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THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK WAS RESET AT 90 SECONDS  
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Robert C. Koehler
January 28, 2024
Common Dreams
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_ For the second year in a row, the Doomsday Clock has been set—by
scientists analyzing the dangers faced by Planet Earth due to human
exploitation and nuclear-armed geopolitics—at 90 seconds to
midnight. In other words, be afraid. Be very afraid. _

The Doomsday Clock was reset at 90 seconds to midnight on January 23,
2024., (Photo: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

 

I inhale the big, do-nothing shrug that always follows the annual
posting, by _The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists_, of its global
metaphor for Armageddon.

For the second year in a row, the Doomsday Clock
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set—by scientists analyzing the dangers faced by Planet Earth due to
human exploitation and nuclear-armed geopolitics—at 90 seconds to
midnight. In other words, be afraid. Be very afraid.

The dangers include ongoing nuclear-weapons development by both major
and minor national powers, combined with the planet’s current
slaughter-wars—in Ukraine, Palestine, and elsewhere—and the
ever-looming possibility that they could go nuclear. In other words,
human civilization’s collective thinking remains trapped in an
us-vs-them modality. One of the weirdest aspects of this that
the _Bulletin_ cited was the fact that artificial intelligence has
begun assuming control of our fate:

Military uses of AI are accelerating. Extensive use of AI is already
occurring in intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, simulation,
and training. Of particular concern are lethal autonomous weapons,
which identify and destroy targets without human intervention.
Decisions to put AI in control of important physical systems—in
particular, nuclear weapons—could indeed pose a direct existential
threat to humanity.

Join me as I let loose a child’s scream of terror and disbelief.

And of course this is all combined with the planet’s ongoing climate
collapse. As the _Bulletin _pointed out, 2023 was the hottest year
ever recorded, greenhouse gas emissions are still on the rise, the ice
is still melting in Antarctica and... uh, we’re not addressing this
with any effectiveness. You know, we’re still too busy playing war
and exploiting what’s left of the planet’s resources.

This is how human civilization has organized itself—and nothing can
change it, right? That seems to be the attitude of much of the media,
which largely contextualizes the news it brings us in a mainstream
shrug. Climate collapse? Nuclear war and global annihilation? That’s
way too complicated to write about. Come on, we’ve got an election
coming up. Us vs. them!

This, at any rate, is what occurred to me when I read a story in _The
Washington Post_
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other day, which kept trying to make the point that the country is
collapsing into what it called “tribalism,” that is,
left-vs.-rightism, with both sides equally convinced of their
rectitude and equally snarky toward the other guys. Both sides—get
it? When the corporate media serves us politics this way, it displays
its (centrist) “objectivity,” which, as far as it’s concerned,
is simply reality and not something to be critically analyzed.

War isn’t the result of evolution but sheerly
the _unevolved_ aspect of who we are.

The problem, according to centrist analysis, is that the country is
getting more and more polarized, both politically and culturally. On
one side you’ve got Trump and the MAGA Republicans. On the other
side, you’ve got Bernie Sanders
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scary! The USA has never been this divided, the story notes,
apparently failing to remember slavery, Jim Crow lynchings,
race-separated bathrooms, and such.

What was most unsettling to me about the story, however, was its
pulling in several social scientists who explained the nature of
evolution to us. While, yes, human beings learned to work together
over the millennia and created self-sustaining communities, aka,
tribes, the “evolution of cooperation required out-group hatred,”
according to a Yale sociologist. In other words, there could be no
“us” without a “them” lurking just around the bend—not
simply different from us but scary, threatening, and no doubt evil.

While the _Post_ story had no connection whatsoever to _The
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists_ and its 90-seconds-to-midnight
global prognosis, I felt a shrug of indifference toward it
nonetheless, in that it remained quietly caged in the us-vs.-them
mindset that makes human collective thinking and, oh my God,
geopolitical cooperation a cynical joke. That ain’t gonna happen.
War is inevitable. So is our trillion-dollar military budget. Any
questions?

My primary question is this: How dare you shrug at the Doomsday Clock,
at the looming inevitability of climate collapse, at the ongoing
expansion of nukes, and the ultimate certainty of nuclear war... if
nothing changes?

We are capable of larger thinking than this! That’s the ultimate
message of the atomic scientists, and for corroboration I turn
to World Beyond War [[link removed]], which
makes the point that the very essence of evolution is the expansion of
our thinking to embrace ever-larger realities of cooperation,
connection, and understanding. And not only that, killing our fellow
human beings is not the simplistic result of what our DNA tells us to
do but a political creation of the last several millennia that is
anything but universally accepted.

“According to myth, war is ‘natural,’” a World Beyond War
essay points out. “Yet a great deal of conditioning is needed to
prepare most people to take part in war, and a great deal of mental
suffering is common among those who have taken part...

“ ...We need to understand war as the cultural creation that it is
and stop imagining it as something imposed on us by forces beyond our
control... In fact, war is not required by a particular lifestyle or
standard of living because any lifestyle can be changed, because
unsustainable practices must end by definition with or without war,
and because war actually impoverishes societies that use it.”

In other words, war isn’t the result of evolution but sheerly
the _unevolved_ aspect of who we are. Humanity did “evolve with
habits of cooperation and altruism,” and in so doing created
communities of connection and trans-individual support. And yes, any
community has an edge, beyond which looms the unknown. But as we
encounter the unknown, we needn’t see it, simplistically, as “the
enemy,” but rather as part of a larger community, which requires
larger understanding. Our need to understand never stops.

_[ROBERT KOEHLER is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and
nationally syndicated writer. Koehler has been the recipient of
multiple awards for writing and journalism from organizations
including the National Newspaper Association, Suburban Newspapers of
America, and the Chicago Headline Club. He's a regular contributor to
such high-profile websites as Common Dreams and the Huffington Post.
Eschewing political labels, Koehler considers himself a "peace
journalist. He has been an editor at Tribune Media Services and a
reporter, columnist and copy desk chief at Lerner Newspapers, a chain
of neighborhood and suburban newspapers in the Chicago area. Koehler
launched his column in 1999. His book, "Courage Grows Strong at the
Wound
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(2016). Contact him or visit his website at commonwonders.com
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_Licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to
republish and share widely._

* Doomsday Clock
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* nuclear danger
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* Nuclear war
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* nuclear weapons
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* nuclear energy
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* human exploitation
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* Climate Crisis
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* Climate Change
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* Climate disaster
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* Planet Earth
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