The Age of the Unthinkable (2 page)

Unfortunately, whether they are running corporations or foreign ministries or central banks, some of the best minds of our
era are still in thrall to an older way of seeing and thinking. They are making repeated misjudgments about the world. In
a way, it’s hard to blame them. Mostly they grew up at a time when the global order could largely be understood in simpler
terms, when only nations really mattered, when you could think there was a predictable relationship between what you wanted
and what you got. They came of age as part of a tradition that believed all international crises had beginnings and, if managed
well, ends. They share as background a view in which the spread of capitalism is good and inevitable, in which democracy and
technology produce an increase in general stability. Such a view represents a shared consensus of elites, the best-mind conventional
wisdom of our day, found everywhere from Geneva boardrooms to Whitehall corridors to Washington war rooms. These ideas fail
both tests of good science: they neither predict nor explain our world. But too many of our leaders are incapable of confronting
this disconnect. They lack the language, creativity, and revolutionary spirit our moment demands. In many cases, they have
been badly corrupted by power, position, and prestige. We’ve left our future, in other words, largely in the hands of people
whose single greatest characteristic is that they are bewildered by the present.

The sum of their misconceptions has now produced a tragic paradox: policies designed to make us safer instead make the world
more perilous. History’s grandest war against terrorism, for instance, not only fails to eliminate terrorism, it creates more
dangerous terrorists. Attempts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons instead encourage countries to accelerate their quest
for an atom bomb. Global capitalism, intended to boost the quality of life of people around the world, claws the gap between
rich and poor ever wider. Decisions taken to stem a financial crisis appear, in the end, to guarantee its arrival. Environmental
techniques engineered to protect species lead to their extinction. Middle East peace plans produce less peace. We stare now
at a long list of similar looking-glass problems, challenges in which our best intentions and their terrible results exist
in a horrific mirror-image dance. The integrity of our leaders, our ability to trust that they understand what we are confronting
— or, for that matter, that they are telling us the truth about it — is leaching away. Why should we believe what they say
about the war on terror, the safety of our food, the global financial crisis, or any of a dozen essential issues when, over
and over, their policies endanger us?

Little in the current discussion of our shared problems suggests the radical rethinking our world requires. There is now hope
and even the first hints of substantial changes in policy, but the basic architecture of ideas and theories necessary to back
up such difficult work remains profoundly underdeveloped. No debate about terrorism, global warming, destructive weapons,
economic chaos, or other threats can make sense without a grand strategy, though this is the thing most obviously missing
today. Instead, the most likely course for our future is the most dangerous: minor adjustments to current policies, incremental
changes to institutions that are already collapsing, and an inevitable and frustrating expansion of failure. And this will
happen fast. Among the things our leaders seem to be missing is a comprehension of the staggering speed at which these change
epidemics occur: one bank fails, then fifty; one country develops an atom bomb, a dozen try to follow; one computer or one
child comes down with a virus, and the speed of its spread is incomprehensible. The immensity of the challenges we now face,
the disturbing failures that likely lie ahead, and our inability to deal with problems effectively with old ways of thinking
will assuredly lead us to question many fundamental values of our society. It will put even the nature of our government and
our democracy into the debate. These discussions are important and legitimate. But they should occur only on a basis of security
and confidence. Today we have neither, and that fundamental uneasiness could lead to some awful betrayals. It would be nice
if we lived in a time when technology or capitalism or democracy was erasing unpredictability, when shifts could be carefully
mapped and planned for using logic that originated centuries ago. This is the world that many politicians or foreign and financial
policy experts have been trying to peddle to us.

It bears very little resemblance, really, to the future we do face.

This book is the story of a new way of thinking. It is one that takes complexity and unpredictability as its first consideration
and produces, as a result, a different and useful way of seeing our world. It explains why unthinkable disasters are blossoming
all around us and — as important — what we can do about them. The main argument of the book is not particularly complicated:
it is that in a revolutionary era of surprise and innovation, you need to learn to think and act like a revolutionary. (People
at revolutions who don’t act that way have a particular name: victims.) When I say the ideas here are useful, it’s because
all of them are already at work in the hands of people who are thriving in this new order. The concepts have been field-tested
in places where the consequences of ignoring the rules of the new power physics are often catastrophic: bankruptcy, social
chaos, even death. As we travel from Hizb’allah guerrilla camps in Lebanon to the offices of billionaire investors in Silicon
Valley, as we listen to a brilliant spymaster and a game-changing innovator in Kyoto, you’ll see that what marks them all
is a relentless urge to avoid models of the world built with the language of the past.

One of the lessons of this new model is that we can harness the change we see all around us, and if we do so, we shall gain
a clearer sense of what sort of nation America should be. In a way, the most ambitious goal of any international policy —
improving as many lives as possible around the world while securing our own safety — is more important than ever. But our
only real chance of delivering such a result, our only hope of guaranteeing the human rights and moral decency this world
demands, is radically new language and thinking. Today we are generally neither secure nor decent. This is, profoundly, not
a moment to abandon decency for pure power, not the time for cold and brutal calculations that treat states like gears and
humans like lubricant. This poses some hard questions on subjects like rights and the uses of national power.

