From: Elizaphanian (Elizaphanian@members.v21.co.uk)
Date: Sat Oct 12 2002 - 18:39:29 BST
Hi David, all,
At one point in the conservatism thread with David I said that the
discussion was only worthwhile if it was both done with integrity and where
there was an open explanation of each person's position. I had to rush to
finish my earlier post in the Conservatism thread today, so didn't get a
chance to put in what my position actually is. I shall now remedy that lack.
As I see it, political parties are intrinsically social level institutions,
and no one political party has a monopoly on the truth. Moreover, political
philosophies, whilst more or less cogent, cannot to my mind have an
exhaustive understanding on the truth either, not least because I am
suspicious of any organisation which would make such a totalising claim (and
I'm post-modern and Pirsigian enough to think that there isn't a Truth that
we can fully articulate, although we can have better and worse
approximations thereto). I tend to think that the broad two party division
which seems so common in the US/UK and other communities embodies a little
bit of the yin/yang division from Taoism. You need both in a healthy body
politic, and the extremes of each tend to start resembling the opposite
side. One side is progressive seeking to change things, the other side is
conservative, seeking to preserve things. Of course, political parties are
fluid - you could argue that Thatcher's government was a progressive
reaction against a conservative establishment represented by the
'Butskellite' consensus. But there you go.
My objections to David's attitude (actually, they were objections to a
particular attitude shared by many on both sides of the debate) were simply
that I don't see political arguments in such black and white terms, and I
don't think the MoQ shuts down all political debate. In contrast to others,
I see political debates as partly social v social, and partly intellectual v
intellectual. I don't see it as (necessarily) social v intellectual, which
was what I was trying to get away from by writing my original 'conservatism'
post.
Moreover, I once spent four and a half years working in UK central
government, briefing politicians on environmental issues, including one
time, memorably, having to brief the Prime Minister. (In the UK you don't
tend to become a civil servant unless you have a detached attitude to party
politics, the system operates differently to that in the US). But what I
remember is that most decisions aren't dictated by ideological
considerations. When you get into the nitty-gritty most of the political
rhetoric is irrelevant. Which isn't to say that political bias doesn't
exist, only that it is much more subtle than the headlines would suggest.
When political decisions - or indeed any decisions - are made, surely, in
MoQ terms, what matters is an openness to DQ in that particular situation.
And what we need are institutions that can foster that openness to DQ and
allow it to flourish; democracy is one such, for reasons that Pirsig
articulates. This is where I think we need to be clear about ideologies and
dogmas, and how to understand and judge between ideologies, and the capacity
to separate from the social background that has shaped our view of the
world. The most scary thing of all is a viewpoint that doesn't allow for the
admission of error - and I would put fundamentalism into that category.
One last thing. I am undoubtedly a conservative-minded (anti-Modern) person
in the religious sphere, and it was pondering that which made me want to
re-examine my previous assumptions about conservatism, which I had viewed -
along with many of my generation in the UK - as being wholly without
Quality. I think I was wrong in that judgement, despite all the efforts of
the Conservative party in the UK to prove it correct. And as I have said
before, it was in part through discussions about the free market with Rog
and Platt that clarified my thinking. So my thanks to them - if they hadn't
argued so cogently, then there would never have been that conservatism post,
forged from a desire to understand (what I took to be) their point of view
more clearly.
With friendly greetings to all.
Sam
www.elizaphanian.v-2-1.net/home.html
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