THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (126 page)

The enormous wealth made possible by the technological breakthroughs of this period, especially laser-fusion, fueled the recovery from the
2005 – 2009 recession, but it was simply not enough to paper over the cultural chasms that opened up among states. These chasms were in part the result of the dizzying growth in the knowledge about how other people live and how other societies' systems work. A deep alienation arose between the states of the developed North and the underdeveloped South and also even within states, leading to a fragmentation of the world trading system and the creation of the first new states since the collapse of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In some parts of the world, the terrifying appearance of the weather epidemics followed by the OOA-V plague raised suspicions that government agencies in the developed world—the CIA was often mentioned—were deliberately trying to depopulate the Third World.

In the 1990s, an analyst from the policy planning staff of the U.S. Department of State had concluded that the “unfolding of modern natural science has had a uniform effect on all societies that have experienced it…. This process guarantees an increasing homogenization of all human societies, regardless of their historical origins or cultural inheritances.”
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He further concluded that these forces “have a powerful effect in undermining traditional social groups like tribes, clans, extended families, religious sects, and so on,”
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and predicted “something like a Universal History of mankind in the direction of liberal democracy”
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which actually seemed about to come true in the wake of the commitments of the Peace of Paris. In retrospect we can see, however, that the disruption of traditional societies and values had exactly the opposite effect, rendering the South suspicious and insular, and ultimately fractionating the progressive states of the North. Moreover, one of the consequences of modern science, advancing automation, deprived the South of the capital benefits of cheap labor that would otherwise have resulted from globalization. With hostility and fear toward the messages that advanced telecommunications would bring, and without the capital to build the telecommunications infrastructure needed to exploit that technology for their own benefit, the states of the South gradually sank into a kind of silence, but not before they had received pictures, and been pictured, in ways that deeply alienated the two parts of the globe from each other.

Emblematic of this mutual misunderstanding was the massacre at Times Square in 2005, only one year after the final collapse of the remnants of the Al Qaeda network that had savagely attacked the United States in 2001. The movie version of the novel
Mahomet
depicted the prophet as a young man in defiance of the Islamic injunction not to portray his face. Perhaps because the script had been the subject of worldwide protests, large crowds were gathered on the evening of the premiere at a theatre on 42nd Street in Manhattan.
The movie's principal actors, as well as about two hundred persons, including many adolescents, were attacked with
automatic weapons by a militant Islamicist group
. More than fifty were killed. The pictures of the massacre—the entire scene was captured on video—were repeatedly played across the world and, to the growing consternation of many, produced diametrically opposed opinions in different countries. In the West there was outrage at the killing; in many Islamic states, the terrorists were regarded as heroes.
When their release was achieved through a bombing campaign against movie theatres
that threatened to shut down the film industry,
the West embargoed oil sales from Iran
(where the terrorists had turned up to a tumultuous welcome).
This proved to be the first in a series of economic reprisals against various oil-producing states in the Middle East,
which had the unfortunate effect of raising oil prices and slowing growth early in the century. There seemed to come from the Islamic world a surge of hatred that distressed, alarmed, and above all baffled
¹⁹
persons in the West. In retrospect this should not have come as a surprise.
²⁰

In the opening decades of the twenty-first century, Muslims had suffered successive stages of humiliation at the hands of the West. The first was their loss of a leading role in the world economy as other energy sources—principally owing to laser-fusion technology, which brought the long-sought “hydrogen economy” into being—finally lessened reliance on the fossil fuels that were the source of wealth for many Muslim states. The second was the undermining of Muslim authority in Palestine through the economic renaissance of the Israeli state in the very midst of one of Islam's holiest lands, and
the refusal of the United States and other powers to play a part in Mideast negotiations with Israel
. The third was the challenge to Muslim cultural traditions, from emancipated women to rebellious children, as the presence of the new handheld television/computer/ telephones loaded with “edutainment” software that combined educational materials with entertainment formats—began to sweep the world. The main effect of the efforts of
various Islamic governments that undertook spectrum jamming in an effort to disrupt the signals on which such technology depended
, was to remove large sections of the globe from the international communications architecture. The Muslim world was the first to turn its back on the West and the ethos of consumerism, secularism, and libertarianism that was the engine of economic growth of this era. Not all Muslims were reconciled to the ignominious defeat of the Taliban in 2001, nor to the death of their terrorist collaborator. One consequence of the World Trade Center attacks had been a mutual suspicion between Islamic and non-Islamic cultures.

At almost the same time, the meltdown of a nuclear reactor in Belarus (of the same design as the one that curdled at Chernobyl in 1988) caused a flood of refugees from Russia, Ukraine, and Poland to storm barricades hastily erected at the German border. In the next two and a half months,
more than 1.5 million persons tried to enter Germany,
where eventually they were housed in camps
. Unable to return to their poisoned homelands,
these persons were not allowed to move further west into Germany and were strictly confined
. A wall, unfortunately reminiscent in some ways of the Berlin Wall, was ultimately erected around the perimeter of the camps.

