Prophesy in a Small Package: The Fifth Risk

 

Michael Lewis's "The Fifth Risk" has three salient virtues:

1. Brevity: 219 pages

2. Originality: It's really a book about why we need government

3. Perspicacity: Published in 2018 and focused mostly on the failure of Donald Trump's pirate band to engage in transition, it is the story of what happens when smart warnings go unheeded. Lewis asks an under secretary of Agriculture what his greatest fear is looking ahead-- in the form of "What do you worry about what Trump might do to the department of Agriculture?" and he answered with a single word: Wildfires.

Having spent most of a chapter describing the myriad responsibilities of the Department of Agriculture, which, as Lewis says, is really the department of science, having talked about its roll in keeping geese away from airports, its food programs for rural poor, its meat and food inspection functions--remember Mad Cow Disease--its role in preventing cruelty to animals, its forest management service, that word "Wildfires" seems to come out of the blue. And yet, spoken in 2017, this obscure bureaucrat, Robert Bonnie, knew what Trump and his band were afraid to know, as the vast wildfires of 2020 proved.

Re-reading this book now, two years later, it is a beacon in the dark.

Democrats are forever apologizing for "big government" but Lewis lays out in sufficient detail how indispensable government, even big, federal government is in the life and well being of the nation. 

He begins with the Department of Energy, which like most of the departments in the federal government is misnamed, having outgrown its original missions, and  now midway through re-reading the book and Mad Dog has worked his way back up to the Agriculture Department.

Energy was the obvious place to begin, if only for comic effect. Trump appointed Rick Perry to head it, presumably because during debates Perry had said he would eliminate three departments: Education, Commerce and...he could not recall the third, but later added "Energy."  So he seemed the ideal man for the job to head (i.e. to destroy) the Department of Energy.

Unlike other Trump appointees who were sent to their posts to destroy the organizations they headed, Perry actually slowly learned a little about what the department does. (As opposed, for example, to Wilbur Mills who begrudgingly agreed to be briefed about his new digs at the Commerce Department only to learn that is really the department of statistics, and he erupted: "I thought this was about business! All you talk about is numbers!) 

DOE, it turns out is responsible for the safety of all those nuclear missiles in their silos, which have a tendency to age, deteriorate and leak. It also funds research into energy related things like solar panels, fracking and electric cars. "Every Tesla you see on the road came form a facility financed by the DOE." Of course, whatever you think of fracking, it was the pivotal technology which made American energy dependent and freed us from reliance on those miscreant Saudis.

One fourth of the budget of DOE, many billions, is tied up in trying to keep nuclear waste from seeping into the Colorado river from the site of production of our nuclear arsenal in eastern Washington, Hanford, where the plutonium was made, buried and then sought out ground water like a viper hungering for vital organs. 

Oh, and before we leave the DOE, there is that little matter of the electric grid and the incident, mostly unreported, where "a well informed sniper" with a high powered rifle shot up exactly the right transformers  and cut the cables to the substation to prevent it from communicating. This substation, in San Jose, fed Apple and Google. Imagine what well informed snipers could do if they organized to take out grids on the East Coast.

As Lewis noted, people are pretty good at responding to a crisis that has already happened, like Pearl Harbor. Never going to let that happen again! But imagining what could happen--suppose somebody flew airplanes into a world center of finance in Manhattan--that we don't want to think about. Why upset yourself with scary ideas?

Why, indeed. Of course, imagining scary things is exactly what prompted Einstein to write that famous letter to Franklin Roosevelt, who read it and started the Manhattan project. Einstein had learned of the German work on nuclear fission and he imagined a risk. Fortunately, FDR was not inclined to seek the comfort of ignorance.

Most people are at least dimly aware the internet and GPS are government inventions.

But if you were elected to "drain the swamp" which translates: Kill government or shrink it down to a size you can drown it in a bathtub, then you do not want to know what that would cost you, or how it would put you and those you love--assuming you love anyone other than yourself--at risk.

Lewis observes: 

"Here is where the Trump administration's willful ignorance plays a role. If your ambition is to maximize short term gain without  regard to the long-term cost, you are better off not knowing the cost. If you want to preserve your personal immunity to the hard problems, it's better never to really understand those problems. There is an upside to ignorance, and a downside to knowledge. Knowledge makes life messier. It makes it a bit more difficult for a person who wishes to shrink the world to a worldview."

So when Trump sent his men to the various departments, none of them were sent to learn anything about the work of those departments, they were sent to hunt. They demanded lists of employees who had attending conferences on climate control or solar panels. They were seeking out those nasty knowledge seekers in the various departments just as Joe McCarthy, one of Trump's heroes, had sought out "Reds" in the State Department in the Red Scare of the 1950's. 

The core Trump value, which is really the core value of his voters, is the desire to remain ignorant, to stop the search for new knowledge, to simply repeat a mantra, "Freedom!" or "Make America Great!"

In this, Trump and his acolytes are nothing new; they are in fact a regression to the Middle Ages, where knowledge was considered the great threat. People who believe they cannot learn new things cling to their guns and their religion, as Mr. Obama so keenly observed. It's not really socialism or elitism which strikes fear into the heart of the Proud Boys, it's the scary idea of new knowledge. 

Joe Biden is not the smartest man who has ever won the Presidency, but he is brave enough to look at the potential for the new and not be terrified but to be excited. He wants a "moon shot" to "cure cancer." As if there is just one disease, cancer. But his idea is that progress is not to be feared but to be pursued and applauded. 

Look at those defeated coal miners, whose wives say, "We don't want re-training. My husband is 50 years old. All he knows is digging coal. He can't learn anything new now." 

At least they were honest. 

And, in one sense, Trump is honest in that same way: I'm just as stupid as you are, and as ignorant and I don't need to know anything new. I'm rich and I fly around on my own private jet and that's fine with me."