The World's Most Dangerous Ideas

Ideas matter, and sometimes they can be dangerous. With this simple conviction, Foreign Policy asked eight leading thinkers to issue an early warning on the ideas that will be most destructive in the coming years. A few of these ideas have long and sometimes bloody pedigrees. Others are embryonic, nourished by breakthroughs in science and technology. Several are policy ideas whose reverberations are already felt; others are more abstract, but just as pernicious. Yet, as the essays make clear, these dangerous ideas share a vulnerability to insightful critique and open debate.

War on Evil

By Richard Wright

Evil has a reputation for resilience. And rightly so. Banishing it from Middle Earth alone took three very long Lord of the Rings movies. But equally deserving of this reputation is the concept of evil—in particular, a conception of evil that was on display in those very movies: the idea that behind all the world's bad deeds lies a single, dark, cosmic force. No matter how many theologians reject this idea, no matter how incompatible it seems with modern science, it keeps coming back.

You would have thought St. Augustine rid the world of it a millennium and a half ago. He argued so powerfully against this notion of evil, and against the whole Manichaean theology containing it, that it disappeared from serious church discourse. Thereafter, evil was not a thing; it was just the absence of good, as darkness is the absence of light. But then came the Protestants, and some of them brought back the Manichaean view of a cosmic struggle between the forces of good and evil.

The philosopher Peter Singer, in his recent book The President of Good & Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush , suggests that the president is an heir to this strand of Protestant thought. Certainly Bush is an example of how hard it is to kill notions of evil once and for all. On the eve of his presidency, in a postmodern, post-Cold War age, “evildoers” had become a word reserved for ironic use, with overtones of superhero kitsch. But after September 11, Bush used that word earnestly, vowed to “rid the world of evil,” and later declared Iran, Iraq, and North Korea part of an “axis of evil.”

So what's wrong with that? Why do I get uncomfortable when he talks about evil? Because his idea of evil is dangerous and, in the current geopolitical environment, seductive.

Some conservatives dismiss liberal qualms about Bush's talk of evil as knee-jerk moral relativism. But rejecting his conception of evil doesn't mean rejecting the idea of moral absolutes, of right and wrong, good and bad. Evil in the Manichaean sense isn't just absolute badness. It's a grand unified explanation of such badness, the linkage of diverse badness to a single source. In the Lord of the Rings , the various plainly horrible enemy troops—orcs, ringwraiths, and so on—were evil in the Manichaean sense by virtue of their unified command; all were under the sway of the dreaded Sauron.

For the forces of good—hobbits, elves, Bush—this unity of badness greatly simplifies the question of strategy. If all of your enemies are Satan's puppets, there's no point in drawing fine distinctions among them. No need to figure out which ones are irredeemable and which can be bought off. They're all bad to the bone, so just fight them at every pass, bear any burden, and so on.

But what if the world isn't that simple? What if some terrorists will settle for nothing less than the United States' destruction, whereas others just want a nationalist enclave in Chechnya or Mindanao? And what if treating all terrorists the same—as all having equally illegitimate goals—makes them more the same, more uniformly anti-American, more zealous? (Note that President Ronald Reagan's “evil empire” formulation didn't court this danger; the Soviet threat was already monolithic.)

Or what if Iran, Iraq, and North Korea are actually different kinds of problems? And what if their rulers, however many bad things they've done, are still human beings who respond rationally to clear incentives? If you're truly open to this possibility, you might be cheered when a hideous dictator, under threat of invasion, allows U.N. weapons inspectors to search his country. But if you believe this dictator is not just bad but evil, you'll probably conclude that you should invade his country anyway. You don't make deals with the devil.

And, of course, if you believe that all terrorists are truly evil, then you'll be less inclined to fret about the civil liberties of suspected terrorists, or about treating accused or convicted terrorists decently in prison. Evil, after all, demands a scorched-earth policy. But what if such a policy, by making lots of Muslims in the United States and abroad feel persecuted, actually increases the number of terrorists?

Abandoning such counterproductive metaphysics doesn't mean slipping into relativism, or even, necessarily, dispensing with the concept of evil. You can attribute bad deeds to a single source—and hence believe in a kind of evil—without adopting the brand of Manichaeism that seems to animate Bush. You could believe that somewhere in human nature is a bad seed that underlies many of the terrible things people do. If you're a Christian, you might think of this seed as original sin. If you're not religious, you might see it in secular terms—for example, as a core selfishness that can skew our moral perspective, inclining us to tolerate, even welcome, the suffering of people who threaten our interests.

This idea of evil as something at work in all of us makes for a perspective very different than the one that seems to guide the president. It could lead you to ask, If we're all born with this seed of badness, why does it bear more fruit in some people than others? And this question could lead you to analyze evildoers in their native environments, and thus distinguish between the causes of terrorism in one place and in another.

This conception of evil could also lead to a bracing self-scrutiny. It could make you vigilant for signs that your own moral calculus had been warped by your personal, political, or ideological agenda. If, say, you had started a war that killed more than 10,000 people, you might be pricked by the occasional doubt about your judgment or motivation—rather than suffused in the assurance that, as God's chosen servant, you are free from blame.

