting up of a stable government and functioning economy, then leaving with little expectation of a near-term redux.1
In short, territorial occupations are expected to accomplish far more than before. Of course, advocates of such operations point to the cases of Germany and Japan in the post-World War II period. However, these were anomalous in already having been economically viable industrial states, with significant, recent experience of modern civil society and democracy, and a high degree of ethnic homogeneity, eliminating the danger that ethnic or sectarian tensions would exert centrifugal forces in a moment of weakness. In short, it was a matter of getting the country up and running again, rather than building up what was never there in the first place (or dismantling what was there before and building up something entirely new), a much taller order.
The occupations of the immediate post-war period (of which the occupations of Germany and Japan were a part) represent exceptional rather than typical cases. U.S.-led occupations in Western Europe and Northeast Asia during those years represent six of the seven successful occupations that David Edelstein found out of a total of twenty-four he studied.2 A critical factor appears to have been the occupier's guarantee of the occupied nation's security against an external threat, specifically the Soviet Union, which quelled internal opposition.3 In other words, the rapid onset of the Cold War following the end of World War II created unique opportunities which are unlikely to recur in the foreseeable future.
Many observers also forget just how demanding the occupations were. The American presence in West Germany alone (and it should be remembered that there were also British and French zones) involved four hundred thousand troops. The U.S. occupation of Japan involved an even larger number of soldiers, four hundred and fifty thousand at its height--approximately one soldier for every 180 Japanese citizens.
Meanwhile, a number of developments have made occupation more rather than less difficult. Several of them have to do with changes in the countries to be garrisoned themselves, related to their modernization:
* Demographic expansion.
* Urbanization.
* Social mobilization.
Put simply, the populations to be administered and policed in the course of an occupation are larger; and are concentrated in much more complex environments. To give but one example, the population of Baghdad expanded twenty times between 1932 and 2006, producing a metropolis sprawling over some three hundred square miles, and containing seven million people.
That same urbanization, as well as higher levels of education, and greater access to media in virtually all locations, results in a population that is at least potentially more engaged politically, with predictable results. Moreover, all of these count for more in an age where conflict is characterized less by "industrial war" than "war amongst the people," to use General Rupert Smith's terms.4 Battlefield decisions count for far less, as do arms in general, these becoming more clearly just a way of creating conditions in which other "means and levers of power" can be brought to bear to produce the results. And given how slowly those levers work, conflicts "tend to be timeless, even unending."
All of this comes just as a number of other factors have combined to make it more difficult for the major military powers (and especially the developed states) to raise the kinds of military forces needed for long-term occupation:
* Again, demographics, or the graying of populations. Smaller youth cohorts mean smaller (relative) pools of manpower from which to draw armies. This trend is globally evident, but most advanced in North America, Europe, Russia, East Asia and Australasia, the regions containing the countries with the bulk of the world's military capability, and also the ones most likely to stage such interventions-with the countries where interventions are most likely usually in earlier stages of the process, resulting in a significant disparity.5
* Professionalization. The claim that modern armies can only be professional armies is an old one. Basil Liddell Hart made it after World War I, and again after World War II.6 He was proven wrong each time, but it may be that the claim is more valid today. Professional forces are necessarily smaller forces.
* Diminished civic militarism. This extends not only to the willingness to serve in the armed forces, but the willingness to pay for large defense establishments, or politically support operations, particularly when they are messy, lengthy and open-ended. That those operations are much less likely to relate to traditional territorial defense, and more likely to consist of constabulry missions, also makes such operations less gratifying to traditional patriotism, so that this is not simply a function of more pacifistic culture.7
* The "rising cost of war." As societies develop, they afford more (and often more attractive) career opportunities in civilian life to the ambitious. Nonetheless, this is offset somewhat by the reality of high structural unemployment and underemployment, especially among the young.
* Task specialization. It is arguable that there is an increasing divergence between the kind of army necessary for fighting and winning conventional conflicts; and one that might be effective at the tasks entailed by occupation duty. (Modern conventional forces have high support-to-combat ratios, and an emphasis on high-performance equipment of marginal value to such operations, for instance.) Responding to this reality, strategist Thomas Barnett has gone so far as to suggest the U.S. develop two, different forces (the "Leviathan" and "SysAdmin" forces, respectively), one for each task.8
Some observers will also point to the pressure on militaries to preserve their forces, and the enlarged role of the media. It is likely the case that the sensitivity to casualties has been exaggerated in the past, and that the same goes for the scrutiny to which the media subject such operations.9 Nonetheless, these too are factors, despite the exaggerations.
In short, there are very considerable, structural reasons why occupations have become more difficult, and the plain and simple truth is that there is no tactical, technological or political "silver bullet" which will resolve those difficulties. The only reasonable response for the foreseeable future is the recognition of the limits of military power in general, and in particular the capacity of even the strongest military powers to perform these sorts of missions. This means not undertaking given missions with unrealistic ideas about the size or length of the commitments they entail if they are to be done right, or overselling what occupations can do, in the course of moving toward a sounder balance between means and ends.
1 Incidentally, this was never an object for the British Empire (so often held up as a model imperialist by neoconservatives like Boot, and Niall Ferguson), which was ready to go to the greater lengths of permanently garrisoning its possessions and in cases, transplanting significant numbers of colonists.
2 The sole exception was France after the end of the Napoleonic wars. David M. Edelstein, "Occupational Hazards: Why Military Occupations Succeed or Fail," International Security 29.1 (Summer 2004), pp. 49-91.
3 Edelstein, p. 81.
4 The core of this argument can be found in chapter seven of Smith's The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 269-307. You can also find it summed up in my review of the book for the journal Strategic Insights, which you can access here.
5 In 1950 the developed states accounted for about a third of the world's population; today they account for less than a fifth, with most of the world's population growth continuing in poorer and less developed states.
6 See Liddell Hart, Paris, or the Future of War (New York: Garland, 1925); Liddell Hart, Defence of the West: Some Riddles of War and Peace (London: Cassell, 1950).
7 One can also argue that where civic militarism has not decreased, it has been redefined, Andrew Bacevich arguing that militarism has actually risen in American society in recent decades, pointing to a shift from an emphasis on service to politically "supporting the troops." See Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War (New York: Oxford, 2005)
8 See Thomas P.M. Barnett, Blueprint for Action (New York: Berkeley, 2006).
9 As Martin Van Creveld recently put it, "'media' has become an excuse for failure." See Van Creveld, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat From the Marne to Iraq (New York: Ballantine, 2007), p. 217.
Neoconservative Max Boot's 2002 book The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, a self-described history of America's "small wars" intended to sell the idea that empire is feasible and worthwhile, depicts a few thousand American soldiers, sailors and marines venturing out, pacifying a country in short order, and going home time and time again.
When I first read it, something seemed off about Boot's analysis. He made it seem too easy, and the events of recent years have helped clarify why that was. In the operations Boot describes, U.S. objectives were very limited, quashing an immediate, perceived threat, and otherwise leaving the countries much as they were, so that American forces were likely to return again in the not-too-distant future to do it all over again. By contrast, "proper" nation-building today entails the setting up of a stable government and functioning economy, then leaving with little expectation of a near-term redux.1
In short, territorial occupations are expected to accomplish far more than before. Of course, advocates of such operations point to the cases of Germany and Japan in the post-World War II period. However, these were anomalous in already having been economically viable industrial states, with significant, recent experience of modern civil society and democracy, and a high degree of ethnic homogeneity, eliminating the danger that ethnic or sectarian tensions would exert centrifugal forces in a moment of weakness. In short, it was a matter of getting the country up and running again, rather than building up what was never there in the first place (or dismantling what was there before and building up something entirely new), a much taller order.
The occupations of the immediate post-war period (of which the occupations of Germany and Japan were a part) represent exceptional rather than typical cases. U.S.-led occupations in Western Europe and Northeast Asia during those years represent six of the seven successful occupations that David Edelstein found out of a total of twenty-four he studied.2 A critical factor appears to have been the occupier's guarantee of the occupied nation's security against an external threat, specifically the Soviet Union, which quelled internal opposition.3 In other words, the rapid onset of the Cold War following the end of World War II created unique opportunities which are unlikely to recur in the foreseeable future.
Many observers also forget just how demanding the occupations were. The American presence in West Germany alone (and it should be remembered that there were also British and French zones) involved four hundred thousand troops. The U.S. occupation of Japan involved an even larger number of soldiers, four hundred and fifty thousand at its height--approximately one soldier for every 180 Japanese citizens.
Meanwhile, a number of developments have made occupation more rather than less difficult. Several of them have to do with changes in the countries to be garrisoned themselves, related to their modernization:
* Demographic expansion.
* Urbanization.
* Social mobilization.
Put simply, the populations to be administered and policed in the course of an occupation are larger; and are concentrated in much more complex environments. To give but one example, the population of Baghdad expanded twenty times between 1932 and 2006, producing a metropolis sprawling over some three hundred square miles, and containing seven million people.
