On this 100th aniversary of the tragic sinking of the Titanic, it seems fitting to write a tribute to that historic event, but one which takes what lessons it may offer and applies them to our own ship of state today.
A story on the PBS Newshour yesterday (Friday, 4/13/12; http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/media/jan-june12/titanic_04-13.html) about an interesting New Yorker article (“Unsinkable: Why We Can’t Let Go of the Titanic,” by Daniel Mendelsohn; http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/16/120416fa_fact_mendelsohn) got me to thinking about the parallels between that ill-fated vessel, and our perhaps equally tragic nation. The parallels Mendelsohn drew were to Greek tragedy, to the themes of hubris, of Man v. Nature, of something glorious and admired and full of a sense of its own exceptionalism going down in flames, or icy waters, as the case may be. It is about too much smugness and too little pragmatism.
As Mendelsohn aptly put it: It’s too perfect, too much like a story, the “unsinkable” ship sinking on its maiden voyage. Like Oedipus, the flawless hero, swept up and sucked down by forces that grab hold of all those who eschew humility, the great Titanic was doomed by its own sense of perfection, or the sense of those who had invested their identities into it. It was about the limits of technology, about class and injustice, about the bracing, icy reality confronting the dreamed up ideal. It was, of course, the ideal of unsinkability rather than the reality of unpredictability which sank.
The United States is, in many ways, “the Titanic Nation,” this great ship of state launched by the culmination of European development, by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, full of a sense of its own exceptionalism, bigger than life, “unsinkable.” We are still on our maiden voyage, for the first couple of centuries in the history of a nation is still its infancy. And we are careening toward the icebergs of our hubris, of our uncompromising belief in our own exceptionalism, in our scoffing at the demands of pragmatic reality in deference to the oversimplified ideal we believe will always trump it.
Despite what many say, despite what many cling to, despite the satisfaction it may give to entertain the notion, in the final analysis, America is not an ideal; it is a nation, a product of history, a living, breathing, thriving and striving and faltering and self-correcting society, a work in progress, an on-going challenge to be met with a modicum of humility and a heavy dose of pragmatism. And it is the increasing rather than decreasing loss of this awareness that sends us hurtling toward unseen icebergs, destined, perhaps, to collide with them and rip ourselves to shreds in the process.
But we have not collided yet. We have not sunk yet, and do not have to. We can regain our humanity, our recognition of being nothing more or less than a nation struggling with the challenges of thriving in a complex and subtle world, a nation guided by wonderful values and founding principals, but a nation that is not invulnerable because of them, or beyond improvement in deference to them. Sometimes, we need to correct our course, to re-chart our trajectory, to avoid the obstacles that those who designed and launched us could not possibly have anticipated. Their design, and the course they charted for us, remain our foundation, but they do not remain the limits of who and what we are.
There are those in America today, too many, too loud, too smug, too full of hubris and folly, too natonally self-destructive, who insist that we must not evolve, that we must not develop our political economy to confront the challenges of today, that we must not adapt and grow and steer our course through the ever-dangerous waters of history. There are those who offend the spirit and character of the brilliant but historical and fallible men who drafted our Constitution by reducing it to a shallow sacred document, stripping it of its meaning, stripping it of its intent, and seeing in it only a mirror of their own blind ideology, whether its specific clauses actually mirror that ideology or not. (See. e.g., Right-Wing New-Speak.)
There are those who insist that a century-old non-empirical Austrian economic philosopher got everything right, and the entire empirical and analytical discipline of economics as it has developed ever since has gotten everything wrong, and who claim that theirs is the only reasonable position imaginable, all others being error. There are those who are as lost in their own blind ideologies, as insulated from reason and evidence, as any Medieval Inquisitor ever was, and who insist that that is what America is, that that is what America was meant to be. And they are steering us straight toward those icebergs of human folly, of ignorance, of hubris, of believing that an act of admirable engineering, whether technological or social institutional, whether a historically unprecedented giant ocean liner or a historically unprecedented national Constitution, once accomplished, need no longer be piloted in response to the realities as they are encountered, and can not possibly fail if only left to barrel ahead blindly.
