Multi-cultural dancers

                 (credit: Lance Cpl. Jackeline Perez Rivera, via Wikimedia Commons)

Sociodiversity

A concept that has been drifting around the borders of my thinking for years now is the concept of sociodiversity. A nation is sociodiverse if there are several different clearly identifiable sub-groups within its borders that have sets of morés and customs largely alien or unrecognizable to other sub-groups within its population. Innu hunter/trappers in Canada can meet, interact with, and pass among, Hutterite farmers, Quebecois truck drivers, Russian-Canadian laborers, Mexican-Canadian farm workers, and Scottish-Canadian welders. Any of these groups can have children who mingle, and form relationships with, any of the others. Immigrants from Somalia come to Canada as farm workers, stay as landed immigrants, apply for, and obtain, citizenship, and see their children graduate from universities with degrees in English Literature.

My belief is that Canada, and for that matter, any other nation, is stronger and more resilient when it is composed in this way. The stresses of blending cultures are documented often in newspapers, magazines, ezines, and t.v. news reports. Maybe some Cuban restaurant workers don’t understand and don’t like the way that policemen in a Canadian city come to tell them that their party has to shut down. The guests are violating the noise bylaws. Yes, your father has been allowed to leave Cuba, and come to Canada. Yes, he arrived today, and that is a good thing. A happy thing. No, you can’t celebrate and keep your apartment building’s residents awake till 3 in the morning. We all have to live together. But those Cuban workers may very well come around and apologize to several people in the building the next day. In Spanish. To neighbors that immigrated to Canada from El Salvador. The neighbors may then translate the apology into English and pass it on to twenty or more other residents in the building. The Cubans accept that we all need sleep. Some human expectations are universal.  

It is very important to note here that there are enormous strengths to this design for a society. The Mexican farm workers may have among their numbers a man who trained for a short while to be a bullfighter. If a bull somehow gets released into a field where many people from many cultures are working, the bullfighter apprentice may save two Scots teens, a Russian musician, a Somali cartoonist, and an Innu cook from injury or death on the horns of an angry bull.

The concept of sociodiversity extends much further as well.

When a town contains a homosexual couple who create a moving company with 17 employees on the payroll, the whole community is enriched by that venture. When a 19 year old computer programmer writes, develops, and markets a computer game, she may create dozens or even hundreds of jobs for her town. She may also have just provided kids from many of the town’s diverse households with a way to share their leisure time. Build community spirit. Our team is going to the world finals this year in Seoul! There are hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money.

Then a Scottish-Somali-Canadian boy finds a cure for sickle cell anemia. Some Mexican workers buy their own farms and breed a variety of corn with nearly twice the yields of the corn B.C. farmers used to grow. And so on.

Yes, sometimes it’s hard to mingle many sub-cultures and still keep the peace of the whole nation. But compared to the benefits of the mingling, these drawbacks do not matter. Or at least, to be accurate, they don’t matter nearly as much as the benefits of the intermingling for the whole nation.

By a simple extrapolation, we can see that sociodiversity is an asset for any society. It’s just useful and survival oriented over the long haul to have a lot of different kinds of people interacting and exchanging ideas in your nation all the time. The future always contains unforeseeable challenges for any nation or individual. The nation has better chances of meeting every challenge, pandemic, famine, and even war if it contains a wide variety of people with a wide variety of knowledge sets and talents. 

Biodiversity makes an ecosystem strong. Resilient. But humans don't evolve by that genetically-driven means any more. We evolve and adapt through changes to our cultures. We don't get 99% wiped out by a pandemic anymore as other species do. We find vaccines. Biodiversity is good for an ecosystem; in an analogous way, sociodiversity is good for a human nation. 

There are a lot of bulls out in the world. They leave evidence of their existences all over. We need a lot of different kinds of bullfighters.

How much sociodiversity can a society stand before it begins to break into mutually hostile sub-cultures? We have no idea. We have now built in several different parts of the world societies based on the ideas of tolerance and respect. Even mutual support. Democracies are built around this vision. Mutual respect. Diversity. Pluralism. The experiment is still in progress, and we are it. 

Therefore, love your neighbor. The very "ways" that he practices and that strike you as strange ...may one day save your life. 

I believe, very deeply, that this is the direction in which our species must go if we are to survive at all. We can do this. The evidence says we can. 

                 NAEM (National Association for Environmental Management) team  

                                       (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

       Ernest Hemingway (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Patriotism

A quote from Ernest Hemingway (from A Farewell To Arms):

           “I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.”

And another (from Selected Letters):

“I've seen a lot of patriots and they all died just like anybody else if it hurt bad enough and once they were dead their patriotism was only good for legends.”

And another (from Notes On The Next War):

“They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason.”

These quotes from Hemingway capture a lot of how I feel about patriotism. I know that Hemingway is a very controversial writer in these times. He was very left-leaning for many years in world politics, especially in Castro’s takeover of Cuba. As a writer, he seemed uninterested in, and even hostile toward, his female characters. Today, he has more detractors than followers. But he did succinctly express the thoughts on war of a man who had been there.

                                 American children pledging allegiance to the flag 

                                (credit: Staff Sgt. Bernardo Fuller, Public Domain) 

                                         Chinese children in PRC saluting flag

                                                     (credit: chinadaily.com)

So why am I picking on the human mindset called “patriotism”? Can’t it be an asset or, at least, harmless if it is controlled carefully? I don’t think so.

I don’t think it can be controlled in the long haul. Deep in the chemistry of the human psyche, it turns into militarism in the end, under the pressures of real politics in a world full of nations in which there are a lot of patriotic people. The nations are bound to have disputes. The citizens’ patriotism will gradually draw them more and more into inflating these disputes, for the protection of their economies, rights of minorities, or just plain “face”.

Patriotism does not openly drive tolerance out of the individual human heart, but the two have many difficult times in living together. And as their clashes get more and more heated, the owner of that heart gets weary with trying to resolve their disputes. Then, she or he gradually tends to lean more and more to one of the two sides, the patriotic or the tolerant. ("But these immigrants are taking Canadian jobs!") Reduce cognitive dissonance. Rah-rah patriotism gets a person more friends faster than quiet expressions of tolerance ever will.

The idea that maybe the whole human race is going to have to give up patriotism is abstract and counterintuitive for most people in every country today. It is so contrary to what they absorbed as kids from their culture, i.e. their parents, teachers, entertainment media, etc. The Fatherland. Mother Russia. America, Land of the Free. Rule Britannia. Vive la France. Viva Mexico. O Canada. The East is Red. All of these nations have fought wars with several of the others at different times in their histories.  My land, Canada, is a kind country. But Canada has made too many bad mistakes for me to ever give her some kind of unconditional loyalty.

Like we could learn to treat all other humans with respect, regardless of their skin color, ethnicity, accent, gender preference, etc., we could learn to let go of patriotism. I base that claim on the fact that there have been so many folk in the past century who have done it. Given up an old patriotism for a new one, or in some cases, for no patriotic feelings at all. Russians who became devoted Americans after being accepted as U.S. citizens. Korean-Americans. Indo-Britons. Turko-Germans. Ukrainian-Canadians. Afro-Mexicanos.

                                        Pan American Health Organization Interns

                                                            (credit: paho.org) 

So I’ll state my thesis today plainly: patriotism must fade out of the psyches of the citizens of the future if we are going to survive. Its day is over. You are a human being. Your identity may contain implicit loyalties to several groups and causes. But not to a nation. The feelings of rivalry and jealousy that belonging to a nation stir up are just too risky. It’s you as a person that I look at as I decide whether you are deserving of my respect and, maybe even, brotherly love.

We can reprogram ourselves and, even better, the kids, to take pride in being good swimmers or knowledgeable movie fans or software engineers or writers or dancers or even loyal sons or daughters or pediatricians or any of thousands of other forms of identity. But rah-rah patriotism? “My country right or wrong”? Either that way of thinking is obsolete, or we are.

 

                                                        Hand symbol for peace 

                                                    (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Choosing Peace

Some serious insights that suggest strategies for avoiding war are contained in a text that I found online a few days ago. It’s called The Origin of War, and it was written by a socio-biologist named Johan van der Dennen.

In this book, the author proposes that war developed and became a widespread pattern of behavior among tribes of our earliest ancestors because it works. Or at least it did for them. Males in some troops of early hominids (our ancestors of 7 million years ago) first acquired some precursor traits that proved useful in the survival game: language (for quick communication); group cooperation (so several males could move smoothly as a coordinated team); an easy way of identifying group members (so there would be no confusion in battle as to which combatants were “your guys”); and weapons. Then, a few smart males in a troop of hominids put this combination together. Their beginning to practice lethal raiding on other troops in their area then became pretty much inevitable.

Why? Because the aggressive males, by conducting successful raids on other troops, got more females. Then, the warmongers did more breeding, produced more offspring, and taught this pattern of behavior to their sons. War was a vigorously self-perpetuating trait. It made greater numbers of troop members in a few generations for troops that contained lots of war-loving males.

There are interesting corollaries to the main thesis in the book too; I'll omit them. I think that far more important is the fact that van der Dennen’s main thesis misses a big point: humans can reason.

He and many of the researchers he quotes acknowledge the power of conceptual thinking in our survival struggle. For example, hominids capable of conceptual thinking were better at anticipating the movements of an enemy, better at improving weapons, and more likely to come out on top in their clashes than were their duller adversaries. But van der Dennen does not go into detail about how much of a warlike set of behaviors is programmed into its carriers via their genes and how much depends on their social imprinting. Do we today come into the world already programmed to do the dirty deed of large scale murder or do we learn from our elders to attack and kill “enemies”?

It seems to me that either way, by genetic engineering or by education, we ought to be trying to reprogram our species to be less aggressive than our forebears were. But the second view – of war as a learned behavior – offers so much more hope for our species. If war is learned behavior, not factory-installed, then we can unlearn it. Change our deep responses to “others”. In us and in the kids.

And let’s just remind ourselves why we want to make our kids less violent and aggressive: we have the weapons now to kill three quarters of the humans on earth in an afternoon, with almost all the rest likely dying of radiation poisoning, famine, and disease in the next few months. We must not do this.

                                                       Trident submarine 

             (capable of fighting WW3 by itself; about three football fields long) 

Getting people to go along with government-run, controlled breeding would be impossible. Too many people all over see their child-nurturing roles as sacred. We could never get meaningful numbers of people to accept such a program.

But if war is more learned during childhood than it is hard-wired into us from birth, then we could re-educate the kids via our schools and the media to favor peace-building as a way of life: peaceful resolution to disputes of all kinds as their way of life. War could become like picking one’s nose while speaking at a formal gathering: a thing to be avoided; a thing just “not done”.  

We could learn alternate behaviors to express aggressive drives. For example, sport is a substitute for war. A kind of ritualized form of aggression. Sport could become a keenly enjoyed activity for large numbers all over the world. As it is becoming now. And everyone – fans, player, officials – goes home safe.

Van der Dennen admits many species have evolved into ritualized aggression. Males in many species have evolved to engage in “songs” and “dances” to prove their fitness to females. The quick conclusion we can draw here is that species which learn mating “rituals” that redirect aggression do so because they are caught in environmental circumstances that make males killing males counter-productive for the species. Sometimes, war does not favor greater odds of long term survival of the species. Perhaps predators are all about. The group needs its males. Or a pandemic makes cooperation from every group member vital for survival. Or for any of hundreds of arrays of other possible reasons.

                                                          Sarus crane duet 

                                                  (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                                                             Tango dancers 

                                               (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

Such species, over generations, evolve into ways of competing that exhibit male fitness, but avoid violence; males in these species “dance” or “sing” to prove they’re fit to breed. Females, most often, watch and listen. If in humans, the evidence shows that we can reprogram ourselves consciously and deliberately to change behaviors we consciously don’t want to see expressed in our societies, we could do so. We could learn to ritualize our aggression into non-destructive behavior patterns. Sport. Dance competitions. Writing contests.

