The Age of the Unthinkable (22 page)

Yet Holling knew there was an alternative. After all, he had seen plenty of systems in nature that were able to snap back
with astonishing speed from shocks like forest fires or earthquakes. This sort of lifesaving resilience under extreme stress
was an expression of what the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who studied the phenomenon, has called “complex adaptation.” In
Gell-Mann’s view, “simple adaptation” resembles the on-off of a household thermostat trying to maintain a particular temperature:
“It’s too cold, it’s too cold, it’s too hot, it’s just right, it’s too cold.” These kinds of on-off systems have almost no
flexibility, which makes them very efficient and, at moments when they are faced with something new or confusing, mind-blowingly
dangerous. Deterrence logic, for example: “If you threaten me too much, I will attack you” can bend no further than the amount
of time it takes to launch a counterstrike to avenge yourself — about three minutes from sensing what might or might not be
the radar signature of a missile to launching a retaliatory strike. Slightly better than these on-off switches is what Gell-Mann
labeled “expert adaptation,” which leans on a preprepared model, usually based on what’s worked before, to figure out how
best to tackle a serious problem. This was Simon Levin’s biological-risks panel in action, dealing out solutions to the nightmares
they could think of. But the limit here is obvious: you can never push such adaptation beyond the frontier of your imagination
or your own history.
Complex
adaptive systems, however, are the ones Gell-Mann admired most. They are like our immune system. They don’t just react, they
learn. Simply adaptive ants, for instance, exhaust one food supply before moving on to another one. When they run out of food
altogether, they die. Complex adaptive ants are capable of switching between high- and low-nutrition foods as circumstances
dictate, allowing their habitats to refresh. You can probably guess which type of ant survives best in harsh settings.

When I said earlier that being resilient was a way both to protect ourselves (by reducing the chances that we’ll snap under
an attack)
and
to capture those benefits of mashup innovation, complex learning adaptation was what I had in mind. Resilience allows us,
even at our most extreme moments of terror (in fact, precisely because we are at such a moment), to keep learning, to change.
It is a kind of battlefield courage, the ability to innovate under fire because we’ve prepared in the right way and because
we’ve developed the strength to keep moving even when we’re slapped by the unexpected. But resilience has to be built into
our system in advance, like a strong immune response before flu season. In practice this means widening how we interact with
the world — the better to learn new skills and make new connections — instead of narrowing to the fewest possible essential
threats or plans or policies. “A management approach based on resilience would emphasize the need to keep options open,” Holling
wrote in one paper, using language that fits neatly into a view of our own future security. “Flowing from this would be not
the presumption of sufficient knowledge, but the recognition of our ignorance; not the assumption that future events are expected,
but that they will be unexpected.” What might matter most for us in the face of a scary biothreat future might not be the
preparation of anti-bioweapon vaccines, so much as investment in a durable, efficient, and broad-reaching national health-care
system. A high national savings rate, instead of policies that encourage high levels of personal debt, might be more important
than the regulation of specific financial instruments. Resilience pushes these fundamental concerns right to the front lines
of protection. If the goal of resilience began to guide our policies and leaders, it would change a massive national spending
program from a mere short-term economic boost into — done properly — a lifesaving security investment.

When Holling, Levin, and other scientists began digging deeper into ecosystems, they discovered something else. Complex environments,
whether they are stock markets or nations, are stuffed with influences that run on different clocks. Scientists say that these
systems have a “broad timescale.” The lives of bugs in a forest, for example, are measured in hours; those of fish in weeks;
trees in centuries; rocks in millennia. And sometimes it’s hard to pin down when utility begins and ends: dead trees can continue
to play a role in a forest’s ecology for decades, providing nutrition and shelter for animals even as nitrogen leaches from
their dead branches into the ground, fertilizing new generations of plants. A classic Ecology 101 error was to go into an
ecosystem and pull out all the dead trees, thinking they were irrelevant. (This was what overeager German naturalists had
done to their forests in the 1800s, “cleaning up” dead trees and accidentally deforesting huge parts of the country before
they figured out that the rotting trees mattered as much as the living ones.)

