Tag Archives: sanity

Sane Societies:  A Father’s Day Reflection, Dr. Robert Zuber

21 Jun

There exists no more difficult art than living.  Seneca

Our planet is the mental institution of the universe. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage. Ray Bradbury

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.  Bertrand Russell

Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.  Friedrich Nietzsche

Where to look if you’ve lost your mind? Bernard Malamud

Was insanity just a matter of dropping the act?  Susanna Kaysen

Eventually you learn to exist on the precipice of insanity. R.F. Kuang

It is perhaps an oddity (even by my standards) to write about madness as a tribute to Fathers’ Day.  But madness now accompanies a broad swath of our personal, family, economic and governance domains and it is reasonable to ask if there are particular responsibilities that parents — that fathers — can exercise to help ensure that the music accompanying the sanity-deficient dance we now collectively perform, thereby giving expression to a range of social and personal pathologies, can be toned way down.  

The motivation for this post is a book which I recently read again and which had a good bit to do with my own social psychology awakening, “The Sane Society” by Erich Fromm.  The book is certainly dated in some aspects, still wrestling with outdated Freudian assumptions  and advocating mostly conventional therapeutic options. But it also makes an important contribution to the creeping anxiety and “great fear”  which characterize this moment, indeed has characterized many of our “civilized” societies and their institutions well before the inception of Fromm’s work (and my own earthly existence) back in the 1950s.

Most of us don’t need to be convinced about the collective insanity which punctuates our present.  We experience the carnage of epidemic levels of predation, sexual and economic.  We endure a system which stacks the deck against workers and in favor of oligarchs and corrupt officials, a system which has left many of us desperate for health care and other services all while we literally starve for connection beyond transaction.  We daily witness the unleashing of bias and violence against people, even citizens, whose skin color and language preference is exploited by out-of-control enforcement agents.  We recoil from seemingly endless armed conflict  and rumors of more, as well as from faith traditions which are now as likely to justify the madness as demand the repentance for our most  toxic actions and aspirations.

There is more, of course, both life affirming and life challenging.  What interests me is that, 70+ years on, none of our current levels of insanity would be news to Fromm.  Even then, he lamented the “lengthening shadows” over societies which have increasingly made human beings an alienated “appendix” to societies rather than being central to the creation of their meaning and value. Indeed, Fromm lamented traits of personality which made people “acceptable” in his time and ours – humans  who “fit” without friction, who obsess over recognition and affirmation, who refuse to “stick their necks out no matter the provocation, people who are “well adjusted” in a way that reminds of the robots and AI which, despite the benefits, now seem to be pushing us further towards “the precipice of insanity” and further away from the human agency which remains our primary antidote to alienated living. 

Fromm was explicit in his concern that, unless societies can transform material interests into respect for what he called “the fundamental facts of human existence,” such as our need for transcendence, relatedness and rootedness, that decay and barbarism were likely outcomes and that “blood and soil” concerns would crowd out solidarity and the quest for genuine security in a world which is literally ruled by (largely outmoded) economic indicators and priorities.  Even back then, Fromm lamented the gaps increasingly separating knowledge and reason (let alone wisdom), the willingness of too many to sit back and let the world simply take its course, to reinforce and amplify passivity as a lifestyle in which “taking care of your own” is the only care you are ever expected to take.

Many of the fathers I know see these recurring warning lights and understand the threats they pose to the children they are trying to raise.  They recognize that, quoting Fromm again, “ the aim of life is to live it, to be fully born, to be fully awake.” But these fathers also see the pressures emanating from an increasingly sanity-challenged society which deifies the economic, which reinforces the passive, which mocks the humble, and which sustains mighty divides of race and economic opportunity, religion and gender – divides which ultimately magnify insecurity rather than promote its resolution.

Fromm worried in his time about the idolatrous “blood and soil” concerns upheld by too many men,  concerns which have only served to make prescient his “decay and barbarism” warning in our own, more immediate contexts. But he  also worried about fathers who were seemingly, in his words, “along for the ride” of rearing children in this current time of creeping madness.  Thankfully, however, many of the  fathers I know largely recognize the need to model and promote a certain kind of courage and resilience in their children, helping them along the road to more effectively tolerating insecurity and to do so free of panic, free of  pretense , and free of the life-denying consequences of the “great fear” which currently grips much of our individual and institutional expressions.

