[Mb-civic] The Past Meets the FutureBy DAVID BROOKS

[Michael Butler]

The New York Times
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April 13, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Past Meets the Future
By DAVID BROOKS

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.