The Drone as Symptom

The first thing the drone should call to our attention is the issue of unintended consequences. This is often a euphemism for a failure to think about or take seriously the longer term impact of the technology on society. This is notoriously true of military technology.

The machine gun is an example. Invented in the mid-19^th century, its earliest use was by colonial European powers to quell the mass attacks of indigenous warriors. Subsequently, when applied in the intra-European World War 1, it horrified Europeans who saw factory productivity applied to killing on the battlefield. The startling losses in just one battle, that of Verdun, produced 714,231 casualties of which 262,308 were dead or missing, were substantially attributable to the machine gun. Eventually this weapon was reduced in size from the initial horse-drawn carriage to the submachine gun used in the gang wars of Prohibition in the 1920s. If the larger ramifications of this weapon are of interest to you I would suggest reading The Social History of the Machine Gun by John Ellis.

Again, we dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We killed between 150,000 and 240,000 people to demonstrate our new awesome power to the Russians. This time we had a very knowledgeable prophet in J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer, the physicist in charge of developing the atom bomb, upon witnessing the first test uttered these fateful words from the Bhagavad Gita, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”  He resisted subsequent development of a nuclear bomb. For this he was pilloried by this nation’s leaders, especially that citadel of the short view we call Congress. Here, in the glow of our atomic dominance of the moment, there was little consideration of the bomb’s employment by small countries like Israel, Pakistan and North Korea, not to mention the small “dirty” bomb that can be carried in a suitcase.

During the resistance to our invasions in the Middle East the first roadside bombs have now passed to suicide explosive vests and the explosive carried in a shoe to destroy an airliner loaded with people. One of the pronounced tendencies of modern technology is to go small.

With this evidence of our profound inability to learn, what are we to expect of the drone? Already it has passed from large missile-carrying aircraft to a small, model-airplane sized device called the Switchblade. It is launched from a mortar-sized tube carried, launched, and flown by one person. It kills by crashing into the victim. Wired Magazine reports that drones the size of insects are being tested in England in networked swarms. Surveillance of cities is an intended application.

All this technology dumped on an unaccustomed population that has problems with red light surveillance at traffic intersections, requires a deep understanding of the human psyche and how it functions in a social context. What, for example, does it mean to abandon privacy? Do we know enough about the relationship of privacy to self-identity to subject large populations to mass surveillance unannounced?  People in Southern Yemen have become accustomed to seeing drones overhead. When there is an exceptional number of them they know the Americans are looking for somebody.

 In short, they know danger lurks, but they know not where. What happens to the human psyche living in an environment such as this?

George Orwell dealt with this kind of world in his novel 1984.  A technology that undoubtedly will be promoted to the public as a provider of safety can easily, and probably will, turn into the all-encompassing dictatorship Orwell describes. We simply do not know enough about human beings that have evolved over many millennia in a context of disparate tribal groups, the psychology of which is on constant display in everything from the tribal violence of the Middle East to the tribal violence following a European soccer game.

Where are the sociologists and social psychologists that could lead a well-publicized effort to warn the citizenry of what their corporate-driven government is doing? Where is the Green Peace of military technology?

Bob Newhard

Two Types of Morality: What Happens When One is Mistaken for the Other

There is a personal morality in which values such as honesty function. There is also a social morality in which values such as justice function. When personal morality takes the place of social morality, dictatorship or some other form of authoritarianism usually results. As an example, Plato does this when articulating his ideal state in the Republic. For Plato the highest good or value is knowledge. This is a personal value. States or other groups do not have knowledge; only individual humans do. As a result, when Socrates in this dialogue is asked who will guard the citizens from the guardians of the Republic , Socrates introduces the philosopher king, a wise dictator. Plato had no use for democracy so this result did not bother him. Because we use language so sloppily (and often pay the price) we sometimes attribute knowledge to society as when we talk about a "knowledge-based economy."

A second feature of personal morality is that its values in and of themselves are absolute. The problem with absolute values is that when they are applied to the real world, which is highly variable in its content, this results in either awkward modification of the absolute value or denial of the facts. This latter consequence is illustrated by the Catholic Church's banishment of Galileo for asserting that the Earth revolved around the sun and hence mankind was not the center of their deity's universe. Again, the value expressed in the imperative "Thou shalt not kill" is quickly modified when applied to the real world. Some forms of killing are less heinous than others, e.g. murder versus manslaughter or perfectly moral, e.g. self defense or killing in military combat. The fact that this value so quickly becomes inoperative unless its moral injunction is modified should teach humanity something about personal moral values, namely, they need to be thoroughly evaluated before being applied to the real world. The current conflict over abortion is another case in point. Despite the factual evidence that the fetus, at least in its earlier embryonic stages, is not human, e.g. it does not have the nervous system to be human, many people are prepared to assert that a woman must carry that fetus to term unless her life is threatened no matter what the consequences for the rest of her life. The same argument is made even when there is no fetus. Moral injunctions against birth control are premised on the wrongful interference with their deity's desire to create a new soul. Cases such as these show how morality, given free reign, can be so damaging because it is not subject to the same level of initial and ongoing evaluation that people often exercise in buying a home or a car.  

Social morality is concerned with what a society ought to be and do. Social morality appeared in the 18^th century as part of the Enlightenment. For instance, Immanuel Kant justified the moral injunction against lying not as a violation of God's law or a moral code, but as deleterious to society. His argument against lying was that if everybody did it society could not function. Again, Jeremy Bentham's measure of morality was "the greatest good for the greatest number."

Several things follow from Bentham's definition:

1) It leaves the "good" undefined thus giving it maximum applicability to many cultures and promoting a global ethic.

2) It is open to investigation and modifications as the human condition changes. In this it is much closer to the scientific method than the arbitrary injunctions of previous moral systems, which sometimes tried to apply millennia old tribal moral values to modern society.

3) This reality-based moral system is founded on intelligent inquiry not on the intellectual vacuity and untestability of faith. Unlike faith, testability is less manipulable by those who use "faith" for devious political and social purposes.

Finally, this approach to morality avoids the "dumbing down" of humanity at a time when its intelligence is most needed.

Our current value systems are killing large numbers of our species. They are endangering the future of our species and promoting increasing violence. They are doing this because they deal in absolutes rather than with the facts of human existence. As an example, the Catholic Church has long held that contraception is an evil because it interferes with God's will in procreation. In Genesis, an ancient tribal text, their deity commands them to "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth…"  On a planet that now has 7 billion people and counting and is faced with rapidly diminishing resources, this injunction to an ancient small tribe seeking to insure its growth is creating havoc in the modern world. They also vigorously pursue an anti-abortion agenda even at the point of first cell division because they believe a soul is created at that point. Again, with no regard for future humans and the chaos and suffering they will experience. Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living. At the social level the unexamined value is not worth having and can be very dangerous.

Bob Newhard