SAD TIDINGS

I was deeply saddened to read that F. Lee Bailey, the famous defense attorney, is nearly broke and working over a hair salon.  Why do I care? you might ask.  Because F. Lee Bailey was one of my classmates at Harvard in the early '50s.   I never knew Bailey, of course. Nor did I know Ted Kennedy or John Updike, also my classmates.  [I did actually know Wally Gilbert, who went on to win a Nobel Prize.]  Bailey never graduated.  He left after two years to join the Air Force  [it was during the Korean War.]  All of this was more than sixty-five years ago, and I could probably get away with claiming that I knew them all, but to quote Richard Nixon, "that would be wrong."

A FURTHER RESPONSE

My remarks about North Korea prompted a number of interesting comments.  Let me address just one relatively minor but important issue.  At the height of the cold war between Russia and America, there was a very great deal of serious concern among the American military about the possibility that a Russian nuclear attack would, in several different ways, disrupt communications and the chain of command.  What would happen, American military planners asked, if Congress was “taken out” by a Soviet strike, making it impossible for even a select committee of the Senate to sign off on the use of nuclear weapons?  Mightn’t a Soviet attack disrupt communications between the President and the Joint Chiefs, or between the central military high command and the Commanders of nuclear submarines on patrol under the waters of the Atlantic or Pacific?  Would it prove impossible for the soldiers stationed in hardened ICBM silos in the Dakotas to double check a command to fire their missiles?  Would it be unfeasible to reprogram missiles to new targets after an attack?

These and many other questions were debated in think tanks, but the answers were hardly academic.  Software and hardware had to be designed to implement whatever strategic response the President and top military planners decided in advance in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States.

In the end, certainty was given priority over flexibility, and systems were designed and put in place to ensure: first, that only the President had the authority and capability to order the use of nuclear weapons; and second, that once a Presidential order was issued it would be conveyed without intermediation or delay to the military personnel charged with carrying it out.

As a consequence, if Trump were to order a nuclear strike, there would be no period of debate, delay, reconsideration, and double checking before the order was carried out.  Kelly, McMaster, and Mattis would not be able to slow walk the order while Trump was calmed down, flattered, reassured about the size of his hands, and propped up in front of an ego-confirming crowd of supporters.  We could of course hope that if Trump demanded the nuclear codes, someone would offer him a dud phone into which he could shout orders like a crazy street person yelling into an unconnected handset in a street corner booth.  We could hope, but nothing in the system in existence offers much reason for confidence.

One other matter of great importance about which I will say only a word or two.  As part of an interesting exchange in the comments section, LFC writes:  “The definition of 'existential threat,' as with the definition of any threat, should take into account what can reasonably be known with a high degree of confidence about intentions, not simply capabilities. Thus, for example, far from the UK and France posing an existential threat to every country in the world as the post says, the UK and France do not pose an existential threat to any country since there is no evidence at all that the UK and French governments, or really any conceivable UK and French govts, intend a first use of their nuclear weapons. (Indeed I'd guess that UK and French nuclear doctrines explicitly renounce or abjure first use, though I'd have to check on that.)

To say that every nuclear armed country by definition poses an existential threat to every other country is like saying that anyone who chooses to carry a gun in a place where that is legal poses an existential threat to everyone who does not carry a gun. That's not the case; it depends on the intentions, and the mental condition, of the gun carrier.”

I am afraid in my haste I did not make myself clear.  The term “existential threat” was meant to convey not the likelihood of the threat being actualized but the magnitude of the threat and the impossibility of defending against it.  Of course one must use what information one has when estimating the likelihood of a threat being actualized.  The point is that a single madman in a President’s chair can, in a world of conventional weapons, start a world war, which is terrible indeed.  But a single madman in the President’s chair of a nuclear armed nation can start a civilization ending war, which is to say that such a person poses an existential threat.  Do France and Great Britain have mad rulers?  No.  Could they?  Well, America does.