In short, with this conception of evil, the world doesn't look like a Lord of the Rings trailer, in which all the bad guys report to the same headquarters and, for the sake of easy identification, are hideously ugly. It is a more ambiguous world, a world in which evil lurks somewhere in everyone, and enlightened policy is commensurately subtle.

Actually, there are traces of this view even in the Lord of the Rings films. Hence the insidious ring, which can fill all who gaze on it with the desperate desire to possess it, a desire that, if unchecked, leads to utter corruption. The message would seem to be that, thanks to human frailty, anyone can play host to evil—hobbits, elves, even, conceivably, the occasional American.

Robert Wright, author of NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny (New York: Pantheon Books, 2000) and The Moral Animal: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), is visiting fellow at Princeton University's Center for Human Values and Seymour Milstein senior fellow at the New America Foundation.

Undermining Free Will

By Paul Davies

You don't have to read this article. But if you do, could you have chosen otherwise? You probably feel that you were free to skip over it, but were you?

Belief in some measure of free will is common to all cultures and a large part of what makes us human. It is also fundamental to our ethical and legal systems. Yet today's scientists and philosophers are busily chipping away at this social pillar—apparently without thinking about what might replace it.

What they question is a folk psychology that goes something like this: Inside each of us is a self, a conscious agent who both observes the world and makes decisions. In some cases (though perhaps not all), this agent has a measure of choice and control over his or her actions. From this simple model of human agency flow the familiar notions of responsibility, guilt, blame, and credit. The law, for example, makes a clear distinction between a criminal act carried out by a person under hypnosis or while sleepwalking, and a crime committed in a state of normal awareness with full knowledge of the consequences.

All this may seem like common sense, but philosophers and writers have questioned it for centuries—and the attack is gathering speed. “All theory is against the freedom of the will,” wrote British critic Samuel Johnson. In the 1940s, Oxford University philosophy Professor Gilbert Ryle coined the derisory expression “the ghost in the machine” for the widespread assumption that brains are occupied by immaterial selves that somehow control the activities of our neurons. The contemporary American philosopher Daniel Dennett now refers to the “fragile myth” of “spectral puppeteers” inside our heads.

For skeptics of free will, human decisions are either determined by a person's preexisting nature or, alternatively, are entirely arbitrary and whimsical. Either way, genuine freedom of choice seems elusive. Physicists often fire the opening salvo against free will. In the classical Newtonian scheme, the universe is a gigantic clockwork mechanism, slavishly unfolding according to deterministic laws. How then does a free agent act? There is simply no room in this causally closed system for an immaterial mind to bend the paths of atoms without coming into conflict with physical law. Nor does the famed indeterminacy of quantum mechanics help minds to gain purchase on the material world. Quantum uncertainty cannot create freedom. Genuine freedom requires that our wills determine our actions reliably.

Physicists assert that free will is merely a feeling we have; the mind has no genuine causal efficacy. Whence does this feeling arise? In his 2002 book, The Illusion of Conscious Will , Harvard University psychologist Daniel Wegner appeals to ingenious laboratory experiments to show how subjects acquire the delusion of being in charge, even when their conscious thoughts do not actually cause the actions they observe.

The rise of modern genetics has also undermined the belief that humans are born with the freedom to shape their individual destinies. Scientists recognize that genes shape our minds as well as our bodies. Evolutionary psychologists seek to root personal qualities such as altruism and aggression in Darwinian mechanisms of random mutation and natural selection. “We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes,” writes Oxford University biologist Richard Dawkins.

Those aspects of the mind that are not predetermined by genetics lie at the mercy of “memetics.” Memes are the mental equivalent of genes—ideas, beliefs, and fashions that replicate and compete in the manner of genes. British psychologist Susan Blackmore recently contended that our minds are actually nothing but collections of memes that we catch from each other like viruses, and that the familiar sense of “I” is some sort of fiction that memes create for their own agenda.

These ideas are dangerous because there is more than a grain of truth in them. There is an acute risk that they will be oversimplified and used to justify an anything-goes attitude to criminal activity, ethnic conflict, even genocide. Conversely, people convinced that the concept of individual choice is a myth may passively conform to whatever fate an exploitative social or political system may have decreed for them. If you thought eugenics was a disastrous perversion of science, imagine a world where most people don't believe in free will.

The scientific assault on free will would be less alarming if some new legal and ethical framework existed to take its place. But nobody really has a clue what that new structure might look like. And, remember, the scientists may be wrong to doubt free will. It would be rash to assume that physicists have said the last word on causation, or that cognitive scientists fully understand brain function and consciousness. But even if they are right, and free will really is an illusion, it may still be a fiction worth maintaining. Physicists and philosophers often deploy persuasive arguments in the rarified confines of academe but ignore them for all practical purposes. For example, it is easy to be persuaded that the flow of time is an illusion (in physics, time simply is, it doesn't “pass”). But nobody would conduct their daily affairs without continual reference to past, present, and future. Society would disintegrate without adhering to the fiction that time passes. So it is with the self and its freedom to participate in events. To paraphrase the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, we must believe in free will—we have no choice.