In these times, such is the opening portal to a very high calling, one which models a life engaged robustly, a life which eschews the paralysis of boredom, which upholds the ethical even while sailing across seas of corruption, which allows us space to find rest without resignation, which insists on agency to help mold a world fit for more — much more — than our borderline-insane pursuits and distractions focused largely on human consumption.

Fromm urged all parents, especially all fathers, to commit to raising children able and willing to use their skills and commitments in the service of life  and not of destruction, alienation or even death. From my seat in the policy world, I believe that these contrasting ends remain fully relevant if we are ever to move our planet beyond its “mental institution of the universe” status. And from my even better seat in the human community, I deeply honor those fathers who help their children master “the difficult art of living” in all its aspects, in part by choosing life themselves.

In this sanity-challenged world of ours, this mastery might be the highest calling of all. Grateful to all the fathers who heed the call on this Father’s Day.

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From a Distance: Autonomy and Sanity in Weapons Systems, Dr. Robert Zuber

8 Aug

Empires are never built or maintained on the basis of compassion.  Empires live by numbness.  Walter Brueggemann 

To be in hell is to drift; to be in heaven is to steer.  George Bernard Shaw

A quietly mad population is a tractable one.  Naomi Wolf

Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be. Thomas à Kempis

It was like being in a car with the gas pedal slammed down to the floor and nothing to do but hold on and pretend to have some semblance of control. Nic Sheff

It’s possible to name everything and to destroy the world.  Kathy Acker

Disillusion comes sooner or later, but it always comes, it doesn’t miss an appointment, it never has.  Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Over this long weekend, we and a number of groups with whom we work (including our colleagues at Reverse the Trend) have acknowledged the anniversary of the still-controversial use of a nuclear weapon on the residents of the city of Hiroshima, Japan (August 6, 1945) and the even more controversial bombing of Nagasaki on August 9.

Amidst all the important discussion about the morality and legality of testing indiscriminate weapons on urban populations, what is not controversial is that the bombs were launched from US bombers flown by human beings.  The hatch releasing the bomb was controlled by human beings.  The orders to drop these weapons for the first (and only) time in history were given by human beings. And the fireballs which these weapons created were visible to the human beings tasked with chronicling outcomes and consequences.  

This is surely one of Bob’s “duh” moments but the point is that even with respect to the most destructive of weapons and weapons systems, the presumption of human control has always been built into the equation.  Such bombs don’t drop themselves, don’t set their own targeting objectives. While full accountability for military mis-adventurism remains elusive, the presence of human agents and command chains has been understood as indispensable for ascribing at least some accountability for military operations which go off the rails, are deemed disproportionate to threats posed, or cause indiscriminate harm beyond the boundaries of any “reasonable” military objective.

But these erstwhile “human safeguards” are steadily being eroded as weaponized drones attack targets at distances of separation measured in the thousands of miles and as space-based weapons threaten populations at even greater distances.   As our targets become more abstracted from human realities, as the distance between launch and destruction become ever greater, our targeting takes on more and more of the attributes of a video game.  We don’t have to live with the consequences of our attacks in part because we are no longer a witness to those consequences. We aren’t required to experience the fireballs or the hollowed-out communities. We don’t hear the cries of the victimized or smell the burning flesh. More and more, we can push the buttons, clear the board, get on with our lives, and then return to our seats to prompt the systems to hone-in on our next, equally remote targets. 

And as we were reminded this week at the UN, we now have the capacity to develop and manufacture weapons systems which can operate virtually independent of human control, which can make (and implement) autonomous targeting decisions based on algorithms that they might eventually be capable of altering themselves.   

This week, amidst discouraging news from Afghanistan, Myanmar and Tigray, we spent a good bit of time covering the Group of Government Experts meeting on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS).  The dominant theme of this week was the maintenance of what the UK and others referred to as “meaningful human control “over LAWS and their deployments, taking into account (as the Holy See advocated) “potential implications for international peace and security as weapons systems becomes further detached from human agency.”

