EXISTENTIAL THREATS

 

By definition, the United States as an aspirational democratic-Republic will not survive an authoritarian takeover. Since our main authoritarians are self-described Nationalists, the American nation, as they define it, will.

CoViD-19 may get horrific. However, Eurasian civilization and perhaps half or more of its people survived Bubonic Plague and The Black Death, and its harming European feudal society was on balance a good thing. We'll survive CoViD-19, but it's caused by a pretty robust zoonotic virus with the potential for mutations that could ravage large populations.

Climate change from (basically) global warming is a major threat, but civilization and most humans and other organisms — including some large ones — will survive and some may prospser (those of us in hot, dry places, or near oceans, are in serious danger).

As Daniel Ellsberg shows in his much praised, popularly ignored book The Doomsday Machine (2017), Stanley Kubrick did his homework and DR. STRANGELOVE is farcical in tone but documentary in substance. Kubrick's one major error was saying the official policy of the US was that we wouldn't initiate nuclear warfare: our official policy since at least Eisenhower is that, under some conditions, we would (source: Ellsberg and my MilSci courses in the early 1960s). Kubrick got right:

 

• The public policy of the US is that the US President has "sole authority" over use of nuclear weapons (and can use that authority at any time for any reason: think about that with your least-favorite US President). However, to assure 2nd strike capability, presidents since Eisenhower have delegated authority — or at least have been believed by the relevant people to have done so — to "lower echelon commanders." Whatever their dedication to Central Control, since the Carter and Reagan buildup (and as far as we know continuing since the more recent build-down), the "Ruskies" have done the same. And for the same reasons: credible threat of retaliation in case of "decapitation." In a number of highly unlikely but possible scenarios, any remaining "Launch on Warning" missiles might *be* launched.

 

• "General Nuclear War" — all-out and thermonuclear — could destroy civilization in the Northern Hemispheres, starting with all those cities that are the root of the word "civilization."

• General Nuclear War with a significant number of ground-burst nuclear and thermonuclear weapons threatens to start a global winter leading to global famines (etc.) and threatening civilization world-wide, and, if sufficiently prolonged, large-scale extinctions of many species of animals and plants and other organisms dependent on sunlight.

 

The EXISTENTIAL THREAT to humans and a number of other species remains nuclear warfare.

But no b.s. on "destroying the planet" or "destroying life on Earth." "Earth abides," as Ecclesiastes and a post-apocalyptic novel title has it, and life on Earth will survive: the vast majority of living things are non-vertebrates, a number of whom don't need sunlight. Or will survive until the sun goes nova or other cosmic calamity. We might not; a whole lot of vertebrates and fancy-bodied eukaryotes might not. What we arrogantly call "prokaryotic" — like Nature was just chomping at the bit to evolve cells with nuclei — what we think of as primitive life forms will make it through yet again. They were here before us by billions of years, and they well may outweigh us in biomass and/or outnumber us in genes.

But for us, as we think of us, Nukes remain the only Weapons of Mass Destruction and Existential Threat. Let's pay more attention.

CoViD-19, School Re-Opening, 55 MPH Speed Limit, and "Acceptable Casualties"

 

Responding to a letter to the editor of my local newspaper in south-central-coastal California (we're a big state)

SUBJECT: "What 'death rate' is acceptable?" Ventura County Star 20 Feb. 2021

Writing about opening schools in the time of the CoViD-19 pandemic, George Maguire of Ventura notes that he has "never heard of what death rate” is acceptable and asks if "someone" can write in and tell teachers and students what death rate is acceptable," adding that "That data is available somewhere" (February 20). 

I’m writing in to compliment Mr. Maguire on raising the old and important question I’ll call "acceptable casualties" and to note that relevant data are available for CoViD-19 and school re-opening but such questions are never just factual. To start, "Acceptable to whom?" and then on to "What values are to be applied?" with one big area, "What is the value of human life?"

Here’s an example from the past that illustrates the point. From Wikipedia (and my memory): "The National Maximum Speed Limit was a provision of the […] 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act that effectively prohibited speed limits higher than 55 miles per hour. It was drafted in response to oil price spikes and supply disruptions during the 1973 oil crisis and remained the law until 1995." The data get complicated, but a case could be and was made that "there was a decrease in [traffic] fatalities of about 3,000 to 5,000 lives in 1974, and about 2,000 to 4,000 lives saved annually thereafter through 1983 because of slower and more uniform traffic speeds since the law took effect."

The final repeal of the law in 1995 was very popular. 

Now, let’s say the net savings in human life was a tenth of the estimates, some 300 lives a year: Would 300 additional dead people (and injured and maimed) be "acceptable casualties" for the additional convenience and efficiency of higher speed limits? Would the mere risk of avoidable deaths (injuries, maiming) be acceptable? Ethical decisions either way required making a conscious judgment, and among the Americans ethical enough to think it through — at least with Americans who accepted the conclusion of greater safety — a good number thought the casualties acceptable. 

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law#Safety_impact>

Or we can look at drug legalization, such as the end of alcohol Prohibition in 1933, and the obvious costs of easier access to alcohol beverages, along with obvious benefits. Of those who think about it at all, most of us think ending capital "P" Prohibition was a good idea, and many would legalize other recreational drugs, with any increase in deaths (addiction, violence) acceptable when weighed against other gains.

It is necessary for practical ethics and politics to think humans special among all the life on Earth, and good to believe that "Every human life is sacred and of infinite value" — but actual ethical decisions in real-world politics often require doing bloody arithmetic, and infinities don’t work there. 

We need a mature conversation on the gains and losses of opening schools to various degrees and in various ways, including what sometimes competing groups can agree would be "acceptable casualties" from doing so.