Paul Davies is professor of natural philosophy at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney. He is the author of 25 books, including The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999) and How to Build a Time Machine (New York: Viking, 2002).

Business as Usual at the U.N.

By Samantha Power

For the United Nations, relevance may be almost as perilous as irrelevance. In the span of a year, the Bush administration went from taunting the world body to begging for its help. A beefed-up U.N. team will soon arrive in Baghdad to advise the Iraqi government on reconstruction, social services, and human rights and directly assist with elections. At the same time, U.N. peacekeeping missions are sprouting or expanding in Burundi, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti, and Ivory Coast. Indeed, by the end of 2004, more blue helmets will likely be in action than at any time in history.

Although some U.N. backers revel in the growing global reliance on the world body, now is no time to get smug. These weighty responsibilities are landing on the shoulders of an organization that national governments have deliberately kept weak. The United Nations' 60-year-old machinery has never seemed so ill-equipped for its work, and its credibility has plummeted. As the major powers fight terrorism and dwell on homeland security, they will hand the United Nations essential but thankless tasks they might once have tackled themselves (or just ignored). Without major changes, the United Nations may well buckle under the growing strain.

The idea that the United Nations can stumble along in its atrophied condition has powerful appeal in capitals around the world—and even in some offices at U.N. headquarters. But believing that the status quo will suffice is dangerous.

Regrettably, most of those who could change the organization have an interest in resisting reform. None of the permanent Security Council members wants to give up its veto; smaller powers delight in their General Assembly votes, which count as much as those of the major powers; repressive regimes cherish participation in United Nations' human rights bodies, where they can scuttle embarrassing resolutions; and the Western powers whose troops and treasure are needed to strengthen U.N. peacekeeping have other priorities. Even within the U.N. bureaucracy, many veterans shy away from dramatic reform—it has taken them decades to become masters of the old procedures, and change is risky. And while U.N. officials, including the secretary-general, are quick (and correct) to blame the member states for the constraints they face, they too rarely find the courage to spotlight those specific states whose obstinacy, stinginess, and abuses undermine the principles behind the U.N. Charter.

Much U.N.-bashing is, of course, unfair. The United Nations is in many respects just a building. It is a place for states to butt heads or to negotiate as their national interests dictate. And, on the operational side, the organization performs many indispensable tasks—feeding, sheltering, and immunizing millions, and even disarming the odd Iraqi dictator. But the organization's reputation rises and falls these days based on the performance and perceived legitimacy of three of its most visible components—the Security Council, the Commission on Human Rights, and the peacekeepers in the field. Each is in dire need of reform or rescue.

Permanent membership on the Security Council—granted to the Second World War victors (plus France)—is woefully anachronistic. Britain and France can't fairly claim two fifths of the world's legal authority. The permanent five members once spoke for close to 40 percent of the world's population. They now account for 29 percent. The world's largest democracy (India) is excluded; so are regional powerhouses such as Nigeria and Brazil, not to mention the entire Islamic world. It is the permanent members who decide when atrocities warrant humanitarian intervention, but this decision is made by two of the planet's worst human rights abusers (Russia and China) and one country (the United States) that exempts itself from most international human rights treaties. While still coveted in some cases, the council imprimatur is fast losing its sheen.

The Commission on Human Rights, the 53-state forum based in Geneva, has become a politicized farce. Because the commission takes all comers (seats are allocated on a regional basis), some of the world's most vicious regimes are members. Libya chaired the 2003 commission, and this year's commission extended membership to Sudan, which is busy ethnically cleansing hundreds of thousands of Africans in Darfur. Until membership comes with responsibilities, the commission will shelter too many human rights abusers and condemn too few.

When the states on the Security Council tell the secretary-general to put boots on the ground, his peacekeepers often face impossible assignments. They march into some of the world's most treacherous conflict zones, but only those where major Western economic and security interests are not at stake. Not coincidentally, the peacekeepers invariably lack the wherewithal to actually keep peace. In the 1990s, peacekeepers who were chained to Serbian lampposts became poster boys for the international community's impotence, as Western powers dispatched lightly armed troops to Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia without the mandate or means to stop genocide. To accommodate the unexpected surge in demand for peacekeeping in the last year, Secretary-General Kofi Annan (who likes to joke that “S.G.” stands for “scapegoat”) has appealed for more troops, intelligence resources, and logistical support—and the ability to call upon reinforcements if needed.

Funding for peacekeeping missions has increased somewhat, but another $1 billion is needed. Even more important, the United Nations must be able to recruit soldiers from the major powers, which have coughed up only a few hundred troops in recent years. The countries that do contribute significant forces—including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uruguay, and Nigeria—are often lured by the cash and military hardware they receive just for turning up. No wonder command and control of these forces often melts down. If the major powers continue to deploy peacekeepers on the cheap, the Security Council will again set up the United Nations for failure—and endanger the millions of desperate civilians who have no choice but to rely on the baby blue flag.

