Ted Troxell writes what is, effectively, my biography: The problem is that I never really liked being a joiner, and as much as I was (and am) sympathetic to the issues, I dont care for liberalism as a discourse community. I see the same things among liberals that turned me off from conservatism: the us-vs.-them mentality, the straw man fallacies and ad hominem attacks, the ideological entrenchment, the in-group posturing. Politics and religion seem particular fertile breeding grounds for these weaknesses in human thought, which is probably why were not supposed to bring them up at dinner. [...] By the time I got interested in politics again, it was Christian anarchism, which really is a thing. Ive written about the theological side of that journey here, and about anarchism here, so I dont want to belabor those. The short version is that I ended up an anarchist by virtue of a pacifist ethics, and I glommed onto that ethics via a particular understanding of Jesus, an understanding that is predicated on a belief in the Resurrection that I no longer have. Now, to be completely fair, there are ways of being an anarchist that dont involve being a pacifist, but I wasnt interest in those. And there are ways of being a pacifist without believing in the Resurrection, but I wasnt interested in those, either. For that matter, there are ways of being Christian dont involve being pacifist or necessarily believing literally in resurrection, but -- you guessed it -- Im not really interested. Like libertarianism, anarchism can useful for pushing away from the usual partisan divide and for its ideological clarity. Its somewhat common to think that the right and left meet at their extremes in these two political viewpoints but the economic divide between the two is quite wide. Anarchists share the libertarian disdain for the state but add to it an equal or even greater suspicion of capitalism. [...] One way of describing the difference between liberals and conservatives, then, is that the latter embrace the neoliberal ideology without questioning its effects while the former seek to mitigate the effects without questioning the ideology. Push far enough to the right, and you get the libertarian goal of an unfettered market. Push far enough to the left and youre getting rid of capitalism entirely. [...] So whats the problem? The problem is that Im really, really bad at believing in things. I have a history of finding something interesting to believe in, thinking it to be The Thing that I might be able to really dig into, and then believing it so hard that I break it, like Lenny mauling the puppy to death in Of Mice and Men. I dont mean to; it just happens. Anymore I just dont bother. I really am a bit of a nihilist, epistemologically speaking. Im the happy kind, though: more Nietzsches passive than active nihilist, with some absurdism thrown in for good measure, which probably helps to explain my fondness for Hitchhikers. irritablereaching.blogspot/2014/12/share-land.html
Posted on: Sun, 21 Dec 2014 17:38:00 +0000
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