Adapting to our mistakes

An unpopular truth

[Reprinted from Issues & Views September 3, 2001]

In the Sixties, a few prescient people warned that escalating the war in Vietnam might result in a conflict as serious as the Korean War. Actually, more Americans finally died in Vietnam than in Korea.

At about the same time, Lyndon Johnson declared "war on poverty." He pledged that if his new programs failed to "eliminate" poverty, they would be abandoned. Conservative skeptics warned that the programs wouldn't work, which was true enough; but none foresaw how devastating the welfare system would be to the cities and black family life. Yet even when the damage was obvious, the programs proved politically hard to reverse.

One of the odd things about our mistakes is that after we commit ourselves to them, it becomes difficult even to perceive them as mistakes. We adapt to them, justify them, become dependent on them, and forget the alternatives to them, until we no longer have the mental detachment we had before we made them. They become almost impossible to disown, and we sacrifice our judgment to them.

And over time, our wrong turns are normalized and exalted as steps in the epic of progress. Anyone who proposes to correct them is given the standard homily: "We can't turn back the clock!"

-- Joseph Sobran, excerpt from "History's irreversible errors." For more of his wisdom and insight, subscribe to his newsletter at Sobran's.

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