You asked me to find x, and I found it. You didn't ask me to find the value of x. You rode roughshod over a perfectly obvious distinction. So don't call me a smart-ass!
Linkage and Thinkage
The Grand Central Conundrum in the Philosophy of Fiction
As I see it, the central problem in the philosophy of fiction is to find a solution to the following aporetic dyad:
1. There are no purely fictional items.
2. There are some purely fictional items.
The problem is that while the limbs of the dyad cannot both be true, there is reason to think that each is true.
(1) looks to be an analytic truth: by definition, what is purely fictional is not, i.e., does not exist. George Harvey Bone, the main character in Patrick Hamilton's 1941 booze novel Hangover Square, does not now and never did exist. He is not a real alcoholic like his creator, Patrick Hamilton, who was a real alcoholic. What is true is that
3. Bone is a purely fictional alcoholic.
That (3) is true is clear from the fact that if a student wrote on a test that Bone was a teetotaler, his answer would be marked wrong. But if (3) is true, then, given that nothing can satisfy a predicate unless it exists, it follows that
4. Bone exists
and, given the validity of Existential Generalization, it follows that
5. There is a purely fictional alcoholic.
But if (5) is true, then so is (2).
It should now be spectacularly obvious what the problem is. There are two propositions, each the logical contradictory of the other, which implies that they cannot both be true, and yet we have excellent reason to think that both are true.
Now what are all the possible ways of solving this problem? I need a list. London Ed et al. can help me construct it. Right now all I want is a list, a complete list if possible, not arguments for or against any item on the list. Not all of the following are serious contenders, but I am aiming at completeness.
A. Dialetheism. Accept dialetheism, which amounts to the claim that there are true contradictions and that the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC) is false.
B. Paraphrasticism. Reject (2) by attempting to show that sentences such as (3) can be paraphrased in such a way that the apparent reference to ficta is eliminated. For example, one might offer the following paraphrase of (3): 'Hamilton wrote a story implying that here is an alcoholic named Bone.' The paraphrastic approach works only if every reference to a fictional item, whether it be a person or place or event or fiction, can be paraphrased away. (As Kripke and others have noted, there are fictional fictions, fictional plays for example, such as a fictional play referenced within a play.)
C. Logic Reform. Reject Existential Generalization (off load existence from the particular quantifier) and reject the anti-Meinongian principle that nothing can satisfy a predicate (or exemplify a property) unless it exists. One could then block the inference from (3) to (2).
D. Ontology Reform. Reject (1) by arguing that fictional items, without prejudice to their being purely fictional, do exist. Saul Kripke, for example, maintains that a fictional character is an abstract entity that "exists in virtue of more concrete activities of telling stories, writing plays, writing novels, and so on . . . the same way that a nation is an abstract entity which exists in virtue of concrete relations between people." (Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures, Oxford UP, 2013, p. 73.) Or one might hold that fictional items are abstract items that exist necessarily like numbers.
E. Dissolutionism. Somehow argue that the problem as posed above is a pseudoproblem that doesn't need solving but dissolving. One might perhaps argue that one or the other of the dyad's limbs has not even a prima facie claim on our acceptance.
F. Neitherism. Reject both limbs. Strategy (A) rejects LNC. This strategy rejects the Law of Excluded Middle. (Not promising, but I'm aiming for completeness.)
G. Mysterianism. Accept both limbs but deny that they are mutually contradictory. Maintain that our cognitive limitations make it either presently or permanently impossible for us to understand how the limbs can be both true and non-contradictory. "They are both true; reality is non-contradictory; but it is a mystery how!"
H. Buddhism. Reject the tetralemma: neither (1) nor (2), nor both, nor neither.
I. Hegelianism. Propose a grand synthesis in which thesis (1) and antithesis (2) are aufgehoben, simultaneously cancelled and preserved. (I have no idea what this would look like — again, I want a complete list of options.)
First question: Have I covered all the bases? Or are there solution strategies that cannot be brought under one of the above heads? If you think there are, tell me what you think they are. But don't mention something that is subsumable under one of (A)-(I).
Second question (for London Ed): under which head would you book your solution? Do you favor the paraphrastic approach sketched in (B) or not? Or maybe Ed thinks that the problem as I have formulated it is a pseudoproblem (option (E)).
Be a good sport, Ed, play along and answer my questions.
Flannery O’Connor on Ayn Rand
Flannery O'Connor died 50 years ago today. About Ayn Rand she has this to say:
I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky.
Pushing Outwards Toward the Limits of Mystery
Flannery O'Connor on the Beats and Their Lack of Discipline
A Good Woman is Hard to Figure
The Worldly Too Know that Life is Short
And so they compose 'bucket lists' of things to do before they 'kick the bucket.' It's as if, on the sinking Titanic, one were to try to make the most of the ship and its features and amenities instead of considering how one might survive the coming calamity.
"There are a lot of things I want to do before we sink. I've never been to the captain's quarters or inspected the engine room or admired the gold fixtures in the first-class cabins or had a drink in the VIP lounge."
The worldly too know that life is short but they draw the wrong conclusion from the fact.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: From the Billboard Top Twenty, Fifty Years Ago, this Week
List found here. Hyperlinks by BV to songs he is in the mood to revisit this Saturday night while he drinks a specialty boilermaker: a bourbon and sweet vermouth wine spodiodi with a Sam Adams Boston Lager 'chaser.' He will repeat as necessary to achieve the requisite mood. He drinks only one time per week, this time of the week. For some, alcohol is the devil in liquid form. For BV it is a delightful adjunct to a civilized life, one he can take or leave. To hell with Sharia and its 'liberal' and leftist enablers.
BILLBOARD (USA) MAGAZINE'S SINGLES CHART FOR WEEK OF:August 1,1964
TW LW Wks. Song-Artist
1 2 3 A HARD DAY'S NIGHT-BEATLES
2 1 7 Rag Doll-Four Seasons
3 6 6 The Little Old Lady (From Pasadena)-Jan & Dean
4 11 5 Everybody Loves Somebody-Dean Martin
5 18 4 Where Did Our Love Go-Supremes
6 9 7 Wishin' And Hopin'-Dusty Springfield
7 8 8 Dang Me-Roger Miller
8 3 11 I Get Around-Beach Boys
9 4 10 Memphis-Johnny Rivers
10 5 9 The Girl From Ipanema-Stan Getz & Astrud Gilberto
11 13 6 Under The Boardwalk-Drifters
12 14 6 Nobody I Know-Peter & Gordon
13 7 8 Can't You See That She's Mine-Dave Clark Five
14 10 9 Keep On Pushing-The Impressions
15 20 7 I Wanna Love Him So Bad-The Jelly Beans
16 12 9 Good Times-Sam Cooke
17 22 6 How Glad I Am-Nancy Wilson
18 15 9 Try It Baby-Marvin Gaye
19 23 7 Farmer John-The Premiers
20 25 7 Steal Away-Jimmy Hughes
Another Round on Fictional Characters as Abstract Objects
London Ed recommended to me Patrick Hamilton's 1941 booze novel, Hangover Square. It gets off to a slow start, but quickly picks up speed and now has me in its grip. I'm on p. 60. The main character is one George Harvey Bone.
Ed gives this argument in an earlier thread:
(*) Bone, who is depicted by Hamilton as a sad alcoholic, is living in a flat in Earl’s Court.
The argument is that either the predicates ‘is depicted by Hamilton as a sad alcoholic’ and ‘is living in a flat in Earl’s Court’ have no subject, or they have the same subject. Either way, van Inwagen’s theory is wrong.
If they have no subject, then ‘is depicted by Hamilton as a sad alcoholic’ has no subject, but PvI argues that the subject is an abstract object. If they have the same subject, then if the subject of ‘is depicted by Hamilton as a sad alcoholic’ is an abstract object, then so is the subject of ‘is living in a flat in Earl’s Court’, which he also denies.
Either way, his theory cannot explain sentences like the one above.
The first thing I would point out (and this comports somewhat with a comment by David Brightly in the earlier thread) is that (*) can be reasonably parsed as a conjunction, the conjuncts of which belong to different categories of fiction (not fictional) discourse:
(*) Bone is depicted by Hamilton as a sad alcoholic & Bone lives in Earl's Court.
The two different categories are, first, the category of sentences we use when we engage in lit-crit discourse about fictional characters 'from the outside' while yet attending carefully to the 'internal' details of the fictional work. An example of such a sentence would be the following. "George Bone, like Don Birnham of Charles Jackson's 1944 Lost Weekend, have girlfriends, but Netta, the inamorata of the former, is a devil whereas Helen, the beloved of Birnham, is an angel."
Now that sentence I just wrote might be a second-rate bit of lit-crit, but it is a sentence that occurs in neither booze novel, nor is it entirely external to either novel. It is not entirely external because it reports details internal to the novels and it either gets them right or gets them wrong. 'George Bone is a purely fictional character,' by contrast, is an entirely external sentence. That sentence does not occur in the novel, and indeed it cannot occur within the novel (as opposed to within a bit of text preceding the novel proper, or as an authorial aside in a footnote) unless it were put into the mouth of a character. It cannot occur therein, because, within the world of Hangover Square, George Harvey Bone is precisely real, not fictional. As the same goes for Earl's Court, although it is also a real place in London. (One could, I suppose, argue that the Earl's Court of the novel is a fictional Earl's Court and thus distinct from the real-world Earl's Court. Holy moly, this is tricky stuff.)
The second category I mentioned comprises sentences that are either wholly internal to pieces of fiction or sentences that occur in synopses and summaries but could occur internally to pieces of fictions. For example, the second conjunct of (*):
C2. Bone lives in Earl's Court.
(C2) is probably too flat-footed a sentence to occur in a novel as good as Hangover Square, but it could have occurred therein and it could easily figure in a summary of the novel. (C1), however, namely,
C1. Bone is depicted by Hamilton as a sad alcoholic
could not have occurred in Hangover Square.
Now as I understand things, the grammatical subject of a sentence is a linguistic item, a word or a phrase. Thus (C1) and (C2) have the same grammatical subject, namely, the proper name 'Bone.' The grammatical subject is to be distinguished from its extralinguistic referent, if there is one. Call that the real subject. ('Logical subject' doesn't cut it since we do not typically refer to items on the logical plane such as propositions.)
So I take London Ed in his above-quoted animadversion to be referring to the real subjects of (C1) and (C2) when he uses 'subject.' He poses a dilemma for van Inwagen's view. Either the conjuncts have no subject or they have the same subject.
They cannot have no subject on van Inwagen's view because the subject of (C1) is an abstract object. And they cannot have the same subject, because then both conjuncts would have as real subject an abstract object. That cannot be, since on van Inwagen's view, and quite plausibly to boot, the subject of (C2) cannot be an abstract object. No abstract object lives or resides at any particular place. Abstract objects don't hang out or get hung over.
So, Ed concludes, van Inwagen's theory cannot explain (*).
Now my metaphilosophy teaches that no theory is any good on this topic or on any other. The problems of philosophy are most of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but none of them soluble. They are genuine intellectual knots that we cannot untie. That's about as good as it gets when it comes to "nailing my colours to the mast" as Ed demands that I do.
In other words, I am not advocating a particular theory as superior to Ed's, whatever exactly it is. (I am not being 'snarky' to use a Gen-X expression; I really don't know exactly what his theory is.) I don't think that van Inwagen's theory is unproblematic and I am not advocating it.
But I do think that Ed has failed to refute van Inwagen. The reason is because he conflates the two categories of fiction sentences lately distinguished, the category of lit-crit sentences like (C1), and the category of sentences that either do or could occur within pieces of fiction, an example being (C2).
Defending van Inwagen, I reject Ed's disjunction, namely: Either the conjuncts have no subject or they have the same subject. They have neither the same subject nor no subject. One has a subject and the other doesn't. (C1) has as its subject an abstract object and (C2) has as its subject nothing at all.
That's what van Inwagen could say to Ed so as to neutralize Ed's objection.
Spencer Case on Atheist TV
Here. "The skeptical channel's ideological commitments won't appeal to conservative atheists."
Academic Librarian Compares PhilPapers and Philosopher’s Index
Here. (HT: Dave Lull)
Why Sam Harris Doesn’t Criticize Israel
Although Sam Harris is out of his depth on philosophical topics, and wrong about religion, he talks sense on politics and is courageously blunt about the threat to civilization of radical Islam. Hats off to Harris! Excerpts with emphases and comments added:
One of the most galling things for outside observers about the current war in Gaza is the disproportionate loss of life on the Palestinian side. This doesn’t make a lot of moral sense. Israel built bomb shelters to protect its citizens. The Palestinians built tunnels through which they could carry out terror attacks and kidnap Israelis. Should Israel be blamed for successfully protecting its population in a defensive war? I don’t think so.
[. . .]
But there is no way to look at the images coming out Gaza—especially of infants and toddlers riddled by shrapnel—and think that this is anything other than a monstrous evil. Insofar as the Israelis are the agents of this evil, it seems impossible to support them. And there is no question that the Palestinians have suffered terribly for decades under the occupation. This is where most critics of Israel appear to be stuck. They see these images, and they blame Israel for killing and maiming babies. They see the occupation, and they blame Israel for making Gaza a prison camp. I would argue that this is a kind of moral illusion, borne of a failure to look at the actual causes of this conflict, as well as of a failure to understand the intentions of the people on either side of it.
BV: Harris ought to have pointed out that nine years ago, in 2005, Israel withdrew all of its settlements and military from Gaza. In what sense, then, is Gaza under occupation? True, Israel kept control of the borders, sea-lanes and air space, but if they didn't, Hamas could import even more rockets and other armaments. Even much of the cement that should have been used for peaceful purposes has been diverted into tunnel construction.
[. . .]
The truth is that there is an obvious, undeniable, and hugely consequential moral difference between Israel and her enemies. The Israelis are surrounded by people who have explicitly genocidal intentions towards them. The charter of Hamas is explicitly genocidal. It looks forward to a time, based on Koranic prophesy, when the earth itself will cry out for Jewish blood, where the trees and the stones will say “O Muslim, there’s a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him.” This is a political document. We are talking about a government that was voted into power by a majority of Palestinians.
Is the Success of Science Evidence of Metaphysical Naturalism?
A reader poses this question:
Some people argue that the success of science using methodological naturalism is evidence of metaphysical naturalism because, according to them, why would the methods work unless the subject was naturalistic? My question is: do you think this is a fair argument to make?
It depends on what exactly the argument is.
The argument the reader reports is unimpressive. It comes down to saying that the natural sciences are successful because metaphysical naturalism is true. But the success of the sciences in explaining much of what goes on in the natural world is consistent with both the truth and the falsity of metaphysical naturalism. So scientific success does not entail metaphysical naturalism. Does the former provide nondemonstrative evidence of the latter? It is not clear how it could. How could there be empirical evidence of a metaphysical proposition?
Metaphysical naturalism (MN) is the thesis that "all that exists is the space-time world . . . ." The space-time world is the physical world. The thesis, then, is that reality is exhausted by the physical world. The quotation is from David Armstrong.
Now if MN is true (false), then it is presumably necessarily true (false). For it is a metaphysical claim, a claim about the nature of reality. If MN is necessarily true, if true, then it is hard to see how there could be empirical evidence either for it or against it.
Perhaps one could argue as follows:
1. The sciences of nature, physics in particular, have been extremely successful in explaining much about the physical world.
2. This explanatory success, though at present partial, will one day be complete: everything about the physical world will eventually have a natural-scientific explanation, and indeed one that adheres to the constraints of methodological naturalism. (Methodological naturalism is not a thesis or proposition, but an injunction or procedural principle: In explaining natural phenomena, do not invoke as explanantia anything non-natural or supernatural.)
3. If a complete explanation of the physical world and everything in it, including human beings and their cultural artifacts, is achieved by natural-scientific means under the constraints of methodological naturalism, then one would have no good reason not to be metaphysical naturalist.
Therefore
4. One ought to be a metaphysical naturalist.
The problem with this argument is premise (2). It is nothing but a leap of faith. One pins one's hopes on future science, to invoke a widely-bruited battle cry. (And isn't there something utterly bizarre about hoping to be shown to be nothing but a complex physical system? And to be profoundly disappointed if one were shown to have an eternal destiny and the possibility of unending bliss? "Damn! I was so hoping to be nothing but a bag of bones and guts slated for destruction in a few years!")
