I have seen
the winged man, and he was no
angel.
R. S. Thomas, ‘The Refusal’
ROOF GARDENS, FEATHERS AND HUMAN SACRIFICE
‘Our Lord, the lord of the near, of the nigh, is made to laugh. He is arbitrary, he is capricious, he mocketh … He is placing us in the palm of his hand; he is making us round. We roll; we become as pellets. He is casting us from side to side. We make him laugh; he is making a mockery of us.’ This is how the last Aztec nobles, remnants of the civilization that was destroyed after the incursion into its territory of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1519, described their god – whose spirit they believed entered into their earthly ruler – in the Florentine Codex.
Named after the city where the original manuscript is kept, collected and transcribed thirty years after the conquest by a Franciscan missionary, the Codex presents a picture of a way of life that seems utterly alien to the modern mind. There are many today who, ascribing to the Aztecs needs and values they take to be universally human, cannot imagine a society in which these marks of humanity are absent. How could the Aztecs, fixed in rigid hierarchies, fail to want to choose the course of their lives? Surrounded as they were by ritual violence, how could they not feel revulsion? If the Codex does not reflect these impulses, it can only be because it portrays the Aztecs as less than human.
An alternative interpretation may be more interesting. If the Aztecs appear unrecognizably alien to the modern mind, it may be because the modern mind does not recognize itself in the Aztecs. We cannot understand the Aztecs because we do not want to understand ourselves.
Inga Clendinnen, a scholar with a profound insight into the Aztec way of life, writes:
There is one activity for which the ‘Aztecs’ were notorious: the large-scale killing of humans in ritual sacrifices. The killings were not remote, top-of-the pyramid affairs. If only high priests and rulers killed, they carried out most of their butchers’ work en plein air, and not only in the main temple precinct, but in the neighbourhood temples and on the streets. The people were implicated in the care and preparation of the victims, their delivery to the place of death, and then in the elaborate processing of the bodies: the dismemberment and distribution of heads and limbs, flesh and blood and flayed skins. On high occasions warriors carrying gourds of human blood or wearing the dripping skins of their captives ran through the streets, to be ceremoniously welcomed into the dwellings; the flesh of their victims seethed in domestic cooking pots; human thighbones, scraped and dried, were set up in the courtyard of the households – and all this among a people notable for a precisely ordered polity, a grave formality of manner, and a developed regard for beauty.
The ‘Aztecs’ were several different peoples, each with characteristics they prized as proof of their distinctiveness. But life in the great lake city of Tenochtitlan, which was for two centuries the capital of the Aztec empire and had a population greater than any city in Spain at the time the conquerors arrived, expressed an understanding of what it means to be human that was shared by the larger family of ‘Aztec’ or Mexica communities. Giving central place to human impulses that modern thinking denies, it is a conception that shocks and horrifies today.
The feature of the Aztec capital that most impressed the conquerors was its order and cleanliness. Inured to the filth of European cities, some of the soldiers wondered if Tenochtitlan was a dream. Linked to the land by three causeways, the city was a vast settlement, with its aqueducts, dwellings and streets meticulously planned. Large or small, its houses were bright and elegant. ‘All the buildings shone with whitewash and were bordered by ruler-straight canals and well-swept footpaths.’ Green gardens had been cultivated on land reclaimed from the lake, while plants and flowers were grown on the roofs of the houses. The centre of a network of trade and tribute, the city was rich in precious metals. The walls of great courtyards were decorated, and the priests produced beautiful painted books. Topped with its Great Pyramid, the central temple precinct contained dozens of pools, temples and lesser pyramids.
Today a city of this kind would be seen as an embodiment of human reason. In fact, this majestic settlement was an artefact of the practice of magic. The Aztec city was built to reflect a sacred cosmogony in which humankind was living in the last of five worlds, or ‘Suns’. When the last Sun ceased to shine, the city would be destroyed. Tenochtitlan sheltered those who lived in it from the gods – but only if they tended the city with the utmost care. ‘Through the devoted sweeping and ordering of the houses of men and the houses of gods, through remembering the sprinkle of pulque [an alcoholic brew] and the pinch of food routinely offered at the hearthstone, and the daily lacerations to draw forth one’s own blood, the Great Ones’ destructive manifestations might be held in check.’
For the Aztecs the gods were forces of havoc in the world. Forever at risk of disruption, order was a thin veil stretched over chaos. No increase of knowledge or understanding could deliver human life from primordial disorder.
A belief in underlying chaos lay at the heart of the Aztecs’ remarkably delicate aesthetic sensibility. If order was fleeting, so was beauty. Transiency was a mark of what is ultimately real – the opposite of many western traditions in which it is the passing world that lacks substance. The Aztecs used feathers not just as a type of adornment but as a pointer to the nature of things: like human life, the feather-work in which they delighted was essentially transitory. The ritual use of flowers expressed a similar conception. Warriors were taught to seek a ‘flowery’ death, a willed surrender to mortality that was celebrated in verse.
A belief in underlying chaos underpinned order throughout Aztec society. The violence of the state mirrored that of the cosmos and the gods. The Aztecs felt no shame in making a spectacle of killing. The population rejoiced in ‘the lines of victims dragged or driven up the wide steps of the pyramids to meet the waiting priests … fêted through the streets, to dance and die before the deities they represented … The killings, whether large or small, were frequent: part of the pulse of living.’
Such practices cannot help evoking horror. A way of life based on human slaughter can only be a type of barbarism. But barbarians may have something to teach those who think themselves civilized, and in this case they show how tenuous are the assumptions on which western thinkers base their hopes of peace. Even the greatest realists among these thinkers base their account of order in society on an account of human motivation that is far removed from reality.
Consider Thomas Hobbes. A byword for a hard-boiled view of life – ‘Hobbesian’ has passed into common use as shorthand for a brutish struggle for survival – the seventeenth-century Enlightenment thinker was able to erect his bold edifice of thought only by excluding actually existing human beings from it.
The system constructed by Hobbes has an impressive simplicity. Aiming to rely on a minimum of morality, he postulated that human beings want to avoid death by violence more than they want anything else. Finding themselves threatened with such a death, they will contract with one another to set up a ruler with unlimited power to command obedience. This sovereign – a mortal god, Hobbes sometimes writes – will bring peace to warring humanity: ‘The Passions that encline men to Peace, are Feare of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a Hope by their Industry to obtain them. And Reason suggesteth convenient Articles of Peace, upon which men may be drawn to agreement.’
Without this contract, Hobbes declared in a famous passage in Chapter 13 of his book Leviathan,
there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth, no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death …
Rendered in peerless English prose, it is a fine fancy. Much of the later part of Hobbes’s long life (he died in 1679 aged ninety-one) was given over to work in geometry – in particular, to squaring the circle. His belief that human beings respond to the threat of violent death by seeking peace is no less quixotic. He does not make clear whether he thought the process he described could ever actually occur. Yet there is no doubt that he believed his ideas could be practically useful, and he expressed the hope that his book would fall into the hands of a prince who would apply its teachings.
But if Hobbes’s language is marvellously clear, his thought is highly deceptive. The figures that appear in his system are not human beings, however abbreviated. They are homunculi invented in order to overcome a problem human beings are unable to solve: reconciling the imperatives of peace with the demands of their passions. Hobbes recognized that pride and the pursuit of glory stand in the way of order. Even so he believed that, impelled by the fear of death, humankind could renounce violent conflict and build a lasting peace.
Experience suggests otherwise. Rather than trying to escape violence, human beings more often become habituated to it. History abounds with long conflicts – the Thirty Years’ War in early seventeenth-century Europe, the Time of Troubles in Russia, twentieth-century guerrilla conflicts – in which continuous slaughter has been accepted as normal. Famously adaptable, the human animal quickly learns to live with violence and soon comes to find satisfaction in it.
It is true that, when they are weary of killing, human beings very often look for a tyrant to keep them in check. But it is never only a dream of order they are pursuing. A more organized type of bloodletting, often directed in the first instance against minorities – Jews, Roma, gay people, immigrants and others who may seem different – is part of the dream. Instead of passing their days in dull and senseless misery, those who practise persecution can see themselves as players in a struggle between good and evil.
Unable to exorcize violence within themselves, humans have chosen to sanctify it. This – without any pretence or compunction – was the Aztecs’ solution to the problem of order. Ritual killing embodied the savagery that is part of any kind of peace among humans.
When the tlatoani – the ‘Great Speaker’ who exercised supreme power – died and passed into the other world, the ruling lineage selected a new ruler from its adult males. Prowess in war was a crucial consideration, but once chosen the new ruler had to be imbued with the qualities of a god. Entering his palace only after a night passed praying naked in front of an image of the god Tezcatlipoca – the god of warriors and sorcerers whose name ‘Smoking Mirror’ referred to the obsidian mirrors made from dark volcanic glass that were used by the priests for divination – the ruler embodied the fickleness of fate. Also described as ‘the mocker’, Tezcatlipoca was celebrated in a poem whose first line reads: ‘I myself am the enemy.’ This was the god who entered into the ruler-elect. At that point the new ruler was possessed and there was no hope of taming his savagery: ‘when we replaced one, when we selected someone … he was already our lord, our executioner, and our enemy.’
