In the methods of conflict and war, the Samurai philosophy notes that rushing is never a part of a successful strategy. Nor is it good to be rushed into reactivity and be controlled by the enemy. Miyamoto's Book of Five Rings has been applied and popularized in the Western world as a book of business strategy. In this idiom, the business strategist was seen as a skilled warrior. Yet, Stephen Kaufmann, the 10th Dan Grand Master and founder of the School of the Snake, sees it differently:
Business is mental. War is mental and physical. The true warrior has no difficulty understanding this difference...the warrior is all passion although he shows none and 'kills' without hesitation.
Hence, while the overlapping of business and war is fascinating in the context of the Americanized rendering of the classic Samurai text, nonetheless it is also problematic. The result of this misrepresentation is that within contemporary Western values, historically rooted in efficient mass-production mechanisms and the machine itself, the enemy of war strategy is the reactive response, the efficient principle or strategy of the mechanisms of war itself. Today, in an era of globalized communication, fast-paced lifestyle, and instant answers and production, humans are led by the logic and telos of an unmanaged, unbridled faith in technology as both the goal and very method of what is deemed as being civilization.
This essay draws from works by Karl Jaspers and Jacques Ellul in an effort to highlight the need for cultural transformation with the aim of providing an argument against the deployment and further development of nuclear weapons. In addition, it heeds the warnings regarding politics-versus-ethics given by Hannah Arendt, revisits the unbridled potential of the destructive military-industrial complex via Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove, and concludes with insights offered by Robert Latiff in his book, Future Peace.
In their introduction to the proceedings of a meeting regarding advances in the philosophy of technology that took place in the early years of the Internet Age (the late 1990s), Avandro Agazzi and Hans Lenk note the important perspectives of mid-twentieth century's key philosophers of technology: Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. Agazzi and Lenk argue that Heidegger saw technology (dubbed as technique) as the perfected metaphysics of civilization, equipping humans with the possibility of confronting nature through successful instrumentalization. More critical than Heidegger, Jaspers described technology as the main problem of modernity. Agazzi and Lenk elaborate that at this important point and time in history, technology is distinctively human-made—and at that time (the late 1990s), humanity lived in a human-made world. Twenty short years later, calls are being voiced to embrace a post-human world, or even some sort of transhuman post-existence, enabled by the trajectory of technology and the simultaneously heightened level of nuclear threat.
Additionally, Jaspers presented the idea that technology as applied to the invention and possibly deployment of nuclear weapons has created the necessity of developing additional innovations to further increased opportunities for human cooperation. Reason and philosophical-existential principles of thought and reflection, and an overall culture of compassion should guide humans given the potential for a destructive utter end precipitated by the deployment of nuclear weapons. It stands to reason that the atomic age presents the need for both supra-political ideals, and curbing power politics and totalitarianism. Ultimately, this suggests the need for an international conversion of humanity away from self-serving politics. Political rhetoric alone is not enough, and a new sense of humanity must be built upon principles based on reasoned dialogue, reflective consciousness, responsibility, and restraint. In other words, for Jaspers, a new cultural orientation, an atomic awakening, is necessary for diminishing the possibility of nuclear war.
The possibility of the use of the atomic bomb suggests the importance of both military-industrial and cultural forms of deterrence. In his interpretation of Jaspers regarding the reality of nuclear bombs, Mats Andrén suggests that
in order to manage the new situation, societies need to go beyond what politics can achieve. Indeed, the status quo demands a new world order.
While the cultural aspect may be essential for establishing world peace, I argue that it may be in peril. Being a fierce critic of the technological age, Jacques Ellul analyzes the cultural elements of the technological era. He diagnoses the mental dysfunctions of the obsession with efficiency and other hang-ups of technological selves, and prescribes not just government policy, but a social set of conversions that channel cultural and psychological dispositions. Similarly, Jaspers shows a cautionary stance, when politicians call upon morality to advance their interests. He refers to having read a politician's closing statement that included the following advice:
In the atomic age, no policy will get us anywhere if it is not deeply rooted in the moral sense of the people...In matters of morality you have to start with yourself.
