Erosion of individual autonomy- II

Modernity  is characterized by such features as rationalism, secularization, industrialization, the scientific culture, individualism, technological mastery of nature and the drive towards globalization. Gandhi thought that modern civilization did the opposite of what a proper civilization is supposed to do. Instead of producing people who have self-determination, autonomy, self-knowledge, self-discipline and social cooperation, modern civilization did the opposite. By encouraging people to subject their powers to large organizations run by experts, it rendered men passive, helpless and heteronomous.

The impersonal institutions of modernity make some actions costly and others more welcome. They thus direct people towards certain choices but all the while pretend that people are free to make any choice they want. With their inducements to rivalry and ambition modern society forces men to put on a mask to hide the contradiction in their actions between their deepest convictions and the considerations upon which these institutions are founded and maintained. Instead of treating humans as autonomous agents, humans are treated as programmed robots who cannot deviate from the instruction of their operating systems.

What makes modernity especially dangerous according to Gandhi is that this constraining of available choices comes with a surface gloss which makes people blind to the costs that they are obliged to pay.  The modern industrial economy is engaged in an endless process of  producing  cheap consumer goods and maximizing profit. He argued that modern economic life reduced men to its helpless and passive victim and represented a new form of slavery, more comfortable and invidious and hence more dangerous than the earlier ones.  (To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov describes the lives of such 'over-sized ants' who are content to let institutions automate virtues for them.)

Gandhi resisted the idea that those who subscribe to these norms felt it their duty to impose these views on the the rest of the world. He attacked the idea that every technological and scientific advance implied ‘progress’. That doesn’t mean that he was anti-science.  He said in 1925, ‘I think that we cannot live without science, as long as we keep it within its limits.’ For Gandhi, ‘its limits’ were to keep it within his ethical norms and to ensure that its fruits are not enjoyed only by a minority. When the fruits of science are confined to a minority, they tend to dominate others and erode their autonomy.

It is not that he only criticized modernity and left traditions untouched. With traditions the problem was in ancient texts which people followed blindly and with  modernity the problem was its focus on production and efficiency. The problem was not about choosing one or the other but about taming the excesses of each. He said in Harijan, January 13, 1940, 'There is nothing to prevent me from profiting by the light that may come from the West. Only I must take care that I am not overpowered by the glamour of the West. I must not mistake the glamour for true light. The latter gives life, the former brings death.'

It is true that we do not have any definite philosophical scheme evolved by Gandhi which can be described as Gandhian Philosophy. He had his general philosophy of life; they are reflected in his writings and speeches, mixed up with other related topics. They have to be discerned more in his actions, which must be viewed in their entirety not merely in an isolated way. He lived day in and day out open to public view and none in history has left behind so much of documentation and direct evidence concerning everything he thought and did. Ronald Tercheck writes in Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy:

If Gandhi is to have a voice in the twenty-first century, then not all of his texts can be approached literally. Texts do not entirely speak for themselves, particularly those that teach and admonish, often by reaching to practises, problems and opportunities whose original home is much different than that of later readers. . . Anyone in the late modern world who is interested in addressing the issues Gandhi raises about autonomy and non-violence needs to interrogate him to understand how his commitments are transported to a different world and translated into their own idiom. 

The ideal society about which Gandhi is discussing is the society where the individual is of supreme consideration and all the other aspects of the society, either machine, industry, production or distribution, revolve around him. For him, an action had moral worth only if it was voluntary, was a product of one’s own thought and not done because of some external force. So if an individual loses his freedom, as happens inexorably in the above-mentioned products of human ingenuity, the person becomes an automaton, an ‘over-sized ant’.

Gandhi's defence of individual autonomy is due to his conviction that every human being has only a partial conception of the truth. For him, any conception of the truth will include a commitment to autonomy.  He rejects all claims to certainty and does not accept the contention that it is ok to inflict pain on a person for some future good. Compelling a person to live by the moral standards determined by others implies believing in one’s infallibility which was not acceptable to him. He said on 17-4-1924, 'I have repeatedly observed that no school of thought can claim a monopoly of right judgment. We are all liable to err and are often obliged to revise our judgments.'

For Gandhi the case for freedom was simple and the same as that for truthfulness. Respect for truth implied respect for human beings as they were constituted at a given point in time. It ruled out all attempts to ‘force them to be free’ or sacrifice them at the altar of an abstract and impersonal ideal. For him a person is not moral if he is good because of the fear of getting caught. As he understands it, one can only have a good society if all individuals in it are free.

