I just didn’t have a lot to say at the Montclair Socrates Café meeting this week. The topic of the evening was suggested by Kon, who always comes up with interesting topics. His topic on Tuesday was whether the US and western Europe have the right to criticize and judge inhumane practices that occur in the Muslim and underdeveloped nations (e.g., stoning adulteresses, chopping off the hands of theifs, female circumcision, criminalizing homosexuality, etc.).

So the topic had potential; a spin-off from the classic tension between relative and absolute views of morality. But after a while the discussion bogged down into a tear-session about how terrible our so-called civilized society is. Let’s just say that the people that attend these meetings are generally educated, well-off, and have a “liberal” political bias; they don’t stray too far from what they read or hear from the Huffington Post, the Nation, and NPR. So they decried our nation’s history of prejudice, poverty, slavery, male dominance, economic inequality and military action. Even today, we make war. We still have soldiers out there shooting bullets and killing people. Our economy distributes wealth, power and privilege in highly unfair ways. One fellow at the meeting decided to lecture us about Abraham Lincoln, claiming that Lincoln only issued the Emancipation Proclamation so as to prevent British aid to the Confederacy. He was clearly implying that Lincoln, who has been held up as the American Gandhi, was not against slavery in principle; in fact, our lecturer concluded that if Lincoln could have held the Union together without ensuring African Americans their rights as human beings, he would have taken the lesser path. (There is a more nuanced analysis of this question on Wikipedia).

I usually don’t jump into the conversation at Socrates for the first hour or so; I like to see where it’s headed before I get involved. I could see that this conversation was heading into a vortex of liberal guilt and lamentation, without any real insight on where things were headed or what could be done. After a while, a bottom was reached – on the question of war. Someone suggested that the USA take all that it is spending in Afghanistan and divert it to human development, or just pay everyone in Afghanistan to do what we want (i.e., keep al Qaeda from using it as a base for terrorism against us; and maybe stop growing heroin poppies and subjugating women so much). Someone else went even further, asking what would happen if we converted the US Department of Defense (oh what Orwellian “doublespeak”, said one of the penitents) into the Department of Peace. I assume they would have the US (and the NATO nations of western Europe, let’s say) end or radically cut back its military spending and use the money instead for “peace”, arguably by trying to eliminate poverty and injustice.

OK. So would that work? If we and our Euro allies all reduced our armed forces and our intelligence services by say 80%, with just a small residual force for immediate border defense and internal security, and offered to spend this bounty on helping the poor of the world, what would change?

Would the bad guys behave themselves (especially if they qualified for a portion of our new cornucopia of foreign aid, which would total around 3/4 trillion dollars per year), or would they get cocky? Would Iran take eastern Iraq and push Israel into the sea (with perhaps a few nukes popping off in the process)? Would Russia take Poland and Hungary back, along with the Baltic states and some of the “stans” in the south? Would a nuclearized North Korea invade its neighbor to the south and revive the early 20th Century Japanese dreams of a northern Pacific empire, ironically against Japan itself? Would China force Taiwan back into the fold and expand its dominance in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, even Australia (where it gets much of its iron ore)? And would India finally have at it with Pakistan (more nukes)?

And even if all this happened, would it really bother us that much? Or would we be able to live with an expanded Persia, Russia, China, India and Korea, given that they would all need us as trading partners to maintain their own economies? Could the world reach a new power balance without NATO as the heavily armed “cop on the block”, without any significant dent in living standards and political freedoms? Is the world and its economy now too interdependent for a mad-man like Hitler with a dream of world domination to arise?

I don’t have a definitive answer to that. But given that about half of the world’s 6.7 billion people are poor (living on less than $2.50 per day), and given our 750 billion former military budget for human aid, we can’t really afford to spend much more than $224 per year per poor person. Yes, the dollar goes farther in poor countries, but somehow I still don’t think that that would be enough to “change the world” quickly enough so as to make everyone happy (e.g. reliable water and power, modern health care, automobiles, air conditioning, cell phones, DVD movies – which many of America’s poor and Europe’s poor possess) and thus erase all political incentives for war. Even if NATO eliminated most of its military and intelligence spending and devoted it to the poor, there would still be a lot of poor left out there who could be manipulated by power-hungry politicians.

It seems to me that it’s still a tough world out there, and those of us living in the few portions of this planet that are lucky enough to have resources sufficient to support education and science and culture need to defend our islands of order and civilization, because there are still hordes with exploitative leaders who would tear down what we have built up over many centuries just for a few more chickens and buckets of coal (and feelings of power and glory). And then we would all be poor and subject to despots. Yes, it is unfair that we have these luxuries, but were we to throw them out to the hungry crowd, I somehow doubt that the crowd would share them in intelligent, productive and just ways.

Actually, it would be good to ponder the lessons of the fall of the western Roman Empire in this regard. But I will leave that for a later blog entry! And perhaps a future discussion at Socrates Cafe, on a better evening.