Undulating Ungulate

The American announcement of their intent to fight a Long War, stretching out through the majority of the rest of our lives, spanning wherever in the world they deem necessary, is unsurprising as a logical consequence of the impossibility and irrationality of a “war on terror“. Rather, it simply provides official and ideological confirmation of the actions already underway; part of the continuing trend of making the invisible visible, as when they baldly announced they were seeking to assassinate Saddam Hussein, where previously such actions would be necessarily covert, and as with the open collusion between US and Israel to destabilise the democratically elected Hamas Palestine government, where again these would previously be undertaken covertly.

Briefing reporters in Washington, Ryan Henry, a Pentagon policy official, said: “When we refer to the long war, that is the war against terrorist extremists and the ideology that feeds it, and that is something that we do see going on for decades.”
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The authors anticipate US forces being engaged in irregular warfare around the world. They advocate “an indirect approach”, building and working with others, and seeking “to unbalance adversaries physically and psychologically, rather than attacking them where they are strongest or in the manner they expect to be attacked.

(If we are uncomfortable with the prospect of living our lives beneath this spectre, we should perhaps turn serious attention to how else we might be living.)

It was interesting to experience this announcement of the long war while reading the remarkably prescient War and Peace in the Global Village by Marshall McLuhan. His focus is on the effect of technology on our environment and cognition, with some quite radical insights.

“…new technology disturbs the image, both private and corporate, in any society, so much so that fear and anxiety ensue and a new quest for identity has to begin…. In our time, at least, the amount of innovation far exceeds all the impacts of innovation of all the past cultures of the world. We are more frantic to recover and put together the pieces of the shattered image than any past society whatever.”

(This sort of thing is part of the moose’s fascination with the effects of technology on human consciousness and society, and why chunks of this blog are focused on those technologies as they arise, and their potential to make change.)

To define the war as one of ideology further fascinates this moose. Since it seems honest for the first time.

“When we feel that our identity is in danger, we feel certain we have a mandate for war.”

Talk of democracy, capitalism or Islamic fundamentalism is a nonsense. They are abstractions which do nothing. People do things. Beliefs are interesting only insofar as they limit, or enable, what people do. What influences human cognition and consciousness is thus vital; and if we do not understand the effects of our environment and technologies upon our consciousness, we may act in error of our causes. As we adapt to our new environment, as so much changes so fast, our sense of who we are is threatened. And when we are afraid, we lash out in primitive ways, against what is perceived as different, and revert to a fundamentalist mentality to hold on to our sense of self.

A much more developed version of this direction of argument is developing somewhere in my consciousness. Politics and fundamentalism is likely to become the practical example of choice in whatever body of work gestates around the consciousness-reality-language-belief gestalt.

Filed by billy at 6:15 pm under consciousness,politics,the world
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