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Should Have Known

by Christopher Chantrill
June 12, 2007 at 9:48 am

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THE AVERAGE American may wonder, after the failure of the immigration bill in the United States Senate last week, how such a gigantic cock-up is possible. We look at our own lives, at our jobs, our families, and say: How is it possible to get anything so screwed up? Surely President Bush and the Republicans senators who worked with Senator Kennedy to craft the deal should have known that it would blow up in their faces. Surely they should have known that the Republican base was heavily invested in securing the border before amnestying the illegals.

But let us be careful of this “should have known” approach to political analysis. Here is the judgment of a best-selling author on what we “should have known” about the great issues of our time.

[We] as Americans should have “known then what we know now”--not only about the invasion of Iraq but also about the climate crisis, and what would happen if the levees failed to protect New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, and about many other fateful choices that have been made on the cases of flawed and even outright false information.

When best-selling author Al Gore in The Assault on Reason argues the great issues of the time from the 20-20 hindsight of the ambitious politician then men and women of good will are bound to hesitate before passing judgment on President Bush and the Senate Republicans.

Let us taste a few words of Charles Murray to cleanse our palates from the bitter taste of what Disraeli called the “high game” of politics. Politicians may live or die by the cheap put-down, but the rest of us must resolve to do better.

In Human Accomplishment Murray talks about what it takes to become a “significant figure” in science and the arts and produce work of excellence in human accomplishment. It is easy, he writes, to overlook how much work it takes to produce excellence. And not just work, but wasted work.

Nor is all of this work productive. What we see of the significant figures’ work is typically shadowed by an immense amount of wasted effort—most successful creators produce clunkers, sometimes far more clunkers than gems.

It was Thomas Edison who said that his work was one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

Should-have-known is the first resort of the shallow mind. Of more interest is the point at which the should-have-known becomes a question of throwing good money after bad. In the week after Majority Leader Harry Reid withdrew the immigration bill from the Senate floor we are in exactly such a situation.

Let us stipulate that President Bush and the Republican Senators in on the immigration deal “should have known” that the Republican base would upchuck the Senate’s immigration bill. But let us rise above the level of Vice-President Gore’s analytical method. Anyway, it is water under the bridge. This week’s question is: What should they do next?

Should they try, try, and try again, following the advice of Winston Churchill: “Never give in — never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty.” That is what he told the boys of his old school, Harrow, in 1941. And very good advice it was too.

But then he continued: “[N]ever give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”

So the question for President Bush, as he returns to the United States from a triumphant visit to Albania, is whether to go on with his immigration bill, or whether to give in to “convictions of honor and good sense.”

Based on our experience of President Bush over the last six years, we can expect that he will continue trying to negotiate a bill that will pass the Congress.

But enough about President Bush. What about us?

In the last week Michael Barone has noticed that if you listen to the presidential candidates you would assume “that the Republican and Democratic primary electorates are living in two different nations.” Republicans are worried about global Islamism; Democrats are worried about global warming.

Both party electorates are serious about their major concerns. They believe that the question is closed. Republicans believe that we must fight the long war against Islamic terrorism through to victory, whatever the cost. Democrats believe we must save the planet from global warming, whatever the cost.

In another ten years, the moral equivalent of Al Gore will be writing a best-seller arguing with flat-footed humor that back in the oughts people “ought to have known.” But whether he will declare that we should have known that global Islamism or global warming—or even illegal immigration—was a chimera we will have to wait to find out.

Human survival is not built upon “should have known.” It is based on faith, hope, and love—and hard work.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com.

Buy his Road to the Middle Class.

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Responsibility

Seeckt: "to make of each individual member of the army a soldier who, in character, capability, and knowledge, is self-reliant, self-confident, dedicated, and joyful in taking responsibility [verantwortungsfreudig] as a man and a soldier."
MacGregor Knox et. al., The dynamics of military revolution, 1300-2050

Living the Virtues

When recurrently the tradition of the virtues is regenerated, it is always in everyday life, it is always through the engagement by plain persons in a variety of practices, including those of making and sustaining families and households, schools, clinics, and local forms of political community.
Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

presented by Christopher Chantrill

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