Thoughts about Modernism on a Friday Morning During Which I Have to Make Chocolate Cake
The Washington Post published an article today about the potential use of autonomous ships that could fire missiles.
“[A] missile test was a crucial step for the Navy’s autonomous vessel program, an extensive initiative to develop 21 robot ships over the next few years. The program is a direct response to countries such as China, which have been building sophisticated missile technology to target ships that approach their shores. Robot vessels could be a cheaper and more effective way to protect the seas while putting fewer sailors’ lives at risk, former naval officers said.”
I scrolled past the headline on my morning WaPo skim, digested another piece about the pros and cons of handing out goody bags on planes when traveling with babies, and then came back to the autonomous missiles.
As a senior in college, I took a literature class dedicated to modernism and post-modernism. The professor, whom I dearly loved, acknowledged that the line drawn between those two schools was tenuous at best. If something is modern, he argued, how can it be post-modern?
We put semantics aside, however, when we talked about the division and World War II. I distinctly remember discussing that the use of the atomic bomb was one way to delineate the eras. Prior to World War II, most combat was hand-to-hand and face-to-face. You saw your “enemy"; you were trained to put aside the humanity of the person at the other end of your weapon in favor of meeting combat goals—winning the battle, winning the war, winning the propaganda machine.
Modern warfare techniques remove the human aspect of the toll of war even further. When you can’t see the people whom you’re shelling or dropping a bomb on, it is theoretically easier to pull the trigger or hit the launch button.
That, we discussed, is when the world broke and when we moved firmly into post-modernism—when we no longer had to look the “enemy” in the face.
I spent hours researching and writing a thesis on ways to recoup our humanity after this schism. Collective theatergoing experiences, I argued, would help us restore our connections to one another, “enemies” or not. Witnessing suffering together, acted out on a literal or world stage, would help us find our commonalities.
Nearly 30 years later, I find myself asking the same questions, but this time, my brain finds no tidy answer, no easy way to look across the chasm and find common ground. How are we still searching for ways to remove humanity from political and economic machinations?
How can autonomous vessels firing missiles be the answer? Have we learned nothing since the mid-twentieth century?
Chag Sameach, Ramadan Mubarek, and Happy Easter to those observing this weekend. May your celebrations be meaningful. And may we all take a moment to think about our shared humanity across the tables, chocolate cake or not.