The Age of the Unthinkable (13 page)

Deep Security

Gertrude Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, on February 3, 1874. Her father, Daniel, was a German Jewish immigrant
who had made a fortune in the American railway boom of the nineteenth century but held, somewhere, the idea and hope of the
kind of polish a feeling for European life might give his children. When Gertrude was a girl, he moved the family briefly
back across the Atlantic before finally settling in Oakland, California, where Gertrude spent her teen years. It was a well-rounded,
prosperous, comfortable beginning, one intended to produce a well-rounded, prosperous life with all the usual accoutrements
of family, stability, and friends. In fact, however, it produced a woman who was to become one of the most important aesthetic
arbiters of her day. Stein caught a taste for Europe early and realized quickly that she would never be at home in the United
States. “America is my birthplace,” she later observed, “but Paris is my home town.” It wasn’t only that the puritanical traditions
of American life chafed against her modern sensibility and bohemian habits; it was also that Europe was where she was most
likely to see what interested her most: a collision between old and new.

Stein returned to Europe in her twenties, settled in Paris, and quickly became a sort of den mother to the most successful
artists and writers and dancers of her age. They were, she recognized, moving right along the fault line that riveted her,
the one that separated the classical European way of life, with its balls, carriages, and Victorian sensibilities, from what
she spotted around her: the dances of Nijinsky, the sentences of Joyce, the paintings of Braque. This new world obsessed her.
She loved the speed of its trains, the way the Renault factories in Croissy worked around the clock, the hustle of immigrants
on the Paris streets. Almost like a collector of great art, she began to collect great talent: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott
Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and a dozen other great names of the revolution that became known as modernism. What made Stein
so successful in this endeavor wasn’t only her ambition or her intellect or the strength of her own talent (which was debatable).
It was that her way of thinking and seeing, her curiosity about the collision of old and new, was perfectly tuned for a moment
when Europe was, cataclysmically, struggling with that collision. She was a woman alive to the great theme of her day, the
at once violent, at once beautiful movement from one way of living to another.

If there was a single moment when she felt a sense of the harmony between her instincts and her environment most clearly,
it might have been on a Paris street in the sixth arrondissement one night shortly after the start of World War I. Stein and
Picasso were walking home from a dinner, when a French military convoy rolled past them. But this convoy was different. It
looked
different: the sides of the trucks and the cabs had been splotched unevenly with different colors of paint. The two of them
froze. Stein wrote later, “I very well remember being with Picasso on the Boulevard Raspail when the first camouflaged truck
passed. It was at night, we had heard of camouflage but we had not yet seen it and Picasso amazed looked at it and then cried
out, yes it is we who made it, that is Cubism!”

This is quite a scene — the saturnine Stein, forty years old, and the diminutive thirty-three-year-old Spanish genius, exulting
together in a fresh aesthetic surprise of the Great War. That war became for Stein the defining moment of her sense of aesthetics
and history. For her, 1914 marked a pivot between radically different sensibilities. It wasn’t simply that the war destroyed
so many lives; it was also that it destroyed an older idea of order. “You are, all of you, a lost generation,” Stein told
Hemingway when he showed up in Paris after the war. It was that same confused geography she had in mind when marking out the
way the war had been fought, the way it looked, and the landscape it left behind. “The composition of this war,” Stein wrote,
“was not a composition in which there was one man in the center surrounded by many others but a composition that had neither
a beginning nor an end, a composition in which one corner was as important as another corner, in fact the composition of Cubism.”

What Stein was sensing, marked out on those trucks or the paintings on the walls of her apartment, was, for its age, very
much like what we are feeling now, a violent change in the way the world appears to work. In her case, the world really
looked
different. (If you’ve ever stared at a great Cubist painting, you know that the movement proposed a radically different way
of seeing.) But there are important similarities between her historical moment and ours: a sense of new complexities, fresh
interactions, and a speed that bedraggles old language and confuses old ideas. Statesmen of World War I lamented afterward
that if only the negotiations in the days before the first mobilizations had
not
been conducted by telegraph, the war might have been avoided. The problem, they said, was that none of the kings or foreign
ministers of Europe had accustomed themselves to the speed of information, to the quantity of it that became available when
telegraphs replaced letters. And in their confusion, they felt they had to act and decide at the (then-blistering) speed of
a telegraph machine. It destroyed their judgment.

Every important historical moment is marked by these sorts of shifts to new models of living, which expand in velocity and
complexity well past what the current ways of thinking can handle. Our moment is no exception. And usually the source of the
greatest historical disasters is that so few people at the time either recognize or understand the shift. Artists, with their
tuned instincts for the new, often do. This is, at least partly, why their hearts sometimes seem to break as history collides
with their lives. But for diplomats, politicians, or businessmen buried under piles of old ideas and biases, well, for them
real comprehension is usually impossible. This is, we are about to see, what bewildered and derailed the best minds of the
early part of the last century. And it’s worth looking at how Stein spotted the distilled essence of her age, because in a
moment we will turn to the distilled essence of our own.

