[Peace-discuss] War and peace again

[illyes at uiuc.edu]

The problem with accepting a consistent usage of left and right, as Carl proposes, is that this is not a line but a circle. Pure democracy and authoritarianism are very close, not opposites. The first devolves reliably into the second. Pure democracy, I claim, is not a good idea.

There is an inherent conflict between self-interest and altruism that we all live every day. It is a part of what it is to be human. This conflict has to be a part of any valid political science, because political science must respect what it is to be human.

I can't give you an exact quote without spending half an hour digging through Bertrand Russell's writings, but this is pretty close: "When I was a young man, I found the idea of the golden mean boring. When I became older, I realized that the truth was not always interesting."

For those of you who do not know what this means, Aristotle   proposed that moral behavior consists of avoiding extremes. In the case I bring up, this would mean that neither a society based on pure altruism nor pure self-interest is moral, but that something in the middle was. This is not a comfortable concept, but I think it is correct.

Bob