That same urbanization, as well as higher levels of education, and greater access to media in virtually all locations, results in a population that is at least potentially more engaged politically, with predictable results. Moreover, all of these count for more in an age where conflict is characterized less by "industrial war" than "war amongst the people," to use General Rupert Smith's terms.4 Battlefield decisions count for far less, as do arms in general, these becoming more clearly just a way of creating conditions in which other "means and levers of power" can be brought to bear to produce the results. And given how slowly those levers work, conflicts "tend to be timeless, even unending."
All of this comes just as a number of other factors have combined to make it more difficult for the major military powers (and especially the developed states) to raise the kinds of military forces needed for long-term occupation:
* Again, demographics, or the graying of populations. Smaller youth cohorts mean smaller (relative) pools of manpower from which to draw armies. This trend is globally evident, but most advanced in North America, Europe, Russia, East Asia and Australasia, the regions containing the countries with the bulk of the world's military capability, and also the ones most likely to stage such interventions-with the countries where interventions are most likely usually in earlier stages of the process, resulting in a significant disparity.5
* Professionalization. The claim that modern armies can only be professional armies is an old one. Basil Liddell Hart made it after World War I, and again after World War II.6 He was proven wrong each time, but it may be that the claim is more valid today. Professional forces are necessarily smaller forces.
* Diminished civic militarism. This extends not only to the willingness to serve in the armed forces, but the willingness to pay for large defense establishments, or politically support operations, particularly when they are messy, lengthy and open-ended. That those operations are much less likely to relate to traditional territorial defense, and more likely to consist of constabulry missions, also makes such operations less gratifying to traditional patriotism, so that this is not simply a function of more pacifistic culture.7
* The "rising cost of war." As societies develop, they afford more (and often more attractive) career opportunities in civilian life to the ambitious. Nonetheless, this is offset somewhat by the reality of high structural unemployment and underemployment, especially among the young.
* Task specialization. It is arguable that there is an increasing divergence between the kind of army necessary for fighting and winning conventional conflicts; and one that might be effective at the tasks entailed by occupation duty. (Modern conventional forces have high support-to-combat ratios, and an emphasis on high-performance equipment of marginal value to such operations, for instance.) Responding to this reality, strategist Thomas Barnett has gone so far as to suggest the U.S. develop two, different forces (the "Leviathan" and "SysAdmin" forces, respectively), one for each task.8
Some observers will also point to the pressure on militaries to preserve their forces, and the enlarged role of the media. It is likely the case that the sensitivity to casualties has been exaggerated in the past, and that the same goes for the scrutiny to which the media subject such operations.9 Nonetheless, these too are factors, despite the exaggerations.
In short, there are very considerable, structural reasons why occupations have become more difficult, and the plain and simple truth is that there is no tactical, technological or political "silver bullet" which will resolve those difficulties. The only reasonable response for the foreseeable future is the recognition of the limits of military power in general, and in particular the capacity of even the strongest military powers to perform these sorts of missions. This means not undertaking given missions with unrealistic ideas about the size or length of the commitments they entail if they are to be done right, or overselling what occupations can do, in the course of moving toward a sounder balance between means and ends.
1 Incidentally, this was never an object for the British Empire (so often held up as a model imperialist by neoconservatives like Boot, and Niall Ferguson), which was ready to go to the greater lengths of permanently garrisoning its possessions and in cases, transplanting significant numbers of colonists.
2 The sole exception was France after the end of the Napoleonic wars. David M. Edelstein, "Occupational Hazards: Why Military Occupations Succeed or Fail," International Security 29.1 (Summer 2004), pp. 49-91.
3 Edelstein, p. 81.
4 The core of this argument can be found in chapter seven of Smith's The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 269-307. You can also find it summed up in my review of the book for the journal Strategic Insights, which you can access here.
5 In 1950 the developed states accounted for about a third of the world's population; today they account for less than a fifth, with most of the world's population growth continuing in poorer and less developed states.
6 See Liddell Hart, Paris, or the Future of War (New York: Garland, 1925); Liddell Hart, Defence of the West: Some Riddles of War and Peace (London: Cassell, 1950).
7 One can also argue that where civic militarism has not decreased, it has been redefined, Andrew Bacevich arguing that militarism has actually risen in American society in recent decades, pointing to a shift from an emphasis on service to politically "supporting the troops." See Bacevich, The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced By War (New York: Oxford, 2005)
8 See Thomas P.M. Barnett, Blueprint for Action (New York: Berkeley, 2006).
9 As Martin Van Creveld recently put it, "'media' has become an excuse for failure." See Van Creveld, The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat From the Marne to Iraq (New York: Ballantine, 2007), p. 217.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
A Russian Resurgence? (Part One)
By Nader Elhefnawy
Originally published in the SPACE REVIEW, November 10, 2008
"RUSSIA RESURGENT" read the cover of the August 16, 2008 issue of The Economist, which depicted a giant Vladimir Putin towering over advancing ranks of flag-bearing Russian soldiers as fighters and attack helicopters streak past.
This none-too-subtle image was, of course, a reaction to the Russian invasion of Georgia, which signaled the country’s return as a military heavyweight to many, a reading of events reflective of the usual media exaggeration. While it may still be too early for a really thorough assessment of the Russian military’s performance in the conflict, there is little reason to believe that the Russian armed forces have been seriously rehabilitated, despite the unveiling of schemes like the State Armaments Program—still in its very early stages—and gestures like the resumption of long-range bomber flights, and a handful of high-profile military exercises (like the recently announced joint exercise with the Venezuelan navy in the Caribbean). The Russian military’s success in a limited war with a much smaller and poorer neighbor is also a long way from the "long-range power projection" capability that some of those hyping Russian military power describe as a foregone conclusion by 2020, like Barry McCaffrey in a recent pitch for an ambitious aircraft procurement program in the Joint Force Quarterly.
Nonetheless, the perception marks a dramatic turnaround in the view of Russia compared with ten years ago. In 1998 Russia was widely regarded as a basketcase, and able to look forward only to more of the same. Today, it is seen as a vigorous, economically dynamic state that may not be the superpower it once was, but a much more substantial actor in international affairs, and with brighter prospects, than might have been guessed a decade ago. It seems only reasonable to wonder, then, if Russia's "resurgence" will translate to the country's position in space, as some are already arguing, notably Brian Harvey in his recent book, The Rebirth of the Russian Space Program.
The fall of a great space power
The Soviet Union had the world’s second-largest economy until at least 1980, and perhaps until the end of its life, which enabled it to be the space superpower that it was. Not only did it have a striking list of "firsts" to its credit from Sputnik on, but its vast infrastructure in space, its satellite networks and space stations, had no peer save the United States. And not even the US matched it in certain respects, like the sheer rate of satellite launches it was able to sustain.
Of course, this state of affairs did not continue. Following the country’s collapse in 1991, the division of the Soviet Union into fifteen states, and the disruption of the break-up, left Moscow with the trappings of the ex-superpower, the space program included, but just a quarter (or at most, a third) of the national income that had sustained them.
Predictably, the Soviet program collapsed after the country that had built it up. In 1992 the worldwide seaborne tracking fleet was recalled to Russian ports, for lack of the hard currency to pay for their stays in foreign harbors. The Buran shuttle program was cancelled the year after that. The GLONASS navigation system decayed, the 24-satellite constellation shrinking to a mere six craft by 2001 for lack of replacements. The plans to build on the Mir space station were never realized: Mir barely remained operational up to its deorbiting, and the remnants of that program were absorbed by the International Space Station. As Russian military launches fell from 28 in 1992 to a mere five in 2000, the country’s senior officers would increasingly complain of periods of "blindness" and "deafness," in which the number of Russian photo- and electronic reconnaissance satellites in orbit at a given moment dropped to zero.
This is not to say that Russia was totally without successes in this period. That the program was able to stay alive on its old capital (and the income secured from commercial sales of its services) was by itself an achievement. Russia remained the world’s most active satellite launcher during the decade, and around the turn of the century a turnaround began. The Russian government initiated a restoration and modernization of GLONASS, and pioneered space tourism (just one of the ways in which the country has been an important player in the commercial services market), which optimists expect to see become a significant business. Most symbolic of all, Russian Soyuz launches have proven essential to the continued functioning of the International Space Station, especially after the Columbia disaster in 2003—during which it was the only nation in the world with an established manned spaceflight capability, a status to which some think it will return given the uncertainties about the shuttle’s future.
Nonetheless, the tendency in the media was to pay far more attention to the failures than the successes, in line with the generally bleak view of Russia’s situation, while doing exactly the opposite in the case of China (expected by everyone from science fiction writers to defense analysts to be the US’s great competitor in the future). Predictably, where Soviet space activity had once loomed so large in Western imaginations, in some ways, preposterously so (see "Space war and Futurehype," The Space Review, October 22, 2007) it is now easy to forget that this was ever the case. However, things have already started to turn up, and the Russian government has accordingly committed itself to an ambitious ten-year program, on which it hopes to build in the decades to follow.
