Robert Wright's Nonzero (private feed for eveningglass@gmail.com)
Society & Culture:Philosophy
“Death, destruction, disease, horror—that’s what war is all about, Anan. That’s what makes it a thing to be avoided. You’ve made it neat and painless—so neat and painless, you’ve had no reason to stop it.”
That’s Captain Kirk talking in an episode of Star Trek broadcast in 1967. Last week I taped a conversation with Samuel Moyn, a professor of history and law at Yale, who is saying things kind of like that in his important new book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.
The conversation will go public tomorrow evening, but I wanted to give paid subscribers access to it today and also give you a quick rundown of Moyn’s argument. And I thought: What better way to do that than to compare/contrast the world Moyn is describing with the world Captain Kirk was describing? So here are three Kirk-vs.-Moyn bullet points. (Video of our chat is at the bottom of this newsletter, and the audio is at the top. If you want to listen to it in your podcast app, go here, where you can subscribe to a feed that will give you all paid-subscriber-only podcasts—which mainly means Friday’s Parrot Room conversations with Mickey Kaus, my frenemy and ideological nemesis.)
1) In the Star Trek war there is lots of death but no pain. In this episode (called “A Taste of Armageddon”), the Starship Enterprise happens upon two planets that are locked in a forever war. The war itself isn’t “real”—it’s played out via computer simulation. But—and this, as they say, is a big but—by mutual agreement, the outcome of each simulated battle has to be reflected in real, human terms; the computer tells each side which soldiers have died, and those soldiers have to report to a disintegration chamber. The good news: death is immediate, and there’s no pain.
In Moyn’s world there is, in contrast, still pain and suffering—slow, agonizing deaths, plus the non-lethally wounded. But on balance there are way fewer casualties, including deaths, than there used to be. And that’s especially true for civilians. Massive collateral damage was part of not just World War II (in addition to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo each killed tens of thousands) but the Korean and Vietnamese wars. These days if 10 civilians die—as in the final US drone strike of the Afghanistan war—there can be an outcry. This is a good thing in itself, but Moyn worries, as Captain Kirk worried, that more humane war is making us more tolerant of the continuation of war.
2. The Star Trek war is symmetrical. The two warring planets are both very powerful. Indeed, like the US and USSR during the Cold War, they possess the power to annihilate each other—which is one reason an endless war that doesn’t wipe out either planet seems bearable.
The wars Moyn focuses on, in contrast, feature one very powerful and technologically sophisticated player—the United States—and various less powerful and lower-tech players: small countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya) and non-state actors (al Qaeda, ISIS). So from Americans’ point of view, there are actually two things that make wars more tolerable than, say, back in the Vietnam era: not just that the enemy is being attacked more surgically now, with fewer civilian casualties, but that America, by virtue of its overwhelming military superiority, suffers a tiny number of casualties by historical standards.
3) In the Star Trek war, no future reduction of casualties is in sight. The computer’s war simulation seems to be in a more or less steady state.
In Moyn’s world, in contrast, there seems to be a trend toward more far-flung but much smaller-scale military engagements: drone strikes killing a few people here and there, US special forces doing discrete missions in numerous countries (with most missions lower profile than the killing of Osama bin Laden or of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi). Indeed, Moyn thinks American military engagements of the future may increasingly resemble policing actions—targeting specific individuals, maybe even giving them a chance to surrender before killing them.
This, Moyn fears, may make the American public endlessly tolerant of—almost oblivious to—ongoing military activities in a large number of countries.
You may ask: Well, if so few people are dying, what’s so bad about Americans tolerating this kind of war?
In the course of my conversation with Moyn, more than one answer to that question emerged. The one I find most concerning is that even war-as-policing can create lots of ill will abroad. Not only because there will inevitably be some civilian casualties, and not only because the militants we target may have popular support—but also because the day-to-day military operations that constitute the infrastructure for such strikes can be oppressive. Moyn notes that lots of people abroad who never see a US drone strike are familiar with the sight and sound of US surveillance drones hovering above, watching them and their neighbors, any of whom, if they look suspicious, could be sentenced to death by a government that’s not theirs. If you put yourself in their shoes, it shouldn’t be hard to see how a forever policing war, conducted in a shifting array of countries, could foster large quantities of hatred of America.
And if hatred of America grows and festers, and the stuff you need to make, say, biological weapons continues to become more and more available, the days of low-casualty wars could be over.
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