the iraqi desert of the real

A New Model Army Soldier Rolls Closer to the Battlefield
NY Times | February 16, 2005 | TIM WEINER

The American military is working on a new generation of soldiers, far different from the army it has.

"They don't get hungry," said Gordon Johnson of the Joint Forces Command at the Pentagon. "They're not afraid. They don't forget their orders. They don't care if the guy next to them has just been shot. Will they do a better job than humans? Yes."

The robot soldier is coming.

The Pentagon predicts that robots will be a major fighting force in the American military in less than a decade, hunting and killing enemies in combat. Robots are a crucial part of the Army's effort to rebuild itself as a 21st-century fighting force, and a $127 billion project called Future Combat Systems is the biggest military contract in American history.

The military plans to invest tens of billions of dollars in automated armed forces. The costs of that transformation will help drive the Defense Department's budget up almost 20 percent, from a requested $419.3 billion for next year to $502.3 billion in 2010, excluding the costs of war. The annual costs of buying new weapons is scheduled to rise 52 percent, from $78 billion to $118.6 billion.

Military planners say robot soldiers will think, see and react increasingly like humans. In the beginning, they will be remote-controlled, looking and acting like lethal toy trucks. As the technology develops, they may take many shapes. And as their intelligence grows, so will their autonomy.

The robot soldier has been a dream at the Pentagon for 30 years. And some involved in the work say it may take at least 30 more years to realize in full. Well before then, they say, the military will have to answer tough questions if it intends to trust robots with the responsibility of distinguishing friend from foe, combatant from bystander.

Even the strongest advocates of automatons say war will always be a human endeavor, with death and disaster. And supporters like Robert Finkelstein, president of Robotic Technology in Potomac, Md., are telling the Pentagon it could take until 2035 to develop a robot that looks, thinks and fights like a soldier. The Pentagon's "goal is there," he said, "but the path is not totally clear."

Robots in battle, as envisioned by their builders, may look and move like humans or hummingbirds, tractors or tanks, cockroaches or crickets. With the development of nanotechnology - the science of very small structures - they may become swarms of "smart dust." The Pentagon intends for robots to haul munitions, gather intelligence, search buildings or blow them up.

All these are in the works, but not yet in battle. Already, however, several hundred robots are digging up roadside bombs in Iraq, scouring caves in Afghanistan and serving as armed sentries at weapons depots.

By April, an armed version of the bomb-disposal robot will be in Baghdad, capable of firing 1,000 rounds a minute. Though controlled by a soldier with a laptop, the robot will be the first thinking machine of its kind to take up a front-line infantry position, ready to kill enemies.

"The real world is not Hollywood," said Rodney A. Brooks, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at M.I.T. and a co-founder of the iRobot Corporation. "Right now we have the first few robots that are actually useful to the military."

Despite the obstacles, Congress ordered in 2000 that a third of the ground vehicles and a third of deep-strike aircraft in the military must become robotic within a decade. If that mandate is to be met, the United States will spend many billions of dollars on military robots by 2010.

As the first lethal robots head for Iraq, the role of the robot soldier as a killing machine has barely been debated. The history of warfare suggests that every new technological leap - the longbow, the tank, the atomic bomb - outraces the strategy and doctrine to control it.

"The lawyers tell me there are no prohibitions against robots making life-or-death decisions," said Mr. Johnson, who leads robotics efforts at the Joint Forces Command research center in Suffolk, Va. "I have been asked what happens if the robot destroys a school bus rather than a tank parked nearby. We will not entrust a robot with that decision until we are confident they can make it."

Trusting robots with potentially lethal decision-making may require a leap of faith in technology not everyone is ready to make. Bill Joy, a co-founder of Sun Microsystems, has worried aloud that 21st-century robotics and nanotechnology may become "so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses."

"As machines become more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them," Mr. Joy wrote recently in Wired magazine. "Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage, the machines will be in effective control."

Pentagon officials and military contractors say the ultimate ideal of unmanned warfare is combat without casualties. Failing that, their goal is to give as many difficult, dull or dangerous missions as possible to the robots, conserving American minds and protecting American bodies in battle.

