House of Eratosthenes

I had cited in the seven lies I was told, as a boy in public school, presumably being told the same things that many other kids were told, the canard that “Republicans and Democrats want to get the same things done but have different ideas of how to go about doing it.” Post-high-school-graduation, I have seen very little evidence of this. Higher standard of living, maybe? Republicans and democrats both want that? I dunno about even that one. There are a lot of Republicans, it seems to me, who take the “money is the root of all evil” thing a little too seriously (chopping off the “love of” at the beginning of that cliche). And the democrats who want to raise standards of living, I’ve notice, always seem to want to target certain favored classes of people. With other classes not quite so smiled-upon, an increased standard of living is, in their minds, an evil thing.

One of the wonderful things about America, in my mind, is that our ideological split is rather singular in nature — us on the one side, them on the other. This gives rise to some unhealthy things, such as people in both camps who are tempted to cross the fourth milestone to insanity, essentially insisting “nobody from my tribe can have a bad idea, and nobody from the other tribe can ever have a good one.” That isn’t good at all. But consider the alternative to a single ideological split: Many of the same. Ugh. You think it’s hard, now, for an election campaign to be run on issues rather than personalities. I’ll take one single big fat chalk line down the middle of the house, thank you very much.

But here’s another wonderful thing about America’s split between conservatives and liberals: It goes right down to the definition of morality. This means you can find decent people on both side of the line — we aren’t quibbling about whether to be moral, we’re disagreeing about how to test it. In that sense, the old falsehood has a kernel of truth to it (as do all potent and convincing falsehoods). We all — or most, anyway — want to be good people. How do we define it?

I’m amused that this piece that leans right contains essentially the same phraseology as this other piece that leans left…”Liberal morality is a very alien thing…” versus “…social conservatives frequently take stances that liberals find baffling, if not downright evil.”

Now here is a differential across the divide: Once we do have morality defined in a way that makes us comfortable, what do we think of people who fail to adhere to our standards?

I think Larry Elder summed it up very capably when he said,

Conservatives consider liberals well-intentioned, but misguided. Liberals consider conservatives not only wrong, but really, really bad people.

The column in question concerns Elders’ encounter in a barbershop with a fellow patron who was shocked to learn Elder had voted to re-elect George W. Bush. It is titled “Open-Minded Liberals”…with a question mark at the end.

The older I get, the more befuddled I am that this “open-minded” nonsense ever got started. It is one of the few mysteries in life that my unhealthy childhood television diet back in the seventies, might provide some assistance in unlocking. I recall it was very fashionable for television networks to release pastiches of “All in the Family” in one boring episode or another, setting up a central character to be good-hearted “meathead” and another marginal character, often a one-time-only character, to be “Archie” except not so lovable. It became ritualistic for the central character to deliver some caustic, dismissive line in one of the last scenes while the canned studio audience sound effects would cheer wildly, condemning the marginal character’s racism or, occasionally, sexism. The marginal character would give this look downward at his toes like “aw gee, I suck so much” and he’d never be seen again.

It was boring and unimaginative immediately. It didn’t get to be tragically funny until years later. Half-hour sitcoms telling us what values to have? Nowadays we have cable television shows like “Desperate Housewives” or “Six Feet Under” or “Dead Like Me” telling us how to look at life…which is another problem…but overall, a vast improvement.

I digress. The point, here, is that stale comedy shows from the era of double-digit inflation and gas rationing, represent the last time I have ever seen liberal ideas given even the semblance of “open-mindedness.” How our left-wing friends got all twisted around from tolerance, to anything-but, is a delicious chronicling of irony. It’s as if they set themselves up for it from Day One. Like their bumper sticker slogan might as well have been…”we all need to be respectful of people who aren’t like us…and we have no room anywhere for anybody who disagrees.” Or how did Austin Powers’ father put it? Something like “There’s two things I can’t stand, people who are intolerant of other cultures…and the Dutch.”

Discarding all the occasions where intolerance would necessitate some form of action, I haven’t seen the people we call “liberals” tolerate anything outside their perimeter of favored cultural sexual-preference and skin-color baubles since…well…ever. Their morality seems to have something to do with intolerance, if anything. And the intolerance is a complicated thing. It has at least two tiers. They’re intolerant of terrorists…they’re intolerant of conservatives…you don’t exactly have to be a seasoned scholar of modern popular culture to realize these are two entirely different things. There is a commitment to making sure the conservatives don’t get their way. To make sure of it. And if the conservatives do indeed get away with some shenanigans, why, vengeance will surely belong to the liberals someday.

Myself and others have thought, very often, how things would look now if liberals were as committed to thwarting terrorism as they were to thwarting conservatism.

And how long do you have to wait for a liberal to, even in the midst of denying what’s above, justify it nevertheless? Something about your odds of being killed in a terrorist attack being thirty gazillion to one? When we waterboard we’re worse than they are? Aren’t those favored liberal talking points now?

Anyway, all that is just a prelude to what follows below. I was having a discussion over at Phil’s place which led to an interesting off-line. The subject isn’t quite so much liberalism, it’s more like very mild forms of egalitarianism…the minimalist sort that formed, among other things, the American experiment itself. Phil was referring to the last 200 years or so in terms of how tyrants come to power, and I’ve always been rather interested with what came before the 200-year period. What started all this, I wonder? The storming of the Bastille? The subject immediately under discussion is what Rush Limbaugh sometimes calls “Gettin Even Withem Ism” (it’s a phonetic expression and I have no idea how one correctly spells it), which by itself is a curiosity. Listen to liberals for awhile, especially Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton, and you’ll see it’s almost compulsory to call out some bad guy who’s due to be taken down a peg or two. One gets the impression that their brand of liberalism cannot survive long without this essential element, not even for a breath or two.

That has always struck me as odd and strange. If we’re trying to achieve an open, tolerant, transparent and diverse society, why we could just babble away about that noble vision for months at a time without calling out any villains, right?

Today’s liberals can connect bad guys to anything you want to discuss. Health crises, like AIDS. Weather phenomena like Hurricane Katrina. I mean…you just name it. Maybe this is why Barack Obama is kicking Hillary’s ass lately; maybe the liberals themselves are just sick of it. That’d be a good thing. It would imply that like the rest of us, they have a hunger for solutions and are ready to subordinate the distribution of blame to a decidedly inferior priority. That they’re finally starting to grow up a little bit. To think about becoming what, in my lifetime, they have always bragged about being: “progressive.”

But on the subject of morality, I thought this DailyKOS writer did a pretty good job of drawing up the difference:

Liberal Christian morality differs from conservative Christian morality in that liberal Christians don’t look at the Bible and see rules but instead see guidance for how to think about morality and justice. Right and wrong is not determined by God, but God’s morality is based on fundamental truths of right and wrong. Conservative Christians criticize this thinking as non-Biblical, because it excludes sections of the Bible that are clearly rules-based. Liberal Christians have a number of responses, including the idea that God is constantly trying to get us to change and move beyond what we once were.

If I understand this right, the liberal view of morality is not superior or inferior, but rather dynamic instead of static. It defines continual self-improvement as one of the most important pillars, perhaps the all-important pillar. We are a continuously self-improving thing, designed to discern for ourselves what is right and what is wrong.

Maybe that’s why liberals don’t like us to talk about terrorism. It highlights self-contradictory things about this that would normally be kept in the dark, and it lights up those contradictions rather brilliantly. If we are in a process of evolution, becoming a progressively more moral species, relegating to the realm of wrongness things that were previously thought right, we can cheerfully avoid ethical conundrums right up until the point where we encounter some “missing links” such as the terrorists who murdered thousands of people on September 11, 2001. If we’re being socially tolerant, then we need to respect other cultures, and that includes the decision to live in the seventh century. If some other culture wants to live as million-year-old chimpanzees on the spectrum of moral evolution, and the rest of us our in a process of relegating previously-right things to the realm of wrongness, that would mean these primitives are living in a time when the acts we consider wrong, are in fact right. And if that includes murdering thousands of office workers and bystanders to make a point about our foreign policies, then the potential exists that the September 11 attacks fall into the zone of “aw, that’s quite alright” — at least in the perspective of those who committed them. And we are honor-bound to respect that.

If you want to avoid that conclusion, then you have to at least allow for the idea that some issues of right and wrong are absolute. And if you want to allow for that, then you have to embrace at least some of…oh, dear…that awful, dreaded conservatism.

Well, it’s widely accepted that moderation is a good thing. So maybe that’s how the liberals justify it. But when you listen to liberals and their opinions of conservatives for very long, it doesn’t seem like this can be the case. They seem to think of conservatism the way Yoda spoke of the Dark Side of the Force…you know…once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.

They are the doctor’s hands, scrubbed and ready for surgery. We’re the filth, slime and muck. They are not to come into contact with us. It’s exactly what Larry Elder saw in that barbershop.

I was looking around for something that would more reasonably explain all this, and I stumbled across this piece that invoked images of the Bastille all over again, and made a brilliant point besides.

The Nature of Liberal Morality
By John “Birdman” Bryant

In contrast to conservative morality, liberalism is based on the premise that Reason, rather than Tradition, should be the criterion of good. Ironically, however, the first historical instance in which Reason was made the basis of morality — the French Revolution — not only witnessed some of the most immoral acts ever performed by man, but saw Reason literally transformed into the god of a religion thru the efforts of Hebert and others, so that Reason simply became a different form of Tradition.

