Tag Archives: War

Utopia of the Wastelands

Part of the problem with utopia is the question of where do you put it. After all, what any imaginary ideal society ultimately ends up being is its “own world turned upside down”, which means that the world, as it is, must not have a place for anything like a paradise on earth, otherwise an author would have had no reason to dream up a utopia in the first place.

Authors have gotten around this problem by locating utopia on an unknown island, on the frontier, in the deep past, in the future, in outer space, or on some alternate historical timeline where everything has worked out for the good. Cory Doctorow is the first fiction author I’m aware of to have located his utopia in our own society’s garbage dumps.

His novel Walkawy depicts a world where individuals have abandoned a hyper-capitalist world not all that different from our own and relocated to the zones of destruction and decay familiar to anyone who has lived in the post-industrial wastelands of the US, Europe, or beyond. Anyone who has lived within walking distance of a man made disaster or regions deemed lost by the forces of capital rushing around the globe has first hand experience of the kind of environment walkaways hope to build their utopia in.    

Walkaways can find the space to build a new kind of society in these zones because capitalists- whom Doctorow delightfully calls “zottas” find little value in the material and human trash heap they have created. The utopia of the wastelands the walkaways build is indeed a blissfully bizarro world version of our own. Money counts for nothing there, nor do possessions. Merit is a matter of service to the collective good rather than a way to mark one off as deserving of special rewards.

A utopia that builds itself on the basis of capitalism’s trash would seem to have scarcity built into its very design. But it’s just not so. Perhaps no one but Doctorow could have made collective dumpster diving sound so sexy, high-tech, and well…cool.

The codebase originated with the UN High Commissioner on Refugees, had been field tested a lot. You told it the kind of building you wanted, gave it a scavenging range, and it directed its drones to inventory anything nearby, scanning multi-band, doing deep database scapes against urban planning and building-code sources to identify usable blocks for whatever you were making. This turned into a scavenger hunt inventory, and the refugees or aid workers (or in shameful incidents, the trafficked juvenile slaves) fanned out to retrieve the pieces the building needed to conjure itself into existence. p.45

And almost anything that can’t be ripped and re-fabricated from a pre-existing source can be created via 3D printing or crafted via the love and labor of willing walkaways.

The only rival for the leftist ethos in the wastelands are the “reputation economy freaks” whose own version of utopia isn’t so much and upside down version of the world of the zottas as one where the zottas’ false meritocracy- where the “best” come out on top- is supposed to be made real. Reputation freaks hope to make it real via the intricate measurement of every individual’s contribution, through the gamification of human action. Doctorow is having some fun here by showing the absurdity of the current Silicon Valley fad for neo-Taylorism and the “quantified self”.

We’ve known since Jesus that doing good for the recognition of being seen to be doing good doesn’t result in goodness but “in game-playing and stats-fiddling”. Virtue signaling didn’t need Twitter to come about- it’s as old as the Pharisees.

A major problem for contemporary utopianism on the left is what position to take on abundance, above all, how to square the older dream of truly universal material prosperity with the now equally strong utopian desire to be free of the dehumanizing machine– the global network of corporations and bureaucratic processes, laborers and devices which Marx himself pointed out had made our unprecedented era of abundance possible. Such a desire to be free from the machine, on the left, can be found in the desire to return to the craft economy and the organic. At its most pessimistic this newer branch of the left urges an exit from the machine on the basis that whatever prosperity is experienced today is being bought at the price of the destruction of the rest of nature, and ultimately, perhaps, the human species itself.              

Doctorow has mentioned a number of influences for the utopia of walkaways which are really positions on the abundance/scarcity question. He wants to preserve and universalize prosperity but on reconfigured, and more human foundations- a prospect perhaps only now possible given current technologies. Influences such as Leigh Philips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts: A Defence Of Growth, Progress, Industry And Stuff, Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism: A guide to our future, and Ronald Coase’s 1937 article The Nature of the Firm are all part of Walkaway’s source.  

Walkaway, in one sense, is an attempt to bridge this new gulf among the left between those, such as Philips, arguing that after asserting public control and ownership of the productive instruments of society, we need to go deeper into the machine so as to unleash what some have called “fully automated luxury communism” and figures such as Douglas Rushkoff urging a return to more organic forms of living and an economy based on craft.

In Walkaway ad hoc networks enabled by digital technology combined with advanced and ubiquitous 3D printing serve as an alternative to the huge centrally controlled industrial systems that provide the bulk of our food and products. In the novel Doctorow has given us a plausible version of a makers’ economy where technologically empowered craftsmen are once again the equals of the factory system that had swept them away starting in the 1700’s.

I’ll return to the question of whether I think such a path is plausible in a moment. Right now, I want to discuss one author and her work whose philosophy I think also lies at the root of the utopia Doctorow has imagined in Walkaway, namely; Rebecca Solnit and her amazing book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.

In its essence, the argument Solnit makes in A Paradise in Hell is that human beings are essentially good. What undermines this goodness is that powerful minorities are often able to exploit for their own gain the fact that so few of us believe this very fact. Most of us know that if all the state’s police powers disappeared tomorrow we wouldn’t straight away set upon our neighbors to seize their goods and wives. Yet somehow we assume that in a crisis those around us would do just that, as if we personally were somehow the exception to Hobbes’ picture of humankind as being in a state a war of “all against all” absent the threat of violence by the state.

At least that’s what we learn in Hollywood disaster flicks. Get rid of the state and you unleash an even more violent mob.  In A Paradise built in Hell Solnit makes a strong empirical case that this is nothing like what human beings do in the face of actual disaster. Instead, time after time, and in varying circumstances and locations, crises give rise to responses of altruism and mutual aid. As a general rule when faced with the demand that we feed, clothe, heal, and protect our neighbors we do so not merely willingly, but joyfully. The surprising thing is that in doing so people in the midst of horrible privation have often reported experiencing a type of freedom unavailable in the world they inhabited before disaster struck. As Sonit put it:    

The positive emotions that arise in those unpromising circumstances demonstrate that social ties and meaningful work are deeply desired, readily improvised, and intensely rewarding. The very structure of our economy and society prevents these goals from being achieved.

Disaster demonstrates this, since among the factors determining whether you live or die are the health of your immediate community and the justness of your society. We need ties, but they along with purposefulness, immediacy, and agency also give us joy- the startling, sharp joy I found in the accounts of disaster survivors. These accounts demonstrate that the citizens any paradise would need- the people who are brave enough, and generous enough- already exist. The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being,so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it’s because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live in another way. (p.15)

Solnit helped answer for me questions I had stumbled into eons ago while reading the political theorist Hannah Arendt. Her argument was that we moderns only experienced genuine freedom under two conditions, and while I understood Arendt’s assertion that one of these conditions was revolution, I never grasped why it was she also claimed that the other condition in which freedom could be found was war.

In an introduction to the soldier Jesse Glenn Gray’s philosophical meditation on war The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle Arendt grapples with a story from the book where Gray encounters an isolated French hermit who has no real idea of the Second World War that is raging around him:

Who am I? What is my function in life?” This was fraternity, and it was possible because one of them, the old man and hermit, was blessed with “the gift of simplicity” and the other, soldier and philosopher, had been stripped of his normal sophistications, of all that is subtly false in what we teach and learn.

