Legend has it that King Solomon’s ring, also known as the Seal of Solomon, conferred on him the ability to command the supernatural and to speak with animals.  Despite the enticing title, the book has nothing to do with King Solomon and his famous ring, or Jewish history, or the Israel-Palestine conflict (since this topic is on everyone’s mind these days…).  Instead, it consists of interesting stories about the animals that the author raised to observe their behaviors.  Widely considered “the father of ethology”, Konrad Lorenz won Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1973 for his foundational contributions to the study of non-human animal behaviors.  King Solomon’s Ring, published in 1949 and written for a popular audience, remains his best-known book.  Lorenz was a controversial figure due to his association with Nazism, which apparently came to light only after his death.  According to Wiki, not only was Lorenz a Nazi, but he served as a psychologist in the notorious Office of Racial Policy during the war.  In his application for the party membership, Lorenz pledged to devote “his whole scientific work to the ideas of the National Socialists”.  That said, I found no racial slurs, dog-whistles or anything that can be construed as remotely antisemitic or hateful in the book.   Quite the contrary, the book was a relaxing and enjoyable read that made me giggle more than any book in recent memory. Beyond fascinating facts about animals, the reader will also be confronted with thought-provoking questions concerning human nature and the relationship between men and animals.

Lorenz described many species of animals that he kept in and around his home, ranging from fish and birds to dogs and monkeys.  Notably, he did not keep these animals in captivity but instead let them – to the extent possible – freely wander around on his property, even in his office.  In some sense this was the mandate of his work, since only free ranging animals can “be themselves” and thereby reveal their natural behaviors. However, to Lorenz these animals were more than just a research subject.   He lived with them, bonded with them, and cherished their company.   He saw humanity in these animals – or animal traits in humans, depending on your perspective – because humans, in a quite literal sense, are their descendants.   As a result, his writing adores and humanizes them.

I was never a big fan of animals. Growing up in a small and poor city in China, where few families keep pets in their home, I was naturally disposed to be afraid of most animals, including dogs and cats.  Yet, I think even I would find the gaze of Lorenz’s beloved dog, named Tito, irresistible.  Tito was an Alsatian (or German Shepherd), famous for being “exaggeratedly faithful”.    Lorenz recalled that Tito would remain lying at his feet for hours and hours as he works at his desk, and

she was far too tactful to whine or to call attention to herself by the slightest sign. She just looked at me. And this gaze of the amber-yellow eyes in which was written the question “Are you ever going to take me out?”, was like the voice of conscience and easily penetrated the thickest walls.

Lorenz injected a delightful sense of humor into his storytelling that is truly infectious. I remember several instances when I laughed so loudly in my office that people in the hallway could probably hear me.   His vivid account of the territory-setting battle between two stickleback fish was a great example.  He wrote, describing how the distance from a male fish’s nest is a reliable predictor for the strength of not only his will, but also his actual ability to defeat his rival,

In the immediate neighborhood of his nest, even the smallest male will defeat the largest one…. The vanquished fish invariably flees homeward and the victor, carried away by his successes, chases the other furiously, far into its domain. The further the victor goes from home, the more his courage ebbs, while that of the vanquished rises in proportion. Arrived in the precincts of his nest, the fugitive gains new strength, turns right about and dashes with gathering fury at his pursuer. A new battle begins, which ends with absolute certainty in the defeat of the former victor, and off goes the chase again in the opposite direction.

On another occasion, Lorenz saw a father jewel fish accidentally swallow, at the same time, his own baby—a duty he routinely performs to save his children from drowning—and an earthworm, his favorite food. The father thus faced a dilemma, as in his mouth were two different things “of which one must go into the stomach and the other into the nest”. Lorenz recalled with amusement what unfolded next,

The fish stood stock still with full cheeks, but did not chew. If ever I have seen a fish think, it was in that moment! … For many seconds he stood riveted and one could almost see how his feelings were working. Then he solved the conflict in a way for which one was bound to feel admiration: he spat out the whole contents of his mouth: the worm fell to the bottom, and the little jewel fish, becoming heavy in the way described above, did the same. Then the father turned resolutely to the worm and ate it up, without haste but all the time with one eye on the child which “obediently” lay on the bottom beneath him. When he had finished he inhaled the baby and carried it home to its mother.

Using his jackdaw bird colony, Lorenz repeatedly explores what appears to be an important theme of the book: the similarities and differences between human and animal behaviors.

He observed how jackdaws teach their youth about the danger of the enemy by making a rattling sound in response to a dangling black object in sight. This is remarkably “human” for two reasons. First, knowledge is passed on to the next generation through “learning” rather than “inheritance”. Second, like jackdaws, humans also fall victim to such blind, instinctive reactions (the black object). I am certain Lorenz had his former Fuhrer in mind when he asked,

“Do not whole peoples all too often react with a blind rage to a mere dummy presented to them by the artifice of the demagogue?”

Lorenz observed that a “married” jackdaw couple would not only take each other to love and to cherish till death do they part, but also, apparently, maintain “the glowing fires of the first season of love” throughout their marriage.    Even after many years, he wrote, “the male still feeds his wife with the same solicitous care, and finds for her the same low tones of love, tremulous with inward emotion, that he whispered in his first spring of betrothal and of life”. At first glance such a relationship feels amazingly human; but if you pause and think again, you realize it is in fact quite nonhuman, if not superhuman.  Although humans may live in a life-long marital union, Lorenz lamented, they tend to forget “the thrilling enchantment of courtship’s phrases entirely” as time goes on, and only perform the ritual of their marriage “with the mechanical apathy common to other everyday practices”.

It is well known that a definite order – by which each animal is afraid of those above them in rank – exists in many social animals.  Lorenz’s jackdaw colony is no exception. The interesting twist is that a female jackdaw can acquire a higher rank by marrying a male who ranks above her – a social mobility that is, unfortunately, not available to a male (again, how very human this is!).  If the bird marries the king, she will be granted by every member of the colony the status of a queen.  When this happens, the news of the marriage, and hence the promotion of the wife, spreads quickly in the colony. The funniest part of the story is how the newly crowned queen, having suddenly risen far beyond her own station, would “conduct herself with the utmost vulgarity” when she encounters other jackdaws whom she must look up to only a few days earlier:

She lacked entirely that noble or even blasé tolerance which jackdaws of high rank should exhibit towards their inferiors. She used every opportunity to snub former superiors, and she did not stop at gestures of self-importance, as high-rankers of long standing nearly always do.

Establishing a pecking order is one way by which social animals resolve conflicts without suffering excessive casualties. Lorenz mentioned another mechanism that I shall call the surrender’s inhibition.  According to this law, a victor emerging from a bloody battle for dominance would be inexplicably “forbidden” from hurting the loser, as long as the latter surrenders, i.e., offering to his adversary the most vulnerable part of their body as a submissive gesture. Humans evidently have inherited the habit of making submissive gestures (e.g., kneeling and bowing) when facing a dominant aggressor. Unfortunately, such an appeal to mercy is not as failproof among humans as in the animal world. Homer’s heroes, noted Lorenz, often killed supplicants “without compunction”.  Bai Qi, a Qin Kingdom general, killed 400,000 surrendered soldiers after the Battle of Changping, a prelude to the kingdom’s brutal campaign to unite China under imperial rule.  Mongols, of course, had an abhorrent reputation for indiscriminately slaughtering entire cities of people when they faced even the slightest resistance during their conquests. Nor do we have to go back to primeval or medieval times for the evidence of our species’ sub-animal barbarity.  About three weeks ago, on October 7^th, 2023, Hamas militants invaded Israel and killed more than 1,000 civilians, including many children and elderly – many of the victims, I imagine, would have begged for their lives, but to no avail. Why?

