PONDERING CIVILIAN TARGETS

THE LOGIC OF THE EVOLUTION OF WESTERN MILITARY THEORY

Experience has shown that my posts tend to wind up in front of many more readers on those rare occasions when I reluctantly expand my usual geeky, historical sociology horizons. (I suspect the regular readers are slightly amused at such bumbling about outside of my usual comfort zone.) So, for anyone entirely new to this substack, allow me to assert what regular readers I’m sure know very well. This is not the right place for you if you’re prone to succumbing to the naturalistic fallacy.

My aspiration as always is to try and make sense of what is; that is in no way ever an endorsement of what ought (or ought not) to be. With such forewarning noted, I’ve been a little amused at the recent kerfuffle over bin Laden’s letter to Americans, which has come to belated, widespread attention no doubt as part the endless information war between those taking sides in the recent Middle Eastern conflict.

I decidedly refuse to take sides in that conflict. Though, I must note, parenthetically, how odd it seems to me is the moral outrage on both sides, generally. It seems to me that most, at least North Americans, who engage in such moralizing have very little skin in the conflict. And most of them, who think they do have such skin, base such claims on abstract appeals to justice or Western civilization. Be all that as it may, such grand moralizing gestures strike me as bizarrely sterile. They seem to fall somewhere along a spectrum (if you’ll excuse the quasi-Freudian language) ranging from orgasmic impotence to imperialistic desire. Interesting as all that may be, it isn’t the point of this post. Instead, I want to address the controversy over the bin Laden letter.

There seem to have been several reasons for calls to “cancel” it. Some decry “platforming” a terrorist. Others perhaps want (and certainly others accuse others of wanting) to suppress the claim that 9/11 wasn’t just about hating “our freedoms,” but rather was a blow against decades of U.S./Atlanticist imperialism in the Muslim world. All interesting things to discuss. But my reflection here is motivated by the explanation that the bin Laden letter should be suppressed because it rationalizes the killing of civilians. Obviously, this explanation was provided by him in relation to the 9/11 attacks, but it is now being used by advocates of the Palestinian cause to at least explain – in some cases defend – the Hamas attacks of October 7. (Though the same logic perhaps could be used to defend the Israeli response, too.)

This is all predictable; people will argue for what they think is right (which of course I’d say is what they perceive – at some level of unconsciousness – as in their evolutionary fitness interest) and will mobilize whatever information serves that purpose. Though self-awareness may modulate degrees, this is simply the unfolding of human nature. Where I’d object though is when people suggest that the bin Laden letter constitutes an assault on the sacred values of Western civilization. On the contrary, the arguments made in the letter on behalf of treating civilians as legitimate targets are not outlandishly novel conclusions by bin Laden; nor are they some egregious affronts to the sacred values of Western civilization. Rather, the seeds of such ideas are planted deep in the western military theory of the West in response to the rise of the principle of popular sovereignty.

At the time of the French Revolution, a code of war had prevailed in Europe. It in fact had been reinstituted following the brutal religious wars of then recent prior centuries, resuscitating something resembling the knighthood code of the Middle Ages. This code set limits upon legitimate warfare in terms of location, targets, and even duration. (Though, the latter was certainly often influenced by limits of resources.) Once, though, Rousseau’s General Will was instituted in the political culture of France with the revolution, that code became unsustainable. At least as far back as Machiavelli, there’d been calls for citizen-based armies, noting the shortcomings of mercenary armies. But it was only with the incorporation of the General Will’s ideal of popular sovereignty by the Rousseau-inspired French Revolutionaries that citizen armies became the inevitable logic of the times.

One finds frequent assertions by military theorists at this time that under conditions of popular sovereignty, not only is universal conscription fully sanctioned, but war becomes a full-fledged contest between different nations or states, mobilizing all aspects of society, economy and culture. Most famously, inspired by the French Revolution’s imperialist expansion across Europe in the skilled hands of Napoleon, Clausewitz famously dubbed this new situation an age of “total war.” As Hippolyte Taine observed, the unambiguous implication in the relation between popular sovereignty and total war was that if you wanted to enjoy the revolutionary benefits of liberty and democracy the tradeoff entailed welcoming the obligation to kill and die in defense of those benefits. (Taine, we might note, though, was dubious about how welcomed most people would find that tradeoff.)