As the economist and dynamical systems analyst Brian Arthur noted in his wonderful book, The Nature of Technology, these feats of engineering, of historical innovation, are not faits accompli, but are rather always works in progress, always tested and honed and refined by the reality of life and the challenges that it poses. The brilliance of our nation is not that we got it right once and for all, and only must adhere to that perfect, unsinkable design, but rather that we accomplished something admirable on which we can build, which we can continue to steer, which will take us farther than we ever imagined if only we continue the work rather then rest on ancient laurels.
We are, indeed, a Titanic Nation. But ours is one Greek Tragedy whose ending hasn’t yet been written. We are the ones who will write it. We are the ones who will determine whether it is written by our hubris and folly, or by our wisdom and humility. We are the ones who will either steer it into the icebergs that lay before us, or will continue to navigate our way among them, refining our institutions and developing our humanity to confront a reality that was not part of or foreseen by our original design, but rather is a part of what continues to make us . . . or break us.
As I like to say, let’s write our story well.
No Comments »
Yes, Denver Post’s most insane and inane columnist, John Andrews, published a column today advising that we need to defeat Harvard Law graduate, former Supreme Court clerk, and current CU Law professor Melissa Hart for CU regent, because we have to protect the university from professors (http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_16401229). And he doesn’t just mean protect governance of the university from any representation of faculty at all (there are currently none on the Board of Regents), but actually protecting the academy itself from its traditional definition as the home of academic discipline. Instead, Andrews assures us, the people want it to be more representative of popular opinion, and so we should impose a rule that the university affirmatively hire professors more representative of popular opinion.
Here’s what Andrew’s doesn’t get: Scholarship is a discipline, a methodology through which to distill observation and interpretation in ways far more useful for understanding systemic, causal relationships than any previous approach. Imposing on it some a priori requirement to represent a certain spectrum of lay beliefs is completely antithetical to its purpose, and what has set western science apart as a robust system of thought.
And it is precisely the kind of Medieval approach to knowledge that science and scholarship have whittled away at, this imposition of arbitrary cultural beliefs rather than subjecting them to the lathe of systematic scrutiny. One would have hoped that the battle over whether arbitrary opinion or systematic thought subjected to scientific methodology is superior in accuracy would have been settled by now, since we have about 400 years of experience pretty decisively settling it. But, alas, it is not to be so. Andrews quotes that any handful of random people know more than a cross-section of experts on the subject of their expertise, parroting a popular but absurd ideological conviction.
Andrews’ examples all prove his error: The stimulus package did avert an economic disaster, and was cost-effective, in light of the non-partisan CBO’s conclusion that it created between 1.3 million and 3.4 million jobs (do the math). Roosevelt’s New Deal spending, despite the information-deprived ideology to the contrary, resulted in about five years of phenomenal economic growth during the Great Depression, until FDR, seduced by this success, tried to implement budget-balancing measures.
Arbitrary opinion “benefits” from neither being tested, nor allowing itself to be tested, so that it can always declare itself correct despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And Andrews wants to “storm the gates” (in the words of his preferred candidate for regent) of the last refuge of systematic academic thought in America, and reduce it to just another ideological echo-chamber, under the delusion that he and his fellow Inquisitors are doing just the opposite.
Like his predecessors over the centuries, those products of scientific methodology that are inconvenient to his ideology are heresies, and the fact that the academy systematically dispells the absurdities that his camp clings to (evolution is a myth, etc.) means that it must be a left-wing ideological echo-chamber. Because in Andrews’ Bizarro world, all belief is arbitrary, but his arbitrary beliefs are absolute truths.
The Inquisition is returning in full force, folks. John the Inquisitor has long been writing such drivel, and the Denver Post has long been irresponsible enough to privilege it with column space (along with others, like Vince Carroll, who contribute to the vacuuming of intelligence from the minds of his loyal readers). “Political Fundamentalism” is a force to be reckoned with. And we had better reckon with it, very, very assertively.
No Comments »
