Commentary: Faith Instead of Reason
For George Bush, faith is more important than reality, and the will transcends any need to consider the facts.
By Scott D. O?Reilly
President Bush is not a man given to doubt. Faith, he believes, can not only move mountains, it can transform the world. This is powerful stuff, and it is at the heart of why so many Americans fervently support George W. Bush, even when it is clear that he has committed gross errors in judgment.
For Bush, and his followers, reality isn?t something you accommodate yourself to, it?s something you shape until the facts reflect your will. ?Reality,? to borrow a line from the classic black comedy Being There starring Peter Sellers, ?is a state of mind.?
Four years ago the Bush campaign began to impose its state of mind on the American people. An electoral deficit was no obstacle to their designs; the man who got half a million fewer votes than his opponent was able to convince the American people to accept the premise that examining disputed ballots would only ?cloud? the election. Thus, the election was not decided by the voters, but by the campaign excluding voters. As Joseph Stalin once remarked, ?The voters decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything.?
The impartial media-sponsored recount showed that in a statewide recount Gore received more votes than Bush in the critical state of Florida. If it had been up to the voters -- both in Florida and the rest of the United States -- Gore would have been president. But as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court William Rehnquist ruled, there is no guaranteed federal right to vote for president in America. Democracy, it appears, is just one state of mind among others, and one wave of the judicial magic wand is all it takes to undo the spell of democracy and make it disappear.
Convincing America to accept Bush?s version of the election on faith, rather than empirically examining the ballots, was one of the great conjuring tricks of our age. For the Bush campaign, success would be self-legitimizing; quickly shaping new realities would render old realities irrelevant. The Bush administration, however, has been far more successful is shaping the public?s perception of reality than in shaping reality itself.
One could say that the Bush administration succeeds precisely because it is so adept at denying reality. For Dick Cheney, deficits don?t matter; for Donald Rumsfeld, the insurgency in Iraq was confined to just a few dead-enders; for Paul Wolfowitz, Iraq?s oil revenue would finance Iraq?s own liberation; and for Bush, the continued violence in Iraq has been cited as proof we are succeeding. We are, to use the president?s words, victims of our ?catastrophic success.? Well, if that isn?t the mother of all understatements, oxymorons, and mixed-messages, all at the same time.
Notions of ?catastrophic success? and the idea that ?deficits don?t matter,? only produce cognitive dissonance for those unfortunate enough to have contact with the real world. But Bush lives in a virtual bubble, where his virtuous intentions are assumed sufficient to guarantee a good outcome.
This style of leadership hearkens back to the pre-Enlightenment era, where the moral character of a leader was assumed to be more important than his intellectual qualities. The thinking was that the head of state was God?s representative on earth and that the fortunes of the state would rise or fall depending on the extent to which the leader exercised his authority in keeping with God?s will.
This is a charismatic form of leadership -- personality matters more that political judgment -- and this kind of leadership does not have a good track record. In his landmark study, The Open Society and its Enemies, the philosopher Karl Popper delineated how detrimental the charismatic style of leadership is to social progress. When a leader?s policies and judgment cannot be questioned because it is presumed that the leader is exercising God?s will on behalf of his subjects, cataclysmic errors of judgment can arise because prudent checks and balances are forgone -- after all, a leader channeling a deity?s will should be enabled, not questioned.
Questioning a charismatic leader is tantamount to thwarting God?s will, at least from the pre-Enlightenment point of view. We can see this perspective at work in the Bush administration: When Joseph Biden, a democratic senator from Delaware, asked president Bush how he knew that invading Iraq was the right course, the president replied, putting his arm on Biden?s shoulder, ?My instincts. My instincts.?
You don?t have to doubt Bush?s sincerity to be concerned that he doesn?t even consider the possibility that he should offer a rationale or explanation for his decisions. On the resolution authorizing the use of force in Iraq, the president, as reported in Bob Woodward?s book Plan of Attack, simply told lawmakers, ?I want your vote. I?m not going to debate you on this.? In other words, ?I know what?s right, end of discussion.? This amounts to a faith-based foreign policy, and it helps explain why the Bush administration never even imagined some of the worst-case scenarios we now face in Iraq. The kind of thinking that deals with reasoned deliberation and probabilities (not certainties) is foreign to a faith-based style of leadership.
The Bush administration represents a decided shift -- some would say reversion -- from the Age of Reason, which emerged during the Renaissance, to the Age of Faith, which existed during the Middle Ages. Bush is unusually averse to proffering arguments designed to convince, relying instead on the trappings of his office, his personal magnetism, and his role as commander-in-chief to attract adherents. His message seems to be, ?I wouldn?t be here if God didn?t intend it, so trust me.?
The temptation to substitute faith for reason is strong, but it is contrary to what is best about the Christian tradition itself. The great Christian philosopher Saint Thomas Aquinas demonstrated most effectively that faith and reason were not antagonists, but allies, and that true articles of faith would not be contradicted by reason. If I were to sum up his philosophy I would say, ?Reason may be barren without some degree of faith, but faith without some degree of reason risks blindness.? The wisest leaders, surely, rely on both.
The need to temper faith with reason is well illustrated by a story told by the 19th century mathematician and philosopher William Clifford. Clifford asks us to imagine a ship owner who knows his ship could do with a costly inspection and repairs, but sincerely believes that Providence will see the ship and its passengers through on a difficult voyage. Clifford argues that the ship owner?s faith was not acquired ?by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.? When the ship sinks, its owner?s guilt is not absolved by the sincerity of his faith; indeed, he is culpable precisely for substituting belief in place of practical measures.
I believe Clifford?s story speaks to the predicament that Bush?s leadership style presents. Bush?s personal faith may be quite admirable, but his certainty -- on Iraq?s WMD, for instance -- has proven demonstrably false. Faith is one thing. But stifling doubt because one doesn?t like reality is another. And I, for one, believe that George W. Bush no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt.
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