Are We Alone in the Universe? By Charles Krauthammer. National Review Online, December 30, 2011. Also here.
Things That Matter, excerpt from the Introduction. By Charles Krauthammer. New York: Random House, 2013. Also here.
Krauthammer [Are We Alone]:
Huge
excitement. Two Earth-size planets found orbiting a sun-like star less than
1,000 light-years away. This comes two weeks after the stunning announcement of
another planet orbiting another star at precisely the right distance — within
the so-called “habitable zone” that is not too hot and not too cold — to allow
for liquid water and therefore possible life.
Unfortunately,
the planets of the right size are too close to their sun, and thus too
scorching hot, to permit Earth-like life. And the Goldilocks planet in the
habitable zone is too large. At 2.4 times the size of Earth, it is likely
gaseous, like Jupiter. No earthlings there. But it’s only a matter of time —
perhaps a year or two, estimates one astronomer — before we find the right one
of the right size in the right place.
And at
just the right time. As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the
drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For
all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy — a
lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid
utter silence.
That
silence is maddening. Not just because it compounds our feeling of cosmic
isolation. But because it makes no sense. As we inevitably find more and more
exo-planets where intelligent life can exist, why have we found no evidence —
no signals, no radio waves — that intelligent life does exist?
It’s
called the Fermi Paradox, after the great physicist who once asked, “Where is everybody?” Or as was once
elaborated: “All our logic, all our anti-isocentrism, assures us that we are
not unique — that they must be there.
And yet we do not see them.”
How
many of them should there be? Modern satellite data suggest the number should
be very high. So why the silence? Carl Sagan (among others) thought that the
answer is to be found, tragically, in the high probability that advanced
civilizations destroy themselves.
In
other words, this silent universe is conveying not a flattering lesson about
our uniqueness but a tragic story about our destiny. It is telling us that
intelligence may be the most cursed faculty in the entire universe — an
endowment not just ultimately fatal but, on the scale of cosmic time, near
instantly so.
This is
not mere theory. Look around. On the very same day that astronomers rejoiced at
the discovery of the two Earth-size planets, the National Science Advisory
Board for Biosecurity urged two leading scientific journals not to publish
details of lab experiments that just created a lethal and highly transmittable
form of bird-flu virus, lest that fateful knowledge fall into the wrong hands.
Wrong
hands, human hands. This is not just the age of holy terror, but also the
threshold of an age of hyper-proliferation. Nuclear weapons in the hands of
half-mad tyrants (North Korea) and radical apocalypticists (Iran) are just the
beginning. Lethal biologic agents may soon find their way into the hands of
those for whom genocidal pandemics loosed upon infidels are the royal road to
redemption.
And
forget the psychopaths: Why, just 17 years after Homo sapiens discovered atomic power, those most stable and sober
states, the United States and the Soviet Union, came within inches of mutual
annihilation.
Rather
than despair, however, let’s put the most hopeful face on the cosmic silence
and on humanity’s own short, already baleful history with its new Promethean
powers: Intelligence is a capacity so godlike, so protean that it must be
contained and disciplined. This is the work of politics — understood as the
ordering of society and the regulation of power to permit human flourishing
while simultaneously restraining the most Hobbesian human instincts.
There
could be no greater irony: For all the sublimity of art, physics, music,
mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on
the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its
most exacting subspecialty — statecraft). Because if we don’t get politics
right, everything else risks extinction.
We grow
justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics — in all its
grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human
affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it.
Fairly
or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will
live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only —
who got it right.
Krauthammer [Things That Matter]:
Accordingly,
this book was originally going to be a collection of my writings about
everything but politics. Things beautiful, mysterious, profound or just odd.
Working title: There’s More to Life than
Politics.
But in
the end I couldn’t. For a simple reason, the same reason I left psychiatry for
journalism. While science, medicine, art, poetry, architecture, chess, space,
sports, number theory and all things hard and beautiful promise purity,
elegance and sometimes even transcendence, they are fundamentally subordinate.
In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics.
Politics,
the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the
end, everything – high and low and, most especially, high – lives or dies by
politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your
politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not
ancient history. This is Germany 1933.
