The decline of the feudal system and the progressive rise of the medieval bourgeoisie to power roles and government functions, leads the West (17th century) to theorize and assume a materialistic, reductionist and mechanistic model of thought, based on a privileged, tendentially exclusive, relationship with Science (Galilean scientific method), technique and technology. This paper takes into account the historical, sociological, and anthropological elements (such as the unlimited perfectibility of humanity advocated by the French Enlightenment and the mechanization of the production cycle envisaged by English pro-to-liberalism) of this paradigmatic revolution, which more than others help us understanding the causal process that led to contemporary techno-centrism 4.0. It is highlighted that thanks to the interweaving between the ideals of the French Enlightenment, with its two souls (Naturophilus and Technophilus), and the Anglo-Saxon entrepreneurial foresight (proved successful with the Industrial Revolution 1.0), takes shape the Positivist paradigm, and with it the Positivist secular religion, whose affirmation and diffusion generate a stream of widely shared thought throughout the West, i.e. Eugenics, which radicalizes the most ambivalent (pseudo-scientific) and reactionary (philocolonialist) instances of Enlightenment and Positivism, leading to a series of crimes against the person and against humanity, which will result in the mass eliminations conducted, in particular but not only, by Nazi-fascism and Stalinism (two totalitarian regimes that share the same Positivist roots and the same passion for Eugenics thought). It is highlighted that the heart of the industrialization process begins to throb in factories, where the introduction of mechanical systems into the production cycle triggers the man-machine integration process, which soon becomes the ful-crum, the economic, social and cultural driving factor of the western civilization. It will be thanks to the evolution of the mechanical systems employed in the production chains and to the establishment of the Liberalist economic model, that between the second and third Industrial Revolution consolidates the alliance between academic, industrial and military (the academ-ic/industrial/military iron triangle). An alliance destined to play a decisive role in the two World Wars of the 20th century and in all subsequent warfare. The present paper therefore highlights how the two World Wars have exponentially increased western scientific and technological development, which once transferred from the military to the civilian sector, has taken off the Industrial Revolution 3.0. Thanks to the Second World War, the US academic/industrial/military iron triangle is strengthened and becomes the world leader in scientific, military, economic and technological development. The computerization of society and the development of so-called Artificial Intelligence are side effects of the new way of conceiving the integrated relationship between soldier and armament, matured in the US military sector during World War II. The soldier-armament automation model that emerged from that war experience, and the enormous technical and technological developments that have taken place, paved the way for the creation of man-machine hybrids (cyborgs) and for the robotization of society (Industrial Revolution 4.0), intended to be a complementary effect of contemporary warfare. In conclusion, the birth of a neo-positivist secular religion, inspired by a scientific and hermaphroditic divinity, called Universal Consciousness, is contemplated.
The necrophilous person is driven by the desire to transform the organic into the inorganic, to approach life mechanically, as if all living persons were things. All living processes, feelings, and thoughts are transformed into things. Erich Fromm The Heart of Man (1964)1
The revolutionary change in the relationship with the technique and technology, which it has been promoted by, and of which is bearer Western civilization, by adopting the Enlightenment (18th century) and Positivist (19th century) paradigm, in the definition of its own identity system [
Starting from the advent of the Industrial Revolution 2.0 (second half of 19th century) to date, the power accrued by the techno-centrism grew exponentially. In the wake of the pressing development, first military and then civil, of increasingly versatile and high-performance technical and technological solutions, the technological revolution, whose heart began to pulsate in the factories, has succeeded in imposing a new set of social values, where the patrimony of capacity, possibilities and tendencies, phylogenetic and epigenetic, which give identity and dignity to the human being2, is constrained, and subordinated, to the abilities, possibilities and trends that depend on the technological contribution.
In particular, the current Industrial Revolution 4.0, promoted by the Vannevar Bush’s (1947) “academic/industrial/military iron triangle”3, is pointing to a radical change in the man-machine integration process, theorized by Enlightenment and applied at first by the Industrial Revolution 1.0, which opens serious questions about both the fate of human anthropological status and the future of human civilization. In the new contemporary hyper-technological scenario, human beings must no longer only adapt to, and conform to the use of, more or less sophisticated mechanical systems.
Today, in order to be competitive and socially fit, human subjects, especially the new generations, must undergo a real techno-genetic mutation that forces them to merge and confuse themselves with platforms, systems, devices and artificial solutions that do not add, but eventually subtract, value to their humanity.
What, indeed, takes enormous value and prestige, is the (compulsive) use of the new technologies, thanks to which it is acquired a digital identity that elevates the users grown with it to the status of digital natives.
Digital identity is an expression linked to the phenomenon of Digital Transformation (D.T.), or rather Digital Mutation (D.M.), which is rapidly investing the technologically advanced societies, involving, above all, the way in which it is communicated, consumed, informed about the world, studied and worked (a gradual phenomenon of automation in manufacturing and services is in progress, resulting in the extinction of certain types of workers and their jobs4). D.T. modify habits, traditions, principles and relationships through the organic evolution of a heterogeneous and combined set of four digital megatrends of technologies: a) mobile (mobile devices, smartphone and tablet); b) big data (data set and information analysis, both current and future, in real time, through structured and unstructured data analysis processes); c) cloud computing (data development and management platforms) and d) social (social networks, online platforms that allow users to create a public or semi-public profile, and interact with other users). All four megatrends subjected to data security issues (hacking).
“Mutation” then is the right term to describe not a transition, but a true techno-genetic modification of people and society that leads to the generation of digital identities, as real as those of the physical dimension and, perhaps, even more powerful than the latter, because digital identity can be shaped according to one’s or others’ needs, and is not bound to material limits.
The contemporary man-machine integration process offers us pseudo-intel- ligent cybernetic anthropomorphic systems (robot), man-machine hybrids (cyborg) and new generations of genetically modified organisms. Side effects of a man-machine integration process conceived in the military during World War II. As Frank Rose wrote at the beginning of the ‘80s [
Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) [
As Wiener writes [the bold in the text is mine]:
The antiaircraft gun is a very interesting type of instrument. In the First World War, the antiaircraft gun had been developed as a firing instrument, but one still used range tables directly by hand for firing the gun. That meant, essentially, that one had to do all the computation while the plane was flying overhead, and, naturally, by the time you got in position to do something about it, the plane had already done something about it, and was not there. It became evident―and this was long before the work that I did―by the end of the First
World War, and certainly by the period between the two, that the essence of the problem was to do all the computation in advance and embody it in instruments which could pick up the observations of the plane and fuse them in the proper way to get the necessary result to aim the gun and to aim it, not at the plane, but sufficiently ahead of the plane, so that the shell and the plane would arrive at the same time as induction. I had some ideas that turned out to be useful there, and I was put to work with a friend of mine, Julian Bigelow. Very soon we ran into the following problem: the antiaircraft gun is not an isolated instrument. While it can be fired by radar, the equivalent and obvious method of firing it is to have a gun pointer. The gun pointer is a human element; this human element is joined with the mechanical elements. The actual fire control is a system involving human beings and machines at the same time. It must be reduced, from an engineering point of view, to a single structure, which means either a human interpretation of the machine, or a mechanical interpretation of the operator, or both. We were forced―both for the man firing the gun and for the aviator himself―to replace them in our studies by appropriate machines. The question arose: How would we make a machine to simulate a gun pointer, and what troubles would one expect with the situation?
Industrial Revolution 4.0 it is touted, by all means available to the contemporary academic/industrial/military iron triangle, as an Eldorado of promises and opportunities intended to increase the Private & Public Good, sponsored by the idea that what is natural it can be progressively replaced by what is artificial, claiming that the human model to be pursued must adhere to the hyper-technological engineered model of man-machine conceived for military purposes.