"Anyone who's a decision maker doesn't want American lives at risk," Mr. Brooks said. "It's the same question as, Should soldiers be given body armor? It's a moral issue. And cost comes in."

Money, in fact, may matter more than morals. The Pentagon today owes its soldiers $653 billion in future retirement benefits that it cannot presently pay. Robots, unlike old soldiers, do not fade away. The median lifetime cost of a soldier is about $4 million today and growing, according to a Pentagon study. Robot soldiers could cost a tenth of that or less.

"It's more than just a dream now," Mr. Johnson said. "Today we have an infantry soldier" as the prototype of a military robot, he added. "We give him a set of instructions: if you find the enemy, this is what you do. We give the infantry soldier enough information to recognize the enemy when he's fired upon. He is autonomous, but he has to operate under certain controls. It's supervised autonomy. By 2015, we think we can do many infantry missions.

"The American military will have these kinds of robots. It's not a question of if, it's a question of when."

Meanwhile, the demand for armed bomb-disposal robots is growing daily among soldiers in Iraq. "This is the first time they've said, 'I want a robot,' because they're going to get killed without it," said Bart Everett, technical director for robotics at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center in San Diego.

Mr. Everett and his colleagues are inventing military robots for future battles. The hardest thing of all, robot designers say, is to build a soldier that looks and acts human, like the "I, Robot" model imagined by Isaac Asimov and featured in the recent movie of the same name. Still, Mr. Everett's personal goal is to create "an android-like robot that can go out with a solider to do a lot of human-like tasks that soldiers are doing now."

A prototype, about four feet high, with a Cyclops eye and a gun for a right arm, stood in a workshop at the center recently. It readied, aimed and fired at a Pepsi can, performing the basic tasks of hunting and killing. "It's the first robot that I know of that can find targets and shoot them," Mr. Everett said.

His colleague, Jeff Grossman, spoke of the evolving intelligence of robot soldiers. "Now, maybe, we're a mammal," he says. "We're trying to get to the level of a primate, where we are making sensible decisions."

The hunter-killer at the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Center is one of five broad categories of military robots under development. Another scouts buildings, tunnels and caves. A third hauls tons of weapons and gear and performs searches and reconnaissance. A fourth is a drone in flight; last April, an unmanned aircraft made military history by hitting a ground target with a small smart bomb in a test from 35,000 feet. A fifth, originally designed as a security guard, will soon be able to launch drones to conduct surveillance, psychological warfare and other missions.

For all five, the ability to perceive is paramount. "We've seen pretty dramatic progress in the area of robot perception," said Charles M. Shoemaker, chief of the Army Research Laboratory's robotics program office at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. That progress may soon allow the Army to eliminate the driver of many military vehicles in favor of a robot.

"There's been almost a universal clamor for the automation of the driving task," he said. "We have developed the ability for the robot to see the world, to see a road map of the surrounding environment," and to drive from point to point without human intervention. Within 10 years, he said, convoys of robots should be able to wend their way through deep woods or dense cities.

But the results of a road test for robot vehicles last March were vexing: 15 prototypes took off across the Mojave Desert in a 142-mile race, competing for a $1 million prize in a Pentagon-sponsored contest to see if they could navigate the rough terrain. Four hours later, every vehicle had crashed or had failed.

All this raises questions about how realistic the Army's timetable is for the Future Combat Systems, currently in the first stages of development. These elaborate networks of weapons, robots, drone aircraft and computers are still evolving in fits and starts; a typical unit is intended to include, say, 2,245 soldiers and 151 military robots.

The technology still runs ahead of robot rules of engagement. "There is a lag between technology and doctrine," said Mr. Finkelstein of Robotic Technology, who has been in the military robotics field for 28 years. "If you could invade other countries bloodlessly, would this lead to a greater temptation to invade?"

Colin M. Angle, 37, is the chief executive and another co-founder of iRobot, a private company he helped start in his living room 14 years ago. Last year, it had sales of more than $70 million, with Roomba, a robot vacuum cleaner, one of its leading products. He says the calculus of money, morals and military logic will result in battalions of robots in combat. "The cost of the soldier in the field is so high, both in cash and in a political sense," Mr. Angle said, that "robots will be doing wildly dangerous tasks" in battle in the very near future.

