15 February, 2004
The String

George W. Bush has one thing in common with a lot of us: a bad habit of learning only what he already knows. About a week ago came confirmation from an inside source that although Mr. Bush looks at several newspapers each day, he avoids those parts that disagree with his thinking. That's dangerous behavior in the President of the United States, especially when his better half does the same. As she was the inside source, speaking to The New York Times, it must be true — or if it's a canard, the Bushes are behind it themselves. So much for the hope that the President was receiving curtain lectures on the plight of the human race.

A habit that's bad in one transient politician is worse when millions of people take it up. The Internet opens a great vault of information and opinion to us. Let's not use it merely as a polemical armory to be ransacked for weapons, or a pantry where we can sit on the floor and gratify our ideological cravings. If President Bush won't pay attention to alternatives, some of the rest of us had better be in the habit of doing it for him — not only alternatives to the President's settled notions, but to our own as well. For example, if you're accustomed to the view of Henry Kissinger as a high priest of American tyranny, you can enjoy something a little different by reading "Springtime for Kissinger." There's no need to start liking the man, but you may find the contradiction refreshing in itself.

A contradiction is often a valuable discovery. People with complex tastes in knowledge are valuable people, and never more so than when single-minded fanaticism is rampant. As you must have noticed, it's rampant now. We're in the lair of the Minotaur these days. What's worse, there's something in here with us stalking both the Minotaur and ourselves: a gaping, insensate thing that would pacify the world by consuming it. We have to fight, and so we write. But like Theseus in the Labyrinth, we need more than a weapon for survival. We also need a trail of string leading back to civilization, or, shall we say, to the hope of civilization. In times past, such strings have generally consisted of three strands: knowledge, reason, and humanity. All three depend on self-doubt. We desire knowledge because we doubt the adequacy of the knowledge we possess; we submit to reason because we doubt the intuition of any human being; and we loosely bind the two with humanity because we doubt whether we could stand rigid justice.

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