There are more modest ways to work our way around pseudospeciation and education can focus profitably on both the basic belief problem and on the approaches suggested by this understanding. We can endorse initiatives that conform to our appreciation of pseudospeciation theory even though the theory itself is not widely known. Prime examples are peace initiatives, independent acts undertaken by a society before agreement with its adversaries, but designed to gain reciprocation from them and thus set the ground for agreement. The initiative act enhances our sense of power and, once underway, puts our adversaries in such a position that joining increases their sense of power and failure to join diminishes it. In 1963 President Kennedy announced, without prior agreement, that the United States would cease atmospheric tests and would not resume them unless the Soviet Union did so first. This initiative led shortly to the Limited Test-Ban Treaty. It worked. Osgood had suggested this approach in 1962, emphasizing that such initiatives, while unilateral, should be graduated, in order to induce reciprocation. 2' Such a graduated process also conforms to pseudospeciation theory in that power and the perception of power remain balanced. Large unbalancing unilateral moves risk dangerous stretching of the genetic leash and cultural constraint. The biological and psychological needs for nationalism and military strength are too deeply embedded to confront directly with indiscriminate altruism.
The depravity of a world stocked with 50,000 nuclear warheads is inspiring what might appear to be naive solutions. One, for example, envisions a superpower dismantling one of its nuclear devices in remote Iceland and the spotlight on that act of power induces a like act in the adversary, the process repeating itself to the eradication of the stockpiles. This suggestion actually is putting pseudospeciation theory to work and is not as naive as a first impression might suggest. Each dismantling act enhances immortality power. The decrement is small enough so the old power stability of "deterrence" is not altered but the reduction in arms moves both pseudospecies away from annihilation. While the proposal exemplified is a caricature, it illustrates the power of the initiative process.
Initiatives would address the arms race in all its dimensions, and would include, for example, establishing uniform military financial accounting so as to create the baseline for percentage reduction in all classes of arms. Initiatives can also address nonhardware questions, such as the necessity of creating political community across national borders: of particular interest to physicians would be information and exchange policies capable of helping diversify and pluralize closed societies. Again, these initiatives are all designed to induce bilateral participation and build structures for resolving conflict.
Recognizable here is the win-win strategy of popular psychology. In a similar vein the art and science of negotiation is under study and a recent book Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Fisher and Ury22 nicely exemplifies pathways of mastery around pseudospeciation.
Pseudopseudospeciation
Another approach to pseudospeciation turns it against itself, as it were, by encouraging the formation of multiple international pseudospecies. In this way populations are subdivided into groups with various professional, business, scientific and other international loyalties so that they are no longer a discrete; homogeneous single pseudospecies. Wilson1" and Hamburg4 suggest that a tangle of such cross-binding ties may be able to confound the genetic bases of our irrational behavior.
International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War is a candidate for such an international crosscultural linkage for physicians. As presently constituted, it has a single message, the stupendous devastation of a nuclear war and the helplessness of the medical community to heal anything thereafter. Its message could help achieve perception of the prevention of nuclear war as a superordinate goal but as argued above would be strengthened if balanced by a similar commitment to international understanding of pseudospeciation and its belief systems. Were it to acquire such an expanded set of concerns so as to represent a full professional ethic, with positions on other issues as well-such as biological warfare and imprisonment under the guise of treatment-it could develop into an international professional pseudospecies serving supranationalistic goals. An example of the effectiveness of such an organization in the resolution of international conflict is shown by the the role of the airline pilots whose refusal to fly to countries that harbored hijackers helped curb that international blight. By transcending national boundaries in the service of their profession and of global human interest, the pilots were able to act where national governments had failed.
The promotion of multiple and complementary loyalties also makes sense in Becker's schema, in that it encourages a more objective look at our sacred hatreds. This suggests an education effort in our primary and secondary schools to develop what might be called global fundamentals: foreign language proficiency, skills in international affairs and studies of world cultures. One of the side effects of our enhanced holocaust consciousness is a sense of futility and despair in our young people. They can become part of the problem if they are not enabled to see their opportunity- in such foreign studies-to work on solutions. The concepts of contemporary social and biological theory, including pseudospeciation, should be added to the curricula of our higher educational institutions including as well the fledgling US Academy of Peace and Conflict Resolution. Physicians as citizens have an important responsibility in fostering this kind of education reform.
Answers to all your Biology Questions
