Book Review: Warrior Geeks: How 21st Century Technology is Changing the Way We Fight and Think About War by Christopher Coker.
Warrior Geeks: How 21st Century Technology is Changing the Way We Fight and Think About War by Christopher Coker. London: Hurst & Company, 2013. 384 pp., £25.00 hardcover. 978 1849042543
In his latest book, Christopher Coker offers a compelling and erudite engagement with the momentous transformative effects that a seemingly ever-accelerating influx of technoscientific innovations is having on the practice and experience of war and, by extension, on humanity itself. Readers familiar with Coker’s earlier work will recognise the coordinates of a philosophical landscape mapped out in previous books such as Waging War Without Warriors (2002) and The Future of War (2004). Yet it is in this volume that they will encounter his most pointed engagement with the myriad advances in genetics, neuroscience, pharmacology and artificial intelligence that are spearheading the military’s latest attempts at shaping compliant and predictable executants finally rid of their troublesome human uncertainties and frailties. Coker’s central thesis is that, to the extent that such a programme can ever be realised, it risks being achieved at the cost of our own humanity.
Confronted to the geeks as the scientific reductionists who ‘wish to purge war of its existential and metaphysical elements and render it wholly instrumental’, we find the Greeks as the contemporary bearers of a classical tradition that values the humanity and ‘spiritual dimension of “being”’ of those still called upon to fight today (p.291). But in articulating this opposition, Coker avoids any simplistic choice between CP Snow’s ‘two cultures’ that would result in a worn-out and sterile knee-jerk opposition to the sciences in the name of the embattled humanities. Ultimately advocating a reconciliation of these two perspectives, we find him highly conversant in the latest scientific discoveries and debates, acknowledging the valuable insights these have contributed and recruiting them for his own arguments while ceaselessly underlining where particular claims over-reach themselves on the basis of questionable methodologies, hasty generalisations, or impoverished understandings of the human condition. Nor does he cling onto any essentialised humanistic conception of this condition, insisting that ‘humanity is neither an essence nor an end but a continuous and precarious process of becoming human’ (p.xxv).
Thus the book is as much about the enigma of human existence as it is the technological revolutions that may yet usher in the post-human. Particular emphasis is placed on the symbiotic relationship between humanity and war or how, in Thucydides’s words, war is that peculiarly ‘human thing’ in which some of the most profound depths of individual and collective experience are attained. Drawing on evidence ranging from studies in anthropology and evolutionary psychology to literature and personal testimonies, Coker endeavours to show that if humans make war, war makes humans no less. Yet if war and humanity have co-evolved alongside, it is the present acceleration of technological change that is threatening to beget a battlespace that has no place for not only such venerated human qualities as courage, sacrifice, character, and honour but even more fundamental categories of subjectivity, agency and ethics.
Behind the most pernicious forms of scientific reductionism and their desire to understand inner life as a mere surface effect of underlying genes and neurochemistry that will be eventually amenable to rational control, Coker sees the negation of the human self, free will and the very possibility of moral agency. The individual soldier enframed in this manner seems destined to being enmeshed in ever-tighter cybernetic assemblages of organic and inorganic elements in which the overarching system or network is all that counts and the human is reduced to merely one of its constituent units or nodes. Such a dissolution of individuality in an all-encompassing totality would preclude not only any self-expressive autonomy but also the forms of inter-subjectivity experienced through both fraternal camaraderie and respectful enmity (p.101-2). Already increasingly imperilled, the warrior’s quest for “the actualisation of their own personhood, an affirmation of their own authenticity as a human being” (p.268) would find itself definitively foreclosed. And if some readers find the warrior too martial and aristocratic a figure to share Coker’s lament of its decline, they would do well to consider the ethical import of the moves to delegate decision-making away from the individual human to synthetic intelligences, best exemplified by the project for ethical autonomous weapon systems articulated by the roboticist Ronald Arkin. Contra the latter’s views that unwaveringly logical silicon-based reasoning would attain a higher ethical standard, Coker argues persuasively that true moral agency is necessarily embodied and grounded in human capacities for emotion, empathy and imagination that no artificial intelligence can even begin to emulate today. But most important of all are the inescapable moral ambiguities and dilemmas that confront us with existential choices that we must commit to and bear responsibility for since we are in the final instance, as Sartre would have it, “condemned to be free” (p.182).
Warrior Geeks stops short of offering any immediate solutions to averting its most dystopian visions with Coker explicitly staking a common ground with that of science-fiction in proposing less a prophecy of the future than a systematic and rigorous extrapolation of some the more insistent features of our present time. If the future is indeed not a destiny but a choice (p.150), not the least of the merits of his penetrative study is its salutary reminder that in tracing the path ahead, it is at great peril that we forgo a sustained dialogue with the past experiences and reflections of our predecessors’ own struggles with existence on the battlefield. In our haste to attain post-humanity, we may otherwise end up neglecting the task of becoming human in the first place.
Antoine Bousquet is a Lecturer in International Politics, Birkbeck, University of London.
