Most people I know feel endlessly fascinated by the lives of others, yet consider their own existence to be little more than drudgery and toil.  This is a peculiar but universal trait of our species.  We are obsessed with what others do – and how they do it, and why.  Television, with its reality shows and crime documentaries, profits greatly thereby.  YouTube pretty much exists to meet this need.

Other lives hum with the background music of drama and adventure, while ours, alas, plod on in the cadence of dull prose.

It doesn’t matter if the lives are fictional so long as they are “not me” – in fact, as Hollywood and the book publishing industry know, falsehood may actually enhance our interest.  The most intriguing person who never lived may well have been R. R. Raskolnikov, the anti-hero of Crime and Punishment.  At least I think so.  Objectively speaking, it sounds pathological to weep over a naked lie:  instead, it’s all too human.

I don’t know why we find other people so fascinating.  Mostly they aren’t, at least not any more than we ourselves are.  We probably succumb to a combination of empathy and fear.  We are hardwired to connect emotionally to the inner lives of others, and to predict their behavior relative to our own survival.  People also learn largely by example, so all the peeping, gossiping, and story-telling may have a didactic purpose.

I have no problem with snooping into my neighbor’s business as a sort of hobby, an idle sport:  but I want to argue, against the odds, on behalf of my own life and yours.

There’s nothing strange about the feeling of drudgery.  Life, all the proverbs and commercials tell us, is short – but the day is long.  Duty and necessity fill up most of the hours.  We yearn to find meaning, to impose a grand theme, uniquely ours, on the passing of time, but instead we feel like that feather in Forrest Gump, blown here and there by external forces.  Helplessness and boredom turn us against our own life’s tale.

I have lived long enough to understand how tactical and moment-driven, and therefore mistaken, this perspective is.

Human life is a range of possibilities derived from the circumstances of birth.  Some encounter hardship and suffering.  Some are privileged and pleasurable – the existential equivalent of a stroll in the park.  But all entail choices, and the consequences are unknowable in advance.  I may drop out of college and become Steve Jobs or the dishwasher at Chili’s.  I may marry the girl of my dreams and experience a nightmare or joy to old age.

Every life is a mystery even to itself.  My life is a mystery to me.  I make choices and things happen which force yet more choices on me.  The connections seem unclear.  Causes and effects are nebulous.  Hamlet called death the undiscovered kingdom, but that description pertains to the living future as well.

Each of us is Columbus, sailing into the unknown.  All of us must discover the world anew.  The keepers of culture and tradition labor to keep our lives bounded, but each of them is an individual, each has made a choice and internalized, in a personal and subjective way, a set values and moral directives meant to guide a community, an entire civilization.  The most timid and hidebound human being is a discoverer of continents.

If we embraced a sense of adventure commensurate with the uncertainty of the future, I suppose we would all drop dead from excitement.  However, a bit of buzz in the bloodstream about the surprises which lie ahead is justified at every age.  Kids must stare down monsters in the shadows.  The young must bump into and stumble around an alien world crowded with adults.  The middle-aged – likeliest to forget life’s adventure – share decades with spouses in uncertain intimacy, raise children with yet-untold stories, navigate careers with unknown destinations.

For the old, death permeates all calculations:  every action is taken with a mysterious final reckoning in mind.

The doors to adventure stand open, even to the end.  The worth of a life, the measure of the man, is his relation to the adventure which happened to be his lot.  None is important in itself.  None is insignificant either.  This is not a matter of egalitarian principle but of mathematical complexity.  Abraham Lincoln and Jonas Salk may have had the power to free or to heal, but their achievements rested on an infinite number of obscure circumstances caused by anonymous individuals.  The latter are the wings of the butterfly which bring about the hurricane.

Greatness depends on smallness:  no human life is so mean or deprived that its adventure isn’t big with consequences.

Here I might be accused of playing the glad game, portraying the world in a Panglossian light.  Some lives, it might be argued, are too brief to matter.  They add nothing to the store of our experience.  Others are contemptible.  Others still are vicious, morally depraved.  What is the worth of their adventure?  Wouldn’t we be better off if these hadn’t taken place?

Excitement about tomorrow, too, may be proper for a well fed, well educated, well-to-do character – for me:  maybe not for the Alzheimer’s patient, though, or the mother of a dying infant in Somalia.  To endow the latter with the emotional life of the former, my accuser might claim, can only be the product of bourgeois romanticism.

But I am not playing the glad game.  This is not a glad season of my life.  I’ve lost people close to me, family members and neighbors – and it is precisely their loss, the pain of it, but also the appalling arbitrariness, which led me to wonder why we fail to value the story of our own lives.

When I say adventure I don’t mean a Disney World ride.  An adventure is a test.  Most of the time, we fail.  That is the way of the world.  The excitement I feel arises in the determination to endure, even advance, in the face of failure.  I would not judge the suffering Somali mother by the same standards I judge myself, but every moment she maintains her integrity is a triumph, even if she falls apart the next.  The adventure is a test of truth:  when truth is lived, we are redeemed.