To a large extent, the United States and other member states get the United Nations they want and deserve. But proponents of U.N. reform should view the quagmire in Iraq as a moment of opportunity. Rather than regarding the United Nations' new centrality as evidence of success, the secretary-general must talk some sense into the member states, who stubbornly persist in believing that a hobbled United Nations can meet the 21st century's deadly transnational challenges.

Dag Hammarskjöld, the United Nations' second secretary-general, liked to say that the United Nations was not created to take humanity to heaven but to save it from hell. Even escaping hell requires an international organization that is up to the job.

Samantha Power is a lecturer in public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and author of “A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize.

Spreading Democracy

By Eric J. Hobsbawm

We are at present engaged in what purports to be a planned reordering of the world by the powerful states. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are but one part of a supposedly universal effort to create world order by “spreading democracy.” This idea is not merely quixotic—it is dangerous. The rhetoric surrounding this crusade implies that the system is applicable in a standardized (Western) form, that it can succeed everywhere, that it can remedy today's transnational dilemmas, and that it can bring peace, rather than sow disorder. It cannot.

Democracy is rightly popular. In 1647, the English Levellers broadcast the powerful idea that “all government is in the free consent of the people.” They meant votes for all. Of course, universal suffrage does not guarantee any particular political result, and elections cannot even ensure their own perpetuation—witness the Weimar Republic. Electoral democracy is also unlikely to produce outcomes convenient to hegemonic or imperial powers. (If the Iraq war had depended on the freely expressed consent of “the world community,” it would not have happened.) But these uncertainties do not diminish the appeal of electoral democracy.

Several other factors besides democracy's popularity explain the dangerous and illusory belief that its propagation by foreign armies might actually be feasible. Globalization suggests that human affairs are evolving toward a universal pattern. If gas stations, iPods, and computer geeks are the same worldwide, why not political institutions? This view underrates the world's complexity. The relapse into bloodshed and anarchy that has occurred so visibly in much of the world has also made the idea of spreading a new order more attractive. The Balkans seemed to show that areas of turmoil and humanitarian catastrophe required the intervention, military if need be, of strong and stable states. In the absence of effective international governance, some humanitarians are still ready to support a world order imposed by U.S. power. But one should always be suspicious when military powers claim to be doing favors for their victims and the world by defeating and occupying weaker states.

Yet another factor may be the most important: The United States has been ready with the necessary combination of megalomania and messianism, derived from its revolutionary origins. Today's United States is unchallengeable in its techno-military supremacy, convinced of the superiority of its social system, and, since 1989, no longer reminded—as even the greatest conquering empires always had been—that its material power has limits. Like President Woodrow Wilson (a spectacular international failure in his day), today's ideologues see a model society already at work in the United States: a combination of law, liberal freedoms, competitive private enterprise, and regular, contested elections with universal suffrage. All that remains is to remake the world in the image of this “free society.”

This idea is dangerous whistling in the dark. Although great power action may have morally or politically desirable consequences, identifying with it is perilous because the logic and methods of state action are not those of universal rights. All established states put their own interests first. If they have the power, and the end is considered sufficiently vital, states justify the means of achieving it (though rarely in public)—particularly when they think God is on their side. Both good and evil empires have produced the barbarization of our era, to which the “war against terror” has now contributed.

While threatening the integrity of universal values, the campaign to spread democracy will not succeed. The 20th century demonstrated that states could not simply remake the world or abbreviate historical transformations. Nor can they easily effect social change by transferring institutions across borders. Even within the ranks of territorial nation-states, the conditions for effective democratic government are rare: an existing state enjoying legitimacy, consent, and the ability to mediate conflicts between domestic groups. Without such consensus, there is no single sovereign people and therefore no legitimacy for arithmetical majorities. When this consensus—be it religious, ethnic, or both—is absent, democracy has been suspended (as is the case with democratic institutions in Northern Ireland), the state has split (as in Czechoslovakia), or society has descended into permanent civil war (as in Sri Lanka). “Spreading democracy” aggravated ethnic conflict and produced the disintegration of states in multinational and multicommunal regions after both 1918 and 1989, a bleak prospect.

Beyond its scant chance of success, the effort to spread standardized Western democracy also suffers from a fundamental paradox. In no small part, it is conceived of as a solution to the dangerous transnational problems of our day. A growing part of human life now occurs beyond the influence of voters—in transnational public and private entities that have no electorates, or at least no democratic ones. And electoral democracy cannot function effectively outside political units such as nation-states. The powerful states are therefore trying to spread a system that even they find inadequate to meet today's challenges.

Europe proves the point. A body like the European Union (EU) could develop into a powerful and effective structure precisely because it has no electorate other than a small number (albeit growing) of member governments. The EU would be nowhere without its “democratic deficit,” and there can be no future for its parliament, for there is no “European people,” only a collection of “member peoples,” less than half of whom bothered to vote in the 2004 EU parliamentary elections. “Europe” is now a functioning entity, but unlike the member states it enjoys no popular legitimacy or electoral authority.

