2001 : WHAT NOW?

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."

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.

FRANKFURT. President George W. Bush did not say what was in the script. One could even write that he did not say what Americans until now believed one should say at such a moment. He has withstood the pressure of succumbing to the collective consciousness and — if one interprets the impressions correctly — by doing so he has reinvented a piece of America. His address will do more than bolster international solidarity with the United States. Despite his allusions to Pearl Harbor and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Bush's breaking the mold heralds a changed perception of America's role. His speech shows that it is no mere phrase to call the coming struggle a "struggle for culture." This speech could become something like a founding document of this cultural renewal.

The screenplay, this all-powerful reality script that has long been creating reality in its image, hails from Hollywood and the literary-industrial complexes of the past 50 years. It is engrained not just in the minds of politicians, generals and journalists; it has been rooted in the imagination of the entire world, including, as we have seen, in that of the terrorists, as a globalized role model. They produced their bloody Hollywood exactly as they found it in the American imagination. In fact, as every detail shows, down to preparatory visits to the gym, they set it in motion like a machine. And they believed that everything would happen the way it is set out in Hollywood's scripts.

According to the script, this is what should have happened after the attack: A government, surrounded by bunkers real and imagined, fearfully and hastily sets in motion a fateful mechanism that engulfs the world in flames. It was hardly coincidence that CNN used the apocalyptic title "The Day After" for its coverage. In Hollywood's imagination, in the 1980s and '90s the attack on the Pentagon alone would have unleashed the big strike.

Whatever the future brings, this much is certain now: It is the U.S. government and not, as European fantasy would have it, concerned world opinion that is urging patience. The U.S. president is not dealing with the crisis sitting in a bunker, as Tom Clancy and Hollywood played it, but by visiting a mosque a few days after the assault. The United States is not forcing conspiracy theories upon the world, taking the big powers into a world war — another stereotype — instead, it is trying to forge an alliance with Russia and China.

In other words, until the destruction of the World Trade Center, that is to say, for as long as the Islamist terrorists had the initiative, everything was running according to a Hollywood script. But only until that point. The Americans are putting an end to the movie. And they are also putting an end to any form of predictability, even by the notoriously anti-American groups in Europe. For the Islamic terrorists, nothing could be more disruptive to strategic planning than this change of script.

"It will be a showdown." These words were spoken yesterday not by Bush but by the Taleban's ambassador to Pakistan. This was the moment when the ambassador, deliberately speaking not in any Afghan language but in Arabic, used a piece of Wild West terminology in a renewed attempt to focus the Arab world on the comic-book version of America, which yesterday became history.

As the Arab world becomes unable to interpret the West, it would make sense for us to reassess our own comic-book versions of the attackers and their leaders. Those who attacked New York were not displaced, starving, misguided youths. The men who studied in Hamburg were all from middle-class backgrounds. Their parents appear to be enlightened, almost secularized citizens. The attackers were also far from ascetic. From the German girlfriend to the drinking bout before the attack, everything points to a type of global terrorist whose ideology consists essentially of nothing but murdering other people.

After Sept. 11, we know that in addition to this death wish, it also consists of planning and executing mass killings of civilians. Who can seriously doubt that such a domestic frontline will open up in Germany too? Groups like the irrelevant Association of German Writers (to which hardly any writers now belong) — that can think of nothing better than to warn against a rerun of the nationwide pogroms of November 1938, this time with burning mosques — are following a script of alarming stupidity.

The enemies of the open society know no more about that society than what its own cultural industry throws on the world market. In Bush's speech, they have now suffered the first powerful counterattack. They cannot read the signs, and these children of the wealthy classes merely imitate the showdown they know from the movies. An open society reacts differently, with more skill, intelligence and patience. 

But it is also true that our society itself expected this least of all. Its image of immediate escalation, inspired by the Cold War and still often promoted by narrow-minded politicians and generals, no longer applies. This does not necessarily mean the crisis will not escalate. But it will no longer do so for the reasons laid down in the familiar plot. There is no script. 

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.

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." 
 

However, Arquilla likes the idea of understanding how the network works by using clandestine technical collection. For instance, he says, when any computer user surfs on the Web — looking for travel tickets, say — more often than not a piece of software, called a cookie, is transmitted to his computer. The device monitors his every move and reports back to some database what he's done.

Now, Arquilla says, "think of something much more powerful than cookies." They exist, he says. One way to use them is by creating "honey pots." This involves identifying Web sites used by activists or setting up a Web site that will attract them, and seeding them with these intelligent software agents. When the activists check in, they can't leave without taking with them a piece of software that allows you to backtrack, getting into at least one part of the enemy network. "That likely gives you his/her all channel connections, and maybe even some hints about hubs or the direction of some links," says Arquilla.

There are other possibilities.

"You know those little cameras that some people have on top of their monitors? Let me just say that it is entirely possible to activate those and operate them and look through them without the machine being turned on," he says.

Software also exists that "allows you to reconstruct every single keystroke. One after the other. Why is that important? If you do find the right machine, you can reconstruct everything that happens. Even with unbreakable encryption, you have all the keystrokes.".

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."

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.

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.

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.

Oppressive Islamic fanaticism is in part a recent development - perhaps from the 1970s. Before then intellectual youth were modernists, but in the 70s political Islamism became dominant in many countries. Perhaps this is related to the loss of confidence in Western society among the Western media elites and among Western youth, at least as depicted in the media.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The first thing Edge must do is to emphasise the obvious: there is no "technical fix" for terrorism. Terrorists fit into normal society, are trusted by their colleagues and then they betray that trust. Until so much is known of how the human brain thinks that it will be possible to read out people's secret thoughts by some non-existent non-invasive technique, diagnosing the condition of "terrorist" is science-fiction. In my opinion, it will always be so.

The second is to insist that we all use words more carefully. That is not a plea for political correctness but for accuracy and politeness. We are not embarked on a "war" because, as others have pointed out, no enemy has been identified. The phrase "muslim terrorist" means a terrorist who happens also to be a muslim, but gives offence to muslims when the two words appear cemented together. Yet our goal in what lies ahead should be to drive a wedge between the terrorists and the wider communities to which they belong. (How shall we feel if it turns out that not all those behind the destruction of the WTC were muslims?) But we should be unafraid of saying that the Koranic concepts of jihad and fatwah are incompatible with the tolerance and the rule of law on which Western Europe and North America have prided themselves (not always correctly) since the ending of the crusades.

Third, we must urge consistency. There is a chilling similarity between the breakdown of the rule of law on 11 September and the illegality with which single-issue NGOs often set out to dramatise their aims, by "liberating" laboratory animals or pulling up GM crops.

