Gerard has posted a rousing essay on American Liberty and Destiny. I want to point out the obvious, that my use of the concept of "uncertainty" was far more modest than his. I've been struggling with how to explain the notion of an hypothesis test, and what it means in a public policy setting. I've never been very successful. And the problem is that it gets very complicated, very quickly, when you're confronted with the difference between an "innocent until proved guilty" situation (normally called an alpha test) and a "guilty until proved innocent" situation (or a beta test). Most of us intuitively know that only the latter was appropriate to the Iraq situation, but about 30% of the US population, and 90% of the world's population, doesn't see it that way. Well, you can see why I hate to bring it up. So I hit on the idea of discussing uncertainty in an entirely different context than the Iraq War.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that uncertainty about cultural values is a whole lot tougher than uncertainty about an event, even a justification for war. In the latter case we know something happened, or will happen, but we don't quite know what. Or we don't know for sure who won an election in which the uncertainty about the vote count is greater than the margin of victory. We could simply call it a tie, but for some reason people are reluctant to do that. New Mexico has a nice process by which it resolves tied elections. The candidates play a hand of stud poker. That's really a pretty profound way of resolving such disputes. Very "democratic," in the best sense. It resolves uncertainty by playing a game of chance.
But I don't know what to say about uncertainty regarding founding values. To some extent, the debate is still unresolved. For instance, there is a heated argument among political philosophers over issues about "fairness" in establishing a constitution. And there is a general consensus among Public Choice theorists that the real issue isn't "freedom" or "liberty," but individual sovereignty. And the difference is important. But it's a long discussion, and the hour is late. So I just want to say that those quibbles aside, I found Gerard's comments accurate, and his passion quite stirring.
Until now, we have not seen "Americanism" as a calling... and if and when we do, we'll learn a lot about why we avoided it for so long. There was, in fact, some comfort in being "exceptional," but it's also a curse. And if we accept this project, and are successful, it will mean that we'll no longer be exceptional. And we can also only hope that we aren't so exceptional that the task is impossible. Tocqueville thought Americans were so exceptional, as a people, that we'd probably always be a unique case. If he had been right, that would have been catastrophic. Think about it.
No, our best days aren't behind us. With all the very valid uncertainty that we face, I'm pretty sure of that, at least. And you realize, of course, that we're going to have to convince an awful lot of people to share this destiny with us.
So it's a good thing that Lance Armstrong speaks French.
Posted by Demosophist at October 20, 2003 01:56 AM | TrackBack