Tuesday, January 18, 2005
I used to read a lot from the Zmag website. It is a good source of essays by notable progressive writers such as Chomsky and Zinn. I like it because some of the essays published on the website tend to be more professional in nature, since they are written by academics who (unlike most columnists) carefully cite their sources to back up their claims. On the Zmag website, you will usually find an assortment of articles that decry the universal social destructiveness which imperialism and capitalism tends to perpetuate. In particular, these days discourse on the website is dominated by articles criticizing American foreign policy in the middle east, and the adverse effects that the war in Iraq has on both American and Iraqi society.
However, I no longer feel a strong need to keep returning to the Zmag website and its fundamentally humanist perspective on international relations. This is because I've come to feel that no amount of moralizing is going to change the rules that govern international relations. In the case of the middle east, no essay, no matter how well-written, will change the geopolitical reality that this region holds most of the world's fossil fuel reserves, in an industrialized planet dependent on fossil fuels for most of its energy. Given the current state of technology, fossil fuel is the opium of industrialized nations, and under such circumstances it is unavoidable that the dominant industrialized nation would seek to gain control of the middle east.
This is perhaps one of the many reasons why I spent most of today applying to summer internships in fusion physics. As strange as that sounds, I believe in the potential that fusion technology holds to provide a clean and abundant source of energy to satisfy the needs of the industrialized world of the future. More importantly, because the fuel for fusion energy can be extracted from water, which is found everywhere humans live, in a fusion-powered planet no one region will be a geopolitical prize in the sense that it is where all other nations find their energy supplies. Thus, unlike the contributors to Zmag, I propose to end the war in the middle east not by teaching politicians to be humanists, but by making fossil fuels irrelevant.
In short, geopolitics is the name of the game when in comes to international relations. I have lost faith in the ability of morality to change the rules by which that game is played, but perhaps science and technology can.
However, I no longer feel a strong need to keep returning to the Zmag website and its fundamentally humanist perspective on international relations. This is because I've come to feel that no amount of moralizing is going to change the rules that govern international relations. In the case of the middle east, no essay, no matter how well-written, will change the geopolitical reality that this region holds most of the world's fossil fuel reserves, in an industrialized planet dependent on fossil fuels for most of its energy. Given the current state of technology, fossil fuel is the opium of industrialized nations, and under such circumstances it is unavoidable that the dominant industrialized nation would seek to gain control of the middle east.
This is perhaps one of the many reasons why I spent most of today applying to summer internships in fusion physics. As strange as that sounds, I believe in the potential that fusion technology holds to provide a clean and abundant source of energy to satisfy the needs of the industrialized world of the future. More importantly, because the fuel for fusion energy can be extracted from water, which is found everywhere humans live, in a fusion-powered planet no one region will be a geopolitical prize in the sense that it is where all other nations find their energy supplies. Thus, unlike the contributors to Zmag, I propose to end the war in the middle east not by teaching politicians to be humanists, but by making fossil fuels irrelevant.
In short, geopolitics is the name of the game when in comes to international relations. I have lost faith in the ability of morality to change the rules by which that game is played, but perhaps science and technology can.