Unsurprisingly, problems arose as soon as the EU moved beyond negotiations between governments and became the subject of democratic campaigning in the member states.

The effort to spread democracy is also dangerous in a more indirect way: It conveys to those who do not enjoy this form of government the illusion that it actually governs those who do. But does it? We now know something about how the actual decisions to go to war in Iraq were taken in at least two states of unquestionable democratic bona fides: the United States and the United Kingdom. Other than creating complex problems of deceit and concealment, electoral democracy and representative assemblies had little to do with that process. Decisions were taken among small groups of people in private, not very different from the way they would have been taken in nondemocratic countries. Fortunately, media independence could not be so easily circumvented in the United Kingdom. But it is not electoral democracy that necessarily ensures effective freedom of the press, citizen rights, and an independent judiciary.

Eric J. Hobsbawm is emeritus professor of economic and social history at Birkbeck, University of London, and author of The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994). ©E.J. Hobsbawm 2004.

Transhumanism

By Francis Fukuyama

For the last several decades, a strange liberation movement has grown within the developed world. Its crusaders aim much higher than civil rights campaigners, feminists, or gay-rights advocates. They want nothing less than to liberate the human race from its biological constraints. As “transhumanists” see it, humans must wrest their biological destiny from evolution's blind process of random variation and adaptation and move to the next stage as a species.

It is tempting to dismiss transhumanists as some sort of odd cult, nothing more than science fiction taken too seriously: Witness their over-the-top Web sites and recent press releases (“Cyborg Thinkers to Address Humanity's Future,” proclaims one). The plans of some transhumanists to freeze themselves cryogenically in hopes of being revived in a future age seem only to confirm the movement's place on the intellectual fringe.

But is the fundamental tenet of transhumanism—that we will someday use biotechnology to make ourselves stronger, smarter, less prone to violence, and longer-lived—really so outlandish? Transhumanism of a sort is implicit in much of the research agenda of contemporary biomedicine. The new procedures and technologies emerging from research laboratories and hospitals—whether mood-altering drugs, substances to boost muscle mass or selectively erase memory, prenatal genetic screening, or gene therapy—can as easily be used to “enhance” the species as to ease or ameliorate illness.

Although the rapid advances in biotechnology often leave us vaguely uncomfortable, the intellectual or moral threat they represent is not always easy to identify. The human race, after all, is a pretty sorry mess, with our stubborn diseases, physical limitations, and short lives. Throw in humanity's jealousies, violence, and constant anxieties, and the transhumanist project begins to look downright reasonable. If it were technologically possible, why wouldn't we want to transcend our current species? The seeming reasonableness of the project, particularly when considered in small increments, is part of its danger. Society is unlikely to fall suddenly under the spell of the transhumanist worldview. But it is very possible that we will nibble at biotechnology's tempting offerings without realizing that they come at a frightful moral cost.

The first victim of transhumanism might be equality. The U.S. Declaration of Independence says that “all men are created equal,” and the most serious political fights in the history of the United States have been over who qualifies as fully human. Women and blacks did not make the cut in 1776 when Thomas Jefferson penned the declaration. Slowly and painfully, advanced societies have realized that simply being human entitles a person to political and legal equality. In effect, we have drawn a red line around the human being and said that it is sacrosanct.

Underlying this idea of the equality of rights is the belief that we all possess a human essence that dwarfs manifest differences in skin color, beauty, and even intelligence. This essence, and the view that individuals therefore have inherent value, is at the heart of political liberalism. But modifying that essence is the core of the transhumanist project. If we start transforming ourselves into something superior, what rights will these enhanced creatures claim, and what rights will they possess when compared to those left behind? If some move ahead, can anyone afford not to follow? These questions are troubling enough within rich, developed societies. Add in the implications for citizens of the world's poorest countries—for whom biotechnology's marvels likely will be out of reach—and the threat to the idea of equality becomes even more menacing.

Transhumanism's advocates think they understand what constitutes a good human being, and they are happy to leave behind the limited, mortal, natural beings they see around them in favor of something better. But do they really comprehend ultimate human goods? For all our obvious faults, we humans are miraculously complex products of a long evolutionary process—products whose whole is much more than the sum of our parts. Our good characteristics are intimately connected to our bad ones: If we weren't violent and aggressive, we wouldn't be able to defend ourselves; if we didn't have feelings of exclusivity, we wouldn't be loyal to those close to us; if we never felt jealousy, we would also never feel love. Even our mortality plays a critical function in allowing our species as a whole to survive and adapt (and transhumanists are just about the last group I'd like to see live forever). Modifying any one of our key characteristics inevitably entails modifying a complex, interlinked package of traits, and we will never be able to anticipate the ultimate outcome.

Nobody knows what technological possibilities will emerge for human self-modification. But we can already see the stirrings of Promethean desires in how we prescribe drugs to alter the behavior and personalities of our children. The environmental movement has taught us humility and respect for the integrity of nonhuman nature. We need a similar humility concerning our human nature. If we do not develop it soon, we may unwittingly invite the transhumanists to deface humanity with their genetic bulldozers and psychotropic shopping malls.

Francis Fukuyama is professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and author of State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004).

Religious Intolerance

By Martha Nussbaum

Sometimes old ideas are the most dangerous, and few ideas are older than those that undergird religious intolerance. Lamentably, these ideas are acquiring new life. In 2002, Hindus in Gujarat, India, killed several hundred Muslims, with the collaboration of public officials and the police. Europe has recently seen a frightening rebirth of anti-Semitism, while the appeal of radical forms of Islam appears to be increasing in the Muslim world. Prejudice against Muslims and a tendency to equate Islam with terrorism are too prominent in the United States. On and on it goes. Intolerance breeds intolerance, as expressions of hatred fuel existing insecurities and permit people to see their own aggression as legitimate self-defense.

Two ideas typically foster religious intolerance and disrespect. The first is that one's own religion is the only true religion and that other religions are false or morally incorrect. But people possessed of this view can also believe that others deserve respect for their committed beliefs, so long as they do no harm. Much more dangerous is the second idea, that the state and private citizens should coerce people into adhering to the “correct” religious approach. It's an idea that is catching on, even in many modern democracies. France's reluctance to tolerate religious symbols in schools and the Hindu right wing's repeated claims that minorities in India must become part of Hindu culture are disturbing recent examples. The resurgence of this kind of thinking poses a profound threat to liberal societies, which are based on ideas of liberty and equality.

The appeal of religious intolerance is easy to understand. From an early age, humans are aware of helplessness toward things of the highest importance, such as food, love, and life itself. Religion helps people cope with loss and the fear of death; it teaches moral principles and motivates people to follow them. But precisely because religions are such powerful sources of morality and community, they all too easily become vehicles for the flight from helplessness, which so often manifests itself in oppression and the imposition of hierarchy. In today's accelerating world, people confront ethnic and religious differences in new and frightening ways. By clinging to a religion they believe to be the right one, surrounding themselves with coreligionists, and then subordinating others who do not accept that religion, people can forget for a time their weakness and mortality.

Good laws are not enough to combat this fundamentally emotional and social problem. Modern liberal societies have long understood the importance of legal and constitutional norms expressing a commitment to religious liberty and to the equality of citizens of different religions. But, though codification is essential, constitutions and laws do not implement themselves, and public norms are impotent without educational and cultural reinforcement.

We need, then, to think harder about how rhetoric (as well as poetry, music, and art) can support pluralism and toleration. The leaders of the U.S. civil rights movement understood the need for this kind of support; the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. illustrate how rhetoric can help people imagine equality and see difference as a source of richness rather than fear. During the recent electoral campaign in India, leaders of the Congress Party, especially Sonia Gandhi, effectively conveyed the image of an inherently pluralistic India. (The words of India's national anthem, written by pluralist poet Rabindranath Tagore, also celebrate India's regional and ethnic differences.) The current U.S. administration has made useful statements about the importance of not demonizing Islam, but the rhetoric of certain key officials has also highlighted Christian religion in ways that undermine tolerance. Attorney General John Ashcroft, for example, regularly asks his staff to sing Christian songs. And while he was a sitting U.S. senator, Ashcroft characterized America as “a culture that has no king but Jesus.”

For centuries, liberal thinkers have focused on legal and constitutional avenues to tolerance, neglecting the public cultivation of emotion and imagination. But liberals ignore public rhetoric at their peril. All modern states and their leaders convey visions of religious equality or inequality through their choices of language and image. Writing to the Quaker community in 1789, then President George Washington said, “The conscientious scruples of all men should be treated with great delicacy and tenderness.” Such delicacy is now in short supply. If leaders do not think carefully about how to use public language to foster respect, human equality will remain vulnerable.

Martha Nussbaum is the Ernst Freund distinguished service professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago and author of Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

Free Money

By Alice M. Rivlin

Fiscal irresponsibility is politically attractive, but it is equivalent to believing in something for nothing. Basing the policy of the world's dominant economy on the hope that the normal rules of fiscal prudence do not apply is an exceedingly dangerous idea.

Large and sustained deficits in the United States threaten not only U.S. prosperity but the world's economic health as well. Massive public borrowing in the United States is already absorbing other nations' savings to finance the world's richest country. And it may soon raise interest rates around the world and slow global growth. U.S. profligacy could even invite an international financial crisis that would bring enormous human costs everywhere.

Small countries cannot afford to behave irresponsibly for very long; their currencies lose value and their governments cannot borrow money. But investors give the United States more leeway. Its debt—the famed U.S. Treasury bonds—is still regarded as a very safe place to park money. The persistent appeal of U.S. bonds is leading politicians in the United States to believe that the ordinary rules of global finance don't apply to them. When they realize that rules are rules, it may be too late; the world could be caught in a financial crisis that has escalated beyond control.

Sermons on fiscal rectitude often fall on deaf ears in the United States. Everyone likes a free lunch if they can get it. Raising taxes and cutting spending are always painful, and political leaders have to be convinced that the pain is worth it. But a glance at the recent past should wake the slumbering body politic.

In the early 1980s, the Reagan administration cut income tax rates and increased defense outlays without restraining other spending. Supporters of those tax cuts predicted they would stimulate economic growth so powerfully that deficits would vanish. They claimed that deficits did not matter because government borrowing did not raise interest rates. They were wrong on both counts, and the free lunch proved expensive. Fortunately, the costs of high deficits in the 1980s evoked a bipartisan response in the United States. Politicians in both parties voted for tax increases and forced themselves to restrain spending growth. Fiscal responsibility and a strong economy turned the deficits into surpluses by the end of the 1990s.

Irresponsibility is back. Once again, a U.S. administration is touting huge tax cuts as stimulants to economic growth and massively increasing military spending. Once again, deficits initially blamed on recession persist even as the economy recovers. If the United States does not quickly change course, deficits will remain around 3.5 percent of gross domestic product for the next decade and then escalate rapidly as an aging society forces more spending for social security and health care.

In many ways, the current deficits are even more dangerous than those of the 1980s. The retirement of the baby boom generation is two decades closer. Moreover, the United States has shifted from being the world's largest creditor to being the world's largest debtor, and a far more substantial portion of U.S. public debt is held by foreigners, especially Asian central banks. This dependence makes the United States vulnerable to the shifting moods of international investors. A day may come when wary foreign investors demand high interest rates as compensation for holding their assets in U.S. dollars. Worst of all, the political will to deal with deficits has evaporated. The spending rules adopted in the 1990s have lapsed, and the bipartisan coalition to restore fiscal discipline has splintered.

The most likely scenario is continuing deficits financed largely by borrowing from the rest of the world. The principal victims of this fiscal irresponsibility will be Americans, who will suffer higher interest rates, slower growth, more of their tax money going to debt service, and higher inflation. The larger debt will be passed on to future taxpayers, who will simultaneously have to grapple with the burdens of a rapidly aging population.

Eventually, the government will raise taxes and cut spending by more than would have been necessary if action were taken earlier. The weakness in the United States will almost inevitably sap the strength of the world economy.

That's the best case. An even darker possibility is that investors (including many Americans) will lose confidence in the ability of the United States to handle its fiscal affairs and will move their funds elsewhere. Such a massive migration of capital would precipitate a plunge in the dollar and generate a spike in interest rates and inflation in the United States. This tsunami in the world's largest economy would disrupt international markets and devastate many developing countries.

Avoiding possible disaster, or even the more likely slow erosion of prosperity, will test U.S. political leadership. Will elected officials recognize that common-sense rules of fiscal responsibility apply to the United States as well as to other countries? Will they make the tough choices needed to restore fiscal sanity to the world's most important economy?

Alice M. Rivlin is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a visiting professor at Georgetown University. She was director of the Office of Management and Budget in the first Clinton administration and vice chair of the Federal Reserve's Board of Governors from 1996 to 1999.

Hating America

By Fareed Zakaria

On September 12, 2001, Jean-Marie Colombani, the editor of Le Monde, famously wrote, “Today we are all Americans.” Three years on, it seems that we are all anti-Americans. Hostility to the United States is deeper and broader than at any point in the last 50 years. The Western Europeans, it is often argued, oppose U.S. foreign policy because peace and prosperity have made them soft. But the United States faces almost identical levels of anti-Americanism in Turkey, India, and Pakistan, none of which are rich, postmodern, or pacifist. With the exception of Israel and Britain, no country today has a durable pro-American majority.

In this post-ideological age, anti-Americanism fills the void left by defunct belief systems. It has become a powerful trend in international politics today—and perhaps the most dangerous. U.S. hegemony has its problems, but a world that reacts instinctively against the United States will be less peaceful, less cooperative, less prosperous, less open, and less stable.

The wave of anti-Americanism is, of course, partly a product of the current Bush administration's policies and, as important, its style. Support for the United States has dropped dramatically since Bush rode into town. In 2000, for example, 75 percent of Indonesians identified themselves as pro-American. Today, more than 80 percent are hostile to Uncle Sam. When asked why they dislike the United States, people in other countries consistently cite Bush and his policies. But the very depth and breadth of this phenomenon suggest that it is bigger than Bush. The term “hyperpower,” after all, was coined by the French foreign minister to describe Bill Clinton's America, not George W. Bush's.

Anti-Americanism's ascendance also owes something to the geometry of power. The United States is more powerful than any country in history, and concentrated power usually means trouble. Other countries have a habit of ganging up to balance the reigning superpower. Throughout history, countries have united to defeat hegemonic powers—from the Hapsburgs to Napoleon to Kaiser Wilhelm and Hitler.

