[lit-ideas] Re: On the prospect of World Peace (correction)
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 13:03:40 -0700
Eric quotes me as saying:
>>it is equally possible that better working conditions could have
been obtained through reasoned discourse.
This was really all I had to say; it should be plain to anyone who doesn't
believe in Dialectical Materialism or that human history is is the history of
some sort of weird logical inevitability. However, I'll comment briefly below.
Eric rehearses some grim events in the history of American labor relations and
Teddy Roosevelt's part in resolving them, and says:
To imagine, as Robert does, that reasoned discourse could have
emerged first--before the strikes, the Molly Maguires, the
dynamiting, the arrests, the clubbings, the hangings, the forcing of
people out into the streets, and BEFORE Teddy Roosevelt's new
approach to labor problems--is indeed imaginative. It's also ignores
history. Sure they could have reasoned first. Sure. Napoleon could
also have invented a nuclear submarine and rock music. We could also
have been born as butterflies dreaming we were philosophers.
What happened happened. But Eric may have forgotten the post to which I
originally responded in which he claimed that there were some things which
could only be brought about by violence. To argue that because Roosevelt, as a
matter of historical fact, was alarmed by the violence exemplified in
the early
days of the American labor movement and took practical steps to end it, steps
which brought about what one might call 'reasoned discourse' no more
shows that
some things can only be brought about by violence than would the fact
that I got
someone to do what I wanted by hitting him show that I _could not_ have
got him
to do what I want by reasoning with him. Eric's argument, as far as I can see,
is that because violence resulted in x, x can only be brought about by
violence.
Unfortunately, this year's Mutton College Summer Logic Camp is closed, in
preparation for the annual Fall sheering contest.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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