If any group dominates the other, the society cannot be good. He said in Harijan on September 29, 1946, ‘The mind of a man who is good   under compulsion cannot be good; in fact it gets worse. And when compulsion is removed all the defects well up to the surface with even greater force. ‘ Although theoretically it is possible for a person to be fearless and resist domination (as he himself did), he recognized that it is not possible for most people to bear the costs of such resistance.

Erosion of individual autonomy- I

Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari is an inquiry into humanity’s apocalyptic, tech-driven future. “Modernity is a deal,” Harari writes. “The entire contract can be summarized in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.” That power, he suggests, may in the near term give us godlike attributes. Modern biology offers a mechanistic view of humans and  exposes even our most sacred emotions of love and hate as simple heuristic learning algorithms, evolved over millions of years to help us make quick decisions.

This has made techno-utopians think that man-made algorithms can decipher these organic algorithms. This has resulted in authority slowly shifting from humans to algorithms. Governments in that situation would be much less powerful than Google. We have already built vast data-processing networks that can know our feelings better than we know them ourselves. Google can process our behaviour to know what we want before we ourselves know it. Big Data analysis already allows accurate predictions of individual human behavior based on their tweets and Facebook posts.

We are at the edge of letting cars without drivers take us to the airport and automated chat bots answer our inquiries online. A lot of our current jobs are slowly being replaced by automated processes that are faster and cheaper. Algorithms are now getting better than humans at data entry and analysis and  even music creation. The next decade of development might make millions of people completely irrelevant to economic and societal progress. This includes not only office workers, but artists, doctors, lawyers and scientists, as algorithms are already entering their fields. Many of us will most likely have to reinvent ourselves in the upcoming years, if not even now.

What problems will such technological changes bring about? What will an uneducated 40-year old taxi driver upgrade to that can be useful in the economy of the future? Harari thinks that  if current trends continue, then the benefits of this phase of modernity will be vastly unequally distributed. The new longevity and super-human qualities are likely to be the preserve of the techno super-rich, the masters of the data universe. Meanwhile, the redundancy of labour, supplanted by efficient machines, will create an enormous “useless class”, without economic or military purpose. Harari envisages that “Dataism”, a universal faith in the power of algorithms, will become sacrosanct.

He thinks that only those abilities of humans will be encouraged that the political and economic system finds useful. An example is the attention helmet that I had written about earlier. It shuts outs empathy and doubts and enables a person to make quick decisions in morally difficult situations. But overuse of the helmet risks creating lots of what he calls ‘over-sized ants’ who are very good in the dimension that is rewarded by the political system and market forces but are deficient in other dimensions. You are often told that you are free to make your own choices about what you want to do. But what if technological progress makes it possible to reshape and engineer those choices in directions which someone else determines?

Evegeny Morozov gives an example of such a ‘directed  choice’ in To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. The 'suggestion' is due to the various kinds of data that are floating around the Web and interpreted in myriad ways by different algorithms. Suppose you are thinking of becoming a vegetarian and visit a few websites on the topic. An algorithm belonging to a tech giant correctly guesses your intention and concludes that there is an 83% chance of your becoming a vegetarian within a month.

Whoever operates the algorithm sells this information to the association of meat producers. Suddenly you start receiving free samples of meat and while visiting various websites you keep getting ads explaining the benefits of eating meat. Finally you decide to remain a meat-eater. You are of course oblivious of the connection between your initial aspiration, the samples, the ads. Are you making your choice consciously or are you being directed towards the preference of somebody else? In Homo Deus, Harari writes:

In the heyday of European imperialism, conquistadors and merchants bought entire islands and countries in exchange for coloured beads. In the twenty-first century our personal data is probably the most valuable resource most humans still have to offer, and we are giving it to the tech giants in exchange for email services and funny cat videos. 