Adventure makes a single demand:  that we become worthy of it.  Once we perceive life in these terms, we must engage in a struggle to measure up.  Most of the time (I repeat) we will fail.  The contemptible and vicious fail systematically.  They deny the adventure.  They are unworthy of the lives they were given.  Their fall into the abyss serves as a terrifying reminder of the stakes for which we are playing.

The last temptation is to escape into falsehood.  If I’m consumed by the drudgery and triviality of my days, I may deny who I am.  I will then lie to myself about myself, and to all around me about my place in the world.  This is a form of suicide.  I disintegrate into a shifting shadow, a specter of deluded vanity, visible only to those in the same condition as me.  My ruling emotion will resemble a criminal’s:  fear of being exposed.  My unforgiving enemy will be the truth.

I expect most people lie to themselves in moments of weakness.  I have done so often enough.  But when I think of the people I love who are now gone forever, I don’t want to lie to myself about them, I don’t want to falsify or prettify their stories:  I want to honor their truth as I understand it.  My life’s adventure is bound with theirs, and the whole crew of us, living and dead, belong with the sweeping self-willed trajectory of the human spirit, a cosmic migration to a strange land.

We may deny ourselves in fear and weakness, like St. Peter, before the cock crows, but can’t escape the truth in the light of day.  We are headed somewhere unknown, at an uncertain pace, for mysterious reasons – and we might as well enjoy the ride.

Duncan Watts, Everything Is Obvious

In that lost world, authority ruled.  I use the word in the most benign sense.  Knowledge must be separated from nonsense, and someone had to do the job.  The educated public felt grateful.  Its work was simplified.  Whatever disputes or uncertainties occurred within the ranks of authority caused hardly a ripple elsewhere.

The situation today is almost entirely reversed.  Knowledge pours down like a monsoon, day and night, in every place.  As it multiplies beyond comprehension, the word knowledge loses its descriptive value:  it’s really information, a cosmic explosion of random bits.  Only when we string the bits back together inside our heads does it reassume the form of knowledge.

In this vast chaos of information, one person can only grope.  The most brilliant and best-informed can know little of the whole:  for practical purposes, almost nothing.  The whole is unfathomable, as if designed by a deranged quantum physicist or a drunken disciple of Hegel.  All of us are ignorant of even the most salient features of the landscape we traverse.

Those vested with authority stand rattled and confused.  They can’t help us.  They can’t help themselves.  The lucky ones squat on well-funded specialized islands of knowledge, participating in quaint hierarchies, behaving as if the accreditation which props up their self-image rests, or at least should rest, on universal law.  But most have been swept away in the deluge.

We can debate whether the present moment is favorable to democracy:  but it is fiercely anti-authoritarian.  The public has awakened, and found authority to be no guide to the way forward.  To reasonable questions about the blizzard of bits within which all of us must now function, authority – government officials, scientists, academics, journalists, artists and poets, billionaire financiers – return transparently hackneyed, defensive, unknowledgeable answers.  Those who represent authority seem rather to impersonate it.  Basic facts and principles are objects of loud, indecisive disputes.  They don’t know.

The public has awakened, and is in open revolt.  Threatened in their livelihood and stung by the collapse of their prestige, those vested with authority have used the organs of mass communication to preach a cataclysmic vision.  With no one to separate knowledge from nonsense, the public, they claim, will be free to indulge its fractured prejudices, its contradictory appetites, degenerating finally into warring barbarian bands.  The rise of the public means the end of civilized social life.

Such claims come from wounded pride, but have a grain of truth in them.  In nations as distinct and well-established as Egypt and Britain, the foundations of society appear to be tottering.  Here at home, mobs of young blacks have attacked whites for no particular reason.  Apparently, the militant rage of the public can be ignited by sociopolitical grievances of long standing or by simple boredom with the established order.

But these are signs and omens, not evidence of a demonstrable trend.  There remain in the new dispensation enough shared points of reference that we can easily talk to one another across partisan, ethnic, and class lines.  Some shared topics are generated by the world:  the brute facts of nature.  Many more are produced by culture.  Others crystallize mysteriously within the digital storm:  the phenomenon of virality.  One job of education in the new environment will be to teach those shared points of reference which, in the public’s view, sustain and enrich social life.

In fact, education – always of strategic importance to a democracy – will be revolutionized.  The old ideal of covering all general knowledge must necessarily be abandoned.  Accredited teachers and professors who cling to their authority will either die in place or be shoved, ungently, out the door.  They will be replaced by global talent which must compete for the public’s attention.

Given a near-infinite universe of information, the new educational approach will focus less on content and more on navigation skills (including search and research), source assessment, and tools.  The task is to make members of the public, who are also citizens of a democratic nation, capable of finding data bits and stringing them together inside their heads to create knowledge.

Once we attain this capability, the obvious question is how it should be applied:  what knowledge each of us ought to seek.  And here morality, which has been lurking in the wings of this story, at last takes center stage.

Superficially, many responses are possible to the question of what knowledge to seek:  but morally only two matter.  One answer is to abdicate personal responsibility for knowledge.  A person can stand pat, or put himself in the hands of some other person considered an authority.  In the first instance, the mind will be tyrannized by the environment:  mental life will feel like a series of accidents, void of knowledge, adrift among the random bits churned up, arbitrarily, by the chaos.  In the second instance, one surrenders autonomy to specialists who, though masters of minutiae, at best have no clearer vision of the big picture than the public itself – and at worst abuse science, or pseudo-science, to promote anti-democratic projects.

The alternative is to choose the domains of knowledge we wish to create:  to forge a purpose, wrestle with boundless chaos, impose our will on information.  These are acts with profound moral consequences.  They imply a new freedom, unavailable under the old authority-driven system.  They endow the seeker with a certain majesty.  The subjects chosen are of course important, but only in the moral sense.  A nihilist who seeks to learn methods for blowing up innocent people is evil.  A student of manga or computer games, so long as he is imposing himself on his subject, in terms of human dignity is no different from an expert on Renaissance art or a practitioner of atonal music.

The production of knowledge by an autonomous public will appear eccentric, because beyond the shared points of reference our current hierarchies of intellectual value were erected by authority, and mirror the esoteric products of accredited professionals.  By the same token, the possession of such knowledge by amateurs, and the abolition of ancient hierarchies, will transfer moral responsibility on every question of importance to the many from the few.  This in turn places a burden on every individual member of the public.

In a world drained of valid authority yet drowning in informational chaos, we must each choose to choose:  and we must know what to know.

Our values descend from two very different sources, calling for opposite types of behavior.  It shouldn’t be wondered at, therefore, that we who live in the wealthiest, most successful country in the world often suffer from a bad conscience.

The Greeks gave us a love of excellence, defined as worldly success.  Christianity preached the supreme merit of spirituality, defined as renunciation of the world.  Like all raised in the civilization of the West, we Americans are caught in the grip of these irreconcilable commandments.

In practice, we go after success, and – like the Greeks – we idolize the hugely successful, although we tend to focus more tightly on money and fame.  We can’t get enough of Bill Gates, despite his goofy looks and anodyne public personality, because of his stratospheric level of worldly success.  Nothing else about Bill Gates calls to our attention:  only that he’s a billionaire many times over.  But that’s enough for us.

At the same time, we find the disproportion between his wealth and success and ours somehow sinister if not downright evil.  Bill Gates is a plutocrat, a monopolist, a bully to everyone smaller than himself – which, in the context of money, includes the entire human race.  We recall the Gospel saying about the camel and the eye of a needle, and allow ourselves to feel morally superior to Bill Gates.  He’s a bloated materialist:  a worshipper of Mammon.  We abide by purer values.

This struggle occurs at every level of success in American life.  In Europe, it’s even more intense, but far less interesting:  Europeans restrict bloated materialism to the sphere of the state, and appease their consciences, insofar as they have any, by identifying the state with the community.  In America, it’s personal.

I said that we are a successful country.  Every last one of us who has enjoyed any degree of material success at length comes to a dark night of the soul, when he must ask:  what is it for?  Is my striving after money worthy or shameful?  Can I simply enjoy the fruits of my labor, or am I going to hell like the Gospel predicted?

Americans are religious but practical:  we lack a tradition of spirituality.  The most we have ever mustered have been momentary spasms of revivalism and idealism.  These were emotionally satisfying, but – except for the occasional failed commune – didn’t amount to much in the way of renunciation.  Thoreau, for example, had to purchase his shack from an Irishman who was really poor.  His life in the woods was a romance funded by the commerce-minded nation he so deeply despised.

True renunciation belongs to an older tradition, embodied in the life of Francis of Assisi.  Born (it should be noted) into a wealthy commercial family, Francis stripped naked to signify his contempt for the worldly vanity of his father’s ways, and embraced dire poverty, humiliation, and self-torture as his own.  He was, like Thoreau, a romantic, and served as a model to the writer in his love of nature – but he was in earnest in his craving for spiritual attainment, and never walked away from his own harsher version of the Irishman’s shack.  He died in his mid-forties, worn out by mortifications.

The Church never knew what to make of this strange character, at once rebellious and otherworldly.  It seemed hard to dispute that Francis had behaved as Jesus prescribed:  whether this was good or bad, the spiritual lords of the time were uncertain.  In the end, the Church compromised by making Francis a saint while taking over his order, which by then, in any case, had become quite successful and un-Francis-like.

A mythic Francis has lived on in Western literature and film, portrayed as the ultimate bohemian, living refutation of the West’s material strivings.  In this guise, his main influence over the rest of us has been to ruin our peace of mind.