The contrast with western models of authority is stark. Hobbes may have described his absolute sovereign as a mortal god, but it was a god bound by the terms of an agreement: if it did not keep the peace, it could be overthrown. But what if the ruler used its absolute power to pre-empt rebellion and then behaved with the arbitrariness of a god? The Aztecs expected nothing else. No one among them imagined that power could be tamed. But nor did they believe it could be dispensed with. Humans were fated to live in a world in which their rulers were their enemies. Yet these same enemies ensured a type of order that would not otherwise be possible.
If Hobbes had been right in his diagnosis of human conflict, Aztec life could only be a brutish anarchy, without art, industry or letters. The actuality was the thriving metropolis that so amazed the invading Spaniards. Destroyed soon after the conquistadores arrived, the Aztec city was an experimental refutation of some of the most fundamental assumptions of modern western ethics and politics.
Nothing about the Aztecs is as unsettling as their way of death. Many reasons have been suggested for their practice of ritual sacrifice. Clendinnen lists some of these ‘grandly simple explanations’: ‘human sacrifice as a device to enrich a protein-poor diet; human sacrifice as the invention of a sinister and cynical elite, a sort of amphetamines-for-the-people account; human sacrifice as technology, the Mexica response to the second law of thermodynamics, with the taking of the hot and pulsing human heart their despairing effort to replace energy lost by entropic waste’. As she writes, any explanation of this kind ‘assumes that which most needs to be demonstrated’.
It may be more useful to look at what happened. The victims were none of them volunteers. They seem to have been mostly outsiders – captives taken in war and slaves received in tribute from other cities. Only one category of victim definitely came from within the community – the small children who were offered to the god at points on the sacred calendar, who had been ‘purchased’ from their mothers. With regard to adult victims, a variety of techniques was employed to secure compliance. Most likely mind-altering drugs were used along with alcohol, together with practices of rehearsal that numbed the feeling of dread. There was no affectation of sympathy towards the victims. But nor were the victims seen as less than human, like so many casualties of the mass slaughters of the twentieth century, or sacrificed for the sake of an imaginary future generation that would live in peace. Instead, the captor and the captive were merged into one.
At the core of the rituals surrounding the killing was a blurring of the sense of self. Admired by their captors, warrior captives were visited and adorned in preparation for their deaths. Once the captive was killed – whether by ritual combat or by being beheaded on the killing stone at the top of the temple pyramid – the captor was given a gourd of blood, with which he daubed the mouths of idols throughout the city. The flesh of the captive was then used by the captor’s family in a ritual meal. But the captor himself did not partake, saying, ‘Shall I perchance eat my very self?’
Aiming to loosen the grip of the warrior’s conventionally assigned identity, these ritual killings allowed a connection to be made with the chaos that was seen to be more truly real. Stripping away the meanings with which the mind covers its fear, the killings allowed a revelation of naked humanity. Having been exposed, the absence of meaning was once again veiled. Swaddled in blood, life began again.
In Aztec thinking humans do not come into the world as fully functioning beings. Half-finished puppets of the gods, they must make their own identities – but not by choosing who or what they will be. Their ‘faces’ emerge in interaction with a world they can never control, or come close to understanding.
In the ritual killings, nothing was left of human pride. If they were warriors, the victims were denied any status they had in society. Stripped of their warrior regalia, they were:
trussed like deer to be lugged, heads lolling, up the pyramid steps; others, similarly trussed, cast writhing into the fire … The watchers must have seen an unfluent movement of men, climbing or stumbling or dragged up the steps; then seized, flung back, a priest’s arm rising, falling, then rising again; the flaccid bodies rolling and bouncing down the pyramid’s flanks … They watched again as each broken, emptied cadaver was taken up to be carried to the captor’s home temple for dismemberment and distribution: flesh scraped from skulls and thighbones; fragments of flesh cooked and eaten; human skins, dripping with grease and blood, stretched over living flesh; clots of blood scooped up to smear the temple walls.
It must have been a grisly spectacle – and for anyone who reads about it today, it is also uncanny. In Aztec ritual, Clendinnen concludes: ‘[The Aztecs] knew they were killing their fellow men. It was that humanity which defined them as victims. The Mexica [Aztec] genius, deployed across the astonishing stretch of their ceremonial life, was to figure a human stance within the inhuman conditions of existence.’
It is a superb summation, but it does not remove a sense of unease. The alien quality of the Aztec world does not come simply from the fact that they made a spectacle of killing. The Romans did as much in their gladiatorial games, but they did so for the sake of entertainment. The uncanniness of the Aztecs comes from the fact that they killed in order to create meaning in their lives. It is as if by practising human sacrifice as they did the Aztecs were unveiling something that in our world has been covered up.
Modern humanity insists violence is inhuman. Everyone says nothing is dearer to them than life – except perhaps freedom, for which some assert they would willingly die. Many have been ready to kill on an enormous scale for the sake of creating a future in which no one dies of violence. There are also some convinced that violence is fading away. All say they want an end to the slaughter of humans by other humans that has shaped the course of history.
The Aztecs did not share the modern conceit that mass killing can bring about universal peace. They did not envision any future when humans ceased to be violent. When they practised human sacrifice it was not to improve the world, still less to fashion some higher type of human being. The purpose of the killing was what they affirmed it to be: to protect them from the senseless violence that is inherent in a world of chaos. That human sacrifice was a barbarous way of making meaning tells us something about ourselves as much as them. Civilization and barbarism are not different kinds of society. They are found – intertwined – whenever human beings come together.
If you take the Aztec world seriously – and it was, after all, one made by human beings – you will see the modern world in a new light. Humans kill one another – and in some cases themselves – for many reasons, but none is more human than the attempt to make sense of their lives. More than the loss of life, they fear loss of meaning. There are many who prefer dying to some kinds of survival, and quite a few that have chosen to go to a violent end.
At this point it is easy to think of jihadists courting martyrdom, but not all who choose a violent end are religious believers. Suicide-bombing has often been taken up for pragmatic reasons: it is a cost-effective method in asymmetric warfare, which can have benefits for the bombers’ families. But the practice has spread because it appeals to a need for meaning. The Tamil guerrilla fighters in Sri Lanka who first developed the explosive suicide vest were disciples of Lenin, as were some of the suicide-bombers in Lebanon in the Eighties. Rejecting any idea of an afterlife, they cherished the far more absurd fantasy of making a new world.
That humans are prone to absurdity was recognized by Hobbes. In a delightful passage in Chapter 5 of Leviathan that undermines much of the rest of the book, he writes of ‘the priviledge of Absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only’. By absurdity Hobbes meant the tendency of humans to use words without meaning, and then act on them. Here he pointed to a feature of the human animal that his rationalist philosophy concealed from view. Alone among the animals, humans seek meaning in their lives by killing and dying for the sake of nonsensical dreams. Chief among these absurdities, in modern times, is the idea of a new humanity.
In the twentieth century, the worst episodes of mass killing were perpetrated with the aim of remaking the species. If followers of Lenin dreamt of a socialist humanity, the Nazis imagined they were bringing into being a ‘superior race’. Western governments that launch wars of regime change may seem in another league, but the impulses that drive them are not altogether different. Critics claim the true aims of these adventures are geopolitical – the seizure of oil or some other strategic advantage. No doubt geopolitics plays a part, but a type of magical thinking may be more important. Serving no realizable strategic objective, wars of regime change are an attempt to secure a place in history. By intervening in societies of which they know nothing, western elites are advancing a future they believe is prefigured in themselves – a new world based on freedom, democracy and human rights. The results are clear – failed states, zones of anarchy and new and worse tyrannies; but in order that they may see themselves as world-changing figures, our leaders have chosen not to see what they have done.
If the Aztecs also practised a type of magical thinking, they knew that their magic would eventually fail. When the Spaniards came they fitted nowhere in the Aztec scheme. Treacherous and cowardly, they breached every custom of war – attacking unarmed men, killing warriors on sacred ground, wiping out entire villages and kidnapping the tlatoani. The invading Spaniards also brought plague with them – the smallpox that ravaged the region’s indigenous populations.
Looking for guidance in omens, the Aztecs saw a light in the sky that sank into the lake. Still resisting and enduring a four-month siege, they surrendered only when the last tlatoani was caught trying to flee the city. The last of the five Suns had ceased to shine.
The ruin of the city was total. Having described its great rooms, courtyards, orchards, stonework and temples, one of the Spanish soldiers wrote: ‘All that I then saw is overthrown and destroyed; nothing is left standing.’ The remaining inhabitants were marked by the Spaniards as slaves. Women and boys were branded on the face. Promised safety, the tlatoani was tortured and then hanged. The temple guardians were killed by having dogs set on them.
No one can know what the priests thought in their final agony, but it is possible to suppose that they were not surprised by their fate.
DARK MIRRORS, HIDDEN ANGELS AND AN ALGORITHMIC PRAYER-WHEEL
For some advanced thinkers, violence is a type of backwardness. In the more modern parts of the world, they tell us, war has practically disappeared. A litter of semi-failed states, lacking the benefits of modern institutions and modern ideas, the developing world may still be wracked by every kind of conflict – ethnic, tribal and sectarian. Elsewhere humankind has marched on. The great powers are neither internally divided nor inclined to go to war with one another. With the spread of democracy and the increase of wealth, these states preside over an era of peace the like of which the world has never seen. For those who lived through it, the last century may have seemed notably violent; but that is a subjective, unscientific judgement, and not much more than anecdote. Objectively assessed, the number of those killed in violent conflicts was steadily dropping. The numbers are still falling, and there is reason to think they will fall further. A vast shift is under way, not strictly inevitable but still enormously powerful. After many centuries of slaughter, humankind is entering the era of the long peace. Presented with an impressive array of tables and figures, this has proved a popular message.
