Folly defines Western history

Dear editor: Why did the Trojans drag that suspicious looking wooden horse inside their walls, despite having every reason to suspect a Greek trick? Why do we insist on continuous ‘growth’ when evidence demonstrates arable land, clean water and unpolluted air diminish because of it? Folly defines Western history. Barbra Tuchman’s book, “The March of Folly” looks at 30 centuries of folly, from the fall of Troy to Vietnam, How the Renaissance Catholic popes provoked the Protestant Reformation and how the Aztec king Montezuma with an army of 300,000 fierce warriors fell to a 120 ragged Spanish conquistadors.

How Louis XIV’s incompetence and decadence spawned the French Revolution and how England’s hapless royal ministers lost the American colonies who were pleading for their help; and Hitler’s folly to invade Russia, when both Sweden’s Charles XII (1709) and Napoleon (1812) had previously tried and failed.

These are some of the many crimes and folly over the centuries and the misfortune suffered as a consequence.

While mankind has made many accomplishments, as it stands today, Tuchman says, we govern ourselves little better than the Greeks did 3,000 ago.

Folly in government is perceived as policy that is counter-productive in its own time, not merely in hindsight. Folly is unrelated to the type of government; monarchy, oligarchy and democracy produce folly in equal measure.

Wooden-headedness, the constant companion of folly, consists of assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions, while ignoring or rejecting any contrary evidence; a remarkably accurate description of Donald Trump’s rational for his loony trade war.

For 2,500 years, Western political philosophers from Plato and Aristotle through Thomas Aquinas, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton, Nietzsche, Mills, Hobbes and Marx, devoted thinking to issues of ethics, social contract and rights of man, the corruption of power and the balance between freedom and order. None could find any kind of immunity to folly. Though periodically, history produces an exception to folly in the appearance of a strong, efficient administrator and occasionally wise leader. We live in hope.

John Locke tells us: “The worth of a state is the worth of the individuals composing it.” If so, then better government decisions need the nourishment of a dynamic and enlightened electorate, rather than one that is troubled and bewildered.

Folly in government will persist until the electorate strive to recognize and reward integrity of character and reject fake. Then perhaps, a better time brings better people and wiser governments. Jon Peter Christoff West Kelowna