« The WW3 Scenario: An Appeal to Sanity » (2014)

The WW3 Scenario: An Appeal to Sanity Michel Weber et al. 1 In March 1939, when Whitehead publishes an “Appeal to Sanity,” he seems to wake up from his political slumber. His analysis is dispassionate, even though he claims to assess his topic with the concept of emotion: To-day the world is plunged in this second phase of contagious emotion. […] The point to notice is that war, even if successful, can only increase the malignant excitement. The remedy is peace, fostering the slow growth of civilized feelings. (ESP 53-56) Strangely, Whitehead further invokes the possibility of a miracle to solve the crisis. No miracle saved the world from collective insanity in 1939; will history repeat itself in 2015? It is well-known that the late Whitehead has remained a Platonist of sorts for whom events are necessarily framed by a double strain: the uniformity of extension and the eternal objects. In order to become fully aware of the details of this well-tempered processuality, one needs to leave the cave of opinion and to contemplate the Idea of the Good. We rediscover then that our mundane beliefs were a minima very limited in their applicability and a maxima dangerously misleading. In today’s geopolitical world, the metaphor is simpler: as soon as Western propaganda is identified as such and properly deconstructed, the concerned citizen realizes that the world is actually upside down. On the one hand, Russia, with a population similar to Japan’s spread on a territory twice the size of the USA, is threatening nobody, while Vladimir Putin has been keen to foster all possible diplomatic venue to secure peace. On the other hand, the USA is desperately looking for new wars to distract its citizens from its bankruptcy, to salvage what can be of its atavistic imperialism, and to remain first in the race for what's left.2 The ecological crisis is so dire that more and more scholars evoke the possibility of a near term human extinction: who could deny that this is without impact on the current international politics? The wheel is now running fast and the risk of a war between NATO and Russia involving tactic thermonuclear weapons is higher than it ever was during the cold war. The MAD doctrine does not hold anymore. On Dec. 04, 2014, the U.S. Congress passed H.Res.758 (“Strongly condemning the actions of the Russian Federation, under President Vladimir Putin, which has carried out a policy of aggression against neighbouring countries aimed at political and economic domination”) that amounts to a declaration of war on Russia.3 Numerous claims are made against Russia, but no actual proofs are provided to support them. Hence the old trick that Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz often shares with his students: if the facts are on your side, pound the facts into the table; if the law is on your side, pound the 10 Michel Weber law into the table; if neither the facts nor the law are on your side, pound the table. Where were the US satellites when the MH-17 was shot down? Where are they now that Russia is, once again, invading the Donbass? Why was the Kiev coup legal and the Crimea referendum illegal? Why are US economic sanctions against Russia legal and Russian measures to secure payment for gas delivered to Ukraine scandalous? As Ron Paul writes, “there are too many more ridiculous and horrific statements in this legislation to completely discuss.” Scholars, and especially Whiteheadians, have the duty to make this state of affairs plain and to stir everyone’s awareness of the threat of a new world war. Everyone who has travelled cannot but testify that hospitality is a fundamental characteristic of all cultures and that all human beings, when they meet in person, recognize in each other the same traits and the same peaceful hopes. In 1870, like in 1914 and in 1939, people were lied to in order to weave the events leading to the carnage. Will we be able this time to bypass the engineering of consent? Ignacio Castuera (Latin America Project, Center for Process Studies), Roland Cazalis (Université de Namur), John B. Cobb, Jr. (Center for Process Studies & Claremont Graduate University), Arran Gare (Swinburne University), Jean-François Gava (Université libre de Bruxelles), Hank Keeton (Keeton Corporation, U.S.A.), Catherine Keller (Drew University), Jay McDaniel (Hendrix College), Adam C. Scarfe (University of Winnipeg), Michel Weber (Centre de philosophie pratique & University of Saskatchewan), Howard Woodhouse (University of Saskatchewan). Appendix: Why War? Unless one dives into theological considerations or refer to Marx and Lenin, philosophers prefer to address the morality of war and especially the “just war” issue.4 In 1904, James proposed a different diagnosis: “Our permanent enemy is the noted bellicosity of human nature. […] The plain truth is that people want war.”5 Three complementary functions of the art of war can then be introduced, the more obvious coming first and the more concealed last.6 We will rely upon the lead of James, Mumford and Orwell. Visible functions The most visible, obvious, military business is self-defence: military action is said to be justified when a country has to respond to an unjust aggression by a third party. This means to assume the