Fourth, the campaign against terror must be made internationally constitutional as soon as possible. There are obvious difficulties; not all members of the coalition now being assembled have equal regard for human rights (and even the United States still practices capital punishment). The United Nations spans an even broader spectrum.

It will be disastrous if the United States becomes the sole source of strategy in a long campaign extending over decades. That will only reinforce convictions (however wrong-headed) that its undisputed military and economic power is used exclusively for its own self-interest and which may have contributed to the attack on the WTC. What is needed is a consortium of governments sharing US values ("liberty and the pursuit of happiness", for example, but not religiosity) yet able by openness and deliberate demeanour to persuade the world that it is acting in the world's interests. Is that too much to hope for?

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.

There is no doubt that religion played a key role in the attacks of Nov 11, but in our response to this tragedy we must not make the mistake of demonizing religious belief or believers. The weekend after the attacks Muslim commentator Ziauddin Sardar (a philosopher of science now living in London) wrote a superb piece in the Independent in which he explained the real meaning of the Islamic term "Jihad." As he pointed out it has nothing to do with suicide bombers. "Jihad", he explained, is a term which implies the quest within each individual to live a just life. The men who flew the planes into the WTC and the Pentagon had a profoundly corrupted interpretation of this term, and Sardar, like so many other Muslims, is appalled at the twisting of this essentially personal and peaceful concept. Likewise, Sardar stressed that paradise for Muslims "is not a business transaction" nor "a brothel." The idea (much repeated in the press) that these men were buying their way into paradise — complete with 72 attendent virgins — is nowhere supported by the Koran, according to Sardar, who rightly condemns this debased spiritual accounting.

The men of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network do not represent, as some on the Edge list have suggested, the "inherent irrationality" of religion, but rather the face of religion at its most corrupted. Islam is not the only religion to have produced this face. Think of the Crusades — one of the bloodiest and most horrific episodes in world history, when tens of thousands of innocent Muslims were slaughtered in the name of the Christian God. Yes religion does at times efflouresce into terror — and even terrorism (think also of the religious fundamentalists in this country who are killing doctors who perform abortions) — but that is by no means the only face of religion. The notion that religious belief is inherently irrational and that religious believers are inherently prone to irrational acts is not only arrogant, but also dangerous, for it denies the immense amount of supremely rational thinking that has over many millenia been produced by religious thinkers the world over. To those who claim Osama bin Laden as the face of religion I would counter with the names Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Mahatma Ghandi and Mother Teresa, all people, driven by deep religious feeling, who have fought heroically for justice and equality.

When considering our response to the events of Sept 11 it seems to me that one thing we who love science must also address is not only to role of religion but that of science itself. Religious fanaticism (among other factors) may indeed propel Osama bin Laden but science has made possible the weapons that bought him to power. One of the questions we must now address is why there are so many forms of weaponry in the world and why those weapons are apparently so easily available. Why for example in a country like Afgahnistan, where millions of people are without adequate food supplies, is the country awash with arms? Why is it that in the world today, when 780 million people are living on the edge of starvation, that automatic guns, missiles and even fighter planes are available to every two-bit insurgent? Why, moreover, do we in the developed world continue to spend such vast amounts of our national budgets on the production of ever more weapons of ever more lethal effectiveness — weapons which, inevitably, trickle out of our control and into the hands of our "enemies"? The Taliban might be flying the MIG's but they certainly did not design them? The landmines that seed Afghanistan —and Cambodia and large parts of Africa — were not developed by these poor and poorly educated peoples, but by the well-educated nations of the north — including the USA. In short, we must deal with the issue of supply, where we are inherently implicated.

Physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, cryptographers, engineers, biotechnologists — large numbers of scientists from all these fields contribute directly or indirectly to the development of weapons. Scientists do not of course mass produce these weapons but without the basic R&D such weapons would not be producable at all. In the wake of September 11, the US administration has called for a huge increase in military spending. That will mean the production of more even weapons and more scientists will be implicated in the development of these. In response to the question What Now?, I suggest that one thing we need is a concerted response from the scientific community against any such move.

Science, like religion, is a double edged sword — neither inherently good nor inherently evil, but rather a tool in the hands of its users. If Osama bin Laden's fundamentalist brand of Islam is a perversion of that fairth, I would suggest that so too it is a perversion of the "faith" of science to lend that faith to the production of landmines, napalm, cluster bombs, biological weapons and other such attrocties of war. If we in the scientific community can send any message at this time of crisis I suggest it should be that our "faith" will not be co-opted to the service of mass destruction.

The Taliban are kind of like Nazis to the Afghanis, but we should remember that while the Nazis had resistance and passive obedience among the Germans, they also had supporters. And so do the Taliban. But it's true most of the Afghanis, like the Germans, are just getting screwed.

The other important point is that the Taliban are not bin Laden, and bin Laden not the Taliban. bin Laden is a foreigner who is barely tolerated by most rural Afghanis, since the Afghanis are very xenophobic. I think bin Laden is far more sophisticated, complex, and cosmopolitan than the Taliban. Few Taliban have ever left their home province. bin Laden is a world savvy.

For another thing, he is brilliantly creative, and known among his supporters as 'imaginative." You can't say that about the Taliban. His idea of using American know-how to bomb itself, using no resources of his own, is sheer genius.

He is one of the few Islamics to bridge the great cultural gulf between and among the Arabs. Remember that the Afghanis are NOT Arabs. They are Caucasians, their language is "Indo-European" and they are culturally Persians. The Afghanis don't even like Arabs. Yet bin Laden is able to speak to and appeal to them as well as North Africans, Lebanese, Egyptians, Iraqis, Palestinians, Iranians, Pakistanis, Kashmiris ‹ which is simply remarkable. More so, he has bridge the religious differences among the Muslims, although he still has a way to go. Just getting Shiite and Suni Muslims in the same room is itself a remarkable achievement.

That fact that bin Laden appeals to married, 43-year old residents of America with pilot licenses willing to give their lives, says to me there is something large and non-marginal about this. bin Laden may be Hitler, but it does no good to think of Hitler, or bin Laden, as "fringe" or even as a terrorist. This is a main stream, middle of the road skirmish.

Radical Islam will become the new communism, if it isn't that already. It has a deep appeal, even to those subjugated to it. There are aspects about that, even supporters don't like and can't stand, but they will submit to it because they believe it is better overall than the alternative of "western capitalism."

