Last week, China quietly launched the aircraft carrier Varyag from the port of Dalian. The ship is expected to be deployed to Hainan province in close proximity to the strategic regions of Taiwan and the South China Sea. Amidst an atmosphere of existential gloom triggered by the debt-ceiling debacle and the deeper economic crisis, the reaction in the United States was dominated by the fear of a rising, militarist China challenging America’s global superiority. What few in the United States bothered to mention, however, is that the new Chinese carrier was built from an unfinished Ukrainian hull purchased in 1998 – and is the first and only aircraft carrier China has ever had. The United States, meanwhile, has eleven.

The real problem with the U.S. response was not, however, that it exaggerated the Chinese threat. It is that it greatly overestimates the benefits, to America, of the country’s continuing quest for global supremacy – politically, economically and militarily. To lament America’s decline from a dominant position of unaffordable and unsustainable strategic burdens is, in fact, to mistake an opportunity for a threat. For all of the past decade’s concerns around the world about the reach and military assertiveness of U.S. unilateralism, it seems increasingly clear that its principal casualty has been the U.S. itself. America is choking on the edifice of empire and the sooner it’s dismantled, the easier will be America’s return to a leading – not the leading – position as a dynamic, innovative economy.

Consider briefly what the past decade’s economic policies, military interventions and strategic priorities have brought the country: a Great Recession, debts that are fundamentally irrecoverable, a credit crisis, a housing collapse, and two wars with immense costs in lives and treasure. A country that employs more than one million people within its intelligence community, and still is surprised by the Arab Spring, is not being efficient with its resources. Waste and corruption are endemic to any enterprise of this size – and the U.S. military-industrial complex has been no exception.

Six numbers tell the story of empire’s price in stark terms: federal deficits, gross debt, military spending, infrastructure investment, income inequality and now endemic joblessness:

• Seen over a ten-year span, federal revenue has largely stayed constant, rising from $2.02 trillion in 2001 to $2.17 trillion in FY 2011. Expenditures, meanwhile, more than doubled from $1.85 trillion to $3.82 trillion producing a deficit this year of $1.65 trillion.

• Over the same period, gross U.S. debt has ballooned to over $14 trillion (roughly 100% of GDP) with net debt standing today at $9 trillion (of which 50% is held by non-U.S. entities).

• Defense expenditure over the same period has risen from approximately $300 billion in the year prior to 9/11 to $700 billion in FY 2011, and the figure is hundreds of billions higher if military spending outside the Defense Department is included. The total costs (estimated and very likely low-balled) of the Wars of 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq now stands at some $1.5 trillion, financed of course entirely by deficit spending.  The result is that the U.S. now spends more on its defense budget than all other countries combined.

• The U.S., which once led the world in infrastructure development, now spends just 2.0% of GDP in such investments, as opposed to 5% in the EU and 9% in China. Of the 30 largest infrastructure projects globally, half are in developing economies and just five are in the U.S.  A single Chinese project (the $150 billion North-South water diversion plan) involves more than double in total investment ($65 billion) of all five current U.S. projects.

• Looking at the U.S. gini coefficient, the most commonly used measure of inequality, no country in the developed world today has a greater gap between rich and poor.  U.S. inequality is currently at levels not seen since the first decade of the 20th century – and greater even than in 1929.

• Finally, last week’s payroll report for July showed that nearly fourteen million Americans are now out of work, and more than six million of them have been jobless for more than six months. For more than two years, the unemployment rate has been close to or above nine per cent – and if you include those people who’ve given up looking for work it’s nearly double that.

If this is what global dominance looks like, who needs it?

Not that such a recognition appears anywhere on the horizon when listening to U.S. politicians or policy-makers – from either side of the political spectrum. Instead, reactions appear divided between those on the far right who appear to wish for perpetual hegemony while blithely defaulting on the full faith and credit of the U.S.; and those on the left who are hoping that the present crisis could trigger a second “Sputnik moment” – one that will shock America into redoubling its efforts to achieve global leadership through responsible policy-making. What this hope – fanciful as it seems today – assumes is that restoring the country to its pre-eminent global position is actually a good thing for America. It isn’t.

A nation that thinks it can do anything will do everything – deploy its military to wars of questionable strategic value at a vast cost in lives and treasure; issue IOUs in the trillions to finance consumption; turn the advantage of international reserve currency status into a curse by spending far beyond what creditors are likely to tolerate in the long term; and sustain the fiction of entitlements that no serious observer thinks will be honored.

A victim of strategic gluttony, America has gorged itself for the past two decades on unbridled consumption and military expenditure. And now, like an aging prize-fighter mounting the scales in advance of a major bout only to find that he’s disqualified on grounds of weight, the U.S. will need go on a crash diet.

