Enlightenment, Enslavement, and War

In 1949, German philosopher Martin Heidegger first presented what would later become to be known as a highly influential and controversial work, a volume entitled "The Question Concerning Technology." In his opening, he states "Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral." Heidegger contended that without acknowledging the control that technology itself holds over us as humans, rather than having mastery over it, we are instead enslaved to its will. That is, for example, without questioning the means of a gun (technology) to carry out an end for the government (also technology), we are then enslaved to both.

Heidegger's contemporaries in Germany's Frankfurt school, Horkeimer and Adorno, contended that modernity, commencing with the enlightenment, enabled above all humanity's "sinking into a new kind of barbarism." Scientific and technological advancements were not used for enlightened progress as much as morphing Christianity into an anthropocentric and ethnocentric utilitarianism.

Both the concepts of technology as an enslaving device and modernity as conceiving a barbaric humanity could be considered the defining themes of modernity itself, and nowhere is this more present than in the practice of warfare. The stories of the Winter Soldiers, a group of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans, who are now telling their stories around the nation in order to rally support for Iraq Veterans Against the War lend credence to this claim. Four service people presented their testimonies to a large audience last week in Burlington, speaking with great passion, power and remorse about their experiences in Iraq, all acknowledging that they had acted immorally at the behest of the United States government. One soldier's testimony was particularly wrenching; he presented horrific images and footage to the audience as a backdrop to his acknowledgment that in Iraq, he and other young members of his unit murdered innocent humans out of aggression and boredom. The deaths of innocent Iraqis were celebrated within the unit, and often the result of contests or bets, cavalierly referred to as kills, while the murderer was congratulated.

Modern warfare is not the hand-to-hand combat that we still imagine to be "war," it is not a valiant duel or a human vs. human struggle, nor is it the heroic endeavor of the "good guys versus the bad guys," in which "We" are acting toward those holy ends of Democracy, Peace and Justice for "Them." There is no shadow of humanity left in the mechanistic destruction that is wrought at the hands of young American men fueled by a steady diet of extreme machismo and hubris, often perpetuated by their commanding officers.

Previously unimaginable destruction has been made possible due to the machinery that is the result of vision of some of the world's most skilled scientists and engineers, and previously unimaginable justification of these horrors is made possible by the vision of some of the world's most skilled religious and "patriotic" extremists.

The young soldier spoke of being turned into a killing machine, a monster, ultimately to carry out the will of the United States Government in this modern nightmare, which most people either justify or fear is a holy war. The truth is, this occupation has nothing to do with any god other than that holiest of modern deities, the American dollar. Modern war is executed with expensive mechanical technological advancements, while its human components are nothing more than an extension of their M-16s, but this war would not exist without that most significant (and destructive) of human technological advancements: capitalist imperialism.

Hundreds of years after the enlightenment, the Frankfurt school's half-century old assessment of it echoes eerily relevant. If modernity began with the physical manipulation of nature and ideological manipulation of "God's will," it will end when these two modes of destruction have mined that last of what remains of the natural and human, or that which not yet been used as a means to an end by imperialistic governments.