Monthly Archives: August 2014

How our police became Storm-troopers

Ferguson Riot Police

Scott Olson Getty Images via: International Business Times

The police response to protests and riots in Ferguson, Missouri were filled with images that have become commonplace all over the world in the last decade. Police dressed in once futuristic military gear confronting civilian protesters as if they were a rival army. The uniforms themselves put me in mind of nothing so much as the storm-troopers from Star Wars. I guess that would make the rest of us the rebels.

A democracy has entered a highly unstable state when its executive elements, the police and security services it pays for through its taxes, that exist for the sole purpose of protecting and preserving that very community, are turned against it. I would have had only a small clue as to how this came about were it not for a rare library accident.   

I was trying to get out a book on robots in warfare for a project I am working on, but had grabbed the book next to it by mistake. Radley Balko’s The Rise of the Warrior Cop has been all over the news since Ferguson broke, and I wasn’t the first to notice it because within a day or two of the crisis the book was recalled. The reason is that Ferguson has focused public attention on an issue we should have been grappling with for quite some time – the militarization of America’s police forces. How that came about is the story The Rise of the Warrior Cop lays out cogently and with power.

As Balko explains much of what we now take as normal police functions would have likely been viewed by the Founders as “a standing army”, something they were keen to prevent. In addition to the fact that Americans were incensed by the British use of soldiers to exercise police functions, the American Revolution had been inspired in part by the use by the British of “General Warrants” that allowed them to bust into American and search homes in their battle against smuggling. From its beginning the United States has had a tradition of separation between military and police power along with a tradition of limiting police power, indeed, this the reason our constitutional government exists in the first place.

Balko points out how the U.S. as it developed its own police forces, something that became necessary with the country’s urbanization and modernization, maintained these traditions which only fairly recently started to become eroded largely beginning with the Nixon administration’s “law and order” policy and especially the “war on drugs” launched under Reagan.

In framing the problem of drug use as a war rather than a public health concern we started down the path of using the police to enforce military style solutions. If drug use is a public health concern then efforts will go into providing rehabilitation services for addicts, addressing systemic causes and underlying perceptions, and legalization as a matter of personal liberty where doing so does not pose inordinate risk to the public. If the problem of drug use is framed as a war then this means using kinetic action to disrupt and disable “enemy” forces. It means adhering as close to the limits of what is legally allowable when using force to protect one’s own “troops”. It mean mass incarceration of captured enemy forces. Fighting a war means that training and equipment needs focus on the effective use of force and not “social work”.

The militarization of America’s police forces that began in earnest with the war on drugs, Balko reminds us, is not an issue that can easily be reduced to Conservative vs Liberal, Republican vs Democrat. In the 1990’s conservatives were incensed at police brutality and misuse of military style tactics at Waco and Ruby Ridge. Yet conservatives largely turned a blind eye to the same brutality turned against anarchists and anti-globalization protestors in The Battle of Seattle in 1999. Conservatives have largely supported the militarized effort to stomp out drug abuse and the use of swat teams to enforce laws against non-violent offenders, especially illegal immigrants.

The fact that police were increasingly turning to military tactics and equipment was not, however, all an over-reaction. It was inspired by high profile events such as the Columbine massacre, and a dramatic robbery in North Hollywood in 1997. In the latter the two robbers Larry Phillips, Jr. and Emil Mătăsăreanu wore body armor police with light weapons could not penetrate. The 2008 attacks in Mumbai in which a small group of heavily armed and well trained terrorists were able to kill 164 people and temporarily cripple large parts of the city should serve as a warning of what happens when police can not rapidly deploy lethal force as should a whole series of high profile “lone wolf” style shootings. Police can thus rationally argue that they need access to heavy weapons when needed and swat teams and training for military style contingencies as well. It is important to remember that the police daily put their lives at risk in the name of public safety.

Yet militarization has gone too far and is being influenced more by security corporations and their lobbyists than conditions in actual communities. If the drug war and attention grabbing acts of violence was where the militarization of America’s police forces began, 9-11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq acted as an accelerant on the trend. These events launched a militarized-police-industrial complex, the country was flooded with grants from the Department of Homeland Security which funded even small communities to set up swat teams and purchase military grade equipment. Veterans from wars which were largely wars of occupation and counter-insurgency were naturally attracted to using these hard won skill sets in civilian life- which largely meant either becoming police or entering the burgeoning sector of private security.