None of this is to ignore the unique threats and responsibilities that the United States faces today – largely, though not completely, as a consequence of its hegemonic status. 9/11 was an attack on the country that required a strong and sustained global response. Nor is it to discount the future need for the U.S. to help provide essential global public goods – in trade, economy, and security.  It is rather to say that even those challenges will be met more successfully by a rebooted and re-sized America that engages with the world as a strategic partner, and not as patron.

From Brazil to Indonesia, Turkey to South Africa, the rising pivotal powers are not looking to replace U.S. hegemony with Chinese dependency.  In fact, as they focus on strategies of inclusive growth that sustain accountability and legitimacy, the mobile networked younger generations of these countries will continue to look to America as a model in many respects.  A new partnership with a right-sized America disciplined by limitations and constraints is there to be forged – if only U.S. political leaders are willing to rethink the value of empire.

In an Archipelago World defined by the fragmentation of power, capital and ideas where the winners will be those states able to vertically integrate public and private interests, America’s present global posture is more a curse than a blessing. Competitiveness, growth, innovation, and influence are today more a function of intellectual capital and a high-tech infrastructure built to navigate a resource-constrained future. And if you’re asking yourself who will stand up for the victims of aggression and human rights abuses around the world, an exhausted, over-extended, deeply indebted America “leading from behind” it is not.

Rid of the burdens of empire, mentally and physically, the United States will remain a singular country in the world – with its openness, ingenuity, diversity, rule of law, moral purpose and ability to renew itself. An object lesson in the paradox of power, the decline of the American Empire may well be the best thing that can happen to the American Republic – and the sooner the better.

1.  OLORGESAILIE An hour’s drive and a 600-metre drop in altitude from Nairobi is Olorgesailie, a Lower Palaeolithic archaeological site on the floor of the Rift Valley in Kenya. It is blisteringly hot. Nothing moves in the heat of the day except dust, gathering into twisters. There are puff adders in the grass, scorpions under the rocks. The lions are thin, the giraffes few, the elephants killed. It might be the closest we have to the Garden of Eden. From the campsite it is possible to make out the outline of the prehistoric lake which once flooded the plain in soapy water. According to potassium-argon dating, hominids lived here for 900,000 years. They made handaxes which they used to butcher the hippos, zebras and baboons they hunted and scavenged. Olorgesailie stands for the gaping history of our species, a blurry, half-formed and dreamlike time from which archaeology can pull out only pieces. The Kenyan anthropologist Louis Leakey uncovered a Homo erectus skull here in the 1940s; the brain cavity was disappointingly small. There must have been grunts, gestures with stones, blood, the sky blotted with vultures, ape children kept back in the darkness. The sense of space here is immense. So too is the sense of known time, hominid time, known at first in the way a beast knows time, in light and darkness, but conscious all the same. The night sky is black lacquered. Satellites pass across it like trams. There are shooting stars. Sometimes there is the sound of hyenas. “To the extent we are hardwired, it is probably as small bands of hunter-gatherers,” says Spencer Wells, the American geneticist who heads the Genographic Project. Its aim is to take 100,000 DNA samples from indigenous peoples around the world and write the songline of mankind’s journey out of Africa from a place like Olorgesailie, obliterating any literal interpretation of the Garden of Eden and replacing it with a new evidence-based creed.