This echoes one of Gandhi's main criticisms of modernity - it reduces individual autonomy. According to Ronald Terchek in Gandhi: Struggling for Autonomy, ‘Autonomy stands at the center of Gandhi’s political philosophy. It is his greatest good and precedes in importance his other political and social goals.’ His focus on individual autonomy was what made him question the use of machinery, attack social ills like untouchability, be suspicious of the state and other institutions, the uses of violence to settle disputes, repudiate capitalism, communism and imperialism. He says in Young India on June 12, 1924, ‘I am not interested in freeing India merely from the English yoke. I am bent upon freeing India from any yoke whatsoever.‘

In Bapu Kuti, Rajini Bakshi makes a distinction between the historical Gandhi and the civilizational Gandhi. The historical Gandhi may be criticized and condemned as an ordinary figure. But the civilizational Gandhi, the Gandhi of the  ideas and concepts and uncomfortable questions scattered throughout his works about what a good society should be like, is a far more imposing and enduring figure. I am more interested in the Civilizational Gandhi, especially his critique of modernity which many find queer. Getting lost in extreme statements distracts from the substance of his critique. He considered modern civilization to be without a moral centre with its emphasis on progress without limits, rights without responsibilities, and technology without cost.

He held that modern man was the victim of a vast humbug perpetrated by legislatures, educational institutions, hospitals, and armies. The ‘life-corroding competion’ encouraged by modernity resulted in bondage rather than freedom. He insists that economics and science should be judged not only by their own internal standards but also by standards external to them i.e. ethical standards.  He recognized the oppression in theories of efficiency and progress, conventionality and commonsense. He held that freedom came from internal sources rather than by submitting to the will of others.  He keeps reminding us of what we are missing in modern life. He said in Harijan, 1-2-1942 (in Democracy: Real and Deceptive):

If the individual ceases to count, what is left of society? Individual freedom alone can make a man voluntarily surrender himself completely to the service of society. If it is wrested from him, he becomes an automaton and society is ruined. No society can possibly be built on a denial of individual freedom.  In reality even those who do not believe in the liberty of the individual believe in their own. Modern editions of Ghenghiz Khan retain their own [autonomy]. 

The transcranial helmet

“The day-by-day experience of a managed existence leads us all to take a world of fictitious substances for granted. . . . The verbal amoebas by which we designate the management-bred phantoms thus connote self-important enlightenment, social concern and rationality without however denoting anything which we could ourselves taste, smell or experience. In this semantic desert full of muddled echoes we need a Linus blanket, some prestigious fetish that we can drag around to feel like decent defenders of sacred values.” — Ivan Illich

The id is the primitive component of personality that responds directly and immediately to the instincts. The id operates on the pleasure principle which is the idea that every wishful impulse should be satisfied immediately, regardless of the consequences. The superego's function is to control the id's impulses, especially those which society forbids, such as sex and aggression. It also has the function of persuading the ego to turn to moralistic goals rather than simply realistic ones and to strive for perfection. The ego or ‘the self’ is a result  of the tussle between the id and the superego. Modernity appears to have suppressed the superego, for authority and society say that now it is good to do what has always been bad. Gandhi wrote in Harijan, 31-1-'35:

Man must choose either of the two courses, the upward or the downward; but as he has the brute in him, he will more easily choose the downward course than the upward, especially when the downward course is presented to him in a beautiful garb. Man easily capitulates when sin is presented in the garb of virtue.

Philosophers and scientists debate about whether humans have free will. There are scientific studies that indicate that free will is an illusion. If this is true, then it should be possible to manipulate desires and feelings by genetic engineering or direct brain stimulation. Experiments indicate that even complex human feelings like love, fear, anger and depression can be manipulated by stimulating the right spots in the brain. Not surprisingly, the military has started using this idea to make soldiers kill more people. In On Killing, Grossman writes that military history can be written as a history of methods to overcome a human being's inbuilt resistance to killing another human.

There are helmet-like devices fitted with electrodes that attach to the outside of the scalp. It produces weak electro-magnetic fields and directs them towards specific brain areas which stimulates the desired brain activities. The American military is trying out such devices for improving the performance of soldiers on the battlefield. The results are not conclusive but they could be used for enhancing the abilities of snipers, drone operators etc.

In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari writes about a journalist for New Scientist, Sally Adee, who was allowed to visit a training facility for snipers and test the effects of the helmet herself. In a battlefield simulator without the helmet, she felt fear as 20 masked virtual men, armed with rifles and strapped with suicide bombs, charged straight towards her. For each assailant she shot, three new ones appeared and her panic and incompetence were continually jamming her rifle.

