The common denominator of progress...
Do you know what is the common denominator of all of the most successful people and situations that support creativity and originality and success that I have encountered? Of the people who promote and create the most real progress in the culture?
It's not ideology, that's for sure...plenty of liberals, conservatives, radicals, theocrats, Communists, anarchists, libertarians, and all the like who contribute very little to the culture, at large, and who are small, petty and vindictive...
It's not even smart in a clever or fact-accumulating kind of way, since there are tons of very smart people -- David Horowitz or Charles Krauthammer or Christopher Hitchens or James Carville come to mind, here -- who are clever by half and whose arrogance undermines their ability to contribute most meaningfully to the culture...
The common denominator of folks like Joe Nye and Amartya Sen and Gordon Wood and Abraham Maslow and John Dewey and Mary Wolstencraft and John Stuart Mill and Francis Fukuyama and Milton Friedman and E.O. Wilson and Frederich Hayek...and of folks like Harper Lee, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edna St. Vincent Millay (and I've just been mentioning American authors, here...I haven't even included, yet, authors like J.M. Coatzee or Roald Dahl or V.S. Naipaul or Pablo Freire or Desmond Tutu or Arundhati Roy) is that they are all more forgiving and they all take freeedom -- their own and others' -- more seriously than do most people...and out of that freedom and ability to see beyond the past toward the future, they contribute the ideas and work that most meaningfully moves the culture ahead...
The more freedom and forgiveness they offer for mistakes -- freedom and forgiveness allowing us to think, make mistakes, reflect, and learn -- the more learning that takes place...and the more success they promote...
Human beings may be the only animal species that explicitly studies its own history to learn about its achievements and its failures and then persistently ignores the bigger lessons in bizarre mental gymnastics -- that it regards as serious endeavor rather than as sport -- to try to prove that they are right about matters where the writing is so clearly on the wall that they are wrong...
Twain might have said that humans are the only animals that make excuses or that need to make excuses, because humans are the only species that can try to talk themselves out of their own failures...
The bigger lesson of history that the entire world seems to missing, right now, is that cultures and leaders that embrace greater freedom and more forgiving, broader, compassionate attitudes clearly make more progress than cultures that don't...
And do you know the reason why this is true?
Because we are persistently, as the rule rather than the exception, doing things that require forgiveness...
And just as persistently, acting as if we are not...
I have to say that one thing that seems to be a common element for many social conservatives is that they are persistently acting like they never do anything wrong or that social conservativism has protected us from sin -- which every sex and other scandal by conservative preachers in the 1980's and 90's should have disabused us of -- and that they persistently talk about history as if it is a place where people did no wrong...and they did no wrong because they had the fear of God in them-- either from God, directly, or his business managers here on earth -- to prevent all the sinning that we see today (and always, since the beginning of time)...
Radicals, too often, on the other hand, seem to see no right in our history...as if history was an inexorable march toward their clearly superior leadership...so clear that they need to not demonstrate the power of their ideas (as Marxists go on forever defending the clearly failed leadership and ideas from that bitter, nasty man) and only need to compel the submission of those who disagree with them...
The truth is that our behavior has clearly always been worse in the past...including with regard to more conventional sin, I am convinced...
Slavery, oppression of women and minorities, anti-semitism, repression of religious expression and of everyone by religious zealotry, debtors prisons and involuntary servitude, imperialism, warfare for political and personal gain, repression of speech and thought...
But the deeper truth is that it is freedom and more forgiving attitudes that have made things better, rather than some arrogant notion that our ability to beat our sins from our past made the real difference... it's so clear to me that it really is a fairly bizarre notion that either people did not sin or make serious mistakes in the past -- or that they did so less than we do today -- or that less freedom or a less forgiving attitude would somehow help us make progress that it has so clearly failed to deliver for most of the history of humanity...since the clear trend of history favors greater freedom and greater forgiveness, humanity, generosity, decency, compassion, and all of our highest values...
Our fears otherwise are borne of our pettiness, I think...and our inability to face more honestly our failures because of that pettiness...
The fear that we are soft is borne of the hard hearts of political and religious zealots -- on both the left and the right -- who both just can't face up to their failures and the failures of their ideas and who can't face up to the clear fact that their hard hearts are the best evidence for their own moral failures and failures as people that we could ever conjure up...meaning that the reason why they feel so compelled to compel others to do their bidding is because they have examples too poor to inspire leadership...
And that is all the more reason for them to not have power...
Far, far too little wisdom and compassion and forgiveness is what plagues us today...not too much, by a very, very long shot...
And we will not move forward and things will continue to get worse as long as we will not face up to that fact of life...
Love,
Ben