MORE ON NORTH KOREA

I need to say more about the North Korean crisis, not because I know any more, but simply because it is far and away the most serious threat now confronting the world.  Let me repeat what I said yesterday.  Every nation armed with deliverable nuclear weapons poses an existential threat to every other nation in the world, because nuclear weapons cannot be defended against.  I wrote and spoke and argued and protested about this almost sixty years ago as a young man, and nothing has changed.  Russia poses an existential threat to every nation in the world.  The United States poses an existential threat to every nation in the world.  China, Great Britain, France and Israel pose existential threats to every nation in the world.  Pakistan and India pose regional threats [I do not know whether they possess intercontinental ballistic missiles or long range bombers or nuclear submarines].  When North Korea succeeds in weaponizing usable long range missiles, it too will pose an existential threat to every nation in the world.

Nuclear weapons cannot be defended against.  The only thing any nation can do is to try to deter nuclear armed nations from attacking it.  Any nuclear armed nation whose government and military forces fall into the hands of a suicidal or irrational, hence undeterrable, ruler can at any moment launch a nuclear attack even if the cost is that ruler’s own destruction.

For reasons that I shan’t trouble you with now, the command and control structure of America’s nuclear forces is deliberately and intentionally designed to make it very difficult to delay or countermand a presidential order to launch a nuclear attack.

It is within the realm of possibility that Donald Trump, obsessed with negative press coverage and ill-tempered because rain is interrupting his golf, could from his vacation retreat issue an order to attack North Korea with nuclear weapons.  If he does that, it is extremely unlikely that the trio of generals around him will intercede to reverse or simply “mislay” that order.

It is my armchair guess that Donald Trump does not care at all about the lives that such an attack would cost, American lives as well as North Korean, South Korean, and Japanese lives.  My guess is that he cares about nothing save whether he looks big and important and powerful on television, in social media, and in the tabloid press.  This is the second biggest crisis since World War II [the biggest was the Cuban Missile Crisis, brought to us by young, handsome, well-educated charismatic John Fitzgerald Kennedy.]

THIS IS SERIOUS

We are at a very dangerous moment in the world.  Let me be clear.  It would be better if North Korea did not have nuclear weapons.  It would also be better if the United States, Russia, Pakistan, India, France, the United Kingdom, China, Israel, and Iran did not have nuclear weapons.  But they do [save for Iran, apparently], and there is no reliable defense against nuclear weapons, which means that mutual deterrence is our only hope for a world not devastated by them.  There is nothing special about North Korea.  It is just one more nation, the seventh by my count, that has chosen to invest money and effort in the old technology of deliverable nuclear weapons.

What can we do about North Korea?  The same thing we can do about Israel or France or Russia, and the same thing they can do about us:  we can make it clear that we do not challenge North Korea’s existence, and will respond to a nuclear attack with a nuclear response.  This is called Mutual Assured Destruction, appropriately referred to as MAD. 

Is there any way to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons?  Inasmuch as I do not speak or read Korean [although one of my books has been translated into that language] and have never been, I believe, within a thousand miles of that nation, I have not a clue, but I would guess not, since if they were to do so, the United States might very well undertake to overthrow the ruling government.

At this moment, we are dependent on a trio of generals to manage and control the impulsive narcissistic child in the White House.  That summarizes pretty succinctly the miserable state to which we have fallen.

TEMPTATION

My new morning walk takes me, after a series of little streets in Carolina Meadows, out onto Whippoorwill Lane, a country road most of which, after the Farrington Mill intersection, is a long secluded dead end   The entire walk, to the end of Whippoorwill and home again, is roughly 3.6 miles, a bit shorter than my old walk, but quite pleasant nonetheless.  Near the end of Whippoorwill, I walk past a grand house [grand for this neighborhood] with a pair of gated driveways, guarded by a large Great Dane who cannot, I trust, get through the gates.  The Great Dane has siblings, a little calico cat and a small black cheerful dog of mixed ancestry who once trotted across the street to say hello.

Yesterday, I walked earlier than usual, starting at about 5:15 a.m.  When I passed the big house, the little black dog came over again to say hello.  I scratched her behind the ears, petted her, and told her how lovely she is.   Then I continued on my way.  The little black dog followed along, wagging her tail.  I thought, “Well, she will stop after fifty feet and go back,” but she kept on right to the end of Whippoorwill Lane.  Then she turned as I did and walked back with me to her house.

But she did not stop when we had reached her home.  She kept right on trotting beside me.  I tried telling her to go home, but she just took this as more attention and wagged her tail even more vigorously.  She followed me past the corn field, past the riding stables, all the way to the intersection with Farrington Mill.  By this time I was getting worried.  Although she is well fed and obviously a house dog, not a stray dog, she has no collar, no i.d. tag. 

She followed me to the entrance to Carolina Meadows, she followed me as I turned from street to street, she followed me into my building, she followed me onto the elevator, she followed me off the elevator, and she followed me right into my apartment, delighting and astonishing Susie.  We gave her some water and took her back down to our car, which she hopped into as though she had done it a hundred times.  Then we drove back to the gated house, pushed her out of the car, and drove away very fast.

This morning it started to rain before I reached the gated house and I turned back.  The flesh is weak, and tomorrow, if she follows me home again, I cannot be certain that I will do the right thing and take her home.  I mean, they can’t be very nice to her if she is so ready to follow me home, right?

BOYHOOD MEMORIES

David Auerbach’s amusing summary of a sci-fi story published sixty-three years ago in Galaxy took me on a trip down memory lane.  My second venture into print [the first was a letter to the Harvard Crimson] was a fervent defence of Aristotle, published in Galaxy’s principal competition, Astounding Science Fiction. As a boy, I was an avid reader of science fiction. In the 40’s and 50’s, the leading sci fi publications were two stubby little monthly magazines with nubby pages called Astounding Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction. All the big names appeared there, including L. Ron Hubbard, who announced the birth of his new psychological therapy, Dianetics, in a pair of what were at least supposedly non-fiction articles. (Trouble with the law for practicing medicine without a license led Hubbard to transform Dianetics into the religion of Scientology, protected by the First Amendment.) One of the oddities of the sci fi world in those days was the popularity of something called Non-Aristotelian logic. There was even a famous novel by the great sci fi writer A.E. van Vogt, which, if memory serves, appeared originally as a serial in a predecessor to Astounding Science Fiction. All of this was connected in some mysterious manner with the then fashionable theories of Count Alfred Korzybski, which went by the name “General Semantics.”

By 1953, I was a serious student of Mathematical Logic, and the casual slandering of Aristotle by those entranced by many-valued logics and other arcana offended my deeply conservative soul. The result was this letter to Astounding Science Fiction.

To the Editor:

I am a student of Logic and Philosophy at Harvard University. I have been reading and enjoying science fiction for many years, now, and generally have no complaints or criticisms to make. For some time, however, I have read with increasing annoyance the many editorials, and the like, on so-called “Aristotelian Logic,” and the proposed Null-A logics. Your editorial of April, ‘53, seems to provide as good an opportunity as any to get a few simple facts straight, so that we can dispense with this nonsense about non-Aristotelian logic.

Your editorial, in effect, says that while all human action is governed by, and completely describable in the framework of, an Aristotelian Logic, human thought is capable of “grays and shadings and tones,” which it is even possible to communicate to other human beings. You then go on to make the error, apparently indigenous to science fiction, of asserting that these “grays and shadings” are characterised and governed by a multivalued logic. I do not know just what the fascination of multi-valued logics is to the modern scientist and science-fiction writer, but their misuse and incorrect application is perhaps the most common modern error. Since most of your stories are chemically, physically, and biologically correct wherever possible, I think we ought to set the record straight for logic.