Both were outside civilization, outside tradition and culture, the soldier because war had thrown him into one of those lonely foxholes with nothing to keep him company but “watching the stars at night,” the hermit because it was “as though he had sprung from nature herself… her authentic child… (xii)

This “fraternity” between two human beings was made possible by the unraveling, or self-imposed exile from the world that by its nature embeds the individual in a particular history, culture, and set of power relations and their supporting modes of thought. On this reading the freedom experienced in war has little to do with the adrenaline rush of battle, or the fact that in war the individual is permitted to break the taboo of “thou shalt not kill”, rather, as in revolution and disaster, war can temporarily release the individual from the weight of history, set them free from the complicated structures that define life in modern society, structures which from their nature of being based on machines, demand that individuals become machine-like.

We’ve built these structures largely because they provide for our needs, keep us comfortable and safe in the face of a hostile nature. Yet such safety comes at the cost of each of us becoming a cog in a larger system, easily replaced if lost. Disaster, revolution, and war temporarily restore not merely our ability to act creatively, but to have our actions actually have consequences that change the shape of the world.

Walkaway depicts an escape route into a very similar realm of freedom, though if it emerges out of any of my triumvirate of disaster, revolution, and war it is in the form of a slow moving disaster in which the powers that be have allowed great zones of the world they find superfluous to their profit seeking objective, along with the people who inhabit them, to fall into decay. Science-fiction is always as much about the present as it is the future and the policy of Doctorow’s zottas towards the wastelands is but a ramped up version of the new imperialism practiced by capitalists today. The sociologist Saskia Sassen in a recent essay for e-flux said it best:

These are not old imperial modes where conquerors wanted it all. Today’s financial conquerors want specialized, and selective geographies: they need specific sites within national geographies. They do not want to deal with a whole country. They want instruments that allow them to cut across international borders and occupy only the sites of that territory that they need or desire for their own projects—differing radically from the older imperial land grabs.

As in Walkaway, Sassen seems to imagine a utopia based on the occupation of abandoned or yet to be colonized spaces. It’s a hopeful vision, yet I can’t help wondering if recent events might be warning us that this particular path to paradise might have shortcomings of its own. And I say all this as a person who has consistently argued that we need to renew our utopian imagination and create opportunities for alternatives to our society to be experimented with. Thus if I appear critical of Doctorow, Solnit or Sassen it’s not so much in order to challenge their perspective or goals as it is a means to be critically engage with myself.

Let’s imagine that the largely self-sufficient makers’ economy Doctorow depicts in Walkaway is a plausible alternative to the world of continent and globe straddling bureaucratic systems we currently depend upon for our wants and needs. Though I may completely agree with Limpopo, one of the main characters of the novel when she argues against the reputation freaks that:

“If you do things because you want someone else to pat you on the head, you won’t get as good as someone who does it for internal satisfaction”  (75)

I know that many others won’t. Indeed, the rivalry between the walkaways and the reputation freaks Doctorow depicts show just two of the possible and radically different forms of society constructed using the same technology. Many, many others are equally possible, and while from my perspective the society built by the walkaways is ideal, I know that many others would choose to build something else. And I know this even though I am in complete agreement with Solnit- that in a crisis human beings are more prone to feed their neighbors rather than prey upon them. The problem arises the moment these issues of basic survival, without which no society can exist, have been solved. For at that moment we run into the intractable question- what is the best way to live? The answer to which, far too often in human history, has been a rationalization of our own interest, even when that means the oppression of others for what is deemed to be the “greater good”. I know this because we’re already in a world where the same technology empowers both the very best and worst of people. Encryption protects dissidents against cruel states and creeps at the same time it shields hard core criminals and terrorists groups such as ISIS. Perhaps it has always been so.

A makers’- economy world where anything we wanted could be scavenged from civilization’s refuse or summoned out of the ether with 3D printers would just as likely lead to profound moral and political splintering as a “leap to freedom.”

One doesn’t have to adopt Marxism whole hog to agree that political and social systems are ultimately based on the “system of production” that underlies them. We’ve created for ourselves a globalized, liberal, world order because our own system of production- industrial capitalism- requires precisely this to function. A truly effective suite of maker-technologies might return us to something that more resembles feudalism than anything we’ve seen since the beginning of the modern world.

Splintering would not, of necessity, be a bad thing. Such a world would be littered with utopias and dystopias depending on one’s point of view. Whether or not such a pluralistic system would be better than our current global mono-culture, which has its benefits as well as its all too obvious risks and downsides would depend upon the mix of societies at any one time, along with the relationship between the different societies that inhabit the world.

A splintered world would be more diverse and free, but, unless coupled with a species shattering disaster, it wouldn’t release us from the problems and moral dilemmas we face from living in one world. Policies and technologies pursued by one society might still impact and threaten those living half a world away, we would still be aware of, and feel morally compelled to act, in the interest of sufferers (including animal sufferers) far removed from us. In other words, it’s impossible to see how we should, or even could, walk away from politics- the conflict between human groups- for no such conflict free zone can exist in a universe where individuals and groups must choose between mutually opposing options, and this is the case even when all of those options are good.

The only universe where we could escape these Sophie’s Choice type problems would be one that was wholly simulated and virtual. There’s no need to choose between options when one can fork and have both, no need to fret about the individual and collective impact and consumption on the environment when our desires are just built out of code.

Doctorow has called the central role played by uploading in Walkaway a McGuffin, yet the walkaways pursuit of defeating death by scanning their brains, along with the zottas efforts to prevent these outcasts from democratizing immortality, seems baked into the political logic of the novel. Human abundance, whether of the capitalist or socialist sort ultimately comes into conflict with the rest of nature. It’s a conflict that the virtualization of the human would seemingly solve. As the character Sita explains to Limpopo:

For hundreds of years, people have been trying to get everyone to live gently on the land, but their whole pitch was, “hold still and try not to breathe.” It was all hair-shirt, no glory in nature’s beauty. The environmental prescription has been to act as much as possible like you were already dead. Don’t reproduce. Don’t consume. Don’t trample the earth or you’ll compress the dirt and kill the plants. Every exhalation poisons the atmosphere with CO2. Is it any wonder we haven’t gotten there?

Now we’ve got a deal for humanity that’s better than anything before: lose the body. Walk away from it. Become an immortal being of pure thought and feeling, able to travel the universe at light speed, unkillable, consciously deciding how you want to live your life and making it stick, by fine-tuning your parameters so you’re the version of yourself that does the right thing, that knows and honors itself.  (195)

A virtualized humanity wouldn’t only solve the conflict between humanity and the rest of nature, it would seemingly solve the problem of humanity’s conflict with itself.

Virtualization would solve the issue of human contention because everyone could live in whatever imaginary social order one chose, including, disturbingly, one where you played the role of a tyrant or a sinister god. Perhaps solved is the wrong word.

Yet there are problems with believing virtualization truly would solve our perennial problem of scarcity, let alone the conflict between humanity and nature or the conflict between humans themselves. Even if what Doctorow has previously satirized as a “rapture of the nerds” was available for everyone any belief in a paradise made of electrons suffers from the fact that the material world is not something we can actually walk away from.

After all, running uploads requires all kinds of physical systems and above all the energy to run them. A lot of energy. As the physicist Caleb Scharf recently pointed out:

…our brains use energy at a rate of about 20 watts. If you wanted to upload yourself intact into a machine using current computing technology, you’d need a power supply roughly the same as that generated by the Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric plant in China, the biggest in the world. To take our species, all 7.3 billion living minds, to machine form would require an energy flow of at least 140,000 petawatts. That’s about 800 times the total solar power hitting the top of Earth’s atmosphere. Clearly human transcendence might be a way off.