Decades ago, Isaac Asimov posited three rules for robots: Do not hurt humans; obey humans unless that violates Rule 1; defend yourself unless that violates Rules 1 and 2.

Mr. Angle was asked whether the Asimov rules still apply in the dawning age of robot soldiers. "We are a long ways," he said, "from creating a robot that knows what that means."

l'age d'or: a conversation between a woman and a man i.e. "maybe you should become a cultural theorist"

who is weber?

max
you know...

do you have any interest in attending a creepy/fun makeout party on saturday?

sure, whose? and why creepy?

do you have interest in doing cocaine?

sure

really?

I got some in providence, I can bring it

really? you buy cocaine!

are you reading about the protestant ethic yet?

skimming. oh weber. he is so right, so true.

you are having an intellectual love affair

I have been thinking about japanese anime and how it has a curious time/space old rural, yet at the same time, super high tech it's like a sci-fi but w/ a seamless blend of history and nature specifically nature because it seems that american sci-fi narratives take place after nature has been destroyed

star trek, for instance

and I'm interested in looking at what the difference in representation means culturally ideologically and how these images can influence what actually happens in the future
we need more green space
but if we're already seeing it as gone w/ the advancement of technology, then we're bound to lose it for real
don't you think?
so this is of course inspired by landscape architecture teachings. I think it has to do w/ religion. nature is associated w/ more pagan religions and even thinking about the protestant ethic a la weber, it seems that christianity has led us down a road to a blade runner type existence

i agree that christianity has led us down a bad road but the idea of our being doomed by industry is a relatively new idea
post-industrial revolution but actually the bible apparently talks about how when all the trees are gone, the apoclypse is upon us

I know japan kept its doors closed throughout the whole western industrial revolution but then caught up really fast
but the apocolypse is a good thing

i was just reading an interesting thing yesterday how some christians actually welcome environment destruction

cause you return to heaven
yeah totally... I can see that

they actually think it's encouraging that we're depleting our recources

there is no incentive to fix it

but i mean that is a tiny fringe of crazies

but it's interesting...

your theory is intriguing, jizz. i buy it so far. i would like to read the paper

because weber suggests that we can't do anything about capitalism

i feel like there must be some u.s. sci fi that's not post-apocalyptic

and if so, the only thing we can do is believe in god which sort of closes it up full-circle
yeah I don't know too much about sci-fi
there is the fantasy sci-fi, which doesn't deal w/ technology
I am interested in looking at the technology vs. nature reading

you lost me with the believing in god bit

ok, so weber seems to criticize the protestant belief in god's pre-destination but then he basically says now that capitalism has happened, we can't do anything about it. it's all very fatalistic. and the only thing left is to believe in the whole christian belief system that started the whole thing in the first place. and that actually makes everything ok right? with the apocolypse and all?

i don't see why the only thing we have left to believe in is christianity
why can't we believe in capitalism?
the nation-state?
these are things that would seem to undermine god
capitalism in particular

it's a cold thing to believe in... pure rationality
that is irrational

but rationality erodes belief in god

I think what is most appalling about capitalism is that it seems to undermine feelings and I still want to believe in feelings

but the more economically advanced a society becomes, the less religious it is. you could argue that the u.s. is an exception

I wonder how japan's capitalism works. it is socially very different

japanese business culture seems even colder than the u.s.'s

people kill themselves if they get fired
yeah...
1:40 AM
there's lots of 'shame' involved
not so much so in american society

yes, we're not much into shame

you'd think shame was a by product of a religious system though
I wonder where it comes from in japan

well, aren't women much less empowered?
so if a man loses his job, he's letting his whole family down?
i remember reading all those stories about unemployed japanese business men telling their families they were still employed, but going to the library all day to pretend

but the men and women don't have much of a relationship. it's less feeling bad about letting the family down than it is feeling ashamed amongst his peers and community that he is doing poorly

well the american mythology is all about bursts of success -- you might be down one minute, but you can jump right back in with one great idea

if he kills himself, it would be more of a let down, but that's the choice that is acceptable among the group

maybe the japanese are more about the slow build

I guess so

steve jobs drops of out of college, starts a company in his garage -- it makes his story that much better. we tend to celebrate success born out of failure
god, I exotify japan as much as the white man, but it sure is fascinating

ha ha!

