A bad immunization decision

Dr Shakeel Afridi  made a very bad immunization decision. Although his decision involved hepatitis vaccination it has implications for polio.

Eradication of polio would be a great human achievement. Only once before have human beings work together successfully to eliminate the disease from our planet. In many ways we are making progress in the efforts to eliminate polio. In January of this year India past the one-year mark for being polio free. So far this year there have only been 60 confirmed cases mostly in the three remaining endemic countries Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria. Last year at this time there had been 165 cases. 

The original plan was to eliminate polio by the year 2000. A couple of years later the war in Afghanistan made the efforts to eliminate polio all that much more difficult. Successes are often followed by failures.  In 2010 devastating flooding in Pakistan led to major outbreaks.  Many places that have been polio free become reinfected from time to time. Most of the polio cases in Pakistan and Afghanistan are in the border regions between the two countries where infections in the knocked back and forth like a volleyball. 

Although we may be closer than we have ever been to the goal of eliminating polio this last bit may prove to be exceedingly hard. There is a problem of donor fatigue. The budget for the next few years stands at just over $2 billion, nearly $1 billion still need to be raised. The 2012 world polio eradication budget is $270 million short. Even the unfunded $2 billion budget is lacking resources for funding ongoing polio immunization in areas that are vulnerable to reinfection.

Beyond the financial struggle there is the very real challenge of conducting an immunization campaign in a war zone. At times the polio eradication campaign has been seen by some communities as a Western conspiracy. One of the stumbling blocks in Nigeria has been acceptance from some local Islamic leaders. Similarly the Taliban has an uneasy relationship with immunization efforts. Some Taliban have believed that immunization efforts were really a conspiracy to sterilize Muslim populations. Even though both the Taliban and local Islamic leaders in Nigeria have more recently supported immunization campaigns, “immunization efforts” are not always innocent and free of conspiracy.

Dr Shakeel Afridi was recently convicted of espionage by the Pakistani government. Afridi was involved in CIA efforts to look at DNA samples that were acquired from immunization needles in Abbottabad. The target of that search was DNA of children of Osama bin Laden. When the CIA identified that his children were in the area that helped in confirming their belief that they had found the compound where he was dwelling.  Although this DNA search apparently involved giving real hepatitis vaccinations Dr. Afridi acted in a way that violated multiple principles of medical ethics. One might try to justify many of these violations on the grounds of stopping Osama bin Laden. Patient privacy, for instance, is broken for much smaller police investigations. 

What is particularly objectionable, is that this fraudulent campaign has the potential to undermine polio eradication efforts. There has already been some suggestion of fear of immunization by people in tribal regions of Pakistan. The concern these people have is that the immunization campaign may be a front for an effort to track down Taliban leaders. Even a small amount of nonparticipation in the polio eradication campaign could allow the virus to harbor, and later breakout. We need to be vigilant against the possibility of even a small number of cases spreading to other countries and then like dominoes spreading beyond. At this point, such an outbreak could put back the eradication efforts by years, if not even leading to the collapse of the efforts altogether. Political enemies come and go, wars do not eliminate them. On the other hand, if eradicated, polio will not come back. 

Let's do a cost comparison. According to the website “cost of war” the cost of the Afghanistan war is now over 500 billion, so the ratio between the amount spent on this useless war and the amount still needed to eliminate polio, is greater than 500:1. Let's look at it another way, the Center for Defense Information estimates the cost of a team of four drones to be about $120 million (they typically fly in teams of4) a little more than two teams would cover the unmet polio eradication budget needs for 2012.

The CIA's program that used immunization to engage the DNA of children in tracking down and killing their father may have unforeseen ramifications regarding the effort to eliminate polio. The American war machine is not much on apologies, or paying for their mistakes, but in relationship to the Pentagon budget a couple hundred million dollars is hardly anything.

