What a pack of weaklings we've become.
If anyone other than myself (a tall order, I know) is reading this, I want to you participate in an experiment. I want you to think back over the past 6 months. I want you to think of conversation you've had with another person (excluding the internet, which is a breeding ground for anonymous mudslinging) where you respectfully disagreed with that person regarding politics, philosophy or religion (the big 3 nasties).
Can you think of one? I bet not even one. Me neither. The last time I tried was at work and I backed down when the volume started to rise.
I think that kind of discourse is literally going extinct. Somewhere along the way we've psyched ourselves out. We've managed to invert reality in our own minds. What I mean is, people today believe that courage means quietly smoldering and nursing resentments while listening to the enemy, keeping your mouth shut, and waiting to vent with likeminded friends. How did this happen? We've sorted ourselves into these political cliques, and the thought of mixing with ideological foreigners seems completely backwards to us. It means that you're "squishy" or your "trying to have it both ways".
An idea is only as good as the reason which supports it. Reason is only as good as the data which feeds it. Without fresh, reliable data from as many sources as possible, we cripple ourselves. Yet we think that by hanging out with the same predictable crowd, and reenforcing eachothers ideas by regurgitating the same tired, hackneyed facts and figures, we somehow make ourselves stronger or make our ideas... More true?
What adds insult to injury is the supposed courage involved in this. What could be more cowardly than only sticking up for what you believe when you're with people you're sure will agree with you?
Philosophy, Religion and Politics all have something in common. They all hinge on the concept of truth. Philosophy and Religion are obvious enough, but Politics is special. Politics involves a more practical (and much more satisfying) form of truth: utility. What works makes for good policy. What doesn't work is bad policy.
When you take a step into anything that involves truth, you burden yourself with a heavy obligation. An obligation to think and act in all things with honesty and personal humility. Finding things that work means trying a lot of solutions, and having your (sometimes well justified) ideas get disproved. It means accepting these difficult realities with good faith and good humor. It means taking the high road when everyone else is slinging mud. Why? Because that's how you get what you want. That's how you get to good ideas.
But Americans today largely aren't concerned with good ideas. In the modern mind, knowing what's right is more important than finding what's right. Courage today means sitting securely in your impenetrable fortress, looking across the miles of open frontier and sneering.
Friday, September 25, 2009
The Problem of Evil
Andrew Sullivan has an ongoing debate with Jerry Coyne, the last post can be found here. Andrew is putting forward an argument that human suffering - from a spiritual perspective - isn't altogether bad and actually may be very necessary. I agree with Andrew's point, but I see it as side-stepping the root of the paradox. Even if the experience of human suffering could be seen as a good thing, you still have to address the existence of evil, in one form or another.
If God:
A) Exists and
B) Is wholely good
Then you must conclude that anything resulting from God's actions (for Christianity that means the entirety of creation) is good.
If we believe any element of existence possesses even one particle of evil, that negates the supposed nature of God. Or negates his existence altogether. You end up a two extremes: A perfect God and a perfect creation (Evil being more of a personal inconvience rather than a universal absolute) or an imperfect God and an imperfect creation (like the Greek myths).
A Christian might counter by invoking the idea of agency. God created man with the power to freely choose his actions (a property with is good), and as a result Man chose evil and has "fallen from Grace". This tactic attempts to shift the focus to Man, and away from God. Man freely chose evil, therefore man is responsible for the existence of evil.
I don't think this is a fair argument. A perfect God would be able to create a version of Man which always freely chooses good. In other words, a perfect man. You can argue that nature of perfection and free-choice until the cows come home, but the most important facts are that the existence of imperfection contradicts the supposed nature of God.
If God:
A) Exists and
B) Is wholely good
Then you must conclude that anything resulting from God's actions (for Christianity that means the entirety of creation) is good.
If we believe any element of existence possesses even one particle of evil, that negates the supposed nature of God. Or negates his existence altogether. You end up a two extremes: A perfect God and a perfect creation (Evil being more of a personal inconvience rather than a universal absolute) or an imperfect God and an imperfect creation (like the Greek myths).
