It was hard to detail all the things we lost as eight years of cronyism and anti-intellectualism, the disempowering of expertise, research, studies, and specialists began. But isn't it fascinating, now in hindsight, to look back and compare the different outcomes from the radically different worldviews?
I know postmodernists like to take potshots at the Enlightenment, but like literacy, the Enlightenment gave an important base for the pomos to branch off FROM. The Bush "post-rationalists" were a nightmare of authoritarian relativism, and I am of great hope that some good academic types will spend time exploring all the various aspects and contradictions and ironies embodied in authoritarian relativism, not just in its thought processes, but also in its outcomes, in the thorny knots in public affairs it tied us all up in.
Like "proving" absence, as when the U.S. demanded Saddam Hussein "prove" he didn't have WMD. I've revisited this conundrum recently, while listening to Ron Suskind's "The Way of the World" and "One-Percent Solution" on audio book. Suskind of course was the one who first clued us in on how deep the post-rationalist thinking went, with his famous quotation about the Bush Administration's loose association with the so-called "reality-based universe."
But the demand on Saddam to prove absence, which left me gasping at the time for its unabashed fallacious thinking, is made even worse when we see in "The Way of the World" that the British spy agency had turned an internal security officer high up in Saddam's government, an officer who was offering detailed and highly credible information about Saddam's WMD programs before the war started, but it wasn't the information the Bushies wanted to hear, so the source was blown off, not even used as an intelligence asset DURING the war.
And of course, Cheney's twisted logic that gave us the "one-percent solution" remains probably the most logically tortured post-rational policy in the history of the modern world.
But now... BRAINS ARE BACK! Yay!
Link: Goodbye, Anti-intellectualism. Brains are Back! | Newsweek Voices - Michael Hirsh | Newsweek.com.
THE WORLD FROM WASHINGTON Michael Hirsh
Brains Are Back!
After eight years of proud incuriosity and anti-intellectualism, we now have a leader who values nuance and careful thought.
Published Nov 7, 2009
For two days now Americans have celebrated the idea that we may have atoned finally for our nation's original sin, slavery, along with its long legacy of racism. We have rejoiced in the world's accolades over the election of a multicultural African-American to the presidency after nearly eight years of cringing in shame as the Bush administration methodically curdled our Constitutional values and sullied our global reputation as a beacon of hope. Every once in a while, it seems, we Americans do manage to live up to our ideals rather than betray them. Hooray!
I am just as happy as everyone else over all this global good feeling. But there's something else that I'm even happier about--positively giddy, in fact. And the effects of this change are likely to last a lot longer than the brief honeymoon Barack Obama will enjoy as a symbol of realized ideals. What Obama's election means, above all, is that brains are back. Sense and pragmatism and the idea of considering-all-the-options are back. Studying one's enemy and thinking through strategic problems are back. Cultural understanding is back. Yahooism and jingoism and junk science about global warming and shabby legal reasoning about torture are out. The national culture of flag-pin shallowness that guided our foreign policy is gone with the wind. And for this reason as much as any, perhaps I can renew my pride in being an American.
I'm under no illusion that Barack Obama will turn out to be Barack Panacea. In terms of holding major office, he's the least experienced president in memory. He'll probably screw up a lot of things, especially at first. The problems he faces – from the economic crisis to Iran's nuclear program – are just too hard. And I occasionally worry that in his eloquent eagerness to empathize and reach across cultural barriers, Obama may overreach in the opposite direction from Bush, stumbling into the appeasement of adversaries like Iran (whose buffoonish president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, practically invited him to do so this week by sending him the first letter of congratulations from Tehran since 1979). Obama must also guard against the sort of intellectual arrogance that characterized the "best and the brightest" of the Vietnam era.
But, frankly, these are all risks worth taking after nearly eight years of a president who could barely form a coherent sentence, much less a strategic thought. We can finally go back to respecting logic and reason and studiousness under a president who doesn't seem to care much about what is "left," "right" or ideologically pure. Or what he thinks God is saying to him. A guy who keeps religion in its proper place—in the pew. It's no accident that Obama is the first Northern Democrat to be elected president since John F. Kennedy. The "Sun Belt" politics represented by George W. Bush – the politics of ideological rigidity, religious zealotry and anti-intellectualism--"has for the moment played itself out," says presidential historian Robert Dallek.
[...]
One tragedy of the Bush administration is the amount of American brain power and talent that went unused, the options that went unconsidered, because they were seen to lack ideological purity. That era is over as we confront a desperate landscape—a serious recession and two prolonged wars. While he hasn't yet invoked Franklin Roosevelt, Obama seems to be embracing FDR's pragmatic approach in 1933 -- knowing that what the country may need, economically and politically, is not so much an organized program but a hodgepodge of bold experiments like the New Deal. "It is common sense to take a method and try it," FDR said back then. "If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."
[...]
And finally, we won't have to pretend any more, for the sake of civil conversation, that invading Iraq was a rational act. George W. Bush cited not a single study to justify such a dramatic move, nor did he convene a single strategic meeting to discuss it. (Did it ever occur to anyone to ask where the conceptual linkage between the rise of al Qaeda and the lack of democracy in the Arab world came from? The answer is: nowhere. No such study exists.) In order to sell this neck-wrenching and nonsensical shift away from the actual culprits of 9/11—al Qaeda--to the American public, Bush then broadened the grim and necessary war in Afghanistan into the strategic monstrosity we now routinely refer to as the "global war on terror." Because this became the official ideology of his administration, and because so many major media pundits and Democrats also persuaded themselves it was valid, we've all felt compelled to pay deference to it.
[That will be the hangover from the Bush Administration, all the various ingrained media genuflections to anti-logic by repetition and party-line marching, almost like a series of verbal tics that suddenly and radically become absurd posturing, in an instant, in a blinking of an eye, as the exposed spin-fiction no longer holds power, no longer carries force beyond the exigencies of currying favor with an Emperor's New Clothes administration no longer in power.
I wonder if some in the media will even notice that they are waking up from a bad dream. I imagine there will be some, the true sophistic media relativists (as opposed to the authoritarian relativists on the right) who will simply move their tape recorders to the other side of the political spectrum and transcribe as faithfully from that power group as it did from the anti-intellectual power group, without parsing that arguments are now supported by real studies, by policy papers, by entire meta-ethical schools of thought that have been subjected to critical review, replicable data, and comparative historical outcomes. There will be some in the media, I suppose, who won't even notice the difference. But some will.]
But now President-to-be Obama, who first came to national attention back in 2002 arguing that Iraq was a "dumb" war unrelated to the real fight against al Qaeda (a fact now borne out by the resurgence of the Taliban in the only battlefront that ever really counted, Afghanistan and Pakistan), will dictate a new reality in Washington. The "media elites" who've managed to escape whipping for their strategic blindness will have to quietly acknowledge this reality, even if they can't bring themselves to admit their errors. Victors, it is said, write the history. Obama is now about to write America's new history. Unless I mistake my man, its theme will be that reason and sense and that cardinal American virtue--pragmatism--are going to rule once again. And that's really something to celebrate.
Comments