Of course, even if improvements in computations-per-joule have been leveling off, we should expect at some point, in the far future, to have drastically shrunk the gap between the human brain and a copy of it run on a computer, unless, as the neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis has argued the mind is something to complex and stochastic to be digitally simulated.

I suppose, after a long concerted effort, one could eventually put such energy harvesting systems in outer space, yet the quest might prove less one of the creation of new and better simulated worlds than the human retreat into a kind of cartoon. That’s because as Rudy Rucker long ago pointed out in his essay The Great Awakening:

We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don’t fully match the richness of the real world. What’s not so well known is that no feasible VR can ever match nature because there are no shortcuts for nature’s computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the “principle of natural unpredictability,” fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don’t allow for drastic shortcuts.

Matter, just as it is, carries out outlandishly complex chaotic quantum computations by dint of sitting around. Matter isn’t dumb. Every particle everywhere and everywhen computes at the max possible flop. I think we tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality.

Virtualization would be more like Bitcoin than an escape from either scarcity or human caused environmental destruction- it would based on the unequal access to energy and materials necessary for the creation and maintenance of uploaded individuals and their worlds, and it wouldn’t do nature much good until much of this infrastructure was moved off of the earth. Until that time it would be perhaps even more destructive to the environment- because of its hunger for energy- than the world of biological humans we currently have.

Regardless of its effect on scarcity and environmental destruction, retreat into the great uploaded beyond wouldn’t solve the issue of human moral conflict unless we surrendered our moral responsibilities and adopted a laissez faire approach regardless of the consequences. (I find it weird how grappling with a world of uploaded humans results in a reality that is merely an intensified version of our own where we spend much of our time digitally engaged already.) Would we allow an individual to live in any digital world they chose? Would simulated persons have rights? Would we allow the sale of copies of oneself even if knew that copy would be mistreated or abused? If the answer to any of these question is no, then we’re back in the world of moral contention, a world we can seemingly escape only at the cost of our own soul.

If there is one fundamental flaw to the utopian imagination it is the belief that we can permanently escape this zone of dispute. The price of escaping has often come at the cost of withdrawing from the responsibilities of caring for the larger world and leaving those left behind to fend for themselves. Yet there is an even worse option whereby utopians attempt to enforce their particular version of the ideal society by force. The latter is the means by which the hope for a better world has given way to its opposite- to dystopia.

Ultimately, there is no possibility of walking away from the world we inhabit. Rather than leaving we must fight now and forever to build and preserve the kind of societies we want to live in. In his novel, Cory Doctorow has given us a compelling vision of what kind of society we should be fighting for whether or not we can ever enter the promised land.

What makes war between the US and China or Russia inevitable?

Battle of Lepanto

There is a dangerous and not so new idea currently making the rounds that not only is conventional war between the great powers inevitable, but that it would be much less of an existential threat to humanity than we have been led to believe and even might be necessary for human progress.

The appearance of this argument in favor of war was almost predictable given that it was preceded by a strong case being made that war was now obsolete and at least in its great power guise was being driven out of history by deep underlying trends towards prosperity and peace. I am thinking here mostly of Steven Pinker in his Better Angels of Our Nature, but he was not alone.

The exact same thing happened in the 19th century. Then, voices arose that argued that war was becoming unnecessary as values became global and the benefits of peaceful trade replaced the plunder of war. The counter-reaction argued that war had been the primary vector for human progress and that without it we would “go soft” or de-evolve into a species much less advanced than our own.

Given their racist overtones, arguments that we will evolve “backward” absent war are no longer made in intelligent circles. Instead, war has been tied to technological development the argument being that without war in general and great power war in particular we will become technologically stuck. That’s the case made by Ian Morris in his War What is it Good For? where he sees the US in shepherding in the Singularity via war, and it’s a case made from opposite sides of the fence regarding transhumaism by Christopher Coker and Steve Fuller.

The problem with these new arguments in favor of great power conflict is that they discount the prospect of nuclear exchange. Perhaps warfare is the heir of technological progress, but it’s better to be the tortoise when such conflicts hold the risk of driving you back to the stone age.

That said, there is an argument out there that perhaps even nuclear warfare wouldn’t be quite the civilization destroyer we have believed, but that position seems less likely to become widespread than the idea that the great powers could directly fight each other and yet some how avoid bringing the full weight of their conventional and nuclear forces down upon the other even in the face of a devastating loss at the hands of the other. It’s here where we can find Peter W. Singer and August Cole’s recent novel Ghost Fleet: A novel of the Third World War that tells the story of a conventional war, mainly at sea, between the US and China and Russia.

It’s a copiously researched book, and probably gives a good portrait of what warfare in the next ten to fifteen years will look like. If the authors are right, in the wars of the future drones – underground, land, air, and sea will be ubiquitous and AI used to manage battles where sensors take the place of senses- the crew of a ship needs never set sight on the actual sea.

Cyber attacks in the future will be a fully functional theater of war- as will outer space. The next war will take advantage of enhancement technologies- augmented reality, and interventions such “stim tabs” for alertness. Advances in neuroscience and bioelectronics will be used at the very least as a form of enhanced, and brutal, interrogation.

If the book makes any warning (and all such books seem to have a warning) it is that the US is extremely reliant on the technological infrastructure that allows the country to deploy and direct its’ global force. The war begins with a Chinese/Russian attack on American satellites, which effectively blinds the American military. I’ve heard interviews where Singer claims that in light of this the US Navy is now training its’ officers in the art of stellar navigation, which in the 21st century is just, well… cool. The authors point out how American hardware is vulnerable as well to threats like embedded beacons or kill switches given that much of this hardware has come out of Chinese factories.

The plot of Ghost Fleet is pretty standard: in a surprise attack the Chinese and Russians push the US out of the Pacific by destroying much of the American navy and conquering Hawaii. Seemingly without a single ally, the US then manages to destroy the Chinese fleet after resurrecting the ships of its naval graveyard near San Francisco- a real thing apparently, especially a newfangled battleship the USS Zumwalt, which is equipped with a new and very powerful form of rail gun. I am not sure if it helped or hindered my enjoyment of the book that its’ plot seemed eerily similar to my favorite piece of anime from when I was a kid- Star Blazers.

The problem, once again, is in thinking that we can contain such conflicts and therefore need not do everything possible to avoid them. In the novel there never seems to be any possibility of nuclear exchange or strategic bombing and with the exception of the insurgency and counterinsurgency in Hawaii the war is hermetically contained to the Pacific and the sea. Let’s hope we would be so lucky, but I’m doubtful.

Ghost Fleet is also not merely weak but detrimental in regards to the one “technology” that will be necessary for the US to avoid a war with China or others and contain it should it break out.

If I had to take a vote on one work that summed up the historical differences between the West and everyone else, differences that would eventually bring us the scientific revolution and all of the power that came with it, that work wouldn’t be one of science such as the Principia Mathematica or even some great work of philosophy or literature, but a history book.

The thing that makes Herodotus’ The Histories so unique was that it was the first time that one people tried to actually understand their enemies. It’s certainly eurocentric to say it, but the Greeks as far as I am aware, were first and unique here. It wasn’t just a one off.

