NONZERO

Introduction

PART I: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

1. The Ladder of Cultural Evolution
2. The Way We Were
3. Add Technology and Bake for Five Millennia
4. The Invisible Brain
5. War: What Is It Good For?
6. The Inevitability of Agriculture
7. The Age of Chiefdoms
8. The Second Information Revolution
9. Civilization and So On
10. Our Friends the Barbarians
11. Dark Ages
12. The Inscrutable Orient
13. Modern Times
14. And Here We Are
15. New World Order
16. Degrees of Freedom

PART II: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORGANIC LIFE

17. The Cosmic Context
18. The Rise of Biological Non-zero-sumness
19. Why Life Is So Complex
20. The Last Adaptation

PART III: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

21. Non-crazy Questions
22. You Call This a God?

Excerpt from

Chapter Fifteen

NEW WORLD ORDER

[SNIP]

Biological weapons are much easier to make and to hide than nuclear weapons. The encroachment on sovereignty that they will call for is, to current sensibilities, shocking. All kinds of industrial and medical facilities will have to be monitored. The personal possession of some equipment will probably have to be banned, and surprise inspections will be necessary. This prospect--that some supranational agency could demand to search your basement or your kitchen freezer--would now strike most Americans as unthinkable, even if local police were in tow to guard against abuse.

But trauma has a way of making the unthinkable widely thought. In the middle of World War II, the historian Arnold Toynbee met with a number of notables in Princeton, New Jersey, to discuss the postwar world. By the end of the meeting, Toynbee had convinced John Foster Dulles--a temperamentally conservative man who would later become secretary of state in a Republican administration--that world government was essential. Dulles signed on to the group's conclusion that "as Christians we must proclaim the moral consequences of the factual interdependence to which the world has come. The world has become a community, and its constituent members no longer have the moral right to exercise 'sovereignty' or 'Independence' which is now no more than a legal right to act without regard to the harm which is done to others."

And World War II, bear in mind, was not as scary for the average American as biological weapons will be. There was no chance in 1942 that whole American cities would be decimated without warning. Once this threat becomes real, appreciable sacrifices of sovereignty are among the less extreme solutions that will get trotted out. (And among the more benign. Persecuting particular groups, such as Muslims, may seem far-fetched now, but recall the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Wouldn't supranational governance be preferable?)

Lots of non-zero-sum problems show the same logic: basic technological trends make their growth all but certain, and their eventual solution will likely entail real accretions of supranational governance. Global laws on the prescription of antibiotics? Sure, if their too casual use creates strains of super-bacteria that can cross oceans on any airplane. Limits on each nation's saltwater fish harvest, complete with random inspections of any fishing boat and stiff penalties? Sure, as the oceans thin out. An International Monetary Fund whose regulatory powers approach those that national governments now possess? Quite possibly, in the wake of a global depression.

And then, of course, there is that notorious sovereignty-sapper, cyberspace, which empowers offshore tax evaders, offshore infoterrorists, offshore copyright violators, offshore libelers. (And sometimes the culprit may be on-shore, using an offshore computer.) Nations will find it harder and harder to enforce more and more laws unless they coordinate law enforcement and, in some cases, the laws themselves.

Viewed separately, the various layers of supranational governance may not seem momentous. But they add up. We can't predict for sure which problems will find strong supranational solution, but a broader prediction is possible: as technological evolution keeps doing what it has always done--expand and deepen non-zero-sumness--much supranational governance will be in order.

[SNIP]