Reading Nonzero During a War

“The point isn’t just that we are playing for the highest stakes in history.  More souls are crammed on this planet than ever, and there is a real prospect of commensurately great peril. At the same time, there is the prospect of building the infrastructure for a planetary first: enduring global concord.” Robert Wright, Nonzero

Since Thursday, I’ve been absorbed in the news of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.  The sadness, and terrible human tragedy of war.  The bravery, and shrewd leadership of Ukraine, particularly President Zelensky to both stay in Kiev and to broadcast direct appeals to both the people of Russia and the world.  And, the increasingly unified response of Western democracies to counteract the aggression.

The fear of the moment is not just of large-scale war returning to the European continent. It is a breakdown of our post World War II system for preventing war.  If large states like Russia can invade smaller democracies like Ukraine, the post-war global stability is no longer.

It is too early to see if we have indeed crossed that Rubicon.  The past seventy-two hours are encouraging, as we see much of the world unifying around a strong economic and diplomatic response. The rapidly escalating response of NATO, a dramatic shift in policy from Germany in particular, and widespread global protests, coordinated and broadcast through social media, increase the chances that Russia’s actions will not stand.

Logic of Human Destiny

This weekend, I also returned to a longtime favorite book, Nonzero, but Robert Wright. The book was written in 2000, just before 9/11 and in the very early days of the internet.  

Wright makes the case that the logic of human destiny is the ever expanding role of positive sum interactions - mutually beneficial exchanges between people in ever expanding circles of concern.

Nonzero is an optimistic book.  Wright traces human history through his thesis, then outlines parallels in the natural world.  Reading this book while doom scrolling Twitter for updates on Kiev provided reassurance.  A framework for why and how humanity may overcome our baser instincts for a more secure future (the book pairs well with the more recent Humankind, which focuses more on the individual).

Wright refrains from taking a definitive stance on how we will overcome the enduring challenge of inter-state conflict.  The closest he comes is:

“World government – a single, centralized, planetary authority – may or may not arrive, but something firm enough to warrant the name world governance is in the cards.  World governance, you might say, is human destiny, the natural outgrowth of the millennia-old expansion of non-zero sumness among human beings.”  Nonzero, by Robert Wright

It seems to me that the move from world 'government' to world 'governance' is critical.  It provides a potential bridge for political thinkers who more naturally orient to local solutions.

I'm thinking here of Nassim Taleb, and his particularly insightful Skin in the Game.  Taleb argues (persuasively, I believe) to default to the smallest unit of people in making political decisions - move local decisions to local bodies of authority, etc.  

Within this argument, Taleb supports federalism of the US kind.  By empowering local munipalities, states and the federal government with different powers, our political structures both align incentives and provide for greater diversity and experimentation in political decision making.

The bridge I see between the more libertarian Taleb and idealistic Wright is in the potential for a limited, but essential, global governance structure that provides reassurance of a certain set of rules for all of humanity.  This level of decision making is essential when problems extend beyond national borders - as is the case when one country invades another, but also for many of our global challenges today such as climate change.

I had envisioned such a body to come from a place like the UN. A formal, deliberative body with a set of rules and procedures.  The benefit of such a system would be fairness and predictability.   The process goes:  national debate --> international debate --> political compromise --> codification of rules --> interpretation of rules (political process, as we are seeing in the UN today with Russia) --> enforcement of rules.

But perhaps this weekend we are seeing the emergence of a more informal global system of checks and balances.  With over 6B smartphone users in the world today, there is a ready made network of witness for any state (or other action).  This surveillance network activates without a political process or top down decision making.  The process goes:   local action --> global dissemination of action --> national & international debate on specific response to action -->  individual and collective ad hoc response.

The benefit of the later is there is no requirement to pre-negotiate a set of rules that encompasses all potential actions and their response.  It is messy, and arguably less fair.  But over time different precedents will emerge.

We may be seeing that today.  Just four days in, the global response to Russia's invasion seems legitimate (in the sense that is made through a legitimate political process by duly elected representatives of large populations), proportional (not escalating the war, yet at least), and effective (it is early, but it seems to be changing Moscow's decision making).

An emergent world governance enabled by real time technology, supported by transparent political processes and legitimized by popular opinion could be the way to prevent international conflict going forward.

All of which reminds me of one of my favorite speeches of all time.  Robert Kennedy, speaking to an audience in Cape Town in 1966, outlined a very nonzero view of our collective humanity with the following:

In a few hours, the plane that brought me to this country crossed over oceans and countries which have been a crucible of human history. In minutes we traced migrations of men over thousands of years; seconds, the briefest glimpse, and we passed battlefields on which millions of men once struggled and died. We could see no national boundaries, no vast gulfs or high walls dividing people from people; only nature and the works of man - homes and factories and farms – everywhere reflecting man's common effort to enrich his life. Everywhere new technology and communications bring men and nations closer together, the concerns of one inevitably become the concerns of all. And our new closeness is stripping away the false masks, the illusion of differences which is at the root of injustice and hate and war. Only earthbound man still clings to the dark and poisoning superstition that his world is bounded by the nearest hill, his universe ends at river's shore, his common humanity is enclosed in the tight circle of those who share his town or his views and the color of his skin.  Robert Kennedy