The Russian Federal Space Program (FSP), 2006–2015
The program, first announced in July 2005, included not only the rehabilitation of GLONASS, the meeting of Russia’s commitments to the International Space Station program and the launch of a number of earth-monitoring and communications satellites, but the development of the Kliper space shuttle, the Parom space tug (a system long seen as a requirement for ambitious space development projects), and the Angara heavy-lift launcher; an upgrade of the Soyuz rocket; and a host of scientific programs, including the dispatch of unmanned missions to the moon and Mars, and a terrestrial experiment intended as part of a run-up to an international manned mission to Mars, perhaps in the 2020s.
Of course, all of this was to be funded by a substantial increase in the space budget. According to the best available data, Russia is to allot over $20 billion to its various space programs, $12 billion of them to the Federal Space Agency (with the rest going to military endeavors, and additional appropriations for GLONASS). Another $4.5 billion in commercial revenue are expected to go to the Agency, bringing the expenditures on the FSP up to $16.5 billion (out of some $25 billion going to space in total). Counting in the usual Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) factor, this may give the program the equivalent of $25 billion (out of a PPP-adjusted total of $40 billion on Russian space activity).
In other words, at best, the Space Agency budget may grow from the $1.4 billion commonly cited for 2007 to $2–3 billion by 2015. This means that the plan is for Russia to catch up with the levels of expenditure of France and Japan by the middle of the next decade. The ten-year program budget, even counting the supplementary commercial revenue, comes to what NASA spends in roughly one year (and the total space budget substantially less than what NASA and the Defense Department together spend annually). It is inconceivable that any of those other programs would accomplish so much with so little, and there have already been disappointments in this regard. The design and development bill for the Kliper ran five times as high as the Russian government’s original estimate.
Moreover, it cannot be taken for granted that even the sums discussed here will actually be available. Along with the inevitable ups and downs of the commercial market that is expected to carry a large part of the tab, this raises questions about the availability of the will and the means to keep the budgets at the planned level. It is worth noting that government allocations for the program already fell into arrears back in 2006. Additionally, given Russia’s rate of inflation (15 percent earlier this year), which frequently exceeds any announced plans for funding increases, the Space Agency budget may actually fall in real terms during this period.
Consequently, Russia will not only have to live up to these commitments, but spend more, or do less (perhaps trimming costs by using existing launch systems for a bit longer than hoped, or curtailing the scientific and exploratory programs in favor of priority services like GLONASS), or some combination of both. The government's ability to do any of these things will depend greatly on the performance of its economy. So will its ability to share out the costs of projects like the Kliper (in which the European Space Agency has taken an interest), since this will determine the view of Russia as a reliable partner, even more than international approval or disapproval of its actions. It only seems appropriate, then, to take a look at Russia’s renewed economic growth, rarely examined in any detail, but of crucial importance to any analysis like this one: the subject of part two of this essay.
Continue to Part Two.
"RUSSIA RESURGENT" read the cover of the August 16, 2008 issue of The Economist, which depicted a giant Vladimir Putin towering over advancing ranks of flag-bearing Russian soldiers as fighters and attack helicopters streak past.
This none-too-subtle image was, of course, a reaction to the Russian invasion of Georgia, which signaled the country’s return as a military heavyweight to many, a reading of events reflective of the usual media exaggeration. While it may still be too early for a really thorough assessment of the Russian military’s performance in the conflict, there is little reason to believe that the Russian armed forces have been seriously rehabilitated, despite the unveiling of schemes like the State Armaments Program—still in its very early stages—and gestures like the resumption of long-range bomber flights, and a handful of high-profile military exercises (like the recently announced joint exercise with the Venezuelan navy in the Caribbean). The Russian military’s success in a limited war with a much smaller and poorer neighbor is also a long way from the "long-range power projection" capability that some of those hyping Russian military power describe as a foregone conclusion by 2020, like Barry McCaffrey in a recent pitch for an ambitious aircraft procurement program in the Joint Force Quarterly.
Nonetheless, the perception marks a dramatic turnaround in the view of Russia compared with ten years ago. In 1998 Russia was widely regarded as a basketcase, and able to look forward only to more of the same. Today, it is seen as a vigorous, economically dynamic state that may not be the superpower it once was, but a much more substantial actor in international affairs, and with brighter prospects, than might have been guessed a decade ago. It seems only reasonable to wonder, then, if Russia's "resurgence" will translate to the country's position in space, as some are already arguing, notably Brian Harvey in his recent book, The Rebirth of the Russian Space Program.
The fall of a great space power
The Soviet Union had the world’s second-largest economy until at least 1980, and perhaps until the end of its life, which enabled it to be the space superpower that it was. Not only did it have a striking list of "firsts" to its credit from Sputnik on, but its vast infrastructure in space, its satellite networks and space stations, had no peer save the United States. And not even the US matched it in certain respects, like the sheer rate of satellite launches it was able to sustain.
Of course, this state of affairs did not continue. Following the country’s collapse in 1991, the division of the Soviet Union into fifteen states, and the disruption of the break-up, left Moscow with the trappings of the ex-superpower, the space program included, but just a quarter (or at most, a third) of the national income that had sustained them.
Predictably, the Soviet program collapsed after the country that had built it up. In 1992 the worldwide seaborne tracking fleet was recalled to Russian ports, for lack of the hard currency to pay for their stays in foreign harbors. The Buran shuttle program was cancelled the year after that. The GLONASS navigation system decayed, the 24-satellite constellation shrinking to a mere six craft by 2001 for lack of replacements. The plans to build on the Mir space station were never realized: Mir barely remained operational up to its deorbiting, and the remnants of that program were absorbed by the International Space Station. As Russian military launches fell from 28 in 1992 to a mere five in 2000, the country’s senior officers would increasingly complain of periods of "blindness" and "deafness," in which the number of Russian photo- and electronic reconnaissance satellites in orbit at a given moment dropped to zero.
This is not to say that Russia was totally without successes in this period. That the program was able to stay alive on its old capital (and the income secured from commercial sales of its services) was by itself an achievement. Russia remained the world’s most active satellite launcher during the decade, and around the turn of the century a turnaround began. The Russian government initiated a restoration and modernization of GLONASS, and pioneered space tourism (just one of the ways in which the country has been an important player in the commercial services market), which optimists expect to see become a significant business. Most symbolic of all, Russian Soyuz launches have proven essential to the continued functioning of the International Space Station, especially after the Columbia disaster in 2003—during which it was the only nation in the world with an established manned spaceflight capability, a status to which some think it will return given the uncertainties about the shuttle’s future.
Nonetheless, the tendency in the media was to pay far more attention to the failures than the successes, in line with the generally bleak view of Russia’s situation, while doing exactly the opposite in the case of China (expected by everyone from science fiction writers to defense analysts to be the US’s great competitor in the future). Predictably, where Soviet space activity had once loomed so large in Western imaginations, in some ways, preposterously so (see "Space war and Futurehype," The Space Review, October 22, 2007) it is now easy to forget that this was ever the case. However, things have already started to turn up, and the Russian government has accordingly committed itself to an ambitious ten-year program, on which it hopes to build in the decades to follow.
The Russian Federal Space Program (FSP), 2006–2015
The program, first announced in July 2005, included not only the rehabilitation of GLONASS, the meeting of Russia’s commitments to the International Space Station program and the launch of a number of earth-monitoring and communications satellites, but the development of the Kliper space shuttle, the Parom space tug (a system long seen as a requirement for ambitious space development projects), and the Angara heavy-lift launcher; an upgrade of the Soyuz rocket; and a host of scientific programs, including the dispatch of unmanned missions to the moon and Mars, and a terrestrial experiment intended as part of a run-up to an international manned mission to Mars, perhaps in the 2020s.
Of course, all of this was to be funded by a substantial increase in the space budget. According to the best available data, Russia is to allot over $20 billion to its various space programs, $12 billion of them to the Federal Space Agency (with the rest going to military endeavors, and additional appropriations for GLONASS). Another $4.5 billion in commercial revenue are expected to go to the Agency, bringing the expenditures on the FSP up to $16.5 billion (out of some $25 billion going to space in total). Counting in the usual Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) factor, this may give the program the equivalent of $25 billion (out of a PPP-adjusted total of $40 billion on Russian space activity).
In other words, at best, the Space Agency budget may grow from the $1.4 billion commonly cited for 2007 to $2–3 billion by 2015. This means that the plan is for Russia to catch up with the levels of expenditure of France and Japan by the middle of the next decade. The ten-year program budget, even counting the supplementary commercial revenue, comes to what NASA spends in roughly one year (and the total space budget substantially less than what NASA and the Defense Department together spend annually). It is inconceivable that any of those other programs would accomplish so much with so little, and there have already been disappointments in this regard. The design and development bill for the Kliper ran five times as high as the Russian government’s original estimate.
