peace on terror

i'm declaring peace on terror. we could say, "there are a bunch of people in the world that hate us, they hate us so much that they want us to die, they would be willing to kill us, they want to kill us, they would even be willing to sacrifice their lives to harm us. how can we stop this? i know, let's go over to where they are, and kill them! that way, they won't be able to hate us any more, because they'll be dead. problem solved."

i would like to make a different statement. it may start out the same way (although it would probably explain certain elements a little more clearly), but it would drastically different after "how can we stop this?" i might go something like this, "i know, let's go over to where they are, and help them! that way, they won't hate us anymore. instead of spending our money on destroying that which they cherish, let us provide for them. let us teach them how to provide for themselves, such that they will no longer be at the mercy of hunger and poverty."

while the first response may be called "waging a war on terror", the second may be called "waging a peace on terror." somebody must have thought of this before. it seems like it would be pretty easy to get the UN to approve such a waging. further, it seems even some of the more radical dictators would be hard-pressed to forbid other countries from providing aid (they all do already, to my knowledge). so, some practical concerns seem relatively easy to deal with. building love is a pretty easy thing to do: determine the needs of the other, and satisfy those needs, while simultaneously helping the other to satisfy those needs without the help of others. let's do it...

the opposite of war...

the opposite of love is hate. what's the opposite of war? one might be inclined to say peace, but i think that is not correct. rather, peace can be to war as apathy is to hate - the absense of war, not the opposite of it. war is the decision of a nation-state to contribute a huge fraction of its gdp and emotional energy to destroying something. in that sense, foreign aid might be the opposite of war. but again, not really. foreign aid is more like the opposite of minor skirmishes, like when clinton dropped some bombs on iraq. so, i'm still stuck. i think english hasn't yet thought of a word that means the opposite of war. more importantly, it is not clear to me whether any country has even engaged in such an act (which, incidentally, explains the lack of such a word). engaging in this act would entail things like a draft to get people into something like peace corp, where many tens or hundreds of thousands of people from one country flock to another to build things. a good example would be something like what happens after a major natural disaster. instead of just sending money, we send people, goods, money, services. we stay for years helping rebuild their society (as they see fit). people who aren't drafted stay back to help build things to send over there. this could be a multilateral effect, we could form a coalition, etc. as war might be considered a great national expression of fear or hatred, this would be a great national expression of love and compassion. what should we call such a thing?

doubt on knowledge

some posit that "to have knowledge is to know something, and that something is true." i have some problems with that. for trivial statements such as, "it is snowing outside," while i don't have a well formed argument against it, i am somewhat uncomfortable with saying that it is true. however, for less trivial statements, such as "there is gravity," i think it is pretty easy to form an argument. the statement "there is gravity" can only be a summary for stating

"there is a large body of empirical observations that are all expected on the basis of positing the existence of some inexplicable force pulling all objects together. in particular, various physicists have concocted a precise formula that quantitatively characterizes this force for many cases."

i'm inclined to acknowledge that the first sentence is approximately true. however, the second sentence implies that the current model of gravity is imperfect, in that certain cases are not accurately characterized by even our best gravitational models. in that sense, the gravity that we posit to exist in correct, and so the statement "there is gravity" is also incorrect. furthermore, it is unlikely that we will ever have a comprehensive model of gravity, so the statement, "there is gravity" will never be strictly true.

mathematically, one could imagine that gravity is an "ill-posed problem", meaning there is no unique solution. thus, even if one could construct a comprehensive model of gravity, it would by no means by the only possible model; rather, it would be the only one we've thought of so far. aside from trivial changes in the model (like renaming something), in general, i see no reason to believe that all the observations relating to gravitational forces should only be explicable in a single way. therefore, there could be many equally good models of gravity. are they all correct? maybe. alternately, they may all be useful descriptions of the same phenomena. probably, some descriptions would be more useful than others (at the least, in some cases this should be true). in that case, we would prefer certain models at certain times. then, talking about whether a model is true becomes less important, and talking about whether it is useful is more important. so the question of truth vanishes in favor of the question of utility. i guess this makes me some what of a pragmatist.

this argument holds generally for any model of any feature(s) of the world. if one posits that all descriptions are really just linguistic models of the world, then the appropriate question to ask is which are useful. those models/descriptions that are useful are tho ones that should be kept and refined, others should be discarded. since we probably will never get a completely true model, i think this is the only reasonable desirate: utility.