Lorenz argues that the surrender’s inhibition is a result of evolutionary adaptation.  That is, for a species to survive, it must develop a social inhibition to prevent the abuse of its lethal weapon which could endanger the existence of the species.  However, we humans make our weapons “of our own free will” rather than grow them on our bodies as dictated by nature.     Because human weaponry developed so rapidly relative to the time scale of evolution, our instincts could not keep up with it, leading to a lack of adequate inhibition in its usage.  There is a certain truth to this argument.  However, humans also have far more reasons to murder the members of their own species than the imperative of survival. Ideology, for example, offers a powerful motive for mass killing infidels, heretics, or those who happen to have an intolerable identity.  In the end, Lorenz expressed optimism that humans can learn from animals, that if anyone slaps us on the right cheek, we should, as Bible teaches us, turn to him the other cheek also.  This is not so that our enemy may strike us again, explained Lorenz, “but to make him unable to do it”.  I admire his faith in humanity and wish he was right, but I am deeply skeptical whether this age-old wisdom would have saved anyone who was killed by Hamas fighters on October 7^th.

Doris Goodwin’s ‘Team of Rivals’ was the first presidential biography I ever read.  Biography was not among my favorite genres, but I did have a desire to learn more about Abraham Lincoln.  He is widely considered the greatest American president. In fact, to many even that title seems an understatement.  Tolstoy once wrote that Lincoln ‘was bigger than his country—bigger than all the Presidents together…and as a great character he will live as long as the world lives’.    Like most people, I’ve heard about the highlights of Lincoln’s remarkable life as I passed through grade schools: the self-made lawyer and politician haunted by family tragedies, the epic struggle to end slavery while forging a truly United States of America, and the ultimate sacrifice for the cause at the zenith of his career.  Still, I am not quite sure how to make Tolstoy’s melodramatic assessment. The book partially solved the puzzle for me.

Goodwin’s narrative is constructed around, and often from the perspectives of, Lincoln’s key cabinet members who were once his rivals:  Salmon Chase (Secretary of Treasure), Henry Seward (Secretary of State), Edward Bates (Attorney General), and Edwin Stanton (Secretary of War). The first three men ran against him for the nomination of the Republican party, and Stanton, when serving with Lincoln as co-counsel in a lawsuit, not only questioned the then country lawyer’s legal expertise but openly ridiculed him as ‘a gorilla and an imbecile’.  As Goodwin follows Lincoln’s footsteps from the humble origins to the poignant end, she recounts many stories of these rivals, often quoting extensively from their public speeches and private letters.  This helps unlock the mystery in Lincoln’s persona that ‘led countless men, even old adversaries, to feel bound to him in admiration’.

Lincoln ‘possessed extraordinary empathy’ and a ‘melancholy temperament’, wrote Goodwin.  These qualities might be the result of the tragic losses he endured from an early age – at 26, he had already lost three women dearest to his life: his mother, his only sister, and his first love. Empathy can be a curse ‘in a world environed by cruelty and injustice’ because, as Goodwin noted, the fellow-feeling for the misery of others inevitably causes pain and suffering.  It also sometimes made him appear weak and lacking the will to do what must be done in difficult situations. His attorney general confided to a friend that Lincoln, despite ‘very near being a perfect man’, was ‘unfit to be entrusted with the pardoning power’, because he too easily succumbed to touching stories and women’s tears. Yet, empathy was a powerful tool for Lincoln to gain the respect, trust, and devotion of others through understanding their motives and desires.  It also rendered him a remarkably magnanimous man, demonstrating an incredible capacity to forgive even those who had opposed, wronged, and betrayed him.

Goodwin also lauded Lincoln’s `literary genius’ and his mastery of rhetorical power.   His ability to explain intricate concepts through storytelling, coupled with a sharp sense of humor, was unparalleled among his contemporaries.  In the strictest sense of the word, Lincoln might not be as great an orator as Seward, who could deliver stirring, completely improvised speeches to a crowd for hours.  Lincoln was much more careful with his words, but he perfected ‘a language of enduring clarity and beauty’ that made him an extremely persuasive and effective communicator.

Lincoln believed in ‘the better angels of our nature’, a term coined in his first inaugural address.  He once told a friend that he preferred to believe in the possibility of human perfection, when asked about whether George Washington was a perfect man.  His entire life may be seen as the pursuit of becoming that perfect, inspiring human being he envisioned. It is the unwavering conviction to ‘engrave his name in history’, Goodwin noted, that underscores Lincoln’s greatness, carrying him through the dreary childhood, the political failures, the personal tragedies, the disintegration of his beloved Union, as well as the devastating military defeats in the early phase of the Civil War.

But Lincoln was also a realist.  Unlike Chase and Seward, who had advocated for radical abolitionist policies on moral grounds, Lincoln carefully charted a moderate path confined within the limits set by public opinion on slavery. His famous Emancipation Proclamation was timed and configured to be perceived by the people of the North as an indispensable instrument to win the war and preserve the Union, rather than as a necessary step to end slavery once and for all.   Goodwin sees nothing wrong for politicians to go along with public opinion, even if that means they must slightly bend their moral compass.  If anything, that expediency made Lincoln ‘the most truly progressive man of the age’, because he neither ‘wasted strength in premature struggles’ with the public nor waited to be ‘dragged by the forces of events’.  To be sure, Lincoln did owe much of his success to his exceptional ability to read and follow the will of the people.  But that does not make him ‘the most truly progressive’.  Based on what I gathered from the book, Lincoln is more of a pragmatist, a shrewd politician, maybe even a ‘political genius’ (As Goodwin likes to call him). Yet, he does not seem to have the burning conviction to reshape the world in the image of his ideology that many a great man of history possesses.  That difference, I think, is precisely what sets Lincoln apart from (or above, depending on how much you love him) that league of great men.

I was always curious about Lincoln’s view on race.  According to the book, Lincoln was against slavery but did not believe in racial equality.  He said the physical difference between whites and blacks would ‘probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality.’  As a result, he was not in favor “of making voters or jurors of n****, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.”  Nor did he just say these things to get the white people’s votes.  Lincoln was a passionate advocate for colonization, the idea of aiding freed slaves to establish a colony in Central America. To sell this proposal to the country, he even convened a conference of freed slaves at the White House, where he said in his opening remarks, “you and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races.”  By today’s standard, therefore, Lincoln is a textbook racist. Should harboring racism in 19^th century diminish his greatness?  I imagine Tolstoy and Goodwin would dismiss such a thought as quintessential presentism. But many from today’s political left would probably disagree with them.

‘Team of Rivals’ is a thick book of nearly 1000 pages, of which about a quarter were notes.  It was meticulously researched and elegantly written, though at times, the lengthy quotes and extravagant details about the lives of the people in Lincoln’s outer orbit feel a bit excessive. If you don’t want to read the whole book, do not miss the last chapter, in which Goodwin describes how Lincoln met his destiny.  I finished that chapter on an airplane – I still remember having tears in my eyes that I had to hastily cover when a flight attendant asked me if I needed a drink. That rarely happened to me.   I shall end with a quote taken from the very end of the book.

“With his death, Abraham Lincoln had come to seem the embodiment of his own words—’With malice toward none; with charity for all’. The deathless name he sought from the start had grown far beyond Sangamon County and Illinois, reached across the truly United States, until his legacy, as Stanton had surmised at the moment of his death, belonged not only to America but to the ages—to be revered and sung throughout all time.”