1:45 AM
yeah. manifest destiny
it's the whole notion of going out to the boundless west
our sights aren't limited

i am endlessly fascinated by americanness

yeah totally

but I feel so american too

maybe you should become a cultural theorist

the sight of the sea

New Yorker | 11.29.2004

WHY WORK
by ELIZABETH KOLBERT
A hundred years of “The Protestant Ethic.”

In the fall of 1897, Max Weber suffered a nervou breakdown. He was thirty-three years old—stil quite young, in the rigidly hierarchical world o German academia—and occupied a prestigious chai in political economics at the University o Heidelberg. Over the previous decade, routinel working until 1 a.m., he had assembled a list of publications that filled several pages and ranged from the agrarian history of Rome to the deficiencies of the German stock market. Following his breakdown, according to his wife, Marianne, who also happened to be his cousin, “everything was too much for him; he could not read, write, talk, walk or sleep without torment.” A slight improvement in his condition was followed by a relapse, another improvement, and then an even more serious breakdown. By October, 1903, he had given up teaching altogether; apparently, the idea of having to prepare lectures and deliver them at a predetermined time was more than he could bear. The following year, he recovered sufficiently to write what would become his most celebrated work and one of the founding texts of the emergent discipline of sociology, “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”

Originally published as a two-part essay in the scholarly journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, “The Protestant Ethic” is brief (at least by Weberian standards), dense, and completely idiosyncratic. Nominally, it is a work of cultural history; why, Weber asks, did the institutions of modern capitalism come into being in a particular region (northern Europe) at a particular time (the seventeenth century) even though “the auri sacra fames,” as he puts it—the greed for gold—“is as old as the history of man?” Weber was not the first to pose this question; in German academic circles, it was the subject of running debate. Nor would he be the last. But the answer he came up with—in effect, that Donald Trump is the spiritual heir of Martin Luther—probably still ranks as the most perverse.

Almost immediately, “The Protestant Ethic” became a target of criticism, which Weber, alternately aggrieved and irascible, spent years trying to answer. (By the time he republished the work, shortly before his death, in 1920, the footnotes he had added had grown longer than the original essay.) In the century since then, there is hardly a claim made in “The Protestant Ethic,” either about the history of religion or about the history of economics, that hasn’t been challenged; one Weber scholar recently dubbed the ongoing debate “the academic Hundred Years’ War.” The reason that Weber’s essay remains so compelling despite all the controversy is that it isn’t really a work about the past; it’s an allegory about the present.

Everyone who is part of the modern capitalist economy—whether he’s employed flipping burgers, writing code, or putting out a weekly magazine—has at one point or another considered that his efforts had an ascetic cast. We all accept the notion that our jobs ought to be more than just a way to sustain ourselves and acknowledge working to be our duty. But we don’t quite understand why this is the case. Post-nervous breakdown, Weber appears to have felt with peculiar intensity both the compulsion to labor and its fundamental motivelessness. And, if he didn’t actually come up with a resolution to the problem (either a good reason to work or a way to stop doing so), he did invent in “The Protestant Ethic” a myth to explain his, and our, befuddlement.

From early on, Weber’s drive was apparent. As a adolescent, he spent his Christmas holidays writin essays on subjects like “the course of German histor with particular reference to the position of Kaise and Pope,” and entered into a length correspondence with an older cousin on Homer Virgil, Herodotus, and Cicero. By the time h graduated from the Gymnasium, he is supposed to have made his way through all forty volumes of Goethe’s collected works. (His teachers thought he had an attitude problem.)

Weber was trained not as a sociologist—there was no such field until he helped to invent it—but as a lawyer, and he began his academic career lecturing on legal history. Virtually nothing that he wrote before his breakdown is still read today. (Typical of his early works is a nine-hundred-page report on the condition of agricultural workers in the German regions east of the Elbe.) In time for the centenary of “The Protestant Ethic,” Fritz Ringer, professor emeritus at the University of Pittsburgh, has published “Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography” (Chicago; $19). The book opens with Weber as he is emerging from his convalescence and never looks back.