Thucydides would do something similar for the intra-Hellenic conflict between Athenians and Spartans, but the idea of actually trying to understand your enemy, no doubt because so much about being an enemy lends itself to being hidden and thus needs to be imagined was brought to its’ heights in the worlds of drama and fiction. The great Aeschylus did this with the Persians as well with his tragedy named for that noble people.

It’s a long tradition that was seen right up until The Riddle of the Sands a 1903 book that depicted a coming war between the British and the Germans. Much different than the dehumanizing war propaganda that would characterize the Germans as less than human “Huns” during the First World War, The Riddle of the Sands attempted to make German aggression explicable given its’ historical and geographical circumstances even while arguing such aggression needed to be countered.

In Ghost Fleet by contrast the Chinese especially are reduced to something like Bond Villains, US control of the Pacific is wholly justified, its’ characters largely virtuous and determined. In that sense the novel fails to do what novels naturally excel at; namely, opening up realms to the imagination that otherwise remain inaccessible, and in this specific case the motivations, assumptions, and deep historical grievances likely to drive Chinese or Russian policy makers in the run up to and during any such conflict. Sadly, it is exactly such a lack of understanding that makes war great power wars and the existential risks to humanity they pose, perhaps not inevitable, but increasingly more likely.

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.

 

 

War and Human Evolution

40-12-17/35

 

Has human evolution and progress been propelled by war? 

The question is not an easy one to ask, not least because war is not merely one of the worst but arguably the worst thing human beings inflict on one another comprising murder, collective theft, and, almost everywhere but in the professional militaries of Western powers, and only quite recently, mass, and sometimes systematic rape. Should it be the case that war was somehow the driving mechanism, the hidden motor behind what we deem most good regarding human life, trapped in some militaristic version of Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees, then we might truly feel ourselves in the grip and the plaything of something like the demon of Descartes’ imagination, though rather than taunt us by making the world irrational we would be cursed to a world of permanent moral incomprehensibility.

When it comes to human evolution we should probably begin to address the question by asking how long war has been part of the human condition? Almost all of our evolution took place while we lived as hunter gatherers, indeed, we’ve only even had agriculture (and anything that comes with it) for 5-10% of our history. From a wide angle view the agricultural, industrial, and electronic revolutions might all be considered a set piece, perhaps one of the reasons things like philosophy, religion, and literature from millennia ago still often resonate with us. Within the full scope of our history, Socrates and Jesus lived only yesterday.

The evidence here isn’t good for those who hoped our propensity for violence is a recent innovation. For over the past generation a whole slew of archeological scholars has challenged the notion of the “peaceful savage” born in the radiating brilliance of the mind of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Back in 1755 Rousseau had written his Discourse on Inequality perhaps the best timed book, ever. Right before the industrial revolution was to start, Rousseau made the argument that it was civilization, development and the inequalities it produced that was the source of the ills of mankind- including war. He had created an updated version of the myth of Eden, which became in his hands mere nature, without any God in the story. For those who would fear humanity’s increasingly rapid technological development, and the victory of our artificial world over the natural one we were born from and into, he gave them an avenue of escape, which would be to shed not only the new industrial world but the agricultural one that preceded it. Progress, in the mind of Rousseau and those inspired by him, was a Sisyphean trap, the road to paradise lie backwards in time, in the return to primitive conditions.

During the revived Romanticism of the 1960’s archeologists like Francis de Waal set out to prove Rousseau right. Primitive, hunter-gatherer societies, in his view, were not war like and had only become so with contact from advanced warlike societies such as our own. In recent decades, however, this idea of prehistoric and primitive pacifism has come under sustained assault. Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined is the most popularly know of these challenges to the idea of primitive innocence that began with Rousseau’s Discourse, but in many ways, Pinker was merely building off of, and making more widely known, scholarship done elsewhere.

One of the best of examples of this scholarship is Lawrence H. Keeley’s War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. Keeley makes a pretty compelling argument that warfare was almost universal across pre-agricultural, hunter-gatherer societies. Rather than being dominated by the non-lethal ritualized “battle”, as de Waal had argued, war for such societies war was a high casualty affair and total.

It is quite normal for conflict between tribes in close proximity to be endemic. Protracted periods of war result in casualty figures that exceed modern warfare even the total war between industrial states seen only in World War II.Little distinction is made in such pre-agricultural forms of conflict between women and children and men of fighting age. Both are killed indiscriminately in wars made up, not of the large set battles that characterize warfare in civilizations after the adoption of agriculture, but of constant ambushes and attacks that aim to kill those who are most vulnerable.

Pre-agricultural war is what we now call insurgency or guerilla war. Americans, who remember Vietnam or look with clear eyes at the Second Iraq War, know how effective this form of war can be against even the most technologically advanced powers. Although Keeley acknowledges the effectiveness and brutal efficiency of guerilla war,  he does not make the leap to suggest that in going up against insurgency advanced powers face in some sense a more evolutionarily advanced rival, honed by at least 100,000 years of human history.  

Keeley concludes that as long as there have been human beings there has been war, yet, he reaches much less dark conclusions from the antiquity of war than one might expect. Human aversion to violence and war, disgust with its consequences, and despair at its, more often than not, unjustifiable suffering are near universal whatever a society’s level of technological advancement. He writes:

“… warfare whether primitive or civilized involves losses, suffering, and terror even for the victors. Consequently, it was nowhere viewed as an unalloyed good, and the respect accorded to an accomplished warrior was often tinged with aversion. “

“For example, it was common the world over for the warrior who had just killed an enemy to be regarded by his own people as spiritually polluted or contaminated. He therefore had to undergo a magical cleansing to remove this pollution. Often he had to live for a time in seclusion, eat special food or fast, be excluded from participation in rituals and abstain from sexual intercourse. “ (144)

Far from the understanding of war found in pre-agricultural societies being ethically shallow, psychologically unsophisticated or unaware of the moral dimension of war their ideas of war are as sophisticated as our own. What the community asks the warrior to do when sending them into conflict and asking them to kill others is to become spiritually tainted and ritual is a way for them to become reintegrated into their community.  This whole idea that soldiers require moral repair much more than praise for their heroics and memorials is one we are only now rediscovering.

Contrary to what Freud wrote to Einstein when the former asked him why human beings seemed to show such a propensity for violence, we don’t have a “death instinct” either. Violence is not an instinct, or as Azar Gat wrote in his War in Human Civilization:

Aggression does not accumulate in the body by a hormone loop mechanism, with a rising level that demands release. People have to feed regularly if they are to stay alive, and in the relevant ages they can normally avoid sexual activity all together only by extraordinary restraint and at the cost of considerable distress. By contrast, people can live in peace for their entire lives, without suffering on that account, to put it mildly, from any particular distress. (37)

War and violence are not an instinct but a tactic, thank God, for if it was an instinct we’d all be dead. Still, if it is a tactic it has been a much used one and it seems that throughout our hundred thousand year human history it is one that we have used with less rather than greater frequency as we have technologically advanced, and one might wonder why this has been the case.    

Azar Gat’s theory of our increasing pacifism is very similar to Pinker’s, war is a very costly and dangerous tactic. If you can get what you are after without it, peace is normally the course human beings will follow. Since the industrial revolution, nature has come under our increasing command, war and expansion are no longer very good answers to the problems of scarcity, thus the frequency of wars was on the decline even before we had invented atomic weapons which turned full scale war into pure madness.