So that’s the problem as laid out by Balko, what is his solution? For Balko, the biggest step we could take to rolling back militarization is to end the drug war and stop using military style methods to enforce immigration law. He would like to see a return to community policing, if not quite Mayberry, then at least something like the innovative program launched in San Antonio which uses police as social workers rather than commandos in to respond to mental health related crime.

Balko also wants us to end our militarized response to protests. There is no reason why protesters in a democratic society should be met by police wielding automatic weapons or dispersed through the use of tear gas. We can also stop the flood of federal funding being used by local police departments to buy surplus military equipment. Something that the Obama administration prompted by Ferguson seems keen to review.

A positive trend that Balko sees is the ubiquity of photography and film permitted by smart phones which allows protesters to capture brutality as it occurs a right which everyone has, despite the insistence of some police in protest situations to the contrary, and has been consistently upheld by U.S. courts. Indeed the other potentially positive legacy of Ferguson other than bringing the problem of police militarization into the public spotlight, for there is no wind so ill it does not blow some good, might be that it has helped launch true citizen based and crowd-sourced media.

My criticism of The Rise of the Warrior Cop to the extent I have any is that Balko only tells the American version of this tale, but it is a story that is playing out globally. The inequality of late capitalism certainly plays a role in this. Wars between states has at least temporarily been replaced by wars within states. Global elites who are more connected to their rich analogs in other countries than they are to their own nationals find themselves turning to a large number of the middle class who find themselves located in one form or another in the security services of the state. Elites pursue equally internationalized rivals, such as drug cartels and terrorist networks like one would a cancerous tumor- wishing to rip it out by force- not realizing this form of treatment is not getting to the root of the problem and might even end up killing the patient.

More troublingly they use these security services to choke off mass protests by the poor and other members of the middle class now enabled by mobile technologies because they find themselves incapable of responding to the problems that initiated these protests with long-term political solutions. This relates to another aspect of the police militarization issue Balko doesn’t really explore, namely the privatization of police services as those who can afford them retreat behind the fortress of private security while the conditions of the society around them erode.

Maybe there was a good reason that The Rise of the Warrior Cop was placed on the library shelf next to books on robot weapons after all. It may sound crazy, but perhaps in the not so far off future elites will automate policing as they are automating everything else. Mass protests, violent or not, will be met not with flesh and blood policemen but military style robots and drones. And perhaps only then will once middle class policemen made poor by the automation of their calling realize that all this time they have been fighting on the wrong side of the rebellion.

A Cure for Our Deflated Sense of The Future

Progressland 1964 World's Fair

There’s a condition I’ve noted among former hard-core science-fiction fans that for want of a better word I’ll call future-deflation. The condition consists of an air of disappointment and detachment with the present that emerges on account of the fact that the future one dreamed of in one’s youth has failed to materialize. It was a dream of what the 21st century would entail that was fostered by science-fiction novels, films and television shows, a dream that has not arrived, and will seemingly never arrive- at least within our lifetimes. I think I have a cure for it, or at least a strong preventative.

The strange thing, perhaps, is that anyone would be disappointed in the fact that a fictional world has failed to become real in the first place. No one, I hope, feels like the present is constricted and dull because there aren’t any flying dragons in it to slay. The problem, then, might lie in the way science-fiction is understood in the minds of some avid fans- not as fiction, but as plausible future history, or even a sort of “preview” and promise of all the cool things that await.

Future- deflation is a kind of dulling hang-over from a prior bout of future-inflation when expectations got way out ahead of themselves. If, mostly boys, now become men, feel let down by inflated expectations driven by what proved to be the Venetian sunset, rather than the beginning, of the space race regarding orbital cities, bases on the moon and Mars, and a hundred other things, their experience is a little like girls, fed on a diet of romance, who have as adults tasted the bitter reality of love. Following the rule I suppose I’d call it romance-deflation- cue the Viagra jokes.

Okay, so that’s the condition, how might it be cured? The first step to recovery is admitting you have a problem and identifying its source. Perhaps the main culprit behind future-deflation is the crack cocaine of CGI- (and I really do mean CGI as in computer generated graphics which I’ve written about before). Whereas late 20th century novels,  movies, and television shows served as gateway drugs to our addiction to digital versions of the future, CGI and the technologies that will follow is the true rush, allowing us to experience versions of the future that just might be more real than reality itself.

