Without a set of shared values, argues Ken Goldstein, we can’t talk with, argue with or perhaps even live with the other side. And then what?
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A recent debate on my Facebook page raised the issue of whether there is a double standard among Progressives as to where and when indictment of political opponents is warranted. Taking this a step further, the discussion evolved into the appropriateness of vilification of someone’s opponent in an argument, and whether that vilification was one-sided with regard to political party leanings.
I have my opinions on this, but I want to set them aside for a moment and simply delve into the issue of vilification as the outcome of disagreement, and how we devolve to that extreme.
As a noble sidebar, let’s take a quick run down a philosophy bypass in summarizing the works of Soren Kierkegaard, a 19th-century Danish philosopher largely focused on making sense of his devout Christian faith in an increasingly modern and existential world. Kierkegaard suggested we live our lives in three realms: the aesthetic, where we act simply in our own interest and do whatever we enjoy; the ethical, where we act according to agreed laws to avoid punishment; and the religious, where we do what is right in an absolute sense because we see no other acceptable alternative. From the religious realm, comprehensively embracing the tale of Abraham’s test by God to sacrifice his own child, Kierkegaard describes faith ultimately as an absurdist paradox. You believe or you don’t. You don’t owe anyone an explanation because you decide in your heart what God believes is right.
Vilification emerges with the full erosion of our shared values.
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You don’t have to buy Kierkegaard’s framework to apply it. You simply have to understand that our values are substantially derived from the religious realm as he describes it, regardless if we consider ourselves traditionally religious. They are belief sets we acquire however we acquire them, and we don’t feel we have to justify them to others. Returning to the realm of the political—the ethical set of laws we choose to accept in our Constitutionally defined secular society—my sense is that our act of vilification emerges with the full erosion of our shared values. If we don’t have enough places we agree on critical laws reflecting deeply held values, then the opposition to our views becomes moral and absolute vs. legal and relative.
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Consider some examples: Whether taxes should be increased 2% or 4% is essentially an intellectual argument where we are unlikely to vilify someone who disagrees with us. Whether healthcare is a human right or an imposition of authority is less intellectual, so we become emotional. Whether a woman’s right to choose is absolute or controllable takes us to fundamental beliefs, where the opposition becomes the enemy. The more we disagree at the fundamental level, the less we have in common and the more we reject the opposing argument as an assault on our basic living principles.
Here’s the rub: Without a set of some shared values embodied in our ethical laws, we can’t be much of a unified, strong nation.
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Here’s the rub: Without a set of some shared values embodied in our ethical laws, we can’t be much of a unified, strong nation. This is a danger of our profound experiment in democracy, and at the moment I believe we are fully putting it to the test. If you extrapolate the tenor of our current discourse to the full extreme, where all we can do is vilify one another because we cannot find a set of shared values, we might indeed be one national crisis away from ending our time in the sun—no matter how many nukes we have in our inventory, or how many gold bars we have in our repository. Call it the challenge of WWIII, or perhaps an economic meltdown without a reachable escape hatch. If we can’t find the shared values that lead us to an agreed solution with a clock ticking, everything we have accomplished together to date becomes a footnote.
How scary is it, and how much do we cross into each other’s most sacred space? Consider this starter list of how little we value in each other’s convictions:
- We don’t agree on a woman’s right to choose.
- We don’t agree on the universality of health care.
- We don’t agree on how to deploy military forces in the Middle East or otherwise around the world.
- We don’t agree on the basics of immigration reform, or for that matter, who can or can’t enter the United States, short or long-term.
- We don’t agree on gun control, with our interpretations of the Second Amendment light years apart.
- We don’t agree on how to address poverty and homelessness in our own nation, let alone abroad.
- We don’t agree on how to address controlled substances, or whether the war on drugs is worth continuing in anything resembling its current form.
- We don’t agree on where to set minimum wage, or if a minimum standard of living should be possible if minimum wage is what one earns working full-time.