Then she wore the helmet and she picked off the terrorists one by one coolly and methodically. At the end of her 20 min. session, she felt a bit disappointed - she was enjoying killing the terrorists and wanted to kill more. Her 20 minute session seemed to be over in an instant. She says:

. . . the thing that made the earth drop from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut up. . . My brain without self-doubt was a revelation. There was suddenly this incredible silence in my head. . . I hope you can sympathise with me when I tell you that the thing I wanted most acutely for the weeks following my experience was to go back and strap on those electrodes.

The helmet helps the mind to drown out the argument between the Id and the Superego thus enabling the Ego (Self) to make decision about matters (eg. killing a human being) which do not come easily to a person. In some battlefield situations, such a helmet may be useful. The political and economic system would expect and reward such abilities. But its overuse may reduce the person’s ability to show empathy and tolerate doubts and inner conflicts. In Homo Deus, Yuval Noah Harari writes:

When we mix a practical ability to engineer minds with our ignorance of the mental spectrum and with the narrow interests of governments, armies and corporations, we get a recipe for trouble. We may successfully upgrade our bodies and our brains while losing our minds in the process. Indeed, techno-humanism may end up downgrading humans. The system may prefer downgraded humans not because they possess any superhuman knacks, but because they would lack some really disturbing human qualities that hinder the system and slow it down.

 As any farmer knows, it's usually the brightest goat in the flock that stirs up the most trouble which is why the  Agricultural Revolution involved downgrading animals' mental abilities. The second cognitive revolution, dreamed up by techno-humanists, might do the same to us, producing human cogs who process data far more effectively than ever before, but who can hardly pay attention, dream or doubt. For millions of years we were enhanced chimpanzees. In the future, we may become over-sized ants.

The difficulty of killing - III

The basic aim of a nation at war is establishing an image of the enemy in order to distinguish as sharply as possible the act of killing from the act of murder. — Glenn Gray 

The observation of low firing rates till World War II resulted in the US army, and subsequently other armies, initiating certain changes in their training methods designed to enable killing in the modern soldier. These changes resulted in a firing rate of 55 percent in Korea and a 90 to 95 percent firing rate was attained in Vietnam. These training methods appear to represent a form of classical and operant conditioning (a la Pavlov's dog and B. F. Skinner's rats). The philosopher-psychologist Peter Marin says the lack of discussion about the topic is "a massive unconscious cover-up" in which society hides itself from the true nature of combat.

According to Grossman, the most important aspect of modern military training is the role of (1) Pavlovian classical conditioning and (2) Skinnerian operant conditioning. What Pavlov did was ring a bell just before feeding a dog. Over time, the dog learned to associate the sound of the bell with eating and would salivate when he heard the bell, even if no food was present. The conditioned stimulus was the bell, the conditioned response was salivation: the dog had been conditioned to salivate upon hearing a bell ring.

This process was further refined by B. F. Skinner into what he called behavioral engineering or operant conditioning. Classical conditioning is when a stimulus automatically triggers an involuntary response. In contrast, in operant conditioning, a voluntary response is followed by a reinforcing stimulus. It is a process that attempts to modify behavior through the use of positive and negative reinforcement based on the fundamental idea that behaviors that are reinforced will tend to continue, while behaviors that are punished will eventually end.

Training techniques of modern soldiers are nothing more than an application of conditioning techniques to develop a reflexive "quick shoot" ability. Instead of shooting at bull's-eye targets, the modern soldier spends many hours with full combat gear shooting at  man-shaped targets at varying ranges . The soldier must instantly aim and shoot at the target(s). When he hits a target it provides immediate feedback by instantly dropping backward — just as a living target would. Soldiers are highly rewarded and recognized for success in this skill of accurately "engaging" the targets — a standard euphemism for "kill." In addition to traditional marksmanship, what is being taught in this environment is the ability to shoot reflexively and instantly. Grossman writes:

In behavioral terms, the man shape popping up in the soldier's field of fire is the "conditioned stimulus," the immediate engaging of the target is the "target behavior." "Positive reinforcement" is given in the form of immediate feedback when the target drops if it is hit. In a form of "token economy" these hits are then exchanged for marksmanship badges that usually have some form of privilege or reward (praise, public recognition, three -day passes, and so on) associated with them. 

The intensity of the trauma suffered by an individual who kills another is proportional to the distance between the two. At hand-to-hand combat range the instinctive resistance to killing is strongest. The soldier is disturbed less by the use of a grenade than a rifle, especially if the killer does not have to see or hear the screams of his victim. A U.S. Air Force officer explained: "In the air, it's very clinical, very clean. … You see an aircraft; you see a target on the ground - you're not eyeball to eyeball with the sweat and the emotions of combat, and so it doesn't become so emotional for you and so personalized."

Various enhanced technologies used in modern warfare enable killing. For example, dropping bombs from planes or drones provides emotional distance between the killer and the victim. Similarly, mechanical distance provided by the unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight, or some other kind of mechanical buffer makes killing easier. These new weapon systems enable the solder to fire more accurately and the victim becomes an anonymous blob. Night-vision devices provide a superb form of psychological distance by converting the target into an inhuman green blob. Grossman quotes Richard Holmes in Acts of War:

A soldier who constantly reflected upon the knee- smashing, widow-making characteristics of his weapon, or who always thought of the enemy as a man exactly as himself, doing much the same task and subjected to exactly the same stresses and strains, would find it difficult to operate effectively in battle. . . . Without the creation of abstract images of the enemy, and without the depersonalization of the enemy during training, battle would become impossible to sustain.  

But if the abstract image is overdrawn or depersonalization is stretched into hatred, the restraints on human behavior in war are easily swept aside. If, on the other hand, men reflect too deeply upon the enemy's common humanity, then they risk being unable to proceed with the task whose aims may be eminently just and legitimate. This conundrum lies, like a Gordian knot linking the diverse strands of hostility and affection, at the heart of the soldier's relationship with the enemy.

The rate of killing increases all right with all these changes but the mental cost for members of the military, as witnessed by the increase in post-traumatic stress, is devastating. Grossman says that psychiatric trauma is due primarily not to incredibly high levels of physical stress and constant fear, but to the moral strain of overcoming one's instinctive revulsion towards killing. And worryingly, civilian society, particularly the media, replicates the army’s conditioning techniques.

Grossman points out that young people see on television or at the movies detailed, horrible suffering and killings. They are learning to associate this violence with their favorite soft drink, candy bar, and the close contact of their date. Firing ranges with pop-up targets and immediate feedback, just like those used to train soldiers, are found in interactive video games. Grossman argues that this is responsible in part for the rising rate of murder and violence, especially among the young. He writes, 'We are reaching that stage of desensitization at which the infliction of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment: vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are learning to like it.'

The difficulty of killing - II

Nations customarily measure the "costs of war" in dollars, lost production, or the number of soldiers killed or wounded. Rarely do military establishments attempt to measure the costs of war in terms of individual human suffering. Psychiatric breakdown remains one of the most costly items of war when expressed in human terms. — Richard Gabriel 

It was thought that civilians would be much less prepared to deal with the horrors of war and hence the bombing of cities would result in a lot of psychiatric causalities. That was a major reason for the German bombing of Allied cities, and the Allies' bombing of German civilians. But civilians suffered hardly any psychiatric causalities while there was plenty among soldiers. Why? Could it be that, as rough as things were for civilians in a besieged city, the one thing they were not forced to do was kill?

Anecdotal evidence bears this out - when prisons are bombed, psychological trauma is observed only in guards, not prisoners. Both groups are endangered, but only one holds the moral responsibility for the lives of others. Studies show that naval personnel have experienced almost no psychiatric damage because they don't have to kill anyone directly. Instead of killing people, modern navies kill ships and airplanes. There is a personal price paid by individuals who kill others, even though that killing may be done with the sanction of the state.

Why is this reluctance of the average soldier to kill on the battlefield not often discussed? Grosman says that for those who avoided killing, it would be an intense, traumatic, guilt-laden situation which they will not be proud of. It will inevitably result in a web of forgetfulness, deception, and lies. Such situations continue for thousands of years and become institutionalized. Dave Grossman says that there  have been two institutions about which the male ego has always justified selective memory, self-deception, and lying:  sex and combat. He writes:

In A History of Militarism, Alfred Vagts accuses military history, as an institution, of having played a large part in the process of militarizing minds. Vagts complains that military history is consistently written "with polemic purpose for the justification of individuals or armies and with small regard for socially relevant facts." 

He states, "A very large part of military history is written, if not for the express purpose of supporting an army's authority, at least with the intention of not hurting it, not revealing its secrets, avoiding the betrayal of weakness, vacillation, or distemper."

Vagts paints an image of military and historical institutions that for thousands of years have reinforced and supported each other in a process of mutual glorification and aggrandizement. To a certain extent, this is probably because those who are good at killing in war are quite often those who throughout history have hacked their way to power. The military and the politicians have been the same people for all but the most recent part of human history, and we know that the victor writes the history books. 

As a historian, as a soldier, and as a psychologist, I believe that Vagts is quite correct. If for thousands of years the vast majority of soldiers secretly and privately were less than enthused about killing their fellow man on the battlefield, the professional soldiers and their chroniclers would be the last to let us know the inadequacies of their particular charges. 

Grossman also blames the media for perpetuating the myth of easy killing and have thereby become ‘part of society's unspoken conspiracy of deception that glorifies killing and war’. It gives very superficial insights concerning the nature of killing and war. Looking another human being in the eye, making an independent decision to kill him, and watching as he dies due to your action causes deep psychological trauma in all but a minority of human beings.

Usually killing in combat is reflexive; the human being becomes a weapon. It is later that the psyche responds. Grossman says, ‘For those who have never experienced it, the depiction of battle that Hollywood has given us, and the cultural mythology that Hollywood is based upon, appear to be about as useful in understanding killing as pornographic movies would be in trying to understand the intimacy of a sexual relationship.’

PS: In The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, Raghavan Iyer writes about Mr. Rae, a schoolmaster at Harrow, who deplored the fact that even children have been so indoctrinated  by the idea of inevitable killing that they have no vision of a world, no desire for a world in which killing is as uncivilized as cannibalism. He mentions three dangerous myths - 1) that violence is not only justifiable but also laudable; 2) that war is fun, a great game; 3) that physical courage is the finest virtue and the moral courage shown by the conscientious objector is contemptible. He writes:

These myths were not, of course, created and spread by those who were doing the fighting; no one who has looked war in the face could describe it as a game. These myths were an essential part of the home front, offspring of official propaganda and human blindness.

Mr. Rae believes that wars are made possible not by megalomaniac dictators or religious fanatics or foolish politicians or blind patriots, but because the majority of people in the world have been brought up to accept war and violence as a normal part of life.

The difficulty of killing - I

"The soldier above all other people prays for peace, for they must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war." -  MacArthur

On killing : the psychological cost of learning to kill in war and society is a book written by Dave Grossman. He is a soldier of twenty years' service, has been a sergeant, a platoon leader, a general staff officer and a company commander in an infantry Division. In addition, he is a parachute infantryman and an army Ranger. He has been deployed to the Arctic tundras, the Central American jungles, NATO head-quarters, the Warsaw Pact, and many mountains and deserts. In short, he knows what he is talking about.

He quotes Leo Tolstoy at the beginning of the book:  ‘War has always interested me; not war in the sense of maneuvers devised by great generals . . . but the reality of war, the actual killing. I was more interested to know in what way and under the influence of what feelings one soldier kills another than to know how the armies were arranged at Austerlitz and Borodino.’ This is a topic that is not generally focused on. This book is different because it focuses on the psychology and the motivations of soldiers in actual combat which made them shoot or not shoot.

The standard way to model the response of an endangered creature is the fight or flight model.  This model is fine for inter-species fights but for intra-species fights, the set of options expands to include posturing and submission. Thus, the first response in intra-species fights is deciding between fleeing or posturing. The intimidating but harmless posturing motions and sounds are designed to convince an opponent  that the posturer is a dangerous and frightening adversary. What is created is a "perfect illusion of violence." When the posturer has failed to dissuade an intraspecies opponent, the options then become fight, flight, or submission. When the fight option is utilized, it is almost never to the death.

Similarly in war, as in gang war, posturing is the name of  the game. Small, invisible groups yelling could make itself sound like a regiment if it shouted loud enough. Plumed helmets, brilliantly shined armour, war cries, exploding grenades, charging bayonets,  etc., are posturing devices meant to intimidate the enemy before actual fighting. Adding the posture and submission options to the standard fight - or -flight model of aggression response helps to explain many of the actions on the battlefield. When a man is frightened, he literally stops thinking with his fore brain (that is, with the mind of a human being) and begins to think with the mid brain (that is, with the portion of his brain that is essentially indistinguishable from that of a non-human animal), and in the mind of an animal it is the one who makes the loudest noise or puffs himself up the largest who will win. Grossman writes:

. . . modern training or conditioning techniques  can partially overcome the inclination to posture. Indeed, the history of warfare can be seen as a history of increasingly more effective mechanisms for enabling and conditioning men to overcome their innate resistance to killing their fellow human beings. 