When I was in graduate school in the early 2000s, the phrase Artificial Intelligence, or AI, did not have the mesmerizing power it possesses today. The field might have been slowly recovering from the twilight of 1990s, but remained an obscure subject that did not exactly inspire enthusiasm among graduate students –– certainly not in my field of study.  I might be more biased against AI research than most in my cohort, having acquired a distaste for it from the Dreyfus brothers’ contentious book, Mind Over Machines, which I interpreted at the time, perhaps over simplistically, as a rebuke of AI aspiration.   Much has happened since then. In the past decade, AI has made breath-taking progress that enabled computers to navigate complex urban environments and beat the best human Go players.  The Dreyfus brothers would probably read the news of these developments with astonishment and disbelief, though they may still not be ready to withdraw their opposition. For me, the last straw was ChatGPT, the chatbot that demonstrates human- and superhuman-level performance in tasks that I never thought can be done by computers in my lifetime: write essays, produce arts, and even achieve top 1% scores in the GRE verbal test, all delivered instantly by conversing fluently in natural language.  I am convinced that I need to reassess my outdated opinions about AI.  This conviction led me to delve into Human Compatible, a book written by Stuart J. Russell in 2019, whose work I initially came across on Sam Harris’s Podcast.  Russell is a world-renowned AI researcher at UC Berkeley, where, ironically from my perspective, the Dreyfus brothers had spent most of their teaching careers.

Russell began by defining human intelligence loosely as the ability to achieve one’s objectives through actions.  He believed AI should be described and assessed similarly. Yet, he argued that the focus should not be the “strength” of that ability, but rather its “usefulness” to humanity.  In his words (the emphasis is mine), “machines are beneficial to the extent that their actions can be expected to achieve our objectives.”

Paradoxically, a machine that strives to achieve our goals could still be an eminent danger to us.  For one thing, humans do not always know their real objectives.  Steve Jobs famously said, “people don’t know what they want until you show them.” Russell quipped about the perils of “getting exactly what you wish for”, as everyone who has been granted three wishes by a god can relate to.  He calls this the King Midas problem, because the legendary Greek King demanded that everything he touched would turn into gold, only to later regret his ill-fated wish.  Second, a rigid, human-specified goal can often be best achieved by violating norms and values that we humans consider common sense.  In a thought experiment, Russell imagined a super-intelligent machine, being asked by its human masters to cure cancer, decided to deliberately induce tumors in human beings so that it may carry out medical trials of “millions of potentially effective but previously untested chemical compounds”.  Be the fastest cure as this strategy may, it is an abhorrent violation of the established ethical standards in the field of medicine. This is the infamous value alignment problem in AI research.

At this point, most readers would probably breathe a sigh of relief and dismiss these so-called dangers as the illusion of doomsayers.  Surely enough, no machines that we know of can grant us wishes or cure cancer without any human supervision, right? Russell warned such complacency is dangerous and irresponsible, given the rapidly improving competence of AI systems. Contrary to what Hollywood movies lead us to believe, a conscious machine is not necessarily dangerous even if it hates humans. But a highly competent one surely is.

When it comes to the future of AI competence, Russell can be described as a cautious optimist. Not only does he believe artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is possible, but he once predicted “it would probably happen in the lifetime of my children”. He reminded us, furthermore, he is “considerably more conservative” than most active AI researchers, adding that it is entirely possible that AGI could come much sooner than his humble forecast.  In part, Russell’s confidence stems from seemingly boundless computing power available to machines. At the time of his writing, the fastest computer on earth, the Summit machine at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has gained a raw processing capacity in par with human brain, roughly 10¹⁷ operations per second (ops).  But this is infinitesimal compared to what machines could acquire in theory: 10⁵¹ ops for a laptop-sized computer, according to an estimate “based on quantum theory and entropy”.

To be sure, faster does not mean more intelligent.  As Russell said, a faster machine may simply “give you the wrong answer more quickly”.   According to him, reaching AGI still awaits several conceptual breakthroughs that may be hard to come by, which include: (i) understanding and extracting information from natural language; (ii) cumulative learning and discovery, which is essential to advancing science; (iii) planning and executing activities hierarchically to achieve complex objectives (e.g., going to Mars); and (iv) becoming an autonomous thinker that can manage one’s own mental activity (i.e., knows what and when to think).

Russell asserted that natural language technology was “not up to the task of reading and understanding millions of books”, and even though the existing language models can “extract simple information from clearly stated facts”, they can neither “build complex knowledge structure from text” or engage in “chains of reasoning with information from multiple sources”.  That was four years ago.  Today it seems clear that our first line of defense against AGI has already begun to fall to the advent of ChatGPT.  While this entirely unexpected breakthrough may have caught Russell himself by surprise, it actually proves that he was right all along: we must embrace and prepare for a future in which AGI is an integral part, not in spite of, but precisely because of huge uncertainty.

Russel thinks a super-intelligent machine can understand the world far better and more quickly, cooperate with each other far more effectively, and look much further into the future with far greater accuracy, than any human could ever hope to do.  In a nutshell, in a world with AGI,

“there would be no need to employ armies of specialists in different disciplines, organized into hierarchies of contractors and subcontractors, in order to carry out a project. All embodiments of AGI would have access to all the knowledge and skills of the human race, and more besides.”

What does this extraordinary technological triumph mean for human society?

First, the omnipotent AGI would drive up factor productivity to such a level that scarcity and poverty would be eliminated. When “the pie is essentially infinite”, Russell asked, why fight each other for a larger share? If this utopia sounds familiar, it is because Karl Marx said the same thing about communist society.   This crown achievement, however, will come at the cost of shattering job losses. Russell believed few of us could keep our jobs. It is delusional to think AGI will create more new jobs than it renders obsolete or enhance workers rather than replace them.  His metaphor of “the worker in an online-shopping fulfillment warehouse” is as enlightening as it is frightening.  He wrote,

“She is more productive than her predecessors because she has a small army of robots bringing her storage bins to pick items from; but she is a part of a larger system controlled by intelligent algorithms that decide where she should stand and which items she should pick and dispatch. She is already partly buried in the pyramid, not standing on top of it. It’s only a matter of time before the sand fills the spaces in the pyramid and her role is eliminated.”

The implication seems clear: no matter how indispensable you think you are, there will come a time when you too will be replaced.   That said, Russell told us everything will be just fine, if only humans could, as Keynes had famously advised 90 years ago, cope with their permanent plight of joblessness by learning “the art of life itself”.

Second, we must solve the alignment problem before entrusting all human affairs to AGI and retiring to the purer pursuit of happiness.  The solution to the problem is Russell’s expertise and the essence of the book. Russell argued that AGI development must follow the “Principles for Beneficial Machines”, which state “(i) the machine’s only objective is to maximize the realization of human preferences; (ii) the machine is initially uncertain about what those preferences are and (iii) the ultimate source of information about human preferences is human behavior.”   In a nutshell, Russell’s machine would continuously learn and strive to fulfill the preferences of their human masters. Whenever in doubt, it always defers to them, pausing its actions and seeking permission before proceeding.

I am skeptical these principles would be enough to save us from an AGI apocalypse.  The last part of the book discusses extensively the imperfection of humans, which are “composed of nasty, envy-driven, irrational, inconsistent, unstable, computationally limited, complex, evolving, heterogeneous” individuals.   Given that our species leaves so much to be desired, it seems strange to insist AGI must learn from our behaviors and help advance our (often) ruinous self-interests. Also, history has shown, time and again, humans of ordinary intelligence are perfectly capable of wreaking havoc on earth and perpetuating horrific violence against each other.  It stands to reason that the scale of destruction they can inflict would be incomprehensible when armed with superintelligence.  Unfortunately, that infinite pie Russell promised won’t eradicate human conflicts, because humans fight and kill as much for differences and status as for survival.

