The Art of War

[alice wellintown]

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 8:30 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> "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.
>
> The rhetorical glaze might fill a mixing bowl the size of the moon;
> spread thin it might even go back to Able & Cane and God. But the
> rhetorical glaze has not only exposed God and Cane as murderers, it
> has paralleled a steady decline in the violence acts of Man. Is there
> some cause and effect? Did all that glaze, somehow, curtail much of
> the violence? How did Man learn to live in relative peace?
>
> One of favorites, that BM. Decapitated heads in jars and big guns and
> sharp knives. And blood, blood, blood. But it don't stain the pages
> nor my soul.
>
>
>>
>> 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.
>>>
>>
>