What Is the Problem?

One of the problems in talking about why we are in the fix we're in - and a major challenge for formulating an intellectual or an activist response - is agreeing on the nature and causes of our current condition.

We live in a time of existential crisis in three overlapping and, unfortunately, mutually reinforcing realms:

• Our planet is deeply stressed by pollution, the loss of biodiversity, and global climate change. The earth, which Buddhism and many of the other religions tell us is our mother, is in extremis.

• Further, too many of our fellow human beings live in conditions of utter poverty. More than a billion people in the world live on less than a dollar per day and half the world's population lives on less than $2 per day. Their lives are, by most measures, miserable - plagued by disease, hunger, cold, and the humiliation of homelessness. If they have homes, they may be covered by tin roofs and lacking basic amenities such as toilets or even outhouses. Their lives are characterized by the constant struggle to find food and safe drinking water. Meanwhile the richest 20 percent of the world grows richer - now consuming 86 percent of the world's wealth while the poorest 20 percent account for about 1.3 percent of world consumption.

• Finally, we are on the verge of war after war, with no end in sight. Our descendants, if we have them, will probably look back on this time as the beginning of an era of constant war, and they will wonder, much as we wonder now about the period leading up to World War I, why no one could stop the march of folly.

I do not have time to talk about how these problems reinforce each other. Rather, what I will do is concentrate on trying to say why we are on this military march of folly and then how we might get out of it.

My own interpretation of the United States in early 2003 is this: The patient presents with acute imperial behavioral tendencies. Specifically, the United States is attempting to use military, economic, and ideological power to dominate and control the globe. The drive is to maintain and use U.S. preeminence to the advantage of the United States. In other words, the underlying condition is acute imperialism, and each intervention and war, such as the current drive for counter-proliferation in Iraq, is a symptom.