I should like you to consider that these functions (including passion, memory, and imagination) follow from the mere arrangement of the machine’s organs every bit as naturally as the movements of a clock or other automaton follow from the arrangement of its counter-weights and wheels. Descartes Treatise on Man (1633)5
Between the 18th and 19th century, when the average age of Europeans ranged from 35 to 40 years, and when [translation is mine] “the animal placed higher, which was usually thought to be the monkey, was related with the type of man placed lower, usually being considered the black” (George L. Mosse) [
For this purpose, Enlighteners intellectuals (“une assemblée de philosophes occupés à préparer le bonheur du monde”, Pierre Louis Manuel, 1792) have retroactively excluded from the perspective of dominant knowledge, all that does not concern the sensitive world, establishing a materialistic, reductionist and mechanistic paradigmatic model, according to which only what can be rationally explained, and from which it is possible to obtain a material profit, that is, only what can be calculated, measured, reproduced and eventually marketed, it is worthy of attention and can be considered real. Everything else belongs to a fictitious plane of reality, as the mind (res cogitans vs res extensa), or is the result of fantasies and superstition.
The retroactive effect applied to the new categories of reality gives the Age of Enlightenment the character of a watershed between a major history, which began with the formulation and the use of physical laws translatable in a universal and constant quantitative language (→ Galilean scientific method6), functional to the catechism of bourgeois entrepreneurial profit, and a minor history, written over time based on the categories of reality generated in other places and at other times, by other human communities, through forms of knowledge other than that adopted by Enlightenment.
To fall under the guillotine of the Enlightenment year zero, it has been not just the head of the noble caste, and with them the credibility of the mysteries of the Catholic faith (→ consubstantiality), instrumentally invoked by the priestly caste, the one of the Holy Roman Church that starting from the 12th century up to the mid-15th century first tortured and then burned millions of women accused of witchcraft by the Holy Inquisition; the one that between the 14th and 16th century undertook, with the complicity of the feudal nobility, a thriving business based on the buying and selling of plenary indulgence.
The excellent victim of the Enlighteners reformers it has been the centrality of the role assigned to Man by the founding core of all the internal representations of the external reality and of all systems of values, with their respective relational, social, cultural, cultic, utilitarian and non-utilitarian systems, generated by human communities from the Middle Paleolithic onwards. This role, emerged from the human psychological birth (Middle Paleolithic) [
All the most significant concepts of the modern doctrine of the State are secularized theological concepts. Not only because of their historical development, since they have passed on to the doctrine of the State from theology, such as the omnipotent God who has become the almighty legislator, but also in their systematic structure, whose knowledge is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. Carl Schmitt [my translation] Teologia politica. Quattro capitoli sulla dottrina della sovranità (1922)8
In its place, in place of the archetypal symbolic content that led to interpret the human being as an elective medium between Earth and Sky, the 18th century Enlighteners reformers introduces the figure of Homo Technologicus (Homme Machine, J.O. de La Mettrie, 1747), a New Man (Homme nouveau) who interprets the world and himself as a mosaic of moving mechanical components, driven by energy input, which can be measured, calculated, controlled, modified, enhanced, reproduced.
For the Enlighteners first, and for the Positivists then, the Universe is a mechanical system of solid objects (res extensa) that fill portions of an otherwise empty space, placed in reciprocal relation according to laws of motion that, at least in principle, are calculable. On this Universe reigns an Enlightenment God, a Deus otiosus. A Logical God as its predecessor, the one who was made-man-in-Christ with a dogma of faith9 [
A Homme nouveau who chooses to exclude (→ Cartesian dualism) the immaterial, fictitious dimension (→ res cogitans), subjectively lived and not circumscribable by rationality (not translatable in a universal and constant quantitative language such as that used to describe the formal world → res extensa), from his own perspective of knowledge10.
A New man destined to rule and to be ruled by the Reason (Pure?) of the Science of what is useful and constructive; the renewed face of the metaphysics applied for practical purposes [
A New Man embodied by the 17th and 18th century bankers-merchants- craftsmen, who no longer want to be second to anyone, neither to the clergy nor to the feudal nobility. The Entrepreneurial and Liberalist bourgeoisie, which has more than all been able to take advantage and impulse from the effects of the Protestant Reformation (16th century), the circulation of ideas promoted by the invention of the mobile printing press (1455) and the lesson of economics finance given to contemporaries and posters by the Fugger family (16th-17th century).
A Man-Machine that will capitalize on technological resources (second half of the 18th century, England, Industrial Revolution 1.0), i.e. on the knowledge and know-how related to the intentional creation, production and application of manuals and/or instrumental techniques (procedures), aimed at fulfilling the anthropic needs [
On the sequence of historical events ranging from the introduction of wu-wei to Europe to its transformation into laissez-faire, see: Gerlach, C. (2005) Wu-Wei in Europe. A Study of Eurasian Economic Thought, London School of Economics. http://hsozkult.geschichte.hu-berlin.de/daten/2005/gerlach_christian_wu-wei.pdf
A Man-Machine that during the hundred years separating the Industrial Revolution 1.0 from the Industrial Revolution 2.0, submits the credibility of the Trinity and the authority of the Catholic priestly caste to a process of secularization, still underway, which traces the boundaries of their interference in earthly private and public affairs, subordinates them to the interests set by the bourgeoisie for the Private & Public Good11, and raises them in open competition with a new form of divine law, established by scientific criteria, and with a new category of representatives of the sacred (secularized), the scientists, delivering to history the epic of modern Liberalist and technological revolution, where “Government has no other end but the preservation of property”12 (John Locke, 1632-1704).
The Hommes nouveau, the libertines-entrepreneurs of which narrates the Divine Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), supporters of the practice of the laissez-faire13 and of the disintegration of religious worship, in favor of replacing the sacred symbols of Christianity with erotic images, metaphors of an eroticism used in a pretestuous way, as a sales strategy, as an advertising technique to entice the customer to buy the marketed products, to submit him to an orgy of images, arguments, demonstrations, information that will give him the sense of a system of values in which carnal violence and the purchase of a commodity are equivalent, in which the cold representation of a corporal mechanics turns out to be metaphorical of something else.
Something else to which Liberalism assigns a market value.
Doctrine and economic policy developed starting from the 17th century, as a reaction to mercantilist theories (and economic policies), which had spread widely in Europe between the 17th and 18th century, Liberalism finds its full formulation in England with Adam Smith (1723-1790). Unlike the mercantilist doctrines, that affirm the benefits of state protectionist economic policies, Liberalism is founded on complete freedom of production and goods and services trade, both internally and abroad, thus opposing any form of interventionism and protectionism in the economic field by the State. In fact, the latter must confine itself to guaranteeing economic freedom and to meet the needs of the community by legal rules only when they can not be satisfied privately.
With different shades, modes and socio-political implications, Liberalism is based on the principle understood by the metaphor of laissez faire, an expression attributed to the French merchant Legendre (1680) but passed to history as laissez faire, laissez passer (let it go, let it pass) thanks to the physiocratic proto-liberalist JCM Vincent de Gournay (1712-1759). The principle to which the laissez faire refers, states that the optimum functioning of the economic system flows from the free initiative of the single individuals (which means, first of all, the private property of means of production), which in the pursuit of their interest must not be conditioned or hindered by any external constraint (i.e., imposed by the interference of the State). When interpreted in Locke’s direction (John Locke, 1632-1704), the laissez faire, laissez passer leads to the exaltation of the virtues of a free market conceived as a system in its own right, independent, self-determined and self-sufficient, a system that does not have to be influenced or controlled by (but which can influence and control) the cultural and political context within which it operates. As the neo-liberalist Friedrich von Hayek will write [
Instead, when interpreted in the Smithian sense, the Liberalist laissez faire, laissez passer must take into account that freedom of market can only be achieved in a cultural and political context in which the freedom of the individual and the legal certainty is guaranteed.
… modernity abolishes religion, as a system of meanings and engine of human efforts, but at the same time creates the space-time of a utopia which in its very structure has an affinity with the religious issues of fulfillment and salvation. Danièle Hervieu-Léger14 [my translation]
The establishment of the Enlightenment paradigm marks the tipping point of the downward trend that has gone to meet, with the establishment of the dogma of the consubstantiality (Homoousion) of the Son with the Father (Nicaea Council, 325 AD), the little that remained of unthinkable, non-edible by the senses, unassailable by the fork of emotions and the knife of discriminative and speculative thinking15, in the western internal representation of external reality. What is conveyed to history is a materialistic vision of the world, with some pantheistic reminiscence and some inclination towards inner sentimental experiences, such as those preached by the pietism of Jakob Spener (1635-1705), governed by two souls, the two souls of Enlightenment.