* * *

Levin and Holling found that what was most likely to cause big shifts in a system wasn’t changes in fast variables — like
how many fish you were catching every day — but rather shifts in the slow ones. In fact, even though it didn’t always appear
so, fast variables such as the movement of sand grains on a dune or the population of fish in a lake were often “slaved” to
slower variables like changes in temperature or sea level. For example, the Yale University ecologist Lisa Curran, in her
groundbreaking studies of forests in Borneo, discovered that the most destructive influence on local ecosystems wasn’t overharvesting
of trees but the way in which deforestation combined with El Niño, a slow-variable weather phenomenon that operates on a timescale
of centuries. Mixed up with local modernization, El Niño changed from being a source of healthy twice-a-century fertilization
into “a destructive regional phenomenon, triggering droughts and wildfires with increasing frequency.” This logic is broadly
true for all complex systems, whether natural ones or the sorts we now confront in dealing with financial markets, terror
cells, or drug runners: the things that linger longest often have the most profound impact on the system — yet they tend to
be the things we ignore, precisely because they do move and change so slowly.

Holling has said that resilience may be the hardest quirk to figure out about complex systems. You could run around our world
forever, chasing the fast variables, trying to address the surface concerns of security and stability — attacking missiles,
trying to kill terrorists and regulate diseases. Unless you were in touch with those underlying slow forces, you would fail.
If you were in touch with them, however, you could survive almost anything. You could learn to
use
the chaos, to become a complex adaptive system yourself. Then most apparently dangerous attacks would, in the end, be like
small, controlled burns in a forest, clearing away just enough underbrush to make you invulnerable to a larger fire. Yes,
individual trees or fish or, for that matter, people might perish. But as a whole, you would live to tell the tale. This was
the logic of economist Raghuram Rajan, who argued in 2004 that a Fed policy of constantly fighting for economic growth was
limiting the ability of the financial system to develop tools to deal with crisis and slowdown. “Perhaps Chairman Greenspan
should be faulted for allowing only two mild recessions during his tenure,” he wrote. “And perhaps we can sleep better at
night if we pray, ‘Lord, if there be shocks, let them be varied and preferably moderate ones, so we can stress test our systems.’
”

This is deep security. And it shows up in some rather unexpected places.

We are coming up the road toward Sidon, and the traffic has slowed. There is a spot on the coastal highway here, south of
town, where the asphalt chokes down to about ten feet wide, a narrow, rutted channel that runs, at the moment, between two
giant Israeli bomb craters. This stretch of road is repaired from time to time, but it seems to be one of those little corners
of the world where efficiency is destined to be undone by history. Whenever Israel begins dropping bombs on Lebanon — something
that happens with more regularity than either the Lebanese or the Israelis might like — this mile-long section of ruined beachside
highway is on the target list.

We are all a bit tired. The day has been hot, and while we’ve managed good cheer through the dust and the sad little villages
that dot the land between the United Nations buffer zone and the Israeli border, there is something wearing about the landscape,
a dejected collage of cratered hillsides and thin, snaking rivulets of dry rivers, footpaths, and tank traps. We move on and
off the shoulder of the road as we skirt the craters. Looking ahead, I see the back of my Hizb’allah driver’s head, slightly
coated in sweat.

In the rear of the car we have the windows down as a sort of bargain between the boiling air and the road dust outside, the
kind of negotiation that, without air-conditioning, is determined by your relative preference for perspiration over coughing
fits. One of my Hizb’allah hosts and I are arguing about a subject you find yourself debating only in the Arab world. Wearied
by traffic and coming down off a high of Lebanese coffee, we have been reduced to shorthand conversation. “Ted Turner,” he
says, looking at me with the intensity of a chess whiz hitting a checkmate. “Jew.”

