-----Original Message----- >From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> >Sent: Jan 5, 2007 2:20 PM >To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx >Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Max Boot > >Understanding that most of the positive achievements of >"culture" -- such as the Hague Conference laying the >groundwork for the Geneva Convention -- are realized against >a backdrop of ceaseless amoral struggles for advantage ... More accurately, are realized against a backdrop of ceaseless amoral struggles for struggle. Advantage comes from cooperation, unless the destruction of war is seen as an advantage. War is expensive monetarily, as well as kills potential scientists, inventors, etc. Of course, leveling Japan and Germany did bring those countries back as ultramodern, while we had no war on our soil, so we fell behind the times. (See what you're missing? We could be modern too if our cities were leveled). Seems, though, that unless one is really really uncreative, that there might have been an easier way to modernize Europe and Japan. The problem is that humans love their ceaseless amoral struggles for struggle and they are in fact really really uncreative... >this would seem to be essential to any cultured person's >understanding of geopolitics. > A cultured person is just someone who knows some poetry and the like and that's it. The Germans made it a point to rescue the paintings before destroying the museums as they struggled for "advantage". Did that make them cultured? And if it did, who cares? All that money that went into the firepower and militaries could have gone into a lot of other things, but it didn't. Likewise today all that money is being wasted by a Yale graduate and a country is being lost in the process. A cultured person means nothing. ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html