Maxwell's Demon and the Golden Apple: Global Discord in the New Millennium

223 Pages·2014·1.45 MB·English

by  Randall L. Schweller

Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple
Maxwell’s Demon and
the Golden Apple
Global Discord in the New Millennium
Randall L. Schweller
© 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press All rights reserved. Published 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schweller, Randall L.
Maxwell’s demon and the golden apple: global discord in the new
millennium / Randall L. Schweller.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-42141277-1 (hardcover: alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-1278-8
(electronic) — ISBN 1-4214-1277-2 (hardcover: alk. paper) —
ISBN 1-4214-1278-0 (electronic) 1. World politics—21st century—
Forecasting. 2. International relations—Forecasting. 3. International
organization—Forecasting. 4. Twenty-first century—Forecasts. I. Title.
JZ1318.S366 2014
327.1—dc23
2013025011
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For Julie
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Navigating the Chaos of Contemporary World Politics: Network
versus No-work,
1 Understanding the Language of Energy: Why Entropy Does Not Herald
Doomsday
2 Entropy as Metaphor: Pattern Recognition, Time’s Arrow, and the Big Chill
3 The Multidimensions of Disorder: Thermodynamics and World Politics
4 The Role of Emerging Powers in the Age of Entropy; or, What Happens
When the Sheriff Leaves Town and Anonymous Moves In
5 How Power Diffusion Works to a State’s Advantage: This Is Not Your Great-
Grandfather’s Multipolar World
6 Rising Entropy at the Macro Level: The World Is Not Flat in Purgatory
7 Rising Entropy at the Micro Level: Information Overload and the Advent of
Truthiness
8 Maxwell’s Demon and Angry Birds: Big Data to the Rescue?
Notes
Index
Preface
This is a book about how and why international politics is transforming from a
system anchored for hundreds of years in enduring principles, which made it
relatively constant and predictable, into something far more erratic, unsettled,
and devoid of behavioral regularities. In the fall of 2009, I was asked by Justine
Rosenthal, then editor of the National Interest, to write an essay for their First
Draft of History series which posed the question: Twenty-five years from now,
what will we be saying about today’s international politics? I decided to roll a
grenade down the table, so to speak—to write a provocative and theoretically
unconventional piece that attempted to capture what is essential and
unprecedented about global politics in the new millennium. In that article I
argued that contemporary international politics is steadily moving toward a state
of chaos and randomness, a change consistent with the universal law of rising
entropy.
The present study is an outgrowth of that essay. In a sense, it throws down the
gauntlet, challenging the “garden-variety” theoretical treatments of international
politics that continue to populate an already crowded field of books—one fueled
by the public’s “parlor game-like” fascination with what comes after the
American century or, in the language of academics, what comes after unipolarity.
Most of these works are rooted in concepts, rules, and premises that, tellingly,
would be familiar to Napoleon Bonaparte and Otto von Bismarck, both of
whom, if they suddenly awoke from their long sleeps and read these books,
would mistakenly (but understandably) conclude that little had changed in their
absence.
The title, Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple, is a whimsical play on the
book’s core theme of global (dis)order. I say whimsical because the theme is
disguised not only in a fanciful but also a counterintuitive way: a commonsense
guess as to which object, the demon or the golden apple, stands for order and
which for disorder would most likely prove incorrect. The apple, not the demon,
represents disorder and chaos; it is a reference to the mythical Golden Apple of
Discord.
According to Greek mythology, Zeus held a banquet among the Olympian
gods to celebrate the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. Eris, the goddess of discord
(corresponding to the Roman goddess Discordia) was deliberately not invited by
Zeus because he feared that she, given her troublesome nature, would make the
party unpleasant for everyone. Angered by this snub, Eris showed up at the fête
anyhow with a golden apple upon which she had inscribed KALLISTI (THI
KAAAIXTHI in ancient Greek), meaning “For the Fairest,” and tossed it into the
banquet hall, sparking a vanity-driven dispute among the goddesses that
eventually led to the Trojan War. The goddesses wanted Zeus to play the role of
judge, but he, naturally reluctant to proclaim one of them the most beautiful,
decided instead to send the three contestants—Aphrodite, Athena, and Hera—to
a mortal but fair-minded Trojan shepherd-prince, Paris, for a decision. Guided by
Hermes, the three goddesses appeared naked before Paris at Mount Ida. As he
inspected them, each goddess tempted him with a bribe to give her the apple.
Hera offered to make him king of Europe and Asia; Athena promised him
wisdom and skill in war; Aphrodite said that he could have the most beautiful
woman in the world. In what is known as the Judgment of Paris, the prince,
being a healthy young lad, gave the apple to Aphrodite, thereby making
powerful enemies of Athena and Hera. In Aphrodite’s eyes, the most beautiful
