Not Picking A Fight

I'm late, but this is a pretty great column by David Brooks. I love this section with its focus on the intelligence of the individual:

At some point, it's worth pointing out that it wasn't the centralized system that stopped terrorism in this instance. As with the shoe bomber, as with the plane that went down in Shanksville, Pa., it was decentralized citizen action. The plot was foiled by nonexpert civilians who had the advantage of the concrete information right in front of them -- and the spirit to take the initiative.

Like Brooks, I think this notion that the state can protect us at all times from all things is fucking absurd, delusional and collectively immature.

But as much as I like this column, and I do, I want to focus on the lede:

During the middle third of the 20th century, Americans had impressive faith in their own institutions. It was not because these institutions always worked well. The Congress and the Federal Reserve exacerbated the Great Depression. The military made horrific mistakes during World War II, which led to American planes bombing American troops and American torpedoes sinking ships with American prisoners of war.

But there was a realistic sense that human institutions are necessarily flawed. History is not knowable or controllable. People should be grateful for whatever assistance that government can provide and had better do what they can to be responsible for their own fates.

That mature attitude seems to have largely vanished. Now we seem to expect perfection from government and then throw temper tantrums when it is not achieved. We seem to be in the position of young adolescents -- who believe mommy and daddy can take care of everything, and then grow angry and cynical when it becomes clear they can't.

Better people than me will be able to assess this claim, but I am, from my professional amateur seat, skeptical. The atomic bomb immediately comes to mine. The ability of one man to basically press a button and end an entire civilization must have done wonders for our belief in technology.

But further back than that, what about the sense, among Americans, that this country divinely guided? Here's Tom Paine writing i about the American Revolution:

We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation, similar to the present, hath not happened since the days of Noah until now.

I think about George Wallace exclaiming that Southerners were "the greatest people to have ever trod the earth," or the South's sense during the Civil War that it could not be possibly defeated. This could all be just written off as the kind of nationalism that haunts all countries.

Also there's a difference between thinking of something as unflawed, and thinking of it as divinely glorious. But my intellectual intuition, for whatever it's worth, suspects that one extends from the other. Again, better people than me can take this on. I guess I tend to believe, almost as a matter of religion, that our sense of self is deeply rooted in our parents and grandparents collective sense of self.