Technology for nonviolent struggle

The response toScience, Liberty and Peace was at best lukewarm. Reviewers ranged from the mildly critical to the openly hostile, generally finding fault with one or more of satyagraha, decentralisation or the strategy of relying on scientists to bring about change.[6] The time was not ripe for developing the link between science and nonviolence. Huxley’s essay is virtually unmentioned in the fields of both peace research and the critique of science.[7]

In this book I develop ideas about technology and nonviolence that can be interpreted as a development and application of Huxley’s vision. A recurring theme is that those technologies that allow people to control their own lives are the ones best suited to enabling a community to use nonviolent methods to resist aggression or oppression.

1. Introduction

Let’s begin with two bold propositions. First, methods of social action without violence can be extremely powerful — indeed so powerful as to be a possible alternative to military defence. Second, technology, which is now massively oriented to military purposes, can be reoriented to support nonviolent action.

These two propositions, if followed through, lead to two striking conclusions. First, nonviolent struggle, which is normally seen as primarily a social and psychological process, has vital technological dimensions. Second, reorienting technology to serve nonviolent struggle would involve a wholesale transformation of research directions, technological infrastructure and social decision making.

This is a quick overview of the task ahead in this book. The rest of this introduction provides a more measured approach to key ideas. It is useful to begin with weapons of war.

War has always involved suffering and death. Centuries ago weapons included swords, bows and arrows, catapults and battering rams, enough for plenty of killing. Today’s weapons include rifles, tanks, giant battleships, aircraft for saturation bombing, precision-guided missiles, landmines, and biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.[1] Some types of weapons are much more powerful than in the past, while others are entirely new. It is now much easier for military forces to kill large numbers of people. Civilians are at much greater risk than in earlier eras, in part due to the development of antipersonnel weapons such as cluster bombs.[2] The rapid developments in technology for warfare over the past few centuries have relied on the dedicated efforts of scientists and engineers.

One of the biggest problems with science and technology is their use in war. In 1975, prominent philosopher Arne Naess listed 13 “current main grievances against science” which he considered to be justified and important. Second on his list was this: “Leading scientists take part in creating new terrible and ecologically devastating ways of warfare. Scientists support any state or regime if sufficiently rewarded. Some serve the State through research on how to torture, and take part in international teaching on how to torture without organized opposition from colleagues.”[3]

In 1978, 26 individuals associated with the World Order Models Project, an initiative seeking to develop visions of and methods to achieve a better world, endorsed a statement entitled “the perversion of science and technology.” Focussing on the impact of science and technology on the Third World, the statement listed the following problem as one of the initial four points: “the employment of 50 percent of all research scientists in the world in military R&D [research and development]; a significant proportion of that number for developing the technology of mass destruction and repression.”[4]

In earlier eras, it was possible to imagine that military technologies could be a source of liberation as well as oppression. The sword and the rifle can be used not only by rulers but also against them.[5] But it is difficult to imagine cluster bombs and nuclear weapons being used for popular liberation. Modern weapons are mainly of use by governments against peoples, often against their own populations.

What is the alternative to military science and technology? The most common response of the world’s governments is to seek controls, such as treaties against biological weapons or agreements on numbers of nuclear missiles. Such reforms are welcome enough but do little or nothing to stem the development of ever more sophisticated weapons. Indeed, some critics argue that arms control negotiations serve only to regularise military races, not to halt them.[6]