Next Wednesday and Thursday, you'll have the opportunity to watch a documentary film called Fog of War. (I say "opportunity" because you can beg off if you want to use the time to work on your final project and/or your blog.)
The film's about a man named Robert McNamara (as you may have guessed, that's him up there). McNamara had a varied and influential (some would say infamous) career in both the public and private sectors; he's most well-known for his service as the Secretary of Defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, but he was also the President of Ford Motor Company in the 1950s and he finished his career as head of the World Bank. Suffice it to say, if there was a class called "20th Century Challenges" he'd be the one to teach it because he had a front row seat to most of them, everything from the 1918 flu epidemic when he was a mere tot, all the way to WWII, the Sixties (and everything that portentous decade entailed), Vietnam and beyond.
I want to use this documentary -- this man -- to conclude our festivities for at least four reasons:
1. First, we spent last week talking about the role of government and I'd like you to continue thinking about what government is supposed to do -- what it does well -- and what it doesn't do well. I don't think there's a hard and fast answer to those questions, but I do want you thinking about them. As I said last week, we may very well be entering an era when the role of government, both here and abroad, is making a fundamental shift. There appears to be a prevailing sense -- right or wrong -- that government can and should do more. Fog of War is, I think, instructive when it comes to understanding both the potential and the limitations of governments and government officials, even (or perhaps especially) if they're really, really smart.
2. Speaking of really, really smart people: the second reason I want to show the film is because McNamara himself is not unlike you. He's really smart (and he knows it). As a young man, he was really ambitious and he wanted to have a role in solving the problems of his day. That worked out well in some respects (Seatbelts! Yay!) and not so well in other respects (Bay of Pigs, Gulf of Tonkin [:(]...boo!). Regardless, he collected a lot of insights from his varied experiences, his success and his failures, and I think those insights are useful for folks who want to give their talents and energy to tackling today's most vexing issues.
3. Oh yeah: vexing issues. I want to show this film because it drives home an important point. There have always been vexing issues. Some even more vexing than the ones we're facing now. It's not so much the issues themselves; it's how you approach them.
4. Last, I want us to consider one of McNamara's lessons in particular: "Rationality will not save us," he says. Much of this class has been about applying rationality -- reason, intention, Logos, whatever you want to call it -- to the challenges we've considered. I'll go on record as saying that we've got a dearth of rationality in our cultural ecosystem, and that's a problem. But here's a guy who structured his life around reason, facts, evidence -- a guy who applied those particular intellectual tools directly to the great conundrums of his time. He's the 20th century's poster boy of Logos. And yet at the end of the ride, he looks back on all of it and says, "Rationality will not save us." What on earth could he mean by that? I say we watch the film and find out.
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