Excerpt from Julius Paine's Memoirs: Journals of the Wanderer

Published 2035

I found myself hosting lectures or discussion after dinner a few nights a week. They ended up being a sort of social event for the folks on the ship. I didn’t know it at the time, but they were also fairly popular on Earth media. PBS published a few in their entirety and the talking heads loved pointing to quotes out of context as evidence of genius or instability-- depending on who you asked.

For me it was cathartic to talk about the things on my mind. I had always loved sharing ideas. Grace kept transcripts of what she has been calling my seminars, and insisted I include a few of the important ones in this memoir.

Hi everybody, I can’t believe you came out after last week’s disaster. I should have known better than to try to give a serious speech about the best ways to use microgravity. I mean really, I think all of you talked more than I did.

Well anyways, you all probably know that the topic of this speech is “Achieving World Peace This Year.” I hope it got your attention; I certainly intended it to. As naïve or absurd as you might think this belief is, I truly believe that we could do it.

There are obstacles; I, of course, mean humans.

As long as there have been people there has been violence. Our oldest archeological records show the warlike nature of the first proto-humans. Historically war has served to shrink and to differentiate the gene pool, to stimulate the economy, to prove the superiority of a tribe or a belief, and to settle individual scores. Long before sports, it was man's favorite pastime.

Now there is a lot to say for what war has done for mankind. It is certainly responsible for the tendency for taller, faster, and stronger humans. Those with reach and speed would outbreed those without it. It advanced the technology of metals more than any other single cause. Those with steel had a technical advantage over those with iron. Sigurd bore a sword forged from the metal of a meteorite; none could stand before him and his mighty blade.

Even into the twentieth century it was war that drove the expansion of all kinds of technology, none more so than medical technology. War has taught doctors the art of triage, and the subtleties of hygiene and of penicillin. We might not be in space if not for the Nazi’s development the first rocket missiles to kill Englishmen.

These technologies might still be in their infancies without a concerted government investment in “defense.”

Our species were predators for most of our history. Some have said that to deny our war-like nature is to negate what it is to be human.

Now that we have reached the second decade of the 21st century, it is those with the best guidance systems and robots who win battles. War between nations is fought in a way that is increasingly separate from soldiers. The UAV that kills an enemy mastermind might save the lives of our country’s soldiers, but every dollar spent on it’s construction and deployment will never be spent educating a child, or feeding a grandfather, or treating a mother’s cancer. And sometimes the mind that directs it will mistake that criminal mastermind for a Zen master.

That loss of value cannot be counted, nor can the hatred that does and should grow from the event.

I hear no protest from the crowd. That should be no surprise. The idea of war has long been anathema to a rational mind. Who would defend the intentional killing of another group of people whose only crime is nationality, or religion, or even just location?

These tragedies still happen every day. Every single day a child is turned into a zealot when a person driven to evil actions kills his father. Every single day the cycle starts over and another mind will be driven to evil actions. It has to stop somewhere.

The sad truth is there is a terrible illogic in holding a nation responsible for the actions of its leaders or the worst among its people. A sadder truth is that a true total war between nations could certainly result in the destruction of all life on the planet. And our weapons are getting better all the time.

Our society has too much wisdom and power not to solve these problems. So where to start?

It makes sense to me that we start with the causes.

What causes war in our society?

One answer is certainly that the wars of the past continue to. In Africa and the Middle East (and truly everywhere) vengeance is a way of life that has existed since the first tribe.

Mandela showed us how to end this type of war in South Africa.

Other wars begin when a country feels that something essential to its survival is withheld; it can feel that it has no choice but to strike out to protect its ability to exist. Economic war is still a sad reality, despite the scientifically calculated fact that war hurts economies. When the US stopped selling Japan oil and steel, the Sunset Empire struck at Pearl Harbor; and the United States responded by making that war one that truly spanned the globe.

