'Can a humanist make sense of war?' | A C Grayling speaks to Defence Humanists
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- čas přidán 27. 04. 2016
- Philosopher and BHA Vice President speaks on humanist attitudes to war and defence to the Defence Humanists, the British Humanist Association section for armed forces and Military of Defence personnel and their families.
I am a humanist. My family has fought and balanced throughout the course of time, and will continue to do so into the future. Pioneering as needed. I see problems today, and there will always be new problems as we work into the future. No war needed, just a proper works, which can not be ignored. Right now is the time. I am proud of the interational teams that keep each other in check, but ashamed at the problems we have right now. No war, just something else... which can not be ignored and the focus must be handled in a good and discerning way. Which I plan to deploy.
Bertrand Russel: "Wars don't show who is right, it shows who is left, after the war is over." Nice.
Im on video 25 of trying to follow Graylings ideas.... it still fails at a fundamental level
The cuckoo clock was invented in the Black Forest area in southwestern Germany.
The actual,quote is from the film The Third Man (not in the book).
war is war. there are no rules. its about killing people till someone says "stop". any other description is just a game. games are not war.
thats what happens in the elections for political offices. those that say "were just not going to show up" give free reign to those that do, and those that do, generally are the crazy assholes that end up winning. its as good as just surrendering to the crazy assholes. its a defeatist attitude. I dont like war, I am a realist.
I admire A. C. Grayling, but I take issue with his calling non-violence "non-resistance." Pacifists are willing to resist aggression, if need be at cost of their own lives. What they reject is taking life. As such, non-violent resistance might be seen not as weak but arguably as a still incompletely tested but far from ineffective alternative to reciprocal, escalatory violence (something whose dangers Grayling recognizes; see his rejection of the Allied bombing of cities).
A second weakness in Grayling's analysis is too close an analogy to the 17th Century. Most of us would see the change of attitude accelerated by the Thirty Years War as positive (though whether Descartes is to be preferred to Montaigne is debatable; see Stephen Toulmin's "Cosmopolis"). The social changes brought by the First and Second World Wars were also in many ways positive (racial and gender equality and an end to colonialism), though they also brought fascism. But the real world is not one of linear projections, and we may now be near a threshold where humans react to trauma in highly dysfunctional ways, such as religious fundamentalism and right wing extremism.
In short, this lecture is -- as always from A. C. Grayling -- a nuanced and illuminating discussion, but I wish he had been bolder in seeing the radical uncertainty of the present and the need for fresh approaches.
What constitutes a war is the issue?
+BenE. Taylor But what a lovely, logical gentleman he is...
So you don't agree with George Bush then?!
This speech is more poignant talk 6 years later in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.