Martin Rees mentioned that "The pessimism that underlies my proposed 'Final century' book is of course likely now to become more widely shared. But what terrifies me most is that, in years to come, biological advances will offer new 'weapons' that could cause world-wide epidemics, etc; moreover such catastrophes could be caused by a single individual. Not even an organised "cell"or network of terrorists is required — just a single fanatic, or a wierdo with the mindset of those who design computer viruses (or even someone who is merely incompetent rather than malign) — and there seems no realistic chance of effectively combating these growing risks.

Paul Davies wrote "It occurred to me that an Edge discussion of technological solutions to the problem of aircraft hijackings may be timely. I am forwarding my own modest contribution to this topic in the form of some recent correspondence with a web news column devoted to cosmic impacts and other natural disasters.....Regarding technological solutions to aircraft hijackings, there is a simple solution. Aircraft are perfectly capable of being landed safely entirely by computer, a provision that is occasionally used in poor weather conditions. It would be an easy matter to pre-programme airliners with default instructions to fly to a designated airport in event of an on-board emergency. These instructions could be made irreversible from within the aircraft, and deactivated only by a coded instruction from Air Traffic Control. If these measures were taken, and widely known, it is almost certain that they would never be invoked. Any residual risk to passengers from the measures would be far less than the risk from further hijackings."

Richard Dawkins forwarded the piece he wrote for The Guardian last week — "Religion's Misguided Missiles." In it, he suggests that research conducted by the psychologist BF Skinner during the 2nd World War on pigeon guided missiles, might shed light on last week's terrorist acts and why the hijackers could be considered human guidance system, which, unlike the pigeon version, ... "knows that a successful mission culminates in its own destruction." [Click here for the Guardian article.]

The ever-counterintuitive Kevin Kelly, during a telephone conversation, explained to me his idea that this is not a hi-tech war at all but that the entire operation was low-tech (plastic knives, box cutters, etc.). No spy satellites for these guys, and no possibility than an $80 billion expenditure on a star wars defense would have had any deterrent effect whatsoever.

I wrote the following to the list: "I believe that the Edge community can mount a serious conversation about the catastrophic events of the past week that might do some good. Within the community is invaluable expertise in many pertinent areas, not to mention the intelligence that the "Edgies" can bring to the subjects. I am interested "hard-edge" comments, derived from empirical results or experience specific to the expertise of the participant. Edge is not the proper venue for people to vent their justified rage at the acts of terrorism, displeasure with the administration, U.S. Mid-East policies, etc. But it is the right venue for an informed, intelligent commentary."

"So how about a new Edge question: WHAT NOW?"

nature

[Editorial: 20 September 2001 Volume 413 Issue no 6853, p 235.]

Fighting against terrorism, engaging with Islamic science

Last week's attacks in New York and Washington were an offence against fundamental values that merits a well-targeted response, helped by science. But enhanced contacts with Islamic colleagues should also be pursued.

As Nature goes to press, the world is wondering how President George W. Bush, given extra powers by Congress and significant support by other nations, will respond to the barbaric killings of thousands in the United States. The impact on the scientific community has already begun to make itself felt (see page 237). Leaders of the scientific community around the world have expressed their horror and sympathy: see http://www.nationalacademies.org.

Science itself will play a critical role in the identification of the victims and in the unprecedented intelligence and military steps that the United States and others will now take to prevent such attacks in the future (see page 238). Many of the finest scientists and engineers will be called upon to channel their expertise into the defence of their countries against repetitions of last week's atrocity, and against its perpetrators and their defenders in every corner of the globe.

Appropriately, given last week's offence against fundamental values, most are likely to respond in full measure. A previous generation of scientists quietly helped to assure victory for the Allies in the Second World War, through the development of radar, code-breaking algorithms, and the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb (the last of which, as things turned out, had the least strategic significance of the three in that conflict). This time, the challenges lie in security innovations and counter-terrorism, intelligence gathering, and enhancing an already large military advantage.

Science's role
But scientists, and others engaged with science, can do more. Last week's terrible events are utterly removed from normal relations between countries and peoples. But they are not divorced from underlying political and social forces that also affect those relations. Perhaps the least to be expected of those in a position to make a difference is some reflection on the roles of science in the cultures and societies caught up in this conflict. How might contacts between scientists and between scientific organizations, of a sort that proved valuable during the cold war, play a constructive role in long term relations?

With thousands of dead still to be identified and put to rest, engagement of any sort will be the last thing on many people's minds. But others, deeply affected by the conflict, may feel that not to explore it could be seen as a minor victory for terrorism.

Last week's terrorist violence, after all, was not the expression of a clash of civilizations: many Islamic scholars and leaders have emphasized that the murder of the innocent is as offensive to their beliefs as to anyone else's. Their societies should not stand condemned because of extremists who disagree.

Although there could be said to be a tide of Islamic activism in the Arabic world and in Asia, there is no uniformity about it. There is a common aspect, according to knowledgeable commentators, in which resurgent Islam appears to be giving a sense of values and cultural identity to populations that may see themselves as disadvantaged or repressed within their countries. But the political contexts and the consequences that follow are diverse - for example, only some activist groups are revolutionary in intent. Understanding that heterogeneity will be important.

Views of the Enlightenment
Differences in world view between most Western scientists and influential Islamic intellectuals (including scientists) can be profound. Societies in which Islamic beliefs are important include those actively importing Western science and technology, yet which have a distrust of the modernity and secularism of the West. Iranian political commentators, for example, saw the collapse of the Soviet system not as a triumph of the West but as a prelude to the total collapse of a system based on humanist beliefs fostered in the Western Enlightenment, which, in their eyes, committed the fatal error of divorcing a scientific understanding of nature from an appreciation of its divine aspects (see, for example, http://web.syr.edu/~mborouje/jpr.html). Most Western scientists, and this journal too, would consider a denial of Enlightenment values as a betrayal of everything science stands for.

In Iran and in other Islamic countries, there is no shortage of intellectual interest in the Western scientific and philosophical traditions. But questioning about the philosophical and spiritual underpinning of science can be intense. Whether only parts of Western science and culture can be imported, and whether secularization is an essential corollary of the Western Enlightenment, are important questions for Islamic scholars.

The scientist-turned-Islamic-scholar Seyyid Hossein Nasr has commented on divergent views about modern science within the Islamic world. One view, which he characterizes as 'modernist', has for over a century set about importing science without much attention to the consequences for the societies that seek to absorb it. Another view sees Western science as giving rise to ethical problems for Islam, but welcomes it nevertheless on the basis that Islam can resolve those challenges on its own ethical terms. And then there is Nasr's own view, which has been influential, and which sees science as inextricably bound up in the system of values in which it operates. It makes sense, in his terms, to identify Islamic science as related to Western science but "totally transformed into the part and parcel of the Islamic intellectual citadel" (see
http://web.mit.edu/mitmsa/www/NewSite/libstuff/nasr/nasrspeech1.html).

Evidently, in comparison with the character of cold-war contacts, there may well be fewer common assumptions between scientific communities in the West and those in Islamic countries. There is much less knowledge of each others' scientific histories, and a consequent lack of mutual appreciation. But both inside and outside the Islamic world, there is also room for consideration of shared beliefs about the values of science, its history and its significance. Funding agencies should foster collaborations between Islamic and Western scientists and between those in the humanities studying science. Now may be a particularly good time to do so.

Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2001 Registered No. 785998 England

What Next? End Economic Sanctions

America has long been spared the most painful experience of modern warfare: massive civilian casualties. The terrorist attack on September 11 has taught us what most other nations learned earlier in the century, that no one is safe. Pearl Harbor was a military target and American civilians were safe in their homes and communities through two world wars. We have also been spared that other less dramatic experience of modern warfare, the destruction of infrastructure, with all the dislocation, privation and economic disruption that follow. In earlier wars, the U.S. infrastructure was ramped up, not destroyed, but today significant parts of it are at risk. The terrorist attack has newly taught us how dependent we are on a complex and interconnected infrastructure and the economy is reeling, but we have yet to understand the implications of these new experiences.

The first lesson to learn and act on is not that terrorists are uniquely evil but that all targeting of civilians is immoral. This includes the destruction of infrastructure, which is equivalent to the Biblically prohibited poisoning of wells, the material basis, of survival and the disruption caused by economic sanctions. Economic disruption creates unemployment and lost savings in industrialized nations; in the third world it can create famine and uncontrolled epidemics. The casualties are real. One of the problems with calling our new effort against terrorism a "war" is that it legitimates punishing ordinary people for the crimes of leaders they did not choose. We must not express our anger by retaliating against populations or writing off the "collateral casualties" caused either by bombing or blockade. America learned from the smoldering enmities that followed the civil war and World War I that peace is not founded on vengeance, a lesson expressed in the Marshall Plan. America needs to combine that earlier insight with this new and painful sense of vulnerability.

The appropriate expression of this understanding would begin with the lifting of US economic sanctions in all those places where they have deliberately and apparently bloodlessly eroded the material basis of survival without changing government policies, such as Cuba and Iraq. Above all, Afghanistan, with whose civilians we say we are not at war. Only weapons and weapon building materials should continue to be blocked (and these should be reduced world wide). The "wells" that need to be protected from poison today include infrastructure of all kinds: transport, water purification plants, public health, electricity and basic industry and food production; protecting these includes maintaining communications and education. An appropriate next step would be to join with our allies in the coalition against terrorism in the creation or restoration of essential infrastructures worldwide, especially in the poorest countries which U.S. economists have taken to writing off.

The second lesson is the urgent need to take seriously the full meaning of globalization. Globalization offers huge benefits and huge dangers, and is in any case probably irreversible short of calamity. Today we must add skillful, disciplined terrorism to a list of dangers that includes new infectious diseases transported rapidly around the planet, as well as the dangers of human and environmental exploitation that have been emphasized by the anti-globalization movement. Yet globalization at its best goes far beyond economic interest and must combine respect for the distinctiveness of cultural traditions, religions, and bioregions with the awareness of a radical degree of interdependence and mutual responsibility.

Hard as it seems to realize, America's self interest can no longer be distinguished from that of other nations — not just our traditional allies but our rivals and even our enemies. Recognizing this, the United States must reengage with international efforts like those for arms control and against global warming, as a nation among nations rather than perpetually demanding to be treated as an exception. We need to recognize that we are vulnerable in our homes — and that our home depends on the health and goodwill of the entire planet.

The US must not let the war on terrorism drive out other priorities. For example, we should still pay attention to human rights, non-proliferation, free trade, and democracy. We should not make the mistake of the Cold War where we let our anti-Soviet priority lead to collaboration with brutal right-wing dictators.

Even more important, we must not let the war on terrorism distract us from dealing with other problems. Examples of other problems that need attention are the plight of millions of refugees from and in Afghanistan, the stagnation of our relationship with North Korea, the adjustment of China to the WTO, and the possibility of progress between the PLO and Israel. And if another problem arises that calls for attention, we must not be too distracted to deal with it as well. An example would be a currency crisis in a country like Argentina, that if not attended to, could spread through the continent and then throughout the Third World.

One of the most important issues facing the United States and its like is to prevent 2004 from becoming 1984 (Orwell's story of a dismal future). In defense of liberty and in order to defeat those who attempt to subvert it by terror, we must avoid so changing our society that they will have won.

It is very easy to demand changes in our laws and those of our friends that will "make it easier to protect ourselves". These laws now protect our citizens from excessive intrusion of government at all levels into their private life and their private thoughts. It is tempting to argue that the government needs to be able to listen to your phone calls, to monitor you email, to make sure it can by forbidding encryption etc. It will also be argued that having cameras trained on citizens in public places and keeping those records for latter analysis will help keep us safe. Picture a future politician who retroactively applies those records to a morality in the future and shows how you met a non-person years ago and thus you must be non-loyal. Ben Franklin said more than 200 years ago — "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

We must defend our liberty not just now but we must realize that what we do now will define what nation we will pass on to our children and their children. Liberty, once given up, is almost impossible to recover. We must choose wisely and deliberately what we do to defend our democracy and our future — and our children's future.

Why does the rest of the world hate Americans so much? I agree with Roger Shank that we must face this question.

One reason surely concerns the unthinking zeal with which we export our brand of American consumerist capitalism ‹ a zeal comparable in irrationality and intensity to fundamentalist religion. Luyen Chou has observed that “We seem to conflate our technological supremacy, our consumerism and exultation of the free market, with moral supremacy and military imperviousness." Likewise, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote "We are perceived increasingly as a country willing to trample underfoot anyone who interferes with our God-given right to the latest appliances and diversions. I don't see us solving the problem of anti-American hatred unless we find a way of including the hopes of the rest of the world in our plans." They have touched the heart of our problem.

As an evolutionary psychologist researching a book about the roots of consumerism, I feel increasing confidence that contemporary American consumerist capitalism (CACC) is not the only possible form of reciprocity open to intelligent social primates such as us, nor the only possible form of a free market economy.

Rather, CACC is a particular cultural development that includes many historically contingent features, such as:

(1) Until very recently, the ability of pension funds and mutual funds to invest ethically, by taking corporate social responsibility into account, was severely limited by laws regarding fiduciary duties, and by accounting standards. Thus, the largest blocks of capital available to CACC were explicitly forbidden to use ethical criteria in deciding which companies to invest in, and how to vote as shareholders. The result has been a peculiar amoral sort of capitalism, in which individual Americans had no idea what evils their pension capital might be funding, while they simultaneously gave generously to ineffectual pro-social charities.

(2) The military-industrial complex has acted as a Keynesian employment booster since WWII, largely through resource-wasting vanity projects such as manned space flights and Star Wars programs, and through massive arms exports that destabilize other countries. People in the destabilized countries tend to resent this. Other, less harmful Keynesian employment-boosters could have been favored instead, such as France's innocuous waste of manpower in trying to out-compete the Australians in wine-production.

(3) The doctrine of corporate personhood, under which limited-liability corporations have all the same rights granted to human individuals under the Constitution. This doctrine was introduced by U. S. Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite, without argument or explanation, in a bizarre 1886 ruling in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. The doctrine of corporate personhood in turn allowed corporations to corrupt the political system (through their "right" to give campaign contributions), the media (through their "right" to free speech, i.e. advertising, and their resulting tacit control as advertisers over the editorial content of national media), and the public interest (through their "right"to life ‹ i.e. unlimited persistence even if convicted of corporate malfeasance).