See, science has taught us some things about life that have not truly penetrated into all levels of society. The most important truth is that one belief is not fundamentally different from another. Saying that belief in Hashem is superior to belief in Allah is like saying that rooting for the Yankees is superior to rooting for the Red Sox.

I think that people are confused about what science is. Every time I find myself debating a non-scientific person I run into questions like ‘Do you believe in evolution?’ My honest answer would be yes, but the question that I hear and that they ask are not the same. The question I hear “do you have faith in the scientific process that concludes life is evolved” is profoundly different from ‘do you think evolution is true’, the question they are actually asking.

Evolution doesn’t require our belief to be true.

To a scientist, belief is relevant only for questions without evidence.

Recognizing such a question that cannot be answered with the means science currently possesses is one of science’s foremost tasks.

It is why there is little scientific opinion on the creation of the universe prior to the Big Bang or on the nature of the interior of black holes. The lack of data that we have collected (or some say can collect) about those questions make such an opinion one of belief—not of evidence.

In my opinion, a scientific approach to understanding beliefs has yet to catch on in lay society. That is one of the major ills of the Western world. My assertion about questions of belief is this: the answers are all equally valid. So going to war to prove the superiority of a belief is a contradiction in terms. One belief cannot be more or less true than another; they are all equally true in that if there is evidence, it isn’t a belief.

I suppose I could take a moment to prove that war does not help economies, but it is such an obvious fact that I hesitate to waste your time.

I should?

Well then. Look at is this way. Can the destruction of a car factory in Germany have a positive long-term effect on a car factory in Great Britain? Initially, the change favors the British; they no longer have to compete with German engineering. The car that a Frenchman would have purchased from Germany must now be purchased from Great Britain.

Will that stop the Germans from building cars forever? Probably not. If knowledge of the technology that built the plant still exists in Germany, the new factory that they build will be more modern and efficient than the one that came before it. When the French want to buy cars the next time, they will see the industry of the Germans and reward it. But while there is no competition from Germany, Great Britain will seem to prosper while really stagnating in a less competitive market. The products of both countries will be weaker than if they hadn’t been competing during that whole time.

This is something of a trivial argument. A country can be destroyed so completely that it will take generations to reach a competitive level again, or the minds that held those ideas can be stolen from one country by another. But that very lack of competition will be bad for the thief country. The minds that could have grown to hold jobs in the thief country will be redirected elsewhere, and the overall quantity of brilliant minds in the field will be lessened. When the Japanese and European car industries were flattened, the American car industry flourished. That is, until such a time as foreign cars were able to penetrate the market. Then the foreign cars dominated a market grown stagnant through a lack of competition.

It is one of the world’s strange quirks; competition is good and killing is bad.

Anyway, the title of the lecture is still “World Peace This Year” not “World Peace would be nice.”

See, there are just a few things that people still go to war for. The economic causes for war seem to be fading of their own accord. The world economy is becoming increasingly integrated. The fact that crude oil is found predominantly in the Middle East is balanced by the lack of wood to be found there, and the lack of fruit and water.

Value can be found everywhere on the planet, and when people are open about what they have, need, and can do for and from each other, the idea of going to war over goods seems decidedly inferior to going to the world marketplace instead.

Most of today’s wars are not between nations but within them. Solving these wars becomes a more difficult problem because the current structure of international law makes it hard to justify intervention. Internecine wars are not permanently won by robots or soldiers unless one side is willing and able to commit genocide and their IT is restrictrive enough to keep it secret.

Less than total civil wars are won by ad campaigns and justifiable actions. The only way to lose one of these wars is to commit an act so truly terrible that the people are united against you. These are wars of criminals. These are wars that have no unjust victors.

An unjust victor will just become the next tyrant to be removed. The loser will become the next revolutionary party.

The only way to win a modern war is to create value for all of the just parties. If it is a civil war where Shia and Sunni are fighting for control of a country, the truth is that neither should be victorious.

Their victory will last only as long as the victor is just. It is my belief, and I use the word because I have not studied the data that such a truth implies, that the leaders who strive to make war are criminals. They are criminals who escape justice because there is no court to judge them and no officer to arrest them.