In the first part of this book I tried to destroy, politely, the idea that our current thinking about international affairs
is of much use. I didn’t really need to tear down much of anything; those out-of-date ideas are collapsing under their own
weight every day. When presidents pronounce wars won before they are, when central bankers are apologizing for what were once
their very best ideas — at such moments it’s easy enough to recall what Hayek said in his Nobel Prize speech about the dangers
of too much certainty. What I have tried to present instead is a way to see how changes in the international order are now
creating an ever more dynamic power physics. This constant process of shifting adjustment, of innovation, of surprise for
both good and ill, is what I have called the sandpile effect. We’ve seen how this effect demolishes the idea that we can somehow
manage the international system toward a period of peace as if balancing it on a teeter-totter. We have seen how it erodes
our financial, intellec-tual, and physical security. The sandpile effect takes notions at the heart of contemporary foreign
policy, ideas like soft power or that democracies won’t fight one another, and shreds them. The fundamental impossibility
of adapting our old diplomatic or financial habits to this new world is similar to the problem statesmen faced during World
War I or that physicists confronted in the twentieth century when they found that Newton’s physics had run out of answers.

Traditional Grand Strategy took strength from its static nature. It began with a vision of the world as we wanted it to be
— all democratic or all French or all British (and subservient) — and then directed every fiber of national life toward achieving
it. Old grand strategies looked like the Cold War détente balance between East and West or the Monroe Doctrine, which said
that no foreign power should establish a foothold in the Western Hemisphere. These grand strategies assumed, as you’ll recall
from Morgenthau, the primacy of states. They relied on the idea of rational powers, threats that could be named and monitored,
violence that came in the form of armies, and usually clear lines between economic, environmental, political, and military
policy. In a sandpile world no such division is possible. In a world that is changing fast, we need a grand strategy that’s
capable of the sorts of rapid change the world itself produces, because much of what we have to confront will be things that
have never occurred to us before.

Such a world demands a whole new way of composing a grand-strategic view. I call this new approach “deep security” because
it is about mastering the forces at work deep inside our sandpile world. Deep security doesn’t answer all of our questions
about the future. Indeed, it’s predicated on the idea that
we don’t have all the answers
and, in fact, can’t even anticipate many of the questions. What it is instead is a way of seeing, of thinking, and of acting
that accepts growing complexity and ceaseless newness as givens — and, used properly, our best allies. Deep security creates
a context in which all of the change we now need and are planning for can make sense, can be as adaptive and flexible as the
world we inhabit. Instead of starting with a view of how we want the world to be and then jamming that view into place, we
start more reasonably with a picture of how the world is. We leave behind, to recall Per Bak’s old joke, the spherical cows
and start to think and live among the more complex real ones all around us.

Deep security works because it comes from the essential,
lifesaving
difference between us and the grains of sand on Bak’s piles. We’re not helpless or passive; we can move. Our world shares
the same dynamic as the pile, the same complex mysteries and laws. But even though the flows are the same, the objects are
not. A stick thrown into a river will simply float downstream. If you’re thrown into a river, you might not be as passive.
This is a crucial — and hopeful — distinction. Bak’s sandpile
logic
accurately reflects the dynamics of our world, but the sandpile
experiment
only touches on what is possible. We can and should and even must do certain things. Our actions, our policies, and our dreams
can
influence everything around us. This is, in the end, the saving virtue of what is otherwise a very dangerous power dynamic.

Perhaps the best way to think of deep security is as a kind of immune system, a reactive instinct for identifying dangers,
adapting to deal with them, and then moving to control and contain the risk they present. Many of the most serious threats
we face today, from financial crises to terrorism, resemble nothing so much as epidemics: they start small, spread fast, and
often are bred at the intersection of things that look benign until combined (jet travel and fundamentalism, home mortgages
and hedge funds). Dealing with epidemics requires an unusually clear-sighted way of thinking. Good epidemiologists are relentless
about asking how and where such contagions begin, what they involve, why they are spreading. Public-health officials will
tell you the only way to control an epidemic is with a carefully orchestrated approach that works along many lines at once.
Deep security is a strategy that makes this possible. But it also enables us to achieve the dreams of national power and global
stability we cherish. As we will see, the very things we need to do to keep the world healthy happen to be in our best interest.
Someone who is sick cannot do much hard work, so getting this global immune system running is a first step for almost any
challenge, from poverty to environmental damage, that can only be faced on a global scale.

Part of the reason we know that deep security works is that many players in our world order are already using it to survive
and thrive. Largely these are the sorts of revolutionary figures we encountered at the start of this book: Internet firms,
terrorists, successful investors. Revolutionaries see big changes early because they are looking for signs that things are
different, not for those “Oh, I’ve seen that before” markers of commonality between old and new. Most people on the Boulevard
Raspail that night in 1914 would have seen the military convoy and thought “military convoy”; Stein and Picasso saw it and
knew instantly what it was: a signpost of the future. Once mastered, this instinct for looking deeply is as useful for the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as for businesses facing a radical shift, governments trying to frame new treaties, or families
and church groups trying to decide what this age demands of their consciences. The one thing it requires absolutely is a comfortable
fluency with the disruptive energy that is remaking the world. But as we grow comfortable with this new and sometimes counterintuitive
language, old problems will become clearer and we can turn to new questions with fresh energy. How do we do that? Well, we
could do worse than by examining a similar shift that blew up at the start of the last century. And this is where Picasso
and Stein return to our story.

When Stein labeled the Great War as “Cubist” she was referring to a movement that had changed painting. Cubism reflected Picasso’s
hope, cadged from artists such as Matisse and Cézanne and shared with his good friend Georges Braque, that he could make pictures
that held a multidimensional view of the world. By distorting what they were painting, Picasso and Braque hoped to make paintings
as dynamic and alive as what they were painting. In this view, a picture of a horse might look more like a horse if it captured
the energy of the animal galloping instead of recording it with hair-by-hair fidelity. The terrifying bulls (and sometimes
terrifyingly bull-like women) in Picasso’s canvases didn’t really look like bulls (or women), but they held, perfectly, the
spirit of angry animals.