There’s been a lot of “I told you so’s” form war-hawks and even a few mea culpas from war opponents in the wake of the Iraqi elections, and now the apparently hopeful signs in Egypt and Lebanon.
In a recent TCS piece, war supporter Michael Totten avoids gratuitous I-told-you-so-ism, but goes on to make this curious argument:
Iraq has made morons out of a lot of people, as perhaps it should. Getting history right in the present tense is hard work. It’s probably impossible for any one person to do it consistently. And if somebody could do it, how would we know? In the 1960s Zhou Enlai was asked what he thought of the French Revolution. He wisely said “It is too soon to tell.”
Great events should shake people and change them. I have a hard time trusting someone who says this never happens to them. After the toppling of Saddam’s regime, it happened first to the hawkish right. And now the anti-war left has had its turn.
The good news is that the latest earth-shaking news is good news. The Iraqi election was flawed, to be sure, but it still exceeded the expectations of most of us. The case for optimism is therefore stronger than it recently was. But the existence of unexpected and earth-shaking events should remind us that — ultimately, as always — it is still too soon to tell.
What I find curious is the assumption that making moral decisions is somehow equivalent to “getting history right,” as though we’re dealing with some Hegelian dialectic. Too soon to make judgments about the French Revolution? I’d say the Reign of Terror was aptly named.
Totten’s argument, in fact, makes the case against consequentialist thinking. If we can’t evaluate the outcome of events until years (or centuries) down the road, then consequentialism doesn’t seem to provide a very good guide to moral decision-making. We’re stuck having to evaluate actions based on their intrinsic character, not as something that “history” might someday judge to be right.
A Thinking Reed 
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