And like communism it will be very hard to eradicate it, should we attempt to. The Arab countries we are now asking to take sides, will probably take sides with us, but this will kill and maim them because they are essentially taking sides against many of their own citizens, who may be better organized and committed than the government itself.

The key question for me is: will this revolutionary style ‹ a sort of mafia, suicidal, networked, globally guerilla insurgency ‹ be imported by other non Muslim radicals? Will bin Laden become the Che Guevera of this century? Will the resident antipathy towards America in other spheres be cast in the same style? Will all anti-global-capitalism become clones of bin Laden?

Like communism this can spread. And like communism I think it's a very bad idea in practice, though it sounds good in theory. So I am in favor of halting it, and I believe that it needs to be combated early and often.

But the danger of radical Islam becoming the new communism is that anyone who is not against them becomes branded a communist, or "terrorist," themselves. That worries me because I am not so eager to label bin Laden a "tinpot terrorist." He is not second rate, and he may not even be a terrorist. This is a new kind of war. There has been no demands made, like in most terrorism. There is nothing we have that they want. Their intent is not to terrorize. This is only a side product. Their intent is to destroy the prevailing mono-system. But they are not a state government, but a pan-national network that is growing. We've done little to eradicate them in 20 years. They are stronger now then ever before.

At first I thought that the World Trade airbombing would need to be followed through by another attack to have lasting meaning, but as the depth and sophistication of the network of the radicals is revealed I think we have already reached a critical moment. I think we need a new framework for understanding them. I would ban the use of the words "terrorists" and "terrorism." A better old word is "revolutionary."

Our chief concern should be that there is nothing we have they want. They don't want recognition. They don't want our trade. They don't want our culture. They don't want our aspirations ‹ democracy, free choice, high technology. They don't want our values. They don't want our wealth.

Actually, they would like our literacy (for males) and health care, but that is not enough. I think we need to enlarge western civilization so that we have something to offer them that they want. For all their differences, the Chinese and other Asians share aspirations with us. They would like to have much that we have. This is true of Latin America and even Africa to some extent. They want it in their own way, and on their own terms, and with their own improvements, but there is a sense of a common goal.

The Radical Islamics don't share that goal. And for the first time since communism, there is a competing destiny in the world. It is not the end of history as far as they are concerned. We in the west look at radical Islam and blink in disbelief that anyone could possibly want this? Are you serious? Yes. They are as serious as the World Trade Towers. Does it work in practice? Well the few examples we have (Afghanistan, Iran, etc.) do not give us much hope. But it took many decades for the practicality of communism to sink in.

There were plenty of bombs dropped and people killed in western capitalism's battle against communism. But my own view of all that warring is that very little of it made as much difference in the end as the simple fact that the west, through its own improvement, came to offer many things that those in communist countries wanted. And when we had something they wanted, communism collapsed.

We don't have much radical Islam wants right now, but we should. Providing it will be the only way, and the only honest way, to triumph.

Needless to say, even if Bush was Churchill (ha!) this would not happen during his term. It's gonna take many many years.

The puppet masters who orchestrated the September 11th attack might be as strategically suicidal as many people make them out to be. That assumption leads to an oft-mentioned scenario for this episode of our history. They destroy a symbol of free enterprise and thousands of civilians. We get mad and blow them away. End of story.

The future might unfolds in this way. But underestimation of the enemy has been a common cause of disaster throughout history, from the underestimation of Romans by the Teutones and the underestimation of the Parthians by Romans a half century later to underestimation of the Soviets by the Nazi's and the underestimation of the Afghans by the Soviets a half century later. Imperial Japan paid dearly for its underestimation of the destructive power of the United States a half century ago. We would be wise consider carefully the possibility that the attack at the World Trade Center is part of a clever strategy rather than simply an act of terrorism.

The horizons of analysts have generally been focused on relatively gradual escalations of destruction that can be grasped in the context of previous experiences with terrorism. We need to consider the entire spectrum of possible scenarios, particularly those on the most damaging end of the spectrum, all in the context of the possible goals of the perpetrators and the tradeoffs they would be willing to experience in order to achieve those goals. Many analysts have mentioned, for example, the danger of repeating the recent Soviet fiasco in Afghanistan, but that possibility is a relatively minor threat. The U.S. has demonstrated competence at learning from mistakes of previous engagements. The greater dangers lie in new opportunities for disaster that arise from the minds and actions of clever adversaries who do not share our values--in this case the values of technological advancement and freedoms of speech and expression.

Perhaps the most important starting point in assessing the spectrum of dangers is to recognize that our terminology may restrict our outlook. The term terrorist may not be appropriate in the current situation, because, by definition, terrorists are committing violent acts to instill terror in the target population. This term causes us to focus on our response rather than the goals of our adversaries. The perpetrators may be global nihilists and may thus be more dangerous than mere terrorists.

The first step in this line of thinking arises frequently in the discussions of the motivation of the perpetrators. It is suggests that the September 11th attack was carried out to provoke the United States and its allies to lash out against Islamic countries, thereby increasing support for the militant fringes of Islam. But the important questions is, "For what purpose?" If the finger pointing at Osama bin Laden is pointing in the right direction, we can look to his rhetoric for clues to the strategic motivations behind the attack. His rhetoric suggests that he is motivated by the American presence in Saudi Arabia because it is holy soil for Islam. He calls for American withdrawal from Saudi Arabia. But is that really his goal?

The actions of bin Laden and his associates use of economic resources to destroy the people and structures of modern society. More economic resources would allow him to create more destruction for whatever long-term goals he may have. The Saudi economic wealth seems the most attractive source of such resources. His fractious history with the Saudi government, his connections there, and his recent criticism of the Saudi government for allowing American presence in Saudi Arabia are all consistent with control of Saudi wealth as the intermediate goal of the current round of destruction. If so the emphasis on the US presence is a clever chess move. By casting the American military presence as an affront to the holiest sites of Islam, he generates animosity against the Saudi government and the US. If the US were to withdraw (for example, to reduce the animosity against the Saudi government) then bin Laden becomes more powerful because he is considered a hero and leader for many in the Islamic world; moreover, an important military barrier to the takeover of the Saudi resources is removed. If the US maintains its military presence in Saudi Arabia and especially if it uses these bases to harm civilians, then the animosity against the US and the Saudi government is heightened, again increasing support for bin Laden and his program for militant Islam.

One way to get control of Saudi wealth would be to push the situation in Saudi Arabia toward a revolution like the one that toppled the Shah of Iran. One way to so push this situation would be to make the United States so angry that it would lash out against predominantly Islamic countries, causing the death of innocent muslims. Or, if such violence could not be instigated, perhaps the rhetoric of the United States could be ratcheted up, creating the sense of a Crusade against Islam.