Moreover, it cannot be taken for granted that even the sums discussed here will actually be available. Along with the inevitable ups and downs of the commercial market that is expected to carry a large part of the tab, this raises questions about the availability of the will and the means to keep the budgets at the planned level. It is worth noting that government allocations for the program already fell into arrears back in 2006. Additionally, given Russia’s rate of inflation (15 percent earlier this year), which frequently exceeds any announced plans for funding increases, the Space Agency budget may actually fall in real terms during this period.
Consequently, Russia will not only have to live up to these commitments, but spend more, or do less (perhaps trimming costs by using existing launch systems for a bit longer than hoped, or curtailing the scientific and exploratory programs in favor of priority services like GLONASS), or some combination of both. The government's ability to do any of these things will depend greatly on the performance of its economy. So will its ability to share out the costs of projects like the Kliper (in which the European Space Agency has taken an interest), since this will determine the view of Russia as a reliable partner, even more than international approval or disapproval of its actions. It only seems appropriate, then, to take a look at Russia’s renewed economic growth, rarely examined in any detail, but of crucial importance to any analysis like this one: the subject of part two of this essay.
Continue to Part Two.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Rethinking Military History, by Jeremy Black
New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 258.
The main themes of Black's Rethinking Military History, which readers of his other work are likely to have run across elsewhere, are that the writing of military history, especially as consumed by the broader public,
1. has focused overwhelmingly on Western Europe and the United States, to the neglect of the military history of other regions.
2. has been biased toward technological explanations for capability (and other developments).
3. has focused on "leading powers and dominant military systems, leading to a paradigm/diffusion model of military capability and change."
4. has separated the understanding of war on land and on sea.
5. has focused on interstate wars rather than war within states (with only a few exceptions, like the U.S. Civil War).
6. has failed to pay enough attention to "political 'tasking' in the setting of force structures, doctrines and goals, and in the judging of military success."
For the most part, I find it impossible to argue with his view of the state of military historiography, and on the whole I think he did a good job of offering a corrective in the book (except perhaps for point number four, which got comparatively little attention).
I also enjoyed the discussion of the writing of "pop" military history in the book's second chapter. Quite accurately, I thought, he analyzed the focus not just on Western history and interstate conflicts, but the tendency of writers to treat the same handful of wars over and over again while virtually ignoring every other subject. (Because he devotes so much time to the British market, the discussion of the status of Napoleonic era and World War I historiography is far less representative of the United States, but the principle is pretty much the same.) And of course, he notes the emphasis on biography, memoirs and operational accounts, at the expense of other kinds of writing.
You only need to check out C-SPAN's BOOK TV one weekend to see how much this is the case.
The main themes of Black's Rethinking Military History, which readers of his other work are likely to have run across elsewhere, are that the writing of military history, especially as consumed by the broader public,
1. has focused overwhelmingly on Western Europe and the United States, to the neglect of the military history of other regions.
2. has been biased toward technological explanations for capability (and other developments).
3. has focused on "leading powers and dominant military systems, leading to a paradigm/diffusion model of military capability and change."
4. has separated the understanding of war on land and on sea.
5. has focused on interstate wars rather than war within states (with only a few exceptions, like the U.S. Civil War).
6. has failed to pay enough attention to "political 'tasking' in the setting of force structures, doctrines and goals, and in the judging of military success."
For the most part, I find it impossible to argue with his view of the state of military historiography, and on the whole I think he did a good job of offering a corrective in the book (except perhaps for point number four, which got comparatively little attention).
I also enjoyed the discussion of the writing of "pop" military history in the book's second chapter. Quite accurately, I thought, he analyzed the focus not just on Western history and interstate conflicts, but the tendency of writers to treat the same handful of wars over and over again while virtually ignoring every other subject. (Because he devotes so much time to the British market, the discussion of the status of Napoleonic era and World War I historiography is far less representative of the United States, but the principle is pretty much the same.) And of course, he notes the emphasis on biography, memoirs and operational accounts, at the expense of other kinds of writing.
You only need to check out C-SPAN's BOOK TV one weekend to see how much this is the case.
About This Blog
This is one of my (Nader Elhefnawy's) two personal blogs. (The other is Raritania.)
This particular blog is principally concerned with my areas of interest in the social sciences, economics, technology and current events.
Comments Policy
Reader comments are welcome, with this going even for comments on older posts, but they are moderated (with the help of a spam filter). Where these are concerned I reserve the right not to post and/or delete any comment for reasons including but not necessarily limited to their looking like spam (typically a result of the comment's marginal or nonexistent relevance to the subject of the post, inclusion of suspect links, etc.), or their being of an abusive or incoherent nature. (The final judgment about these matters, of course, rests with me.)
I generally endeavor to post those comments consistent with these necessary rules as quickly as possible, and to respond to every one of them as quickly as possible, but because of the moderation process it may take some time for comments to go up, and still longer for me to respond to them.
Your patience and understanding in the meantime are appreciated, and I look forward to your feedback.
Other Contacts
Should the reader need to contact me in a manner other than leaving a comment they can use the Contact Form on the right side of the page.
This particular blog is principally concerned with my areas of interest in the social sciences, economics, technology and current events.
Comments Policy
Reader comments are welcome, with this going even for comments on older posts, but they are moderated (with the help of a spam filter). Where these are concerned I reserve the right not to post and/or delete any comment for reasons including but not necessarily limited to their looking like spam (typically a result of the comment's marginal or nonexistent relevance to the subject of the post, inclusion of suspect links, etc.), or their being of an abusive or incoherent nature. (The final judgment about these matters, of course, rests with me.)
I generally endeavor to post those comments consistent with these necessary rules as quickly as possible, and to respond to every one of them as quickly as possible, but because of the moderation process it may take some time for comments to go up, and still longer for me to respond to them.
Your patience and understanding in the meantime are appreciated, and I look forward to your feedback.
Other Contacts
Should the reader need to contact me in a manner other than leaving a comment they can use the Contact Form on the right side of the page.
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
On Dark Ages
By Nader Elhefnawy
Originally published in THE FUTURIST (November-December 2007, pp. 14-19). Used with permission from:
World Future Society
7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450
Bethesda, Maryland 20814 USA.
301-656-8274
www.wfs.org
I spend a lot of time thinking about the future-maybe too much. As a professor of literature, I often teach and write about science fiction. As a writer on security issues, I'm often thinking about the shape of future war and future peace. In this kind of work it is routine for projections, planning documents, and studies to look to 2025, 2050, and even beyond. In the process they posit a future where science fiction has turned into science fact. Thinking about the future in such ways, and coming into constant contact with the thoughts of others about the same things, I find myself exploring the ways people used to picture the future, and all the things that didn't happen-the bad as well as the good.
Naturally, I can only wonder how people in the future will look back on the present-and about all those in the present who suspect there may be no one able to do so. During the lats few years, there's been an explosion in books with words like "collapse," "catastrophe," and "dark age" in their titles. While millenarian religion always seems to be doing a brisk business, there is also no shortage of secular doomsday scenarios at any given moment.
A natural disaster like a large meteor impact or the eruption of a supervolcano might wreck the world in one fell swoop. (David Keys's Catastrophe, in fact, argues that a massive volcanic eruption in the sixth century did bring about the collapse of the ancient world.) The Cold War may have ended, but the risk of large-scale nuclear war remains, particularly the risk of a war beginning accidentally. (This almost happened in the "Norwegian rocket incident" of January 1995, when the Russian military mistook a weather rocket for a ballistic missile.) Relatively innocent scientific research might unleash a technological catastrophe on the world, high-energy particle accelerators tearing open the fabric of the universe, a tidal wave of tiny robots turning the planet into gray goo as Martin Rees describes in Our Final Hour.
A number of unhappy factors have combined in recent years to boost the discussion, however. One is concern about a shrinking supply of oil amid high energy prices and war in the Persian Gulf. Another is the destruction of the natural environment by the activity of a rapidly growing human population, and in particular a widening recognition of human-driven climate change. Still another is an apparent growth of irrationalism and a rejection of science, evident in religious fundamentalism, New Age fads and the like, the subject of Carl Sagan's last book, The Demon-Haunted World. While not comparable to concerns about a major nuclear war, terrorism has also fed such worries, with biological weaponry, computer attacks and so forth causing some to argue that a few quick blows could bring modernity crashing down all around us.
Conservatives may worry less about resource shortages or the environment, and view religiosity in any form as a positive development, but find other causes for worry. Population growth in and of itself also may not bother them much, but the disparities inside that growth often do. Low birth rates in the industrialized world and rapid population growth in poor countries sending waves of immigrants to the former cause them great consternation. They also worry about the widespread questioning of traditional attitudes toward nationalism, culture, race, sex, religion, capitalism and so forth, which they see as opening the gates to barbarians within and without.
Of course, there are also writers who go to the other extreme and dismiss such concerns completely. In The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman promises to trace the history of the idea rather than pass judgment on it, but he ends up rejecting thinkers on the subject as a collection of pathetic neurotics and concludes his study on a triumphalist note.
The History of Civilization Collapse
While Herman may dismiss the idea, the fact remains that advanced societies have collapsed in the past and protracted "dark ages" have followed, and it seems only natural to ask why they did so. Why do the problem-solving abilities of societies give out? Why is it that instead of going on forever forward and upward, societies so often stagnate, decline and collapse, leaving behind little but ruins for archaeologists to pick through? In other words, was the process inevitable, or could something have been done about it? Learning the answer to that question might tell us which of the many seemingly catastrophic threats to our survival we should be most concerned about, or whether, as Herman argues, we aren't unnecessarily fixated on catastrophe.
As Herman's study attests, no small number of thinkers has attempted to address these concerns, especially during the last two centuries. Not every story those writers tell is the same, but there is a great deal of overlap in their accounts of particular declining societies, and declining societies in general. Values once adhered to seem irrelevant, and institutions that worked before no longer do so (or at least, it seems that way). Governments become less effective at collecting taxes from their citizens, and at providing them with the services that justified such exactions. Insecurity rises due to widespread crime, intensified class warfare, and fighting among elites themselves. Achievement in the arts and sciences drops off (or at least it seems that way). In the end a society is left susceptible to threats that it might once have coped with successfull and the barbarians--once easily held at bay--are suddenly in the Colosseum.
Moral vs. Material Decline
While these thinkers recount many of the same incidents and trends, the theories they propose as to why these things happen vary widely. They do, however, tend to fall broadly into one of two categories-mystical explanations, and materialistic ones. Many of the "mystical" writers are rightly criticized for being weak on cause and effect, but they often identify a culprit nonetheless, such as the exhaustion of a people's "life force," or the genetic impoverishment of a once-triumphant nation. Others point to a nebulous moral decline, or the replacement of an intuitive or spiritual approach to life by barren rationality, a phase that may initially have been fruitful but, carried far enough, means decadence. Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Pitrim Sorokin, Christopher Dawson and many others developed theories along such lines. Their thinking has more recently been echoed by Pat Buchanan in books like The Death of the West.
The writings of the materialistic theorists are similarly varied, but they usually find economic explanations for decline. In recent years, scholars applying complexity science to the problem, such as Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies and Peter Turchin in War and Peace and War have added considerable theoretical sophistication to this approach. It is by no means new, however, and Carroll Quigley's 1960 book The Evolution of Civilizations is an outstanding example.
For sociologist Quigley the key to success or failure is a society's "instrument of expansion." This is a social mechanism enabling it to accumulate and invest resources in economic, political and cultural enlargement. Medieval feudalism, early modern mercantilism and laissez-faire capitalism are just a few examples of such systems. After early successes, these mechanisms produce diminishing returns, which clash with the rising expectations of a population that had likely been expanding up to that point. The resulting economic scarcity, insecurity and inequality lie at the root of the ills that follow, including the "moral decline."
Consider the case of ancient Rome, a popular one given the over-reliance of many of these writers on Classical history in developing their "universal" theories of civilizational rise and fall. Starting in the third century B.C.E., Roman agriculture began to shift away from a foundation of small, independent farmers to plantations worked by slaves. The farmers went into the cities-and the legions-where they participated in a sequence of brutal, class-driven civil wars and the conquest of the Known World, a process that destroyed the republic and ushered in the reign of the emperors. That reign became increasingly oppressive, the empire weaker and weaker economically, militarily, demographically and culturally, and in the end the barbarians overwhelmed it.
Writers of a more mystical bent see the formerly austere Romans corrupted by a loss of religious faith, an influx of foreign cultural elements and the temptations of wealth and urban living. The result is the popular image of depraved elites wallowing in cruelty, sensuality and luxury, while the rabble lived only for bread and circuses. Rather than enabling renewal the spread of an otherworldly, pacifistic Christianity is commonly blamed for undermining the last of the original virtue of the Romans, providing an object lesson in the danger that alien ideas will fill a moral vacuum. The only wonder is that the empire lasted as long as it did, given the circumstances.
Economics-minded writers instead point to the limits of economic development for preindustrial, agrarian societies. The Roman Empire was sustained by territorial expansion, and especially the opportunities expansion brought to acquire slaves and plunder. These were eventually exhausted, however, and the empire was left managing many unprofitable territories that drained its resources. Attempts to redress the problem often worsened it, for instance the debasement of the currency (which set off a wave of inflation) and the increasing tax burden (which the wealthy shifted away from themselves and onto the poor, who had less and less to tax).
In response the government became increasingly heavy-handed, ineffective and torn by usurpers and civil wars, this instability rising right at the same time as the pressure from land-hungry barbarians. This strangled the empire's commerce and economic productivity, and in particular its insecure, overburdened farmers, often driven to abandon their land and turn bandit or join a spreading manorial economy. The resulting feedback loop of declining productivity, state weakness and insecurity drove the western empire to collapse.
Questioning the Inevitability of Civilization Decline
So, is the process of civilization decline inevitable, or can something be done about it? There are writers who argue that Rome's fall was indeed inexorable. Philosopher Oswald Spengler took the organic analogy of a civilizational life cycle to such an extreme that he mathematically charted the future of Western civilization through the third millennium. Still, even he recognized the possibility of societies arresting their own decline. Civilizations can bring much of their strife to an end by uniting in a "universal empire," the way that Rome united the Known World of its day, an idea that can also be found in Toynbee and Quigley. They may even enjoy a "golden age" of sorts, as Rome did in the second century C.E. under the "Five Good Emperors."
Such actions, however, are just stopgaps unless the underlying causes are dealt with. This is much more difficult to do, especially if one leans toward mystical explanations. Several writers, like Toynbee and especially Sorokin, see the only real way out in a religious renewal.
Many of the materialistic authors also offer a grim prognosis, but they are less prone to insist on the certainty of decay. Quigley, for instance, saw a way out in the replacement of a failed instrument of expansion. When feudalism failed in the fourteenth century, centralized, mercantilist nation-states appeared in Western Europe. When mercantilism hit a wall, financial capitalism came along. While he saw the Western world as having been in another such crisis since 1929, he did suggest a possible way out, based on molecular technology and renewable solar energy. (Intriguingly, many observers who have never read Quigley now regard molecular technology and solar power as the driving technologies of the future.)
While not framed as the narrative of a civilization's rise and fall, David Hackett Fischer's The Great Wave presents a pattern of crisis similar to the one Quigley described. He identifies crises in the fourteenth, sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries, each coinciding with a wave of inflation, the last ongoing at the time of his writing. Fischer notes, however, that better technology and organization each time around made the crisis less severe than the one that preceded it. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s saw nothing like the famines and epidemics that made Europe's population implode in the early fourteenth century.
Of course, the same technology and organization made the war that ended the decade the most destructive in history. Troubled societies usually have no shortage of astute observers diagnosing their ills and recommending workable solutions for at least some of their problems. The weak link in the chain tends to be politics, the capacity of societies to change their collective behavior when a given way of doing things stops working. This is very difficult to do in the face of old habits and vested interests.
This challenge may loom especially large for Americans, who may be more attached to recent attitudes and behaviors than any other major nation because of the cherished successes those approaches seem to have brought the nation in the twentieth century--global economic predominance, victory in wars hot and cold. There is also the very nature of those attitudes and behaviors. The brand of rugged individualism Americans celebrate sits uneasily with talk of a common good. Decades of culture war and market fundamentalism have also left their mark, the results memorably described in Morris Berman's Dark Ages America.
Today's generation appears to be one of cyberpunk anti-heroes, alienated and alone for all the promised connectiveness of their technology, abiding by no rules in its scramble to survive and succeed, and incapable of even imagining a different sort of world. However, no cultural moment lasts forever, and it's not impossible that this phase has just about run its course.
In either event, the toughest part of any effort will probably not be the availability of wealth, technology or ideas, but getting societies to use these resources to take serious action. This will mean recovering lost social capital, not in the sense of bringing back a stifling conformity, but drawing people out of their solipsism. It will mean restoring rationality and depth to a political discourse divided among a confusion of ideologically-slanted outlets preaching to their respective choirs and the superficial, tepid dialogue of the mainstream, and widening the too-narrow range of ideas that can get a hearing from a general audience. It will mean the cultivation of a mind-set that Thomas Homer-Dixon in his recent The Upside of Down terms "prospective," able to cope with uncertainty and complexity in its efforts to "prevent or forestall horrible outcomes," if necessary through fundamental, far-reaching solutions. And it will mean "idiot-proofing" those solutions so that they can survive the hostility of the vested interests which invariably appear.