There’s a phenomenon discovered by social psychologists studying motivation that says that it’s a mistake to visualize your idealized outcomes too clearly for to do so actually diminishes your motivation to achieve them. You get many of the same emotional rewards without any of the costs, and on that account never get down to doing the real thing. Our ability to create not just compelling but mind blowing visualizations of technologies that are nowhere on the horizon has become so good, and will only get better, that it may be exacerbating disappointment with the present state of technology and the pace of technological change- increasing the sense of “where’s my jet pack”.

There’s a theory that I’ve heard discussed by Brian Eno that the reason we haven’t been visited by any space aliens is that civilizations at a certain point fall into a state of masturbatory self-satisfaction. They stop actually doing stuff because the imagination of doing things becomes so much better and easier than the difficult and much less satisfying achievements experienced in reality.

The cure for future deflation is really just adulthood. We need to realize that the things we would like to do and see done are hard and expensive and take long commitments over time- often far past our own lifetimes- to achieve. We need to get off our Oculus Rift weighed down assess and actually do stuff. Elon Musk with his SpaceX seems to realize this, but with a ticket to Mars to cost 500 thousand dollars one can legitimately wonder whether he’ll end up creating an escape hatch from earth for the very rich that the rest of us will be stuck gawking at on our big-screen TVs.

And therein lies the heart of the problem, for it’s actually less important for the majority of us what technologies are available in the future than the largely non-technological question of how such a future is politically and economically organized which will translate into how many of us have access to these technologies.  

The question we should be asking when thinking about things we should be doing now to shape the future is a simple and very human one – “what kind of world do I hope my grandchildren live in?” A part of the answer to this question is going to involve technology and scientific advancement, but not as much of it as we might think. Other types of questions dealing with issues such as the level of equality, peace and security, a livable environment, and amount of freedom and purpose, are both more important and more capable of being influenced by the average person.  These are things we can pursue even if we have no connection to the communities of science and technology. We could even achieve many of these things should technological progress completely stall with the technological kit we already have.

In a way because it emerged in tandem with the technological progress started with the scientific and industrial revolutions science-fiction seemed to own the future, and those who practiced the art largely did well by us in giving it shape- at least in our minds. But in reality the future was just on loan, and it might do us best to take back a large portion of it and encourage everyone who wants to have more say in defining it. Or better, here’s my advice: for those techno-progressives not involved directly in the development of science and technology focus more of your efforts on the progressive side of the scale. That way, if even part of the promised future arrives you won’t be confined to just watching it while wearing your Oculus Rift or stuck in your seat at the IMAX.

Why archaeologist make better futurists than science-fiction writers

Astrolabe vs iPhone

Human beings seem to have an innate need to predict the future. We’ve read the entrails of animals, thrown bones, tried to use the regularity or lack of it in the night sky as a projection of the future and omen of things to come, along with a thousand others kinds of divination few of us have ever heard of. This need to predict the future makes perfect sense for a creature whose knowledge bias is towards the present and the past. Survival means seeing enough ahead to avoid dangers, so that an animal that could successfully predict what was around the next corner could avoid being eaten or suffering famine.

It’s weird how many of the ancient techniques of divination have a probabilistic element to them, as if the best tool for discerning the future was a magic 8 ball, though perhaps it makes a great deal of sense. Probability and chance come into play wherever our knowledge comes up against limits, and these limits can consists merely of knowledge we are not privy to like the game of “He loves me, he loves me not” little girls play with flower petals. As Henri Poincaré said; “Chance is only the measure of our ignorance”.

Poincaré was coming at the question with the assumption that the future is already determined, the idea of many physicists who think our knowledge bias towards the present and past is in fact like a game of “he loves me not”, and all in our heads, that the future already exists in the same sense the past and present, the future is just facts we can only dimly see.  It shouldn’t surprise us that they say this, physics being our own most advanced form divination, and it’s just one among many modern forms from meteorology to finance to genomics. Our methods of predicting the future are more sophisticated and effective than those of the past, but they still only barely see through the fog in front of us, which doesn’t stop us from being overconfident in our predictive prowess. We even have an entire profession, futurists, who claim like old-school fortune tellers- to have a knowledge of the future no one can truly possess.

There’s another group that makes a claim of the ability to divine at least some rough features of the future- science-fiction writers. The idea of writing about a future that was substantially different from the past really didn’t emerge until the 19th century when technology began not only making the present substantially different from the past, but promised to do so out into an infinite future. Geniuses like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells were able to look at the industrial revolution changing the world around  them and project it forward in time with sometimes extraordinary prescience.

