Connecting Political Dots
Lee Emmerich Jamison
A friend of mine and I have had an email exchange going on for a while. We live on opposite sides of the political divide, which provides more than a little food for thought, given that on almost every fundamental concept we share the same values. Pointing this out in a message some time ago I posed a number of issues where I find the positions of so-called liberals curious. Her reply told me a lot about the liberal world view.
The first of two major points to catch my eye was my friend's response to curiosity over why liberals seem so eager to trust government and to fear private industry. Do people become better people when they are cloaked in the immunity and power of a government than they would be if they actually had to produce a result generally pleasing to their constituency to survive? The second was her response to my noting that, though most liberals would profess to be "little 'd' democrats", they have no objection to our Supreme Court being possessed of a power to overthrow the people's will and even invent law.
Both points speak to the power of many individuals working together to affect the decisions of those charged with serving them.
Getting to the second point she commented, after talking about a Catholic priest friend who had left the Episcopal Church in part out of frustration with the uncertainty brought about by that denomination's reliance on a democratic process, that all in all it is debatable whether democracy has been all that successful an experiment. Had I not heard that before I would just have been speechless.
The great challenge of intelligence is to find simplicities that underlie what appear to be pervasive complexities. I am told by my brother (150 or so I.Q., sometimes very irritating. You know...) that quantum explanations of chemistry, while very difficult to master, provide much more deeply revealing insights into the behavior of the chemical world than standard chemical instruction. The smattering I know about quantum mechanics encourages me to believe him, even coming from Andrew Jamison. The trouble with the quantum world is that it is outrageously un-intuitive. More than eighty years after people started putting quantum mechanics together as a theory the debate still rages as to how to connect the world of the large with the world of the very small that theory describes. No one can tell us exactly how the frantic randomness of the quantum world drives the school bus down the road and brings it to a stop at the railroad tracks. Thank heaven most of us don't know enough to worry about that.
Oh, gee, I've just figure out how to make a lot of money on antianxiety medications.In a sense the same thing is at work in the world view of many so-called liberals. How can the seeming randomness of individual human decisions drive the proverbial bus of the larger world so that the needs of everyone can be met. When they get down to examining individual cases their inability to suspend disbelief causes them to see cases of failure almost to the exclusion of cases of success. That is in spite of the fact that in the most democratic area of our lives, the private economy, the vast majority of the needs of our population are met with such seeming ease it is difficult not to take what happens there for granted! Their intuition is that the bus must have a driver carefully directing it on its way. Never mind that all of the most directed nations of recent times have miserably failed to meet the basic needs of their own people and many have failed outright.
My friend believes that the economic bus must have a driver, a powerful driver. But she rails against one of the powerful drivers who drove the bus in a manner with which she disagreed. She openly questions the success of the democratic process when any remotely objective view of the world that has resulted from the dominance of the democratic process in America would show that human beings gravitate toward the areas of the world that are dominated by that process and must be held against their will in places that aren't.
When forced to concede these principally economic successes liberals fall back on claims of "injustice" (see "Expertocracy") or that this progress will kill us all with environmental disasters. This claim ignores the fact that the most environmentally devastated places on earth are either the result of the decisions of directed economies or are in the world's poorest places. On the other hand the places on earth that have come back the farthest from the brink of such devastation are in the United States.
At some point one must accept the connections between the world of the small and the world of the large, even if it is counter-intuitive. This is true of the quantum world and the world we can see. It is also true of the world of the individual and that of the nation. We can't fully understand why freedom and self-determination work, but sometimes it would help to trust our eyes and admit that they do.