To be sure, the picture of declining violence may not be all that it seems to be. The statistics that are presented focus heavily on deaths on the battlefield. If these numbers have been falling, one reason is the balance of terror: nuclear weapons have so far prevented industrial-style warfare between great powers. At the same time deaths of non-combatants have been steadily rising. Around a million of the ten million deaths due to the First World War were those of non-combatants. Half of the more than fifty million casualties in the Second World War and over 90 per cent of the millions who have perished in the conflict that has raged in the Congo for decades almost unnoticed by western opinion belong in that category. Again, if great powers have avoided direct armed conflict since the end of the Second World War they have at the same time pursued their rivalries in many proxy wars. Colonial and neo-colonial conflicts in South-East Asia, the Korean War and the Chinese invasion of Tibet, British counter-insurgency warfare in Malaya and Kenya, the abortive Franco-British invasion of Suez, the Angolan civil war, the Soviet invasions of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan, the Vietnam War, the Iran–Iraq War, American involvement in the genocide of indigenous peoples in Guatemala, the first Gulf War, covert intervention in the Balkans and the Caucasus, the invasion of Iraq, the use of airpower in Libya, military aid to insurgents in Syria, the proxy war that is being waged against a background of ethnic divisions in Ukraine – these are only some of the contexts in which great powers have been involved in continuous warfare while avoiding direct conflict with one another.
War has changed, but it has not become less destructive. Rather than a contest between well-organized states that can at some point negotiate peace it is now more often a many-sided conflict among armed irregulars in fractured or collapsed states, which no one has the power to end. The ferocious and seemingly unending conflict in Syria – which features the methodical use of starvation and systematic destruction of urban environments, alongside continuous sectarian massacres – suggests a type of unconventional warfare whose time has come.
Among other casualties, statistics of battlefield deaths pass over the victims of state terror. With increasing historical knowledge it has become clear that the ‘Holocaust-by-bullets’ – the mass shootings of Jews in Nazi-occupied countries, mostly in the former Soviet Union, during the Second World War – was perpetrated on an even larger scale than previously realized. Soviet agricultural collectivization incurred millions of foreseeable deaths, mainly as a result of starvation, with deportation to uninhabitable regions, life-threatening conditions in the gulag and military-style operations against recalcitrant villages also playing a part. Peacetime casualties of internal repression under the Mao regime have been estimated to be around seventy million. How these deaths fit into the overall scheme of declining violence is unclear.
Estimating the numbers involves complex questions of cause and effect, which cannot always be separated from moral judgements. There are many kinds of lethal force that do not lead to immediate death. Are those who die from hunger or disease during a war or in its aftermath counted among the casualties? Do refugees whose lives are shortened by their sufferings appear in the count? Do victims of torture figure in the calculus if they succumb years later from the physical or mental damage that has been inflicted on them? Do infants who are born to brief and painful lives as a result of exposure to Agent Orange or depleted uranium find a place in the roll call of the dead? If women who have been raped as part of a military strategy of sexual violence die before their time, will their deaths appear in the statistical tables?
While the seeming exactitude of statistics showing a decline in violence has a compelling charm, the human cost of warfare may be incalculable. Deaths by violence are not all equal. It may be terrible to die as a conscript in the trenches or in an aerial bombing campaign. It is worse to be killed as part of a systematic campaign of extermination. Even among the worst kinds of violence there are qualitative differences. To perish from overwork, beating or cold in a labour camp, your end unknown to those who care for you, may be a greater evil than death in battle. It is worse still to be consigned to a camp such as Treblinka, which existed only to deal out death. Passing over these distinctions, the statistics presented by those who celebrate the long peace are morally dubious, if not meaningless.
The highly contingent nature of the figures is another reason for not taking them too seriously. If the Socialist Revolutionary Fanya Kaplan had succeeded in assassinating Lenin when two of the three bullets she fired at him entered his body in August 1918, violence would still have raged in Russia for some years; but the Soviet state might not have survived and the killing machine Lenin went on to construct could not have been used by Stalin for slaughter on a larger scale. If a resolute war leader had not unexpectedly come to power in Britain in May 1940, Europe would most likely have remained under Nazi rule for decades if not generations to come – time in which it could implement more fully its plans of racial purification and genocide. If the Cuban missile crisis had not been defused as the result of action by a single courageous individual – a Soviet submariner who rejected orders from his captain to launch a nuclear torpedo – a nuclear war could have occurred causing colossal numbers of fatalities.
There is something repugnant in the notion that endemic warfare in small and weak states is a result of their backwardness. Desolating some of the most refined civilizations that have ever existed, the wars that ravaged South-East Asia in the Second World War and the decades that followed were the work of colonial powers. One of the causes of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 was the segregation of the population by German and Belgian imperialism. War in the Congo has been fuelled by western demand for natural resources. If violence has dwindled in advanced societies, one reason may be that they have exported it. Then again, the idea that violence is declining in the most highly developed countries is questionable. Judged by accepted standards, the United States is the most advanced society in the world. It also has the highest rate of incarceration, some way ahead of Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Around a quarter of all the world’s prisoners are held in American gaols, many for exceptionally long periods. The state of Louisiana imprisons more of its population per capita than any country in the world – three times as many as Iran, for example. A disproportionate number of the vast American gaol population are black, many prisoners are mentally ill and growing numbers aged and infirm. Imprisonment in America involves the continuous risk of violence from other inmates, including an endemic threat of rape, and months or years spent in solitary confinement – a penalty that has sometimes been classified as torture. Along with mass incarceration, torture appears to be integral in the functioning of the world’s most advanced state. It may not be accidental that the practice is often deployed in the special operations that have in many contexts replaced traditional warfare. The extension of counter-terrorism operations to include assassination by unidentifiable mercenaries and remote-controlled killing by the use of drones is part of this shift.
Deaths on the battlefield have declined and may continue to decline. From one angle this can be seen as an advancing condition of peace. From another point of view that looks at the variety and intensity with which violence is being employed, the long peace can be described as a condition of perpetual war.
It is obvious that these are quibbles. Talk of state terror and proxy wars, mass incarceration and torture only dampens the spirit, while questioning the statistics is to miss the point. It is true that the figures are murky, leaving a vast range of casualties unaccounted for. But the human value of these numbers comes from this opacity. Like the obsidian mirrors the Aztecs made from volcanic glass and used for purposes of divination, these rows of graphs and numbers contain nebulous images of an unknown future – visions that by their very indistinctness are capable of giving comfort to anxious believers in human improvement.
Plundered and brought to Europe after the Aztecs were conquered and destroyed by the Spaniards, one of these mirrors was used as a ‘scrying-glass’ by the Elizabethan mathematician, navigator and magician Dr John Dee (1527–1608/9). In her celebrated study The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, first published in 1972, Frances Yates describes Dee as ‘a figure typical of the late Renaissance magus who combined “Magia, Cabala, and Alchymia” to achieve a world-view in which advancing science was strangely mingled with angelology’. Described by Queen Elizabeth as ‘my philosopher’, Dee acted as a court adviser and ‘intelligencer’ or spy. Travelling widely in Europe, he pursued his interest in science and hermetic philosophy while engaged on other missions.
Dee’s fame came from his reputed possession of occult powers. Working with a scryer or medium, he claimed to discern ‘angels’ pointing to letters and symbols, which he transcribed. According to Dee, the archangel Michael appeared in one of these sessions with a message about the relationship between divine and earthly powers. Commanding Dee to record what he was about to see, the angel produced some elaborate tables, each containing lists of numbers and letters, which together contained a revelation of a future global order based on godly principles. Dee copied the tables into his notebook, and at that point the scryer fell silent.
In his biography of Dee, Benjamin Woolley writes that more than almost anyone at the time Dee realized that the impact of the scientific revolution would be to displace humankind from the centre of things. He:
had seen with his own eyes the world spill off the edge of the map, and the universe burst out of its shell. And as the cosmos had spread into infinity, so he had seen his and everyone’s position in it correspondingly reduced. For the first time in over a thousand years, anyone with the learning to see (and there were still very few) beheld a universe that no longer revolved around the world, and a world that no longer revolved around humans.
The role of occult beliefs in Dee’s time was peculiarly modern. The emerging science of astronomy reinforced the appeal of magic as a way of securing human primacy in the world. Like many others in late Renaissance times, Dee needed reassurance of the continuing importance of human action. Offering a vision of the future in their tables of letters and figures, the angels confirmed that humans still had a central place in the cosmos.
Five centuries later, there are many who need reassurance of their significance in the world. The Aztecs and the Elizabethans looked into their mirrors to discern danger. Today those who peer into the future want only relief from anxiety. Unable to face the prospect that the cycles of war will continue, they are desperate to find a pattern of improvement in history. It is only natural that believers in reason, lacking any deeper faith and too feeble to tolerate doubt, should turn to the sorcery of numbers. Happily there are some who are ready to assist them. Just as the Elizabethan magus transcribed tables shown to him by angels, the modern scientific scryer deciphers numerical auguries of angels hidden in ourselves.
To give succour to the spiritually needy is an admirable vocation. No one will deny the intellectual ingenuity and humanistic passion that go into the effort. Still, there is always room for improvement. Whether they are printed on paper or filed on an e-reader, books cannot give the most enlightened among us what they most need: an instantly available sensation of newly created meaning. It is only new inventions that can meet modern needs. At the same time, inspiration can be found in more primitive technologies.
A revolving metal cylinder containing a sacred text, the Tibetan prayer-wheel is set in motion by the turn of a human hand. The result is an automated form of prayer, which the votary believes may secure good fortune and a prospect of liberation from the cycle of birth and death. The belief-system that the prayer-wheel serves may possess a certain archaic charm, with the sacred texts displaying a dialectical subtlety rarely found in western philosophy. Still, it is self-evident to any modern mind that the practice is thoroughly unscientific. How much better, then, to develop a state-of-the-art prayer-wheel – an electronic device containing inspirational texts on the progress of humanity, powered by algorithms that show this progress to be ongoing.
Unlike the old-fashioned prayer-wheel, the device would be based on the best available scientific knowledge, including big data demonstrating the decline of violence. Designed as an amulet or talisman that could be worn at all times, it would have the ability instantly to process and deliver statistics that never fail to show long-term improvement in the human world. If regress of any kind occurred, it would appear as a temporary pause in the forward march of the species. Best of all, the device would be fully interactive. In order to ward off moods of doubt, it could be programmed to broadcast at regular intervals a sound version of the figures. The wearer could recite the statistics out loud, and by constant repetition expel any disturbing thoughts from the mind.
There will be some who object that meaning cannot be manufactured and then programmed into our minds in this way. Meaning shows itself in intimations, these reactionaries will say – the shadow that reminds of mortality; the sudden vista that reveals an unimagined loveliness; the brief glance that opens a new page. Such objections will count for nothing. The advance of knowledge cannot be halted any more than the desire for improvement can be permanently thwarted. A state-of-the-art electronic tablet continuously generating meaning from numbers will render the dark mirrors and prayer-wheels of the past obsolete.
HUMAN REDUNDANCY AND THE CYBORG ECONOMY
The pioneers of modern robotics, Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann, were both involved in the Manhattan Project which produced the atomic bomb. Wiener is recognized as having originated cybernetics, while Neumann is acknowledged to be the principal progenitor of the mathematical theory of games. They were fully aware that the sciences they were developing opened up possibilities that stretched far beyond the struggle against Nazism. Writing in 1954, Wiener mused on the power that humans were acquiring with this new knowledge:
[Humans are] playing a game against the arch enemy, disorganization. Is this devil Manichaean or Augustinian? Is it a contrary force opposed to order or is it the very absence of order itself? The difference between these two sorts of demons will make itself apparent in the tactics to be used against them. The Manichaean devil is an opponent, like any other opponent, who is determined on victory and will use any trick of craftiness or dissimulation to obtain this victory. In particular, he will keep his policy of confusion secret, and if we show any signs of beginning to discover his policy, he will change it in order to keep us in the dark. On the other hand, the Augustinian devil, which is not a power in itself, but the measure of our own weakness, may require our full resources to uncover, but when we have uncovered it, we have in a certain sense exorcised it …
For Wiener science was a game played against nature. Whether nature was a malign demiurge or a mere absence of order was left open. Even in the latter case nature exhibits a kind of intelligence, and there is no reason to rule out the possibility that machines will do so too. If nature in the form of the human species could bring forth intelligent machines, the process of evolution would continue among the machines.
In 1964, Wiener envisioned such a process:
Man makes man in his own image. This seems to be the echo or the prototype of the act of creation, by which God is supposed to have made man … What is the image of a machine? Can this image, as embodied in one machine, bring a machine of a general sort, not yet committed to a particular specific identity, to reproduce the original machine, either absolutely or under some change that may be construed as a variation?
Could a game be played between humans and machines, the effect of which would be to leave machines beyond the comprehension of their human inventors? Might the process whereby new types of machines developed come to be as much of a mystery as the act of creation in religion? Wiener thought the answer to these questions was ‘Yes’, and just such a prospect was also envisioned by Neumann:
It is not unlikely that if you had to build an automaton now you would plan the automaton, not directly, but on some general principles which concern it, plus a machine which could put these into effect, and will construct the ultimate automaton and do it in [such] a way that you yourself don’t know any more what the automaton will be.
Towards the end of his life Neumann became preoccupied with the relations of computers with the human mind. An unfinished manuscript published posthumously as The Computer and the Human Brain (1958) explored similarities and differences between the two. In a foreword to the third edition of the book, Ray Kurzweil writes that Neumann ‘define[s] the essential equivalence of the human brain and a computer’. He declares, ‘Artificial intelligence … will ultimately soar past unenhanced human thinking.’ Kurzweil has no fears regarding this prospect: ‘the purpose of this endeavour is not to displace us but to expand the reach of what is already a human-machine civilization.’ It is not obvious why Kurzweil is so sure that human purpose will prevail.
The pioneers of robotics were more sceptical. Wiener and Neumann envisaged situations arising when thinking machines could cease to be either controllable or comprehensible by their makers. Implicitly, they recognized that machines would develop by natural selection – a process without purpose or direction. Eventually humans could find themselves displaced by thinking machines they had originally created. The upshot of progress in human knowledge and invention might well be human redundancy.
Kurzweil and other scientific futurists celebrate the increase of knowledge as enhancing human power. By controlling natural processes, they believe, humans can gain mastery of the planet and even the universe. It does not occur to them to inquire who or what will exercise this mastery. Dreaming of a more fully self-aware species, they are attempting to create another version of humankind – one that reflects the flattering image they cherish of themselves as rational beings.
The icons of the prevailing faith in science came into the world as a result of the imperatives of war. Emerging towards the end of the Second World War and developing in the Cold War that followed, the new technologies of robotics and artificial intelligence were tools of human conflict. During the Second World War Wiener suggested that funds be made available for research on computers as part of a project on automatic gun control – an early example of what would prove to be a continuing interaction between war and the rise of computer-controlled machines. Later, Neumann’s work in game theory was used to deal with the strategic dilemmas that resulted when the Soviet Union acquired nuclear weapons.
It was not long before the new sciences escaped from what Philip Mirowski, in his study of their role in economics, has described as their ‘military incubator’. Theories of computation, information and dynamic systems, which had been confined to engineering and the physical sciences, were applied to the human world. It came to be believed that society could be understood using the same methods that are used to understand machines, and from there it was a small step to think that society is in fact a kind of machine. Long bewitched by the idea of a mathematical model of human behaviour, economists were captivated by the prospect.
As Mirowski writes of the spread of cybernetic thinking into economics in the decades after the Second World War: ‘If there was one tenet of that era’s particular faith in science, it was that logical rigour and the mathematical idiom of expression would produce transparent agreement over the meaning and significance of various models and their implications.’ What cybernetics offered economics was not just the power of prediction and control – though that was certainly part of the appeal of the new science – but the possibility of understanding human behaviour in non-human terms. If the economy could be modelled as a machine, the values and meanings that human beings brought to the market could be discounted. Whether they knew it or not, human actors were incidental to the operation of a system that was more rational than they could ever be. The economy was becoming a computer in which human judgement was superfluous.
Curiously, though perhaps not unpredictably, this vision of the market attracted some who had been enthusiasts for central economic planning. As one of them wrote: ‘When I think of it, it’s not such a great distance from communist cadre to software engineer. I may have joined the party to further social justice, but a deeper attraction could have been to a process, a system, a program. I’m inclined to think I’ve always believed in the machine.’ For former communists as for those who had never questioned the free market, the idea that the economy was a highly sophisticated machine was irresistible. Human labour would continue to be necessary. But with their mercurial passions and irrational longings, human beings were obstacles to the machine’s efficient functioning.
A few decades later it is no longer clear that the machine needs large inputs of human labour. Many have observed how the internet has decimated some industries and fundamentally altered others. As banking, the allocation of capital in markets, medical diagnostics and many managerial functions are automated, whole swaths of professional occupations seem close to being wiped out. It is not just the superior computational powers of computers that are eliminating these jobs. The developing capacity for pattern-recognition is displacing human judgement.
Unskilled labour is being automated, while many functions that have been assumed to require human contact will no longer do so. Robot nurses and teachers, sex workers and soldiers are ceasing to be merely the stuff of speculative fiction. If these replacements for human labour are not yet feasible, it is likely that they soon will be. Self-driving cars and telephones that interact with human voices are the front line of a rapidly advancing trend. Occupations that seemed safe because they required a level of skill or education are no longer secure.
There is no reason to expect technological innovation to stop or slow. As we are forever being reminded, the advance of knowledge is now an exponential process. Some believe computers will soon pass the Turing test – named after the great mathematician who played a vital role breaking German codes at Bletchley Park during the Second World War – and display intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from that of humans. Kurzweil may well be right in his forecast that within a decade or so computers will be joking and flirting with their users.
Economists may object that in the past technological innovation has not reduced employment permanently – as old occupations have died out, others have been born. But robotic technologies are unparalleled in their scope and reach. If an earlier burst of technological advance left behind a lumpenproletarian underclass, the current wave looks set to create a lumpenbourgeoisie. Denied any prospect of a lifelong career, lacking pensions or savings, the former middle classes can expect a life of precarious insecurity for the foreseeable future. A few may recreate the trappings of Edwardian privilege, but for most a bourgeois life of any kind will soon be as remote as feudalism.