With “The Protestant Ethic,” Weber seems to have discovered his calling: the study of rationality. This is, for him, a capacious term. One Weber scholar counts sixteen different senses of “rational” in “The Protestant Ethic” alone, among them “systematic,” “impersonal,” “sober,” “scrupulous,” and “efficacious.” In Weber’s view, modern Western society is the product of increasingly rational forms of organization. Its institutions are governed by “systematic” rules and “impersonal” procedures, rather than by custom or religious obligation, and this sets it apart from virtually all other world cultures. Weber intended his assessment to be value-neutral; indeed, he spent much of his career arguing that aesthetic and moral evaluations had no role to play in the study of the social sciences. True to his word, he deems the highly rationalized order of modern society to be, as far as those who inhabit it are concerned, deeply irrational. What he sees as the fundamental mystery about the origins of modern capitalism is not why it took so long to be established but, rather, how, given actual human needs and desires, it ever came into being at all.

Near the start of “The Protestant Ethic,” Weber illustrates this puzzle with a nineteenth-century version of a business-school case study. In agriculture, he notes, nothing is more important than the gathering of the harvest, and, owing to the uncertainties of the weather, the speed with which this is accomplished can spell the difference between profit and disaster. In an effort to encourage greater efficiency, some farmers have tried paying their workers more at harvest time. This tactic, however, has “with surprising frequency” yielded a result precisely opposite that which had been hoped for:

Raising the piece-rates has often had the result that not more but less has been accomplished in the same time, because the worker reacted to the increase not by increasing but by decreasing the amount of his work. A man, for instance, who at the rate of 1 mark per acre mowed 2 1/2 acres per day and earned 2 1/2 marks, when the rate was raised to 1.25 marks per acre mowed, not 3 acres, as he might easily have done, thus earning 3.75 marks, but only 2 acres, so that he could still earn the 2 1/2 marks to which he was accustomed. . . . A man does not “by nature” wish to earn more and more money, but simply to live as he is accustomed to live and to earn as much as is necessary for that purpose.

In order for capitalism to succeed, everyone had to believe that earning more money, even if he had no particular need for it, was a good thing. But why would anyone believe that?

This is where Martin Luther and, perhaps even more pertinently, John Calvin come in. Weber’s argument has several steps—or, if you prefer, leaps—and in a highly summarized form his reading of Reformation history runs as follows. Thanks to the doctrine of predestination, early Puritans believed that there was no way to affect—or even to know—one’s eternal fate. At the same time, they believed that the faithful were obligated to live as if they knew themselves to be among the elect. Constant, uncomplaining labor came to be seen as the way to banish doubt. In this way, work acquired an ethical dimension.

Deeply opposed to sensual pleasure, the Puritans and members of other ascetic Protestant sects toiled away but didn’t spend. Instead, they acquired capital, which, prudently invested, produced still more capital. Nothing, of course, was further from their minds than refashioning the world to suit Mammon, but, as is so often the case, their zeal had unintended consequences. “What the great religious epoch of the seventeenth century bequeathed to its utilitarian successor was . . . an amazingly good, we may even say a pharisaically good conscience in the acquisition of money,” Weber writes. Subsequent generations lacked their forebears’ spiritual commitment to labor, on the one hand, and to self-denial, on the other, but by this point it didn’t really matter. Once the system was put in place, it carried all before it. “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so.”

Weber’s wife, Marianne, was his first biographer Her “Max Weber: A Biography,” published in 1926 runs to more than seven hundred pages in th English translation, and is a deeply odd book Marianne consistently refers to herself in the thir person, as in “When Marianne read this letter, sh was profoundly shaken by a sense of the ineffabl and eternal.” In a chapter entitled “Breakdown,” sh relates that she was secretly gratified by he husband’s psychological problems: “If Weber’ sovereign self-sufficiency had occasionally made he wonder whether he needed her, she now did no doubt it.” Marianne suggests that her husband’ illness was prompted by his father’s death; the tw men had had a falling out a couple of month earlier, and had not reconciled when Weber senio died. Others have suggested that Marianne hersel was to blame. The Webers’ marriage lasted fo nearly thirty years but was never consummated eventually, the long-suffering Weber had an affai with a friend of his wife’s. As one Weber schola has dryly observed, the couple’s asexual relationshi “certainly did not contribute to Weber’s menta stability.” Weber wrote a detailed chronicle of hi illness, which must have offered some insight int the source of his suffering, but Marianne destroye it in the final months of the Second World War supposedly out of fear that the Nazis would use it t discredit him

