Posted by
thinker on Monday, July 31, 2006 3:36:42 AM
When I visited the Holocaust museum in LA, there was a brief snippet of a recording by Joseph Stalin, saying something like " Ideas are weapons, too. Why should we allow them to our enemies?"
Nietzche said "
Around the creators of new values revolves the world: -- invisibly it revolves"
I love reading blogs by Hugh Hewitt, Powerline, Captain's Quarters, and others, and it strikes me that they are engaged in the battle of ideas-- and their posts are always articulate, cogent, and often thought provoking. But what drove me to finally begin my own blog was an article by Mark Steyn that I read tonight: http://www.suntimes.com/output/steyn/cst-edt-steyn30.html. Also, of course, the fact that Hugh Hewitt, in a brilliant move, has lowered the barrier to creating a blog, making it easier for people like me to actually write something.
But Mark Steyn's essay framed a fascinating issue, which I hope to explore in greater detail throughout this blog: the effects of our own culture on our ability to wage war. He echoes in part a theme I first read in Victor Davis Hanson's excellent book,
Why the West Has Won: Nine Landmark Battles in the Brutal History of Western Victorynamely, (to use a locution of philosophers) that great armies of the past (such as Athens') had an army made up of all citizens. He also expressed concern in this book that the US now has a professional army, and that citizens no longer are required to serve, no longer required to defend their land and personal property.
I think this is not the issue at all; rather it is what my post began with: the war of ideas. In Mark Steyn's post, he references a story about a writer being attacked for using the tools of a liberal arts education in the defence of the country. I belive that ideas are central to the defense of this country, and that is the theme of this blog.
Much has been written about the self destruction of western civilization with its embrace of leftist ideas that include moral equivalency, denigration of western values, rejection of Judeo Christian morality, etc. Often the self-loathing exemplified by these leftists is contrasted with the focused attitudes of todays Isamic fundamentalists. The conclusion frequently drawn is that Western civilization may be losing the vitality and sense of self preservation required to survive. Europe is cited as the example of where we may be headed.
Yet this is an entirely too passive approach to the issue. Remeber, ideas are WEAPONS. Islamic fundamentalism is a system as well. It may well have a similar capability for self loathing and weakness. I am reminded of one of the most philosophically powerful metaphors in the western tradition, Goedel's incompleteness theorem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_theorem.
For any consistent formal theory that proves basic arithmetical truths, it is possible to construct an arithmetical statement that is true 1 but not provable in the theory. That is, any consistent theory of a certain expressive strength is incomplete.
To the point of this discussion, it implies that large, complex, self-referential systems will have weaknesses (although this is not explicitly what the theorm states). I've also been influenced by Richard Dawkins' idea of memes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme. Again, to the point of this post, large, complex, idea systems are subject to infection from other ideas.
It strikes me that the work of Hugh Hewitt's blog project is to encourage meme's that will strengthen western culture. He has created a petri dish for these new ideas, with I believe the unspoken hope that in this laboratory of culture new ideas will emerge that will have the ability to influence others toward values of western civilization. My addition to this discussion, to net it all out, is that we should also be thinking about ideas that will infect and weaken our opponents.