Virilio article

The article is a lot more interesting than I remembered. It’s always a good sign if you reread one of your own pieces of writing (which I do only rarely) and it makes you think rather than cringe at changes you should have made. This one made me think.

Virilio’s only a part of it. I wanted to write about warfare, because this was the Hiroshima conference, and it would have felt cowardly to go as an American to Hiroshima and talk about Husserl’s reductions or something like that. There is a lot to chew on for one who visits Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as I did on that very moving trip.

At the same time, I think it’s important to avoid falling into “beautiful soul” dismissals of the military profession as nothing but a bunch of bumbling killers and torturers. Same goes for the police. There are real dangers in the world, and real protection is often needed from those dangers. If we confine ourselves to “critique” as our only political gesture, it’s easy to point fingers but much harder to make responsible decisions. That’s why I admire politicians, as Latour does. It’s easy to criticize them from the ether of pure thought, but not always easy to do better than they did.

At any rate, the article goes something like this:

1. Virilio did show remarkable foresight in anticipating a number of trends.

2. Nonetheless, like Heidegger, he has a monolithic vision of history in which a single sinister force (“speed” in Virilio’s case, “presence” in Heidegger’s) is on the increase, and it is basically not in our human capacity to stop it.

3. McLuhan was much sharper in seeing reversals as a key force in history. It is too robotic to extrapolate from past trends and assume that they will become only more pronounced as time goes by. McLuhan showed that any medium can take only so much “heating” before collapsing and reversing into its opposite. It’s a simple but profound idea that I think is not sufficiently widespread yet.

4. Along the same lines, a less monolithic view of the history of warfare than Virilio’s can be found in a masterful and famous little 1989 article from the Marine Corps Gazette. Many readers of this blog may not be aware that the Marine Corps is a pretty theoretically savvy organization. I first became aware of this due to my fascination with the works of the late Colonel John Boyd (he was from the Air Force, but it was the Marines who took his ideas the most seriously). Boyd is sometimes called “the American Sun-Tzu,” and along with being a fine fighter pilot, he was a heroic opponent of waste, corruption, and careerism in the Pentagon, a criticism he performed from the inside. Most of his writing is still available only in the form of PowerPoint shows on the web. His work contains many surprises, such as his glowing admiration for the military genius of Mao, and his favoring of Grant over Lee and Napoleon. (Note: I have no military background myself, just a deep intellectual respect for the fact that the military has to take realities into account, such as physical geography. This makes them strong in the area in which most of the philosophy of recent centuries has been weak. I can also say that I’ve had the chance to meet a number of top retired officers from the Egyptian military, and have been universally impressed by their balance, moderation, wisdom, and intellectual integrity. This included one of the chief planners of the Egyptian side of the 1973 war, who lacked even the tiniest drop of vitriol against Israel– not at all what I expected, which was a moralistic diatribe.)

In any case, the Marine Corps Gazette authors trace modern warfare through three generations. Writing way back in 1989, with the Cold War still going, they miraculously foresaw a fourth-generation warfare, which looked an awful lot like post-9/11 asymmetrical war.

Using the principles they identified in the transition from first-generation war up through fourth-generation, I tried a bit of idle futurology and imagined a possible fifth- and sixth-generation warfare that could emerge over the next 200 years.

And then, I tried to establish parallels between their evolution of warfare since Napoleon’s time, and the evolution of philosophy since Kant’s time. I ran out of space before speculating what 4th, 5th, and 6th generation philosophy might look like, but did link the first three generations with (a) Kant, (b) German Idealism, and (c) some of the major non-Kantian philosophies of the 20th century, such as Bergson, Whitehead, Deleuze.

I’m more convinced by the parallel upon rereading the article than I was the last time I read the draft.