John Arquilla on Noopolitical Statecraft
Video via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFVUr0-mH0o
Description
"We first became aware of John Arquilla through a paper he wrote with David Ronfeldt, published by the RAND Corporation in 2020, titled “Whose Story Wins: Rise of the Noosphere, Noopolitik, and Information-Age Statecraft”. More of his papers can be read here. We learned later that this visionary pair of geopolitical thinkers had in fact coined the term Noopolitik 20 years earlier, in a paper they wrote when both were employed by RAND: “The Emergence of Noopolitik: Toward An American Information Strategy”. That they qualify as visionaries is evidenced by another paper they wrote in 1993, titled “Cyberwar Is Coming”. Cyberwar, as we know all too well, is an active force in undermining global cooperation today.
Teilhard first used the term noosphere in the mid 1920s. However, a passage from The Heart of Matter suggests that the underlying ideas took shape when he served as a stretcher-bearer in the trenches of World War I. As he was witnessing first-hand some of the most horrific conflict that men had yet perpetrated on the earth, his mind turned instead toward the universal and unifying principles that gave purpose and meaning to life:
“…precisely because the individual human being represents a corpuscular magnitude he must be subject to the same development as every other species of corpuscles in the World: that means that he must coalesce into physical relationships and groupings that belong to a higher order than his…I have no doubt at all (as I said earlier) that it was the experience of the War that brought me this awareness and developed it in me as a sixth sense.”
World War I was characterized as “the war to end all wars”—a designation that lasted only until World War II followed two decades later. That war’s truly global-scale violence and destruction ended with the explosion of nuclear bombs, prompting Teilhard to write an essay in 1946 titled “Some Reflections on the Spiritual Repercussions of the Atom Bomb”. With a vision of the Noosphere more clearly in mind at that point in his life, Teilhard found reasons for optimism amid the horror once again:
“We are told that, drunk with its own power, mankind is rushing to self-destruction, that it will be consumed in the fire it has so rashly lit. To me it seems that thanks to the atom bomb it is war, not mankind, that is destined to be eliminated, and for two reasons. The first, which we all know and long for, is that the very excess of destructive power placed in our hands must render all armed conflict impossible. But what is even more important, although we have thought less about it, is that war will be eliminated at its source in our hearts because, compared with the vast field for conquest which science has disclosed to us, its triumphs will soon appear trivial and outmoded.”
When Teilhard wrote that essay, the long Cold War had not yet begun. Though the threat of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) has indeed kept global-scale war at bay, there have been nearly constant smaller-scale armed conflicts and civil wars along the way. The dominant geopolitical thinking that characterized the Cold War era is known as Realpolitik. It is driven by a practical, frank, and “realistic” assessment of conditions as they exist on the ground.
John had originally encountered the idea of the Noosphere in high school, when his French class was assigned a passage from Teilhard’s L’Apparition de L’Homme, (The Appearance of Men). In that passage, as John told us, Teilhard pointed out “that humanity had a choice between extinction and transformation”. That clear contrast appealed to him. Early in his life it inspired him with a positive vision of what humanity could become—if we chose the path of transformation. In the conversation with David Sloan Wilson, he explains how reading Teilhard’s ideas in L’Apparition de L’Homme affected him during the turbulent times of 1968:
“It seemed to me that Teilhard offered a great hope for us and suggested that this third story that humankind brings to the world—the idea of a realm of the mind—succeeds the geosphere, the hot rock of the earth as it was formed, and the biosphere, when life emerged. And now the true purpose of existence is manifested in the rise of humans who can create a thinking circuit around the world, this Noosphere, this third story of the world. And it offered the possibility of transformation and of creating something of great beauty and harmony, as opposed to what I remember in that same essay, he called mankind’s open sore, which was the notion of constant conflict that somehow we lived in an anarchic world where people did what they would, the strong did what they would, and the weak suffered what they must.”