Daedalus articles from January 2007

Daedalus archives from January 2007

Violence & submission in the human past.
January 1, 2007... The retreat of Gandhian 'nonviolence' in public affairs from its high points in the 1930s when the might of the British Raj in India was so seriously challenged by Gandhi and his followers, and since the 1950s and 1960s when Martin Luther King,...

Why warfare? Lessons from the past.
January 1, 2007... If we ever hope to end warfare we must first understand why it occurs. Because this is trivially obvious, it is surprising how poorly studied warfare is. Considerable work has been done on the details of particular wars and the events leading...

People's power vs. nuclear power: a conversation.(Interview)
January 1, 2007... ROBERT S. BOYNTON: When did you first start thinking about the idea of cooperative power and people's war? JONATHAN SCHELL: In the late 1980s, shortly before the collapse of Communism. I'd been a reporter in Vietnam in the mid-1960s, an...

Gandhi vs. terrorism.
January 1, 2007... Immediately after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the idea of taking a nonviolent stance in response to terrorism would have been dismissed out of hand. But now, after the invasion and occupation of...

Violence & the cultural order.
January 1, 2007... Almost all theoretical and research approaches to violence begin with the assumption that, at its core, violence represents the breakdown of meaning, the advent of the irrational, and the commission of physical harm. Certainly the violence of...

Avant-gardes & totalitarianism.
January 1, 2007... The history of modernity is characterized by an immense transformation: the transition from a world structured by religion to a world organized exclusively in terms of human beings and worldly values. This process of emancipation and...

The Ultras of moral revolution.
January 1, 2007... We need a moral revolution! (1) Do we really need one? But of course! Replied an ultrarevolutionary, a Jacobin. But of course! Replied an ultrareactionary, a partisan of the Counterrevolution. Radicals, adherents of extreme...

The rise in female violence.
January 1, 2007... Whether encountered in the mythos of the Madonna or in the image of the dutiful wife and obedient daughter, females have been regarded over the ages as having a special capacity to reinstate balance where it has been undermined by the excesses...

Female suicide bombers: a global trend.
January 1, 2007... Ever since Muriel Degauque, a Belgian convert to radical Islam, blew herself up in Iraq last November, questions have surfaced about the growing role of women in terrorism. Degauque's attack occurred on the same day that Sajida Atrous...

Ethnic conflicts: Flemings & Walloons, Palestinians & Israelis.
January 1, 2007... Because of mass demonstrations objecting to the presence of any francophone curriculum within a university situated in Dutch-speaking Flanders, the Belgian government negotiated a deal in 1968 that split the five-hundred-year-old Catholic...

Robert McNamara: then & now.
January 1, 2007... But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden Be remembered; involved with past and future. --T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton" (1991) (1) A singular fact about the twentieth century is this: roughly 160 million human beings...

Pluto, perception & planetary politics.
January 1, 2007... Last summer, in Prague, members of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted to remove Pluto from the list of planets. It is not a major planet like our own Earth, or Mars, or Jupiter, they declared; it is instead a 'dwarf planet' along...

Planetary perils in Prague.
January 1, 2007... For astronomers, Prague is a singularly nostalgic city. It was here, in February of 1600, that the young, starry-eyed Johannes Kepler met the imperious, eccentric Tycho Brahe. Brahe brought a priceless trove of precise observations of the...

Into the Sun.(Poem)
January 1, 2007... The film of moisture on the eyeball sizzles though it's not really hot outside: sun the other side of gold and occasional cloud umber to gravitational black; all surfaces are reflective from early morning rain, and into the sunlight is...

Life is adequate.(Fictional work)
January 1, 2007... Sheep, milk, TV. He's tried everything, but she never believes him. She thinks it's a joke that he can't sleep. She thinks if only he tried harder. If he really wanted to he could. All he has to do is close his eyes. It's that easy. What does...

On improving nation-state governance.
January 1, 2007... Good governance is essential if citizens of nation-states or subordinate political jurisdictions are to maximize their inalienable rights as subjects, taxpayers, or mere residents of the polities to which they owe, or are compelled to pay,...

On prejudice & the brain.
January 1, 2007... "They are bigots; you are, maybe, a little biased sometimes; I, of course, am accurate." [how to conjugate an adjective across three persons] Most people think they are less biased than average. Just as we can't all be...

On the economic origins of democracy.
January 1, 2007... Will Iraq, and subsequently the rest of the Middle East, manage to establish and maintain democratic institutions? Many, and not only detractors of the current Republican administration, are skeptical about the prospects of democracy in the...