What’s worse is that the impassioned hostility arising from existential stakes has intensified over the years into the horrifically unspeakable face-to-face brutality witnessed in the Hamas attack followed by the collateral toll from Israeli retaliation on terrified civilians in Gaza.

The convergence of a series of shifts in the region over recent decades that are a consequence of previous conflicts lay behind the outbreak of this war.

The 1982 Invasion Of Lebanon

In my personal experience, there is a sense of déjà vu today with the terrorism of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In response to back-and-forth raids across the border and the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador to the U.K. by the offshoot Abu Nidal faction, then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin launched “Operation Peace for Galilee” aimed at expelling Yasser Arafat and his PLO from their safe operating base in Lebanon.

The onslaught was already raging when I arrived by ship from Cyprus with a delivery of emergency medical supplies for the hospital at the American University of Beirut. I checked into what I was mistakenly told was the only safe place in town, the Alexandre Hotel in East Beirut. All the windows had been blown out the day before by a car bomb intended for Ariel Sharon, then the Israeli general leading the military operation who had held a meeting there.

Whenever gunfire erupted somewhere nearby, as it did regularly, everyone hit the ground for cover. Crossing into besieged West Beirut, controlled by a patchwork of PLO and local militias, each contesting the other’s arbitrary authority, was a perilous exercise. If you turned into a wrong intersection, those controlling their sliver of space would fire machine guns mounted on the back of pickup trucks in your direction.

Israeli tanks and artillery constantly shelled from the hills, leaving plumes of dark smoke rising high into the sky. The neighborhood around the Green Zone crossing line between East and West was obliterated into piles of rubble. The PLO leadership cowered in safe-house bunkers, waiting out the siege, plotting escape routes and trying to negotiate their survival. The turmoil toppled the Lebanese government and brought the Christian Phalangists and their militia, allied with Israel, to power.

Just as now, American warships were sent off the Mediterranean coast, at that time to assist the evacuation of the trapped and defeated PLO, which embarked for Greece and on to exile in Tunisia. With the PLO gone, Phalangist fanatics entered the Sabra neighborhood and adjacent Shatila refugee camp in Beirut and massacred hundreds of civilians, including women, children and the elderly.

I drove down to the northern Israeli border through southern Lebanon, passing columns of massive Merkava tanks trailing menacing dust clouds as they headed north. Beyond Sidon and Tyre, I encountered the wholesale wreckage of village after village, like Ain al-Hilweh, where Palestinians had taken refuge as far back as 1948.

In an effort to stabilize Lebanon and act as a buffer between warring parties, U.S. and French forces were stationed in Beirut. In October 1983 suicide bombers blew up their barracks, killing 241 American and 58 French troops. Then U.S. President Ronald Reagan ordered an end to the mission.

It was out of the ruins of Lebanon and the ensuing political vacuum that the Shiite Hezbollah arose as a major force in the country. Instead of the “40 years of peace” Menachem Begin sought with his invasion, what remains today is an Iran-sponsored, well-armed and battle-hardened threat on Israel’s northern border aligned with Hamas in its determination to destroy the Jewish state.

The 1982 war was the beginning of the end of the PLO as an effective enemy of Israel. It became so weak as time went on that present Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his extremist cabinet felt little need to take the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which morphed from it, seriously. For the PLO’s part over the years, it never seemed to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, as Israeli statesman Abba Eban famously quipped, with each successive failure of leadership strengthening the desperate sentiments that fueled the rise of Hamas.

When the PLO did seize an opportunity during the Oslo process, it never gained traction in the face of intransigent constituencies in Israel. As long ago as 1996, Netanyahu flatly told me in an interview that a two-state solution as envisioned in that accord would never happen. “The fledging Palestinian state that Arafat and the PLO are trying to establish is not what the Israeli people want,” he declared summarily.

The U.S. Invasion Of Iraq

When the U.S. ousted Saddam Hussein in 2003 in the name of expunging post-9/11 terrorism once and for all in the Middle East, King Abdullah of Jordan was alarmed by what he saw as the inexorable end result. He warned that by removing the Iraqi dictator, the mostly Shia population of a liberated nation would turn their sympathies toward Iran, shifting the entire balance of power in the region and creating a “Shia crescent” that stretched from Bahrain to Hezbollah in Lebanon.

When I raised this concern at a lunch with then-U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2004, he just stared back uncomprehendingly as if the thought never occurred to him, or just merely assuming that enduring American influence in Iraq allied with Saudi Arabia would somehow checkmate Tehran forever.

Two decades on, radical Iran-aligned and supported forces, including the Sunni Hamas, which deny the very legitimacy of the Israeli state and oppose any reconciliation with it by the Arab world, are showing their vicious mettle in yet another round of eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth meting out of desert justice.

Not A Black Swan Event

In short, as Noema editorial board member Fareed Zakaria correctly analyzed on his CNN show, GPS, the Hamas attack may have erupted unexpectedly for those looking elsewhere, but it was not a black swan event appearing from nowhere. It was a “white swan” event that can be readily traced back to a wave of developments over the last half-century in the Middle East that are the unintended outcome of manifold mistakes, missteps and misapprehensions. It is worth watching Fareed’s commentary here.

Another commentary worth listening to is that of Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli author of “Sapiens” and other works on human nature. As a historian, he always looks at how seeds planted by actions at one time can foster unforeseen repercussions later on.

He also draws a general observation from the recent civil strife in Israel over the rule of law and role of the Supreme Court in checking the power of the executive and the parliament, which the Netanyahu government has sought to diminish on behalf of a theocratic fringe. Speaking of the failed defense of Israel’s borders when Hamas struck, Harari argues that when populists destroy state institutions, they are not there when you need them.

One wracks the fair soul for ways to disentangle the long threads of animosity that nurture an endless cycle of retribution in the Middle East where all atrocities are equally atrocious. Everybody knows, to paraphrase Albert Camus, that when victims become executioners, soon only the dead will be innocent.

The post When Victims Become Executioners appeared first on NOEMA.

That is the hopeful prognostication of former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Nobel economist Michael Spence and venerable investor Mohamed El-Erian in their new book, “Permacrisis: A Plan To Fix A Fractured World,” written with Reid Lidow.

