Politics is More Uncivil than you Think

With the intensified rhetoric from both sides of the political aisle in the United States, there have been increasing calls from the punditry for "more civil discourse."  This rhetoric is itself uncivil, since the pundits are not calling for a return to genuine civility (if it ever existed) but rather a return to the niceties and pleasantries of "polite politics."  Genuine civility, as M. Scott Peck defines it in his book about Civility, A World Waiting to be Born, is "consciously motivated organizational behavior in submission to a Higher Power."  

Our politics is, if anything, far from conscious and even farther from being in submission to a Higher Power.  We live in a world that is increasingly predicated on coercion, especially of the State kind.  Ideally of course, the State exists to prevent coercion, whether it comes in the form of force (murder, rape, assault, etc.) or fraud (Madoff).  The State however, has throughout history been at least as guilty of the commission of force and fraud as private citizens have, and in many egregious instances, the results are even more devastating (the Holocaust, Japanese Internment, Nuclear Warfare, The Great Leap Forward, and so on).  

And yet, as much as I like to fantasize about a Stateless society (a world without government), I know that it is but a mere daydream, and highly unlikely to be achieved in my lifetime, if it is even achievable.  Consequently, we must each individually, and within the context of the greater society, decide how we are to make our world function given the constraints as they currently are.  This means that at least for the foreseeable future, the State is here to stay.  Many of my libertarian friends will be aghast to read this proclamation, but we would all do well to accept it and then determine the best course of action for increasing liberty in our own lifetimes.

Few people would contest that American society is fundamentally broken.  The Left believes it is because of too little State intervention.  The Right believes it is because of too little Church intervention, and the Libertarians believe it is because of too much intervention from everybody.  So the fight, rather than being about making society work for everybody, is about who can garner the most votes at the next election to impose their vision on everybody else.  Nothing could be less civil.

Democrats treat the "Rich" as people to be exploited--for noble ends, of course--but exploited nonetheless.  The Rich are a bunch of greedy people who made their money through ill-gotten gain, we are told, and they deserve to "pay their fair share" to everybody else.  Who decides what a "fair share" is?  The Democrats, of course.

The Republicans on the other hand treat the environment, third world labour, and the "masses" as objects for exploitation so that somebody can achieve his Randian vision of shrugging the atlas while at the same time viewing gays and other heteronormative people as deserving of oppression because they are nominally different than they are.

Each election, then, becomes about who gets to punish whom.  This is a broken democracy.

If we are to save ourselves from killing each other, we must forge a new path, one that is based upon genuine civility and value for each other as individuals.  We are not islands unto ourselves--but neither are we communes.  Where we cannot agree, we must seek to find true consensus (not where "all bureaucrats agree" counts as a consensus)  about how to proceed.  Police power cannot and should not be used to enforce ideology, but it is what both sides do anyway.  

In the coming weeks, I hope to write more about this subject, as I believe it is among the most important issues of our day, if not THE issue of our day.  I do not live under any false pretenses that building a more civil society will be easy, or that even once achieved that it will be without significant problems.  Life is about problems, and problem-solving.  But perhaps if we do have a more civil society, we can solve these problems without trying to destroy one another.

Posted via email from skinnerlayne's posterous

When God Tricks Us

Most people lose their Vision by the end of their college years, or at least by the end of the first year of living in the "real world." Certainly I do not mean they have lost their physical ability to see, but rather their ability to see great things and a bright future ahead, a specific one of their own making. Vision is the foremost of prerequisites for successful entrepreneurship--sometimes it is the only thing we entrepreneurs even have. Without it, we are lost at sea, adrift and directionless.

Entrepreneurial vision (which I mean broadly--one can be an entrepreneur in many fields, including law, medicine, education, politics, etc.--it is not limited to people who are in the world of commerce) is the engine that drives the progress of mankind, and although all entrepreneurs have a vision of changing the world, there is always some specific personal gain we all seek. For some, it is money and material possessions, for others, it is the satisfaction gained from the work itself, and for yet others it is leaving a "legacy." For most entrepreneurs it is some combination of all three of these things, but this desire for personal gain does not obliterate the astounding humanitarianism that always accompanies the Ethical Entrepreneur.

I have come to realize, though, that entrepreneurial vision is not something we are born with, but is rather something we are called to. The word "vocation" comes from the same Latin root as the words "voice" and "vocal." It literally means "calling." Some of us are born with a sense of vocation to entrepreneurship generally--to change the world. But coming to and realizing our specific vocation (or, as is often the case, series of vocations) is a winding path with twists and turns that we would never have signed on for if we had known it all at the beginning. But this is one of the mysteries of God--his "trickery." I do not mean this pejoratively. The Divine Person is undoubtedly a witty and creative fellow--how else would we end up with animals as strange as Giraffes and Elephants and simultaneously foods so utilitarian and ordinary as the potato?

As the Old Testament prophet said "[God's] thoughts are not our thoughts, nor his ways our ways. For his thoughts are higher than our thoughts and his ways higher than our ways." Sitting in the midst of the trying times of our vocation, we must all step back and look objectively at the circumstance, marveling at how we got to where we are. Rarely, if ever, the path is not only something we wouldn't have chosen, but it isn't even a path we could have expected or imagined. Sometimes we may even feel that God has tricked us into going down our present path with some short-term taste of the beauty that is life when we answer our calling.

In this way, we must find it in ourselves to detach from our own narcissism and our desire to have accomplished things in our own time and with our own strategy and give Thanks for the mystery of God's methods, which at time may seem to us unorthodox at best, and cruel at worst. But when our calling is clear, it is that we must cling onto, and accept the pathways that are presented to us. There are many lessons to be learned along the paths we wouldn't choose for ourselves, and that is of course why we are called to go down them--so that we are prepared for the next run, whether here on Earth or in the hereafter.

Posted via email from skinnerlayne's posterous