Will hits a home run here. McNamara and BO have a lot in common -- they are both arrogant and intelligent guys that lack that hallmark of wisdom, "epistemological humility". Humility about what is even knowable by anyone that draws breath. Of course McNamara had a lot more experience than BO before he flamed out and helped Kennedy and LBJ get us into 50K+ deaths in Vietnam where we turned tail and ran with no progress. Bob headed Ford, BO made a good shot at getting some asbestos out of an apartment building and only came up a little short.
Here is George's take:
Today, something unsettlingly similar to McNamara's eerie assuredness pervades the Washington in which he died. The spirit is: Have confidence, everybody, because we have, or soon will have, everything -- really everything -- under control.
The apogee of McNamara's professional life, in the first half of the 1960s, coincided, not coincidentally, with the apogee of the belief that behavioralism had finally made possible a science of politics. Behavioralism held -- holds; it is a hardy perennial -- that the social and natural sciences are not so different, both being devoted to the discovery of law-like regularities that govern the behavior of atoms, hamsters, humans, whatever.
Once God is dead, then the hope is that man, via "science" can "settle things" -- as in "settled science" (an oxymoron) for Global Warming, "Quantization of risk" in the markets and all manner of other "science" in every pursuit of mankind. It used to be that when things failed, it was "God's will" -- in today's randomized atheist world, the answer of the profane to the divine seems to be "Shit happens". We have come a "long way".
So paradoxically, we live in an unordered, purposeless, random universe, yet through some fantastic accident, we are "blessed" with the masterful brilliance of BO who somehow possesses all the right "answers" to the unordered "questions" of our troubled world.
McNamara, like many who leave high office, never left the capital of this nation that believes people learn from history, and that therefore history is linear and progressive. But the capital, gripped once again by the audacious hope of mastering everything, would be wise to entertain a shadow of a doubt about that.
Do the masters of the randomly created ordered universe have doubts? How could they? If they did, there might possibly be a God beyond them, and that just won't do at any cost!