“Beauty
is truth, truth beauty, – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to
know,” every schoolchild is fed. But even Keats – poet, romantic, early
19th-century man oblivious to the horrors of the century to come – kept quotational
distance from such blissful innocence. Turns out we need to know one more thing
on earth: politics – because of its capacity, when benign, to allow all around
it to flourish, and its capacity, when malign, to make all around it wither.
This is
no abstraction. We see it in North Korea, whose deranged Stalinist politics has
created a land of stunning desolation and ugliness, both spiritual and
material. We saw it in China’s Cultural Revolution, a sustained act of national
self-immolation, designed to dethrone, debase and destroy the highest
achievements of five millennia of Chinese culture. We saw it in Taliban Afghanistan,
which, just months before 9/11, marched its cadres into the Bamiyan Valley and with
tanks, artillery and dynamite destroyed its magnificent cliff-carved 1,700-year-old
Buddhas lest they – like kite flying and music and other things lovely –
disturb the scorched-earth purity of their nihilism.
Politics
is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at
bay, and everything burns. The entire 20th century with its mass political
enthusiasms is a lesson in the supreme power of politics to produce ever-expanding
circles of ruin. World War I not only killed more people than any previous war.
The psychological shock of Europe's senseless self-inflicted devastation
forever changed Western sensibilities, practically overthrowing the classical arts,
virtues and modes of thought. The Russian Revolution and its imitators
(Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, Cambodian) tried to atomize society so thoroughly –
to war against the mediating structures that stand between the individual and the
state – that the most basic bonds of family, faith, fellowship and conscience
came to near dissolution. Of course, the greatest demonstration of the finality
of politics is the Holocaust, which in less than a decade destroyed a millennium-old
civilization, sweeping away not only 6 million souls but the institutions, the
culture, the very tongue of the now-vanished world of European Jewry.
The
only power comparably destructive belongs to God. Or nature. Or, if like
Jefferson you cannot quite decide, Nature’s God. Santorini was a thriving
island civilization in the Mediterranean until, one morning 3,500 years ago, it
simply fell into the sea. An earthquake. A volcanic eruption. The end.
And yet
even God cannot match the cruelty of his creation. For every Santorini, there
are a hundred massacres of innocents. And that is the work of man – more
particularly, the work of politics, of groups of men organized to gain and exercise
power.
Which
in its day-to-day conduct tends not to be the most elevated of human
enterprises. Machiavelli gave it an air of grandeur and glory, but Disraeli’s
mordant exultation “I have climbed
to the top of the greasy pole,” best captured its quotidian essence – grubby,
graspmg, manipulative, demagogic, cynical.
The most
considered and balanced statement of politics’ place in the hierarchy of human disciplines
came, naturally, from an American. “I must study politics and war,” wrote John Adams, “that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy,
geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and
agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry,
music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”
Adams
saw clearly that politics is the indispensable foundation for things elegant
and beautiful. First and above all else, you must secure life, liberty and the
right to pursue your own happiness. That's politics done right, hard-earned, often
by war. And yet the glories yielded by such a successful politics lie outside
itself. Its deepest purpose is to create the conditions for the cultivation of
the finer things, beginning with philosophy and science, and ascending to the
ever more delicate and refined arts. Note Adams’ double reference to architecture:
The second generation must study naval architecture – a hybrid discipline of
war, commerce and science – before the third can freely and securely study architecture
for its own sake.
The
most optimistic implication of Adams’ dictum is that once the first generation
gets the political essentials right, they remain intact to nurture the future.
Yet he himself once said that “there never was a democracy yet that did not commit
suicide.” Jefferson was even less sanguine about the durability of liberty. He
wrote that a constitutional revolution might be needed every 20 years. Indeed,
the lesson of our history is that the task of merely maintaining strong and sturdy
the structures of a constitutional order is unending, the continuing and
ceaseless work of every generation.
To
which I have devoted much of my life. And which I do not disdain by any means.
Indeed, I intend to write a book on foreign policy and, if nature (or God or
Nature’s God) gives me leave, to write yet one more on domestic policy. But
this book is intended at least as much for other things. Things that for me, as
for Adams, shine most brightly.
Israel in the Lead. Caroline Glick interviewed by Kathryn Jean Lopez. National Review Online, March 20, 2014.
