We are presently as bad at backcasting as people were in the past about forecasting

An excellent point. From Billy Graham's Record on Race Was Both Ahead and Of His Time by Stephen L. Carter.

There’s a nice story about Billy Graham’s reaction when he arrived to preach at a revival meeting in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1953. Upon reaching the site, he found ropes marking off a separate section for black congregants. He removed them. “Either these ropes stay down,” Graham told his hosts, “or you can go on and have the revival without me.”

The great evangelist, who died this week at the age of 99, fully deserves the accolades he has received from across the political spectrum. Yet mixed in with the praise of Graham has been a tone of reservation, because -- it is said -- the man who preached to over 200 million people in his career did not speak enough about race when his words would have made a difference. There is limited merit to this contention. The actual history is complicated, a tale of growth and retrenchment and further growth. Given the era in which Graham came of age, what he accomplished is admirable.

Let’s begin with the obvious: Graham grew up when he grew up. In college, he was influenced by “Up From the Ape” by the Harvard anthropologist Earnest Hooton. The book is not mainly about race -- it’s about evolution -- but the pages nevertheless abound in racial stereotypes. Yet Hooton is also quite clear that there is no basis for the conclusion that any race is more intelligent on average than any other. For the era, this was an enormous advance.

Graham’s ministry as a public phenomenon is usually dated from 1949, when he was preaching in Los Angeles in what amounted to a large canvas tent. Some 350,000 congregants of several races passed through its entrance. Whether or not William Randolph Hearst really gave the command “Puff Graham!” the Hearst newspapers were fascinated by this phenomenon, and the national magazines swiftly joined the coverage. Within a year or two, the news that Graham was coming to town with his crusade often meant that businesses and even schools would limit their hours or close down to allow people to attend.

Early in his ministry, Graham was careful to avoid talk of race. In 1951, he even stayed at the home of Strom Thurmond, at that time the segregationist governor of South Carolina. But by the early 1950s, the issue could hardly be avoided, and in a 1952 interview in Mississippi, Graham was forthright. “There is no scriptural basis for segregation,” he said. He added: “It touches my heart when I see white stand shoulder in shoulder with black at the cross.” But in the face of sharp public criticism, Graham softened his stance: “We follow the existing social customs in whatever part of the country in which we minister.”

Scant months later, however, Graham was calling on all Baptist colleges and universities to admit black students. By the following year, he was taking down those ropes at the crusade in Chattanooga. Soon after, in the teeth of Southern opposition, Graham’s organization adopted a rule that its audiences must not be segregated. This was no small step in a Southern world in which Jim Crow was a way of life. But it was also very much the step of what was known at the time as a racial moderate: trying to live a different model without trying to force social change. This form of moderation was also consistent with the theology behind Graham’s ministry, which emphasized personal salvation rather than activism in the world.

Carter goes on, his article is a good read. It is a well-written, sophisticated, sympathetic, knowledgeable, nuanced article. Wish we had more journalists writing like this.

Decision-making (personal, communal, commercial, public policy), is always a function of achievable trade-offs which in turn are a function of the real and perceived constraints in effect at the time of the decision. You cannot wish attainment of a goal into existence, you have to plot a path to its attainment according to the constraints. Sometimes the journey to goal attainment is long and sometimes it can be achieved quickly.

As an example, once the US entered World War II at the end of 1941, there was an array of strategies. Focus on Europe first and then, sequentially, Japan. Japan first, then Europe. Europe primary and simultaneously secondarily Japan.

Beyond that question, there were other debates. In Europe, focus on Germany as the primary target or all the Axis powers simultaneously? Focus on an invasion of Germany or approach Germany via North Africa and then Italy?

Each of these alternatives had some merit. The practical constraint was that the U.S. effectively had no significant military in 1941, certainly no military of a match to what needed to be accomplished. Total US military forces at the beginning of WWII in 1939 were only 334,000 men. By the time war was declared on us in December 1941, we were at 1.8 million. We eventually needed a force of more than 12 million to defeat the Axis powers.