(4) Lack of any high-quality, state-supported television or radio system (analogous to Britain's BBC) that could offer critically incisive, internationally oriented news and analysis. Instead, we have local TV news, local newspapers, and local radio that pander sensationalism, reinforce provincialism, and never question the culture's domination by their advertisers.

(5) The ideological legacy of a Cold War against Communism, which corrupted the ability of American intellectuals to engage in nuanced, constructive argument about alternative ways to run our economy and our society. We know something is amiss when both Ralph Nader's calls to end government subsidies to corporations, and his calls to improve government subsidies to PBS, were dismissed as "socialist" by conservative pundits.

These five features of CACC, and many others, were not original with the American Revolution and could not have been anticipated by the Founding Fathers. Rather, they arose from about 1880 through about 1940 with the development of specifically American forms of mass retailing and mass advertising. In attacking the World Trade Center, I believe the terrorists were attacking not so much the free market or secularism per se, but America's arrogance that CACC is the only way any country could be run in the 21st century.

Although I think Darwinian principles illuminate a great deal of human behavior, our American problem is more cultural than biological. We need a serious, cultural self-examination of CACC ‹ not a vague, superficial debate about the importance of spiritual values in a materialist world, but rather, a historically informed examination of specific ways in which power, money, and culture have intersected to corrupt our democracy. If the rest of the world sees us undertaking this self-examination, we will have much less to fear. But if they see us persisting in our blind arrogance that CACC is best for everybody, the blood will be on our hands next time.

The events of September 11 brought to mind another vivid and uncomfortable memory. I am sixteen years old, lying in bed at my home in London on a noisy night in September 1940. I am violently hostile to the British Empire and everything it stands for. I hate London, the citadel of oppression, with its grandiose buildings sucking the wealth from every corner of the world. I lie in bed listening to the bombs exploding and the buildings crumbling. What joy to hear, after each explosion, the delicious sound of buildings falling down, the great British Empire audibly crumbling. The joy far outweighs any fear that my own home might be hit, or any pity for the people in the falling buildings. How many sixteen-year-olds all over the world are now seeing on television the pictures of the World Trade Center buildings collapsing, and feeling the same joy that I felt in 1940. I find it easy to imagine the state of mind of the young men who so resolutely smashed those planes into the buildings. Almost, I could have been one of them myself.

The only wisdom that I can extract from these memories is that the problem of terrorism is not a military problem. It is a problem of people's hearts and minds. Attempts to solve it by military means will only make it worse. I don't pretend to know how to solve it. A good way to start would be for our country to stop telling the rest of the world how to behave. We must learn to live with the world as it is, not as we want it to be. We must treat our enemies with respect, so that we do not appear to be trampling on their cultures and traditions. The ultimate goal must always be, not to destroy our enemies but to convert them into friends. And meanwhile, do whatever we can to defend ourselves without killing more thousands of innocent victims.

From: Robert Provine
Date: 9.25.01

Decision Theory And National Security

Decision theory offers guidance for national security policy and associated civil liberty issues introduced by the tragic events of September 11. Signal Detection Theory, the state-of-the art procedure for decision making considered here, provides a powerful model for detecting the presence of a "signal," whether a sensory stimulus in the laboratory, a bomb, or a terrorist. Although the underlying mathematical model is complex, predictions from the model are straightforward and will be explored in a few of the many possible security-related applications.

In detection tasks involving yes/no decisions, there are two ways to be right and two ways to be wrong. In searching for a bomb among airline luggage, for example, a security person responding "yes, I've detected a bomb," can result either in a "hit" (the correct detection of a bomb), or a "false alarm" (saying "yes" when no bomb is present). As with "yes," the decision of "no" also carries dual consequences, one right and one wrong. An inspector deciding "no" can either correctly deny the presence of a bomb (a "correct rejection"), or produce the dreaded "miss," the failure to detect a bomb when one is present.

Enough about theory. What about security policy? The decisions are not as straight-forward as policy makers may like. We must confront a pesky problem — there is no single best decision, because each alternative has linked costs and benefits that cannot be finessed. For example, the only way to detect more bombs (increase "hits" and reduce "misses") is to lower our criterion and say "yes" more often, a result that also increases false alarms. The only means of detecting all bombs is to always say "yes, a bomb is present," and act accordingly. Obviously, we must balance this impractical standard against the expense and inconvenience to travelers and airlines, and the reduced attentiveness and credibility of security personnel who would almost always be crying wolf. But instructing inspectors to respond to suspected bombs only when they are certain of their judgement is no solution — fewer "yes" responses serves only to lower the proportion of hits and increase the proportion of misses.

One means of increasing bomb detection rates by inspectors would be to increase the number of bombs to detect. Another would be to provide a reward (cash, promotion, etc.) for successful bomb detection. Both approaches produce a bias for saying "yes" and a higher rate of bomb detection. The virtue of the reward procedure is obvious, but what of the dubious procedure of increasing bombs? The best procedure would be for roving security inspection teams to plant fake bombs in luggage. Security personnel will be more attentive if they are aware that test bombs will be present to detect, rather than the present situation in which their career will probably pass without a single "hit." Currently, variants of the fake bomb technique are used only for unsystematic exposes of flaws in the security system, not to improve inspector performance.

Security decisions become more controversial when we shift our attention from bombs to the people who may plant them. Fortunately, decision theory cuts through political hyperbole and clarifies the conflicting demands of security and civil liberty. As in the task of bomb detection, the only way of increasing "hits" (e.g., terrorist detection) is to lower the criterion for saying "yes," an act that necessarily yields more false accusations. No method of improving detection rates magically escapes the costs of more false alarms.

"Discrimination learning" is another area of behavioral research that brings insight to detection tasks but forces tough decisions. Through trial-and error, humans and other animals learn cues relevant to discovering stimuli, whether a bird developing a "search image" for a caterpillar hidden on a leaf, or the police generating a "profile" of a likely suspect. Focusing on relevant cues increases the efficiency of the search, but is the basis of "profiling," a potential threat to the civil liberty of targeted groups. However, there is no way of implementing an efficient search strategy that considers all suspects in proportion to their number in the general population, a tactic suggested by opponents of profiling. In the recent crisis, evidence suggests that airline security is more at risk from Muslims from the Middle East than from Episcopalians from the Midwest and suspect profiles should be weighted accordingly.

Approaches to stimulus detection and decision making are well understood and grounded in value-free theoretical and empirical research. The challenge is to balance the social costs and benefits of various options when decision protocols become policy.

From: Jaron Lanier
Date: 9.24.01

I want nothing more right now than to have distance from the awful events of Sept. 11th, but distance is not available to me. I live five blocks from the poor World Trade Center and saw the attack from an outdoor café at the corner. I saw many things that I am not ready to describe. I was evacuated and returned almost a week later to find my home damaged. It isn't yet clear if I'll have to move or not. And yet, of course I feel lucky, even a little guilty, at my relatively extreme good fortune.

Seeing the dreadful rescue site is an unbearably sad daily ritual. It is beyond my mental capacity to register that I have seen with my own eyes over 6000 civilians suddenly killed in front of me.

I struggle for something useful to say. I think I'll be wiser about this at some point in the future, because some distance must surely form with time.

Here is a scattering of ideas that might be of some small use:

I must first address some remarks to "Leftist" readers in Europe. Many of you have suggested to varying degrees that we Americans brought this attack on ourselves through our horrid foreign policy. The claims vary from the mild- that we can't expect to extend our will around the world without somebody striking back- to the insane, as exemplified by the words of Karlheinz Stockhausen , who said the attack was "the greatest work of art ever." I'm a composer, and I fear these words will tarnish the tradition of Western music forever. That someone could even think to say this is an indictment of our esthetics. Could one of our most prominent artists really have lost touch with all concerns other than the quest for extremity and public notice?

To address the more mild slights: I don't think our recent foreign policy has been as consistently bad as it's often portrayed. Somalia really was a humanitarian effort; our Balkans policy was late and confused, but not imperialistic, and was at least better than Europe's; the Clinton mid-East peace proposal was enlightened, respectful to all sides, and at least plausible; our man Mitchell is roving around the world talking sense to all parties

There are a lot of kinds of power. There's an odd strategic parity between post-industrial democracies and the new worldwide society of suicide-cult terrorists. You really don't need to envy us now, ok?

Here is a historical framework that I have found useful in thinking about the attack: The advantages of confederation have not been constant. Rather, they've been on a constant track of modification due to changing technologies. Technology has changed the degree to which cooperation between people improves their fortunes.

If we go back far enough, say before the bronze age, there were limits to the advantages individuals could gain from forming large alliances, and indeed there were benefits to staying in small hunting or scavenging parties instead of large ones.

But once a technology like the shield appeared, it created a rationale for large scale cooperation. A line of men cold walk with their shields overlapped to form a moving wall of metal which was quite impenetrable. Similar observations could be made about agricultural and many other technologies. This enabling of scaling produced in its extremes the Roman Empire, and eventually the modern states.

By the time we come to the twentieth century, there was a new problem: States had become TOO powerful, once again because of changing technologies. Survival in a nuclear age depended on détente and treaties, structures that superceded states.

Perhaps we are now entering a period when tiny groups of people, or even individuals, routinely become powerful enough to be threats to large numbers of people. If this is so, then the original advantages of the state no longer apply. The technologies that are enabling this transition are, disturbingly, ones that I have devoted much of my life to improving; distributed communications networks, simulators, and open education institutions and teaching tools.

As I think about the forms of defense that could protect us from repeated intense threats from insane but powerful small groups of people, I see few strategies that are appealing. We could try to live in something like an immune system instead of a state with it's attendant army. It's plain, after all, that a traditional army is ill-matched to the present threat. The immune system metaphor is revolting to us, however, because we've all struggled so hard to cease to be racist or to otherwise divide the human family into the similar and the foreign.

It's hard to be completely honest about whether an immune system approach is what's really needed, or whether it's just the easiest response for us to envision. Xenophobia seems to me to be a universal human tendency, and that observation stands whatever mix of nature and nurture might be responsible.

On the other hand, maybe ever more severe social structures that resemble immune systems are inevitable, and as we learn to survive in the new situation we will expose a new grim corner of the confines of the human condition.

In the past, I was pro-privacy and most definitely against the notion of a government spying on me. Now I think I was crazy to have that position. Yes, the government poses a threat, but I wasn't willing to believe before that there were other threats that are even worse.

I can see a few rays of hope that dimly illuminate how a society might be pleasant and still protect itself from violent/suicidal cults. Instead of surveillance, a high degree of transparency might protect us from evil. An American supreme court justice famously proclaimed that "Sunlight is the best disinfectant". While this trope originally concerned censorship, it could just as easily be applied to the balance between privacy and security. The Dutch came upon a version of this. Theirs is a dense society of intense interdependence, and in it one does not close one's curtains. Perhaps we should make all our emails and phone calls freely available to anyone who is interested. Almost no one will be. Once revealed, our fascination with the private lives of other people will be so minimal that our boredom could form the basis of a stable social order.

Another possibility is that we might retain privacy but imagine more elaborate governmental structures than we have yet seen to reduce the chances that intelligence agencies will abuse their powers or become lost to their own ideological phantoms.

There is also a McLuhanesque thought that has occurred to me. In the last few years, the Arab world has encountered its own mass media for the first time, in the form of satellite television stations. I've seen a little of the material, and it is inflammatory. It might be the case that societies require some years to get sufficiently used to mass media so as not to be driven insane by it. World War II might have had something to do with the West's early experience of the power of mass media and modern propaganda. Over time one grows somewhat immune to it. In this light, cynicism is seen to be not only a good thing, but a mental habit that is necessary if any society is to survive in an age of potent media.

Finally, I must address a question to my colleagues on edge.org. In the final decades of the twentieth century we've seen an unprecedented rejection of the enlightenment. The assault on rationality has come in many forms, from pricey astrologers for coddled pet dogs, to the prominence after centuries of obscurity of the most militant and strident variants of just about every world religion. We have recently seen neo-Christian suicide cults (the Branch Dividian), Jewish extremists not heard from since Roman times (the "Settlers"), Hindu ultra-nationalists, and many others.

Is our way of marketing science and technology part of the problem? I must emphasize that it's the marketing that I worry about, not the technological capabilities or scientific theories. I'm thinking of the way we market computers as living things and Darwinian interpretation as an oracle. Some of this must play very strangely to people who are poor and wonder what will happen to them as the elites in the West soar into uncharted heavens on the wings of Moore's Law and the genome, hoping to leave even the most basic rules of life as it was known behind.

Is violent fundamentalism in part encouraged by a sense that science and technology are ruining faith in the soul?

I'm not talking about any notion of an immortal soul. I just mean the sense that a person is somehow really there, conscious, that when one communicates with other people they are similarly really there. I know many of the respondents on edge.org believe it's only a mental confusion to feel alive, but I beg you in this instance to reconsider your position. You can do so without harming science in any way, and you'd be more honest for having done it.

From: Timothy Taylor
Date: 9.24.01

'What now?' depends on our analysis of what happened and 'What happened?' depends on perspective. For most westerners, the twin towers were two office blocks for global traders. For the charismatic, inward-looking seventeenth child of a family of 50 Saudi Arabian siblings, Osama bin Laden, they did not simply symbolize the horns of Satan stretching from earth towards heaven, they were their physical reality. The actions of Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, the respective pilot-murderers who destroyed the World Trade Centre on 11th of September 2001 have been attributed to their religion both by us and by those who supported them. They cannot now tell us their own justification but, even if they were also able to say it was religion, I would remain unconvinced. Religious and political ends may have provoked this tragedy, but they needed a substrate to act on, one that is not created by religion itself. Many fundamentalist Muslims would not and could not have done what they did. It takes a particular type of personality, under particular circumstances.

It was only on the 10th of May 2001 that Judy Kirby drove her nephew Jeremy Young to an Indianapolis branch of Toys R Us to get his tenth birthday present, picked up her own three children and then deliberately drove them all at speeds approaching 100 miles an hour down the wrong side of Ind. 67. A witness saw a small boy on the front seat on his knees, gripping terrified onto the dash before the spectacular explosion that killed all the children in the car, plus two in an oncoming van and their father. Bizarrely, Kirby survived and is now serving 215 years. She was not a fundamentalist Muslim funded by bin Laden. She was a disturbed, depressed and aggressive human being with a grim romantic streak who wanted to commit suicide infamously. One look at Mohamed Atta's face in the published photo tells me that here was a protagonist who (while at one level a well-educated and financially well-off man) was profoundly depressed too. In Islam, as in many cultures both now and in the past, suicide is deeply shameful. This can give the road to martyrdom powerful appeal.