Starting from different but complementary arguments, the two souls of Enlightenment state that the future of humanity is placed, thanks to a natural order for one of the two, the Naturophilus soul, and to a mechanical order for the other, the Technophilus soul, in the hands of Western civilized peoples16, i.e. in the hands of the French and English 18th century bourgeois class and their allies and descendants.
The roots of the Naturophilus soul, fish in the cultural background of hermetic-rosicrucian-masonic-esoteric origin [
The Technophilus soul, on the other hand, which will inspire the mechanistic (the mechanical philosophy) and deterministic current of the progressive techno-scientism, it is the product of its time, conceived in the sign of the Cartesian dualism and Newtonian physics, praising, as does Turgot19, to progress as a goal to which mankind is inextricably tending (which also meant to legitimize the colonialist, conqueror and racist messianism, who pretended to civilize peoples judged inferior for their institutions or their development), and to the indefinite perfectibility of mankind. A position clearly anticipated by the philosopher and mathematician Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794) [
The optimism towards science, the confidence in scientific progress, will contributes to determine a very significant conceptual overturn: the category of naturalness, the supposed existence of an eternal and immutable natural order, is pressed by that of artificiality, changeability. Nature, including human nature, is thought to be scientifically perfectible, freeing it from the hard law of necessity. What is scientifically modified and artificially built becomes desirable.
The most important effect of machine production on the imaginative picture of the world is an immense increase in the sense of human power (...) no change seems impossible. Nature is raw material; so is that part of the human race which does not effectively participate in government. Bertrand Russell History of Western Philosophy (1945)20
Under the propulsive action impressed by the two souls of Enlightenment paradigmatic revolution, two processes of epochal change begin.
One marks the transition from a monarchy of divine right, absolutist, straight by the division of goods and privileges between feudal nobility and clergy, to a constitutional monarchy based on principles, laity and republicans, of equality, freedom and brotherhood, as proclaimed by the Declaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen (1789), which will lead the West to take on forms of parliamentary government, but which will also expose it to the cause of authoritarianism of the Public Good (as is the case of Stalinist and Hitlerian totalitarianism, and as is the case with the current imperialist drift of globalization, which seeks to establish a world-wide public order governed by oligarchic supranational financial interests).
The other process, perhaps even more characterizing of the former and destined to have an even more incisive development and action on the fate of peoples, marks the transition between a protectionist and mercantile economic model, based on agriculture-crafts-trade, to an industrial Liberalism model based on targeted, entrepreneurial, specialized use of mechanical systems driven by inanimate energy sources, which will blur in the process of industrialization (→ Industrial Revolution 1.0, England, second half of 18th century) [
Unlike the process of social transformation, whose assumptions and dynamics require complicated and uncertain processing and implementation times, difficult to extract from the Western cultural and historical context, and thus difficult to export to other socio-political contexts, the process of economic transformation has a high degree of penetration into, and adaptability to, socio-cultural environments also very different from the Western one, it guarantees to those who govern it higher profit margins, it facilitates the acquisition of new powerful control tools and it opens perspectives of well-being otherwise
unthinkable. This process will, in fact, be spread with different modes and speeds first across the Western European continent (18th century/Industrial Revolution 1.0 → 19th century/Industrial Revolution 2.0) to be then exported and progressively adopted (19th century/Industrial Revolution 2.0 → 20th century/ Industrial Revolution 3.0) by the European colonies of the New World, by Eastern European continent and by Japan, followed by China, the European colonies of Oceania, South Africa and South America, by Eastern Asia, the Middle East and finally, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall (20th century/ Industrial Revolution 3.0 → 20th century/Industrial Revolution 4.0), by India and partly by North and Central Africa.
The centrality of mechanical systems in the industrial economic model, requires an adaptation of the human capital employed in the production chain, directly proportional to the needs imposed by the characteristics of the invested technological capital21. It is in this period that the process of integration between man and technology (mechanical systems) moves its first steps, assuming that human capital scarcely endowed with res cogitans (as the slaves deported from colonies and all non-white race, the women, children, and the male laborers), must exercise their own productive role in function of technological capital. As a consequence of this unavoidable prescription, a man-machine integration process takes shape which, in accordance with the postulates of the two souls of the Enlightenment, contemplates the idea of a humanity susceptible to corrections and adjustments, which can be induced either naturally or artificially, in order to make the anthropic characteristics and performance conform to the characteristics and performance of the mechanical systems.
The Industrial Revolution 2.0 (second half of the 19th century) declines with the awareness that the man-machine integration process is not the only condition characterizing the process of industrialization. For this process to be effective, predictable and reproducible in the time and space of the Liberalism economic model (but also of the protectionist one, elaborated by historical materialism), it must be able to satisfy, and here the end justifies the means, at least three other conditions:
Capitalism is not only a better form of organizing human activity than any deliberate design, any attempt to organize it to satisfy particular preferences, to aim at what people regard as beautiful or pleasant order, but it is also the indispensable condition for just keeping that population alive which exists already in the world. I regard the preservation of what is known as the capitalist system, of the system of free markets and the private ownership of the means of production, as an essential condition of the very survival of mankind. Friedrich August von Hayek (1899-1992)25
The political, social and economic systems of much of the contemporary world would not exist without the introduction of mechanical systems in production cycles. An epochal event that came to pass with the Industrial Revolution 1.0 (England, second half of the 18th century, mechanization of production in the textile and metallurgical sector, invention of the steam engine) and that, as from the first half of the 19th century, is governed by, and is variously subject to, the laws of the market, introduced by the financial oligarchies that control the stock systems (commodities and values), traditionally the London Stock Exchange (foundation year 1801) and the New York Stock Exchange (1817).
The epoch of the Industrial Revolution 1.0 has been distinguished from previous periods for the systematic introduction of inventions and technological innovations that gave the course to: a) a growing mechanization of production processes; b) the emergence of efficient and precise machine tools (such as the hydraulic chassis) and the design of machines powered by the steam force (making a steam engine economically and technically advantageous and efficient, was made possible by the use of the new blades built around 1775 by British John Wilkinson, initially used to produce cannon barrels, which allowed Watt to build with due precision the cylinders for his steam engines), resulting in increased labor productivity; c) the ability to manufacture standardized objects consisting of interchangeable parts; d) the ascent of coal as the predominant source of energy and f) the mechanization of transport (first half of the 19th century, steamships and steam locomotives).
This acceleration in the pace of technological innovation did not affect the entire European territory in a homogeneous way. For about a century, the industrial revolution remained confined to England, Belgium, to a part of France, and to remote areas of Germany. Between the sixties and seventies of the 19th century and the first decade of the 20th, industrialization expanded and intensified in Germany, Northern Italy, in some regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russian Empire, in Japan and United States. It is then that the new industrial urbanism values, the values of the civilized and industrious bourgeoisie, take the lead by building a different reference model and a new collective identity.
From the second half of the 19th century (Industrial Revolution 2.0) the influence of scientific research on the evolution of the industry grew. The novelty of this period lies in the original alliance that is created between science, technology and industry. Scientific research is increasingly oriented towards its potential industrial applications and increasingly realized in the laboratories of large companies, which systematically apply the results to production, leading to the development of sectors that did not exist before, or that existed but with limited relevance, such as those of steel, electricity and chemistry. Unlike previous decades, inventors tend to have solid scientific training (they are mathematicians, engineers, biologists, chemists, physicists) and those of scientist, technician and researcher become highly specialized professions. These transformations were accompanied by others relating to the organization of production. The growth in investment and costs to be supported, increasingly less easily faced by family businesses, led to i) the affiliation of joint stock companies, ii) the dependence of many companies on bank credit, iii) the search for economies of scale, through the dimensional growth of companies, and iv) a policy of mergers and cartels, to limit competition and to integrate into a single corporate umbrella companies protagonists of the various stages of production of certain goods.
In many states, the school and university system experienced a functional evolution to meet the needs of the industry, which was expressing a growing demand for skilled workers.
It was the factory system the heart of what emerged progressively as the new organization of society and work. The large-scale application of technology to production, led increasingly to concentrate masses of workers in factories organized according to rational criteria, with functions, times, rhythms defined according to the needs of the division of labor. In this context, mechanization had a massive impact on capitalistic-led companies, starting from the textile, mining, steel and mechanical sectors, while, in parallel, the introduction of the steamship, of the first railway lines and telegraph, made it possible to build a new and very powerful network for the transport of goods and people and for communication.
