911

© Laurence B. Winn

Oct 1, 2001

On September 11 this generation of Americans learned what profound evil exists in the world. The result is an almost irreconcilable grief, and grief is a process they say.

First, there's denial. One can hardly believe that the US taxpayer gives $300 billion a year for national defense only to have American bulwarks breached by a collection of yahoos from the backside of the world wielding box knives.

Well, never mind. Paranoia has set in, also a form of denial. Maybe the people who are supposed to predict and prevent these things did know. Maybe they let it happen. Maybe they needed the emotional environment, the rage, the patriotic fervor caused by these murderous suicide runs on the American homeland to make acceptable the thing they think they must do.

Then there's anger.

The weapon used by the destroyers of New York's World Trade Center was not a collection of box knives really. Even the airplanes were incidental. Their weapons were knowledge and mobility - both purchased with money from oil.

And the terrorists enjoyed an advantage Americans have (mostly) denied themselves in past wars, "police actions", "conflicts", "campaigns" and "crusades". Outside of the Occident, certainly in Muslim countries, there is no such concept as "noncombatant". We have hobbled ourselves by a Medieval chivalric notion of war-fighting. Our enemies do appreciate it, and think of us as very nice dead people.

That may have changed. By noon Eastern Daylight Time on September 11, a significant number of Americans had already decided who the enemy was and were ready to employ the nuclear option. Here's a plan: Small nuclear weapons like the one called "Davy Crockett" emit more prompt radiation in the form of neutrons than thermal energy. You can stand a few hundred yards from one, it is said, and suffer no consequences except an immediately fatal dose of radiation. Damage to infrastructure is comparatively minor. Therefore, in order to deprive an Islamic jihad of its means of support, let us detonate a spread of these over the oil fields of the Middle East and move in immediately with repair crews and troops to secure the area. In this plan, we would need to simultaneously incinerate all defensive and suspected covert nuclear or biological warfare facilities everywhere in the Arab world. We would then await evidence of what further action needs to be taken against our attackers.

And finally, acceptance...

As has been pointed out previously (see "We are Borg, Mentats, Empaths ..."), tolerance is a frontier virtue. We may have to acknowledge that America can no longer afford it. Even if it can, the one thing that tolerance should certainly not tolerate is bigotry that kills.

For now, America appears to have decided on a course less radical than nuclear Armageddon, to pursue terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden across the earth until he is brought to justice. And, if famed Arab poet Gibran Kahlil Gibran was correct in his assessment of the U.S., that "The Americans are a mighty people who never give up or get tired or sleep or dream", then bin Laden will be caught.

What then? Surely our issue is not with just one man, no matter how perverse. Security alone, while not worthless, will ultimately fail because it is a purely defensive action, something which always flops in the long term.

Should we prohibit all religion, and Islam in particular, because of the threat it presents in an enclosed world?

Should we have a Madison Avenue experience and make up slogans like "Islamic jihad - The untouchable doing the unthinkable"?

None of the above. As it happens, bin Laden and his boys are just some of John Calhoun's rats.

Dr. John B. Calhoun, a researcher at John Hopkins University and the National Institute of Mental Health, observed the behavior of Norway rats and laboratory mice under enclosed conditions in experiments that continued from about 1946 through at least 1962. Dr. Calhoun died in 1995 at the age of 78. His results are referenced in most works on social pathology as a study on the effects of crowding. It is not merely crowding the researchers studied, however, but crowding under very specific conditions that prevented the removal of aberrant individuals by emigration. That is a practical definition of enclosure from the social pathology point of view.

The disorders observed in Calhoun's experiments included unprovoked incidents of violence and and bizarre sexual behavior (bizarre for rats, that is). Perhaps the strangest of all the types that emerged among the males was a group that Calhoun called "the probers". They were the most active of all the males in the experimental populations, and they persisted in their activity in spite of attacks by the dominant males. Their behavior included lying in wait for weaker animals, both males and females, whom they would rape. They cannibalized the young. They always turned and fled as soon as the territorial rat caught site of them, but, even if they did not manage to escape unhurt, they would soon return. Terrorists. (See also "Universe 25".)

You know those kids who blast away at families on the freeway? Who murder strangers on the street or in their homes as a rite of passage? Who spray their classmates and teachers with gunfire? Rats. The the so-called (by the press) "Attack on America" was done by such gangrenous souls with a bigger budget and better planning. In a letter to The New York Times of September 23, horror novelist Stephen King noted that "the boys who shot up Columbine High School planned to finish their day by hijacking a jetliner and flying it into - yes, that's right - the World Trade Center."

In the great monotheistic religions, persons have free choice. They can choose to do good or evil. Science, however, offers choice only within certain, sometimes calculable, limits of certainty. Frontier theory takes the scientific view.

Terrorists are exiled persons without a place of exile. They are unemployed, possibly unemployable. They don't belong anywhere. They have no stake, no hope, nothing to lose, nothing to do but die. So death is their frontier. The outcome is inevitable.

In a free society, there is probably no certain, short-term defense against terrorism, whether it originates in the Middle East or next door. Frontier theory gives us the conclusion that an effective answer can only involve the opening of a new frontier in space to which fanatical religious and political groups can escape and be isolated while they grow up.

Will they grow up? Sure. The intolerant and bloodthirsty Puritan "Pilgrims" did, and America is the result.

To those who would raise the hackneyed practicality issue as an objection to a "high frontier", one can only respond, "do your homework". Proofs have been given that moving into space does not require the breaking of any natural laws, or even the use of any fictitious technologies. If the doing presents certain engineering, financial and political challenges, so much the better - Sauce for the goose.

Americans will define themselves by how they respond to 9/11. Predictably, we have wrapped ourselves in the flag (some would say hidden under it) and plotted "justice". One hopes we can look at ourselves and our world with dispassionate logic, realize that enclosure is the root cause of our grief, and make something wonderful happen.

References:

Gibran, Kahlil, (translated from the Arabic by Anthony R. Ferris), Kahlil Gibran: a Self Portrait, The Citadel Press, New York, 1959

Calhoun, John B., "Population Density and Social Pathology", Scientific American, February 1962, pp. 139-146.

O'Neill, Gerard K., The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, William Morrow & Co., New York, 1977.

Heppenheimer, T.A., Colonies in Space, Stackpole Books, Harrisburg, PA, 1977