You're probably familiar with Isaiah Berlin's essay, the Hedgehog and the Fox.
It's based on an old aphorism by Archilochus, stating that "the fox knows many
things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." From this, we distinguish
between people who:
1. have a wide breadth of knowledge, but don't have a single lens with which to
view things (foxes)
2. look at history through the lens of a single overarching idea (hedgehogs)
What I see as my political weakness, through and through, is that I'm naturally
a fox. I'm a knowledge collector who's always hesitant to make a political
determination, lest there's some essential fact out there that I'm missing. I
always think that it must be extraordinarily easy to be an ideologue who can
boil the entirety of human experience into a single, supreme value like
"freedom" or "diversity." Imagine knowing the solution to a problem by simply
skimming through a summary. In contrast, I recognize the immense complexity of
reality, and the changing nature of society, ethics, and politics. A democratic
society relies on its liberal education to reflexively handle a myriad of
problems as they arise. The whole nature of this country is that we reform
ourselves and evolve continuously to better handle situations.
But I also recognize the importance of hedgehoggedness. Brands gain loyalty
when they begin with a simple statement of desire ("Our products should be X"),
rather than any other set of products of beliefs. If you sell a value rather
than a product, you can get a believer to buy everything you sell, whether or
not they ever wanted it initially. This is the same way that politics operates,
because the ultimate goal of political parties is to turn the average voter
into a brain-dead consumer.
"If you liked Obama, you'll absolutely love Clinton 2.0! Available November
2016."
So the choice is between the worldview that's oversimplified and binary, yet
successful, and the worldview that reflects reality, yet is unsellable. This is
what I view as the battle between the wingnuts and the centrists, a conflict
which is ultimately more important to history than the battle between Left and
Right.
The Right has typecast "freedom" in terms of pure negative liberty as if
Rousseau's noble savage or the philanthropic monopolist is some ideal.
Confoundingly, The Right also believes rigidly in "tradition" by worshiping the
shell of something even as its value dies inside, as society sanctifies
exclusion as "don't blame me: that's just how the world was when I got here".
The Left has calcified "diversity" into a demonization of "straightness,"
"whiteness," and "maleness". They've created the humunculus middle
class-male-WASP-bogeyman as a convenient minority to attack, though they don't
advertise that you're an oppressor if you're either straight OR white OR male
OR religious OR not homeless, which covers pretty much everyone. The same Left
attempts to combat this oppression and neo-colonialism by pursuing a vendetta,
rather than pursuing egalitarianism. It's as if they've learned nothing from
Robespierre and The Terror.
How do people not see that the Right and Left have the same vision of
Kafkaesque unwarranted punishment and tribalism?
My ultimate goal is to turn centrism into a political power. I recognize that
this will require, to a large extent, a willingness to sell a single
predominant value, even though we instinctively wait and wait for a nonexistent
normative fact. Centrists believe that, when you research an issue thoroughly,
the answer will appear. This is a statement of desire, but it is also somewhat
disingenuous. As Hume said, you can't infer a normative statement from any
collection of facts. You can collect all the facts in the world and they still
won't tell you what to do. There has to be some set of beliefs, independent of
fact, that drives your decision process. Complicating matters further, we live
in a liberal democracy with elections. Other than the small number of
limitations set by the Constitution, and respecting the will of the majority
and the consent of the minority, we can basically do anything.
Populism is a contender. It asks the voter, "well, uh, what do you wanna do?"
But out-and-out populism doesn't work when you have a population so twisted by
ideologues that it can't distinguish a fact from an opinion. It also drives
increased power through anger and desire for punishment. Enlightened populism
would also require an extraordinary amount of political intelligence, and the
purpose of a republic (as opposed to a direct democracy) is in the election of
representatives to take care of this for their constituency.
I had a conversation with Ernie a few months ago where he expounded on the idea
of "responsible innovation." I played around with my thoughts for a few months,
at his request.
"Responsible innovation" works as an alternative contender. The term works for
us because of both its components and its existence as a unique term.
"Responsibility" calls to a conservatism that demands obligation to the
taxpayer, citizen, and objects under our control. "Innovation" is a progressive
assurance our continued evolution and rejection of rose-tinted glasses.
Together, responsible innovation are two words competing against each other,
demanding both analysts and philosophers constantly in the driver's seat. In
essence, we would be dressing up foxes as hedgehogs and selling it. So I
suggest the goal, so long as the vision works for you also, is now to get
others to embrace the term and build on what it means.
--
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Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
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Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism
Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
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