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

Preface

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. x Preface 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 (ΤΗΙ ΚΑΛΛΙΣΤΗΙ 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...