2.  THE  GENOGRAPHIC CREED The creed holds that every single non-African on the planet is descended from one or possibly two small bands of humans who made it on rafts and skins across the Red Sea at the narrows of the Bab el-Mandeb, or Gate of Tears, about 50,000 years ago. We are a more maritime species than we ever supposed, even if we keep close to the shore. These early humans, this Mayflower on foot, scavenged shellfish along the tideline and in the rock pools, increasing their range by a few kilometres a year. Within 5,000-10,000 years, without much need for adaptation, they had worked their way around India and across the land bridges that then linked Asia with a short sea crossing to Australia. Some 99% of the human genome is shuffled from one birth to the next. The Genographic Project traces the 1% of the genome which is not shuffled—mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) through the maternal line and the Y-chromosome through the paternal. These jokers in the pack allow geneticists to work back to our common ancestors. Our mtDNA appears to coalesce in a single woman, who lived on the African savannah 150,000 years ago. Our Y-chromosome survives from a single man, who lived in the Rift Valley of Kenya or Tanzania 59,000 years ago. So Adam and Eve did exist—90,000 years apart. The discrepancy is because, unlike the biblical Adam and Eve, this couple only represent the last common Ancestors we can trace genetically. About 60,000 years ago, our species had crashed to 2,000 individuals, then recovered with the help of language and conceptual thinking. The speed of our spreading is alarming set against evolutionary time, as if we’re bacteria. The journey of each individual is arranged by haplogroup, a branch of migration marked by a genetic mutation. Since the 1848 revolutions, the spread of mechanised transport and the rise of “isms” culminating in globalism, couples have been shuffling their distinct genetic families, or haplogroups, some representing tiny indigenous peoples, others much of western Europe. In many respects the Genographic Project is a race against time. Indigenous peoples amount to just 350m of the 6.8 billion people on the planet. The number of languages has gone from 15,000 in 1492 to 5,900 today. The ancient bloodlines are almost gone. Soon only the vampires will be left. The Genographic Project, which is underwritten by National Geographic, IBM and the Waitt Foundation, revolves around the dazzling countenance of Spencer Wells (pictured below). With his blond hair, blue eyes and Nebraska roots, he is the ideal high priest to explain to white Americans that they are blacks gone curdy. His biography carefully notes that he was a “child prodigy with a love for both history and science” who entered the University of Texas at 16. He took his PhD at Harvard under the noted evolutionary geneticist Richard Lewontin, then worked for the founding father of population genetics, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, at Stanford. After a stint running a lab in Oxford and a couple of television shows, he became an explorer-in-residence at National Geographic, which he regards as “the world’s coolest job”. For publicity’s sake, the project will help solve popular history questions. Did the Vikings leave a genetic imprint on America? How far did the Incas spread? But at its core is the hard science of population genetics. Cavalli-Sforza’s “The History and Geography of Human Genes”, written with Paolo Menozzi and Alberto Piazza (Princeton University Press, 1994), is still considered the best overview of genetic diversity in humans. Cavalli-Sforza demolished the idea of there being different species of human being. No more Homo afer, asiaticus, europaeus, americanus and monstrous. Race, says Cavalli-Sforza, has hardly any useful biological meaning at all. It is about adaptation. Grain-eaters between the Baltic and Black Sea got pale skin, pale eyes and pale hair because they were under selective pressure to process more Vitamin D from limited sunlight. Lewontin, Wells’s other mentor, posited that if a nuclear war struck and only the Kenyan Kikuyu survived, they would still have 85% of the genetic variation of mankind; with a similar history and conditions, they too would turn blond and blue-eyed under the northern sun. Cavalli-Sforza was the first to propose a global sample of genetic diversity, but hisHuman Genome Diversity Project foundered on insensitivity to indigenous peoples and a murky position on whether the DNA samples could be sold. The Genographic Project has learned from those mistakes. Instead of covering its costs with industrial sponsorship, it sells kits to interested members of the public, which in turn support a small legacy fund for indigenous peoples that sweetens their participation. The project has so far gathered 50,000 DNA samples from indigenous peoples. It has sold 300,000 kits at $100 a pop to the public in 130 countries. The major findings will be made public in 2011. “The biggest challenges have been bureaucratic and financial,” says Wells. The few remaining ethnolinguistic hotspots are in remote bits of rainforest, marsh, desert and steppe: National Geographic country.

3.  IBM The sequencing of nucleotides—the Lego bricks which build our DNA and RNA—within each gene segment is only possible with the power of computing, particularly the algorithms that allow for swifter and more detailed analysis of the data. The work on the Genographic Project is being done by the computational biology team at IBM’s vast research division in the Watson labs outside New York. The genome has a digital structure played out over long strands. It may be significant that we live in an age where the digital is more understandable to us. The head of the IBM team is an Indian, Ajay Royyuru. IBM has used the Genographic Projectas a way of sharpening its understanding of genetics. The goal was to build a statistical model for human variation and migration, he says, but the first lessons were ethical. IBM extended its non-discrimination policy to include genetic markers and helped make it law in the United States; it is now illegal to get rid of an employee because their genes indicate, say, a likelihood of multiple sclerosis. The biggest advance Royyuru’s team has made is on new algorithms that could allow population geneticists to work with the 99% of the genome that is shuffled. Since the number of our ancestors grows by “two to the power for each generation removed”, the Genographic Project is only looking at a small part of any given person’s genetic inheritance, a few branches on a tree. So far, says Royyuru, the problem remains “NP-hard” (nondeterministic polynomial-time hard), meaning that it cannot be proven with the present computing power. But by applying parsimony, the logic of the simplest evident solution, the IBM algorithm could allow geneticists to say something about complex traits within given populations. Royyuru expects it could be applied to the growing field of personalised testing for genetic markers within the next decade, constituting a significant medical advance.

