Decommissioning Terror 4

Considering the possibility that the Talmudic injunction quoted in the previous item might go some way towards explaining the IDF's pre-emptive strikes against their Palestinian attackers brought me to think once again of the strong role played by different cultures in the ways in which we see and evaluate the world around us. Accordingly, comparative anthropology can help us see past our own cultural assumpotions and easy certainties into the worldviews of (and hence the world as seen by) others.

The somewhat forthright Jewish aphorism in the previous item can therefore stand comarison with the two quotes offered in this one.

I'd like to consider each of them in turn, very different as they are, as two ways of approaching the riddle proposed by Robert Axelrod in terms of iterative games of prisoners dilemma: what is the optimal strategy for social existence in terms of cooperation and defection? Axelrod in his two books, The Evolution of Cooperation and The Complexity of Cooperation, comes as close as anyone to providing a rational / empirical basis on which to propose the benfits of an altruistic component in human behavior. His finding is that treating others with an initial assumption of goodwill and then following their actions tit-for-tat is a strategy for success. The Qur'an here effectively endorses tit-for-tat, and indeed specifically permits Muslims to engage in otherwise prohibited behavior when that behavior has been initiated by their enemies. The contrast with Christ's proposal, in game theoretic terms that one should continue cooperating with a defector until seventy times seven times, couldn't be clearer.

But then Christ's teaching here admittedly doesn't work very well as a strategy in iterated games of prisoners dilemma...

And again, my purpose here is not to praise one perspective and denigrate another, but to offer the contrast between them as a sort of Socratic gift, a means of probing deeper into the extraordinarily vexed question of human morality.