THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, September 7 - 8, 2019 |A
will make sure they don’t make life
monstrous. And so the busy geniuses
in their genius campuses, all born in
stability, mostly born in a postpatri-
otic and post-Christian West in
which old loyalties not only lessened
but came to be seen as wicked, are
doing their thing, largely unregu-
lated and in secret.
Don’t you think it will all turn out
well and only benefit mankind?
No. You think they’ll push it too
far.
One thing I miss is the Profes-
sional Worriers who populated pre-
vious generations in government.
They were a special type in foreign
affairs, men who were by nature
concerned that some international
move or eruption would result in
“heightened tensions” and “instabil-
ity” and who counseled “prudence.”
They were usually veteran diplo-
mats. They were extremely boring.
They were always cautioning. They
were worth their weight in gold.
They didn’t trust history—they’d
seen it go bad before World War II,
in Korea and Vietnam. So they were
careful. They never wanted to push
it too far.
I end with Britain and the Brexit
saga, which turned chaotic this
week in Parliament with a series ofdefeats for the new prime minister,
Boris Johnson, and defections and
expulsions on the Conservative side,
including the resignation of Mr.
Johnson’s brother.
What a lot of wreckage.
A real crisis isn’t about “someone
will lose and someone will win”; it’s
about “something will be changed—
a reality that reigned in the past
won’t be reigning anymore.”
Brexit is a real crisis.
The cultural composition of the
Conservative Party is being
changed. Out are the great and
stately—Winston Churchill’s grand-
son Nicholas Soames and former
Chancellor of the Exchequer Ken-
neth Clarke. In are the crazy-haired
and bodacious, technocrats and in-
ternet gurus. Out is austerity, in is
high spending. All this echoes
changes in American conservative
thinking and style.
When Boris Johnson was elected
I wondered: Is he the brute and bril-
liant force who can resolve this
thing? Is he the only animal big
enough to fight European leaders
who will do anything to stop the
jailbreak?
This week the only question was:
At this extraordinary moment is Bo-
ris playing some grand and subtleBeijing, Brexit and Pushing It Too Far
rassing China, which found itself
with a World Opinion Catastrophe
on its hands. The demonstrators
made a statement, successfully—
not easy to do in this world. They
asserted certain implicit boundar-
ies for Chinese behavior. They gave
it a warning: push Hong Kong
around and the price will be unrest
and humiliation.
The protesters have sustained
their demonstrations and vow they
will continue. They demand firmer
autonomy and more democracy.
China, angry at the disruptions,
some violent, and shutdowns, had
already moved forces closer. Will
Beijing again push things too far?
Will it intervene militarily? Is a col-
lision with world-wide implications
coming?
I hope the demonstrators know
what they’re doing and aren’t push-
ing it too far.
The Democratic presidential can-
didates are pushing it too far. No
left-wing idea is too much. Nothing,
no sense of political reality, is hem-
ming them in. They are like progres-
sive Barry Goldwaters: Moderation
in pursuit of justice is no virtue. The
president meanwhile is so crazily
taken with his own power that he
redraws hurricane maps.
Everyone is pushing it too far. My
way of explaining this to myself is
that everyone now making decisions
grew up in the past 60 years, a time
of historic wealth creation, human
growth, relative stability. And they
can’t help it, they think this is nor-
mal. They think life is nice! They’ve
lost a tragic sense about history.
They often accuse those who dis-
agree with them of being on “the
wrong side of history,” as if it has a
side, as if it flows ever upward.
It’s odd but in this cynical age
they’ve grown too trusting of good
fortune.
They assume no one will, through
accident, miscalculation or madness,
launch a nuclear missile. They as-
sume these robots we’re inventing,
the artificial intelligence, will ulti-
mately be benign—the authoritiesstrategy only he can see? Or is he
flying by the seat of his pants, mak-
ing it up as he goes along. Is he op-
erating on anything that might be
called a plan?
The question reached one of his
most committed parliamentary sup-
porters, who replied: “Bismarck
never had a plan, he always impro-
vised.” Meaning, I think: Mr. John-
son doesn’t have a plan, sometimes
you can’t make one.