There is a good case to be made, and I’ve tried to make it before, that science-fiction is no longer very good at this prescience. The shape of the future is now occluded, and we’ve known the reasons for this for quite some time. Karl Popper had pointed out as far back as the 1930’s that the future is essentially unknowable and part of this unknowability was that the course of scientific and technological advancement can not be known in advance.  A  too tight fit with wacky predictions of the future of science and technology is the characteristic of the worst and most campy of science-fiction.

Another good argument can be made that technologically dependent science-fiction isn’t so much predicting the future as inspiring it. That the children raised on Star Trek’s communicator end up inventing the cell phone. Yet technological horizons can just as much be atrophied as energized by science-fiction. This is the point Robinson Meyer makes in his blog post “Google Wants to Make ‘Science Fiction’ a Reality—and That’s Limiting Their Imagination” .

Meyer looks at the infamous Google X a supposedly risky research arm of Google one of whose criteria for embarking on a project is that it “ must utilize a radical solution that has at least a component that resembles science fiction.”

The problem Meyer finds with this is:

 ….“science fiction” provides but a tiny porthole onto the vast strangeness of the future. When we imagine a “science fiction”-like future, I think we tend to picture completed worlds, flying cars, the shiny, floating towers of midcentury dreams.

We tend, in other words, to imagine future technological systems as readymade, holistic products that people will choose to adopt, rather than as the assembled work of countless different actors, which they’ve always really been.

Meyer’s mentions a recent talk by a futurist I hadn’t heard of before Scott Smith who calls the kinds of clean futuristic visions of total convenience, antiseptic worlds surrounded by smart glass where all the world’s knowledge is our fingertips and everyone is productive and happy, “flat-pack futures” the world of tomorrow ready to be brought home and assembled like a piece of furniture from the IKEA store.

I’ve always had trouble with these kinds of simplistic futures, which are really just corporate advertising devices not real visions of a complex future which will inevitably have much ugliness in it, including the ugliness that emerges from the very technology that is supposed to make our lives a paradise. The major technological players are not even offering alternative versions of the future, just the same bland future with different corporate labels as seen, here, here, and here.

It’s not that these visions of the future are always totally wrong, or even just unattractive, as the fact that people the present- meaning us–  have no real agency over what elements of these visions they want and which they don’t with the exception of exercising consumer choice, the very thing these flat-pack visions of the future are trying to get us to buy.

Part of the reason that Scott sees a mismatch between these anodyne versions of the future, which we’ve had since at least the early 20th century, and what actually happens in the future is that these corporate versions of the future lack diversity and context,  not to mention conflict, which shouldn’t really surprise us, they are advertisements after all, and geared to high end consumers- not actual predictions of what the future will in fact look like for poor people or outcasts or non-conformists of one sort or another. One shouldn’t expect advertisers to show the bad that might happen should a technology fail or be hacked or used for dark purposes.

If you watch enough of them, their more disturbing assumption is that by throwing a net of information over everything we will finally have control and all the world will finally fall under the warm blanket of our comfort and convenience. Or as Alexis Madrigal put it in a thought provoking recent piece also at The Atlantic:

We’re creating a world that seamlessly, effortlessly shapes itself to human desire. It’s no longer cutting through a mountain to prove we dominate nature; now, it’s satisfying each impulse in the physical world with the ease and speed of digital tools. The shortest way to explain what Uber means: hit a button and something happens in the world (that makes life easier for you).

To return to Meyer, his point was that by looking to science-fiction almost exclusively to see what the future “should” look like designers, technologists, and by implication some futurists, had reduced themselves to a very limited palette. How might this palette be expanded? I would throw my bet behind turning to archaeologists, anthropologists, and certain kinds of historians.

As Steve Jobs understood, in some ways the design of a technology is as important as the technology itself. But Jobs sought almost formlessness, the clean, antiseptic modernist zen you feel when you walk into an Apple Store, as someone once said whose attribution I can’t place – an Apple Store is designed like a temple. But it’s a temple that is representative of only one very particular form of religion.