To his credit, Russell did concede that AGI must mind the interest of others, as well as that of its own master.  Having reviewed the theories of ethics, he suggested that utilitarianism –– which advocates for maximizing the sum of everyone’s utilities while treating their preferences equally –– might work.  Comparing utilities across individuals is meaningful and doable, Russell reasoned, and therefore, machines can be trained to master the science of ethics by what he called inverse reinforcement learning.  What he did not elaborate, though, is what mechanisms will be used to reconcile the inevitable conflicts between private and public interests. Humans invented pluralistic politics to deal with this ancient and intricate problem. However, super-intelligent machines are likely to find such politics too messy, too stupid, and too ineffective for their taste. Instead, they may favor a top-down approach that promises to “optimize” everything for everyone.  Unfortunately, this very promise had been made and broken before, often with devastating consequences.

Even if Russell’s “beneficial principles” ensure AGI never evolve into a tyrant – a big IF – they are still vulnerable to the “wireheading” trap, which is “the tendency of animals to short-circuit normal behavior in favor of direct stimulation of their own reward system”. Once the machines learn about the shortcut – say, directly stimulating a human’s brain to release pleasure-inducing chemicals – they would exploit it relentlessly to maximize the “total happiness” of humanity.  This tactic is not in violation of Russell’s principles because simulated happiness is still happiness, and to many it is an authentic experience.  The reader may recall that, in the famous movie The Matrix, many people willingly choose that virtual experience (the blue pill) over the real one (the red pill). Even Pascal admitted, “the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know”.  How could you blame AGI for gleefully encouraging their human masters to want what their heart loves more than their reason does?

Perhaps the gravest concern for humanity in the era of AGI will be the potential loss of autonomy.  In order for our civilization to endure, Russell explained, we must recreate it “in the mind of new generations”.   With AGI, this is no longer necessary since machines can store our knowledge and essentially “run our civilization for us”.  What is the point for any individual to spend a significant portion of their life acquiring knowledge and skills that they have no use for, except for the purpose of preserving our collective autonomy? Sadly, human nature being what it is, this tragedy of the commons may trap us all for eternity.

Russell’s writing exhibits a delightful wit, and the breadth of his knowledge in social sciences is remarkable, especially considering he specializes in computer science.  The book would make a stimulating but comfortable read for anyone who has some basic understanding of game theory and machine learning. A reader without such a background may find some materials less accessible.  Nevertheless, if Russell wanted to assuage the public’s concerns about AI safety, he might have fallen short.  If anything, the book had rendered me more pessimistic about AGI’s human compatibility.  While the Dreyfus brothers may be wrong about the superiority of mind over machines, deep down, I still wish they were right after all. To end on a desperately needed positive note, allow me to indulge a favorite quote from their book (again, the emphasis is mine):

“The truth is that human intelligence can never be replaced with machine intelligence simply because we are not ourselves “thinking machines”. Each of us has, and use every day, a power of intuitive intelligence that enables us to understand, to speak, and to cope skillfully with our everyday environment. We must learn what this power is, how it works, where it fits into our lives, and how it can be preserved and developed.”

My former colleague and mentor, Prof. David Boyce, loved Vaclav Smil’s How the World Really Works.  In a short email sent earlier this year, he urged me to read it, adding, “of the nearly 100 books I read this year, this one was the best”.  As encouragement he even mailed a hardcopy to me all the way from his retirement home in Arizona, to my pleasant surprise.  I’ve never heard of Smil before.   According to Wikipedia, he is a prolific and decorated author who counts Bill Gates among his fans.  An immigrant from Czech Republic, he had a PhD in geography but wrote about a wide variety of topics ranging from energy and environment to economics and public policy.

I don’t quite know how to make sense of the book’s seemingly pretentious title. If not for David’s recommendation, the title would probably have turned me away.  Having read the book, I suspect Smil had chosen the title to hide the controversial thesis of the book, which I think is an earnest pushback on the current “mainstream” climate policies and initiatives. Had the book been entitled to reflect this position, however, I imagine many people from the left would reject it out of hand as a manifesto from yet another climate change denier.  Here is Smil’s thesis in a nutshell:

“Complete decarbonization of the global economy by 2050 is now conceivable only at the cost of unthinkable global economic retreat, or as a result of extraordinarily rapid transformations relying on near-miraculous technical advances. But who is going, willingly, to engineer the former while we are still lacking any convincing, practical, affordable global strategy and technical means to pursue the latter?”

Let me first unpack how he reached this conclusion.

Citing Ludwig Boltzmann, Smil argues that free energy (i.e., energy available for conversion) is “the object of struggle for life”.   In the past two centuries, humans have gradually gained access to “a tremendous amount of energy at low cost” from burning fossil fuels.  This has largely transformed life on earth, from scarcity and misery that plagued much of human history to abundance and comfort that so many today had taken for granted.  By 2020, the annual energy consumed by an average person reached 34 GJ, equal to the energy content of about 0.8 tons of crude oil.  If the person would source this amount of energy from physical labor, Smil estimates they would need 60 adult servants working non-stop, day and night.  In affluent countries, this number would increase to approximately 200 to 240.  Clearly, before the energy revolution, only a very small minority could ever hope to avoid hard labor necessary to sustain and advance civilization.  As Thomas Piketty explained in his Capital in 21^st Century, in such a world, social inequality was not only inevitable but maybe necessary because “if there had not been a sufficiently wealthy minority, no one would have been able to worry about anything other than survival.” Moreover, “without a fortune it was impossible to live a dignified life”.   Of course, the energy revolution did not eradicate inequality; but living a dignified life and thinking beyond mere survival is no longer the privilege of the super-rich. For this newfound luxury we have the fossil fuel industry to thank.

Central to Smil’s argument is, therefore, the observation that humanity has become deeply dependent on the cheap energy provided by fossil fuels.  The book explores this dependency in the production of electricity, food, industrial materials, and transportation.

• Although the share of renewable energy (hydropower, solar and wind) in global electricity generation has reached 32% by 2022, fossil fuels (coal and natural gas) remained the dominant source (about 60%). As the uptake of renewables continues, however, the challenge lies not so much in converting solar and wind energy to electricity as in addressing their uneven spatiotemporal distribution.   Tackling this challenge requires the ability to store a massive amount of electricity and transmit it across vast distances. The former is contingent upon a technological breakthrough and the latter, even if we tolerate the cost of transmission, needs expensive infrastructure that currently does not exist. As Peter Nihan pointed out, there is a reason why “95 percent of humanity sources its electricity from power plants less than fifty miles away”.  Indeed, Germany had to keep almost 90% of its fossil fuel power plants as backup despite more than half of the country’s electricity is now generated from renewable sources.
• The agricultural industries depend on fossil fuels for synthetic fertilizers, among other things (e.g., power for machinery). Smil estimates that more than two thirds of the nitrogen needed for growing crops worldwide is supplied by fertilizers produced from natural gas using the Haber-Bosch process. If we decide to only feed crops by organic wastes, he concluded, more than half of the current global population would be wiped out, and those lucky enough to stick around would struggle to afford regular consumption of meat.  To drive home the crucial importance of fossil fuel to our food supply, Smil painstakingly calculated the life cycle “oil contents” in several staple food items. Perhaps the most memorable example was the tomato grown in the heated greenhouses of Almería, Spain, which consumes more than half liter diesel fuel per kilogram of edible fruit. In contrast, a kilogram of chicken, the most “efficient” meat in terms of energy conversion, can be produced with as little as 0.15 liters of diesel fuel.
• Smil also surveyed the ubiquitous presence of cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia in our life. The production of these “four pillars of modern civilization”, as he like to call them, relies heavily on energy- and carbon-intensive processes, collectively accounting for about one sixth of the global energy supply and a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption.  Smil asserts that we won’t be able to displace these materials anytime soon given their extensive current utilization. Nor could they be readily decarbonized because their established production processes have no “commercially available and readily deployable mass-scale alternatives”.
• As for transportation, there are two major obstacles. First, electric motors are still far from a viable substitute to turbofan engines currently powering long-haul aviation.  After all, the energy density of today’s best Li-ion batteries only amounts to about 5% that of jet fuel.  Second, the raw materials needed to build batteries – lithium, cobalt, and nickel, to name a few – may not be able to keep up with the enthusiasm of EV advocates.   To reach a 50% EV market share globally by 2050, Smil estimated that the demand for lithium, cobalt and nickel would grow by a factor of, respectively, 20, 19 and 31.  Take cobalt for example.  A quick Google search shows that, as of now (2022), the world has a cobalt reserve of about 8.3 million tons and an annual production of about 190,000 tons. Per Smil’s estimation, the production of cobalt would rise to nearly 4 million tons in 2050, or nearly half of the entire current reserve.

