To set the stage for this little rant, have a look at Tim Kreider’s latest:

• We Ain’t So Bad (The Pain… When Will it End?)

Did you read the commentary? No? Go back and read it.

Okay, let’s continue.

Being a politics junkie of no clear mainstream ideology, I run into two pervasive fallacies over and over and over again. These fallacies are essentially two sides of the same coin, which amuses me because they’re parroted by ideologically incompatible people. They are:

1. Our (country, economic model, system of government, &c.) is (arguably or demonstrably) better than everyone else’s; therefore, it is above reproach and suggesting that it has flaws is treasonous, seditious, or lunatic.
2. Our (country, economic model, system of government, &c.) is not perfect (or doesn’t make everyone deliriously happy); therefore, we should drop everything and assimilate to someone else’s (whatever).

Er, no.

The first (let’s call it the “pro” fallacy) tends to be committed by hyperpatriots (who tend to be “conservatives” here) who see any admission of fault as (a) treason, (b) the thin edge of a wedge labeled “Marxist revolution”, and (c) frightening and change-inducing. These are the sort of people to whom “it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it” makes straight-faced sense; the sort captured by this quotation from Kreider’s comments:

One of the more oxymoronic arguments you hear made by hawkish conservatives is that we liberals ought to get down on our knees and thank God that we live in a free country where we can piss and moan all we want and not in an authoritarian state where (and you can almost hear them salivating over the details here) we’d be taken out and shot in the back of the head for criticizing the government, and that we should demonstrate this gratitude by shutting the fuck up.

(Emphasis added.)

In all sincerity, I think the whole not-getting-shot-for-sedition bit is pretty nifty.

The second (the “con” fallacy) tends to come from (in this country, and for the most part) guilty rich white “liberals” and middle-class socialists — my stereotype of these people is that they wear $400 worth of clothing from Mountain Equipment Co-op and a Che t-shirt. These folks tend to see any endorsement of The Way Things Are as (a) brutal oppression of anyone who happens to be suffering (or condoning the same), (b) the thin edge of a wedge labeled “capitalist exploitation”, and (c) terrifyingly stagnant. These are the sort of people who can argue with a straight face that Marxism is superior to a loosely-regulated market; dismiss the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and any number of other failed states with a waved hand and “well, they didn’t do it right”; and at the same time insist that only straight white male capitalists can be bigots.

I’m picking on the “liberals” here because that’s what’s around me. I’m sure that there are plenty of “con”-providers in socialist countries who laud Augusto Pinochet, Margaret Thatcher, and Ronald Reagan in exactly the same bass-ackwards way that my local hippie militia lauds Che, Lenin, and Chavez. The reasoning is just as wrong.

The “pro” fallacy fails for obvious reasons: complacency is death. Geocentrism lost to heliocentrism; Newtonian dynamics lost to general relativity (though physicists, being uncommonly honest folk, have introduced quantum dynamics as a parallel system to general relativity — GR works in some circumstances; QD works in others — and will cheerfully admit that neither one is “right”); mercantilism lost to market capitalism (although you wouldn’t know it by the way people bitch and moan about free trade). There is always room for improvement

The “con” fallacy fails for equally obvious reasons: change isn’t necessarily for the good. Consider, for example, the progression of the colony of Southern Rhodesia to the state of Rhodesia to the nation of Zimbabwe. Independence for the colony? All other things being equal, a good thing. Universal suffrage and majority rule for Rhodesia? All other things being equal, a good thing. Transformation into a brutal Marxist state which has gone from one of the most productive farming states on the continent to a famine magnet with six-digit inflation? Not good. Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980, when it was pretty obvious that collective farming (and Marxism in general) was a throroughgoing disaster. Changing to a method, system, or philosophy which does what you want better than what you have is… well, rational. Changing to a method that’s untried, but based on existing models ought to be better than what you have (for example, anarchocapitalism) is risky but reasonable — it’s either a spectacular fireball or a paradigmatic shift like Pasteur’s germ theory of medicine or the moon landings. Changing to a method that’s known to kill millions of people for no material gain is, uh, ill-advised.

The fundamental flaw in both of these fallacies is the inability to imagine anything better than what presently exists. The “pro” fallacy fails to imagine that its beloved status quo can evolve into something better than it is; the “con” fallacy likewise fails to imagine that there can exist alternatives other than someone else’s method. Proponents of both sides tend to imagine that any putative flaws in their favoured doctrines can be corrected “if only the right people are put in charge” — this last being a prescriptive recipe for fascism.

(The other thing that makes me uncomfortable about both fallacies is too great an emphasis put upon government — which to my mind is entirely counterproductive. The careful reader will recall that governments are responsible for the most hideous atrocities of the 20th Century; as such, I tend to put what little faith I have in individuals and, when absolutely necessary, in private institutions.)

So no, we ain’t so bad… but then again, we’re merely the best we’ve done so far.