Thursday, August 11, 2005
(8:42 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Reality-Based Community
For a long time, certain bloggers have been proud members of the reality-based community, standing up to the vicious lies of the Bush administration with our diligently researched facts and our exasperated sighs. During the fall of 2004, when this designation was being enthusiastically adopted (now replaced by some variant of "online magazine" in most cases), one of The Weblog's transient tag-lines was "Reluctant Fellow-Travellers with the Reality-Based Community." One might wonder what the motivation was -- what's wrong with basing one's political beliefs on reality? What possible reluctance could I have in standing up to this?The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."My reluctance is precisely in joining the group that this Bush aide accurately describes.
One is justifiably horrified by the prospect of this Bush aide openly calling "us" (and who is this "us"?) an "empire" and talking about the prospect of actively creating reality, but is that not what is in fact happening? Not in Iraq, certainly, not in the real world of real bodies fighting and killing -- but in the United States, they are actively continuing to create the reality they've been developing for over 25 years, precisely in order to give them a free hand for their experiments in the larger world. Just take a look at what's considered "realistic":
- No politician is ever allowed to raise taxes for any reason.
- If the government ever gets involved in any area of life, it only complicates things and screws it up. Thus, if the government ever actually tries to help people, it inevitably ends up hurting them.
- People don't want detailed coverage of national and international news -- they want celebrities. They don't want the (pre-Iraq War) Economist, they want the RedEye.
- People don't want the government to be in the business of making life better and more secure -- they want the government to enforce aribtrary moral norms.
This is the "reality" in which the aforementioned community is based. The most talented politician in a generation, Bill Clinton, only managed to salvage his career by tenuously carving out his niche in this reality, which he did not create, while on the other side, the most appalling mediocrity ever "elected" "president" has managed to undo all of Clinton's accomplishments, merely as a preparatory exercise.
What we need is not a reality-based community, but a community dedicated to creating a different, and more hopeful, reality.
