THE FATAL CONCEIT.

Rod Dreher is discussing the challenges facing the use of military force, elaborating on suggestions Andrew J. Bacevich offered on the folly of U.S. interventions short of total war.  Both essays will reward careful study.  Mr Dreher's observations are focused toward military adventurism, but they generalize to other attempts by Wise Experts to Fix Things.

America keeps making these catastrophic mistakes because we believe that wanting a certain outcome is enough to make it happen. We are rich enough, powerful enough, and, in our own minds, righteous enough that it should happen. It’s interesting to contemplate how this hubris plays out on the foreign policy and military fronts, while we also observe the same dynamic expressing itself socially and culturally.

For example, most of us, it appears, have come to the conclusion that biology does not matter, that it is nothing more than a conceptual barrier that prevents us from exercising our will, and can therefore be destroyed. Because freedom. We have come to believe that there are no moral strictures or structures (like, say, the natural family) that ought to bind us and guide our conduct.

Or it's the Technocratic Vision ("If we can put a man on the moon ...")

Or it's the Postmodern Delusion (Structures are social constructions ...)

There are limits.