by Patrick Appel
A reader writes:
The historian Barbara Tuchman's wonderful book "The March of Folly" documents the persistence, across eras and cultures, of governing elites bringing about calamities for themselves and the societies they ruled by stupidly assuming that what was good for their class was good for everybody. David Leonhardt's column yesterday is an excellent illustration of this principle. He writes about how business elites perceive that the unstoppable federal deficit puts the entire economy at grave risk … but how they actually advocate for policies that will lead to their short-term gain, but long-term ruin. The cognitive dissonance does not bother them overmuch.
Another good example: the U.S. Catholic bishops.
They told themselves that covering up clerical child sexual abuse was good for the whole church, when in fact it only served the short-term interests of the clerical class. When the inevitable accountability was forced upon them, they ended up losing not only loads of money, but more importantly, their moral authority. You couldn't have told them that, though. Fr. Tom Doyle tried to do so in 1985, in a secret report to the American bishops. As we all know now, they ignored him to a man. And look what happened. The "rich and powerful" within the Church really were willing to risk ecclesiastical catastrophe just to preserve their status (and to avoid having to deal with painful realities). As Tuchman would have pointed out, that wasn't the first time for the Church, and certainly isn't unique in history.
The Dish 