While some states such as Australia highlighted the potential military advantages of autonomous weapons – especially with regard to greater targeting precision – most states at this GGE understood at some level that the burden of proof lay with those few states which seemed to minimize the degree of difficulty in maintaining what Brazil referred to as a balance between “military necessity” and regard for legal and ethical principles, including human dignity.  Many states, including those calling for a binding international instrument on LAWS, expressed the concern that as military-related technology increases, human accountability for weapons uses under international law risks becoming akin to a rapidly speeding car which we can now only pretend is still under our control.

Kudos to those states, especially Mexico, Chile and Palestine, for their efforts to keep human agency and dignity at the center of our military doctrine; for ably rejecting (as Chile noted) our current, norm-busing predisposition to “spectator violence,” for our growing comfort (as Palestine maintained) with ascribing accountability for autonomous systems failures to the machines themselves and not to those who program and “manage them,” and for our unwillingness (as Mexico claimed) to draw clear linkages between our work in this GGE to the larger (and oft-neglected) UN project of “general and complete disarmament.” 

And yet, even in these instances, it was easy to come away with a feeling (communicated to me by others as well) that something is missing from these discussions, that ascriptions of “human control” are not a sufficiently high bar, are not sufficiently mindful of the current state of human affairs and its impacts on our emotional stability, indeed even our very sanity. Does not “meaningful human control” assume that we can keep our best emotions switched “on,” that we can maintain the ability (and the will) to integrate implications of weapons deployments beyond the merely technical?

I assume that most readers of this piece have not altogether missed the recent spate of articles in the mainstream and alternative media documenting our growing emotional fragility and “numbness” as the combination of pandemic variants, severe drought and the destructive heat from forest fires and armed violence push many us back into places of social, economic and emotional isolation from which we were just starting, albeit tentatively, to emerge.  We are in danger of saying too much about this, but can also never say this enough – that we are steadily allowing ourselves to become an impaired species, one which is increasingly disposed to see others as adversaries rather than partners; one which has shrunk circles of concern beyond the reach of reason, let alone of multilateral policy and inquiry; one which has generally, even defiantly, succumbed to a default of “numbness,” that place of merely going through the motions, of abandoning any pretense to genuine agency and dignity, let alone compassion; of passively accepting what we are told to do, trained to do, even programmed to do, because it just takes too much energy not to do so.

It is perhaps not the duty of negotiating diplomats to ask themselves these questions, to openly share concern about the basic sanity and humanity of those persons whose agency we rightly seek to guarantee with respect to our more and more sophisticated weapons systems.   But the concerns loom nonetheless, concerns about our escalating levels of high anxiety, disillusionment and “quiet madness” that call into question what remains of our confidence in human agency, eroding the belief that we still have what it takes to keep our technologically advanced weapons systems in line with the international law (IHL) obligations which the weapons themselves never quite agreed to uphold. 

The numbness which now infects so many dimensions of our eroding social contract has particularly grave implications for our military adventures, especially given our current, weapons-related complexities that stretch both the efficacy of our measures of control and the international laws and regulations meant to ensure “humane” deployments. Indeed, some states this week openly wondered whether current interpretation of international law are sufficient to allow us (as Brazil noted) to “draw the line” on violence lacking adequate human authorization and oversight. Moreover the International Committee of the Red Cross — an agency thankfully as invested in preventing war as in upholding its “rules” — claimed that “it is hard to imagine a battlefield scenario where autonomous weapons would not raise significant IHL red flags,” especially given that so many “battlefields” are now resident in heavily populated areas.

To our own mind, sane and stable human agency is most urgently needed at the point of decision to authorize weapons systems such as LAWS in the first place.  Once that fateful decision is made, it is harder to imagine human agency that is sufficient to their uses, that can maintain the balance between military utility and our obligations under international humanitarian law, indeed that can remove all those “red flags” from their flag poles. One task for us all is to guarantee that “meaningful human control” over our increasingly complex and even autonomous weapons systems does not devolve into some misidentified “trial” conducted by the emotionally impaired on unwitting populations.

Until and unless we can better assure that the humans in control of such systems are not overcome by despair or disillusionment, have not become numbed to the consequences of the weapons they seek to manage, it would be better for what remains of our collective health, safety and sanity to keep those weapons out of circulation altogether.

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