A Couple of Outrageous Proposals Regarding Facebook

With radio news time monopolized by Facebook “going public”a radical idea came to me. I want to raise the question who should own Facebook. We know that “going public” is a euphemism for being up for sale to the general public. But the general public won't be buying Facebook, only those with the resources and inclination will purchase any of the stock, and only those of the 1%, or some fraction of a percent will own any significant amount of the company.

The way I look at it, Facebook has, for better or worse, become the global village. Perhaps this overstates it a bit. Maybe it is the Internet as a whole that deserves to be called the global village, in that case Facebook has at least become the social gathering place at the center of the town, the Zocalo, the Piazza, the Agoura. In referring to the Agoura, that place in ancient Athens that is often translated as “the marketplace” I am referring not to that buying and selling side of the Agoura, but that place for popular assembly and political discussion that was quite important to early Greek democracy.

By its very nature Facebook has to be a monopoly. Sure there are cracks, twitter and Google chrome plus. But Facebook holds the center, and to function well as a digital Agoura a single center is appropriate. As a public service monopoly public ownership is appropriate. To quote Tom Johnson the mayor of Cleveland from 1901 to 1909 

“I believe in the ownership of all public service monopolies for the same reason that I believe in municpal ownership of waterworks, of parks, of schools. I believe in the municipal ownership of these monopolies because if you do not own them, they in turn will own you. They will rule your politics, corrupt your institutions and finally destroy your liberties”

To the extent that Facebook is part of a global village, that village is the municipality that should own Facebook, not its rich and it's investing aristocrats.

So let me suggest two proposals:

One proposal is out right expropriation. Since Facebook is based in the United States this would have to be in action of the United States, or perhaps the state of California. Were I to look for case law I would turn to the laws of eminent domain. If the space is needed for a purpose of greater public good eminent domain allows the state to take control of that space. My argument is that global democratic and full of Facebook is a far greater public good than whatever will come from its private ownership.

Once expropriated, Facebook in this scenario should be turned over to its participating members on a one-person one-vote basis. I imagine that there may be a need for a careful and lengthy constitution writing process. My readers will no doubt have a number of questions and concerns about this proposal. We could spend quite some time on these issues, but for the moment I will concede that the biggest hindrance is that neither the United States legislature nor any legislative body within its boundaries is likely to take such action in any foreseeable future, and even if this were in some way possible we still have a conservative court to contend with.

There is a second path so let me move on to that. Gandhi often spoke of trusteeship. His notion was that wealthy owners should treat their wealth not as private gain, but as something held in trust for the people. Here we can imagine a split between the concepts of ownership and control. At the moment this is already the structure of the company as it moves forward with its IPO. My understanding is that while he will no longer hold the majority shares in Facebook, Mark Zuckerman will retain a majority of the decision-making power for the organization. On the surface this may seem less democratic. But it leaves an opening for a more democratic option. Mr. Zuckerman could give away his power to all the participants of Facebook. This would not necessarily mean, giving away stock he and the other investors could be "trustees". Again great effort would be needed to come up with a fair and truly democratic constitution. I think we are capable of this effort.

Here my readers are likely to think I've clearly gone mad, why would Zuckerman ever give away his power. I myself have often misquoted Frederick Douglass, “power concedes nothing without struggle” but what Douglas said was “power concedes nothing without demand.”  According to Frederick Douglass “it never did and it never will” but that's not exactly true. If we go back to the ancient Greeks, there is a man who freely conceded power and in so doing launched the Athenian democracy. Solon was the king of Athens. A true philosopher King, he decided that the state would be best served by democracy so he turned Athens over to its people and set off to travel around the world. In so doing Solon gave not just Athens, but the world a model of democracy that has shaped all future political this course.

If Mark Zuckerman with or without his new investors could turn over the whole organization to the people who use it he would be doing something of comparable greatness to the act of King Solon. Facebook users now number so many that if it became a democracy it would be the second largest democracy in the world, behind only India. At its present rate of growth, it won't be long until it's participants number more than the population of India. Facebook could emerge as one element of a truly democratic world. Mark Zuckerman, you can be that bold.

Unemployment and a shorter work week.

