I'm reading this really fascinating discussion, today, in this most recent and brilliant edition of New Perspectives Quarterly and I'm thinking about the world.
It's a complicated world we live in, isn't it?
It's fully of all kinds of beauty and nobility and courage. And it's also full of all kinds of depravity and immaturity and rebellion and far too often it has more than its share of real evil.
What makes it complicated is, how, in the face of all of us, are we to look at some direction and call it "progress"? How do we know that when we move, we're moving forward. Especially in a world where we so often avoid, repress, supress and otherwise discourage the discussions of those things and values that really matter to us in life. In a world where everyone is too afraid of everything, including and especially discussions about those things that really matters to us, for fear that getting upset and getting each other upset is a worse sin than avoiding the conversation altogether.
See, when I read academic discussions about common values and common ideas and looking squarely at questions of right and wrong and respecting peoples' freedom and understanding relative rights and relative wrongs and respecting different judgments and perspectives and I can nod at all of those discussions and say, "Yeah, I can see that."
But a lot of times, I think we make those conversations too complicated. We make them more complicated than they need to be to account for a life that, admittedly, is not black and white. And I don't just mean liberal professors make it complicated. I mean conservative intellectuals make it too complicated as well. And, yet, they try to account for it more honestly and fully than do so many average folks - media folks, political folks, moms and pops, all included here - who are persistently trying to fit oversimplified solutions on so many of life's problems. It's often all they know. And what various intellectuals know is all they know. And, yet, if we're going to find some resolution on the issues we care about, we're going to have to gather some courage and have those conversations in ways that don't try to artificially resolve them with legalisms or "rules" discussions that consistently miss the real people substance of the issues that matter to us most.
Yet, despite all of this anxiety and confusion and the various artificial certainties - artificial because they are, generally, an incomplete accounting for the reality that people want to be more simple and certain than it is - all of these ideas and unresolved problems and the problematic reasoning that doesn't get to the heart of so many problems that people carry around with them, there is, generally, a much more straightforward conversation that people can have about various cultural, moral, religious, political, and other conversations than they have now.
In fact, it's often not the substantial differences that stand in the way. It is usually the strong feelings and the aggressive, passionate postures that we take when discussing the most important issues we face that undermines more substantive resolution of our most important issues. We get passionate and aggressive, and then we often give up on the possibility of having the conversation or getting resolution so we just give up on an open, engaged conversation, altogether. And then we're stuck with the consequences of that giving up and the fatalism that it gives way to. Forceful consequences - distinct from natural consequences and more effectively and less aggressively set limits - undermine that conversation, as well, making it difficult for people to be honest about themselves and what matters to them.
Are there universal rights and wrongs? Sure. Does everyone agree on them or will they forever agree on them, independent of the times? Not necessarily. Sure, there's common, timeless, universal values that every culture holds dear and that can and should be common to all cultures. But those values are also constantly being reevalutated and considered and challenged and updated, as they should be in societies that take thought and reflection and liberal education and debate and discussion seriously (which I will be so bold to say should be all communities and cultures, liberal or illiberal; choose to be illiberal, I say, but you can deal with the repressive and clearly dysfunctional consequences of that choice for your communities and cultures, if that's the case).
Do we now and forever know the consequences of those debates and discussions and thought and reevaluations? No. Nor should we. That's the hubris of every generation, liberal or illiberal. That all the important questions are decided. Which, if it were true, would effectively nullify the very liberal culture that made such a conclusion and the discussion that made it possible. It's a foolish notion meant to affirm our self-righteous certainties in the face of an uncertain world that we're afraid of, to be honest, and that we want resolved, artifical or otherwise, just so we don't have to face that fear that comes with a world that is perpetually uncertain, no matter how we try to make it more certain than it is.
But having said all of that - which looks really complicated, as I look at it - I think we often lose the forest for the trees.
I think we think that somehow because our ideas of how to deal with the various cultural challenges we face are confusing or uncertain - which are often a variation of how much established authority is going to be taken seriously and how much freedom are we going to allow or take in the face of that authority - we make them too complicated in our initial fumbling efforts to find some workable resolution of our conflicts.
Should gays be allowed to marry? I think so, because I take seriously the notion that people should self-determine their own lives and only be interfered with insofar as it interferes with the lives of others. And, even then, we should discuss those interferences before and in lieu of bullying our way through them. Should straight people and religious people be forced to accept marriages that they don't accept as moral? No. Everyone's conscience should be taken seriously, as far as I am concerned. Both as a matter of respect, but also as a matter of reality. No matter how much we try to force matters of conscience on one another, we will now and forever fail to decide questions for one another, this way.
Racism doesn't go away because you fire Imus. The irony of that situation is that the one thing that does have us come square with it - our consciences coming to terms with our mistakes and sins and flaws - got the shit beat out of it, telling everyone else in the world who needed to face up to some racist impulse, "You better keep that shit under wraps, or else you're gonna get smacked down too." It's foolish and shortsighted. And it doesn't give a shit about anyone except those people we identify with. So it's self-centered. And it certainly isn't noble. It's vengeful and counterproductive and it treats people like they are characters in a morality play rather than people worthy of our love and concern and forgiveness in their own right. You don't want to love and forgive, I say, so be it. But don't expect the high ground while you do it. You accept the low ground that you're taking. And the high ground goes to people who say, "Why don't we listen to what Imus has to say and what's in his heart."