For eugenists such as Margaret Sanger (1879-1966), founder of Planned Parenthood, the effects of the Industrial Revolution 2.0 were a threat, in response to which was invoked the planning and the use of special programs for birth control among the unfit.
This is what Sanger writes in this regard in her book The Pivot of Civilization, published in 1922 [
The history of the industrial revolution and the dominance of all-conquering machinery in Western civilization show the inadequacy of political and economic measures to meet the terrific rise in population. The advent of the factory system, due especially to the development of machinery at the beginning of the nineteenth century, upset all the grandiloquent theories of the previous era. To meet the new situation created by the industrial revolution arose the new science of “political economy”, or economics. Old political methods proved inadequate to keep pace with the problem presented by the rapid rise of the new machine and industrial power. The machine era very shortly and decisively exploded the simple belief that “all men are born free and equal”. Political power was superseded by economic and industrial power. To sustain their supremacy in the political field, governments and politicians allied themselves to the new industrial oligarchy. Old political theories and practices were totally inadequate to control the new situation or to meet the complex problems that grew out of it.
Just as the eighteenth century saw the rise and proliferation of political theories, the nineteenth witnessed the creation and development of the science of economics, which aimed to perfect an instrument for the study and analysis of an industrial society, and to offer a technique for the solution of the multifold problems it presented. But at the present moment, as the outcome of the machine era and competitive populations, the world has been thrown into a new situation, the solution of which is impossible solely by political or economic weapons.
The industrial revolution and the development of machinery in Europe and America called into being a new type of working-class. Machines were at first termed “labor-saving devices”. In reality, as we now know, mechanical inventions and discoveries created unprecedented and increasingly enormous demand for “labor”. The omnipresent and still existing scandal of child labor is ample evidence of this. Machine production in its opening phases, demanded large, concentrated and exploitable populations. Large production and the huge development of international trade through improved methods of transport, made possible the maintenance upon a low level of existence of these rapidly increasing proletarian populations. With the rise and spread throughout Europe and America of machine production, it is now possible to correlate the expansion of the “proletariat”. The working-classes bred almost automatically to meet the demand for machine-serving “hands”.
The rise in population, the multiplication of proletarian populations as a first result of mechanical industry, the appearance of great centers of population, the so-called urban drift, and the evils of overcrowding still remain insufficiently studied and stated. It is a significant though neglected fact that when, after long agitation in Great Britain, child labor was finally forbidden by law, the supply of children dropped appreciably. No longer of economic value in the factory, children were evidently a drug in the “home”. Yet it is doubly significant that from this moment British labor began the long unending task of self-organization. Nineteenth century economics had no method of studying the interrelation of the biological factors with the industrial. Overcrowding, overwork, the progressive destruction of responsibility by the machine discipline, as is now perfectly obvious, had the most disastrous consequences upon human character and human habits. Paternalistic philanthropies and sentimental charities, which sprang up like mushrooms, only tended to increase the evils of indiscriminate breeding. From the physiological and psychological point of view, the factory system has been nothing less than catastrophic.
Dr. Austin Freeman has recently pointed out some of the physiological, psychological, and racial effects of machinery upon the proletariat, the breeders of the world. Speaking for Great Britain, Dr. Freeman suggests that the omnipresence of machinery tends toward the production of large but inferior populations. Evidences of biological and racial degeneracy are apparent to this observer. “Compared with the African negro”, he writes, “the British sub-man is in several respects markedly inferior. He tends to be dull; he is usually quite helpless and unhandy; he has, as a rule, no skill or knowledge of handicraft, or indeed knowledge of any kind ... Over-population is a phenomenon connected with the survival of the unfit, and it is mechanism which has created conditions favorable to the survival of the unfit and the elimination of the fit”. (…) One thing is certain. If machinery is detrimental to biological fitness, the machine must be destroyed, as it was in Samuel Butler’s “Erewhon”. But perhaps there is another way of mastering this problem.
(…) Birth Control which has been criticized as negative and destructive, is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method, and its adoption as part of the program of Eugenics would immediately give a concrete and realistic power to that science. As a matter of fact, Birth Control has been accepted by most clear thinking and far seeing of the Eugenists themselves as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health.
The first half of the 20th century was marked by the accentuation in all industrialized countries of the protectionist and leadership policies emerged over the previous century. This tendency manifested itself in the epochs of the two world conflicts (in which the states were forced to seek self-sufficiency in the various production sectors and to submit industrial activity to strict control, in order to make it functional to the war effort). In the first decades of the century, scientific-technological progress favored, as it had already done in the late 19th century, the progress of existing industrial sectors and the emergence of new compartments. In particular, there was a large increase in electricity consumption, the diffusion of new means of communication (telephone and radio), a growing mechanization of agriculture and the development of aviation and the automotive industry.
From World War II, European countries emerged greatly weakened industrially, due to war breaks, shortages of financial resources, and to disruption of trade relations with other continents, while the US came out stronger, not only because their apparatus production had not suffered direct damage, but also because the strong military demand had stimulated its expansion and modernization.
In this post-war international scenario, the American academic/industrial/ military iron triangle gains the unquestioned power to drive the process of industrialization on a global scale and decide on the fate of the man-machine integration process. The propulsive action imprinted on both processes by the exercise of the US knowledge and know-how, becomes the determining and characterizing factor of the transition from second to third and from third to fourth, industrial revolution.
[Eugenics] must be introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion. It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for eugenics co-operate with the workings of nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. Francis Galton26
The emergence of Positivist thought goes hand in hand with the transition from the first to the second industrial revolution.
Thanks to the action exercised by the two souls of the Enlightenment, Naturophilus and Technophilus, on the man-machine integration process 2.0, and under the suggestions offered by Darwinian theory of evolution, the bourgeois European class of the second half of the 19th century did not interprets anymore reality according to the traditional metaphysical categories of immutability and necessity, of innativeness and of fixity, but rather of dynamism and progress (scientific, technological and industrial).
Evolutionism, the new 19th century dogma of the metaphysics applied for practical purposes, describes the movement of history and, above all, interprets this universal movement in a finalistic way, that is, as directed to a positive approach, the condition of universal happiness, assimilating in this sense the progressive conception of history introduced by the Jewish-Christian promise of the Kingdom of Heaven, then reinterpreted in a materialistic way by Enlightenment.
In this context, both cultural and social, takes shape the current of thought that we call progressive techno-scientism.
On a cultural level, progressive techno-scientism radicalizes the motives of convergence between scientism (France, second half of 19th century) and social-Darwinism (England, second half of 19th century), between faith in the power of science as metaphysics of indisputable-absolute certainties and technology as a tangible proof of its effectiveness, and the conviction that the linear, progressive and ascending evolution applied by Darwin to biological systems can also be applied to social systems (social Darwinism → Herbert Spencer): reality expresses a universal development, constant, progressive and necessary, towards more and more evolved forms of life, from simple to complex, from homogeneous to heterogeneous, from inferior to superior. On the social level, progressive techno-scientism fully welcomes the most radical instances, in the smell of conquering and racist colonial messianism, expressed by the bourgeois Enlighteners class: i) the bourgeoisie has the full power to claim and pursue the right-duty to civilize peoples and individuals judged inferior for their cultures or their development (
improve mankind through a progressive selection and/or modification and/or integration and/or substitution, natural and/or artificial, of the human being, following the criteria dictated by scientific progress (science and technology, by virtue of the effectiveness of their means, can transform what was naturally predetermined).
Eugenics and Artificial Intelligence represent respectively the first and last ideological Manifesto of the unlimited human perfectibility project undertaken by progressive techno-scientism.
I propose that 100,000 degenerate Britons should be forcibly sterilized and others put in labour camps to halt the decline of the British race. Winston Churchill27
The Eugenics thought, is the speech, from the Naturophilous/conservationist and Tecnophilous/mechanistic point of view, on why the Caucasian race (John Friederich Blumenbach, 1865) is superior to the other races and how this self-referential and pseudo-scientific primacy must be safeguarded.