But really? Yes, really. War is at least in part tough to educate out of us because it is so easy to do. And it can appear to justify itself. “We can’t give up. If we do, that will mean that Jim died for nothing!” No. I can love Jim’s memory and still decide that the war is, and always was, stupid.  

The evidence says that we can change. With other behaviors, we already have.

We can learn as adults to eat with chopsticks or cutlery and engage in one behavior in some situations and the other in different situations. Learn to wear both saris and jeans, then wear whichever we choose for the situation in which we find ourselves. Speak English, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu and use the language that fits current circumstances. Play piano and rugby both in the same afternoon. Leave a stressful job in business and become a welder. Confer in Tokyo, Berlin, and London.

We are programmable. We aren’t apes. We don’t need generations to change behavior as genetically-driven species do. We don’t have that kind of time. But we can learn.

We are humans. We can choose to change. Education and re-education. We just need to come to global consensus on the undesirability of war and choose something saner and more strategic for our own survival. 

We can teach the kids peace.

(Here's a link to the book "The Origin of War") 

http://rint.rechten.rug.nl/rth/dennen/dennen6.htm

 

       

                                                  Russian President, Vladimir Putin 

                                                       (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

                    Rene Levesque conceding defeat in the 1980 separation referendum 

                                                           (credit: CBC News)

Canada and Vladimir Putin

I remember very clearly the anguish I felt during the last weeks before the first Quebec referendum on separation from the rest of Canada. They were going to leave the confederation of Canadian provinces. Or so the Parti Quebecois, the one running the province at that time, 1980, wanted. The leader of that party, his cabinet, and thousands of his followers campaigned for separation. They felt very sure that they hadn’t been treated with respect and hadn’t been protected against going the way of the Cajuns in Louisiana – a rural curiosity – in the not-too-distant future. Many in Quebec felt their language, their culture, their way of life were on the verge of becoming cultural casualties. They were six million francophones in the middle of a sea of anglophones. If their culture was not granted safeguards inside of confederation, it would not survive. Or so many of them believed.

And with reason. They were disrespected, even mocked, by too many English-speaking folk in other provinces. Even in sport. Hockey star Maurice Richard was elbowed in the face without any referee calls on the play over and over again. Luckily for him and his many fans, he was really tough. He played a sportsmanlike game for a long time, but eventually, he started flattening every goon the other teams sent after him. Then, they left him alone.

                                          Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau 

                                                         (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In politics, on the other side of the struggle for the hearts and minds of the people of Quebec, we had Pierre Elliot Trudeau. He had come to power by his obvious wit, intelligence, and charisma well before the 1980 referendum, and he had put in place many pieces of legislation that did protect the French language right across Canada. School programs, for example, in which students could study subjects in French right through to grade 12 graduation. Even in provinces far away from Quebec. Like British Columbia, where I taught for 33 years.

So how did the Quebec referendum of 1980 go? The “no” side, the side against separating from Canada, won resoundingly. 60% “no”, 40% “yes”. In politics, a margin that wide is an ass-kicking. I remember Rene Levesque, the premier of Quebec and chief separatist, crying profusely on t.v. that night. And I am very sure that in the privacy of my mind, I was enormously relieved at the outcome, but I was also sad for him. He had risked all on one roll of the dice. He had lost. Quebecers might vote for him provincially, but they did not want to leave their country. High drama. For us, it really was. Up there with assassinations inside the land of our neighbors to the south. Kennedy, King, Kennedy, Malcolm, etc.

So what’s my point today?

