Philosophical pioneers engineered at the outset of modernity new horizons for science.

No longer would it be comprised as it was in the older Aristotelian paradigm as the study of nature. Science would be refashioned and redeployed

to act upon nature, to alter nature, indeed to conquer nature, in Francis Bacon's immortal phrase

for the relief of man's estate. Technology would change the human orientation toward the natural world,

and henceforth we would devise

new systems and new techniques that would allow us to beat back disease, poverty, hunger.

It would allow us to overcome natural limitations imposed on mankind by space and time.

But of course, the impulses laden in the human condition would cause us not only to

invent medicine and the ability to grow more and healthier food, it would also cause us to invent

new and ingenious ways of war. And not only that, but even the good things that we tried to create

would have consequences that we would not be able to reckon with,

trade-offs that were impossible to judge in advance.

And from that time to this time, the question of how to deal with technology as a political

problem has been a central preoccupation for political philosophers and statesmen alike.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau idealized the polities and moral health of

pre-modern pre-technological regimes in one of the first great polemics against enlightenment

technology. And closer to our time, think about all the deep philosophical reflection that

was born of the advent of nuclear weapons. The great statesman of the age, Winston Churchill,

gave some of his most interesting speeches and some of his most reflective deepest essays on the subject.

This large, complex, deep question is now a very practical and immediate import for Israel,

for the IDF, and for its military planners.

Welcome to the Tikva podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver.

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