Tolkien, Technology, and... War

[Kuruharan]

Technology makes war easier and more impersonal; I imagine it's easier to drop a Tomahawk (or whatever missile) from an unmanned Predator than to cut someone's head off with a sword. In his books, Tolkien seems to portray war as a necessary evil (see ), but technology, as I said, makes war easier and more likely.

While I agree with the general drift of your argument, at least as far as it pertains to Tolkein’s view of technology, I disagree with the idea that technology makes war any easier or more likely. Technology does not have anything to do with making human beings more or less violent. Our blood-spattered history seems to indicate that as a group we have a natural inclination to violence.

I also disagree that technology makes war essentially easier. It makes the process different, and it is certainly more destructive. However, it has its own kind of difficulty. I seriously doubt that you could get anybody who has actually had “their boots on the ground” to say that it was particularly easy for them. Even flying around in some planes can be just as physically demanding (in different ways) as running around hacking at somebody with a sword. Technology also creates layers of complexity and economic expense. In an economic sense I’d say that it is perhaps more burdensome for a modern nation to wage a real war than it was in the past.

One key difference between modern and (for lack of a better word) archaic warfare is its continual nature. Back in the good old days you’d set to for a day or so, or you’d settle in for a nice little siege. Once that was done then you’d likely have a little breather before continuing on to whatever was next. And then most everything stopped at the end of the campaigning season. Now, the war stops for no reason. It is fought under all conditions. In fact, it comes to resemble one long never-ending siege. This is on several levels more difficult and demanding than the good old days.

There was also much senseless waste of human life in the Great War of attrition, when the generals' strategies were often, "throw as many men as possible at them and hope they run out before we do." The Germans attacks on Verdun were designed specifically to draw the hordes of French defenders to their doom in the defense of a national treasure.

This type of thinking was not a peculiarity of the modern mind. It has always been some part of this kind of activity (and in spite of the stereotyping, it was not the only thing that the generals in World War I were thinking about).

Senseless waves of young men dying in an impossible assault on Gallipoli before they realized how impossible it was...

Not to be too picky (a sure sign that a picky comment is coming ) but Gallipoli is not the best example of this. If the thing had been better executed from the get go it might have turned out quite different. Even as it was the Turks were getting to the point of withdrawing. The project was an attempt at outside the box thinking by Churchill in an attempt to find a way around just throwing men at the enemy. He was trying to hit the enemy in their vulnerable underbelly. The commanders on the scene just sort of botched the thing from the beginning, and turned it into just throwing men at the enemy. If they had only managed the whole offensive as skillfully as they conducted the retreat…but anyway, I badly digress.

My essential point is that mere technology does not make humans more or less warlike. The problem has always lain with the human beings wielding the technology.