Intuitive Operability

Dear M., if there truly can be no right life in the wrong one (Adorno), then how can Elena be happy with Marek, and so blinded that she is willing to risk her good life? In Ederthal she has everything, including a formidable lover who stands alongside her husband, all within long-established and well-tested arrangements. Inwardly, I have checked out and slipped away to join those who love happily, where, without safety nets or hidden guarantees, the shame of desire is sacrificed. To the thoroughly handled backside—It occurred to me that this fits the expression: one simply cannot keep one’s hands off someone. It happens consensually, with the utmost bilateral urgency, and then, if I remember correctly, it happens. For now, I shall call it a tangible proof of affection, although the idea still lacks flesh on its bones. A person sits on that backside every day, and however beautiful it may be, it nevertheless falls victim to the ordinary wear and tear of decades. Yet that same backside can unleash such a storm in another person that one would surely marvel at it, if one were still in one’s senses and not already carried beyond the categories of order that govern everyday life when fully dressed.

Dear T., you have such a beautiful way of circling around the obvious. These are all such careful formulations. Do you really think I would forbid myself your company if you simply said it outright? Why should you not want to be captivated by me in that way? It is not as though you invented it as some private perversion. I almost wish I could assign it to you as homework: to portray your admiration of my backside in prose.

There is a curious asymmetry in our view of history. We see the atomic bomb, intercontinental missiles, drones, and artificial intelligence, and therefore imagine the past as a place of endless slowness. Yet the past is, above all, remarkable for its continuity.

The armies of the pharaohs fought with spears. The hoplites of Greece fought with spears. The legions of Rome fought with spears and swords. The mercenary landsknechts of the Renaissance fought with pikes. Even the soldiers of Frederick the Great moved in formations whose logic would not have seemed unfamiliar to a warrior of the Bronze Age.

Metallurgy, tactics, and organization evolved. Bows, armor, and fortifications were improved. Yet the fundamental relationship between human beings and weapons remained the same for tens of thousands of years. The weapon was an extension of the body.

Perhaps this explains the fascination with an idea that Alisa introduced into the debate. Having competed in athletics, she spoke of an innate bladed weapon concept. Scientifically, one can hardly claim that human beings possess an inborn knowledge of spears and swords. Nevertheless, we seem to grasp these tools with remarkable intuition. Human beings are the animal that throws the spear. The intelligent use of our largest joint brought us to the top of the food chain. The spear extends the arm. The sword amplifies the cut. The bow stores muscular energy. All of these weapons enhance capacities already embedded in the body: grasping, thrusting, striking, and throwing.

Human beings may be the only animals capable of throwing objects with great precision. The shoulder, the hand, and perception form a system that emerged over millions of years. In this sense, the spear appears not as an alien technology but as a natural continuation of the body. Perhaps that is why it emerged independently in nearly every culture on earth.

The history of warfare, well into the modern era, appears as variations on a single theme. The human body remains the source of power. The weapon organizes, concentrates, and transmits that power.

The rupture of modernity begins when human beings cease to use the body as their primary source of energy. Gunpowder replaces muscle power. The steam engine replaces muscle power. Electricity replaces muscle power. Internal combustion engines replace muscle power. Finally, nuclear fission unlocks a source of energy that surpasses anything earlier ages could have imagined.

Suddenly, the weapon is no longer an extension of the body. It becomes an application of physics. A spearman immediately understands how his weapon works. A swordsman feels the transfer of force within his own body. Even a musketeer still inhabits a world in which the human scale remains decisive. A bomber pilot, a drone operator, or the controller of a missile launch system, by contrast, sets physical processes into motion that bear no relation to his own bodily strength.

This is why the development of the last two hundred years appears so astonishingly rapid. We are undoubtedly dealing with a paradigm shift of the most fundamental kind, yet most people search for the source of disruptive innovation in the wrong place. Alisa explained to the audience—composed of Anson’s Animal Move group—where the real issue lay. What was revolutionized was the way knowledge itself is produced.

For millennia, inventions emerged slowly and often in isolation. A brilliant craftsman died, and his knowledge died with him. A brilliant engineer left behind no school. The transmission of knowledge was fragile. Only the modern era created a system capable of preserving, verifying, and expanding knowledge indefinitely. Each generation builds upon the results of its predecessors. Individual discoveries become part of a self-reinforcing process. History accelerates.

One could therefore provocatively argue that the eighteenth century was closer to the Stone Age than to our own time. A farmer in 1750 would have understood the basic conditions of life experienced by a farmer three thousand years before the Common Era: fire, wood, animals, muscle power, harvests, and seasons. The foundations of our world—semiconductors, global communications networks, satellites, nuclear physics, and digital information systems—would have been incomprehensible to him.

From the Stone Age to the dawn of modernity, human existence was governed by a single condition: people fought, worked, and lived within the limits of their own bodies. Modernity begins where those limits are systematically surpassed through the use of external energy sources.

The atomic bomb does not mark the culmination of the history of weapons. It marks the end of an epoch that began with the first spear. The history of weaponry is the story of a gradual distancing from the body—from the extension of the arm to the release of the energy contained within the atomic nucleus.

Intuitive Operability

The reason spears emerged independently in almost every culture lies in human biological evolution. Human anatomy—particularly the shoulder complex and the opposable thumb—is optimized for transferring kinetic energy into external objects. With the advent of gunpowder in the late Middle Ages, weapons began to detach themselves from the body. Chemical energy replaced muscular force. Atomic bombs, autonomous drone swarms, and artificial intelligence complete this break. Modern weapons systems are no longer extensions of the human body; they are often algorithmically autonomous systems. Human beings have become little more than data points within a chain of decisions.