Human beings are individually capable of holding mutually contradictory beliefs and also of being guided as much by uncognized emotion as any species of logic, whether religious or materialist. Atta, as he flew into the side of the World Trade Centre may in one way have believed in a martyr's reward in paradise. At another level he may have hoped for oblivion, an end to inner pain, by committing a personal suicide that was masked in a cloak of fanatical religion. But he was one of 19 others, spread among the four hijacked planes. None of them quite needed Judy Kirby's level of lone resolve to do what they did. They had invidious backup and they had each other. So it was much easier.

Depressed-aggressive suicide-murderers are likely to be people who feel unloved and unvalued, the very opposite of the New York firemen and self-sacrificing passengers aboard the fourth plane, scuppered in the Pennsylvania woods. Actions that create more desperate and bitter people will contribute to the world becoming more dangerous for us all. What now? — it depends on the quality of our humanity.

There's been a lot written about our military limits, as if it were impossible to combat a network.

Actually, we've learned a great deal in the last ten years about how to degrade, detach and destroy human trust networks (as distinct from electronic networks). Ironically, it's the flip side of what we've been furiously learning about how to make ours work better.

I wrote an article in The Washington Post on September 17th about destroying networks after I got a chance to talk to a lot of smart people, from Manuel Castells to John Arquilla to Karen Stephenson. The whole piece is at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41015-2001Sep16.html. Some key excerpts follow:

"Disconnect the Dots
Maybe We Can't Cut Off Terror's Head, but We Can Take Out Its Nodes"
By Joel Garreau
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 17, 2001; Page C01

But how to establish a target list in a network?

The good news is that in the last decade we have developed a whole new set of weapons to figure that out.

An industry has arisen to help corporations build new networks and junk old hierarchical bureaucracies in the age of merging and emerging companies, says Kathleen Carley, director of the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon University. New tools have been developed that analyze how an organization interacts, yielding a kind of X-ray that shows where the key links are.

There is a general set of principles to any network, says Stephenson, whose company, NetForm, has developed software that mathematically analyzes networks.

She points out that typically a network is made up of different kinds of nodes — pivotal people.

The critical ones are "hubs," "gatekeepers" and "pulsetakers," she believes. Hubs are the people who are directly connected to the most people; they know where the best resources are and they act as clearinghouses of information and ideas, although they often are not aware of their own importance. Gatekeepers are those connected to the "right" people. They are the powers around the throne, and often they know their own importance. Pulsetakers are indirectly connected to a lot of people who know the right people. They are "friends of a friend" to vast numbers of people across widely divergent groups and interests.

The classic example of how to use this analysis is "finding the critical employee in the company — the lone expert who knows how to fix the machine," Carley says. Ironically, without network analysis, managers frequently don't recognize who that is and the nature of his importance.

"But there's no reason it can't be turned around in the opposite way," she says. There's no reason organizational glitches, screw-ups, jealousies and distrust that slow and degrade performance can't be intentionally introduced." A network's ability to adapt to new challenges can be degraded.

Carley says: "One of the things that leads to the ability to adapt is who knows who and who knows what. The higher that is, the better the group's flexibility. But you can reduce the number of times the group can communicate or congregate. Or you can rotate personnel rapidly." And in war, this may have to be done by capturing or killing them. "You can also segregate the things people are doing, so they learn only on a need-to-know basis. The more isolated the tasks are, the more you inhibit their ability to function as a team.

"Imagine in your office if you knew who went to whom for advice," Carley says. "If you found a set of people who gave out more advice than anyone else and then removed them from the network, so they can't communicate with others, you would infringe on the ability of the network to operate."

In the case of terror networks, people are linked by family ties, marriage ties and shared principles, interests and goals. They thus can be all of one mind, even though they are dispersed and devoted to different tasks. They "know what they have to do" without needing a single-central leadership, command or headquarters.

On the other hand, depending on the structure of the network, removing a few key nodes can sometimes do a lot of good, says Frank Fukuyama, author of the seminal work "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity" and now a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

"Some are so tightly bound to each other that they are not embedded in other networks. Kill a few nodes, and the whole thing collapses. Take the case of the Sendero Luminoso [Shining Path] in Peru. It couldn't have been that hierarchical. It was designed for the mountains of Peru. It couldn't have been terribly centralized. It had a scattered cell structure. It was hard to infiltrate. It was dispersed. And yet when you got [Shining Path founder and leader Abimael] Guzman and a few top aides, the entire thing fell apart.

"The idea that there is no end of terrorists, no way to stamp them all out, that if you kill a hundred, another hundred will spring up — I would be very careful of that assumption. The network of people who are willing to blow themselves up has to be limited. Sure, there are sympathizers and bagmen and drivers. But the actual core network of suicide bombers is probably a much smaller population. It is also tightknit and hard to infiltrate. But it is limited. It is not obvious to me that there is an endless supply."
Another tactic: advancing the cause of the weakest link.

"Suppose I've got a really powerful pulsetaker," says Stephenson, "vying for a position of dominance. But I also know that a member of the blood kin group is moving forward who is weaker. If you arrange an accident to eliminate the pulsetaker, and let the weaker family member come in, you've helped corrupt the network."

The beauty of seeding weakness into an organization is that you can degrade its effectiveness while still monitoring it, and not causing a new and potentially more efficient organization to replace it. "You don't want to blow away the organization. You want to keep some fraudulent activity going on so you can monitor it. If you blow them away, you lose your leads," says Stephenson. "Better the devil you know. Like [Moammar] Gaddafi. Keep him alive, because you know him. Who knows what sort of clever mastermind might replace him."

Intelligence is crucial to analyze the network's weak links so you can destroy it.

"You're talking about what amounts to a clan or a tribe or brotherhood of blood and spilled blood. That is really tough to crack. Trying to infiltrate it — we're talking years," says David Ronfeldt, a senior social scientist at Rand. However, from outside the network you can also look for patterns that stand out from the norm, like who talks to whom, e-mail exchanges, telephone records, bank records and who uses whose credit card, says Ronfeldt.

"I would attack on the basis of their trust in the command and control structures by which they operate," says Arquilla. "If they believe they are being listened to, they will be inhibited. If we were to reduce their trust in their infrastructure, it would drive them to non-technical means — force them to keep their heads down more. A courier carrying a disk has a hell of a long way to go to communicate worldwide. If you slow them down, interception is more likely."

Human networks are distinct from electronic networks. But technology is the sea in which they swim.

"What made nets vulnerable historically is their inability to coordinate their purpose," says Manuel Castells, author of "The Rise of the Network Society," the first volume of his trilogy, "The Information Age."

"But at this point," he says, "they have this ability to be both decentralized and highly focused. That's what's new. And that's technology. Not just electronic. It's their ability to travel everywhere. Their ability to be informed everywhere. Their ability to receive money from everywhere."

In 1996, Arquilla and Ronfeldt wrote a slim but highly prescient volume called "The Advent of Netwar" for the National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the defense agencies.

It predicts that in a war between human networks, the side with superior intelligence wins. It also makes some tactical suggestions about countering human networks with counter-networks that actually have been used to combat computer hackers.

They include:

• Find a member of the enemy group who is clearly a harmless idiot; treat him as if he were the most important figure and the only one worthy of being taken seriously.

• Single out competent and genuinely dangerous figures; write them off or call their loyalty to the cause into question.

• Control the stories people tell each other to define their reason for living and acting as they do. The terrorist story, says Ronfeldt, "gives these people common cause — us versus them. Right now the U.S. would seem to have the edge at the worldwide level. But within the region, there was the dancing in the streets in Palestine. Part of the story is that America's evil, and that America's presence is to blame for so many of the problems in the Middle East. We have to attack that part."

• Find the list of demands extorted by the network; grant some that make no sense and/or disturb and divide their political aims.

• Paint the enemy with PR ugly paint so that they seem beyond the pale, ridiculous, alien, maniacal, inexplicable.

• Destroy their social support networks by using "helpful" but differently valued groups that are not perceived as aggressive.

• Divide and conquer; identify parts of the network that can be pacified and play them against former allies.

• Intensify the human counter-networks in one's own civil society.

Adds Manuel Castells: "We should be organizing our own networks, posing as Islamic terrorist networks. We should then demand to join one of these networks and then destroy the trust structures. Only way to infiltrate. Oldest technique in the world."
Few of these ideas involve flattening Kabul, all of these analysts note.

Stephenson worries that massing the Navy near Afghanistan is "a symbolic show of old-fashioned strength. It's not about that anymore. This whole playing ground has shifted."

"In order to do anything, you cannot be blind," says Castells. "The most extraordinary vulnerability of the American military is it looks like they do not have many informants inside Afghanistan. It also looks like the majority of the components of this network do not relate directly or essentially to nation-states. That is new. Unless we have a fundamental rethinking of strategic matters, it's going to be literally, literally exhausting and impossible. It will be desperate missile attacks at the wrong targets with a lot of suffering. Massive bombardments turn around the opinion in many ways."

"Basically," says Ronfeldt, "you have to find somebody to wipe out."

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

From: John McCarthy
Date: 9.24.01

I have lots of ideas but have decided to present just one of them:

What Can The West Do To Help Islamic Countries Overcome Fanatacism

Today fanaticism based on Islam is a major force in Islamic countries. It is a danger to the West, but it is much more a danger to the peoples of these countries themselves to whom it has already done enormous harm. What's the harm?

1. It has led to more oppressive government. Many governments in these countries have always been oppressive, but religious fanaticism makes the oppression worse.
2. It has suppressed free speech and free press and has put dissenters in prison or killed them.
3. It has reinforced educational systems based on rote learning and fostered ignorance.
4. It has hindered economc progress.
5. It has prevented these countries from making their full contribution to science and technology. In the Middle Ages and well into the European Renaissance Islamic countries were leaders in mathematics and science. In particular, they preserved the Greek knowledge, but they did a lot more.

Fanaticism is therefore not a permanent feature of these countries, and will probably die down again as new generations come to see it as a dead end.

What can the West do about this situation?

In the main the changes will have to come from within these countries, but Western media are quite influential. The purely cultural aspects of the West are sufficiently widely known, whether it be high culture or the low culture of consumerism.

Here is some of what can be done.

Western broadcasts in the languages of these countries should emphasize:

1. Historical contributions of these countries to world culture.
2. The voices of dissidents to oppressive governments.
3. Direct criticism of the harm fanaticism does.
4. Current contributions of writers, e.g. Mahfouz, to world culture.
5. Developments in Western science, technology and medicine.

Probably the number of broadcasts should be increased.

More Internet sites emphasizing modernism in Arabic, Farsi, Berber etc. are needed and people building them should be helped.

The gamut of natural human reactions to the appalling events we witnessed on September 11th must run their course: shock, grieving, fear of what happens next, and the need to take action to prevent further, even worse, terrorist attacks. There must also be action to deal with the general situation in the Middle East, particularly the need for a just and long-term settlement of Palestinian-Israeli problems, or this region will remain a seedbed of fanaticism.

But beyond these issues, I have another sadness and even greater fear: that the world will forget the even greater threat we all face from global warming. If we do not start to face up to this threat properly, the chaos that will ensue over the next century as half the Earth tries to relocate to find food and water will make these recent events, awful as they are, pale into insignificance.

From: Steve Grand
Date: 9.24.01

Since this question has been posted on Edge. I've been casting around for something useful I could say — something that I could recommend we do. I've failed. Most of the techno-fix and cultural solutions that occurred to me were either unworkable or simply closing one of many stable doors after the horse has bolted. So instead I've decided what to do at a personal level: as my tiny contribution to this learning experience I am going to become less tolerant.

A lot of people have expressed the opinion that we need to become more tolerant, not less; that we need to understand the reasons behind the terrorists' actions and see how their decision made perfect sense to them in the context in which they found themselves. Speaking for the human species as a whole I think this is true, but for myself I would say that I have always thought this way and have probably been overdoing it. I'm a "cybernetic" fatalist: I consider that most people, most of the time, find themselves in situations where they have no real choice. Murderers do not kill on a whim, and governments do not start wars for amusement. They do it because their circumstances have driven them to it, or at least because they believe their circumstances have driven them to it, which is essentially the same thing.

All complex systems, from brains to societies, contain myriad feedback loops. Every now and then something will happen that triggers the creation or dominance of a positive feedback loop, which drives the system into some extreme state. From here it will probably rebound and thrash violently, eventually perhaps shaking itself to bits. Once started, these things become increasingly hard to stop, and beyond a certain point the individual actors in the drama will be impotent puppets, driven to do whatever they are driven to do, regardless of how distasteful they find it. So from my position as a cyberneticist I have always been (I hope) extremely tolerant of people when they act as they inevitably will in the context in which they find themselves. By the time someone does something truly awful it is probably fair to say that it's not their fault.

Nevertheless, the purpose of intelligence is precisely to predict such runaway situations well in advance and prevent them while we still have the energy to do so. Only the stupid blunder into situations from which they have insufficient power to extricate themselves, and at the level of individual organisms it is this predictive energy management that keeps us alive. Equally, it is our responsibility as members of the human race to ensure that we do not do things that might let the whole of society run out of control. And we already know a good deal about the science behind such systems behaviour. Blame does not, therefore, lie with the end product — the terrorists, murderers, hooligans and bullies. It lies with those of us who make trivial decisions with insufficient thought as to their long-term consequences. The terror starts with a poorly considered policy, a minor bit of selfishness or a moment's lapse of concentration. Above all it starts with simplistic, fallacious or lazy reasoning.

Perhaps the clearest sign of a lack of intelligence is the inability to distinguish more than two categories at once. For such people the world is divided into Us and Them, Black and White, Good and Bad, while in reality nothing is that simple. Such people frequently lapse into dogma, and I agree with Richard Dawkins about the culpability of religion in this instance (on both sides — the number of times God was invoked by Westerners in the aftermath of this tragedy depressed me enormously). Religion is a powerful force for polarisation, as are nationalism, sexism and party politics. Such dogmas create monolithic and potent forces that can easily topple the system. They allow people to be lazy; to avoid taking personal responsibility and ally themselves blindly and unquestioningly to a formula (whether the Bible, the Koran or a manifesto).

