the utopian fallacy

Megan McArdle identifies what I call the utopian fallacy, the irrational belief that all problems have solutions:

It is astonishing how often I have arguments about environmental issues, and a few others, in which I state a belief that the political and economic realities mean that some pet solution won't happen, and am rewarded with an angry/exasperated "Well, then how do you plan to fix the problem?" It is as if they believed that to state a problem, is also to imply a solution.

There are plenty of problems in the world, from unrequited love to people with stubbornly obnoxious beliefs, that I have no plans to fix because the solutions, if there are any, seem self-evidently worse than the problems they would replace. Yet many people seem to believe that if I refuse to state such a plan, or agree to theirs, it must be because I don't want to solve the problem--that I hate people who are unlucky in love, or the environment, or at the very least selfishly wish to continue harming same--rather than from any honest belief that sometimes life's a bugger and there's not much you can do about it.

This is a particular problem for our political system; every constituent is somebody with a multitude of problems and every politician gets votes by promising to fix those problems. Unfortunately, most of these problems are impervious to fixing. Every government program begins as a solution to a problem, but it has to be revised and expanded and improved as every iteration of the solution fails to fix the problem. Our government grows inexorably, but the problems remain, or mutate and grow. This is a problem. With no solution. Alas.

Change

Change, even change for change's sake alone, is often very good. Sometimes you just have to give your status quo bias a kick in the shins, to teach it who's boss. Or, to put it in other words:

Cast your bread upon the waters, for you will find it after many days. Give a portion to seven, or even to eight, for you know not what disaster may happen on earth. If the clouds are full of rain, they empty themselves on the earth, and if a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where the tree falls, there it will lie. He who observes the wind will not sow, and he who regards the clouds will not reap.

As you do not know the way the spirit comes to the bones in the womb of a woman with child, so you do not know the work of God who makes everything. In the morning sow your seed, and at evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good.

Ecclesiastes 11:1-6

I've barely a week left until I move to Houston. It's nice not having any clue what my life will look like in a year.

mission impossible

Dennis Prager draws some lessons from the war in Iraq and the recent war in Lebanon:

The world defines victory of the stronger party — in this case, Israel — as either total victory or as a loss. Israel did not destroy Hezbollah, therefore it lost. . . . Likewise, America is said to have lost the war in Iraq. As with Israel, the stronger party — America — has not achieved total victory. Since no one has surrendered and there are still terrorists and insurgents, America is deemed to have lost. And the media — and its ideological ally, the Democratic Party — have been announcing the American defeat for years.

One lesson to be learned from these two wars is that victory as we have understood it in the past may not be possible when fighting terror organizations. There will be never be an equivalent to the Japanese surrender aboard the USS Missouri in 1945. There is no way to completely stop suicide terror against "soft" targets or to stop car bombs in public places. The only total victory over Islamic terrorists will have to come from within the Muslim world. There will have to be a theological and moral revulsion so great that no Muslim would dare risk hell and universal Islamic opprobrium by targeting innocents for murder. Unfortunately that day seems quite distant.

In effect, then, America will have lost in Iraq when America decides it has lost. And then it becomes what is known as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The primary point of his article is that America is only "losing" in the sense that our definition of victory is inherently unattainable. I think there's a deeper lesson about the goal of our war in Iraq. This war isn't about WMDs alone, or about oil, or even about deposing a cruel dictator. Rather, in Iraq we have an opportunity to redefine the cultural landscape of the Middle East. By giving common Iraqis a shot at real freedom we threaten the cultural foundations upon which Islamic terrorism is built. So Al Qaeda must fight in Iraq, but theirs is a defensive war fought on territory of our choosing, in their own backyard.

Al Qaeda can not defeat us in a conventional war, so they resort to terror tactics, to suicide bombings and IEDs and kidnappings. The purpose of these tactics seems to be two-fold: to erode American support for the war and also to destroy Iraq's fledgling democracy in civil war. American support is eroding and Iraq is dangerously close to civil war, but Al Qaeda's tactics also pose a danger to their own existence. With one bloody attack on civilians after another, the Iraqi people are learning who their real enemies are. Already we see signs of Sunni tribes uniting to fight against Al Quada. If we hold on, Al Quada may yet destroy their domestic support in Iraq and the wider Middle East. And therein lies our hope of really solving the problem of Islamic terror. As Prager says,

The only total victory over Islamic terrorists will have to come from within the Muslim world. There will have to be a theological and moral revulsion so great that no Muslim would dare risk hell and universal Islamic opprobrium by targeting innocents for murder.

If we want to see the Middle East reform itself, our best bet is to keep Al Quada fighting in Iraq.