There is little doubt in the minds of these authors that the productivity leaps unleashed by AI will generate vast new wealth by broadly expanding the provision of goods and services. The question is whether such a high-growth trajectory will further exacerbate inequality or lessen it. And that largely depends on whether growth is inclusive and the rollout of robots creates more new occupations for gainful employment than it displaces jobs and depresses wages.

Signs point both ways on the impact of AI.

In one study earlier this year, Goldman Sachs predicted that the enhanced productivity of generative AI would raise global GDP by 7% over the next decade. At the same time, another study by the investment bank warned that 300 million full-time jobs could be automated by platforms like ChatGPT. The impact would be mostly on white-collar administrative labor in the advanced service economies, less so in physical occupations like repair work.

Productivity Is Not Where The Jobs Are

As Brown and company point out, the core problem behind the protracted slump has been that productivity growth is taking place where most jobs aren’t — and where most jobs are, productivity growth has stalled.

In the U.S., “productivity is higher in tradable sectors overall, and more importantly, productivity is growing in the tradable sectors much faster than in the non-tradable sectors. In fact, the non-tradable sectors have been in a productivity backwater for more than 20 years. This rut is significant because the non-tradable sector is a huge part of the economy,” they write.

“The tradable economy,” which includes knowledge work and digitally enhanced manufacturing, “accounts for one-third of the overall economy. The non-tradable sectors combined — think government, healthcare, hospitality, retail, education and construction — account for nearly 80% of total employment and the remaining two-thirds of the economy. And it is in this non-tradable sector where productivity is most lagging.”

That gap, they warn, is a “prescription for having a dual economy marked by the have-nots and the have-a-lots.” The best chance to reverse this pattern, they argue, is “the expansion of the digital footprint” to those least productive sectors of the service economy.

Automate Or Augment?

Certainly, digitizing the service sector, as we all know from the personal experience of automated bank tellers to Amazon orders that arrive the next day, improves the productive use of time. In the first instance, it definitively eliminates jobs. In the second case, brick-and-mortar retail jobs are displaced while new tasks are indeed created, mostly for low-wage warehouse workers along with those who physically transport and deliver the goods.

In the manufacturing sector, the point of digitization is both to reduce or eliminate labor costs and improve efficiency. If “innovations within innovation” follow the pattern of previous technological diffusions, they will serve to augment the efficient performance of tasks while also creating entirely new occupations, for example software engineers who must program the robots for ever-more diverse tasks.

The scale and scope of all this is speculative and undetermined since we can’t know what will emerge, how, when and where as AI courses through the economy. But two things are certain: First, to the extent that AI divorces employment and income from productivity growth and wealth creation, the inequality gap will only widen if the new wealth generated by intelligent machines that displace gainful employment is not widely shared but accrues narrowly to a plutocracy that owns the robots.

Second, if AI is to augment instead of fully automate labor, the workforce will have to be upskilled to manage machines more intelligent than we are.

Pre-Distribution And Public Higher Education

The best way to remedy widening inequality in the digital age is to spread the equity around. That entails fostering ways for people to share the wealth created in the first place as high growth takes off instead of trying to mend the inequality gap after the fact through redistribution of income.

We call this “pre-distribution” through “universal basic capital.” Personal accounts could be assigned in mutual-fund-like universal savings plans that are invested in the shares of a broad array of tech companies, including those that profit from AI-enhanced productivity at the expense of jobs with livable wages.

As the economic pie grows larger through AI improvements in the service sector, that value added needs to be properly taxed to finance public higher education institutions that will be primarily responsible for upskilling a workforce so it will be knowledgeably aligned with the new technologies.

As it stands now, public higher education in the U.S. is underfunded. For example, the California State University system, with 480,000 students and 23 campuses, is widely regarded as the surest route to upward mobility in the Golden State. But it suffers an ongoing $1.5 billion operating deficit to meet the heavy demand of the state’s young population, forcing it to close the gap by raising tuition to a nearly unaffordable level for its mainly Latino and Asian students.

The very services where productivity has lagged, but will improve through the diffusion of digitization, account for 70% of California’s $3.6 trillion economy. Yet, aside from odd items like gift wrapping or welding, the service economy is not taxed. As calculated by the Think Long Committee for California, a 1% sales tax on business-to-business services (such as accounting and financial or legal consulting) would generate $7 billion in revenue for the country’s largest four-year university. It is a virtuous circle of capturing new growth to invest in upskilling labor that will spur and sustain further growth.

The integration of AI can jumpstart slumping economies and lagging sectors and set them on a high-growth trajectory as Brown, El-Erian and Spence argue. But for those gains to be fairly shared, the counterpart of innovation must be robust public policies that ensure there will be more winners than losers in the arriving digital age.

The post AI Is The Way Out Of Low Growth And Inflation appeared first on NOEMA.

Gray’s provocative volume focuses on the diverse ways of ordering societies that have emerged out of the dispelled illusion that a liberal universalist consensus was bound to reign after the end of the Cold War.

As Gray once put it to me, “We are just returning to the pluralism that has characterized most of history.” He cites the dictum of the 17th-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes as his guiding light.  “There is no finis ultimis [final aim],” Hobbes declared in “Leviathan,” “nor summum bonum [highest good] as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers.”

The world Gray sees out there today is not a pretty one. He casts Russia as morphing into “a steampunk Byzantium with nukes.” Under Xi Jinping, China has become a “high-tech panopticon” that keeps the inmates under constant surveillance lest they fail to live up to the proscribed Confucian virtues of order and are tempted to step outside the “rule by law” imposed by the Communist Party.

Gray is especially withering in his critique of the sanctimonious posture of the U.S.-led West that still, to cite Reinhold Niebuhr, sees itself “as the tutor of mankind on its pilgrimage to perfection.” Indeed, the West these days seems to be turning Hobbes’ vision of a limited sovereign state necessary to protect the individual from the chaos and anarchy of nature on its head.  