What we need is for all of us to use our brains to the best of our ability, and when we see lazy, selfish, illogical or short-term thinking in other people, we should point it out to them in no uncertain terms. So I have vowed to become less tolerant of stupidity and irresponsibility than I have been. From now on I intend to be militantly intellectual. I shall always remember my moral duty not to hurt people's feelings, but their beliefs, cultural assumptions and political opinions I shall consider it my responsibility to consider and then, if necessary, to challenge. Sadly, it won't save anybody's life today, but it may help avert disaster for tomorrow.

From: Robert Aunger
Date: 9.24.01

The "first war of the new millennium" — with its very different targets, and hence tactics — provides an excellent opportunity to make use of what has become one of the most sophisticated, but relatively unknown, corners of contemporary social science: the formal study of social networks.

The possibility that the US Administration might now be interested in this arcane branch of knowledge has already been recognized by the mainstream press. Terrorists are organized in loose, intercontinental fabrics of social relations, linked together as nodes in what have been called "cells" from Lenin to bin Laden, but which are better recognized as a group of nodes connected by links which represent the exchange of some sort of resource — ranging from information to machine guns.

For example, the effort to "follow the money" which makes terrorist activities possible is made more difficult by the existence of a covert, world wide laundering system called hawala banking in India or the Hundi system in Pakistan. This network, defined by the exchange of money, is based entirely on trust, so that no paper-trail is left behind (it is strictly a "word of mouth" network, which is what "hawala" means in Hindi). Still, once the structure of a social network becomes known, the crucial links for maintaining that structure (or destabilizing it) can be rigorously identified — no matter how distributed the power relations in it might be. In the present context, this has obvious implications — implications which have already made a number of practitioners of the networkers' art nervous about the ethics of their hard won knowledge being used by politicos in war-making mode. Still, the terrible recent events in the United States provide a rare opportunity for a much maligned profession — academic social science — to make itself useful to the society which funds it. Surely part of the answer to the question of "what now?" will be: Do formal analysis of terrorist social networks.

It is possible, however (as Martin Rees observes in an earlier posting here), that the next escalation in terrorist activity will not involve a network at all. Theoretically, a single biotechnologist with a grudge and a round-the world plane ticket could instigate a thoroughly modern Black Death. The paltry remainders of the human race might then have to go underground for generations until the surface of the Earth becomes safe for multi-cellular life-forms again. (This is, in fact, the scenario from Terry Gilliam's gripping movie, "Thirteen Monkeys".) Tor Nørretranders' suggestion to decentralize personnel would not help much in such a case. So network analysis may only work in the short run. The answer to the "what now" question is thus possibly more frightening even than what we have contemplated so far, just as driving people-laden planes into people-laden buildings seemed incomprehensible only a few short weeks ago.

From: David G, Myers
Date: 9.23.01

1. The social psychology of terrorism

What compels people to commit simultaneous mass murder and suicide? Although evolutionary psychology may be challenged to invent an adaptive purpose for such behavior (it can more easily explain its rarity), my own discipline of social psychology can help. Research on the roots of hatred, aggression, and conflict shed light. For example, experiments on "group polarization" reveal how groups amplify their members' shared tendencies. In one study, I observed that when prejudiced high school students discussed racial issues, their attitudes became more prejudiced. When low-prejudice students discussed the same issues, they became more tolerant.

Group polarization can amplify the mutual resolve of those in a self-help group. But it can also have dire consequences. In other experiments, group decision making has amplified retaliatory responses to provocation (a phenomenon we may now be experiencing). Clark McCauley (Bryn Mawr) has also documented how terrorism arises among people who are drawn together out of a shared grievance, and who then become more and more extreme as they interact in isolation from moderating influences. We can hope that, over time, the globalization of communication will lessen isolation and its associated extreme polarizations.

Social psychological principles also help explain our responses to terror. Four quick examples of principles that have operated writ large since 9-11:

• "Terror management" experiments by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszcynski have found that being reminded of death and of our own mortality heightens prejudice and patriotism.

• "Self-serving bias" ensures that each party to a conflict will see its own actions and reactions as moral and laudable.

• In many a study, sharing a common threat or predicament has served to unify group members. Being marooned in a snowstorm makes friends, and being attacked brings out the flags.

• In judging risk, memorable and available images dominate statistical reality. Over one recent ten year period we were 26 times safer, mile per mile, on commercial aircraft than in cars. When this year's numbers are in, air travel will again have been safer than automobiles (and one suspects that, for at least the near future, airplanes will no longer be terrorists' venue of choice). But try to tell that to anyone — which is all of us — harboring vivid images of planes flying into the WTC.

2. Regarding Richard Dawkins' Guardian essay blaming religion

The "insane courage" that enabled the horror of 9-11 "came from religion," noted Dawkins. If "a martyr's death is equivalent to pressing the hyperspace button and zooming through a wormhole to another universe, it can make the world a very dangerous place . . . . To fill a world with religion, or religions of the Abrahamic kind, is like littering the streets with loaded guns."

Dawkins is perhaps right to suggest that a warped religious idea of martyrdom and the afterlife was at work here. And he's surely right that religion at its worst can be toxic and superstitious — which is something healthy religion must ever be vigilant about (much as science is vigilant about pseudoscience). Witness Jerry Fallwell's initial explanation of the disaster. But on balance, is religion good or bad for us? (Medicine, twisted, can kill people. But we'd want further evidence before deciding that medicine is bad.)

Why not resolve the issue empirically? Setting aside research on religion's correlations with health, happiness, and communal solidarity, what are its effects on good vs. evil-doing? Does religion's promised afterlife and its associated purpose and accountability more often call forth good deeds or bad? Does religiosity tend to be associated with increased or decreased criminality? With increased or decreased compassion, volunteerism, and generosity? (As I've explained in The American Paradox, there are lots of relevant data.) Or we might inquire into the religiosity/irreligiosity of the world's genocidal dictators (such as Hitler, Mao, and Stalin) as compared to the great humanitarians who established universities, founded hospitals, took medicine to the Third World, and led civil rights movements in the USA and South Africa.

From: Piet Hut
Date: 9.23.01

I find it fascinating that, notwithstanding John's initial urge to limit the discussion to "hard-edge" comments, most writers have focused on what we normally consider rather "soft" topics, such as culture and ways of viewing one-self and one's world, as well as suggestions for changing the current global economic situation. This is a remarkable shift, especially among a group of intellectuals with a background in science and technology.

Of course, it has always been true that prevention is the best approach to most problems. But until now we have been preoccupied with high-tech solutions, intellectually challenging and expensive, rather than low-tech approaches, cheap and less interesting scientifically. And we assumed that we had the luxury to focus mainly on the fancy but less efficient approaches.

Far more resources have been spent on "fighting", on scales from individuals to nations: on fighting cancer rather than in stimulating people to live healthier life styles; on fighting AIDS rather than creating conditions that lower the possibility of infection; on fighting drug dealers rather than diminishing the demand for drugs; on fighting unfriendly countries with military or economic might rather than trying to understand what the cause of their unfriendliness could be.

If anything good will come from the tragic events on 9.11, it may be the public realization that the answer to our main problems can be neither technological nor societal, but have to be an intimate mix of both. The notion of a third culture is relevant now more than ever before. And perhaps there is room for hope.

In the first half of the twentieth century, we had two world wars. In the second half, after the invention of weapons of mass destruction, there were no more world wars. Could it be that the current half century might witness the end of all wars, when we learn to counter global terrorism in really effective ways?

All eyes have been opened now for the specter of terrorists armed with nuclear or biological weapons of mass destruction. While this threat has been with us for decades, it was largely ignored. If we are lucky, the cruel awakening on 9.11 will finally teach us to prevent rather than to fight. Unbelievable as it may sound, wars could soon become a thing of the past, just like world wars have already become a thing of the past. The sudden end to hostilities between the Israelis and the Palestinians may be just the beginning.

For this optimistic vision to be viable, we need insight. That the cold war remained cold was not through an increase in wisdom and insight, but rather through a very effective form of deterrence, a side effect of nuclear weapons. Now that the cold war is behind us, perhaps terrorism will have an even more remarkable side effect. Instead of paralyzing the civilized world, it could force upon us a real and deep reflection of the role of "soft" world views upon the real "hard" world — from scientific or religious to cynical or nihilistic world views, and everything in between. Wrestling a discussion of world views from the specialized and obscure corners of academic philosophy or comparative history of religion into the broad daylight of practical life-and-death issues of confronting terrorism would be the first step.

Ways of changing world views, both ours and "theirs", may seem like an odd weapon, far more odd even than a hydrogen bomb that is too powerful to be used in a war. But what else will give us a chance to cut the roots of the mind set in which terrorism thrives? We will have to change our views of the societies in which there is so much hatred against us. And they will have to change their views of our values. This means that both sides have to make radical changes in how they view the world. Helping each other to make these changes may be the only way to go. Just to give one example: over-simplified and arrogant arguments of scientists against religion, or of religious adherents against science and secular values, will hopefully be superseded by more mutual understanding and hence respect.

In short, the main challenge is not to start new fights nor to focus only on deterrence, but to offer an open invitation for recognition and respect. By creating a climate for opening up world views, both ours and 'theirs', whoever and wherever 'they' are, we can invite friend and foe alike in new global gatherings aimed at learning from and appreciating each others views. How to even begin such an idealistic program? Several answers have already been suggested by other contributors: Roger Schank advocates exporting education; Douglas Rushkoff advocates writing new narratives; Mihaly Csikszentmihaly advocates finding a way of including the hopes of the rest of the world in our plans; Terry Bristol, George Lakoff, Tor Nørretranders and Mihaly Csikszentmihaly all advocate a new social contract between the developed and developing world.

Could we really move from war to deterrence to respect? I don't know, but I also don't know anything more worth trying.

To be honest, I have always thought that "third culture" was a bit of an overstatement; to me the count felt more like two and a half than three since the leaning was so much to the scientific and technological side: interesting and fascinating, but not really fully a "third way". Until now. The current discussion is sterling third culture. Congratulations and thanks for working for so many years to lay the foundations. How paradoxical it is that it takes such a cruel event to let the core of the third culture become more bare and visible.

I approach the Edge question as a mathematician who examines logical reasoning within real-life contexts. My research into the influence of context and culture on human action (as described in several of my books) has conditioned me always to seek the logic that guides decisions.

Humans do not act irrationally. When a human acts in a way the rest of us view as irrational, there is inevitably a context or background within which the action makes perfect (if sometimes horrific) sense. To refer to the actions of the September 11 terrorists as "cowardly" or "mindless," as far too many world leaders have, is a massive misunderstanding of the situation. Moreover, it is a misunderstanding that, when perpetrated by those in a position to influence subsequent events, is likely to have dangerous consequences. It is likewise dangerous to say such acts are simply the result of "pure evil." Not because they are not evil; for surely they are. But saying they are "simply the acts of evil-minded men" provides a neat and comforting explanation that avoids those of us on the other side from having to figure out what lies behind the terrorism.

The September 11 terrorists were not carrying out an act of "mindless violence." Nothing, surely, can carry more significance than their choice of targets. They were taking careful aim at one nation, the United States. Nor is the symbolic nature of their specific targets mere happenstance. They chose clearly identifiable symbols both of the America way of life and of American power and influence.

Assuming that the terrorists were not acting alone (which seems a reasonable assumption, but has not as far as I know been ruled out), and that some person or organization lay behind their actions, then we can all speculate as to the overall strategic motive, if any: to provoke a US military response that leads to global warfare; to pressure the US population to force their government to abandon support for Israel; to create a symbol of US vulnerability that will eventually encourage Islamic nations to wage holy war on the West; there are many possibilities.

Leaving possible strategic goals aside, however, we face an important question we would do well to answer. What could possibly persuade 19 human beings to get onto airplanes with the carefully thought out intention of flying them into large buildings at high speed ‹ and to go through with the plan? We are not talking about a heat-of-the-moment "irrationality" here ‹ the kind of circumstance where any one of us can finds ourselves doing something that under normal circumstances we would regard as wrong, foolhardy, dangerous, heroic, or even "evil." These guys planned their actions in great detail and with enormous precision, almost certainly aided by others.

In an article published in the British newspaper The Guardian on September 15, titled Religion's misguided missiles, Edge member Richard Dawkins puts the blame squarely on religious extremism. In doing so, he is surely partly right.

Convincing oneself that one is acting in the name of God for some cosmic purpose far greater than mere human lives is a long standing device whereby humans manage to excuse themselves (in their own minds) the most abominable actions. The decidedly outdated sexual (and sexist) passages in the Koran that the world at large has become familiar with in the past two weeks, which Dawkins also cites in his article, could also play a role. (Literal reading of some parts of the Koran surely debases Islam every bit as much as a literal reading of certain passages in the Bible debases Christianity.) But as others have commented, there has to be more to it than Dawkins says.

I have no way of knowing, and I fear that if our authorities find out they will keep it to themselves, but I would not be at all surprised to learn that each one of the 19 terrorists had suffered personal, tragic loss ‹ of a wife, a son, a daughter, a close friend, an entire family ‹ in a Middle East air attack. An attack for which, rightly or wrongly, they hold the United States responsible, be it in the form of actions in the Iraq War, support for Israel, or simply the supply of arms and funds to various regimes. You don't have to be a trained logician or a psychologist to understand how that could be enough to overcome the normal human desire to remain alive. Few among us can claim that, when faced with a person, persons, or even nation that we can clearly identify as the cause of a horrific loss of our loved ones, perhaps even in front of our own eyes, we would not want to strike back. I think I am a fairly timid, placid individual who bears no one any ill will. But kill my wife, my lover, my sons, or my daughters before my eyes, and I too would want to hit back ‹ hard. Judging by the responses of the majority of Americans to the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, most of whom were surely only symbolically affected by the devastation, I am not alone. Now put me in the "care" of cynically-minded and highly manipulative individuals who want to make use of me for their own ends, and, particularly if I am a young male, I will eagerly become a decidedly dangerous pawn in that person's deadly game.