4.  MY MIGRATION If you are not an indigenous person, you can buy a DNA kit. You “vigorously” scrape off cells from the inside of your cheek, insert the sample in a clear plastic vial and send it off to Washington, DC. For Europeans, the results are generally bland. About 80% of Europeans are descended from paleolithic hunter-gatherers, with the rest coming up the Danube with the first farming culture, or in smaller groups, such as Ottomans and attendant gypsies. Genetically speaking, my genes are the unsalted of the bland. I was born in the Shetland Islands, of Yorkshire Norman stock. Predictably, comfortingly, my Y-chromosome haplogroup is identified as I1a. “Because of its high frequency in western Scandinavia,” my results read, “it is likely many Vikings descended from this line. The Viking raids on the British Isles might explain the dispersal of this lineage as well.” The I1a Northmen migrated from Africa, through the Middle East to the Balkans and on to western Europe. About 28,000-23,000 years ago they helped found the sensual “Gravettian” culture, weaving cloth from natural fibres and carving voluptuous figurines, fertile in their swollen breasts, belly and hips. They then took refuge from the last glacial maximum in Iberia. When the ice retreated, they made their way up the French coast to populate parts of Britain and Norway. At least I am not a Neanderthal. One of the Holy Grail questions of anthropology, which persisted until recently, was whether Europeans had some Neanderthal blood. The groundbreaking research by Svante Paabo at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, examining DNA extracted from Neanderthal bones, shows that is not the case. The lead researcher for the European part of the Genographic Project is Lluis Quintana-Murci of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He spends some of his time in the Central African Republic studying the links between Bantu and pygmies. In Europe, he hopes to help solve the mystery of the Basques. Are they relic hunter-gatherers, as some Basque nationalists claim? An extensive study of the Basque lands in Spain and France together with control groups from non-Basque Asturias and Aragon may settle the question and shed light on the Basque language, which “doesn’t belong to any known linguistic family”. My partner is Czech, and her  mtDNA is haplogroup K. At first glance this is a quirky group associated with Ashkenazi Jews, but it is in fact also a common Slav maternal line. Our youngest son, Hamish, has lived all his life in the Rift Valley. He speaks a little Swahili, but also inherits from his Mum the M17 marker which indicates Kurgan descent. These pre-Scythian nomads glittered on horseback, leaving burial mounds—kurgans—filled with gold across the Eurasian steppe. The Ashkenazi marker is interesting, no question, but the Kurgan brings me back to one of the definitive films of my childhood, “Highlander”, in which two (almost) immortals, a Scottish Highlander played by Christopher Lambert and a Kurgan played by Clancy Brown, engage in mortal swordplay. What does it mean to be a couple of thousand generations removed from Adam when, say, Donne and his sonnets are already a cosmos away after only eight generations? On the level of modern history the genographers are no big deal. A haplogroup is so vague as to be useless to genealogists. I could stand on a street in Edinburgh and find more people who shared my I1a haplogroup than my green politics, much less my star sign. But on the level of deep ancestry the Genographic Project is a very big deal. Matt Ridley, author of  “Genome” and a former science correspondent for The Economist, believes the genome revolution “is the biggest development in human history, bar none”. Within that, “out of Africa is a huge story”. Most of genetics looks forward—to the elimination of disease, cloning, perhaps even the creation of a new species. But if we as a species are but nature’s brief experiment with self-awareness, the Genographic creed is a moment of Copernican consequence, when we truly awake to our origins and journey.

5.  ALL AFRICANS We are all Africans. We originated in Africa. That is proved by the continent’s rich genetic inheritance. Africans are more diverse than the rest of humanity put together, because they are drawn from the pool of humans who did not leave. As Wells points out, two Africans from the same village could be more divergent from each other than either is from a non-African. The question is whether this new understanding will reinforce prejudices against Africans, or help end them. As Africa’s population rises and parts of the continent collapse under economic and environmental pressures, eugenics may reappear. This would be revised eugenics, conceding the physical superiority of Africans in everything from penis size to sprinting, but holding that they are not selected for problem solving, having never benefited from the training ground of the Eurasian steppe (with its need for microliths, clothing and portable shelters). “To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity,” wrote the novelist H.G. Wells, a proponent of eugenics. Rubbish, says Spencer Wells. There are no nasty genetic secrets out there about Africans, “certainly no differences in general intelligence”. Whites’ superior attitudes towards blacks, he reckons, is based on a “general correlation between latitudes and economic development”. Even if National Geographic is suffocated by political correctness and an obsessive need for a tidy narrative, he is right. If Africa is stunted, it is through circumstance, not genetics. Just look at the Nile-Saharan Genetic markers on President Obama’s Y-chromosome. Besides, evolutionary biologists point out that cold rewarded as much as it punished. With plentiful reindeer, fish in the rivers, nutritious roots and berries, more water, more wood and fewer diseases, the living may have been easier in the north. In any case, the genetic questions for Africa come rolling in. Who are the most ancient Africans? Why did some Africans select for milk digestion and others remain intolerant? Did the slave trade weaken natural selection in west Africa or strengthen it? What is the genetic legacy of Arabs and Europeans in east Africa? There is agreement that Y-chromosome Adam would have looked much like a San Bushman of the Kalahari, with an epicanthic fold over the eyes, a hairless cocoa body, and a loose graceful gait. East and southern Africa would have been scattered with hunter-gatherer groups. They probably spoke click languages similar to the San. In modern times they were replaced by farming Bantu from western Africa. Now only the San and a few other groups like the Hadza in Tanzania keep alive the ancient hunter-gatherer traditions.