His objective isn’t wrong. A great
nation cannot be at its own throat
forever. Britain has endured de-
structive uncertainty for more than
three years. Enough: It must be one
thing or another, in Europe or not.
The voters chose not. Exactly how
Britain leaves it must be legislated.
Leadership in such a moment
needs not only wit, presence and
charisma, which Mr. Johnson has. It
requires judgment, trustworthiness—
that people have confidence in your
thinking, your word. It is in those ar-
eas that Mr. Johnson fails.
Almost everything he did this
week looked like pushing it too far.
A month ago he seemed the solu-
tion. He looks now the problem.
At this point Mr. Johnson should
remember that politics is a game of
addition, not subtraction, and limit
the wreckage of the past week by
taking back into the party those he
threw out.
Sooner or later he’ll get the elec-
tion he’s asking for, and it will likely
put him against Labour’s Jeremy
Corbyn, whose ideology amounts to
a daily pushing-it-too-far. Mr. John-
son would be the favorite. Britain is
always stronger than it thinks: It
has a thriving economy and tough,
capable economic players. And as it
showed when Mr. Soames’s grandfa-
ther was in charge, it knows how to
fight for its life. It can take Brexit.
What it can’t take is Mr. Corbyn and
Brexit.
So ends my paean to modera-
tion—to not assuming things will go
well, to a kind of watchfulness to-
ward history. To not pushing it too
far.Prime Minister Boris Johnson at 10 Downing Street Tuesday.DANIEL LEAL-OLIVAS/AFP/GETTY IMAGEST
his is on the danger of
pushing it too far. It is a
delicate business knowing
what the moment will al-
low. You can be right in
intent and wrong on execution, and
if you’re wrong on that it may not
matter you were right in intent. A
great woman in business and the
arts once told me the most danger-
ous place to be is significantly
ahead of the curve. People will dis-
miss you as too far out. Better to be
just a little ahead of the curve,
which allows people to wonder if
you might be a visionary. She in fact
was a visionary, and careful not to
seem too many steps ahead.
A great challenge in politics and
diplomacy is to see in real time the
line between the opening that
should be pursued and the trap that
must be avoided. And, once you’ve
made that calculation, not to push
things too far. It can be delicate.
You have to be like a safecracker
who files down his fingers so he’ll
feel every click.
China pushed Hong Kong too far
the past few years, bullying it, try-
ing to pull it into a closer, more
smothering political embrace. Hong
Kong pushed back. Are the demon-
strators now pushing it too far? I
hope not but fear they may be.
They’ve already won—humiliating
the chief executive, who this week
backed down on the issue that
sparked the rebellion, and embar-
Everyone making decisions
grew up in the past 60
years and thinks wealth
and stability are normal.
DECLARATIONS
By Peggy NoonanOPINION
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Doubt, Faith and a Strange Grace in the Critical-Care Unit
‘D
id you get the health-care
proxy for Mr. Jay yet?” the
social worker asked. Em-
barrassed, I shook my head. Mr. Jay
had been in the critical-care unit for
two days, and I’d failed to check this
important box. “It’s a matter of time
before he codes,” continued the so-
cial worker. “Who’s going to tell you
guys when to stop?”
Mr. Jay had been dodging the
question. Because of his elusive re-
sponses, some of us even began to
speculate about his competency.
True, his peculiar embellishments
might be mistaken as pathologic. But
really, he was a man of parts, worn
down to spare parts, riveted to-
gether with Spaghetti Western allu-
sions and Bible verses.
I sat down at the foot of his bed.
“People think you don’t make much
sense, Mr. Jay.” He chuckled.
“I probably don’t make sense, but
that’s because they don’t know what
I’m talking about, not because I
don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I’d like to pick up on our discus-
sion of code status,” I said.
“Oh I don’t know. Do everything,
CPR, tube down my throat. Do it all
for a while!”
“OK, for a while, but who’s going
to decide how long?” This was going
to be harder even than I expected.
“Mr. Jay, you’ll be unconscious, un-
able to tell us when to stop. If you
couldn’t make a decision for your-
self, who knows you best to make
decisions on your behalf?”
“Can’t you do it? You’re my ‘dear
and glorious physician,’ after all,” he
said.
