Why Contemporary Liberals Frustrate the Crap out of Conservatives
Several weeks ago, one of my readers posted a link to an article that attempted to empirically prove that Islam is a dangerous religion. While I reject the article’s conclusion, a part of it did resonate with me.
Do you ever read something and a light goes off in your head and you say “wow, that’s me!” The author, David Steinberg (not the comedian), specifies what he believes to be the dividing point between classical liberals and contemporary liberals:
Liberalism withholds judgment until finding an answer bulletproofed by logic and reason, and this practice is nothing less than the bedrock of the first world.
I am of course referring to classical liberalism, now tragically mistitled conservatism. The half-philosophy known as the Left co-opted that most precious word, liberty, then stopped reading at “withholds judgment.”
He goes on to say:
Technically, the Left preaches that the most enlightened human behavior is to withhold judgment in favor of first concluding a thorough self-examination. But that self-examination process — the perfecting of America and the West prior to judging another culture — can never conclude. There will always be a poor decision, a misguided decision, or a failed policy enacted by democratically elected officials. A Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with Saddam.
Our country is run by a marketplace of ideas. Some will win support and be proven right and some will win support and be proven wrong. Representatives will be voted in and out, the future will always remain unknown, and our leaders will continually take risks with our direction. So withholding judgment in favor of a thorough self-examination becomes a fraud, a half-measure. It becomes a permanently withheld judgment, which is no approach at all. Just a worthless, subjective, illogical philosophy of government, a perennial invocation of “this sentence is false,” to the point that a definable Leftist international policy does not, in fact, exist.
Yes folks, I saw myself so clearly in that analysis. My point of view has always been to look to oneself for fault before blaming others. I had to chuckle at how Mr. Steinberg had so accurately nailed one aspect of the modern American liberal. What’s more, it gave me insight into why I (and my fellow liberals) enrage conservatives. It is as much frustration as it is rage. I see it in the comments section of this blog all the time. Readers who give me credit for having at least half a brain, cannot fathom how I come to the conclusions that I do.
What conservatives, and Mr. Steinberg, fail to see is how the other extreme is just as dangerous if not more so. When you begin from the premise that you are unquestionably “right” and therefore the fault must lie with the “other”, there is no room for discussion, for compromise, for empathy or for anything remotely resembling “relationship”. The only logical conclusion is for the right party to defeat the wrong party. The consequence of this philosophy is that all conflicts must be resolved by confrontation. All enemies must either be ignored (like “lazy welfare mothers” in the inner city) or vanquished, like the regimes of Iran and North Korea. No room for conversation. Right is right, wrong is wrong and that’s that.
This difference between extreme conservative thought and extreme liberal thought is irreconcilable. The extreme conservative refuses self examination and the extreme liberal gets so bogged down in it as to become ineffective.
While I think the bulk of Mr. Steinberg’s article is a justification for anti-Muslim bigotry, I must give him credit for holding a mirror up to me on my more extreme days and helping me understand why I frustrate the crap out of my conservative readers.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
158 comments June 30, 2009
The Media and Family Business
Should politician’s families always be off limits? At what point does the media go over the line in the treatment of family members and private family issues?
Two cases crossed my desk this morning. One of them inescapable if you have a TV or read a paper, the other more obscure and my take on each is quite different.
The first is that of Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina. Now I am as guilty as the rest of using his misfortune for amusement. I’ve made several irreverent tweets about his recently revealed affair with an Argentinian woman. But I do think the media has crossed the line in one way. Why are we reading e-mails between him and his mistress? What possible decent productive purpose does it serve for this private correspondence to be aired in public? It is for pure titillation, nothing more. I don’t see how the South Carolina newspaper, The State, legally obtained these e-mails and I would love to hear their editorial defense for their publication. They should be ashamed of themselves. And yes, when I first heard about them, I tweeted “Sanford: It gets worse. There are e-mails.” But after I read them and gave the matter further thought, I decided this was nothing to tweet about. It’s over the line.
Then there is the flip-side, a politician who consistently parades her family in public to make political points and then gets angry when this backfires on her. You’ve probably guessed I am talking about Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.
