It was known that individual neurons became electrically active (‘they fired’) if stimulated by their finely ramified input cables (called den drites). When it ‘fires’, a neuron emits electrical signals along a series of output cables (called axons) … Since the ‘firing’ of each neuron depends on the activity of many others, there is no simple way of calculating what should happen or when. […] According to the particular disposition of the synaptic connections, every simulation of a network of a hundred neurons defined its own set of possible states of equilibrium (out of a total of absolute possibilities of one thousand billion billion billions, or 1030).
If war is a neoconnectionist system, it is no longer a phenomenon in which the calculations and intentions of the protagonists have any value. Owing to the multiplication of the powers in play, war distributes itself according to unpredictable patterns of weights. It may resolve itself in a way that is convenient for one of the opposing parties; but in principle, since it defies all decisional calculations, it is lost for both parties. The operators’ frenetic attempts to control the network, which receives contradictory impulses, will cause it to collapse. The most likely outcome of a war is «tilt.» Old-fashioned wars were like a game of chess in which each player could try to take as many of his opponent’s pieces as possible, but the ultimate goal was checkmate. Instead, contemporary warfare is like a chess game in which both players (working on the same network) move and take pieces of the same color. Modern warfare is therefore an autophagous game.
To state that a conflict has turned out to be advantageous for someone at a given moment implies an equation of that momentary advantage with the final advantage. There would be a final moment if war were still, as Clausewitz would have it, the continuation of policy by other means (hence the war would end when the situation reached a state of equilibrium sufficient to permit a return to politics). But in our century it is the politics of the postwar period that will always be the continuation (by any means) of the premises established by war. No matter how the war goes, by causing a general redistribution of weights that cannot correspond fully with the will of the contending parties, it will drag on in the form of a dramatic political, economic, and psychological instability for decades to come, something that can lead only to a politics «waged» as if it were warfare.
Have things ever been any different? Is it forbidden to think that Clausewitz was wrong? Historiography has reinterpreted Waterloo as a clash between two intelligences (because there was a result), but Stendhal interpreted it in terms of accident. To conclude that classic wars produced reasonable results—a final equilibrium—derives from a Hegelian prejudice, according to which history has a positive direction. There is no scientific (or logical) proof that the order of the Mediterranean after the Punic Wars, or that of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, corresponded perforce with a state of equilibrium. It could have been a state of imbalance that would not have occurred had there been no war. The fact that for tens of thousands of years humanity has used warfare as a solution for states of disequilibrium has no more demonstrable value than the fact that in the same period humanity learned to resolve states of psychological imbalance by using alcohol or other equally devastating substances.
And this brings us to the notion of taboos. Moravia suggested that, since it took centuries for humanity to develop the incest taboo because of the realization that endogamy gave negative results, we have perhaps reached the point in which humanity has become aware of the need to proclaim war a taboo. Realists have replied that a taboo is not «proclaimed» by moral or intellectual decree, it is formed over millennia in the obscure recesses of the collective consciousness (just as a neural network, in the end, can attain a state of equilibrium on its own). Of course, a taboo is not proclaimed: it proclaims itself. But the times required for growth are shortening. Becoming aware that mating with mothers or sisters hindered exchange between groups took thousands of years—it apparently took humanity ages to grasp the cause-and-effect relation between the sexual act and pregnancy. But it took us only two weeks to realize that airline companies close when war breaks out. It is therefore compatible with intellectual duty and with common sense to announce the necessity for a taboo, although no one has the authority to say that a certain time is required for its coming to maturity.
It is an intellectual duty to proclaim the inconceivability of war. Even if there were no alternative solutions. At most, to remind people that our century has known an excellent alternative to war, and that is «cold» war. In the end, history will have to admit that cold warfare, the source of horrors, injustices, intolerance, local conflicts, and widespread terror, has proved a very humane and mild solution in terms of casualties, and cold warfare can even boast victors and vanquished. But declaring cold wars is not a task for the intellectual.
What struck some as the silence of intellectuals about war was perhaps their fear of talking about it in the media in the heat of the moment, and this for the simple reason that the media are a part of war and its paraphernalia, and so it is dangerous to think of the media as neutral territory. Above all, the media work on a different time scale. The intellectual function is always exercised ahead of time (regarding what might happen) or with hindsight (regarding what has happened), seldom with regard to what is actually happening, for reasons of rhythm, because events are always faster and more relentless than reflection on events can be. This is why Calvino’s Baron Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo stayed up in his tree: not to shirk the intellectual duty to understand and to take part in his day and age, but to be able to understand and take part in it better.
However, even when it opts for tactical silence, in the end reflection on war requires that this silence must eventually be articulated. In complete awareness of the contradictions of a proclamation of silence, of the persuasive power of an act of impotence, and of the fact that the exercise of reflection exempts no one from the assumption of individual responsibility. But our first duty is to say that war today annuls all human initiative, and even its apparent purpose (and someone’s apparent victory) cannot stop what has become the autonomous game of weights caught in their own net.
War cannot be justified, because—in terms of the rights of the species—it is worse than a crime. It is a waste.
When the Other Appears on the Scene
Dear Carlo Maria Martini,
Your letter has extricated me from one serious dilemma only to leave me on the horns of another that is equally awkward. Until now it has been up to me (through no decision of mine) to open the debate, and he who talks first inevitably puts his questions and invites the other to reply. My predicament springs from my feeling inquisitorial. And I very much appreciated the firmness and humility with which you, on three occasions, exploded the myth that would have us believe that Jesuits always answer a question with another question.
But now I am at a loss as to how to reply to your question, because my answer would be significant had I had a lay upbringing. But in fact I received a strongly Catholic education until (just to record the moment of the breach) the age of twenty-two. For me, the lay point of view was not a passively absorbed heritage, but rather the hard-won result of a long and slow process of change, and I always wonder whether some of my moral convictions do not still depend on religious impressions received early in my development. Now, in my maturity, I have seen (in a foreign Catholic university that also employs lay teaching staff, requiring of them no more than a manifestation
