This week we have another case of, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
No, my name is not Inigo Montoya. But every now and then I get hung up on repeated and inconceivably inappropriate usage of certain words. Lately I’ve been stuck in the political genre. I know, I know. How dare I bring up such an ugly, smelly topic. Like so much fart gas, politics has this tendency to linger in a room after the culprit is long gone. So allow me to rhetorically “crop dust” if you will.
Let’s start with the word, “politic.” I’m guilty of abusing this term just like most of us. The pure definition of politic is: wise and showing the ability to make the right decisions. Hmmm, so what does this mean for the definition of politics? Politics is: the art or science of government. Politics consist of: the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups.
Hmmm. Did you notice that little bit about making “right decisions?” Right decisions within a group or society. Well, butter my biscuits. The way we toss the word “politics” around these days one would assume it be synonymous with “partisanship” or “punishing those who disagree with you.” To call someone political these days usually means they are a divisive jerk hellbent on castigating their foes.
As it turns out, being political should imply someone cares about implementing boundaries that help enforce right living with each other in a civil society. In America, that civil society is a liberal one. Aha! This leads us to yet another case of “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” It turns out, in American politics, we are all liberals. Some simply like to think of themselves as liberal liberals while others prefer to be considered conservative liberals. But abuse the word all you want, liberal still has quite a specific meaning when it comes to politics.
Liberal: relating to or denoting a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.
Liberalism is a political theory and movement that focuses on the liberty of the individual over against various forms of authority or power (including government, church, patriarchy, etc.). And guess what? Liberalism has pretty much been the dominant ideology since the Enlightenment. All you so called conservatives? You’re liberals. Conservative liberals, to be sure. But liberals none the less. If you like stuff like, individual rights, freedom, liberties, and the pursuit of happiness, then you are a liberal. Before all you liberal liberals get a swelled head, remember, you have your own foibles when it comes to being illiberal about money and guns. That’s the funny bit of the joke. All of the partisan bickering is simply over the best means of being liberal.
This brings us full circle to the idea of “right decision making in groups.” How can we make right decisions in groups if we don’t agree on what is right and what is wrong? That’s what politics is supposed to be all about—the practice of how, as a society, we treat money and possessions and how we protect the vulnerable and how we define marriage and how we think of privacy. How do we live together? How is authority mediated, employed, ordered?
This should be the stuff of politics. But here is where liberalism has a weakness. Liberalism, in practice, is all about the individual (while politics is about public life). In liberalism, moral right and wrong is relegated to the private life. Thus Liberalism tends to sequester “religion” to the realm of the individual rather than any sort of corporate entity or society. (“Don’t push your faith on me.”) This means a topic like ethics must start from some different foundation than traditional value-based ethics that start by defining what it means to be a good person and work from there.
In my humble opinion this leaves both liberal liberals and conservative liberals in a bit of a bind when it comes to filling that void at the moral heart of politics. If we have no clear definition of what it means to be human, of what it means to truly live the good life in regard to how we live with and interact with others, then we’re doomed to squabble over short-term power dynamics and over the relatively trivial back and forth movement of private-rights-boundaries that boil down to nothing more than “the proper way to be selfish.”
I suppose all of this has been to say, despite all the good liberalism has brought to humanity (opposition to racism, sexism, etc.), it should be okay in civil circles to discuss the glaring lack of soul found in liberalism. “To treat others as you want to be treated,” was a political statement when Jesus first spoke it, just as it is a political statement now. Jesus’ entire “Sermon on the Mount” was a political treatise on how to live among others. (A damn fine one at that.) It was never meant to be a rule of thumb applied privately or individually. In this regard, liberalism has done us a great and lasting violence (by throwing out the political baby along with the religious bathwater).
There. Now that I feel that much better, with a quick wave of my hand, I’ll discreetly saunter into the other room and leave my rhetorical gas cloud behind. Mwahahaha…
From the Desk of DMB
This week I’ve been playing around with how my thirteen year old protagonist would think about radiation and prayer. He learns that everything puts off radiation. And not all radiation leads to cool effects like Bruce Banner being turned into the Hulk. Some of it makes things look yellow. Some of it burns our skin over time. But what about the radiation people put off? And what about God?
If plants use radiation from the sun, does God use radiation from people? Or do people use radiation from God? Some radiation can be seen, some felt, some heard. Some is thought to be undetectable by human senses. But what if it isn’t?
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