In the pursuit of truth and justice and love and all those things we aspire (or should aspire) for, I often see people fall prey to what I call "the other cliff." My analogy goes like this:
We're all hiking along this narrow path that has a cliff on either side of it. At some point, one guy steps too far to the left and falls off the cliff. A number of people notice that someone just fell off the cliff on the left, and worried about doing the same, they move towards the right and a some of them step too far and fall off the cliff on the right. This is not missed by a large number of the other hikers, many who veer left and off that cliff. Pretty soon everyone is yelling at the other side, warning them about the one cliff while at the same time backing off the cliff on their own side. The moral of the story is: Avoiding one error often leads to another.
I would point to political debate as a prime example of this. Some Fox News commentators seems to me to be especially guilty of this, accusing others are becoming Socialists and Nazis to scare you away from considering their beliefs as an option (though I may point to Fox News because I've it more than others). Liberals in turn will accuse conservatives of pandering to big business, being ungenerous, uncaring etc. I'm not really sure what the current attacks are, but it seems that many of the loud voices on TV are trying to scare you away from one of the cliffs. What they wont admit is that the only way to guarantee you are not being too liberal (or conseravive) is by being too conservative (or liberal). They ask you to flee the one while hiding the danger of the other. The answer is that we can't find the right path by avoiding wrong ones, we have to focus on figuring out what is actually right.
Or look at it this way. Imagine we are trying to get to the top of a mountain with the conservative folly on one side and the liberal folly on the other. If you are on the liberal folly side, the only way to get to the top is to get closer to the conservative folly side and vice-versa. In fact, you can never get closer to the top without also getting closer to some error.
Now, I am not suggesting that the answer is to be "moderate." Trying to avoid being extreme doesn't help avoid errors unless you happen to have a full grasp of all possible errors you could be making. Besides, "moderate" isn't really a position and aiming for it quickly becomes nonsensical. Should you try to be extremely moderate or should you instead focus on being moderately moderate?
Each issue will have to be looked at independently (ie. don't just swallow your political party's platform whole) and the correct path is always on the verge of all sorts of errors. As we are not going to walk perfectly, every mistep we make will be into some error, but we must walk the path as best we can. So whatever the dangers are (being too conservative or liberal, immodest or prudish, generous or stingy, brutally honest or diplomatic, naive or cynical, emotional or rational, etc.), you cannot believe or behave as you aught by trying to avoid error. Instead you must focus your energies on finding what is right and true without fearing the dangerous errors you must step within an inch of to get there.
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False dichotomies are everywhere, especially in politics, though certainly not exclusively so. In America, in particular, we do have notions of "conservative" and "liberal" which connote things very culture-specific.
ReplyDeleteWe do want to avoid error, but I suppose that first we need some notion of what "error" (or "right") is. Regarding many issues, the intellectually honest among us are groping for something that can be called "right," and often we go to extremes (which may sometimes be appropriate) in the process of finding what works.