In Through the Looking
Glass, Alice says “Why, sometimes I believe as many as six impossible
things before breakfast.” Yet American
voters have made her look like a piker.
They are determined to believe in hundreds of impossible things before
they head to the polls to choose a president.
It is not as if most of them
do not know that the candidates are over-promising. They have been along this path before. They have witnessed countless grandiose
pledges crumble to dust once their favorites got into office.
But still they believe. How can this be? Why do so many otherwise intelligent people
remain willfully ignorant? Can’t they
see that in deciding to bust the budget, or gut the military, or start a trade
war, we will all ultimately suffer? The
idea that the politicians can rescue us from our current anxieties may sound
plausible, but it is a myth.
And yet millions
believe. The reason is that the world is
so complicated that we require a roadmap in order to find our way around. In order to be useful, however, this map must
simplify the terrain. If it corresponded
one-to-one with reality, it would be just as confusing as reality.
Nonetheless, in simplifying,
these maps distort. They leave out
important factors, while over-emphasizing others. This can prompt us to take the wrong turns in
moments of doubt. That, in fact, is
where we today find ourselves.
What are these
roadmaps? They are our ideologies. These idea systems tell us how the world is
constructed and therefore what we should do in order to get where we want to go. They help us make sense of facts that are, in
their absence, too complex to grasp.
The problem is that our
current ideologies are out of whack.
They have deviated so far from reality that they often encourage us to
go astray. It is as if we were trying to
circumnavigate the planet by consulting a chart that was drawn up when people
believed the earth was flat.
What are these out-of-date
ideologies? They are none other than the
current liberal and conservative catechisms.
The ideals these espouse may seem beyond question—at least to their
adherents—and yet the policies they promote are frequently defective.
Take liberalism. It is often conflated with being
“progressive.” Liberals believe they are
on the cutting edge of a brave new world.
As they see it, they are rationally seeking to reconstruct the world
along egalitarian lines. In other words,
they are for social justice, whereas their foes are not.
But liberalism is not
progressive. Its central ideas are at
least two centuries old. They go back to
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Karl Marx. Ideas,
such as the “general will” and a proletarian revolution, color their vision of
ideal social arrangements.
But in truth, there is no
general will and the proletarian revolution fizzled. The notion that we will all eventually be equal
is likewise fanciful. It is a pipe dream
that is in the process of being converted into a nightmare. Robbing the rich to give to the poor is a
recipe for reducing everyone to poverty and oppression.
Unfortunately some
conservative visions are little better.
They too were formulated hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. Consider the libertarian utopia. It is derived from the Enlightenment
observations of Adam Smith. He noted,
with some justification, that an invisible hand regulates the economy.
And yet the libertarians
have turned this into a call for dismantling the government. While it is certainly true that liberals
promote too much government, too little is also dangerous. Nor are we solely economic animals. Our family life, for instance, cannot prosper
in a totally laissez-faire environment.
Ours is a new world that
confronts us with challenges our ancestors could have not imagined. Doubtless, they were smart people. There is unquestionably much we can learn
from them. Nonetheless, if we bind
ourselves too tightly to their beliefs, we are bound to stumble.
Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University
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