Ah, Thursdays, and what a pleasure: another cuckoo David Brooks column to dissect. Today, Brooks presents us with a Socratic dialogue on the nature of the Iraq problem, staged between two voices: Mr. Past, and Mr. Future. Mr. Past has just finished reading an essay on Britain's occupation of Iraq by the eminent historian and thinker on nationalism and empire, Elie Kedourie. And it must be said that whatever half of Brooks's brain is impersonating Mr. Past is doing a reasonably good job of making him sympathetic.

Mr. Past: Your big problem is you don't understand the limits of what governments can achieve. Before this whole Iraq thing, you should have read Elie Kedourie's essay on the British occupation in the 1920's. This isn't history repeating itself, it's the same unbroken pattern.

Kedourie shows the whole history of Iraq is a story of "bloodshed, treason and rapine." He shows how Iraqi politics have always been marked by "murderous currents," "demonic hatreds," "grisly spectacles," Sunni violence and Shiite fanaticism. He shows naïve Westerners who thought they could change all this. He even quotes a memo from a British officer saying Britain should threaten to withdraw because then the Iraqis will be forced to behave responsibly. It's all the same!

So far, so sane. One might take issue with this argument on the grounds that it makes the same error as Robert Kaplan's "Balkan Ghosts" did a decade ago, ascribing too much of the civil war to unexplained "ancient hatreds" and not enough to the actual dynamics which create and encourage sectarian tensions in weakening modern states: competition over scarce resources, especially state-apportioned resources like government jobs or nationalized oil revenues; state failure to ensure security, provoking the establishment of sectarian militias to fill the security gap; and so forth. But it's an argument, anyway.

So then, Brooks brings in his counter-arguer, Mr. Future, who will rely on his own third-party historical narrative to describe the Iraqi adventure of the past 3 years. (Presumably we're supposed to side with Mr. Future, since he represents, you know, the future.) And what historical narrative does Mr. Future choose? Germany under the Marshall Plan, perhaps, as described by Arthur Schlesinger? Not exactly.

It's Exodus.

Mr. Future: Actually, I did read Kedourie, but last night I also reread the Exodus story. The Exodus story reminds us that human beings can transform themselves and their situations. It reminds us that people who embark on generational journeys are the realistic ones, because they are the ones who see all the possibilities the future contains.

The finest things humans have done have been achieved in an Exodus frame of mind. This country was settled and founded by people who adopted the Exodus mentality. The civil rights movement was also led by such people.

I actually had a similar experience last night, but instead of rereading Exodus, I was re-watching the Disney animated film "Mulan" with my 3-year-old daughter. And it occurred to me that while Kedourie may have his points, based on boring research in all those dusty old colonial documents and blah blah blah, "Mulan" shows that even though savage, rapacious, amoral hordes like the Huns or the Iraqi terrorists might seem to be unstoppable in the middle of the movie, the good guys will always triumph in the end because good guys believe in gender equality, and bad guys don't. (Ladies of the US Armed Forces - you go!) Actually it was my 3-year-old daughter who made this point, but I think she was dead on.

Actually, I had another thought, for a little Mr. Past - Mr. Future socratic dialogue of my own. It goes like this.

Mr. Past: I have a job with a six-figure salary at the most prestigious newspaper in the United States. All I have to do is write about 1200 words twice a week with a witty slant on current events. I don't do any research, and sometimes what I write doesn't even make sense. Ain't I the shizzum!

Mr. Future: I have what is called a blog. I write 1200 words with a witty slant on current events once or twice a day. Often, I conduct original research into these topics, and I invite others to come onto my site and either comment on what I've written or conduct original research of their own and present it. I also sometimes respond in posts to what my readers write. Most of my posts make more sense than the insane thing you wrote this morning. I do all this for free. There are thousands of me for every one of you. Why do you still have a job?

David Bell, in an otherwise interesting review in The New Republic of David Andress's new history of the Terror (the period of the French Revolution, that is), says the following weird thing:

It is time to conclude that, with the demise of modern revolutionary politics over the past generation, the Terror simply no longer belongs to that part of the historical record which seems to speak directly and vitally to our contemporary experience.

