For us to lessen inhumanity in the future - - we have to deal with things that have happened - within the limitations that we can actually make work - as things are.

I believe these postings from February 27th, 2001 - a few days before almarst was invited on the board - are worth posting again. I appreciate the chance to do so.

We can improve on the mess we're in. Radically. Safely. Gracefully. Practically.

With resources we have available.

In a way that makes almost everyone involved feel much better.

. . ..

Looking at the situation, I find myself in a cheerful mood.

With ugliness and conflict so intense, new beauty may not be far away.

rshowalter - 09:11am Feb 27, 2001 EST (#791

Sometimes the issues involved with the accomodation of significant fact are bracing, and morally important. . . The core problems with ending the nuclear terror, now, are of just this kind.

The technical problems are relatively easy. The psychological and moral problems are hard.

But doable.

rshowalter - 06:03pm Feb 27, 2001 EST (#792

Tina Rosenberg represents one of the most admirable flowerings of a tradition, admirable in many ways, that , taken no further than she takes it, makes an effective nuclear disarmament impossible.

Rosenberg believes passionately, eloquently, that a central problems of transition from old regimes to new ones is truth about what actually happened. People need to know what was actually done.

That's surely right.

But what was to be done with the facts? What can be done that is satisfactory in the complex contexts where people live their lives? A major concern is "what is justice" and especially what is justice, considering everything, under complex and conflicted circumstances. The answer isn't easy, and answers that appear evident don't work well in practice.

Yesterday Rosenberg wrote on the editorial page of the NYT: She starts:

"When a nation goes through a transition from war or dictatorship to democracy, the standard practice is to hold elections, free political prisoners — and, nowadays, convene a truth commission. . . . . .Truth commissions can aid nations in understanding and remaking a damaged political culture. They can help victims to heal, create a consensus for democratic reforms and uncover evidence that can be used to prosecute the guilty.

Even a passably satisfactory "net justice" is often classified out of existence by the complexities and conflicts built into the human realities.

havent read the above posts as there are too many of them and they are too long.

It is certainly an enticing theory. I don't think it should be used to justify a repressive state, as Hobbes does (Leviathan). Rather, people who are framing constitutions and political theory should remember that sadism is a natural part of human nature, along with a lot of other things, and that any constitution, manifesto, etc, that doesnt take this into account is doomed to faliure.

rshowalter - 06:15pm Feb 27, 2001 EST (#794

The situations Rosenberg describes, where she hungers for justice, do not admit of satisfactory justice. They are too complicated. There is too much ugliness. What is needed, for logical reasons that are fundamentally secular rather than religious, is redemption.

The phrase beyond redemption is sometimes used, but I havent heard much discussion of the idea that a situation is beyond justice. But situations that are beyond justice occur, and our nuclear circumstances are full of such situations, and paralyzing conflicts produced by them.

These situations cannot be resolved in a way that specifically balances all rights and all wrongs. They are too conflicted and too complicated. These situations need to be redeemed, and they can be.

The situation needs secular redemption. rshowalter "There's Always Poetry" Fri 08/12/2000 20:08

The redemptive solution can't be an abstraction, or a fizzle - it has to be able to propagate - to get past chain breakers rshowalter "There's Always Poetry" Fri 08/12/2000 20:05 , as only a redemptive solution can.

A central problem is to deal with - or put pressure on, people who deny very obvious, provable, morally compelling facts, because the cost is somehow, too great Learning to Stand rshowalter "There's Always Poetry" Wed 14/11/2001 23:43

A central requirement of this is to find ways to lower the price of truth, the price of right answers.

The cost of lies is prohibitive here. The bottle scene from Casablanca offers an example of this.

Punishment should be avoided, whenever it is at all possible. It produces chain breakers to solutions that need to go through.

Redemption should be the goal instead. Because nothing else can possibly be beautiful, and safe, in these circumstances.

rshowalter - 06:18pm Feb 27, 2001 EST (#795

Here, for technical reasons, the risks are very great - great enough so that right answers need to be gotten, so that the world can go on.