Russia Will Never Be Like Us. By Anne Applebaum. Slate, March 20, 2014. Also at the Washington Post.
Russia Without Illusions. By Ross Douthat. New York Times, March 22, 2014.
Applebaum:
There
have been high moments: Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin, locked in a bear hug;
George W. Bush looking into Vladimir Putin’s eyes and seeing “a sense of his
soul”; Hillary Clinton pressing the “reset button.” There have been some very
low moments, too. But for more than 20 years of Russian independence, a single
narrative about Russia in the West has nevertheless prevailed.
Openly
or subconsciously, Western leaders have since 1991 acted on the assumption that
Russia is a flawed Western country. Perhaps during the Soviet years it had
become different, even deformed. But sooner or later, the land of Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky, the home of classical ballet, would join what Mikhail Gorbachev,
the last Soviet leader, so movingly called “our common European home.”
In the
1990s, many people thought Russian progress toward that home simply required
new policies: With the right economic reforms, Russians will sooner or later become
like us. Others though that if Russia joined the Council of Europe, and if we
turned the G-7 into the G-8, then sooner or later Russia would absorb Western
values. Such privileges were never even extended to China, which is a far
greater economic and political power. This is because we’ve never believed that
China would be “Western.” But deep down we believed that Russia would someday
join our club.
Still
others thought that Russia’s forward progress required a certain kind of
Western language, a better dialogue. When the relationship deteriorated,
President Bush blamed President Clinton. President Obama blamed President Bush.
And all of us blamed ourselves. Back in 1999, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story titled “Who Lost Russia?”
Much-discussed at the time, it argued that we’d lost Russia “because we pursued
agendas that were hopelessly wrong for Russia” and gave bad economic advice.
Last week, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow Jack Matlock, echoed Putin and argued that the United States, by “treating Russia like a loser,” is
responsible for the current crisis.
These
arguments are self-serving: Russian politics has never been “all about us.” In
truth, we’ve had very little influence on Russian internal politics since 1991,
even when we’ve understood them. The most important changes—the massive
transfer of oil and gas from the state to the oligarchs, the return to power of
men formed by the KGB, the elimination of free press and political
opposition—took place against our advice. The most important military
decisions—the invasions of Chechnya and Georgia—met with our protests. Though
many appear to believe otherwise, the invasion of Crimea was not primarily
intended to provoke the West either. As one astute Russian commentator has
noted, the most important lines in Putin’s annexation speech this week were
largely overlooked: his reference to the “fifth columnists” and the
Western-funded Russian “traitors” who will now have to be silenced. Putin
invaded Crimea because Putin needs a war. In a time of slower growth, and with
a more restive middle class, he may need some more wars, too. This time, it’s
really not about us.
But
because Crimea is so close to Europe, and because Putin’s new
ethnic-nationalist language contains so many echoes of Europe’s bloody past,
the Crimean invasion might have a bigger effect on the West than even he
intended. In many European capitals, the Crimean events have been a real jolt.
For the first time, many are beginning to understand that the narrative is
wrong: Russia is not a flawed Western power. Russia is an anti-Western power
with a different, darker vision of global politics. The sanctions lists
published in Europe this week were laughably short, but the fact that they
appeared at all reflects this sea change. For 20 years, nobody has thought
about how to “contain” Russia. Now they will.
In any
case, even the new and longer U.S. sanctions list is only a signal. Far more
important, now, are the deeper strategic changes that should flow from our new
understanding of Russia. We need to reimagine NATO, to move its forces from
Germany to the alliance’s eastern borders. We need to re-examine the presence
of Russian money in international financial markets, given that so much
“private” Russian money is in fact controlled by the state. We need to look
again at our tax shelters and money-laundering laws, given that Russia uses
corruption as a tool of foreign policy. Above all we need to examine the West’s
energy strategy, given that Russia’s oil and gas assets are also used to
manipulate European politics and politicians, and find ways to reduce our
dependence.
All of
this will take time, and for some it may be too late. In Kiev, Ukraine, last
week, I met young Ukrainians who were heartbreakingly enthusiastic about the
idea that they might, someday, live in a different kind of country. I didn’t
have the heart to tell them that I didn’t know if they ever would.
