Crusader War College

An extremely good article by J. R. Nyquist on the unintended consequences of men deciding they can create Utopia on earth, and who thus feel themselves free from any restrictions because the utter blessedness of the ends must surely justify the means.

However, this set of quotes Mr. Nyquist cites from David Ignatius' "Agents of Innocence", says exactly what I have been trying to articulate:

There is a passage from a novel by David Ignatius about Middle East espionage, titled Agents of Innocence. It expresses the damning verdict of an Arab who had been working for the Americans. At first he thought the Americans had the toughness to persevere. He thought they were “cynical enough” to liberate the Arab world (and t hereby do something good).

The disillusioned Arab wrote to his handlers: “I was wrong. Americans are not hard men. Even the CIA has a soft heart. You want so much to achieve good and make the world better, but you do not have the stomach for it. And you do not know your limitations. You are innocence itself. You are the agents of innocence. That is why you make so much mischief.”

The great teaching of David Ignatius may be condensed, as follows: Men who are not sufficiently cynical, who are soft-hearted, who do not have the stomach for what they propose, cannot do anything good. If you want to level nations and kill millions of men, adopt a Utopian foreign policy. Ignatius’s Arab tells his American handlers, “You convince people to put aside their old customs and allegiances and to break the bonds that hold the country together. With your money and your schools and your cigarettes and music, you convince us that we can be like you. But we can’t. And when the real trouble begins, you are gone. And you leave your friends, the ones who trusted you, to die.”

There is, indeed, a millenarian spirit at work. This spirit now contaminates American domestic policy as well as military policy. “You urge us to open up the windows of heaven,” wrote Ignatius’s Arab. “But you do not realize that the downpour will come rushing through and drown us all.”

Exactly. In an imperfect and evil world, doing real good takes real effort. Sometimes, to do real good means doing what a fake good would call evil.