My World of “Ought to Be”
by Timothy Wilken, MD










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Friday, September 27, 2002
 

Reverence for Life

Albert Schweitzer wrote: An absolute ethic calls for the creating of perfection in this life. It cannot be completely achieved; but that fact does not really matter. In this sense reverence for life is an absolute ethic. It makes only the maintenance and promotion of life rank as good. All destruction of and injury to life, under whatever circumstances, it condemns as evil. True, in practice we are forced to choose. At times we have to decide arbitrarily which forms of life, and even which particular individuals, we shall save, and which we shall destroy. But the principle of reverence for life is nonetheless universal and absolute. Such an ethic does not abolish for man all ethical conflicts but compels him to decide for himself in each case how far he can remain ethical and how far he must submit himself to the necessity for destruction of and injury to life. No one can decide for him at what point, on each occasion, lies the extreme limit of possibility for his persistence in the preservation and furtherance of life. He alone has to judge this issue, by letting himself be guided by a feeling of the highest possible responsibility towards other life. We must never let ourselves become blunted. We are living in truth, when we experience these conflicts more profoundly. Whenever I injure life of any sort, I must be quite clear whether it is necessary. Beyond the unavoidable, I must never go, not even with what seems insignificant. The farmer, who has mown down a thousand flowers in his meadow as fodder for his cows, must be careful on his way home not to strike off in wanton pastime the head of a single flower by the roadside, for he thereby commits a wrong against life without being under the pressure of necessity. (09/27/02)


  b-future:

The American Empire?

Jonathan Freedland writes: Are the Americans the new Romans? In making a documentary film on the subject over the past few months, I put that question to a group of people uniquely qualified to know. Not experts on US defence strategy or American foreign policy, but Britain's leading historians of the ancient world. They know Rome intimately - and, without exception, they are struck by the similarities between the empire of now and the imperium of then. The most obvious is overwhelming military strength. Rome was the superpower of its day, boasting an army with the best training, biggest budgets and finest equipment the world had ever seen. No one else came close. The United States is just as dominant - its defence budget will soon be bigger than the military spending of the next nine countries put together, allowing the US to deploy its forces almost anywhere on the planet at lightning speed. Throw in the country's global technological lead, and the US emerges as a power without rival. ... The US has military bases, or base rights, in some 40 countries across the world - giving it the same global muscle it would enjoy if it ruled those countries directly. (When the US took on the Taliban last autumn, it was able to move warships from naval bases in Britain, Japan, Germany, southern Spain and Italy: the fleets were already there.) According to Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, these US military bases, numbering into the hundreds around the world, are today's version of the imperial colonies of old. Washington may refer to them as "forward deployment", says Johnson, but colonies are what they are. On this definition, there is almost no place outside America's reach. Pentagon figures show that there is a US military presence, large or small, in 132 of the 190 member states of the United Nations. So America may be more Roman than we realise, with garrisons in every corner of the globe. But there the similarities only begin. For the United States' entire approach to empire looks quintessentially Roman. It's as if the Romans bequeathed a blueprint for how imperial business should be done - and today's Americans are following it religiously. (09/27/02)


  b-CommUnity:

A Day with Edward O. Wilson

New York Times: Science -- Dr. Edward O. Wilson, Pellegrino university research professor and honorary curator in entomology of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, winner of two Pulitzer prizes and scientific honors too numerous to recount, is on his hands and knees, pawing in the leaf litter near Walden Pond. He eases into a half-sitting, half-reclining position and holds out a handful of humus and dirt. "This," he says, "is wilderness." Just a dozen yards from the site of Thoreau's cabin Dr. Wilson is delving into the ground with a sense of purpose and pleasure that would instantly make any 10-year-old join him. His smile suggests that at age 73, with a troublesome right knee, he still finds the forest floor as much to his liking as a professor's desk. ... Dr. Wilson is playing guide to this micro-wilderness — full of ants, mites, millipedes and springtails in a miniature forest of fungal threads and plant detritus in order to make a point about the value of little creatures and small spaces. ... "Untrammeled nature exists in the dirt and rotting vegetation beneath our shoes. The wilderness of ordinary vision may have vanished — wolf, puma and wolverine no longer exist in the tamed forests of Massachusetts. But another, even more ancient wilderness lives on."  (09/27/02)


  b-theInternet:

Russian Engineers Teach America

New York Times: Science -- Moscow may have lost the cold war, but its companies are beating Western capitalists at the game of making rocket motors. With technology that is simple and reliable, powerful yet relatively cheap, the Russians are winning over not only commercial customers around the globe but the American military as well. What's more, the Russians have outperformed their technologically advanced rivals by relying on a strikingly low-tech fuel: kerosene. ... A Russian company, NPO Energomash, formed an alliance with Pratt & Whitney to make a new engine for Lockheed Martin. The result is the RD-180, a new Russian design that experts say has a performance edge of at least 10 percent over its Western rivals. "We're getting the crown jewels," said Charles P. Vick, an expert on the Russian space program at the Federation of American Scientists, a private group in Washington. "It makes up for 30 years of not doing the appropriate amount of engine research ourselves." The trick is that the Russians learned during the cold war how to excel without pushing technological limits — the opposite of the West's approach. For instance, Moscow often relied on kerosene, an inexpensive fuel that can work at room temperature. In contrast, Washington pushed to perfect the use of liquid hydrogen. This costly, high-energy propellant must be refrigerated down to hundreds of degrees below zero, a temperature that can freeze, shatter or otherwise play havoc with fast-moving parts. (09/27/02)


  b-theInternet:

The Fifty-first State?

The Atlantic Monthly -- James Fallows writes: Going to war with Iraq would mean shouldering all the responsibilities of an occupying power the moment victory was achieved. These would include running the economy, keeping domestic peace, and protecting Iraq's borders—and doing it all for years, or perhaps decades. Are we ready for this long-term relationship? ... "This could be a golden opportunity to begin to change the face of the Arab world," James Woolsey, a former CIA director who is one of the most visible advocates of war, told me. "Just as what we did in Germany changed the face of Central and Eastern Europe, here we have got a golden chance." In this view, the fall of the Soviet empire really did mark what Francis Fukuyama called "the end of history": the democratic-capitalist model showed its superiority over other social systems. The model has many local variations; it brings adjustment problems; and it encounters resistance, such as the anti-globalization protests of the late 1990s. But it spreads—through the old Soviet territory, through Latin America and Asia, nearly everywhere except through tragic Africa and the Islamic-Arab lands of the Middle East. To think that Arab states don't want a democratic future is dehumanizing. To think they're incapable of it is worse. What is required is a first Arab democracy, and Iraq can be the place. (09/27/02)


  b-theInternet:


8:33:58 AM    



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