High achievers in America end up unloved and unhappy.  They have won the race only to wonder why it was run.  Most of them, with various degrees of self-awareness, wish to edge toward spirituality, and given their characters and our culture there is but one path for them to follow:  they must give back their money to some worthy cause.

The two sources of our moral descent, interestingly, also provide two modes of giving.  One goes back to Rome and the idea that the great men of the republic are expected to pay for its public buildings, aqueducts, and highways.  This is called magnificence, and it’s done publicly, for show and to earn the admiration of the populace.  The other mode was called love by St. Paul, and charity by the Internal Revenue Service.  It’s private rather than official, modest – often anonymous – instead of ostentatious, and earns no credit or admiration unless one believes in heaven.

We can see that Bill Gates, in his later life, has been much preoccupied with his money:  he desires, after making so much, to give some of it away.  His mode is blatantly Roman.  It would be tough for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to operate anonymously.  He travels in poor countries offering the contemporary equivalent of aqueducts:  cash grants.  The causes are no doubt worthy, and while all this is to the greater good, our admiration is somehow restrained if not altogether curdled.  We appreciate Bill Gates’ magnificence but we understand its mixed motives.  It really is the case that money can’t buy love, either in St. Paul’s sense or the typical American’s.

What of the silent givers?  They are by definition invisible.  The impact of their gifts is unknown.  The secular benefit is null.  Yet countless Americans who aren’t particularly religious give anonymously.  They don’t look to heaven, or to any other reward.  Maybe, in their hearts, they feel they have balanced the ledger:  they have succeeded materially, and shared the wealth in secret.  Maybe in this way they fortify their consciences, or attain some small measure of spiritual grace.  But still:  to give without hope of reward.  That’s curious.  It begs a question, and any answer must involve a moral judgment.  I find it impossible to explain this large group of Americans unless I endow it with a certain nobility of character.

This is not a new rhetorical device.  In earlier remarks on Libya, the president made this sweeping generalization:

Like all governments, the Libyan government has a responsibility to refrain from violence, to allow humanitarian assistance to reach those in need, and to respect the rights of its people. It must be held accountable for its failure to meet those responsibilities, and face the cost of continued violations of human rights.

“Accountable” is a deeply moral term – and, indeed, the president’s use of it is in the context of Qaddafi’s barbarities against his own people.  But I would like to know what he means by it.

Webster’s International Dictionary defines “accountable” as “Subject to giving an account:  answerable.”  Answerable to whom?  Webster’s provides a helpful example:  “every sane man is accountable to his conscience for his behavior.”  Muammar Qaddafi’s sanity is a topic of controversy these days – my take is that a lunatic rarely hangs on to power for 42 years – but his lack of a conscience is beyond dispute.

Asked about the violence in the country he rules, Qaddafi responded, “My people love me.  They would die to protect me.”  This is not a man who is going to hold himself accountable for his behavior.

Of course, there’s a simpler explanation.  When the president of the United States asserts, “Colonel Qaddafi needs to step down from power and leave,” it’s reasonable to assume American power will make it so – that Qaddafi isn’t accountable to his own forgiving conscience, but to us.

Yet nothing in the president’s statement suggests the slightest exertion on our government’s part to help see Qaddafi off.  When asked about US military intervention, the president spoke vaguely of contemplating the “full range of options” and having “full capacity to act” – but seemed to imply that any action would wait on the development of a humanitarian crisis, and on “consultation with the international community.”

President Obama does not sound like a man who will personally hold Qaddafi accountable.

A transgressor who won’t answer for himself must be held accountable by a higher authority.  It is notorious that, among sovereign nations, no such authority exists.  The UN is just a theatrical stage where nations scuffle for advantage.  As Ortega y Gasset observed, there isn’t even such a thing as international law, because true law would require a higher court of appeal, and that would require a surrender of sovereignty – something no government on earth would willingly contemplate.

President Obama is in no way a fool.  He must know all this.  If he isn’t willing to give the order to bring the Qaddafi regime to account, then in what sense does he believe the man will be held accountable?

I believe I know the answer.  It’s speculative, but I’ll stand by it.

The world, according to President Obama, is contained by a moral structure resembling a powerful gravitational field:  all human events are embedded in this force, and are driven to their inexorable conclusions by it.  The great moral structure of the world is like fate with Judgment Day attached.  It acts as the impersonal author of history, rewarding certain actions, punishing others.  Only the wisest perceive the flow of the moral structure – and they have deciphered the course of history.

That the president counts himself among the wisest should not be in doubt.  He warned Qaddafi’s henchmen to heed the “way history is moving, they should know history is moving against Col. Qaddafi” – and there followed another assertion that they will be held accountable for violence against the population.  In defending US inaction, President Obama argued:  “The region will be watching carefully to make sure we’re on the right side of history…”

“The region will be watching,” “The whole world is watching,” “violence… will be monitored” – an abiding feature of President Obama’s view of the world is fear of being caught out while on the wrong side of history.  That is what he believes has happened to Muammar Qaddafi.  Qaddafi’s goons are on YouTube killing unarmed civilians.  He thus “has lost legitimacy to lead.”  The great moral structure of the world, rather than any person or nation, will hold him accountable.  He will have no choice but to step down.  “It is the right thing to do.”

