Shorter David Brooks: “Hebraic mythology, ergo neoconservativism.”
“The Past Meets The Future”:
Mr. Past: Your big problem is you don’t understand the limits of what governments can achieve. Before this whole Iraq thing, you should have read Elie Kedourie’s essay on the British occupation in the 1920’s. This isn’t history repeating itself, it’s the same unbroken pattern.
Kedourie shows the whole history of Iraq is a story of “bloodshed, treason and rapine.” He shows how Iraqi politics have always been marked by “murderous currents,” “demonic hatreds,” “grisly spectacles,” Sunni violence and Shiite fanaticism. He shows naïve Westerners who thought they could change all this. He even quotes a memo from a British officer saying Britain should threaten to withdraw because then the Iraqis will be forced to behave responsibly. It’s all the same.
The central lesson of the past three years is that societies are not that malleable. Evils do not grow out of manageable defects in the environment that can be neatly fixed. We need to change our mentality, scale back to more realistic expectations.
Honestly, to this point I thought he was writing a mea culpa, and admitting that Iraq was a failure. I had no clue what “Mr. Past” was referring to, but I figured it might be some sort of fucked-up Reservoir Dogs homage.
Mr. Future: Actually, I did read Kedourie, but last night I also reread the Exodus story. The Exodus story reminds us that human beings can transform themselves and their situations. It reminds us that people who embark on generational journeys are the realistic ones, because they are the ones who see all the possibilities the future contains.
The what, now?
Looking to the Exodus story for practical geopoltical advice is realistic?
The finest things humans have done have been achieved in an Exodus frame of mind. This country was settled and founded by people who adopted the Exodus mentality. The civil rights movement was also led by such people.
Martin Luther King learned from Exodus that it is not enough to sit back and let history slowly evolve. It’s sometimes necessary to venture into the hazardous wilderness.
There are times amid the journey when the Promised Land can seem a long way off, when the words “next year in Jerusalem” seem unrealistic. But those are the times when the words mean the most. So of all the lessons to learn from the past three years, the worst would be to settle back into your cold-hearted acceptance of the status quo.
It’s not Jerusalem. It’s Iraq. And he’s definitely getting his metaphor a little twisty – it’s already clear that he’s agitating “stay the course” because change doesn’t happen overnight, but the exact point of the civil rights movement was that we didn’t want equality in 60 years. We wanted it fucking now.
Mr. Past: You had no right to force others to sacrifice for your distant visions of milk and honey. How long is the young woman in Najaf supposed to be oppressed while you wait for the Arab journey through chaos to end?
Your problem is that in your innocence, you have no idea how long historical processes take to work themselves out. You have no idea of the deep cultural continuities that stretch back over centuries and shape behavior. The people who suffer for democracy should see the wages of their labor sometime in their own lives.
Mr. Future: Because you are so arrogant, you assume I am an idiot. The Exodus story prepares us for all that. It is not the story of liberation, but of the long, troubled march to freedom.
“Because you are so arrogant, you assume I am an idiot,” is totally going to be my new catchphrase. Also, this is the point at which I lost the ability to follow the column. Basically, he’s saying, “I know it’s going to take forever, we all know that!!!!1!” Except for the bit when it was going to take, like, a week. But then he goes on this fucking amazing tangent about how it’s fine that it will take us years to maybe establish democracy in Iraq, because a group of legendary Jews were in the desert 3500 years ago. This is where I had to go back and make sure I hadn’t missed something at the start, like it was really WorldNetDaily and not the New York Times, or something.
The Israelites had been damaged by their own oppression. They longed for freedom but were not ready for it. There were fights and divisions.
Moses told his men to “slay every man his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbor,” thus ordering the murder of 3,000 Israelites.
Tocqueville gets at this when he writes that freedom “is ordinarily born in the midst of storms, it is established painfully among civil discords, and only when it is old can one know the benefits.” The adolescence of freedom is painful, but what is the alternative?
A) Moses is a dick.
B) de Tocqueville was not talking about Exodus, you tool.
Mr. Past: The alternative is to develop a mind-set in which you don’t try insanely to solve great historical problems, but you understand that history is one unexpected thing after another. You seek balance. You navigate through the storms to keep some reasonable order intact for one more day. It never ends.
I don’t like Mr. Past as my straw man. He’s supposed to be a rabid atheist. Rabid atheists don’t believe in Exodus. And even as a straw man, he’s entirely more reasonable than Mr. Future.
Mr. Future: You will be surprised by the habits of mind you fall into. You will stop trying to end tyranny and pretty soon you will stop condemning it. You will develop a hardheartedness that flatters your moral vanity because it seems mature.
Remember, fewer Iraqis have died in the second Iraq war than in the first, when Saddam crushed the Shiite uprising we fomented. The world wasn’t bothered by that extermination — there were no rallies in the streets. We were all being realistic.
The nation will adopt one mind-set after the trauma of Iraq, yours or Moses’. Right now, the public mood is with you, but I can’t imagine yours will long prevail.
So, the war is only immoral if we top the first one’s death toll? And wanting to end a war is hard-hearted? Wait, we’re bleeding-heart liberals! We’re the ones who chicken out because we feel too much!
I also dig his certainty that America will adopt some monolithic worldview as a result of this war, because if there’s one thing that’s a horrifying new development in American politics? It’s partisanship.