Let's Start Thinking

   As a political science student in college, I took a class titled “Liberals and Conservatives,” which studied the philosophical foundations of these two ends of the ideological spectrum.  We looked at the various forms of government born of either end of the spectrum – Fascism on the Right, Communism on the Left – and read the big thinkers: John Stuart Mill, Thomas Hobbes, Edmund Burke, Voltaire.  We discussed liberal versus conservative positions on issues and discussed why someone of either persuasion would choose his or her position.  We learned how to think about issues and what drives our tendencies to form opinions on them.  We performed that great exercise that colleges and universities are supposed to promote: thinking.

   From the rhetoric of the day (which is not especially new or modern in its tone), I would be shocked to learn that anyone has any idea why they believe what they profess to believe.  We are toy boats on the sea of news, information, and opinion; the winds of change blow us mightily.  This is why someone like Newt Gingrich – who is a wealthy man by most modest standards – can decry the corrupting wealth of his fellow Republican Mitt Romney, and none of us really blinks.  This is why someone like President Obama can tout the benefits Government can provide for us as citizens, even while he pushes forward policies that hinder or injure citizens of the nation, and we’ll nod at the rhetoric.  To call the ways we think about our opinions Schizophrenic would be an understatement.  I think it’s more accurate to describe ourselves as crazy.

   So now we have self-described libertarians who essentially decry any effort Government makes, even if those efforts protect liberties.  And we have self-described progressives who are not progressive enough to let us exercise our freedom of speech without wagging a finger in our face if someone’s feelings get hurt.  Like I said, crazy.  We call ourselves either Liberal or Conservative, words that have become proxies for Democrat or Republican, even though these parties as bodies of policy positions are crazier than any of their constituent members.  Really, several hundred billion dollars for two simultaneous wars is conservative?  A federal health care program that stands to benefit private insurance companies to the tune of billions of dollars is liberal?  Nobody knows what he is, but we keep slinging the mud of labels that carry no meaning.  These terms have become epithets, not adjectives; they describe nothing.

   I’m tired of hearing politicians tout their conservative credentials, or lionize their liberal policy positions.  I’m tired of the talking-head-news-shows giving credence to two competing and inane voices that purport to tell “both sides of the story” as if there are only two positions on any issue.  I’m sick of the effort to push one guy right and another guy left, when meanwhile the people doing the pushing have no idea what their destination is.  I’m tired of a general public and citizenry that cares so little for the activity of thought.  If anything brings us down it will be this: we stopped thinking.  Because the folks who gave us such great things in human history – democracy, capitalism, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence – were first and foremost great thinkers.  We can implement their ideas as effectively as they developed them only if we continue to pursue that great and difficult (and tedious) process of thought that they did.  Labels and empty rhetoric fill a lot of air time, but they don’t move nations, they don’t solve problems, and they don’t improve lives.  Let’s get back to the business of thinking.  Let’s each of us get down to the bottom of what we believe.