A social theorist in her own right, Marianne was an early leader of the German feminist movement. After organizing a march in the fall of 1910—a “beautiful and encouraging” march, in her words—she was mocked, or at least so she believed, by a young docent at the University of Heidelberg, with which Weber was still affiliated. In a newspaper article, the docent declared that all feminists were either widowed, unmarried, Jewish, or sterile. Weber’s response— fairly typical of his dealings with the world—was “systematic,” “scrupulous,” “efficacious,” and, at the same time, completely nuts. He offered to fight a duel with his wife’s antagonist, demanded a retraction of a newspaper account of the contretemps, and, eventually, after a series of increasingly baroque charges and countercharges, was sued for libel by the paper’s editors. The dispute resulted in the filing of three lawsuits in two cities and ended only when Weber, having ruined the career of a colleague in the university’s history department, discovered that he felt sorry for all the casualties he had produced. (After the last of the trials, Marianne wrote to Weber’s mother, “It is gruesome when things take their own course, detached from the initial impulse of the person who set them in motion.”) But no sooner had Weber declared his remorse—“Never again!” he wrote to the dean of the faculty—than he plunged into another protracted and highly public battle, this time over a new edition of a handbook of political economy that he had written. In the course of this to-do, he challenged his opponent to a duel with sabres “under the most stringent conditions permitted in academic practice.” (The duel never came off, because of Christmas vacation.)

Even as all this wrangling was taking place, Weber continued to write dense, voluminous meditations on rationality. (His magnum opus, “Economy and Society,” spans well over a thousand pages, although it was never finished.) Weber’s investigation of Protestantism led him to undertake studies on the “economic ethics” of other world religions, including Hinduism, Islam, and Buddhism, and his interest in the origins of the modern Western society produced works on, among many other topics, the evolution of cities, the sociology of law, the decline of feudalism, and the rise of bureaucracy. This last development was, for Weber, particularly significant; he saw bureaucratic institutions as technically more effective than other forms of administration, just as he saw mechanical means of production as more efficient than nonmechanical means and capitalist economies as destined to outcompete traditional ones. Weber’s vision of bureaucracy is different from the one you might get by standing in line at, say, the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. In his view, only a well-ordered bureaucracy is capable of supporting a modern technological society, and this fact is problematic precisely insofar as those running the machinery are actually competent. The Germans, of course, have always had a peculiar talent for Ordnung—the passion for bureaucracy among German students “is enough to drive one to despair,” Weber once declared. Still, the conflict between organizational efficiency and individual needs has universal implications. Bureaucracy is central to the rise of capitalism because bureaucracies, at least according to Weber, make decisions that are predictable and, hence, amenable to calculation. Indeed, he writes, bureaucracy becomes more useful to capitalism the more it “depersonalizes” itself; “i.e., the more completely it succeeds in achieving the exclusion of love, hatred, and every purely personal . . . feeling from the execution of official tasks.”

The contrast between Weber’s scholarly pursuits and his personal behavior struck many of his contemporaries as bizarre, even comical. But the incoherence of modern life could be said to have been Weber’s great subject. Weber used the term Entzauberung—“dis-enchantment”—to describe the way in which science and technology had inevitably displaced magical thinking. The new rationalism had the instrumental advantage of allowing the world to be mastered. But what the new thinking couldn’t provide was, in terms of lived experience, hardly less important. Rationality could do everything but make sense of itself.

The most famous passage of “The Protestant Ethic comes at the end, when Weber, who has struggled—not always successfully—to maintain a dispassionat stance toward his subject, finally gives up the effort

For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.