Paradoxically, Hobbes’ sovereign authority has transmuted, in America in particular, into an extreme regime of rights-based governance, which Gray calls “hyper-liberalism,” that has awakened the assaultive politics of identity. “The goal of hyper-liberalism,” writes Gray, “is to enable human beings to define their own identities. From one point of view this is the logical endpoint of individualism: each human being is sovereign in deciding who or what they want to be.” In short, a reversion toward the uncontained subjectivism of a de-socialized and unmediated state of nature that pits all against all.

The Illusion Of Universality

Gray has long been a discomfiting apostle of pluralism against the false idol of one-size-fits-all universalism under a liberal banner that fails to acknowledge the diverse disposition of humanity.

In a prescient conversation in London two decades ago, when the post-Cold War end of history was still on the horizon, we discussed how liberalism was bound to fail just as Marxism did, and for the same reason.

Marxism had no theory of politics among diverse constituencies because it assumed the universality of the interests of one class. Liberalism also has falsely assumed its own universality in the belief there can be a consensus on only one conception of “the good life.”

“It is an irony,” Gray said back then, “that Marxism’s defective understanding of the sources of politics both in theory and practice should be replaced by a form of liberalism that has an equally defective understanding of the sources of politics. … Liberalism has aimed at abolishing politics or removing from the political domain most of the controversial issues having to do with justice, the regulation of personal liberty and the clash of values, and placing them in the sphere of rights and the judiciary.

It is this disability of mainstream liberal theory … that seeks to derive something like an ideal constitution from a theory acceptable to all ‘reasonable’ persons. Within this ‘ideal constitution’ major issues of the regulation of liberty and of clashing ideas of the good life are resolved or privatized. This kind of liberalism is as utopian and perverse in its actual consequences as was Marxism.”

In theory, “the neutral state” seeks a framework of rights that is equally impartial among competing conceptions of the good life. Individuals and groups are left to pursue their own interests and values as long as they are consistent with the liberties of others. In reality, it is precisely the absence of any substantive content of the state that has invited the culture wars over contending visions of “the good life” raging across liberal societies today. The clash between so-called civilizational states such as China and Russia with the liberal rules-based order constructed by the West springs from the same dynamic.

For Gray, the presumed neutrality of “legalist liberalism” has two disabling flaws.

“The first flaw is that the rule of law is taken as an accomplished fact, which is not the case anywhere in the world. … The rule of law is not the precondition of politics, but is itself a political achievement. Unless you have a political settlement underpinning the rule of law, the rule of law will be insecure or contested.” 

The Trump trials, the U.S. Supreme Court rulings of late, the legal battles in American states over guns, abortion and LGBTQ issues all testify to the truth of this statement, as do questions over the rights of asylum and immigration in both the U.S. and Europe.

“The second flaw,” Gray argues, “is the expectation that issues which are politically intractable can become tractable by removing them from the political arena and enshrining a solution to them in terms of judgments about fundamental rights. … [But] attempting to remove highly controversial issues like abortion from the political domain and placing them in the sphere of rights only ends up politicizing the judiciary.

Further, this legalist approach casts in stone the resolution of conflicts that might best be resolved by legislative compromise, by a mixture of public discourse and political bargaining that yields a ‘modus vivendi’ that is renegotiable over time and which needn’t be the same in all jurisdictions or in all countries where changes in values — and even technology — can make a difference.”

Rights With Content Cause Contention

“Beyond all this,” Gray continued in our conversation 20 years ago that could have taken place today, “there is a deeper reason in philosophy itself that argues against the legalistic, rights approach to liberalism. The deeper reason is that there is no plausible or defensible theory of rights which doesn’t invoke a theory of human well-being and of human interests — and all such accounts are in some degree rationally disputable.

Accounts of human well-being and of human interests are contestable in two ways. One way is that different readings of the human good, different ideals of the good and different beliefs about human beings — their fate and destiny and the conditions under which they thrive — will map human interests differently. Thus, different conceptions of human well-being will generate different accounts of human rights.”

He went on: “Another [reason] is that even an agreed conception of human well-being will encompass a variety of interests that won’t always be harmonious. They won’t always make the same demands in practice. They won’t always dovetail. Quite commonly, they will make competing demands.

The underlying reality disguised by legalistic liberalism is that important liberties are endemically in conflict. The freedom of gays not to be discriminated against, not to have their sexuality disparaged, may conflict with the freedom of private or public schools — Orthodox Jewish schools, Muslim schools, Catholic schools and state schools — to hire whom they wish. That is a real conflict, a genuine deep conflict.”

Clearly this conundrum underlay the ferocious fights over the content of curriculum and parental control in American schools.

“To re-describe the liberties so that they cohere in a harmonious set eliminates or deletes some liberties from the equation. This is a mistake because if you delete some liberties you are disregarding underlying interests which actually are the justification for the liberties and which give them meaning and content. Rights have content only to the extent they embody definite human interests. But to the extent they have that content, they trigger conflicts among themselves.”

Back To The Middle Ages

If legalist liberalism that enshrines rights is the basis of its own undoing, what then is the alternative?

“Liberalism for the future,” says Gray, “must recognize that judgments about human rights and conceptions of human rights themselves embody conceptions of the good that are contested between different ways of life and even within them. … Any well-developed conception of the good must recognize not just one human interest, but a whole variety. And that means a negotiation between conflicting interests in the name of civil peace. A ‘modus vivendi’ is the liberalism now in order.”

For good and ill, we’ve seen in history how such a modus vivendi actually worked during the late Middle Ages in Europe, a time of plural jurisdictions, each with its own set of governing values, before the Treaty of Westphalia, when the absolutist claims of the modern state hadn’t yet been accepted.

“Despite the systematic inequalities of power and privilege, and systematic discrimination against minority religions and traditions,” Gray mused in our London talk, “I tend to share Isaiah Berlin’s judgment that in some respects the Middle Ages were more civilized and more peaceable than our time,” referring to two world wars and the nuclear devastation of Japanese cities. “And that is precisely because all those plural jurisdictions had to negotiate with each other over their powers and interests, none powerful enough to simply dominate the other.”

These competing, but often overlapping, jurisdictions and identities have a clear echo in the circumstances of our own time as the world once again splinters into civilizational realms and cultural tribes within societies. “The Middle Ages,” says Gray, “reminds us that there are many other ways in which human beings have arranged life other than under the nation-state and found a ‘modus vivendi.’”

At a time when the rule of law is being sacralized as one of the key pillars of democracy under threat from autocrats and populists, Gray’s “thoughts after liberalism” are deeply unsettling to ponder. But that does not make him wrong.

The post What Comes After Liberalism appeared first on NOEMA.

Her poem below, which we publish in memoriam and courtesy of MIT Press, is indicative of her unique vision that traced the interconnected lineage of life on Earth from primordial times to the digital device on which you are reading this. It will be included in her posthumous volume, “Gaia’s Web.”

As Claire Isabel Webb, director of the institute’s Future Humans program, writes: 

Parable Of Tree And Stone

Long before dinosaurs roamed our planet, in a time called the Carboniferous, a tree was born. A seed fell to Earth, rooted in swampy soil, grew over a hundred feet tall and a hundred years long. When the tree died, its body became home to cockroaches as big as house cats, and dragonflies with wings as wide as hawks. Bacteria fed on the rotting wood, and mosses grew. Covered by Earth’s blanket, the tree’s body sunk deep, compressing into coal, a slow-motion burial. Millenia later, the coal was unearthed, heated, deprived of oxygen, splintered into plastic pellets, liquified and poured into molds, and polished into small black jewels. Tree, reborn: the keys on my computer.

The stone is even older than the tree.

In Precambrian time a volcano rift opened, and lava flowed from Earth’s core. Cooled by rain, the lava sunk deep, compressing into stone. Millennia later, the stone was lifted from a mine shaft, crushed and bathed in caustic fluid, liquefied and poured into molds, and polished to a shine as sharp as a knife. Stone, recast: the casing for my computer, cradle for the keys.

In deep time, trees and stones are descended from stars.

Tree once drank sunlight and mixed it with air, storing energy for future generations. Stone was forged in the furnace of a long-ago star which — with the cosmic clap of a supernova — dispersed itself as stellar dust, the raw ingredient of our planet. These are the ancestors of our digital devices:

Mother Tree, Father Stone, Grandmother Star, Grandfather Time.

Our computers, then, are made of stardust and tree flesh. Their memories live on machines whose breath warms the sky. Our digital devices are ecological, our ecologies are growing digital.

The post From Stellar Dust To Digital Devices appeared first on NOEMA.

The “wave” he sees washing over all aspects of society, for better and worse, is propelled by generative AI and another general-purpose technological innovation — synthetic biology, which, powered by the processing prowess of intelligent machines, can read and rewrite genetic code and then boot up life in the lab. “For the first time core components of our technological ecosystem directly address two foundational properties of our world: intelligence and life. In other words, technology is undergoing a phase transition. No longer simply a tool, it’s going to engineer life and rival — and surpass — our own intelligence,” Suleyman writes.

Intelligent Machines, Humanist Renaissance?

As has been widely discussed, the promise of these innovations ranges from curing cancer to predicting and preventing disease, from creating clean forms of energy, drought-resistant plants and manufactured protein to eliminating the drudgery of rote mental and manual labor while minting vast new wealth that could eradicate scarcity.

LinkedIn co-founder and top venture capitalist Reid Hoffman even sees a new humanist Renaissance on its way thanks to the “amplification [of] intelligence” the coming wave will bring. He analogizes AI to Filippo Brunelleschi’s invention of mobile scaffolding that permitted the thentofore unrivaled construction of the stunning masonry-vaulted dome that crowns the Duomo in Florence. That innovation, in turn, fostered other imaginative leaps by artists, architects, blacksmiths and carpenters that helped fuel the cultural and scientific flourishing in Italy from the 15th to 17th century. Hoffman regards generative AI as “the cognitive ‘mobile scaffolding’” of our time. 

Such promise, Suleyman is quick to note, is mirrored in perilous possibilities from displacing gainful employment while concentrating wealth in a few hands to ubiquitous surveillance, industrialized production of misinformation, automated warfare, the pernicious weaponization of pandemics and even the design of master races.

Uncontained Asymmetry

Like earlier general-purpose technologies such as electricity, AI-enabled innovations will inexorably proliferate in scope and scale across every realm of daily life. The momentum of their diffusion will be driven not only by endless entrepreneurial opportunities drawn from massive social demand, but, distinctively, by the distributed nature of AI platforms that are available to anyone and everyone.

The capacities of this phase transition are so consequential for humanity that, in Suleyman’s view, we need to take a different approach than in all previous waves of innovation. “For most of history,” he warns, “the challenge of technology lay in creating and unleashing its power. That has now flipped; the challenge of technology today is about containing its unleashed power, ensuring that it continues to serve us and our planet.” This echoes the general take of Hoffman as well, who argues that “As today’s imperfect Large Language Models improve, requiring less and less from us, we will need to demand more from ourselves.”

Suleyman puts meat on these bones. He departs from the silicon libertarians of his ilk by calling for strengthening the state and other governing authorities to keep the consequences from getting out of control. His remedies go beyond talk of mere regulation to include bringing government and critics into building technology from the start to transparent audits of tech rollouts, the identification of chokepoints to stall or stop innovations and “public input at every level.”

As the title of his book suggests, Suleyman is cognizant of the daunting dilemma posed by pursuing this effort in open societies where the very nature of the distributed technologies that must be controlled erodes the legitimacy of any authority, not least the state, that might do so. Never before in history, which has been mostly characterized by hierarchical political orders, have societies faced common challenges created by technologies that at the same time undermine the capacity for a common response. Suleyman calls this “uncontained asymmetry.”

In Noema, we have noted how the peer-to-peer digital media ecosystem spreads information from private space to private space without forming a public sphere. Absent that solid ground for democratic deliberation through which open societies make the key choices about their future, there is scant hope of addressing the issues Suleyman raises on both the near and far horizon.

For that reason, renovating the practices and institutions of democracy must precede in importance all else, which can only follow from it. Here too, as noted in this column previously, the old paradigm has flipped: Just as republics have historically sustained themselves by establishing institutions and practices that check power when too much of it is concentrated in one place, so too checks and balances are needed in the digital age when power is so distributed that the public sphere itself is disempowered.

As it is now, we are suspended within a contradictory dynamic. As Suleyman sees clearly, “The internet centralizes in a few hubs while also empowering billions of people. It creates behemoths and yet gives everyone the opportunity to join in. Social media created a few giants and a million tribes. Everyone can build a website, but there is only one Google. Everyone can sell their niche products, but there is only one Amazon. The disruption of the internet is largely explained by this tension, this potent, combustible brew of empowerment and control.”

Suleyman has made a major contribution to the discourse with this manifesto calling for governance of both the giants and the tribes in the coming wave. As he so rightly concludes, “The central problem for humanity in the 21st century is how we can nurture sufficient legitimate political power and wisdom, adequate technical mastery and robust norms to constrain technologies to ensure they continue to do more good than harm.”

The post Containing AI In Open Societies appeared first on NOEMA.

What follows after rupture is the passage to something new. The forces that have been gestating in response to breakdown emerge to forge fresh ways of thinking. Practices grounded in newfound purpose are then imbricated in society through institutional innovations that affirm the path ahead.

In his “A Study of History,” Arnold Toynbee identified this movement of “challenge and response” as the driving dynamic in the rise and fall of civilizations. Those who meet the challenge flourish. Those who fail are marginalized in the unrelenting march of transformation.

It goes without saying that the lessons of history offer little prospect of a linear leap from yesterday to tomorrow. The past rarely recedes willingly and, indeed, more often than not reappears to deflect or derail the most hopeful intentions.

In this issue, Noema seeks to trace the contours of the present historical passage and their interrelated implications. Here are the main themes:

The Return Of Civilizations

The paradox of this moment of transition is that the great economic and technological convergence forged by Western-led globalization did not lead toward a singular cosmopolitan order. It engendered instead a cultural divergence as prospering emerging nations, most notably China, once again attained the wherewithal to chart a path forward rooted in their own civilizational foundations. Economic and technological strength fosters cultural and political self-assertion. 

What exists today is thus an interdependence of plural identities, neither fully convergent nor divergent. And it is the geopolitical clash between China and the West that is the most dangerous and difficult to navigate. Never before in history have two civilizational realms challenged each other at the global level where the extent of their integration is itself the terrain of contestation.

To explore this fraught aspect of the passage to a new world order, Noema asked several contributors to address scholar-diplomat Bruno Maçães’s thesis that we are witnessing “the return of civilizations” — discrete ways of life cultivated among one’s own kind — as a challenge to the universalist claims of liberalism embodied in neutral, procedural rules for ordering societies that lack any identitarian content of their own.

In our collage of responses, Chinese political scientist Zhang Weiwei argues that China’s system of governance is superior because it is rooted in the civilizational legacy of a unitary state administered by meritocratic elites led in modern times by a disciplined party. For the Shanghai scholar favored by leadership in Beijing, such a system is better at delivering the “substance of democracy” than the merely formal democracies of the West with features like the separation of powers. As Zhang sees it, China has shown that non-Western modernization can be a viable alternative to the liberal order for the Global South.

Shashi Tharoor, the Indian parliamentarian and former under-secretary general of the United Nations, argues that civilization states are, by definition, “exclusive” and “profoundly illiberal.” The journalist Pallavi Aiyar discusses the clash playing out in India today between, on the one hand, Hindu nationalists who claim civilizational ownership and, on the other, the adherents of Nehruvian secularism that marked the country’s birth as a modern nation in 1947.

Former Singaporean Foreign Minister George Yeo argues that the West needs to shed its hypocrisy and instead “refresh and extend” its liberal ideas globally to tolerate “the yearnings of non-Western peoples.” Finally, the eminent historian of Eurasia, Wang Gungwu, notes that “civilizations can coexist across boundaries as they have for centuries” but warns that “when civilization power is claimed as universal and conflated with national interests, or when it is invoked in the name of national empire, the world becomes a dangerous place.” 

The Geopolitical Economy Of Deglobalization

Closely linked to the return of civilizational realms is the geopolitical economy of deglobalization. Economic blocs are forming that seek to disentangle the global integration of markets and supply chains through competitive regional and nation-building industrial policies aimed at strengthening self-reliance and resilience. As Nils Gilman and Yakov Fegin have pointed out elsewhere in Noema, this new paradigm of a “designer economy” — in which the state steers investment, departing from the free-market ideology of the past — has garnered broad consensus in the U.S., from left environmentalists to right-leaning security hawks.

In the case of the West and China, when it comes to sensitive technologies, there is a conflict of values between blocs aligned by politico-cultural affinities. Whereas between the U.S. and Europe, there is conflict over interests — for example, when it comes to subsidies for investments in green tech — even though values coincide.

Carbon Purgatory

The disruptive shifts noted above, combined with the cut-off of oil and gas supplies from Russia to Europe and the scramble to replace them, have contributed to backsliding on climate pledges, which has pushed the world into a kind of carbon purgatory where the transition to clean energy is stalling even as the window to avert a cascade of irreversible climate consequences is closing. The urgency of moving toward a sense of “planetary realism” is fading under the pull of the present.

One illustrative case is Germany. Though it has one of the strongest green parties anywhere, the canary is back in the coal mine there. Not only has the governing coalition eased a future ban on combustion-engine vehicles; it has also restarted mothballed coal-burning plants to keep industry and households humming.

Beyond Electoral Democracy

Another aspect of the present passage is the protracted dysfunction of democracies across the West. From Israel to France to Mexico, decisions taken in the halls of power fill the streets with protests. In the United States, Washington is paralyzed along partisan lines while state governments battle over abortion rights, same-sex marriage, school curriculums and the integrity of the electoral process itself.

It has become clear that electoral democracy, in which all-out partisanship foists binary choices over complex issues on a diverse public, cannot in and of itself resolve the crisis of governance. New institutions that enable nuanced solutions by encouraging negotiation and compromise in the broader civil society are screaming to be born. 

Institutions that marry public deliberation with more direct democracy, from citizen assemblies to what David von Reybrouck calls the “preferenda,” are emerging in response to the failure of representative democracy to mend the breach of distrust between the public and the institutions of self-government.

The AI We Empower Will Demand More Of Us

The most game-changing development is the arrival of generative artificial intelligence. Many of those birthing this inorganic offspring of humanity harbor the hubris that, if nourished with ever larger language models, AI may one day quicken into consciousness equal to the spirit we understand, to paraphrase the mocking Earth Spirit in Goethe’s Faust. Others worry that this ostensible servant will become our new master.

Those wiser among us grasp that realizing AI’s promise will require the vigilant guidance of humans who possess the sense, conscience and socially relational qualities that cannot be imparted to machines.

Looking beyond the usual debates on AI, astrophysicist Sara Walker offers an original take, arguing that all intelligence is the result of evolutionary lineage. “Technology, like biology,” she says “does not exist in the absence of evolution. Technology is not artificially replacing life — it is life.”

A Greater Labor Share Of Wealth

To the extent generative AI divorces productivity growth and wealth creation from employment and income for the mind-laboring jobs of professionals as well as the non-college educated, it will have to be alleviated by fostering an ownership stake by all in the robots displacing gainful occupations.

Embracing this idea of “universal basic capital” would increase the labor share of wealth by capturing more of the value being created by intelligent machines in the first place instead of trying to fix growing inequality by redistributing income after the fact. Getting beyond industrial-era paradigm inertia that still pits capital against labor is part and parcel of any successful transition to a digital economy that works for all.

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In one way or another, the various essays and features in this print edition of Noema reflect these connected themes. Resolution of the challenges they pose will define where we end up on the other side of the passage we are presently going through.

Here’s a glimpse of the art that can be seen in print, in Issue IV:

The post Introducing Noema Issue IV: Passage appeared first on NOEMA.

The declarations from the Bandung conclave, when a scattering of countries such as Algeria still remained under colonial rule, rang with the strident rhetoric of the weak against the strong. They insisted on the core principles of political self-determination, mutual respect for sovereignty, and equality as the condition for raising up their impoverished populations to the level of the West that had long dominated their destinies. Wary of imperial interventions or being pressed as pawns into the great game of the new superpowers, the admonition of non-aggression and non-interference in internal affairs was the sine qua non of international relations for these fledgling states.

Nostalgia notwithstanding, the Bandung Conference didn’t do much to advance the participants’ aims since, at that time, they lacked the economic clout, military might, diplomatic savvy and collective organizational capacity to realize their claims.

Nearly 70 years on, mainly due to China’s long march to the top ranks of the global economy and its frontline role in contesting the Western worldview, that wherewithal is, at last, at hand. This was in full evidence at the BRICS summit held late last month in Johannesburg, South Africa, where the original core membership of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa was expanded to include the mixed bag of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Ethiopia, Argentina and Iran. In the future, others will be invited to join. 

Back in the Bandung days, the U.S. alone accounted for nearly 50% of global GDP. Today, the BRICS+ countries together account for 37% of the world economy (projected to reach 50% by 2040), compared to 30% for the global West. And they represent 46% of the planet’s population and growing, compared to that of the G7 nations, which stand at less than 10%, and declining. 

Inhabit, Don’t Supplant, The Rules-Based Order

As if by rote posture, the BRICS summit rehearsed, sometimes verbatim, the long-ago lingo from Bandung. Despite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Johannesburg declaration expressed “concern about the use of unilateral coercive measures, which are incompatible with the principles of the Charter of the UN.” That is either a good sign intended to restrain anyone else tempted to mimic Putin’s aggression or it is a bad sign that the stated principles are only the empty window-dressing of a false consensus. None of the nations at the summit have condemned the invasion outright.

But most significantly, the BRICS countries signaled their intention not to supplant the multilateral institutions established after World War II by the mostly Western victors of that conflict, but inhabit them anew on their own terms. What comes to mind here is the old revolutionary playbook of capturing the periphery and surrounding the metropole in preparation for entering and occupying it.

The final communique declared its “commitment to enhancing and improving global governance by promoting a more agile, effective, efficient, representative, democratic and accountable international and multilateral system” with “greater representation of emerging markets and developing countries, in international organizations and multilateral fora in which they play an important role.” 

The declaration continued with some specificity: “We support a comprehensive reform of the UN, including its Security Council, with a view to making it more democratic, representative, effective and efficient, and to increase the representation of developing countries in the Council’s memberships so that it can adequately respond to prevailing global challenges and support the legitimate aspirations of emerging and developing countries from Africa, Asia and Latin America.” 

The group further called for “the open, transparent, fair, predictable, inclusive, equitable, non-discriminatory and rules-based multilateral trading system with the World Trade Organization (WTO) at its core” as well as for “increases in the quota shares of emerging markets and developing economies” in the IMF and a greater role, “including in leadership positions in the Bretton Woods institutions.” 

The mortar that binds the BRICS+ is not some internally cohesive ideology. Rather, the common denominator is resentment of, and resistance to, the continued dominance of the global West in setting the rules of world order despite the hefty presence of the rising rest. In short, this premier platform for the Global South is seen by those present at its creation as a righteous counterweight to the G7, which U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan calls “the steering committee of the free world.” 

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s decision not to personally attend the G20 summit in New Delhi suggests that these two competing blocs will become the main players, which will no longer seek some sort of reconciliation in one common global forum. 

Some of the nations involved, such as South Africa, Brazil or Argentina, are “multi-aligned,” with one foot in each camp across current divides, instead of “non-aligned,” as the Bandung group defined itself. At this transitory moment, they seek both to maintain any beneficial links to the West while tacitly accepting China as the leader of the Global South.

Surely, there will be nationalist tensions within the BRICS+, just as there are within the G7 over cleantech subsidies and other issues. But such tensions are unlikely to break either apart, because both are constituted in these fraught times as a reflection of the other. The Global South is no more an illusion, as some claim, than the global West. Together, they create this new reality.

The Johannesburg summit marks a historic shift in the balance of power on the world stage in which the formerly dispossessed are mustering their collective weight to take over the very institutions of a “rules-based order” its hidebound custodians have been so vociferous in defending, and bend it to their benefit. 

This challenge can no longer be ignored as it was in the Bandung era. The battleground for the next world order will be on the terrain of the present one.

