Jan. 1, 2007
 
EDITORIAL: Looking Back, and Ahead, with More Perspective
The Providence Journal
 
It is difficult to be ruminative in a culture with so much communication that it's difficult to remember anything more than about five minutes old. Thus the tradition of looking back and looking forward at this time of year seems an antiquated custom.
 
But actually, we would do well to look far back, at least by current standards. For instance, Paul Greenberg, a thoughtful and very well read guy (whether or not you agree with him), had a column this week speculating on what the Iraq Study Group report would look like if its sort of analysis had been applied to a review, in early 1943, of 1942, in the middle of World War II. Things didn't look good, of course, and a negotiated settlement with the Axis powers would have seemed reasonable. Of course, the full horror of the Holocaust was not yet known, nor were the Allied victories to come, although there had already been a few. More recently, in the 1970s, it seemed as if communism would continue to spread; the fall of the Berlin Wall within a decade would have seemed close to unthinkable.
 
The point is not that the Iraq or Afghanistan wars will come out well. Who knows? Given the depravity of some people in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the disinclination of the West, including America, to pay the full freight of fighting them, we may well lose. The point is that the confident-sounding predictions from all sides of the issue don't mean all that much. Government officials and professional pundits are paid to sound confident. And when they are wrong and move to a new position they sound just as confident. But the vagaries of human society mean that it's impossible to predict with any precision what will happen in war or in most other man-made dramas. Indeed, the predictions may be becoming more inaccurate because of the superficiality and speed with which they're made amidst increasing cultural illiteracy and computer keyboard speed. Getting back to Paul Greenberg, they are made with a remarkable lack of knowledge of history, which in America seems to be spreading.
 
Now, history doesn't necessarily repeat itself. Technology and other developments in human culture change some of the ways we act. Still, there are certain persistent facts of human nature -- love, greed, fear, ambition, hate, spirituality and so on -- that can still suggest what people are likely to do in a general sort of way.
 
There is also the human tendency to think that just because something just happened, it's important, and to ignore events' connections to historical continuums. In other words, to lose all perspective -- including that, as Keynes liked to say, "in the long run, we're all dead." People in the news business lose such perspective all the time.
 
For instance, they neglect to note that the number of armed conflicts in the world is actually falling, as are the number of refugees. (These things tend to be ignored in America in favor of conflicts where Americans are serving in uniform -- we're national narcissists.) Further there were fewer natural disasters last year than normal. And the fatter we get, the longer we seem to live ... .
 
So as we go through another eventful year (actually, they all are), let's try a little humility when we predict what's going to happen, or even say what's happening now. And as for those in public life who make the big decisions, let's remember that they don't know everything but have to make decisions anyway.
 
The importance of most events this year will be exaggerated -- mostly on the negative side but also on the optimistic side. Time will fairly swiftly cast a more nuanced light on these things. Happy New Year, and let's slow down.
 
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