Economists often talk about unemployment and job growth rates. As we have things set up presently unemployment is a big issue. People's lives get devastated when they lose a job, suicide rates go up, domestic violence increases, unemployment is stressful and from that comes worse physical and mental health. But is this how we have to have things set up?

Let's look at what a job is. Jobs bring with them both positive and negative elements. Some people get to work, they have a dream job, it's what they want to do every day. Other people have to work, some people have to take any job there offered, others persist for years in a job they don't like. I could go on for quite a bit about the negative aspects of work, the alienation, the stress, the drudgery, the exploitation and oppression that can be found in the workplace. That's not the focus of what I'm writing about at the moment.

There are basically three positive aspects of a job. For the individual a job brings income, and meaning. For society or at least the employer, jobs are about productivity, making something or providing a service. For the economist the focus on jobs is about productivity and income. The importance of income may be predicated on the importance of productivity. I will start by discussing productivity and then employment, work as a source of meaning is a very important issue, perhaps the most important issue that we face regarding jobs, but the economists framework should be laid out first. I will take up meaning in a future posts.

Productivity refers to how much one person can get done.  As the productivity of workers goes up this is seen as good for the economy, the economy is more competitive. And all things being equal businesses can make more money. Increased production is how we measure the wealth of the society, and it generally equates increased profits for the business. 

 Unemployment is seen in a negative light because without a job one has less income to spend, and spending is also seen as good for the economy because when you spend you are consuming something that has to be produced. We can add the point that unwanted unemployment is bad for the individual who is unemployed, but this really doesn't seem to be the concern of economists. There are exceptions and for some economists caring about human beings appears to be their central concern. 

Productivity has nearly doubled in the last 50 years. As productivity continues to go up any one person can make more or provide more services than a similar person could have any time in the past. It looks to me like there is an obvious problem here. If society needs a certain amount of something and half the workers are needed to produce that that were needed 50 years ago then the other half would be unemployed. We have solutions to this problem of course, new products and increased consumption. 

At first that doesn't sound so bad. For economists this is how we measure the success of our society, but let's look at it more closely. Once you are well fed more food amounts to obesity and the many health problems that go with it. The increased productivity in everything from housing to cars to consumer goods may make these things readily available but in the process may be helping to destroy the earth.

I'm not saying there's nothing we should be producing more of, I'm all in favor of windmills and solar panels and experiments in algae diesel. Nonetheless in spite of exponential growth in these green areas of the economy the only dip we have seen in carbon emissions since the Kyoto protocol has been due to the global recession in 2008. 

The point is that generally speaking productivity is exceeding our needs. Any economist can tell you that excess production eventually leads to a downturn in the economy. The standard way of downturn takes shape is that people are laid off until inventories are lower.

There is another way that excess productivity could be dealt with. All of us could work less. I'm in favor of the six-hour workday, or the four day work week and as productivity continues to climb our time spent working should be shortened even further. The eight hour work day had become a general standard by the mid-1930s. With productivity more than doubling why can't we work less?

A shorter work week doesn't have to amount to less pay. A strong union movement would be able to win equal pay for less hours. Since we don't have a strong union movement it could come through federal legislation or funding. Since we don't have a worker friendly political system I suppose this isn't likely either. But as they say, power concedes nothing without a struggle, if you don't ask for it you're never going to get it.

International political assassination and its ramifications.

The Roman emperors had to be quite careful to protect themselves from assassination. Assassination was how power politics was conducted in those days. Thanks to illustrious American technology and the glory of American foreign-policy vision, those days are back again. Of course at first assassination by drones hid in the shadows. Now it has been championed by the assistant to the president for homeland security and counter terrorism, John Brennan. In a speech that perhaps should be called the Obama doctrine Brennen presents what he considers to be an ethical justification for the use of drones in killing identified “terrorists”and others who happen to get in the way. His many arguments are at best weak and sloppy and I will not spend time here critiquing each of them. I'm sure others will do an adequate job of that. I want to however pick up on one point, that of precedent.

