Military Historian Carl von Clausewitz famously asserted that warfare is politics by other means. This formula frequently gets turned on its head, and we hear (or read) that politics is warfare by other means. Both phrasings are accurate; any number of examples of each come to mind. For instance, the American Civil War originated as a series of political disputes between the Federal government and a number of southern (slave-holding) states. These states implemented a political solution to the problem — secession from the Union. When the Union found that solution not to their liking, they pursued politics by other means. More recently, from the end of World War II until the late 1980′s, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a struggle for world dominance which took many forms, including armed conflicts, although obviously none in which the two powers were directly at war with each other. Lacking the desire to engage in a full-scale direct nuclear confrontation, the US and the USSR duked it out in myriad local elections, trade disputes, border disputes, propaganda initiatives, etc. It was a war that was fought largely by other means.

We can hope that, over time, the trend is away from Clausewitz’ formulation: that the world is becoming less amenable to warfare as a solution to problems and increasingly insistent that we find other means to solve them. All things being equal, a political solution to a problem is preferred to having to go to war. I’m going to treat that as an axiom — yes, it will depend on whether the political solution is really the same (or an acceptable) “solution” and might also have to do with the time frame in which it is rolled out. But assuming we’re talking about two different ways of getting to approximately the same outcome, the one that doesn’t require a bunch of people be killed along the way is better. (I think you would have to be a Spartan or a Klingon or something to argue with that.)

However, because politics has a distinct moral advantage over warfare, and because the two are often presented as a dichotomy, politics gets credited as the “good way” that human beings solve problems. And, again — in the context of that dichotomy — it is. But there may be more to the story than that. Just as there are many different kinds of problems that human beings attempt to solve, there are many different strategies for solving them — not just those two.

In fact, one of the most effective problem-solving strategies may be to engage in activity other than problem-solving. As I have written previously in my description of the Human Imperative — the long-term effort of humanity to improve the world — we as a species seem to be all about making incremental improvements to the world. Some of these have to do with solving specific problems and some have to do simply with a desire to make things better. To quote myself:

Throughout human history, we have carried out the Human Imperative using two basic strategies:

1. Solving problems / mitigating risks

2. Achieving the good / increasing benefits

The first strategy has always taken priority, as the primary ongoing problem we have had to solve is how to achieve our survival (or prevent our extinction.) But we now stand on the threshold of a new era in human history. Improvements and potential improvements are increasing exponentially; we are moving rapidly towards a critical mass of human intelligence and capability. Our achievable future is one that transcends the expectations, hopes, or even dreams of most of humanity.

We can achieve that future only by recognizing that we are at a transitional point in carrying out the Human Imperative. We must transform our thinking about the future and, for the first time, change the order of our priorities. While survival remains our top priority, we must recognize that focusing on problems and risks is no longer our optimal strategy for achieving our survival. Our survival lies within the realization of our achievable good.

Of course one can argue that political efforts can be and have been put in place around proactively achieving net new good outcomes rather than solving known problems. I suppose it’s possible that even war has been waged with this in mind, although I can’t think of any examples. But more often than not, efforts to achieve wholly new good outcomes arise parallel to the political process rather than as part of it. Such efforts often involve innovative approaches to what are otherwise thought of as well-known and well-defined fields of endeavor. The innovation is often, but not always, technological in nature.

A terrific example of this kind of innovation is found in the work of Dr. Norman Borlaug, who died on Saturday at the age of 95. Borlaug has been described (by persons not otherwise given over to hyperbole) as the “greatest human being who ever lived.” He is more widely, and somewhat more modestly, acclaimed as the man who saved a billion lives:

Dr. Borlaug has spent his life staving off world hunger. In a sense, the fact that people have become so complacent about having a plentiful food supply is itself a testament to his accomplishment — revolutionizing the production of basic foodstuffs, and in the process proving wrong better-known scientists such as Dr. Paul Ehrlich, who argued that starvation would inevitably increase as population did.

Borlaug is responsible for developing, and working to achieve, worldwide implementation of new agricultural techniques that massively increase crop yields for wheat and rice. That business about “saving a billion lives” is no exaggeration.

