The world appears to be under attack by irrational fanatics. Most are religious fundamentalists, but some, such as Saddam Hussein, have been fanatical about power rather than religion. Most are in the Middle East, but some, such as Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, are not.
Soon after al-Qaida attacked New York City and Washington, we attacked al-Qaida and their Taliban supporters in Afghanistan.
I initially supported the Afghanistan war because I thought we could help reform that nation but turned against it in 2003 when we launched our misbegotten Iraq adventure as Afghanistan sank irredeemably into its own Islamic cesspool.
Even though there were no known connections between Iraq and the Sept.
11 attacks, we feared Hussein might support international terrorism, develop nuclear weapons and use oil to disrupt the West and fi nance his own adventures. We lost a lot in that war. Iran, while hardly firing a shot, was the big winner as Iraq shifted from a dictatorial secular anti-Iranian regime to afundamentalist pro-Iranian regime with unremitting religious warfare. President Barack Obama wisely decided to get the heck out of Dodge and leave that benighted nation to its own fate.
Like most Americans, I was hopeful when the Arab Spring broke out in 2010. It’s improved the lot of Tunisia and perhaps Algeria, but it may be doing more harm than good. Things have gone awry in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Lebanon with negative implications for Turkey, Jordan and others.
Obama has been smart not to charge in with guns blazing as we did in Iraq and as some still urge in Syria. That war is between fanatical Sunni rebels and the murderous secular (but Shiite) dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. I can’t imagine why we would support either side.
We need to think this fanatical global trend through more carefully than we have. It’s about culture, religion and people’s ways of thinking - or not thinking. In other words, it’s about what makes us human.
Following the split 7 million years ago betweenapes and the ultimately two-footed hominids, humans developed through about 25 distinct species.
Two characteristic aspects of that evolution were tool-making ability (the opposable thumb, for example) and rational thought (the cerebral cortex). These abilities were fully developed by 150,000 years ago and led, beginning 12,000 years ago, to organized agriculture, cities and today’s powerful technologies.
The problem is our irrational animal instincts still control these modern developments. Think of apes with nuclear weapons.
Many of our instincts are inconsistent with our highly evolved capabilities.
Physicist and astronomer Carl Sagan put it this way in his classic 1995 book “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”: “We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements … profoundly depend on science and technology.
We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it fora while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”
It’s blowing up all over the Middle East and elsewhere, including America.
Although there are other dark forces such as political ideology and the desire for power, the strongest force on the side of ignorance is fundamentalist religion.
For example, the Catholic Church’s global opposition to family planning has done untold harm. Our current 7.1 billion population is already twice the planet’s carrying capacity. A second example is the contribution of fanatical Jewish and Islamic fundamentalists to the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy.
With our current technological power, all humans should be living like kings and queens.
But we seem unable to pull out of the Middle Ages and adopt rational, pragmatic ways of thinking.
Fundamentalist religionsemphasize dogmatic, implausible, irrational notions that one is expected to simply believe, notions such as virgin births, papal infallibility or the separate creation of Homo sapiens.
Such religions work directly against the evidence-based thinking that can help us and for which evolution provided our excellent brains.
It’s not complicated.
Simply base your conclusions on objective evidence and rational thought without regard to religious or political ideology. Use your brainto work more toward your own happiness and the happiness of the human race and less toward supporting abstract ideological labels such as Muslim, Christian, liberal, conservative and so forth.
Such abstractions are not goals in themselves and are only useful when they promote human welfare.
This prescription is simple but diff cult to execute. It’s not easy to be really human.
ART HOBSON IS A PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF PHYSICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS.
Opinion, Pages 11 on 08/18/2013