woman of the world was Helen of Sparta (now known as Helen of Troy), the
wife of a Greek king, Menelaus. While the king was away, Paris carried Helen
off to Troy, provoking the Greeks to combine their military forces for war on
Troy to bring her back. Trojan civilization was destroyed in the process.
The demon, whom you will meet later in the book, is an allegorical creature
at the center of a thought experiment by the physicist James Clerk Maxwell to
reverse the entropy-rising process inherent in all closed systems. Entropy may be
thought of as a measure of disorder in the universe (or, in a purely
thermodynamic sense, of the availability of energy in a closed system to do
work): the higher the entropy, the higher the disorder. The entropy of an isolated
system never decreases because isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards
thermodynamic equilibrium—the state of maximum entropy. Maxwell’s demon
defies the Second Law of Thermodynamics by means of a superhuman sorting of
molecules according to their differing kinetic energies. Guarding a frictionless
door between two rooms filled with gas, the demon opens the door for
particularly fast-moving molecules, allowing them to pass into a room that
becomes progressively hotter. Likewise, the demon allows particularly slow-
moving molecules to pass out of the warmer room into the cooler one. By
segregating the fast particles from the slow ones, the demon creates a growing
temperature difference within the system that violates the Second Law, restoring
the potential energy available for work and, thereby, increasing order in the
universe.
One of the core ideas of the book will strike most readers as counterintuitive.
Large, destructive wars are not always or in all ways bad; they serve the function
of providing world order. Indeed, the time-honored solution for rising global
disorder—as well as for rising discord among nations and what political
scientists refer to as system disequilibrium—is a large and total war fought
among all the great powers. These so-called hegemonic wars have regularly
ensued every hundred years or so. The destructiveness of modern weaponry,
however, precludes any rational thought of another hegemonic war, and if
rationality did not prevent another one being fought, a twenty-first-century
hegemonic war would eliminate not only global disorder but everything else on
the planet. That major-power war is unthinkable is a good thing, to be sure. The
downside, however, is that there is no other known remedy for rising entropy in
international politics. Also, today’s rising disorder is not confined to the
international politics conducted solely by nation-states but to a global system
composed of many different types of actors exerting various kinds of power. Add
to this the accelerated pace of technological change and we have a world that is
dauntingly complex and driven by the certainty of unpredictable change. Is there
a Maxwell’s demon in our future? Can the allegory become a reality? Candidates
abound, but only time will tell if one will step forward. If not, that’s fine too.
International politics will be messier than ever, but life will carry on as it always
does.
Acknowledgments
My deepest thanks go to Daniel Drezner and Andrew Moravcsik for their
immeasurably helpful advice and criticism on the initial proposal and later drafts
of the manuscript. I am also indebted to Justine Rosenthal for her insightful
suggestions and queries that were incorporated in the National Interest article,
which spawned the present work.
Some of the talks I gave about the book generated probing questions and
useful suggestions from the audiences. I want to especially thank my hosts,
Michael Reese and Charles Lipson, at the University of Chicago’s Program on
International Politics, Economics, and Security (PIPES); Charles Glaser,
Director of the Institute for Security and Conflict Studies at George Washington
University’s Elliott School of International Affairs; and Barry Posen, Director of
the Security Studies Program Seminars at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. I am also grateful to A. Burcu Bayram, Bear Braumoeller, Julie
Clemens, Eric Grynaviski, Ted Hopf, Robert Jervis, Jennifer Mitzen, Xiaoyu Pu,
Gideon Rose, David Schweller, Jack Snyder, Alex Thompson, Alexander Wendt,
the audience at the Research in International Politics (RIP) Seminar at Ohio
State University, John Ikenberry and the distinguished participants at the
National Intelligence Council workshops in Washington, DC, and three
anonymous reviewers for their comments on an early incarnation of the project:
“Entropy and the Trajectory of World Politics: Why Polarity Has Become Less
Meaningful,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, vol. 23, no. 1 (March
2010), pp. 145–63.
At my academic home, the Department of Political Science at the Ohio State
University, I benefit from a group of first-rate international relations theorists
whom I am thankful to call “colleagues” and from whom I continue to learn. I
am grateful for the support I received from the Mershon Center for International
Security Studies at Ohio State University and from the Center’s two directors,
Richard Herrmann and J. Craig Jenkins. I am also indebted to the College of
Arts and Sciences at Ohio State University for awarding me a Joan N. Huber
Faculty Fellowship in 2012, which provided vital research support for the
project.
This is my first project entrusted to Suzanne Flinchbaugh. She confirmed her