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Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Answers
Your Curmudgeon is a lifelong connoisseur of opinion munications.
Yes, you read that right. Communication assumes at least the possibility of a response. But folks who municate aren't interested in your backtalk. They deliver their opinions to you with unanswerable one-way devices such as lapel buttons and bumper stickers: devices of genus municata. (The better-heeled buy time on radio and television with which to enlighten us, but that's beyond the scope of this screed.)
Among the more interesting specimens of munication are those which purport to have an answer. No doubt you've seen a few. "Christ Is The Answer" and "War Is Not The Answer" are fairly commonplace. Just yesterday your Curmudgeon spied his first "Obama Is The Answer" bumper sticker. Of course, a munication doesn't have to include the word "answer" to offer one; many such exhortations merely call for a specific public-policy action. But missing from all these items is any suggestion of what the question might be.
Very few "answers" directly imply the "question" to which they apply. An answer, in the political realm, presupposes a matter of public import that demands some sort of response or adjustment from government. He who municates an "answer" to such a matter is implying that the actions he's suggested will bring about its rectification, or at least will assist in ameliorating it. But plainly, to decide whether or not to accept the answer, one must know what the question is; otherwise, there are no criteria by which to evaluate it, whether before or after its implementation.
Your Curmudgeon has always been specially tickled by the "War Is Not The Answer" munications. Not the answer to what? Stemming the tide of illegal immigrants? Keeping order in the streets? Junior's perpetually runny nose? War is most definitely not the answer to those things, but what about Nazism? What about the North Korean invasion of the South? What about the tyrannies of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein? What about the prospect of nuclear weapons in the hands of Iran's theocracy? A good solid war, well provisioned with bullets, tanks, and laser-guided bombs, would clean those problems up rather nicely. Indeed, in the first three cases, that's exactly what occurred.
(Regarding "Christ Is The Answer," your Curmudgeon merely hopes that the question doesn't involve politics, one's personal financial status, or the persistent scoring drought in the NHL. And as for "Obama Is The Answer," Barack Obama doesn't even have a clue, much less an answer; his sole asset is his personal charm. That's why his campaign is a pure cult of personality, run entirely on messianic bombast.)
Thomas Sowell has scathed the purveyors of "solutions" to notional social and economic "problems" for many a year now. The persistent belief that conditions deemed undesirable by some can and must be "solved" by government action has provided him with material for several books and innumerable essays. Dr. Sowell is eloquent in defense of what he terms the "tragic vision:" in essence, that all things have a price, and that some prices are beyond Man's purse. Certain conditions pertaining to Man's societies cannot be eradicated -- in some cases, cannot even be ameliorated -- without bringing about still worse. To the social-engineering mindset of an American liberal, this is black heresy, not to be admitted to political discourse. They routinely call down the foulest epithets upon the head of anyone who dares to suggest it.
In recent years, our discourse has changed somewhat. From roughly 1960 to 1990, liberal nostrums were proposed as responses to reasonably well specified problems, though there were always many who disputed that the "problems" were real, or urgent, or the proper domain of government. The nation reeled from the catastrophic consequences from these "answers:" an explosion of crime, welfarism, illegitimacy, lawsuits, racial restiveness, legal instability, taxation and inflation. But whereas an open-minded person is willing to say of such consequences, "Well, that didn't work, so let's undo it and think a bit harder," a liberal promoter operates from an assumption of intellectual and moral superiority which inhibits the admission of error or misjudgment. This impels him to shift his ground from the utilitarian realm to field of moral prescription: "We are obligated to do this, regardless of the consequences; it's simply the right thing to do."
By this shift, liberals' "answers" are briskly divorced from any relevant "questions" against which they might be validated; they become commandments, to be municated, not discussed. Given the way the Left castigates us on the right as would-be theocrats, the irony could hardly be more extreme.
The most vivid current case of an utterly acontextual answer being urged upon us is the hysteria over global warming. When there was some evidence that suggested that the Earth might indeed be getting warmer, the subject could be discussed on rational grounds. Is this a problem in the making? Present trends continuing, will the consequences be grave? If so, what can we do and what would it cost? Inasmuch as the proposed answers have all been tantamount to retreating to Cro-Magnon standards of living, while even their most ardent proponents admitted that the effect on biospheric temperature would be slight, few persons are willing to consider them. Matters have recently become far worse for the warmistas, as global surface temperatures have declined since 1998, which is consistent with recent indications that the oceans and the high atmosphere are cooling as well. But that hasn't brought an end to the warmistas' insistence that we've got to act now! It's obligatory -- not to be discussed -- regardless of whether a climate-related problem exists, regardless of whether human action could do anything about it, and regardless (of course) of what it would cost or on whom the burden would fall.
(For a great deal of excellent, detailed coverage of this subject, please see Jack Lacton's excellent blog Ker-Plunk!)
Recently, the esteemed Dr. Helen Smith asked whether facts matter to liberals. No doubt they do, to some; no political family is homogeneous. But among liberal activists, the answer is that to the overwhelming majority, what matters is:
- Winning politically;
- Maintaining their self-image as intellectually and morally above the common run of Man.
To these desiderata, facts are irrelevant at best, a damnable distraction at worst. That being the case, we're in for quite a lot of munication: "answers" to questions no one has asked, "solutions" to problems that might not even exist.
Comments
Excellent points about war, Francis. With all the talk of having the answer and having ‘meaningful dialogue’ unfortunately there are plenty of the Leftist persuasion who aren’t interested in any ‘answers’ but those of their own opinions.
Posted by Aurora on 03/27/2008 at 07:42 AMOf course, if you take the “war is not the answer” munication to the next verse:
“only love can conquer hate”
You end up with the following logical conclusions:
“War is not the answer” logically begets “We should not have gone to war with the Nazis”
“Only love can conquer hate” logically begets “We should have LOVED the Nazis”
Therefore, using the logic strings detailed above, I must conclude that liberals must have LOVED the Nazis.
So there you have it. Liberals love Nazis.
By the by, in case any of you might have missed it, this was all written in humor, please don’t think I was actually serious. I am merely trying to reinforce the ideas of the OP, that a universal demonization of war is really quite silly.
As was stated in the OP, a complete resistance to the evils of war would lead to evils far worse than those of war. Proof of this is the fact that a “pre-emptive strike” against Nazi Germany in 1933 or 1934 would have resulted, when compared to the actual war, in a relatively bloodless, and quite brief intervention that would have saved millions. However, the universal belief that war is to be avoided at all costs merely introduced a much bigger, more violent, and far more costly war in the end.
Posted by on 03/28/2008 at 03:05 PM"Obama is the answer”
You’re joking, right? Please?Posted by on 03/28/2008 at 10:32 PM
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