Prior to World War II it had always been assumed that the average soldier would kill in combat simply because his country and his leaders have told him to do so and because it is essential to defend his own life and that of his friends. But the unexpected discovery was that, of every hundred men along the line of fire during the period of an encounter, an average of only 15 to 20 "would take any part with their weapons." Why did the others fail to fire? From his studies, Grossman concluded that an important factor contributing to this surprising finding is that within most men there is  an intense resistance to killing their fellow man, ‘a resistance so strong that, in many circumstances, soldiers on the battlefield will die before they can overcome it’.

Several studies have confirmed this: surveys and observations of the ancients, numerous accounts of ineffectual firing, assessment of Argentine firing rates in the Falklands War, data on the extraordinarily low killing rates among Napoleonic and American Civil War regiments, the British Army's laser re-enactments of historical battles, the FBI's studies of nonfiring rates among law-enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and countless other individual and anecdotal observations all confirm that the vast majority of combatants through-out history, ‘at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be "conscientious objectors." ‘

Studies show that only a few men actually fire at the enemy, while others prefer to do other tasks like gather and prepare ammo, load weapons, pass weapons. Those who did fire seem to have intentionally missed their targets. Most soldiers seem to have an inner resistance to firing their weapon in combat.  This lack of enthusiasm for killing the enemy causes many soldiers to posture, submit, or flee, rather than fight; it represents a powerful psychological force on the battlefield; and it is a force that is discernible throughout the history of man.

Grossman interviewed numerous soldiers during his research. He says that while writing the book, he had been concerned that World War II veterans might take offense at reading that the vast majority of combat veterans of their era would not kill. But he found that not one individual from among the thousands who have read On Killing has disputed this finding.  He writes:

Just as I do not wish to condemn those who have killed in  lawful  combat, nor do I wish to judge the many soldiers who chose not to kill. There are many such soldiers; indeed I will provide evidence that in many historical circumstances these non-firers represented the majority of those on the firing line. As a soldier who may have stood beside them I cannot help but be dismayed at their failure to support their cause, their nation, and their fellows; but as a human being who has understood some of the burden that they have borne, and the sacrifice that they have made, I cannot help but be proud of them and the noble characteristic that they represent in our species.

Is the psychological distance between people shrinking or growing? - V

When you have a feeling that you might already understand something, but are not quite sure, you tend to go searching for information that will confirm your suspicions. When you find that confirming piece of information, you become satisfied that you were correct all along and you stop searching. Once you believe you’ve made sense of something, you feel that you need not continue your efforts and you stop your pursuit of new knowledge. When you depend on the Internet for information, such conformation bias is all-pervasive.

The search sector has tremendous power to determine what we see, where we spend, how we perceive the information we find, etc. In The Black Box Society, Frank Pasquale quotes George Dyson as saying in his book Turing’s Cathedral, “Facebook defines who we are, Amazon defines what we want, and Google defines what we think.” Eventually people may give algorithms the authority to make many important decisions. An illustration is the change in how we choose books in a bookstore and how we choose books in Amazon. When people go to a bookstore, they flip through one book and read the first few sentences of another, until some gut feeling connects them to a particular title.

In the Amazon virtual store, a message pops up and tells them: “I know which books you liked in the past. People with similar tastes also tend to love this or that new book.” Devices such as Amazon’s Kindle are able constantly to collect data on their users while they are reading books. Your Kindle can monitor which parts of a book you read quickly, and which slowly; on which page you took a break, and on which sentence you abandoned the book, never to pick it up again. If Kindle was to be upgraded with face recognition software and biometric sensors, it would know how each sentence influenced your heart rate and blood pressure. It would know what made you laugh, what made you sad, what made you angry. Soon, books will read you while you are reading them. Such data should eventually enable Amazon to choose books for you with uncanny precision.