The International Court in The Hague spends its days trying ancient Nazi’s who will not live for a hundredth of their sentence. Only their children will suffer for their conviction. Yet, while teams of lawyers argue those trials, kings kill their citizens who riot for privileges that many of us take for granted.

Ask our Chinese competitors what happens when they express their “right” to free speech.

While decaying Nazi bone-piles stand trial the losers of internationally-moderated elections start civil wars where the both sides commit crimes of murder and rape.

These are crimes: pure and simple. There is no justice for the victims; maybe in 30 years these criminals will be tried in the Hague. Maybe not.

These are crimes on a national scale, committed against entire peoples.

If only Superman were here to defend them.

These crimes are committed in the name of national sovereignty. It was the sovereigns of France and England who led their people into 30 generations of war.

Nations-states came into existence because some people wanted rights and protections that others did not conceive of. The state of Rome gave its citizens a lifestyle that they would or could not give the Gauls. The pharaohs counted the motion of the stars so that their people would know when to plant their crops; they kept their armies so that their people would be safe from the barbarians of the jungles and deserts.

I will ask you a question today that came to haunt me while I walked across the Canada Arctic last year.

Where are today’s barbarians?

Do you really understand the question, what it implies? I’ll phrase it a different way.

From whom does a nation protect me?

It seems to me that it does exactly one thing that I could not do on my own: it fights other nations.

If we wanted you could join me and we could do those things that the government used to do: internal law and order, insurance from disaster, roads, you know, providing services to people instead of restrictions to them. We could do that together without a nation for people to hate.

I am sympathetic and realistic enough to know that some would eventually hate us too, but I can’t but feel like it would be less than the system we have now.

Back on Earth I don’t think this plan is going to be terribly popular. People have gotten so used to someone telling them exactly what they can and cannot do… who they must and must not pay… that letting them choose for themselves will seem like foolishness.

The status quo, governments and the corporations that fund them, have convinced so many people that what they do is so hard that there couldn’t possibly be a better way.

That is how I see nationalism, and I cannot pretend otherwise. It seems like gorillas banging their chests when there is enough space for all of them, especially now that we can send people off the planet. It just strikes me as terrible folly to support coercion on the part of my government as a way to prevent coercion by other governments. I am choosing the lesser of evils when I would rather be choosing something good. Other national governments do the same things for the same reasons, justifying our own actions. It strikes me as a terribly wasteful cycle.

I say loudly and proudly, my government would not be justified in commiting evil actions to prevent evil actions.

Someone needs to arrest criminals, don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that anarchy is the solution. As a civilization, we can always get better at identifying criminals; we can get better at not granting them exceptions; we can get better at reforming them while we punish. These are just and justifiable goals for any government that the world has ever imagined.

I want to get back to my question about the barbarians… I wouldn’t want anything less than the same three things for criminals from another country: identification, recognition, and reform. There is no way that I would think myself justified to kill them just because they were pushed past their breaking point. I wouldn’t call a terrorist a barbarian.

I mean honesty, I can’t imagine a group of people who deserves fewer rights than I deserve.

And honestly, if there are barbarians left, civilization shouldn’t be threatened by them. What could a barbarian, unitiated in the ways of industry, do to topple our way of life?

What? Do we need war? Why would we… oh aliens. Hitler. Alien Hitler.

Really it is a better point than I am making it out to be. In a demilitarized society Hitler would have risen without effort and rolled over the world. Except maybe in a non-nationalistic society Hitler would never have been elected to do the things that he did. Who would want to go to war in a post-scarcity world?

[shouted answers from the crowd]

I hear you, I hear you. Aliens… that is too big an issue to address tonight. Will you all be here next week? Good, good, because I have met a lot of aliens and there are all kinds of things they want me to tell you. Just kidding.

Can I make spaghetti tomorrow? Sure. Bring your friends and I’ll teach you my recipe.