Having explained why we will be stuck with fossil fuels in the foreseeable future, Smil turned to address what he considered hyperbolic responses to the unfolding climate crisis.  To be sure, Smil is no climate change denier. However, he does raise serious concerns regarding climate science and the way it is being portrayed to mobilize mass action.   Smil tells us the cutting-edge global climate models contributed little to advance our understanding about the greenhouse effect and its long-term consequences.   Instead, the scientific community has been “aware of them for more than 150 years, and in a clear and explicit manner for more than a century”.  He also questions the value of performing long-term forecast with these large, ostensibly sophisticated, and complex models.  Such exercises may produce headlines decorated with impressive numbers.  However, riddled with “layered and often questionable assumptions”, they are little more than “computerized fairy tales”, whose primary function is to help the users
“reinforce their own prejudices or to dismiss plausible alternatives”, rather than reliably informing decision making. Smil’s distaste for complex forecasting models reminds me of Douglas J. Lee who, in his famous Requiem for Large-Scale Models, criticized the development of integrated land use and transportation models for the purpose of infrastructure planning. To explain why a more complex model isn’t necessarily better, Lee wrote,

“Including more components in a model generates the illusion that refinements are being added and uncertainty eliminated, but, in practice, every additional component introduces less that is known than is not known”.

In a nutshell, the climate models cannot really tell us what is going to happen in 30 years and to believe otherwise is “to mistake the science of global warming for the religion of climate change”.  Thus, Smil rejects the grim warning that our fossil-fueled civilization will soon collapse unless we immediately take drastic actions to decarbonize the world economy.   He also dismisses the grandiose claims that technological breakthroughs will somehow save humanity from this impending calamity, if only we have faith in them.  He ruthlessly mocks the “techno-optimists” –– who promised that 80 percent of global energy supply can be decarbonized by 2030, and an economy fueled by 100% renewables actually “needs less energy, costs less, and creates more jobs” –– and likens them to “green hymn” singers.

So, what is Smil for?  First, he prefers steady and mundane strategies to “sudden desperate actions aimed at preventing a catastrophe”. Two specific actions he suggested does make sense: reducing food waste, which shockingly amounts to a third of the overall food supply, and curtailing the ownership of SUVs, whose wide adoption had more than offset in the past decade the decarbonization gains resulting from the slow adoption of EVs.  Second, he wants us to “be agnostic about the distant future”, to admit the limits of our understanding, to “approach all planetary challenges with humility”, and to recognize no amount of planning can assure ultimate success.

Smil likes to build his argument around numbers and facts.  However, absorbing all the numbers can sometimes become such a mental burden that the reader may be distracted from the flow of the book.  Of course, this may be a feature rather than a bug; after all, Smil also wrote a popular book called Numbers Do Not Lie.  The chapter discussing risks and life expectancy seems a little baffling to me: it may be interesting in its own right, but a poor fit for the main theme.   That said, the book is a joy to read overall: Smil writes elegantly, his argument well-construed and his conclusions convincing.  Harsh as his critique of the climate modelers may be, it did resonate with me –– and I am a bit of a modeler myself.  However, I am probably not the kind of audience that Smil intends (need) to win over. To young liberals like AOC and Greta Thunberg, Smil’s even-headed message may be too conservative to swallow.  They might even find his lectures on “how the world really works” nerdy and old-fashioned, if not condescending and insulting.  Many a climate action enthusiast would probably never have time and patience to hear the old man out anyway, as they are so preoccupied by the continuous flow of new bad news that implore them to do something, anything, here and now, and at any cost if necessary.

It’s a little embarrassing to admit that I was drawn to the book largely because of the provocative title. The “end of something” is one of my favorite genres – somehow part of me just cannot resist that whiff of fatalism.  In any case, if you crave for apocalypse, Peter Zeihan will not disappoint.

I should first clarify that the “End” spoken of here is not really the “world” itself, but rather the “Order”, the US-led, post-cold-war world order that centers on globalization.  Here is Zeihan’s verdict on the Order in his characteristically assertive tone:

“The globalization game is not simply ending. It is already over. Most countries will never return to the degree of stability or growth they experienced in 2019.”

Let me first walk you through why Zeihan thinks the game is doomed.

First and foremost, the Order is not normal. It was possible entirely because the only superpower on earth, the US, guarantees global security by suspending geopolitical competition.   Zeihan asserted our current era is “the most distorted moment in human history” and thus cannot be indefinitely sustained.

Second, globalization has been subsidized by America’s massive military spending and voluntary de-industrialization of her heartland. However, in the past five decades, this policy has squeezed the once mighty American middle class so hard that a major course correction seems inevitable.

Third, globalization went hand in hand with industrialization, urbanization, and women’s rights movement, which, while pulling billions out of poverty, has depressed birth rate below replacement levels in all but a handful of countries that “have managed a high degree of development”.  Where these processes were artificially accelerated thanks to rapid diffusion of technologies –– the so-called latecomer advantage –– populations also age at an artificially accelerated pace, fast approaching what Zeihan called “postindustrial demographic collapse”.   In fact, Zeihan claims that many countries have already passed the point of no-return, demographically.  The shrinking population will pull the rug out from under the consumption-based global economy.

To summarize Zeihan’s proposition, the Order is inherently unsustainable, can no longer be sustained as of today, and has already produced its own grave digger: the impending population crash.

Well, that explains the “end”. What about “the beginning” part, namely what is going to happen when the Order dissolves?

The first casualty is long-haul transportation.  According to Zeihan,  once the US   withdraws from policing the ocean surface, the global shipping industry will kiss goodbye to its most important asset: the impeccable safety record. Even a small uptick in the risk of losing cargo to pirates or rogue states will drastically increase transportation costs, in the form of rising insurance premiums, lost time, and disruptions to today’s hyper-efficient supply chains.  Without reliable and cheap transportation, moving raw materials and goods halfway around the world would make no economic sense.  As a result, every country must become less specialized and more self-sufficient –– growing all (or most) of one’s own food, rather than importing it from another continent, will become the new norm.  The countries that have selected (or been selected) to turn their entire economies into niche specialties at the behest of globalization will face upheavals, if not existential threats.   Unfortunately, not every country will make it.  Zeihan predicts the places that don’t have “the right geography to make a go of civilization” before the Order will experience not only depopulation –– a euphemism for mass starvation –– but also de-civilization (whatever that means).

The next victim is what Steven Pinker would call Long Peace.  Without effective law enforcement, the world will morph into the jungle that it once was. Under the rule of Darwinism, smaller nation states will have trouble protecting and feeding themselves.  A natural coping strategy is to coalesce around their regional hegemons to form military and economic alliances that would look disturbingly similar to the great powers of the past centuries. As these new empires begin to quarrel over resources and territories, violence ensues. Indeed, war has already returned to Europe when Putin’s Russia launched its bid to regain control over Ukraine about a year ago. Many people thought Putin had committed a huge blunder. However, if the future were to unfold as described in Zeihan’s book, the invasion may well be understood as a strategic imperative: grabbing “the granary of Europe” to ensure Russia can feed her own people when things go south.

