profundity and beauty lie precisely in decisiveness. Only in it can love mature in all its beauty.He's talking about the virtue of prudence there --a virtue that entails not only choosing wisely what to do, but sticking to it once you've decided. Because of the supremacy of feelings in our culture, many of us think that each crisis or difficulty requires us completely to rethink our original decision. How many times do we run into a cross and start to think, "this must not have been God's will for me?" Not so. Of course it may be that you've been guilty of rash judgment and in that case maybe you should learn and re-group. And new information can require "course corrections" in carrying out the original plan. But if your decision was made honestly, with good judgment (and for Christians, in the light of prayer), and there are no new data to consider, you have no business rethinking the matter. Virtue requires you to overcome the obstacle, and the very understandable human tendency to shrink from difficulty --or to allow fate to choose for you by vacillating until events overtake you-- is to be resisted. As the Pope puts it:
Even in crisis, in enduring moments that seem unbearable, new doors are opened, and love takes on a new beauty. A beauty made up of nothing but harmony is not a real beauty. [...] Real beauty also needs contrast. Light and darkness complement each other.
One of the constants you hear or read from people who meet privately with the President is that he's sure of himself, comfortable in his own skin, or negatively --a la Peggy Noonan recently-- he "never says anything new" (curtsy to NLT). I maintain this is because the President has a high degree of this lost and unrecognized virtue. Our feelings-based culture wants to see him on t.v. all the time visibly agonizing over his decisions ("admitting mistakes") and "feeling our pain." Or we think he can suddenly come up with the exact right words to assuage all of our doubts about the correctness of his approach to the war on terror or our pain or exhaustion with its toll.
I admit I sometimes think I could make the case better than he does, but it's not true; I think this because I am a product of my culture, overly impressed by rhetoric and insufficiently capable of prudent action. Is it Thucydides who remarks that when Pericles speaks, men applaud, but when Demosthenes speaks, men march? (Where is VDH when you need him?) Rhetoric is important, but let's not pretend it's everything. At bottom, what more more can be said? The original decision to go into Iraq was a judgment call. The President we elected made the best call he could in light of the duties of his office and the facts available to him, and we're in it now. Historians can judge it later when results are known and all the hidden facts released, but there is no virtue inherent in agonizing per se. It would not be right for him to re-think the matter every second --that would be to take the lives at stake (ours and the Iraqis) extremely lightly (it's worth your life. . .no, wait, maybe it isn't. . .yes it is. . . .well, I'm not sure). That kind of agonizing is for the time of deliberation. Once you've set your course, it's a fault --a deformation of will that leaves you weak, unable to accomplish anything, anxious, sad, paralyzed --ultimately, not free.
If you think the President doesn't fully feel the weight of each death in Iraq, you should ask the military families he visits about that. But he equally understands that suffering and hardship are not signs you made a bad decision; you find them on every road. When you undertake something hard, there are only two things to keep repeating: the ultimate goal and the value of the effort and sacrifice to get there. He has been utterly upfront with us about that. There are no magic words to make a difficult war against a strange enemy easy and popular, and were the President eloquent as Churchill, he'd still be telling us about liberty and difficulty --just a little more nicely.
This is what human freedom is: to discern the good; through deliberation to choose the best means to achieve it; to pursue those means wholeheartedly. Providence decides the rest (even the wisest and most virtuous decisions don't always yield success). This is why I was struck by that comment from C.S. Lewis a few days ago:
What I cannot understand is [the] sort of semipacifism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you were ashamed of it. It is that feeling that robs lots of magnificent young Christians in the Services of something they have a right to, something which is the natural accompaniment of courage--a kind of gaity and wholeheartedness.
Bush has that wholeheartedness and we judge him for it. We seem to think that being stressed out about our decision-making is in itself a sign of virtue or depth. That's why people think the President is shallow --he doesn't seem to be stressed out. But the Prudent man, the Courageous man, actually enjoys decision-making and action --he enjoys exercising his freedom, he can bear the sword of Damocles above him. And he's generally more humble than others in the sense that he knows he isn't guaranteed success and can learn from his mistakes without letting them paralyze him. Which leads me to another interesting quotation, in connection with the President's alleged arrogance. From G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy:
The old humility was a spur that prevented us from stopping; not a nail in our boot that prevented us from going on. For the old humility made us doubtful about our efforts, which might make us work harder. But the new humility made us doubtful about our aims, which makes us stop working altogether.
In all of this I am not for a moment suggesting the President is semi-divine, infallible, a genius, superhuman, or anything of the kind. I'm not even promising he's right. I do think he has a better handle on what it is to be a mature and free human being than anyone else in American public life. I am really tired of the midget men snipping at him.