All the flat-pack versions of the future I linked to earlier have one prominent feature in common they are obsessed with glass. Everything in the world it seems will be a see through touchscreen bubbling with the most relevant information for the individual at that moment, the weather, traffic alerts, box scores, your child’s homework assignment. I have a suspicion that this glass fetish is a sort of Freudian slip on the part of tech companies, for the thing about glass is that you can see both ways through it, and what these companies most want is the transparency of you, to be able to peer into the minutiae of your life, so as to be able to sell you stuff.

Technology designers have largely swallowed the modernist glass covered kool-aid, but one way to purge might be to turn to archeology. For example, I’ve never found a tool more beautiful than the astrolabe, though it might be difficult to carry a smartphone in the form of one in your pocket. Instead of all that glass why not a Japanese paper house where all our supposedly important information is to constantly appear? Whiteboards are better for writing anyway. Ransacking the past for the forms in which we could embed our technologies might be one way to escape the current design conformity.

There are reasons to hope that technology itself will help us breakout of our futuristic design conformity. Ubiquitous 3D printing may allow us to design and create our own household art, tools, and customized technology devices. A website my girls and I often look to for artistic inspiration and projects such as the Met’s 82nd & Fifth as the images get better, eventually becoming 3D and even providing CAD specifications make allow us access to a great deal of the world’s objects from the past providing design templates for ways to embed our technology that reflect our distinct and personal and cultural values that might have nothing to do with those whipped up by Silicon Valley.

Of course, we’ve been ransacking the past for ideas about how to live in the present and future since modernity began. Augustus Pugin’s 1836 book Contasts with its beautiful, if slightly dishonest, drawings put the 19th century’s bland, utilitarian architecture up against the exquisite beauty of buildings from the 15th century. How cool would it be to have a book contrasting technology today with that of the past like Pugin’s?

The problem with Pugin’s and other’s efforts in such regards was that they didn’t merely look to the past for inspiration or forms but sought to replace the present and its assumptions with the revival of whole eras, assuming that a kind of impossible cultural and historical rewind button or time machine was possible when in reality the past was forever gone.

Looking to the past, as opposed to trying to raise it from the dead, has other advantages when it comes to our ability to peer into and shape the future.  It gives us different ways of seeing how our technology might be used as means towards the things that have always mattered most to human beings – our relationships, art, spirituality, curiosity. Take, for instance, the way social media such as SKYPE and FaceBook is changing how we relate to death. On the one hand social media seems to breakdown the way in which we have traditionally dealt with death – as a community sharing a common space, while on the other, it seems to revive a kind of analog to practices regarding death that have long past from the scene, practices that archeologists and social historians know well, where the dead are brought into the home and tended to for an extended period of time. Now though, instead of actual bodies, we see the online legacy of the dead, websites, FaceBook pages and the like, being preserved and attended to by loved ones.  A good question to ask oneself when thinking about how future technology will be used might not be what new thing will it make possible, but what old thing no longer done might it be used to revive?

In other words, the design of technology is the reflection of a worldview, but this is only a very limited worldview competing with an innumerable number of others. Without fail, for good and ill, technology will be hacked and used as a means by people whose worldviews that have little if any relationship to that of technologists. What would be best is if the design itself, not the electronic innards, but the shell and organization for use was controlled by non-technologists in the first place.

The best of science-fiction actually understands this. It’s not the gadgets that are compelling, but the alternative world, how it fits together, where it is going, and what it says about our own world. That’s what books like Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy did, or  Frank Herbert’s Dune. Both weren’t predictions of the future so much as fictional archeologies and histories. It’s not the humans who are interesting in a series like Star Trek, but the non-humans who each live in their own very distinct versions of a life-world.

For those science-fiction writers not interested in creating alternative world’s or taking a completely imaginary shot in the dark to imagine what life might be like many hundreds of years beyond our own they might benefit from reflection on what they are doing and why they should lean heavily on knowledge of the past.

To the extent that science-fiction tells us anything about the future it is through a process of focused extrapolation. As, quoting myself, the sci-fi author Paolo Bacigalupi has said the role of science-fiction is to take some set of elements of the present and extrapolate them to see where they lead. Or, as William Gibson said “The future is already here it’s just not evenly distributed.” In his novel The Windup Girl Bacigalupi extrapolated cut throat corporate competition, the use of mercenaries, genetic engineering, and the way biotechnology and agribusiness seem to be trying to take ownership over food, along with our continued failure to tackle carbon emissions and came up with a chilling dystopian world. Amazingly, Bacigalupi, an American, managed to embed this story in a Buddhist cultural and Thai historical context.

Although I have not had the opportunity to read the book yet, which is now at the top of my end of summer reading list, former neuroscientist and founder of the gaming company Six to Start, Adrian Hon’s book The History of the Future in 100 Objects seems to grasp precisely this. As Hon explained in an excellent talk over at the Long Now Foundation (I believe I’ve listed to it in its entirety 3 times!) he was inspired by Neil MacGregor’s History of the World in 100 Object (also on my reading list). What Hon realized was that the near future at least would have many of the things we are familiar with things like religion or fashion, and so what he did was extrapolate his understanding of technology trends gained from both his neuroscience and gaming backgrounds onto those things.

Science-fiction writers and their kissing-cousins the futurists, need to remind themselves when writing about the next few centuries hence that, as long as there are human beings, (and otherwise what are they writing about) there will still be much about us that we’ve had since time immemorial. Little doubt, there will still be death, but also religion. And not just any religion, but the ones we have now: Christianity and Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism etc. (Can anyone think of a science-fiction story where they still celebrate Christmas?) There will still be poverty, crime, and war. There will also be birth and laughter and love. Culture will still matter, and sub-culture just as much, as will geography. For at least the next few centuries, let us hope, we will still be human, so perhaps I shouldn’t have used archeologist in my title, but anthropologists or even psychologist, for those who can best understand the near future best understand the mind and heart of mankind rather than the current, and inevitably unpredictable, trajectory of our science and technology.

 

The First Machine War and the Lessons of Mortality

Lincoln Motor Co., in Detroit, Michigan, ca. 1918 U.S. Army Signal Corps Library of Congress

I just finished a thrilling little book about the first machine war. The author writes of a war set off by a terrorist attack where the very speed of machines being put into action,and the near light speed of telecommunications whipping up public opinion to do something now, drives countries into a world war.

In his vision whole new theaters of war, amounting to fourth and fifth dimensions, have been invented. Amid a storm of steel huge hulking machines roam across the landscape and literally shred human beings in their path to pieces. Low flying avions fill the sky taking out individual targets or help calibrate precision attacks from incredible distances beyond. Wireless communications connect soldiers and machine together in a kind of world-net.

But the most frightening aspect of the new war are weapons based on plant biology. Such weapons, if they do not immediately scar the face and infect the bodies of those who had been targeted, relocate themselves in the soil like spores waiting to release and kill and maim when conditions are ripe- the ultimate terrorist weapon.

Amid all this the author searches for what human meaning might be in a world where men are caught between a world of warring machines.  In the end he comes to understand himself as mere cog in a great machine, a metallic artifice that echoes and rides rhythms of biological nature including his own.

__________________________________

A century and a week back from today humanity began its first war of machines. (July, 28 1914). There had been forerunners such as the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War in the 19th century, but nothing before had exposed the full features and horrors of what war between mechanized and industrial societies would actually look like until it came quite unexpectedly in the form of World War I.

Those who wish to argue that the speed of technological development is exaggerated need only to look to at the First World War where almost all of the weapons we now use in combat were either first used or used to full effect– the radio, submarine, airplane, tank and other vehicles using the internal combustion engine. Machine guns were let loose in new and devastating ways as was long-range artillery.

Although again there were forerunners, the first biological and chemical weapons saw there true debut in WWI. The Germans tried to infect the city of St. Petersburg with a strain of the plague, but the most widely used WMDs were chemical weapons, some of them derived from the work on the nitrogen cycle of plants, gases such chlorine and mustard gas, which killed less than they maimed, and sometimes sat in the soil ready to emerge like poisonous mushrooms when weather conditions permitted.

Indeed, the few other weapons in our 21st century arsenal that can’t be found in the First World War such as the jet, rocket, atomic bomb, radar, and even the computer, would make their debut only a few decades after the end of that war, and during what most historians consider its second half- World War II.

What is called the Great War began, as our 9-11 wars began, with a terrorist attack. The Archduke of Austria- Hungary Franz Ferdinand assassinated by the ultimate nobody, a Serbian nationalist not much older than a boy- Gavrilo Princip- whose purely accidental success (he was only able to take his shot because the car the Archduke was riding in had taken a wrong turn) ended up being the catalyst for the most deadly war in human history up until that point, a conflict that would unleash nearly a century of darkness and mortal danger upon the world.