I know if I tried to be a liberal, I’d make a very bad one. This notion of moral definition that is dynamic across time, has always troubled me greatly, and I suspect it troubles everybody else too — even liberals.

I do something marginally terrible, such as jaywalking or littering, and fifty years later my grandson is busted for exactly the same crime. We both go through the judicial process and receive, half a century apart, radically different judgments. Both those episodes are alright? How can that be? If that is the case, what is to be said if the crime for which we are each respectfully busted, me now, him five decades from now, is far more serious? What if we each kill someone under identical situations? I serve 25-to-life and my grandson gets out after two and a half years? Or vice-versa? Neither scenario carries some kind of miscarriage of justice? How can that possibly be?

If that is indeed the case, what are we to think about slavery — back when it was actually practiced here? We’d have to grant some kind of approving nod to it, wouldn’t we? Or at least, fail to condemn it. And if we fail to condemn that, what else would we have to say is alright…so long as it comes from a respectfully primitive time.

The author goes on to quote himself, and finds an exception to a rule that previously left such exception unmentioned:

“The principal axiom — and fallacy — of the philosophy which in the present day goes by the name of “liberalism” is that any given human life possesses infinite value. It is this axiom which explains the liberals’ eagerness to feed the starving third-world masses, in spite of the fact that such feeding will not stop starvation, but will make it all the worse once an infusion of food has made it possible for those who are starving to add to their numbers. It is this axiom which explains the liberals’ abhorrence of the death penalty, even for those persons who have committed the most heinous and despicable crimes. It is this axiom which explains the liberals’ opposition to war, even when the enemy is clearly opposed to the democratic principles which make the liberals’ self-righteously resounding protests possible. And it is this axiom which so arouses the liberals’ anger when scientists, in the study of their carefully-gathered statistics, conclude that some racial, ethnic or other groups may be inferior to others, thereby implying that — since the value of some people is less than that of others — that therefore not all those values are indeed infinite. “There is, however, a notable exception to the above axiom, which is that liberals, in favoring a woman’s right to abortion, do not seem particularly concerned with the lives of the unborn. I am not sure why this exception has arisen — or indeed that it is an exception, as liberals may well be split on the issue — but my suspicion is that it has much to do with liberal opposition to religion, and particularly the liberal distaste for the views of religious fundamentalists on abortion, who maintain that every fetus possesses that apparently-imaginary entity known as a ‘soul’.

Personally, I think that might explain part of it, but there’s got to be a whole lot more to it than that. Some liberals are religious, after all.

The relationship between liberals, and oppression of humans by other humans, is a curious one. They outwardly deplore it, but as we saw with the Iraq war, they also condemn bitterly those who interfere with it. It’s kind of like the big brother who pronounces nobody can ever touch a hair on his little brother’s head — except him.

Except the big-brother-bully occasionally has to translate his words into action, while our liberals seem opposed to doing that or allowing anybody else to do it either. Whaddya get when you cross bullying with laziness…liberalism.

Cause of Global Warming The abortion issue has always seemed, to me, to have something to do with a minimalist definition of what people are. I reach this conclusion by observing it from a high level, from which I can simultaneously observe the euthanasia issue, the death penalty issue, the evolution-versus-intelligent-design flap, and the “don’t emit carbon ManBearPig” thing. Across all five of these issues, it seems the one axiom that earns opposition and condemnation from our liberals, is the one that says we matter. That we are here to accomplish something wonderful and great. Five times out of five, this dictum wanders into arguments that our liberals cannot allow to stand.

And you could power large cities off the energy they arouse in opposing them.

One can’t help but wonder if “global warming” isn’t caused, over the last ten years, primarily by liberal outrage. I guess when you work really hard over a lifetime at being ordinary, you get extra-extra-ticked-off if you see someone else trying to be extraordinary. Maybe that’s what liberalism is.

Interesting analysis, as always, Morgan.

As for you being a “bad liberal,” were you a liberal… That was me, all over. I began to question some of the more egregious Liberal tenets, and then got tired of the hypocrisy and the shouting down of dissent from “approved thought.” There was no discussion to be had, only condemnation for deviating from the orthodoxy. So, I switched sides nearly 30 years ago.

I’m tempted to say “I never looked back,” but that’s not entirely true. Some of my correspondents have accused me, in so many words, of being a bit “squishy” when it comes to my conservatism. Perhaps I AM squishy, but none of us fits…exactly… in any given Box.

So Be It.
- Buck | 02/12/2008 @ 15:08
Well, that’s just the mark of a man who thinks for himself.
- mkfreeberg | 02/12/2008 @ 15:19
Conservatives consider liberals well-intentioned, but misguided. Liberals consider conservatives not only wrong, but really, really bad people.

I’ve noted this myself quite often over the last several years.
- philmon | 02/12/2008 @ 23:49

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

On Liberal MoralityTuesday, February 12th, 2008

On Liberal Morality
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008