David Brooks had a maddening column in the New York Times that was shared approvingly by many of my old/former friends who still make their living associated with the national security state.
Makes complete sense to me, Van. But people like me are not your audience. They're also not reading Gil Bailie's Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. Bailie uses ideas based on sociologist Rene Girard's work to emphasize every human culture's fixation on rivalry as the way to ease its inevitable internal tensions. It's an age-old dynamic, clearly revealed in the behavior of political powers in the Bible, yet ever new, ever current, and ever blind to its own history. Your argument would, I think, be made even more forcefully if it took Girard's ideas into account.
Makes complete sense to me, Van. But people like me are not your audience. They're also not reading Gil Bailie's Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. Bailie uses ideas based on sociologist Rene Girard's work to emphasize every human culture's fixation on rivalry as the way to ease its inevitable internal tensions. It's an age-old dynamic, clearly revealed in the behavior of political powers in the Bible, yet ever new, ever current, and ever blind to its own history. Your argument would, I think, be made even more forcefully if it took Girard's ideas into account.