In the days of classical foreign policy, back when the old rules seemed to make more sense, the best statesmen, the honest
ones, admitted that they were always trying to manage a physics that lingered beyond real control, that confounded old ideas
pretty quickly. This is the sense, a sort of bashfulness in the face of history, that emerges from the private letters and
diaries of men like Metternich or Castlereagh or Eisenhower or Bismarck (or the testimony of a former Fed chairman). This
isn’t simply the natural worry of brilliant men who have found the limits of their intelligence. Rather, it is an instinctive
sense of the weird, impenetrable, and complex magic that seems to linger in global politics, marking the line between triumph
and disaster. It is an awareness that enforces a constant alertness — an eagerness, even, to discard old models for new ones.
August Fournier, one of Metternich’s more arch biographers, once derisively labeled him
ein Virtuoso des Moments —
a virtuoso of moments. It’s hard to imagine that the Austrian prince would have been offended; mastery of the passing instant
is often the most that even the best statecraft can hope to deliver. As the great seventeenth-century statesman François de
Callières wrote: “There is no such thing as a diplomatic triumph.” Even when you think you’ve reached the end of a problem,
you are usually simply at the start of new troubles.

Louis Halle, an American diplomat and strategist of the 1950s, once observed that foreign policy is made not in reaction to
the world but rather in reaction to an image of the world in the minds of the people making decisions. “In the degree that
the image is false, actually and philosophically false,” Halle warned, “no technicians, however proficient, can make the policy
that is based on it sound.” Our image of the world now, constructed by people we once thought we could rely upon for such
work, is false, actually and philosophically false. It’s time to replace it with an image that actually works. What we need
is a framework for the sort of change that fits our world — and that lays a foundation for the widespread personal involvement
of millions of people that will make such change useful, durable, and sustainable. Without these two elements, hope for change
will dissolve quickly into lethargic frustration at best and, at worst, panic.

In the physical sciences, dramatic shifts to very different ways of thinking are common. In fact, they are regarded as essential.
Every once in a while a big idea will arrive, thundering in from a great genius or slipping quietly in from an obscure research
corner, to replace all of the old thinking in an instant. Albert Einstein started such a revolution with his theories of relativity.
James Watson and Francis Crick did the same when they described the double helix of DNA. The fundamental challenge of adapting
our old thinking about power to this new world is similar. It resembles nothing so much as the problem physicists confronted
in the twentieth century when they found that Isaac Newton’s physics failed to explain how things worked at a subatomic level.
It didn’t mean junking Newton altogether but, rather, augmenting his ideas with a set of theories that fit a complex subatomic
landscape. Moving into that smaller world required a revolution in thinking, creative concepts so inventive that they appeared
at first blush to contradict much of what was assumed to be true in conventional physics. Einstein’s theory of relativity
showed that Newton’s laws had to be modified for objects moving at high speed; the same might be said of our international
system. The old laws of power, confronted with a faster-moving and more intricately ordered system, are now in need of modification.

Such a paradigm shift isn’t easy. It certainly wasn’t simple for physics. As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr once told friends,
“If quantum mechanics hasn’t profoundly shocked you, then you haven’t understood it.” The goal of this book is not to give
stylized, simple answers — what honest thinker would hope to answer questions that are still being created and that exist
outside our current language? Rather, it’s to explore a new way to think about problems as they arise, to develop new instincts.
Some of the ideas here or those you may dream up as you read should shock you at least a bit —
Stop trying to create a peace agreement as a way to make the Middle East more peaceful? Redesign much of the State Department
?
Let illiterate farmers manage complex health-care programs?
Understood fully, however, the same forces now making our world more dangerous contain the ingredients we need to make it
safer. In every roadside bomb in Tal’Afar, in every death from drug-resistant tuberculosis, in each hiccup of global financial
markets, we can see the workings of powerful forces that, once mastered, offer hope at the same time they present new dangers.

It is difficult to overstate the difference between our world today and that of just one hundred years ago, when many of our
ideas about nations and global politics originated. We may think of 1900 as the modern era, but in fact the world was then
struggling hugely with the demands of the simplest aspects of modernity. Sixty percent of Europeans and Americans were still
essentially preindustrial, living off the land and just beginning the earliest march of urbanization. Factories and assembly
lines were new and tenuous inventions that created wealth for some and a new sort of wretchedness for others. The unrest that
resulted helped plant the seeds of economic dislocation, which blossomed into socialism and fascism. Yet, that shift from
agrarian to industrial was also accompanied by an acceleration of interconnection, transportation, and education. These forces
in turn helped drive a vast increase in productivity, which, combined with our more recent shift from industry to information
and service, means that economies now double in size about every thirty-five years, quadruple the rate of a century ago. But
perhaps nothing has changed so much as the speed with which we can transmit information. A letter carried on horseback 150
years ago would have moved information at a rate of about .003 bits per second (the average note carrying, say, 10 kilobytes
of data, though of course that measure didn’t yet exist). As late as the 1960s those same 10 kilobytes might have moved at
300 bits per second. Today global telecom cables transmit at a rate of billions of bits per second, a many-billion-fold increase
in speed over 150 years.

All of these trends follow what Internet watchers like to call a “hockey stick” curve: they start slowly and then rapidly
accelerate. And while we might feel as if we’re at the end of some historical process called “modernization,” for most of
the world it is just beginning. Today only ten of the world’s fifty largest cities are in Europe or North America. And all
around us, new actors are streaming one after another into the mix once optimistically described as the global order. States
matter less, interconnections make it very hard to trace simple lines between cause (home mortgages) and effect (declining
oil prices), and, as we’ve seen, our smartest-looking policies backfire over and over.

Scientists speak of systems like this as “complex” because their internal dynamics confound easy description and often defy
prediction. Change in complex systems, whether they are ecosystems or stock markets, often takes place not in a smooth progression
but as a sequence of fast catastrophic events. Not surprisingly, these systems are very hard to manage or design from the
outside. They also stump the classical approach of physics, the one we associate with Newton or Aristotle, which relied on
the idea that you could reduce the world to building blocks and then assemble everything from them.