If Osama bin Laden understands the American mindset even moderately well, he would not expect the United States to pack up and withdraw from Saudi Arabia in response to the attack on the World Trade Center. If that were his preferred outcome the attack would have occurred against Americans or the American base in Saudi Arabia rather than on US soil, as in the Beirut model. Attacks on American soil will strengthen rather than weaken American resolve to maintain our presence in Saudi Arabia. Thus his rhetoric about the American bases in Saudi Arabia was probably crafted to get muslims inflamed against the Saudi government. His following in Saudi Arabia, his familiarity with Saudi society, and his contacts within that society may put him in a relatively good position to generate this response and to use it to topple the Saudi government.

But why control of the Saudi government? It could be just revenge, but his past actions indicate that his mode of operation involves control of the wealth and the things that wealth could by, things such as nuclear weapons. Attempts to gain large numbers of nuclear weapons by countries who would like to have them has not been particularly successful. But two points should be kept in mind. These countries did not have the economic assets of Saudi Arabia to allocate to this purpose, and the net value of nuclear weapons for most countries may be much less than for someone who wants to control a medieval world. Osama bin Laden has reportedly been attempting to acquire nuclear weapons, apparently without success. But his nest egg of a quarter billion dollars is pocket change in comparison with the wealth of Saudi Arabia. We should consider carefully, and imaginatively, what he might have planned for such weapons should he acquire them.

On the basis of statements and actions by bin Laden and his associates, the prospect of destroying modern civilization is not as unappealing for them as it would be for people who value modern civilization. It has become a cliche to talk about bombing an opponent back to the Stone Age. As Walter M. Miller has portrayed in his novel Canticle for Liebowitz, however, this cliche is probably incorrect. There would be enough steel tools, implements, and information to support a lifestyle no more primitive than that enjoyed in the Middle Ages. The life style advocated by the most severe of the militants bears a much greater similarity to medieval lifestyles than does the lifestyles of technologically advanced society. Which of the two sides would be more deterred by the prospect of being bombed back to the Middle Ages, and which side would be more likely to make such threats and carry them out if they had the weapons in hand? The jockeying between the US and USSR over nuclear weapons appears tame--even collegial--compared with the actions that could be envisioned when one side has little interest in the products of post-medieval technology, except as tools to destroy post-medieval technology.

If their intermediate goal is to replace the Saudi government through a revolution analogous to the Iranian revolution that toppled the Shah, will the US and other governments of the modern world be willing to do what is necessary to prevent it? If the Saudi government is toppled, what would these governments of the modern world be willing to do to avoid having the wealth of this region being transformed into weapons of mass destruction?

Could such mass destruction actually be accomplished by people who seem to interested in using modern technology primarily to destroy modern technology? The destructive power of modern technology is great--only a tiny fraction of it has ever been used. One wouldn't need thousands of nuclear bombs to bomb civilization back to the Middle Ages, perhaps only a few hundred, well placed in the centers of modern civilization, and enough planning to detonate them simultaneously.

It is not just enough for the modern governments to think like the enemy. For democratic societies the general public must also do so, because government action is dependent on public support. The emotional responses of the public and the action that they take and advocate can either ameliorate or exacerbate the threat. Usurpation of mid-east wealth by global nihilists could have catastrophic consequences that dwarf the effects of the World Trace Center attack. Recognizing this difference can be important in generating public support for activities the reduce the chances of revolutions in countries such as Saudi Arabia.

Lesser threats may also be altered by public awareness and action. One of the best example concerns biological weapons. As I argued in a recent book (Plague Time, Free Press:NY), biological weapons are not particularly effective weapons for terrorists. For the same reasons they would not be particularly good weapons for global nihilists. Rather than weakening resolve their use would tend to galvanize. The threat of biological weapons, however, generates concern because the damage they could cause is repulsive and potentially pervasive. If the public realizes this difference between their use as a threat and as a weapon, and are prepared to withstand the impact of their use, their effectiveness as a threat diminishes.

The relative ineffectiveness of pathogens as weapons does not mean that they will never be used, but it does mean that we might be able to reduce the possibility of their use by making their net effectiveness even less than it already is. One of the best ways to lower their effectiveness is vaccination. Those who are making decisions about public health have been slow to move in this direction, apparently because they are applying guidelines that are appropriate in the absence of terrorist threats to situations in which such threats are manifest. The tradeoffs in these two circumstances are different.

It would be ethically questionable to require that everyone use a vaccine such as the vaccine against smallpox, which, like most vaccines, imposes a small probably of serious adverse effects (one in ten-thousand to one in a million vaccines depending on the adverse effect and the care in assessing associated risks). However, choosing not to produce and make available a vaccine such as the smallpox vaccine is also ethically questionable for several reasons, the most obvious being that unvaccinated people may die or becomes seriously ill during an attack. In addition, the ability to administer vaccines safely may be diminished during a crisis situation and people who might have been at a low risk for severe side effects prior to the attack might have developed conditions that place them at high risk by the time of the attack (conditions such as immunosuppression or eczema, for example). Perhaps most importantly, the greater the proportion of the population that is vaccinated, the greater the probability of deterring such an attack. If a population is mostly immune through vaccination, terrorists would have little impetus to initiate an attack, which would tend to make them look impotent and incompetent. In a situation such as the current one, getting vaccinated against smallpox could therefore be considered an activity that contributes to the defense not just of the vaccinated individual but to the country as a whole. Making the relevant vaccines available along with the relevant information about benefits and risks is the ethically sound alternative.

Unfortunately, because those making the key decisions has been so slow to recognize these tradeoffs, there are now woefully insufficient numbers of the relevant vaccines. According to the current schedule, vaccines against smallpox, for example, will not be generally available in until 2004. It is incredible to hear experts argue, as they have for several years, that a suitable vaccine against smallpox cannot be made widely available, even though one had been generally available for most of the past two centuries.

When evaluating and preparing for possible scenarios we need to shift mentally from considering the problem from the perspective of the targets to the perspective of the perpetrators. When we do so the threat of biological weapons shifts from being a primary concern to a secondary concern. This threat could be shifted further to a tertiary concern for particular pathogens if an educated public takes action by encouraging development of and access to vaccines, and by becoming vaccinated.

