The principle of regression to the mean is one of the most powerful in the universe, and a reliable humbler of enthusiasts and declinists. Tonight we meet in somber circumstances--much more somber than the circumstances of last year’s dinner were festive. That evening came just two days after the vice chairman of the AEI Board of Trustees had been definitively pronounced Vice President–elect of the United States, and Lynne Cheney regaled us with tales from the campaign trail and the new Veep promised gleefully to raid AEI talent for the new administration--a promise in which, as ever, he proved true to his word. And our poster that evening showed John Bolton frowning over dimpled ballots and hanging chads in the Palm Beach County recount. Tonight our attentions are on a war campaign rather than a political campaign; John Bolton is in Moscow in urgent negotiations to end the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; and our poster is from an earlier December 7, displaying a torn and battered Old Glory much like the one that flew over the 2001 World Series.[1]

For almost the entire fall, up and down the Atlantic seaboard, from Boston to Washington, we have been faced, day after day, with brilliant, crystalline skies such as I have never seen before--just as preternaturally clear as the sky on the morning of September 11. The perfect clarity and stillness of the Earth, forming the tableau for so much human carnage, grief, anger, and confusion, seemed to me a rebuke—the meteorological equivalent of God’s pronouncement to Job: Where were you when I created the universe? And, more prosaically, it seemed to me that we had entered a world where act was everything, and thought and idea nothing, and that as our fate now depended chiefly on the progress of our arms very little depended on the progress of our ideas.

But on the latter point I was entirely wrong. We are all of us consigned to Job’s part, only we sometimes realize it more clearly than at other times; and it is especially the part of those who work at AEI, whose job is not just to understand and explain but to rail--to use our faculties of reason and argument as best we can not only to analyze but to reform and improve, often against implacable circumstances.

Almost everyone has his post-911 spin on why exactly what he was doing before has now become more important than ever. This is captured in the New Yorker cartoon showing a customer addressing a bartender: "If I don’t have a second martini, the terrorists will have won." Here is my post-911 spin: Just as we are filled with admiration and gratitude (and some of us a little envy) for the deeds of our military men of action, so we are coming to realize that our own work at AEI, and its influence on pulpits and pundits and generals and legislators, is even more important in wartime than in peacetime.

In times of peace, it is often easy to know what should be done--the challenge is figuring out how to do it. But in war, knowing what to do is often the hard part, because this requires not only intellectual skill and insight but also moral clarity. And what distinguishes AEI scholars from others in the knowledge business, such as many university scholars, is the attempt to combine analysis with moral purpose. For us, ideas are not playthings to be toyed with and manipulated and paraded for their own sake. We are here because we have moved from mastery of a particular academic field to a moral calling: to use what we know to try to make the world as it is conform more nearly to our conception of an achievable better world.

We have learned this fall that horrible events can make us better than we were before. This has begun with the fervent, patriotic outpouring of gratitude for things we had taken for granted. As Michael Novak quipped the other day in introducing his new book, On Two Wings: If we are going to be murdered just for being Americans, then we might as well be Americans. The war has begun so well because the skill and bravery of our military has been matched by the great moral clarity of our President--as clear as the September skies and the best response to them a man could give.

Before the war is over it will make America and Americans better still. A truly mortal danger will leave us less distracted by the trivial and contrived, and the necessities of responding to the danger will make us less self-indulgent than we had become. The war against terrorism will oblige us to confront the phenomenon of militant Islam itself, not just its criminal epigones; among other things this will require that we cease treating the Arab world as hopelessly backward and begin to help it come to grips with modernity, pluralism, and liberalism. These tasks will provide many new outlets for the reforming, improving impulse that is so essential to the American spirit, and they will lead us to understand our own culture and institutions with new perspective and seriousness.

In all of this, we at AEI now have a generation of work cut out for us. What I have called the need to combine intellectual skill with moral clarity Donald Rumsfeld put with greater and characteristic crispness this morning, in his December 7 essay in the Wall Street Journal. He wrote that we need to be smart as well as brave. If we at AEI can be as brave in our work as our warriors are smart in theirs, I know that we will shine.

Notes

1. The poster, "Remember Dec 7th!--We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain," is a 1942 War Information Office poster recently donated to AEI by Kenneth Rendell.

Christopher DeMuth is the president of AEI.