My own view, for technical reasons that I've asked repeatedly to have checked, is that the world is LIKELY to end unless current nuclear weapons systems are much better controlled. That the system is much less well engineered and much less well defended than it looks. In fact degenerate.

It seems to me that he only reasonable solution is to take the nuclear weapons down and EFFECTIVELY prohibit them.

Note: (I also think that there's been progress since Feb 27, 2001.)

rshowalter - 06:21pm Feb 27, 2001 EST (#796

A narrow wish for "justice" rules resolution and right answers out, where a search for secular redemption permits resolution.

SECULAR REDEMPTION

I'm dreaming of redemption,

rshowalter - 06:27pm Feb 27, 2001 EST (#797

In dealing with nuclear weapons, the questions who is guilty? and what to do about it? can dominate thought and action in ugly, counterproductive, and fundamentally unjust ways.

The beauty of justice, from one perspective, is utter injustice, and ugliness, from others.

Our nuclear postures, and the history of how these happened, are so conflicted, and subject to so many different, yet existentially valid points of view, that a justice with proper conformity of the parts to the whole and to one another is impossible.

Results, even in the hands of well meaning, sympathetic people, can be and have been monstrous. People have done things they knew were terrible, or that could have terrible consequences, feeling that they were morally compelled, on other ground, to do them.

For more than fifty years, and especially since the late 1950s, we've had large groups of people knowingly acting to make it possible to reduce large populations, almost all innocent in military terms, into masses of rotting unburied corpses. http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001203mag-osborne.html

There is no reason to think that the US population, or the Russian population, was in any substantial doubt about what was being done, and threatened, by our military forces. rshowalter "Science in the News" 8/29/00 7:26am

Even today, people deny crucial aspects of the holocaust in part for intellectual reasons. What they know of it seems not to fit what they "know" about what human beings do. Some of the actions and intentions of our own military forces are denied, or suppressed from consciousness, due to similar "ignorances."

To the degree that people were responsible members of German society during the Nazi years, they needed to know enough for the complex cooperation, and focused and mutual coercion, that they actually showed. (That is, everybody had to know practically everything, except for details of execution.) The same holds for us. rshowalter "Science in the News" 8/29/00 8:03am

But were the American and NATO forces using or threatening to use nuclear weapons aggressors or defenders? What about the Russians? There can be MANY views of this, and most people, from most positions, have reasons to be give credence, in one way or another, to several perspectives.

My own view is that the Americans, at most times, were the agressors, though they had good reasons to do what they did. Perhaps they had no choice, in term of the imperatives they faced, until after the fall of the Soviet Union.

But the Cold War is over now, nuclear weapons should be taken down, and they should be prohibited.

I don't think the mechanics of doing this are difficult, setting the costs and challenges against the needs.

I set out one possible way of proceeding in an all-day web meeting with "becq" on Sept 25, 2000 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?14@@.f28e622/2008 Once the inescapable reality of fear and mistrust is recognized, there may be many ways.

What do people think of the massive popularity of S&M in this context? On the one hand it could be a disturbing feature of a very sadistic society, on the other a sign of progress, that people are getting it off their chest in a safe place rather than in real life.

Any takers?

rshowalter - 02:47pm Feb 28, 2001 EST (#798

It is worth pointing out a practical sense in which nuclear war is entirely, vividly real - a sense in which crimes and massive injuries have already happened. They have happened, over and over, in great detail, in the imaginations of people. And those imaginations have been made vivid, and reinforced repeatedly, by careful and detailed rehearsals.

People who are part of forces set up to launch nuclear weapons think about what they are going to have to do. In all sorts of ways. Again and again. They have to go on, for years, in a condition where they are plotting premeditated mass murder, and ready to commit it.

Some among them, if not all, will have guilt feelings about this. And will have built up psychological rationalizations about this. And they will have had to endure a great deal of emotional strain, dealing with this. In the minds of these people, on both sides, nuclear war has already happened. And it has also happened, to an inescapable degree, in their hearts.