A school of thought that seems to satisfy the positivists and neo-positivists need, already clearly expressed by Auguste Comte28, to find a scientific substitute for clerical orthodoxy (Adam Cohen defines Eugenics as a sort of secular religion [
The conservationist current of Eugenics thought was born out of the Positivist elaboration of the Enlightenment Naturophilus soul, in the name of the evolutionary biology, in order to plan the suppression of the unfit and the control of their reproduction and diffusion with strategies and methods considered natural, a position that the English economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) anticipated well with these words29: All the children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to this level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons. (…) To act consistently therefore, we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.
The mechanistic current was born out of the Positivist elaboration of the Enlightenment Technophilus soul, in the name of the deterministic conception expressed by the mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon de Laplace in his Système du monde (1814), to promote the unlimited scientific refinement, with artificial strategies and methods, of the human species, i.e. its progressive homologation to “the state of civilization attained by those people who are most enlightened, most free, most exempt from prejudices, as the French, for instance, and the Anglo-Americans” (Condorcet). As previously stated by Condorcet: In sine, may it not be expected that the human race will be ameliorated by new discoveries in the sciences and the arts, and, as an unavoidable consequence, in the means of individual and general prosperity; by farther progress in the principles of conduct, and in moral practice; and lastly, by the real improvement of our faculties, moral, intellectual and physical, which may be the result either of the improvement of the instruments which increase the power and direct the exercise of those faculties, or of the improvement of our natural organization itself? (....) And who shall presume to foretel to what perfection the art of converting the elements of life into substances sitted for our use, may, in a progression of ages, be brought? But supposing the affirmative, supposing it actually to take place, there would result from it nothing alarming, either to the happiness of the human race, or its indefinite perfectibility (...) Would it even be absurd to suppose this quality of melioration in the human species as susceptible of an indefinite advancement; to suppose that a period must one day arrive when death will be nothing more than the effect either of extraordinary accidents, or of the slow and gradual decay of the vital powers; and that the duration of the middle space, of the interval between the birth of man and this decay, will itself have no assignable limit? Certainly man will not become immortal; but may not the distance between the moment in which he draws his first breath, and the common term when, in the course of nature, without malady or accident, he finds it impossible any longer to exist, be necessarily protracted?
Neologism Eugenics [
Concepts such as evolution and adaptation are used by Galton to legitimize the leadership of the rich bourgeoisie of industry and commerce, which had made the British nation great in the international scenario and in the cultural relations between races32. The very concept of natural selection (natural selection chooses among the possible emerging random variation between individuals of a species, the more favorable for survival, and therefore for the breeding in a particular environment, ensuring the survival of the only individuals best suited in the struggle for life and death) is used ideologically and conservatively as a criterion of distinction between fit and unfit, although it is already decided upon the criteria for identifying the fit, how to establish the distinctive features, in relation to whom or what.
Among the sixties of the 19th century and the sixties of the 20th century, Eugenic policies extended to Europeans judged unfit, the same dehumanizing treatment, now corroborated by pseudo-scientific theses, that European colonists had for centuries reserved to colonized peoples33. The Eugenics ideas spread from Sweden to Russia to England to Portugal to Germany to Italy to Denmark to Japan to France to the United States of America to South America to Oceania to Africa and to various European colonies scattered around the planet. Racial hygiene practices became part of the collective and institutional behavioral norms intended to improve the race, legitimating an uninterrupted series of crimes against the person and against humanity:
- selective breeding by coercive selection or modification of germinal lines (→ forced mass sterilization34; forced coupling between individuals according to traditional techniques for livestock breeding, including hybridization);
- forced separation and removal of the offspring from the unfit families, to become human material for use and consumption of the fit;
- systematic application of the law of the strongest, evoked and justified by a supposed general law of nature, expressing itself in the struggle for life and death, and legitimizing, on the biological-anthropological level, the disparities between humans and the elimination of the weakness (→ slavery, racial segregation, summary elimination or reduction to the impotence of anyone obstructing or polluting the path of the fit);
- medical experimentation on human guinea pigs (tens of thousands of individuals considered unsuitable or unfit or simply useless and harmful were locked up in psychiatric institutions, or in special colonies for unfit, and subjected to electroshock, genital mutilation, frontal lobotomy and other restrictive and medical-surgical practices that will be emulated and applied on a large scale by, among others, the Nazi-fascists, the Stalinists and the Japanese Empire Army).
A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them. George Bernard Shaw35
Between the end of 19th century and Second World War, the Eugenics cause caused many acolytes, ordinary people, politicians, lawmakers, esteemed scientists, accredited researchers, entrepreneurs, wealthy businessmen, illustrious psychologists, economists, religious, sociologists, anthropologists [
However, for the purpose of this paper, it is useful to mention at least some of the many significant intersections (which tend to survive at the departure of their actors) between the academic, industrial and military world, i.e. the academic/industrial/military iron triangle, in particular in the United States of America [
Here are some.
Between the ‘20s and ‘40s of 20th century some American investors, Dutch bankers and German businessmen gave birth to a millionaire turnover, the New York-Rotterdam-Berlin Connection, which funded the rise to power by Adolf Hitler, continuing to do business with the Third Reich throughout World War II [
The Eugenics Record Office (ERO) was a Research Institute dedicated to eugenics and human inheritance studies. It was founded in 1910 by Charles B. Davenport and Harry H. Laughlin (two of the major advocates and speakers of Eugenics in USA), thanks to funds provided by the wealthy widow Mary Harriman (EH Harriman’s wife), John Harvey Kellogg (the cereal magnate who founded the Kellogg Race Betterment Foundation in 1911) and the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Station for Experimental Evolution, founded in 1902 by millionaire Andrew Carnegie (steel magnate) [
The American Breeders’ Association, founded in 1903, was the first scientific organization in the United States to recognize the importance of Mendel’s laws and to support eugenic research (through a subcommittee chaired by ichthyologist and Stanford University’s president David Starr Jordan), in 1914 changed its name to the American Genetic Association (AGA) [
The exclusive Boone and Crockett Club (B & C, founding year 1887) was the first and most authoritative American conservationist association, engaged in the field of Eugenics and immigration restrictions. Among its members, largely naturalists, appear Theodor Roosevelt (founder of the Club and 26th President of the United States), Madison Grant [
The Rockefeller Foundation (RF) funded various projects for the promotion and application of Eugenics thinking both in the United States and abroad [
Illustrious Eugenists were, among others, Alexander Graham Bell (1847- 1922), inventor of the phone, honorary president of the 2nd Eugenic International Congress in 1921.
Robert Mearns Yerkes (1876-1956), psychologist, was commissioned by the American Psychological Association, under the mandate of the US Department of Defense, to chair the Committee on the Psychological Examination of Recruits, a team of 40 psychologists, among which stands out the figure of another pioneer in the IQ test, the psychologist Henry Herbert Goddard (1866-1957), who developed, in line with Eugenics thinking, two IQ tests, the Army Alpha and Beta test, which were administered at 1.75 million recruits of the US Army, paving the way for large-scale IQ testing at school as well (the IQ Test Sponsor, the National Research Council Psychology Committee, also chaired by Yerkes, described the IQ test administered in schools as “the application of the army testing methods to school needs” [
Nobel Prize winner James Watson, US biologist and discoverer, together with Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, of the molecular structure of DNA (1952), in an interview in 2014 stated that: “Eugenics is sort of self correcting your evolution, and the message I have is that individuals should direct the evolution of their descendants, don’t let the State do it. I think it would be irresponsible not to direct your evolution if you could, in the sense that you could have a healthy child versus an unhealthy child, I think it is irresponsible not to try and direct the evolution to produce a human being who would be an asset to the world as well as to himself 38.
Karl Pearson (1857-1936), English mathematician, president of the Galton Eugenics Laboratory (created by Francis Galton in 1907, from the merger of the Biometric Laboratory directed by Pearson and Galton’s Eugenics Record Office), headquartered in the University College of London.
Sir George Darwin and Leonard Darwin, the latter president of the British Eugenics George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925, Stalin’s supporter and friend, wrote39: The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it. If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?