In a probing tone, Jaspers comments that politicians would need to show their high moral ground by example. The tangible and concrete social and ethical are key realms for Jaspers' argument regarding cultural transformation in response to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Furthermore, in The Future of Mankind, Jaspers strongly reminds the reader that experience of extremity requires individual resolve, namely,
the resolve of the human being in whom a change is wrought by extremity...This is why purely political thinking, confined to political rules is at a loss in extremities...Something above politics must guide political institutions….To us, the suprapolitical element is manifested in the ethical idea and the valor of sacrifice. [FM 23]
Although this ethos is suprapolitical it conveys an extremely democratic spirit. Jaspers explains:
All are equal. If we want democracy, this means that each, by his existence, must help to take care of the whole. [FM 309]
Democracy, thus, requires collective responsibility, not selfish individualism. A great collective spirit –on a global level—is required. Yet another example that is compatible with Jaspers and Ellul's position is in the context of observations presented by E. P. Thompson, who felt, as Michale Bess points out, that cooperative diplomacy was not sufficient to bring about a lasting peace. This position put Thompson sometimes in tension with his Marxist comrades. For Thompson, there must be a grand-scale human affirmation and commitment to anti-nuclear capacity. The peace movement,
if it is to make peace, and not only make protest, must set itself an agenda which extends into every nook and cranny of our culture, and our polity. It has to be an affirmative movement of an unprecedented kind.
In his introduction to the first official English translation of Ellul's The Technological Society, Robert Merton summarizes and defines Ellul's concept of technique as follows:
Technique refers to any complex of standardized means for attaining a predetermined result. Thus, it converts spontaneous and unreflective behavior into behavior that is deliberate and rationalized. The Technical man is fascinated by results, by the immediate consequences of setting standardized devices in motion. He cannot help admiring the spectacular effectiveness of nuclear weapons of war.
To Ellul, the looming threat to humanity is the automation of technique itself. No state or government-imposed policy change could solve these deeply embedded cultural and even, at times, psychological dispositions that feed the perceived destructive power of technique. This perception has totalistic implications for nuclear weapons technology.
For both Jaspers and Ellul, the invention of nuclear weapons signified a shift in the value and orientation of the human relationship with technology. For Ellul, our relationship with technology has always had the potential to create dread, threat, and ontological fear (TS 61-2). This is classically exemplified in the Luddite destruction of production machines, during the early period of the Industrial Revolution. However, the atomic age has harnessed technique and deployment of weapons in a way that exceeds more traditional fears about technology. Ellul writes:
today's war is total war...It is the onus and concern of all men. [TS 320]
Could not positive techniques of peace and economic development have co-opted the conceptual and material use of atomic science before it was used for weapons of war? This assertion is plausible to Seymour Melman, the author of The Peace Race. During the Cold War, Melman and other writers described the positive potential of reconfiguring and repurposing technological development toward disarmament, research, and development. This converges with the projections of peace in the Biblical phrase of beating swords into plowshares (Isaiah 2:4). However, Ellul clarifies the role of the modern nation-state apparatus' bureaucratic machine and the logic of technique toward destruction. He describes how in the 1930s and 1940s, the State, as a national or even internationally embedded engine of war, aligns itself with the military-industrial complex in the pursuit of a technique of war-over-peace and observes:
Research was greatly accelerated by the necessities of war and consequently directed toward a bomb. If the state had not been oriented toward the ends of war, it would not have devoted so much money to atomic research. [TS 99]
The cultural shift should come from an awakening to the possibility of nothingness. Commenting on Jaspers, Andrén writes that
Jaspers presented an either-or predicament. Either we would all be dead, or we would create a new world order. Either the end of human beings would occur, or a peaceful world order would emerge.
Here, Jaspers parallels Arendt's descriptions of the link (or the gap, when it occurs in dysfunctional environments) between morality and politics. She writes:
There are two good reasons why philosophy has never found a place where politics can take shape. The first is the assumption that there is something political in man that belongs to his essence. This simply is not so; man is apolitical. Politics arises between men, and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no real political substance. Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships.
