Technology and Peace

One characteristic feature of certain trends of current socio-economic thinking, when it comes to the question of technology, is the curious mixture of fatalism and optimism that they are burdened with. On the one hand, we are told that we are helpless in the face of an all-encompassing technological style of living that has its inner logic towards universalisation (e.g. a ‘snowballing globalisation’), and on the other hand, we are also asked to believe nevertheless that we have enough room for manouevre within the straitjackets that we find ourselves living in (e.g. a powerful belief in 'rationality' as a part of the European heritage).

Turning to the question of military technology in particular one powerful line of argument is that such technology arises from ‘historical necessity’. Technology has its own way of growing, whether or not there are enough human beings interested in such development, and in a world with contrasting ideologies, it is imperative, so it is argued, that the experimentation with these different styles of technology is not restricted to only one nation. We have to make a virtue out of this necessity and project situations of warfare in front of us and develop the requisite skill, imagination, and 'realism' that is needed to preserve the balance of peace. We have to let our opponents know that we are aware of what to do if we are attacked, as well as convince ourselves that our opponents know that we know (as well as convince ourselves that our opponents know that we know that our opponents know .... ad infinitum). We know the price to be paid on both sides, and developing nuclear arsenals and playing war games is therefore needed for maintaining the fragile peace. By showing our opponents how seriously we take the possibility of warfare, we and them can together remind the rest of the world the cost of breaking the peace. In this way, our technologies can have an ‘educative’ value. There is a variation on this line of argument which says that we human beings are inherently prone to experiencing collective fear and panic, and in order to overcome such anxieties we form our own groups which are set off against other groups. Thereby, our collective fantasies are transferred on to the Other. The opponent is defined as the enemy perennially present at the gates, and it is only by developing more and more sophisticated forms of technology that we can make sure that the enemy does not actually capture our citadel of ‘liberty’ and ‘human rights’.

In arguments such as the above, we see two very different types of assumptions running against each other. On the one hand, they assume that the situation that we are born into is somehow 'given' and is incapable of being resolved. After all, I was born after Stalin and Nixon, Cuba and Hanoi, and there is nothing I can do to change the legacy that I find myself burdened with. This is a pessimistic interpretation of the present that we find ourselves in --- we are utterly at the mercy of the forces that the past has unleashed upon us. On the other hand, they also try to justify as fundamentally reasonable the attempt to diversify into various patterns of technology on the basis of an enlightened self-interest. And this is a radically optimistic understanding of human goodness --- our motives are transparent to ourselves and are untainted by any perverted seeking for power.

We, therefore, have a mixture at once of both high and low estimates of human freedom and rationality in these debates over technology. We claim that the world we live in is constantly threatened by the prejudices and the ingrained fears of human beings on the other side of the curtain. This builds up into a ‘faith’ in the inevitability of war and the belief that there is a hidden hand of historical destiny that is pressing the buttons, even against our wills. As a result, even when we think that we are acting in ‘freedom’ and in a ‘rational’ manner, this freedom and rationality are in fact based on our deep fears, anxieties, and suspicions. Meanwhile, every nation-state is obsessed with trying to prove its own Innocence. Governments tend to assume that they cannot be criticized and are above moral reproach because it always the willful perversity of the Other side that has set the ball rolling. Entire institutions thus make themselves incapable, in principle, of admitting mistakes.

Consequently, the concern for peace must go with some hard thinking over some of the fundamental notions on which the ‘idea’ of technology is based. It is not enough to point out the human dimunition in a technological society (people have been doing this since the 18th century and has now become a trite issue) : what is equally important is to search for resources that will enable people to develop patterns of living which are rooted in receptivity and responsiveness to the varieties of human/humane experience, and in a healthy suspicion that points towards a wider horizon. Many peace movements stop with the first step and hence die out soon after, their once-rushing youthful streams wasting themselves out in the deserts of infighting, civil-bickering and a lack of vision. The distortions of unexamined self-obsessiveness will not die out overnight but these must be exposed to the painful process of a self-forgetful discipline that is combined with a self-awareness within a community in which mutual questioning is possible.

Instead of accepting the heady mixture of fatalism and optimism that is presented to us from on high, what is needed is a sombre realism in which our awareness of our own unreasonableness is tempered by the desire to reach out to the pain and the need of the world's deprivation. In our moments of self-examination and silence, we need to seek a centre of stillness and also hope for a clarity of discrimination that will enable us to realise the depths of our own resources of deceitfulness. Too often, peace movements repeat the same mistake that is committed at higher levels. Instead of the ‘We-good, They-evil’ dichotomy that we hear from the authorities, they come up with their own version of a ‘We-good, The Government-evil’ dichotomy. Ironically, they castigate their own societies and sometimes even condone the militarism of other governments, and can reproduce with uncanny accuracy the neurotic responses of their governments, only this time directed against their own countries. This is why such movements very often do not solve anything except to change the perspectives from an external to a domestic level. What is instead required is the acceptance that we are all inside a world of cause-and-effect and various interactions, and that nobody has attained to that Archimedean point from which she could claim that her hands are totally clean from any complicity. A sombre realism, in contrast, will require from us the honest confession that we are willing and ready to participate in a community of grace and truthfulness, a community which is grounded in the belief that the truth can be spoken only in compassion and that grace can be received only through attention to the other and delight in the presence of the other. It is only this form of attentive love that can lead us to greater transparency in seeing and participating in the truth. This in turn is based on a faith, obscure but real, that the world's transforming starts through that first act of self-commitment involved in our opening up to the reality of transfiguring compassion trying to find some habitable space in a world of the dark night.