Greg Cochran writes: Now and then I contemplate the possible outcomes if the United States got really, really angry, say at jihadists, if they went too far and struck a nerve. Crazed fury. Jihadists seem to think that enraging the western powers is strategically sensible, but they might be wrong. I’m not talking about little things like the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan: no, I mean really angry. You should picture Uncle Sam turning green and bursting out of his Uncle Sam suit (fortunately he wears highly stretchable purple undies).
There’s the old reliable, nuclear weapons. There wouldn’t be a lot left of the Arab world, especially when you consider little tactical enhancers like blowing up the Aswan Dam, or nuking a nuclear reactor. You could simply drop enough medium-life-time radioactive dust to make a region uninhabitable for months, or years, or decades, making the Haj pretty difficult.
Even semi-conventional war could become lot more intense: we haven’t done fire raids lately, but we still can (B52s can carry a huge payload). It’s hard to make laser weapons work for most purposes (atmospheric transmission) – but it’s easy to make ones that blind. We’re working on smart bullets: right now you have to fire thousands per hit, but that’s going to change.
Nerve gas? effective.
Germ warfare? Amazing things are now possible: we could probably tailor agents to hit particular ethnic groups (there is always leakage: I’m not saying that we wouldn’t get our hair mussed.) . They could kill – swiftly, or agonizingly slowly, They might trigger Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease: not just for cannibals, anymore. You might see agents that cause insanity, or sterility, or damn-foolishness(hmmmmm). Once CRISPR goes to war, you would see agents that cause germ-line genetic changes – nasty changes with built-in genetic drive that spread to the whole population.
COMMENTS:
* My personal favorite: An ethnically targeted slow virus that reduces fertility to well below replacement levels. An undetectable form of eugenics that could greatly speed up human evolution via cultural selection.
* George Church of Harvard has talked about how CRISPR can just as easily be turned on as turned off. Now let’s just say for the sake of argument that we don’t kill the rabble rousers, but just make them infertile to the point that no matter how much effort they put into it they will still reproduce below replacement levels until that form of genetically engineering is disabled. Killing people seems so old fashioned, just prevent new ones and in a few generation everyone will have elbow room.
* Greg Cochran: The urge to totally destroy a foe is sometimes the result of the foe’s action. Other times, peoples or countries are just that way, without much provocation or even an obvious reason. Practical considerations and the passage of time often temper this urge – also, decision makers aren’t just expressions of the popular will. Or even close to it, a lot of the time.
Border wars (meta-ethnic conflicts) can leave a lot of frontiersmen furious, after losing their families for example. The Puritans were furious in and after King Philip’s War. After Metacomet’s death, his wife and nine-year-old son were captured and sold as slaves in Bermuda. His head was mounted on a pike at the entrance to Fort Plymouth, where it remained for more than twenty years. His body was cut into quarters and hung in a tree.
Sometimes this was an individual thing. Jeremiah Johnson, also known as Liver-eating Johnson.
The Nazis were utterly murderous against the Jews, and in eastern Europe against everybody. They contemplating exterminating all the Slavs, and certainly killed millions – in ways that made them more likely to lose the war. And I sure can’t think of what exactly the Jews, the Poles or the Russians had done to provoke them. Similarly, the Japanese acted like a plague of locusts most everywhere they went – but I don’t think you can call it revenge. Revenge for what?
The Russians were mad as hell at the Germans after WWII, but they didn’t treat the Germans anywhere near as badly as the German had treated them. Partly this was due to reasons of state: Stalin thought that the East Germans would be useful (alive). For example, 57% of Russians held as POWs by the Germans died, while about 15% of German POWs held by the Russians died.
The Mongols started out exterminating: hardly anyone seems to have survived in the Kin empire. Then Yelü Chucai sold them on taxation instead of extermination – but they would still exterminate when a city rebelled, or simply because they were in the mood, as with Baghdad in 1258.
In WWII people in the US hated the Japanese a lot, and that hatred grew with war experience. Rape, torture, murder, lethal medical experimentation, cannibalism – not the way to make friends and influence people.
Halsey said that when he was done, Japanese would only be spoken in Hell. We sank their navy and merchant fleets (bringing them to the edge of starvation): burnt their cities to the ground, nuked them. But we took their surrender, when they finally gave it, and treated them pretty decently, much to their surprise. Not everyone with personal experience agreed with that. My father met a Canadian (originally British, in the RAF) who had been captured at Singapore and spent years in Japanese POW camps. He was at Nagasaki when we nuked it, and he enjoyed it. What he couldn’t understand was why we ever stopped dropping atomic bombs on Japan.
* No, the appropriate defense is actually thousands of miles of oceans, the determination to stop dysgenic & maladaptive immigration, and the understanding that almost all foreign intervention works against the best interests of the West and particularly against the best interests of American citizens.
* The reason is the dominance of the universalist dogma, which (given its current dysgenic repercussions) is a long-term evolutionary dead-end branch of certain proselytizing religions.
Religions/dogmas, of course, don’t have to be all like that. In fact, per Turchin, the Axial Age produced a stage of socio-cultural evolution that made large-scale societies (ergo, today’s nations via yesterday’s empires) possible in the first place. It is possible to conceive of dogmas that are pro population growth, technical progress, and are also externally expansionary/warlike. In fact there already are. Those can make living in such a world into a very interesting time.
Actually, IMO, what we are witnessing today with regard to social frameworks, in the context of evolution, is kind of like what life was before DNA: Very fast RNA-based evolution, requiring high-reproduction and horizontal gene transfer to overcome high mutation rate. Before DNA, lots of low-level experimentation and dead-ends, and very hard to build complicated structures, due to error-sensitivity of the latter. In society-speak, this translates to lots of mini-dogmas/experimentation (philosophies, cultists, ideologies, etc. etc) which constantly cross-pollinate each other, but individuals that practice them stay more or less atomized, and their beliefs and practice don’t pass on very well to their offspring.
With the emergence of DNA (and things around it like better protection of the nucleus etc), mutation rate slows down, the errors that go through are better corrected for, allowing the code to get passed down much more reliably. Much less low-level experimentation, of course, but it’s offset by higher-level experimentation, as the cells can now form colonies and, eventually after overcoming Weismann barrier, even whole organisms (via group selection). Horizontal gene transfer is reduced, if not altogether eliminated, but it’s offset by, again, stability of the overall code, and more reliance on occasional beneficial mutations and reliance on higher-order selection. In society-speak, this translates to religions (nay, whole frameworks) that are not merely orthodoxies, but orthopraxies. Change is much slower, there is, in fact, resistance to change, but selection operates on higher-level, because individuals are no longer individuals, but part of the collective, of a mega-family/mega-tribe that live and breath by a Law and principles that are not only not divorced from the Divine (whatever abstract or non-abstract way it can be thought of, with the former being a better choice), but in fact, are considered to be its emanations. It is, IMO, how survivable nations ought to operate.
It is possible to imagine that a lot of such societies may converge on very similar concepts and principles. After all, evolution has a lot of examples of convergence and even re-invention.