The post From Bandung To BRICS+ appeared first on NOEMA.

Not only has Putin’s invasion of Ukraine reconsolidated the waning NATO alliance system in Europe; it has spawned the sibling of a neo-NATO for East Asia with the security pact agreed among the U.S., South Korea and Japan at Camp David last weekend. The three countries formally pledged for the first time that a threat to one is a threat to all that would be met by a coordinated defense.

The bitter antipathy harbored over the entire post-World War II period between Japan and South Korea was only overcome because the first land war in Europe in nearly eight decades made military conflict with a more assertive China palpably imaginable in their own region. Before that, Xi’s rattling of the sword over Taiwan was considered more of a nationalist rant than a probability.

This new development has upended China’s own strategy of keeping these two Asian powerhouses at odds precisely to prevent a surrounding alliance aimed at containing it. It is in this sense that Xi’s “no limits” embrace of Putin has brought China’s fear of being encircled ever closer. 

Back in 2014, the centennial of the outbreak of World War I, the former South Korean foreign minister, Yoon Young-kwan wrote presciently of what has now come to pass: “China’s efforts to enhance its influence as a rising power in an assertive way will actually backfire and result in an unintended encirclement of China by her neighbors. The irony is that this ‘security dilemma’ was exactly what happened in Europe when Kaiser Wilhelm II, confident of the rising power of Germany, began to practice a muscular diplomacy in 1890.” 

The misadventure of Xi’s friend in Ukraine has only deepened that nascent dilemma in East Asia,  strengthening the very trans-Pacific ties that were steadily weakening due to the gravitational pull of China’s economic clout.

The Entangling Of Timescales

In the emotional state of nations, nothing is ever forgotten. What is fascinating about the current moment is that the postures being taken on all sides today are shaped by historical triumphs and humiliations alike, entangling the fighting of past wars in the anticipation of what might come next. 

For the U.S. and those countries surrounding Japan, including China and South Korea, the top concern for the post-WWII decades was to prevent the “land of the rising sun” from ever re-militarizing, especially with respect to attaining the kind of nuclear weapons unleashed upon it. 

I remember Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew saying to me in one conversation that even allowing Japan to send its forces outside of the country for multilateral peacekeeping operations would be like “giving a chocolate liqueur to an alcoholic. Once the Japanese get off the water wagon, it will be hard to stop them.” We’d all be happier, he said, if Japan stays under American protection, leaving it “to concentrate on high-definition television.” 

Here, President Joe Biden’s strategy bears in mind the last war as well as the next one. One key element in the U.S. thinking behind the recent Camp David security pact, beyond the obvious objective of containing China, was to reaffirm its security umbrella so that Japan is not tempted to toss out the pacifist constitution America forced upon it after defeat in 1945. And it was meant to avoid South Korea going nuclear as a deterrent to its menacing brethren in the North, something more hawkish local voices are preaching. 

China and Russia are battling different demons of the past. Xi is seeking to rejuvenate Chinese civilization, hoisting it back to its rightful centrality in the world after being subordinated by Western imperialism. Putin, possessed by a millennial vision of restoring the “great Russia” of the 11^th century, is seeking to recover from the post-Cold War humiliation of becoming a rump state.

These visions linking the long past to a revived future are all converging in the mounting tensions of the present. In their stunning miscalculation, both Putin and Xi seem to have determined that Biden’s summary withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, combined with the cultural civil war and populist revolts wreaking havoc across the democratic world, signaled a historically irreversible weakness of which they could take advantage. 

One lesson they have now surely learned is that, even a global hegemon in relative decline still packs a lot of vigor in its tail. At this point in time, it appears that Putin and Xi will go down in history not for achieving their aims, but for setting them back through their monumental misreading of the global West.

A Symbiotic Antagonism Unleashed

The consequence of these entangled timescales is that a symbiotic antagonism, manifested in no-limit partnerships and fortified alliances, has taken hold, propelled forward by its own logic into hostile arrangements that cast the die. Once these structures are in place, just like the fraught alliances of the European empires at the turn of the 20^th century that compelled the march toward war, they fuel their own momentum.

The recent Camp David pact comes on top of the AUKUS agreement between the U.S., U.K. and Australia to deploy nuclear subs to roam the contested seas of South and East Asia. And that is in addition to the Quad group that brings India into the anti-China mix with Japan, Australia and the U.S., along with a new agreement with the Philippines to host more U.S. military bases in the north of the country near Taiwan.

In response to all this, Russia and China have been conducting more frequent joint military exercises in the region, most recently in the Sea of Japan and off the coast of Alaska.

One wracks the mind searching for ways to break this logic despite everyone knowing from history where it all leads. Perhaps all that can be hoped for is that the (so far) cold conflict in Asia can be managed through a protracted détente so its fervent enmity loses steam before it can boil over.

The post Putin-Xi ‘No Limits’ Tie Traps China appeared first on NOEMA.

Poetic time is the opposite of the turbocharged tempo of intelligent machines. It apprehends reality by dwelling mindfully on those moments computation relegates in passing to mere data points.

It is worth slowing down along our quickening trajectory to reflect on the sage perspectives of two of the greatest poets of the 20th century, Octavio Paz and Czesław Miłosz, both muses of the moment whom I had the humbling privilege of knowing. 

When Time Stops

For Miłosz, good poetry expresses a sense of piety for being in a world that has “succumbed to a peculiar nihilism” in which experience “loses its colors. Grayness covers not only things of this earth and space, but also the very flow of time, the minutes, days and years.”

In such a dulled-down landscape, “abstract considerations are of little help or remedy,” the Nobel laureate put it to me in one conversation. “Poetry matters greatly in the face of this deprivation because it looks at the singular, not the general. It cannot look at things of this earth other than honestly, with reverence, as colorful and variegated; it cannot reduce life with all its pain and ecstasy into a unified tonality. By necessity it is on the side of being.”

For Miłosz, “mindfulness occurs in the moment when time stops. And what is time? Time is our regrets, our shame. Time contains all things toward which we strive and from which we escape. In that moment of time stopped, reality is liberated from suffering. Then, in art, you can have a purified vision of things independently of our dirt. Everything that concerns us disappears, is dissolved, and it does not matter whether the eye that looks is that of a beggar or a king.”