The latest incident involves a mock photo in which a picture of her and new baby Trig was photoshopped to replace Trig’s face with that of a local conservative talk show host. You can find the photo and corresponding article here. One particular passage of Palin’s spokesperson’s response really boiled my blood:
Recently we learned of a malicious desecration of a photo of the Governor and baby Trig that has become an iconic representation of a mother’s love for a special needs child.
via Palin Attacks Blogger For “Malicious Desecration” Of Trig Photo.
An “iconic representation of a mother’s love for a special needs child”? Excuse me? What should be iconic about a mother’s love for her special needs child? Is there something heroic or outstanding that she loves her mentally retarded baby? Would it be acceptable if she did NOT love her mentally retarded baby? What kind of total foolishness is this? So far, her youngest daughter Piper is the only one to escape exploitation by this attention craving pol. She paraded her pregnant daughter Bristol all over the place to score points with the pro-life contingent. She equated her daughter Willow with statutory rape in an unnecessarily prolonged battle with David Letterman to enhance her “women’s rights” street cred. And now poor Trig is thrown to the wolves so Sarah can get more attention.
There are limits to how the media should cover politicians and their families. In the case of Sanford, the media crossed that limit. In the case of Palin, she’s the one who crossed it. Again.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
79 comments June 25, 2009
88 Years of Hate
The title is of course an exaggeration. There is little doubt that 88 year old James W. von Brunn did not emerge from the womb sufficiently full of hate that he would one day attempt to kill visitors of the Washington D.C. Holocaust Museum. Still, a good portion of this man’s life has been spent rabidly and irrationally hating others. In the early 80’s he went to prison for trying to kidnap members of the Federal Reserve. He emerged from prison blaming blacks and Jews for his troubles. Today he decided to take action again and before he could be stopped, he had indeed killed a black man, a guard whose presence at that museum may have saved several lives.
In the past two weeks, we have seen three high profile murders with political underpinnings. Private William Long was murdered by an American convert to Islam. Doctor George Tiller was murdered by a pro-life extremist and now this attack in Washington. What chills me is not so much the expressions of rage and frustration evidenced by these men, it is the fuel that sets them off. What chills me is the environment of intolerance, hatred and outright wackjob rhetoric that serves as the backdrop for these crimes.
Just a few days ago, I wrote in the comments section of this blog my growing concern over the insane speech that I’ve seen in the blogosphere. One of my readers regularly e-mails me unsolicited items concerning nutty conspiracy theories. These notes speak of Obama’s lack of legal authority because he is not a citizen of the United States (by the way, von Brunn was a “birth certificate skeptic”). They speak of impending violence. One of the latest spoke of the World Health Organization upgrading swine flu to pandemic level six which would mandate “global martial law” and give the US government authority to enter your home without warrant. These notes are not sent to me by a skeptic. They are sent to me by a believer.
A couple of months ago I encountered the blog of a man who had recently lost his family to divorce and then his job. He was about to be put out on the street. The blog was full of seething rage and thinly veiled threats of violence against an entire host of perceived enemies from the government to the church. I chose to make some comments on that blog that were predictably greeted with contempt. After the shooting today in Washington, I now wonder if I shouldn’t have called the blog to the attention of law enforcement.
The Internet has given us a view into people’s souls, some of them very disturbed souls. von Brunn had written enough hate speech on his blog to make today’s act completely predictable. But how do we discern between a person posing, a person just venting, and a person who is truly dangerous? What role do we play in these people’s lives by the words we write in our blogs and our online comments? What role do we play in their lives by reading their vitriolic and usually irrational rants and then ignoring them? We write them off as crackpots. When they take action, is there blood on our hands?
Giving up our free speech is too great a price to pay on the offhand chance that if everybody writes “nice” things, no one will ever be harmed. Violence existed before the advent of the blogosphere and the blogosphere cannot be blamed entirely for the current climate. Yet isn’t it worth our examining what role we play? From the moment someone yelled “kill him” at a John McCain rally (referring to Barack Obama), I knew we were entering the age of the powder keg. Social analysts much smarter than I have pointed out there is a confluence of forces at work right now in this country that can spell danger.