6.  THE MORMON  QUESTION All this is provocative. Success for the Genographic Project undermines traditional beliefs. When I asked Spencer Wells about it, he took the Genographic Fifth Amendment: genetics tells us where we come from, not why we are here, or where we are heading. “We try to present it as one aspect of their history. We tell them it does not replace their mythos. It just means they are connected to people all over the world.” Ajay Royyuru of IBM admits that he is “not used to using the part of my brain that deals with religious questions”. But he had a revelation, a year in. “The bulb went off in my head. All the differences we see in each other, colour of skin and the rest, I realised they were all so minor.” Religions, he says, have appeared and disappeared since Y-chromosome Adam. Royyuru acknowledges that the research means the end of any literal understanding of large parts of Hinduism. “I came to see these like clothes you wear. The human population has existed through all this.” Try telling a Hindu nationalist or a Mormon, whose Book is confounded by genetics. “American-Indians are not the lost tribe of Israel,” says Wells evenly. “They are from Central Asia.” As science advances, so too will creationism. The clash of cultures will deepen between those who recognise genetic markers and their implications, and those for whom the price of acceptance is too high: ditching their creed. Right now, creationism is winning. The only major religion in Africa to uphold Darwin is the Roman Catholic church. Hominid finds in Kenya are stored in a vault in the National Museum to stop them being destroyed by religious fundamentalists. The persistence of creationism “is something we as evolutionary biologists cry about,” says Wells. “Literally.” Yet the Exodus story as told by geneticists may prove more vivid than any religious tradition. There is poetry in the way the Lord parted the Red Sea for Moses, congealing the waters, then “dasheth in pieces” the pharaoh and his chariots. But the physical arc of the story is puny. Writing this, I’ve been listening to “Exodus” by Bob Marley.

Exodus: movement of jah people! So we’re going to walk—alright!—through da ropes of creation: We the generation (tell me why!) trod through great tribulation.

It is not the Rastafarian return to the Rift Valley that comes to mind as I listen, genetically elegant though it now seems, but the first hunter-gatherers making it through the Gate of Tears and heading for every point in our world.

FURTHER  READING: “The Human Career” by Richard Klein, 1989.  The authority on human evolution. “The History and Geography of Human Genes” by Luca Cavalli-Sforza, 1994.  The authority on evolutionary genetics. “The Journey of Man” by Spencer Wells, 2002. Zippy if self-promotional. “Genome” by Matt Ridley, 2000. The best overview of the genome. “Self-Made Man and His Undoing” by Jonathan Kingdon, 1993. Rare insights and African knowledge.

Picture Credit: Sand Paper, khym54, whiteafrican, nd.strupler (all via Flickr); Andrew McConnell/WPN (J.M. Ledgard is The Economist‘s Nairobi correspondent and author of “Giraffe“. His next novel is about the ocean. His last piece for Intelligent Life was about the tallest building in the world.)

The media have picked up a new buzzword: “isolationist.” They jumped on it after Sen. John McCain, who seems to want the United States to be at war everywhere, said after the last Republican presidential debate, “I do want to send a message, and that is that we cannot move into an isolationist party.” He was soon joined by his fellow advocate of empire, Sen. Lindsey Graham, who told his party’s critics of President Obama’s Libyan intervention to “shut up.”

Is the GOP going isolationist? Presidential aspirant Jon Huntsman calls for an “aggressive drawdown” from Afghanistan. Mitt Romney wants the troops out “as soon as possible.” That brought rebukes from rivals Tim Pawlenty and Michele Bachmann. Speaking at the establishment Council on Foreign Relations, Pawlenty accused some Republicans — presumably Huntsman and Romney — of “trying to out-bid the Democrats in appealing to isolationist sentiments,” while Bachmann said the U.S. government must “finish the job” in Afghanistan.

Pawlenty and Bachmann need not worry. There is no “danger” that Huntsman and Romney will fall into “isolationism.” Calling for bringing the troops home “as soon as possible” is a meaningless statement, and an aggressive drawdown from Afghanistan, when the public is sick of America’s longest war, says nothing about foreign policy in general.

On the other hand, another candidate in the race, Rep. Ron Paul, does want an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and everywhere else the U.S. government maintains troops, including Europe, Japan, and South Korea. He wants the thousand or so U.S. military installations scattered around the world closed.

But is that isolationism?

No, it is not. Why would anyone use that term to describe a program of peace and free trade with the rest of the world? Where’s the isolation? There have indeed been political figures who wished to create a Fortress America, a program that would have included economic self-sufficiency. That is properly called “isolationism.”

But a foreign policy of trade with the world and military nonintervention is as far from isolationism as one could get.

It is telling that the critics of “isolationism” equate engagement in the larger world with invasions, occupations, bombings, drone missile attacks, assassinations, black-site prisons, torture, covert operations, and all the rest of the malign things associated with the so-called war on terror. For them the choice is between empire and isolation.

How absurd! Were George Washington and Thomas Jefferson isolationists when they advised the United States to have commercial relations with all countries and political ties with none, and that it stay clear of foreign quarrels? Was John Quincy Adams an isolationist when he said that America “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own”?

What those who attack “isolationism” don’t want the public to know is that Washington, Jefferson, and Adams favored a foreign policy of nonintervention because it is best suited to a constitutional republic. As we have seen in recent years, keeping government power in check is impossible when it is free to roam the world imposing its notion of order — and always in a way that turns a profit for special interests. As their counterpart in Great Britain, the free trader and pacifist Richard Cobden, noted, freedom cannot flourish in an empire.

Or as James Madison put it, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other.”

But aren’t we in danger? If so, it is because of a half-century of U.S. military and political intervention.

So let’s hear no more about isolationism. But if the word must be used, let it be used as the classical liberal William Graham Sumner used it:

“Our ancestors all came here to isolate themselves from the social burdens and inherited errors of the old world…. When the others are crushed under the burden of militarism, who would not be isolated in peace and industry? When the others are all struggling under debt and taxes, who would not be isolated in the enjoyment of his own earnings for the benefit of his own family?”

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation, author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor ofThe Freeman magazine. Visit his blog “Free Association” atwww.sheldonrichman.com. Send him email.

Kurtz has been the leading intellectual and organizational figure in the atheist/freethought/humanist movement for over 40 years. Throughout his long career Kurtz has sought to develop a positive alternative to the reigning theological orthodoxies of the day. While Kurtz has spent much of his life critically examining religion, he believes that secular humanists need to emphasize and build positive alternatives to religion. For Kurtz, it is not enough to reject God. He has always maintained that secular humanism and atheism are not identical. Throughout the years this put Kurtz at odds with atheist firebrand Madalyn Murray O’Hair. For many years both Kurtz and O’Hair were the leading foes of leaders of the religious right such as Pat Robinson, Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye, David Noebel and others. Now with the emergence of “the new atheism” Kurtz finds himself in the uncomfortable position of being the elder statesman and founder of a movement tempted by tactics he has warned against before.

“I hope this statement will help reorient the humanist movement in a positive and constructive direction by emphasizing what we are for rather than against,” said Kurtz, who founded the Council for Secular Humanism in 1980 and the Center for Inquiry in 1991. He now serves as chair emeritus for both organizations.

Among the signers of this new statement, coming ten years after Humanist Manifesto 2000, are heavyweights Rebecca Goldstein, Colin McGinn, Steven Pinker, Lionel Tiger, Patricia Schroeder, Phillip Kitcher, Owen Flanagan, and Ann Druyan (the widow of Carl Sagan). Also included are movement insiders such as R Joseph Hoffmann, Joe Nickell, James Randi, DJ Grothe, Carleton Coon, Edd Doerr, Terry O’Neill, Dale McGowan, Anthony B. Pinn, along with many others.

Writing in the December 2009/January 2010 issue of Free Inquiry, the magazine he founded, Kurtz declared “militant atheism is often truncated and narrow-minded…it is not concerned with the humanist values that ought to accompany the rejection of theism. The New Atheists, in my view, have made an important contribution to the contemporary cultural scene because they have opened religious claims to public examination…What I object to are the militant atheists who are narrow-minded about religious persons and will have nothing to do with agnostics, skeptics, or those who are indifferent to religion, dismissing them as cowardly.”

