The Word and The Deed

"Dangers to a society may be mortal without being immediate. One such danger is the prevailing social vision of our time--and the dogmatism with which the ideas, assumptions, and attitudes behind that vision are held.

It is not that these views are especially evil or especially erroneous. Human beings have been making mistakes and committing sins as long as there have been human beings. The great catastrophes of history have usually involved much more than that. Typically, there has been an additional and crucial ingredient--some method by which feedback from reality has been prevented, so that a dangerous course of action could be blindly continued to a fatal conclusion.

Today, despite free speech and the mass media, the prevailing social vision is dangerously close to sealing itself off from any discordant feedback from reality. Even when issues of public policy are discussed in the outward form of an argument, often the conclusions reached are predetermined by the assumptions and definitions inherent in a particular vision of social processes.

To a remarkable extent, empirical evidence is neither sought beforehand nor consulted after a policy has been instituted. Facts may be marshaled for a position already taken, but that is very different from systematically testing opposing theories by evidence. Momentous questions are dealt with essentially as conflicts of visions."

So says Thomas Sowell, darling of conservative intellectuals as well as anyone who can appreciate such lucidity and humble honesty, so rare among modern American public thinkers. The above quote speaks volumes, as anyone who reads it is instantly tempted to apply its chastisements to those who disagree with them on any of a myriad of issues.

For example, many would argue that the above quote perfectly articulates how Hitler was allowed to become so powerful before finally being confronted. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and it has become conventional wisdom, especially on the right, that the failure to confront Hitler earlier resulted from wavering liberals willfully ignoring what was manifest for all to see.

This is a very selective reading of history, of course, as it ignores the unignorable fact that the populations of western Europe and the United States overwhelmingly rejected to prospect of war from 1933 through 1939 (or 1941 for the Americans). In other words, as much as Churchill or Roosevelt may have understood the threat, they governed free countries, and their vision meant nothing until their countrymen shared that vision.

The American people from 1933 through 1941 were not naive; nor were they appeasers. In actuality, they were right; they understood that the coming war would make the last one look tame by comparison and that everything, everything, must be done to avoid it. In December 1941, Hitler declared war on the United States and the American people, their ire sufficiently aroused, proceeded to carry out the largest-scale slaughters of civilians in the history of the world. Such horrible deeds should have been avoided, and to the American peoples' credit, they did all they could to avoid them.

The lesson of "appeasement" has since been bandied about as evidence that the United States needed to fight all manner of impoverished and defenseless enemies before they gained sufficient strength to pose an existential threat to the United States. As Sowell reminds us above, however, these situations (Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, etc.) were never assessed on their own merits; rather, they were crammed into a paradigm that has not existed since Hitler sucked on his pistol.

Facts are marshaled to support predetermined conclusions, but they are rarely allowed to sway one from a course of action he is already inclined to take. All ideological stripes are guilty of this propensity, of course, and I perceive it as becoming more entrenched by the day in our culture.

Many people currently in power are predetermined to seek confrontation with Iran. Iran is deemed to be not just irritatingly independent of American designs and dictates, but to be uniquely psychotic and evil. Indeed, the whole premise of the coming attack on that nation is that they will use nuclear weapons as soon as they have them. In other words, we must believe that Iran is suicidal. So we must kill them to keep them from killing themselves. Only those who proudly ignore evidence could embrace such an absurd predisposition.

Nonetheless, the predisposition exists. Therefore, when evidence is collected, it is only treated as authoritative if it can be twisted into buttressing this psychotic paranoia. Here's a fact: Iran has not started a war since before the United States existed. That fact does not jibe with the preconceived policy, however, so it is ignored. Iran, we are told, is incorrigibly aggressive.

Here's another fact: Iran was the mortal enemy of both the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Since the United States overthrew these governments, it has faced vicious insurgencies consisting, to varying extents, of the remnants of these regimes. Completely unwilling or incapable of admitting that Afghans and Iraqis might not love Americans, these insurgencies must be the work of......Iran!

Such willful disregard of history, logic, and objectively certifiable facts led America to war in Iraq, and it will lead America to war in Iran. Sowell's warning is wielded by the neo-cons to spell out the dangers of "appeasement", but never to spell our the dangers of war. War in these instances is far more dangerous than "appeasement", because there's not much danger in "appeasing" defenseless nations.

Another example: I attended a lecture by Robert Spencer as part of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. Mr. Spencer laid out an airtight case that there are quite a few Muslims out there with universal contempt for the West's concepts of human rights and dignity, especially as applied to women. Mr. Spencer's point was that, while evil exists among and within all people, the unique thing about Islamo-fascists is that their faith is not incidental to their crimes; it is the wellspring of them.

After hearing about how homosexuals are executed in several Muslim countries for the crime of.....being homosexual, a homosexual student got up and attempted to get the speaker to acknowledge some sort of moral equivalence between the discrimination that homosexuals face in the West and that which they face in the Muslim world.

Think about that. This person was so invested in his preconceived notion of moral relativism and Western sinfulness that he was prepared to sacrifice the very idea that he had a right to be alive in the interest of making his "point". This outwardly and openly gay member of a Gay Student Alliance couldn't understand where we get the moral authority to condemn those who would kill him just for living.

This would be the equivalent of an American Jew in the 1940's being denied access to a private golf club and saying, "well I might as well live in Nazi Germany". After this gay man insulted gay people everywhere by his conduct, a middle-aged Arab man came to the mic and berated the speaker for implying that it was wrong to execute homosexuals. God had forbidden sodomy, he said, and homosexuals deserved death for their conduct.

Was this man drowned out in boos and jeers, berated as the provincial and hateful bigot that he so clearly was? No. Why? Because he was an Arab. And Arabs of course, in the worldview of the young gay man and the student audience at large, are oppressed by the powerful, so all of their sins are somehow the fault of the West and, in any case, we have no moral authority to critique their "customs" or "culture".

Try telling a neo-con that Iraq posed no conceivable threat to the United States in 2003 and that the invasion was manifestly illegal. Try telling a big-government liberal that welfare has destroyed the black family. Try discussing Victorian literature with a brick wall.

These anecdotes should make it clear to use that this mentality is poisoning out minds and our country. There are millions of Americans who would find fault in George W. Bush or Bill Clinton if one of them cured cancer. Millions. There are millions more who have their mind made up, our current president included, and go through life seeking out reinforcing "facts" from the growing ranks of the equally incurious, the auto-lobotomized masses, where free speech is only free because it isn't worth anything anymore.