0. Black Sun Rising
The Black Sun Rises
In The Dark Knight, the 2008 epic co-written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Batman battled with the psychopathic Joker. Soon after making his entrance, Joker set fire to a towering green pile of cash, demonstrating convincingly that he was not motivated by simple rationales like greed; he just wanted to watch the world burn. In the infamous ferry scene, Joker sprung a wily trap.
He rigged two Gotham river ferries with high explosives. One ferry was manned with hundreds of citizens and the other with hundreds of convicts from Gotham’s prison system. Joker placed the detonator for each ferry aboard its opposite and threatened to destroy them both if anyone tried to escape or at midnight, whichever came first. The game was on. Would the civilians destroy the convicts or would the convicts destroy the civilians? Tantalizingly, understanding this situation helps us understand the world today.
Just for a moment, let’s pretend we’re one of the people the boats. All survive, one boat survives, and everyone dies are the only outcomes at play. If our only criteria for success is our own survival, it’s tempting to quickly lunge to detonate the other boat. However, there’s a problem. If both sides do that, the synchronousness of the strategy means there’s the distinct possibility of a simultaneous detonation.
Trying another angle, we could instead minimize of the total loss of life. While we could agree with the other boat to not push the button, the time limit forces our hand. It’s possible we might be rescued, but we can’t depend on it. However, we can try to give our would be rescuers the best possible chance. If we wait until the last minute before destroying a single boat, we guarantee that we’ll avoid the worst case. This strategy allows the most time for rescue and, conveniently for a movie, creates maximum drama. If midnight strikes, there’s no good way to decide who should die. A coin flip would be “fair” in the sense that it is statistically unbiased, but it is reasonless. The least bad way to decide who dies is for one boat to volunteer, but it is practically guaranteed that in retrospect their sacrifice will begin to look problematic for one reason or another.
Nonetheless, if we attempt this strategy, we’ll allow the possibility of rescue and in the worst case only one boat will be destroyed. However, there’s a vicious downside that’s inescapable: if you care about your own life, you’ll need optimism that the other side is doing the same thing. If they aren’t, you might just wind up dead.
This conflict between our more angelic natures and our biologically imperative quest for a guaranteed survival probably means that most crews won’t immediately detonate, but will instead look for some justification for their decisions. This is where the danger lies. If the other party knows you won’t detonate, they can much more easily take the high road, but if they are unsure, it becomes much more tempting to swiftly and silently push the button. Under conditions of uncertainty, which is where we find ourselves in The Dark Knight, the longer you wait, the more likely you are to die.
Batman presents us with a third way by changing the rules. While we doomed ferry people try to decide when to kill each other, Batman hunts down the Joker, gives him a beat down, and releases us from the midnight deadline. Batman is a superhero. He saved us from the Joker’s trap and by the end of the movie he also saved all of Gotham.
How does any of this relate to world affairs? Joker’s setup forces us to make strikingly similar calculations to those behind fighting a nuclear war.
A Planetary Perspective
In April 2017, I attended a talk at a unitarian church given by MIT Professor and noted U.S. foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky where he was interviewed by journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!. Chomsky described an urgent world that teeters on the brink of human annihilation. In his conception, humanity is being subjected to a three way pincer attack by nuclear war, environmental catastrophe, and now the increasingly obvious undermining of democracy, the one positive force that could stop the other two.
Nuclear war will obliterate cities, poison survivors, and fill the atmosphere with smoke until our crops can’t feed our people. It’s a human manufactured crisis. It’s especially dangerous because the man on the street thinks that with the end of the Cold War, it’ll never happen with the possible exception of a missile launch by North Korea. This view can’t be sustained when confronted with a fuller picture of the world today. Indeed, with the recent escalation between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un, this view is changing.
Our climate is changing. We live in the midst of the sixth mass extinction on Earth. Our seas levels are rising, wildfires rage, both land and ocean life are dying, storms grow to terrifying strength, and deserts expand in response to accelerating greenhouse gas emissions that trap the rays of the sun to excess. Our planet, our only life support system, is quickly becoming inhospitable to human life. This too, is a human manufactured crisis.
Both of these crises have the striking potential to end human civilization and in the extremes, humanity itself. Yet somehow, we have trouble confronting collective risk. On an individual level we fear death. We fear the pains and processes of death, we fear leaving others behind, and we fear never reaching the goals we struck out for. Even more horrible is the expectation that instead of receiving the contemptible false blessings of heaven, we’ll instead find a cold, lonely endless winter, and that we too, within a finite time lying in an infinite span, will join Ozymandias.
Existential threats to humanity take this to a new incomprehensible level. Not only does the prophesy of death come true times 7.4 billion (as of this writing), but it snuffs out the lives of the strong and the weak without discrimination. Even those that whom by all measures deserve to live are culled. All of culture is dissolved and with it all cultural transmission. All artifacts of love, civility, and knowledge are drawn into a cosmic incinerator. The raw physical power it would take to eradicate a humanity scattered around the crust of the world in caves, across oceans, and on mountain tops would not likely be selectively destructive to humans. Multicellular life on Earth would likely be grievously affected.
It gets worse. So far as we can remember, there has never been a time a human hasn’t been observing the universe. Does the universe exist if no one is there to observe it? If it does exist in our absence, does it have any significance whatsoever? The eradication of sentient observers is the eradication of the universe itself. The void yaws and recalls all things.
Both nuclear war and environmental catastrophe, to a stunning degree, have been Made in the U.S.A. We invented nuclear weapons and so far have been the only country to actually use them in war. As of 2011, we contributed about 27% of the world’s total carbon emissions beginning during the industrial revolution. You could imagine a sane, empowered population would soberly acknowledge each of these problems and work diligently to solve them. This is laughably not the case in the United States.
While the Obama administration did get a new arms reduction treaty inked with Russia, it ended its term by pushing for a nuclear modernization package worth more than $1,000,000,000,000 over thirty years to improve our ability to fight an unwinnable nuclear war. The Trump administration is continuing that policy and topped Obama’s by pulling out of the entirely voluntary Paris Accord to reduce greenhouse emissions, scrubbing references to climate change from government web sites, and yanking funding from agencies that study the problem.
What the hell happened? How is it that we can’t collectively even debate, let alone solve, problems that threaten us all? We are in the midst of a crisis of democracy. For a long time something in our system has been deeply broken and it has led to enormous backlash fueled by grievance and institutional failure.
Nuclear bombs are synthetic stars we aim at each other like children with arms cocked about to have a rock fight. The sun is poaching our planet with humanity as sous-chef. We, the insane people that live here, genuflect to a dark astral god and advance its aims as though we are compelled.
When we watch Batman and Iron Man movies, we like to believe that if we were given an incredible gift and faced a dire situation that put our species at risk, we would take up the cause of justice and crusade for the good of all who live. Nuclear arms, environmental catastrophe, and the decline of democracy threaten the viability of human civilization. The private story we tell ourselves is facing its ultimate test.
In this series, we’ll explore each of these topics, how we got here, and discuss what you can do about them. What follows is a very U.S. centric discussion of planetary-wide problems. There are several reasons for this, but here’s the most important one: we are only directly responsible for and can only make a difference in our own very powerful country.
Keep reading. We can’t let Joker win this one. ☀
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Next: The Dangerous Nuclear Weapons States
This article is part of a series. Read more about nuclear war at Insane Before the Sun. Be one of the first to join the community on Facebook to connect with others interested in this topic.
Title Photo: The August 21, 2017 Black Sun of the North American eclipse. Courtesy of NASA.
Thanks to Oliver Lao for making suggestions to an early version of this article.
