Light On Dark Water

Sunday Night Journal — September 11, 2011

It often seems to me that no one of genuinely conservative temperament and instincts is ever entirely at ease in the mental atmosphere of the United States. As has been pointed out many times, the whole spirit of the place is fundamentally progressive, and a major component of what American conservatives seek to conserve is the promise of a continually improving future. But if you’re the sort of person who believes not only that things could get worse but that there’s a fairly good chance that they will get worse, that the capacity of the human race to improve itself is quite limited, and that every improvement is subject to the law of unintended consequences, you just don’t ever feel fully on board the progress train. Whether you’re on the last car, looking back at the landscape disappearing behind you, or up front with the engineer, fretfully anticipating dangerous curves, damaged tracks, and menacing obstacles, you are never very confident that the journey is going to end well, and that you might not better have stayed home.

From this perspective, the American left and right appear to be in fundamental agreement, in that they both believe that tomorrow can and should be better than today: they both believe in some variation of the traditional American idea of progress. The right believes that the bright future is to be attained by unleashing the enterprising genius of the people, with little interference from the government. The left believes that the people need mostly need to be restrained, and that the government must intervene constantly to protect them from themselves and each other. In a nutshell, it’s the old argument which pits equality of opportunity against equality of result.

Also from my perspective, it is immediately obvious that there is some truth in both views, and that in each case that there is a valid point to be made in favor of what they advocate and against what they denounce. Obviously the wealth of this country was produced mainly by enterprise and invention, and it is foolish to contemplate the redistribution of wealth without considering whether your actions will result in there being little to distribute. Equally obviously, enterprise and invention do not always operate ethically when left to themselves (the institution of slavery serves as sufficient illustration of that fact), and there are always predators who must be restrained by the force of law. And there are always those who cannot provide adequately for themselves and must be helped by others.

Both sides tend to press their own case in a Manichean sort of way—forces of good vs. forces of evil, and as we all know this is a big part of the reason for the extreme levels of hostility in political life. But underlying the programs of both is the assumption that we can do something about our problems: most problems can be solved, given the willingness to do so.

This is certainly not a bad thing in itself. It is surely a major part of the reason why we have in fact solved many problems. The conservative voice whispers but the solutions have introduced their own problems and that’s generally true, but surely even the most pessimistic of us can admit that sometimes people really do succeed in making things better, and that to believe the attempt is worth making is not necessarily foolish utopianism.

When Americans see a problem, we think “Somebody ought to do something about that.” And a significant number of us follow that thought with “And that somebody is me.” I am not usually one of these people, and I’m glad we have them. They may sometimes be quixotic, and they may sometimes be partially or completely wrong about what they want to accomplish. But on the whole I think we’re better off for the prevalence and strength of this impulse.

It has its limits, though. It can lead us to think not only that we can Do Something about every problem, but that when we have done it the problem will be gone. It becomes an ideological commitment, in which one believes that even the biggest problems have fairly straightforward solutions, and that the only moral thing for us (that is, society at large) to do is to implement them. Do-something-ism becomes do-everything-ism. It is not content with modest measures, but is determined to be radical, to solve the problem at its root, so that it will cease to be a problem.

It is not enough to help the poor; we must have a War on Poverty. It is not enough to take prudent straightforward measures to protect ourselves from homicidal fanatics; we must have a War on Terror. One of those notions comes from the left, the other from the right, but they originate in the same American confidence that there is a solution to every problem, and that big problems must be addressed by big plans from a big government. The conventional voices of the left and the right all want a big government, either for social justice (on the left) or for national security (on the right); they differ in what they want it to to do, but they agree that it must be very big and very powerful. (I emphasize “conventional” because there are those on the right who question our militarization, and those on the left who question our centralization.)

This is a very American way of approaching things, and one hardly needs to point out the hubris that may go along with it. America has done so much: why should there be anything at all that we can’t do, if we but choose to and set our will to it? With the economy a mess, with social life deteriorating, with our military ventures failing to transform the Middle East, we now seem to be coming to the end of that fantasy. Now that the money has run out, and there has begun to be some recognition that we can’t keep borrowing and printing more of it indefinitely, we may hope to see some lessening of our destructive over-confidence.

There are many good things which might never have been if the people who attempted them had listened to people like me. But sometimes the conservative voice that says you can’t really solve that problem; you can only alleviate it is right. And the more fundamental the problem, and the more grandiose the plan for solving it, the more likely that is to be true. There is, in the end, only one truly radical solution, and that is the Gospel, which never promised an end to trouble in this world.

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Although this piece is not specifically about 9/11/2001, it was written with that anniversary very much in mind; specifically, with the ill-advised war in Iraq and the weird, sometimes scary, internal security measures which were responses to that attack in mind. I'm sixty-two years old. I'm not going to live long enough to get over being bothered by the fact that the United States has a Department of Homeland Security.