If you are George Marshall, you are looking at increasing the military forty-fold in three years. Not only training all those millions of men in all branches of the military but clothing them, feeding them, equipping them. Virtually all and every type of arm or equipment in 1941 had been replaced more than once including weapons, and even generations of weapons, invented and deployed in the space of three and a half years.

These are the types of constraints which the US faced and which dictated that we would focus on Europe first with the Pacific as a simultaneous but secondary theater. It also dictated our invasion of North Africa rather than straight to an invasion of Germany. Men, officers, equipment, and leaders were all inexperienced and untested.

And ever since there has been second-guessing of all those decisions. This second guessing is unavoidably gifted by the knowledge of what did turn out and what the resolution to uncertainties actually yielded. We are generally sensitive to the unfairness of this sort of second-guessing. But even when we are sensitive to it, we do it anyway.

Carter is getting at a somewhat deeper issue. Hard as it is to recall how decisions were made at the time, it is even harder to recall what were understood to be the viable alternatives and the associated trade-offs. Relying on the WWII examples again, at the end of the Philippines Campaign, there were three broad alternatives - invade Formosa (destroy some major Japanese military assets), invade Okinawa (last stepping stone to Japan) or invade Iwo Jima for its airbases and then invade Okinawa. Each alternative had a variety of benefits, costs and trade-offs. In hindsight, it is nigh impossible to recapture the reality of the perceived limits and trade-offs.

Carter accords Graham the respect of his having to make hard trade-off decisions under circumstances which are truly difficult to comprehend and recapture. If you are Graham, do you take a hard and unvarying principled stand on race from the beginning even if it might subvert your longer term effectiveness? Or do you push as far as you can, pause, let the world catch-up, and then push forward again? Changing the terrain of acceptability as you go in order to win the objective.

Armchair purists always argue for purity. Armchair purists are also usually exceptionally ineffective in their own lives. And while they are usually wrong, they are not always wrong. The very impossibility of attaining a goal directly sometimes is so inspiring that it mobilizes talent and energy to make the impossible, possible. In the commercial arena, Steve Jobs was infamous for asking the impossible of his designers and engineers. Aksing, and then receiving. This phenomenon was coined the Steve Jobs reality distortion field.

The RDF was said by Andy Hertzfeld to be Steve Jobs's ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, charisma, bravado, hyperbole, marketing, appeasement and persistence. RDF was said to distort an audience's sense of proportion and scales of difficulties and made them believe that the task at hand was possible.

This debate of purity versus pragmatism comes up all the time. One frequent debate among such armchair moralists (virtue signaling up a storm) has to do with people who are morally affronted by the fact that the Founding Fathers punted on slavery in the Constitution with the 3/5ths compromise.

But when you go back to the press accounts of the time, to the Federalist Papers, to the letters among leading citizens, it is astonishing to see the limits, constraints, and trade-offs with which they were working. Indeed, it is remarkable that the Age of Enlightenment ideals embodied in the Constitution saw the light of day at all despite the missteps of the Articles of Confederation, the extreme differences in economies and population size among the original thirteen states, the fact that slavery was a worldwide institution sanctioned by law and religion virtually everywhere.

Consensual compromise in the US led to a government that evolved itself beyond its original constraints and towards a better realization of its professed ideals. Similar Age of Enlightenment revolutions in the same period were more ideal and consequently tragically brief and bloody - The French Revolution quickly spiraling into the Reign of Terror followed by a totalitarian dictatorship that waged global war around the world resulting in the deaths of millions and the Haitian Revolution ending in genocide.

All this to acknowledge that Carter is communicating a very sophisticated graciousness which is rare - that we ought to take into account the circumstances, constraints, and trade-offs people understood themselves to be facing when we make judgments of the past. It is not a plea for excuses for those historical decisions; it is a recognition that we are presently as bad at backcasting as people were in the past about forecasting.