The inherent tendency of this wave of technological innovation seems to be to render the human majority superfluous in the process of production. In a more remote future envisioned by techno-enthusiasts, human redundancy could be more complete. There is no way even a small elite will be able to keep up with the development of artificial intelligence. In the longer run the only rational course of action will be to reconstruct the humans that remain so that they more closely resemble machines. A technologically enhanced species will join in in the ongoing evolutionary advance. As for the remnants that are left behind, human obsolescence is a part of progress.
AN IRON MOUNTAIN AND A SHIFTING SPECTACLE
A visionary study first published anonymously in 1967 presented a new paradigm of social order: ‘War is not, as is widely assumed, primarily an instrument of policy utilized by nations to extend or defend their expressed political values or their economic interests. On the contrary, it is itself the principal basis of organization on which all modern societies are constructed.’ The study recognized a fact not addressed in mainstream thinking: the constant threat of war is one of the essential features of the modern state. ‘The historical record’, it notes, ‘reveals one instance after another where the failure of a regime to maintain the credibility of a war threat led to its dissolution … The organization of a society for the possibility of war is its principal political stabilizer.’
But it is not just political authority that requires the threat of war. So does the organization of society as a whole:
In advanced modern democratic societies, the war system has provided political leaders with another political-economic function of increasing importance: it has served as the last great safeguard against the elimination of necessary social classes. As economic productivity increases to a level further and further above that of minimum subsistence, it becomes more and more difficult for a society to maintain distribution patterns insuring the existence of ‘hewers of wood and drawers of water’. The further progress of automation can be expected to differentiate still more sharply between ‘superior’ workers and what Ricardo called ‘menials’, while simultaneously aggravating the problem of maintaining an unskilled labor supply.
The problems of political authority and social stability the study identified in the Sixties are more pressing today. How can order be maintained when ‘superior’ workers comprise only a small fraction of the population and much of the population is composed of ‘menials’ whose services are no longer needed? How could a society in which the majority has no productive role possibly be sustainable?
Having detailed the essential social and political functions that war has provided in the past, the analysis concludes with a number of suggestions for policy-makers:
– optimum levels of armament production, for purposes of economic control, at any given series of chronological points and under any given relationship between civilian production and consumption patterns;
– correlation factors between draft recruitment policies and mensurable social dissidence;
– minimum levels of population destruction necessary to maintain war-threat credibility under varying political conditions;
– optimum cyclical frequency of ‘shooting’ wars under varying circumstances of historical relationship.
Claiming to emanate from a ‘Special Study Group’ with links to the Pentagon and the White House, Report from Iron Mountain became a major success. Some readers may have been horrified, but more were intrigued. Seemingly revealing a type of thinking that prevailed in the innermost recesses of the defence establishment, the ‘realist’ analysis presented in the report had reverberations decades later.
In the Eighties a far-right group distributed thousands of copies without seeking copyright permission. When the author sued the group, its defence was that the book was a government document and therefore not subject to copyright. By the Nineties the report was being used by the Michigan Militia and other far-right American armed groups as ‘a sort of bible’. Former Chief of Special Operations under President Kennedy Fletcher Prouty, who came to believe that Kennedy’s assassination had been part of a coup d’état and achieved celebrity by being the model for ‘Mr X’ in Oliver Stone’s film JFK (1991), declared the report ‘the real McCoy’ and seems to have held this view up to his death in 2001.
Report from Iron Mountain was, of course, a hoax. In 1972 the writer Leonard C. Lewin identified himself as the author in the New York Times. By mimicking the jargon-ridden style of think-tanks and government agencies, Lewin was able to convince many readers of the existence of his ‘Special Study Group’. Some of them were ready to act on the basis that the group and its plans were fact. Like the mysterious encyclopaedia detailing an alternate planet that features in Borges’s ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, Lewin’s fiction became part of the real world.
While Lewin meant his report as satire, it can be read as prophecy. To be sure, the picture of an inner cabal of strategic thinkers directing the course of government has no resemblance to reality. Wracked by internal conflicts, guided by unreliable impressions of volatile and nebulous public moods, seizing on one faddish notion after another, modern governments often have no clear picture of what they are doing, let alone of its unintended consequences. Most likely nothing like the Special Study Group ever existed. If it did, it had no leverage over events. Yet something like the state of affairs that is pictured in the report could have come into being through a process of evolutionary change.
War no longer has some of the functions that the report identifies. Large conscript armies have been abolished in nearly all advanced countries, and drones are further reducing the need for human soldiers. Also, the economic functions of warfare have altered since the report was written. While institutions devoted to intelligence and surveillance are expanding, the military-industrial complex no longer has the centrality it once did. The Reagan administration may have attempted a version of ‘military Keynesianism’ – the practice of stimulating economic activity through increased defence spending. But with the shrinkage of the defence sector, war no longer generates these benefits.
The role of war in advanced societies now lies elsewhere. Twenty-four-hour news media generate a chronic state of low-intensity anxiety together with a tranquillizing sense of security. Shaping a perception of the world as endemically dangerous, a landscape of terror can be projected anywhere via television screens, laptops and mobile devices. This landscape frames the view of the world, while those who inhabit it are enclosed in a zone of safety. More than on any other single factor, the stability of advanced societies depends on how perceptions are shaped by the media.
In the same year that Report from Iron Mountain appeared, Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle was published in France. Bringing together elements from Surrealism, Marxism and anarchism, the book made a mark at a time when student rebellion was under way in Europe and the United States. Much of Debord’s analysis was a reworking of familiar and discredited ideas. There is nothing of interest in his fantasies of revolution or in the Marxian schema he deploys to support them.
Yet in one key respect Debord was ahead of his time. The core of advanced capitalism, he suggested, was the creation of a spectacle through which social relationships are mediated. More than simply producing images, the spectacle assigns roles and ambitions to the population. As capitalism has developed, the division of labour in society has become more fluid. No one can rely on having any particular type of employment, and the idea that work can be a means to self-realization is increasingly unreal. In these circumstances it becomes necessary to remotivate the population. With automation advancing rapidly, there may be a decreasing need for human beings in the productive process. It is the need to continue consuming that is central to the economy. Hence the culture of celebrity, which by offering anyone fifteen minutes of fame reconciles everyone to the boredom in which they must pass the rest of their lives.
Debord writes:
It is in these conditions that a parodic end of the division of labour suddenly appears, with carnivalesque gaiety … A financier can be a singer, a lawyer a police spy, a baker can parade his literary tastes, an actor can be president, a chef can philosophise on cookery techniques as if they were landmarks in universal history. Anyone can join the spectacle, in order publicly to adopt, or sometimes secretly practise, an entirely different activity from whatever specialism first made their name. Where ‘media status’ has acquired infinitely more importance than the value of anything one might actually be capable of doing, it is normal for this status to be readily transferable; for anyone, anywhere, to have the same right to the same kind of stardom.
When he identified the indispensable role of the virtual world created by the media in reproducing the most highly developed varieties of capitalism, Debord grasped one of the ruling facts of the age.
At the time he first published the book, Debord may have believed that his analysis could have a political impact. Simply to reveal the spectacle’s workings, he may have thought, would somehow derail it. If so he failed to take into account the fact that knowledge can always be used for a variety of ends. Whether he was surprised when a disciple who became head of Silvio Berlusconi’s media empire announced that he had learnt his craft from Debord’s writings cannot be known; but the ironic subversion of his thinking must have left a mark.
When the student movement of 1968 failed to trigger a general insurrection, Debord left Paris and spent most of the rest of his life in the French countryside playing war games and drinking. Dissolving the group he had founded – the Situationist International, a fractious claque of some thirty people all of whom he would eventually expel – he retreated into a life of seclusion with his companion Alice Becker-Ho.
Debord committed suicide in 1994. Two of his friends killed themselves shortly afterwards. Both had been acquainted with Debord’s publisher and patron, who had been murdered ten years earlier. Debord had written – and possibly boasted – that since the early Seventies he had been under surveillance by the French secret service. Rumours of dark plots were rife. But the cause of his death was almost certainly simpler and more prosaic. Believing his ideas to be without influence and suffering from neurological symptoms of his alcoholism, he had no further use for his life.
By the time he killed himself Debord had come to think the spectacle was indestructible. A society in which it had reached its full development, he writes in a commentary on his original ideas that he published in 1988, displays five mutually reinforcing features: ‘incessant technological renewal; integration of state and economy; generalised secrecy; unanswerable lies; an eternal present’. Taken together, these features removed any possibility of revolutionary change.
Clearly, no human institution could possess the power Debord ascribed to the spectacle. Even if today it is near-omnipotent, why are those who live under it so compliant? If human beings could in some way penetrate the ever-present veil, he believed, they would demand a life that was not mediated and distorted. But what if many prefer a vicarious existence in the virtual world?
A self-proclaimed follower of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu, Debord thought of himself as a pitiless realist. Had he ever possessed power, he would surely have been pitiless in exercising it – in the first instance, against those who had been his friends. His capacity for realistic thinking is more questionable. Like revolutionaries everywhere, he believed that the mass of human beings shared his values. He could not conceive that others would not want to be as he imagined he would himself like to be.
It is doubtful whether Debord would have appreciated the joke when in 2009 he was appointed a national treasure by the minister of culture in the government of Nicolas Sarkozy. Intervening to prevent Yale University acquiring Debord’s archive, the minister described him as ‘one of the last great French intellectuals’. For all his sardonic wit, deficient in any sense of the absurd, he would have regarded his posthumous respectability as final proof that opposition to the spectacle had ceased to be possible.
An abstract entity, ‘the spectacle’ does not exist. By attributing omnipotence to a theoretical category, Debord showed he had lost any sense of reality. But something would come into being in the decades after his death that exercised some of the functions he attributed to the spectacle. Writing in 1988, he noted the expanding role of secrecy in advanced capitalist societies:
Our society is built on secrecy, from the ‘front’ organisations which draw an impenetrable screen over the concentrated wealth of their members, to the ‘official secrets’ which allow the state a vast field of operation free from any legal constraint; from the often frightening secrets of shoddy production hidden by advertising, to the projections of an extrapolated future, in which domination alone reads off the likely progress of things whose existence it denies …
Foreseeing the rise of a society based on secrecy, Debord failed to anticipate how new technology would enable the abolition of privacy. Nearly everything that is done leaves an electronic trace, which can be collected and stored indefinitely. It is not only the governments of western states that have the power to monitor the population. So do business corporations, tyrannical states and global networks of organized crime. If western governments were to renounce surveillance, the practice would not cease. Other states and other forces would go on prying and eavesdropping.
The rise of the surveillance state is an integral aspect of globalization. The more fragmented world that existed in the past was more stable than the interconnected world that exists at present, partly because shocks in any part of it were not instantly transmitted to the rest as they are today. This vanished world was also friendlier to privacy. When people are locked into local communities they are subject to continuous informal monitoring of their behaviour. Modern individualism tends to condemn these communities because they repress personal autonomy. But societies that pride themselves on their devotion to freedom dread disorder. The informal controls on behaviour that exist in a world of many communities are unworkable in a world of highly mobile individuals, so society turns to the technology of surveillance. Closed-circuit cameras replace oversight by families and neighbours, while information on the entire population is available on the web. Near-ubiquitous technological monitoring is a consequence of the decline of cohesive societies that has occurred alongside the rising demand for individual freedom.
A degree of privacy may survive as a luxury good. Encrypting parts of their lives, the rich may contrive for themselves a freedom that many people possessed without such effort in the past. For the rest, loss of privacy is the price of individualism. Anyone can achieve a momentary fame, but for nearly everyone today fifteen minutes of anonymity has become an impossible dream.
An early version of the surveillance society can be found in a model penitentiary designed by the English Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). A singular personality who thought of himself as being above all else rational, Bentham had a penchant for inventing neologisms. Among the hundreds of new words he coined, international, bicameral, maximize and minimize are some that have entered everyday use. Others such as ‘cacotopia’ (Bentham’s neologism for a thoroughly undesirable state of society of the sort that would later be described as dystopian) and ‘uranoscopic physiurgics’ (more widely known as astronomy) have failed to catch on.
The provisions Bentham made for his cadaver reveal his sense of what a rational human being might be like. Leaving instructions that the body be used for dissection, he specified that an ‘auto-icon’ be constructed from the skeleton and head. Dressed in Bentham’s clothes and with a waxen head, a life-sized manikin was created. Passing into the hands of University College London, the doll-like effigy has been on almost continuous public display ever since.
For many years convinced that a rational society could best be constructed under the direction of an enlightened despot, Bentham corresponded with a number of European monarchs. Bentham’s brother Samuel visited Russia in order to build a circular textile factory whose overseers could monitor workers without being seen. Bentham joined Samuel in the hope of persuading Catherine the Great to build what he described as a Panopticon (in Greek, ‘all-seeing’).
As outlined in letters he wrote while he was in Russia, the Panopticon was a multi-storeyed circular building designed so that those who were enclosed within it could be watched at all times. Inmates would be unable to see the central tower and could not know whether they were being watched or not. Each held in a separate cell, they would also be unable to see or communicate with each other. The windows of the observation tower would have venetian blinds, which could be adjusted so that the prisoners would be unable to see shadows. Small lamps backed by reflectors would be installed outside each window, throwing light into the corresponding cell.
Never sure whether they could be seen, the inmates would be compelled to act on the basis that any act of transgression would be witnessed: as Bentham put it, the prisoners would have a constant sense of omnipresence. In order that guards could communicate with each prisoner without others hearing, a tin tube would connect each cell with the observation area. Otherwise silence would be imposed; any noise the prisoners made would be punished by gagging.
The central hall of the building would be intersected by partitions, with each quarter of the hall divided from the rest by zigzag openings rather than doors. In the Panopticon there would be no night; everything would occur in the all-seeing light of the inspector’s lamps. With each prisoner cut off from view from every other, they would spend their time in a place that was at once completely closed and entirely open to view, and from which there would be no possibility of escape.
Bentham stipulated that the Panopticon be managed on a contractual basis, with the governor having a direct pecuniary interest in the efficiency of the institution. He was insistent that the institution be self-financing and profit-making, and made clear that forced labour was necessary for this to be possible. If they wished to avoid perpetual solitary confinement on a diet of bread and water, the inmates would have to work. He was conscious that there might be a risk of contractors neglecting the wellbeing of the inmates. To deal with this contingency he proposed that contractors be charged ten pounds for each prisoner who died under their care.
Worked out in obsessive detail, the Panopticon is an example of the cult of reason in action. For Bentham the Panopticon was much more than an ideal prison. The design principles of the penitentiary applied to all social institutions, such as poor-houses, factories, hospitals, mad-houses and schools. In effect the Panopticon was a model for a world in which universal surveillance would be the basis of social control.
Despite Bentham’s large ambitions for it and the close attention he gave to its design, nothing like the Panopticon has been built. It may be that the scheme was never cost-effective. Where prisons have been handed over to private companies, omnipresent surveillance of the kind Bentham prescribed has proved to be an unnecessary expense. Sanctions such as solitary confinement, together with the need to deal with violence from other inmates, seem to be sufficient to maintain order.
The situation alters when a Panopticon can be constructed that encloses the entire population. To a large extent, this has already been done. With new technologies of surveillance, economies of scale overcome problems of cost. Since all their electronic communications can be accessed, it is no longer necessary to segregate the inmates from one another. As there is no outside world, escape becomes unimaginable. Technological progress has brought into being a system of surveillance more far-reaching than any Bentham could have conceived.
Enclosing the entire population in a virtual Panopticon might seem the ultimate invasion of freedom. But universal confinement need not be experienced as a privation. If they know nothing else, most are likely to accept it as normal. If the technology through which surveillance operates also provides continuous entertainment, they may soon find any other way of living intolerable.
Alongside the system of surveillance there is a world of media images in which terror and entertainment are intermingled. Seemingly safer than the world outside and more stimulating than unmediated everyday life, this virtual environment resembles the settings of reality television more than it does a prison. A feature of reality shows is that the inmates have nothing to do. Aside from overcoming cleverly staged challenges and interacting emotionally with one another, they are completely idle. It may not be too far-fetched to see in their condition an intimation of the future for the majority of people. If the advance of smart machines leaves most human beings an economic role only as consumers, this may be how they will be expected to pass their time.
One of the strengths of such a universal Panopticon is that the perils against which it protects are not all imaginary. The atrocity exhibitions that are on display in the media are not just fantasies. The most savage wars rage unabated; random violence can happen anywhere at any time. With the rapid evolution of techniques of cyber-attack, every modern amenity is vulnerable to sudden disruption. To assume that the inmates yearn to escape the universal Panopticon would be rash. Their worst fear may be of being forced to leave.
PUPPETRY, CONSPIRACY AND OUIJA BOARDS
In his account of the kidnapping and murder of the Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia tells the reader that when he finished putting the documents surrounding the events into some kind of order he could not help thinking of one of Borges’s fables. The story was ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ (1941), in which Borges imagines a French writer who, in addition to his little-known oeuvre, writes an altogether unknown masterpiece: a version of Don Quixote in which not a word had been changed. What is astonishing in Menard’s achievement is not that he wrote the same book again but that he wrote another book. The book was different because the reader was different – starting with Menard himself.
When examining records of the kidnapping, Sciascia writes:
one had the irresistible impression that the Moro affair had already been written, was already a completed literary work, already existed in all its unbearable perfection. Inviolable except in the manner of Pierre Menard – by changing everything without changing anything … Why does the Moro affair give that impression of something already written, something inhabiting a sphere of intangible literary perfection, something that can only be faithfully rewritten and, while being rewritten, be totally altered without altering anything?
The public facts that produced what came to be known as the Moro affair can be quickly recounted. On the morning of 16 March 1978 a group claiming allegiance to the Red Brigades seized Moro while he was being driven to parliament, killing all of his five bodyguards. While being held by the group he underwent trial by a ‘people’s court’ in the course of which he disclosed the role of Italian intelligence agencies in bombings attributed to the neo-fascist right. Fifty-five days after he had been kidnapped, his bullet-riddled body was found in the back of a car in the centre of Rome.
Five times prime minister, Moro had led the Christian Democratic Party towards a ‘historic compromise’ with the Italian communist party. Occurring in the era of the Cold War, his abduction and execution were interpreted as part of a covert struggle between the superpowers. From the start there were suggestions of conspiracy.
In his book Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy, the investigative journalist Philip Willan quotes an unnamed secret service officer in an interview with La Repubblica newspaper two days after the kidnapping describing the operation as ‘so perfect as to seem almost artistic’. Executed by people who ‘have undergone lengthy commando training in specialized bases’ and directed by an organization that was extremely competent ‘both in its genuinely ideologically motivated members and in the sectors that are controlled by other directors, for other purposes, which paradoxically coincide’, the operation was not the work of the Red Brigades alone. The implication is that it was an intervention by covert state agencies, though the provenance of these agencies is left open.
Many stories were told in the aftermath of the murder. Some linked Moro’s death with Operation Gladio, an underground organization set up by the Allies after the end of the Second World War to promote resistance in the event of a communist coup. Others focused on Moro having information relating to banking scandals involving the Mafia and the Vatican. Most of these stories treated the murder as confirming the existence of a ‘parallel government’ in Italy, independent of democratic institutions and capable of undermining or bypassing them. With few exceptions, those who have written on the subject have viewed the idea that the kidnapping and murder were committed by those who actually claimed responsibility for the crime as too far-fetched to be worth pursuing.
The affair included some comically absurd episodes. One involved Romano Prodi, a bumbling, avuncular academic who would go on to become head of the vast Institute for Industrial Reconstruction (IRI), Italian prime minister in 1996 and president of the European Commission. On a wet Sunday afternoon in April 1978, while Moro was being held by his captors, Prodi visited the country home of one of his professorial colleagues at the University of Bologna. Having nothing better to do, Prodi and seven of his colleagues decided to while away the afternoon by conducting a seance. Arranging themselves around the Ouija board, they called up the spirit of a dead Christian Democratic politician and asked where Moro was being held. Via the board, the spirit responded. The word ‘Gradoli’ was slowly spelt out. The name was not known to him or his colleagues, Prodi told the commission inquiring into Moro’s death some years later. But they found a village with that name in an atlas, and in the following days the information was passed on to the police. The village was raided and nothing found. Later it appeared that Moro had been held in an apartment in a block of flats in a street in the suburbs of Rome called Via Gradoli. It was from there that he had been taken, before being shot and his body left in the car boot in central Rome.
Prodi’s account of receiving the information at a seance was a story few found credible. Many believed he had been tipped off as to Moro’s whereabouts and had fabricated the seance in order to protect his source. Others speculated that Prodi’s motive could have been to prevent Moro’s place of captivity from being identified. Some even suspected that the story of the seance was nothing but a joke.
From one observer the Moro affair evoked something like a theory of terrorism. A member of Debord’s Situationist International and the last to be expelled from the organization, Gianfranco Sanguinetti, viewed terrorist activity as a strategy practised by states against their own citizens in a time when these states were losing legitimacy. As a central part of the ‘spectacle’ – the system of images manufactured through the media to mask real social conditions – terror was being stage-managed:
in solemnly taking it upon itself to stage the spectacle of the common and sacrosanct defence against the terrorist monster, and in the name of this holy mission, [the state] can exact from all its subjects a further portion of their tiny freedom, which will reinforce police control over the entire population … Terrorism and ‘the emergency’, a state of perpetual emergency and ‘vigilance’, these are the only existing problems, or at the very least, the only ones which it is permitted and necessary to be preoccupied with. All the rest does not exist, or is forgotten and in any case is silenced, distanced, repressed in the social unconscious, in the face of the gravity of the question of ‘public order’.
Sanguinetti’s book distinguished between ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’ terrorism, the former being directed against the state and the latter controlled by the state. It goes on to make another distinction between ‘direct’ terrorist operations – such as neo-fascist attacks on the general population – and ‘indirect’ operations such as those of the Red Brigades, which strengthen the state by creating a climate of fear. All of these types of terrorism, the book maintains, are covertly directed by states against their own populations.
Sanguinetti’s slim volume was first published in Italian in April 1979. He had been imprisoned in 1975 for ‘subversive conspiracy’, one of the charges against him being that he belonged to the organization that had inspired the Red Brigades. It was a bizarre accusation, and also heavily ironic. The Situationist International had been dissolved in 1972. Its ideas had a wide and enduring influence, but only in the media and fashion – that is to say, within the world that has been created by the spectacle. Few ideas have been more readily co-opted by capitalism.
In his book Sanguinetti claimed that terrorism is sponsored by states against their own populations. This had not always been his view. In letters to Guy Debord in 1978, he suggested that the murder of Moro was what it seemed to be – the work of a genuine revolutionary group, which he appears to have regarded as misguided in its tactics but sound in its view of society. Debord on the other hand always believed that both the Red Brigades and far-right terrorists were directed by the state.
Debord may have been right in thinking that the Italian state had a hand in right-wing and left-wing terrorism. Power never resides only in publicly visible institutions. Much that occurred in these years may have been the work of covert agencies. But this does not mean that what happened was orchestrated. No one directed the crimes that were committed – or fully understood how they came about. Even for the protagonists, the pattern of events must have been indecipherable.
The belief that there is some hidden cabal directing the course of events is a type of anthropomorphism – a way of finding agency in the entropy of history. If someone is pulling the strings behind the stage the human drama is not without meaning. Human beings are not – as they might appear to an impartial spectator – repeatedly trapped in intractable dilemmas: they are puppets of occult forces. This is the message of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious anti-Semitic forgery fabricated in the last years of the nineteenth century, most likely by the head of the foreign branch of the Tsarist intelligence service. The view of the world expressed in the Protocols is entirely delusional, and no doubt for that reason has proved vastly influential. As Norman Cohn writes, ‘what is really important about the Protocols is the great influence which – incredibly yet incontestably – they have exercised on twentieth-century history.’
Interpreting history as the work of a conspiracy is a backhanded compliment to human rationality. It assumes a category of people that is capable not only of controlling events but also – and more important – of understanding why they occur. But the fundamental problem of conspiracy theories is the same as that which faces conspirators themselves: no one can know why human events happen as they do. History abounds in conspiracies; but none has ever escaped the universal drift of which they form part.
One of the most ingenious conspiracy theories was developed by the twentieth century’s greatest authority on scepticism. In The Second Oswald, the distinguished philosopher Richard H. Popkin argued that the official account of the Warren Commission in which the assassination of John Kennedy in November 1963 was the work of a lone gunman is marred by too many omissions and inconsistencies to be plausible. Attempting to remedy these defects, he proposed an alternative theory: looking very much like the suspect Lee Harvey Oswald, a second Oswald impersonated the suspect in ways that would distract attention from what had actually happened – the assassination of Kennedy by two other gunmen.
Popkin does not pronounce on the objectives the assassination was meant to achieve. In a 1983 Postscript to The Second Oswald, a study of the assassination first published in 1966, he lists eight possibilities that ‘are supportable by evidence, and are not disprovable’: the true target of the assassination was someone else, and Kennedy was an innocent bystander; the assassination was designed by anti-Castro Cubans, with the aim of precipitating another invasion of Cuba that would achieve what the Bay of Pigs invasion had failed to achieve in 1961; the assassination was conceived and executed by elements in the Mafia because Kennedy and his brother the US attorney general Robert Kennedy were threatening to curb Mafia operations; the assassination was linked with Oswald’s Russian involvements, his calm demeanour after being arrested suggesting he was acting as the agent of some branch of Soviet or American intelligence or both; the assassination was planned and carried out by Soviet agents; the assassination was committed so that Soviet agents would be held responsible for it; the assassination was sponsored by Fidel Castro in retaliation for American attempts to assassinate him; or the assassination occurred as part of an internal struggle between rival factions in the CIA.
The list is not meant to be exhaustive, nor are the theories mutually exclusive. But Popkin never doubted that the author of the assassination could in principle be known: ‘these are possible scenarios, supported by some evidence and not presently refutable. There are no doubt other scenarios that meet these conditions. Unless more evidence, a confession or two, some secret papers released, somebody’s secret memoirs turn up, we may be left at this point.’ No doubt he was right in thinking that the Warren Commission’s account of the assassination was unsatisfactory. But whatever facts the report may have omitted or covered up, the reason the report was inadequate was not that it failed to finger who was responsible for the crime.
For all his scepticism, Popkin seems to have believed that human events cannot be without meaning; behind the scenes, someone must be in control. There is another possibility, though. Human beings act, certainly. But none of them knows why they act as they do. There is a scattering of facts, which can be known and reported. Beyond these facts are the stories that are told. Human beings may behave like puppets, but no one is pulling the strings. Someone pulled the trigger and shot Kennedy. That does not mean they knew on whose behalf they were acting, or why Kennedy was killed. By the time of the assassination, many actors may have been in play; any plans they may have formed would long ago have been lost in the chaos of events. If they asked themselves why things turned out as they did, the conspirators – if any existed – could only tell stories, like everyone else.
With his intimate knowledge of the labyrinthine deceptions of Sicilian life, Leonardo Sciascia could not help reading the reports of Moro’s abduction and murder as accounts of events that had been scripted and staged. Like the reader of Menard’s Quixote, Sciascia felt a shock of recognition. But if the reported events were staged it was not by a secret author. The author was the reader, who looked at the events and found a story.
We think we have some kind of privileged access to our own motives and intentions. In fact we have no clear insight into what moves us to live as we do. The stories we tell ourselves are like the messages that appear on Ouija boards. If we are authors of our lives, it is only in retrospect.
‘She had never known silence, and the coming of it nearly killed her – it did kill many thousands of people outright. Ever since her birth she had been surrounded by the steady hum. It was to the ear what artificial air was to the lungs, and agonizing pains shot across her head. And scarcely knowing what she did, she stumbled forward and pressed the unfamiliar button, the one that opened the door of her cell.’
The woman is Vashti, the central character in E. M. Forster’s story ‘The Machine Stops’. Passing her life like everyone else, in an underground cell that provides for all her needs, Vashti has no interest in the natural world:
There were buttons and switches everywhere – buttons to call for food, for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. And there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all she cared for in the world.
Human life is no longer shaped by the rhythms of the planet. ‘Night and day, wind and storm, tide and earthquake, impeded man no longer. He had harnessed Leviathan. All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child.’ But human relationships could still perturb the calm, and Vashti is worried about her son Kuno. Using a tablet provided by the Machine that enables them to see images of each other, he has told her of his strange desire to see the stars from the surface of the Earth. Boarding an air-ship left over from former times, she travels to see him.
On the way she is disturbed by light coming in from the cabin windows. ‘When the air-ships had been built, the desire to look direct at things still lingered in the world. Hence the extraordinary number of skylights and windows, and the proportionate discomfort to those who were civilized and refined. Even in Vashti’s cabin one star peeped through a flaw in the blind, and after a few hours’ uneasy slumber, she was disturbed by an unfamiliar glow, which was the dawn.’ When she swerves away from the sunbeams, the cabin attendant tries to steady her. Vashti is enraged and cries out angrily. ‘People never touched one another. The custom had become obsolete, owing to the Machine.’ The attendant apologizes for not having let Vashti fall.
When Vashti and Kuno meet they cannot understand one another. He tells her he was unable to obtain an ‘Egression-permit’ to visit the surface of the planet, so found a way there on his own. She is horrified by this breach of regulations, while he responds by accusing her of worshipping the Machine and thinking him irreligious for finding his own way. ‘At this she grew angry. “I worship nothing!” she cried. “… I don’t think you are irreligious, for there is no such thing as religion left. All the fear and the superstition that existed once have been destroyed by the Machine.”’ Vashti fears for her son. If he persists in his rebellion, he will suffer the ultimate punishment – expulsion from the Machine.
Vashti and her son part company, and she resumes her eventless existence in her cell. But the Machine was overreaching itself and starting to break down. To begin with, the change was not obvious. The Central Committee that supervised the Machine reported signs of malfunction, and made some adjustments. No one questioned the Machine’s powers. Religion had been re-established with the Machine as the Supreme Being. Everyone yielded to ‘some invincible pressure, which came no one knew whither, and which, when gratified, was succeeded by some new pressure equally invincible. To such a state of affairs it is convenient to give the name of progress.’
Time passed. The Machine was getting out of hand, but most people adapted to its whims. Vashti’s son, with whom she is in contact using the tablet, has told her, ‘The Machine stops.’ She cannot grasp what he means; the prospect is unthinkable. But mechanical faults were creeping in: the air was becoming dark and foul. Panic started to spread, with people praying to the books that recorded the Machine’s omnipotence. New ‘nerve-centres’ were evolving, they believed, which would do the work of the Machine more efficiently. ‘But there came a day when, without any previous hint of feebleness, the entire communication-system broke down, all over the world, and the world, as they had understood it, ended.’
Finally leaving her cell, she finds her fellow inhabitants of the underground city in panic and despair. ‘People were crawling about, people were screaming, whimpering, gasping for breath, touching each other, vanishing in the dark … Some were fighting round the electric bells, trying to summon trains which could not be summoned … Others stood at the doors of their cells fearing, like herself, either to stop in them or to leave them, and behind all the uproar was silence – the silence which is the voice of the earth and of the generations who have gone.’
Published in 1909, Forster’s story describes humankind living within a machine. When the machine comes to a stop, it is because its internal workings have become faulty. Like H. G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895) – by which Forster’s was surely influenced – it is a vivid and arresting tale. Where Forster’s story loses force is in its failure to explain how the Machine came to have dominion in the first place.
The lack of realism in the story comes from the absence of any serious human conflict. When the Machine start to run down there is discontent; there is some mention of riots. But no Machine that ruled the world as Forster’s did could achieve such power without tumultuous revolutions and long wars. Omitting to explain how the Machine achieved its dominance, Forster fails to explain why it broke down. A fault in the works does not take the reader very far. We are left with the enigma of a world inexplicably pacified, which comes suddenly to a standstill.
If the Machine were to stop today, the most likely cause would be intensifying geopolitical struggle. In technological terms the world is something like a single integrated system. In geopolitical terms the world is fragmenting. The instantaneous flow of information and images enabled by the internet and social media is kindling mass movements – the Arab Spring, the Orange Revolution, the Maidan events and the rise of ‘people’s republics’ in Ukraine, among others – which serve as instruments through which the rivalries of great powers can be pursued. Touted as unifying forces, new technologies of communication are being used as weapons.
It is not hard to foresee circumstances in which the internet could fracture along the shifting lines of power. Abounding in worms and viruses that can be used to disrupt human armies and shut down vital utilities, cyberspace is a site of unceasing warfare. Partly for this reason, cyberspace could turn out to be the site of a radical evolutionary shift. We tend to think that life and mind can evolve only in forms recognizably similar to ourselves. But while they are being used as weapons, electronic technologies may also be creating a terrain on which intelligent life-forms could evolve independent of human control. Our successors may not be rebellious robots but more highly evolved descendants of computer worms. The prospect of the world being taken over by electronic viruses may seem to have evolution upside down; but that is so only if you view evolution from a human point of view.
Thinking of evolution as a succession of step-wise advances is like thinking of history as a series of incremental improvements. In each case the actuality is erratic and discontinuous. Few societies have been stable enough and resilient enough to renew themselves in recognizable forms over long stretches of time. History is littered with civilizations that have been utterly destroyed. Everywhere, the self-assured confidence of priests, scribes and intellectuals has been mocked by unexpected events, leaving all their prayers, records and treatises wholly forgotten unless they are retrieved from oblivion by future archaeologists and historians. Sudden extinction of ways of life is the human norm.
The same is true of species. Evolution has no attachment to the attributes modern thinkers imagine are essentially human – self-awareness, rationality and the like. Quite the contrary: by enabling the increase in human power that has taken place over the past few centuries, these very attributes may bring about humanity’s obsolescence.
With climate systems altering as the result of human intervention, the human and the natural world are no longer separate. That does not mean humans are in control. This may be the era of the Anthropocene – the geological epoch in which human action is transforming the planet. But it is also one in which the human animal is less than ever in charge. Global warming seems to be in large part the result of the human impact on the planet, but this is not to say humans can stop the process. Whatever is done now, human expansion has triggered a shift that will persist for thousands of years. A sign of the planet healing itself, climate change will continue regardless of its impact on humankind.
There is little prospect of the human species becoming extinct in any near future. But it is difficult to imagine humans being as central in the life of the planet as they have been over the last few centuries. Humans may turn out to be like the Neanderthals, a byway in evolution. Aiming to remake the world in its own image, humankind is bringing into being a world that is post-human. However it ends, the Anthropocene will be brief.
Today’s Darwinists will tell you that the task of humanity is to take charge of evolution. But ‘humanity’ is only a name for a ragtag animal with no capacity to take charge of anything. By destabilizing the climate, it is making the planet less hospitable to human life. By developing new technologies of mass communication and warfare, it has set in motion processes of evolution that may end up displacing it.
One way in which a post-human world could come about has been envisaged by James Lovelock, the inventor of the Gaia theory in which the planet acts, in some respects, as a single living organism. Lovelock points out that, since we know so little about how the Earth system works, we cannot remedy the disorder our expansion has inflicted on the planet:
We can try sustainable development and renewable energy, and we can try geoengineering to help the Earth self-regulate. We can do these things with the same certainty that our eighteenth-century ancestors had about the power of mercury, arsenic or blood-letting to cure their diseases. Just as they failed utterly, so I think we also are not yet clever enough to handle the planet-sized problem and stop the Earth from over-heating.
But if humans are creating the conditions in which they cease to be the planet’s dominant life-form, they may also be seeding the planet with their successors. Lovelock cites artificial intelligence and electronic life-forms as examples of human inventions that can carry on where humans leave off. Developing first as human tools, entering into symbiosis with human beings and then evolving separately from them, electronic life could develop that was more suited to thriving in the hot world human beings have created:
We must never forget that the priceless inheritance of humans includes the know-how of electronic hardware and intelligence. The new life, if its neurons operated at electronic speed and included intelligent software, could live 1 million times faster than we do and as a result its timescale would be increased as much as a millionfold. Time enough to evolve and diversify in the same way carbon life has done. It might extend the life of Gaia still further, long enough even to enable the next Gaian dynasty, whatever that might be.
In Lovelock’s premonitory vision, the Machine may sputter and stall. It will not stop. Interwoven with the life-cycle of the planet, machines have created a virtual world in which natural selection is at work at far greater speed than among the planet’s biological organisms. With the rise of artificial forms of life, the next phase of evolution may already have begun.