Yet, a good case can be made that war played a central role in putting down the conditions in which the industrial revolution, the spark of the material progress that has made war an unnecessary tactic, occurred and that war helped push technological advancement forward. The Empire won by the British through force of arms was the lever that propelled their industrialization. The Northern United States industrialized much more quickly as a consequence of the Civil War, Western pressure against pre-industrial Japan and China pushed those countries to industrialize. War research gave us both nuclear power and computers, the space race and satellite communications were the result of geopolitical competition. The Internet was created by the Pentagon, and the contemporary revolution in bionic prosthetics grew out of the horrendous injuries suffered in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thing is, just as is the case for pre-agricultural societies it is impossible to disaggregate war itself with the capacity for cooperation between human beings a capacity that has increased enormously since the widespread adoption of agriculture. Any increase in human cooperative capacity increases a society’s capacity for war, and, oddly enough many increases in human war fighting capacity lead to increases in cooperative capacity in the civilian sphere. We are caught in a tragic technological logic that those who think technology leads of itself to global prosperity and peace if we just use it for the right ends are largely unaware of. Increases in our technological capacity even if pursued for non-military ends will grant us further capacity for violence and it is not clear that abandoning military research wouldn’t derail or greatly slow technological progress altogether.

One perhaps doesn’t normally associate the quest for better warfighting technologies with transhumanism- the idea “that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology”-, butone should. It’s not only the case that, as mentioned above, the revolution in bionic prosthetics emerged from war, the military is at the forefront of almost every technology on transhumanists’ wish list for future humanity from direct brain-machine and brain- to-brain interfaces to neurological enhancements for cognition and human emotion. And this doesn’t even capture the military’s revolutionary effect on other aspects of the long held dreams of futurists such as robotics.

The subject of how the world militaries have and are moving us in the direction of “post-human” war is the subject Christopher Coker’s  Warrior Geeks: How 21st Century Technology Is Changing the Way We Fight and Think About War and it is with this erudite and thought provoking book that the majority of the rest of this post will be concerned.

Warrior Geeks is a book about much more than the “geekification”  of war, the fact that much of what now passes for war is computerized, many the soldiers themselves now video gamers stuck behind desks, even if the people they kill remain flesh and blood. It is also a book about the evolving human condition and how war through science is changing that condition, and what this change might mean for us. For Coker sees the capabilities many transhumanists dream of finding their application first on the battlefield.

There is the constantly monitored “quantified-self”:

And within twenty years much as engineers analyze data and tweak specifications in order to optimize a software program, military commanders will be able to bio-hack into their soldiers brains and bodies, collecting and correlating data the better to optimize their physical and mental performance. The will be able to reduce distractions and increase productivity and achieve “flow”- the optimum state of focus. (63-64)

And then there is “augmented reality” where the real world is overlaid with the digital such as in the ideal which the US army and others are reaching for-to tie together servicemen in a “cybernetic network” where soldiers:

…. don helmets with a minute screen which when flipped over the eyes enables them to see the entire battlefield, marking the location of both friendly and enemy forces. They can also access the latest weather reports. In future, soldiers will not even need helmets at all. They will be able to wear contact lenses directly onto their retinas. (93)

In addition the military is investigating neurological enhancements of all sorts:

The ‘Persistence in Combat Program’ is well advanced and includes research into painkillers which soldiers could take before going into action, in anticipation of blunting the pain of being wounded. Painkillers such as R1624, created by scientists at Rinat Neuroscience, use an antibody to keep in check a neuropeptide that helps transmit pain sensations from the tissues to the nerves. And some would go further in the hope that one day it might be possible to pop a pill and display conspicuous courage like an army of John Rambos. (230)

With 1 in 8 soldiers returning from combat suffering from PTSD Some in the military hope that the scars of war might be undone with neurological advances that would allow us to “erase” memories.

One might go on with examples of exoskeletons that give soldiers superhuman endurance and strength or tying together the most intimate military unit, the platoon, with neural implants that allow direct brain- to-brain communication a kind of “brain-net” that an optimistic neuroscientist like Miguel Nicolelis seems not to have anticipated.

Coker, for his part, sees these developments in a very dark light, a move away from what have been eternal features of both human nature and war such as courage and character and towards a technologically over-determined and ultimately less than human world. He is very good at showing how our reductive assumptions end up compressing the full complexity of human life into something that gives us at least the illusion of technological control. It’s not our machines who are becoming like us, but us like our machines, it is not necessarily our gain in understanding and sovereignty over our nature to understand underlying genetic and neural mechanisms, but a constriction of our sense of ourselves.

Do we gain from being able to erase the memory of an event in combat that leads to our moral injury or lose something in no longer being able to understand and heal it through reconciliation and self-knowledge? Is this not in some way a more reduced and blind answer to the experience of killing and death in war than that of the primitive tribes people mentioned earlier? Luckily, reductive theories of human nature based on our far less than complete understanding of neuroscience or genetics almost always end up showing their inadequacies after a period of friction with the sheer complexity of being alive.

There are dangers which I see as two-fold. First, there is always the danger that we will move under the assumptions that we have sufficient knowledge and that the solutions to some problem are therefore “easy” should we just double-down and apply some technological or medical solution. Given enough time, the complexity of reality is likely to rear its head, though not after we have caused a good deal of damage in the name of a chimera. Secondly, it is that we will use our knowledge to torque the complexity of the human world into something more simple and ultimately more shallow in the quest for a reality we deem manageable. There is something deeper and more truthful in the primitive response to the experience of killing than erasing the memory of such experiences.

One of the few problems I had with Coker’s otherwise incredible book is, sadly, a very fundamental one. In some sense, Warrior Geeks is not so much a critique of the contemporary ways and trend lines of war, but a bio-conservative argument against transhumanist technologies that uses the subject of war as a backdrop. Echoing Thucydides Coker defines war as “the human thing” and sees its transformation towards post-human forms as ultimately dehumanizing. Thucydides may have been the most brilliant historian to ever live, but his claim that in war our full humanity is made manifest is true only in a partial sense. Almost all higher animals engage in intraspecies killing, and we are not the worst culprit. It wasn’t human beings who invented war, and who have been fighting for the longests, but the ants. As Keeley puts it:

But before developing too militant a view of human existence, let us put war in its place. However frequent, dramatic, and eye-catching, war remains a lesser part of social life. Whether one takes a purely behavioral view of human life or imagines that one can divine mental events, there can be no dispute that peaceful activities, arts, and ideas are by far more crucial and more common even in bellicose societies. (178)

If war has anything in human meaning over and above areas that are truly distinguishing between us and animals such as our culture or for that matter experiences we share with other animals such as love, companionship, and care for our young, it is that at the intimate level, such as is found in platoons, it is one of the few areas where what we do truly has consequences and where we are not superfluous.

We have evolved for culture, love and care as much as we ever have for war, and during most of our evolutionary history the survival of those around us really was dependent on what we did. War, in some cases, is one of the few places today where this earlier importance of the self can be made manifest. Or, as the journalist, Sebastian Junger has stated it, many men eagerly return to combat not so much because they are addicted to its adrenaline high as because being part of a platoon in a combat zone is one of the few places where what a 20 something year old man does actually counts for something.