First let me say unequivocally that not one of the conditions mentioned by you in this or any other article, nor any of the conditions ever described or alluded to in your magazine or any other magazine, can be characterised by anything but two-valued Aristotelian Logic! Furthermore, probably 99% of the errors can be traced to one fundamental misunderstanding of the nature and claims of two-valued logic.

Let us consider the old situation of the three buckets of water, filled respectively with hot, lukewarm, and cold water. Now, it is said, this is a situation in which we need three values to describe the situation, for it is not a true-false, on-off, hot-cold set-up, but a yes-maybe-no, hot-medium-cold one. That this point of view is subscribed to by you can be seen from the passage in which you say of Aristotelian logic that it “insisted that everything in the world was either pure white or pure black,” and later, that “his every act must necessarily be on a yes-or-no basis.”

In other words, you seem to think that Aristotle was unaware of greys, or lukewarm water, or of indecision. You also seem to think that he, and Aristotelian logicians, wish to restrict the world to what in ordinary language are called “opposites.” Your view, however, is the result of the most elementary misreading of Aristotle and the logicians. In fact, it is so simple a mistake that I am afraid it will almost come as an anti-climax. To state it as simply as possible, no one ever claimed that water was either hot or cold. They either claimed that it was hot or not-hot. And by not-hot is meant anything but hot, including lukewarm. Similarly, no one has ever claimed that things are either black or white. They have claimed only that they are either black or not-black, where not-black may include any shade of grey, green, chartreuse or purple you like. It may even include those things which are not any colour at all, like sounds or tastes – there, incidentally, would have been a more convincing argument for three-valued logics, although it would have been equally incorrect.

As for your shadings of human thought, the same applies. Just as the existence of thousands of alternative actions in a given situation does not change the fact that any given one of them is either done or not-done, so too the existence of even a continuous shade of feelings and states-of mind does not change the fact that for any given one of them, a person either feels or not-feels it.

Perhaps one of the sources of your error is the failure to notice that the values, truth and falsehood, are applied by logicians to sentences, not to situations. Thus, one may have a description sentence for each of a thousand possible events, each one stating that that event has taken place, but once those sentences have been composed, it is absolutely and unequivocally true that each one is either true or false. The shading comes not in the “values” but in the situations described by those sentences, and Aristotelian logic is as alive to such facts of life as modern science fiction.

In short, the solution to the “problem” stated at the end of your editorial is that it doesn’t exist. Our actions and feelings are equally shaded, and equally characterisable completely within old-fashioned Aristotelian Logic. As for why that fact is so, the best answer I have seen to date can be found in Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” but that is another, and vastly more complicated, question – Robert Wolff.

LIKE HE SAID

Having finished my walk and morning coffee, I was reluctantly girding up my loins for battle with the abusive but not inconsiderable Professor Egmont Kakarot-Handtke of Stuttgart when I read the delicious response of F. Lengyal, who reveals himself to be none other than I. M. Flaud.  I am most grateful for the assistance.  Now I can turn my thoughts to a lighter post inspired by several other comments.

By the way, one of the themes lately touched upon in the comments section of this blog is the perennial question of the purpose, function, or justification of Philosophy.  It is, I think, rather odd that this question has never exercised me in the slightest.  Having identified myself as a philosopher before I was old enough to drive, I somewhat illogically concluded that anything I was interested in was philosophy, including Game Theory, Freudian theories of personality, the economics of Marx, and nuclear deterrence theory.

If I were pressed to say what it is that I imagine myself to be doing as a Professor of Philosophy, I would reply that I grapple with deep, powerful, beautiful ideas and turn them over in my mind until they are transparently clear to me, at which point I show them to others, either in a lecture or in print, so that they too can see how beautiful they are.  That is what I was doing in my first book on Kant's First Critique, in my two books on Marx, in my early essay on Hume's Treatise, and in many other writings as well.  Is this, as Callicles pointedly asks in the Gorgias, an appropriate way for a mature adult to spend his or her time?  I leave it to others to answer.  However, I can report, after a long life devoted to such activity, that I have found it deeply satisfying, and not obviously harmful to others.