Please don't misunderstand me. I am not seeking to excuse either the September 11 terrorists or terrorism in general. Nor am I saying that the US has acted wrongly or in some way "deserves" to be attacked. Like the vast majority of Americans (and as an Englishman by birth, I am a US citizen by a free choice I made as an adult), I am deeply troubled by what happened on September 11. I feel it on a personal level. To adapt the words John F. Kennedy spoke long ago in, and of, Berlin, "I am a New Yorker." I hope that those who were involved in planning and supporting the attacks are found and brought to justice. The pragmatist in me even makes me concede that the fight will inevitably lead to further loss of innocent lives. But if we are serious about eliminating terrorism ‹ and I hope we are ‹ then we must do more than address the symptoms. We need to understand ‹ and then address ‹ the underlying causes. We have to escape the mindset that says terrorists are "mindless" or "simply evil." Instead, we have to think deeply about the circumstances within which premeditated and carefully executed mass murder and mass suicide make contextually consistent, if ultimately horrific, logical sense.

Human being have evolved to behave rationally in a given context ‹ to follow the logic of the context. Following the survival logic of the given context is how natural selection works. We cannot change the logic in a context any more than we can change the mathematical fact that 1 + 1 = 2. In the case of terrorism, what we can change is the context. Doing so will inevitably require enormous wisdom, knowledge, and resources. Maybe this is where the true future greatness lies for the most powerful nation on Earth.

Frank Schirrmacher
Date: 9.21.01

Lights, Camera — Reason

Self-images will change. Films and books will now change — as will culture itself. For example, the idea that every undertaking by Western civilization must end in failure. Or the idea that we have no enemies. Or the idea that we can leave it to America to attract all the hate for the world in which we live.

© Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2001

What Now?

Actually, despite Colin Tudge's skepticism, I found the Edge responses to the Sept.11 catastrophe on the whole much more thoughtful and potentially helpful than what one finds in the media, and especially in the pronouncements of our political leaders. Given that I agree with so much that has been said so well by, e.g. George Lakoff, Peter Von Sivers, Luyen Chou et al., I will just focus on just two points I don't think have been much discussed so far:

1. We must make sure that the new Secretary of Homeland Security (or whatever it's going to be called) understands that one of the major reasons our nation is structurally vulnerable to terrorist acts is the concentration of vital resources and services (sources of energy, water, transportation, communication, etc.) As long as we keep building ever larger skyscrapers, oil tankers, planes, and so on, we present increasingly easier targets to those who want to do us in. The reason a few barely armed opponents can hold our technological might at bay in places like Vietnam, Bosnia, (and certainly Afghanistan) is that they are part of an elusive network, decentralized and able to survive without long supply lines. We can't compete with them on that score, but we should realize that in this new climate small is not only beautiful, but also more healthy.

2. As I was driving through Montana on September 13, I read the editorial of The Missoulian with a sinking feeling: it's response to the tragedy was, in essence: "Don't let the bastards change the way you live — we will show them they can't beat us by going on with our lives as usual. If you wanted to buy that new dishwasher, go ahead and buy it. If you planned that vacation to the Caribbean, go ahead and make your reservations right away ..."

I have seen this idea that consumerism will win the war resurface again and again. It seems to me equivalent to someone having been bitten by a malarial mosquito in a swamp who then says: "I won't let that bug change my lifestyle; I will go back to the swamp and live there." Ironically, the evidence is rather conclusive that fancier dishwashers and dreamier cruises don't make our lives better in any meaningful sense. The material goals that have become our raison d'etre have a very short shelf life. People are happy when they have a job that is fulfilling, a family they can rely on, a faith that sustains them, and a government that respects their freedom.

The United States provided a beacon of hope in the last century because people around the world saw it as a place where these goals could be achieved within reasonable material conditions. Now we are perceived increasingly as a country willing to trample underfoot anyone who interferes with our God-given right to the latest appliances and diversions. I don't see us solving the problem of anti-American hatred unless we find a way of including the hopes of the rest of the world in our plans.

"Globalization" should not be a code-word for exploitation, but for a sense of solidarity and responsibility extending to the rest of the planet. And we should realize that while this would involve material sacrifices, in terms of quality, it would actually make our lives more happy and meaningful. In previous times this message would have come from the churches. Now it is time that men and women of science take on the responsibility of telling why life will be better if we acted less selfishly. It may be a dangerous line to take in these volatile times, but it comes with the territory.

From: Todd Feinberg, M.D.
Date: 9.21.01

Complacency or Denial? According to reports, after the first plane hit Tower One of the World Trade Center, and the evacuation of the second tower was in progress, there was an announcement that the second tower was secure and everyone should go back to their offices. Upon hearing this, some workers unfortunately returned to their desks and some of these persons perished when that building later collapsed.

As a neuropsychiatrist who has studied psychological defense in patients who have neurological disease, I found the account of these events quite extraordinary. How could anyone who was responsible for the safety of that building declare that the building was "secure" when the tower next door was in fact in flames and the cause of that unfolding disaster was still unknown? How could someone believe that the building was safe when they knew the first tower was still ablaze? I further wondered how safe these people felt in the Twin Towers in the first place, given that there had been an attack on one of the Towers in 1993 and organizations associated with that attack were still in operation. Nonetheless, rational and good people went to work at the Twin Towers every day without undue anxiety, and while a catastrophe was in progress, they felt safe enough to return to their desks.

An even greater mystery is how the widespread terrorist activity that was required by these attacks unfolded right in front of our nation's collective noses. One wonders how many people working in banks and other financial institutions noticed "odd" transfers and disbursements of funds yet explained them away as somehow acceptable. How many flight instructors quietly wondered why so many of these future terrorists needed flight training, yet said nothing?

Were the people that worked in the World Trade Center, their loved ones, indeed America, in denial of the now obvious fact that there were more attacks in the offing? After the dust settles and all the facts are known, I suspect it will be shown that America has not been merely complacent, but that we have indeed been collectively as a nation in denial.We have been in denial because the possibility of a catastrophe on the scale of the recent airplane attacks on The World Trade Center was simply unthinkable.

In the medical and psychiatric patient, when psychological denial lifts, common reactions include anxiety and depression. In the poorly adjusted individual, there may be serious disruption and even breakdown of the personality.On the other hand, in the well adjusted individual, the lifting of denial enables the person to adjust and adapt in a constructive fashion.America will now come out of its denial and face these new challenges with a transformed sense of who we are as a nation.

From: Martin Rees
Date: 9.21.01

The most immediate concern is that an ill-judged US response to the WTC attack could heighten tension still further. But recent events should be a "wake-up call", alerting us to the risk of even more devastating attacks, using nuclear devices. A long-range missile carrying a compact warhead ô the kind of weapon that "star wars 2" is supposed to defend the US against ô may be beyond the resources of dissident groups. Not so, however, detonation of a stolen weapon transported in a truck or ship, or a crude device assembled, using stolen fissile material, in a city apartment. The latter activities are less technically demanding; and they would would, unlike a missile -launched bomb, leave no trace of their provenance. The US and Western Europe should offer resources to accelerate programs to monitor and dismantle the 20000+ nuclear weapons in the FSU, and to safeguard fissile material. A devastating amount may already have gone astray, but this effort surely deserves far more urgent priority from the US government than missile defenses.

But what terrifies me most is the potential impact of biological advances. Thousands ô even millions ô of people will soon have the technical capability to make and disseminate "weapons" that could cause widespread (even worldwide) epidemics. Not even an organised "cell" or network of terrorists is required ô just a single fanatic, or a wierdo with the mindset of those who design computer viruses (or even someone who is merely incompetent rather than malign) . Even if all nations imposed strict regulations on perilous applications of biological advances, the chances of effective enforcement are no better than in the case of the drug laws. And a single infringement could trigger disaster. I'm despondent about the 21st century because there seems absolutely no realistic chance of preventing these hazards from looming ever-larger.

From: Douglas Rushkoff
Date: 9.21.01

Succumbing To Narrative, Or Writing Our Own

In his speech to Congress, Bush ô perhaps unintentionally ô presented the choice before us: we will either bring justice to the nations of our enemies, or bring our enemies to justice.

Although he probably didn't mean it this way, his two alternatives represent two completely different tacks. The former suggests extending the ideals of the Enlightenment on which this nation was founded into regions where human rights are not honored. The latter implies nothing less than accepting the fundamentalists' invitation to holy war.

Were we to bring justice to those who currently suffer under despotic regimes, it would certainly mark a shift in our foreign policy, which has until now been based more on short-term strategic goals than extended democracy's reach. It would be a welcome change, and one less likely to create the kinds of fundamentalist Frankenstein monsters we sponsored in the past.

Engaging in a traditional holy war would be entirely less fruitful, and tragically hypocritical. Currently, we are witnessing what happens when the narratives human beings have been using to understand their reality no longer work. Fundamentalism is the belief that the real world conforms to the stories we were told about it; that reality has an author, God. We do not participate, we merely adhere to the story (or risk damnation) and are willing to die for the story because the ending has already been ordained. When the map no longer fits the territory, it is the territory that must be changed. Life itself is fixed. Dead.

In the West, thanks to our relative openness, wealth and the scientific advancement it allows, we have been empowered to abandon our narratives, and to understand reality as emergent, rather than ordained. Our brand of idealism ô our emphasis on life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ô encourages us to participate the writing of the narratives we live by. As a result, our overarching narrative is a consensus, and more fluid. Unlike the fundamentalists' ordained apocalypse, it offers us a way out: evolution.

The attack on the US marks a shocking discontinuity for most Americans. Ito could lead us back into narrative ô as far back as the Holy Crusade against the Moslems ô in order to find a mythology that conforms to these events. Or, we can look to the underlying causes and even our own complicity in the emergence of these phenomena, and accept responsibility for writing a new narrative, altogether.

In addressing the question of "What Now?" I want to speculate freely on what might happen on a large scale in the near term. Here are some rough scenarios, with my even vaguer estimate of their likelihood.

A. Aum Shinry Kyo II. The malefactors of September 11 are rounded up with little effort, because they are not genuine provocateurs of a Clash of Civilizations; they are merely nuts. Only distantly connected to any serious revolutionary terrorist, they are in fact an obscure splinter cult who are mostly dead at their own hands. The suffering of New York City is seen in retrospect, not as a grand battle over any principle worth fighting for, but as a simple aberration that is both tragic and crazy, a loathsome, Jonestown-like phenomenon. No particular lessons are learned, very little changes in the global scene, but there's a lasting blow to general morale and to humanity's assessment of itself. Society is saddened and sickened, and people around the world are often seen to hesitate before setting foot in a subway or airliner. Probability: 15%

B. Gulf War III. After a great deal of angst and sword-sharpening, there's a quick, surprising Coalition victory. Those who promised a ruthless struggle to the death in the Mother of All Battles are revealed as blowhards. Suicide bombing cells turn out to be careless and unprofessional terrorists, who are easily rounded up by street-wise cops. Americans and allies go back to their barracks, leaving a few extra Southwest Asian bases to keep guard on the troublemakers. A war-leader President with the gratitude of a relieved nation loses his re-election due to economic troubles.
Probability: 25%

C. Cold War II. A sustained ideological and economic struggle sets in between the G-8 and the world's poorest and bitterest countries. There are numerous hot-war flare-ups, much narco-terror, a great deal of ruthless, paramilitary spy skullduggery, and considerable civil dissent from dissidents in the West unable to morally stomach this grinding, Balkan-style dirty war. McCarthyism and witch-hunts flare up, while the sentiment of "Viva Osama" moves to a simmering Central America. There is huge, inflationary spending on imaginary, symbolic, and unusable super-weapons. The general American population is put under a level of police surveillance previously available only to American black people. This grinds on for decades, with America gamely bearing-any-burden, on until the opposition loses all heart and begins drinking itself to death. Probability: 15%

D (1). Pearl Harbor Straight to Bretton Woods. Since there really is no military enemy to fight — a few nasty guys with boxcutters — there is a general economic and diplomatic rearrangement, without WWII's ugly bother of bombing and sacking whole continents. The original enemy — a rather vaporous notion of "terrorism" — is quickly lost sight of in a general, very wide-scale, geopolitical emergence into 21st century Modernity. This global New Deal moves Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam and other longterm pariahs into the "Civilized" camp, while the broken nations that are today considered basket-cases are made into blue-helmet protectorates. The Second World vanishes. From now on, there's just two sides: Real People, and some pariahs.

Among the Real People, there is a great deal of general housecleaning: currency reforms, arms reduction, climate treaties, economic rationalization, demolition of trade barriers, labor laws, emigration, all that sort of thing. Everybody else — The People Without Plumbing, basically — have to live off a combination of empty threats and emergency handouts.

Oddly, the one major power least likely to join the Real People is probably the United States, but the USA may have a grudging unilateral role as a kind of Third Way or Loyal Opposition.

D (2) . 1989 Redux. Upset and alarmed by the unnecessary global mayhem so cynically triggering by madmen, civil society takes to the streets worldwide in a touching display of aspiration and political maturity. Democratization sweeps the Moslem world in a second wave of Velvet Revolution. A grateful mankind sees the martyrs of New York as the unwitting harbingers of a better and kinder way of life, which is full of caring, solidarity, human rights and social justice. This scenario is basically the same as D(1), but seen from the other side of the WTO fence and the Genoa barriers. Since Al Qaeda can't distinguish a Western radical from a Western capitalist, they are both in the same boat now and can henceforth work in tandem.
Probability: 20%

E. Greater Afghanistan. The Coalition suffers an outright military defeat at the hands of indomitable armed peasants, in a ruthless, bloody, punjee-stick dirty war, possibly combined with an unconventional use of weapons of mass destruction. NYC 9.11 turns out to be just the first of a series of bloody Tamerlane-style attacks from a growing and increasingly frenzied horde of enemies of the West. Nerve-shattered, the West takes the last copter from the Saudi embassy and sues for peace.

This Qaeda victory scenario has a number of variants, which could exist singly or in combination.

E1. The Empire Formerly Known As NATO. The US bears the blunt of blame for its clumsy handling of the global conflict, which relied so fatally on the so-called strength of America's arrogant and untenable free-market ideology. The defeated Alliance splits up much like its former mirror image, the Warsaw Pact. Without Persian Gulf oil, the American economy and its war machine both collapse. Severe discord and disillusionment ensues, with crime and corruption skyrocketing. Desperate Russian women leave the streets of every capital in the world and are replaced by desperate American women.

E2(A). The Great Terror. A victory by fanatics careless of life becomes a giant Khmer Rouge-style death machine for Islam; the Aztec charisma of a Qaeda cult requires ever-greater human sacrifice, especially of one's own. A 12th-century lifestyle can only sustain a 12th-century population.