But what fucks up these and so many situations is that instead of having those conversations, we just go around scaring the shit out of people to have any conversations at all. And then we say, "See, there's no other way."
It's cynical and it's bullshit. And if the current political environment is any sign, it's utterly and hopelessly dysfunctional.
So how about this?
How about we gather some courage and start having those conversations with one another and stop worrying, so much, about whose going to lose their jobs or who we're going to fire or who won't show up to family holiday dinners next year or which friend just couldn't handle knowing what we really think because we or they voice an unpopular view or a view that offends someone or gets someone upset.
How about we start opening up some honest space for people to start having some honest conversations with one another about the issues that concern us that don't talk around issues the way that too many academic conversations do and yet don't give into simplistic and all-too-certain and self-righteous conversations that too many average folks have as well?
How about we have honest conversations with honest differences with opportunity for honest resolution because we more honestly understand one another and how we come at our differences and our focus is on the understanding rather than futile and fruitless efforts to prove how people are just hopeless or clueless or just don't get it.
And the most important effort we could make in this direction is to face up to some serious humility that, perhaps, on even the most important issues - like the war in Iraq or abortion or liberal democratic values or economic well-being or law and order - that there isn't a single person that does, has ever, or ever will have some foolishly conceived monopoly on wisdom or insight or knowledge or righteousness or any of it.
People are constantly losing the forest for the trees on the most important issues that we face together. They are perpetually taking more seriously their self-righteous notions of the world than the honest and decent relationships with people they care about that are the reason why they care about all of those issues.
I had a relationship with a best friend and then a serious girlfriend that taught me this lesson the hardest way someone can learn that lesson: when you lose the relationship because the fight takes precedence over the people.
The people in our lives are more important to us than being right about any particular issue, when we're really honest with ourselves. And if they're not, they should be. And when they're not, the truth is that such perspectives should be listened to, but then squared back with the people that we do or should care about.
People are what really matters in those discussions and in our thoughts about complicated moral and political issues that we face together. And understanding them, better, and their many various and independent and strong and not-so-strong and interesting and not-so-interesting perpectives on those issues is the surest way to more genuine resolution of so many of the issues we face.
When you know that someone who opposes abortion does not want fetus' or babies to be killed or made to experience pain, and really, generally, just want people to consider and take seriously alternatives like giving birth and adoption or surrogant parenthood or any of the other alternatives available, then it makes it harder to demonize such folks and their ideas about the world. And when you know that abortion rights advocates just want to make sure that women and girls have as much freedom as they might possibly need to make those decisions about their bodies and the fetus' they carry in a way that also has integrity to their own situations and dilemnas, and especially when you know a particular woman or girl facing that choice - like the 12 year old who got pregnant at our school, last year - then it makes it harder, or should, to demonize people who face that choice and are wrestling with their consciences about difficult issues.
Our dysfunctional alternations between a repressed politics that does not express our differences nearly enough with one another, person to person, and ugly periods like the current one, where we try to substitute for more honest engagement with efforts to impose our will on all of those who disagree, are both illiberal and they cannot sustain a more honest, decent liberal democratic discussion that gets us more honest with ourselves and one another, including about our failures to resolve difficult questions by fiat rather than by open-minded, open-hearted, and open-ended discussion that is not always trying to protect self-righteous notions about the world.
We can keep doing that. But the world is a mess for it. And it's not our most honest, most decent, wisest values at play.
And you know what the kicker is?
We, generally, when we take such discussions seriously, find, as an empirical fact of our liberal democratic history, that we have more in common on the most important questions that face us than different.
What we need to do, now, is to start having the hardest conversations out in the open, without accusation or grilling or efforts to play gotcha or get one another. We need to let go of this far too aggressive, ugly mess that we have created with this more mean-spirited conversation that disrespects these questions of conscience that has been led by an overzealous media and overzealous activists and politicians in the last few years.
We need to start having conversations that we know in our hearts are more honest and decent and constructive. They will take trust. And that will have to be built and earned.
But trust built and earned is a far more genuine path to resolution of our most important issues than any imposition, democratic or otherwise, could ever be. It also happens to be a better life. A happier life. And more decent life. A life that respects liberal values better and more honestly. A better life.
A better life. That's the one we want, right?
We'll learn this lesson the hard way. We'll fuck it up and we'll get all heated and fuck up some peoples' lives, sadly. And then we'll be this crazy, foolish, dysfunctional little mess that we are, right now.
And then we'll pick ourselves from that mess. And we'll fumble our way toward something more honest and decent. Eventually. Or we'll be stuck in this mess until we do.
But we can't stay stuck here forever.
We'll get there. A little bumped and bruised and worser for wear. But we'll get there.
That's a promise.
Love,
Ben