As for transhumanism or continuing technological advancement and war, the solution to the problem starts with realizing there is no ultimate solution to the problem. To embrace human enhancement advanced by the spear-tip of military innovation would be to turn the movement into something resembling fascism- that is militarism combined with the denial of our shared human worth and destiny. Yet, to completely deny the fact that research into military applications often leads to leaps in technological advancement would be to blind ourselves to the facts of history. Exoskeletons that are developed as armor for our soldiers will very likely lead to advances for paraplegics and the elderly not to mention persons in perfect health just as a host of military innovations have led to benefits for civilians in the past.

Perhaps, one could say that if we sought to drastically reduce military spending worldwide, as in any case I believe we should, we would have sufficient resources to devote to civilian technological improvements of and for themselves. The problem here is the one often missed by technological enthusiasts who fail to take into account the cruel logic of war- that advancements in the civilian sphere alone would lead to military innovations. Exoskeletons developed for paraplegics would very likely end up being worn by soldiers somewhere, or as Keeley puts it:

Warfare is ultimately not a denial of the human capacity for social cooperation, but merely the most destructive expression of it. (158)

Our only good answer to this is really not technological at all, it is to continue to decrease the sphere of human life where war “makes sense” as a tactic. War is only chosen as an option when the peaceful roads to material improvement and respect are closed. We need to ensure both that everyone is able to prosper in our globalized economy and that countries and peoples are encouraged, have ways to resolve potentially explosive disputes and afforded the full respect that should come from belonging to what Keeley calls the “intellectual, psychological, and physiological equality of humankind ”, (179) to which one should add moral equality as well.  The prejudice that we who possess scientific knowledge and greater technological capacity than many of our rivals are in some sense fundamentally superior is one of our most pernicious dangers- we are all caught in the same trap.

For two centuries a decline in warfare has been possible because, even taking into account the savagery of the World Wars, the prosperity of mankind has been improving. A new stage of crisis truly earthshaking proportions would occur should this increasing prosperity be derailed, most likely from its collision with the earth’s inability to sustain our technological civilization becoming truly universal, or from the exponential growth upon which this spreading prosperity rests being tapped out and proving a short-lived phenomenon- it is, after all only two centuries old. Should rising powers such as China and India along with peoples elsewhere come to the conclusion that not only were they to be denied full development to the state of advanced societies, but that the system was rigged in favor of the long industrialized powers, we might wake up to discover that technology hadn’t been moving us towards an age of global unity and peace, after all, but that we had been lucky enough to live in a long interlude in which the human story, for once, was not also the story of war.

 

Waiting for World War III

The Consequences of War Paul Rubens

Everyone alive today owes their life to a man most of us have never heard of, and that I didn’t even know existed until last week. On September, 26 1983, just past mid-night, Soviet lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov was alerted by his satellite early warning system that an attack from an American ICBM was underway. Normal protocol should have resulted in Petrov giving the order to fire Russian missiles at the US in response. Petrov instead did nothing, unable to explain to himself why the US would launch only one missile rather than a massive first strike in the hope of knocking out Russia’s capacity to retaliate. Then, something that made greater sense- more missiles appeared on Petrov’s radar screen, yet he continued to do nothing. And then more. He refused to give the order to fire, and he waited, and waited.

No news ever came in that night of the devastation of Soviet cities and military installations due to the detonation of American nuclear warheads, because, as we know, there never was such an attack. What Petrov had seen was a computer error, an electronic mirage, and we are here, thank God, because he believed in the feelings in his gut over the data illusion on his screen.

That is the story as told by Christopher Coker in his book Warrior Geeks: How 21st Century Technology is Changing the Way We Fight and Think About War. More on that book another time, but now to myself. During the same time Petrov was saving us through morally induced paralysis I was a budding cold warrior, a passionate supporter of Ronald Reagan and his massive defense buildup. I had drawn up detailed war scenarios calculating precisely the relative strengths of the two opposing power blocs, was a resident expert in Soviet history and geography. I sincerely thought World War Three was inevitable in my lifetime. I was 11 years old.

Anyone even slightly younger than me has no memory of living in a world where you went to sleep never certain we wouldn’t blow the whole thing up over night. I was a weird kid, as I am a weird adult, and no doubt hypersensitive to the panic induced by too close a relationship with modern media. Yet, if the conversations I have had with people in my age group over the course of my lifetime are any indication, I was not totally alone in my weirdness. Other kids too would hear jets rumbling overhead at night and wonder if the sounds were missiles coming to put an end to us all, were haunted by movies like The Day After or inspired by Red Dawn. Other kids staged wars in their neighborhoods fighting against “robot”like Russians.

During the early 1980’s world war wasn’t something stuck in a black and white movie, but a brutal and epic thing our grandfathers told us about, that some of our teachers had fought in. A reality that, with the end of detente and in light of the heated rhetoric of the Reagan years, felt as much part of the future as part of the past. It was not just a future of our imaginations, and being saved by Stanislav Petrov wasn’t the only time we dodged the bullet in those tense years.

Whatever the fear brought on by 9-11, this anxiety that we might just be fool enough to completely blow up our own world is long gone. The last twenty three years since the fall of the Soviet Union have been, in this sense, some of the most blessed in human history, a time when the prospect of the big powers pulverizing each other to death has receded from the realm of possibility. I am starting to fear its absence cannot last.

Perhaps it’s Russian aggression against Ukraine that has revived my pre-teen anxieties, it’s seizure of Crimea, veiled threats to conquer the Russophone eastern regions of the country, Putin’s jingoistic speech before the Kremlin. Of course, of course, I don’t think world war will come from the crisis in Ukraine now matter how bad it gets there. Rather, I am afraid we were wrong to write the possibility of war between the big powers out of human history permanently. That one of these times, and when we do not expect it, 10 years or 20 years or 100 years from now one of these dust ups will result in actual clashes between the armed forces of the big powers, a dangerous game that the longer we played it would hold the real risk of ending in the very nightmare we had avoided the night Petrov refused to fire.

Disputes over which the big powers might come to blows are not hard to come up with. There is China’s dispute with Japan, the Philippines, other, and ultimately the United States, over islands in the Pacific, there is the lingering desire for China to incorporate Taiwan, there is the legacy conflict on the Korean peninsula, clashes between India and China, disputes over resources and trade routes through an arctic opened up by global warming, or possible future fights over unilateral geoengineering. Then there are frictions largely unanticipated , as we now see, Russia’s panic induced aggression against Ukraine which brings it back into collision with NATO.

Still, precise predictions about the future is a game for fools. Hell, I can still remember when “experts” in all seriousness predicted a coming American war with Japan. I am aiming, rather, for something more general.   The danger I see is that the big powers start to engage in increasingly risky behavior precisely because they think world war is now impossible. That all of us will have concluded that limited and lukewarm retaliation is the only rational response to aggression given that the existential stakes are gone. As a foolish eleven year old I saw the risk of global catastrophe worth taking if the alternative was totalitarian chains. I am an adult now, hopefully much wiser, and with children of my own, whose lives I would not risk to save Ukraine from dismemberment along ethnic/linguistic lines or to stop China from asserting its rising power in the Pacific. I am certainly not alone in this, but fear such sanity will make me party to an avalanche. That the decline of the fear that states may go too far in aggressive action may lead them to go so far they accidentally spark a scale of war we have deemed inconceivable.