Then, as if to show that no area would go unscathed,
an indigenous revolution in the southern states of Mexico
ignited a popular uprising in the economically depressed north. This touched off another mass migration, with eventually more than five million Mexican nationals pouring into southern Texas and California. Scenes of vigilante violence against the illegal aliens shocked the country, and perhaps more ominously angered and repelled the Hispanic community in the United States.
In both Texas and California there were reprisals; armed Mexican Americans volunteered to protect the refugees;
for some months there was a lawless state of affairs along the border. Throughout the nation, there was a mood of mutual disgust: non-Mexican Americans felt betrayed by those who sheltered and hid illegal aliens. Hispanic Americans, in numbers well beyond those of Mexican heritage, felt contempt for their fellow Anglo citizens who had appeared indifferent to Mexican suffering.

In 2015, a teenage gang led by a former Army officer known to the world only as “Prince” seized power in the area around Monrovia, in Liberia. There were at that time about one million persons living in this city without potable water and without electricity. Using automatic weapons and often accompanied by handheld minicams, soldiers from this force engaged throughout the next months in a campaign of terror and depravity that was filmed and sold to distributors in the West. An outcry arose in the United States in particular urging intervention to restore order. There was no G-9 (P8) or U.N. force available to intervene. The advocates of a policy of intervention captured the imagination of the African American community—Liberia had been founded by former American slaves— who detected an unspoken racism behind the president's reluctance to intervene. Many Americans, however, saw the matter differently: the problems of poverty, political instability, and what were widely perceived as “tribal” conflicts were thought to be beyond solution. Indeed events in Africa tended to harden the worst racial stereotypes in the developed world.
A divisive and intemperate debate in the Congress over whether to send humanitarian aid ended by failing to provide any funds for such a measure
. Rioting broke out in Washington, D.C., where an Afrocentric curriculum had long been mandated in the public schools.

These developments seemed to exhaust the global community, which had struggled with the immediate but attenuated empathy that instant communications seemed to evoke. In reaction, states of The Garden turned
inward, and groups within those states ceased striving for cultural homogeneity and celebrated differences instead.

Ironically, it was the multicultural aspects of the developed states that fostered this mutual distancing. By creating a culture in which the international media and entertainment industry had more influence than the national political class of any state, the market-states of the early twenty-first century had also created a powerful weapon that destabilized other societies and, even in their own societies, brought forth violent reactions that sought to restore the cultural values that were apparently being cast away. International communications at first made famines in faraway countries moving and tragic; eventually, these events seemed tiresome and inevitable. International communications initially made the prosperity and liberty of the developed states alluring; eventually these qualities came to seem vulgar and addictive. The national political class was powerless to either lead a state's people toward compassion or insulate a state from cultural invasion. The fragmentation that then occurred in these developed states was only an inner reflection of the alienation their peoples felt toward the outer, foreign world: the contact with other cultures had reinforced the intractability of cultural differences and the felt need to avoid the frustration and danger of such encounters.

As a result, the market-states of this era were thrown back on custom. Customary approaches to allocations are not concerned with optimizing output or increasing the productivity of the individual. Many of the steps taken by the states in this era were irrational, if by that is meant the adoption of policies that cannot in the long run strengthen the economic opportunities of the society on whose behalf such policies are undertaken. Openness and candor are often sacrificed by relying on customary approaches, but openness and candor are not absolutes and there are other values—the preservation of a way of life, religious values that range from the sanctity of life to the protection of a certain structure of the family—that were protected. By mid-century languages that were almost dead in 2000 were flourishing. Art and architecture ceased to be dominated by the West and experienced a new renaissance. Educated persons played more musical instruments, performed more plays, and made more art now that echnology brought down the skill levels required for these tasks. The Garden, by subordinating the value of the race for wealth, evoked the value of artistic expression in many cultures that had almost nothing else in common.

During this period of increasing surpluses in finished products, little attention was paid to stable or slightly falling levels of food production. Grain
stockpiles had been reduced during the middle teens of the century, but as population seemed to be leveling off, there seemed to be no cause for alarm. When in the summer of 2020, a drought struck the United States there were ample world reserves of foodstuffs.

