Science, Strategy and War The Strategic Theory of ... - Boekje Pienter

sciences and culture. It was a tumultuous period. In the sixties and seventies, a “newsensibility” rose 8 . Other would call it a cultural revolution or the great disruption 9 . Inparticular the “long 1960s” may be regarded the most important postwar period, the mostpivotal.In the sixties, the student revolts of may 1968, the sexual revolution, the rise of popartand pop culture, race and gender issues dominating politics, competed with the landing ofthe first man on the moon in 1968. In 1973 the oil crisis and the attack by Egypt and Syriaon Israel fuelled doubts about the viability of the modern western capitalist industrializedsocieties. Modernism was becoming suspect with, for instance, the publication of the Club ofRome Report on The Limits to Growth in 1969, a report Boyd was aware of 10 . Indeed, Boydhad read the somber opening question ‘Is there hope for man’ in Robert Heilbroner’s bookAn Inquiry into The Human Prospect, while Jeremy Rifkin painted a future characterized byincreasing disorder due to the unescapable force of the second law of thermodynamics 11 .Individualism was on the rise, reinforcing the sense that culture in modern society waswaning or already absent. The novelist Thomas Wolfe had published The Me Decades in 1976and three years later Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture of Narcissism. For Theodore Roszakthis meant instead that culture was shifting and showing The Making of a Counter Culture,which he published in 1970. He posited that this was a youth revolt and as much as anything,was opposed to the reductionism of science and technology. Everything was called intoquestion: family, urbanism, science, technology, progress. The means of wealth, the meaningof love, the meaning of life, who decides what is knowledge or reason? 12 Not surprisingly,the 1960s and 1970s creative dynamics - how creativity emerges - gained popularity 13 .This came on top of French works by Raymond Aron and Herbert Marcuse whoboth believed the 1960s to have been a critical decade, since they had revealed science andtechnology as real threats to freedom, not just in the form of weapons and weapon research,which had tied so many universities to the military, but also because the civil revolution ingeneral had been underpinned by a psychological transformation of the individual who haddiscovered new ways of freedom and manners to express it. In 1974 Robert Persig publishedZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in which he rallies against the “Church of Reason”and moves between Eastern mystics, Zen Buddhism and the classical Greek philosophers,offering an alternative to the rational scientific mindset of modernity. Boyd had read thiswork too, as he had other authors who are considered part of this wave of authors of the8 Peter Watson, A Terrible Beauty, The People and Iodeas that Shaped the Modern Mind (Phoenix Press,London, 2000), chapter 33.9 Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption, Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (Free Press,New York, 1999).10 His list of personal papers includes for instance Donella Meadows, et. al., The Limits to Growth: Areport to the Club of Rome's Report on the Predicament of Mankind (Signet, New York, 1972); as well asMihajlo Mesarovic and Eduard Pestel, Mankind at the turning Point: The Second Report to the Club of Rome(E.P.Dutton & Co., New York, 1974); and Jan Tinbergen, Rio: Reshaping the International Order: A Reportto the Club of Rome (Signet, New York, 1977).11 Robert Heilbroner, An Inquiry into The Human Prospect, (W.W. Norton & Company, New York,1974), p.13. Heilbroner also touches upon the Rome Report. Jeremy Rifkin’s work, Entropy, A NewWorld View (The Viking Press, New York, 1980), is another book in this vein and also appears in Boydlist of personal papers.12 Watson, pp. 595-596.13 And not within the defence community untill the eighties as Roger Beaumont notes, in War, Chaosand History (Praeger, Westport, Connecticut, 1994), p.113.81