E2(B). A Grand Caliphate. With malignant American and Jewish influence finally scorched from the holy lands of the Umma, a new Golden Age of just and tolerant Universal Islam ensues. It's ruled by Sharia law, under a wise and merciful Caliph who re-unites Sunni and Shi'a and outshines Haroun Al Rashid. A grateful mankind erects many grand and glorious mosques in memory of the warrior saints of Islamic fundamentalism; men whose tactics were rather rough, but in the eyes of history, fully justified. Combined probability of any of the E variants: 10%

F. America Goes Bonkers. The globe's worst fears of a paranoid "Cowboy America" come true, as further terror provocations decapitate the American nation. A ferocious nuclear power, eyeballs gone rigid with a crazed lust for vengeance, launches a massive thermonuclear lynching spree. Probability: 2 %

G. Many More Wild Cards. This is neither an "age of terror" nor an "age of freedom". This is an age of random calamities. It's a genuine end of history, in which the passage of time in human affairs no longer has any rules as we previously understood them. There is no great historical narrative at hand, nor is there any grand scheme by which a rational analyst can make useful sense of events. NYC 9.11 is quickly eclipsed by other, biggest factors even more untoward and shocking: perhaps dumber acts of terror by even smaller groups, plus some Greenhouse calamities, an asteroid strike, some brand-new plagues, or even free beer and five cent nano-genetic intelligent cigars. Humankind has lost all control of our destiny and nothing can restore it.
Probability: 3%

H. None of the Above.
Probability: 10

1

There are a number of metaphors for buildings. A common visual metaphor is Buildings Are Heads, where windows and doors are openings in the head like eyes, nose, and mouth. For many people this metaphor interacted with the image of the plane going into South Tower of the World Trade Center, producing via visual metaphor the unconscious, but powerful image of a bullet going through someone's head, the flame pouring from the other side blood spurting out.

Tall buildings can, via visual metaphor, be people standing erect. For many the falling of the towers activated this metaphor. Each tower falling was a body falling.

We are not consciously aware of the metaphorical images, but they are part of the power and the horror we experience when we see them.

Each of us, in the prefrontal cortex of our brains, has what are called "mirror neurons." Such neurons fire either when we perform an action or when see the same action performed by someone else. There are connections from that part of the brain to the emotional centers. Such neural circuits are believed to be the basis of empathy.

This works literally — when we see plane coming toward the building and imagine people in the building, we feel the plane coming toward us; when we see the building toppling toward others, we feel the building toppling toward us. It also works metaphorically: If we see the plane going through the building, and we unconsciously metaphorize the building as a head with the plane going through its temple, then we sense—unconsciously but powerfully—being shot through the temple. If we metaphorize the building as a person and see the building fall to the ground in pieces, then we sense—again unconsciously but powerfully— that we are falling to the ground in pieces. Our systems of metaphorical thought, interacting with our mirror neuron systems, turn external literal horrors into felt metaphorical horrors.

Here are some other cases:

• Control Is Up: You have control over the situation; you're on top of things. This has always been an important basis of towers as symbols of power. In this case, the toppling of the towers meant loss of control, loss of power.

• Phallic imagery: Towers are symbols of phallic power and their collapse reinforces the idea of loss of power.

• Another kind of phallic imagery was more central here. The planes as penetrating the towers with a plume of heat. The pentagon, a vaginal image from the air, penetrated by the plane as missile.

• A Society Is A Building. A society can have a "foundation" which may or may not be "solid" and it can "crumble" and "fall." The World Trade Center was symbolic of society. When it crumbled and fell, the threat was more than to a building.

• We think metaphorically of things that perpetuate over time as "standing." Bush the Father in the Gulf War kept saying, "This will not stand," meaning that the situation would not be perpetuated over time. The World Trade Center was build to last ten thousand years. When it crumbled, it metaphorically raised the question of whether American power and American society would last.

• Building As Temple: Here we had the destruction of the temple of capitalist commerce, which lies at the heart of our society.

Our minds play tricks on us. The image of the Manhattan skyline is now unbalanced. We are used to seeing it with the towers there. Our mind imposes our old image of the towers, and the sight of them gone gives one the illusion of imbalance, as if Manhattan we sinking. Given the symbolism of Manhattan as standing for the promise of America, it appears metaphorically as if that promise were sinking.

Then there is the persistent image, day after day, of the charred and smoking remains: it is an image of hell.

The World Trade Center was a potent symbol, tied into our understanding of our country and ourselves in a myriad of ways. All of what we know is physically embodied in our brains. To incorporate the new knowledge requires a physical change in the synapses of our brains, a physical reshaping of our neural system.

The physical violence was not only in New York and Washington. Physical changes—violent ones—have been made to the brains of all Americans.

2

The administration's framings and reframings and its search for metaphors should be noted. The initial framing was as a "crime" with "victims" and "perpetrators" to be "brought to justice" and "punished." The crime frame entails law, courts, lawyers, trials, sentencing, appeals, and so on. It was hours before "crime" changed to "war" with "casualties," "enemies," "military action," "war powers," and so on.

Rumsfeld and other administration officials have pointed out that this situation does not fit our understanding of a "war." There are "enemies" and "casualties" all right, but no enemy army, no regiments, no tanks, no ships, no air force, no battlefields, no strategic targets, and no clear "victory." The war frame just doesn't fit. Colin Powell had always argued that no troops should be committed without specific objectives, a clear and achievable definition of victory, a clear exit strategy — and no open-ended commitments. But he has pointed out that none of these is present in this "war."

Because the concept of "war "doesn't fit, there is a frantic search for metaphors. First, Bush called the terrorists "cowards" — but this didn't seem to work too well for martyrs who willing sacrificed their lives for their moral and religious ideals. More recently he has spoken of "smoking them out of their holes" as if they were rodents, and Rumsfeld has spoken of "drying up the swamp they live in" as if they were snakes or lowly swamp creatures. The conceptual metaphors here are Moral is Up; Immoral is Down (they are lowly) and Immoral People are Animals (that live close to the ground).

The use of the word "evil" in the administration's discourse works in the following way. In conservative, strict father morality (see my Moral Politics, Chapter 5), evil is a palpable thing, a force in the world. To stand up to evil you have to be morally strong. If you're weak, you let evil triumph, so that weakness is a form of evil in itself, as is promoting weakness. Evil is inherent, an essential trait, that determines how you will act in the world. Evil people do evil things. No further explanation is necessary. There can be no social causes of evil, no religious rationale for evil, no reasons or arguments for evil. The enemy of evil is good. If our enemy is evil, we are inherently good. Good is our essentially nature and what we do in the battle against evil is good. Good and evil are locked in a battle, which is conceptualized metaphorically as a physical fight in which the stronger wins. Only superior strength can defeat evil, and only a show of strength can keep evil at bay. Not to show overwhelming strength is immoral, since it will induce evildoers to perform more evil deeds because they'll think they can get away with it. To oppose a show of superior strength is therefore immoral. Nothing is more important than the battle of Good against Evil, and if some innocent noncombatants get in the way and get hurt, it is a shame, but it is to be expected and nothing can be done about it. Indeed, performing lesser evils in the name of good is justified — "lesser" evils like curtailing individual liberties, sanctioning political assassinations, overthrowing governments, torture, hiring criminals, and "collateral damage."

Then there is the basic security metaphor, Security As Containment — keeping the evildoers out. Secure our borders, keep them and their weapons out of our airports, have marshals on the planes. Most security experts say that there is no sure way to keep terrorists out or to deny them the use of some weapon or other; a determined well-financed terrorist organization can penetrate any security system. Or they can choose other targets, say oil tankers.

Yet the Security As Containment metaphor is powerful. It is what lies behind the missile shield proposal. Rationality might say that the September 11th attack showed the missile shield is pointless. But it strengthened the use of the Security As Containment metaphor. As soon as you say "national security," the Security as Containment metaphor will be activated and with it, the missile shield.

3

There are (at least) three kinds of causes of radical Islamic terrorism:

Worldview: The Religious Rationale
Social and Political Conditions: Cultures of Despair
Means: The Enabling Conditions

The Bush administration has discussed only the third: The means that enable attacks to be carried out. These include: Leadership (e.g., bin Laden), host countries, training facilities and bases, financial backing, cell organization, information networks, and so on. These do not include the first and second on the list.

Worldview: Religious Rationale

The question that keeps being asked in the media is, Why do they hate us so much?

It is important at the outset to separate out moderate to liberal Islam from radical Islamic fundamentalists, who do not represent most Muslims.

Radical Islamic fundamentalists hate our culture. They have a worldview that is incompatible with the way that Americans — and other westerners — live their lives.

• One part of this worldview concerns women, who are seen as "pearls," objects of value and beauty to be hidden from all men but their husbands. They are to hide their bodies, they have no right to property, no right to travel on their own, and so on. Western sexuality, mores, music, and women's equality all violate their values, and the ubiquity of American cultural products, like movies and music, throughout the world offends them.

• A second part concerns theocracy: they believe that governments should be run according to strict Islamic law by clerics.

• A third concerns holy sites, like those in Jerusalem, which they believe should be under Islamic political and military control.

• A fourth concerns the commercial and military incursions by Westerners on Islamic soil, which they liken to the invasion of the hated crusaders. The way they see it, our culture spits in the face of theirs.

• A fifth concerns jihad — a holy war to protect and defend the faith.

• A sixth is the idea of a martyr, a man willing to sacrifice himself for the cause. His reward is eternal glory—an eternity in heaven surrounded by willing young virgins. In some cases, there is a promise that his family will be taken care of by the community.

Social and Political Conditions: Cultures of Despair

Most Islamic would-be martyrs not only share these beliefs but have also grown up in a culture of despair that leaves people vulnerable to the idea of martyrdom: they have little to lose. Eliminate the conditions of despair and you eliminate much of the breeding ground for terrorists. When the Bush administration speaks of eliminating terror, it does not appear to be talking about remedying cultures of despair and the social conditions that lead one to want to give up your life to martyrdom.

Princeton Lyman of the Aspen Institute has made an important proposal—that the world-wide anti-terrorist coalition being formed address the causal real-world conditions as well. Country by country, the conditions (both material and political) leading to despair need to be addressed, with a worldwide commitment to ending them. It should be done because it is a necessary part of addressing the causes of terrorism—and because it is right! The coalition being formed should be made into a long-term global institution for this purpose.

What about the first cause—the radical Islamic worldview itself. Military action won't change it. Social action won't change it. Worldviews live in the minds of people. How can one change those minds — and if not present minds, then future minds? The West cannot! Those minds can only be changed by moderate and liberal Muslims—clerics, teachers, elders, respected community members. There is no shortage of them. I do not know how well they are organized, but the world needs them to be well-organized and effective. It is vital that moderate and liberal Muslims form a unified voice against hate and, with it, terror. Remember that "taliban" means "student." Those that teach hate in Islamic schools must be replaced — and we in the West cannot replace them. This can only be done by an organized moderate, nonviolent Islam. The West may be able to help in some ways, but we alone are powerless to carry it out. We depend on the good will — as well as the courage and effectiveness — of moderate Islamic leaders. To gain it, we must show our good will by beginning in a serious way to address the social and political conditions that lead to despair.

But a conservative American government, thinking of the enemy as evil, will not take the primary causes seriously. They will only go after the enabling causes. But unless the primary causes are addressed, terrorists will continue to be spawned.

5

I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States. This is a very complex and complicated matter.

However difficult this vote may be, some of us must urge the use of restraint. Our country is in a state of mourning. Some of us must say, let us step back for a moment. Let us just pause for a minute and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.

I have agonized over this vote, but I came to grips with it today and I came to grips with opposing this resolution during the very painful yet very beautiful memorial service. As a member of the clergy so eloquently said, ''As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.''

I agree. But what is striking to me as a linguist is the use of negatives in the statement: "not prevent," "restraint" (inherently negative), "not spiral out of control," "not become the evil that we deplore.'' Friends are circulating a petition calling for "Justice without vengeance." "Without" has another implicit negative. It is not that these negative statements are wrong. But what is needed is a positive form of discourse.

There is one.

The central concept is that of "responsibility," which is at the heart of progressive/liberal morality (See Moral Politics). Progressive/liberal morality begins with empathy, the ability to understand others and feel what they feel. That is presupposed in responsibility — responsibility for oneself, for protection, for the care of those who need care, and for the community. Those were the values that we saw at work among the rescue workers in New York right after the attack.

Responsibility requires competence and effectiveness. If you are to deal responsibly with terrorism, you must deal effectively with all its causes: religious, social, and enabling causes. The enabling causes must be dealt with effectively. Bombing innocent civilians and harming them by destroying their country's domestic infrastructure will be counterproductive — as well as immoral. Responsibility requires care in the place of blundering overwhelming force.

Massive bombing would be irresponsible. Failure to address the religious and social causes would be irresponsible. The responsible response begins with joint international action to address all three: the social and political conditions and the religious worldview and the means with all due care.

6

The idealistic claim of the Bush administration is they intend to wipe out "all terrorism." What is not mentioned is that the US has systematically promoted a terrorism of its own and has been trained terrorists, from the contras to the mujahadeen to the Honduran death squads to the Indonesian military. Indeed, there are reports that two of the terrorists taking part in The Attack were trained by the US. Will the US government stop training terrorists? Of course not. It will deny that it does so. Is this duplicity? Not in terms of conservative morality and its view of Good versus Evil and lesser evils.

If the administration's discourse offends us, we have a moral obligation to change public discourse!

Be the change you want! If the US wants terror to end, the US must end its own contribution to terror. And we must also end terror sponsored not against the West but against others. We have made a deal with Pakistan to help in Afghanistan. Is it part of the deal that Pakistan renounce its own terrorism in Kashmir against India? I would be shocked if it were. The Bush foreign policy of self-interest does not require it.

The question must be asked. If that is not part of the deal, then our government has violated its own stated ideals; it is hypocritical. If the terrorism we don't mind — or might even like — is perpetuated, terrorism will not end and will eventually turn back on us, just as our support for the mujahadeen did.

We must be the change we want!

The foreign policy of moral norms is the only sane foreign policy. In the idea of responsibility for oneself, it is eminently practical. But through empathy and other forms of responsibility (protection, care, competence, effectiveness, community development), it would lead to international cooperation and a recognition of the reality of interdependence.