“Quoting Taylor Caldwell?” I
asked. He nodded, happy I had rec-
ognized his reference to her 1959
novel about the conversion of Luke,
the physician-turned-saint. His allu-
sion expressed trust. Feeling far
from saintly, I swallowed my discom-
fort and began to make an excuse,
“The system doesn’t trust us to...”
I couldn’t finish the sentence. A “sys-
tem” doesn’t have feelings like trust
or belief. Physicians do. Patients do.
“Do you have any family?” I
asked.
“I’m the last one.”
His Caldwell reference offered me
a path. “Do you have faith in anyone
to do what’s right for you?”
“I guess I would pick Rev. Albert,”
he sighed.
“What’s his telephone number?” I
pulled out my phone.
“I don’t know it. I’ve lost my
phone moving rooms in this
hospital!”
“Where does he live?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I usually see him at
church.”
“When’s the last time you talked
with him?” I was growing suspicious.
“Not too long ago.”
“Well, if I needed to ask him a
question, how would I find him?” Mr.
Jay then shaped his fingers into the
nursery-rhyme “here’s the church,
here’s the steeple” configuration. I
believed he could make a decision
but doubted whether I was being
given a straightforward answer. So I
sought a backup. “Just in case, is
there someone else?”
“Whoever’s the rector at the
church,” he said, and deferred any
more questions. The next morning
his respiratory status crashed, and
after intubating him, I began my
quest.
I made some calls and eventually
found a church that knew of the Rev.
Albert. He did exist! I asked to speak
with him.“He’s in his 90s,” said the parish
secretary.
“But is he sound?”
“He’s a very active 90.” I took his
number.
“Could I speak with the current
rector?” I asked, just in case.
“Don’t know Jay from Adam, son,
but God bless,” said the current rec-
tor. The call came in the evening.
“Rev. Albert, do you know a Mr.
Jay?” He said he’d known him for 20
years. I sighed with relief.
“When’s the last time you saw
him?” I asked.
“Twenty years ago,” he replied.
“Well,” I said, “he’s picked you as
his health-care proxy.”
“I never agreed to that. I don’t re-
ally know him that well. I’d see him
now and then at church. There must
be someone else.”
“You’re the only soul in the wholeworld who knows him, and he has
faith you’ll do right by him.”
It was 9 p.m. when a slim, tall
man in crisp white collar entered the
unit with a sure, quiet step. I led the
Rev. Albert to the bedside. It felt like
a procession, with so many of the
unit staff peeking in to see the apoc-
ryphal padre. I asked of his life, and
he asked of his case. He came to a
decision about what to do if Mr. Jay
didn’t improve in the next three
days. Then he looked about the busy
room. “Can someone assist me in the
Sacrament of the Sick?”
Medical staff departed, as they
usually do—as I usually do—when
this request is made. But after be-
lieving in my patient’s competency,
then doubting his decision, then
coming to have faith in it, I felt com-
pelled to stay. He dipped his thumb
into the holy oil and gave a blessing.He prayed, and by my presence in
this moment, so did I.
“Thank you for acting as his
health-care proxy,” I said. The eleva-
tor was taking an eternity, and, feel-
ing afloat in an unfinished awkward-
ness, I wanted to let him know
something I wasn’t even sure how to
say, so all I could muster was:
“Thanks for your ministry, too.”
The Rev. Albert searched my face
for a moment. As he did, I recog-
nized in his eyes a lifetime’s worth
of bafflement and doubt, praise and
awe.
“No, thank you for your ministry.
What I do in God’s house is not so
different from what you do in this
house.”Dr. Stanley is a resident in neurol-
ogy at the Massachusetts General
Hospital.By Michael P.H. Stanley
I managed to track down a
dying man’s reluctant
health-care proxy. His
gratitude surprised me.
CNN Climate Show Wasn’t Just Boring
CNN’s seven-hour
climate town hall
with the Demo-
cratic presidential
candidates was the
ratings bomb you
expected, and no
wonder since there
was little debate. If
it was unwatch-
able, though, it
wasn’t unwatch-
able enough for some. The Columbia
Journalism Review’s “public editor
for CNN,” Emily Tamkin, beforehand
insisted that moderators should pro-
ceed “on the assumption that the
climate is in crisis,” and limit them-
selves to calling for action and fault-
ing inaction.
In other words, make it an exer-
cise in liturgy, not inquiry, as well
as a repetition of the most failed
experiment in history: trying to
bully viewers into accepting predic-
tions of a pending climate disaster.
All this comes as the sixth “as-
sessment report” of the Intergov-
ernmental Panel on Climate Change,
still two years off, is likely to offer
nothing new on the vexed, conten-
tious 40-year-old stalemate over
how much warming actually can be
expected from a given amount of
CO2.
It comes just days after the
shocking suicide of Harvard climate
economist Martin Weitzman, rightly
praised in obituaries for an insight
lacking in the CNN town hall: A cli-
mate disaster is far from guaran-
teed. It’s the low but not insignifi-
cant chance of a “fat tail” worst-
case disaster that we should worry
about. (Mr. Weitzman put the odds
at 3% to 10%.)
It comes as Weitzman’s student,
collaborator and co-author, Gernot
Wagner, tellingly has focused his
attention lately on geoengineering
rather than the seemingly lostcause of carbon reduction.
Words hardly serve to describe
the mediocrity of climate journal-
ism, including CNN’s. But at least
Elizabeth Warren had an interesting
moment when she admonished a
network personality for trying to
rile up viewers “around your light
bulbs, around your straws and
around your cheeseburgers.”
She might also have mentioned
electric cars as another distraction,
like all of the above promoted by
greens themselves to fill a need for
policy “victories” no matter how
trivial in relation to an alleged cli-
mate problem.As the New York Times also
noted, “For the first time, Ms. War-
ren explicitly embraced a carbon
tax before quickly pivoting
away.. .”
What’s Ms. Warren afraid of? A
carbon tax would hardly be prohibi-
tive. Weitzman advocated $40 a
ton—the equivalent of 36 cents per
gallon of gasoline. Such a tax could
be implemented without raising the
overall tax burden; it could be used
to trim taxes on work, saving and
investment, improving the economy
overall. It could be embraced and
copied by other nations out of self-
interest rather than self-abnegation
(unlike the absurd Green New Deal).
How did such a modest and
potentially beneficial adjustment to
the tax code become virtually
undiscussable?
The blame obviously can’t be laid
entirely at the feet of climate press.There is much else going on, in
which journalists are but lockstep
automatons. And here it is: With
their decision to resort to a strategy
of hysterical exaggerations, vilifica-
tions and hackneyed partisanship,
the greens have now succeeded in
convincing voting publics that any
climate strategy must be cata-
strophic to their lifestyles, transfer-
ring trillions from their pockets to
green special interests.
Worse, voters are right. Many
climate campaigners are more in-
terested in social revolution than in
climate science. Some are more in-
terested in expressing their craving
for humanity’s death and engaging
in apocalyptic playacting than in
improving the human condition.
So to answer CNN’s non-debate
and the worries of the late Prof.
Weitzman, if the small but not negli-
gible chance of a climate catastrophe
is borne out, we already know what
the answer is going to be: to throw a
bunch of particles into the atmo-
sphere, at a cost of perhaps $2 bil-
lion a year, in order to block the es-
timated 1% of sunlight necessary to
keep earth’s temperature in check.
And everybody across the scien-
tific spectrum understands this is
where we are headed. How this real-
ity could go unmentioned in seven
hours on CNN is explicable only by
the debate not being a debate.
One more point: When and if the
IPCC resolves its manifest struggles
over climate sensitivity (i.e., how
much warming can be expected),
the result will necessarily be to re-
duce uncertainty regarding the
great chemistry experiment in the
atmosphere. Therefore it will re-
duce, or at least reframe, the fat-
tail risk that Weitzman’s followers
worry about today, which is largely
a product of unresolved and prolif-
erating uncertainties in today’s
highly inadequate climate models.BUSINESS
WORLD
By Holman W.
Jenkins, Jr.Hint to green media:
Voters might actually be
more prone to act if told
the truth instead of lies.wsj_20190907_a013_p2jw250000_4_a01300_1____xa2019.crop.pdf 1 07-Sep-19 06:09: