Things I wrestle with: Politics
Among those issues that I don’t feel that I’ve got worked out is how to be political. Part of the problem is that I’m quite passionate about this topic: I’m a raging left-winger. Obama is my guy for president. But I’d better stop myself from this track before I get started.
One of the reasons this is all a problem for me is that Jesus was staggeringly apolitical. He didn’t shrink from the power structure… but he seems mostly to have gone about his business as if the political situation didn’t exist… though the political situation he was up against was quite extreme, and the expectations on him were quite political, he just did his thing.
This is also a problem that I can identify by looking at the other side. The Christian right drives me up a wall. They have a right to there beliefs… but they don’t have a right to subject me to beliefs that I don’t agree with.
Some of the dilemna maybe comes from the fact that there are facets of faith that are personal, even mystic. Some of my reasons for following Christ are so intensely personal that I can’t put words on them.
Yet the ramifications of faith calls us to political beliefs… Democracy is based on debate in the public sphere, yet some of my politics aren’t reducible or understandable through debate in the public sphere.
Furthermore, if I admit my right to support politics based on private matters, it seems hypocritical to expect others not to… Discourse, seems to break down if we admit religion… and yet, society breaks down if we deny it.
November 30, 2007 at 3:29 pm
Jeff, I believe a new kingdom away from politics is ahead of us. I can still hear in the tone of your writing the disdain for the right extremists, while the left extremists get away with whatever they want to do in your mind. This was a problem for me before when I looked at the extremists right as normal. I saw them as that not because they were actually normal, but because it was who I identified with for much of my life.
When we move away from that identification and begin to identify with Christ, we begin to see a new kingdom, which more than likely has the best of all that we have to offer.
We’re almost there, you and I. And someday we shall really meet in the middle.
December 1, 2007 at 1:26 pm
Marty-
You’re absolutely right. I do give the left a pass on things I hold the right accountable for. There’s all sorts of ways our old life can infiltrate our life in Christ. One of the most subtle is force of habit. My default assumoptions are to assume that the left is correct and the right’s claims ought to be carefully screened. Of course, claims from both the left and the right are human and flawed.
When I’m calmer, I get that there are no ultimate solutions on the right or the left. We might move resources around, but in this world there will be winners and there will be losers. On the surface, it will look the losers are the ones with the least stuff, but I think in a deeper way, the losers will be the ones who took the resources away. (Maybe this is part of meant by “the meek shall inherit the Earth”.)
I keep thinking about Brian McLaren’s thoughts about how Jesus was bigger than political distinctions, how he got to the real root of them. It’s such a temptation for all of us to just want to locate Jesus somewhere on the spectrum itself of politics, rather than seeing him as resolving these things by being above them.
December 2, 2007 at 9:24 pm
Jeff, in your comment above, you hit the nail on the head for me about what is wrong with virtually all political philosophies. Every one is just shot through with confirmation bias.
Your quote above is very perceptive and self-aware: You’re absolutely right. I do give the left a pass on things I hold the right accountable for. There’s all sorts of ways our old life can infiltrate our life in Christ. One of the most subtle is force of habit. My default assumoptions are to assume that the left is correct and the right’s claims ought to be carefully screened. Of course, claims from both the left and the right are human and flawed.
I believe that this sort of bias is due to the lack of a clear and consistent epistemology. Here’s a quote from Michael Huemer in ‘Skepticism and the Veil of Perception’:
“To state the problem more clearly: The fact that skeptical arguments seem plausible to us – or anyway, their premises do, when considered in isolation – suggests that we hold a set of very stringent criteria for justified belief – criteria so strict, in fact, that they can be used to rule out any proposition whatsoever from being considered justified. But the fact that we reject skepticism and accept common sense beliefs indicates that, at the same time, we hold a much looser set of criteria for justified belief – criteria that allow lots of propositions to be considered justified. Now, suppose there are a number of claims, about which it is controversial which of them, if any, are justified. Here’s something that might happen: I come upon claim A, which I happen to like. So I apply my loose standards of justification, and find A to be justified, whereupon I accept it. Then, some time later, I come upon claim B, which I don’t like. So I apply my strict (skeptical) standards of justification, and find B to be unjustified. In reality, it may be that both claims are equally justified (or equally unjustified), but my inconsistent standards enable me to believe whatever I like. This is a prescription for intellectual chaos. This is a danger not only for epistemology, but for every field of inquiry wherein claims need to be assessed as justified or unjustified – which is every field of inquiry.
“I believe that this sort of thing happens fairly frequently in our thinking about matters of controversy. You might hope that intellectual honesty and self-awareness would be sufficient to prevent people from switching justificatory standards in the way I have described. But my experience is that the human capacity for self-deception is both vast and subtle. It enables us to seize upon any available tools for maintaining the beliefs – particularly about philosophy, religion, and politics – that we prefer, while avoiding full consciousness of its own operation. In fact, it takes a concerted, conscious effort not to engage this otherwise automatic faculty.”
I have wrestled with controversial issues like abortion and gun control and the death penalty (not to mention religion) all my life. I meet people on both sides who are convinced of their positions even though it is obvious that I have thought about these issues both longer and better than they have and I am still unable to reach any definite conclusions. When I carefully question them, it is clear that they don’t have any particularly compelling reasons for their beliefs. The arguments they give for them are just afterthoughts. They reached their conclusions first and then cast about for justifications for them.
Moreover, these people tend to assume that everyone does what they do and they therefore conclude that there isn’t any point to discussing or debating anything. Since they know that they will never change their minds, no matter how much evidence is arrayed against them, they assume this is true of everyone else as well. It isn’t, by the way, but it’s true far more often than I would like.
December 3, 2007 at 2:41 pm
Thanks for the praise Andrew. Within my world view, the role of faith makes things a bit less bleak. If faith has no role in the world, though, I believe you are correct… And I also recognize that the debate about why we’d want to take a faith stance is a huge one, and that some of my reasons for taking the faith stance that I do are personal and mystic. If God hadn’t taken the role in my life that he had my beliefs would be quite different. However, there’s no good reason to expect that my private, unverifyable experiences are going to be particularly persuasive to folks outside of my relationships with them.
The best I can do is cultivate relationships which will (among other things) lend creedence to claims about my private experiences, and assert that I believe that God rewards our seeking and honest questing…
In short, I’m left in a position where I can’t fully justify my belief in the role of faith to others and therefore can’t expect others to buy that faith is a property that might save us from the chaos you describe.
December 3, 2007 at 5:02 pm
I wasn’t actually trying to criticize faith as an epistemological position. (I’m happy to do so, but that wasn’t the point of my post.) In fact, I believe most of these problems (politically) are caused by too much skepticism and cynicism of claims we don’t like, rather than too much gullibility about claims we do (though the latter certainly happens as well).
I believe, for example, that this happens a lot of times with moral arguments. There are a number of people who reject skeptical arguments for almost everything, but embrace them when they’re used against morality. These people are being very selective in their skepticism. (Moreover, they are never consistent in this since they do not refrain from making their own moral judgments.) The same sort of thing spills over into politics.
I wasn’t actually criticizing faith. I was criticizing the refusal to refute certain skeptical premises which are ultimately untenable (e.g. the claim that in order to claim to know something, we have to know it infallibly) and the kind of chaos this causes in our thought processes.
April 5, 2008 at 1:30 pm
[...] what political decisions should I make. One example of my attempts to come to terms with this is here I picked up this phenemonal book: Jesus for President by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw. They state [...]