If Putin really were sincere and really did care about democratic principles, the current mess in Ukraine would not be happening. Were there people in Canada who were enraged by the thought of Quebec just up and pulling out of Canada? Of course. Some thought the rest of Canada should invade and block any steps that the Quebec government might begin to take toward real separation if they began to take them after a different referendum vote. But they were a very tiny minority in Alberta and B.C. I’m sure of this. I lived in both of these provinces. We, TROC (the rest of Canada), were ready to sadly let Quebec go. We would all muddle through somehow. Some Westerners thought B.C and Alberta should join the US, if the Americans would have them. The Maritime provinces in the East would have been on their own.

There was another referendum in 1995 and it was much closer. The hostility on both sides, among the minorities that like hostility, rose and fell over the years. But Quebec is still here and looks like it will be for generations. The haters have, by and large, on every side, worn themselves out and shut up.

And I will also mention that in the former Czechoslovakia the result in a very similar referendum was opposite from that in Canada. They call the separation of Czech Republic and Slovakia a “velvet” divorce. They are separate countries. But they separated peacefully.  

The key theme I am touching on this morning is choice. The indicator of justice.

Again, with little doubt in my mind, I can say to Vladimir Putin and his cronies: the people of Ukraine don’t want you! Take the country, and you’ll only end up with a much worse situation to try to manage. Too many of you are criminals. Thieves. Liars. Bullies. Murderers. And Russia’s GDP is less than Canada’s. Russia has almost four times Canada’s population. Your way doesn’t work.

The people of Ukraine really, really want you to leave. Save face in some ways in the terms of the treaties you strike with Ukraine. But leave. Ukraine does not like you. Leave.

My sad, but determined thoughts on a rainy Wednesday morning in rural B.C.  

                                 Maurice Richard (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

 

 

                                          January 6, 2021 riot in Washington, D.C. 

                                 (credit: Tylor Merbler, via Wikimedia Commons) 

Changing Our Philosophies of Life

The ongoing investigations into what happened in the US capitol last January 6 has got me thinking heavy thoughts again. Very general, large-scale thoughts. 

I know people who claim confidently that they do not have a philosophy of life. In a simpler analysis, I believe they just don't want to have to think about it. But have no philosophy of life of any kind in their heads? I don't think it is possible for that to be true. 

If one had no philosophy of life whatsoever, one would sit catatonic and stare and, probably, drool. There aren’t a lot of such people, but they do exist. Most of them are in asylums, of course, and a few are being looked after at home by family members.

But the point is that in almost everyone’s head there is a set of values and a decision process of some sort that enables them to choose – second by second, as they watch the details coming in from their senses – what matters, how much it matters, and what they should do about it. That much of a basic minimum of a philosophy of life must be in your head in order for you to function at all in the real world. And stay on the curb until the traffic light changes and even then, stay on the curb if you see a car coming at you at a high rate of speed. And so on for decisions all day long for all of us. You have an ontology, an epistemology, and an axiology in place, or you wouldn’t be making any statements at all.

The set of concepts and beliefs that enables you to make decisions and act second by second is a philosophy. By it, you put sensory details into categories like “matters”, “urgent”, “animal”, “edible”, “hazard, “sexually available”, and so on. This philosophy or code also guides you to form action plans with which you’ll respond to, or ignore, the details you are noticing.

You may never have thought about whether your philosophy of life causes you to seek specific kinds of people and experiences or avoid others. The code may have been programmed into you so deeply (by parents, usually) that you can’t examine it honestly. Or you may have lived a life that so far has run smoothly and has never caused you to ponder over your code. But I reiterate that it is still in there. You couldn’t survive everyday life if you had no code at all.

I think one of the things gnawing at millions of us now, in cultures all over the world, is that we have learned in the last fifty years or so just how mistaken our codes can be. Many people have also realized that all cultural codes are, in fact, always changing. Our ways of life change as we come upon new organisms like new plants or animals that may be dangerous or edible or in some other useful category. Or we may, as a whole tribe, make contact with another tribe whose way of life is very different from our own. Different foods, rituals, morés, customs, and beliefs. We may mingle, get on well, trade, or even exchange members for marriage. Or we may become mutually hostile and dissolve into making war on each other. The scenarios can become very complex.

