David Brooks is:
- A frustrated philosophical historian?
- A bored op ed columnist?
- A wannabe Greek playright?
- Suffering from post traumatic writers syndrome?
Or, in the words of Shakespeare's Macbeth: "...a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
The Past Meets the Future
By David Brooks
The New York Times
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Photo credit: David Brooks (The New York Times)
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