Ping Pong 45: The Body Shattered
What did the First World War really change? Everything? Nothing? Was it the death of religion or the death of empire? Or the eclipse of Europe? Perhaps. But what is clear is that it did force us to think of our relationships with machines in a weird old way. What made the First World War different, was not the mud and the blood in Flanders, or even the state of total war, into which countries slipped, during the conflict. But rather, what made it different was the very uncomfortable jostling together of flesh and metal, man and machine upon the bloody fields. This was a war unlike others, because it was the first real time that humanity realized the effect of machines upon the world. Machines stopped being about nice little shortcuts to produce more, ways that could be neatly locked into factories, and became something very different, something far more problematic. They became a way to shatter the power and the ability of the body.
Such a shattering had two very clear dimensions. On the one hand it was the case that the bodies were caught up and destroyed in machines (whether using them or inflicting them on others). But on the other hand, and far more profoundly, machines clearly challenged the unity of human actions. A man in a machine became able to greatly extend what one part of his body could do, what it could affect. He could throw death miles, or ride over a muddy field or pollute the atmosphere… Elements that had therefore been merely one aspect of a human, along with others, became thereby expanded and became a power in their own right.
What the First World War challenged, what it blew up for all of time was therefore, the simple and easy relation between human actions and human bodies. Bodies became powerful not because they were a part of a whole, but rather because they were plugged into a machine, a machine that augmented what they could and would do. This power and its legacy is a problem that overhangs us all, creating endless implications and problems; four of the most important of which (the moral, the medical, the personal and the political, i.e. of the state) will be considered in detail in the rest of this Rant.
The moral problem which machines have posed since the First World War onwards, is that deep odd problem about how humans ought to relate to their ability to affect the world by augmenting different aspect of themselves. The problem here is a very subtle one. On the one hand extending the power of technology is going to make a society where predicting how people behave and who is or is not dangerous and when, very complex. If anyone with the right machine can kill another with the press of a trigger or the swerve of a steering wheel (and does not need years of training and superior muscle power), then it becomes rather difficult to define a simple power structure to contain and label violence. That is, one of the hidden functions of a state was to separate out humans and label them (peasant, knight or gentry and commoner) so that one might be able to have a chance of predicting how these humans would behave in certain circumstances. There would of course be rogues, but on the whole years of training and specialization ensured that there was a high degree of predictability in the entire affair. If however one creates technologies that will allow humans to do anything (to kill, but also to conceive late or kill themselves oddly), then the entire system of rules and traditions which has supported such actions in previous times, and therefore limited them (to places and people) is swept aside. The First World War revealed to us that we lived in a society where everyone really could do anything (as long as they had the right machine): A truly frightening idea.
On the other hand, and just as problematically, it is clear that in extending machines into human actions, and augmenting certain actions, I am likely to break with all systems of morality that had been based upon the dignity of Man (understood as a single unit). Instead of ‘Man’ one has a creature of very uneven powers, some of which are very great, others very undeveloped. The game of morality them becomes caught up in the problem about how to reconcile the weak in a human with the strong, and do so in the context where any rocking back from the strong is very difficult to think. For example cars are clearly polluting our lives; not only our lungs but also our atmosphere, is caught up and systematically undermined by our myriad journeys. However the ethic of this weakness and the conclusion that one could draw from this ethic (let us go less far by cars), is one which we cannot allow ourselves to think. The weakness of the world or of ourselves is not enough to limit the power. We rather hope to extend the powers of the world (and our lungs) to allow for cars. That is we look to technological solutions to solve what is really an ethical problem. Or perhaps we hope that given the right machine we, and all we can do, will be strong together and so the problem will vanish. A blind faith that is surely more problematic and extreme than any blind hope for the afterlife.
The medical problems that technology creates are of course well known. Once machines can seep into the rhythms of a body and copy some (and only some) of them, and do so at a cost, all kinds of deep changes are affected. Foremost of which are two deep new problems about the position of life, and our entire definition of what it is to be alive. Where before there was a rough and ready assumption that to be alive was to be active, and have a degree of health, and mental capacity, one is now faced with a situation - that one can be kept alive indefinitely. Life becomes therefore something apart from the body and the actions that enshroud it. It becomes both impersonal and unspecific to a certain body. Machines also allow and extend life, or might at times. The problem of whether life if precious enough come what may, should be extended for a week or a month or for as long as possible, is therefore born. A problem without any solution (other than monetary).
Secondly, machines extend or rather challenge and change how a mind can affect its body. They create a short cut to effects. The problem with such a shortcut, is that it effectively promises so very much for minds who have once been offered it. Minds become lost in a dream of power. All they need to do is think a thing, and the machine can be found to effect that dream (be it a thin body and alternative identity, or merely the right to die). All the messy and difficult stuff of life becomes unnecessary or at least not very relevant. However this dream, this promise, poses real challenges to any mind caught up in such a nest of hope. The problem is of course that minds find it very difficult in such a dream world of possibilities to hold down their sanity. One becomes locked within an orgy of cosmetic surgery, or high tech diets or computer games or worrying about what will be. To avoid this mad-world, the mind will need to find its own means to understand its limits. It might therefore clutch onto religion, or philosophy or belief in value for money or even politics as a means of insulation against the mad promises. Such a move is indeed the only sensible move to make. However all these jumps to a delimiter are not equally effectively or equally innocent. For example religious fundamentalism is a viable way to limit one’s desires, but of course, comes at the price that this limit then seeks to leech across everyone else’s desires, and become the only limit possible. Such belief is therefore effective and yet on another level highly corrosive of something else in society. Philosophy by contrast is often ineffective at defining a position (one is a philosopher sometimes and in some situations and at others, are carried away by the weight of events). The effective are all too frequently not innocent, and the innocent are too often ineffective…
On a personal level it will already be clear that machines and technology deeply challenge how we have to understand what we are. What we can do, ceases to simply be the result of our own actions. On the contrary we become creased and textured by those technologies in which we are caught, and through which we allow for and build our world. We are very easily caught up in the position which we commonly associate with children, and are forced merely to choose whether we are either a powerful or underpowerful tot.
To choose to be an underpowerful tot is to simply assume that others will be sorting out the problems elsewhere. One can therefore use technologies to feed whatever lusts one wants. Bellies can grow, or sexual desire be gratified, safe in the hope that elsewhere someone will ‘do something’ and all those problems that excessive desire creates, be mitigated (or at least rendered less problematic). Our society is therefore warped by excess. Or perhaps better, it has become inbred to it and simply accepts it. Obesity and sexual disease become therefore medical rather then ethical problems. It stops being anyone’s fault, for humans are merely children. Passive overgrown children who assume they are already medicalized, become then the norm.
However one cannot escape this problem by simply attempting to seize control of one’s life. And one cannot for the simplest of reasons: it is very difficult to predict exactly what one will, as a human, be able to affect in a few years time. That is, it is difficult to say where technology will whisk one. Humans therefore, simply lose all ability to map out a life, based on a stable set of cares and possibilities, and become mere children loosed to the powers of an arbitrary world (which could all too easily turn against them). Technology therefore sounds a death knell to being a simple adult. We become all adolescents caught up in technologies now (as the young men of Flanders were similarly caught up in a world they did not understand).
On the level of the state, machines offer both a boon and a curse. To run a state becomes all about investing in the right technology at the right time. So that - the promise is held out -that exactly what that state can affect will greatly grow. However this possibility comes of course at a price. The state will only become powerful if it chooses the right technologies to extend that power. If it does not, then it will merely waste its money on projects that will never work as it dreams, and never lead where it wants. Politicians become gamblers on what technologies will be widespread and useful, to a degree that has not been seen before.
The problem here is actually threefold. Firstly it is clear that there is a real Trojan horse here. Technologies are extended on the promise that they make our lives easy. That ease is then used as a justification for further oppression, and the extension of state power (it would dream of becoming the parent to the underpowerful tots that are its citizens). Our very laziness is then packaged as a means for oppression. Secondly, the problem is of course that politicians (and apparently their advisors) are very bad at predicting what technologies actually do matter. This might not be their fault. It is in the nature of such things that prediction is impossible (this is after all the problem). But the state is up against this lack, in way that is far more problematic than the citizen. The citizen is simply made like a child by it – while the state becomes its gambler. States are made powerful or rendered effective by their ability to gamble aright, and they risk losing much when they gamble wrong.
Thirdly and most troublingly of them all, is that in perturbing how we understand our own nature, technology is likely to make legislation rather difficult. One legislates after all with a certain citizen and a certain set of actions in mind. If these actions can constantly change, it becomes rather hard to predict what will happen, and what laws will be effective. The result is that a government is playing perpetual catch up. Inventing and then re-inventing new legislation, until the statute book groans under its weight. More than this, given the difficulty which people are posing law makers it is likely enough that the tendency for such legislation will be to become more oppressive over the years. That is, if humans are being a problem, if they are being less predictable than they were, it makes sense to restrict them and their actions, so that at least in certain fields the world becomes easy once more.
What then died in the First World War was an entire vision of the world. That vision had been founded upon an idea (bolstered by religion and evolution) in the corporeal and moral integrity of humanity. Technology demonstrated that actually humans had now reached a point where their exact connection with machines (and what they could do) rendered simple equations about one body, one mind, one life, ineffective and unreal. Technology was opening the way to a far more textured world, where to be a human was to extend oneself (using machines) across a range of possible actions and affects: And there was nothing that came with it to ensure that these effects could ever match up or be reconciled one with the other. The world was therefore rendered problematic and complex. It was then up to the politicians and philosophers to attempt to define solutions to this new and very deep problem. A topic that the next Rant will consider in detail.
