The Art of War

[Michael F]

"They recognize universal values or ethics
but fail to consider how pluralistic ones often create paradoxes and
deadlocks."

Paradoxes and deadlocks are the result of positivistic and pragmatic
thought attempting to rhetorically glaze over "what is."  This goes
back 500 years or so.

Blood Meridian's Judge is a hyper-Modernized man and the evil that is
at the heart of "us"(Modern Man: contemporary, both vociferous
conservatives and liberals, and self-proclaimed university humanity
profs).  We, Modern Man, all love war; gun-toting or protest sign-
wielding or essay writing not mattering.   The Judge says it all on
page 249:

"All other trades are contained in that of war.
Is that why war endures?
No it endures because young men love it and old men love it in them.
Those that fought, those that did not."-The Judge


It amuses me to know end how outspoken positivists, pragmatists, and
idealists want to end war, but the tools they employ are the essential
tools of the war trade, just not as sharp.  Blunt tools, but not as
sharp.

"This is the nature of war, whose stake is at once the game and
authority and the justification."-The Judge

Without "war", Idealists, Progressivists, and Pragmatists would have
no use and wouldn't even exist.

The whole call to end war negates the entirety of Modern thought.



On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 10:56 AM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> Young soldiers and students are ignorant. They know little about
> history, life, love, war. What little they know about the past allows
> them to condemn its evils. They recognize universal values or ethics
> but fail to consider how pluralistic ones often create paradoxes and
> deadlocks.
>
> This is how the young look at history.
>
> It is relatively easy to look into the past and draw lines, seperate
> the good from the bad.
>
> Formulating ethics for current problems and setting criteria for what
> is good or bad action, or even defining what is evil in our current
> affairs is not so easy.
>
> Unless we are merely talking about these as if they were a football match.
>
> Not when we are called to act.
>
> Once criteria are formulated, if we are required to act,  we must
> accept that we will need to constantly improve our actions.
>
> Moreover, we can not reduce the war in Afghanistan & Pakistan ...to
> old problems and ignore the emerging ones.
>
> More knowledge of history doesn't alway help as it often obscures
> persistant problems or oversimplifies emerging ones.
>
> We can go on and on...but one thing even the young may see with ease,
> war compounds and does not solve. Communication, not love,  is the
> answer.
>
> We are in the middle of a revolution in communications (not
> technology). So, we are everyday better able to communicate, to talk
> our problems out and work toward solutions.
>
> Young soldiers and young students can understand this. Can you?
>
>> Is war Freudian? Attempts at return, or mimicry of the return to the
>> mineral stasis through disintegration and decay?
>> I wondered sometimes as I watched young students who had enlisted
>> prepare to ship out whether it was duty or the hope for death that was
>> the call they answered--a convenient and socially condoned suicide
>> attempt. A way out for misfits who couldn't opt for the arts as a way
>> to dump the parents, like Jim Morrison, etc. If you can't beat 'em,
>> die. All the young men and women coming home now, alive by some ill
>> fate, who turn the barrel back on themselves out of despair at having
>> survived. There's a hole in the American heart.
>