L. Jagi Lamplighter's Blog, page 31
August 7, 2014
Part Two: Seeing With Eyes Unclouded By Hate
Again, reposting for technical reasons:
Here is the promised conclusion to: The Ones Who Walk Away From Washington.
At the end of part one, you may recall, I decided to withdraw from politics, to no longer throw my weight with one side, argue the issues, etc.
Once I did this, a funny thing happened…
Some (or all) of you may be familiar with the movie Princess Mononoke, from the fabulous Japanese animator Miyazaki. In it, a young man is sent by his tribe to observe a struggle between humans and nature (represented in the movie by huge beast-gods who inhabited the forest the humans need to cut down if they are to mine the iron ore they need to survive.) The young man, Ashitaka, is told to go and observe the struggle “with eyes unclouded by hate.” To look and see the needs and shortcomings of both sides without prejudice.
Well, this is what began to happen to me.
I began to listen more closely to both the Liberals and Conservatives I knew, and I discovered something astonishing: they were not even talking about the same subjects!
Oh, they were certainly arguing about conflicting conclusions, but those conclusions stemmed from entirely different premises. The result of this was that nothing either side said to their opponents was persuasive, because they were never addressing the issue that caused their opponent to take his stance in the first place.
Let me use an example:
Let’s take war. Say a war is brewing and there are some good arguments for going forward and some good arguments for holding back.
The Conservative looks at the world, and he sees a challenge that needs facing. Something daunting is on the horizon, but he knows that sometimes you need to take a stand for Right. You need to be brave and willing to face the fire to protect what it is that you value in life. Sometime violence is necessary. You’ve got to punch the bully back, or he will just keep bullying you.
What is called for in this situation, then is courage. Only those who lack this quality would not be willing to do what needs to be done.
Liberals must be cowards.
The Liberal looks at the world, and he sees how often violence is misplaced. How applying force can damage or break something that would flourish so much better with an application of patience and hard work. True violence tends to produce a quicker outcome, but the long term effects are often messy and much worse than the problem was to begin with.
All this is so clear, if one merely takes the time to look at it. Only those who are too slow-witted to comprehend these simple truths could think otherwise.
Conservatives must be stupid.
And, if you listen to the two sides, that’s just what they say. The Conservatives I know call the Liberals cowards. The Liberals in the press call the Conservatives stupid. (The Liberals I know personally are mainly too polite to go in for this kind of name calling, but it is done often enough by their fellows.)
I could give other examples. (Clinton’s impeachment – the sanctity of the law (no perjury) vs. the right to privacy (i.e. “they should not have asked that question to begin with.”) In each case, the concern of the Left differs from the concern of the Right.
All this reminded me of an experience I had years ago. Back in high school – junior year Social Studies, we were studying American History. Each time a new time period came up, I had a lot to say about what was happening at the time did another member of the class, a young man known as Misha the Commie.
Now, Misha (who looked nothing like Misha Collins…sorry, Ladies) was known as a Commie, not because of his politics, but because he had a Russian name and a red mailbox. As far as his politics went, Misha was to the right of Archie Bunker.
What happened that year has always fascinated me. Back then, I was a Liberal, and no matter what subject came up, Misha and I were on opposite sides. Banking, slaves, immigration; we were always instantly at loggerheads. Even when the subject was completely different from what we had discussed before – a subject I had never encountered before. Never had an opinion about before – Misha and I were still on opposite sides.
We lived in a rather conservative area, so the class divided with my best friend on my side, and everyone else on Misha’s side. (This did not dim my enjoyment of the process – but it did make it so that I was rather surprised when I later moved to places that weighted more heavily to the Liberal side and discovered I was not always alone. )
Seventeen-year-old me found this mind-boggling. Since I was only aware of my individual opinions, not of the principles that informed my beliefs, I kept expecting that sooner or later, Misha and I would agree on something.
We never did.
That was my first introduction to the idea that our opinions are colored by a world view that has a logic to it. If you want to convince someone of your position – or even to bring them around to being sympathetic to your position, even if they don’t agree – you need to approach the premises of these world views, not the rhetoric that is the conclusion. (As John did when he slowly pointed out how my goals were not in keeping with some of the premises of the Liberal position.)
