Via LGF, The Tyranny of "BUT". Wow, this is an awesome essay:
The current proliferation of these words reflects the popularity of equivocation, of covering all bets. Or maybe it is deeper -- proof of an insidious relativism that now infects our thinking generally. There must be various explanations why so many of us cannot flat-out distinguish between right and wrong, smart and dumb, evil and good, or stasis and action -- period.
Some of the blame can go to a certain deductive, anti-empirical view of the universe that has become institutionalized in our schools and popular culture. Timidity and the fear of losing our comfortable lifestyle may play a role as well. Clintonism and the idea that Americans did not know what "is" really meant left an unfortunate legacy.
In the new orthodoxy, for example, all cultures are a priori equal, so any evidence -- like a public Iranian stoning, racist Saudi op-ed, or Sudanese genital mutilation or two -- that, in fact, there exist vast civilization fault-lines has to be qualified. Force is presumed always wrong in our enlightened, postmodern world, so any proof that it actually solves problems -- such as Milosevic or the Taliban -- must be qualified. The United States is across the board dubbed unthinking, clumsy, and often sinister, so any evidence -- such as its efforts in Afghanistan -- suggesting that it is, in fact, sophisticated and benevolent, requires prevarication.
Life in the West is easy and good. So any course of action that calls for sacrifice and danger -- higher gas prices, treasure and lives risked, and terrorist reprisals -- is de facto wrong. Our enemies are usually seen as poor and less educated rather than as medieval, so that when they murder, explode, and terrorize us they are to be understood, rather than detested, opposed, and defeated. Oppression and exploitation are deemed reasonable pretexts for terrorism, so when multimillionaires like bin Laden carry out -- and pampered Sheiks fund -- terrorism, qualification and nuance are required.
In the same fashion, religions must all be founded on principles of peace, so that when Islamic radicals -- in Pakistan, the Philippines, Nigeria, Afghanistan, and Europe -- daily kill Christians and Westerners, and do not act like Buddhists, we must assume that they are either deranged or using exceptional exegeses not being promulgated in thousands of mosques or madrassas.
The old, less-sophisticated America has gone the way of the coalmine, steel factory, and farm. Indeed, there are very few dinosaurs left who, after using reason and logic to discern good from evil, will grudgingly accept the world as a tragic place, inhabited by bad characters who cause suffering and pain -- in a world of constant dangers, both natural and human. Not surprisingly, the world of "He's no damn good" and "I've had about enough of that nonsense" is gone -- replaced by different sorts of people who speak in different sorts of ways. Hence we see the ascendancy of our ubiquitous BUT.
Mr. Bush, who may lament this loss of absolutes, is, of course, caricatured for his accent and occasional mispronunciation. Yet perhaps the real reason for the unease is that he -- more so than his diplomats -- employs the old language of "smoke 'em out" or "dead or alive," and so draws into question our comforting assumption that the world is too complex to be so easily fathomed by the mere senses and by intuition. Mr. Reagan's "evil empire" chilled many who had been accustomed to Jimmy Carter's "no inordinate fear of Communism" -- perhaps in the same manner that the "axis of evil" is now scarier than Mr. Clinton's "I feel your pain."
Wow!
To dethrone the reign of BUT, I suggest a revolution led by therefore -- a better adverb which follows from, rather than sidesteps or elides, the truth... Language is the mirror of morality... in times of crisis we need concrete language to reflect our moral clarity.
Yaaay! Great article. Read it, even though I'm an ass and quoted most of it.
Friday, January 17, 2003
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