Monday, April 7, 2008
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Letter #1 Introduction
September 1, 2006, the sixty-seventh anniversary of the German and Soviet invasions of Poland
Dear John and Nickie:
This begins my response to John's letter and essay. I apologize for the long delay. I hope you are still interested in my thoughts after these many months. You covered a lot of topics. I don’t think I can do you justice by writing a single response. Instead I hope you will accept a series of shorter pieces by which I intend to comment on your writings and to use your writings as a gateway to expressions of my own thoughts on contemporary political questions. I’ll also address the list of questions you emailed me awhile back.
From an early age I held political convictions. Those convictions changed several times over the years, but not much over the most recent twenty years or so. When I was 12 I was a great enthusiast for the French Revolution. (Blame A Tale of Two Cities.) Nine years later Professor Gerhardt Niemeyer told me that no one should have an opinion about politics until he made up his mind about the French Revolution. It took me a long time to figure out what he meant.
Professor Niemeyer also taught it was useless to talk to anyone with whom we do not share common first principles. (He referred specifically to Communists and Fascists, with whom he thought it useless to argue.) Here I state my first principles.
(1) People should be free from arbitrary coercion imposed by other people, and people are most free under the rule of laws which apply to everyone and which can be known in advance.
(2) It is the function of government to provide order within which individuals can pursue their private goals or, as St. Augustine put it, the salvation of their souls.
(3) A system of laws which protects private property, free enterprise and capital formation and which rewards work and risk taking is the system that best secures everyone’s liberty, safety, and comfort.
(4) Good and evil exist in the world, it is possible to tell one from the other, and our duty of self preservation requires us to do so.
Only the first of these is truly a first principle, one I hold to be self-evident and not a fit subject of much reasonable or even interesting discussion. I name the other three as first principles because, if their truth is assumed, then reliably correct conclusions about day to day political issues follow. However, reasonable people do differ about these latter three, and we can profitably argue their merits. Indeed, the public thinker's most important task may be to bring people of good will to share those principles.
For many years I had very little interest in current affairs, party politics or who should be elected. I devoted my reading and thinking much more to history and literature, and occasionally to science, and that reading informed the way I voted when the need came. I have not followed the daily news to any great extent. For thirty years I listened to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered (“Radio Free Russia” Miles Jaffe used to call it) every day and read The Wall Street Journal Editorial and Op Ed pages five days (now six days) a week.
In the last few years I’ve thought and read more about current events for two reasons. One is the current Iraq war and my sense of an obligation to reach an informed opinion on that subject. The second is the enormous loathing and hatred my friends on the left have for George W. Bush. I have very frequently heard expressions of this hatred, and these expressions are invariably a substitute for rational argument. I get a clear message that I am to be persuaded not by the content of the speaker’s arguments but by the depth of his or her feelings.
In general John’s essays have some central themes I hope to address. In some cases I identify these themes not so much because they were big parts of John’s writing but because some remark in John’s essay catalyzed my thoughts. Here are the themes I have identified.
• John provides a bibliography of current political writings which appear to have been drawn from reviews and dust jacket descriptions. Many or most of the listed works are polemical. John attempts to separate them into categories according to their perceived biases. In some case I think John has designated a work as “conservative” in bias based on the book’s conclusions and not on any real evidence of bias. (Sometimes in these writings I will allude to discussions with my dear and much respected brother-in-law, Waheed. I sometimes suspect Waheed dismisses my sources based on his disagreement with their conclusions rather on any real evidence of bias on their parts.) I will provide my own bibliographies of materials I have read. While I occasionally read polemical books with some enjoyment, I will not generally include them in my lists.
• John provides some dictionary definitions of various political labels. I have some thoughts on labeling I desire to share.
• John objects to the religious right, believing the religious right wants to impose its narrow and peculiar beliefs on the rest of us.
• John believes conservatives generally are narrow and mean spirited. He suggests that fascism is where government joins with big business and on that basis distinguishes fascism from communism.
• John believes we went to war in Iraq without sufficient debate and without any effort to understand Arabs or Islam.
• John is curious about the views of Conservatives and seems to wonder how people with unpronounced brow ridges could hold such Neanderthal opinions.
My offering will not attempt to change your minds very much. I hope to expose a way of thinking with which your essay suggests you may not be familiar. I trust you will forgive me if I occasionally belabor arguments with which you too familiar. In particular I hope to share my conviction that, while history will judge whether George W. Bush's decisions were is right or wrong, he is not evil, and he is not stupid, and he is not guided by unworthy motives.
At one point in his essay John remarks that he doesn’t really know any conservatives and has little chance to hear their views. That’s Manhattan for you, I suppose. I will try to reacquaint you with the diversity of provincial opinion.
