Epistemological Modesty

Op-Ed Columnist - The Big Test - NYTimes.com

David Brooks was a big BO supporter, but apparently now he is starting to see where his "hope went wrong".

These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.

"They knew how little we can know"! There we have it, the crux of the problem! Liberals were always saying that "Bush was arrogant". Why? Well, because he looked like he smirked, and they thought he was too stupid to be President. Did he think that he (or any human) could address ALL of them? No, in no way.

Compare that with this quote from BO:

“We cannot successfully address any of our problems without addressing all of them.”

Uh, hello? Like that would meant that in the SHORT run we are all DEAD!!

It is too bad the following aren't nearly the only possibilities:

All in all, I can see why the markets are nervous and dropping. And it’s also clear that we’re on the cusp of the biggest political experiment of our lifetimes. If Obama is mostly successful, then the epistemological skepticism natural to conservatives will have been discredited. We will know that highly trained government experts are capable of quickly designing and executing top-down transformational change. If they mostly fail, then liberalism will suffer a grievous blow, and conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity.

It’ll be interesting to see who’s right. But I can’t even root for my own vindication. The costs are too high. I have to go to the keyboard each morning hoping Barack Obama is going to prove me wrong.

Among the other obvious ones -- we don't recover, we sink into being some sort of "fallen nation" status like many liberals liked to predict would happen after Reagan. BO and company turn us into a totalitarian socialist gulag. Terrorists attack us with smallpox or some other worse bio weapon and the vast majority of Americans die -- who knows what comes out the other side.