My current war pessimism over the long term might also stem from the year I am in, 2014, a solemn centenary of the beginning of the First World War. Back when I was in high school, World War I was presented with an air of tragic determinism. It was preordained, or so we were taught, the product of an unstable system alliance system, growing nationalism and imperialism. It was a war that was in some sense “wanted” by those who had fought it. Historians today have called this determinism into question. Christopher Clark in his massive The Sleepwalkers details just how important human mistakes and misperceptions were to the outbreak of the war, the degree to which opportunities to escape the tragedy were squandered because no one knew just how enormous the tragedy they were unleashing would become.

Another historian, Holger Afflerbach, in his essay The Topos of Improbable War in Europe Before 1914 shows how few were the voices in Europe that expected a continental or world war. Even the German military that wanted conflict was more afraid until the war broke out, and did not end quickly, that conflict would be averted at the last minute rather than stopped. The very certainty that a world war could not be fought, it part because of the belief that modern weapons had become too terrible, led to risk taking and refusal to compromise, which made such a war more likely as the crisis that began with the assassination of Archduke Fransferdinad unfolded.

If World War II can be considered an attempt by the aggrieved side to re-fight the First World War, what followed  Japan’s surrender was very different, a difference perhaps largely due to one element- the presence of nuclear weapons. What dissuaded big states in the Cold War era from directly fighting one another was likelihood that the potential costs of doing so were too high relative to the benefits that would accrue from any victory. The cost in a nuclear age was destruction itself.

Yet, for those costs to be an effective deterrent the threat of their use had to be real. Both sides justified their possible suicide in a nuclear holocaust on the grounds that they were engaged in a Manichean struggle where the total victory of the opposing side was presented as being in some sense worse than the destruction of the world itself. Yes, I know this was crazy, yet, by some miracle, we’re still here, and whether largely despite of or because of this insanity we cannot truly know.

Still, maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps I should not be so uncertain over the reason why there have been no wars between the big powers in the modern era, perhaps my anxiety that the real threat of nuclear annihilation might have been responsible is just my eleven year old self coming back to haunt me. It’s just possible that nuclear weapons had nothing to do with the long peace between great powers. Some have argued that there were other reasons big states have seemingly stopped fighting other big states since the end of World War II, that what changed were not so much weapons but norms regarding war. Steven Pinker most famously makes this case in his Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.

Sadly, I have my doubts regarding Pinker’s argument. Here’s me from an earlier piece:

His evidence against the “nuclear peace” is that more nations have abandoned nuclear weapons programs than have developed such weapons. The fact is perhaps surprising but nonetheless accurate. It becomes a little less surprising, and a little less encouraging in Pinker’s sense, when you actually look at the list of countries who have abandoned them and why. Three of them: Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Ukraine are former Soviet republics and were under enormous Russian and US pressure- not to mention financial incentives- to give up their weapons after the fall of the Soviet Union. Two of them- South Africa and Libya- were attempting to escape the condition of being international pariahs. Another two- Iraq and Syria had their nuclear programs derailed by foreign powers. Three of them: Argentina, Brazil, and Algeria faced no external existential threat that would justify the expense and isolation that would come as a consequence of  their development of nuclear weapons and five others: Egypt, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Germany were woven tightly into the US security umbrella.

I am sure you have noticed that Ukraine is on that list. Had Ukraine not given up its nuclear weapons it is almost certain that it would not have seen Crimea seized by the Russians, or find itself facing the threat by Moscow to split the country in two.

A little more on Pinker: he spends a good part of his over 800 page book showing us just how savagely violent human societies were in the past. Tribal societies had homicide rates that rival or exceed the worst inner cities. Human are natural Hobbesians given to “a war of all against all”, but, in his view we have been socialized out of such violence, and not just as individuals, but in terms of states.

Pinker’s idea of original human societies being so violent and civilization as a kind of domestication of mankind away from this violence left me with many unanswered questions. If we were indeed so naturally violent how or why did we establish societies in the first place? Contrary to his claim, didn’t the institutionalization of violence in the form of war between states actually make our situation worse? How could so many of us cringe from violence at even a very early age, if we were naturally wired to be killers?

I couldn’t resolve any of these questions until I had read Mark Pagel’s Wired for Culture. What Pagel showed is that most of us are indeed naturally “wired” to be repulsed by violence the problem is this repulsion has a very sensitive off switch. The way it can be turned off is when our community is threatened either by those who had violated community norms, so-called moral anger, or when violence is directed towards rival groups outside of the community. In such cases we can be far more savage than the most vicious of animals with our creativity and inventiveness turned to the expression of cruelty.

Modern society is one that has cordoned off violence. We don’t have public hangings anymore and cringe at the death of civilians at the hands of our military (when we are told about them.) Yet this attitude towards violence is so new we can not reasonably expect it has become permanent.

I have no intention of picking on the Russians, and Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech would have done just as well or better here, but to keep things current: Putin in his bellicose oration before the Kremlin pressed multiple sides of the Pagel’s violence “off switch”:

He presented his opponents as an evil rival “tribe”:

However, those who stood behind the latest events in Ukraine had a different agenda: they were preparing yet another government takeover; they wanted to seize power and would stop short of nothing. They resorted to terror, murder and riots. Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites executed this coup. They continue to set the tone in Ukraine to this day.

And called for the defense of the community and the innocent:

Let me say one other thing too. Millions of Russians and Russian-speaking people live in Ukraine and will continue to do so. Russia will always defend their interests using political, diplomatic and legal means. But it should be above all in Ukraine’s own interest to ensure that these people’s rights and interests are fully protected. This is the guarantee of Ukraine’s state stability and territorial integrity.

What this should show us, and Americans certainly shouldn’t need a lesson in here, is that norms against violence (though violence in Ukraine has so far, thankfully been low), can be easily turned off given the right circumstance. Putin, by demonizing his Ukrainian opponents, and claiming that Russia would stand in defense of the rights of the Russian minority in Ukraine was rallying the Russian population for a possible escalation of violence should his conditions not be met. His speech was met with a standing ovation. It is this ease by which our instincts for violence can be turned on that suggests Pinker may have been too optimistic in thinking war was becoming a thing of the past if we are depending  on a change in norms alone.

Then there is sheer chance. Pinker’s theory of the decline of violence in general relies on Gaussian bell curves, averages over long stretches of time, but if we should have learned anything from Nassim Taleb and his black swans and the financial crisis, its the fat tails that should worry us most. The occurrence of a highly improbable event that flips our model of the world and the world itself on its head and collapses the Gaussian curve. Had Stanislav Petrov decided to fire his ICBMS rather than sit on his hands, Pinker’s decline of violence, up to that point, would have looked like statistical noise masking the movement towards the real event- an unprecedented expression of human violence that would have killed the majority of the human race.

Like major financial crises that happen once in a century, or natural disasters that appear over longer stretches of time, anything we’ve once experienced can happen again with the probability of recurrence often growing over time.  If human decision making is the primary factor involved, as it is in economic crises and war, the probability of such occurrences may increase as the generation whose errors in judgement brought on the economic crisis or war recedes from the scene taking their acquired wisdom and caution with them.

And we are losing sight of this possibility. Among military theorists rather than defense contractors, Colin S. Grey is one of an extreme minority trying to remind us the war between the big powers is not impossible as he writes in Another Bloody Century: 

If we, grant with some reservations, that there is a trend away from interstate warfare, there hovers in the background the thought that this is a trend that might be reversed abruptly. No country that is a significant player in international security, not least the United States, has yet reorganized and transformed its regular military establishment to reflect the apparent demise  of ‘old’ (interstate wars and the rise of new ones.

