War of the Worlds: What About Peace?

by Bruno Latour

I've posted a snippet of this pamphlet on the philosophy of modern conflict before. However, written in 2002, it resonates with just how devastatingly wrong our response to 9/11 has been. It digs beneath the emotionally driven reactionary surface and touches upon the historical and philosophical conflicts that have been erupting all along. This is good stuff for those with the patience to read it, especially those who like to engage in healthy doses of self-criticism.

Here are the requisite snippets. Corresponding just to the introduction of this 29 page essay.

http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/paradigm2.pdf

911
The lesson does not seem to sink in. When did Paul
Valéry prophetically observe that, “We have now
learned that all civilizations are mortal?” Just after
the so-called Great War. Many horrific disasters have
passed since, and yet we are still surprised when
another attack seems to threaten the precarious
forms of life so dear to our hearts. Since September
2001, we go on dialing the same emergency number,
911, and rightly so, since we have entered a state of
emergency. We look around frantically to understand
why all that we feel is worth fighting for remains so
fragile. I read in the news that Hollywood
scriptwriters rushed to revise the catastrophist
scenarios that suddenly looked obscene in the face of
a much harsher reality. In the same way, nihilism
used to look like a gold mine when it was applied
hypothetically to any value worth its salt. Does such
idle criticism not look superficial now that nihilism
is truly striking at “us”—at US— putting what we
call civilization in great danger of being found
hollow? Who needs to add another deconstruction
to a heap of broken debris? The courageous iconoclast
waving her arm in defiance, so proud of her
hammer, ready to break everything with the
powerful weapon of critique—down with empires,
beliefs, fetishes, ideologies, icons, idols!—does she
not look a bit silly now that what she wanted to
strike down lies in dust, already smashed to the
ground, and by people who do not fit at all the ideal
of the critical avant-garde?! What has happened to
the critical urge? Has it not overshot its target?

The word “war” is spewing out of every mouth, and
although it sounds so disheartening at first there
might be an opportunity to seize on these clarion
calls. In “emergency” lays a hidden word, “emergent.”
What is emerging, being “brought to light,”
by the recent events? To realize that we are in the
midst of a war might take us out of the complacency
with which so many people imagined an ever more
peaceful future, with all the nations converging
toward fuzzy modernist ideals. No, Westerners
might not be able to modernize the whole planet
after all. This does not mean that they are forever
locked into the narrow confines of their own civilization,
threatened by all others in a war of all against
all. It just means that they counted a bit prematurely
on possessing a sure principle that could unify the
whole world, make one accepted common world. It
is not the case that an already existing peaceful union
has been savagely shattered. We have merely been
reminded that unity has to be made; it is not simply
observed. Far from being self evident, unity was
never more solid than a future possibility to struggle
for. Unity has to be the end result of a diplomatic
effort; it can’t be its uncontroversial starting point.

My argument in this tricky, prickly piece is that it
might after all be better to be at war, and thus to be
forced to think about the diplomatic work to be
done, than to imagine that there is no war at all and
keep talking endlessly about progress, modernity,
development—without realizing the price that must
be paid in reaching such lofty goals. So we are at
war, aren’t we? Fine. But then three questions can
finally be raised: who is involved? What are their war
aims? And finally, the most important one: what
about peace? I will argue that we are not faced with a
peace unfairly shattered, nor with a “war of civilizations,”
but that we have first to fathom that a war of
the worlds has been raging all along, throughout the
so-called “modern age”—this modern parenthesis.
Still, nothing proves we are on the wrong side, and
nothing proves either that this war cannot be won.
What is sure is that it has to be waged explicitly and
not covertly. The worst course would be to act as if
there were no war at all, only the peaceful extension
of Western natural Reason using its police forces to
combat, contain, and convert the many Empires of
Evil. That is the mistake those who still believe they
are moderns are in danger of making. On the other
hand, if we are going to bring the wars of modernization
to an end, we cannot afford to declare that all
bets are off, that premodern savagery will be met
with premodern savagery, that senseless violence will
answer senseless violence. No, what is needed is a
new recognition of the old war we have been
fighting all along—in order to bring about new kinds
of negotiation, and a new kind of peace.

end snip-

argument laid out within