From this week's Gilder Friday Letter:
OSAMA BIN LUDDITE
Tragedy purges the mind of trivia. Perhaps the horror of a new Black
September can rescue our culture from its thrall of humorless TV Conditry.
From gossip about the moral codes of mayors and actors. From the search
for the combination to the loony bin of politicians and economists who
believe in the lockbox for Social Security. Instead, we can focus on what
is truly important: the glass ceiling facing millionairettes at Morgan
Stanley. Having survived the vaporization of its 24-floor former World
Trade Center offices, the Wall Street power now faces a second wave from
the gender cops.
Purged too of trivia, perhaps some of the deeper minds of Silicon Valley
can let go of their obsession with the threat possibly posed by computers
to human dignity and supremacy, and get back to work. Computers pose no
threat to humans beyond Microsoft's blue screen of death and fatal-error
messages. Indeed, information tools alone can save us from the
depredations of desperate technophobes -- the Bin Luddites, for whom a
mud-brick New Jerusalem ("Afghanistan, Land of Nothing," The New York
Times headlined one dispatch) apparently harkens relief from the
tribulations of freedom and wealth. The Bin Luddites could no more build a
767 -- much less a World Trade Center, or even a flashlight -- than they
can feed (never mind, free) the oppressed masses whose interests they
claim to advance. But armed with hijacked technologies and apocalyptic
grudges, they pose a devastating menace to all civilization.
The chief thing terrorists have going for them is the lack of usable
information about them. The U.S. commands the world's supreme information
technology. Neural networks -- already used to scan mortgage applications
and currency market turbulence -- integrate huge amounts of sparse data
and recognize crucial patterns (or countenances). New analog optical
processors sort through troves of information in real time. Bin Laden's
bands left bit trails through the airlines, car rental companies and
federal agencies. He put an infomercial video on the Net. Tom Clancy
provided his plan of attack. But there was no effective integration.
We cannot win by imitating our adversaries. In a rivalry focused on
secrecy and control, demonic cliques will always outperform democratic
bureaucracies. Freedom and openness are our chief enduring assets. As
Edward Teller points out, the U.S. nuclear and missile programs, shrouded
in secrecy, could not even keep their edge against the Soviet Union's
Sputnik and hydrogen bombs. But the U.S. triumphed through entrepreneurial
industries, whose innovations -- and the wealth they generate -- are the
real foundation of our security. Washington now needs to summon those and
the distributed resources of insurance firms, financial institutions,
security consultancies and commercial data farms -- together with the
factious teams of government intelligence -- to address fiendish threats
to open society. Without stifling it in the process.
We should stop using the word "cowards" to describe people who board a
757, ruthlessly kill the pilots, take the controls and fly the plane into
the side of an office tower. They are brave and evil. Nor should we pay
attention to the pretense of their having some legitimate historic
grievance over the loss of territory. Bin Luddites do not care about
history or territory. They resent the Israeli demonstration that even a
semi-capitalist garrison state can grow flowers and sell them all over
Europe, build semiconductors in Herzlia, practice democracy under fire and
supply a third of Silicon Valley's key communications technologies.
Such envy of creative capitalists provoked all the horrors of the
Twentieth century, from the Holocaust, the liquidation of Russia's Kulaks
and the expulsion of white colonists from Africa, to the massacres of Ibos
in Nigeria, Indians in Uganda and the Chinese in Indonesia. Despots always
promise development, but their first acts are invariably to kill or banish
as many of the actual developers as they can. The Israelis are desperate
to help the Palestinians out of poverty; their own leaders prefer instead
that they die as suicide bombers.
In the light of the burning Trade towers, Democrats and liberals and
European tut-tutters should consider that opposition to missile defense is
tantamount to advocating the destruction of Israel. Without anti-missile
technology, Israel is simply not defensible. It is hard to believe that
Democrats are too stupid to see this. Israel has become as crucial to U.S.
defense as we are to Israel's. Israeli outposts in Silicon Valley
contribute indispensably to all the leading technologies that uphold the
U.S. economy. Unlike many American technologists -- wringing their hands
over the threat of global warming, "gray goo" and humanoid robotics --
Israelis are unembarrassed to work on the weapons that will save us all.
What the enemies of Israel -- and America -- really hate and fear is human
creativity. Flourishing only under capitalism, creativity is our key
endowment, in the image of our creator. Without the miracle of mind,
expressed in the art and enterprise of a free society, human beings become
mere meat. Without the word that breathes spirit into creation, nature is
brutal, deadly and Darwinian. Soulless butchers rule, and rush to bury
civilization under the rubble. Human creativity reflects divine creation.
And this arouses the unending abomination of nihilists everywhere. That is
the real evil in the Luddite urge -- the annihilation of the sapient
creativity that lifts humans beyond the beasts and the Bin Ladens. |