If I’m right in my interpretation, the president is about to commit a tragic error.  It’s an error because morality doesn’t pertain to the world but to human action.  And it’s tragic because, in the face of turmoil and suffering, he has found a pretext for doing nothing.

The president is like a lifeguard who sees a man drowning in the middle of the river, and walks away thinking, “The current will bring him safe to shore.”  But inactivity is an action:  if the man drowns, the lifeguard will be accountable.  Personal responsibility, not public exposure, is the engine powering morality in the real world.

Each of us is accountable for those actions within our power to do:  nothing more, but nothing less.  The Libyan people are being tormented by a moral monster, whose grip on power is slipping and who is fighting back without scruples or restraint.  Qaddafi’s defeat is not predestined.  His victory would set a grim precedent in the area.

The United States has it within its power to intervene in this bloody scene.  We aren’t duty-bound to overthrow Qaddafi – just to do our best to preserve decency and protect our interests.  To stand by brandishing words and proclamations is to play a game of chance with human life.  If that is President Obama’s policy, let’s pray that luck is on his side.

Otherwise, the Libyan people will – rightly – hold him and us accountable.

Whatever the future brings to Qaddafi, his regime, or Libya, one thing appears certain:  the United States will have had no influence over the outcome.

In the midst of the most astonishing global upheaval since 1989, American foreign policy can best be characterized as an embarrassed silence.  We seem to have no official opinion about these transformational events, no interests we wish to protect, no outcomes we prefer.  President Obama rarely speaks, and when he does, he says nothing.  Secretary of State Clinton makes vague pleas for an end to violence – as if a resumption of the Qaddafi regime’s control over the population were devoutly to be desired.

Never in my long life have I witnessed anything like it.  I have seen presidents with bad foreign policies and good, who succeed or fail in their endeavors.  I have never seen a president with no foreign policy, whose approach to the world imitates the mute self-righteousness of a Trappist monk.

The case of Libya exemplifies this urge to quietude.  Unlike events in Egypt and Bahrain, where pro-American authoritarians were challenged by popular uprisings, Qaddafi’s current troubles don’t represent a conflict between our interests and our ideals.  He’s a bloody-minded egotist, a plague to his own people, a bomber of commercial airliners, a murderer of innocents, including Americans.  He loves us not at all – and we owe him nothing.

So why the vow of silence?  I have heard rumors in the media about a concern that the Libyans would take Americans hostage.  If true, this is naïve on many levels.  It assumes Qaddafi would strike at American citizens only in response to US actions, and not because, at a given moment, he considers this move to be in his best interest.  It also supposes Qaddafi will respond more favorably to silence and passivity than to a show of force.  Yet we have evidence to the contrary.  After President Reagan bombed Libya in 1986, Qaddafi pulled his head into his shell and didn’t pull it out again for years.

Another explanation whispered by the media is that we have no influence to bear on Qaddafi or Libya.  This is both hypocritical and false.  Hypocritical because where we did have influence – in Egypt, for example – we refused to apply it, and chose to wait on events instead.  False because, absent this administration’s reflexive twitch to look away and bite its tongue, a great power always has options.

After all, Peru – not a great power – broke relations with Libya three days ago.  Switzerland – tiny and neutral – froze Qaddafi’s assets two days ago.  These countries didn’t ask anyone’s permission, didn’t make excuses:  they acted.  Surely our own government can do as much.

We can state aloud our preferred outcome:  a democratic and peace-loving Libya.  We can say what we won’t tolerate:  the slaughter of the Libyan people by Qaddafi’s forces.  And we can warn, clearly and specifically, of the measures we will take if the intolerable occurs:  impose economic sanctions, say, or a no-fly zone with the Sixth Fleet – or take out Qaddafi’s armor and air force.  None of this will guarantee that events will flow in our direction.  What it will do is ensure that US interests and values are in play, and must be reckoned with by friends and foes in the region.

President Obama doesn’t confide his motives to me, but I doubt the explanations in the media account for the strange American silence.  The recipe for the president’s quiescent slouch in the Middle East, I’d guess, is one part perplexity, one part belief in the nefarious effect of US power, and eight parts indifference to the fate of the world.  He found the time and energy to chastise his political opponents in Madison, Wisconsin, but for days, while Qaddafi’s goons murdered protesters by the score, he looked the other way and kept mum.

Silence is a form of action.  It has consequences.  In Libya, as in Egypt, America’s unwillingness to defend its interests and values will be noted by all political forces currently contending for ascendancy.  Those who hate us and despise our way of life will feel emboldened.  Those who might have advocated liberal democracy will feel forsaken and betrayed.  The vast majority, fence-sitters all, will embrace with various degrees of sincerity whatever ideology fills the void left by our withdrawal.

This is unlikely to be kind or gentle.  It is, in my opinion, a fact of history that when America grows silent, freedom loses its voice.

On New Year’s Day, 1959, the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista packed his family and his gold into an airplane, and took off for Spain.  A week later, when the charismatic hero of the revolution addressed an adoring public in Havana, he seemed curiously unwilling to celebrate, and instead aimed his considerable rhetorical arsenal against political groups not directly under his control.

That was the beginning of a half-century of horror – a suffocating nightmare from which the Cuban people have yet to awaken.

Similar dismal scripts followed the overthrow of the shah in Iran, and of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua.  Celebrations of freedom gave way to a more savage and lasting oppression than the old regime’s.

There are no iron laws in history, however.  The fall of Ferdinand Marcos in the Phillipines restored democracy to that country.  The same transpired in Argentina when the military junta ceded power after its defeat at the hands of the British.  More surprisingly, the collapse of the Suharto regime began a democratic experiment in Indonesia, a country with no history or tradition of political freedom.

With the fall of tyrants, nothing is fated, nothing is promised.  The problem is that these great upheavals of power are also reversals in the flow of time.  They appear, to the rejoicing crowds, like a happy ending, but are in reality the start of an uncertain tale.

Those who have never endured life under a dictator can’t imagine the nauseating hopelessness everyday life can achieve.  Fear sucks the air from the atmosphere.  The sight of a policeman, a sycophant, a censored news report poisons the happiest moment with feelings of shame and disgust.  Hypocrisy becomes the highest virtue – the ability to smile outwardly, and weep and rage in one’s soul.

Without freedom, the day is long.  Time is the ally of tyranny, an oppressive force which, by sheer dreariness and repetition, breaks down the strongest will.  Tomorrow will be like yesterday:  and the dictator, in his heroic pose, will cast a sickly shadow over both.

So when history miraculously resumes, when the clock begins to tick again, and the regime of lies crumbles before something very like the truth, it’s understandable for the long-suffering population to wish to celebrate an ending.

But consider the task ahead.  Political life, and many social and economic arrangements, have been hollowed out by the dictator.  Corruption like a contagious disease has spread from the palace to the marketplace to the home.  With the despot’s departure, distrust will replace fear as the overwhelming emotion of the public square.

People have little experience in self-rule or civic-mindedness, but own vast stores of knowledge in how to lie and cheat to feather one’s own nest.  The government which follows the dictator’s will be composed of his creatures or of neophytes, will preserve his system or trample on it, will be called “provisional” or “popular”:  regardless, it won’t last.  Citizens will learn that, beyond hatred of the old regime, they share little in common.  Some will advocate democracy.  Others, the triumph of some messianic ideology.  Others still crave economic betterment, or revenge for past humiliations.

At some point, a powerful and attractive voice will cry above the turmoil, “I can restore order” or “I can purify society” or “I can find work and dignity for all.”  And that will be the hinge of history, with freedom and tyranny in the balance.

To say yes to the charismatic voice is to open the door to an Ayatollah Khomeini, a Fidel Castro:  to slip from bad to worse.  The crowd, weary of celebrating liberation, will acquiesce in silence to a resurrected oppression.

The starting-point of these reflections is the fall from power in Egypt of Hosni Mubarak, after 30 years of rule.

Nobody knows what the future will bring for Egypt.  I mean that quite literally:  nobody, on principle, can know, because complex systems are inherently unpredictable and every human being is a complex system.  In the matter of prophecy, President Obama and CIA are off the hook.

But we know that the path to freedom will be long and difficult, and will require the intelligent assistance of friends of freedom everywhere, but most particularly in the United States.  The sanest message the Obama administration can send at the moment is that this is a beginning, not an end.

Egypt has some traditions of self-rule, though few Egyptians alive today will remember.  The country also spawned the Muslim Brotherhood, which the US should make every effort to marginalize:  not because it is anti-American, but because it is anti-democratic.  Although, unlike Al Qaeda, the Brotherhood is happy to play the electoral game, its political objective is identical to Osama bin Laden’s:  the restoration of a powerful caliphate.

As part of their long march to freedom, Egyptians must decide whether democracy is a suicide pact.

A more immediate concern is the Egyptian military, who have inherited power in an opaque arrangement that is unlikely to endure.  Apparently the military enjoy some popularity among the people.  They possess most of the guns and much of the wealth – Mubarak, we would do well to remember, was a fighter pilot.  There will be a temptation for the officer class to divvy up the pot now the boss is gone, as happened in Paraguay after Generalissimo Stroessner was pushed out.

The US should have some influence over the Egyptian military, since we pay them big money.  But we should cherish no illusions on this score.  The rules of the game are now broken:  anything goes.  The military will cut its own deal with Egyptian society, and with the world.  From one of its officers, I suspect, will come the siren song of restoration of order and final solution of problems.  The new riddle of the sphinx will be a choice between faux Napoleonic glory and real democratic drudgery.

On the answer given by the Egyptian people will hang their fate and the possibility of freedom in the land of Pharaoh.

Because individuals vary wildly in their tolerance of risk, its definition becomes problematic.  I once knew a young man who loved rock climbing.  He was tall and handsome, with a brilliant future ahead of him, but he tumbled to his death from a cliff wall.  I thought then – still think today – that rock climbing is a frivolous risk of life.  I thought the young man died pointlessly.

Should the government ban rock climbing?  This type of logic leads to perplexing places.  Many more people die in car accidents than rock climbing, for example.  Should the government ban cars?  An even larger number die of hospital-induced infections.  Should the government ban hospitals?

My daughter was taught in her health class that obesity, because of its cost, is a burden “on the community.”  Should the FDA assign a food police to restaurants, to throw me in prison if I eat too much?

Maybe the problem of risk is qualitative rather than statistical – an attitude of criminal recklessness, a disregard for life.  But who can judge for another?  I wouldn’t presume, not even for the young rock climber.  He chose his fate.  Who am I to do it for him?

Every attempt to move beyond common sense and tradition in the definition of risk will get lost in a labyrinth of arbitrary decisions.  Any attempt to erect an abstract standard for acceptable risk will quickly sink to the lowest common denominator of elitism, conservatism, and bureaucratic immobility.

We know this because such a standard already exists:  the “Precautionary Principle,” first perpetrated by the 1992 Earth Summit but now sanctified as EU law, adopted by the UN Convention on Climate Change and our own EPA, and written into the municipal codes of American cities like San Francisco and Portland.

The original version of the Precautionary Principle proclaimed that a “lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.”  This sounds more like the Ignorance Is Bliss Principle, and resembles an infamous Vietnam-era maxim:  when in doubt, take it out.

Here’s a newer version:  “Activities that present an uncertain potential for significant harm should be prohibited unless the proponent of the activity shows that it presents no appreciable risk of harm.”  On this account, rock climbing and cars should both be banned – as indeed should every conceivable human activity.

I first read about the Precautionary Principle in Kevin Kelly’s brilliantly original What Technology Wants.  Allow me a moment of astonishment that I had not heard of it before.  Was it ever debated in the full hearing of the public?  Did the bureaucrats in the UN and EPA, or the politicians of the EU and San Francisco, ever say out in the open, “This is the instrument of our power – this is how moral adults deal with risk, on your behalf”?

The Precautionary Principle isn’t a “standard” at all, since only a few insiders know of its existence.  It’s a weapon of control, deployed by elites to obliterate the democratic process and impose their will on the restless rabble.

Whoever defines risk using the Principle commands the power of life and death.  Because excessive spraying of DDT harmed some animals, the US government banned its use and led a campaign to globalize the ban.  Today two million people die of malaria worldwide – a much higher incidence than in the 1950’s, when DDT was available.

Kelly’s abiding interest is in technology and the pace of innovation.  The practical effect of the Precautionary Principle, he notes, would be to freeze technology at the present moment:  “Safety trumps innovation.” (Had the Principle been applied since the beginning of time, we would still be trilobites, scuttling quietly along the ocean floor.)  Kelly continues:

The safest thing to do is to perfect what works and never try anything that could fail, because failure is inherently unsafe.  An innovative medical procedure will not be as safe as the proven standard.  Innovation is not prudent.  Yet because precaution privileges only safety, it not only diminishes other values but actually reduces safety.

There are risks in avoiding risk that the precautionary philosophy has not dreamed of.  To anyone interested in such “substitute risks,” I recommend spending some time with Kelly’s fascinating book.

My concern here is with the moral effect of the Precautionary Principle, which is to establish a class of definers and deciders, of moral adults who absorb all responsibility for making choices on behalf of an infantilized population.  Members of this class, I imagine, will meander down the labyrinth of arbitrary opinions.  For some reason, or no reason, they will allow some innovations and disallow many more.

The details are unimportant.  What matters isn’t whether this or that particular activity is judged too risky, but the impaling in the heart of liberal democracy of a new Aristocratic Principle:  Who defines risk, commands all.

I have been trying to make sense of our government’s approach to the uprising in Egypt.  Not just the statements and policies, but the inner logic, the deep structure:  the vision of the world from which the statements and policies flow.

And I keep coming back to the idea that President Obama is uninterested in the world, and would – if the world allowed him – turn his back on it.

Much has been made of the administration’s inability to keep up with events on the ground in Egypt.  This is a fair indictment.  White House and State Department statements seem to shift according to the images on that day’s Al Jazeera feed.

I’ll cite one example.  On 28 January, with demonstrators brushing aside the police in many Egyptian cities while Hosni Mubarak, the country’s “president” of 30 years, maintained a sphinx-like silence, the White House made emphatic noises about cutting US aid.  Three days later, after Mubarak offered to leave office in September, Secretary of State Clinton stated, “There is no discussion of cutting off aid.”