More to come.
Affectionately,
Ed
Dear John and Nickie:
This begins my response to John's letter and essay. I apologize for the long delay. I hope you are still interested in my thoughts after these many months. You covered a lot of topics. I don’t think I can do you justice by writing a single response. Instead I hope you will accept a series of shorter pieces by which I intend to comment on your writings and to use your writings as a gateway to expressions of my own thoughts on contemporary political questions. I’ll also address the list of questions you emailed me awhile back.
From an early age I held political convictions. Those convictions changed several times over the years, but not much over the most recent twenty years or so. When I was 12 I was a great enthusiast for the French Revolution. (Blame A Tale of Two Cities.) Nine years later Professor Gerhardt Niemeyer told me that no one should have an opinion about politics until he made up his mind about the French Revolution. It took me a long time to figure out what he meant.
Professor Niemeyer also taught it was useless to talk to anyone with whom we do not share common first principles. (He referred specifically to Communists and Fascists, with whom he thought it useless to argue.) Here I state my first principles.
(1) People should be free from arbitrary coercion imposed by other people, and people are most free under the rule of laws which apply to everyone and which can be known in advance.
(2) It is the function of government to provide order within which individuals can pursue their private goals or, as St. Augustine put it, the salvation of their souls.
(3) A system of laws which protects private property, free enterprise and capital formation and which rewards work and risk taking is the system that best secures everyone’s liberty, safety, and comfort.
(4) Good and evil exist in the world, it is possible to tell one from the other, and our duty of self preservation requires us to do so.
Only the first of these is truly a first principle, one I hold to be self-evident and not a fit subject of much reasonable or even interesting discussion. I name the other three as first principles because, if their truth is assumed, then reliably correct conclusions about day to day political issues follow. However, reasonable people do differ about these latter three, and we can profitably argue their merits. Indeed, the public thinker's most important task may be to bring people of good will to share those principles.
For many years I had very little interest in current affairs, party politics or who should be elected. I devoted my reading and thinking much more to history and literature, and occasionally to science, and that reading informed the way I voted when the need came. I have not followed the daily news to any great extent. For thirty years I listened to National Public Radio’s All Things Considered (“Radio Free Russia” Miles Jaffe used to call it) every day and read The Wall Street Journal Editorial and Op Ed pages five days (now six days) a week.
In the last few years I’ve thought and read more about current events for two reasons. One is the current Iraq war and my sense of an obligation to reach an informed opinion on that subject. The second is the enormous loathing and hatred my friends on the left have for George W. Bush. I have very frequently heard expressions of this hatred, and these expressions are invariably a substitute for rational argument. I get a clear message that I am to be persuaded not by the content of the speaker’s arguments but by the depth of his or her feelings.
In general John’s essays have some central themes I hope to address. In some cases I identify these themes not so much because they were big parts of John’s writing but because some remark in John’s essay catalyzed my thoughts. Here are the themes I have identified.
• John provides a bibliography of current political writings which appear to have been drawn from reviews and dust jacket descriptions. Many or most of the listed works are polemical. John attempts to separate them into categories according to their perceived biases. In some case I think John has designated a work as “conservative” in bias based on the book’s conclusions and not on any real evidence of bias. (Sometimes in these writings I will allude to discussions with my dear and much respected brother-in-law, Waheed. I sometimes suspect Waheed dismisses my sources based on his disagreement with their conclusions rather on any real evidence of bias on their parts.) I will provide my own bibliographies of materials I have read. While I occasionally read polemical books with some enjoyment, I will not generally include them in my lists.
• John provides some dictionary definitions of various political labels. I have some thoughts on labeling I desire to share.
• John objects to the religious right, believing the religious right wants to impose its narrow and peculiar beliefs on the rest of us.
• John believes conservatives generally are narrow and mean spirited. He suggests that fascism is where government joins with big business and on that basis distinguishes fascism from communism.
• John believes we went to war in Iraq without sufficient debate and without any effort to understand Arabs or Islam.
• John is curious about the views of Conservatives and seems to wonder how people with unpronounced brow ridges could hold such Neanderthal opinions.
My offering will not attempt to change your minds very much. I hope to expose a way of thinking with which your essay suggests you may not be familiar. I trust you will forgive me if I occasionally belabor arguments with which you too familiar. In particular I hope to share my conviction that, while history will judge whether George W. Bush's decisions were is right or wrong, he is not evil, and he is not stupid, and he is not guided by unworthy motives.
At one point in his essay John remarks that he doesn’t really know any conservatives and has little chance to hear their views. That’s Manhattan for you, I suppose. I will try to reacquaint you with the diversity of provincial opinion.
More to come.
Affectionately,
Ed
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