- WEAPON TECH 1

The science, craft and art of warfare in history and the present.

MAIN PAGE PRINCIPALE : WWW.WWCOVIDGM.ORG

Le pire imbécile se croit le plus sage- apprentimarcv
Ne traitez personne d'imbécile – Jésus

The greatest fool thinks himself wisest - learnermarkv
Call no man a fool. Jesus

Chapters

• 0:08 The systemic decay of a military-industrial society is a phenomenon of counter-modernization
• 1:57 Long before alchemists hogged the limelight, weapon technicians practiced “the scientific method” as a matter of routine
• 5:27 the Biotech (engineered life) Millennium we are charging into
• 11:49 We, sorry to say, rely on the booty ledgers of greasy warlords to record our past
• 13:24 We should mime Life meticulously
• 15:49 Weapon science
• 19:19 All political transformations were outcomes and accelerators of weapon technology

Transcript

WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- WEAPON TECHNOLOGY (I) - 

“The systemic decay of a military-industrial society is a phenomenon of counter-modernization ― an abrupt reversal of the key developments that have characterized all industrial societies to date. This form of social degeneration was provoked in the Soviet case by the anti-innovative aspects of the economic system coupled with the self-destructive character of its military-driven modernization. The system’s devolution can be factored into four interconnected processes: technological stagnation and declining productivity; decline in the complexity of social structure and the stagnation in the division of labor; the system’s inability to develop new needs, beliefs, and values – all necessary for progress; and finally, waste of resources and ever-spreading ecological damage.” After Empire: Multiethnic Societies and Nation-Building; the Soviet Union and the Russian, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, Edited by Karen Barkey and Mark Von Hagen, Westview Press, Boulder, Colorado, 1997, p. 81.

Victor Zaslavsky wrote the text above as an after-the-fact explanation of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The same criteria apply to soon-to-collapse Western gerontocracies who behave the same. According to him, the Soviet Union’s collapse resulted from its inability to assimilate native majorities in Central Asia and reluctance to convert its military technologies into peaceable ones. 

Learner predicts that Western societies will experience a similar collapse from their inability and refusal to embrace foreigners in a peaceful, global cooperative, as well as their refusal “Après Exxon, le déluge” (adapted from a Louis XIV quote: “After me, the Flood.”) to develop technologies other than those that burn fossil fuels: A) rapidly running out and B) likely to parboil the biosphere. Unlike the crash of the Soviet Union, no compensating foreign aid or global vitality will cushion this catastrophe, barring magic, fantasy or a miracle.

Another weapon myth asserts that the scientific method evolved from alchemy: a scheme to convert base metals into gold. This anal retentive fantasy turned out to be a great waste of time and money for cunning charlatans and their willing, royal dupes. Even if this transmutation were possible, collapsing gold prices would render it worthless. 

Even more obtuse: the alchemist’s search for an alkahest or universal solvent that no container could hold. Other alchemical wishes include:

·      Homunculi (“little men”). Why bother? 

·      Palingenesis: the restoration of plants from their ashes. From this fantasy, it might seem but a short step to restore life from death. 

·      A Spiritus Mundi that dissolves gold and triggers other magic. 

·      An Active Principal or Quintessence of Elements. That sounds like a good way to rekindle the Big Bang. Who volunteers to outswim the next Big Bang?

·      The ultimate alchemical absurdity would ensure human health by means of a potable liquid gold called aurum potabile ― another hollow ambition. 

One of the key differences between Hell and this Earth is our opportunity to live well, die well and reincarnate better. Weapon management's crowning triumph would be to immortalize the senility of the richest tormentors. It would also be obscene vampirism, as long as so many other people went starving. Ditto, 120-year lifespans for the rich while continental populations averaged a third of that duration. How can the rich permit themselves such transgressions?

I wouldn’t criticize these hobbies, (extracted from Manly P. Hall’s encyclopedic The Secret Teachings of All Ages, The Philosophical Research Society, Inc., Los Angeles, 1977, pp. 154-55), if they did not take so much time and talent away from our foremost tasks: namely, making warfare illegal across the planet and restoring world peace. I’ll never get over the range of trivia people distract themselves with, otherwise.

I find fascinating alchemists’ insistence that their earthly formulas constitute one of four separate formulations. To come to fruition, all four must occur simultaneously on three spiritual planes and this earthly one ― or so they believe. 

