Wombaticus Rex » Thu Oct 13, 2016 10:12 pm wrote:Have come to similar conclusions. Foreign policy, as an artform, is morally reprehensible but strategically imperative. That contradiction won't get resolved any time soon.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Please forgive me for rambling...
More brute force than art for much of the last century or so. “Gunboat diplomacy” wasn't metaphorical.
The needs of big oil/coal/gas and MIC have between them determined foreign policy for more than a century so we might well ask how our needs and desires were shaped or encouraged to enable them. How much of what they do is necessary or through authentic popular demand? This is built into the nature of the discourse.
How much of the overriding obsession with security has been a genuine popular concern and how much an invention? How much is entrenched cultural chauvinism? How much is merely an the inevitable expression of economic necessity.* The apparent bizarreness of the security response to perceived threats, which more often than not were wholly misdirected if not invented, seems to indicate a wholly autonomous and out of control mechanism, distorting whatever foreign policy might have been should they (MIC etc) not exist.
Thinking along those lines might even point toward potential solutions. What would the world look like, not only if advanced weapons didn't exist, but if there wasn't a vast infrastructure and workforce dependent on the their continual production and use? How do we get there? What if instead of every war plane or tank, a solar powered desalination plant was built with the same resources. There'd be no water shortage anywhere for a start. What if the cost of resource wars over the last several decades had been spent mining asteroids or eliminating wasteful squandering of resources?
Many of the 'lifestyle' dreams we've been absorbing all our lives from the arts, particularly Hollywood and advertising but also literature, painting, photography and architecture once achieved turn out to be alienating and unsatisfying. The celebration of the car and the gun in American culture exemplify the veneration of objects necessary to those values which will eventually tolerate and then justify all the horror and the inequality. I've heard many people in the states commute to work via planes, sometimes more than one each way. Remember when the internet began to make all things seem possible rather than impossible? That moment where even employers were talking about how much work could be achieved remotely or how life could become less stressful and more family oriented? Much of that seems to be in stasis or gone entirely. Why?
Part of an answer might be found studying the design philosophy of Apple. Whenever I've been in those big apple stores, (out of curiosity, I've never owned an apple product) I notice people seem to adopt whispered tones of reverence in response to the almost priestly administrations of the store clerks, like some kind of bizarre confessional. It's possible to argue that the Mac, iPod, iPhone etc were less concerned with simplicity in minimising the interface than they were in limiting their use outside commercially driven barriers, ineluctably shaping the customer toward the product with each new iteration. The look and shape of the iPhone appears in retrospect to be a (un)conscious yearning for Kubrick's Monolith, the iPhone as agent of evolution. All of which is exemplified by Apples business ethics, hierarchic, restrictive, dogmatic, unprincipled and inscrutable. That little of this applies exclusively to Apple is part of my point. It's in the culture.
Bee Movie, which might have been scripted by the security state is ostensibly a discussion of individual liberty within the group using hive as metaphor for conformity. Community values are set against individual freedom, freedom which almost destroys the world as Bees go on strike and plants wither. With strange irony we began to face this threat within a few years of the film as agri-chem pesticides decimated bee populations with corporate effectiveness.
At heart a deeply conformist picture, Bee Movie argues the danger and essential frivolity of independent thought, though importantly not personal expression. Aimed at children, its most glaring aspect, obvious from outside is the fetishisation of authoritarian apparel, these bees have militarised technology and enforcement. Lantern jawed with the physique of Football players, they sport riot helmets, grimly jovial as they germinate plants not through evolved adaptation but with pollinating guns and other hardware reminiscent of a SWAT team. All this encouraging children to view these adornments as helpful accessories to life, while pollination is something best left to machines. What the fuck is that about?
In the last decade and a half there were innumerable potential technologies on the horizon which might have been designed to serve us. From the beginning we might have dreamed of machines which could liberate us. Instead those who did dreamed of machines which further enslaved us at so many levels, often through the very freedom they appeared to promise us. In every aspect of modern life from work to leisure, there is a machine we don't need.
Isn't foreign policy as we currently have it a machine which outlived it's moment of necessity?
*Economics (Adam Smith) arrived several decades before ecology (Darwin) but might learn a thing or two from it. Instead it drew all the wrong lessons through poorly understood evolutionary theories. In his theory of evolution Darwin stresses competition far less than co-operation.
