As I watch this godforesaken and poorly argued Iraq war debate in Congress, between Congress and the President, in the media, and in international circles, I am coming to terms with the fact that some people will only see the world the way they are already for damned sure that it is.
This post isn't about the substance of that debate. I've written about that ad nauseum. Especially about what should be some humility on this debate, but, inevitably, is overwrought and self-righteous claims of certainty.
I'm even less concerned about the lack of depth in this discussion and the simpler and more polarized divisions that characterize the discussion than I am with the fact that so many people seem so convinced that they are right on every question that's ever occurred to them at this very moment, no matter how much they might have felt differently at another time or might feel differently in the future.
I'm more concerned, right now, with what self-righteous asses we all can be. How certain we are the difficult matters of conscience for so many people most assuredly can be resolved by our superior wisdom. So much so that we would be better to compel their submission to that wisdom than share it, since persuasion is just so fraught with uncertainty and force so guarantess our success.
I think about all of the folks who have taken a series of fairly predictable self-righteous stands during one political period - the 1960's is a popular period for this phenomena for baby boomers - only to be convinced that they were wrong and now are right about another set of fairly predictable self-righteous stands during another period - for those same people, typically today. And it's not just these more obvious folks like David Horowitz or Michael Medved or Christopher Hitchens or David Brock. It's all of us.
"I may have been wrong, at times, in the past," we reason, "But now I've got it figured out. And may God have mercy on the soul that doubts my wisdom or my will."
It's sad. We spend years studying the similar failures of past generations to finally compel righteous behavior from their fellow citizens and all of the tragedy that is wrought from our impositions and self-righteous witch hunts. But we never fail to think that we have somehow all escaped that tendency in the present.
Our forebearers were often fools when it came to regulating the lives of their fellow citizens, we reason. But thank goodness we have learned from their mistakes and finally figured out how to get it right.
Puritan values may have led to scarlet letters and burning of alleged witches, but we've figured out how to protect the moral order today. Alcohol prohibition may have been a miserable failure that led to historical murder records in the U.S. in an underground vice industry that was enforced by a violent underworld, but our current war on drugs is a more noble pursuit that only deals with more serious threats to our civil order. Money and politics may be a marriage that dates back to the invention of government, but we have finally found the rules and finance regulation that will weed out the peddlars of political smut. We may have been more harsh, more brutal, more violent, and more destructive in eras past, but this generation we must get tougher to mirror the strength of our more ruthless legacies.
It's a sad and not terribly well-reasoned spectacle. And it is a perpetual sense of self-doubt in our liberal democratic commitments. We want to be humane, but not too humane. We want to be open and forgiving about our faults, but not too open and forgiving. We want people to be free, but not too free.
And the saddest thing to me is that our self-righteous tendencies never have to face up to themselves. Instead of just acknowledging that we are making uncertain calls in an uncertain world, we constantly argue that we know more than we really do or that are efforts are more successful than they necessarily are. It's a sad, somewhat comic self-fulfilling prophecy. It's Marx and first time tragedy, second time farce without all the revolution. If I never question if I am right, then I am never wrong. And there certainly is no reason for me to take seriously the arguments or concerns of those who disagree with me if I am right all the time.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this uniquely human tendency. No other animal has to justify its actions, because no other animal has the intelligence to think otherwise than what their simple experiences with the world allow them.
Humans, uniquely, have the capacity for intelligent thought. And thus uniquely feel any responsibility to justify their thoughts and judgments to others and have the capacity to make up any justification that suits them, especially when their careers or their reputations or their liberties feel threatened.
How refreshing it would be to have those same discussions with a sense of humility and without feeling threatened and just making our best calls with a sense of openmindedness and openheartedness and no need to justify bad calls just because we made them. How refreshing it would be to acknowledge the much more thorough reality that we tend to make more mistakes than we are want to admit for fear of looking foolish to one another, when the larger foolishness is that we are both so want to admit those mistakes and that it is all the threats that we make against peoples' careers and reputations and families and well-being and lives and freedoms that make us all such cowards and fools. Unless you're Mark McGwire, that is.
To anyone who isn't part of this debate or who aren't making the calls that we are making today, namely our progeny, we have got to seem like a bunch of dimwits and simpletons, heads full of steam and little else. And that goes for almost every political issue that we opine about these days.
We know that's true about our forebearers because we study it for years in schools that we are compelled to attend (and that too many are all to eager to escape as soon as it is possible). And yet, somehow, we all convince ourselves that we have finally escaped that legacy, despite the fact that all of the even most recent history that we have available contradicts that notion.
The way out of that mess is not to make no calls, at all, obviously. But it is to walk more lightly with the calls we make and with the notions we grow attached to. And to presume that perhaps our neighbor may know more than we give him credit for, not necessarily because he actually does, but because perhaps we or anyone know better substantially less than we are more want to acknowledge.
That's the most important lesson that this war has taught me. How little I can trust that most people know for sure anything. Especially the things that matter most. And including the people who know most.
Sadly, the people who are most eager to compel their neighbors are the least likely to bring with them that kind of humility about the matter. And in our own particular brand of democratic irony, we generally call those folks political leaders.
And the sad thing is that so many of those calls really do matter. It just matters more that we have that more humble discussion to get to more right answers than it does to constantly threaten and protect our egos, as we currently tend to do with all of the threats to things we care about, namely our self-images, hanging perpetually over our heads.
Perhaps we are doomed to be self-righteous fools to the ends of our days. But perhaps the hope of liberal democracies is that we might figure this kind of thing out. Because the beauty of that big brain of ours that so many other animals might envy if they had the sense to think about the matter is that we have been given an unprecedented opportunity to reflect on our foolishness and correct our course.
If someone thinks I'm wrong about that observation or that hope, I will, of course, listen. Because it is that capacity to argue and to consider the alternatives that uniquely makes us human. Even when it means that we argue ourselves in circles. And often at our neighbor's expense.
Love,
Ben