But all of this discussion of possible programming-driven scenarios for humans that can arise only underscores my point: you have a philosophy of life of some sort, or you wouldn’t survive in the real world.

What frightens many of the people of the world today, I believe, is that they can now see that their philosophy of life is deeply flawed. We all have been taught to notice and value only certain things we’ve been trained to see as significant. Via more and more experience of the world, we learn that when our system – our culture’s system – is held up to hard scrutiny, many of the beliefs or values it contains are trivial or even unkind. Beliefs and values that are just wrong.

And then we start to get scared. We don’t want to think about how limited and even mistaken our philosophies and customs might be. Such thinking threatens to be very upsetting. We’d rather not contemplate it for very long.

Ours is a changing world. The mingling of cultures and the anxieties that go with that mingling keep happening. In fact, the mingling seems to be moving faster and faster. We’re all going to have to deal with culture shock.

The culture that I am living inside of now here in Canada is called "Western". It has risen to a position of dominance in many parts of the world. It values a lot of different things and sometimes the code is unclear about which of its values should take precedence over which others. Do money or "face" matter more than the love of one’s family? Should some races, creeds, or genders have a right to better opportunities for education and employment? Should I be as honest with my customers as I am with my father? 

To some, answers to questions like these may seem obvious. Every human being has a right to a good education, you say. But maybe your culture has not in the real world practiced that value very well. Some sub-cultures within your culture may now be so badly scarred that the adults have passed anger or criminal behavior on from generation to generation for decades or centuries.

It's a bitter pill to swallow for many white males in the West to realize that maybe they are where they are in life, in the world, in the midst of a comfortable job, family, set of hobbies and possessions and so on more because they were born white and male than for any merits of their own.

It’s a bitter pill for many women or people of color or indigenous people in the West to realize that their opportunities in life have been, and are being, limited by the accidents of their gender or race at their birth. Many of them get angry at a young age as they begin to see their world for what it is. Some stay angry for a lifetime. I think that being that angry tends to destroy the peace of mind and health of the one who carries the anger many times faster than it does the privileges of the ones she/he is angry with. But remaining engaged in this life without getting mad, if you are one of the underprivileged, must be very difficult. And here I speak only from what I’ve learned via my reading and viewing films and talking to people, some of them members of minorities. I’m just a white male from Canada. My experience base is limited.

But my point rises to the surface again. Whoever you are, you do have a philosophy of life and you are likely going to have to examine and revise it soon, if you are not doing so already. With the growth of communications media, travel, and especially the internet, many cultures are mingling now.

                                  UN Headquarters, New York, New York, U.S.A. 

                                             (credit: flickr, via Wikimedia Commons) 

For me, in that reality, there lies much hope. Yes, it will be scary and sometimes painful, but you and I can reprogram. In fact, the brains of humans are always reprogramming. In the past, the privileged had more choice about which beliefs and values they were going to modify, adopt, or throw out than we do now. We used to be able to get away with staying inside the culture of our birth for lifetimes. We can’t anymore. Life for humans on this earth is evolving. We’re changing. But I see many signs that, as a result, we’re coming together. Getting closer every day to understanding one another well enough to live together as a single, complex, global society with a single, complex ecosystem of a culture.

Moral relativists and postmodernists who claim to have no code of values, of course, are not helping the adjustment, though they often argue that they are. But they insist that every culture’s values are right when one is inside that culture. That kind of talk has, in the past, only given the Proud Boys and their counter-parts in other sub-cultures a free pass to do whatever they want as long as they can gather a group of their cohorts together and shout down their opponents. Or beat them down. As some of them did on January 6 last year. 

And why not? Proud Boys are right if they say they are. Or so the moral relativists have told them.

We can’t live that way. We have to come up with a basic minimum set of moral rules: a moral code by which a global community of humans can resolve disputes peacefully and live together. A code built around reason, not violence. I believe very strongly that the evidence that supports that code and makes it acceptable to at least some people in all cultures is going to have to come from the one thing that there is some chance of us all agreeing on: physical reality. The universe itself. Then, if the code works to create a strong, new way of life, that way of life will grow.  

