The Critic Who Counts

THE CRITIC WHO COUNTS

There is a coward’s way of not being wrong: never saying anything at all, responding to every difficult question with shrugs and equivocation: Well, it certainly could be like this, but on the other hand, you see, it very well could be like that . . .

People like that, the quibblers and the naysayers and the maybesayers, don’t make things happen. When one wants to denounce those people, it’s customary to quote Theodore Roosevelt, from his speech “Citizenship in a Republic,” delivered in Paris in 1910, shortly after the end of his presidency:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

That’s the part people always quote, but the whole speech is fantastically interesting, longer and more substantive than anything a U.S. president would deliver nowadays. You can find issues there we’ve discussed elsewhere in this book, as where Roosevelt touches on the diminishing utility of money—

The truth is that, after a certain measure of tangible material success or reward has been achieved, the question of increasing it becomes of constantly less importance compared to the other things that can be done in life.

—and the “Less like Sweden” fallacy that if a thing is good, more of it must be better, and vice versa:

It is just as foolish to refuse all progress because people demanding it desire at some points to go to absurd extremes, as it would be to go to these absurd extremes simply because some of the measures advocated by the extremists were wise.

But the main theme, to which Roosevelt returns throughout the speech, is that the survival of civilization depends on the triumph of the bold, commonsensical, and virile against the soft, intellectual, and infertile.* He was speaking at the Sorbonne, the temple of French academia, the same place where David Hilbert had presented his list of problems just ten years before. A statue of Blaise Pascal looked on from the balcony. Hilbert had urged the mathematicians in his audience into ever-deeper flights of abstraction from geometric intuition and the physical world. Roosevelt’s goal was just the opposite: he pays lip service to the accomplishments of the French academics, but makes it clear their book learning is of only secondary importance in the production of national greatness: “I speak in a great university which represents the flower of the highest intellectual development; I pay all homage to intellect and to elaborate and specialized training of the intellect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of all of you present when I add that more important still are the commonplace, every-day qualities and virtues.”

And yet—when Roosevelt says, “The closet philosopher, the refined and cultured individual who from his library tells how men ought to be governed under ideal conditions, is of no use in actual governmental work,” I think of Condorcet, who spent his time in the library doing just that, and who contributed more to the French state than most of his time’s more practical men. And when Roosevelt sneers at the cold and timid souls who sit on the sidelines and second-guess the warriors, I come back to Abraham Wald, who as far as I know went his whole life without lifting a weapon in anger, but who nonetheless played a serious part in the American war effort, precisely by counseling the doers of deeds how to do them better. He was unsweaty, undusty, and unbloody, but he was right. He was a critic who counted.