This analysis, with its grim determinism, is reminiscent of many of Marx’s most sweeping pronouncements. (Weber has been called, not particularly kindly, but also perhaps not inaccurately, “a bourgeois Marx.”) For all of his insistence on the importance of abstract ideas in the inception of capitalism, Weber follows Marx in viewing alienation as the essential experience of the modern economic order. In certain respects, Weber’s critique is the more thoroughgoing. By his account, all of us—the wealthy and the poor, owners and workers—lead economic lives of quiet desperation. And while Marx imagines a liberating crisis at the end of history, Weber pictures a future that is apt to be as unsatisfactory as the present. Materialism has become, in his words, “an iron cage”:

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance.

These days, to go by self-description, there are still many more Marxists rattling around than there are Weberians—the French philosopher Raymond Aron once wrote, “Weberism does not lend itself to the elaboration of an orthodoxy, unless one gives that name to the rejection of all orthodoxies”—even though, it could be argued, it is Weber’s brand of fatalism, rather than Marx’s, that has been vindicated. His writings anticipate both the rise and fall of the Soviet Union—Weber saw planned economies as leading, more or less inevitably, to tyranny—and also the steady, soulless spread of global capitalism. Since 1904, working conditions, at least in the West, have markedly improved, while market efficiencies have produced wealth and comfort on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, every year brings more evidence that the system obeys its own logic, regardless of what anyone, or for that matter everyone, might wish. The triumph of Wal-Mart, the death of the family farm, the flow of blue-collar jobs to Juárez and white-collar jobs to Bangalore: all are developments that in their equivocal character—from one perspective supremely rational and from another self-defeating—are consistent with Weber’s notions of progress and the futility of trying (or even wanting to try) to resist it.

“It is true that the path of human destiny cannot but appall him who surveys a section of it,” Weber writes in the introduction to “The Protestant Ethic.” “But he will do well to keep his small personal commentaries to himself, as one does at the sight of the sea or of majestic mountains.”

genesis

I'm suddenly shy...
one day we'll be living large with daily calzones and roaming bengals.

Mann versus Benjamin, on the subject of psychedelics

Thomas Mann:

Dear Ida,

Thank you very much for THE DOORS OF PERCEPTION, though the book does not excite me with the enthusiasm which it has you. It presents the latest, and, I might add, most audacious form of Huxley's escapism, which I could never appreciate in this author. Mysticism as a means to that escapism was, nonetheless, reasonably honorable. But that he now has arrived at drugs I find rather scandalous. I already have a bad conscience as it is, since I take a bit of Seconal or Phanodorn at night in order to sleep better. But to put myself in such a state during the day, where everything human becomes a matter of indifference to me and I lapse into conscienceless aesthetic self-indulgence would be loathsome to me. But this is what he recommends to everyone in the world, because their lot in life is said to be "at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous." What a use of 'best' and 'worst'! His mystics should have taught him that 'suffering is the fleetest of the beasts leading to perfection' ---which one cannot say of doping; and the reverie found in a chair as a miracle of existence and in sundry captivating delusions of color has more to do with monotony than he thinks.

The Hamburg doctor Frederking has warned that the excited state of mescaline-rausch, psychotherapeutically speaking, is only suitable for very experienced individuals. (And Huxley is not such a person, but rather a dilettante.) The suggested treatment would have to be strict and restricted. Nor could it in any way be predicted that the outcome of a mescaline-experiment would be at all worthwhile. . . .

Now, encouraged by the persuasive recommendation of the famous author, many English and American youth (especially) will try the experiment. The book comes to a rather abrupt end. But it is a thoroughly --- I don't want to say immoral --- but one must say an irresponsible book, which can only contribute to the stupefaction of the world and to its instability in meeting the extremely serious questions of the time with intelligence....

Walter Benjamin:

We know of primitive peoples of the so-called preanimistic stage who identify themselves with sacred animals and plants and name themselves after them; we know of insane people who likewise identify themselves in part with objects of their perception, which are thus no longer objecta, "placed before" them; we know of sick people who relate the sensations of their bodies not to themselves but rather to other creatures, and clairvoyants who at least claim to be able to feel the sensations of others as their own. The commonly shared notion of sensuous (and intellectual) knowledge in our epoch, as well as in the Kantian and the pre-Kantian epochs, is very much a mythology like those mentioned.