The “eternal moment” in the gaze of the Polish poet is like “a gleam on the current of a black river,” retrieved from movement by mindful attention. 

One of Miłosz’s poems perfectly illustrates this pious regard for those palpable moments of being that elude any abstract sense at the end of the road of existence. It reads in part:

Floating On The Hour

Octavio Paz, also a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, put the nature of the moment in the larger frame of social evolution. He believed that “temporal succession no longer rules the imagination” after all of the abstract utopias of modern progress that didn’t pan out. As now recognized by quantum science, he saw that “we live instead in the conjunction of times and spaces, of synchronicity and confluence, which converge in the ‘pure time’ of the instant.” Coherence and equilibrium are “the momentary exception” in the random swirl of disequilibrium that is the rule.

As the poet explained further in a conversation in Mexico City back in the 1980s, “This time without measure is not optimistic. It doesn’t propose paradise now. It recognizes death, which the modern cult of the future denies, but also embraces the intensity of life. In the moment, the dark and the luminous side of human nature are reconciled. The paradox of the instant is that it is simultaneously all time and no time. It is here and it is gone. It is the point of equilibrium between being and becoming.”

He continued: “The instant is a window to the other side of time — eternity. The other world can be glimpsed in the flash of its existence. In this sense, poets have always had something to show modern man.”

While this recognition of time without measure may be new to the modern sensibility of the Western clock, Paz pointed out, it has long been intimated in the East through the traditional form of the haiku. This terse but evocative verse from the Edo-era Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō is a classic example:

In his last poem, “Response and Reconciliation,” Paz conveyed his vision of time arrested using a similar metaphor as Miłosz to describe the eternal moment of being in the flow of becoming:

If, as Paz said, poetic time had much to teach modernity, it has even more to teach the hastening era of hyper-modernity we are now entering.

The post Poetic Time In The Age Of Acceleration appeared first on NOEMA.

Globalization during recent decades did them both in, undermining the sovereignty of the nation-state while alienating its inhabitants by outsourcing management of their world to an elite class of distant strangers. Not surprisingly, the reaction to global flows of people, capital, technology and information running roughshod over the identity of belonging to a certain way of life sparked populist revolt, nativist rebellion and geopolitical assertion as a way to take back control.

What has emerged in globalization’s wake is both dis-integration and ingathering at a higher order of affinity — civilizational zones bound by the “kinship and cohesion” of those who share the distinct particularisms of moral taste, style of life, form of government and spirit of laws. In short, safe political and cultural spaces defined by those who are not part of it. 

It is in this context that China and Russia declare themselves as “civilizational states” with claims over surrounding spheres of influence. It is in this sense that the G7 sees itself as the “steering committee” of the Western world.

Marsili doubts that this present geo-civilizational constellation is any more the end of history than Francis Fukuyama’s famous post-Cold War benediction about the triumph of liberal democracy. Rather, the dialectical mind suspects that this supersession of the nation-state combined with a repudiation of the false universalism of Western cosmopolites is only a waystation to the next step of history: a lean planetary polity where key “concrete universals” of common humanity are shared across otherwise incommensurate political and cultural realms. 

Such a universality, Marsili points out, does not precede itself. It will emerge not from some heroic foundational event, but through a process of responding one tangible step at a time to pressing challenges that are converging for all of humanity. Only what arises organically can become integral. A planetary “community of fate,” to borrow a phrase from the political scientist Margaret Levi, will only be forged through the shared experience of volitional mobilization by diverse actors to meet a summons that demands a common response.

As Marsili sees it, the European Union is a laboratory for the kind of planetary transition he envisions. The concept of integrating sovereignty arose as a consequence of catastrophic wars on the continent in the 20th century. If “nationalism means war,” as former French President François Mitterrand put it baldly back in the founding moments of the EU, peace has meant a long, often tedious, arduous and evolutionary process to realize a form of unification that respects diversity.

For all its internecine squabbles over the years, from the Eurocrisis to regulatory overreach to restrictive debt limits, the EU did arrive at the equivalent of a “concrete universal” for its own member states in facing the Covid pandemic. As Marsili notes, “The citizens of Europe’s largest economy, Germany, which co-developed the Covid vaccine via the Mainz-based BioNTech, received the same per capita doses of the vaccine on the same day as citizens of Europe’s poorest country, Bulgaria. This is an under-appreciated achievement. Without any preexisting legal requirement for doing so, the fear unleashed on the continent by the virus was leveraged to set aside localist interest and produce the emergence of a concrete universal: the fair and equal access to health in the face of a pandemic.”

On the planetary level, one of Marsili’s proposals is for a fast-acting civil protection corps drawn from across the world to respond to climate emergencies. Such an idea would seem ripe for traction when each successive year breaks the thermometer even as relentless rains inundate some regions while others dwell in drought. Already, on an ad hoc basis, firefighters in California help out when forests go up in flames in Canada, and vice versa. The same takes place within Europe across the Mediterranean countries.

There is a Red Cross for “people affected by conflict and armed violence,” as its mission statement reads. Why not a Green Cross for climate-related calamities? (Mikhail Gorbachev had this idea in the early post-Cold War days, but climate awareness was then too far from the urgent meter for it to take off.)

During the Depression years in the U.S., Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps to employ those out of work while building America’s parks and conserving its forests. Why not a Planetary Conservation Corps in which various nationals might fulfill their mandated service, an idea already in gestation through the Youth Environmental Service, which has worldwide ambitions?

Marsili tangentially mentions AI. Wouldn’t a collaboration of leading Chinese and Western scientists to mitigate the most worrying aspects of AI while amplifying its potential in health and environmental management enjoin a process that would concretely benefit all of humanity?

Each of these cases, where pressing challenges can only be met through the imperative of a common response, would be a path to becoming universal in a way that overarches but does not undercut particularisms in a multipolar world. 

The capacity for diverse civilizational realms to join together for a planetary purpose rests on a sense of security in their own identity. That is not the antithesis of concrete universalism, but the pre-condition for it.

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