If the instigators World Trade Center attack really are terrorists rather than global nihilists, then some of the preparations may be overreaction. But most of these preparations should still be useful for terrorists. Access to vaccination is useful in either category of attacker, as is the avoidance of harm to innocent civilians. Taking actions that precisely target those who have carried out and who are planning to carry out attacks should be beneficial in either case, but especially for global nihilists because it removes the immediate threat and the long-term threat associated with recruitment.

Some actions (such as support of Saudi government and provision of vaccines against the most dangerous pathogens) can reduce the attackers' estimates of success. If these estimates are reduced sufficiently, attempts may be postponed. Postponement buys time for countermeasures, and perpetual postponement is equivalent to a permanent protection.

With regard to military options, before we race in to attack we should assess whether the attack is part of the enemy's next move. Overenthusiasm for an attack together with underestimation of the enemy's strategy led the Romans to be slaughtered by the Parthians, and the Soviets to be slaughtered by the Afghans. The current situation offers few military targets and a great potential for collateral damage to civilians, while modern technology offers new and powerful strategies for attacks against us. As we plan our actions to neutralize the enemy in response to the World Trace Center attack, we need to assess and prepare for new ways in which overenthusiasm for a counter-attack could be part of the enemy's plan for a much greater slaughter. Because our long-term strategy depends on their long-term strategy, gaining intelligence information about their long-term goals may be as important as gaining information about their locations and plans for attacks.

The U.S. in the most highly educated and highly entertained country on earth. We export entertainment. All around the world, people, watch American television and see the latest Hollywood movies. But, instead of exporting education we import the best and brightest of every country, educate them in the U.S, and keep them here. The time has come to seriously consider how we can create an education industry to rival the entertainment industry.

Many of our current problems stem from how badly educated the public is, both here and abroad. Education should be a real priority in this country. 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. If we as a nation take seriously the idea of building high quality on-line courses that can be delivered anytime anywhere to people who have never had access to such educational opportunity before, we can change the world. If the best and the brightest in this country took seriously their role as world educators, then 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. 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 guy who votes, the average guy who fights wars, and the average guy who sometimes acts out bizarre notions of retribution.

To radically reform our education system we need to focus on three issues. what we teach, how we teach, and how we deliver teaching. Working backwards, delivery must be on line. The internet offers the possibility of educating everyone equally, with greater opportunities for the expression of individual differences. Students would be able to take whatever they like whenever they like. Certifying authorities could be located anywhere. Interactions would be of two types primarily: courses that are mentored on line by teachers who evaluate work products submitted by students, and courses where the computer itself provided the evaluation.

The method of instruction would have to be learning by doing. This method of education has long been understood at least as far as Aristotle and probably before that) as the best method of learning. It is has not been used in schools because it is difficult to implement in a classroom setting. It is not difficult to implement on a computer. In fact, the computer facilitates this type of learning through the creation of exciting simulations and the use of one on one instruction by the best and the brightest, captured beforehand, with mistakes in the simulations linked to instruction about those mistakes. In this way students receive the instruction that they need when they need it and can go at their own pace.

The big issue is what to teach. The curriculum of our high schools was established in 1892. Our university system is based on the original ideas in place at the elite universities hundreds of years ago which were focused on the education of the elite and not in the production of employable adults. Early childhood education is focused on preparation for high school. These curricula, in place for decades cannot be changed because there are so many vested interests that want to keep things as they have always been. The construction of fully on line, learning by doing courses not only allows for a different method of instruction but for the possibility of reconsidering the curricula that are the current basis of our school system.

Broadly speaking, school ought to cover issues of living in the real world (getting along with other, raising a family, basic finance), job preparation, mental acuity (reasoning, argumentation, real world problem solving, basic skills (writing, speaking, critical analysis, business, medicine) as well as more purely academic subjects (these might include history in the context of decision making, or mathematics in the context of engineering or some other useful application). Whatever subjects are chosen, the best people in the world can be put to the process of designing courses in their ares of expertise for the various age levels in a school population. An archive of expertise (in video) should be assembled and linked to courses so that the best and brightest will be available to all students for all time.

Courses of the type I am describing cost about $50,000 per instructional hour to build. Thus, a forty hour course might cost $2,000,000 to build. The reality is that courses themselves are an archaic idea and the idea that instruction takes 40 hours is ridiculous. But, we know the costs associated with that length of course and since the courses we have built typically are broken into the smaller bits that would form the basis of any new system, from a cost point of view it makes no difference.

Thus, the basic costs, assuming five 40 hour courses per semester, means that in any given grade, it would cost $10,000,000 per semester to build the on line curriculum. Thus, it costs $20,000,000 per grade and for K-college, the cost is $340,000,000. This would be fine if there were to be no alternatives and everyone took exactly the same curriculum. The whole idea of on-line courses is that everyone can study what they want. We assume therefore that K 6 might offer at least 6 different curricula that would keep maybe half of what is taught the same for everyone for a total of $280,000,000. Grades 7-12 would require at least 20 different curricula, for a total of $400,000,000 per grade or a total of 2.4 billion.

Thus, for a total of about 3 billion dollars we could reform our K-12 system for generations to come and help educate the world in the process. College is extra.

If we are to avert even worse disasters, we need to understand what caused the events of Sept. 11. It's clear that Osama bin Laden is a really bad guy, and these were really misguided people, and we need to do something about disabling them in the future. But if we are to ever return to a more lasting state of peace, we have to address the root causes of terrorism. The best method to control something is to understand how it works.

Randomness and determinism are the poles that define the extremes in any assignment of causality. Of course reality is usually somewhere in between. Following Poincare', we say that something is random if the cause seems to have little to do with the effect. Even though there is nothing more deterministic than celestial mechanics, if someone gets hit in the head by a meteor, we say this is bad luck, a random event, because their head and the meteor had little to do with each other. Nobody threw the meteor, and it could just as well have hit someone else. The corresponding point of view here is that bin Laden and his associates are an anomaly, and the fact that they are picking on us is just bad luck. We haven't done anything wrong and there is no reason to change our behavior; if we can just get rid of them, the problem will disappear. This is the view that we would all rather believe because the remedy is much easier.

The other pole is determinism: There were underlying causal factors that led up to these events, and something like this was bound to happen. This is a much harder view to swallow, because deterministic events are by their very nature predictable and controllable. It leads to the conclusion that we might have anticipated these events and done something about it.

With any chaotic system there are two fundamentally different approaches to prediction and control. One is to predict the detailed trajectory that the system will take. For simple systems like roulette wheels, turbulent fluids, and stock markets, I have a lot of experience with this. To predict the trajectory of something, you have to understand all the details and keep track of every little thing. This is like solving terrorism by surveillance and security. Put a system in place that will detect and track every terrorist and prevent them from acting. This is a tempting solution, because it is easy to build a political consensus for it, and it involves technology, which is something we are good at. But if there is one thing I have learned in my twenty five years of trying to predict chaotic systems, it is this: It is really hard, and it is fundamentally impossible to do it well. This is particularly so when it involves a large number of independent actors, each of which is difficult to predict. We should think carefully about similar situations, such as the drug war: As long as people are willing to pay a lot of money for drugs, no matter how hard we try to stop them, drugs will be produced, and smugglers and dealers will figure out how to avoid interception. We have been fighting the drug war for more than thirty years, and have made essentially no progress. If we take the same approach against terrorism we are sure to fail, for the same reasons.

The other road to prediction and control is to change the system in a more fundamental way. Change the parameters and get rid of the behavior you don't want. This is hard too, because it involves a deeper level of understanding and more fundamental change. But it has the advantage that, when you can do it, it is more stable, more reliable, and a much better solution. This corresponds to finding the root causes of terrorism and altering the political landscape so that it dies out. This will be very hard, but it has the enormous advantage that it might actually work.

When I was a high school student I lived in South America for a year. It came as a shock to me to discover how much people hated Americans. Living with a Peruvian family, and hanging out with Peruvian teenagers, I came to see things from their point of view, and to understand how arrogant and self aggrandizing Americans can be to people who live at a great distance, when the consequences are not visible, and few Americans at home know what is really happening.

This horrible disaster has made me reflect on another that killed a similar number of people. Imagine what it would have been like to see the American supported coup in Chile in 1972 if we had CNN giving us the blow-by-blow on video. Suppose we had all seen the people gunned down in the stadium, being tortured with cattle prods, getting punished for their crime of supporting their democratically elected government? I bring this up not to diminish the awfulness of what happened in New York, or to argue for moral relativism, but just to make it clear that there are some very real reasons why some foreigners don't like us very much. Most Americans are fundamentally good people, and if we were more aware of why people dislike us so much, our behavior would change. If we could only see it reflected back at us on CNN. In this case the reason for the hatred is not just our support of Israel, which I think is driven by some idealistic motives, but also the CIA-designed coup that toppled the democratically elected government of Iran, and the roughly half a million people who have died in Iraq of malnutrition, and many other similar events that we should reflect on.

Even if we were unmitigated good guys, as a superpower it's natural that we are targets. The breakdown of the cold war made this much worse, but it also provided an opportunity that we have unfortunately missed so far. The end of the cold war should have freed us to do the right thing, to act as real leaders, and take tangible steps to help the undeveloped world. We have so far squandered this opportunity in favor of policies of short-sighted self interest. But if we take a long range view, we will recognize the control that we have over the situation and alter it. We can get rid of the chaos by changing the parameters. I have been heartened to see that, through calls for actions like "bombing Afghanistan with butter, not explosives", some Americans seem to recognize this. This approach isn't just a matter of goody-goody liberal ideals; it's the only solution that has any hope of working in the long run. This isn't giving the terrorists what they want. Quite the opposite: It is defeating them by removing the basis of their movement, and being better than they thought we were.

Where were you? In years to come, everyone will remember where they were on Sept. 11, 2001.

I was in Sofia, Bulgaria, with people who had every reason to be grateful to America and Americans: I was speaking at a conference of men and women engaged in bringing democracy and open markets to the post-Soviet world, sponsored by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The idea was (properly) not to create a conference of U.S. experts preaching to the natives but to get the local freedom fighters to meet themselves — NGOs (non-government organizations) from Albania and Moldova, reform politicians and officials from Georgia and Romania, journalists from Poland and Serbia, and more. But USAID was the host and, in his opening remarks, Andrew Natsios, the head of that agency, told stories of America's route to democracy and its president John Adams. The United States was the model, but at the same time, it seemed far away, invulnerable, a place not just of free speech but of "freedom after speech."

The next afternoon (seven hours later than New York on European time), the tables had turned. Serbians familiar with bombings, reformers used to constant fear, businesspeople accustomed to taking risks with little guarantee of results, offered their sympathy and shared our horror.

Despite our loss of innocence, Americans should not lose our hope and the optimism that led to our success as a vibrant democracy. (In its worst form it was smugness and support of corrupt regimes; in its best, courage.) There is one victory at least that all of us — the free world — can deny the terrorists. We can refuse to remake our world in their image: a place of fear and mind control, where citizens are tracked and followed, where people are afraid to look or act different.

We can also refuse to lose our expansive attitude toward the future. For the terrorists, the modern world — and the change and openness it means — is scary. By contrast, Americans generally feel secure about the future, in terms of personal life and business. It is no coincidence that the two are bound together. Businesspeople expect investments to bring returns. The World Trade Center is a good example. It represented not just trade but investment. The towers themselves were built to last for years and to return their investment over decades. It's that faith in the future that led to the U.S. economic miracle, including the technology that enabled it. (Much of the world has access to the same technology but has not reaped the same rewards because they do not use it.)

Now, in the aftermath of the attacks last week, the danger is that we'll lose sight of the long term.

In the old Soviet Union, to use the example most familiar to me, people generally wouldn't make appointments more than a few days in advance (though this is changing in the new Russia). If you called someone to set up an appointment for the middle of the next week, he would say: "Why don't you just call me next Tuesday, and we'll see." Sometimes that made me wonder if he was hoping for a better offer in the meantime, but clearly there's some sense of uncertainty that still leaves many Russians loath to make commitments.

In the United States this month and in coming months, we'll likely see similar behavior: a retreat to the present (if not the past). This comes at an unfortunate time for the economy as a whole and for the high-tech industry in particular. Tech companies and software companies do much of their business in the last weeks of each quarter — and the last two weeks of this quarter have been lost.

Such a retreat would be costly, for investors and for society as a whole. Consider this: Time horizons for investors range from the very short one of day traders, to the longer one of equity investors who pick companies, to that of venture capitalists who take long-term stakes and get involved in the management of the companies. But it is the long-term investors, not the clever day-traders or resource allocators, who have really built our economy. A retreat to "safe" investments means a self-fulfilling prophecy of contraction.

You can see that same spectrum of attitudes in philanthropy, from the person who gives a coin or two to a beggar in the street, to people who give regularly to particular charities and read their literature, to people who give significant sums and join the boards of the charities they "invest" in.

In both spheres, the active participants hope for a return and work hard to get it. In one case, the visible return goes to the individual; in the other, except for the satisfactions — which may be great — the tangible returns go to the beneficiaries of the charity. But in both cases, society benefits - from happier people, fewer social problems, better schools, the presence of art, all the riches created by "civil society."

