Choosing Between Democracy and Doom (W.W. Norton; 582 pages; $35), Harvard University philosopher Elaine Scarry makes the case that the peoples of every nation armed with nuclear weapons have made a potentially fatal mistake: ceding to a few leaders the capacity to render the world uninhabitable through acts of war. When we check our own pulses and ask ourselves whether we consent to or dissent from these new arrangements, she writes, it is hard to get any traction on the feeling at all. ... Because the weapons are utterly independent of our consent, our consent is irrelevant; and because it is irrelevant, it is unexercised; and because it is unexercised, it atrophies. Once we internalize our own irrelevance ... we can set aside the thought of savage world-destroying weapons with a shrug or a brief lament, then turn to other thoughts. Recent international tensions over Russia's dealings with its neighbors have given "Thermonuclear Monarchy" a heightened, unsought currency. Torture involves zero consent on the part of the injured, whereas conventional war allows many levels of consent. [...] if they disagree, say, that the Second Amendment can help us or that political philosophy can help us, they can read the detailed arguments. [...] I think it's outrageous that tens of millions who stand to be injured by nuclear weapons, and are as responsible as anyone for the future of the earth, are seen as irresponsible or unqualified to speak about it. Regarding your subtitle, in the present age of political corruption and corporate oligarchy, is democracy a real choice? In a little book I wrote during the Bush administration called "Who Defended the Country?" I made the point that it was the citizens who brought down Flight 93, whereas the Pentagon couldn't defend itself even with a 55-minute lead time. The tremendous array of arguments in the book all appeal to rational self-interest.
Reported by SFGate 2 hours ago.
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