Now, I'm the first to agree that the totalitarian model of state domination has ceased to be the great threat juxtaposed to Western ideals of freedom and democracy, a role it played from Burke's response to the Terror all the way through the liberal response to Nazism and Communism, Orwell, the Thatcher/Reagan years, and its final misplaced and pathetic denouement in the neocon view of the invasion of Iraq. Today, the great threats to Western ideals of freedom and democracy lie in failed states, anarchy, non-state violent organizations, and the impunity of multinational corporations to democratic rule.

But to say that the Terror no longer speaks to contemporary experience is very, very premature; and it may always remain premature. It has not been very long at all since the last seizure of power by a group of fanatical, "incorruptible" ideologues who proceeded to exterminate their political foes in order to construct an unassailable base of power, only to find the list of enemies proliferating wildly and uncontrollably until it came to include many of the instigators of the purges themselves. It has been two hundred and ten-odd years since Robespierre; only thirty since Pol Pot, and ten since the Taliban. There seems little reason not to include Cromwell in the timeline, pushing the origin back another hundred and fifty years. Meanwhile, candidates to host the next revolutionary ideological bloodbath include Nepal and, yes, Iraq, should any faction ever come out on top of the civil war there.

Witchhunts and political centralization are both phenomena of mass society. Their progeny, hysterical state terror, has been around as long as the modern state itself. There seems little reason to believe that it will disappear until the modern state does, and that looks to be a long way off yet.

Andrew Sullivan has a kind of nice post today about the link between the Bush administration's misdeeds in the war on terror and the nature of its faith. He writes in response to a reader who has sent a long email on the same topic, including the following:

But there is one great dividing line here, between you and me on one side, and Bush and his cohort (and the Christianists and the Islamists and the scientific reductionists, and all the other -ists) on the other: the humility of a faith based on love, with its attendant qualities of acceptance, inclusion and non-violence, and the arrogance of a faith based on fear, with its attendant qualities of judgment, exclusion and, inevitably, violence.

Sullivan agrees:

The battle within faith - between a faith of certainty and order and a faith of humility and wonder - is indeed the great battle of our time.

This struck me, a cultural but non-believing Jew, as a statement of faith which I could wholeheartedly embrace. I mean, I don't agree that it's "the great battle of our time" - I'd say the struggle to keep humans from destroying Planet Earth probably outranks it, even in God's eyes, whatever she may be. But I embrace it as a statement about moral and intellectual attitudes. And what I wonder is this: does Sullivan recognize that agnostics, atheists, and secular liberals also believe in "a faith of humility and wonder" rather than "a faith of certainty and order"?

Rationalism is, at its very core, a philosophy of humility, doubt, and wonder. Nothing could be more scientific than the conviction that we do not understand how the universe works, but that we seek to understand it through observation and discussion; nothing could be more liberal than the conviction that we do not know what moral perfection is, but that we strive towards it by testing our values upon the world and upon each other.

But this isn't quite what I mean to say. My point is that rationalism and secular liberalism are, themselves, types of faith: faith in our ability to trust others, and to trust our own commitment to reason. No scientist can claim to have observed with her own eyes the evidence for every proposition she holds to be true; she must have faith in the truthfulness of generations of other scientists, and in their dedication to following the rules of the scientific community. And the liberal faith that humans are capable of deciding what is best for them, as a community, through the process of free speech and respect for human rights, and by following the rules of a republic, and that democratic participation leads ultimately to the best kind of governance, is just that - a faith. Humans have not shown themselves to be particularly dedicated to reason or to human rights over the last century; the conviction that they are progressively becoming better on these counts is a basic liberal value, a statement of faith in human possibility.

Anyway, I guess I just wanted to point out that everybody has values, and the kinds of values Sullivan embraces here as a part of his kind of Christianity are to a great extent the same values I embrace as a secular liberal Jew. I would hope he would recognize that.