Quantum leap.

• Author: Glynn, Patrick
• Position: Parallelism between quantum mechanics and politics

It is no coincidence that the sweeping changes in international politics today have occurred side by side with an equally radical "paradigm shift" in the physical sciences. On the contrary, there is a causal link between the two developments. The radical changes we have witnessed in foreign policy, including the collapse of the Soviet Union, have come about largely as a result of the information revolution. This revolution, in turn, has come about largely as a result of a revolution in scientific understanding generated by quantum mechanics. At first glance, there might seem to be little connection between contemporary foreign policy dilemmas and the arcana of sub-atomic physics. But in reality the mysterious new laws governing the quantum universe closely parallel the new principles governing political life in the information age - and the new rules shaping the conduct of foreign policy in the post-modern era.

The analogy between politics and physics, between political experience and the scientific worldview, has always been a close one in the West. Modern political thought and experience were essentially born of a conscious marriage between politics and physics - a synthesis of Machiavelli's political insights with the new science of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton. The very term "political science" commemorates this union. Several famous figures, including Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, contributed to the new science of politics. But the scientific political vision was first fully crystallized in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, a thinker who still casts a heavy shadow on foreign policy analysis. Hobbes was the earliest modern thinker to posit that politics could be understood entirely mechanically, that society could be viewed as a massive artificial creation, a machine. The state, according to Hobbes, was an "artificial" body, analogous to the human body, in which, as he put it, the "heart" was no more than a "spring," the "nerves" but so many "strings," the joints, "wheels." Human society essentially resembled a "watch, or some such...engine" in which the "motion of the wheels" could be known through a kind of mental dissection.(1) Hobbes' Leviathan and Sir Isaac Newton's Principia - both published in the second half of the seventeenth century - together inaugurated the "modern" worldview, in which both the physical universe and the political world were seen as governed by mechanistic laws.

It is precisely the long-reigning metaphor of mechanism that has been overthrown by physics in recent years.(2) And it is precisely the overthrow of mechanism-as the dominant mode of both political experience and political explanation - that defines the puzzling new world in which we now live. Mechanistic patterns and forces have not entirely disappeared from world affairs, but they are increasingly subordinated and submerged in a new and fundamentally different kind of order. This rapid shift from one basic paradigm to another helps explain much of the confusion in present day commentary on foreign policy, which continues to view "post-modern" international politics, anachronistically, through a basically "modern" or mechanistic lens.

In place of mechanism today we confront a new set of principles, in politics as well as physics, which can be summarized as instantaneousness or "non-locality," observer participation, and holism.(3) The application of these principles in the political world is readily apparent. Increasingly, national leaders - and especially U.S. presidents - are forced to operate in a holistic international environment where the full global ramifications of any foreign policy action (or inaction) are instantaneously known and fed back through a global information network, and where a global audience effectively "participates" in the drama, affecting its ultimate outcome. Such an environment necessitates a new style, and even a new concept, of leadership, and is pushing U.S. foreign policy in certain very systematic and novel directions. Indeed, it is changing the nature of foreign policy itself. This new political universe very closely parallels the new vision of the physical universe yielded by the quantum theory - a view of the cosmos, in effect, as a holistic "information system" in which events occurring in one locale in principle immediately affect events in a distant corner of the universe billions of light-years away, and in which observation affects, indeed in a sense "creates," our common reality. The common denominator, in both cases, is information.

Scientific vision, political thought, and technology move in tandem. The reality we "see" in the universe is also the reality we construct and experience in the human world. Newtonian physics gave us modern, mechanistic political thought as well as the machines that produced the Industrial Revolution. This marriage of powerful machines and mechanistic political thinking in turn produced modern mass society and the characteristic international politics of the industrial era: a politics, ultimately, of confrontation between great states and empires, mass mobilization, and total war. Quantum mechanics has given us the silicon chip and, through information technologies, a fundamentally new kind of political experience - as well as the necessity for a new kind of political thinking.

Newtonian physics is human-scale physics, ideally suited to the manipulation of objects in our immediate physical world. However, it is not a complete account of reality: it is valid only for medium-sized objects traveling at moderate speeds. As Albert Einstein showed early in this century, Newtonian laws of motion do not hold for very large objects or very large speeds (i.e., speeds approaching that of light). If Newtonian physics grows inaccurate as we move to the large scale, then it also becomes irrelevant as we move to the tiniest scale, as quantum mechanics has demonstrated. At the subatomic level, the laws of Newtonian physics are broken, or, it may be more accurate to say, transcended. Through a combination of relativity and (especially) the quantum theory, we have moved from a mechanistic to a far more holistic and complete understanding of the universe. Something similar has happened in politics and foreign policy: today we "see" events immediately and in a much wider and more holistic context than before.

The theme of the Newtonian worldview was the subjugation and manipulation of matter and...