- We don’t agree on who has the right to be married, even though the Supreme Court has ruled on it.
- We don’t agree on climate change, whether it is a scientifically proven global concern, and if it is, how much a priority it should be for U.S. business policy and financial attention.
- We don’t agree on what constitutes a basic education, or what we can hope to expect in the form of presumed literacy and interpretation skills by the time a person reaches adulthood and takes on the responsibilities of independent living.
- We don’t agree on an approach to reasonable tax reform or the proper tax structure for the rich, the middle class, or the poor.
That is an awful lot that drives us apart. All of those involve values—currently reflected in laws—that we do not seem to share or want to share.
So my ultimate two questions are simple: What shared values do we maintain as a vast majority? And if we can’t find enough of them, where do we go from here?
Perhaps we still maintain shared values around the hope that our children will thrive, our government will remain in humble service to the people who select its leadership, that charitable activity will be lauded, and that criminal activity will be addressed with justice. Yet even as I form those thoughts, I am inevitably driven to the specifics of definition and implementation, and find us back at war among our various convictions about how we bring such affirmative notions into everyday reality.
I guess in the end there really aren’t 12 reasons we vilify. There’s just one: We vilify when we fear the imposition of someone else’s will on our own that crosses the bounds of our most cherished values. Daunting challenge to overcome, don’t you think? And as we let it get out of hand and don’t find a way to bridge the gap, the likelihood that we can find any unifying shared values at all diminishes in our anger and ultimate silence. That’s when we lose everything, and damn if we don’t seem to be hell-bent on flushing away almost 300 years of what we thought was shared progress.
Sometime when I listen to the anonymous, unfiltered invective swelling all around me, I wonder if we ever truly shared it at all.
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Hey Good Men Project Readers! A Special Offer from our Chairman—Ken Goldstein. Click here to order, read an excerpt, and more.
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Photo: through my eyes / flickr / creative commons
We are affected strongly, by what the majority are thinking and saying. We inately, want to be part of the crowd, even when our gut says otherwise. What our concience told us was wrong back in the day, has now been compromised. To villify, is popular, as is the trend toward disrespect, and negativity. Thank God, there will always be those who ARE respectful toward others, even if they don’t share the same opinions, and will always go forward with hope.
1. We don’t agree that about scare” tactics’ corporation should get tax breaks and subsidies while moving jobs overseas, not paying taxes while at the same time, they have the same inalienable rights as human beings plus having access to government services. 2. We don’t agree that poor people should be sent to prison while rich people get off the hook. 3. We don’t agree that we should bailout companies everytime they destroy the country and the world with their toxic products while they still make money off of it. 4. We don’t agree that this argument that raising the… Read more »
And there you have it, sports fans., the sum and substance of the entire point of this whole article. No movement to any compromise, but staunchly entrenched positions. I like to believe we are all patriotic Americans who really dowant the best for us all. Even coming at it from different points of view. But you can see the disgust here in anything the perceived other sides has to say. As if it is acknowledged that the other side is a complete fool, and worse an enemy. No real opportunity for a debate and solution to any point on either… Read more »
Mark as Nick Hanauer pointed out if the rich people continue with their jobs and income inequality and refuse to do anything about it and use the government to keep the population under control, the people will rise up and it will be bloody
People vilified because for the last 35 years, it is the most popular way to get elected to political office. Lee Atwater and Karl Rover were experts at this game. In addition, people vilified because they are just ego hunger maniacs, have a narcissistic personality, or just plain down right bullies and nobody held them accountable for their actions. Mr. Goldstein, politics have been made so poisonous in this country for the last 36 year that entire American families have been split apart because of it. You need to look at the Republican Party. When they are not vilifying their… Read more »
1. We don’t agree when it’s okay to end a life of an unborn muchless place a value on the unborn. 2. We don’t agree that tax payers should continue to pay for healthcare for non-citizens. 3. We don’t agree that our military has become weak which makes us, as a country, vulnerable 4. We don’t agree that we should get a handle on immigration which is cost tax payer billions. 5. We don’t agree that guns kill people and that we have the controls in place but aren’t using them 6. we don’t agree that spending billions on undocumented… Read more »
Point number one Tom. The left generally lumps the right into figurative “baby killers” ala Vietnam. Yet they fail to acknowledge that there in fact literal baby killers and go to great lengths to support that. That’s very odd to me. Btw. You need to revisit the 15 an hour minimum wage issue discussed. I think you’d find it entertaining to say the least.