US positions appear tactical, improvised, and often contradictory.  Egypt is pronounced “stable” by the secretary of state, but a few days later the president finds the country to be suffering a “moment of volatility.”  We deny any wish to “dictate” an outcome to the crisis, but this is how White House press secretary addresses the Egyptian government:  “Violence in any form should stop immediately, and the grievances should be addressed.”

This obsession with tactical positioning is a symptom of a much graver malady.  Toward a country like Egypt, ruled by a sickly 82-year-old despot and key to the frail US-sponsored arrangements in the Middle East, the administration had failed to articulate a vision of how American interests and ideals must evolve into the future.  Tactics were necessary because no strategy existed.

The omission can only be described as attention deficit disorder on a world historical scale.  I’m not privy to the motives of the president or his advisors, but they seem to me strangely uninterested in shaping events, in directing outcomes – in making history.  They seem to me like they wish to be left alone by a turbulent world.

Our official declarations have tended to strike an angelic pose, as if the United States lacked any selfish interests.  Of the Tunisian uprising, prime mover to the current Arab upheaval, Secretary Clinton said:  “We are not taking sides.”  For days after a human tide, like the Red Sea, overwhelmed the security forces of Mubarak’s pharaonic regime, US statements worried mainly about the possibility of violence.  “We urge all parties to refrain from violence”:  another way of saying, “We are not taking sides.”

Even when, in the press of events, the administration at length abandoned Mubarak for some sort of transitional process, the appeal was to airy “universal” principles rather than to American interests or ideals.  “We support the universal rights of the Egyptian people,” read a White House statement.  “The people of Egypt have rights that are universal,” said the president, somewhat later, on TV.  To the Egyptian government, Vice President Biden “restated President Obama’s support for universal rights.”  In a statement condemning regime violence against journalists, Secretary Clinton first spoke of “international norms” but soon reverted to “universal values.”

The values in question were “freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press.”  These are truly noble ideals, but I’d like the chance to question Secretary Clinton about their universality.  Neither she nor anyone else in the administration, I feel certain, would take up the debate.  Their talk of universal values is a dodge, a way of pretending liberal democracy isn’t an American ideal.

In fact the US has an existential stake in the outcome in Egypt.  We wish to prevent an Islamist takeover.  We don’t wish to see the most populous and prestigious Arab nation – but also the birthplace of the Muslim Brotherhood – become, like Iran, a zealous promoter of terrorism.  We wish to see the peace with Israel hold, or else the “moment of volatility” will give way to far more dreadful times.

And because America is an ideological country, and Americans are an ideological people, we wish to have peaceful relations with an Egyptian government which embraces liberal democracy – personal and political freedom – in all its aspects.

President Obama is shy in pressing these peculiarly American interests and ideals.  He prefers the angelic pose.  In a WaPo article, David Ignatius calls him the first “post-colonial” president – which I translate to mean, the first president who believes US influence brings more harm than good to the world.  Maybe so.  This would explain the president’s shyness, and would agree with observations I have made on this blog.

Yet a sincere post-colonialist would possess the theoretical framework to prefer a specific outcome in Egypt – the overthrow of the corrupt NDP clique – and the motivation to seek this outcome by the application of American power.  Instead the president has dithered.  At present he seems to favor a transition managed by the newly appointed Egyptian vice president, a man fully implicated in the crimes of the regime.

If, as Ignatius claims, the president is in his mind a disciple of Frantz Fanon, in his actions he appears to be a servant of the status quo.

Because of his exotic personal background, Barack Obama has been portrayed as uniquely at home outside our borders:  a citizen of the world.  The reality is that, like the typical Joe Sixpack, he is deeply uninterested in, and suspicious of, the sound and fury emanating from the world – the noise of history.  His secretary of state is an invisible woman.  His State of the Union speech scarcely took notice of the existence of contending nations and restless populations, any of which can erupt, as Egypt has, without a moment’s warning, to bring grief to American lives.

On the stage of history, President Obama so far has been, by orders of magnitude, the most passive and conservative chief executive in my lifetime.  He seeks to freeze human affairs in a Faustian moment, with America’s clients distant enough that they won’t entangle us in their troubles, and America’s antagonists flattered enough that they won’t scheme our ruin.  He can then turn inward, and achieve at home his parochial transformations.

But history won’t go away.  The world is too much with us, and the United States is too large a force in the world.  For peculiarly American reasons, that force has been exerted on behalf of freedom.  From Hitler to Saddam Hussein, would-be Caesars have had to contend with the American fighting man, while totalitarians have had to reckon with a fierce American defense of liberal democracy.

American power and influence are identified in history with a way of life.  It will be hard for President Obama to tiptoe away from America’s historical commitments, without wreaking havoc on the status quo he so desperately wishes to preserve.

UPDATE:  Jackson Diehl at WaPo records another instance of the president’s obdurate loyalty to the status quo.

Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses