The reality-based community

This article by Ron Suskind about Bush's sense of infallibility and its relation to his faith has been receiving loads of attention. Especially this passage:

[A senior Bush advisor] said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors....and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

This reminded me almost immediately of a review of a biography of Napoleon I read this Spring that contained this passage:

"What a pity," Valéry, who recognized the emperor's literary abilities, once remarked, "to see a mind as great as Napoleon's devoted to trivial things such as empires, historical events, the thundering of cannons and of men." Englund [the author of the biography] quotes Valéry, and then, at the end of his book, answers him: "Napoleon chose to 'write' his novel on the world, not on paper."

People seem really shocked that a Bush official would say such a thing. This difference between people who do things and people who discuss the actions of those people has existed since Homer. What is slightly disturbing is that the official seems to think that no conduit to reality is necessary. To look at it this way, however, is a bit of a misinterpretation. What the official is saying is that action is necessary and the analysis of static situations is limited because things are dynamic and being changed by the actors who make judgments more quickly than the analysts. Even the actors have to have a connection to reality or their actions would be frustrated by that reality. The official gets a bit carried away with a usage of 'reality,' meaning 'situation,' that I've always found peculiar, but I don't think he is arguing that reality is immaterial but is arguing that one should be a mobile sketch artist rather than a sedentary portraitist that catches every detail.

The refusal of Bush to face reality on Iraq and domestic issues is more simple than such a philosophical position on the siginificance of sense perception would require. The news is bad for Bush. If it were good, he'd be in love with reality as press presents it. He doesn't have an aversion to reality per se, just to bad news. The molding of interpretations on Iraq is also a political act, however dishonest, that has a long tradition (i.e. Gulf of Tonkin). I'm going to have to sit around and analyze things for a lot longer before I conclude that the Bush administration believes it is living in the Matrix.

Update: Uniform Standard-The New Republic Like I was saying, the guy hates dissent, not reality. There is a difference. It's not a comforting difference; both are ultimately pathological, but I think, as one in the reality-based community, that it is most useful to accurately diagnose the problem.

Update 2: The reassurance of a like mind. Wil Wilkinson expresses more clearly what I was thinking in the useful philosophical shorthand that I still haven't internalized.
Wil Wilkinson-Reality Based Community

That said, it strikes me as fairly unlikely that Suskind's source was really positing a kind of power-based ontological constructivism. Maybe, maybe. I have no doubt that much faith-based nutjobbery is afoot. But some people do have a bad habit of using 'reality' in a confusing de dicto sense according to which different people have different "realities" simply because we are separate centers of experience and hold sometimes conflicting assumptions.
...
As Bush's hero Karl Marx wrote: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."[emphasis added]