New York Times on the Web Forums Science

Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

rshow55 - 06:48pm Jan 2, 2003 EST (# 7231 of 7232)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

almarst2002 1/2/03 4:50pm -- will study. Have a nice distraction just now - a new computer and monitor!

Need some time to think, too. I won't write much more tonight, beyond this.

For complicated practical cases the "golden rule" has to be subject to qualifications, especially when it applies outside a group. But the golden rule counts "when it really matters" ... "when cooperation is required" ..... "when things are going wrong." It isn't necessary or desirable, to do away with the tribal ties that bind and provide identity. But workable, nonpathological interfaces between tribes ARE required.

When peace seems impossible, these interfaces are lacking. The problem is emotional, of course, but it has a large intellectual content, too.

The "golden rule" is especially important when passions stand against it - when the people involved hate each other. It is then that the "golden rule" is most essential for complex cooperation and for peace.

How would you want an enemy to treat you? You'd be repelled if he attempted to embrace you. Instead, you'd want clear communication, with clear, proportionate and credible threats and incentives.

. You'd want clear rules of conduct agreed upon between you, that you could each abide by. So that you could cooperate, stay out of each other's way, maintain each other's dignity, and interact as efficiently and honorably as possible. Neither side would have to love, or forgive, or like the other. Neither side would have a right to expect it. What each side would want would be a way of living together in peace.

Friendship, if it happened at all, would come much later. First, livable patterns of peaceful interaction need to be fashioned. In the Middle East, and elsewhere these are needed. And they are possible only if all sides can remember that even their enemies are full, complicated, vulnerable, dangerous human beings.

It may be that in the Middle East, and other places where human cooperation goes grossly, perversely wrong, people are failing, at the level of intellect, imagination, and feeling, to understand what workable reciprocity must mean.

The "Golden Rule" is intensely practical, when people (who may be very different, who may not like each other, who may know different things) have to cooperate and live and work with each other.

http://www.mrshowalter.net/a_md01000s/DetailNGR.htm

- - - some of the complications go a long way back, and are very basic. Knowing them doesn't necessarily mean problems are soluble. But not knowing them can make solutions that might be possible impossible.

(1 following message)

New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense