Solipsism

I don't know how to think about war.

I know how to be against war, but that's easy, that's simple. I don't know how to think given the reality of war. I don't know how to think about scenarios in which every option involves death. Not just death: the conscious decision to cause death. I don't know how to get past "this is wrong" to "what is least wrong?"

Today someone told me that America had no choice but to drop the bomb on Hiroshima. That Japan refused to surrender. That the other choices would have involved more long, drawn out military campaigns that would have resulted in higher total casualty. That retreating would have meant letting a power-thirty militaristic government remain in power. That we couldn't do that, for the good of the world.

I didn't pay detailed enough attention in history classes to counter those statements with similar statements about the military strategy, alternative courses that would have resulted in a grand total of fewer lives lost.

And if I can't counter the assertion that dropping the bomb led to the fewest deaths in the long run, and if I'm theoretically against deaths, then how can I argue that dropping the bomb was wrong?

I don't know, because nothing in my life has prepared me to be able to think about the world in those terms. I can't counter that argument or accept it. So I just emerge confused. And crushingly, suffocatingly sad.

Is there any more powerless feeling than thinking that the little boy on the tricycle I saw at the museum in Hiroshima had to die that morning because it was best for the world in the long run?

I don't know how to think that. Even if it were, in some abstract sense, true. I don't want to know how to think that.

Does that mean I just want to barricade myself behind a wall of unrealistic, over-simplistic pacifism and refuse to deal with the nuances of reality? Probably.

I don't know how to absorb that kind of reality yet.

In more positive news: On the subway on my way home tonight there was a guy with the quadratic formula tattooed in large print on the inside of his left forearm. This prompted a young man standing near me with his girlfriend to discuss with her whether we can consider mathematical truths to be the most pure, irrefutable form of truth that we'll ever encounter in our lives -- if you accept the postulates, everything else follows by pure logic. She tried to counter that accepting postulates meant that it wasn't pure universal truth, and he responded exactly as I do to that point: at their heart mathematical statements are all conditional statements, conditional on the postulates and definitions you are working with, and as conditional statements are logically, irrefutably true. He then pronounced her a skeptic, and asked whether she went as far as solipsism, believing that the only reality she could be sure of was that she exists; her response: "I'm not even sure of that..." As I was about to get off at my stop he observed that I was smiling at their conversation: "This woman is smiling at our philosophical conversation," he said to her. So I laughed and apologized for eavesdropping, told them it had been very interesting, and got off the train.

An amusing little snippet of experience, and it cheered me up a lot, at least in the moment. But also somewhat sad. I liked them. And my chances of ever talking to them again are almost zero.

These lyrics are unrelated except that they also almost made me cry today, in one of those sudden floods of significance that I talked about in the previous post. I've even attempted to translate for you. ^_^

肌寒い日が続く　もう春なのに
目覚まし時計より早く起きた朝
三人分の朝ご飯を作るきみが
そこに立っている

The chill doesn’t lift, although it’s spring;
This morning I woke up before the alarm.
Cooking breakfast for the three of us,
You are standing right there.

きみだけが　きみだけが
そばにいないよ
昨日まですぐそばで僕を見てたよ

Only you…only you…
are missing from my side.
Until just yesterday, you were right here watching me.

きみだけを きみだけを
好きでいたよ
きみだけと きみだけと
歌う唄だよ
僕たちの 僕たちの
刻んだ時だよ
片方だけ続くなんて
僕はいやだよ

Only you…only you…
You were the one I loved.
With only you…only you…
My song is sung.
It should be us, both of us
passing this time together.
Continuing all by myself…
I can’t stand it.