While desolation will be widespread, not every country will suffer equally. Zeihan thinks the US and its neighbors will be doing just fine, because collectively they are endowed with rich natural resources, relatively young and still growing populations, and above all a powerful military that can secure industrial inputs and protect trade routes wherever needed.  America’s European allies, however, will not be so lucky.  The shockwave will break up Europe into small blocks led by the legacy powers – the likes of UK, France, Germany, and Turkey – who unfortunately can no longer count on colonialism and imperialism to get ahead like in the good old days.

That the biggest loser will be China Zeihan is absolutely certain.  The first and foremost problem for China is demography.  Most peoples in the world are getting older, but Chinese would allow no one to beat them at the game of speed, including aging.  Even according to official data, China’s population has already begun to shrink in 2022, with a birth rate standing at 1.3 and (most likely) still dropping.  Thanks in part to a ruthless but successful family planning scheme, China has become “the fastest-aging society in human history”, and at this point, her demographic collapse is inescapable and imminent. Second, China is highly specialized in low-value-add manufacturing to which long-haul transportation is indispensable.  This economic model must be completely restructured to cope with a post-Order world. However, the transformation will dramatically slow the economic growth, thereby undermining the foundation for legitimacy and stability of the Chinese polity.  Third, China could even lose full access to the resources essential to support her current population, including agriculture products and their inputs (fossil fuels and fertilizers), because she does not have a navy capable of projecting power a continent away.  In fact, as Zeihan remarked contemptuously, the Chinese navy “can’t make it past Vietnam, even in an era of peace.”

Specious as Zeihan’s doomsday theory might sound, he did attempt to back it up with witty geopolitical analysis and (re)interpretation of the history of technology and economics.  In fact, most pages of the book are filled with those contents, which, unlike the hysterical predictions, often make a more enjoyable read.   However, Zeihan’s central thesis is so preposterous that it hardly deserves a serious rebuttal.   History tells us doomsday predictions, especially something this extreme, rarely come true.  It is almost certain that the Order won’t end anytime soon, and when the end does come, won’t be in the same fashion imagined by Zeihan.

Zeihan is right about the formidable challenges posed by rapidly aging populations, and the unprecedented nature of the current demographic shift.  Older societies will grow more slowly because their people work and consume less on average. However, a slower accumulation of wealth does not have to trigger a panic stampede and tear the world apart in its wake.  Living in an older world could simply mean we must fix our deeply entrenched obsession for perpetual exponential economic growth.

Zeihan is right about America’s withering commitment to global security and leadership.  It may be true that the cost of upholding the Order has become too high to bear by any single country. However, it does not follow that the US and her allies would sit idly watching the Order collapse in front of their eyes.  If, as Zeihan prophesized, most countries will be so much worse off without the Order, why would they not fight with everything at their disposal to keep it alive?

Zeihan is also right about the worldwide retreat from globalization. The trend has been accelerated dramatically by COVID-19, which had exposed the startling vulnerability of the current system to large-scale disruptions, and forced many countries and cooperations to re-consider the premiums set for resilience and reliability.  However, this does not mean international criminals and thugs will come out overnight in droves, wipe out inter-continental commerce, and shatter the Earth Community into pieces.  Homo sapiens have seen better for far too long to willingly return to the dark ages.

Sometimes I doubt Zeihan actually believes his outlandish predictions. After all, he seems too smart to fall for the fallacies.   Maybe he thinks crying wolf gets the ears anyway, not only of ordinary readers like me, but also of politicians and even world leaders.  My other theory is that he was writing to vent his grievances.  To be sure, he pointedly denied this allegation, claiming in the epilogue that his book is not “a lamentation for the world that could have been”.  Yet, right after this disclaimer, he grumbled about America’s “lazy descent into narcissistic populism”.  He chastised the Europeans for their inability to come together for “a common strategic policy”.   His loathing of China and Russia feels strangely personal, and his harshest words and most vicious prophecies are always reserved for them, especially China.  Here is a remarkable paragraph he wrote at the end of the book.

“China and Russia have already fallen back on instinct, heedless of the lessons of their own long sagas. In the post–Cold War era, the pair benefited the most by far from American engagement, as the Order …created… the circumstances for the greatest economic stability they have ever known. Instead of seeking rapprochement with the Americans to preserve their magical moment, they instead worked diligently—almost pathologically—to disrupt what remained of global structures. Future history will be as merciless to them as their dark and dangerous pasts.”

In some sense China was indeed the largest beneficiary of the Order. However, this does not mean her incredible fortune will continue if she just promises to stay the course.  A geopolitical analyst like Zeihan should know strategic decisions are Markovian: they are always driven by the national interest in the future, not the rewards received in the past. Could China preserve her magical moment by simply “seeking rapprochement with the Americans”?  I doubt it.  Once China is deemed to have become too powerful for the Order to contain, she must either faithfully subscribe to the Order’s ideology or conspire to replace it with a new world order.  Judged by the recent developments, China has unequivocally rejected the first option.   Is her choice a stupid and fatal mistake, the lesser of two evils, or, as Toutiao (头条) News would make you believe, about to usher in the greatest era in the five thousand years of Chinese history?  The die has been cast; only time can answer the question.

Before August 2021 I knew almost nothing about Afghan history. Nor did I care.  As a country, Afghanistan seems neither interesting nor important, culturally or geopolitically.  Yes, it is famous for feverish Islamism, extreme poverty, and brutality against women; but there are plenty of such failed states to go around in the world.  Yes, it is nicknamed the “graveyard of empires”; but to most Chinese, there is nothing mysterious about burying empires in what Chairman Mao would call “boundless ocean of people’s war”.

Then, in April 2021, President Biden announced the plan to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of August that year.  Shortly after, Taliban soldiers began to emerge from caves and tunnels. As they swept through the country with breathtaking speed, their opponents, more than 300,000 strong and trained, equipped, and paid for by NATO, simply melted away.  To be sure, Americans did not think highly of the Afghan legions procured with their money, initially predicting they could not hold off Taliban offense for more than a year.  Yet, they were still caught completely off guard when the Afghan government collapsed in Mid-August, well before the deadline of the planned withdrawal. If Americans had dreamed about a gracious if melancholy farewell from a country that they thought they had liberated and rebuilt, the dream had turned into a nightmare that will be remembered for generations to come.

Like most observers, I watched the events unfolding in Afghanistan that summer with shock, amusement, and confusion.  How could a poorly trained guerrilla force defeat a larger, better-equipped national army in just a few months? Why did not most Afghans fight harder to protect their political freedom, personal liberty, and women’s rights, the things that Americans insisted they should cherish the most? Even Biden seemed genuinely baffled at Afghans’ lack of will “to fight for their own future” despite Americans had given them “every tool they could need”.  These questions had prompted me to find answers in Afghan history.   The book I stumbled on was Games Without Rules by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan American author who was born in Kabul after WWII. Ansary covers the 250-year history of modern Afghanistan, starting from its legendary founder, Ahmad Shah Baba, and ending with the Islamic Republic in the 21^st century.   An easy and enjoyable read, the book did not just answer most of my questions, it answered them head on, as if the author knew the questions would be asked ten years later.

First, a few things that surprised me.

I once thought that Afghans have always been living under a somewhat barbarous regime similar to Taliban, and that it was Americans who incidentally liberated them from the subjection by their antiquated institutions.   I was wrong.

