History as Tragedy

In today's Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan musters a defense of her earlier critical column on Bush's second inaugural address. In essence she argues that Bush is over-reaching in a time of peril; that he should be content to see through the agenda he has already undertaken. To undertake more would imperil his already considerable accomplishments. Underlying this is a tragic view of history.

She writes:

Here is an unhappy fact: Certain authoritarians and tyrants whose leadership is illegitimate and unjust have functioned in history as --ugly imagery coming--garbage-can lids on their societies. They keep freedom from entering, it is true. But when they are removed, the garbage--the freelance terrorists, the grievance merchants, the ethnic nationalists--pops out all over. Yes, freedom is good and to be strived for. But cleaning up the garbage is not pretty. And it sometimes leaves the neighborhood in an even bigger mess than it had been.

Am I saying we shouldn't support freedom then?

Hardly. But we should remember as we do it that history, while full of opportunity, is also a long tale of woe. And human vanity--not only that of others, but our own--only complicates our endeavors.

Such warnings have long been a staple of Cold War foreign policy "realists" and of the left-wing "declinists" who emerged in the wake of Vietnam, but Peggy Noonan is neither of these. She is a prominent figure on the right, the "religious right" at that, and mort importantly she was a spokesperson for the "Reagan Revolution" that, if nothing else, was notable for its optimism. Why then the pessimism?

Noonan's pessimism is rooted in a sense that the world is spinning out of control. The freedom that George Bush exalts terrifies her. Bush argues an almost Hegelian, [perhaps "Fukuyaman" would be a better term] optimism that freedom will bring progress and ultimate peace. Many commentators on the left have disputed that position, arguing that development must come first and must be managed before political freedom can be considered. But Noonan's concern is not that. She manifests a very Catholic sense of the limits of human endeavor unaided by supernatural agency. And, she like many other religious people, is not at all comfortable with the excesses of western materialism. In a telling example she cites approvingly the Pope's disappointment with the outcome of the Polish revolution. She writes:

Pope John Paul II helped free his beloved Poland from the Soviet yoke. But when he looked at Poland some years after its freedom was won, he wondered if many of his kinsman had not chosen a kind of existential enslavement to Western materialism. He wondered if his people were not in some ways less free. It wasn't a stupid question. It was at the heart of life.

Peggy Noonan's apprehensions, and those of the Pope, are much the same as those animating the Islamic jihadists: a sense that the spread of western freedom, western capitalism, and westernized bourgeois culture, threatens religious values that lay "at the heart of life." Her words serve to remind us that opinions on the Iraq war are not just a matter of Republican versus Democrat, or left versus right, or even Christian vs Muslim. The issues involved transcend those tired old disputes. We are in a time of transformation comparable to those of the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. the future is unsettled and obscure and into it people are reading the hopes and fears that lay closest to their hearts. The real dispute is between those who embrace the unknown future and those who fear it.