Not only is (2) a leap of faith and as such something rather unseemly for hard-nosed materialist types to advocate, there is really no chance that natural science operating under the constraints of methodological naturalism and eschewing the sort of panpsychism recently urged by Thomas Nagel, will ever explain in a satisfactory non-question-begging way:
- The very existence of the physical universe
- How life arose from abiotic matter
- How sentience arose from the merely alive
- How self-consciousness — the ability to deploy thoughtfully the first-person singular pronoun — arose from the merely alive or from mere sentience
- How intentionality arose from the merely alive
- How something like a first-person perspective is possible, a "view from nowhere," a perspective without which no third-person perspective would be possible and with it the objectivity presupposed by scientific inquiry
- The intrinsic intelligibility of the world which is a presupposition of scientific inquiry
- Where the laws of nature come from
- Why the physical constants have precisely the values they have
- The normativity of reason and how it governs our mental processes
- The applicability of mathematics to natural phenomena: no mathematics, no physics!
- The existence of mathematical objects and the truth of mathematical propositions.
A Philosophy of Boredom
I am never bored. Tired sometimes, but not bored. A nap and a double espresso work every time. These are times that try our souls while stimulating our minds. Who can be bored?
Regular reader, João Gabriel of Porto, Portugal, writes to thank me for my "great blog" and to recommend Lars Svendsen's A Philosophy of Boredom.
London Paraphrastics Questioned
To block the inference from
1. Frodo is a hobbit
to
2. There are hobbits
we can invoke story operators and substitute for (1)
1*. In the Tolkien story, Frodo is a hobbit.
From (1*) one cannot validly infer (2). So far, so good. But what about the true
3. Frodo is a purely fictional character
given that the following is plainly false:
3*. In the Tolkien story, Frodo is a purely fictional character. (?)
How do we block the inference from (3) to
4. There are purely fictional characters. (?)
At this juncture, London Ed makes a paraphrastic move:
Note that 'fiction' just means what is contrived, or made up, or invented. To say that Frodo 'is' a fictional character is simply to say that he is made up, which itself no more than saying that someone (Tolkien) made him up.
Indeed, that is what 'fiction' means, 'pure fiction' leastways. 'Fiction' is from the Latin fingere. So Ed would paraphrase (3) as
3P. Someone (Tolkien) made up (created, invented, contrived) Frodo.
Now if the paraphrase is adequate, then (3) does not commit us ontologically to anything beyond Tolkien. It does not commit us to the existence of fictional characters. Ed wants to avoid views like that of van Inwagen according to which purely fictional items exist. It is worth noting that Ed agrees with van Inwagen about the univocity of 'is' and 'exists.' There are no modes of existence/being for either of them. And for both the one sense of 'is'/'exists' is supplied adequately and completely by the existential quantifier of modern predicate logic. Both are thin theorists when it comes to existence.
But is (3P) an adequate paraphrase of (3)?
I don't think so. If Tolkien made up Frodo, but Frodo does not exist, then what did Tolkien create? A mere modification of his own consciousness? No. He created a character that outlasted him and that cannot be identified with any part of Tolkien's body or mind. Tolkien ceased to exist in 1973. But no one will say that the character Frodo simply vanished in 1973. When Tolkien ceased to exist, his mental contents ceased to exist. But when the writer ceased to exist, Frodo did not stop being a quite definite fictional character. So Frodo cannot be identified with any mental content of Tolkien. Nor could Frodo be said to be an adverbial modification of one of Tolkien's acts of thinking.
I grant that Frodo is an artifact. He came into being by the creative acts of Tolkien and is dependent on Tolkien for his coming into being, and perhaps even tied to Tolkien for his very identity: essentiality of origin for ficta. Frodo is also dependent on the continuing existence of physical copies of LOTR. Frodo is an artifact that came into being and can pass out of being. This makes Frodo a contingent artifact. What's more, Frodo is not merely a content in Tolkien's mind: he can be thought about and understood and referred to by many different minds. So Frodo has a curious status: he is in one way dependent and in another independent.
Now I claim that if one admits that there are different modes of being/existence, one can make sense of this. Fictional characters have a dependent mode of being, but they are, nonetheless, items in their own right. They obviously don't exist in the way a fiction writer exists. But it would be false to say that they don't exist at all. After all, Frodo cannot be identified with a mental content of Tolkien.
So while it is true that someone made up Frodo, as Ed rightly insists, that does not suffice to show that Frodo does not exist.
Ed's paraphrase is inadequate. And so he is stuck with the problem of blocking the inference from (3) to (4).