Once Learners resolve our problems of warfare and peace-fair, we may make it our lifework to turn turnips into marigolds or earn big bucks dribbling a ball across a playing field ― obsess to our heart’s content over such trifles. We may pursue our topics of passion wherever they lead us, without censure. However, every Learner is disgraced by the last five thousand years of human hyperactivity that has led nowhere. Little children lost in the dark, distracting themselves with trivial games.

Long before alchemists hogged the limelight, weapon technicians practiced “the scientific method” as a matter of routine. They used inductive and deductive reasoning; trial and error; repetition and confirmation of results; the extraction, refinement and admixture of standard elements into consistent compounds, as well as other clever laboratory tricks.

Compared to the tomb-like silence of these ancient weapons institutions, alchemists have been shrill braggarts. 

The first scientific applications served military technologies. More and more demanding, higher-energy weapons (and even tougher weapon-making tools) were crafted from available materials: bone, limestone, flint, quartz, copper, arsenical copper, bronze, iron (first wrought, then cast), alloys, steel, stainless steel, uranium, plutonium, titanium and ceramic/plastic composites ― to make more and “better” weapons. 

Digging down into the Earth, one conclusion comes to the surface. Weapons define the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages; they define the Pyrotech (controlled fire) Era we are crossing at full steam, and the Biotech (engineered life) Millennium we are charging into. 

If we're not very, very careful, this new era may last less than a generation. Otherwise, our survivors will go back to knapping radioactive flint ― assuming anything survives our unintended consequences except, perhaps, weeds, cockroaches, and deep-stratum bacteria … 

I don’t want to reincarnate as a deep stratum bacterium – the closest ecological niche I can imagine to biblical Hell – and re-evolve after endless agonies into something approaching human awareness. No more so than as a mutant rodent chipping glowing flint. 

Imagine to what extent our vital awareness might evolve in a future devoted to peace: as superior to humanity on WeaponWorld as it would be to deep stratum bacteria. Though the contrast between these realities may just be a question of environmental scale and marginal details.

We are entering the Biotech Era because scientists have finally taken seriously the idea of biological weapons. For a science to become “hard” it must show promise as a new weapon technology.

Weapon technicians produce the most sophisticated, durable and expensive inventions: state-of-the-artifacts for hunters and warriors. They have done so incessantly. Weapons were crafted to the most rigorous standards of excellence. They used the most challenging, hardest and most hazardous materials available. Weapons have been more revered than idols, hoarded more greedily than treasure that’s been squandered on military spending sprees. The mightiest ones were named, cherished in great numbers and given more care than many children treated as throwaways ― even though no one will admit as much. Still nowadays, hundreds of millions of children go without adequate sustenance, even though billions of dollars coddle a few thousand nuclear weapons.

The social status of ironsmiths, compared to that of warriors, has long fueled scholarly debate. Tyrants enslaved the best smiths to make more weapons. Weapon production was an arcane craft imbued with religious, mystical and magical overtones. In every land, ancient smiths retained magical status for better or worse.

For example, red-hot blades of the finest steel were bathed in fresh human blood drained just beforehand from terrified human sacrifices (deeply frightened people breathe hard, you see). Quenching these blades in heavily oxygenated hemoglobin (liquid carbon) produced the “finest” sword steel. Apparently, this method produced extremely strong and flexible carbon nanotubes like those found in Damascene sword blades made from ferrous ingots of wootz: a kind of iron ore laced with special trace elements. This, at least, according to an article from Le Monde currently archived and inaccessible to me.

These blockages of information flow, for no better reason than cost, are incredibly shortsighted. Nothing less than the well-recorded consciousness of the whole of humanity will satisfy the Agora of PeaceWorld! The free distribution of knowledge will offer far more rewards than the greed-dictates of Capitalism and its self-defeating habit of info starvation for immediate profit.

See Google: “wootz.”

The more technicians, equipment and cash available, the deadlier the final product. Warrior chieftains had to reward their smiths royally, yet keep their craft a state secret. Thus, “alchemists.” 

So tell me: modern science is supposed to have evolved from alchemy and not from some unmentionable weapon technology, right? That transparent lie is taught to every schoolchild without exception, duly repeated and memorized by all of us, no matter how peaceloving we may consider ourselves. Taught deliberately, mind you, to conceal weapon mentality’s death grip over our cultural norms, and that of its technology over everything we hold dear. 

The devil’s foremost triumph is convincing the whole world that he does not exist. 

