The arguments in this article made little impression on me; there’s little there that hasn’t been said over and over again. What struck me was the openness with which it expressed the growing polarization of debate. Doherty breaks the population down into “hawks” and “doves”, with no acknowledgement of any shading in between. There is no place in Doherty’s paradigm, for instance, for an observer who thinks that war would probably have been necessary, but that our approach to the war contained serious and potentially very destructive blunders. That person becomes a “peacenik”, in the same category as raving lefties who would demonstrate for any reason or no reason at all. There is no place for a person who has deep misgivings about the war, but reluctantly accepts it as a necessity. Subtleties are not recognized. Hawk or dove, choose your side.
This is becoming very common, and it bears uncomfortable echoes of the “liberals vs. conservatives” sniping of the last election. I find this trend discomforting: the evaporation of the center is not a beneficial trend.
This item struck me:
…nothing short of the actual outcome of the war will settle whether waging it was a good idea.
From a purely logical perspective, this construction is unacceptable, and it’s surprising to see it in a publication called “Reason”. Since we cannot know what the outcome of the course not taken would have been, the outcome of the course taken cannot prove that this course was superior or inferior to the other. If the war results in catastrophe, that does not mean, with any certainty, that not waging it would not have resulted in greater catastrophe.
The existence of two mutually exclusive courses of action does not mean that one of those courses is the right one and the other the wrong one. We cannot say that because course A had a positive outcome, course B would necessarily have had a negative outcome, or vice versa.
The outcome, good or bad, will doubtless teach many lessons, but nobody who respects clear thought will be able to use it to prove anything about the hypothetical consequences of traveling the road not taken. I’m sure that many people will try to use it that way - clear thought is not exactly fashionable these days - but that use will be essentially invalid, wherever it crops up. |
