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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 - 06:03pm Feb 27, 2001 EST (#792 of 797)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

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.

She ends:

Understanding the past is crucial for a distressed nation, but such comprehension is useful only if it leads to change.

People are conflicted and uneasy about Rosenberg's position, which is a very widespread position.

An illustration of how problematic this position can be is provided by Tina Rosenberg's celebrated book THE HAUNTED LAND: Facing Europe's Ghosts after Communism

This book won the National Book Award, and a Pulitzer Prize. Reviews could scarcely have been better.

By some high standards, it is a work of stunning and outstanding beauty.

However, the book sold very poorly, something of the order of 45,000 copies in hardback. For many, it was an unrelievedly ugly piece, describing an unrelievedly ugly situation. I felt, when I read it (and I found the book a painful, depressing, if gripping chore to read) that it described a situation of unrelieved ugliness. There were precious few examples of emotionally or aesthetically satisfying justice in the whole book. Results of hard quests for justice all seemed to consist of ill-fitting, mutually conflicting results, ill fit to each other, and forming a misshapen whole.

rshowalter - 06:06pm Feb 27, 2001 EST (#793 of 797)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

Something was missing from the book, and the situations it described.

In the complex, conflicted situations described, beautiful justice is impossible. There are multiple contexts, each inescapable and in a fundamental sense valid.

An aesthetically satisfying justice can be defined for each and every set of assumptions and perspectives that can be defined.

But there are too many sets of assumptions and perspectives that cannot be escaped in the complex circumstances that are actually there.

Beautiful justice judged in one context is ill formed or ugly in most or all the other contexts.

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

rshowalter - 06:15pm Feb 27, 2001 EST (#794 of 797)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

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.

The redemptive solution cant be an abstraction, or a fizzle - it has to be able to propagate - to get past chain breakers, 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

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.

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