The Casual Blog

It’s been a busy travel year for me, which has been great, but wearing, so I’ve been enjoying not traveling in these last weeks of the year.  To keep up my photography skills, I’ve been dragging myself out of bed when it’s still dark and cold and taking my gear down to Shelley Lake.

I like sitting there with the Canada geese as they paddle about, honk, and eventually take off for their morning flying exercises.  I’ve been trying to capture the wildness of their take offs and landings, with only limited success.  The actual events are really exciting, but for photographic purposes the birds are usually too far away, heading in the wrong direction, or in suboptimal light.  Or I commit one of a thousand possible operator errors.  Anyhow, I’ve yet to get the perfect shot, but here are a few that I liked.  

We’ve had a happy holiday season with family gatherings, and I’m conscious of many things to be grateful for.  In the background, though, I’ve been struggling with how to think about our new political reality.  It feels like we’re entering into a dark period.

One of the gifts of reading history (or for me more recently, listening to history podcasts) is perspective: our species has made it through many dark periods. We know that the Romans had a good number of terrible rulers, as did medieval Europe. The same is almost certainly true of more ancient civilizations. In spite of everything, we’re here.

For more perspective, I heartily recommend The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, which I’ve been re-reading (actually, listening to). The main subject is the development of human civilizations beginning around 10,000 years ago.  The book draws on recent scholarship to challenge the standard narrative that there was a linear progression from hunter gatherers to early farmers to urban settlements to the modern world, with increasing levels of hierarchy and authority at each stage.

Instead, Graeber and Wengrow draw on specialist research to demonstrate that there were early societies that organized without relying mainly on farming and without settled hierarchies.  Other societies adopted authoritarian forms and later abandoned them.  They show that, at least until relatively recently (as in, say, the last three hundred years), the nation state was not the primary form of societal organization.  Rather, societies experimented with many different systems.  

This analysis has a hopeful aspect.  Although some of our prehistoric ancestors were cruel and violent, people continued to innovate.  Our food production system and other technologies do not necessarily dictate a certain type of political organization.  Fundamental change is possible.  

A plausible understanding of the election of Donald Trump is that there is deep dissatisfaction with our existing system and a hunger for change.  It seems unlikely to me that Trump will satisfy that hunger.  It may be that we will eventually find our way to a new era of social innovation, with better solutions to our serious challenges.

One of those pressing challenges is what to do about nuclear weapons.  I know this is not a pleasant topic, but it’s vitally important that we deal with it.  The possibility of accidental nuclear accidents and nuclear war is very real.  Indeed, as a recent article pointed out, a highly classified U.S. war game in the 1980s found that any nuclear war scenario inevitably led to escalation and finally  annihilation. 

On this score, I want to highlight a recent opinion piece in the NY Times by Beatrice Fihn, former executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.  She fully recognizes the strength of the common belief that nuclear weapons are, if not sensible, an inevitable fact of life, but she effectively challenges that belief.  

Fihn writes, 

Contrary to popular belief, nuclear weapons are remarkably inefficient tools of war. They are clumsy, expensive, and lack practical military utility. Their use would result in catastrophic destruction, potentially wiping out hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and spreading radioactive contamination across borders and generations. It is hard to envisage a scenario in which a state would be better off choosing to use a nuclear weapon over a conventional weapon, given the significant harm it would cause both to that nation and to its allies. Even nuclear-armed nations openly acknowledge that these weapons should never be used.

Change is possible, as Fihn demonstrates.   The international order has largely reached consensus on banning chemical weapons, and nuclear stockpiles have been greatly reduced since the Cold War.  Most nations have chosen not to create nuclear weapons, and most have signed the United Nations’ Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.  But we stand at a moment when the United States, Russia, and China seem to be committing to a new nuclear arms race.  

Fihn contends that we as individuals can meaningfully contribute to addressing this terrible situation.  She writes,

So how can individuals contribute? First, recognize your power. A key tool is to change the way we talk about nuclear weapons. Instead of thinking of them as magical tools, we should talk about them as being irrational and useless for any real life military situation. Instead of discussing nuclear weapons in terms of abstract theoretical concepts like strategic stability and mutually assured destruction, we should center conversations on the facts and scientific evidence of what happens when these weapons are used or tested. We can all start questioning common assumptions that these weapons are designed to keep us safe and expose the irrationality of a national security strategy based on threatening to commit collective global suicide.

If you’re a student, organize campus discussions. If you’re a professional, engage through your networks. If you are an artist, use your skills to address these issues.

Get in touch with your elected representatives but don’t forget to also engage with city councils, state representatives and community groups. Cities and local authorities are becoming more involved in statecraft and diplomacy. Getting your city or state on board with the growing number of local authorities that are taking action on this can help build a new generation of political leaders taking on this issue.

Fihn also proposes confronting the major corporations that are responsible for nuclear weapons, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman.  She cites the divestment campaigns against big tobacco and fossil fuel companies as possible models.  

For Fihn, the path off of the nuclear precipice requires a change of attitude, and that can only happen through “persistent, collaborative effort.”   We might as well give that a shot.