Brennan states “The United States is the first nation to regularly conduct strikes using remotely piloted aircraft in an armed conflict.  Other nations also possess this technology.  Many more nations are seeking it, and more will succeed in acquiring it. . . . we are establishing precedents that other nations may follow,”

Exactly Mr. Brennan. Let us imagine that an enemy of the United States, a nation, or an organization that the United States is waging war on got a hold of this snazzy technology. Let us imagine that they followed the US precedent. Their targets would be American leaders. The president would no doubt be at the top of the list. Certainly a case could be made by such an enemy that congressional leader funding or promoting the war against them were fair targets. There is nothing in the US drone policy or practice that would prevent this if the shoe were on the other foot.

The American war machine is ugly, and I won't feel more sympathy for the loss of the lives of its American architects and perpetrators then I feel for the innocent Pakistanis or Yemenites who end up as collateral damage to American drone. In fact if drones in the hands of America's enemies ended up killing America's foreign-policy elite one could certainly see this as no more than the chickens coming home to roost. But the political elite know how to share the pain.

The first time a drone kills in America, no doubt someone will be caught unaware, probably the president, although perhaps it will be a second-level politician someone in Congress, the Secretary of State, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or the head of the CIA. Then the security will begin to ramp up. If you think the patriot act is bad, imagine the legislation that will pass after an assassination of a significant American political figure. Further erosion of our civil liberties, further militarization of our society, more fear and paranoia.

Americans will pull out technology against technology, and I don't know where in this arms race will end. Perhaps we will eventually all have our own little assassin bugs that can seek out and kill anyone we wish with no way of detecting who was operating it. I for one can imagine some pretty dystopic futures based on the premise that in war assassination is legitimate and that new technology allows us to do it more precisely and efficiently.

 Okay, ultimately I take issue with the premise that any warfare is legitimate, and I have mixed feelings about efforts to make war "nice". Nonetheless we do have an option. We don't have to go down this road. Drones could be banned by international law in the same way that atomic, biological and chemical warfare has been banned. I suspect that if there were a president who could promote and achieve such a treaty it might be someone like Obama. Here is a great tragedy, because Obama is not about to push for such a treaty. He likes his robotic planes.

We need not new technology, but a new mindset.

I have a friend who is serving 22 years in prison for her involvement with the Earth Liberation Front http://supportmariemason.org/ . The ELF was a loosely affiliated group of people who engaged in ecotage, sabotage against forces that are understood to be destructive to our planet or the environment. In my friend's case she and her husband at the time, burned down a genetic engineering laboratory. By typical judicial standards 22 years as a harsh sentence for arson, but of course she's not in prison for arson per se, she's doing time for political arson. This type of harsh sentencing is part of what is some times called the green scare.

Now I'm not one to consider the destruction of property to be inherently violent. Yes, if you destroy something that someone else feels a great degree of ownership towards there is a sort of emotional violence. Nonetheless any political act, or action to change anything might be felt as emotional violence. The bigger issue is that fires can be dangerous, sometimes out of control, and even the best laid plans can result in someone getting killed. But no one got hurt, they were careful but they were also lucky.

She was arrested nine years after the fire, they caught her only because her former husband wore a recording device and went to talk to her about the events. He got a nine year sentence. But I just read that his sentence has now been reduced to six years, the article presumes that this was due to further cooperation with the police. http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/Judge-gives-another-break-to-man-tied-to-Michigan-State-University-arson/-/1719418/10573778/-/evn59rz/-/index.html 22 years is for not cooperating.

The system of cooperation and plea bargaining has always upset me. I watched another friend of mine get fingered for dealing drugs many years after he'd gone clean. His arrest and subsequent trial ultimately resulted in two years of probation. These outcomes also killed him. I watched as the stress of this process led him back to drugs, destroyed his marriage, and ultimately resulted in an overdose. The irony is that although he had been involved in consuming drugs with the person who framed him, he had not been a dealer at that time. This kind of plea bargaining encourages you to abandon any sense of loyalty, and even to lie.