For the first time it would be a war that would be experienced by people thousands of miles from the battlefield in almost real time via the relatively new miracle of the radio. This was only part of the lightning fast feedback loop that launched and sped European civilization from a minor political assassination to total war. As I recall from Stephen Kern’s 1983 The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1914   political caution and prudence found themselves crushed in the vice of compressed space and time and suffered the need to make policy decisions that aligned with the need, not of human beings and their slow, messy and deliberative politics, but the pace of machines. Once the decision to mobilize was made it was almost impossible to stop it without subjecting the nation to extreme vulnerability, once a jingoistic public was whipped up to demand revenge and action via the new mass media it was again nearly impossible to silence and temper.

The First World War is perhaps the penultimate example of what Nassim Taleb called a “Black Swan” an event whose nature failed to be foreseen and whose effect ended up changing the future radically from the shape it had previously been projected to have. Taleb defines a Black Swan this way:

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Secondly it carries an extreme impact (unlike the bird). Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable. (xxii)

Taleb has something to teach futurists who he suggests might start looking for a different day job. For what he is saying is it is the events we do not and cannot predict that will have the greatest influence on the future, and on account of this blindness the future is essentially unknowable. The best we can do in his estimation is to build resilience, robustness and redundancy, which it is hoped might allow us to survive, or even gain in the face of multiple forms of unpredictable crises, to become, in his terms “anti-fragile”.

No one seems to think another world war is possible today, which might give us reason for worry. We do have more circuit breakers in place which might allow us to dampen a surge in the direction of war between the big states in the face of a dangerous event such as Japan downing a Chinese plane in their dispute over Pacific islands, but many more and stronger ones need to be created to avoid such frictions spinning out of control.

States continue to prepare for limited conventional wars against one another. China practices and plans to retake disputed islands including Taiwan by force, and to push the U.S. Navy deeper into the Pacific, while the U.S. and Japan practice retaking islands from the Chinese. We do this without recognizing that we need to do everything possible to prevent such potential clashes in the first place because we have no idea once they begin where or how they will end.  As in financial crises, the further in time we become removed from the last great crisis the more likely we are to have fallen into a dangerous form of complacency, though the threat of nuclear destruction may act as an ultimate break.

The book I began this essay with is, of course, not some meditation on 21st or even 22nd century war, but the First World War itself. Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel is perhaps the best book ever written on the Great War and arguably one of the best books written on the subject of war- period.

It is Jünger’s incredible powers of observation and his desire for reflection that give the book such force. There is a scene that will ever stick with me where Jünger is walking across the front lines and sees a man sitting there in seemingly perfect stoicism as the war rages around him. It’s only when he looks closer that Jünger realizes the man is dead and that he has no eyes in his sockets– they have been blown out from an explosion behind.

Unlike another great book on the First World War, Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Storm of Steel is not a pacifist book. Jünger is a soldier who sees the war as a personal quest and part of his duty as a man. His bravery is undeniable, but he does not question the justice or rationality of the war itself, a fact that would later allow Jünger’s war memoir to be used as a propaganda tool by the Nazis.

Storm of Steel has about it something of the view of war found in the ancients- that it was sent by the gods and there was nothing that could be done about it but to fulfill one’s duty within it. In the Hindu holy book the Bhagavad Gita the prince Arjuna is filled with doubt over the moral righteousness of the battle he is about to engage in- to which the god Krishna responds:

 …you Arjuna, are only a mortal appointee to carry out my divine will, since the Kauravas are destined to die either way, due to their heap of sins. Open your eyes O Bhaarata and know that I encompass the Karta, Karma and Kriya, all in myself. There is no scope for contemplation now or remorse later, it is indeed time for war and the world will remember your might and immense powers for time to come. So rise O Arjuna!, tighten up your Gandiva and let all directions shiver till their farthest horizons, by the reverberation of its string.

Jünger lived in a world that had begun to abandon the gods, or rather adopted new materialist versions of them – whether the force of history or evolution- stories in which Jünger like Arjuna comes to see himself as playing a small part.

 The incredible massing of forces in the hour of destiny, to fight for a distant future, and the violence it so surprisingly, suddenly unleashed, had taken me for the first time into the depths of something that was more than mere personal experience. That was what distinguished it from what I had been through before; it was an initiation that not only had opened red-hot chambers of dread but had also led me through them. (255-256)

Jünger is not a German propagandist. He seems blithely unaware of the reasons his Kaiser’s government was arguing why the war was being fought. The dehumanization of the other side which was a main part of the war propaganda towards the end of the conflict, and on both sides, does not touch him. He is a mere soldier whose bravery comes from the recognition of his own ultimate mortality just as the mortality of everyone else allows him to kill without malice, as a mere matter of the simple duty of a combatant in war.