Yeah, Mark and the right wingers generallly lump the left into unpatriotic Americans, communists, anarchists, socialists who would destroy America; however, they failed to acknowledge that it is the ultra-wring conserviaties who would destory America and the world if they could make money off of it and go to great lengths to prove their everything is the left wing fault.
Got it. We wouldn’t want to eat at each other’s table, yet by fate we both hold the same issued passport. So how do we proceed? Is it just a numbers game where each side builds a temporary majority to overcome the will of the other side? That’s democracy, majority rules, but we seem to be cracking under the weight of unhappy compromises and capitulation. My words were meant to apply to all sides, I am completelely aware values are equally heartfelt in for and against arguments, so I am glad you quoted me. I simply fear if we don’t… Read more »
Ken, you said “We wouldn’t want to eat at each other’s table, yet by fate we both hold the same issued passport. So how do we proceed?” But we do eat at each others tables. When it comes down to personal relationships, we do manage put put our personal beliefs aside and come together. But we are so divided these days, I think that’s beginning to change for many adults. People are losing interest in “knowing” the person and are beginning to label the person as one thing or another. If you haven’t figured out by now, I can be… Read more »
that should have said “box” not “bos”
Yeah, Mr. Brechlin and you put people in a box and tried to minimise their opinion and don’t want to heard what they have to say.
A very good piece ken. I’ve been wondering if we’re going to survive this, even remotely intact. I have a bad feeling we’re not. Even now, on the GMP in another article, there are people telling me because I dare to disagree with them on minimum wages, social justice, political philosophy that I don’t have a clue, that I must learn from them as to what’s right, and that I am promoting the destruction of the world. I have chosen to not respond further to such. I’m not playing a victim here. But I am appalled by the lack of… Read more »
You’re not playing a victim at all, Mark. People forget what our democracy means. We have different definitions of what it means to be American, and we don’t seem to be able to reconcile them. I have been getting anonymous threats to my well-being since I published my first book, This Is Rage, a darkly comedic novel of all things! Now I am getting regular emails telling me to “go back to Israel,” which would be hard since I have never been to Israel. As William Gibson wrote a while back, “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”… Read more »
Thanks Ken. I’m so sorry you have to experience that kind of vitriol. That would be hard. To go back to somewhere you’ve never been! You could go there but at least the first time could never go back. Like Tom Wolfe said. Lol! I kid you not. On one post I asked what the lefts plan b was if they prevailed but were completely wrong. I had said that if they were right I was perfectly good being wrong and it would be a win win for everyone. I was then accused of being the one without a plan… Read more »
Mark, guys like you don’t have a Plan A or Plan B and don’t want to hear what Plan B is from the other side because you would shoot that plan down and never ever give it a chance to implement it., H Yeah Mark, well in SAC even moderate conservatives if given the order to send off the bombers and fire the missiles would have to do it because if they didn’t, they probably would have been court-martial in the end. If there were a lot of folks left after the nuclear holocaust, they would be spending their time… Read more »
e ken. I’ve been wondering if we’re going to survive this, even remotely intact. I have a bad feeling we’re not. Even now, on the GMP in another article, there are people telling me because I dare to disagree with them on minimum wages, social justice, political philosophy that I don’t have a clue, that I must learn from them as to what’s right, and that I am promoting the destruction of the world. I have chosen to not respond further to such. I’m not playing a victim here. But I am appalled by the lack of consideration in discourse.… Read more »