Moreover, for-profit ventures sometimes turn out to be "charities" too: They may lose money, but often they train people (sometimes in how not to run a company!) or design innovative products on which some later-arriving competitor may make money. In other words (as pointed out by Virginia Postrel in a recent economics column for The New York Times), society benefits from this long-term investment even when the individual investor does not. By contrast, much of the world is scared to count on the future. Moreover, it does not welcome change. The American dream is constant progress, whereas the terrorist dream is to bomb the world back into some supposed state of purity. Somewhere in the middle lies the truth.

The old Soviet world had yet a different view. They wanted to construct a new world, but somehow their vision was of a bigger present rather than a broader future. Their plans left no room for flexibility or innovation or experiment. Their future was defined from the top, rather than grown from the dispersed efforts and visions of individuals. The old Soviet five-year production plans, after the first few, fostered not hope but cynicism. The people had no expectation that they would produce real results or that they would change the world.

What can we learn from this, and from the people I met in Sofia? Even when the world changed for those in the old Soviet bloc, many of their compatriots, through years of habit, still did not trust in long-term returns. Many were afraid of the new climate, still scared to speak their minds because, after all, the world might change back. (I remember the university professor who kept a bust of Lenin in his cupboard "just in case.") In business, the post-Soviet world began as a world of trade rather than of investment. People wanted immediate returns because they did not trust in the long term.

Ironically, there has recently been the same flight to inaction in the venture community, built on last year's overoptimism and the ensuing reality — a disaster in the short term but just a blip in the long term. The danger now is that terrorism will aggravate that fear of uncertainty and spread it well beyond the high-tech community. I hope this doesn't happen. Now is the time not to fear the future, but to rebuild it and make it even better — not because we don't understand the risks but because we can face them. Americans may have been so optimistic because to some extent we were unaware of the risks, isolated in our happy country. Now we need to take heart from the example of the people I met in Bulgaria. Rather than risk reward calculations and unthinking optimism, what we need now is courage.

The technology explosion of the past 30 years has complicated both government's role in, and citizens' desire for, privacy. Citizens demand safety while law enforcement believes it needs timely access to information that flows over networks. With the availability of cryptographically sophisticated mechanisms such as public key systems, we have a world where a vast amount of personal and public information streams wildly over digital systems such as the Internet, POTS (plain old telephone systems), wireless, and satellites.

After the tragic attack of September 11th, the Bush administration is calling for, and receiving, increased powers to listen to our conversations, monitor our e-mail, see who and where we visit in cyberspace — all with the stated intention of protecting us from terrorists. I could fill this column with the implications of the mechanisms that have been proposed for aiding law enforcement. As with any legislative mechanism behind which there is so little technical understanding, many of the changes may create greater dangers than they hope to eliminate. I would like, however, to focus on the security of the basic communications infrastructure we count on.

Turtles upon Turtles

The Internet was built in a university research atmosphere where the problems of creating a working system took priority. As the Internet grew, developers had neither time nor energy to address security. Suddenly we had an insecure network underpinning our industrial might and daily lives.

Consider what would have happened if, in addition to the attacks on New York and Washington, a concentrated physical and cyber attack had been made on the Internet. As the people who are technically responsible for the network, we'd better make sure such an atttack does not happen.

One might suggest that we patch the holes to fix the vulnerabilities, but most discussions on Internet security find turtles upon turtles — security problems on security problems. So what do we do? For the current-generation Internet, patches might be the only answer. Or perhaps regulatory authorities should demand Internet-wide management mechanisms. (I suggest this with real hesitation, but it may be the only path). That does not mean, however, that we should not strongly support holistic research attacks on the security issues to see if out-of-the-box thinking can help.

Untangling the Contradictions

We are about to take a dramatic technical step forward in communications technology with the arrival of end-to-end optical communications links. The very speed of these links (~60 Gbytes/wave) and vast number of waves possible demand a new examination of the Internet's structure and of the architectures of computer hardware and operating systems. This is an excellent time to make security fundamental to any real next-generation network. Information security and network resource protection must be a requirement, not an option.

I started this column talking about the privacy implications of 9/11 with respect to law enforcement. I close with a plea for end-to-end security for future networks. These might seem like contradictory aims, but they both seem to be requirements in the post-9/11 world. The technical community must provide the research needed to understand the nature of the contradictions and to find the path forward. It is equally important that we involve ourselves in continuing efforts to preserve liberty as well as safety.

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.

One must ask what role women have played since September 11, and it seems to me that our voice has been lost. We are not players in this war — all the fighters and outspoken politicians have been men. A few among our ranks have protested outcries of war, a few of us have even perished in this war (although the majority of victims, including all of the perpetrators, were men), but our voice has not been heard. Ironically, while Americans chastise the oppression of Afghani women by the Taliban, the continued economic, political, and cultural oppression, repression, and regression of women at home goes unremarked.

Imagine a distant time when some people noticed that a piece of floating rock pointed somewhere. Eventually, they noticed that all similar floating rocks seemed to point in the same direction. Let's say that they called this floating-rock pointing-direction North. Over time, this North began to take on very important qualities, becoming more and more significant, more and more great. Yes, over time, these people came to worship the great and magnificent North.

Imagine that some other people also noticed that pieces of floating rock all pointed in the same direction. Only these floating rocks didn't point towards the North; they pointed towards the South. And, overtime, these people came to worship the magnificent and great South. To them, nothing could be imagined to be more essential to their very survival than the marvelous South.

Then, wandering, as all people tend to wander, these groups devoted to the North and those groups committed to the South met each other.

No, it wasn't pretty. Yes, it was war.

However fanciful to our sensibility this might seem, this sort of conflict surely isn't unimaginable.

Not understanding that North and South are merely antipodes of a common "environmental field" ­ as we so surely understand ­ these people-from-a-distant-time wouldn't have grasped that they were both committed to the same environment. Earth. They wouldn't have comprehended that they were all dependent on both the North and the South . . . neither of which could exist without the other.

How does this relate to the Edge question, "What Now?"

Consider the possibility that we are now struggling to overcome our own lifetime's "War of The Antipodes."

"Modernism" and "Anti-modernism." Our antipodes. Our war.

Both originated (over and over) at the same times and in the same places. Both are completely dependent on the same environment, the same "field."

As demonstrated by the "Fundamentalism Project," we live in a world of "fundamentalisms" which share a great deal in common, starting with the arresting observation that they are all newly organized social phenomenon.

