Motus Mentis

Look at this sickening video:

At the speed society evolves, so too does warfare. pic.twitter.com/qU9lP5WAGT

— Joshua Hartley (@JHartley2) January 22, 2024

This is a technology still in its infancy. The drone you see pursuing and killing this terrified man was guided by someone sitting comfortably in perfect safety far away.

It’s possible that the person at the controls felt, for a moment at least, the mortal panic of the doomed soldier that he (or even, God help us, she) chased down and blew to pieces. In a few years, though, even that won’t be necessary; onboard computers running “intelligent” software will hunt their targets entirely on their own. There will be no act of killing, let alone torture by mortal desperation, by anyone involved. At every level there will be moral distance and deniability.

We’ve been moving in this direction since the invention of the stirrup. Every advance in the technology of warfare has been an incremental chipping-away of the personal responsibility of murder in conflict: from the arrow-storm of Crécy, to the bombardment at Borodino, to the grapeshot at Antietam, the sausage-grinder of the Somme, the incineration of Dresden, and the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (I might also add the pandemic of 2020.) Compare this with the greatest story ever told of the personality of war, the Iliad of Homer.

Is this “progress”? I don’t know. On the one hand, perhaps we must pass through these stages of horror — a kind of reductio ad absurdum — before something essential, some sort of sacred reaction, is awakened in us that will lift us to the next level of consciousness. Or perhaps there really is no meaning to anything at all, and this is just where things have got to, and we are simply more and more dead inside.

I’m aware, of course, that the awfulness of war is nothing new. (Have you read Junger’s Storm of Steel?) This particular species of horror, though — guided, personal pursuit by an implacable, inanimate killer — is something new in the world.

In Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech of June 18th, 1940, he warned that if the Allied cause failed, “then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

We won that war. But the Dark Age, with its perverted science, seems to be upon us nevertheless.

Update, 1/23:

Above, I wrote:

…perhaps we must pass through these stages of horror — a kind of reductio ad absurdum — before something essential, some sort of sacred reaction, is awakened in us that will lift us to the next level of consciousness. Or perhaps there really is no meaning to anything at all, and this is just where things have got to, and we are simply more and more dead inside.

Yeah, I got a little cosmic there. Just to be clear: nothing is about to “uplift the consciousness” of the great, hulking mass of humanity, so don’t hold your breath on that one, folks. War will always be with us. That doesn’t mean, however, that “there is no meaning to anything at all”. Really my point here is that the depersonalization and dematerialization our accelerating technological advances are causing are taking us to dark places we never meant to go, faster than we can keep up.