I respond to my interlocutor, who has recently experienced inchoate inclinations that the war in South Asia is not entirely in the national interest. In so responding, I regret that I have not been able to fully prove my thesis in this short monograph.

My father was a pilot of Liberator bombers in the Royal Australian Air Force during World War II, stationed in Sri Lanka, and bombing Japanese-occupied Singapore. At 86 years old, he has an ease  of understanding the ways of mankind, and thus has an innate sympathy with the current South Asian war, as having been inevitable, since it has already escalated to war through the state’s prior overseas exploits not publicised at home. The state rationalises this behaviour as necessary for preserving the unity of the nation.

There are two different views of unity: the one holds that unity of a nation is like the unity of the human body, where each limb although different from the head and the torso, for example, are still a part of the unity of the body, and we will call this the anthropomorphic model; the other is like the concept of monolithic unity where each person is essentially to be treated as if exactly the same as his fellow, a clone, as it were.  The latter is the republic-style point of view, and intuitively corresponds well to a republic's government's view of its citizens, a view constructed in order to maintain the republic's control of freedom, and to protect the government from its citizens, which in the author's opinion are the same thing.

“In a republic where the government has determined to be expansionary, and therefore has to hide most of their overseas exploits from the citizens lest the people rise up and destroy the government.”  [Macciavelli  N. The Discourses, Book One, Chapter 6.]

The Halachah (Jewish Law) sets out two kinds of war, a prescribed war to defend the state, and a discretionary war, commenced in order to take advantage of an apparent advantage to expand the state. However conflicts are dynamic arrangements of forces, as illustrated by Rummel, infra.

"Through conflict states negotiate a social contract.  Through conflict, violence, and war, international actors mutually adjust their expectations to their changing interests, capabilities, and wills.  The result is a balance of powers and a correlated structure of expectations, that is, a social contract.  This contract then establishes a region of mutually reliable expectations, a region of peace and cooperation."  [Rummel, R.J.  Understanding Conflict and War  (Vol 2, p 374)  New York: Sage Publications, 1976]

Therefore, since wars are merely escalated conflicts, the same “prescribed/discretionary” division will be present, if not evident, in all lesser disputes

This, namely its internal and dynamically changing interests, capabilities, and wills,  is possibly a cogent explanation of why the United States is so often involved in international war. Has the war now being waged in South Asia already crossed the definitional boundary to that of a discretionary war. My thesis is that, rather, it has moved in the opposite direction: namely, from the discretionary to the prescribed, and has thus become ever so much more important to the national interest.

But do we strive for peace through engagement conflict, albeit under a misapprehension? Again, pursuant to the Halachah, the English word "peace" appears insufficiently descriptive, and should really be translated as "plateau of perfection", as in perfecting a balance. As is clear, perfection can be attained through balance, even with all the balanced forces subsisting. Whereas the English connotation of peace is that of no forces at all. I maintain that such a coloring is unrealistic and unattainable. Thus, in my ADR practice, I seek to find a new equilibrium for the identifiable forces, knowing that when the forces change, or become more substantive than inchoate, a new equilibrium will have to be sought. This explains the phenomenon of mediations "falling apart" at a later time, as forces move from inchoate to substantive, or, as a hypothesis, from discretionary to prescribed, or finally, as a cognate, from fantasy to truth.

This demonstrates the problems of uncontrolled results inherent in a civil servant’s exercise of discretionary power rather than mandatory power, and is a central problem in mediating matters of administrative law, wherein political issues are so potent.

For example: consider that any normal person will make an utmost effort to reveal to himself the true nature of anything he observes, and will act in so doing to exclude falsehood.  If truth were self-evident, it could be gained by simple observation, and the more one observed the world, the wiser one would be.  Regrettably, simple observation fails to provide access to many less apparent aspects of the observed, and therefore there is really no object so apparent in all its aspects that its true nature can be understood solely by superficial observation. 

It is also well known that many people imagine false ideas to be quite true, and they remain firm in their beliefs, refusing to see anything wrong.  After initial study, one may believe his ideas to be clear and true, and only afterwards does he find them false, and face the dissonance of having to retract them, and this is an example of internally generated coercion.  Therefore it can be said with comfort that the true nature of things is neither apparent nor readily understood, and as a result there is ample room for mistake.  In fact, the mind may not merely ignore, but actively turn away from the truth, without even being aware of so doing, its priority pursuit being conflict. 

Dialectic investigation is a process of analyzing a statement or idea in order to explain and clarify its truth or falsity.  This process consists of setting forth all possible arguments which validate and establish the statement, or nullify and disprove it.  An arrangement must be chosen which will test the relative strengths of the arguments pro and con.  Finally, having been subjected to this testing stress, the issue must be resolved on the side that appears most pleasing to the mind.  Therefore any change in position forged in this way is a change moved by optimal coercion.  Resolving an issue so that it is pleasing to each mind in the debate then becomes the goal of the harmonizing process,  and therefore, such a style of investigation can be conducted among many people, even up to conduct within an academy of debate such as a Parliament, or a Talmudic Academy, (such as the Great Sanhedrin), with the first speaker taking one side of the argument and the next opposing the first. 

This allows for multi-variate opposition in comfort.  For example, one might endeavor to prove a statement and the others to disprove it, each opponent setting forth his argument to answer the other, point by point.  It is then naturally possible for one person to conduct the argument all by himself, filling the role of as many sides of the debate as he may wish to generate.  He proposes an initial statement, and then considers every possible rebuttal that might be made by persons holding their opposite points of view.  He then disproves each of his own arguments, and returns to reestablish his original statement.  This is little more unusual than the process of designing a position as a participant in an Oxford-style debate. 

Both these styles are found in the practical legal arguments and disputes of the Talmudic Academy.  However, all these forms of debate lead to the same end, namely the clarification of the truth by means of arranging every argument point by point.  One is obligated to judge a difficulty whether it is raised by someone else against a stated thought, or whether the person raises a difficulty against himself in the same way.  Similarly, with the resolution of any difficulty, there is no difference whether it is his own or someone else's.  The same is true for every other element of dialectic, for we never judge a statement by its author, but only on its own merit. This moves the logic of attempted nullification of ideas or even evidence by attacks on personal credit from mandatory to discretionary. I therefore express concern at demonizing an enemy rather than carefully analyzing his/her position. 

The Talmud, although certainly not widely circulated, nor widely studied, has achieved harmonization on virtually every issue of daily life with which a person grapples, from who is responsible for sharing the cost of a fence, to when circumstantial evidence is admissible, and to how one may judge when a person is to be believed or not.  It is therefore, in itself, a long-existing device for mediation.  Every harmonized Talmudic discussion is built from seven principal elements of dialectic reasoning.  They are: Statement where the speaker states a single idea; Question where a person asks another a point of information; Answer where the person asked responds to the question; Contradiction where the speaker disproves a statement and totally refutes it; Proof where the speaker presents evidence from which the truth of a statement or idea is made apparent; Difficulty where a person points out something untrue or even unpleasing in a statement or idea; Resolution where a person turns aside the difficulty raised against a statement or idea. [Luzzatto, Moshe Chaim  The Ways of Reason.  Jerusalem: Feldheim 1989]  When this resolution becomes palpably pleasing to each party, the debate on that particular point can validly be said to have been harmonized.

This is the essence of dispute resolution, as practiced by the Talmudic Method. Intrinsic to it is the necessity for the parties to accept that it just might be possible that there is no solution, due to the dynamic nature of the forces allowing no reasonable equilibrium, and that moving forces from discretion to prescription has the potential to create war.

 

Gary I. Lilienthal, Ph.D.