These "fundamentalisms" (or "anti-modernisms") simply couldn't exist without their corresponding "modernisms." Likewise, the other way around. As with all antipodes, their mutual interdependence is essential. Radically essential.

Yes, I did say "overcoming" a few paragraphs ago.

For, it would seem that just as antipodal analysis directs our attention away from the antipodes themselves to their common field, this re direction frees us to ask the question, "What is happening to the underlying field and how is that reflected in the activities at the antipodes?"

For, if the field is undergoing radical transformation and if the earth (or the ground) upon which these antipodes mutually depend is undergoing a revolution, then we might expect to observe some activity, even some disturbances at the antipodes.

Osama Bin Laden. Al Queda. Eqyptian Islamic Jihad. These are a group of type-related antipodes and, apparently, they are very upset. Very disturbed.

I am suggesting that this disturbance reflects their sense that they finished . . . that their relevance as antipodes is about to collapse.

I am further suggesting that they are indeed finished and that this is a reflection of changes in their underlying field.

"Anti-modernism" and "Modernism" alike . . . no longer relevant. Both no longer important. Both upset. Both disturbed. Both obsolete antipodes.

(Indeed, John Brockman's entire "Third Culture" project could be partially understood as an attempt to address disturbances in the "modernist" antipode.)

So, what now for all those who have committed themselves to one or the other (or some combination) of these (or other) antipodes?

What's a "Modernist" to do? What's an "Anti-modernist" to do? What is any "Antipodist" to do?

Go to war like those good Antipodists who were once committed to the South and the North, in distant times?

Yes, to be sure, this is exactly what many of them will do.

But, I suspect that some others understand that, like the North and the South of yore, it is what all antipodes depend upon — in common — that is much more important than the antipodes themselves . . . particularly in times of great antipodal instability.

And, if, as I'm suggesting, we are already living in a new environmental field, perhaps we should devote some serious attention to this new ground while we struggle to discard the obsolete antipodes to which we had previously committed our lives.

That is, if we wish to answer the burning question, "What Now?"

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.

We know there will never have another hijacking. The heroes on flight 93 adapted and fought back when they learned (via cellphone) that other flights turned into missiles.

From now on, every person on an airplane will work to overwhelm any hijacker, even if equipped with Uzi's instead of plastic bagel knives. We don't need a federal air police. We can even take down the X-ray scanners.
The game has changed.

Consider this a phase transition in psychological evolution. I wonder whether another phase transition is possible.

Whoever directed the military attack last week was extremely sophisticated:

• to steal identities a decade ago, 
• to know that Saudi pilots are allowed to immigrate, 
• to learn to fly 747's, 
• to expect docility from travellers based on the history of hijackings, 
• to sell the airline stocks short, and
• to do structural simulations of the WTC to estimate strike speed and altitude.

So why would we assume such a sophisticated covert operation couldn't predict and exploit America's likely reaction?

In times like these, we revert from individuals to a bacteria colony. In times like these, Apple Computer could temporarily change its slogan to "Don't Think Different!" to stimulate sales.

Consider, with some pain: The JFK assassination, TWA flight 800, Pan Am 103, KAL flight 007, Iraqi incursion into Kuwait, the bombing of the Murrah building. Remember each aftermath. My recollection is that the American public has been ready to go to war each time. Therefore the attacker last week could anticipate the US reaction.

The behavior of masses, especially in response to strong stimuli, is quite predictable, and the science explaining it originated in the 1890's and was perfected by the 1950's and 60's. I'm not an expert, but I know coherent masses (Crowds) form especially in reaction to events, and all members of the crowd begin to express the same extreme opinion, and follow the leader. Imitation effects, authority effects, and fear of being different all drive the feedforward loop. We could simulate it on a computer, just like we simulate ant colonies or groups of robots.

The direction of the crowd can be modulated by information. if our leaders can convince us that it was a lone crazy, or an accident, or a renegade band of our own ex-special-forces, passions might subside. But name a foreigner and we must attack.

My "What now?" question is whether we can ever overcome our own mass psychology. Can humanity achieve group adaptation at the cognitive level?

If we were bacteria, we wouldn't avoid the fruiting body. If we were ants, we wouldn't abandon the pheremone trail, If we are lemmings, we wouldn't opt out of our mad dash.

But we are humans. I pray we can someday rise above our own mass psychological reactions to achieve a deeper strategy than those who pull the triggers or those who guide the crowd's reaction.

We need another psychological phase transition.

Otherwise, brains are going to lose the war to genes.

I am fascinated to read the latest comments and I certainly want to contribute to the Edge discussion. I am planning something more elaborate but this will do for now. For the moment, my principal concern is that the war rhetoric supported by 80% of Canadians polled (in this morning's National Post) is dead wrong in this situation. What it has provoked is clearly a polarization between Islam and the West. The problem with that is that this is not the kind of convenient polarization of East versus West under the cover of the nuclear threat. It is an ubiquitous polarization where your next door neighbor was your friend yesterday and wakes up your murderous enemy this morning. We have known this situation before in the 16th and 17th centuries with the religious wars. We talked yesterday of the infamous massacre of Saint Barthelemy where protestants were executed by posses of Catholics in a Church and in private houses. Even in a country as far removed from the centre of action as Northern Nigeria, that kind of behavior has already begun.

The other biggest mistake made by the same token is to have given bin Laden a huge PR effect by affording him the dignity of the enemy. Declaring war — even on "terrorism" was disastrously wrong, not only at the military level (how do you fight an enemy without an army?), but much much more at the symbolical level (the one that counts for the perpetrators of the September 11th massacre) because it immediately elevated a bunch of criminals to a heightened status, and provided Bin Ladin with the only military power he and the Taliban have, that is to be recognized officially as an opponent worthy of huge media attention and also have access to the minds of millions who see him as a hero and not as a terrorist.

The proper way to deal with terrorism is not war, but police action. The Americans are learning to really cooperate with the international counter terrorism forces for the first time (they used to snub them) and the payload has been immediate, as for instance, locating the cells in Germany and identifying several attackers. The police everywhere in the world is, in principle, paid to protect citizens precisely against this sort of harm. It may not always do its job well. Police states are not pleasant things, but these are not pleasant circumstance. The difference between asking the army to get into this instead of asking the police is that, while the police actions are largely underground, thus meeting the terrorism on their own terrain, so to speak, the effect of military attacks (and especially largely useless air strikes piling rubble on rubble and occasionally killing innocent Afghans) is to change the nature of planetary space itself, to divide it into two irreconcilable and unrelated entities.