In my reading of Arendt, she would agree with Andrén's interpretation that
Jaspers sees the atomic bomb in light of the criticism of the civilization of the technological age that he and others advanced in the interbellum. [ABR 6]
Thus, Jaspers warns that after the invention of the atomic bomb, the consequences of technology are much more severe than in any previous epoch in human history. The possibility of there being nothing, the elimination of planet Earth itself, stands as an ultimate endpoint of technology for Jaspers. The failures of the ultimate achievements of science here call to mind other critical and continental thought on the dialectic of Enlightenment, for instance, the work of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, that highlights the way in which history shows that scientific progress implies elements of reactive regress. Ellul might take this even further, to suggest that the idolatries of scientific humanism usher in the possibility of the post-human age. Science in the service of humanity becomes warped into inhumane vices and the elimination of humanity itself. There are ironic and tragic elements to this dialectic. Without an orientation to the divine, humanity's own, self-driven capacity for reason produces scientific solutions to problems. These solutions threaten to eliminate humanity and present human beings with the destruction of existence. The twentieth century's failures concerning Enlightenment speak to the pursuit of reason, to the end of the irrational destruction of humanity.
Jaspers was ever mindful of how the achievement of scientific progress demands both an existential and ethical as well as a political response, as well as a collective sense of responsibility and the need for reason. In The Future of Mankind, Jaspers was hopeful for a socio-cultural transformation. He asks a probing conscientious question, "could there be a new level of thought?" and continues to suggest that in both the East and the West,
human beings may be made more human than ever by experience and insight, by the will to change that is needed in both worlds, in which both may meet. [FM 141]
This is an impassioned plea for reason-as-compassion and dialogue, in response to potential annihilation. The exhortation for humanity to achieve solidarity in the face of technologically driven extinction is grounded in the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). A desperate sense of perhaps what Émile Durkheim might appeal to: a global collective conscience calls humans into a necessary common humanity on this issue. The national and diplomatic bodies and their decisions are simply not enough.
However, an obstacle to collective responsibility is the vacuum of the lifeworld of culture and individual freedom: the technological innovations of automation affect global communication. Would this lead to cooperation and solidarity, or to conflict and hatred? In their historical context, Arendt and Jaspers were critical of both sides of their contemporaneous political economies of the Cold War. On the one hand, State-Communism ran the risk of eliminating individual freedoms and culture via Totalitarianism. On the other hand, Jaspers and Arendt were also critics of Capitalism regarding its positivism and atomistic individualism, as it produced unhappy societies in the West.
Navigating the in-between of capitalism and communism required an ethic of responsibility. Andrén shows that for Jaspers this type of responsibility is closely tied to the ethos of the human being. He writes:
Responsibility comes from the individual capacity for transcendence, from the ability of individuals to disseminate responsibility in expanding circles. [ABR 6]
In Responsibility and Judgment, Arendt eloquently established the link between politics and ethics when she writes:
In the center of moral considerations of human conduct stands the self; in the center of political considerations of conduct stands the world.
The human being is embedded in the collective, but also must have the capacity for thinking, reasoning, and whistleblowing, driven not only by the culture of the polis, but also by the individual conscience.
Humanity—and by extensions its institutions, structures, and cultures—has always used technology. On the positive side, one can say that technology has the potential to be attractive to the military-industrial complex with the promise of the creation of kinder or gentler methods of warfare—reducing collateral damage, minimizing military casualties. However, a key drawback of automation technology in war is that with the removal of certain human elements of war via projections of automation and artificial intelligence, oversight seems to be gradually disappearing from war-making strategy and decision processes. This includes both regulatory oversight of technologies and legislative oversight and checks and balances. Without oversight, a technologically based authoritarian system of government is not easily monitored or reined in.
The hopes for the human-made world—the artifices of technological progress—are perhaps just that: artificial. Jaspers sees the possibility of human flourishing, the need for checks and balances on world powers, international solidarity and diplomacy, collective responsibility connecting to individual moral questioning. Stephen Erickson sees the possibility of restorative hope in the humanistic existential philosophy of Jaspers, even despite the threat of the post-human. All that is human may melt away from technology and, I might add, from Ellul's sense of technique. As Erickson warns, the vital institutions of education in human virtues may be eclipsed in the advance of automation and artificial intelligence (PTE 46). When it comes to interpersonal communication, and extending into the waging of conflict, violence, and war, the potential for technology to mediate, diminish, or even eliminate the exchange given an encounter with what Emmanuel Levinas calls the "face." What does this ethic say to the likes of sociological experiments such as the one by Stanley Milgram—when the human face disappears and automatic, cold, dehumanized respect for science and technology remains? The individual is left diminished and thus ripe for ceding power and authority to authoritarian systems and individuals—everything from autocrats to laboratory coat-wearing technocrats.