7

Where is the $40 billion coming from? Not from a rise in taxes. The sacrifices will not be made by the rich. Where then? The only available source I can think of is the Social Security "lockbox," which is now wide open. The conservatives have been trying to raid the Social Security fund for some time, and the Democrats had fought them off until now. A week ago, the suggestion to take $40 billion from the Social Security "surplus" would have been indefensible. Has it now been done — with every Democratic senator voting for it and all but one of the Democrats in Congress?

Think of it: Are your retirement contributions — and mine — are going to fight Bush's "war." No one dares to talk about it that way. It's just $40 billion, as if it came out of nowhere. No one says that $40 billion dollars comes from your retirement contributions. No one talks about increasing taxes. We should at least ask just where the money is coming form.

If the money is coming from social security, then Bush has achieved a major goal of his partisan conservative agenda — without fanfare, without notice, and with the support of virtually all Democrats.

Calling for war, instead of mere justice, has given the conservatives free rein. I fear it will only be a matter of time before they claim that we need to drill for oil in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge for national security reasons. Senator Murkowski has already proposed a rider to this effect on the appropriations bill for funding the war. If that most "pristine" place falls, they will use the national security excuse to drill and mine coal all over the country. The energy program will be pushed through as a matter of "national security." All social programs will be dismissed for lack of funds, which will be diverted to "national security."

Cheney has said that this war may never be completed. Newt Gingrich estimates at least four or five years, certainly past the 2004 election. With no definition of victory and no exit strategy, we may be entering a state of perpetual war. This would be very convenient for the conservative domestic agenda: The war machine will determine the domestic agenda, which will allow conservatives to do whatever they want in the name of national security.

The recession we are entering has already been blamed on The Attack, not on Bush's economic policies. Expect a major retrenchment on civil liberties. Expect any WTO protesters to be called terrorists and/or traitors. Expect any serious opposition to Bush's policies to be called traitorous.

Who has the courage to discuss domestic policy frankly at this time?

From: Nicholas Humphrey
Date: 9.20.01

The only sanity-preserving way to think about what happened on September 11th is as a 'natural disaster', in which human beings were caught up as tragic agents as well as tragic victims.

Had it been an earthquake, we would not have mourned the less, we would not have been any the less determined to prevent a re-occurrence. But, by now, we would have been energised by our capacity to explain, and on the back of this to make good and to overcome.

Our duty as scientists in response to the present crisis is no different. We must try to explain the shifting plates of human psychology and culture, and show why and how these can erupt in individual acts of such madness. This is not to recommend forgiveness — no one forgives a volcano or a hurricane — but it is to oppose any interest in retribution.

When the perpetrators are brought to trial — normal, less than 'infinitely just' human trial — there will be a single, but obvious, defence: that these pathetic human beings acted 'while the balance of the mind was disturbed'. We must try to understand just what this meant — and means.

From: Peter Von Sivers
Date: 9.20.01

The unspeakable events of Sept. 11 have resulted in inquiries from students, friends, and acquaintances about my reaction as a professor of Middle Eastern history. I did a brief summary (following below) which you might find of general interest also for readers of Edge because it summarizes new insights gained during the past fifteen years. Recent scholarship has subjected the history of Islamic origins to the same kind of historical questioning that scholars dealing with ancient Israel, early Zoroastrianism, and early Christianity are used to. Such a questioning, in which Islam is put into its historical context, improves our approach to contemporary Islamic religiosity.

Summary of New Insights On Early Islam and Their Contemporary Relevance

(1) Historically, very little is known about Muhammad, except that he preached what can be called an Abrahamic monotheism at the time of the Roman-Persian wars (603-630) which Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians interpreted according to their respective apocalyptic traditions. Both the Koran and Muhammad's biography are works dating with their beginnings to no earlier than the 690s. When the Syrian and northwest Arabian Arabs conquered their Mediterranean-Southwest Asian kingdom there was no developed Islam around about which anything can be said with certainty.

(2) The full-blown Islam as we know it today is the result of religious scholars writing in Iraq during the 800s and 900s and nostalgically projecting a pristine religious community back into the desert of Arabia. (There is no archaeological proof that Mecca existed before the Arab conquests.) This projection took place in a cosmopolitan, sophisticated Iraq in which wine poetry, Greek philosophy, and the Sassanian royal cult were freely celebrated. Religious scholars designed a utopian community in the past in opposition to the "worldly" caliphs, their court, and the empire at large, hoping that this community would eventually replace the "immoral" empire they abhorred.

(3) The Prophet biography and Koran have to be understood as projections of a post ex facto, utopian Islam into the Arabian desert, complete with exodus and golden age motifs. Both exodus (purity of the desert faith) and golden age (returning to the roots) are the defining elements of Sunni Islam. Although there is eschatology in Sunni Islam (the Islamic empire as the final successor of both Rome and Persia), Muslims superimposed apocalyptic and gnostic speculations only in the Shi'i Islam of later centuries. Usama bin Laden plays on literally interpreted, utopian Sunni exodus and golden age motifs when he wants to cleanse the infidels from Arabia.

(4) Obviously, it is possible to read the Koran and Prophet biography literally and believe that early Muslims killed Jews in Medina and gave unbelievers the choice between sword and Koran. But as critical, modern readers we have to interpret these verses as the result of polemical discussions among Jews, Christians, and emerging Muslims in Iraq during the 800s and 900s when the Arab conquests had long ended. There is no historical evidence of Jews in Medina or a Koran being around in the 620s and 30s. Such a critical interpretation, of course, is no different from that of the Torah and the New Testament, some books of which also bristle with martial passages and which we today view in their historical contexts. We have to free ourselves from the naive essentialist and unhistorical opinion that Christianity is pacific, Judaism passive, and Islam martial. At most, the Koran is polemical, but the same holds true for the seemingly so innocent Gospels.

(5) For further information I recommend the easily obtainable paperback by the Canadian Islamist Andrew Rippin, Muslims: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2001). For more on the non-existing Islam of the early 600s see Ibn Warraq, The Quest for the Historical Muhammad (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2000). See also G.R. Hawting, The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999). The best summary of our current historical knowledge of the seventh century is part 3 of Robert G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1997).

(6) Finally, concerning contemporary Islamic radicals. These radicals despise the West for what they consider the immorality, depravity, and dissoluteness of its mass culture. In their radicalism, they confound this mass culture with the underpinnings of modern scientific-industrial society, such as equality before the law, representative democracy, and economic freedom. They see both together as seamless, satanic perversions contrary to the golden age community of Mecca and Medina. Unfortunately, they don't find any political leaders or intellectuals in the Middle East courageous enough to explain to them the facts about trivial mass culture, serious institutional underpinnings (largely absent from Middle Eastern regimes anyway), and the utopian Islamic golden age.

From: Cliff Pickover
Date: 9.20.01

Now that we are alert for terrorism in the air, the next terrorist act will not come from the sky but through biological or chemical weapons in a public place, for example at Times Square when the New Year's ball drops.

However, for the moment, let's focus on air travel. We've come to realize that no amount of airport security with respect to carry-on items will prevent a high jacking. Three strong men armed with ball point pens and shouting that they have shampoo bottles full of anthrax could be successful in a highjacking. In this respect, it is not useful to overly restrict the nature of items carried onto planes.

Instead, we should add a voice-activated system in the cockpit such that when the pilot says the word "Zanzibar," the plane can't be highjacked. The code word also triggers an emergency alert to air traffic controllers. The plane is sent into autopilot mode. Other biometric devices, such as fingerprint readers, might be useful.

If the cockpit is to be physically isolated, a video monitor must be installed in the cockpit so that the pilots can see the cabin and flight attendants — to check for misdoings and also to avoid the feeling of extreme isolation that one might encounter when locked into a small compartment for many hours. Similarly, the flight attendants should have access to a monitor so that they can see the pilots during conversations, which would also reduce the feeling of imprisonment and isolation.

We should also put a toilet (or other waste collection system) in the cockpit so that the pilots need not leave the cockpit.

In all cases, it is sad that convenience and personal liberty will be sacrificed — while prejudice is increased. Will four men named Mohamad ever be allowed on the same plane?

From: Terry Bristol
Date: 9.20.01

Attack and defense strategies are limited short-term responses. Given that there are 10,000 symbolic targets, largely indefensible, and a number of decentralized terrorist networks, these short-term strategies — while worth doing to some extent — can not be expected, by themselves, to produce an acceptable long-term solution.

These short-term strategies have the added risk of placing discretion in the hands of those (military, CIA, FBI) who to a large extent created the situation and who stand to profit from its escalation. As we provide such people with discretion over our resources and freedoms we should expect them to be what they are.

A colleague in the State Department, who taught politics at West Point for a few years, emphasized to me the divergence of State and Defense Department mentalities. The former, at its best, asks why, and move to create a positive win-win relationship with the main stream of the opponent's base.

Clinton gave a talk to a Jewish group in DC just after he left office. He spoke of two types of wounds. One should be left alone because it is healing. That is Northern Ireland — still difficult but healing. It is healing because the two sides have developed economic ties where each sees the success of the other as contributing to their success. The other type of wound needs intervention because it is not healing and could lead to catastrophic failure. That is the Israeli-Palestinian situation. Clinton pointed out that advancing technology made it unlikely that attack an defense strategies will succeed — for either side.

This latter type of wound is symbolic of the larger global situation that breeds terrorism.

The only realistic long-term strategy is to move to a new global socio-economic strategy, a new social contract between the developed and developing world. This is in everyone's interest. The wounds will — with difficulty — heal.

Without a convincing initiative along these lines the prospect is for the global stage to recapitulate the last forty years of the Israeli — Palestinian conflict — only at a more painful and destructive level.

Victor Klemperer's harrowing diaries of life as a Jew in Nazi Dresden have been my intermittent bedside reading for many months. In the end, Klemperer and his wife escaped deportation and death because the firestorm bombing of Dresden set them free, but only after a dozen years of living with the terror. This week I find it hard to pick him up again because I suddenly feel a small piece of what he felt — a quite impersonal fear that the world I have come to live in is more threatening than I had surmised.

Most Americans now alive have gone their whole lives believing they had something approaching a free pass to escape the miseries of war, terror, and want. Now a fragment of terror easily recognizable to those who survived the Nazis has suddenly torn a strip off that free pass. What now?

Threat and reaction are the commonplace headlines, and measured, decisive response to threats at every level is obviously the order of the day. But we should look for opportunity as well. Some will look for opportunity picking up bargains at the stock market, but there are larger opportunities as well, and two are of great importance:

1. One unexpected effect of World War II was to leave behind a world that found the way to build a far more global and integrated society than had ever existed before. The "Cold War" distracted attention from this effort and impeded it in parts of the world, but it is undeniable that peoples who once hated each other from near or from far (Germany/France, US/Japan) or merely had little to do with each other (Euroamerica/East Asia) now coexist, cooperate, and help build one another's prosperity and well being. We pay now the price for incomplete globalization, for leaving one whole swath of the world poor and angry. However the military history of the next five months or years proceeds, the deeper opportunity is to bring together cultures that still live on different planets and find the modus vivendi for them. That such reconciliation will happen is to me certain; anxiety is in order for the short term (the cost of reaching such reconciliation) not the long. Building that future can and should begin immediately, and many can participate.

2. The technologies of communication mediated by information technology give unprecedented opportunity to support the growth and development of collaborative community. At the same time, the frenzies of media reaction to public events remind us that building the public discourse is a positive task that we all share parts of. The culture of frivolity that has been possible in our heedlessness is, let it be admitted, a delightful thing, but we have now the opportunity to add to the discourse of frivolity a more sustained and sustaining measure of the discourse of responsibility and the long view. In global communication of that sort is the best antidote to the waves of irrational anxiety that many do and will experience.

Best website for this moment? The Long Now Foundation (www.longnow.org) takes the broadest and longest view of human possibility. If your work is not to make a direct contribution to the aversion of new misery (and for most of it is not), then the old, common work of building community and possibility for ourselves and others takes on new and rich meaning. In that spirit, I find myself at the tail end of the day this week reading Proust instead of Klemperer.

I continue to think science is wonderful and that in principle it really should help us to understand human nature and the human condition. But I continue to be disappointed by the contributions of scientists to this end; even outstanding scientists.

Thus Martin Rees is surely right to suggest that in the future biotech buffs might wreak enormous destruction just as computer nerds do now with their viruses. But what's new? The Old Testament tells of miscreants poisoning wells, with consequences way out of proportion to the effort. (Why doesn't this happen more often?). In principle, anyone could wipe out a city by putting a judiciously diseased cow into the reservoir (or perhaps a duck, notorious bearers of botulism). Genghis Khan was among scores of highly-charged young men who at various times have laid waste large proportions of the known world with bands of horsemen, and by setting fire to crops and cities (with the near certainty of epidemic to follow: one of the principal 'dogs of war'). A question for science, sensu lato, is why does this happen? What conditions predispose to such outrages? Can such conditions be recognised, and forestalled? Evolutionary psychology should be able to contribute; the deep answers are surely not to be found in the particularities of specific religions or ideologies, though some will obviously prove to be more conducive than others. To reduce such outrage, I suspect that a lot of social restructuring is necessary, rather than a simple increase in restrictions: renewed bursts of 'clamping down'.

But when Richard Dawkins offers thoughts with an evolutionary theme, they are less than convincing. It simply is not the case that young men agree to kill themselves on behalf of the causes they believe in because they are too ugly to attract women; and to suggest that they do so only because they have been brain-washed to believe in harps and virgins after death is really too ludicrous. Many a brave and handsome young man from the kinds of schools that Richard went to himself, and many, many more from more ordinary backgrounds, 'laid down their lives' in the two world wars, simply from a belief that their way of life, and their children and families, were seriously threatened and were worth dying for — and indeed that there was no tolerable alternative. (This is good modern Darwinism too: a variation on the theme of kin selection). Perhaps the brave young men were deluded in their beliefs, and perhaps not, but that is why they did it. Many knowingly committed suicide, and they were called heroes. Polish pilots in the Battle of Britain, their homelands gone, are reported to have flown their planes into German bombers when their ammunition had run out. Many people in the modern world in all kinds of contexts feel as desperate as those Polish pilots did: they have seen too much horror, and suffered too much privation. They see no way forward except to attack what they perceive to be the root cause of their problems, even at the cost of their own lives: and some, at least, perceive the enemy to be American capitalism. Writing the New York highjackers off as madmen deluded by religious memes is neither accurate not helpful. It is simply a random insult, like calling them (ludicrously) 'cowards', as Bush and Blair have done. This is the kind of analysis that gets science a bad name.