Taliban movement was in fact a new phenomenon that bears little resemblance with most Afghan regimes that came before it.  The reign of Abdur Rahman Khan (1880-1901) ––also known as the Iron Amir––may be a close match in terms of brutality and religious rigidity, but he is also remembered by many as the king who united Afghanistan under one flag and set her on the path toward modernization.  Like many peoples that came in contact with the West in the past two centuries, Afghans had gone through, sometimes not under their own initiatives and terms, multiple iterations of modernization projects.  Amanullah Khan (1919 -1929), who fought for and won Afghan independence from the British Empire, was a radical reformer.  Among his daring edicts was a new law meant to replace Shari’a, which guaranteed many basic human rights, including freedom of religion and women’s rights – yes, a hundred years ago, Amanullah’s code already proclaimed no girls should be denied the right to education and no women should be required to wear burqa.   However, Amanullah’s reform was way ahead of its time.  Afghans rebelled and kicked him out of the country; he ended up in Italy as a refugee, where he spent the rest of his life working as a carpenter.  After a few years of turmoil, the reign of Zahir Shah (1933 – 1973) charted a more moderate and successful trajectory, which culminated in the enactment of the 1964 constitution.   By introducing free elections, a parliament, civil and political rights and universal suffrage––and effectively banning any members of royal family to hold high-level government offices––the constitution created a modern democratic state that is, in principle, similar to the Islamic Republic of 2000s. By early 1960s, Ansary wrote,

“in the big city of Kabul, women were beginning to appear in public showing not just their faces but their arms, their legs, even cleavage. Afghan girls of the elite technocratic class were beginning to cotton to Western fashions. They were wearing miniskirts and low-cut blouses. Nightclubs were popping up, which served beer and wine and whiskey—and not just to foreigners. Afghans were drinking and making no bones about it.”

So, how did Afghanistan descend from this lovely modern democracy to Taliban’s Islamic Emirate? Well, it had much to do with geopolitics.

Contrary to my naïve preconception, Afghanistan has been enormously important to the struggles of great powers, especially those between Russia and the West. In the 19^th century, the Russians attempted to reach the Indian Ocean from the central Asia. Determined to protect their enormous trade interests in the region from Russian interferences, the British took Afghanistan as their protectorate by force.  If the objective was to stop Russians, the British succeeded.  However, their control of the country had always been fragile and treacherous.  According to Ansary, they had “won jurisdiction of every patch of Afghan territory their guns could cover—but not one inch more”. Eventually, after countless lives on both sides lost to violence and a world war that permanently weakened Europe, the British granted independence to Afghans. However, the domination of great power politics did not fade away. Instead, it morphed into a form that had briefly become a benefactor, when Russians and Americans, in their attempt to recruit Afghans to fight for their causes in the Cold War, offered extravagant aid packages.  In 1950s and 1960s, the two superpowers “constructed over twelve hundred miles of superb paved roads through some of the planet’s most difficult terrain”, which connected “all of Afghanistan’s major cities”. Unfortunately, this relatively peaceful and prosperous era was interrupted by the rise of the communist movement in the late 1960s.   Social unrest ensued, followed by three coup d’etat in the 1970s.  From the upheavals a deeply unpopular communist regime emerged in 1978, whose internal strife soon killed its pro-Soviet leader, Nur Mohammed Taraki, and forced his slayer and successor, Hafizullah Amin, to consider jumping ship to the Americans. The Soviet Union intervened, plunging into a 10-year war from which she would never recover.  Like the British in the 19^th century, Russians soon discovered that their war machine could easily crash the Afghan army and state but not the Afghan people.  Frustrated by the tenacious opposition led by Mujahideen (Islam Jihadists), the Russians resorted to a scorched earth policy that aimed at depopulating rural Afghanistan. Their grotesque tactics did little to win the war but unleashed a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportion.   According to Ansary, a million Afghans were killed and six million displaced in 1985 alone.

An entire generation of Afghan boys would grow up in the refugee camps and receive education in religious madrassas (schools).  Having suffered through the worst childhood on earth, they were “allowed to imagine that it might be their destiny to establish the community that would save the world”.   From the schools of these refugee camps would rise the loyal followers of Mullah Omar, the founder of the “student movement”, or Taliban (literally means students in Arab).   Under Omar’s leadership, Taliban would win a bloody civil war in 1990s, only to be dethroned a few years later in the wake of America’s anti-terrorist crusade.

The rest is history.

Let me get back to the questions that drew me to this book in the first place. Why didn’t the Afghan people fight harder for their freedom? The short answer is there were two Afghan peoples: westernized urban elites and common folks from the countryside. The “Afghan people” often spoken of in the western media might only refer to the former.  While the elites considered Taliban an archenemy, the masses did not see Taliban’s moral and religious imperatives conflict with theirs.  While the elites were supposedly in charge, they have never gained full control of the other Afghanistan.  Most importantly, when push comes to shove, they had no idea how to “fight the fight and win the war”.

Why is Afghanistan so deeply divided?  As a collection of tribes and ethnic groups that loosely coalesced around an Islamic culture over a tough terrain, Afghanistan is an inherently weak state. This made it very hard for anyone, even the most powerful country in the world, to penetrate through the layers of physical and cultural barriers that historically separate urban centers from rural communities. Without a strong state, most Afghans naturally turned to tribal and religious authorities for such basic state services as security, law enforcement and education. Ansary likened ruling Afghanistan through a puppet government to swinging a pot by grasping its handle: the foreign powers thought they could swing the pot however they wanted; yet, because the handle was never firmly attached to the pot, they often ended up shattering the pot while holding nothing but a useless handle.

The innate weakness of the Afghan state was further reinforced by the powerful legacy of Islam and the recurrent interventions by the West.  Unfortunately, the Islam and the West have long been at odds with each other, and the animosity had only grown stronger in the past century.  As a result, the head of the Afghan state faces a constant dilemma.  On the one hand, as they need the support of the West––money, permission, or both––to secure power and to modernize the country, they must subscribe, or at least pay lip service, to Western values.   On the other hand, they could not afford to alienate the masses who remain loyal to traditional values, or risk being thrown out of the palace like Amanullah.  The balance between the two acts is so delicate that few could make it work, not for a long time anyway.  As a result, modernization in Afghanistan, because it is “foreign” in name and in essence, had actually widened the cultural and wealth chasm between the elites who welcomed the western influences and the masses who continued to resist them.  Any attempt by a foreign power to correct course by direct intervention, regardless of methods or intention, only serves to pour fuel on the fire.

Seen from this light, the Bush plan to rebuild Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion was doomed from the beginning.   On display in that 20-year nation building project, largely funded by American taxpayers, is not so much America’s idealism as her arrogance and ignorance of history.  Biden was right to cut the loss as soon as he could.   In the end, Ansary told us Afghanistan would probably do okay, regardless of who was in charge, if only other countries are willing to leave her alone.   Let’s see if the world will heed his advice this time.

I learned about R.G. Collingwood and his famous book from a Chinese podcaster who quoted Collingwood as saying, “All history is the history of thought” (in Chinese, 一切历史都是思想史). Struck by the profoundness of the quote, I decided to dig deeper.  Collingwood is known as the most underrated philosopher in history, a reputation largely earned by “The Idea of History”. The book was published posthumously after his premature death in 1943, at age of 53.

By “all history is the history of thought”, Collingwood means history can only exist in the re-enactment of the past in a historian’s mind. The past events are over, cease to exist, and hence cannot be perceived and studied as a real, actual object. Thus, history is knowable only by thinking, and the proper object of history is thought itself: “not things thought about, but the act of thinking itself”.   It follows, I believe, there is no such a thing as the true past, or the real history.  History is idealistic in nature.  Seen in this light, the translation—“一切历史都是思想史” —is misleading. The quote should rather read, “一切历史都是思考史“。

Collingwood believes that a historian must go beyond the materials inherited from authorities.  Otherwise, he is a mere “copy-and-paste” historian. Collingwood goes so far as suggesting history, like novel, is the work of imagination, and in this regard, they do not differ.  The historian must tell a coherent and believable story in which the actions of his characters are justified by circumstances, motives, and psychology.  I suppose Collingwood’s novelistic historian is in sharp contrast with most Chinese historians, who actually praised and cherished the copy-and-paste tradition, sticking to Confucian’s famous precept: 述而不作（pass on the wisdom of the sages without adding anything new to it）.

