Teachings from Chairman Kahn

I mentioned a while back that I was reading On Thermonuclear War by Herman Kahn, polymath, RAND Corporation fellow and model for Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove." Herman Kahn didn't look much like Peter Sellers's caricature, actually; indeed, not at all. He died fairly young, probably for reasons associated with a lifelong problem of obesity, which again is nothing like his movie version.

The brilliance, however, and the blood-chilling willingness to look at any existential situation which humans can create, no matter how horrible, with a steady, penetrating eye are the same. That implacable fixity of purpose allowed him to "think the unthinkable," and it's evident throughout his long book that he delighted in exploring ideas all the way to their inevitable, awful conclusions, wherever they led. I suppose that's what prompted his occasional vilification, along with his Cold Warrior conservatism.

Society needs thinkers like Herman Kahn as a kind of reality check, so we don't get carried away with idealistic notions about ourselves. That self-glorification, I believe, has been a major impediment to American innovation in the face of global challenges. Kahn was a physicist first and foremost and looked at any problem from a rigorous and detached perspective. Writing about the revulsion that most Americans felt in pondering the value of life after a thermonuclear war, Herman pointed out a simple and homely analogy, our tolerance for traffic fatalities, as an example that we are perhaps far more callous about the suffering of others than we like to think. After even a catclysmic war, the survivors would go on, seeking meaning and even happiness to the extent possible. It's simply part of our genetic disposition, however much we like to believe in heroic traits of empathy that would make us "envy the dead."

In modern times, under the heavy influence of conventional political correctness (where idealization of homo sapiens is de rigeur), we're inclined to characterize such sang-froid as "sociopathy," a term often hurled in the general direction of the Presidential incumbent. This criticism (in his case) has to do, largely, with deaths in Iraq, American and indigenous. The sad truth is that if the president is "sociopathic" about such deaths, so are most Americans. I think the true grieving for the fallen American soldiers in Iraq is largely confined to the families and comrades-in-arms of the dead and wounded. Most Americans don't think about the Iraqis at all. Most Americans have compartmentalized the Iraq war as useless and futile and so don't see the outcome as affecting their daily lives in any meaningful sense, except as a waste of money. So we go about our business, as news of the war retreats from the front pages and becomes a kind of dull buzz in the background.

One could even trot out Herman's car wreck analogy on the subject of sociopathic indifference. As relevant today as ever. When he was writing, in 1960, the U.S. had a population of about 180 million with about 40,000 traffic-related fatalities per year. Today the numbers are about 42,000 fatalities and a population of about 300 million. The improved statistics no doubt reflect major advances in safety design, such as air bags and inertial seat belts. The term "traffic fatality" includes pedestrian deaths caused by cars and motorcycle deaths, along with a few other categories which are motor vehicle related. Kahn pointed out that if you lowered the speed limit to 20 miles per hour, you could probably eliminate most deaths. In our era, it seems reasonable to say that most deaths could be eliminated by a reduction in speed to 35 mph, given the improvements in car safety. There would still be deaths caused by bad weather, driving over cliffs or into water, etc., but it isn't difficult to imagine a drastic reduction in mortality, maybe by 90% or more.

And as I write this, the price for oil is topping $130 per barrel. Since the power necessary to overcome air resistance increases by the cube of increasing speed, lower speeds mean improved gas mileage. Indeed, at 35 mph (enforced by governors placed on car engines), it isn't difficult to imagine all our personal transportation needs being met by electric cars, eliminating gasoline altogether. So: virtually no deaths and no oil importation. It seems likely as well that since it might take 12 or 14 hours to drive from San Francisco to Los Angeles at such a tortoise-like pace, the demand for high speed rail would increase dramatically. Finally, imagine that all cars were equipped with breathalyzer interlock systems that did not permit operation of the slow moving electric car by a driver with a BAL in excess of .02 (the standard in such countries as Sweden, where the designated driver is a social institution). The roads would be about as safe as we could make them.

So why don't we do all of that? Because it's inconvenient and because we've set the economy up to run at a faster pace. We tolerate all that blood and gore on the highways, all those tragic deaths, all that wasted gasoline, the growing problem with the balance of trade, our funding of autocratic regimes in the deserts of the Middle East, because it's just easier to own a car of any size we want and drive it as fast as we can to get where we're going, and because we perceive that more money can be made living that way. All the deaths caused by driving too fast for safety are a tolerable and necessary side effect of those simple values, or so the evidence of our behavior indicates. So even though the total deaths per year exceed the total soldier fatalities in Iraq by a factor of 10, we don't care, even though we could obviously do something about it immediately.

As I say, that guy Kahn was a smart dude. Makes you think, doesn't he?

And the same society that thinks that way is supposed to worry about soldiers they never met? Just remember, young men & women, as you enlist in the Army: saving your own ass is Job One.