defence of one’s own territory, including air defence as well as securing the territorial waters that are An Appeal to Sanity 11 sometimes extended to the Exclusive Economic Zone (370 km). In most cases, the security perimeter of a nation is sharply defined: the territory itself, the 22,2 km of territorial waters, and the airspace. Hence the mission of the army, navy and air force is unequivocal. Unfortunately, this comfortable clarity has always been blurred by “diplomatic” issues (remember Clausewitz’s argument according to which “war is diplomacy by other means”). First, military business is not only about self-defence per se, but about defending one’s strategic interests. From that perspective, it is possible, indeed advisable, to control manu military remote territories that appear essential to preserve one’s “way of life.” Second, wars of pre-emption are said to be justified when they involve responding to an imminent threat of an (unjust) aggression. One should not wait until aggressors actually initiate their attacks before self-defence becomes permissible. Preventive wars are more controversial because they involve military attack in the absence of both self-defence and so-called pre-emption. But if the threat is totally uncertain, why should be the preventive action so sure? Third, (even) more eccentric arguments have been built lately: war on drugs, humanitarian wars and war against terrorism allow the “international community,” i.e., the NATO countries, to dispose of any regime refusing their diktat. A sure sign of the pure rhetorics at work is the fact that it is ipso facto invalidated if a non-NATO country attempts to use it: how does the “international community” react when Russia claims to salvage democracy in Afghanistan or China to prevent a massacre in Libya? Would Iran be allowed to settle religious wars in Africa? Liminal functions The next functions are liminal, which means that they still remain partly lit by the official narratives. First, the religious dimension of war needs to be underlined. War is a sort of sacrament; “war is the strong life; it is life in extremis.” (James 1911, 269); it brings us our first—and often last—“glimpse of effective life” (Mumford7); it puts us in contact with the Ultimate (Eliade 1965, 176). The path of the warrior amounts to the glorification of the tragic sacrifice of the one who puts his own life in danger in order to bring death to his enemy. War is a Neolithic innovation that is to be correlated with the obliteration of matriarchy and the seizure of the society by the males. No one doubts that the experience of death, accepted, feared or given, is a religious experience, as the rituals and especially the initiations of the indigenous (or “first nations”) testify—but here it is a typically patriarchal experience that is systematized. The death or maiming of the body give the drama the element of a tragic sacrifice like that which underlies so many 12 Michel Weber primitive religious rituals: the effort is sanctified and intensified by the scale of the holocaust. (Mumford 1962, 309) Second, in war also dwells a moral theory. Martial virtues provide the behavioural metrics: intrepidity, contempt of softness, surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must remain the rock upon which states are built (James 1911, 287-288). According to Mumford, As long as the machine remains an absolute, war will represent for this society the sum of its values and compensations: for war brings people back to the earth, makes them face the battle with the elements, unleashes the brute forces of their own nature, releases the normal restraints of social life, and sanctions a return to the primitive in thought and feeling, even as it further sanctions infantility in the blind personal obedience it exacts, like that of the archetypal father with the archetypal son, which divests the latter of the need of behaving like a responsible and autonomous personality. (Mumford 1962, 310-311) Third, no less impressive are the sociological consequences of war. Martial virtues are also the enduring cement of society, they provide social coherence (Girard8), drill and regimentation (Mumford), “order and discipline, the tradition of service and devotion, of physical fitness, unstinted exertion, and universal responsibility” (James 1911, 292-295). Furthermore, war bridles twice Malthusian threat: at home it enforces eugenics both in the sense of raising the more apt to war and to dispose of the weaker; abroad, it secures the superiority of one group, ideally through slavery and genocide if need be. Invisible functions The last set of functions are “invisible” in so far as the cultural narrative seeks to prevent the awareness thereof. Here dwells the purely ideological function of war: the deep foundation, control and stabilization of society. First, politically. War not only keeps inequalities intact, it fortifies subordination in front external menace. War creates unanimity and so much distractions that all forms of dissensus become unlikely and, if they arise, extremely difficult to spread. Second, economically. The economical stakes are extremely high; they can be sorted in three sets. Primo, military interventions enable a nation to loot raw materials needed by its industry and to open