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By Nathan Bierma


Content & Context

The Books & Culture Weblog

July 2003

This Week:

THE NEW WORLD ATLAS (PART 3)

Much of the weblog this month is devoted to "mapping" the contours of a changing world. After a wide-ranging cover package from Wired, (see parts one and two in this weblog), the Atlantic Monthly's Headlines Over the Horizon feature is regrettably more predictable, focusing on global threats to national security. The feature is written by analysts for the RAND corporation, who  tend to reduce foreign affairs to identifying threats and growing the military; diplomacy and economic development hardly register in RAND's roundup. (The Atlantic's cover package does include Robert Kaplan's more balanced roundup of rules for the future of foreign policy; it's unavailable online but an interview with Kaplan is posted.) Still, since the purpose of the weblog this month (and always) is to recognize what should be on our front pages and newscasts but seldom is, at least four RAND headlines warrant attention.

  • Among the victims of the AIDS crisis ravaging Africa are soldiers, who are two to five times as likely to be infected as civilians. In some countries the rate of HIV and AIDS in the army is 50 percent or more; in South Africa, some units suffer infection rates of up to 90 percent, says RAND, which cites sexual promiscuity and drug use as the primary causes. RAND is worried about the effect this has on African nations' defense capacities, as fewer officers are around to control their ranks, more defense funds are spent on medical treatment, and the military is less capable of keeping the peace.

Unanswered Questions: RAND acknowledges that "African armies are often seen as problems, not as forces for good," but states that "in many cases only they have been able to ensure national and regional stability." How wrong-headed is our view that African armies contribute to political instability and violence as much as they prevent it? Could military depletion (tragic as the loss of life is) actually mean fewer military coups, or will it only encourage more uprisings? Will it make the U.S. more or less inclined to intervene with its own troops? And, finally, is there any chance this threat to armies' health will reduce their reliance on sexual predation as a military tactic?

  • Our nightmares of nuclear war are usually earth-bound; we dread the prospect of nations flinging missiles at each other. What might happen first, RAND reports, are nuclear attacks on satellites orbiting the earth. It's easier to shoot satellites than to send missiles to a distant city, and in five years as many as five problematic nations could be able to do it. Not only would such attacks destroy their targets, but they could also overheat the Van Allen radiation belts that envelop the earth, disrupting the satellites within them. Diplomacy needs to take into account this threat of indirect attack.
  • Throughout revolutions in military technology, the backbone of the armed forces continues to be an old standby: the aircraft carrier. And "old" is the operative word—four of the 12 U.S. carriers date back to the 1960s. Right now only eight of the carriers are deployable, and when we used five in the invasion of Iraq, it left the fleet thin. Should the U.S. need to mobilize in two different places, it may need to expand the fleet (although new carriers would take more than a decade to get ready).

Unanswered Questions: Here's where the conflict-of-interest red flags go up. The Navy, which wants more aircraft carriers, is on RAND's list of "major clients and sponsors," and Frank Carlucci, who sits on RAND's board of trustees, was Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Defense and now chairs the well-connected defense company The Carlyle Group (to which President Bush's father is a senior advisor). So when RAND advocates military expansion, take out your grain of salt. Meanwhile, other than the question of whether the $6 billion price tag for each new aircraft carrier should be a budget priority in a lousy economy (as RAND says it should), there's the practical question of personnel, which RAND mentions only in passing. With the U.S. relying more and more on reservists (see this article), how feasible would it be to staff an even larger fleet?

  • To understand the hostility between India and Pakistan (see fourth item here in earlier weblog), you have to understand the politics of water, RAND says. The two countries' struggle over the Indus River was eased by the Indus Water Treaty in 1960, but increased pollution and falling water levels in the Indus have left the treaty shakier than ever. India has already threatened to break the treaty and choke off Pakistan's water supply. Unlike the countries' tussle over Kashmir, a sparsely populated and seemingly insignificant region (see fifth item here from Wired), the future of the Indus Water Treaty affects the lifeline of people in both countries.

