Sometimes I speak in haste, and write things without taking much time to examine them. Earlier, in an afterthought to a comment to a post which I quoted in an update to a post, I quoted my farmer/grandfather:

You can't make a race horse out of a plowhorse!

Or so it seems....

But is the point (the one I thought I was making, anyway) whether or not one can make a loser into a winner? Could this country have been built and settled had its pioneers possessed only racehorses? Yet of the two, we normally think of the racehorse as being the obvious winner. Never mind that had it not been for the efforts of the plowhorse, there'd have been racetracks to run on, no leisure time to spend watching the racehorses, and maybe no money to spend betting on them.

This reminded me of a conversation the other night between a classically trained musician and a successful rock musician (a star, as it happens, but no names). I know the former and had just met the latter, so I found myself listening avidly, but saying little. The rock musician was talking about how technological developments had revolutionized music, so that now virtually anyone could be his own sound studio. He also spoke of techniques for cleaning up pitch, tone, rhythm, explained how flat notes (even off-key human voices) could now be corrected. I was fascinated to hear that just as it was once common to remove vinyl scratchy noises and hisses from old recordings, now it's the height of fashion to put them in. You know, give it a little "authenticity."

Perhaps the fake authenticity proved too much for the classical musician, who reminded me later that years of training go into getting it perfect, that if an opera singer doesn't sing well or a cellist plays off key, it's curtains for a classical career. Classical music is, it would seem, less forgiving. (I'd hesitate to say it's harder work, though.... any more than I'd care to speculate whether James Joyce or Elmore Leonard worked harder. As to which is "better," I don't know; I'd have to check with Amazon!)

None of this strikes me as particularly fair. But who gives a rat's ass what's fair? What matters is what the public wants, and if classical musicians can't earn a decent living and rock stars make millions, that's the free market at work.

And really and truly, I should hasten to add that have no quarrel with that, because any attempt to tamper with it would make things much worse.

As to who's the winner, I have no idea. (Did Van Gogh win?)

If we turn to politics, I suppose the racehorse would be the candidate that wins. But what about the American love for the underdog?

For the plowhorse? Maybe that's what we need. And maybe the skills it takes to win an election are not necessarily the same skills needed to become a statesman. Carrying the maybe a bit further, maybe Americans know this intuitively, and thus become suspicious of the guy who appears to be trying too hard to win. Pragmatism versus idealism is an extremely delicate balance in politics, and even attempting to define a formula for success is way beyond my competence.

Turning my dark side, I have to confess to something which some people don't like about me. I have this tendency to trust pragmatic -- even crooked -- politicians more than ideological purists. The former can be relied on to make deals and avert danger. They're the kind of people who'd have paid off the slaveholders to free the slaves rather than kill them. They'd have appreciated the need for the grain the experienced Kulak farmers produced and made deals with them instead of packing them off to Siberia. Yet as I say this, I realize that pragmatism can be carried to monstrous extremes. Excesses of pragmatism (the Weimar regime will do; maybe Czarist/Rasputin-style corruption) can also lead to seizures of power by ideological purists.

On the other hand, inflexibility and ideological purity lead often to reforms. Had it not been for "untouchables" like Eliot Ness who couldn't be bought off and who insisted on enforcing unreasonable laws, Prohibition might have lasted longer. As Ulysses S. Grant said famously,

I know no method to secure the repeal of bad, obnoxious, or unjust laws so effective as their strict execution.

When pragmatists meet ideologues, political misunderstandings abound. Wealthy German aristocrats made the same mistake that many Jews made and that Neville Chamberlain made: they assumed Hitler would be, if not reasonable, at least pragmatic. Why would he murder useful people and invade friendly countries? The useful, practical plowhorse may find himself completely unable to understand the impractical, temperamental racehorse.

Might much apparently endless debating boil down to differences in personality?

Unchangeable differences?

Pragmatists are realists and ideological purists are idealists. Is this a difference merely in philosophy?

Here's something I saw (in the way fancy race-horse New Yorker!) about the differences between introverts and extroverts:

The classical difference between an introvert and an extrovert is that if you send an introvert into a reception or an event with a hundred other people he will emerge with less energy than he had going in; an extrovert will come out of that event energized, with more energy than he had going in. Gore needs a rest after an event; Clinton would leave invigorated, because dealing with people came naturally to him.

And while I'm on the subject of the New Yorker, I should add that I often don't like it. Perhaps that is because I was brought up to see it as superior, but it seems to exudes the kind of haughty superiority that is annoying. The writing is too pure. Too obsessed with turns and twists of phrases, double entendres, and rhetorical sleights of hand compressed into each sentence. It makes me suspect that the writers think they know more because they write better, and write better because they know more. It's as fundamentally illogical to maintain that stylish writing makes thoughts more true as it is to maintain that stylish clothing makes people more honest. Not that there isn't truth in the New Yorker, mind you. I just don't think dressing it up makes it truer. (Similarly, superior knowledge about a given subject does not make the possessor of the knowledge right; if the world's most knowledgeable expert on Hitler thought he was a great guy, would that make it so?)

Personality considerations may be related to Frederick Turner's discussion of the good versus the right:

Thus there is a huge unconscious reservoir of sympathy for the likes of Saddam Hussein among the more secular enthusiasts for a law of the good, and even for the likes of Osama bin Laden among the more religious. And Bush-hatred suddenly becomes deeply understandable. He threatens their whole world. And the annoying thing about Bush is that he is simultaneously, in his own private self, a passionate believer in the law of good, while in his outward actions a staunch upholder of the law of right. If he were merely an advocate of the right against the good, he would be easier to disagree with but harder to hate. For believers in the enforced law of good, anyone who believes in the good but does not seek the power to bring it about is a hypocrite.

And hypocrisy is the most fundamental and most heinous charge that the good have to bring against Bush. He is a defender of people who freely believe in different goods than his own, as long as they do not seek to enforce them. He is willing to keep his hands off people who, though they may be offending all the laws of goodness, have managed to stay on the windward side of the laws of contract. He will enforce contracts, while leaving people free to exploit each other if they can do so without breach of contract. He will refuse to enter into contracts that he knows he may not be able to keep (or that he knows that his own country might be the only one to actually keep), even if goodness requires him to give lip-service to the ideals of nuclear disarmament, global environmentalism, and a global legal system.

Like Abraham Lincoln -- another president widely accused of hypocrisy in his own time and since -- he is willing to go to war to enforce a regime of right and to overthrow what at least bills itself as a regime of good. He will hold a tyrant to his contract even if the upholders of the law of good disagree, as long as he himself has won a contractual agreement with a legal legislature to do so. He will hold the United Nations itself to its contract, even if that means offending the sensibilities of his allies. These positions appear monstrously inconsistent, mendacious and hypocritical to people who believe that something obviously good should be forced to happen, and that something obviously bad cannot be right. But in the grand perspective of history, the positions Bush has adopted from his pragmatic Anglo-Saxon predecessors constitute the only policy that has consistently led to large-scale peace, a rough approximation to individual if not social justice, the general prosperity required to make social justice increasingly a moot point, and the freedom that makes goodness possible at all. (Via Glenn Reynolds.)

I'm bothered by the implications for the damned "Culture War." If innate human personality differences account for intractable political problems, then what's going to help? National psychiatry?

Ideologues, I have noticed, tend to confuse the truth with winning arguments. It's not the same thing, because many times, an argument can be won by things like shouting, lying, name-calling. (Especially when a pragmatist sees no point in "winning.")

As I said before, I think it starts with acknowledging reality.

If racehorses are pitted against plowhorses, all lose.