When there is no honor amongst men, where does the human civilization go?

The ancients had codes of conduct in war. In ancient India, the Law of Manu stated that one should not attack a sleeping enemy—even a child can understand that attacking someone who’s sleeping brings no glory because no courage is required. No doubt the ancients Romans, Greeks and others had their own codes of war. Fighting sneakily and without showing your hand was in general considered cowardly—you had to fight with a sword in your hand, clearly visible by the enemy.

The two World Wars remain prominently in people’s memories because they were, besides the epochs of human bestiality, also the epochs of human bravery and courage. The millions of stories of people who behaved humanely during these moments, with the correct code of conduct, is what makes people turn back, time and again, to the memories of those brutal years.

Sadly those times seemed to have passed. Now technological war in which healthy, beefy young men sit in computer cubicles from thousands of miles away and attack defenseless people, including women and children, through aerial aircraft and wireless technologies, and kill them, seems to be accepted as not just the new way of conducting war, but even something that brings glory. And while people fought the Nazis and their apocalyptic vision, people now seem to respond to this new moment in the history of technological warfare with a deadened silence.

Then there are the sneaky, covert wars that are not even accepted yet—the men and women subjected to 24 drone surveillance in their homes, which is a despicable, cowardly way to conduct warfare because these drones are in people’s homes, at night, in their most private spaces, watching and attacking people when they are at their most defenseless—ie, when they are asleep.

The wireless systems we have allowed to enwrap almost every inch of the planet are capable of being “hacked”—not just by the random terrorist or guerrilla, but also by state and government forces intent on subjugating the populace. What can be done through these wireless networks? No international authority has yet looked at these questions in a systematic manner, nor made international rules which forbid attacking people through these ubiquitous technologies. What if the wireless network was simultaneously being used to torture people—by keeping them awake at night, by disrupting their electrical and phone systems, by spying not just on their cell and email messages, but perhaps even the thoughts in their mind? Contemporary science, well documented, tells us of experiments in which scientists are already able to “download” a transcript of people’s thoughts through various methods. Pair that up with a megalomaniac state which imagines it can control every single bit and bob of “information”, and is eager to see the benefits of “data fishing,” than you realize that human civilization, and the codes of conduct with which people have treated each other since time immemorial, breaks down into the deepest void of anomie.

The disruption of climate, and the creation of “natural disasters” through manmade means, has become another way to attack weaker enemies. Those who are working with these technologies may not be visible yet, but one day they will be. Which international body has the authority to deal with such a state, in the case such activities come to light in the future? Disrupting the climate disrupts food and water, and that is the most inhuman way of warfare.

No matter how “great” your technological progress might be, there is no glory, nor any greatness, in attacking vulnerable people in cowardly ways. No technological advances can replace these values that humanity takes for granted—human values which include agreements between human beings about codes of conduct, even in the deepest moment of war. But with no limits to modern warfare, and with every single human civilizational ethics and code of conduct being thrown to the winds to the march of technological “progress”, humanity may have reached a new nadir in its 10,000 year history. Who’s dictating our future? Where are we heading? Are we heading to a future where people sitting at computers will define the nature of human civilization? Or has the time come for a new international movement that opposes this view of humanity?