HIGHLIGHTS OF THE FIRST HASHISH IMPRESSION, December 18, 1927, 3:30 am
1. Apparitions hover (vignette-like) over my right shoulder. Chill in this shoulder. In this context: "I have the feeling that there are 4 in the room apart from myself." (Avoidance of the necessity to include myself.)
2. Elucidation of the Potemkin anecdote[1] by the explanation, be it suggestion: to present to a person the mask of their own face (i.e., of the bearer's own face).
3. Odd remarks about aetheric mask [Äthermaske], which would (obviously) have mouth, nose, etc.
4. The co-ordinates through the apartment: cellar-floor/ horizontal line. Spacious horizontal expanse of the apartment. Music is coming from a suite of rooms. But perhaps the corridor [is] terrifying, too.
5. Unlimited goodwill. Suspension of the compulsive anxiety complex. The beautiful "character" unfolds. All of those present become comically iridescent. At the same time one is pervaded by their aura.
6. The comical is not only drawn out of faces but also out of situations. One searches out occasions for laughter. Perhaps it is for that reason that so much of what one sees presents itself as "arranged", as "test": so that one can laugh about it.
7. Poetic evidence in the phonetic: for a while at one point, no sooner had I made an assertion than I'd have used the very word in answer to a question merely by the perception ( so to speak) of the length of time in the duration of sound in either of the words. I sense that as poetic evidence.
8. Connection; distinction. Feeling of little wings growing in one's smile. Smiling and flapping as related. One has among other things the feeling of being distinguished because one fancies oneself in such a way that one really doesn't become too deeply involved in anything: however deeply one delves, one always moves on a threshold. Type of toe dance of reason.
9. It is often striking how long the sentences one speaks are. This, too, connected with horizontal expansion and (to be sure) with laughter. The arcade phenomenon is also the long horizontal extension, perhaps combined with the line vanishing into the distant, fleeting, infinitesimal perspective. In such minuteness there would seem to be something linking the representation of the arcade with the laughter. (Compare Trauerspiel book: miniaturizing power of reflection). [2]
10. In a moment of being lost in thought something quite ephemeral arises, like a kind of inclination to stylize [a few words here illegible] one's body by oneself.
11. Aversion to information. Rudiments of a state of transport. Considerable sensitivity towards open doors, loud talk, music.
12. Feeling of understanding Poe much better now. The entrance gates to a world of grotesques seem to open up. I simply prefer not to enter.
13. Heating-oven becomes cat. Mention of the word 'ginger' in setting up the writing table and suddenly there is a fruitstand there, which I immediately recognize as the writing table. I recalled the 1001 Nights.
14. Thought follows thought reluctantly and ponderously.
15. The position which one occupies in the room is not held as firmly as usual. Thus it can suddenly happen --to me it transpired quite fleetingly --that the entire room appears to be full of people.
16. The people with whom one is involved (particularly Joël and Fränkel) are very inclined to become somewhat transformed: I wouldn't say that they become alien nor do they remain familiar, but rather resemble something like foreigners.
17. It seemed to me: pronounced aversion to discuss matters of practical life, future, dates, politics. The intellectual sphere is as spellbinding as is the sexual at times to persons possessed, who are absorbed in it.
18. Afterwards with Hessel in the cafe. Departure from the spirit-world. Wave farewell.
19. The mistrust towards food. A special and very accentuated instance of the feeling which a great many things occasion: "Surely you don't really mean to look that way!"
20. When he spoke of 'ginger', H[essel]'s writing table was transformed for a second into a fruitstand.
21. I associate the laughter with the extraordinary fluctuations of opinion. More precisely stated, it is, among other things, connected with the considerable sense of detachment. Furthermore, this insecurity which possibly increases to the point of affectation is to a certain extent an outward projection of the inner feeling of ticklishness.
22. It is striking that the inhibiting factors which lie in superstition, etc.,and which are not easy to designate, are freely expressed rather impulsively without strong resistance.
23. In an elegy of Schiller's it is called "The Butterfly's Doubting Wings" ["Des Schmetterlings zweifelnder Flügel''].[3] This in the connection of being exhilarated with the feeling of doubt.
24. One traverses the same paths of thought as before. Only they seem strewn with roses.

threat matrix

1. poison calzone
2. human and network (biological and technological)
3. train derailment
4. draino
5. dead trees