Paul Davies's purely technical contribution surely could be helpful — rather like the technology that prevents the bank staff getting at the serious money, so that raids become pointless. So is Kevin Kelly's comment that knives may slip the guard of cruise missiles (though I have heard this from several quarters. It's common sense rather than science).

On the whole, though, the comments so far reinforce Churchill's (I think it was) adage that 'scientists should be on tap but not on top' — i.e., they come up with some good wheezes, but generally say nothing very much that enhances what might be called wisdom. That is a pity. The challenge remains.

Edge question: What next?

I assume that 'What Next?" means: how can we avoid this sort of thing in the future? There are two approaches. One is to do with preventing terrorism at the site of action; the other to preventing it at its origin.

The first is easy. Here's what we do:

The job of any useful anti-terrorist organization should be to find opportunities for terrorist acts before they happen and close any loopholes. The best way to do this is to set up an autonomous government — or even world — agency to use teams of 'terrorists' to devise, in secret, schemes for mayhem which stop short at the final fatal deed. It could be called World Agency Resisting Terrorism (WART).

Their activities would be unknown to the CIA or the FBI, they would go undercover, they would infiltrate, they would do all the things terrorists do — stopping just short of killing the pilot, dropping real anthrax, setting off the bomb, or whatever. If they reach that final point without being detected, they declare themselves and the next phase begins. An official commission of inquiry will investigate the 'disaster', calculate likely casualties, point the finger at the culprits who failed to prevent it and order new measures to be taken to increase security. They will also determine massive fines to be paid by whoever has failed to prevent the 'attack' (usually large companies) — through lax security procedures, errors of detection, etc, with the fine related to the projected loss of life. Also, the CIA, the FBI, and anyone else whose job it was to detect them and who failed will be punished in some way — sackings, penalties, etc. The fines (of which there will be many in the early days of the system) will go towards the costs of the Agency, and pay for an exhaustive investigation of the sort that is usually carried after a real disaster. Conversely, if the 'terrorists' fail, there will be an inquiry to determine where credit lies for the terrorism being thwarted and rewards will be given, again in proportion to the likely lives saved.

The same principle can be applied to man-made disaster prevention. Power station design and operation, chemical factories, aircraft and other transportation technology, bridge design, all have the possibility to cause massive loss of human life. In this case, a different agency, Action To Avoid Catastrophe (ATAC), will carry out its activities openly along the following lines: it will identify some major public project or technology and investigate its operations exhaustively. It will then attempt to devise a scenario, however unlikely, that could result in disaster. (The Three Mile Island Disaster Inquiry is a model of such an investigation — the problem is it should have been carried out before the event.) If such a scenario is impossible to devise, the company or organization is rewarded for good practice. If a remotely plausible sequence of events is spelt out that could result in disaster the company is fined, massively.

Now the second, more difficult, approach:

Violence of the sort we are trying to avoid is not, in the end, caused only by American power and oppression, Israeli occupation, religious antagonism, the evils of capitalism. Such grievances are necessary but not sufficient. After all there are many people who endure these without strapping explosives to themselves or bombing buildings. There is always an additional factor, almost too trite to mention — the willingness of a person to use physical violence against other people with whom he disagrees. To reduce violence we need to understand this. And, in various ways, we do already. There almost certainly exist important and useful research findings from different academic disciplines that might not be generally known to other academics or to the world at large. In particular, there may be practical measures, as yet untried, that could be taken to reduce violent behaviour at every level from the individual to the state, starting in childhood.

It may well be that violent behaviour — man against man, man against woman, man and woman against child, men against other men within their society, one race against another, one nation against another — has common roots at whichever level it operates. Those roots may well lie in the way individuals react to threat or perceived threat either from the object of their violence or elsewhere. Thus, even international conflict may have its roots in the personal responses of statesmen and the interaction of those responses with the psychological makeup of the individual members of the state. If such common factors exist, they will more easily become apparent through the exchange of views of a wide range of academics, the wider the better.

The insights we need do not necessarily require new research findings. Neuroanatomy and physiology, sociobiology, experimental psychology and psychiatry, anthropology and sociology, political science, and analytical psychology — all of these disciplines have traditionally looked at the roots of violent behaviour and there are research findings which can enlighten us.

There are many questions whose answers might help:

Neuroanatomy and neurophysiology — where are aggressive impulses located in the brain? Are there differences in anatomy and physiology between normal and abnormally violent people? What do we know of the mediators of anger and violent behaviour in the brain? Are there ethically justified ways of reducing violent behaviour, both pathological and non-pathological, using this knowledge? Is it significant that the sexes differ in aggression?

Sociobiology — does inappropriate violence against members of the same species exist in other animals? What can we tell about violent behaviour from animal studies? What is the evolutionary history of aggressive behaviour? Has it evolved because it has a function?

Psychology and Psychiatry — are there "criminal types" or only criminal behaviour? What makes a violent criminal and how can it be prevented? What are the origins of intrafamily violence, a major contributor to the toll of murder in developed societies? What are the mechanisms that operate in the case of child-batterers, rapists and wife-beaters that are absent in the rest of us when faced with similar temptations? What links are there between childhood circumstances and subsequent violent behaviour? Is there an innate tendency in humans not to harm others? If so, what circumstances lead to a reduction or elimination of this tendency? If not, is it only the law that stops everyone killing everyone else who stands in their way? Are there experiments that suggest ways of modifying violent behavior?

Anthropology and Sociology — is inappropriate violence against fellow-humans present in every society at a similar level? What can we learn from those societies that are less violence-prone than ours? What are the mechanisms that operate to allow representatives of one group (race, religion, political party) to exhibit and express hostility to another, often resulting in extremes of violent behaviour? What role does the ability or inability to identify with the objects of our hostility play in enabling violent behaviour towards others? Are there useful ways of resolving or preventing disputes?

Political science — is there such a thing as a "national character'? Are some nations more aggressive than others? If so why? Do some nations deal more successfully with the resolution of conflict than others? Is there any correlation between the nature of different governing systems and the belligerence of the state?

Analytical psychology — are there links between the behaviour and personalities of statesmen and the aggressiveness and violence of the countries they run? Does differential perception of threat play a part in people's threshold of violence?

Out of the answers to such questions, some known already, can emerge a consensus for action. It would be too much to hope that what scientists say is likely to be true will automatically be accepted by politicians and the public. It hasn't often in the past. But perhaps a new mood born of need will operate to make that acceptance happen in this case, and lead to knowledge-based actions rather than knee-jerk responses. It will be a slow but important process and won't lead to an immediate violence-free society. But we might get a reduced violence generation and eventually a low violence society.

Some random thoughts:

(1) I agree with Kevin Kelly's contrarian take on the situation. If anything, the brilliance (can I use that word pejoratively?) of this attack was in its implicit "fuck you" to the world's greatest technocracy — as if to say: we will use your own technology to destroy the very icons of your technological hubris, and we will accomplish this with nothing more than a piece of plastic and a disdain for the sanctity of life and self-preservation that you hold so dear. After we punish the perpetrators of this heinous crime, I think this country needs to engage in a deep rethinking of the values that underlie our society today. We seem to conflate our technological supremacy, our consumerism and exultation of the free market, with moral supremacy and military imperviousness.

(2) I am deeply perplexed by our culture's recent use of the words "terrorism" and "terrorist", which now seem to be at the core of an emerging definition of a breathtakingly broad and unprecedented vision of America's foreign policy (so much for Bush isolationism). Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz's statement that we will "end states that support terrorism", Colin Powell's reformulated version — "we're after ending terrorism" — and similar statements by our nation's political and spiritual leadership place the onus on our government to provide a precise definition of terms. Is bin Laden a terrorist? What about the Taliban government? Saddam Hussein? The Pakistani government? Hamas? The Palestinian Authority? The Israeli government? Chechen rebels? The Russian government? KLA-supported Macedonians? Bosnian Serbs? Michigan militiaman? Radical anti-abortion activists? Is "terrorism" a code-word for Arab militancy?

I'm not stating a view, I'm just asking the question. Even left-leaning people now speak of destroying terrorism "root and branch". What are the roots of terrorism? How far and how deeply do they extend? We can all see the leaves and some of the branches, but the roots are less visible to the naked eye, and they are undoubtedly where the real problem lies. So far as I know, there is no substantive, high-profile national dialogue about this.

This time the answers are not all in the hi-tech world of physics and electronics, but in psychology, sociology, knowledge-assembling. to the extent physics and computers can be harnessed to serve those areas, hi-tech can do a job. but the human factor , the human thinking , dedication, perseverance; awareness , belief in the cause, will be much more important then just the sheer hi-tech.

Fighting terror on board of an airplane will be many a time , much too late.

As to Dawkins' article, people were always willing to sacrifice their lives, more often then one may think. They are doing it in war, elite commando units, while they are combating crime, or rescuing other people, or in some extreme sports (mount climbing, car racing ), or even in medicine and some scientific endeavors, or in pursuing political causes. It is a subject for group dynamics, education , and strong motivation and inner belief system. Indeed in all these cases it seems to be a calculated risk and not a certain risk. but the gap between calculated risk and sure risk. is probably in the minds of some people more quantitative and less qualitative, then we tend to think.

Managing Fear. While remaining inspired to live and learn.

How do we manage our deepest fears and avoid falling headfirst into the pit of futility. Clearly, "reality" has a new face to it that our nation will have a very hard time facing, and understanding, much less explaining away.

As we all struggle to make sense of the surrealness of last week, we may find some comfort in Marie Curie's words which still reverberate in my mind: "Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood." It's critical we understand the potential of people and cultures living with a certain connectivity. Without this understanding, we're destined to live aching in a state of chronic angst and nausea, like Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist character Antoine Roquentin who was 'horrified at his own existence.'

Aristotle once remarked, "Nature does nothing uselessly." Human nature, on the other hand....In his cynical novel Hocus Pocus, Vonnegut sums up the entire history of 20th century as, "The complicated futility of ignorance." Wouldn't it figure he defined High Art as "making the most of futility." When our sense of reality blurs with futility, I fear we'll experience more of the same migraine dramas as we did on September 11th and 12th and 13th....

I'd like to know how we can honestly address our childrens' fears about the ultimate bogeymen: those invisible, mindless army of suicide bombers who could strike anywhere and at anytime using any number of weapon systems from their pirated arsenal of NBC warfare tools. The possibilities are terrifying to the point of inducing paralysis. For many people today, this terror is as visceral as any flight-or-flight response everyone "knows by heart" because it's something we all feel without even thinking about it.

How do we help ourselves and our families and our local-global community deal with these truly disruptive feelings? Who's confident about using the old "crisis management" techniques to rationally think-things-through in dealing with the most irrational, unthinkable things?

That's what I would really appreciate hearing from any group of thinkers who feel they have a grasp on things and can help us get a better grip on our new reality. It seems we're all clinging to the edges of an unknown world that is shaking even our desire to know it.

Somehow we're going to have to face the emergent reality behind Martin Rees's reflection on those terrors to come from under the horizon of our fears. Because they will come. As Martin and others have noted: 'biological advances will offer new 'weapons' that could cause world-wide epidemics, etc; moreover such catastrophes could be caused by a single individual.' I refuse to abandon my optimism, or succumb to pure pessimism. I believe there is a realistic way of handling this new world of perils and risks. But we're all going to have to think, work, live and act together very differently than we're currently doing. And if we choose not to, then we may as well fold up our tents and lives, and join Albert Schweitzer who saw it all coming when he said: "Man has lost his ability to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth."

Educating Arabs, Educating Ourselves

Why are these people so angry at us? It is odd, but that question is rarely voiced. It is all too easy to say that they are crazy, but we might wonder, even so, how it is that we incurred their wrath. They don't attack Italy or Sweden. Anyone who has spent significant time abroad can tell you that in most countries there is love-hate relationship with the U.S. Most of our citizens fail to understand why this is the case and instead back mistaken notions of patriotism, waving flags, and talking about bombing people who don't like us. It really isn't all about the U.S. support of Israel. That is too easy an answer. We need to look for more difficult answers and do the very thing the terrorists want us to do, reexamine the role of the U.S. in the international arena. Just because that is what the terrorists want us to do, does not make it the wrong thing to do.

There is a technological answer to the hijacking problem of course. The problem is that the technological answer comes with a price. It is quite feasible to create a national identity card and have that be used to check in at the airport. From that point, no silly security questions need be asked. Computer programs can be created that establish exactly the patterns and likely actions of any passenger and determine what questions if any should be asked by the airline personnel and whether the passenger is a risk of any sort. Airlines could refuse to allow on board people who don't fit their safety profiles. This is easy to do, but it would require installation of foolproof identity software (such as retinal scans) and make available to the government the complete whereabouts and intentions of every citizen. We may not be willing to give up the anonymity that many of us cherish. On the other hand we may have to.

The biggest problem is education. When our citizens chat on the Internet about how badly they feel, they do not become better informed. They still think that killing a Sikh store owner is a patriotic action. They still don't know where Afghanistan is and what its role might be. They believe that killing one man will end our problem. Much of our current problems stem from how badly educated the public is. This, of course is even more of an issue in the poorer Islamic countries. If education were a priority in this country, and by this I do not mean silly attempts to raise meaningless test scores, but real attempts to get people to think long and hard about issues that affect their lives, then maybe this wouldn't have happened. If we created high quality on - line courses, for example, if Harvard and Yale and other universities took seriously their role as world educators, then perhaps what they built could be exported to the rest of the world. If it were not done on a for profit basis, but were offered for very little money, then people in poor countries might qualify for better jobs and might be able to reason more adroitly about the complex issues they face. Instead we leave their education to mullahs or their angry fathers in law. While we, as a nation export television, movies and blue jeans, we do not export quality education. Why not? Because for the most part we aren't even interested in that kind of education for our own citizens. No government agency is concerned with establishing reasonable curricula for students (instead we rely on one that was established in 1892!) or in assessing how well we are doing in creating a nation of employable graduates who can reason critically. Instead we focus on meaningless measures and allow schools to do whatever they like as long as they stay within those measures. The private universities are interested in the education of the elite and no one looks out for the average guy. But it is the average guys who vote, the average guys who fight, and the average guys who sometimes act out bizarre notions of retribution.