Winston Churchill (1874-1965), was Home Secretary at Eugenic Education Society from 1910 to 1911 (founded in 1907, changed name to the British Eugenics Society in 1926 and later to the Galton Institute in 1989, the current denomination); in 1911, when he was a military navy minister, he attended the presidency (along with Lord Alverstone, then Minister of Justice, Charles Eliot, President of Harvard University and Alexander Bell) of the first Eugenetic World Congress, organized by the University of Oxford. British Prime Minister from 1944 to 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955, Nobel Prize in Literature in 1953, was among the first editors of the Mental Deficiency Act40 (1913). In October 1910 a deputation to the Government called for the implementation of the Royal Commission’s recommendations without delay. Churchill, in his reply41, recalled the fact that there were at least 120,000 “feeble-minded” persons “at large in our midst” who deserved “all that could be done for them by a Christian and scientific civilization now that they are in the world”, but who should, if possible, be “segregated under proper conditions so that their curse died with them and was not transmitted to future generations”42.
In 1935 the French surgeon and biologist Alexis Carrel, a Nobel prize winner on the staff of the Rockefeller Institute, publishes Man the Unknown. He proposes disposing of criminals and people who are mentally ill via euthanasia institutions equipped with suitable gases. In 1939 Hitler orders widespread ‘mercy killing’ of sick and disabled people. The Nazi euthanasia program, to eliminate ‘life unworthy of life,’ is code-named Aktion T4 (acronym that stood for the Berlin villa located at civic 4 in Tiergartenstrasse). An estimated 275,000 people are killed under the programme from 1939 to 194543.
Many have wondered how it has been possible that Western civilization that originated from the Age of Reason could have given birth to such fierce devastation and inhuman suffering. Perhaps the answer is in the words of Denis Diderot: The most dangerous madmen are those created by religion, and ... People whose aim is to disrupt society always know how to make good use of them on occasion [Conversation with a Christian Lady (1774)].
Enlightenment has given rise to a (monotheist) secular religion44 [
Positivism has consecrated it on the altar of the newborn academic/industrial/ military iron triangle.
Eugenists established the Inquisition courts of the Positivist Church.
Men like Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin used it to put the nation at the service of their delirium of omnipotence.
Men like Winston Churchill used it to put their power ambitions at the service of the nation: The religion of blood and war [Mahommedan] is face to face with that of peace [Christianity]. Luckily the religion of peace is usually the better armed. [Winston Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force: An Episode of Frontier War (1898)]
What can we expect from the present preachers, with transumanists on the forefront, of the hyper-technological perfectibility of humanity?
That is to say, if we humans are simply parts of systems - our skins not boundaries but permeable membranes, our actions measured as behavior rather than by introspection - the autonomous, sufficient “self” begins to seem an illusion. NWF45
For the academic/industrial/military iron triangle, two world wars, racial hygiene programs, chemical and bacteriological weapons, the development of ground, air and sea weapons, the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and millions of civilian casualties, represented an opportunity to develop persuasive and dissuasive strategies and techniques and technological solutions that have had enormous repercussions both on the future of the military and the civilian sector.
An opportunity that has not been reversed even in the face of the possibility of acquiring information of scientific interest, with criminal methods conducted on human guinea pigs with unprecedented cruelty. Like those that distinguish the story page (1936-1945) written by Unit 731 [
Set up by the Japanese army in 1936 at Ping Han, near Harbin, Manchukuo’s puppet state, Unit 731 was a military research center entrusted to the command of a graduate in medicine, Shiro Ishii, where doctors and other Japanese graduate live-dissected, infected with bacteriological agents, subjected to transplants, mutilations and other torture conceived as experiments over three thousand subjects considered fit to be treated as human guinea pigs, mostly Chinese (including woman and children), but also Mongolians, Koreans, Russians and some British and American captured. At the end of the war, commander of Unit 731, Shiro Ishii, and most of his collegues were protected by US intelligence agencies, and in exchange for the results of the Unity research, covered by military secret, obtained immunity. The connections gained during the war paid off handsomely after the war for many members of the Ishii network. The Green Cross, a pharmaceutical company founded by Ishii staff Naito Ryoichi, Futagi Hideo, and Kitano Masaji, was a huge success after the war. Other Unit 731 members went on to success as well in other companies. Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, the Hayakawa Medical Company, the S.J. Company, Ltd., and the faculties of Tokyo University, Kyoto University, Osaka University, Kanazawa University, Showa University of Pharmacology, Nagoya Prefecture Medical University, Osaka Municipal University’s School of Medicine, and Juntendo University along with several others employed former members of Unit 731 after the war. The Japanese government employed its share of Ishii graduates, including a chief of the Entomology section of the Health and Welfare Ministry’s Preventive Health Research Laboratories and a director of Japan’s National Cancer Center, as well as a president of Japan’s Medical Association. There was also a surgeon general of Japan’s newly minted Defense Force, and the list goes on. It is also noteworthy to mention that every director of the Japan National Institute of Health, beginning with its creation in May 1947 until 1983 (with only one exception), served in a biological warfare unit. Many Unit 731 men held other important positions in society and won many awards and achievements, while the lower workers, technicians, and soldiers melted back into Japanese society. Ishii Shiro never faced trial and died in quiet retirement of throat cancer in 1959, having lived out his remaining years on a stipend provided by the Japanese government because of his rank of Lieutenant General at the end of the war.
“I do not expect to publish any future work of mine which may do damage in the hands of irresponsible militarists ...”, Norbert Wiener wrote in 194746, admitting his own ethical and professional responsibilities in lending himself to the game of the super partes scientist who works in the name of neutrality of science (denied by the facts), without worrying about the use that can be made, especially in contemporary hyper-technological society, of the results of his work.
An accommodating game that continues to be shared by many scientists, technicians, researchers, scholars, experts (mathematicians, engineers, biologists, chemists, physicists, psychologists, anthropologists, philosophers, genetics, etc.), but not all, as a testimony to the fact that the positivist priest-scientist should hang the cassock (the lab coat) to the nail, and assume his responsibilities.
Responsibilities which began to be perceived by insiders already from the Great War, when it outlined a world in which “For the first time in history, it has become possible for a limited group of a few thousand people to threaten the absolute destruction of millions” (Norbert Wiener, Moral Reflections of a Mathematician, 1956). This is the case, e.g., of Clara Immerwahr (1870-1915), German chemist and wife of German chemist Fritz Haber, considered the father of chemical warfare, tried in all ways to deter her husband from engaging in chemical weapons but was not successful and rather than assisting their use (during the First World War) committed suicide by firing at the heart at the age of 45.
The following general definition of an animal: a system of different organic molecules that have combined with one another, under the impulsion of a sensation similar to an obtuse and muffled sense of touch given to them by the creator of matter as a whole, until each one of them has found the most suitable position for it shape and comfort. Denis Diderot On the Interpretation of Nature (1753)47
And so we come to the post-war years, the Cold War years, during which the man-machine integration process, which until then had been identified with the assumption of the industrialization process, the mechanization of the production cycle, undergoes a true genetic mutation.
The machines diversify and exit the productive perimeter of industrial fields, where they have remained confined until then. They break into the homes and the lives of millions of Westerners, in the form of household appliances, cars, telephones, radio and television.
They become an integral part of consumers’ (the baptismal name of a new neutral social category that brings together all of the social classes) home habitat, enter their lives and relationship dynamics, differ according to the tastes and expectations, creating the basis for what was to become a progressive, viral, techno-addiction.
An addiction to technological solutions that, over the years, become increasingly self-referential, more and more disconnected from the real needs of their users, increasingly bound by the laws of the Liberalist economic model and increasingly adhering to the Enlightenment myth of unlimited humanity’s perfectibility.
During the ‘50s, when global equilibrium depended on two super powers, United States and Soviet Union, three projects take shape: the manipulation of genetic material, the colonization of space and the creation of intelligent machines (something that might match the flying elephants of the cartoons, but with solid scientific bases).
The first project is outlined by the chromosomal theory of heritability (genetic material is DNA and not protein → Hershey-Chase, 1952) and the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA (J. Watson, F. Crick, M. Wilkins and R. Franklin, 1952). The second project was inaugurated when the Soviets launch the first artificial satellite in orbit around Earth, Sputnik 1 (1957). The third project begins when a young American mathematician, not yet thirty, John McCarthy, proposed to create a working group dealing with a new field of research, which he called Artificial Intelligence (1956).