“While I certainly don’t believe that we ought to abandon our criticism of religious fanaticism or allow religious doctrine to dictate public policy, the future of the secular humanist and scientific rationalist movements depends upon appealing to a wider base of support,” continued Kurtz. Some 16 percent of the American population is not affiliated with any church, temple, or mosque–approximately 50 million Americans–whereas only 2 to 3 percent are estimated to be out-and-out atheists. Hence, Neo-Humanism wishes to address its message to a broader public who we believe should be sympathetic.”

Kurtz says that his new manifesto advances a new form of humanism that is not antireligious per se, nor avowedly atheist. “There are various forms of religious and non-religious beliefs in the world. On the one end of the spectrum are traditional religious beliefs; on the other ‘the new atheism.’ Not enough attention is paid to humanism as an alternative,” declares the statement.

“This statement aims to be more inclusive by appealing to both non-religious and religious humanists and to moderate religious believers who share common goals. It seeks to foster moderation rather than divisiveness and to spark a genuine conversation about meaning and value and the common problems that confront us all as a nation and inhabitants of planet Earth,” added Kurtz.

The “Neo-Humanist Statement of Secular Values and Principles” is available online atwww.paulkurtz.us.

Article Unattributed in the Huffington Post

Jan 05, 2010 – A revealing article in Time Magazine highlights the hypocrisy around the “Iran Crisis”, during which Iran has been relentlessly hounded by Western nuclear nations on suspicions that it too is developing nuclear weapons, while NATO countries have been secretly harboring them for decades.

First mentioned by Humanist philosopher Dwight Gilbert Jones in his 2009 novel “The Humanist”, in which he describes their longtime control by the Dutch military, Time’s article extends their proliferation to three more supposedly nuclear weapon-free countries.

“The truth is that Belgium, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands store nuclear bombs on their air-force bases and have planes capable of delivering them.” writes Eben Harrell, Time, Jan 4/2010. “There are an estimated 200 B-61 thermonuclear-gravity bombs scattered across these four countries.”

Harrell further states that the nuclear weapons’ control  ”…can be transferred to the control of a host nation’s air force in time of conflict.” Given the number of weapons cited, Europe is a nuclear holocaust-in-waiting with no credible enemies.

When asked about his earlier disclosure of the nukes’ reality, Jones was unequivocal.

“It’s the last stand of the militarists.” he said. “If you read The Humanist, the world reacts to this revelation with a boycott  that breaks the nuke countries economically – no trade, no visits – until they finally defer to the UN and a citizen world. The 4N Countries boycott will happen,” he says “and, nota bene, we’ll see the United Nations oversee our species’ governance at last.”

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1943799,00

For an update, read here: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2024161,00.html

(By James Hughes, ieet.org)

What are the current unresolved issues in transhumanist thought? Which of these issues are peculiar to transhumanist philosophy and the transhumanist movement, and which are more actually general problems of Enlightenment thought? Which of these are simply inevitable differences of opinion among the more or less like-minded, and which need decisive resolution to avoid tragic errors of the past?
Now that Mike Treder and I have both decided to step back after eight years of serving on the Board of Directors of the World Transhumanist Association (presently known as Humanity+), we want to take some time this Spring to reflect on the current state of transhumanist thought and determine what questions the transhumanist movement needs to answer to move forward.

I will be structuring my reflections around two general questions. The first is an attempt to parse out which unresolved problems transhumanism has inherited from the Enlightenment. By Enlightenment, I refer to a wide variety of thinkers and movements beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing through the early nineteenth century. The Enlightenment was centered in Britain, France, and Germany, but as recent scholarship has increasingly documented, it had a global dimension with significant contributions from thinkers and movements across Europe, North America, and the Caribbean. These thinkers and movements broadly emphasized the capacity of individuals to achieve social and technological progress through the use of critical reason to investigate nature, establish new forms of governance, and transcend superstition and authoritarianism.

However, this framework of ideas was only understood as the core of the Enlightenment in hindsight. Specific thinkers and movements shared only part of what are now thought of as Enlightenment values and clashed over radically different interpretations of these core ideas on questions of faith, the state, epistemology, and ethics.

My position here is that transhumanism—the belief that technology can transcend the limitations of the human body and brain—and techno-utopianism—the idea that humans can create a progressively better future through the rational mastery of nature—are part of the family of Enlightenment philosophies. Transhumanism and techno-utopianism can be traced back to the original Enlightenment thinkers 300 years ago, and transhumanists need to understand how the ideological conflicts within transhumanism today are the product of these 300 year-old conflicts within the Enlightenment.

