eudaemonia

Blind and "in the Box"

Joe Klein of Time, sagely observes, "It should come as no great revelation that George W. Bush is a wantonly decisive President. He decides Ariel Sharon is good and Yasser Arafat is evil, even though seasoned diplomats tell him it is not wise to make such sweeping judgments."

It is hard to more thoroughly capture the disconnectedness from reality, and structural bias that is conveyed in this sentence.

The purported insight adverted to is that the current international situation is merely the natural result of a deeper theoretical process operating sub-rationally. Such processes are immune to benighted moral judgments. In this parallel universe, seasoned diplomats, and their fawning MSM acolytes, are akin to interior designers tasked with making our common ontology a bit more livable. In short appeasement. That he, the President, fails to acquiesce in the policy corollaries to this decidedly unempirical theory, that he no doubt "doesn't grasp", is merely another example of his cowboy stupidity.

This is to engage a child. The President understands the theoretical judgment and has rejected it as without foundation, root and branch. International relations is not governed by impersonal forces but by very personal actors exercising judgment in the application of force. Nothing is more apparent from the study of history that when reason sleeps monsters roam free. The Joe Kleins of our world would explain any international state of affairs as the result of subrational forces. Any explanatory theory that explains everything explains nothing. And as Professor Yogi Barra says, "If you stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything."

I'll pick up this thought at a later date.

posted by spelunker @ 10:44 AM