I understand why the state has an interest in rewarding dishonesty and disloyalty. Nonetheless it makes me mad. I wish it were my friend who got a few years chopped off of her sentence. Perhaps for maintaining her integrity.

Take Back the Night, Professionals, and Trayvon Martin: A discussion of theory

A young friend of mine recently went to the local Take Back the Night demonstration and march, she was disappointed by the role of the police. Her view is that the cops are a tool of oppression, and one tool of oppression can't be used in the struggle for liberation from another oppression. There is an irony in the fact that what started as women take back the night has become women take back the night with armed escorts from men. I'm sure there may have been some women police, but when I asked my friend if the entire escort was female she of course said no. The early take back the night demonstrations as I understand it were women who had become fed up with the violence of the night and took to the streets in large numbers in mutual self-defense. The last take back the night demonstration I went to, which was quite a number of years ago, at times had a feeling like a pep rally for police/feminist cooperation.

I had to agree with my friend that the police often play an oppressive role in our society. When I worked at a homeless shelter I came to know homeless people who have been beaten up by police just for being homeless. The impression that I developed while working at the shelter was that nearly all homeless people who loitered too long in the public sphere, because they don't have a private space, experience at least police harassment. We could go on with examples of how state power props up systems of oppression. Nonetheless, it's worth asking, as I did of my young friend: "do you think there is any role for individuals who specialize in the promotion of public safety, and the resolution of social conflicts. Or are such things too important to leave to professionals?"

What this gets to is the question of the expert. My friend pointed out that in Ann Arbor it seems that everyone wants to defer to the expert. It makes sense that in a university town this might be a prevalent dynamic. Here where even your cabdriver might have a PhD there is no shortage of experts. There is of course an old definition of expert, one who knows more and more about less and less. And as we learn more in one field we often assume we know less about another.

I myself suffer from this dubious malady. As a nurse practitioner, a role that is often given the unfavorable title of mid-level provider, I am a healthcare expert. In spite of additional training and experience in certain areas of medical interest I still sometimes defer to that expert class, the physicians. Healthcare of course is different than maintaining public safety and resulting social conflict. Nonetheless, my approach to healthcare is to see expertise as a set of resources that whenever possible should be shared. I try to give my patients the information I have and the perspectives I have, and then to engage them in making decisions about their care with me.

How should political decisions optimally be made? I think there is a reasonable and important distinction between governance and administration. There is an old debate between those who favor democracy, and those who believe in the ideal of the philosopher king. In the current political discourse, we might ask what role should science have in shaping political decisions? And related to this, how much should we turn over the experts? It seems to me that to begin with, the role of the expert is to provide information. There is a danger of experts being bought out, but this doesn't completely negate the value that can come from an expert. But experts don't have a monopoly on information either. And in that "more and more about less and less" sense there is a tendency for experts to lack a holistic perspective. Information gathered from whatever source should be processed through democratic participation. A truly democratic decision gives no extra weight to the expert. This point of decision-making is what can be called governance. It's not inconsistent with direct democracy for the participants to identify experts or professionals to administer the decisions that the people have made. However in this context, information must be available regarding how well administration is being carried out. In other words transparency.

In my role as a board member of the Ann Arbor People's food co-op I get to see a variant of these dynamics in action. The co-op runs by a process called policy governance. It is assumed that the board will set policy, and that an administrator will execute that policy. My opinion, which is not necessarily the opinion of the entire board, is that the place that this process breaks down the most is where transparency or feedback is lacking.

Yet a third role in my life where I struggle with challenges around democratic participation and expertise is that of a parent for better or worse I often find myself in the position of having to make decisions for my children. I do this in partnership with my partner. We try to take input from our children, and even to engage them in a consensus process, but fortunately or unfortunately we often make the decisions about aspects of my children's life. On what grounds do we claim the right to this decision-making? Presumably it's our life experience. Our life experience has made us the experts. I wonder if parenting and taking charge of the child's life doesn't promote the kind of thinking that accepts or endorses experts. One term for the attitude of an expert or an experienced individual who looks down on the views of another is patronizing. Of course this comes from the same root as parent.

