Being Liberal

Being Liberal

What does it mean to be a liberal or, more broadly, to be of the American Left in the opening movements of the 21 ^st century? Peter Singer, professor of bioethics at Princeton, writes, “If we shrug our shoulders at the avoidable suffering of the weak and poor, of those who are getting exploited and ripped off, or who simply do not have enough to sustain themselves at a decent level, we are not of the left. If we say that this is just the way the world is, and there is nothing we can do about it, we are not part of the left. The left wants to do something about this situation”. ¹ This is a good enough sketch to be workable for initial purposes. Few, if any, of those who call themselves Progressive or Liberal would quibble the above. This argument, however, is not about the goals, broadly defined, of a Left-leaning American politics. Rather, it is about how to go about 'doing something' about those things that we are concerned about and what gets in our way.

I am going to start outright by saying that the worst enemy of the American Left, the invisible chain holding us to one spot, is not the American Right in any of its faces (Christian, Economic or Neo-Conservative) but rather the Left itself! Over the last two decades or so, the Left has embraced a dangerous and self-defeating relativism in the name of idealism. This relativism has caused otherwise thoughtful and concerned people, who truly do hunger for social justice, are genuinely aware of the force of bigotry in people's lives and strive consistently to resist and rise above, to abandon the very cognitive and social tools necessary for change. It is not uncommon to hear people who call themselves Liberal or Progressive railing against logic, rationality or science in an attempt to appeal to some particular belief or another without realizing that this very argument can and is used by those on the Right to be obstructionist of actions such as taking steps to ameliorate global warming. It is equally common to hear liberals railing against white privilege or patriarchy or racism and then, when the subject changes to some injustice taking place in another nation for those same mouths to become shut, their voices withdrawn because of a desire to not be imperialist. Yet, in doing so, it weakens the moral force of the argument against sexism or racism in the West, because it denies the universality of the wrong of racism. If all that there is is culture and culture is inviolate (instead of individual rights having this honor) then who is to say that in some cultures racism isn't a problem?

Do people really believe things like this? As startling as it might seem, the answer appears to be a resounding 'yes', although I suspect that at some level this is only an appearance. It is possible (perhaps likely)that people have not fully thought through their positions to their logical conclusions. It is possible that people simply imbibed a particular kind of ideological Kool-Aid during their college years and, because they were never really in an environment where that would challenged, have never had to actually defend their position in an arena where there would be robust and vigorous debate. If everyone around you believes that, for instance, logical problem-solving is a Western creation, 'privileged' in the West by middle- and upper-class white men and those who emulate them, then you are very unlikely to be faced with someone willing to put up a spirited defense and, at first blush, this argument will seem sound if for no other reason than that it's manifest unsoundess has not been pointed out.

1Singer, Peter. A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution and Cooperation. Yale University Press 2000