Postmodernism is a philosophical school of thought that had a lot of currency till the mid of this decade, until some of the most prominent proponents died out.
Authentic experience of reality, according to postmodernists, is dead, if not dying. Though this is a somewhat fantastic notion, there is much to it, atleast the trajectory of the society is going that way. Because of technology, mass communication, pop culture, the permeation of media in every sphere of our lives, people in western societies have increasingly ceased to have subjective selves, but in fact live lives in narrow avenues of thought, constructed for them in a mass medium of manufacturing thought, just as increasingly human labour has increasingly been replaced by automated systems. imagine a virtual reality suit, or the matrix. And these artificially constructed, sanitized realities are as real as the ‘real’ reality.
And this is crucial. People who come back from the Gulf war, when interviewed, often used to say that shooting people or deploying bombs felt just like a video game.. or a particular movie. And using this fact.. games these days are constructed to simulate war conditions, such as Full Spectrum Warrior, on which soldiers are actually trained. In other projects, Marines are trained to react to emotional situations (an ‘emotional’ woman is holding her dying son, a crowd is forming, what do you do?) using computer simulations. Trained using ‘artificial’ emotions and artificial humans in order to perceive and react to ‘real’ people.
Before modernity, killing someone was the most personal, most real experience possible. Before modernity, killing someone wasnt like something you had ever played in a game or seen everyday, often in a feel-good context where the person deserved it.
And yet, 1000 people killed in Gaza. Mostly by pressing buttons, on screens that looked like something in a computer game. In the past, wars were brutal, casualties were often much, much higher, yet those actions were registered in the subjective souls of those killing. If nobody else, atleast your killer had to acknowledge your death, and give it some consequence, even if that is triumph and joy.
The brutal coldness of the warfare pioneered by the West, without conscience, without reflection, with increasingly diminished psychological import. For all the savagery of the jihadies, for all the necks that are slit, for all the bodies burnt, there is something still more callous about the technologically packaged, sanitized, only partly human western war.