This exercise is also an attempt to make clear which criticisms of transhumanism are internal contradictions, and which start from external, non-Enlightenment predicates. In other words, saying that transhumanism is bad because it threatens the human soul is a criticism from a non-Enlightenment position. Arguing that transhumanists are being anthropocentric or “human-racist” when they preference particular kinds of intelligence and feeling as the basis for moral standing is an intra-Enlightenment argument.

A few of those problems and conflicts are addressed by technoprogressivism, that is by adding egalitarianism and democracy to the transhumanist meme-set and articulating a clearer picture of the good society. But other questions, such as the problematic nature of “Reason” within Enlightenment thought, are not answered by the technoprogressive project and perhaps shouldn’t be. Some of these conflicts are simply matters of philosophical taste, inevitable disagreements of interpretation which can be accepted as part of the welcome diversity within a shared framework of values. Other conflicts, such as between liberalism and totalitarianism, are fundamental.

The second question I want to address in these essays is how transhumanist technological utopianism has both inspired and retarded scientific and political progress over the last 300 years. I want to challenge the prevailing anti-utopian sentiment and highlight the way that dynamic optimism about transcendent possibilities motivated scientific innovation and democratic reform through the work of people like the Marquis de Condorcet, Joseph Priestley, and J.B.S. Haldane.

At the same time I want to seriously examine how, at different points in history, scientific innovators and political reformers have been threatened by the radicalism of the techno-utopians, and how the failure of techno-utopian hype has sometimes produced an anti-scientific backlash. I want to take seriously the idea that “superlative technocentricity” performs an anti-democratic ideological function, that promising techno-fixes for social problems can be used to distract from immediate social needs and injustices. More darkly yet, I want to discuss how the techno-utopians’ association with eugenics and totalitarianism set back both democratic and scientific progress in the 20th century.

Starting with the “contradictions of the Enlightenment” I will be presenting seven arguments over the next couple of weeks:

• First, that the Enlightenment project of Reason to which many transhumanists are committed is self-erosive and requires nonrational validation. Transhumanist advocates for Bayesianism and transcending cognitive biases need to confront the repeated implosions of the religion of Reason into romanticism and mysticism, and develop more sophisticated and nuanced defenses of rationality.
• Second, while most transhumanists are atheists, their Enlightenment belief in the transcendent power of intelligence generates new theologies. These theologies can follow from consistently naturalist predicates and therefore call into question the presumption that transhumanists must be New Atheists.
• Third, while most transhumanists are liberal democrats, their Enlightenment beliefs in human perfectibility and governance by reason can also validate technocratic authoritarianism. Even staunchly libertarian transhumanists appear to be blithely unaware that arguments for government by benign superintelligent beings that know human interests better than we do recapitulate arguments for totalitarianism from the French Revolution through Marxist-Leninism.
• Fourth, transhumanists are divided on the balance between democracy and the market because anarcho-capitalism and radical democracy are the two most popular interpretations of the Enlightenment’s vision of a society of equal, self-governing citizens.
• Fifth, transhumanists are in contradiction over the inevitability of progress because the Enlightenment tradition is conflicted between teleological expectations of unstoppable progress, on the one hand, and rational scientific awareness of the indeterminacy of the future on the other. We may even have inherited this problem from pre-Enlightenment millennialism, which simultaneously argued that God’s kingdom of heaven on Earth was inevitable, but that we nonetheless needed to devote ourselves to ensuring the defeat of Satan.
• Sixth, transhumanists are divided between advocates of ethical universalism and ethical relativism because both are products of the Enlightenment. On the one hand, transhumanists advocate for a universal, non-anthropocentric standard of ethics and citizenship that would treat humans, animals, aliens, and robots alike based on their sentience and personhood. On the other hand, our decisions about which qualities to use as the basis of moral standing are profoundly and (so far) inescapably neurotypical and human-centric. It is not clear yet how we maintain a commitment to both moral equality and normative diversity.
• Seventh, the center of the Enlightenment project is the individual self, seeking happiness, long healthy life, and free and equal exchange with other individuals. But the Enlightenment’s rational, materialist neuroscience reveals that there are no discrete, persistent selves, no “real me” homunculi in the brain. Transhumanism has therefore inherited, in the most acute form yet, the Enlightenment’s need to develop post-individualist values, to reinterpret liberty, equality, and fraternity for a world in which we no longer pretend that there are authentic selves.

I’m looking forward to working through all these heady ideas with you.

Author: Dr. James J. Hughes Jan 19.2010

See also Dr. Hughes’ other related essays in this series. – Ed.