……………………
UPDATE (7/31). I said above, "Frodo is also dependent on the continuing existence of physical copies of LOTR." That's not quite right. If all the copies of LOTR were destroyed tomorrow, Frodo would continue on as a cultural artifact in the oral tradition for as long as that tradition was maintained. But once that tradition petered out, it would be all over for Frodo if there were no physical copies of LOTR (electronic or otherwise) or writings about LOTR on hand. The dependence of abstract cultural artifacts on human beings, their practices and memories, is not easy to understand. We are in the realm of Hegel's objektiver Geist.
An Active-Passive Puzzle
UPDATE (7/31): The following entry is deeply confused. But I will leave it up for the sake of the commenters, David Gordon and AJ, who refuted it. In my defense I will say something Roderick Chisholm once said about himself in a similar connection, namely, that I wrote something clear enough to be mistaken.
…………..
The following two sentences are in the active and passive voices, respectively:
1. Tom said that someone was in the vicinity.
2. Someone was said by Tom to be in the vicinity.
Both sentences 'say the same thing,' i.e., express the same proposition, the same thought, the same Fregean Gedanke. Aren't active-to-passive and passive-to-active transformations in general truth- and sense-preserving? But the two sentences have different entailments.
(2), which is de re, entails that someone was in the vicinity. (1), which is de dicto, does not entail that someone was in the vicinity. But if the two sentences have different entailments, then they cannot express one and the same proposition.
The puzzle expressed as an aporetic triad:
A. (1) and (2) express the same proposition.
B. (2) entails a proposition — Someone was in the vicinity — that is not entailed by (1).
C. If p, q are the same proposition, then for any proposition x, p entails x iff q entails x.
The limbs of the triad are individually plausible but collectively inconsistent.
How do we solve, or perhaps dissolve, this puzzle?
No Cease-Fire!
[. . .]
According to the New York Times, Secretary of State John Kerry is hoping for a cease-fire to "open the door to Israeli and Palestinian negotiations for a long-term solution." President Obama has urged Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to have an "immediate, unconditional humanitarian cease-fire" — again, with the idea of pursuing some long-lasting agreement.
If this was the first outbreak of violence between the Palestinians and the Israelis, such hopes might make sense. But where have the U.N., Kerry and Obama been during all these decades of endlessly repeated Middle East carnage?
The Middle East must lead the world in cease-fires. If cease-fires were the road to peace, the Middle East would easily be the most peaceful place on the planet.
"Cease-fire" and "negotiations" are magic words to "the international community." But just what do cease-fires actually accomplish?
In the short run, they save some lives. But in the long run they cost far more lives, by lowering the cost of aggression.
At one time, launching a military attack on another nation risked not only retaliation but annihilation. When Carthage attacked Rome, that was the end of Carthage.
But when Hamas or some other terrorist group launches an attack on Israel, they know in advance that whatever Israel does in response will be limited by calls for a cease-fire, backed by political and economic pressures from the United States.
It is not at all clear what Israel's critics can rationally expect the Israelis to do when they are attacked. Suffer in silence? Surrender? Flee the Middle East?
Or — most unrealistic of al — fight a "nice" war, with no civilian casualties? General William T. Sherman said it all, 150 years ago: "War is hell."
If you want to minimize civilian casualties, then minimize the dangers of war, by no longer coming to the rescue of those who start wars.
Israel was attacked, not only by vast numbers of rockets but was also invaded — underground — by mazes of tunnels.
There is something grotesque about people living thousands of miles away, in safety and comfort, loftily second-guessing and trying to micro-manage what the Israelis are doing in a matter of life and death.
Such self-indulgences are a danger, not simply to Israel, but to the whole Western world, for it betrays a lack of realism that shows in everything from the current disastrous consequences of our policies in Egypt, Libya and Iraq to future catastrophes from a nuclear-armed Iran.
Those who say that we can contain a nuclear Iran, as we contained a nuclear Soviet Union, are acting as if they are discussing abstract people in an abstract world. Whatever the Soviets were, they were not suicidal fanatics, ready to see their own cities destroyed in order to destroy ours.
As for the ever-elusive "solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflicts in the Middle East, there is nothing faintly resembling a solution anywhere on the horizon. Nor is it hard to see why.
Even if the Israelis were all saints — and sainthood is not common in any branch of the human race — the cold fact is that they are far more advanced than their neighbors, and groups that cannot tolerate even subordinate Christian minorities can hardly be expected to tolerate an independent, and more advanced, Jewish state that is a daily rebuke to their egos.