Okay what about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman? The dynamics of oppression were clearly in play in this tragedy. Race, age and class were all significant dynamic. Mr. Zimmerman's crime included his biases around these issues. But beyond prejudice what were the other elements of his crime? He has been criticized for not listening to the police after he called them, and they told him to stop his pursuits. Is it a crime not to agree with the perspective of the police? He has been criticized for trying to take the law into his own hands. I don't think that it's inherently wrong to want to act to stop what you see as an injustice. We might sort out if pursuing someone you are suspicious of is a crime. One thing for which I have no doubt is that shooting and killing a young man is a crime. Regardless of how much cover stand your ground laws might give you in the eyes of the law, to me shooting and killing an unarmed young man is a crime. This is a crime if it's committed by of bigoted vigilante, or if it's committed by a highly professional police officer.

I'm reminded of one of my favorite cartoons. The caption reads the nonviolent police. It shows a picture of people crouched behind police cars. One of them holds a megaphone that's pointed in the direction of a house in the background. The words from the megaphone are “okay Rocky! This is the nonviolent police! We know you are in there! Come out with your hands up or we’ll start fasting!!” There is humor here because it's naïve to expect Rocky to surrender in response to a Gandhian fast. Still, I want to ask, how would we design a social mechanism, or social process to stop injustice, or crime with nonviolent methods.

Because it is said that the state claims to have a monopoly on violence, experts from the state are not totally credible agents of nonviolent methodology. I am much more hopeful that society is mobilizing the forces necessary to oppose violence against women when women march on their own terms without police escort. This does not completely negate the expert. Another friend of mine is a local legend for her accounts of times that she has encountered fights about to break out. She has found creative ways to distract and defuse, for instance asking for directions, or breaking into song. She is an expert who does training in nonviolence for the Michigan Peace Team, an organization that sends nonviolent activists to Palestine and other conflict rich areas. Sure, she is an expert, and quite good at what she does. But the most important thing she does is train others. What would the world look like if we all had the basic skill set of a well-trained nonviolent activist?

Postscript: With a neo-Nazi group now patrolling the streets of Sanford, Trayvon Martin's Hometown claiming they are there to protect white people from a "potential" race riot, a couple things need to be said. When it comes to analyzing issues involving race, class, gender, and so on, the power status of the groups involved is an essential ingredient in any worthwhile analysis. Large numbers of women marching at night make something safe that wasn't before. The action by the neo-Nazis is the exact opposite their presence on the street intimidates people who are already on the downhill side of oppression. A reasonable interpretation of their actions is that they are not there to protect white people from a race riot, but to be a lightning rod that starts one.

The End of War- a book review

When we think of ending warfare for most of us it's hard to be optimistic. As anyone in the American peace movement can tell you, the past 10 years have been very frustrating. an effort to stop the Iraq war from starting millions of people around the planet participated in the largest day of peace demonstrations ever, and yet the war still started. If the Iraq war is now over, and it's not clear that it is, this likely happened under its own weight, and not due to any efforts of the peace movement. Even the election of a Democratic Congress in 2006, and a Democratic president in 2008 were more likely window dressings then actual forces bringing the war to an end. Many of the Democrats elected in 2006 ran on a campaign of ending the Iraq war, but when there was an opportunity to withhold funds for the war the Democrats were not willing to do so. Obama ran on a campaign to end the Iraq war, but in fact the deal that resulted in the removal of US troops(with certain exceptions) from Iraq was negotiated between the Bush administration and the Iraqi government. And yet like a shell game even with the drawing down of Iraqi troops we saw a build-up in the Afghanistan war effort (also something Obama campaigned on). Meanwhile America's war technology has taken a new gruesome turn with the flourishing of the drones. In this allowing America to open up military theaters anywhere in the world with soldiers working from the comfort of their home base on American soil. If this weren't bad enough, we could be on the verge of an Iranian war, which is the candidate at the moment for the war most likely to engulf a region.

