Against the State of Nuclear Terror Joel Kovel South End Press Boston4 The Culture of Technocracy Culture is the linchpin between the people and the established order. It can be manipulated by the latter but stems from the spontaneous life activity of the former. And culture is the intersection of the psychological and the material, the way in which history is transmitted. If we are victims of nuclear terror, it is because we have lived lives in which the ways of the nuclear world appear to be natural instead of as intolerable violations of nature. There are two salient features of a culture which can breed a nuclear order: violence and technocracy. By violence I mean the forcible alteration of the nature of things (literally having to do with their position in nature-putting a knife through someone's skin is violent, but so is caging an animal or suppressing a child's curiosity). By technocracy I mean something beyond the ordinary usage of the term indicating the rule of experts (although my meaning includes this sense): technocracy is political domination shaped by technical, "value-free" reasoning. It is the controlling of the human world by principles drawn from the natural sciences or the application of science to machines. We shall have considerably more to say about these terms as we proceed. For now, the point is that these are the two distinctive features of societies that generate nuclear weapons, and where they are greatest, as in the U.S., so is the nuclear order the most advanced. It should be added that violence and technocracy are not necessarily coupled, nor are they necessary features of capitalist societies as such, even though capitalism has classically entailed both violence and technocracy. There are violent societies that are not particularly technocratic, for example, Iran; and there are technocratic societies that are not particularly violent, for example, Denmark; and there are capitalist 9394 AGAINST THE STATE OF NUCLEAR TERROR The Culture of Technocracy 95 and non-capitalist societies that fit into all possible combina-tions of these qualities. In particular, existing "socialist" countries are highly technocratic. However, when capitalism, violence and technocracy coexist under one social roof, then the world is in trouble, since the inherently expansionist tendencies of capitalism will be stirred by the aggression of violence and advanced with the technological force inherent in technocracy. From another angle, what we are describing is the culture of power-that of domination over the Other. And since both violence and technocracy involve relationships to nature, we must add that the domination in question is always of nature, involving environmental degradation as well as that of other humans-and, it follows, of human nature also, a point we shall develop when we return to a discussion of the psychological dimension. The atomic bomb is the end-product of an obsession with technical power. It is the ultimate-in the sense of final-transformation of nature to yield human power; and since it yields that power in the service of dominating the Other, it both fulfills domination and brings it to a close. Because of technocracy, the power which is generated by the nuclear state takes on an impersonal, value-free quality. Yet it is human power; and unless we recognize it as such, there will be no hope of affecting it politically. It is, however, human power of a special kind. It is human power that has become inhuman, and returns to us as a stranger. It is alien-ated power.' It is of us, yet we do not recognize it, and being ' unrecognized, alienated human power becomes the source of fragmentation, and the reason there is no organic "we" to take up the struggle against the bomb. It is the secret behind technology; and the secret behind economic domination; the secret behind the war between the sexes and the secret behind racism; and it is the secret behind violence. And so it is the secret behind the nuclear crisis-behind the making of the bombs, the use of them as trump cards in the game of world imperial supremacy, and the terrorizing of the population in their name. It is, in sum, the secret of history itself, until nuclear weapons arose as the threat to put an end to history. And since history until now has been the record of man's domination of nature (and here the masculine noun is used advisedly), the alienated power which is our enemy is also the product of an estrangement from nature.2 It is the part of us which left nature and returns to us a stranger, a god, a demon, a ghost, a dream, or, of course, an atomic bomb. The end of history will then be nature's revenge on history, blindly wreaked by nature's wandering son. And the escape from the nuclear trap which is the end of history is also a reconciliation with nature. Let us glance at some of power's guises. They will all be intertwined. Technology Technocracy models itself after technology.3 Therefore, we begin with the machine, since we are in danger of ending by the machine. Modern man (again the masculine term applies to what has happened to the species) worships technology. This is understandable, since he is swaddled in it from the day of birth. It becomes his alter mother, a cocoon that carries him passively through the world, as visitors to Florida's Disney-world are encased in a plexiglas vessel and wafted before the universe's wonders. When my youngest child was born, the nurse took her from her mother after a couple of minutes and put her under a heat lamp. "Why?" we asked. "Because the new-born does not have its temperature regulation down yet," was the answer. Without the heat lamp, she would become too cold and possibly perish. How interesting; we wondered how the human species had managed to survive so many millennia before the heat lamp was discovered. Silence from the nurse. The machine expands the body, and replaces the body. , Ride in an automobile, and once again be encased in the technological womb. It is quiet and comfortable in the car (at least that is how the better ones are designed). Stand outside on the road, though, and listen, and smell, and breathe as the cars go by. Then you will understand something else about technology (which becomes a ruling principle of technocracy). Not only does it replace nature as our encasement, but it exports violence outward. Once we have multiplied the power of our body by a machine, then we have lost the self regulating features