This new condition entirely exploded the prior code of war limitations. The state or nation of popular sovereignty enjoys a constant stream of taxes and conscripts which simply were not available to kings of the past. (For those interested, I discuss this in more detail in The Managerial Class on Trial.) And all its resources – industry, culture, population, etc. – are mobilized and intrinsically entailed in the new era of total war. So, was it so outlandish or bizarre for bin Laden to draw the conclusion that if the sovereignty of a state or nation is rooted in the totality of its people – mysteriously melded into a popular will – that they be all held responsible for the sovereign actions of that state or nation? It’s not even clear that bin Laden had to appeal to elections or taxes as revealed consent. The appeal to state legitimacy through popular sovereignty logically entails responsibility for that state’s actions, or its simply a vacuous term.

I can understand obvious objections. Those who reject this conclusion would of course want to resurrect a new code of war, distinguishing between combatants and civilians. That might be a compelling retort if you were to claim, not popular sovereignty, but sovereignty of the soldiers. If only soldiers exercised sovereignty, then non-combatants would be freed from bin Laden’s conclusion. And incidentally, that’s pretty close to what happened in the democracy of Periclean Athens. But we don’t assert sovereignty of the soldiers, nor would most contemporary people be happy with such a grounding of sovereignty. No, in one form or another, our modern western world appeals to popular sovereignty. The government is us; universal suffrage; we the people; our sacred democracy: and all the rest of it.

There’s probably a stronger case for excusing children from this equation. Though, frankly, I’m not sure Rousseau’s General Will permits that. Does one grow into the General Will or is it some mysterious collective expression of a people? Rousseau, famously, did promote a rather laissez-faire approach to child-rearing. So, maybe he’d be excused from implicating them in the logical consequences of the General Will’s popular sovereignty. Though, of course, such attitudes toward childhood are hardly universal in the history of the modern, sovereign state. Certainly, it’s common to treat proper childhood education as an extension of the state, and an inculcation into the values of the nation. So, even in this area, I’m not sure how clear cut the case even is. But even if we could make a decisive argument that the logic of popular sovereignty excludes children below a certain age, the complications even in parsing that case points to the difficulties arising from a theory of popular sovereignty.

And, again, to emphasize for new readers, not accustomed to acknowledging the constraints of the naturalistic fallacy: nothing above is a defense of military entities targeting children, or women, or the elderly, or even non-combatants generally. It is though in a sense of defense of bin Laden for pointing out how the logic of the principle of popular sovereignty not only can be interpreted as legitimizing such targeting, but stimulating occasion for us to reflect upon how that logic has long percolated in the western ethos of total war.

All I’m saying is that rather than getting outraged at bin Laden for explaining/rationalizing his strategy – as anyone responsible for the killing of thousands of people would be expected to do – or at those who (however selectively) are recognizing the logic he identified in the western tradition (myth?) of popular sovereignty, maybe it is the logic and legitimation of popular sovereignty that needs rethinking. Maybe popular sovereignty has always been a veil behind which a self-interested ruling class – in recent years, employing its ventriloquist techniques – has enriched and empowered itself at the expense of everyone else’s livelihoods, communities, and families.

While you might object to the specific weaponization of the critiques of popular sovereignty in the current political context, they point to the very logic of regime legitimacy in the modern, western (spatialist) world. Unintentional though it may be, perhaps bin Laden has posthumously provided a service to us in drawing the logic of popular sovereignty to the attention of many people who previously weren’t particularly inclined to give it much thought.

In my new (must read!) book, A Plea for Time in the Phenotype Wars, I’ve suggested that a path for those who want to prepare for the inevitable decline of the current spatialist regime is to pursue pluralist and federalist strategies, that fracture and disperse sovereignty. There’s no panacea for the current condition of the world, but those strategies have the potential to offset the hegemonic spatialist monism, which bin Laden recognized, and which has haunted the western world since the left’s triumph in the long French Revolution. If you’d like to understand all that much better, you can get the book here.

And if I haven’t shocked and offended you to no end, perhaps you’d be interested in following my usually less topical, geeking-out on historical sociology and related efforts. In which case, please…

And if you know any other budding heretics, by all means, please do…

Meanwhile. Be seeing you!