new markets when need be. As far as we can tell, all the wars since 1945 have been predation wars (essentially for oil), accompanied with the necessity to open new markets (the archetype remaining the Opium wars of 1839–1860). Secundo, even in the absence of war, the military itself constitutes a very efficient device to steer clear of overproduction without indulging in social welfare. Orwell writes: “The primary aim of modern warfare […] is to use up the products of the An Appeal to Sanity 13 machine without raising the general standard of living.” (Orwell 2003, 218) More precisely : An all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction— indeed, in some sense was the destruction—of a hierarchical society. […] If leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. (Orwell 2003, 219) War is an extraordinary waste management device to the benefit of power. Huge budgets are spent on projects that are socially completely useless. The orders are paid by the State, i.e., financed by taxation of the poor and by loans provided by the rich. Who is the best customer, the ideal consumer? Burroughs claims that it is the addict because “the junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product,”9 the very same is true of the military but the scale of the sale is unprecedented and the industrial involvement unmatched. Mumford makes this plain: An army is a body of pure consumers. […] The most wanton and luxurious household cannot compete with a battlefield in rapid consumption. War is the chief instrument by means of which the ruling classes create the state and fix their hold upon the state. (Mumford 1962, 86-106) Tertio, the military is also the main stimulus for technological innovation. Research and development are more often than one thinks funded because of its military potentialities. One should not indeed focus on the immediate return of some disciplines, such as space exploration and rocket science. Chomsky reminds us that when started to teach at the MIT, in 1955, the philosophy department was entirely funded (directly and indirectly) by the military. Researching generative linguistics and analytic philosophy do constitute a strategic field. It is not only a matter of conformism of thought, both socially and technologically: computer science, image processing, control systems engineering AI, robotics etc. rely upon such basic disciplines.10 In a nutshell, we obtain what is called military Keynesianism in Academia or the “Pentagon System” by Chomsky. Third, the key-vault is psychological. Primo, the capitalistic ethos of industrial nations is a culture of predation, aggression, violence, of making demolition necessary and pleasurable.11 Its typical organs, writes Mumford, are at the service of death, which means that, on the one hand, they desire domination upon others and, on the other, they fear annihilation from others. All these paranoid characteristics are deeply ingrained in the social tissue, but remain collectively unconscious unless war erupts. When war comes, it is welcomed with open arms, for it relieves the intolerable suspense: the shock 14 Michel Weber of reality is more bearable than the constant menace of spectres.12 War breaks the tedium of a mechanized society but, paradoxically, it involves more conformism, more technique, more drill and regimentation, more alienation.13 In sum, “war is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society.”14 Secundo, as a result of all this, war is absolutely necessary: “If no enemy really existed, it would be necessary to create him, in order to further this development.” (Mumford 1962, 309-310) This is exactly what Orwell meant by “war is peace.” Tertio, war is the core of a class struggle of an unknown nature and magnitude. It is not just a matter of keeping factories busy, boosting employment and muzzling the opponents. Or of sanctioning infantility in the blind personal obedience required of “citizens.” War unleashes the sadism of the oligarchs. Three points of importance here. First of all, war is not directed outwards anymore but inwards: “war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.” (Orwell 2003, 228) The modus operandi is terror, which means that anxiety is created and nurtured as against fear or phobia. Fear is actually a positive feeling, it mobilizes you toward action (basically to fight or to flight). Anxiety is immobilizing: the subject is aware of a threat but cannot pin-point it. Phobia is intermediate: the fear of a specific object, place, action, is generalized and it is always projected on irrelevant contexts. Why anxiety? Because it brings total power on individuals. Whereas most people tend to think that the oligarchs are ruling over us for our own good—because there is no way people could manage their own lives by themselves—Orwell adamantly claims that the inner party actually seeks power entirely for its own sake.15 The quest of power for the sake of power necessarily translates into the motto of totalitarianism: terror is an end in itself. (Arendt 1958) Terror is less how you rule than why you rule. O’Brien is very straightforward about this when he lists the four ignoble truth of totalitarianism: power is not a means but an end; power is collective, it is power over human beings; power seeks total control of the mind in order to totally control matter (and the body); power necessarily consists in the capacity to impose suffering and, ultimately, to torture: “How does one man assert his power over another?”—“By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” (Orwell 2003, 305307) To flesh this thesis out, one needs to consider the resources of nosology, and to acknowledge that the pathology that is the quest of power is worthy of An Appeal to Sanity 15 the name sociopathy or perversion. All this is perhaps already too abstract for most readers, so let us try to exemplify what happens when one gets addicted to power. In everyday life, it is impossible to avoid power games. Life is a robbery (PR 105). The newborn has a social horizon that barely extends to include his or her mother. Total selfishness is the rule for survival at that stage. There are however two forms of power that are theoretically innocuous: the quest of power that seeks to endow one individual with the curative potentialities required by therapy (especially psychotherapy: it all started with shamanism); and the dance of power that takes place in a community where all individuals are co-developing cultural bounds. The individual who realizes that his or her social status allows him or her to inflict suffering, in whatever way (mild humiliation, instrumentalization, infantilization, …) has swallowed the bait of power. Depending on the circumstances, that person will, or will not, start the long journey that leads to become a priest (or a priestess) of power, as Orwell says. It is difficult to obtain a picture that would match all idiosyncrasies, but the main pattern is easy to visualize with the help of the experience gained in psychotherapy. If you aim at more power, you try to become able to inflict more suffering on living beings: a car or a watch do not suffer when misused but a dog or a colleague do. If you have little resources yourself, you will probably seek power only over animals and ill-treat them. Most scenarios involve nevertheless domestic violence over children and women. But some individuals cannot quench their thirst for power that way either. Raping women or men (undoubtedly a form of torture) could be the next step—but this is hardly the last one since the victim can still survive and usually make sure to keep appearances together (denial is one of the surest sign of PTSD). Then comes the epiphany of the need to torture itself, that can still accommodate rape and finally necessitates murder. The cycle is however not complete until the power seeker attacks the weakest human beings: sometimes elderly, often children, and eventually infants or even newborn. The abduction, torture, rape and murder of children is the ultimate form of the quest of power. It is the truth of the inner party. It is the truth that Goya was trying to picture and that Sade made plain. It is likely to be truth of the own tormented childhoods of these individuals. It is the very reality that citizens cannot confront for obvious emotional and rational reasons. References Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1951; enlarged edition, 1958). Burroughs, William S., The Naked Lunch [1959] (New York, Grove Press, 1991). Eliade, Mircea, Le Sacré et le profane [1957] (Paris, NRF Éditions Gallimard, 1965). 16 Michel Weber Geuens, Geoffrey, Les Vieilles élites de la nouvelle économie. Un portrait collectif des dirigeants de la "révolution numérique" aux États-Unis et en Europe (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2011). Girard, René, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque (Paris, Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1961). James, William, Memories and Studies, ed. by Henry James Jr. (Longmans, Green and Co., London, Bombay, and Calcutta, 1911). Klare, Michael T., The Race for What's Left. The Global Scramble for the World' s Last Resources (New York, Metropolitan Books, 2012). Klemperer, Victor, LTI — Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen (Leipzig, Reclam Verlag, 1947). Lowe, Victor Augustus, Alfred North Whitehead. The Man and His Work. Volume I : 1861–1910 (Baltimore and London, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985). Mumford, Lewis, Technics and Civilization [1934] (London, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1962). Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949]. Introduction by Thomas Pynchon (London, Penguin Books, 2003). Robinson, W. I., “Global Capitalism and its Anti-‘Human Face’: Organic Intellectuals and Interpretations of the Crisis,” Globalizations (2013), DOI: 0.1080/14747731.2013.828966. Russell, Bertrand, Autobiography, Volume II (London, George Allen and Unwin Ltd, 1968). Russell, Bertrand, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1956). Van Wyk, Alan and Michel Weber (eds.), Creativity and Its Discontents. The Response to Whitehead's Process and Reality (Frankfurt, Lancaster, Ontos Verlag, 2009). Weber, Michel, “Much Ado About Duckspeak,” Balkan Journal of Philosophy, 3/1 (2011a): 135-142. Weber, Michel, “On a Certain Blindness in Political Matters,” Cosmos and History, 7/2 (2011b), www.cosmosandhistory.org. Yan Fu, Complete Works Vol. 3, (Zhonghua Book Company, 1986). Notes 1 Centre de philosophie pratique « Chromatiques whiteheadiennes », Bruxelles. 