But that is material for another post on another day. For today, let’s just be content with concluding that every one of us has a set of values and a philosophy of life in place in her/his head. And take heart from the fact that Psychology tells us clearly that humans and their sets of values are programmable.

We really can make a new, better us.   

                               International Court of Justice, the Hague, Netherlands 

                                            (credit: Yeu Ninje, Wikimedia Commons)  

                      

                                    Joan Clarke, cryptanalyst, World War Two 

                                                                (credit: Wikipedia)

Leo Szilard, Joan Clarke, and the Women of Bletchley Park

Leo Szilard and Edward Teller had a lot in common. They were both born Jewish in Hungary a generation before World War Two. They both became scientists, and both worked on the team in the U.S. in the mid-1940s that built the atom bombs, the ones that were dropped on Japan in August of 1945.

But otherwise, they diverged in many ways. Szilard did not want to see the Los Alamos team’s first nuclear bombs, “Fat Man” and “Little Boy”, actually used on any cities in Japan. He put together a petition and got many of the main scientists who had built the bombs to sign it in the last days before “Little Boy” was dropped on Hiroshima. He wanted the bomb dropped on some island near Japan with Japanese official observers present, so they would see what could be done to their cities if they continued with the war. The military ignored him. He and many other scientists working on the bomb had only joined the project because they feared Germany might build one first. By June of 1945, Germany was out of the war. Leo, to his dismay, found that control of the project had been ripped out of the hands of the men who knew what these gadgets could do. 

                                                  Leo Szilard (credit: Wikipedia)

 

In the meantime, Teller consulted with project director, Robert Oppenheimer, who reportedly felt military and political leaders should handle the decision on whether to drop an atom bomb on Japan. Teller refused to sign the petition. Teller has been characterized since those times as a stooge of the US military, while Szilard is seen as a man of conscience. These characterizations are not completely fair, but close enough for my purposes in this post.

My larger point is that these men who were key players in the building of the bomb were both of Jewish descent. In Nazi Germany, they probably would have died in Auschwitz. They would never have had the chance to work together and agree – or disagree – as they did. The Jewish components wouldn't even have been available. 

Enrico Fermi, the key scientist in the earlier Manhattan Project, had a Jewish wife. They had fled Italy in 1938 to escape the harsh new race laws there, which were deeply anti-Semitic. Oppenheimer himself was Jewish. In fact, the list of key figures in the building of the first bombs is full of names of Jewish scientists. 

                                              Edward Teller (as a young man) 

                                                            (credit: Wikipedia) 

Teller is also seen as the father of the fusion bomb, the H-bomb, which was built a few years after the war. Fusion bombs are more powerful than fission bombs. They are the weapons in the figurative cloud that now hangs over this planet.

Some of these scientists did not like each other, but that didn’t matter to the final results. They tolerated each other. They cooperated and built the bombs. Out of this mix, the democracies of the West got an early lead on the totalitarian system in the USSR, which had long since openly vowed to create a Communist world state and kill all who opposed that view.

The secret of the H-bomb was stolen by Soviet spies, and the whole arms race we all know about was run. But the USSR was held in check by those weapons until it dissolved out of existence. (Without a major war, we should also note. Those who cared more for peace than ideologies defeated those who believed in violence simply by outlasting them.)    

When Heisenberg’s facility was destroyed by Allied agents in April of ’45, the German work on nuclear weapons was found to be at least two years behind the work at Los Alamos. He didn’t have Oppenheimer, Szilard, or Teller. 

In Japan, arguably an even more monochrome society than Germany, during WWII, no meaningful work on atom bombs was even done.  

But I reiterate that there is a larger point here. In the more tolerant national ethos of the US, the project was simply more possible sooner. There were more varied and numerous human resources there.