A Christian might counter by invoking the idea of agency. God created man with the power to freely choose his actions (a property with is good), and as a result Man chose evil and has "fallen from Grace". This tactic attempts to shift the focus to Man, and away from God. Man freely chose evil, therefore man is responsible for the existence of evil.
I don't think this is a fair argument. A perfect God would be able to create a version of Man which always freely chooses good. In other words, a perfect man. You can argue that nature of perfection and free-choice until the cows come home, but the most important facts are that the existence of imperfection contradicts the supposed nature of God.
Friday, September 18, 2009
Ius Latii
Like every other significant problem in our society, the immigration issue has been simplified to the point of grotesqueness. The dueling champions are two political caricatures: Squishy Liberal Appeasement Monkey and Raging Conservative Crypto-Nazi. We've seen this dance many times, and it looks like we're gearing up for another go-round.
When you get past the distractions (race, territory and culture) the root of the immigration problem is this: there is a foreign element which impacts our system, and we have very little visibility and control of this element. That should our first concern. Since the illegal immigrant population exists ourside the legal system, we can't even conduct a proper census. Current estimates are wildly inconsistent.
The two solutions are:
A: Find and forcibly expel all of them from the country, and create a barrier to keep any more from coming in.
B: Find a way to incorporate them into the system.
It continues to surprise me that modern conservatives insist that A is the only acceptable choice. In the interests of fiscal responsibility and realism, the brute force method should be met with overwhelming skepticism. Besides the immense resources necessary to forcibly remove a chunk of the population, the impact to the economy is impossible to estimate. Cities with large immigrant populations like San Antonio and L.A. would see a significant piece of the economic landscape simply disappear.
Is it not more prudent, realistic and responsible to grant limited rights to these people, tax them and by those means regulate the industries that employ them? Strengthening our borders is fine, but fences can be cut, and walls can be scaled. If you remove the incentive to come here, the problem will resolve itself naturally. It's not citizenship, it's not amnesty, it's simply accepting the reality of the situation and no more.
Conservative polititians understand this point, I think. They probably even privately agree. They publicly disagree, not out of ignorance, but political necessity. When it comes to constituent support, you have everything to gain from "standing up for your principles" and everything to lose from pragmatism. A takeaway here is that adhering to principles is sometimes the easiest thing in the world. Depending on which guns you're sticking to, it may require no discipline or strong character at all.
When you get past the distractions (race, territory and culture) the root of the immigration problem is this: there is a foreign element which impacts our system, and we have very little visibility and control of this element. That should our first concern. Since the illegal immigrant population exists ourside the legal system, we can't even conduct a proper census. Current estimates are wildly inconsistent.
The two solutions are:
A: Find and forcibly expel all of them from the country, and create a barrier to keep any more from coming in.
B: Find a way to incorporate them into the system.
It continues to surprise me that modern conservatives insist that A is the only acceptable choice. In the interests of fiscal responsibility and realism, the brute force method should be met with overwhelming skepticism. Besides the immense resources necessary to forcibly remove a chunk of the population, the impact to the economy is impossible to estimate. Cities with large immigrant populations like San Antonio and L.A. would see a significant piece of the economic landscape simply disappear.
Is it not more prudent, realistic and responsible to grant limited rights to these people, tax them and by those means regulate the industries that employ them? Strengthening our borders is fine, but fences can be cut, and walls can be scaled. If you remove the incentive to come here, the problem will resolve itself naturally. It's not citizenship, it's not amnesty, it's simply accepting the reality of the situation and no more.
Conservative polititians understand this point, I think. They probably even privately agree. They publicly disagree, not out of ignorance, but political necessity. When it comes to constituent support, you have everything to gain from "standing up for your principles" and everything to lose from pragmatism. A takeaway here is that adhering to principles is sometimes the easiest thing in the world. Depending on which guns you're sticking to, it may require no discipline or strong character at all.
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