The March of Folly_ From Troy to Vietnam - Barbara Wertheim Tuchman [242]
Factors other than random selection subdue the influence of the “thinking fire” on public affairs. For the chief of state under modern conditions, a limiting factor is too many subjects and problems in too many areas of government to allow solid understanding of any of them, and too little time to think between fifteen-minute appointments and thirty-page briefs. This leaves the field open to protective stupidity. Meanwhile bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by error, duplicates it forever.
Above all, lure of office, known in our country as Potomac fever, stultifies a better performance of government. The bureaucrat dreams of promotion, higher officials want to extend their reach, legislators and the chief of state want re-election; and the guiding principle in these pursuits is to please as many and offend as few as possible. Intelligent government would require that the persons entrusted with high office should formulate and execute policy according to their best judgment, the best knowledge available and a judicious estimate of the lesser evil. But re-election is on their minds, and that becomes the criterion.
Aware of the controlling power of ambition, corruption and emotion, it may be that in the search for wiser government we should look for the test of character first. And the test should be moral courage. Montaigne adds, “Resolution and valor, not that which is sharpened by ambition but that which wisdom and reason may implant in a well-ordered soul.” The Lilliputians in choosing persons for public employment had similar criteria. “They have more regard for good morals than for great abilities,” reported Gulliver, “for, since government is necessary to mankind, they believe … that Providence never intended to make management of publick affairs a mystery, to be comprehended only by a few persons of sublime genius, of which there are seldom three born in an age. They suppose truth, justice, temperance and the like to be in every man’s power: the practice of which virtues, assisted by experience and a good intention, would qualify any man for service of his country, except where a course of study is required.”
While such virtues may in truth be in every man’s power, they have less chance in our system than money and ruthless ambition to prevail at the ballot box. The problem may be not so much a matter of educating officials for government as educating the electorate to recognize and reward integrity of character and to reject the ersatz. Perhaps better men flourish in better times, and wiser government requires the nourishment of a dynamic rather than a troubled and bewildered society. If John Adams was right, and government is “little better practiced now than three or four thousand years ago,” we cannot reasonably expect much improvement. We can only muddle on as we have done in those same three or four thousand years, through patches of brilliance and decline, great endeavor and shadow.
REFERENCE NOTES AND WORKS CONSULTED
Chapter One
PURSUIT OF POLICY CONTRARY TO SELF-INTEREST
REFERENCE NOTES
1. JOHN ADAMS: Letter to Thomas Jefferson, 9 July 1813, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters, ed. L. J. Cappon, Chapel Hill, 1959, II, 351.
2. ENGLISH HISTORIAN, “NOTHING IS MORE UNFAIR …”: Denys A. Winstanley, Lord Chatham and the Whig Opposition, Cambridge, 1912, 129.
3. PLATO ON PHILOSOPHER-KINGS: Republic, V, 473.
4. HISTORIAN ON PHILIP II: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 14th ed., anon.
5. OXENSTIERNA: Bartlett’s Familar Quotations.
6. REHOBOAM: I Kings 11:43, 12:1 and 4; II Chronicles 9:31, 10:1 and 4.
7. “AMPLE IN FOLLY”: Ecclesiasticus (Book of Sirach) 48:6.
8. MONTEZUMA: William H. Prescott, The Conquest of Mexico, New York, 1843; C. A. Burland, Montezuma, New York, 1973.
9. THIRTEEN MUSKETS: New Cambridge Modern History, I, 442.
10. VISIGOTHS: Dr. Rafael Altamira, “Spain