Further, the risk humankind runs now with its reliance upon technology for confronting, dominating, and certainly exploiting the natural world, and the threat of the eclipse of the human being cede human dependence over into an ultimate powerlessness. The logic of technique, not as Heidegger defined it, but as Ellul describes it with cold clarity, is a grave warning to the possibility of the erosion of the very forms of culture that Jaspers found necessary to make Existenz possible following atomic innovation. For instance, Robert Latiff has outlined these technological principles as being culturally reinforced by an assumed faith in the very idea of technology itself being the supreme good—this carries over into a generalized American belief that technological progress and prowess justifies and reinforces the military superiority of the United States. It also implies that this military-technological might is the best method to maintain the United States' global hegemony.
As alluded to above, at a more cultural and psychological level, the soft features of technique leave selves atomized and diminished. For Ellul's interpretation applied to today, technique conveys ideas about results, automation, efficiency, productivity, instrumental rationality, and the end point is an inauthentic and dehumanized form of media and communication. Jaspers' late-career work converges with Ellul on these points—especially concerning the erosion of the moral sphere from both totalitarianism and selfish instrumentality undermining ethics. Further, the weapons and arms trade itself is fueled by the paradox wherein there is an entire global economy for the development of arms for deterrence—yet (perhaps hypocritical) questioning of muscle-power displayed in nuclear testing from places such as North Korea: only an irrational leader would drop the big one, right? There is a stigma against the use of nuclear weapons, but not regarding the acquisition of them. This connects the proliferation of the arms race to the deterrence and peace race.
As for weapons technology, Ellul's predictions regarding the impulse and trajectory of technological culture in the mid-century still ring true today. Samuel Matlack pens a contemporary application of Ellul in The New Atlantis:
Perhaps the clearest example that Ellul provides of autonomy is the way that industry and the military began to adopt automation technology.
Automation and what Ellul calls "the self-augmentation" principle of technique both create a sense of helplessness in the trajectory of machine efficiency (TS 87). This echoes the phrasing of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the Communist Manifesto—namely, in the nineteenth century, the worker is an appendage of the machine. In the new middle-class technical society of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, humans are appendages of the technique itself; the lifeworld is colonized by the mentality of technical domination occurring amid a fear of an atomic end. Where in the early twentieth century there was Revolutionary hope, a new anxiety of the technical age gives humans now a realm of unceasing production toward a possible nothingness. Before technocracy, the power of the voice of society, or perhaps a revolutionary voice of the masses, could blame, and then potentially transform or overturn the political or economic power elite. In other words, the military-industrial complex could be seen as an external and not an internal psychological or cultural factor. However, Jaspers might remind us today that this would ignore our own responsibility in feeding the technological complex that both disquiets and serves humans as a panacea. As Ellul describes technologically driven communications and media—it agitates and integrates. Therefore, the finger must point to oneself, not abstractions of power such as the media or the man. In Matlack's words:
But in fact, Ellul argues, the mere technical possibility has served as the impetus for achieving it; economic, political, and moral considerations have all followed. [CTS 55]
Everyone is embedded in the political, moral, and economic, and by extension, cultural implications, actions, and choices that connect the individual to the collective.
According to Matlack, Ellul holds that the logic of technique perpetuates itself. Human beings increasingly become technicians wherein autonomy and automation, and the phenomenon of technique as a closed system combine to create a reality in itself with its special laws and its own determinations (TS 55). Nowhere is there a better cinematic rendering of the absurdity of the independence of technology and its accompanying principle of automation than in Stanley Kubrick's film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
In a brief description, Dr. Strangelove is a satire exposing the absurdity of nuclear war and modern life. Kubrick is likely making an ironic comment on the hypocrisy of the military-industrial complex in promoting peace, the great post-World War II Pax Americana. But in this effort, Kubrick highlights many ironies and hypocritical tensions in American culture: mainly that of war-or-peace, humanity-or-technology. In Dr. Strangelove, humanity is at the whim of its self-made technological codes and failed failsafe, taking the human factor, checks and balances, out of nuclear war: the Doomsday machine is supposed to be curbed by the restraint from the knowledge of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) which is supposed to create a balanced form of deterrence, however, Dr. Strangelove paints a different picture, namely one of automation that overrides human empathy and restraint.
Restraint-versus-hubris is a common theme in Indo-European cultural traditions. In a conservative voice, technology could be associated with hubristic enterprise that seeks to ignore or even exceed human limitations—to confuse the human with the divine. In terms of the tragic element of the human ego (either taken collectively or individually) creating destruction, one could refer to the Tower of Babel in the Hebrew Scriptures. However, considered in more realistic terms, the primary concern regarding the development of technology is the functionality of the intended final product. This means without moral reflexivity or a pause to question cause and effect and moral or ethical implications of a technological development or action, the use of technology ultimately relates to the mere question, "Does it work?"
Dr. Strangelove's absurdity echoes the sentiment found in Hebrew and Hindu scriptures. Undoubtedly, humans' technological hubris can create their destruction. Jaspers was ever-mindful of the way that the nuclear option is a game-changer. However, today, to think about the larger implications of technology, this extends far beyond the capacity for nuclear destruction. Extending the argument to today's rapid pace of communications technology, an increasing number of ever-invasive gadgets accompany humans from cradles to nursing homes, ultimately eliminating the majority of human-embodied aspects of life. It has the power to annul a sense of reality itself, as the reins of propaganda seem to be both horizontal and vertical, in the nomenclature of Ellul. Humans manipulate the world, as Heidegger might suggest. Then they create an artificial world. However, the artifice is just that, namely artificial, and then the artificial world has the potential to manipulate the human being.
When it comes to the implications of automation on war and political systems, Kubrick gives his audience a comedic set of insights. The character Dr. Strangelove follows the mad scientist trope, with political aspirations for leadership in a utopia. Kubrick portrays how science and technology take on a life of their own—that is, both utopian, and also genocidally destructive and eugenicist: he runs through examples of automation that move humanity toward destruction.
Today's Wars—what are they good for? Destruction. Creating annihilation. But war appears to give humans something of value, and this is why wars continue to be fought, as they perpetuate and propagate themselves almost like Kubrick's technocratic automatic machine. For instance, the Doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove cannot stop itself. Why? It drives humans to turn their will over to it due to the promise of social, political, economic, and psychological gains.
Since the time of the Ancient Greeks' theater performances and today's motion pictures, these entertainment venues reflect upon and critique humans psychologically and have served as a source of social reflexivity and criticism. In Dr. Strangelove, the human conflict between what Freud calls the destructive urge (thanatos) and life-fostering drives (eros) is exposed through the lens of the absurd relinquishing of responsibility to the mechanisms of automation. Today, Jaspers might draw attention to the way in which technological forces can help us avoid the essential need for human connection against the forces of destruction.
When viewed as a form of satire, Dr. Strangelove exposes humanity's duality, hypocrisy, and ultimate absurdity. In a Jaspers-like fashion, Kubrick left it up to the viewer to make an individual existential choice. It is up to the viewer to make a moral choice in how to respond: peace or war; love or hate; connection or destruction. A verbal or written phrase appears several times in Dr. Strangelove: "Peace is our Profession." Is there a double-entendre here? Is peace perhaps merely what humans are professing to aim for? As Latiff expresses it in Future Peace:
While we are not at war, per se, the world is certainly not at peace. [FP 4]
Peace has to be manifested in action, not merely in words. Dr. Strangelove is a comic testimony to and about the very absurd split human condition. What Jaspers might call for is seeking responsibility over automation as an existential response to this conundrum. Since automation poses a grave threat to the necessary conditions for Existenz, moral and ethical reflexivity are necessary for realizing any sense of justice in war—it requires human intervention. Latiff writes:
The idea of a machine having intentions or making judgments about justice is simply meaningless. [FP 7]
In extreme forms of automation and artificial intelligence, there is a built-in mechanism of efficiency and speed—yet the human requires a pause; moral reflection in response to threats of violence and war asks humans to "slow down the impulses to action" (FP 8).
Responding to the threat of atomic weapons use and subsequent total devastation due to nuclear war, there is a tension between Jaspers' position regarding a renewal of culture and Ellul's diagnosis regarding the collective psychological problem of technique as culture. Kubrick's film, Dr. Strangelove, illustrates this tension and the need for cultivating a thoughtful human choice concerning dealing with the hypocrisies of the Military-Industrial-Technical culture in the United States. I argue that this tension implies a need for a heightened conscious embrace of a humanistic, epistemologically reflexive, visionary, and Existenz-based philosophy where community members value connection, reason, reflection, and pause for the objective of challenging the looming post-human era that is driven by the logic of technique.