On one side is Google’s well-known motto – ‘Do no evil’. On the other hand, its former CEO Eric Schmidt once said that “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” In Black Box Society Frank Pasquale says, ‘It is probably more accurate to say that he and other Silicon  Valley leaders don’t want to be caught crossing the creepy line. As long as secrecy can be used to undermine market competition and law enforcement, they will be emboldened to experiment with ever-creepier, more intrusive, and even exploitative practises.’

Algorithm driven programs popularize more extreme views. People with more extreme views are more likely to express their feelings through clicks, likes and postings than moderates. Over time, the algorithm figures out which box you fit into and tailors suitable results towards you. (It will be called 'enhancing user experience' . And when you couple this with the future of fake news, you will have a mess.) Moderates will give a lot fewer data points for the algorithm to work with and so the targeting will be less precise.

The way Google’s search function operates ensures that people live in their own bubbles and are satisfied that the fragmented knowledge they get represents the whole truth. Google installs a cookie in your computer by default and collects the maximum possible information. Google knows the general location of the user from the IP address and his tastes and preferences from his previous usage pattern. Google will customize its search results according to such information so the results for the same search string at different locations and different users may not be the same.

Hiding behind labels like ‘objectivity’ and ‘neutrality’, Google creates a new reality by the way it slices and presents reality. Google ranks pages according to the number of links they get and they proclaim that their search results show that ‘democracy on the web works’. But some have the resources to generate more links perhaps by paying influential sites  to link to it. There are many ways to game the system. Evgeny Morozov writes in To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, ‘The neutrality defense is bunk – and the sooner Google itself acknowledges this and finds a way to exercise its newly found powers responsibly, the fewer mistakes . . . it will commit in the future.'

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal in August 2010 (quoted in Googlisation of Everything), Google’s chief executive officer, Eric Schmidt, said, “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next. . . . We know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are.” As Google learns more about our search histories, and customizes the search results through its estimation of our interests, we will increasingly find ourselves in a bubble. You will never encounter the unexpected, the different, the ‘Other’. You will only get information that fits your prior beliefs.

There are ways to remove customization but most people are not technically savvy enough to perform the necessary actions so they are stuck with Google's default option which is to gather whatever information is possible about an individual. Siva Vaidyanathan says in The Googlisation of Everything, ‘Over time, as users in a diverse array of countries train Google’s algorithms to respond to specialized queries with localized results, each place in the world will have a different list of what is important, true, or “relevant” in response to any query.’ So although information has been made available to everyone in theory, walls get built up in practice.

We tend to think that when people take decisions after discussing an issue in a group, an 'average' of the group view emerges. But this is not what happens. People take more extreme views when in a group rather than when they are alone, a phenomenon known as group polarization. Many studies from different parts of the world have shown the phenomenon of group polarization in action. For example, after a group discussion, people already supportive of a war become more supportive, people with an initial tendency towards racism become more racist. This phenomenon also occurs in online discussion.

During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump said  that a man who tried to rush the stage during a rally had ties to ISIS. When he couldn’t produce any evidence,  he said that all he knew about it came from what he saw on the Internet. When the most powerful man on the planet believes the information on the Internet, it can't be comforting. As Clay Shirkey says in his post A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority, ‘There’s a spectrum of authority from “Good enough to settle a bar bet” to “Evidence to include in a dissertation defense”, and most uses of algorithmic authority right now cluster around the inebriated end of that spectrum…’

More data makes us feel that we can make more accurate predictions. But those predictions change human social and political behaviour thus negating  those same predictions soon after they are made. Thus more data will make the world more complex and unpredictable than before. I keep recollecting a statement by Gandhi in Hind Swaraj – 'I am prepared to maintain that humbugs in worldly matters are far worse than the humbugs in religion.' And the ‘silly’ old man was right (which doesn’t surprise me anymore). Ironically, the 'modernist' vision of Nehru has become controversial while the 'obsurantist' Gandhi has become more relevant. Joseph Brodsky writes in Less Than One:

There is something in the consciousness of literati that cannot stand the notion of someone's moral authority. They resign themselves to the existence of a First Party Secretary or of a Fuhrer, as to a necessary evil, but they would eagerly question a prophet. This is so, presumably, because being told that you are a slave is less disheartening news than being told that morally you are zero. After all, a fallen dog shouldn't be kicked. However, a prophet kicks a fallen dog not to finish it off but to get it back on its feet. The resistance to those kicks ...comes not from a desire for truth but from the intellectual smugness of slavery.