As Quigley notes, it was not possible for state-building monarchs, the rising middle classes and rebels from the long-suffering peasantry to defeat the feudal aristocracy's resistance to change outright, but they did succeed in going around them, and built the modern world in doing so.
Originally published in THE FUTURIST (November-December 2007, pp. 14-19). Used with permission from:
World Future Society
7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite 450
Bethesda, Maryland 20814 USA.
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I spend a lot of time thinking about the future-maybe too much. As a professor of literature, I often teach and write about science fiction. As a writer on security issues, I'm often thinking about the shape of future war and future peace. In this kind of work it is routine for projections, planning documents, and studies to look to 2025, 2050, and even beyond. In the process they posit a future where science fiction has turned into science fact. Thinking about the future in such ways, and coming into constant contact with the thoughts of others about the same things, I find myself exploring the ways people used to picture the future, and all the things that didn't happen-the bad as well as the good.
Naturally, I can only wonder how people in the future will look back on the present-and about all those in the present who suspect there may be no one able to do so. During the lats few years, there's been an explosion in books with words like "collapse," "catastrophe," and "dark age" in their titles. While millenarian religion always seems to be doing a brisk business, there is also no shortage of secular doomsday scenarios at any given moment.
A natural disaster like a large meteor impact or the eruption of a supervolcano might wreck the world in one fell swoop. (David Keys's Catastrophe, in fact, argues that a massive volcanic eruption in the sixth century did bring about the collapse of the ancient world.) The Cold War may have ended, but the risk of large-scale nuclear war remains, particularly the risk of a war beginning accidentally. (This almost happened in the "Norwegian rocket incident" of January 1995, when the Russian military mistook a weather rocket for a ballistic missile.) Relatively innocent scientific research might unleash a technological catastrophe on the world, high-energy particle accelerators tearing open the fabric of the universe, a tidal wave of tiny robots turning the planet into gray goo as Martin Rees describes in Our Final Hour.
A number of unhappy factors have combined in recent years to boost the discussion, however. One is concern about a shrinking supply of oil amid high energy prices and war in the Persian Gulf. Another is the destruction of the natural environment by the activity of a rapidly growing human population, and in particular a widening recognition of human-driven climate change. Still another is an apparent growth of irrationalism and a rejection of science, evident in religious fundamentalism, New Age fads and the like, the subject of Carl Sagan's last book, The Demon-Haunted World. While not comparable to concerns about a major nuclear war, terrorism has also fed such worries, with biological weaponry, computer attacks and so forth causing some to argue that a few quick blows could bring modernity crashing down all around us.
Conservatives may worry less about resource shortages or the environment, and view religiosity in any form as a positive development, but find other causes for worry. Population growth in and of itself also may not bother them much, but the disparities inside that growth often do. Low birth rates in the industrialized world and rapid population growth in poor countries sending waves of immigrants to the former cause them great consternation. They also worry about the widespread questioning of traditional attitudes toward nationalism, culture, race, sex, religion, capitalism and so forth, which they see as opening the gates to barbarians within and without.
Of course, there are also writers who go to the other extreme and dismiss such concerns completely. In The Idea of Decline in Western History, Arthur Herman promises to trace the history of the idea rather than pass judgment on it, but he ends up rejecting thinkers on the subject as a collection of pathetic neurotics and concludes his study on a triumphalist note.
The History of Civilization Collapse
While Herman may dismiss the idea, the fact remains that advanced societies have collapsed in the past and protracted "dark ages" have followed, and it seems only natural to ask why they did so. Why do the problem-solving abilities of societies give out? Why is it that instead of going on forever forward and upward, societies so often stagnate, decline and collapse, leaving behind little but ruins for archaeologists to pick through? In other words, was the process inevitable, or could something have been done about it? Learning the answer to that question might tell us which of the many seemingly catastrophic threats to our survival we should be most concerned about, or whether, as Herman argues, we aren't unnecessarily fixated on catastrophe.
As Herman's study attests, no small number of thinkers has attempted to address these concerns, especially during the last two centuries. Not every story those writers tell is the same, but there is a great deal of overlap in their accounts of particular declining societies, and declining societies in general. Values once adhered to seem irrelevant, and institutions that worked before no longer do so (or at least, it seems that way). Governments become less effective at collecting taxes from their citizens, and at providing them with the services that justified such exactions. Insecurity rises due to widespread crime, intensified class warfare, and fighting among elites themselves. Achievement in the arts and sciences drops off (or at least it seems that way). In the end a society is left susceptible to threats that it might once have coped with successfull and the barbarians--once easily held at bay--are suddenly in the Colosseum.
Moral vs. Material Decline
While these thinkers recount many of the same incidents and trends, the theories they propose as to why these things happen vary widely. They do, however, tend to fall broadly into one of two categories-mystical explanations, and materialistic ones. Many of the "mystical" writers are rightly criticized for being weak on cause and effect, but they often identify a culprit nonetheless, such as the exhaustion of a people's "life force," or the genetic impoverishment of a once-triumphant nation. Others point to a nebulous moral decline, or the replacement of an intuitive or spiritual approach to life by barren rationality, a phase that may initially have been fruitful but, carried far enough, means decadence. Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Pitrim Sorokin, Christopher Dawson and many others developed theories along such lines. Their thinking has more recently been echoed by Pat Buchanan in books like The Death of the West.
The writings of the materialistic theorists are similarly varied, but they usually find economic explanations for decline. In recent years, scholars applying complexity science to the problem, such as Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies and Peter Turchin in War and Peace and War have added considerable theoretical sophistication to this approach. It is by no means new, however, and Carroll Quigley's 1960 book The Evolution of Civilizations is an outstanding example.
For sociologist Quigley the key to success or failure is a society's "instrument of expansion." This is a social mechanism enabling it to accumulate and invest resources in economic, political and cultural enlargement. Medieval feudalism, early modern mercantilism and laissez-faire capitalism are just a few examples of such systems. After early successes, these mechanisms produce diminishing returns, which clash with the rising expectations of a population that had likely been expanding up to that point. The resulting economic scarcity, insecurity and inequality lie at the root of the ills that follow, including the "moral decline."
Consider the case of ancient Rome, a popular one given the over-reliance of many of these writers on Classical history in developing their "universal" theories of civilizational rise and fall. Starting in the third century B.C.E., Roman agriculture began to shift away from a foundation of small, independent farmers to plantations worked by slaves. The farmers went into the cities-and the legions-where they participated in a sequence of brutal, class-driven civil wars and the conquest of the Known World, a process that destroyed the republic and ushered in the reign of the emperors. That reign became increasingly oppressive, the empire weaker and weaker economically, militarily, demographically and culturally, and in the end the barbarians overwhelmed it.
Writers of a more mystical bent see the formerly austere Romans corrupted by a loss of religious faith, an influx of foreign cultural elements and the temptations of wealth and urban living. The result is the popular image of depraved elites wallowing in cruelty, sensuality and luxury, while the rabble lived only for bread and circuses. Rather than enabling renewal the spread of an otherworldly, pacifistic Christianity is commonly blamed for undermining the last of the original virtue of the Romans, providing an object lesson in the danger that alien ideas will fill a moral vacuum. The only wonder is that the empire lasted as long as it did, given the circumstances.
Economics-minded writers instead point to the limits of economic development for preindustrial, agrarian societies. The Roman Empire was sustained by territorial expansion, and especially the opportunities expansion brought to acquire slaves and plunder. These were eventually exhausted, however, and the empire was left managing many unprofitable territories that drained its resources. Attempts to redress the problem often worsened it, for instance the debasement of the currency (which set off a wave of inflation) and the increasing tax burden (which the wealthy shifted away from themselves and onto the poor, who had less and less to tax).
In response the government became increasingly heavy-handed, ineffective and torn by usurpers and civil wars, this instability rising right at the same time as the pressure from land-hungry barbarians. This strangled the empire's commerce and economic productivity, and in particular its insecure, overburdened farmers, often driven to abandon their land and turn bandit or join a spreading manorial economy. The resulting feedback loop of declining productivity, state weakness and insecurity drove the western empire to collapse.
Questioning the Inevitability of Civilization Decline
So, is the process of civilization decline inevitable, or can something be done about it? There are writers who argue that Rome's fall was indeed inexorable. Philosopher Oswald Spengler took the organic analogy of a civilizational life cycle to such an extreme that he mathematically charted the future of Western civilization through the third millennium. Still, even he recognized the possibility of societies arresting their own decline. Civilizations can bring much of their strife to an end by uniting in a "universal empire," the way that Rome united the Known World of its day, an idea that can also be found in Toynbee and Quigley. They may even enjoy a "golden age" of sorts, as Rome did in the second century C.E. under the "Five Good Emperors."
Such actions, however, are just stopgaps unless the underlying causes are dealt with. This is much more difficult to do, especially if one leans toward mystical explanations. Several writers, like Toynbee and especially Sorokin, see the only real way out in a religious renewal.
Many of the materialistic authors also offer a grim prognosis, but they are less prone to insist on the certainty of decay. Quigley, for instance, saw a way out in the replacement of a failed instrument of expansion. When feudalism failed in the fourteenth century, centralized, mercantilist nation-states appeared in Western Europe. When mercantilism hit a wall, financial capitalism came along. While he saw the Western world as having been in another such crisis since 1929, he did suggest a possible way out, based on molecular technology and renewable solar energy. (Intriguingly, many observers who have never read Quigley now regard molecular technology and solar power as the driving technologies of the future.)
While not framed as the narrative of a civilization's rise and fall, David Hackett Fischer's The Great Wave presents a pattern of crisis similar to the one Quigley described. He identifies crises in the fourteenth, sixteenth, eighteenth and twentieth centuries, each coinciding with a wave of inflation, the last ongoing at the time of his writing. Fischer notes, however, that better technology and organization each time around made the crisis less severe than the one that preceded it. Even the Great Depression of the 1930s saw nothing like the famines and epidemics that made Europe's population implode in the early fourteenth century.
Of course, the same technology and organization made the war that ended the decade the most destructive in history. Troubled societies usually have no shortage of astute observers diagnosing their ills and recommending workable solutions for at least some of their problems. The weak link in the chain tends to be politics, the capacity of societies to change their collective behavior when a given way of doing things stops working. This is very difficult to do in the face of old habits and vested interests.
This challenge may loom especially large for Americans, who may be more attached to recent attitudes and behaviors than any other major nation because of the cherished successes those approaches seem to have brought the nation in the twentieth century--global economic predominance, victory in wars hot and cold. There is also the very nature of those attitudes and behaviors. The brand of rugged individualism Americans celebrate sits uneasily with talk of a common good. Decades of culture war and market fundamentalism have also left their mark, the results memorably described in Morris Berman's Dark Ages America.
Today's generation appears to be one of cyberpunk anti-heroes, alienated and alone for all the promised connectiveness of their technology, abiding by no rules in its scramble to survive and succeed, and incapable of even imagining a different sort of world. However, no cultural moment lasts forever, and it's not impossible that this phase has just about run its course.
In either event, the toughest part of any effort will probably not be the availability of wealth, technology or ideas, but getting societies to use these resources to take serious action. This will mean recovering lost social capital, not in the sense of bringing back a stifling conformity, but drawing people out of their solipsism. It will mean restoring rationality and depth to a political discourse divided among a confusion of ideologically-slanted outlets preaching to their respective choirs and the superficial, tepid dialogue of the mainstream, and widening the too-narrow range of ideas that can get a hearing from a general audience. It will mean the cultivation of a mind-set that Thomas Homer-Dixon in his recent The Upside of Down terms "prospective," able to cope with uncertainty and complexity in its efforts to "prevent or forestall horrible outcomes," if necessary through fundamental, far-reaching solutions. And it will mean "idiot-proofing" those solutions so that they can survive the hostility of the vested interests which invariably appear.
As Quigley notes, it was not possible for state-building monarchs, the rising middle classes and rebels from the long-suffering peasantry to defeat the feudal aristocracy's resistance to change outright, but they did succeed in going around them, and built the modern world in doing so.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Resurrecting Nikolai Fedorov
By Nader Elhefnawy
Originally published in the SPACE REVIEW, May 21, 2007
One of the most important, but perhaps most ignored, prophets of space flight is Nikolai Fyodorovich Fedorov (1828-1903). Fedorov was a Russian teacher and librarian who spent most of his career working in the Rumiantsev Museum, at the time Moscow's leading lending library.
While a man ahead of his time, Fedorov was also very much of his time and place. In the view of philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev, there may have been no thinker more characteristically Russian than Fedorov. In his essay "The Religion of Resusciative Resurrection: 'The Philosophy of the Common Task' of N. Fedorov" (which can be found online at ) Berdyayev wrote that Fedorov embodied
It was the way in which he expected this to come about that really separated Fedorov from the others. For him there is only one evil in the world that really counts, death. Moreover, rather than being accepted as a part of "the human condition," part of the human mission is the technological conquest of death. This means not only achieving immortality, but restoring all the people who have ever walked the Earth to life, making the heaven of the afterlife a physical reality. (Put in Fedorov's terms, there must be "sonship" as well as brotherhood in the human family, which entails duty to our ancestors, for whom death must also be conquered.)
Doing so, Fedorov teaches, requires the whole world to come together and treat the project as the "moral equivalent of war," all of humanity completely devoting itself to the struggle against the common foe, death. In the process, all of the ills that human beings suffer from (war, poverty, disease, etc.), being rooted in the problem of mortality, would pass away, creating a perfect world in which we would all live in brotherhood (and sonship) forever. Moreover, this task is not one for a distant future that can forever be put off, but humanity's proper vocation in the here and now.
This idea of committing the whole planet to scientifically raising the dead may seem odd. Even taking into account that his vision was very much a work in progress, and so full of ambiguities, apparent contradictions and even a few notions frankly rendered obsolete by the growth of scientific knowledge, it gets odder still the closer one looks at the details. (Among other things, he makes the case that the Russian Czar is uniquely fitted to lead the global project.) Accordingly, Berdyayev's view that Fedorov was exemplary of the Russian spirit notwithstanding, it may seem that his following must have been limited to a handful of cranks. However, the few who knew and were influenced by his ideas in his lifetime were members of an extremely elite circle, "the greatest of Russian people" as Berdyayev puts it--including the writers Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the two greatest figures in Russian literature; and the philosopher Vladimir Solovyev, perhaps the pivotal figure in Russian philosophy in the late nineteenth century.
Granting that, it may seem that what Fedorov called "the common task" has little to do with space flight, butspace travel actually had a prominent place in it. To help bring the dead back to life, Fedorov believed that humans would eventually collect data from space to track down particles which once belonged to their ancestors in order to reconstitute their bodies. Additionally, since Earth would not be big enough to accommodate all of the people who had ever lived at once, room would be found for them on other planets. At age sixteen Konstantin Tsiolkovsky met Fedorov and became acquainted with his ideas, and while there is some controversy over Fedorov's precise impact on Tsiolkovsky's thoughts on space flight, as Professor George Young, author of Nikolai F. Fedorov: An Introduction, told me "most commentators in Russia have agreed that . . . Fedorov had much to do with Tsiolkovsky's development in that direction."
Fedorov's association with Tsiolkovsky would by itself seem enough to assure him a place in the history of space flight. However, his ideas also directly won him a wide audience in the years that followed, with "Fedorovism" a real force in pre-revolutionary Russia and the early Soviet period--a time of unique intellectual ferment in regard to space travel, as Brian Harvey shows in his recent book Russian Planetary Exploration: History, Development, Legacy and Prospects. While this climate was suppressed by Stalin in the 1930s, following his death the discourse on space flight revived with the result that Sputnik was not a shock to Soviet citizens, but the realization of an old idea. (Indeed, there are still thinkers today who cite Fedorov's ideas as influences on their own, like futurist Michael G. Zey, author of The Future Factor: The Five Forces Transforming Our Lives and Shaping Our Destiny.)
In the process of working out his main idea Fedorov, who despite the extravagance of some of his ideas was an ardent and capable student of the sciences as well as a religious philosopher, also suggested a number of other ideas that may have seemed outlandish in his day but are fairly mainstream today, like viewing the Earth as an ecosystem that must be maintained and regulated rather than an object to be exploited, and shifting the world's energy base from fossil fuels to solar and wind energy.
His ideas about immortality also mark him as a clear forerunner of transhumanist thought, one of the main predecessors of which was the Russian Cosmism directly influenced by Fedorov. Indeed, Fedorov's idea that space travel might be part of a larger transhuman evolution is a familiar one today, from both science-fiction and science speculation. The possibilities of biotechnology and life-extending nanites aside, Raymond Kurzweil anticipates in books like The Age of Spiritual Machines that in a matter of decades human beings will be uploadable into computers--after which they need never die, and in which form they might take interstellar journeys.
Frank J. Tipler's The Physics of Immortality is even more radical. Tipler argues that evolution will end with the development of a vast artificial intelligence running simulations of all the sentient beings that have ever existed, a process that Tipler himself has described as the resurrection of all who have ever existed. While Tipler did not depend on the religious philosophy of Fedorov or anyone else in working out his system, the parallel is there nonetheless.
Of course, all of this raises the question of why Fedorov's life and work is not more widely known. The simple answer is that Russian philosophy has been unjustly neglected in the West, and it is difficult to find copies of the major works of even much better known thinkers in any language, let alone good English translations. (Have you ever tried to actually run down an English-language version of any of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's works, for instance?)