I look around today and I see many of my friends are filled with hatred toward members of their political opposition – as if these people are robbing all the good from the world and about to bring about the fall of civilization. Conservatives bemoan that all the decency of Western Christian culture has been lost, and we are assuredly heading for a godless and lawless tomorrow, while Liberals assure me that the Fundamentalist Christians have won and we are on the verge of being forced to live in a totalitarian religious state.
Both of these people cannot be right.
The reason for it, of course, is that each side sees the success of the other side as a sign of the triumph of the vice they abhor. Conservatives think that cowards are taking over and ruling the country, while Liberals think that we are now under the thumb of the ignorant and hateful.
Like Ashitaka, who had little power to sway either side of the struggle he was observing, there is not a great deal I can currently do with these observations. I try to gently share the opinion of the other side with those around me, but often they are too bitter or too fearful to listen clearly.
My one hope is that some of what I have learned will someday trickle into my writing, to help me better shape the characters I write about, and maybe through that medium, some reader might be led to have a better and more compassionate understanding of his fellow man.
August 6, 2014
The Mystery of the Doorknob
So…we have this doorknob–leading into the boys' bedroom–that hasn't worked for years. I've replaced it three times. The new ones didn't work either.
I finally replaced it one more time…just the middle part that didn't work, but I couldn't get it back together. I left it kind of half on.
I walked by a day or so ago and found that the Cherubim had taken it apart. He was kneeling in front of it and looking at it. He had only one half of the knob in.
Last night, I went to open the door…and it was fixed. The doorknob worked perfectly. The screws were properly tightened all the way in.
I checked with John, the princess, my mom, and Juss. None of them had fixed it. Orville is at camp. No one else has spent any time in the house in the last two days…unless either someone came over and didn't tell me, or the cats did it. (Or the dog we are dog-sitting, but I don't think she went upstairs…much less fixed a doorknob.)
So that suggests….that the Cherubim did it himself…
Huh…
Overheard at the Wright Household
Overheard at the Wright Household:
Definitions by Juss:
Immortals — death-impaired
Juss — pancake-impaired
Juss, singing, "And an unemployed jester is nobody's cat!"
Juss, doing his cat impersonation voice: "But an employed jester is nobody's cat either."
Juss: "Oh, good point."
Juss: "How did I get here?"
Me: "You were born."
Juss: "But Dad said that he made me in a vat in the basement."
Juss: "Mom, I think I've been replaced by an alien."
August 4, 2014
Caption This!
(Note: Last week's winner will be posted, but there were so many good captions, we haven't agreed on a winner yet.)
August 3, 2014
August 2, 2014
Contest…sort of…for the Evil League of Evil’s Logo
The Evil League of Evil are trying to design a logo. Ideas welcome here:
http://www.scifiwright.com/2014/08/contest/#comments
August 1, 2014
Part One: The Ones Who Walk Away from Washington
Reposting this for technical purposes. Sorry.
It came to me to repost my Seeing With Eyes Unclouded By Hate posts. Here is part one…just as I wrote it some years ago:
The rainbow leading to the crock of gold…or something…in the Capital Building
Photo by Cat Mihos
In my youth, I was a Liberal of the fiercest sort. I never went so far as declaring myself a communist, because it was clear to me, even at a young age, that communism would not work. However, I was for every other Liberal policy one can imagine.
When John and I got together, we had many discussions (and arguments) on economics and politics. John was a Libertarian at the time. I thought this meant, “he did not care about people.” In fact, I would have summed up politics as: Liberals care about people, and other political groups do not.
Then, one day – after many, many hours of fierce debate with my future groom – I had an epiphany. All in a flash, I saw my philosophy in a new way. Up until that time, I thought that politics was a matter of trying to get the government to put in policies that would help people. Suddenly I realized that someone had to decide what these policies would be – someone had to decide what they thought would help people. Who got to decide this?
Implicate in the Liberal mind-frame, I realized, was the idea that we, the elite, decided what they, the masses, needed.
Close on the heels of this realization came three more:
1) The entire Liberal mentality was based on the idea that ‘we know better than you.’ (As in ‘we know better than you how you should spend your money, so we’ll make you pay for this with your taxes, instead of giving you a choice.’) Liberals were patronizing.
2) While I favored the system that allowed the patronizing elite to decide the fate of the masses, there was no guaranty that my ideas would come out on top. If they did not, then I was one of the masses who did not know better that the other guys to whom the other guys were being patronizing.
3) Treating someone in a patronizing manner often curtailed their freedom of choice.
Suddenly, I was at an impasse. Patronizing the poor was in conflict with freedom, and I had to chose which side I was going to stand upon. I could believe people were too stupid to take care of themselves or I could trust them and side with freedom.
It’s a very scary thing to decide to trust people, especially when the evidence around you suggested that they might not qualify to be trusted. However, I could not knowingly turn my back on freedom. For I was convinced that to be happy, a person needed wisdom, and to be wise, a person needed the freedom to make mistakes.
So, bravely, I chose freedom, turned my back on telling other people how they should live their life, and joined the rank of the Libertarians.
John and I lived some happy years as Libertarians – happy for us. Not so happy for the poor souls we harangued. In general the philosophy suited me, for it required you to believe that if you did something you would often get the opposite result from what the general mass of humanity would expect (lower taxes brings higher revenue, for instance.) This fit my model of hoe the universe worked.
From time to time, I would balk at some particular idea. Once, uncertain about something, I asked John how he could be so sure. He pointed out that it could be logically deduced, so how could it be wrong? I thought he had a valid point, so I stuck to my guns.
After 9/11, John began to slide from Libertarian to Conservative. This really shook me, because I had believed his argument about the logic of it proving it, even when it did not seem to me it would work that way. When he began to temper logic with experience, we began to slide apart, because my experience told me that many of the policies he was leaning toward would not work. So, I began to slide gently back toward where I had started.
About the same time, two things happened:
A) First, I began to spend more time praying. Watching prayer succeed showed me that your state of mind – or the state of your soul with God – mattered much more in how the thing turned out than what you did. For the first time, I applied this to politics. I thought: If I am right about this, then if there were two Senators, and one prayed sincerely and the other acted out of a selfish or fearful goal, wouldn’t the first one produce a good outcome and the second one a bad outcome – no matter what policy they supported or what party they were a member of?
If so, is there any way I can tell a politician’s heart, which ones are acting with God and which are not?
No. There is no way for me to tell.
B) The Iraq War loomed, and I discovered that I had two friends, both well-educated and good at research, who stood on different sides of the issues. Curious to learn which side might be right, I shuttled comments back and forth between them….and I learned something I found terribly disturbing.
Even right then, at the time – much less looking at history years later – there were no reliable sources. Each of them quoted sources, the other one discounted. Each of them quoted facts the other one disputed. Finally, it came down to original sources.
One afternoon, they began arguing over whether a certain politician had said a certain line. Being thorough, they both sent me a link to a site that had the “original transcript” of a speech…and original source. One site showed that the line was in the speech; the other site did not include the line.
And these were original sources.
At that moment, I became convinced that, while it may be true that “The Truth Is Out There,” I was never going to find it. There was too much information on both sides about any topic for me to find out the truth without traveling to examine it on my own, and I did not have the time for that.
What nearly everyone I know seemed to be doing was not finding the truth, but deciding what they’d like the truth to be and then finding evidence for it.
So, I lay down my party affiliation, and I walked away.
I walked away from reading the news, from arguing about politics (I still slip and do this occasionally, but it used to be a major pass time,) from aligning myself with a particular party of thinking, from believing anything I read in the papers, from thinking I knew what was going on, and most of all, from thinking that a particular party platform was correct.
I still vote. Sometimes, I even have opinions. But nowadays, I decide these matters by praying. If it comes to me that I should do something myself (vote for someone, write a letter, etc.) I do it. If not, I try to refrain from having an opinion.
I cannot advice anyone else to take this course. For one thing, you have to have a lot of faith in prayer and not much faith in the world, and that’s not something a person can do by decision…
…but I will tell you that since I’ve walked away, my whole view of the world and my fellow polity-members has undergone an astonishing change.
End of Part One. To follow – Politics Part Two: Seeing With Eyes Unclouded With Hate.
July 28, 2014
Caption This Winner
And the winner for last week was:
"You can't knit while it's still attached, dimwit!"
July 21, 2014
Caption This!
In honor of the upcoming release of the next book of Unexpected Enlightement, here is another sheep-themed picture to capture.
(Those of you who have read the book, no spoilers!)