Related:
-Map of Pakistan from CNN
-Elsewhere in this issue of the Atlantic, see a map of the world's water crisis, unavailable online

  • Earlier: New World Atlas Part 1 and 2

PLACES & CULTURE

From the Washington Post:

TEHUIPANGO, Mexico—As the temperature dipped below freezing in these long forgotten mountains, Justo Chipahua Panzo, 11, sat in his unheated classroom and worried about tomorrow. The fifth-grader had just eaten a school breakfast of watery soup and beans, which he bought with a spare peso—the equivalent of about a dime. But he said that kind of luck never happens two days in a row. In places such as Tehuipango, in Veracruz state, breakfast, lunch and dinner sometimes consist of little more than tortillas and salt. Although there are new government relief efforts, children often live with chronic diarrhea or other stomach ailments, which undermine attempts to improve nutrition. … Life here has continued in quiet isolation, much as it has for centuries, since the Spanish drove indigenous peoples off the flat, fertile lands and into the deserts or these craggy mountains. … Tehuipango has been identified by the government as one of the 10 poorest places in the country for as long as anyone can remember, but little ever has been done about it. Full story

For years, the site called Double Ditch, above the Missouri River in North Dakota, was known mostly as a spot where Meriwether Lewis and William Clark stopped in 1804 during their storied journey across the continent. They took note of the place, where an unusual pair of defensive trenches ringed the site of an old native village. … It had been abandoned in the 1780s after a smallpox outbreak decimated its inhabitants. But last year archaeologists discovered a second pair of trenches about 50 yards outside the first set, enclosing a total of 22.5 acres. Not only had Double Ditch doubled its ditches, but it suddenly became one of the largest Native American sites on the northern plains—strongly suggesting that warfare and social organization in pre-Columbian America had dimensions that scholars had not previously recognized. Full story

DIGEST

  1. Yale professor Robert Sternberg, so-called "scholar of intelligence," has had much to say about the importance of creativity, people skills and street smarts in evaluating people's intelligence. His latest interest is the study of stupidity, says the Boston Globe. Why do smart people do stupid things? Why do those who should best understand the cost of stupid mistakes, from Bill Clinton to Enron's Jeff Skilling, make so many themselves? As editor of a book called Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid, Sternberg has not, the Globe says, "come up with a Grand Unifying Theory of Denseness, but [his contributors] do emerge from the psychology labs with some unstupid first stabs at the problem." Full story It should be noted that these stabs do not (as far as the Globe indicates include a) an articulation of who has the authority to define smartness and stupidness and how, and b) what the moral element of behavior has to do with it. Reducing wrongdoing to poor decision-making comes from a view of human beings as essentially rational machines and not inherently sinful beings.
  2. One creature that defies stupidity is the dolphin. In fact, dolphins are impressing researchers' with their intelligence as never before, says zoologist Anuschka de Rohan in an article from BBC Wildlife magazine. The majestic mammals, whose brains are 25% heavier than humans', have been dazzling observers at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi with their nuanced thinking. Some have used the fish they're rewarded with to bait gulls, which "shows . . . a sense of the future and delays gratification," de Rohan says. Bottlenose dolphins are known to wear sea sponges as masks to protect them from stonefish and stingrays when they poke at seabeds. Full story
  3. Each summer we play a curious game of cat-and-mouse with the sun, trying to hide while out in the open. But while sunscreen has played a major role in reducing skin cancer in Australia and elsewhere, lotion and long sleeves can only go so far, says Discover magazine. Scientists are trying to learn how plants and coral reefs stave off the sun, with the goal of producing an "after-sun lotion" that can reverse the sun's damage after it's seared cells. Full story
  4. "In greater New York, where the Catholic Church and the Jewish community dominate a diverse religious landscape, the slow demise of mainline Protestantism has attracted little notice," wrote the Westchester, N.Y. Journal News earlier this year. Compared with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, which runs fewer than 500 parishes for 2.5 million Catholics, the five mainline denominations have clung to 1,000 churches for 300,000 members in New York City and its suburbs. But that may change; the head of the Hudson River Presbytery says half of his churches could close in the next decade or two. Full story The article is a workable and unusually lengthy introduction to the fate of mainline denominations in a fad-filled age of worship, but leaves a couple of odd comments unexplained—including how the mainline churches "represent a rational, liberal, very New York approach to worship," and how they "reject[ed] evangelism as beneath them or politically incorrect."
  5. One of the Boston Red Sox most interesting acquisitions last winter wasn't a baseball player, it was statistician Bill James—"the professor of baseball," as he's called in a New Yorker profile. James is a box score addict who has spent much his life searching for mathematical patterns to what he sees on the baseball field. His method of "sabermetrics" has a following in baseball circles, including the owner and general manager of the Red Sox, who hired James as Senior Baseball Operations Adviser to give them an edge over the loathed Yankees. But while James can devise detailed critiques of the conventional wisdom about sacrifice bunts and righthanded hitters at Fenway Park, the New Yorker says, the Red Sox' bullpen may defy scientific explanation. Full story

Nathan Biermais editorial assistant at Books & Culture.

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