The sense of beginning experienced in our day goes well beyond the new states, new political means, beyond the science (or art) of coalition making. It is basically a beginning for the new zoon politikon, for a political animal that has lost most of its natural roots and whose human nature is probably better defined in terms of political instincts than cultural accomplishments. Culture is by and large discarded. People simply cannot carry culture with them, but neither can they negotiate their existence without political means appropriate to a social condition structurally different from that experienced in the past. The self-centered individual cannot escape relating to others and defining himself in reference to them. "We Am a Virtual Community" is not merely a suggestive title (conceived by Earl Babble) for an article on Internet interaction, but a good description of today's political world. The specific forms of relations, the We Am faction among them, are subject to many factors, not least to the biological and cognitive redefinition of the human being. When everything, literally everything, is possible and indeed acceptable, the political animal has to find new ways to make choices and pursue goals without facing the risk of losing identity. This is probably the decisive political battle that the humans have yet to win.
"Theirs not to reason why"
High precision electronic eyes placed on orbiting satellites picked up the firing of the rocket and the launch parameters. Data was transmitted to a computer center for information processing. The computed information, specifying angles, firing time, and trajectory, was relayed to antirocket missiles programmed to intercept enemy attack. The system-consisting of a vast, distributed, highly interconnected configuration- incorporates expertise from electronic vision devices, knowledge encoded in software designed to calculate rocket orbits (based on launch time, position, angle, speed, weight, meteorological conditions), fast transmission networks, and automated positioning and triggering devices.
This integrated system has replaced literacy-based modes of practical experiences pertinent to war. Instead of manuals describing the many parameters and operations that military personnel need to consider, information is contained in computer programs. These also eliminate the need for long training cycles, expensive practical exercises, and the continuous revision of manuals containing the latest information. Distributed knowledge and interconnectedness have replaced the structure of top-down command. The system described above contains many mediating components that allow for highly efficient wars.
Examples similar to the relative annihilation of the infamous (and ineffective) Scud missiles can be given from other episodes of the Gulf War, including the 100 hours of the so-called ground battle. This battle displayed the deadly force of artillery and tanks, the power of modeling and simulation, and major planning and testing methods independent of literacy-based military strategy and tactics. The enemy consisted of an army structured on the principles derived from the pragmatic framework of literacy: centralized line of command, rigid hierarchy, modern military equipment integrated in a war plan that was essentially sequential and deterministic, and based on a logic of long-term encounters.
The first war of the civilization of illiteracy
An earlier draft of this chapter-introductory lines excepted-was written when no one anticipated a conflict involving American troops in the Arabian Gulf. During this war, theoretic arguments regarding the institution of the military in the civilization of illiteracy were tested in the flesh and blood of confrontation, probably well beyond my, or anybody's, expectations or wishes. The Gulf War reported by the media resembled a computer game or a television show. As I watched, I felt as though someone had lifted part of my text and sent it through the news wires. The story made for great headlines; but out of context, or in the context of a reality reduced to the TV screen, its overall meaning was obscured. In many ways, the armed conflict ended up trivialized, another soap opera or spectator sport. Other reports related the frustration of the troops with the limited number of phone lines. The reports also commented on the replacement of the traditional letter by videotape as the preferred method of communication. We also heard about an almost magical device, called CNX, used to help orient each person involved in the vast desert theater of war. And we saw or heard about the exotically named preprocessed and prepackaged food, about the pastimes of the troops.
The context started coming into focus. This was to become the first war of the civilization of illiteracy: a highly efficient (the word takes on an unintended cynical connotation here) activity that involved non-sequential, massively parallel practical experiences. These required precise synchronization (each failure resulted in victims to what was euphemistically called "friendly fire"), distributed decision-making, intense mediation, advanced specialization, and task distribution. These characteristics embodied an ideology of relative value disengaged from political discourse, and even more from moral precepts. Nobody expected this war to reinvent the bow and arrow (documented shortly after human self-constitutive experiences in language), or even the wheel (originating in the practical experience of populations whose home was the territory where the fighting took place). It is possible that some of the military personnel had heard about the book entitled The Art of War (written by Sun Tzu in 325 BCE or earlier), or about the books, some of undisputed notoriety, filling the libraries of military academies and the better research libraries. But this was not a war fought for the Book, in the spirit of the Book (Koran or Bible), or in the way books describe wars. In a way, the Gulf War was truly the "mother of all battles" in that it rewrote the rules on war-or did away with them.
All the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy are retraceable in the practical experience of today's military: highly mediated praxis through electronic information storage and retrieval; transition from an economy of wartime scarcity to a war of affluent means of defense and destruction; shift from war based on the positivist notion of facts (many requiring incursions into enemy territory) to a relativistic notion of image, and the corresponding technology of image processing; shift from a hierarchical structure of rigid lines of authority and command to a relatively loose line of context dependent on freedom of choice extended almost to the individual soldier; a discipline of austerity and isolation from the non-military (conditions accepted in the past as part of a military career) replaced by expectations of relaxation and enjoyment, derived from the permissiveness and drive for self-satisfaction of society at large. That some of these expectations could not be fulfilled was criticized, but not really understood. The hosts of the American army live by different standards. Muslim law prohibits alcohol consumption and certain forms of entertainment, as well as burial of dead infidels in a land claiming to be holy.
The Gulf War, on its various fronts, was not a conflict of irreducible or irreconcilable religions, morals, or cultures. It was a conflict between an artificially maintained civilization of literacy, in which rich reserves of oil serve as a buffer from efficiency requirements in all aspects of life, and another civilization, one that entails the illiteracy of a society and an energy-hungry, global economy that reflects a dynamics of high efficiency.