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Fahrenheit 9/11 and The Great Asymmetry

by Siegfried Othmer, Ph.D.

OpEdNews.com

Stephen Jay Gould, the late paleontologist, once wrote an essay for Science titled “The Great Asymmetry.” It reflected on the fact that if an event happened precipitously, it was likely to represent bad news. Good things took time to happen. One could destroy the Alfred P. Murrah building in the blinking of an eye, but it takes a long time to construct such a building. The only exceptions to this dichotomy relates to information. Discovering that an asteroid is bearing down on earth, we could suddenly be issued the good news that it will miss us. Or an election could turn out favorably for one’s cause. On the other hand, if the election outcome was not a foregone conclusion, unhappiness with the outcome in the community at large would nearly match happiness. Concrete events appear to all fit the pattern suggested by Gould. Even intrinsically good things, such as the discovery of the Salk vaccine against polio, take a long time to become accepted, and to reach the point where they have a practical impact.

There is another asymmetry developing that may have even greater policy implications. As our society progresses further in the direction of globalization and in laissez faire capitalism, we are constructing a system that is ever faster in its dissemination of information, and faster in its financial and economic transactions. This is deemed to be an unalloyed good, but in fact we are also building in hazards to ourselves. Little attention is paid to the fact that our whole world-wide economic system is operating as a kind of self-regulatory feedback system, one that is quite capable of making excursions into major collective instability. We got a preview of what is possible in the crash of the Asian Tigers, and in the stock market collapse in 1987. The faster the reaction times of the elements of the system, the greater the potential for a collective excursion into instability. Once such an instability has been kindled, it is very difficult to rein in.

Those who are professionally engaged with the stability of control systems, namely industrial, civil, and electronic engineers, and also architects, are aware that this issue demands explicit attention. They are also aware that the laws of nature are universal in this regard. The stability of systems is something that can be investigated in its own right. Stability criteria must be met in any enterprise of our own construction. Even those who are aware of this issue can get it wrong, as we found out with the collapse of the new wing of the Charles de Gaulle airport (absent any provocation), and with the intrinsic instability of the Millennium Bridge in London in 2000. One can also mention the much more dramatic collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.

The other side of this asymmetry is that as the world becomes more complex, the major constituents are less and less capable of acting collectively in their mutual interest. There is a great need in particular to build up the mechanisms of stabilization, to buffer the world community against sudden collapse into an economic black hole, or excursion into the infrared catastrophe of runaway inflation. But this problem is not yet even on the public agenda. More ominous is our failure to act prospectively when the danger is well recognized---for example, the terrorism threat. 

One of the most revealing moments of the film Fahrenheit 9/11 was the Florida photo op of the President sitting in the second grade classroom on 9/11. As I watched President Bush sitting passively for seven minutes after having been told of the crash of the second airplane into the World Trade Center, it became clear that he was completely unprepared for what he had been told. Not knowing how to react, he decided to act as if nothing had happened. I compare this to my own reaction on hearing radio reports about 9/11 as I was making my way to the airport in Edmonton, Alberta, for a return flight to the states that never got off the ground. The first flight into the towers reminded me of a much earlier such incident in which a small plane flew into the Empire State Building. I treated it initially as an ordinary news item. When news came of the second plane, however, my whole physiology viscerally reacted. Thoughts raced. Scenarios were played out in my mind. Every word over the radio was plumbed for possible implications. Calmness at that moment was not in my inventory. And I was sitting in an airport van in Alberta!  It is not possible for me to imagine how calmness was possible for our President. The disconnect was palpable. The demands of a photo op had the President rooted to his chair, utterly expressionless, and revealing no productive mental activity.

Over the last months, we have been wrangling over the issue of whether this specific terrorist incident could have been anticipated by the intelligence agencies. Much worse is the fact that we did not recognize the event for what it was even after it happened. And the problem did not just lie with the President, but with the whole administration, from the White House staff to the FAA to the military.  To speak of preparedness in this case would be to exercise one’s imagination.

If this state of preparedness is what one may expect of our government when a threat is known and anticipated, how much worse when the threat is ambiguous and remote, such as in the case of global warming and other climate change, the coming decline of the oil age, the threat of opportunistic viral infections of epidemic proportions, the danger of ecological catastrophe, and the hazard of economic runaway conditions. We are witness to a colossal inability of our government to take anticipatory action in pursuit of long-term societal objectives. We are incapable of incorporating long-term cost-benefit considerations into policy.

So the second great asymmetry is that as our world more fully becomes a global village, through information, economic and people exchange, the potential for collective excursions into calamity increases at the same time that the collective means for anticipating events and for preventive action is diminished. The short-term orientation of capital markets has already been widely lamented. By recruiting the instrumentalities of government more exclusively to their purposes, the economic centers of power spread the contagion of short-term thinking across our society. Add to this the propensity of the press to concern itself only with current events, and the inevitable uncertainties we have about our societal future are compounded needlessly. Beyond the propensity to cover events rather than process is the new willingness of the media to serve as mouthpieces for the economic elite, which results with potential problems that are submerged until they reach crisis level. 

One recent scientific advance enables us to understand interacting systems through the analysis of networks. It is becoming understood how easily interacting systems move into oscillatory behavior, and for oscillatory behavior to escalate until it hits up against natural (read external) boundaries. On the good side, we can see our economic systems giving rise to the formation of new networks of various kinds, and on various scales. An ecological argument can be made that the proliferation of such systems contributes to complexity, and complexity in living communities contributes to stability. At another level, however, when we consider how these networks interact with information, the overall propensity may be for them to contribute to destabilization under any kind of unusual and sudden challenge—to the equivalent of a seizure or disabling migraine of the body politic. The fact that networks contribute to economic stability in good times, under “laminar flow” conditions within the economy, gives false assurances. Their contribution to a potential instability—to turbulence—must be explicitly assessed before it is experienced.

Grover Norquist wants to shrink government to the point where it can be drowned in a bathtub. Well before that happens, we will encounter destabilizing events that only governments can manage. We have seen precursors of this in the Savings and Loan crisis,  among other such events. So one may ask, where are the economists to be found at this moment? They seem to be cheerleading the approach of our economic system toward the precipice of instability. Paraphrasing what John Kenneth Galbraith said about economists: “We can be thankful that we are never held accountable for malpractice.” The failure of economists to build stability into our economic affairs overtly, and the failure to recognize that it takes government to do so, constitutes flagrant malpractice. The failure of economists to raise this issue to prominent debate in public policy is a dereliction of responsibility. Economists also seem to have been recruited as acolytes of our emerging plutocracy, and they may end up serving as its pallbearers.

Finally, we return to the issue of terrorism. The great asymmetry is bad enough when we face the uncertainties of natural developments such as epidemics, global warming, meteorite impacts, and ecosystem collapse. In terrorism we face an adversary that is deliberately trying to induce instability into our affairs. The attack on the World Trade Center took advantage of weaknesses existing in our defenses. Such weaknesses are everywhere. What does one plan for? This is where the great asymmetry has frightening implications. Significantly, our adversary has also “evolved” in the perspective of the science of networks to achieve a status that is least subject to disruption. At the same time that our vulnerability to cataclysmic events is escalating, our adversary is increasing in resistance to extinction. There seems to be no alternative but to raise the issue of the stability of institutions to the first rank of our concerns. Unfortunately there is no glory in this task. There will be no accolades for calamities forestalled. We simply have to do it.        

Siegfried Othmer, Ph.D.