Meteor Blades' diary this afternoon includes a telling--if not shocking--statistic: as late as 2007, 41% of Americans still believed that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the attacks of September 11, 2001. In other words, years after a prime rationale for the Iraq war was debunked, a large segment of America still believes it is true. Obviously, a large chunk of this 41% likely coincides with the little remaining support Bush has left--not the more enlightened Kos readers and political junkies like ourselves. Yet in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, even the 'enlightened' ones (on the whole) failed to question and to debunk the conventional wisdom when we needed to. The Iraq War was not solely a matter of Bush lying. This was--and clearly, still is--a matter of our own misguided trust in our leaders and complacency with their decisions. We have been, in effect, lying to ourselves.
One of our biggest roadblocks not just in politics, but throughout life, is complacency. I strongly believe that human progress depends on our having an unwavering discontent with the way things are. On one level, in terms of what we do, we must fight such status quos as partisan politics, a warming global temperature, and violence around the globe. Yet my vision of 'unwavering discontent' extends beyond what we do, to how we think about things. We need to protect ourselves from our own rotten tendencies not to openly question 'conventional wisdom', whereby we instead jump on bandwagons that have been known to veer suddenly--and steeply--downhill.
In the Sunday Times, Mark Leibovich wrote a smart piece about where 'conventional wisdom' has gone right and wrong in the 2008 election cycle thus far. The deep-seated problem, in my view, is our attachment to this so-called 'wisdom' in the fist place.
The economist John Kenneth Galbraith coined the term . . . describing expectations commonly ascribed to an omniscient "public sentiment." In that time, a small, powerful class of broadcasters, columnists, thinkers and political leaders trafficked in such assumptions, often faulty. Today, new swarms of self-styled pundits can formulate conventional wisdom, or merely advance it, in any number of forms.
An over-reliance on conventional wisdom has gotten us into trouble time and time again. Conventional wisdom had it in 2000 that George Bush was an honest man, a compassionate conservative, and a hands-off internationalist. As of early 2007, conventional wisdom had Hillary Clinton as inevitable, with 'Obambi' destined to fail. But throughout most of February 2008, on the other hand, conventional wisdom had it that Obama was inevitable, and Clinton couldn't come back. The most potentially destructive kind of conventional wisdom, though, is the kind used as a rationale for a public policy or, say, military action. Despite the NIE report, at the time it was a given that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and posed an imminent threat. But why? Why did the media fail to peel through the president's war-mongering facade? And why did we, in turn, so blindly absorb the media reports like sponges? I don't pretend to know how to answer these questions fully. But I do know part of the answer: we were complacent.