Against this backdrop it seems almost incredulous that John Horgan would declare that the end of war is not only possible but that it may be happening soon. If “the end of war” is an overly optimistic book, it's just the kind of optimism the peace movement might needs. I first heard of Horgan a couple of weeks before I ran into his book. While trying to get to sleep on an overnight Amtrak trip I was listening to a podcast of the NPR show Radiolab. The show was about whether humans could change, and included a brief segment about Horgan whose favorite question was “Do you think humans will ever put an end to war?” Through his informal surveys in various settings he finds that somewhere between 80 and 90% of the people he asks feel that there will always be wars. These figures seem to hold across a variety of demographic groups he's surveyed, including the progressive leaning congregation where he first asked the question. Horgan is not part of that 80 to 90%. When I first picked up the book I didn't make the connection with the guy interviewed on Radiolab. It was a book I was only judging by the cover. It caught my eye on the new bookshelf at our library. So I brought it home not even sure that I would read it. But once I picked it up I couldn't put it down.

This book is a simple, elegant, easy read. If you're willing to listen to someone speaking optimistically about the future of war, this book is certainly worth reading. The book starts with a review of common theories about the causes of war. These can be divided into two groups, biological theories and economic theories. Then we get to the author's own belief about the cause of war: It’s a cultural phenomenon. The book's main message is that we can change our cultural behavior of war. In making this point he suggests that in fact we are changing our war culture. The final chapter of the book, the action plan if you will, is the place where the book has some of its greatest naiveté but I think it may be the kind of naïve optimism that can change the world.
The biological argument is that humans are innately warlike. Horgan reviews the arguments that have been made regarding our innately violent tendencies. This includes primate research, and anthropological evidence. Chimps for instance have been found to engage in warlike activities. But as Horgan points out on closer examination much of this research is tainted by the presence of the researchers. For example Jane Goodall's supplying of chimps with bananas combined with the environmental pressures of shrinking territory may have led to the chimps becoming more aggressive. In fact the first account of collective violence among chimpanzees was not observed until over a decade after Goodall's arrival. The biggest case for chimp aggression probably comes from Richard Wrangham who along with Dale Peterson published a book entitled, Demonic Males. It argues that at least among male chimps and humans there is pleasure in violence. Apparently, this book is a favorite of both Hillary Clinton and Francis Fukuyama and generally popular among Washington elites. Bonobos, our other closest genetic relative are of course anything but violent and Horgan discusses them as well, the so-called hippie chimps whose slogan could be make love not war. Frans de Waal, a bonobo researcher, argues that “Wrangham has created a cartoonishly distorted picture of the (chimpanzee) species“ to quote Horgan.

Then we get to early human culture. Tribal war certainly seems to occur among pre-contact first nation peoples. According to Horgan war is certainly something seen among Neolithic people but not Paleolithic people. The Neolithic human had agriculture and thus land worth protecting. The earlier Paleolithic were strict hunter gatherers, and so were more likely to pick up and move than they would have been to fight. Among the archaeological evidence for war the oldest site that clearly demonstrates collective violence is a 13,000 year old mass grave. This was a time of transition between Paleolithic and Neolithic but most other evidence of warfare are less than 10,000 years old, clearly into the Neolithic age. The change from Paleolithic and Neolithic is not genetic but rather a cultural change.
This brings us to the economic theories about the causes of war. When humans started farming during the Neolithic age there started to be resources, land or stores of food, that were worth fighting over. So is scarcity the cause of war? Not according to Horgan. He identifies two theories of scarcity, he identifies these theories with Malthus and Marx. From the Malthus perspective the issue was that populations would grow faster than the resources needed to support them, and so scarcity would always emerge as an issue that would lead to war. From the perspective of Marx the issue is inequality. As long as there is inequality, so goes the theory, those with less will struggle against those with more. Horgan draws heavily on work of Lewis Fry Richardson which was published in 1960 by Quincy Wright, The Statistics of Deadly Quarrels to show that neither of these arguments fit the evidence of the causes of war. To the extent scarcity is an issue it seems the perception of scarcity is more important than scarcity itself. Still as Horgan puts it “many conditions appear to be sufficient for war to occur, but none are necessary."