By this point I’ve been reduced as well to economic expression. “No,” I reply. “Ted Turner. Episcopalian.” Honestly, I have
no idea where Ted Turner prays, but I know it won’t have much impact on the outcome of this dialogue, which ostensibly involves
CNN’s coverage of the Middle East. CNN has been a constant bugaboo for Hizb’allah. Why couldn’t they get airtime, they wanted
to know? Why did attacks on Israel get so much more coverage than attacks on Lebanon? In response, Hizb’allah had started
Al Manar, its own TV station, in the years before Al Jazeera. While Al Jazeera, the Qatari channel with a global reach, had
pretensions of objectivity, Al Manar, designed to be an inspiring Islamic antidote to Turner’s channel, had none. Al Manar’s
programming included videos, set to Islamic rap music, showing Hizb’allah fighters snaking through the same towns we had just
left behind, en route to night raids. Though Turner redeemed himself in the eyes of Hizb’allah from time to time with a slap
at Israel, Hassan’s answer to me as we crept back toward Beirut on that steamy late afternoon pretty much summed up his final
judgment on Western media and the Arab world: “Ted Turner,” he shot back with a patient and knowing nod designed to end debate.
“Jew.”

Such narrow-mindedness (after all, a quick look at the Internet would have answered the question) might blind you to the fact
that Hizb’allah is arguably the best-run Islamic militant group in the world, so efficient and well designed that it has not
only survived nearly thirty years of Israeli and international pressure but has also developed some of the most powerful and
successful tactics for fighting its enemies. “This is by far the greatest guerrilla group in the world,” Israeli Brigadier
General Guy Zur confessed after his tank brigade had been pounded by Hizb’allah in southern Lebanon.

I had spent part of the morning jammed into the back of a navy blue BMW blasting around the tiny roads of a linked set of
towns less than a half mile from the watchtowers of Israeli border sentries. And it was clear that Hizb’allah, “great” or
not, was masterfully run. We were always in the grip of their net of watchers, planners, and fighters, even when it seemed
we were not. As we shot through the streets at seventy or eighty miles an hour, people stepped back into doorways or pressed
themselves out of the way under arches. Men stood behind columns with radio wires running discreetly up their jacket arms
or walkie-talkies in hand. When our position was too close to Israel, where there was a chance the tower sentries would open
up with high-powered rifles that could hit a target a mile away, our driver would stop hard and turn. Warning shots usually
came through the car’s engine block or, if the Israelis were feeling less charitable, the front windshield.

But the sense of a great and intimate conspiracy was sort of reassuring. Every three or four minutes we would pass someone
who seemed to know we were headed his way and who would either give us a sign to keep driving or step out and wave a hand
quietly at the ground to stop the car, then come to the window to share a few words with the driver, who would then pull us
into reverse and drive back toward where we had come from, quicker this time — the same movie of heads ducking in and out
of windows and shopping women stepping into doorways, but played faster. Everyone was someone’s cousin or brother, even the
Lebanese regular army officers we sometimes stopped to chat with. They were supposed to be part of the effort to collect weapons
from Hizb’allah, but the usual conversation was something like “I’ll see you at your mother’s for dinner next week?”

Beyond the video-game driving or the intricacy of the Hizb’allah network or even the proud ambition of my guide (“This is
where we will invade Israel,” he explained as we passed a few narrow hillside paths), something else made it impossible to
miss the evidence of how deeply Hizb’allah was woven into the fabric of southern Lebanon. “We built this house,” our driver
would say from time to time as we drove. “And this house.” The houses were, I knew, the work of Hizb’allah’s Campaign for
Reconstruction Institution, a charitable arm of the militant group that had built hundreds of homes in southern Lebanon, trying
to keep up with the Israelis’ pace of bombing them flat. The campaign often failed by that measure, but they were doing something
far more valuable: the houses, every one of them, put Hizb’allah in touch with the most important slow variable in this chaotic
environment, the one that Levin or Holling would have quickly told you was most likely to determine the future.