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9. The external circumstances must militate in favour of, not against, peace. I have described how the changes in the south of Ireland helped create the context for progress. Such a change is almost invariably crucial in a conflict. These conflicts rarely invoke strong feelings only in the immediate zone of dispute. Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Kosovo: in any of these cases, external players also have a role to play, for good or ill. The classic example is the Israel–Palestine dispute. The ramifications are region-wide, even global. The external players, especially in the Arab world, are vital.
Her curiosity piqued, Gallagher set out to better understand the role that attention—that is, what we choose to focus on and what we choose to ignore—plays in defining the quality of our life. After five years of science reporting, she came away convinced that she was witness to a “grand unified theory” of the mind: Like fingers pointing to the moon, other diverse disciplines from anthropology to education, behavioral economics to family counseling, similarly suggest that the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually every aspect of your experience.
Historical evidence supports Gorbachev’s accusations, however defensive Americans may feel about them. Gorbachev ignores at least two important facts, however: that the Soviet Union was demonstrating open and covert aggression in Eastern Europe and that its opacity as a closed society made a realistic assessment of its intentions difficult. From a longer perspective, the arms race was a process of communication and of learning, paced as all progress is paced by the limitations of human intellect. The discovery in 1938 of how to release nuclear energy introduced a singularity into the human world—a deep new reality, a region where the old rules of war no longer applied. The region of nuclear singularity enlarged across the decades, sweeping war away at its shock front until today it excludes all but civil wars and limited conventional wars.
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