- People who took their comfort for granted being displaced by a broken economy
- An increase in the sheer numbers of “minority” folks, making those in the “majority” feel disenfranchised
- A small but vocal portion of society that associates leadership with male Caucasians and now finds themselves led by a black US president
- Minority groups who identify for whatever reason with terrorist factions abroad
These are just some of the forces at play. I’ve been accused of being an alarmist. Yet the tea party demonstrations earlier this year, which I dismissed as silly, carried an undercurrent of social unrest. These three recent murders represent a microcosm of society losing control of its inhibitions. How many more incidences will it take before the recently released Homeland Security report is taken seriously rather than met with demands of apology from Janet Napolitano?
I submit that today’s crime and the two crimes that recently preceded it were fueled by words. Words matter. The lack of civility in our public dialogue and the logical abyss into which much of our rhetoric has fallen, only serves as a predictor for subsequent violence and irrational behavior. Unless we want a return to 1968, we must change course. We can only do it by examining our own beliefs and strongly challenging the beliefs of those who might do this country harm. We cannot censor the “nutjobs” but we must shine a bright light on them and declare them for what they are. Complacency at this time in our history is equivalent to complicity in the horrors that may follow.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
174 comments June 11, 2009
Religion as Game Theory
No matter what topic I write about on this blog, most of my comments sections evolve into a heated debate about the relative merits of Islam. This is partly because tensions between certain Muslim nations and the United States are at an all time high and have an impact on world politics. It is also because one of my readers has devoted a good portion of his time to tracking every perceived slip made by a Muslim anywhere in the world. He documents these slips regularly in the comments section of this blog.
So it was with great interest that I stumbled upon an article in Time magazine by Robert Wright. Wright, as it turns out, is the primary mover and shaker behind a favorite web site of mine, BloggingHeads.tv, where two people, usually authors, record a webcam teleconference between themselves and we get to watch them debate. This Time article was an excerpt from Wright’s latest book The Evolution of God. It’s always a thrill when you read an article that fits neatly into your world view and this one did just that.
Wright uses a concept from game theory, the zero-sum game, to explain the changing “moods” of God throughout scripture, both Judeo-Christian and Muslim. Essentially, his thesis is that when religious interpreters had a zero-sum approach, i.e. one man’s gain is another man’s loss, the result was an intolerant religion and an intolerant God. On the flipside, when a non-zero-sum approach prevailed, religious tolerance was the result.
In the case of the Judeo-Christian tradition, Wright traces the vacillation between tolerance and intolerance back to Solomon:
Wright goes on to discuss those who followed Solomon and how polytheism was increasingly viewed as a threat. As monotheism took hold, so did religious intolerance. As paranoia increased, so did intolerance:
This zig-zag between the win-win and win-lose attitude was not limited to Judaism.
However, Muhammad sensed rejection from Jews and Christians alike and this altered his view of any possible win-win relationship:
After Muhammad’s death the concept of Jihad emerged (intolerance) but later was softened to encompass a greater jihad or a “struggle within oneself toward goodness” as Wright puts it. Again a move from intolerance to tolerance. Wright’s excerpt concludes by re-iterating the win-win that can be found in both Judaism and Islam:
Wright, who in his Bloggingheads.tv discussion of The Evolution of God, says he has an affinity for Buddhism, confirms in this Time excerpt exactly what I have believed about organized religion. Religion is informed by politics as much as it is informed by the “word of God”. A religion’s tendency toward peace or terrorism is a by product of its interpreters and those interpreters were shaped by the times in which they lived.
Islam, Christianity and Judaism encompass the greatest expressions of love and the most savage expressions of evil. Such must be the case as religion is the expression of God skewed through the imperfect lens of human beings.
Respectfully,
Rutherford
If you would like to hear Wright discuss his book and you have an hour to invest, I strongly recommend that you visit Bloggingheads.tv. His discussion ends with a section called “Quantum physics and king-sized video games as paths to God” in which he argues that atheism is more or less an ignorant refusal to wrestle with the wonder that is our world and the possibility that even if we say this life is a “simulation”, then what do we label the author of the simulation, the “hacker” so to speak? Wouldn’t that be God?
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81 comments July 9, 2009