My response to the Arbor Update Gaza thread
As the comments after mine suggest, the solution has to lead to the desired outcome — thriving, mutualistic civil society — despite unending violence and finger-pointing. Moreover, the solution has to work despite conscious efforts to stop it by numerous opponents on both sides.
the only social system that humans have ever devised that, in the long run, produces consistent improvements in median quality of living, despite regular outbreaks of violence in, around, and throughout the system, is the scientific method, accompanied, usually, but not always, by Enlightenment values of tolerance, skepticism, and inquiry.
Patient, long-term investments in education and tolerance are the only sensible solution–and those investments must, tragically, be undertaken in the full consciousness that ongoing violence from factions on both sides is consciously intended to tear down the foundations of civil society in both Gaza and Israel. Yet there is room for optimism. The historical record is that societies can survive great trauma to their infrastructure (the Thirty Years War, 1789, Japan 1945) once the commitment is made to the path of science, tolerance, and inquiry.
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