New York Times on the Web Forums Science

Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 12:42pm Jul 11, 2001 EST (#6924 of 6925)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Dawn's postings are often beautiful, and I was attracted to her posting of Tolstoy's great work, in MD6917 lunarchick 7/11/01 8:53am

Here are exerpts from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy .... Epilogue 2, Chapters 1 and 12 http://www.bibliomania.com/0/0/52/96/frameset.html

From Ep2, Ch 1:

"THE SUBJECT of history is the life of peoples and of humanity. To catch and pin down in words—that is, to describe directly the life, not only of humanity, but even of a single people, appears to be impossible.

"All the ancient historians employed the same method for describing and catching what is seemingly elusive—that is, the life of a people. They described the career of individual persons ruling peoples; and their activity was to them an expression of the activity of the whole people.

"The questions, In what way individual persons made nations act in accordance with their will, and by what the will of those individuals themselves was controlled, the ancients answered, By the will of God; which in the first case made the nation subject to the will of one chosen person, and, in the second, guided the will of that chosen monarch to the ordained end.

"For the ancients these questions were solved by faith in the immediate participation of the Deity in the affairs of mankind.

"Modern history has theoretically rejected both those positions. One would have thought that rejecting the convictions of the ancients of men’s subjection to the Deity, and of a defined goal to which nations are led, modern history should have studied, not the manifestations of power, but the causes that go to its formation. But modern history has not done that. While in theory rejecting the views of the ancients, it follows them in practice.

"Instead of men endowed with divine authority and directly led by the will of the Deity, modern history has set up either heroes, endowed with extraordinary, superhuman powers, or simply men of the most varied characteristics, from monarchs to journalists, who lead the masses. Instead of the old aim, the will of the Deity, that to the old historians seemed the end of the movements of peoples (Tolstoy talks of the commitment to narrow nationalism.)

"Modern history has rejected the faiths of the ancients, without putting any new conviction in their place; and the logic of the position has forced the historians, leaving behind them the rejected, divine right of kings and fate of the ancients, to come back by a different path to the same point again: to the recognition, that is (1) that peoples are led by individual persons; and (2) that there is a certain goal towards which humanity and the peoples constituting it are moving.

Comment : We need a better, more humane, and yet technically more honest view of what those goals can reasonably be. To make room for any such view, we must see the world, and human conceptions, with the complexity that they have -- and strive, as best we can, for workable proportion - workable beauty. Our survival, and after that our prosperity and happiness, depend on doing that.

rshowalter - 12:44pm Jul 11, 2001 EST (#6925 of 6925)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

From Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace Epilog 2, Chapter 12 :

"Ever since the first person said and proved that the number of births or crimes is subject to mathematical laws, that certain geographical and politico-economical laws determine this or that form of government, that certain relations of the population to the soil lead to migrations of peoples—from that moment the foundations on which history was built were destroyed in their essence.

Comment: In a complex world, this doesn't follow.

" By disproving those new laws, the old view of history might have been retained. But without disproving them, it would seem impossible to continue studying historical events, merely as the arbitrary product of the free will of individual men. For if a certain type of government is established, or a certain movement of peoples takes place in consequence of certain geographical, ethnographical, or economic conditions, the free will of those persons who are described to us as setting up that type of government or leading that movement cannot be regarded as the cause.

Comment: In a complex world, this doesn't follow.

"And yet history goes on being studied as of old, side by side with laws of statistics, of geography, of political economy, of comparative philology and geology, that flatly contradict its assumptions.

Comment: There's no contradiction -- these "laws" exist in a complex structure, with many views possible, necessary - and checkable.

. . . .

" So now it seems that we have but to admit the law of necessity to shatter the conception of the soul, of good, of evil, and of the political and ecclesiastical edifices reared on the basis of those conceptions.

Comment: Hitler believed that. It doesn't follow, in a complex world.

. . . . . .

" Just as in astronomy the difficulty of admitting the motion of the earth lay in the immediate sensation of the earth’s stationariness and of the planets’ motion, so in history the difficulty of recognising the subjection of the personality to the laws of space and time and causation lies in the difficulty of surmounting the direct sensation of the independence of one’s personality. But just as in astronomy, the new view said, ‘‘It is true, we do not feel the movement of the earth, but, if we admit its immobility, we are reduced.

Comment: We don't have to be reduced. We are subject to forces, to constraints -- we can only do what we can do. But we can do, we are free to do, a great deal. Enough that we can and must take practical and moral responsiblility -- check what is real -- and do things we can, that as human beings, we must. I feel that we must see that the world does not blow up, because we are here, and the threat is here. We don't have to by Tolstoyian saints, or any other kind of saints. But we can refrain from unnecessary killing, and think hard enough that our violence, if after negotiation we have to use it, does what we intend. We can do better than we're doing today.

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense