Jane Galt is another one of my favorite bloggers. I wonder about her non de plume..........
From the desk of Jane Galt:
We're all gonna diiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!!
Right now I'm reading Christopher Hitchens' Why Orwell Matters. So far, I like it very much. He has some of Orwell's talent for the painfully apt phrase, which arouses in me both envy and wonder.
I was struck, this morning, on the train, by this passage:
Indeed, Orwell himself had been extremely quick to see the implication, of a world run by unnaccountable experts and technicians, that was contained in the advent of nuclear weaponry.
Orwell did not mean to suggest that the choices--between democratising and perishing--were exclusive. He thought there was a third alternative, namely the mutual and absolute destruction of all systems (and all non-combatants) by atomic warfare. But though he often wrote about this in the morbidly fatalistic way that was to become commonplace a decade or so after his death, he also saw the threat of nuclearism to the present, as well as the future.
The reason this struck me is that phrase -- morbid fatalism -- which so perfectly describes books like On the Beach and political groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Anyone over the age of twenty is occasionally confronted with the ignorance of today's youth of some phenomenon that was utterly ordinary when we were their age. It is always disconcerting, perhaps because none of us ever really thinks of ourselves as having grown up, which makes it hard to confront the fact of sixteen-year olds who are palpably not of our generation. Pay telephones (rotary telephones!), cassette tapes, typewriters, black and white televisions, Captain Kangaroo . . . how can they not know about these things?
But perhaps the strangest thing of all is to realize that these children, unlike my generation, did not grow up with the ever-present fear that they might at any moment evaporate, suddenly and without warning, into a fine cloud of radioactive dust. I think that if you had asked the children of my high school class, we would have placed the eventual probability of a nuclear war at higher than 50%. Now, to be sure, they worry about a terrorist attack. But I doubt that any of them has the worry that was always at the backs of our minds: that America, western civilisation, or the earth itself, might at any moment be irrevocably destroyed.
So after fifty years of sullenly expecting it, the doom everyone was waiting for has not only failed to come to pass--even the worry about it has faded utterly. And we achieved this neither by defeating the Soviet Union in battle, nor by unilaterally disarming, the two solutions that were most widely proposed as the only thing that could save us from this disastrous fate (and the former only in the few brief years before Russia tested her first nuclear weapon).
Why do I bring this up? Well, because the failure of one impending doom to come to pass has not stopped other prophets from pushing theirs.
No, I'm not talking about the environmentalists. I mean, that Day After Tomorrow movie Al Gore is pushing looks about as scientifically sound as one of those ads for pills that make you lose weight while you sleep WITHOUT DIET OR EXCERCISE. But not being an astrophysicist, geologist, meteorologist, or other scientific type, I do not consider myself qualified to comment on whether we are, or are not, emitting our way to hothouse hell.
I'm thinking of the purveyors of political and social doom. A few weeks ago, I was talking to a libertarian who was arguing that the Patriot Act was a one-way ticket to totalitarianism. We were violating fundamental rights that had been enshrined in the constitution for 200 years, and once we'd given them up, it was going to be a short step on the slippery slope to a police state. I share her fear of government intrusiveness. But this a markedly ahistorical view of the constitution and the liberties it allows us to enjoy, which is no more accurate for its extreme prevalence in libertarian circles. There is no primal state of liberty, created by the Constitution, from which we have slowly but inexorably been moving away. Liberties have been granted, and taken away, and granted again throughout the history of our country. Just off the top of my head: Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, the Palmer raids, the detention of the west coast Japanese in camps during World War II, the committment of anyone FDR or one of his minion's thought was especially dangerous to the war effort to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital during same, the McCarthy hearings--see this wonderful Richard Posner piece for a more elegant exegisis of the history of American liberties. The shape of liberty has changed over the 200 years of our existence, expanding in some places and contracting in others. There is no libertarian eden, located somewhere in the American past, from which we are now fallen, or falling.
Now, this doesn't mean that the Patriot Act is a good thing. But the fact that we have the Patriot Act now does not mean, as many libertarians ardently argue, that we will always have the Patriot Act. If the Patriot Act is bad, we should vigorously fight it. But there is no need to construct doomsday scenarios in which the existance of the Patriot Act consigns us to a totalitarian future.
Not to dump on libertarians exclusively, because everyone seems to do it. Social conservatives think we're doomed because the institution of marriage has been dangerously undermined, and is therefore likely to disappear entirely, along with God, patriotism, and the super-sized big mac meal, if we don't do something, quick. A large number of wonkish types (including, on odd days, me) spend a lot of time worrying about the possibility that our old-age entitlements will drive us into disastrous bankruptcy; few of us stop to reflect on the many, many unsustainable economic trends that have worried policy wonks right up until the moment that the impending doom suddenly solved itself under the inexorable logic of Herb Stein's famous dictum: "If something can't go on forever, it won't." Many liberals, like Paul Krugman, think that we nearly got into socioeconomic eden sometime around 1966, give or take, and have been staging a fast retreat towards armageddon ever since; marginal tax rates and some forms of social spending here take the part of doom-bringer, even though on every measure except simple inequality, the lives of the poor and the middle class seem to be richer in material goods, leisure, and quality of work than they were in the Golden Era of America's Middle Class.
That's not to say that liberals shouldn't want more progressive taxes and social spending, policy wonks more sustainably structured entitlements, social conservatives more traditional cultural values, or libertarians more freedom. It's perfectly reasonable to look at the way things are and say "they could be so much better if . . . " What we shouldn't do is compare our present to some highly airbrushed past, or mindlessly extrapolate trends, and thereby hastily conclude that we're all going to hell in a handbasket.
Madeline Albright spoke at my sister's graduation last weekend, and during her speech she said something to the effect that the world situation now was scarier than it had been at any time since World War II. This is a common belief -- commoner among liberals, but not exclusive to them. But huh? Think of what the world looked like to George Orwell. Nazism defeated, but at terrible cost--and no one knew, then, that Fascism wouldn't re-emerge. Russia, with Stalin still at its helm, devouring Eastern Europe. The most terrible weapon ever imagined recently used for the first time, and every nation with two scientists to rub together working hard to develop their own, personal holocaust-maker. The Cold War incipient in the battles over Berlin. And, if you're Orwell, a nasty case of tuberculosis, and no nice antibiotics to cure it. Things were bleak.
Yet we made it through, with a modicum of liberty and a splash of human kindness, and now democracy is springing up like mushrooms everywhere you look, poverty is steadily decreasing, though perhaps not as fast as we'd like, and wars are killing fewer and fewer humans each decade. The world is a pretty good place to live, and getting steadily better for almost everyone. As flawed as the human race is, we seem to be a lot better than the doomsayers think at muddling through. |