Grey, for one, does not think that we’ll see a replay of 20th century world wars with massive, industrial armies fighting it out on land and sea. The technology today is simply far too different than it was in the first half of the last century. War has evolved and is evolving into something very different, but interstate war will likely return.

We might not see the recurrence of world war but merely skirmishes between the big powers. This would be more of a return to normalcy than anything else. World wars, involving the whole of society, especially civilians, are a very modern phenomenon dating perhaps no earlier than the French Revolution. In itself a return to direct clashes between the big powers would be very bad, but not so bad as slippage into something much worse, something that might happen because escalation had gone beyond the point of control.

The evolution of 21st century war may make such great power skirmishes more likely. Cyber-attacks have, so far at least, come with little real world consequences for the attacking country. As was the case with the German officer corps in World War I, professional soldiers, who have replaced draftees and individuals seeking a way out of poverty as the basis of modern militaries seem likely more eager to fight so as to display their skills, and may in time be neurologically re-engineered so as to deal with the stresses of combat. It is at least conceivable that professional soldiers might be the first class to have full legal access to technological and biological enhancements being made possible by advances in prosthetics, mind-computer interfaces and neuroscience.

Governments as well as publics may become more willing to engage in direct conflict as relatively inexpensive and expendable drones and robots replace airmen and soldiers. Ever more of warfighting might come to resemble a videogame with soldiers located far from the battlefield.  Both war and the international environment in which wars are waged has evolved and is evolving into something very unlike that which we have experienced since the end of the Cold War. The father out it comes the more likely that the next big war will be a transhumanist or post-human version of war, and there are things we can do now that might help us avoid it- subjects I will turn to in the near future.

Psychobot

It is interesting… how weapons reflect the soul of their maker.

                  Don Delillo,  The Underworld

Singularity, or something far short of it, the very real revolution in artificial intelligence and robotics is already encroaching on the existential nature of aspects of the human condition that have existed for as long as our history.  Robotics is indeed changing the nature of work, and is likely to continue to do so throughout this century and beyond. But, as in most technological revolutions, the impact of change is felt first and foremost in the field of war.

In 2012 IEET Fellow Patrick Lin had a fascinating article in the Atlantic about a discussion he had at the CIA revolving around the implications of the robotics revolution. The use of robots in war results in all kinds of questions in the area of Just-War theory that have yet to even begun to be addressed. An assumption throughout Lin’s article is that robots are likely to make war more not less ethical as robots can be programmed to never target civilians, or to never cross the thin line that separates interrogation from torture.

This idea, that the application of robots to war could ultimately take some of the nastier parts of the human condition out of the calculus of warfare is also touched upon from the same perspective in Peter Singer’s Wired for War.  There, Singer brings up the case of Steven Green, a US soldier charged with the premeditated rape and murder of a 14 year old Iraqi girl.  Singer contrast the young soldier “swirling with hormones” to the calm calculations of a robot lacking such sexual and murderous instincts.

The problem with this interpretation of Green is that it relies on an outdated understanding of how the brain works. As I’ll try to show Green is really more like a robot-soldier than most human beings.

Lin and Singer’s idea of the “good robot” as a replacement for the “bad soldier” is based on a understanding of the nature of moral behavior that can be traced, as most things in Western civilization, back to Plato. In Plato’s conception, the godly part of human nature, it’s reason, was seen as a charioteer tasked with guiding chaotic human passions. People did bad things whenever reason lost control. The idea was updated by Freud with his ID (instincts) Ego (self) and Super-Ego (social conscience). The thing is, this version of why human beings act morally or immorally is most certainly wrong.

The neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer in his How we Decide has a chapter, The Moral Mind, devoted to this very topic.  Odd thing is the normal soldier does not want to kill anybody- even enemy combatants. He cites a study of thousands of American soldiers after WWII done by  U.S. Army Brigadier General S.L.A Marshall.

His shocking conclusion was that less than 20 percent actually shot at the enemy even when under attack. “It is fear of     killing” Marshall wrote “rather than fear of being killed, that is the most common cause of battle failure of the individual”. When soldiers were forced to directly confront the possibility of directly harming another human being- this is a personal moral decision- they were literally incapacitated by their emotions. “At the most vital point of battle”, Marshall wrote, “the soldier becomes a conscientious objector”.

After this study was published, the Army redesigned it’s training to reduce this natural moral impediment to battlefield effectiveness. “What was being taught in this environment is the ability to shoot reflexively and instantly… Soldiers are de-sensitized to the act of killing until it becomes an automatic response. pp. 179-180

Lehrer, of course, has been discredited as a result of plagiarism scandals, so we should accept his ideas with caution, yet, they do suggest what already know that the existential condition of war is that it is difficult for human beings to kill one another, and well it should be. If modern training methods are meant to remove this obstruction in the name of combat effective they also remove the soldier from the actual moral reality of war. This moral reality is the reason why wars should be fought infrequently and only under the most extreme of circumstances. We should only be willing to kill other human beings under the most threatening and limited of conditions.

The designers of  robots warriors are unlikely to program this moral struggle with killing into their machines. Such machines will kill or not kill a fellow sentient beings as they are programmed to do. They were truly be amoral in nature, or to use a loaded and antiquated term, without a soul.

We could certainly program robots with ethical rules of war, as Singer and Lin suggest. These robots would be less likely to kill the innocent in the fear and haste of the fog of war. It is impossible to imagine that robots would commit the horrible crime of rape, which is far too common in war. All these things are good things. The question for the farther future is, how would a machine with a human or supra-human level of intelligence experience war? What would be their moral/existential reality of war compared to how the most highly sentient creatures today, human beings, experience combat.

Singer’s use of Steven Green as a flawed human being whose “hormones” have overwhelmed his reason, as ethically inferior to the cold reason of artificial intelligence which have no such passions to control is telling, and again is based on the flawed Plato/Freud model of the conscience of human beings.  A clear way to see this is by looking inside the mind of the rapist/murderer Green who, before he had committed his crime had been quoted in the Washington Post as saying:

I came over here because I wanted to kill people…

I shot a guy here when we were out at a traffic checkpoint, and it was like nothing. Over here killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean you kill somebody and it’s like ‘All right, let’s go get some pizza’.

In other words, Green is a psychopath.

Again we can turn to Lehrer who in describing the serial killer John Wayne Gacy:

According to the court appointed psychiatrist, Gacy seemed incapable of experiencing regret, sadness, or joy. Instead his inner life consisted entirely of sexual impulses and ruthless rationality. p.169

It is not the presence of out of control emotions that explain the psychopath, but the very absence of emotion. Psychopaths are unmoved by the very sympathy that makes it difficult for normal soldiers to kill. Unlike other human beings they show no emotional response when shown depictions of violence. In fact, they are unmoved by emotions at all.  For them, there are simply “goals” (set by biology or the environment) that they want to achieve. The means to those goals, including murder, are, for them, irrelevant. Lehrer quotes G.K. Chesterson:

The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

Whatever the timeline, we are in the process of creating sentient beings who will kill other sentient beings, human and machine, without anger, guilt, or fear. I see no easy way out of this dilemma, for the very selective pressures of war, appear to be weighted against programming such moral qualities (as opposed to rules for who and when to kill) into our machines.  Rather than ushering in an era of “humane” warfare, on the existential level, that is in the minds of the beings actually doing the fighting, the moral dimension of war will be relentlessly suppressed. We will have created what is in effect, an army of psychopaths.