Now one might argue that, since he worked closely with the governments of Mexico, India, Pakistan, and numerous African countries in bringing about these benefits, Borlaug’s work really does represent a political solution to the problem of hunger. And clearly, in some ways, it does. But there is an important difference between what Borlaug did and what would typically be offered up as a government “solution” to hunger.

In defending the idea of politics against those who claim they can do without it, Jamais Cascio recently wrote:

The core of the argument is straightforward: Politics is part of a healthy society — it’s what happens when you have a group of people with differential goals and a persistent relationship. It’s not about partisanship, it’s about power. And while even small groups have politics (think: supporting or opposing decisions, differing levels of power to achieve goals, deciding how to use limited resources), the more people involved, the more complex the politics. Factions, parties, ideologies and the like are simply ways of organizing politics in a complex social space — they’re symptoms of politics, not causes.

All true, and all good reasons why politics is preferable to war. But just as factions are not causes of politics, innovative ideas are generally not the result of political efforts. The language about “limited resources” is very much to the point. A typical government solution to the problem of global starvation would be all about divvying up and distributing food that already exists. Borlaug’s response was that divvying up and distributing are all very nice, but, hey — what if we just produced a whole lot more food?

Borlaug achieved what politics could not. Or perhaps we should say that in the mid-late 20th century, a billion lives were saved from starvation through politics by other means. And this time, the means used were not warfare, but innovation.

Another great example of this sort of thing can be found in the work of Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank, which provides microfinancing to support subsistence businesses in Asia. Since its founding in 1997, Grameen Bank claims to have helped more than 45 million of the world’s poorest people — mostly women and children. The practice of microfinancing which Grameen initiated has now been adopted by many other institutions and is providing financial support to subsistence businesses in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Few government programs can claim to have done as much good as these microfinancing efforts. Moreover, I would venture to say that there are none which can claim to have done so and broken even financially, whereas — if I understand it correctly — Grameen actually makes a profit.

But achieving political aims by other means is about more than just financial efficiency. There is a fairly good case to be made that microfinancing is an effective weapon in the fight against religious extremism:

Today, Professor Yunus’s Grameen Bank and copycat organizations have 3.5 million women borrowers; adding their dependents, that amounts to about 20 percent of Bangladesh’s population. In the latest elections, held on June 12, 1996, these newly enfranchised flexed their muscle. The Islamic Society, the fundamentalist party antagonistic to the West that wants to keep women at home, lost 14 of its 17 seats in Parliament.

Immediately after the vote, Mr. Yunus began getting angry phone calls from people blaming him for the results. But Mr. Yunus assured them that fundamentalists had only themselves to blame. It was their supporters who burned down microcredit banks, attacked borrowers and condemned microcredit as un- Islamic because it helps women become self-employed.

Every woman borrower I interviewed in Dhaka, Chittagong and Cox’s Bazaar had suffered enormously at the hands of fundamentalists. Some were beaten; others were told they would be denied proper Islamic burial; still others that Grameen would sell them into slavery, feed them to tigers, take them out to sea and drown them, or tattoo their arms with a number and secretly turn them into Christians.

Having braved physical and mental abuse and used microcredit to build decent housing, freshwater wells and sanitary toilets for their families – it’s not surprising that these women went to the polls and voted against the mullahs.

The exact number of women who voted is not known, but observers across Bangladesh estimated that for the first time, more women voted than men.

Consider the following multiple-choice question:

What is the most effective way to protect the rights of women in Bangladesh?

a) Invade Bangladesh and set up a new government

b) Fund NGOs to educate Bangladeshi women and disseminate information on free elections, human rights, etc.

c) Offer the Bangladeshi government aid in return for picking up the ball on human rights

d) Lend Bangladeshi women small amounts of money so they can start their own business

Answers b) and c) can bee seen as ways of getting the same results as answer a) only by different means. But answer d) achieves those ends by still other means.

Oh, and by the way — if we’re interested in that sort of thing — it actually works.

I’m not down on politics, but when I look at what innovative thinking and technological development can accomplish, it makes me sad how uninterested most political discourse is in those things. As I observed concerning the health care debate a while back, a little disruptive change might do this world a lot of good.