48. What if not?

 

What if there had been no bailout and no stimulus? What if China had not instituted the one-child policy? What if, each time I criticized Barack Obama or Deng Xiaoping for their part in those actions, I were required to imagine the consequences of their not being done, or to say what I would have done at the time?

Yesterday I heard, probably on CNBC, the 553rd Republican complain that the bailout or the stimulus had failed and on the same day read in the Economist (7-23-11) that the one-child policy had had oh-so-many bad effects. The politician did not say what, in his mind, would constitute success, or how he, at the time, would have put us on the road to it. The journalist said nothing about the bad effect, over-population, that the one-child policy was designed to counter, and did not consider what a multi-child China might now look like.

Reviewing world events is like reading a novel: we can do it sharply or dully. Dull readers of Billy Budd see Billy hanged and say, "Oh this is unbearable! This good man! These cruel men!" Sharp readers see Captain Vere hanging Billy and say, "This is unbearable! This good man! This world where choice is so limited and good men have to be so cruel!"

Captain Vere hangs Billy in order to prevent a mutiny. It's a choice that can be justified only by the closest attention to Melville's world, a world in which England's victory over Napoleonic France depends on such choices, however multiple. Sharp readers ask, "What if Billy had not been hanged?" They answer, "England would be defeated." They visualize that defeat and don't want it. They sympathize with Vere. Dull readers deplore Vere's actions and go no further.

We're all potentially sharp readers of novels and observers of world events. What dulls us? Distance from the action, according to Melville. "Little ween the snug cardplayers in the cabin of the responsibilities of the sleepless man on the bridge."  Physical distance can do it, but so can imaginative distance. Abstractions dull us, as reformed Marxists well know.  Passionate adherence to one cause, one value, dulls us, as debt-limit Republicans should know.  Anything that keeps us from putting ourselves into a scene and feeling it, feeling the forces operating there, feeling all the forces, will dull us.