Collingwood argues the purpose of history is to inform the present, by revealing “what man has done and thus what man is”.  Reconstructing the past is always done to know the present and to tell us what to do in the present.  Moreover, the past and the present are the same object in different phases and therefore inseparable: we come to know the present naturally by studying the past, because the past is part of the present.

Collingwood believes all history is biased because everyone approaches history with their own biases. Indeed, if it were not for these biases, nobody would write history in the first place.   He does say a good historian must take no sides and “rejoices in nothing but the truth”, but how much of history is written by good historians?

Finally, Collingwood harshly criticized the “scientific” theories of universal history, i.e., the idea that the progress of human history is governed by some universal law.  Chinese students of my generation can attest this is exactly what we had learned in history classes.  According to Collingwood, the value of these theories “was exactly nil”, and, if they have been accepted by so many, it is only because they have “become the orthodoxy of a religious community”.  He claims only two types of people were still writing universal history at his time: the dishonest attempting to “spread their opinions by specious falsehoods”, and the ignorant naïvely writing down everything they know without “suspecting that they know it all wrong”.

To someone growing up in China where historical materialism is treated as the one and only truth, Collingwood’s idea seems like heresy at first glance.  However, the more I read, the more I agree with him.  Since much of the book was compiled from lecture notes, the experience is close to taking a philosophy course: not exactly fun but worth the effort.

I have heard and read about John Stuart Mill many times before but have never read him. Known as the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century, he still has many followers and admirers in the new millennium, even in some intellectual circles in mainland China. For example, Xiang Luo (罗翔) – the famed Chinese law professor who had gained an incredibly strong following on Internet because of his lucid and witty analysis of contemporary legal matters – is evidently a Mill’s fan.   I was reluctant to read Mill, or for that matter any philosophers who lived two centuries ago, as I wasn’t sure I could understand, much less enjoy, their writings.  However, after reading a blog by Luo that passionately praises On Liberty, I decided to at least give it a try.  I’m glad I did.

One of the most important works on political philosophy, On Liberty explains what constitutes liberty, why society must guarantee it, and how to resolve the conflict between liberty and order. Mill’s central argument is that a civilized community should not exercise power over its members against their will except for the purpose of preventing harm to others.  In his own words,

“The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it”.

This doctrine, known as the harm principle, bestows each person a virtual sphere, whose boundary may be described by the adage, “my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins”.  The individual is sovereign over themselves within this sphere, which Mill divides into three compartments: (i) the liberty of conscience, including thought, feeling, opinion and sentiment on all subjects, (ii) the liberty of planning one’s own life according to one’s tastes and character; and (iii) the liberty of uniting with other consenting individuals.

Per the harm principle, the US government seems to overstep its authority by outlawing prostitution, gambling, and drug use.   The government may consider these activities immoral and dangerous, even decidedly harmful to a person who engages in them, but still the person should only be warned of the danger, not forbidden from exposing themselves to it.  In fact, Mill thinks even commercializing such activities – say working as a pimp or selling drugs for a profit – may fall into the realm of individual liberty, so long as those activities themselves are admissible (under the harm principle, they surely are).

It should be noted that harm is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for interference.  Any competition for a scarce resource – admission to Ivy League colleges, election to political offices, tickets to Taylor Swift’s concert, to name a few – necessarily produces winners reaping benefits at the expense of losers. Do the winners thus harm losers, materially and/or psychologically?  Mill asserts such a claim would be valid only if the winner has employed “fraud or treachery, and force”.   Nor harm to others must be caused by actions.  A person can be held accountable for the harm attributed to their inaction, too, though compulsion against such offense must be more carefully exercised.  A somewhat surprising example given by Mill is parents failing to provide their children with the “ordinary chance of a desirable existence”. That is, the failure at parenting is not just a family tragedy, but a crime against the children and society. In fact, Mill has gone so far as suggesting couples who cannot show they have the means of raising children properly should be denied the right to marriage, effectively denying them the liberty to unite with others.

Mill would probably be called a free speech absolutist if he lived today. Expression of any opinion by any fringe group, in his mind, must be tolerated and protected, no questions asked.  To drive home this point, he writes,

“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

Mill does not believe being offended by another person’s conduct or speech is an injury that warrants redress.  To him, the feeling of a person for their own opinion carries much more weight than the feeling of another who finds their holding it hurtful or offensive. If hate speech was a thing back then, Mill would be inclined to protect it too. He would be dumbfounded upon learning that Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, was forced to resign simply because he offered a seemingly innocent explanation of women’s underrepresentation in science and engineering.  The only qualification to the freedom of speech Mill would agree is that it must not incite violence.  For example, “an opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor… may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer”.   This example seems to fit well with the speech that Donald Trump gave to the mob that gathered in front of White House on January 6^th, 2021 –– whether Trump was intended to stop a proceeding of US congress by force or not, the mere presence of a mob that could heed his words means the speech has violated the harm principle.

Mill had more than a healthy dose of skepticism about democracy.  He appears to suggest self-government is an illusion because there is no such a thing as “the government of each by himself”, but only the government “of each by all the rest”. The will of the people spoken of, similarly, is the will of the majority, not the will of everyone.  Mill is wary of society hindering the development of individuality by compelling its members to adopt its own ideas and practices as the rule of conduct.  This tyranny of the majority, he contends, can be more oppressive than an actual tyrant, because “it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

At times Mill sounds like a staunch elitist.  Deriding the mass as “collective mediocrity”, he warns us the danger of allowing the mass to take their opinions from “men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers”.  Instead, to rise above mediocrity, the mass must be “guided by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few”.  Exactly who these geniuses are Mill did not specify.  I don’t think he meant elected officials, since no elected official in a democracy, including the president of the US, could ever hope to achieve this level of potency.

Liberty is not a natural right, according to Mill. He made it clear the people who are incapable “free and equal discussions” have no use for it. These “barbarians”, as Mill calls them, should consider themselves lucky if they can find a competent despot – “an Akbar or a Charlemagne” – to be their ruler.  Instead, Mill justifies liberty by its utility. Freedom of speech is indispensable because it guarantees “the opportunity of exchanging error for truth”.   Even if an opinion is wrong, we would gain, by giving it a fair hearing, a better understanding of truth “produced by its collision with error”.   As Mill puts it eloquently,

“he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

Moreover, liberty fosters individuality, which is instrumental to human progress.  A civilization becomes stationary, Mill asserts, the moment it ceases to possess individuality. He argues the emphasis on conformity at the expense of individuality is the main reason why China fell so behind the West at the time of his writing (twenty years after the first Opium War).   China enjoyed “a particularly good set of customs” from early on, thanks to the talent and wisdom of a few “sages and philosophers”.  Yet, her attempt to “impress the best wisdom upon every mind in the community” backfired because it ended up imposing the same maxims and rules on everyone’s thoughts and conduct, thereby eradicating individuality.  Remarkably, Mill’s analysis still rings true in today’s China.  Growing up in 1970s and 1980s, I remember being taught that the best I can do for the nation is to become a “revolutionary screw” (革命的螺丝钉).   The word “revolutionary” might have been slowly phased out since then, but the metaphor has not. China still sees her citizens as standard parts on a well-oiled machine: indistinguishable and insignificant as individuals, but harmonious and powerful put together – or so she hopes.  In the past two centuries, China had tried to reinvent herself but insisted to do it her own way for so many times that Albert Einstein might think she was insane, as in “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”.  Will she succeed this time around?  I don’t know, but I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from On Liberty (the emphasis is mine):

“A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished”.