I was bemused when someone gave me a copy of the literary hissy fit that Garrison Keillor threw following Norm Coleman’s election. I voted for Walter Mondale and remain personally skeptical about the relative balance of style vs. substance in our state’s newest senator.
However, as a result of my cultural and religious upbringing and my own life experience, I think it is unwise for anyone to presume that they have a monopoly on truth, righteousness or The American Way.
I would caution Mr. Keillor and other fellow Democrats that, regardless of their views on Sen. Coleman’s personality, they not be too sanctimonious about the DFL’s policy stances.
The same applies to economists. While it is good to have confidence in one’s views, believing that you have said the last word on any subject is dangerous. Intellectual history bears this out.
The afternoon that a colleague passed me a copy of Keillor’s diatribe in Salon, I was reading Louis Menand’s “The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America.” While not an easy or casual read, this is a wonderfully written book.
It describes the lives and ideas of four influential Yankee thinkers in the period between the Civil War and World War I: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Charles Pierce, William James and John Dewey. Along the way, Menand also treats us to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jane Addams, Eugene V. Debs, Charles Darwin and Louis Agassiz.
If you partied a lot during your freshman year in college, reading this one volume will fill you in on much of what you missed. And it will demonstrate how the ideas of any individual, no matter how brilliant, impassioned or insightful, eventually are battered by time.
Holmes, James and Dewey were powerful thinkers and they cared deeply about the issues of the day. They, and the others described by Menand, were highly influential in the intellectual and political debates of their generation. Their names were household words, in a way that is almost unknown for intellectuals in our media- and entertainment-saturated age.
Reading their ideas and their arguments, I was struck again and again by how insightful this generation was. I also was repeatedly struck by how far off-base history proved their other assertions to be. Some of their assertions — especially about race, ethnicity and class — are repugnant to me.
For every innovative and lasting insight these thinkers produced, they had at least another that is ludicrous from our perspective. They were lucky to bat .500. That is not a bad average.
We must bear in mind that if our ideas, our theories and our political policy assertions are preserved by some accident, that people a century from now will find many of them laughable or tragically off-target. We will be lucky if we do half as well as the young people who formed a “metaphysical club” 130 years ago.
If we are extremely lucky, some of our ideas may change human history for the good — if even in only a minor way. In economics and philosophy, many of Adam Smith’s assertions in his two principal books now appear quaint. However, several core assertions are as influential today as they were 226 years ago. The same is true of David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill and Alfred Marshall, who wrote in the 19th century.
John Maynard Keynes, whose most important work was produced in the 1930s, was idolized by economists in the 1950s and 1960s. Even so, he was vilified by the New Classical (Rational Expectations) economists who came to the fore in the late 1970s. One, who taught at an eastern university before coming to the University of Minnesota, famously and foolishly boasted that students at his institution took macro courses without ever hearing the name “Keynes.”
Keynes obviously was wrong about some things and it is likely that his critics are similarly wrong on some points. When a couple of generations have passed, economics students will chuckle about some aspect of each of the sectarian camps in late 20th century economic theory.
There is a famous anecdote that an argument once broke out among the participants at some important international negotiations about the effects of the French Revolution on world history. Chou En-Lai, who will go down in history as both a great Chinese leader and a toadying apologist for Mao Tse Tung’s most brutal excesses, calmly remarked, “It is probably too early to tell.”
Keep that humble perspective in mind whenever you hear some economist or politician make any assertion with what seems to be absolute certainty. The millstones of history grind slowly but exceedingly fine, and it is inevitable that some of the ideas any of us holds most dearly will eventually turn out to be silliness. Fight for what you believe in and think is important, but don’t ever make the mistake of thinking that you have a monopoly on truth.
© 2002 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.