A working group that, over the years, has assumed world proportions and that: is conducted by a range of scientists and technologists with varying perspectives, interests, and motivations. Scientists tend to be interested in understanding the underlying basis of intelligence and cognition, some with an emphasis on unraveling the mysteries of human thought and others examining intelligence more broadly. Engineering-oriented researchers, by contrast, are interested in building systems that behave intelligently. Some attempt to build systems using techniques analogous to those used by humans, whereas others apply a range of techniques adopted from fields such as information theory, electrical engineering, statistics, and pattern recognition. Those in the latter category often do not necessarily consider themselves AI researchers, but rather fall into a broader category of researchers interested in machine intelligence48.
Each of these three projects will be developed separately by both Americans and by Soviets, but it will be the US academic/industrial/military iron triangle, supported by an expanding mass media industry, who proved to be more forward looking and to have the greatest entrepreneurship when, in 1958, was established the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), heir of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD, created in 1941) and future Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, 1972), the government agencies of the US Department of Defense in charge of the development of new technologies for military use49.
The expression Artificial Intelligence, coined by McCarthy, indicates a promising new frontier of modern Information Theory. Information Theory is a discipline born in the Telecommunications field between the ‘20s and ‘30s of the 20th century, particularly thanks to the research and solutions in the military (encrypted and non-encrypted telecommunications) experienced during World War I, whose development and fortune is consolidated, again thanks to research and applications in the military, during World War II.
Decisive for the development of the contemporary version of the Information Theory, it has been the work conducted between the ‘40s and ‘50s and separately by Claude Shannon (A Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1948) and by Norbert Wiener (Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, 1948).
The term intelligence used to distinguish the new research frontier of Information Theory resurrects the same term employed by one of the pioneers of IT, Harry Nyquist of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT & T). In 1924 Nyquist publishes an article on the Bell System Technical Journal (BSTJ) entitled Certain Factors Affecting Telegraph Speed, where deals with the factors that affect the “maximum speed of transmission of intelligence”. For those in the works of the period, the metaphorical term “intelligence” used by Nyquist for the transmission of an electromagnetic signal, appeared improper and misleading, compromised by anthropomorphic and psychological references incompatible with the subject matter. The transmission of signals between machines (coder/ decoder), i.e. the sending and receiving of variations of electromagnetic state through a medium (broadcast or via cable), it could not be in any way confused with the transmission of meaning (messages) neither could be associated with intellectual property such as the ability to learn, analyze, understand, communicate, plan, reasoning, hypothesize, draw conclusions, formulate abstract thoughts, solve problems, etc. Four years after the publication of Nyquist’s article, a colleague of Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc., Ralph V.L. Hartley, published an article on the BSTJ, entitled Transmission of Information, where the intelligence metaphor is replaced, for reasons of “physical as contrasted with psychological considerations”, by the metaphor information.
But what did Nyquist meant by the term intelligence? In fact anything that would have to deal with intellectual properties as those listed above, or that could attribute to a signal a semantic meaning. By the term intelligence, Nyquist refers to the statistically determined and decipherable component of a random signal (i.e. to the data inputs, conveyed and made available by an analogic signal, qualified by Nyquist as “the number of characters, representing different letters, figures, etc.” transmitted in a certain period of time), whose transmissibility (with no loss of intelligence i.e. data) from a transmitting device (coder) to a receiver (decoder) depends on the degree of uncertainty resolution (associated with the noise inherently generated by the transmission medium or by the involved apparatuses) obtained in the signal transmission.
AI it has been developed by Information Theory, Cybernetics and Computer Science in the telecommunications field, i.e. is built on feedback-loops algorithmic systems, which have nothing to do with human intelligence, but have much to do with the animal model described by Denis Diderot [On the Interpretation of Nature (1753)] and with the man conceived by Descartes [Treatise on Man (1633)].
At best, the performance of so-called intelligent machines is and will remain a simulation (rounded downward) of the skills manifested by a type of individuals affected by savant syndrome, or syndrome of the idiot savant, where idiot refers to an individual (generally male) with a series of more or less serious cognitive and mental delays, but having one or more of a super-developed capacity, typically the ability of computing and storage. This is all that an intelligent machine can and will aspire to do, Artificial Simulation of the Savant Syndrome (ASSS) [
If this is correct, why ASSS it is being passed off as AI?
Pursuing the development of man-machine hybrids, imagining them as a first step towards the production of artificial humanoids, programmed to be part of Cyber Physical Systems, interconnected by neural nets equipped with AI, is a project conceived and grown by contemporary progressive techno-scientism in the womb of positivism. AI is version 3.0 of the Cartesian “rational soul”, that is: When a rational soul is present in this machine it will have its principal seat in the brain, and reside there like the fountain-keeper50. A project that does not renounce to conceive the human animal as a mechanical system, which, however complex it may be, it always boils down to a mosaic of tiles (building blocks). This means applying to res cogitans the same reductionist and mechanistic pattern applied by the positivist paradigm to res extensa: the structuring of the objects and phenomena that we observe inside and outside of us, happens thanks to a sequence of combinations (factorizable), guided by a code (algorithmic) among certain structural elements (building blocks). In the case of a material object, the structural elements can be molecules, atoms, particles. In the case of a fictitious object as intelligence can be, e.g., the logical-mathematical intelligence, the verbal i., the spatial i., the musical i., the kinesthetic i., the emotional i. (Howard Gardner), in turn decomposable into sub-groups, and so on and so forth. Once broken down into objectifiable structural elements, the object shall be subjected to measuring and eventually reproduced and controlled. The result is a puzzle composed by many elements, connected to joint, in a frame which develops a given function.
As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanised. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature and has lost his emotional “unconscious identity” with natural phenomena. These have slowly lost their symbolic implications. (…) No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied. Carl Gustav Jung Man and His Symbols (1964)51
Between the ‘60s and ‘90s, AI, whose mission is “designing systems that exhibit the characteristics associated with human intelligence, such as understanding language, learning, reasoning, solving problems, and so on”, motivated by the conviction that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it”, becomes an integral part of nascent computer science (the Internet, date of birth 1983, is the evolution of a DARPA creation for military use [
In the ‘90s, the know-how gained during the ‘80s by computer science, cybernetics, robotics and AI research came to the realization of a project called Strategic Computing Program (SCP), funded both by public funds (from the Federal Defense Research Projects Agency, DARPA),and by private investors (such as IBM’s industrial giant, Dragon Systems, BBN, Bolt Beranek and Newman, and SDC, Systems Development Corporation), which will create the so-called intelligent machines, namely: machine with advanced intelligence technology and high-performance computing, including speech recognition and understanding, natural-language computer interfaces, vision comprehension systems, and advanced expert systems development, provided by a significant increasing in computer performance, through parallel-computer architectures, software, and supporting microelectronics.
But the ‘90s are also the years marked by the collapse of the Berlin Wall and, with it, by the collapse of international equilibriums and national identities, drawn by the Cold War and its deployments. The iron arm between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ends with the implosion and abandonment of the field by the latter, and the bipolar world is suddenly unipolar.
The new era is greeted by the “first postmodern war of history” (Jean-François Lyotard), the First War of the Gulf (1990), a war that did not take place (Jean Baudrillard), where conventional weapons are the backdrop to the use of new and sophisticated technological solutions (Cyberwar, Infowar, Technowar, Antiwar, Postmodernwar) [
Thanks to electronic simulation technologies, the massive power of mass media transforms wars into small and big screen performances, Hollywood-style sub-products, super reality shows, super-video games, super-saga of semi-human superheroes fighting Evil for the Good of the world.
The First Gulf War it has been just a taste of the hyper-technological wars that are waiting for us in the near future, where human soldiers will gradually be replaced by robotic armaments flanked by man-machine hybrids, i.e. cyborg-soldiers [
It thus officially begins the man-machine dis-integration process.
Equipped with an internal device inserted in dwelling, e.g. an intracranial nanorobot or a microchip for neural interaction (brain-computer interfaces)52, or a simple subcutaneous chip (transponder implantation), making him or her parametrizable (real-time detection and transmission of physiological and environmental parameters) and identifiable (automatic acquisition of all data relating to its identity, its movements and location), the NIMMH will be able to interact, at work, at home, at school, in public places, etc., via Near Field Communication (NFC) or via Far Field Communication (FFC) [
Different will be the extra-integrated cyborg (EIMMH), a man-machine hybrid trained and designed to deal with high-risk experiences (military missions, police or espionage operations, terrorist or criminal acts, space travel and stays in extra-terrestrial environments) which, besides being supplemented by internal technological components as those of the normo-integrated model, can expand some self-regulating body-mind functions (such as tolerance to pain, hunger and thirst, thermoregulation, etc.), enhance certain normal performances (such as computing ability, memory and perceptual capabilities), and interfacing with military CPSs equipped with robotic systems such as the already existing Modular Advanced Armed Robotic System (MAARS), the already operational Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) [
The use of integrated systems consisting in EIMMHs and robotic CPSs, marks the passage from the phase of computerization of war (and society) to the phase of robotization of war (and society): I see a greater robotization [of war], in fact, future warfare will involve operators and machines (…) They would be integrated into large comprehensive reconnaissance-strike system. The soldier would gradually turn into an operator and be removed from the battlefield [Lieutenant General Andrey Grigoriev, Russian Advanced Research Foundation (ARF), 2016].
Eugenics and the rampant post-human subculture promote the study, elaboration and adoption of scientific methods aimed at perfecting the human being, i.e. aimed at the promotion of physical and mental characteristics considered positive or eugenic (fit), and the removal of those considered negative or dysgenic (unfit) through the selection and manipulation of individuals or their parts (operations that in the past were carried out using traditional techniques for livestock farming and agriculture, which today can rely on high-tech communication marketing, on sophisticated technological devices and on increasingly effective central and peripheral neuro-engineering, and genetic, molecular, cellular, tissue, and organ bio-engineering).
Both make use of “working conditioning” techniques and mass media tools to influence individual and collective behavior, in order to create the belief that human capital is useful insofar as it is subordinate to the scientific-technical and technological capital.
Post-human subculture integrates Eugenics hope in the scientific and selective perfectibility of humanity, with the use of a very advanced technical and technological armament.
The computed-programmed-coded relationship (IT language → algorithmic feed back loops) that elapses between the conditioned (→ software) and unconditional (→ hardware) variables of the hybrid man-machine or of the robot (→ technological birth), gives rise to behavioral dynamics largely (cyborg) or totally (robots) deterministic and reliable, namely controllable-predictable-reproduceble- reversible.
For this reason, the man-machine hybrid, the anthropomorphic robot and the humanoid are clearly preferable (fit, superior, stronger, more suitable) to the unfit-natural-man.
Eugenics and post-human subculture are intertwined by the equivalence ratio which lies between the progressive techno-scientism of the late 19th century (→ Eugenics) and progressive techno-scientism of the late 20th century (→ AI).
An equivalence ratio that can be expressed as follows: Eugenics is to Mendelian theory (theory of the transmission mode of hereditary characters, Johann Gregor Mendel, 1866) and Darwinian theory (the theory of the linear, progressive and ascending evolution of biological systems, Charles Darwin, 1859) as Artificial Intelligence is to i) chromosomal theory of heritability (the genetic material is made up of DNA and not of proteins, Hershey-Chase, 1952), ii) the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA (J. Watson, F. Crick, M. Wilkins and R. Franklin, 1952), and iii) Information Theory, the theory born by convergence between cybernetic theory, or theory of communication and of control systems in artificial systems and in living beings (Norbert Wiener, 1948), and the theory of information’s transmission mode (Claude Shannon, 1948).
It has been a hundred years since the General Theory of Relativity (GR) introduced the notion of spacetime, which radically changed the way of thinking about the time and space of Newtonian physics, and since Quantum Mechanics (QM) has radically changed the way of conceiving energy/matter, but no one yet knows what spacetime is nor what energy is (“It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge of what energy is”, Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I, page 4-1).
However, the fact that no one knows what spacetime is and what energy is, has not prevented from measuring, describing and using phenomena that are related to one and the other.
The physical dimension we are part of is no longer the one described by classical physics, and the strange phenomena that are emerging from the quantum and relativistic dimension are fueling a growing and often unwise interest in the psychic dimension, the fictitious dimension that the science of res extensa had excluded a priori from his own field of investigation.
An almost morbid interest, which, both inside and outside the scientific world, exploits the dangerous combination of hyper-technological techno-centrism and the spiritual drift of the West (but also of the East and of the rest of the world!).
A West, which seems to hold little to warnings like those made by Richard Feynman “I think I can safely say that nobody understands Quantum Mechanics.”, (The Character of Physical Law, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1967), or by Niels Bohr “There is no quantum world. There is only an abstract physical description. It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature …”. So that: “Quantum mechanics is often quoted as the explanation for many things, because it’s so weird that people latch onto it as a hope, to explain everything that they would like to believe about the universe … Quantum mechanics is a replacement for the phrase “anything goes”. Once anything goes, you can have anything you want. So what better thing to have than something that gives you everything you want? The point is, with quantum mechanics, everything doesn’t go. On certain scales, for certain times, in certain regions, everything goes and strange things happen. But it’s not true for the universe at large” (Bo Gardiner).
The two souls of Enlightenment, excited by the syncretism that has developed between the strangeness of some phenomena described by QM or GR and the strangeness that emerge from categories of reality generated in other places and at other times, by other human communities, through forms of knowledge other than that adopted by modern science (e.g. by Buddhism, Taoism, Shamanism), are allying with each other to deliver a new, flamboyant, secular religion, where the Supreme Being, in the art Deus otiosus, alias Deus Absconditus, is called Universal Consciousness.
One of the promising religion incubators currently available on the world market of scientific spirituality, is called Science and Nonduality (SAND)53, a post-materialist international community founded in 2009 by Mrs. Zaya and Mr. Maurizio Benazzo (she’s from Bulgaria, he’s Italian), whose annual conference has become a meeting place for preeminent scientists, philosophers, spiritual teachers, and mystics to explore the new paradigm emerging in spirituality and grounded in cutting-edge science. Among its supporters and sympathizers, grouped in 2014 around a Manifesto54, is the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS)55, where you can attend a Master in Consciousness Studies; the Californian Department of Psychology at John F. Kennedy University, which has started a Master in Consciousness and Transformative Studies56; and the Schumacher College, based in Totnes, England, which offers a Master in Holistic Science57.
Robespierre declared himself supreme priest of the Supreme Being. Auguste Comte proclaimed himself the supreme pontiff of the Positivist Church. Francis Galton established tribunals of the Inquisition of the Positivist Church. Who will be the Grand Master of the nascent Church of Universal Consciousness?
Artificial intelligence is the future not only of Russia but of all of mankind. There are huge opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to foresee today … the industry leader [in this sphere] will rule the world. Vladimir Putin58
Pursuing the development of man-machine hybrids, imagining them as a first step towards the production of artificial humanoids, believed to be better than humans (Ray Kurzweil, chief engineer of Google, theorizes the exceeding of human intelligence by computer): can it be considered a project that resurrects Eugenics in a post-human form? Maybe.
Certainly, to hypothesize, as the scientific mainstream does, the creation of conscious-minded machines, is the tangible sign of a scientific and intellectual shorting that does not promise anything good.
What can be done, and is already underway, is to have new technological persuasive and dissuasive tools, including robotic and IT systems that leverage AI, both military and civil, as a means for market expanding and control, or as a deterrent to resolve conflicts related to it, both locally and globally, on small and large scale.
The noble uses of the new technologies, such as those in the field of medicine, will serve as a deterrent to the affirmation of less noble one.
Progressive Techno-Scientism 4.0, with its science-fiction scenarios, marks the apogee of the man-machine integration process and the point of break in the relationship of coexistence and convenience between the man-naturally-conceived (→ psychological birth) and man-artificially-built (→ technological birth): the relationship is no longer sustainable and is no longer convenient. At stake is the annihilation of mankind.
The man-machine integration process is turning into a man-machine disintegration process: “Unlike other potential manifestations of AI which still remain in the realm of science fiction, autonomous weapons systems are on the cusp of development right now and have a very real potential to cause significant harm to innocent people along with global instability.” (Ryan Gariepy, founder & CTO of Clearpath Robotics59)
Messori, C. (2017) From Enlightenment to Cyborgs. Open Access Library Journal, 4: e4033. https://doi.org/10.4236/oalib.1104033