How many more lies, just as vicious and absurd, has weapon mentality crammed into our skull? How much more noxious junk will weapon technology foist on us ― when we could be crafting the flawless jewelry of peace technology instead? Just how clueless are we? Read on.

In Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford discusses the influence miners and mining had on early technology. He was indeed correct. To make weapons, smiths required metal ore; to pay for them, tyrants required gemstones and precious metal. Siege warfare arose from primitive mining techniques. The first steam engines – and later on, the first reciprocating ones – pumped water from flooded mine pits.

Long before they got a chance to flip a light switch, use a flashlight or pick up a fountain pen, many poor peasants were drilled on bolt-action rifles, even though these novelties were invented around the same time. 

In our supposedly civilized age, titanic sums go to the art and crafts of war. The USA spends fortunes it could ill afford to develop the latest fighter-bomber variants. Those space age wonders are then launched by the squadron, flown by pilots trained for millions of dollars more, to bomb the world’s cheapest infantry. 

According to Stanley Kubrick, we could have launched a manned spaceship to Jupiter in the year 2001. He wasn’t stupid; that feat could have been within our reach, despite its problems and dangers. Instead, we chose to dispatch three hundred fighter-bombers and an army corps to fight in Afghanistan.  Afghanistan! The graveyard of imperial losers! What intellect, what creativity, what genius! I ask you.

Or take a simple handgun. It is a thing of chilling beauty, superbly crafted for homicide alone. The ultimate uni-tasker, as Alton Brown would put it. Manufactured en masse, it can be priced dirt-cheap or handed out for free. People can get paid to carry it instead of earning an honest living. Note too the circuit-guided munitions of this Silicon Age and the military satellites launched into orbit to aim them unerringly. 

Yet we find nothing abnormal with any of this. Our killer ape habits have merely gotten more convoluted. Killing has become the primary focus of public complexity ― just about the only one at which our societies excel in the short and the long run. 

Warfare is a stupid waste by definition, no matter how technologically complex we make it. It demands that we suspend disbelief in its ultimate outcome; it demands magical thinking. Peace is much more cerebral and complex, no matter how impractical we make it seem.

The second forerunner of science was ceramics: at present, a spacey military technology. Given the male chauvinism that prevails these days, it might seem tempting to dismiss pottery, basket weaving, textiles and cooking as trivial, female pursuits. Yet potsherds and remnants of the hearth are dependable indicators of ancient cultural achievement. The more creative and adaptive the cookery, the more dynamic the civilization. What art form could be more ephemeral than cooking a meal?

Despite the patriarchal arrogance of recorded history, real civilization seems to revolve around the kindred arts of medicine (especially midwifery and herbalism), carpentry, washing and thus plumbing, and cooking; followed by the psychic/religious/entertainment permutations of divination, storytelling, astrology and geomancy. Those epics we should recite around the campfire (read the mass media). Ancient skills that gradually decayed into our corporate weapon religions and ideologies. We have cast aside ancient wisdom in the newfound blindness of our scientific positivism. “I am a certified scientist and as such positive you are wrong ― no need for proof!” 

A third ancient source of science was animal husbandry: the breeding of hunting dogs first, then food beasts, chariot mules and warhorses, among other species. Many adult farmers and adolescent naturalists took up botany and zoology as their topic of passion. Their in-depth peace studies attracted more Learner curiosity than the alchemists’ putrid alembics, even though much less coverage in the historical record. 

We, sorry to say, rely on the booty ledgers of greasy warlords to record our past. 

For all we know, gene splicing may have been a prehistoric, mortar-and-pestle cottage industry. Sorta like Mendel and his pea plants, but thousands of years prior. All that would have been necessary was a magic potion that strips the envelope of a seed cell from its nucleus and core DNA ― then a lot of patience. Results could have been studied by microscope or by crossbreeding organisms into new functions. As they say in genetics, phylogeny. This would have taken more time and required generations of hereditary human vocation, clan-craft and priesthood. 

Then again, earlier species of animals or insects, and perhaps of other hominids, may have carried out analyses on microscopic scales. The smaller the species, the likelier its vision would penetrate microscopic scales and speed up this analysis. What else was necessary? Some intra-species chemical communication system? Insects (and especially microbes) are expert at such. Some species could have exploited the magnification of water droplets, or some lens-making plant may have served. These plants are extinct nowadays. But in the past, plants could have grown blisters as organic lenses to magnify solar energy, and other species could have benefited from them visually.

Even if these assumptions remain unproven (which doesn’t mean they’re false), it is certain that ants capture other insects and “milk” their secretions. I’ll bet they select their “cattle” much the way humans do, by killing off poor producers and breeding better ones. It’s likely that other social insects did as much and more in the past. In fact, bacteria, viruses and other microorganisms swap DNA fragments among themselves and infect multi-cellular organisms with them (evolution through disease).

The superiority of human intelligence and human communications, and the inferiority of those of other species past and present, are blinkered prejudices not supported by enough evidence. The collective intelligence of microorganisms precedes that of humanity by billions of years and uncounted generations. 

Humanity should feel deeply humble before the magnificence of the natural world. Learners will stop underrating the genius of Life and the diamond crush of evolution’s selectivity over time. We will study them in all humility, anticipating unplumbed depths of complexity and ingenuity, no matter how sophisticated our sciences may become. We should mime Life meticulously. Upon that sacred worship, that unconditional love like that of a toddler for its parents, human survival may depend. Our current understanding of living systems is as clear as mud: just sufficient to destroy them now, and us in the long run. 

Own up to that, at least.

Scientists won’t come to our aid (as we keep wishing they would, disappointed every time), until they embrace some ideology more fitting than flatulent certitude, sneering nihilism and academic narcissism. At the bidding of weapons orthodoxy, they reject sacred wonder and are the lesser for it. 

For a fixed price, scientists can make deadly evil look promising, cloak grand larceny, engineer mass misery and shut down valid alarms. Given enough grant money, distinguished doctor-professors affirm that social incompetence, pollution, warfare and ecocide are cryptically beneficial, unavoidable or “insufficiently studied ― so let them continue uninterrupted.” Media-driven quarrels between scientific egotists paralyze scientific communities that might otherwise have kept themselves above outright corruption. 

Like seasoned prostitutes, professional scientists serve Conspiracies of Greed: the foremost topics of passion our weapon states subsidize. While some hookers may have a heart of gold – and many scientists, ethics adamantine – it would be unwise to entrust our fate to their care without extensive popular supervision. 

Might this popular wisdom lack enough insight to appreciate the complexities of science and oversee it effectively? The fault would lie with info elites and their ridiculous academic protocols, much more so than with public wisdom. This runaway train could be brought under control and switched toward PeaceWorld in a single generation.

The IQ exam is our crude yardstick of brain smarts. It was first developed to sort World War I (sic) conscripts. Nowadays, its grading serves to dignify racism, especially in works of anti-genius like The Bell Curve. 

“It is a truism that all wars drive forward science and technology. As many historians and philosophers have asserted, weapons always preceded tools. The first machines were battering rams and catapults. The oldest profession on Earth is not the usual one of prostitute, but that of smithy turning out weapons. The first roads were strategic paths; the first canals served a military purpose. Credit emerged to finance mercenaries, and surgery was developed as a result of military campaigns during the 19th century.” Translated from Jean Bacon, Les saigneurs de la guerre (The Bleeding Lords of War), Éditions l’Harmattan, Paris, 1995, p. 139.

Such luminaries as Archimedes, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Cervantes, Dürer, Descartes, Lavoisier, Goethe, Eli Whitney, Somerset Maugham, Dr. Seuss and many more made their reputation as soldiers, officers, spies, fortification engineers, armorers, military industrialists, reporters and bureaucrats: the principal career paths of weapon civilization. 

Roman Legions served as the first factories, producing loot and slaves for centuries on an industrial scale (according to Marshall McCluan in Understanding Media). 

Time and motion studies first rationalized the thrust and parry of swordplay, then the thirty-odd steps it took to fire a clumsy harquebus (primitive shoulder cannon) ― long before factory tasks required such analysis. Diderot’s Encyclopédie, the pivot of Enlightenment technology, was a “How To” of primitive heavy industry — in other words, of weapon technology. The Blanchard lathe, premier design tool of modern industry, was first used to machine-sculpt standardized wooden stocks for Kentucky (Jaeger) rifles. 

All the political transformations our historians hold dear: from tribal allegiance to city-state (whether Tyrannical or Oligarchic), to empire, to royal domain, to “representative” democracy, to today’s corporate/industrial combat-slave market, all of them were outcomes and accelerators of weapon technology.

… 

COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net

- WEAPON TECHNOLOGY (2) -