Fedorov, moreover, is a neglected figure in a field of neglected figures. Frederick C. Coppleston's 445-page Philosophy in Russia: From Herzen to Lenin and Berdyayev contains only two brief references to him (one actually a footnote), and then only because of his influence on the thought of Solovyev and Berdyayev. However, the nature of his writings is also a factor. His principal work, The Philosophy of the Common Task, is not a unified treatise, but a posthumously edited collection of unpublished material ranging from essays and articles to notes and jottings. His thinking was not systematic, and his literary style was notoriously difficult, further complicating matters. Consequently, only portions of his work have been translated into English, and copies of the books containing these are rare enough that even most university libraries do not carry them in any edition.
This is unfortunate. In a time when political scientists of Francis Fukuyama's stature write about "our posthuman future" and Ray Kurzweil gets three hours on C-SPAN to take questions from callers; when stem cell research, genetically modified crops and clones are not just political but legal issues; and it is taken for granted that human technology has evolved to the point at which it can rescue or destroy the biosphere; Fedorov's work is becoming more rather than less relevant to our current situation. As Professor Young put it in his book, exactly
Acknowledgement: The author wishes to acknowledge the help of George Young. Of course, any mistakes are the author's own.
Originally published in the SPACE REVIEW, May 21, 2007
One of the most important, but perhaps most ignored, prophets of space flight is Nikolai Fyodorovich Fedorov (1828-1903). Fedorov was a Russian teacher and librarian who spent most of his career working in the Rumiantsev Museum, at the time Moscow's leading lending library.
While a man ahead of his time, Fedorov was also very much of his time and place. In the view of philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev, there may have been no thinker more characteristically Russian than Fedorov. In his essay "The Religion of Resusciative Resurrection: 'The Philosophy of the Common Task' of N. Fedorov" (which can be found online at ) Berdyayev wrote that Fedorov embodied
the Russian searching for a common task, the task of salvation. The Russian soul cannot joyfully create culture; it is anxious for the world and for all mankind, it thirsts to save all . . . the thirst for the salvation of mankind and the Kingdom of God here, on earth--all this was expressed by Fedorov with an extraordinary intensity, without any sense of strain or quibbling.Like the other "characteristically Russian" thinkers Berdyayev talked about, his thought was powerfully shaped by both Orthodox Christianity and Hegelian philosophy. Also like many of them, he had little trouble reconciling religion and science in a way that would shock the belligerents in today's war over Creationism. A common product of this combination of ideas was not just a focus on eschatology, but a "Christianity of action." Rather than passively waiting for God to bring on the Millennium, being a good Christian meant participating in the building of heaven on Earth.
It was the way in which he expected this to come about that really separated Fedorov from the others. For him there is only one evil in the world that really counts, death. Moreover, rather than being accepted as a part of "the human condition," part of the human mission is the technological conquest of death. This means not only achieving immortality, but restoring all the people who have ever walked the Earth to life, making the heaven of the afterlife a physical reality. (Put in Fedorov's terms, there must be "sonship" as well as brotherhood in the human family, which entails duty to our ancestors, for whom death must also be conquered.)
Doing so, Fedorov teaches, requires the whole world to come together and treat the project as the "moral equivalent of war," all of humanity completely devoting itself to the struggle against the common foe, death. In the process, all of the ills that human beings suffer from (war, poverty, disease, etc.), being rooted in the problem of mortality, would pass away, creating a perfect world in which we would all live in brotherhood (and sonship) forever. Moreover, this task is not one for a distant future that can forever be put off, but humanity's proper vocation in the here and now.
This idea of committing the whole planet to scientifically raising the dead may seem odd. Even taking into account that his vision was very much a work in progress, and so full of ambiguities, apparent contradictions and even a few notions frankly rendered obsolete by the growth of scientific knowledge, it gets odder still the closer one looks at the details. (Among other things, he makes the case that the Russian Czar is uniquely fitted to lead the global project.) Accordingly, Berdyayev's view that Fedorov was exemplary of the Russian spirit notwithstanding, it may seem that his following must have been limited to a handful of cranks. However, the few who knew and were influenced by his ideas in his lifetime were members of an extremely elite circle, "the greatest of Russian people" as Berdyayev puts it--including the writers Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the two greatest figures in Russian literature; and the philosopher Vladimir Solovyev, perhaps the pivotal figure in Russian philosophy in the late nineteenth century.
Granting that, it may seem that what Fedorov called "the common task" has little to do with space flight, butspace travel actually had a prominent place in it. To help bring the dead back to life, Fedorov believed that humans would eventually collect data from space to track down particles which once belonged to their ancestors in order to reconstitute their bodies. Additionally, since Earth would not be big enough to accommodate all of the people who had ever lived at once, room would be found for them on other planets. At age sixteen Konstantin Tsiolkovsky met Fedorov and became acquainted with his ideas, and while there is some controversy over Fedorov's precise impact on Tsiolkovsky's thoughts on space flight, as Professor George Young, author of Nikolai F. Fedorov: An Introduction, told me "most commentators in Russia have agreed that . . . Fedorov had much to do with Tsiolkovsky's development in that direction."
Fedorov's association with Tsiolkovsky would by itself seem enough to assure him a place in the history of space flight. However, his ideas also directly won him a wide audience in the years that followed, with "Fedorovism" a real force in pre-revolutionary Russia and the early Soviet period--a time of unique intellectual ferment in regard to space travel, as Brian Harvey shows in his recent book Russian Planetary Exploration: History, Development, Legacy and Prospects. While this climate was suppressed by Stalin in the 1930s, following his death the discourse on space flight revived with the result that Sputnik was not a shock to Soviet citizens, but the realization of an old idea. (Indeed, there are still thinkers today who cite Fedorov's ideas as influences on their own, like futurist Michael G. Zey, author of The Future Factor: The Five Forces Transforming Our Lives and Shaping Our Destiny.)
In the process of working out his main idea Fedorov, who despite the extravagance of some of his ideas was an ardent and capable student of the sciences as well as a religious philosopher, also suggested a number of other ideas that may have seemed outlandish in his day but are fairly mainstream today, like viewing the Earth as an ecosystem that must be maintained and regulated rather than an object to be exploited, and shifting the world's energy base from fossil fuels to solar and wind energy.
His ideas about immortality also mark him as a clear forerunner of transhumanist thought, one of the main predecessors of which was the Russian Cosmism directly influenced by Fedorov. Indeed, Fedorov's idea that space travel might be part of a larger transhuman evolution is a familiar one today, from both science-fiction and science speculation. The possibilities of biotechnology and life-extending nanites aside, Raymond Kurzweil anticipates in books like The Age of Spiritual Machines that in a matter of decades human beings will be uploadable into computers--after which they need never die, and in which form they might take interstellar journeys.
Frank J. Tipler's The Physics of Immortality is even more radical. Tipler argues that evolution will end with the development of a vast artificial intelligence running simulations of all the sentient beings that have ever existed, a process that Tipler himself has described as the resurrection of all who have ever existed. While Tipler did not depend on the religious philosophy of Fedorov or anyone else in working out his system, the parallel is there nonetheless.
Of course, all of this raises the question of why Fedorov's life and work is not more widely known. The simple answer is that Russian philosophy has been unjustly neglected in the West, and it is difficult to find copies of the major works of even much better known thinkers in any language, let alone good English translations. (Have you ever tried to actually run down an English-language version of any of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's works, for instance?)
Fedorov, moreover, is a neglected figure in a field of neglected figures. Frederick C. Coppleston's 445-page Philosophy in Russia: From Herzen to Lenin and Berdyayev contains only two brief references to him (one actually a footnote), and then only because of his influence on the thought of Solovyev and Berdyayev. However, the nature of his writings is also a factor. His principal work, The Philosophy of the Common Task, is not a unified treatise, but a posthumously edited collection of unpublished material ranging from essays and articles to notes and jottings. His thinking was not systematic, and his literary style was notoriously difficult, further complicating matters. Consequently, only portions of his work have been translated into English, and copies of the books containing these are rare enough that even most university libraries do not carry them in any edition.
This is unfortunate. In a time when political scientists of Francis Fukuyama's stature write about "our posthuman future" and Ray Kurzweil gets three hours on C-SPAN to take questions from callers; when stem cell research, genetically modified crops and clones are not just political but legal issues; and it is taken for granted that human technology has evolved to the point at which it can rescue or destroy the biosphere; Fedorov's work is becoming more rather than less relevant to our current situation. As Professor Young put it in his book, exactly
what we should do with this Godlike power is a question that someone is going to have to answer. Fedorov's answer may not be the best one that will ever be proposed, but so far it seems the most thorough and deepest attempt at one.Young's words are even truer today than when he wrote them almost three decades ago. However, even were that not the case, and Fedorov's ideas only a curious but outgrown starting point for our thinking on space flight, it would only be fitting that the man who devoted so much thought and energy to the problem of resurrection himself be resurrected from obscurity and given his due in the history that led to the space age.
Acknowledgement: The author wishes to acknowledge the help of George Young. Of course, any mistakes are the author's own.
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