John Robson: Complacency in the Face of Bad Policy Can Be Dangerous, as Can Excessive Alarm

Commentary

When Alberta Premier Danielle Smith told her United Conservative Party convention that Canada could work, some people booed. Which is an interesting and instructive response, especially ideologically, because public policy seems to be divided between people who typically refuse to believe things can be as bad as they seem, and ones who refuse to believe they’re better. As both generate dangerous errors when wrong, they’re worth thinking about, and knowing which you are.

The particular issue was this “memorandum of understanding” laying out a roadmap to a plan for an agreement to work out a framework for developing an approach to approving the creation of a pathway to a Neverland pipeline. On which, yes, I’m booing too. But I don’t want to get too far into the specifics, or lack thereof, because my focus is how those people reacted ideologically to alleged good news.

At the risk of inviting boos from my audience, as always, I do not use ideology pejoratively. Whenever I encounter a phrase like “Opting for ideology over good sense,” common even from people I generally admire and agree with, I retort something like: “They opted for the wrong ideology. Ideology is just a coherent world-view and you’d look silly without one. But be very careful which you choose because ideas have consequences.”

Ideologies have very specific contents, of course. But they also involve broad conclusions, necessarily largely intuitive, about how the world works. Including Thomas Sowell’s “A Conflict of Visions” argument that a crucial difference between left and right, so profound it’s hard to discuss, is how much the former emphasize good intentions and a vision for the future in policy design, whereas the latter emphasize good methods and a vision of the past.

It’s hard to discuss because to conservatives, progressives seem daffy and destructive, whereas to progressives, conservatives seem cruel and hidebound. And it’s tempting to bypass the hard work of critiquing our own assumptions explicitly, and instead jeer “ideologue” at one another, invoking some kind of peculiar mental defect that makes a person obtusely blind to the facts, perversely blind to them, or both.

Alas, the only test for “ideology” is that the person insists on holding their opinion even after I tell them mine. And what’s really going on isn’t that they are “blind to the facts” but that they interpret them differently.

I am emphatically not arguing that truth is relative. But I am emphatically arguing that the world, and thought, are so complicated that it’s inherently difficult to demonstrate which interpretation is correct. Something you can verify by reading people’s autobiographical accounts of dramatic changes of mind which, like Hemingway’s character going broke, seem generally to happen slowly then suddenly.

OK, you’re going to boo and walk out if I don’t get to that convention. But we needed this memorandum of actual understanding to consider sensibly that many UCPers are convinced, with good reason, that Canada currently doesn’t work well for Alberta, and many believe it can’t. So what happens when they’re presented with contrary evidence?

Many, like me, aren’t convinced by it. Many clearly also don’t want to be, which is not a criticism per se but does carry risks.

Of course, if you’ve spent decades working out a worldview, it hurts to discover that it’s mistaken. You don’t just face embarrassment in admitting significant error, and risk ostracism by former friends. You have to wonder, if you were that wrong for so long, what hope exists that your next effort to understand the world won’t be equally fatuous. And of course, the contrary evidence could be misleading. So what are we to do?

Well, know thyself. My readers realize I’m disposed to think we’re in a heap of policy trouble and should take swift, bold action. And not, I maintain, just because I’m dyspeptic. I’ve studied the broad sweep of history, and concluded that far too many disasters have overtaken humans through complacency about conventional wisdom and consequent steady-as-she-sinks policy.

Still, when people don’t accept my call to repeal the Canada Health Act, say, as soon as they hear it, insisting that minor adjustments will fix things and I’m too excitable, the hard part is that I must examine myself for that flaw. I have to ask myself how sure I am that we can’t just muddle through here, why I’m so sure and, worst, whether if it did work I’d be relieved, or bitter.

In my view, the complacent outnumber the alarmed, which is dangerous. But the latter are more liable to go down paranoid rabbit holes, which is also dangerous. So while thought is complicated and we sinners cannot ever entirely disentangle the good reasons for what we think and do from the bad ones, we do have to try.

Then we can boo. But only then.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.