I was listening the other night to an NPR interview of Judge Richard Posner, the reigning “authority on everything”. Posner, a noted lawyer and economist, was talking about intelligence reform and preventing terrorism; he’s got a book out now called Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11. The Judge is famous for his applications of cost-benefit economic analysis to almost every possible subject and issue. He wrote a book not long ago about possible mega-catastrophes (the end-of-the-world-kind, not your garden variety catastrophe) and what the cost-benefit perspective would be towards them. E.g., should we let physicists continue to perform research that has a tiny, tiny, tiny chance of causing a runaway physical reaction that might end the world (i.e., the “stragelet” scenario)? Not an easy one to answer, and maybe not even answerable with the mathematics and reason of cost-benefit assessment. So Posner is now focusing on somewhat smaller but still very nasty catastrophes, e.g. repeats of 9-11.

Posner’s equation-like thinking doesn’t play so well when you’re talking about the end of everything; pretty hard to put a price on that. But as to terrorism, he’s on somewhat firmer ground, although there’s still a huge psychological factor that’s hard to put a price on (that huge psychological factor is terror, not surprisingly).

The Judge does make some good points, even if they seem a bit sad and fatalistic. The most important one is that you cannot eliminate surprise. You just can’t be ready for everything, because there are just too many things out there that could happen. There’s gonna be a Pearl Harbor every now and then. If you tried to be ready for everything, you could never live your life. Likewise, if our nation tries to become ready for every possible threat, it will collapse from a martial-law environment that would make the old Soviet Union seem like July 4, 1776, and from the economic burden of enforcing such a militarized system. Posner is right, in that we have to ask whether we spend too much time and money building a wall against the last tragedy, based on our emotional response to its horror. The next punch may be nothing like the last one (although admittedly, you don’t want to make it easy for your opponent by doing nothing at all to stop a repeat attack — it’s a question of balance).

So, bad stuff will happen again, eventually. And you probably can’t imagine right now what it will be, although once it happens we all will say “why didn’t we think of that?” As Judge Posner points out, the Air Force once did a study on the possibility of hi-jacked airliners being crashed into buildings. They were going to put together a response exercise, but there were a million other things to do, so they never got around to it. Posner is NOT saying that we should make no effort to prevent terrorism or other forms of attack. But we can only do so much to detect and prevent them; we just don’t have the resources to put up a perfect shield.

So, under the Posner paradigm, we should also put a fair chunk of our limited resources have into disaster response systems, and make them flexible, portable and “modular” so that they can be quickly mixed and matched to meet whatever comes our way, be it a nuclear explosion or a series of small nerve-gas attacks or a major computer attack (e.g., at some point, a computer virus attack transmitted by wi-fi or cell phones might make huge numbers of autos unstartable or make them stall while driving; now there’s an interesting nightmare – the day that every car stopped, except for a few old junkers that had obsolete microchips – perhaps next summer’s disaster movie plot?).

The other thing our nation can do according to Posner –- sounds very Old Testament-like, but unfortunately we still live in an Old Testament world — is to retaliate against whoever hits us, and hit ‘em back hard. Eye for an eye, that sort of thing. Today I saw a bumper sticker today with a drawing of Gandhi on it, saying “an eye for an eye makes the world blind”. But the hard-core realists say that an eye for an eye saves the other eye.

One thing that Posner didn’t suggest, but I think is relevant, is to try to cool down all the discontent out there. Yea, there will always be some nuts out there, but you don’t get a big movement like Al Qaeda without some widespread resentment against the U.S. Maybe we’ve got to be a bit more generous with the poorest nations, and stop flaunting our wealth so much. I still think some of it is a reaction to current American cultural attitudes about wealth. The attitude is that wealth is everything; the more money you have, the more human you are; if you’re poor, then you’re poor in every way possible. Oh yea, there’s also God and prayer, all that value stuff; but at day’s end, cash is king.

I can’t help but wonder if that GOP / conservative attitude, which shows up on our TV shows, on the Internet, on our commercials, on just about everything that America does, triggers a lot of resentment in various places. (Admittedly it does win us friends in others, such as in Poland. My ethnic background is 100% Polish, but I never really liked the Polish culture, and the more I read about it’s current pro-American materialistic stance, the less I wonder why I never clicked with my ancestral heritage). I can’t help but wonder if a little less attitude and a little more humility (and charity) would also help buy some security.

But yea, I know it’s more complex that just being nice. The whole issue of supporting Israel is a big factor in the overseas threat, and if it’s right to support Israel, we probably have to do it even if it causes an increased risk of terrorism. But the whole Israel thing is incredibly complex, so I’m gonna cut it right here. Sorry, I can’t solve the whole world’s problems in one sitting. Only Richard Posner can do that . . . . . or so he would tell you.