Great Mistakes and Great Men
by Joseph Sobran
Some years ago a Catholic historian took stock of the Second
Vatican Council, held in the early Sixties. He noted that the
condition of the Church since the Council had far surpassed the
darkest predictions and worst fears of the reactionaries.
"Prophets of doom" are commonly held in derision, but they are
often right. In fact they sometimes understate the worst
possibilities, and events show not that they were correct, but
that history held grim surprises even for those who were trying
to imagine what could go wrong. Time may make a Cassandra look
like a cockeyed optimist.
Opponents of the U.S. Constitution feared that it would result
in big government. They couldn?t dream how big the federal
government would actually become, far exceeding in size, scope,
and power what had been called the "tyranny" of George III. Nor
did they foresee such collateral results as the Civil War and
U.S. involvement in two world wars.
If those pessimists said to us now, "Well, we tried to warn
you," defenders of the Constitution might reply that these
things happened because the Constitution was abandoned or
perverted. The pessimists might fairly argue: "But you said it
was a foolproof plan! You said its built-in safeguards would
prevent the centralization of power! Evidently you were wrong."
Again, both sides in the Civil War expected a short contest. A
few months of skirmishing, and everything would be settled. One
pessimist warned that it might last three years and take tens
of thousands of lives; it lasted four years and claimed 620,000
lives.
One Southern senator nearly called it right. Alexander Stephens
of Georgia warned that if the South seceded, it would mean a
war the South could only lose. And in that case, the North
would be able to do everything the South accused it of wanting
to do. He was correct. Secession backfired, bringing on the
South?s worst fears ? and then some.
Today the "isolationists" ? the patriots who wanted the United
States to stay out of World War II ? are spoken of as if they
were obviously wrong. But they were only wrong in failing to
see just how bad the consequences of the war would be.
Japan and Germany were defeated, but they were replaced by a
far more terrifying enemy: the Soviet Union, which, shortly
after the war, posed a threat to this country that Japan and
Germany never did. Apart from seizing ten countries in Central
Europe, the Soviets acquired a nuclear arsenal with which they
could annihilate American cities. Before the war, nobody had
imagined this even as a remote possibility. It was our alliance
with the Soviet Union that enabled its spies and sympathizers
to lay their hands on American nuclear secrets.
In the Sixties, a few prescient people warned that escalating
the war in Vietnam might result in a conflict as serious as the
Korean War. Actually, more Americans finally died in Vietnam
than in Korea.
At about the same time, Lyndon Johnson declared "war on
poverty." He pledged that if his new programs failed to
"eliminate" poverty, they would be abandoned. Conservative
skeptics warned that the programs wouldn?t work, which was true
enough; but none foresaw how devastating the welfare system
would be to the cities and black family life. Yet even when the
damage was obvious, the programs proved politically hard to
reverse.
One of the odd things about our mistakes is that after we
commit ourselves to them, it becomes difficult even to perceive
them as mistakes. We adapt to them, justify them, become
dependent on them, and forget the alternatives to them, until
we no longer have the mental detachment we had before we made
them. They become almost impossible to disown, and we sacrifice
our judgment to them.
And over time, our wrong turns are normalized and exalted as
steps in the epic of progress. Anyone who proposes to correct
them is given the standard homily:
"We can?t turn back the clock!"
It?s amazing how seldom societies ask themselves, before making
a fateful decision, some simple questions:
What if this turns out to be a disastrous mistake? Will we be
able to undo it?
Maybe that?s why history sometimes looks like a tragic trail of
irreversible blunders, and why those who made them are
commemorated as our greatest men. After all, who wants to build
monuments in honor of pessimists?
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