Holding to truth
Feb. 13th, 2005 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvin...And if you want something with more kick to it than Mark Schmitt, here's a typically brilliant Poor Man essay musing on how Clint Eastwood could possibly have become a boogeyman of the Left.
Which inspires some typically despairing and frightened responses in the comments. I sympathize with them completely. Somehow the people who have all the political power are still going around insisting that people like me are an existential threat to the nation. What, indeed, do you do in this situation? Get a gun and a vasectomy and hunker down for the End of Days?
The Editors, I think, actually have a cooler head than I do. The LiveJournal tradition when faced with political desperation is to pour one's immediate feelings directly on the page. But my immediate feelings when I get upset over this stuff tend to be, to put it succinctly, nutty and paranoid and not at all constructive. I suspect that at least part of the game plan of the Ann Coulter/Sean Hannity types is to goad liberals into becoming sufficiently frightened that atavistic fight-or-flight responses take over, and we either flee the country or become afraid to identify ourselves (thereby increasing their power) or, even worse, become violently crazy, transform ourselves into some facsimile of the boogeyman they make us out to be, and provide ready-made material.
So most of the time I back up and try to look at the situation rationally before typing. Or if not rationally, at least somewhat hopefully. I'm one of those Enlightenment children that some activists regard as dangerously naive. Gandhi's favorite word "satyagraha" literally meant something like "truth force" or "holding to truth". I'm personally hopeless as a leader, too suspicious to be much of a follower, and a slacker as an activist. But one thing I'm personally pretty good at is getting worked up over what I see as offenses against truth, and trying to tease out what's actually going on. This kind of thing may have a limited audience; I'm perhaps not going to reach the statistically average American with it; but I can probably reach somebody.
A while back—I think it was in the weeping and gnashing right after the election—Teresa Nielsen Hayden chided American liberals for believing that creationism was an important issue when so many worse things like prisoner-torture and an ill-conceived war and economic stupidities were going on. But besides the actual practical consequences of teaching kids nonsense in school, it's important to me because it's a particularly egregious offense against truth. The environmental stuff is similar. In both cases, too, there's the fact that, as Feynman put it, you are yourself the easiest person to fool but nature cannot be fooled; in the long run I don't think that these strains of craziness in the United States are going to roll back the Enlightenment, but they might well do a lot of damage to the US itself (and, in the case of global warming, to everyone else too). In a hostile climate there's sometimes a tendency to believe that if we only give way on this or that thing, we'll gain enough on the margins to win some election. But I don't regard the truth-based issues as negotiable.
The main thing I have to work on is being a little more vocal about it in real life as opposed to the Internet, to actually call people on it when, say, the DDT-ban-as-genocide myth comes up in conversation. Hard experience growing up as a tactless, big-mouthed liberal kid in a fairly conservative community taught me that you don't come storming in with guns blazing, but these days I can sometimes err on the side of politeness.
Which inspires some typically despairing and frightened responses in the comments. I sympathize with them completely. Somehow the people who have all the political power are still going around insisting that people like me are an existential threat to the nation. What, indeed, do you do in this situation? Get a gun and a vasectomy and hunker down for the End of Days?
The Editors, I think, actually have a cooler head than I do. The LiveJournal tradition when faced with political desperation is to pour one's immediate feelings directly on the page. But my immediate feelings when I get upset over this stuff tend to be, to put it succinctly, nutty and paranoid and not at all constructive. I suspect that at least part of the game plan of the Ann Coulter/Sean Hannity types is to goad liberals into becoming sufficiently frightened that atavistic fight-or-flight responses take over, and we either flee the country or become afraid to identify ourselves (thereby increasing their power) or, even worse, become violently crazy, transform ourselves into some facsimile of the boogeyman they make us out to be, and provide ready-made material.
So most of the time I back up and try to look at the situation rationally before typing. Or if not rationally, at least somewhat hopefully. I'm one of those Enlightenment children that some activists regard as dangerously naive. Gandhi's favorite word "satyagraha" literally meant something like "truth force" or "holding to truth". I'm personally hopeless as a leader, too suspicious to be much of a follower, and a slacker as an activist. But one thing I'm personally pretty good at is getting worked up over what I see as offenses against truth, and trying to tease out what's actually going on. This kind of thing may have a limited audience; I'm perhaps not going to reach the statistically average American with it; but I can probably reach somebody.
A while back—I think it was in the weeping and gnashing right after the election—Teresa Nielsen Hayden chided American liberals for believing that creationism was an important issue when so many worse things like prisoner-torture and an ill-conceived war and economic stupidities were going on. But besides the actual practical consequences of teaching kids nonsense in school, it's important to me because it's a particularly egregious offense against truth. The environmental stuff is similar. In both cases, too, there's the fact that, as Feynman put it, you are yourself the easiest person to fool but nature cannot be fooled; in the long run I don't think that these strains of craziness in the United States are going to roll back the Enlightenment, but they might well do a lot of damage to the US itself (and, in the case of global warming, to everyone else too). In a hostile climate there's sometimes a tendency to believe that if we only give way on this or that thing, we'll gain enough on the margins to win some election. But I don't regard the truth-based issues as negotiable.
The main thing I have to work on is being a little more vocal about it in real life as opposed to the Internet, to actually call people on it when, say, the DDT-ban-as-genocide myth comes up in conversation. Hard experience growing up as a tactless, big-mouthed liberal kid in a fairly conservative community taught me that you don't come storming in with guns blazing, but these days I can sometimes err on the side of politeness.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-02-13 10:48 pm (UTC)Anyway, strange that Coulter being shrill doesn't damage her cause yet if we get shrill in response, it damages ours?
I have a LJ friend who suggested we need to be more powerful like the conservatives and stop mincing our words. That we have to stand for basic well-defined values.
I'm not so sure I agree. (At least with the company she keeps, i.e. she is kind of for Ward Churchill.)
They seem to be able to scare people about us, but we've lost touch on the real scariness of the Right. Back in 1964, people were truly afraid of the consequences of Barry Goldwater's run for the presidency (the "Daisy" commercial) and he would be considered far to the left of Bush. Social Security "Reform" is pretty scary. MoveOn tried briefly to raise the specter of a draft under the Republicans, but I think we Democrats have just lost heart when it comes to fearmongering, thinking it superficial.
Now, there IS lots to fear, and perhaps it's a valid tactic. And perhaps that's the core emotion I feel but fail to communicate when I get worked up over Bush.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-14 07:25 pm (UTC)I think the key thing is to be specific. The problem with Ann Coulter's ilk is not that they use forceful rhetoric, it's that they spread their vilification wider and wider until they're basically accusing about a hundred million American citizens of seeking to destroy America, which is profoundly insane. And the mirror inverse of it is equally insane. I have absolutely no problem describing certain right-wing politicians and professional screed-writers as idiots, charlatans and madmen. I'm just not going to go around trying to get people to regard their friends and neighbors in the same light.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-14 09:41 pm (UTC)Not to mention that the Left is inherently weak. The Left is identified with wacky things like allowing a person to choose what's right for them, and those who think that way aren't as likely to go out and tell someone what to do. If you're truly a liberal, how can you go out and protest and scream at someone for disagreeing with you?
I think that Democrats can be much stronger than they have been, but I think they're afraid of losing the supporters they've already got. It might take an election or two, but if we had Democrats who were willing to be angry and decisive, they would be a much stronger force against Republicans.