2 Michael T. Klare, The Race for What's Left. The Global Scramble for the World's Last Resources, New York, Metropolitan Books, 2012. 3 Cf., e.g., Ron Paul, “Reckless Congress Declares War on Russia,” 04.12.2014, http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featuredarticles/2014/december/04/reckless-congress-declares-war-on-russia/; Paul An Appeal to Sanity 17 Craig Roberts, “Washington’s War Against Russia,” http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/09/14/washingtons-war-russia-paulcraig-roberts-2/; Denis Kucinich, “Green Light” to War on Russia, Legislation in US Congress: Say No To War with Russia under H. Res. 758 “Russian Aggression,” http://www.globalresearch.ca/green-light-to-war-onrussia-legislation-in-us-congress-say-no-to-war-with-russia-under-h-res-758russian-aggression/5417489; John Pigler, “War by media and the triumph of propaganda,” http://johnpilger.com/articles/war-by-media-and-thetriumph-of-propaganda; Michel Weber, “Le prix Nobel de la paix pour M. Vl. Poutine?,” Kairos XIV, 2014, http://www.academia.edu/7136236/_Le_prix_Nobel_de_la_paix_pour_M._ Vl._Poutine_2014_; Gabor Steingart, “Der Irrweg des Westens,” http://www.handelsblatt.com/meinung/kommentare/politik-der-eskalationder-irrweg-des-westens-/10308844.html; Roman Herzog, Antje Vollmer, Wim Wenders, Gerhard Schröder und viele weitere fordern in einem Appell zum Dialog mit Russland auf, “Wieder Krieg in Europa? Nicht in unserem Namen,!” http://www.zeit.de/politik/2014-12/aufruf-russlanddialog. 4 In order to contextualize this Appeal, here is an extract of my key-note address at Krakow’s IWC9, 2013, entitled “Oldthinkers unbellyfeel Whiteheadian socialism,” that will be published in the Proceedings edited by Lukasz Lamza & Jakub Dziadkowiec. 5 William James, “Remarks at the Peace Banquet,” 1904, re-printed in James 1911, 300-304. 6 A first exploration can be found in Weber 2011a. 7 “In view of its end products—the dead, the crippled, the insane, the devastated regions, the shattered resources, the moral corruption, the antisocial hates and hoodlumisms—war is the most disastrous outlet for the repressed impulses of society that has been devised. […] But it is in death that these repressed and regimented populations have their first glimpse of effective life; and the cult of death is a sign of their throwback to the corrupt primitive.” (Mumford 1962, 310) 8 Girard, René, Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, Paris, Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1961. 9 William S. Burroughs, The Naked Lunch [1959], New York, Grove Press, 1991, p. xxxvii) 10 In addition, analytic philosophy can be seen as part of the reframing of human minds of the Technetronic Era; see M. Weber, “Much Ado About Duckspeak,” Balkan Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 3, Issue 1, 2011, pp. 135142. 11 “The European race’s last three hundred years of evolutionary progress have all come down to nothing but four words : selfishness, slaughter, shamelessness and corruption.” (Yan Fu, Complete Works Vol. 3, Zhonghua Book Company, 1986, p. 629) 18 Michel Weber 12 “The state of the paleotechnic society may be described, ideally, as one of wardom. Its typical organs, from mine to factory, from blast-furnace to slum, from slum to battlefield, were at the service of death. Competition: struggle for existence: domination and submission: extinction. With war at once the main stimulus, the underlying basis, and the direct destination of this society, the normal motives and reactions of human beings were narrowed down to the desire for domination and to the fear of annihilation—the fear of poverty, the fear of unemployment, the fear of losing class status, the fear of starvation, the fear of mutilation and death. When war finally came, it was welcomed with open arms, for it relieved the intolerable suspense: the shock of reality, however grim, was more bearable than the constant menace of spectres, worked up and paraded forth by the journalist and the politician.” (Mumford 1962, 195) 13 “The preparation of the soldier, the parade, the smartness and polish of the equipment and uniform, the precise movement of large bodies of men, the blare of bugles, the punctuation of drums, the rhythm of the march, and then, in actual battle itself, the final explosion of effort in the bombardment and the charge, lend an esthetic and moral grandeur to the whole performance.” (Mumford 1962, 309) 14 “War is the supreme drama of a completely mechanized society; and it has an element of advantage that puts it high above all the other preparatory forms of mass-sport in which the attitudes of war are mimicked: war is real, while in all the other mass-sports there is an element of make-believe: apart from the excitements of the game and the gains or losses from gambling, it does not really matter who is victorious. […] But war, for those actually engaged in combat, likewise brings a release from the sordid motives of profit-making and self-seeking that govern the prevailing forms of business enterprise, including sport: the action has the significance of high drama.” (Mumford 1962, 309) 15 “You are ruling over us for our own good. […] The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake.” (Orwell 2003, 301)