The End of Eternity

[airiefairie]

Here is a slightly more philosophical question. I know this is a primarily political community but please do bear with me if you like. What would happen if we could arbitrarily and without hindrances travel back and forth in time, to whichever "point" in time we wanted, and change past and future events in a way that would prevent the occurrence of

Comments

[jonathankorman]

John Holbo has a long blog post about the tendency for exactly this in a review of a book by conservative David Frum:Surely Frum is at most guilty of insufficiently vigorous advocacy of prosperity. He can’t be expressly advocating the lack thereof. Oddly, there are various strong hints that he is. Example:Contemporary conservatives still value that old American character. William Bennett in his lectures reads admiringly from an account of the Donner party written by a survivor that tells the story in spare, stoic style. He puts the letter down and asks incredulously, “Where did those people go?” But if you believe that early Americans possessed a fortitude that present-day Americans lack, and if you think the loss is an important one, then you have to think hard about why that fortitude disappeared. Merely exhorting Americans to show more fortitude is going to have about as much effect on them as a lecture from the student council president on school spirit. Reorganizing the method by which they select and finance their schools won’t do it either, and neither will the line-item veto, or discharge petitions, or entrusting Congress with the power to deny individual NEA grants, or court decisions strinking down any and all acts of politically correct tyranny emanating from the offices of America’s deans of students - worthwhile though each and every one of those things may be. It is socials that form character, as another conservative hero, Alexis de Tocqueville, demonstrated, and if our characters are now less virtuous than formerly, we must identify in what way our social conditions have changed in order to understand why.

Of course there have been hundreds of such changes - never mind since the Donner party’s day, just since 1945 … But the expansion of government is the only one we can do anything about.

All of these changes have had the same effect: the emancipation of the individual appetite from restrictions imposed on it by limited resources, or religious dread, or community disapproval, or the risk of disease or personal catastophe.

(p. 202-3)
Words fail me; links not much better. The Donner party? Where did all these people go?
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Frum is not thinking about what he’s saying. Because what he is saying more or less instantaneously implies an indefinitely large cloud of things he really - really, really - doesn’t think.

We are at this point very near the heart of what Frum styles his ‘conservative philosophy’. But at the heart of it is a sort of proto-cognitive itch; a sensibility, or feeling, or subconscious reflex.
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We all like watching movies about rugged tough guys (well, most of us: I do). But - write this on a 3 x 5 card and consult as necessary - it is absurd to advocate that the government intentionally impose hardship on the people, against their will, for the sake of toughening them up.
Holbo goes on to examine how monstrous this “logic” really would be if you took it seriously.