But the following year the drought expanded, and by 2022 it was clear that the world might be entering a period of food shortages. As world stocks of grain became depleted,
China and Japan began buying rice in large quantities; Russia attempted to purchase virtually the entire U.S. wheat export crop
, which had been cut by a third by the drought. Prices started to rise aggressively: wheat went to $ 10 a bushel; soybeans hit $15, while corn topped $9 for the first time in history.
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Weather patterns around the world intensified the drought that gripped the United States and Canada: records for the severity and duration of winter were set in Russia, Poland, and Germany; dramatically uneven precipitation caused flash floods in China and Southeast Asia, bursting dike systems and polluting rice fields. The price of wheat doubled to more than $20 per bushel; a loaf of bread in an American supermarket cost $4; the price of a quart of cooking oil went to $8. Hoarding began to spread across the developed world, as images of starvation in India, Bangladesh, and Central Africa filled television screens.

There was, in fact, plenty of food for the world's population, although its availability—particularly that of proteins—was sharply constricted by hoarding in the wealthier states. The real difficulty was distribution, and here the collapse of international cooperation proved highly destructive. Nation-state institutions like the IMF and the World Bank had been discredited (the IMF by its doctrinaire adherence to the Washington Consensus, the bank by its perceived reluctance to follow that Consensus) and had fallen into disuse. The OECD had become a forum for high-profile quarreling and finger-pointing. There were literally no international institutions that might have stepped in to organize a worldwide, rational distribution system for food, and in any case there was no legal authority to do so. When in 2024
Viet Nam announced that it was joining a food cartel organized by Japan, China mobilized its armed forces and with some difficulty occupied Hanoi. The following year Russia massed troops on the Ukraine border and virtually coerced an economic union between the two countries to get access to Ukrainian crops
. So things stood in 2025 when weather patterns began to ease.

The mercantile model had been adopted by many market-states—and sometimes by states that had tried, and abandoned, the entrepreneurial model, such as the United States. States as varied as Canada, France, Japan, Tanzania, Korea, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Ecuador, Iran, and even Norway all pursued this method of achieving market success. The mercantile market-state stressed the need for harmony among different market actors. On average, in market-states that adopted the mercantile model the incomes received by the highest 20 percent of the population amounted to no more than four times the incomes of the lowest 20 percent; in entrepreneurial market-states the ratio had often been more than 15 to 1. By sharing the benefits of growth widely among its citizens, a state following this model was able to justify subsidies to certain sectors and to maintain political stability. To be sure, some states without an almost exclusive ethnic and cultural homogeneity that attempted this model—Brazil did so in the early teens of the twenty-first century, for example—faced widespread consumer-led revolts. Still, states following this model seemed to be able to avoid the problems of organized crime and of street crime that plagued other market-states, though whether this was a result of their more homogeneous societies or (as in the United States) other factors cannot easily be determined.

Initially, The Garden was an inhospitable environment for the society of states, because it stressed the mercantile, competitive relations of nonho-mogeneous groups like a society of states. What was required was an international system that could generalize to the society of states itself the self-consciously stable and equitable obligations of the mercantile market-state. Because such an approach depends on complex systems of mutual obligation and trust, it may be that this could never have come into being without the famines and food crises of the early twenty-first century, which ultimately discredited mercantilist attitudes.

Prior to the famines, Asian business combines of hitherto unimagined size dwarfed all other enterprises in other countries. The largest twenty banks, the largest seventy-five corporations, the largest fifty trading companies were all Asian. This figure hid the fact, however, that intra-Asian competition was more cutthroat than ever before, with savage competitive tactics that, in an effort to gain market share in the consuming West, had led to falling living standards in Asia despite the fact that these had been the fastest-growing economies in the world.
The intensely aggressive policies of these states—ruthless market penetration through price-cutting combined with heavily regulated imports of capital and goods—gave them trade surpluses and made them creditors but did not raise living standards
. Child labor appeared more broadly in the world, moving into the developed states, which had not seen such practices since the early decades of the previous century. Moreover,
greater investment was being diverted into military uses
, as each of these states began to fear domination by one of the others when tensions rose out of fierce economic com-etition.

Among world business leaders, there emerged a consensus that would have surprised many of the businessmen of the twentieth century: all three state models were rejected on essentially ethical rather than economic
grounds. The entrepreneurial model, because it emphasized personal rights at the expense of personal responsibilities, led to a kind of libertarian anarchy. The managerial model induced in the peoples of the countries in which it reigned a torpor and dependence on the welfare state that produced a youth culture of drug abuse, birth rates so low as to be practically nonexistent, and ubiquitous vandalism. The mercantile model had proved too competitive, too national to apply even to a handful of states in the same region—much less to all the developed and developing states. This model turned out to work best when it took advantage of a stable international set of rules on which it could act as a free rider, but it had had the effect of dissipating the very system on which it was parasitic.

In the year 2004, the chairman of the largest of the American investment banks gave an address to a group of international executives. It was widely reported and eventually took on an iconic status, though at first its impact was largely owing to the novelty of an American executive thoughtfully comparing the entrepreneurial and the mercantile market-state models. He said:

This criticism of the entrepreneurial model from one of its most successful advocates stirred many. That same year the first of the gene-tech scandals occurred: a series of gene manipulations by computer-assisted technology that went awry and produced horrifying birth defects. When serious weather-induced food shortages began to appear the following year, there was widespread suspicion that these too were the result of corporate experiments with computer-guided weather control systems that had misfired. Although this was never actually determined to be the case, the public's outrage and fear gave immense momentum to movements that sought to reinvigorate the political dimensions of the state. The speech was thought to have prophesied something of what had happened and its call for an “ethical state” was renewed.

One unusual element of that speech was the call for a greater role for the corporation and for business leadership generally. “Today,” this corporate leader had said, “there is only one entity whose effort to create stability in the world matches its self-interest. That entity is a corporation acting globally. In the increasingly borderless world created by the microchip, politicians and bureaucrats will not be the ones to turn to for guidance. It is in the nature of politicians and bureaucrats to serve one country. But global corporations can only do business in a peaceful and stable world.”
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This might have been the most controversial part of the speech; after all, the “gene-tech” scandals and weather-induced famines had called into question the accountability of global corporations. Some corporate leaders might truly act on the assumption that their business enterprises were responsible to their “customers, their employees, and society,” but most thought they were solely responsible to their shareholders. In fact, it wasn't clear that most managers would know what to do if such a broad social responsibility were given to them. They were not politicians or lawyers. Government leaders only knew one way—the way of the nation-state—to make corporations accountable: this was through law and close regulation. Corporations that could pollute the gene pool and precipitate mass migrations by manipulating the weather were hardly to be trusted. On the other hand, absent a culture of trust, there could never develop the long-term relationships of stability and responsibility that seemed so lacking in the states of this period.

In many countries there were riots against the offices of multinational corporations; some firms hired private security forces that grew until they were private militias. Most states were too weak to prevent this development;
others had already privatized police and even core military functions
, so that the line between the security force protecting the corporate headquarters and that protecting the seat of government was blurred.

The principal transforming event, however, was the famine. The collapse of an international effort by governments to save the worst-hit areas from mass starvation—evoking the disillusionment of citizens in relatively prosperous areas who began to fear for their own well-being—was replaced by
an international consortium of business firms who levied a kind of tax on their customers
—really a price surcharge on their products—to finance food aid.
This consortium turned over its operations to government agencies when the crisis had passed
. There is little question that millions of lives were saved. This enhanced the credibility of multinational corporations generally, even though suspicions persisted in some
circles that the weather changes had been artificially induced. Nevertheless, investigations, including an antitrust prosecution for the price fixing by which the famine funds had been raised, proved fruitless and were widely unpopular.

When
the United States and the E. U. were able to negotiate a huge revaluation of the yen
in order to improve their trade deficits, they found that the purchasing power of Japanese multinationals had skyrocketed and that the largest corporate taxpayers, as well as the largest equity holders, were now Asian companies. It was as if these companies had bought the real assets of European and American states through a kind of novel lease-purchase—lending to finance trade deficits and then, through the revaluation, converting those liens to ownership. This too, however, had the effect of strengthening the move to give a political role to the multinational corporation.

By 2025 an informal code of conduct was developing between international business and market-state governments. Those governments that were able to enhance stability while maintaining an open intellectual environment became magnets for investment.
Measures such as income supplements to enable families to care for their elderly relatives, property tax breaks to encourage longer periods of residence in a single community, and invigorated libel and consumer protection laws
all tended to impede market growth; but they also contributed to the citizen's sense of well-being, his sense of place in the environment, and his growing assumption of responsibility. These factors tended to increase trust, which lowered the burden of legal regulation—greater delegation and discretion replaced rule making and litigation—and thus enhanced market growth by lessening transaction costs. Here the computer was indispensable, because
informal networks alerted consumers to the activities of responsible corporations
as well as facilitating ad hoc “communities” centered on common problems. These developments tended to raise citizen confidence that the society was able to respond to social problems and that society's members were willing to take responsibility for addressing these problems.

These structural adjustments did much to ameliorate the worst excesses of the market.
Informal business codes enabled corporations to isolate and shun other businesses that failed to act in the long-term interests of the communities they served
(including large wage differentials between managers and workers) and the instant information provided by computer linkups gave consumers an enforcement mechanism to supplement business pressure. But these adjustments did little to resolve issues of social justice and group identity. Many persons felt stifled in The Garden that emerged from this process of business-led harmony. While crime as a whole lessened in the developed market-states, partly for demographic reasons, the lethality and intensity of criminal acts increased. Millennial cults grew up even though the millennium had passed, and in 2030 the first of a series of computer plagues struck the infrastructure of the developed world. The world saw the first hostile use of a nuclear weapon since 1945 when an Indian religious cult devastated the financial center at Bombay by poisoning its water supply with radioactive isotopes stolen from a lab.