For over 50 years, the United States employed skillful diplomacy to fend off this apparently immutable law of history. U.S. administrations used power in generally benign ways, working through international organizations, fostering an open trading system that helped others grow economically, and providing foreign aid to countries in need. To demonstrate that it was not threatening, the United States routinely gave great respect and even deference to much weaker countries. By crudely asserting U.S. power and disregarding international institutions and alliances, the Bush administration has pulled the curtain on decades of diplomacy and revealed that the United States' constraints are self-imposed: America can, in fact, go it alone. Not surprisingly, the rest of the world resents this imbalance and searches for ways to place obstacles in America's way.

But an equally important force propelling anti-Americanism around the world is an ideological vacuum. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama was right when he noted that the collapse of the Soviet Union also meant the collapse of the great ideological debate on how to organize economic and political life. The clash between socialism and capitalism created political debates and shaped political parties and their agendas across the world for more than a century. Capitalism's victory left the world without an ideology of discontent, a systematic set of ideas that are critical of the world as it exists.

There is always a market for an ideology of discontent—it allows those outside the mainstream to relate to the world. These beliefs usually form in reaction to the world's dominant reality. So the rise of capitalism and democracy over the last 200 years produced ideologies of opposition from the left (communism, socialism) and from the right (hypernationalism, fascism). Today, the dominant reality in the world is the power of the United States, currently being wielded in a particularly aggressive manner. Anti-Americanism is becoming the way people think about the world and position themselves within it. It is a mindset that extends beyond politics to economic and cultural realms. So, in recent elections in Brazil, Germany, Pakistan, Kuwait, and Spain, the United States became a campaign issue. In all these places, resisting U.S. power won votes. Nationalism in many countries is being defined in part as anti-Americanism: Can you stand up to the superpower?

Much has been written about what the United States can do to help arrest and reverse these trends. But it is worth putting the shoe on the other foot for a moment. Imagine a world without the United States as the global leader. Even short of the imaginative and intelligent scenario of chaos that British historian Niall Ferguson outlined in this magazine (see “A World Without Power,” July/August 2004), it would certainly look grim. There are many issues on which the United States is the crucial organizer of collective goods. Someone has to be concerned about terrorism and nuclear and biological proliferation. Other countries might bristle at certain U.S. policies, but would someone else really be willing to bully, threaten, cajole, and bribe countries such as Libya to renounce terror and dismantle their WMD programs? On terror, trade, aids, nuclear proliferation, U.N. reform, and foreign aid, U.S. leadership is indispensable.

The temptation to go its own way will be greatest for Europe, the only other player with the resources and tradition to play a global role. But if Europe defines its role as being different from the United States—kinder, gentler, whatever—will that really produce a more stable world? U.S. and European goals on most issues are quite similar. Both want a peaceful world free from terror, with open trade, growing freedom, and civilized codes of conduct. A Europe that charts its own course just to mark its differences from the United States threatens to fracture global efforts—whether on trade, proliferation, or the Middle East. Europe is too disunited to achieve its goals without the United States; it can only ensure that America's plans don't succeed. The result will be a world that muddles along, with the constant danger that unattended problems will flare up disastrously. Instead of win-win, it will be lose-lose—for Europe, for the United States, and for the world.

Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International and author of The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2003).

WTKM

Important recent works on the power of ideas include Felipe Fernández-Armesto's Ideas That Changed the World (New York: DK Publishing, 2003) and Mark Lilla's The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review Books, 2001). For a look at what happened to some of the popular ideas of yesteryear, see “The Dustbin of History” (Foreign Policy, November/December 2002).

More of Francis Fukuyama's thoughts on technology and humanity are available in Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002) and in his article “Gene Regime” (Foreign Policy, March/April 2002). To better understand the thinkers that question free will, read The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge: mit Press, 2002), by Daniel M. Wegner, or Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

For accounts of the United Nations' recent travails, try Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2003), by Roméo Dallaire with Brent Beardsley. Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright challenges conventional wisdom about the world body in “Think Again: The United Nations” (Foreign Policy, September/October 2003). For insight into the forces that shaped modern political systems, see Eric J. Hobsbawm's The Age of Revolution: 1789–1848 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). Robert A. Dahl's On Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998) and Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) are good primers on the system, its appeal, and its critics.

St. Augustine's City of God (New York: Modern Library, 1950), translated by Marcus Dods, is an important resource for understanding shifting theological views of evil. Peter Singer places the current U.S. president in the context of past thinkers in The President of Good & Evil: The Ethics of George W. Bush (New York: Dutton, 2004). Jean-François Revel explores European criticisms of Americans in Anti-Americanism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), translated by Diarmid Cammell. Fouad Ajami critiques the critics in “The Falseness of Anti-Americanism” (Foreign Policy, September/October 2003). Look to works from several political philosophers to learn more about religious intolerance: John Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1983) and John Rawls's Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). For more on tolerance tested, try the essays in Will Secular India Survive? (Gurgaon: Imprint One, 2004), edited by Mushirul Hasan.

Take a dip in red ink by reading Restoring Fiscal Sanity: How to Balance the Budget (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2004), a collection of essays edited by Alice M. Rivlin and Isabel Sawhill. Lawrence H. Summers offered his own warning about rising debt in “America Overdrawn” (Foreign Policy, July/August 2004).