In developing the argument that war is essentially a cultural habit, Horgan returns to the question of our biological nature, and shows that more than our aggressiveness it may be our docility that gets us into wars. Our willingness to go along, to do what we are told. But this docility is a two-edged sword(apologies for the metaphor). Muzafer Sherif conducted an experiment in the 1950s where he created conditions among two groups of boys that provoked antagonism and hostility. But the good news is the second half of his experiment created conditions where they had to work together, and their antagonisms and hostilities were replaced with friendship. A common goal or common problem can often bridge differences and bring people together. Horgan suggests two such common goals,”one is figuring out how we can all prosper in every sense - materially as well as spiritually - without you remotely damaging our planet. Another, which will help us achieve the first, is ending war."
If war is a learned cultural phenomenon that humans developed some 10,000 years ago, is it possible that we can unlearn this culture? There are ample examples of individual cultures that have turned away from aggression, sure this is hopeful, but can our culture do it? According to Horgan we may be well on our way. He analyzes wars and war deaths and sees a decline in both. The reality is that this may depend on how you read the statistics. World War II was clearly the most destructive war in human history, but wars of the 19th century killed more people than the wars of the 20th century, and so far the 21st century seems to be doing better than the 20th from this perspective. These numbers are in absolute terms, when we look at things proportionally they look even better, because the total numbers of humans have gone up.

When I first heard the argument that war deaths were on the decline I found it hard to believe. So I looked at some other sources. Stephen Pinkner, a Harvard psychologist has done significant work on the decline of war. His book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, just came out in 2011. Although he relies a little too heavily on Hobbes, a worthwhile talk of his is here http://edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker. Another thing I stumbled upon is the chart below. The amazing thing is that weapons have gotten far more destructive and yet daily casualty rates have dropped precipitously. Clearly there are some paradoxes here.

Of course, there are other opinions, some hold to a cyclic theory of war, and by that theory the latter 20th century, and even this first decade of the 21st century can be seen as an extended period between major wars. You can bet if there's another one it's going to be a real doozy.

There are two scenarios that could seriously reduce the trend towards a reduction in war casualties. One is a major war between major powers possibly involving nuclear weapons. The other is the violence that we might imagine could break out if environmental dynamics lead to some form of societal collapse. Regarding major wars my biggest concern is that the declining American Empire would do something stupid to try to prop itself up. This is likely avoidable, the British Empire largely walked away from its colonies. As a pessimist I think environmental collapse is likely. This could be peak oil, global climate change, or species decimation. I don't know how we will deal with these problems. As an optimist I do believe that we have the capacity to go through the environmental transformation we face and in spite of the suffering, somehow to thrive as a species.

Horgan is an optimist; he feels it that the trend away from war is likely to continue and he believes that nonviolent action is helping that process along. It is worth noting that the Soviet Union and several of its so-called communist neighbors fell under the force of nonviolence. More recently we all have reason to be excited about some of the events of the Arab spring, again nonviolent technics proved their power. Horgan is not a complete pacifist, he believes that until war is abolished there may be rules for humanitarian policing actions. Horgan proposes three rules for leaders faced with “either way you lose” choices, regarding when and how to go to war. First do no harm, by which he means don't make things worse, second minimize civilian casualties, and third consider whether it moves us closer to the larger goal of abolishing war. This of course is a completely reasonable perspective for approaching the question of when military intervention might be appropriate. And yet of course it is utter naivety to think that political leaders would agree to such rules much less follow the rules. Still demanding the completely reasonable is a good place for us to start.

There is a concern that if you say, things are getting better, people will become complacent. I think that the message we all need to give, to ourselves and to our politicians is that things have gotten better but we realize how precarious things are, and we demand that things get better still.