A major strength of democracy, clearly visible in the events of the years leading up to the building of the bomb, is its pluralism. Its tolerance. In a real, working democracy, lots of different kinds of people learn to live together and tolerate, even respect, each other. The Americans acquired many of the Jewish scientists of Europe in the 1930s. As the power of the Nazis rose in their home countries, these men made a simple choice: to leave. Most went to the US to continue their scientific work there. Jewish scientists added to the ranks of scientists of many other creeds in the West, and they became a strength of Western democracies. Not out of any one of them, but out of their interactions and teamwork, a huge scientific breakthrough occurred.

                                               Alan Turing (as a young man) 

                                               (credit: Wikimedia Commons) 

In this same vein of thought, I point to Alan Turing in Britain. He was the key player in the project that broke the most important German code, the one called “Enigma”. He was also a homosexual. He was treated shamefully after the war, but repressive laws often get renewed in the nervous times that exist after a war. By 1947, Britain was a more scarred and frightened land than it had been in 1934.

In the meantime, in Germany in 1934, measures aimed at purging the nation of homosexuals were brought in. Thousands were arrested and given prison terms or sent to camps. After the “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, the homosexual life style of Ernst Rohm and several of his cohorts in the SA was even given by many Nazis as an excuse for their being assassinated. 

If Turing had been in Germany during the pre-war years, he would have known his private life would be closely scrutinized before he could do classified work such as code-breaking. He would likely have shied away from doing any such work. But Britain in the years before the war was, unofficially, but practically, more tolerant than Germany. Once again, a democracy’s being tolerant turned out to be a major strength.

The Americans broke the Japanese codes in the Pacific war. Their knowing what Japanese fleets were going to do before they did it produced some major American victories, notably the Battle of Midway in mid-1942 and the shooting down of Admiral Yamamoto’s plane a year later.

In the meantime, the Japanese never did crack the code used by the Americans in the Pacific. It was Navajo. Only a very few people in the world spoke Navajo and none of these betrayed the US. The Navajo men who actually spoke radio messages for the US forces were called “Code Talkers”. They were vital to the winning of the war. The highly monochrome regime in Japan, which was condescending and cruel in its view even of other Asians, had no such resources to draw upon. The Code Talkers were clear-cut strengths of a democracy.

Generally, “macho” male-dominated societies don’t even want women among the ranks of those who are really deeply involved in a war. No important roles for females. Ever. But Joan Clarke was a vital member of Turing’s team in the cracking of Enigma. Many, many women worked at Bletchley Park.

It is also widely known now that women are among the cleverest and bravest secret agents working inside enemy country. Violet Szabo was captured by the Nazis. And tortured. But she never gave away a single fact that was of any use to them.

  

                                 Violet Szabo, British spy (credit: Wikimedia) 

A key insight into nuclear fission came in 1938 from Lise Meitner, an Austrian Jew. In 1953, Rosalind Franklin provided vital insights that made it possible for Watson and Crick to build an accurate model of the DNA molecule, the key to all life.

I could list examples for hours. 

The point is that any nation that bars women from playing meaningful roles in its national life is, in one fell swoop, losing half of its human resources. Not a smart move in the great game.

I could go on, but I think my point is made. In the giant picture, over the long haul of years, decades, generations, and even centuries, democracy is tougher than its competitors, the totalitarian societies, because in the long haul, freedom and pluralism are real assets, not liabilities.

Even more deeply, we need to see that these democratic traits are national assets because of the uncertainty that is built into the physical universe from the level of the atoms on up to the stars. Freedom and pluralism are a society’s way of matching its culture to one of the basic principles of the universe, namely the probabilistic quality of reality. We don’t know what kinds of surprises our nation will be hit with in the future. But we do know for certain that surprises will come. That is how the universe is built.

The answer to this deep uncertainty is to have lots of different kinds of arrows in your quiver and skills in your skill set. You just can’t know what the future may throw at you. But you can know that your nation's chances of handling those shocks are better if your nation has a whole lot of different resources at its disposal.

In plainer English, love is an asset. Democracy’s tolerant way of life is an asset. Kind people, in the long haul, really are the strongest people.

I think I will leave it at that for today.