For the authors of the draft field manual on Fourth Generation War (William Lind et al), 4GW is fuelled by the rising importance of non-state entities and the declining powers of the state. And states cannot win these wars unless they learn to behave like the clans that oppose them.
4GW is not novel, but a return to pre-Westphalian ways. The period where the State held a Hobbseian monopoly of power is not normal, but an interlude, even an aberration:
“Once again, clans, tribes, ethnic groups, cultures, religions and gangs are fighting wars, in more and more parts of the world. They fight using many different means, not just engagements and battles. Once again, conflicts are often many?sided, not just two?sided. [Those] who find themselves caught up in such conflicts quickly discover they are difficult to understand and harder still to prevail in.”
It is not just in warfare that clans are important. How could it be? Today’s world is driven by non-territorial clusters of power – non-governmental organizations (take your pick from Oxfam, Shell or Al Qaeda) or non-governmental non-organizations (neo-conservatism, the Chinese diaspora, the global warmingerati etc.).
Clans are proof that we live in a world where information has a life of its own. Memes attract minds as their carriers; interact; battle for resources; reframe reality; go viral; become cancerous…Even an group based on ethnicity has its shared codes – part genetic (though less so than its members like to think), part memetic (narratives that tell sons and daughters who they are supposed to be).
It should be no surprise that clans thrive on the internet. The most sophisticated engineer vast intellectual edifices – wikipedia, linux anyone? Real-world clans are also addicted to the uncut information of virtual spaces (think of all those beheadings of infidels that you can watch online).
Neal Stephenson saw this coming, as he did so much else.
In The Diamond Age, nano-level fabrication has made the shaping of matter a trivial thing. The economics of scarcity is obsolete as an organizing principle. What fills the void? Culture. And the clans that coalesce around social ideas. Only the feckless don’t belong to one (Bud, for example, who suffers the fatal consequence around page 43). And the clans themselves are shaped by evolutionary pressures, not because of their genes, but based on the effectiveness of their stories, ideas and founding myth.
As Lord Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, founding father of the Neo-Victorian clan (known to outsiders as the Vickys), which has married 19th century hypocrisy to 21st century technology and has its roots in a strategic alliance of ‘several immense companies’ came to believe:
While people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be…some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgement, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed.
Note that Stephenson is talking about success, not the output from a semi-skimmed moral code. In the culture wars, why assume that the nice guys will win?
