You Can Bet Your Bottom Dollar On It

It was Kant who said of Davey Hume, "[He] interrupted my dogmatic slumbers." I guess I always supposed it was a one way street. Once awakened, the dreamer can't return to his dream. Alas. He can.

In January of this year, we found that "commentator Rod Dreher . . . is so dismayed at the way President Bush is handling the Iraq war that all of his prior beliefs have come into question." Fine. Cool. Awesome. We noted it and moved on.

Yet then again in June, he read All Quiet on the Western Front, and lo and behold, earth shake and sky burst with lightening, rivers to blood and fields strewn with firstborn, he discovered that all his prior beliefs had come into question once more. We paused and scratched our chins. Had he found a new set of prior beliefs: full and complete as a regrown starfish arm? No. It appears his beliefs, having been called into question back near the new year, withstood his momentary, interrogatory zeal unharmed. But surely not twice now!

Oh emm gee, as the kids say. Dreher is back with the same rented mule of a Weltanschauung. He's beating the poor thing by the side of the road. Betrayed, he is! Or at least delayed.

Dreher has discovered that: absolute certainty under emotional duress is an delusion; governments are not universally honest; the Republican party is not awesome; force alone cannot "solve deep cultural and civilizational problems"; and liberal democracy isn't the default state of mankind.

In short: Rod Dreher, the Crunchy Con, is now a B student in high-school civics. Next up: Columbus did not really discover the Americas; Nero did not really fiddle while Rome burned; Odysseus' crew didn't really turn into pigs; Atlas doesn't really hold the world on his shoulders.

How, I ask you, how can a man pass through his entire life endlessly reliving the same poor-man's epiphany? And if you can tell me, then tell me how it can so thoroughly fail to stick? And if, at last, you've got that answer, tell me how this blind babe, this foal, this shaky-legged fawn, could master this life sufficiently to not walk out into the street, freeze in someone's headlights, and die like a miserable opposum? Mammals with brains so thoroughly desiccated spend their lives eating eucalyptus and wagging their ears at tourists. They never learn left from right or up from down or article from pronoun or gravity from strong nuclear. They do not speak or walk upright or understand music or experience hope and joy and tragedy and defeat. Taken individually, each of Dreher's confessed beliefs is merely naïveté. Taken together, it astonishes me that the man remembers to breathe.

Of course, in another month, he will remember once more to haul out his prior beliefs for their regularly scheduled shattering.


Via AntiWar blog.