Because his memoir of the conflict is so authentic, so without bias or apparent political aims, he ends up conveying truths about war which it is difficult for civilians to understand and this difficulty in understanding can be found not only in pacifists, but in nationalist war-mongers with no experience of actual combat.

If we open ourselves to to the deepest meditations of those who have actually experienced war, what we find is that combat seems to bring the existential reality of the human condition out from its normal occlusion by the tedium of everyday living. To live in the midst of war is a screaming reminder that we are mortal and our lives ultimately very short. In war it is very clear that we are playing a game of chance against death, which is merely the flip side of the statistical unlikelihood of our very existence, as if our one true God was indeed chance itself. Like any form of gambling, victory against death itself becomes addictive.

War makes it painfully clear to those who fight in it that we are hanging on just barely to this thread, this thin mortal coil, where our only hope for survival for a time is to hang on tightly to those closest to us- war’s famed brotherhood in arms. These experiences, rather than childish flag- waving notions of nationalism, are likely the primary source of what those who have experience of only of peace often find unfathomable- that soldiers from the front often eagerly return to battle. It is a shared experience among those who have experienced combat that often leads soldiers to find more in common with the enemies they have engaged than their fellow citizens back home who have never been to war.

The essential lessons of Storm of Steel are really spiritual answers to the question of combat. Jünger’s war experience leads him to something like Buddhist non-attachment both to himself and to the futility of the bird-eye view justifications of the conflict.

The nights brought heavy bombardment like swift, devastating summer thunderstorms. I would lie on my bunk on a mattress of fresh grass, and listen, with a strange and quite unjustified feeling of security, to the explosions all around that sent the sand trickling out of the walls.

At such moments, there crept over me a mood I hadn’t known before. A profound reorientation, a reaction to so much time spent so intensely, on the edge. The seasons followed one another, it was winter and then it was summer again, but it was still war. I felt I had got tired, and used to the aspect of war, but it was from familiarity that I observed what was in front of me in a new and subdued light. Things were less dazzlingly distinct. And I felt the purpose with which I had gone out to fight had been used up and no longer held. The war posed new, deeper puzzles. It was a strange time altogether. (260)

In another scene Jünger comes upon a lone enemy officer while by himself on patrol.

 I saw him jump as I approached, and stare at me with gaping eyes, while I, with my face behind my pistol, stalked up to him slowly and coldly. A bloody scene with no witnesses was about to happen. It was a relief to me, finally, to have the foe in front of me and within reach. I set the mouth of my pistol at the man’s temple- he was too frightened to move- while my other fist grabbed hold of his tunic…

With a plaintive sound, he reached into his pocket, not to pull out a weapon, but a photograph which he held up to me. I saw him on it, surrounded by numerous family, all standing on a terrace.

It was a plea from another world. Later, I thought it was blind chance that I had let him go and plunged onward. That one man of all often appeared in my dreams. I hope that meant he got to see his homeland again. (234)

The unfortunate thing about the future of war is not that human beings seem likely to play an increasingly diminishing role as fighters in it, as warfare undergoes the same process of automation, which has resulted in the fact that so few of us now grow our food or produce our goods. Rather, it is the fact that wars will continue to be fought and human beings, which will come to mean almost solely non-combatants, will continue to die in them.

The lessons Jünger took from war are not so much the product of war itself as they emerge from intense reflection on our own and others mortality. They are the same type of understanding and depth often seen in those who suffer long periods of death, the terminally ill, who die not in the swift “thief in the night” mode of accidents or bodily failure, but slip from the world with enough time to and while retaining the capacity to reflect. Even the very young who are terminally ill often speak of a diminishing sense of their own importance, a need to hang onto the moment, a drive to live life to the full, and the longing to treat others in a spirit of charity and mercy.

Even should the next “great war” be fought almost entirely by machines we can retain these lessons as a culture as long as we give our thoughts over to what it means to be a finite creature with an ending and will have the opportunity to experience them personally as long as we are mortal, and given the impossibility of any form of eternity no matter how far we will extend our lifespans, mortal we always will be.