More talkin’ back from Liberal Street Fighter
There are multiple issues these days causing division in the country, within the Democratic Party and within the broader left. A disturbing trend is the way party leaders, writers, some activists and lately big bloggers, (as discussed so well here) demand that OTHER less desirable activists quiet down, for fear of offending some centrist idea of “values.”
They turn the crank on their tired organs, reedy calls for the hippies, the pacifists, the feminists and women’s studies crowd, the rabid queers and women and mothers and workers to all dance to their tired old tune. The tune gets louder when directed at the growing peace movement, activists for women’s health and GBLT activists.
We’re told over and over, even by supposed progressives, that “values” in this “conservative” nation are what has led to Republican hegemony in government. I would assert that it is the LACK of demonstrable values from the left that has led to our current straits. For me, those values are rooted in Humanism.
I’m a humanist. It took me some time to get here. I wanted a faith really badly when I was young. The other faiths, besides Christianity, especially ones rooted in a culture or place, felt like putting on drag. The more I read the bible, the more I saw how evil Christianity is. I’ll define “evil” in a moment.
Human beings are where I source value, because that’s the only thing left. After reading many of the religions, the whole new age movement, I knew that none of the Gods were real. Not in a metaphysical sense, but real in the sense that they could really matter to daily life, since we don’t all agree on them. Hell, Jesus is a different God to nearly every Christian who mouths His name.
So when I assert that something is “good” or “evil,” I have to base it on what I value in human beings. How can I do that without asserting the prominence of one human being over another?
By saying my rights, my judgements, my perogatives end in that small space between my fist and the tip of your nose. I would assert that beyond that all I offer is advice that everyone should take with a grain of salt. Each person has to consider their decisions on how they will look back on them. How will this affect me down the road? My children? My neighbors? Should I care about any of them but myself?
As I’ve made clear before, discovering Nietzsche’s writings on the impending modern era, his realization that all of the old illusions of shared Gods were dead, had a big influence on me. One such passage:
The greatest weight.
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?… Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
– Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, s.341, Walter Kaufmann transl
Here is where I define “evil.” Evil is when one human being decides they can make that decision posed by Nietzsche’s demon FOR YOU. At the moment that a society, a man, a church, takes away that essential choice from a woman about whether she will carry a baby to term they are committing evil on her by removing her humanity. Humanity is rooted in how we face that question, and morality is a system we devise for ourselves when we can look that demon in the eye and say:
“Thank you! Promise me that I will relive my greatest triumphs, and my darkets mistakes. Promise me that all that brought me to this point in my life where I know that what I’ve learned and done and experienced was all worth it, even the regrets. Promise me that I will be free when it happens all again to make my own choices, that someone else won’t step between you and myself and take this moment away from me. PROMISE ME.”
I reject and abhor ANYBODY who tells someone else what their inner moral choices MUST be.
And no, don’t respond that my position makes all public mores, all law, impossible, because it doesn’t. You see, when someone’s fist, or pollution, or whatever else, hits another person’s nose … THAT is where we are all justified to step in.
The woman has the sole choice in what to do w/ a zygote, w/ a fetus, because IT cannot face that demon. She has to face that demon for herself and the potential life growing within her. When she crosses the threshold from “I’m pregnant” to “this is my BABY” the entire equation changes FOR HER, but she’s still the only one that can make those choices.
Her.
Alone.
When we are faced with questions of war, we have to decide whether the reasons we are pursuing this course are worth the cost of robbing all of those people of the chance to make their own futures. We have to step in and raise our voices to stop this monumental crime.
A Democratic Party that really had values would step forward and offer people a way to preserve values rooted in humanism electorally, yet so many in the party, the DLC, NDN, many magazines and even leading blogs insist that the party CANNOT do that, and it is impertinent for anybody to demand that it does. They seek to mirror the strict lecturing father voices of the Republicans. To demand that unruly activists only dance when told, to behave like good little children.
Progressive values should be rooted in this willingness to fight for humanist values. The party leadership, in their constant calls for activists to fall in line for some promised future reward, believe that they are calling the tune. In actuality, they are the monkey, dancing to the right’s tune.
Leaving the rest of us to fight for ourselves.
photo from Zohar dancing dot com
Every four years I shut up and submit to the status quo by casting my vote for whoever the powers-that-be have decided to put on the democratic ballot. Duty done, I can then return to expressing my obnoxious opinion and supporting the rabble-rousers.
Thanks for this diary, Madman.
My talibaptist family believes Evil comes from the devil.
I am of the idea that evil usually stems from hate/fear, greed, and APATHY.
Evil knowns no scales. It doesn’t have to be LARGE to be worthy of the title “evil” as in the piles and piles of shoes the Nazi’s collected near the gas ovens, it can be on the small, one on one scale. A child cringing in the dark because he heard his father’s cardoor open and close. Let the terror begin.
But either way, when a person knows of either – and they do nothing. That is not only evil, but it allows evil to not only continue but to grow.
Or… those who try to pretend it’s not evil by masking it in Nationalism (what the Nazi’s did btw) and coming up with excuses and JUSTIFICATIONS for that which most of the world would call evil.
Torture is EVIL
Rape rooms are EVIL
Abu Ghraib and all that happened there – FUCKING EVIL
Apathy… the Miracle Grow for the weed called Evil.
The Democrats have had many meatballs thrown their way. They have had every golden opportunity come their way to be.. well to be fucking heros if they had gotten’ their asses and theirs heads in the propers areas. To me they have been partners in that they haven’t come out swinging at every turn. Except for Conyers and a few few others.
People blew a nut over an alleged blow job in the oval office.
We have fucking pictures of prisoners being stacked in the nude with dog leashes on them… My god America that is evil and that our “leaders” haven’t used that to stop the stupidy in this country and the growing hate from countries… then fuck them. They signed their own pink slip.
History books will remember. Maybe not those published in Duhmerica… but the world will recognize those who spoke up and acted and those that held meetings about steroid use in baseball and video games that had naughty scenes.
Great diary, sorry if I went on a tangent.
not a tangent at all.
Thanks very much. You put into stark terms what I was describing in more academic/hypothetical terms.
Flesh on the bones, so to speak.
I was raised Southern Baptist. This was before the big conservative takeover, but as anyone familiar with Southern Baptists knows, the pre-takeover Baptists were liberal only in comparison to what came after.
I left the church, and ultimately Christianity, for a number of reasons, some of which are too personal to be interesting to anyone but me. The two main reasons were this:
In short, when an organization gets to the point that decent, compassionate, loving behavior is an exception that only gets brought up when some disgruntled apostate like me bitches about the evils of the church, it’s the apologists who need to take a second look at their reasons, not the apostates.
To see politicians pandering to the church sickens me. The talk of morality disgusts me. What is morality ever but a way of condemning others and excusing oneself? In the end, this is what I hated most about Bill Clinton — his ostentatious church attendance. “No really, I am moral.” Yes, Bill, yes you were, exactly in the way that all ostentatiously pious and moral people are — chiefly when they’ve been caught, but especially when they haven’t been caught yet. Somehow, it bothers me less with Bush because, unlike Clinton, he doesn’t pretend to be good; he openly revels in evil. The only people who are fooled by Bush are the ones who want to be.
So screw the centrists and the values voters. The most important value I’m looking for in a politician is respect for the freedom of individuals to choose their own values based on their own considered judgment. There’s ultimately no point in being sly or nice about it — when the “values” crowd finally gets serious about forcing their way on everyone else, it always ends up being a lot messier than just strong words.
Madman, you are a rock star.
Thank you for explaining, better than I possibly could, why taking a stand for the right thing will be better for us – in the long and short run – than carefully-crafted political calculation.
Thanks …
We face a new time, and the potential for new ways of interacting politically as a nation. How sad that both political parties, and many activists, can only look back at bully tactics, politics-by-coersion and lock-step thinking.
A more open debate, with new and vital voices, could save the Democratic Party, and this nation, from this path of destruction we are barrelling down.
I was just thinking about this but came at it from a different direction. Time to watch A Clockwork Orange again…
It is interesting to me how so many of the “big evil” issues are conflated. I was thinking about the term “terrorist” or terrorism as a prime example. What does it really mean? Here’s what Merriam-Webster says:
: the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion
We use the military aspect to differentiate between “good” terrorism (Shock and Awe, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, etc.) from “evil” terrorism (bombings, beheadings, planes as missiles etc.) Note that the only difference beside scale (we appear to be winning on that score) is who is doing the terrorizing, not who is being terrorized. In all cases, the civilian population IS the target of terrorism.
There goes the whole “they target civilians” distinction. So that brings us to the real conflation, justification. We justify “good” terrorism as a necessary means to an end – surrender, regime change, democracy, whereas “evil” terrorism as unjustifiable, a means to no end.
It also appears that we reverse engineering our justification, based on “good” outcome. We never hear justification for terrorism in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos, in fact we rarely hear about it at all. As Hitler said, “Success is the sole earthly judge of right and wrong.”
I am not trying to argue justification, only that that is the real point of divergence. We are unwilling to even define the term because we would lose the subjective ability to shade “good” v. “evil”. We as human beings can never defeat what we cannot define. That seems to be the sum of the entire exercise.
thanks!