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Modernity and War - The Creed of Absolute Violence
By Philip K. Lawrence
Reviewed by Jeffrey Alfier
| For international politics professor Philip K. Lawrence, the leitmotiv of modernity has been Western civilization’s "dominion over other peoples and lands, the place of science in the construction and ordering of the polity, and the rise of technocratic and instrumentalist rationalism." (87) That is, modernity’s essential elements of positivism and rationality became excuses to run roughshod over indigenous cultures on an engine of religious and ideological progress. In promulgating that creed, modernity unveiled its more destructive consequences. Yet, the danger was not seriously entertained amidst the ever-optimistic Enlightenment underpinnings. In particular, what was not foreseen, or ignored, was the nascent Industrial Revolution’s production of weaponry, resulting in a lethal symbiosis of lower cost, higher volume, improvements in communication, standardization, and interoperability. Now, man possessed the ability to perceive of the annihilation of an enemy's forces. Consequently, the civilized rules of warfare gave way to ideological wars that could sweep away the old orders, as military strategy became science executed independently of the notions of history or culture. These cataclysmic changes were set against the background of social Darwinism and its pseudo-science of eugenics. Racism could now be justified in polite circles as a 'survival of the fittest' mentality, painting the enemy as ‘the other’, as something less than human. |
 Modernity and War - The Creed of Absolute Violence By Philip K. Lawrence Hardcover - $ 65.00 Published September 1997 St. Martin's Press |
However, in the ascendant modernity of the 19th century, a strategic and tactical stasis failed to keep up with the reality of the destructive prodigies of the Industrial Revolution, where the industrial worker himself became a key to war. Eventually, the new strategic thinking of total war would make this worker a target as lucrative as the tank or aircraft he built. Other synergies at work as well, including the idea of warfare waged as manly and heroic work, a chimera that dissolved in the miseries of Verdun and the Somme, inducing despair among legions of European intellectuals. Yet such bloodshed, unprecedented on the pages of human history, sprang from modernity which vaulted human perfection into the future, beyond the temporal considerations of armed conflict.
Such was the modernist seedbed spawning the nuclear age. Lawrence believes that by the late 1940s nuclear thinking became the ‘arcana imperii’ of US government think tanks, the military, and politicians, thereby eclipsing public discourse on issues surrounding nuclear weapons employment. "Abstract reasoning became a problem-solving tool"(103), producing conjectures of nuclear deterrence and defense which became logically and militarily suspect.
What of the emergence of the airplane as a weapon of war? According to Lawrence, as an alternative to deleterious wars of mass attrition, a "modernist philosophy of air war…re-established a positive cultural gloss for war." (61) Of utmost importance was the fact that airpower existed in the popular imagination through the genre of science fiction, decades prior to the First World War. This deep cultural mindset, coupled with the ideas of thinkers like Douhet and Billy Mitchell, set about to restore man's optimism in the ideology and vision of human progress. As it would turn out, it became vogue to think of bombing a nation's morale, and thereby its will to wage war. However, the persistent enigma is determining just what constitutes a nation's 'will' to continue fighting.
Despite a tincture of ‘skeptophilia’, there is much to commend here. Lawrence challenges our intellectual complacency regarding mass violence in the context of human progress. Because of his philosophical and historical sweep, he makes a valuable contribution to the dialectics between warfare and morality, offering an optimistic note that "there is also a chance that the powerful will tread more warily in the world." (5). His thesis provides a sobering counter-balance to our dreamy solipsism in the post-Gulf War world, where too much of our culture assumes a kind of folk teleology. Meanwhile, much of the West carries on like the avatar of Wallace Stevens’ "Life on a Battleship" – living on a divinity of steel, in which we are the sole captain.
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Jeffrey Alfier holds an MA in Humanities from California State University. He lives in Germany, where he works for the US government.
He is a member of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, City Colleges of Chicago - European Division, and Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society.
His writing has appeared in professional journals and his poetry in several e-zines.