| An interesting veiwpoint that both sides can hate. |
[Mar. 18th, 2008|09:17 pm] |
I like this guy.
In a Salon.com interview, Chris Hedges compares the radical atheists to the religious right.
Normally, this would irritate me, because I hate people who claim atheism is a religion, because it isn't, but that's not his point. He's pretty much railing against the forces of shrieking dogma, of certainty in the utter correctness of their own view, and of splitting the world into "us" and "them."
Hedges explains how he's debated Fundamentalists and a few of the noted atheists, like Hitchens, and in his opinion, the audience members who showed up agreeing with his opponent didn't hear a word he said, and the impression was no different between the fundies and the hard core atheists. He thinks that both sides pose a huge danger to our nation's, and wold's, future.
This fear of both sides reminds me of a proposal I came up with in 1984, the Jesse/Jesse compromise, where all political parties agreed to take Jesse Helms and Jesse Jackson out behind the barn and re-enact the climactic scene from Old Yeller. The rhetoric goes away, the example sinks in, the remaining powers that be get on with the business of fixing things. Everybody wins.
I was kicking around a topic for the past few days about how I distrust all "ists" and "isms," because slavish dedication to any "ism" kills rational thought. I have issues with Fundamentalists, atheists, capitalists and socialists. Any viewpoint taken to far is pretty much bad.
Take Capitalism and Socialism.
Now, I can say wonderful things and terrible things about both. Were I an "-ist," I'd have to ignore the bad in one and the good in another, or, more accurately, be dishonest or stupid.
Capitalism works, in theory, because the better a product is, the cheaper it is and the more convenient it is, the better the chance I'll use it, and not it's competitor, thus providing an incentive for corporations to try to make things better, cheaper and more convenient , not out of any feeling of altruism, but to get their hands on my money.
Where it falls down is the Capitalist ideal of allowing a market to regulate itself, which leads to slave labor, unsafe products, environmental disaster, and the collapse of the stock market, housing market, mortgage market, etc. None of us wants to go back to working for a dollar a day in credit at the company store, and that's what we will get if we just hand the keys over to the Captains of Industry and let them police themselves.
Socialism, in theory, takes away the incentive to cut corners for profit, and guarantees worker safety, product standards compliance, a living wage, and rainbows and puppies for all, not just those who can afford them.
In theory.
Now, if you want to see socialism in action, spend a day at the Registry of Motor Vehicles trying to get new plates, or trying to pay your overdue bill at a municipal Water Department.. The latter happened to me this week. They never changed the name of the account when I bought the house, so the bill went elsewhere, and it's quarterly, so I wasn't missing it the way I would a monthly bill, and when the sent me a notice that I was overdue for an old balance, after I'd paid the full amount by check, once the next quarter's bill got to me, mind you, that a check was unacceptable for the old portion of the balance, that the clerical error wasn't the fault of anyone in the department that was trying to collect, so they would in no way bend, and that I had three business days to show up, between 8:30 and 5:00, when normal people should be at work, with cash or a money order, or have a lien on my property. For a balance of less than $100.00.
The temptation to show up with a five gallon pail of loose change was great, but I'm sure I'd have had to sit while they counted it, and I was already wasting half a day of my time to pay a bill I'd already written a perfectly good check for. With no option to take my business elsewhere, they can afford to make me jump through hoops, take a day off work, return a payment that any other company would be happy to have, and not take a credit card over the phone, simply because they don't have to.
Now, it's seems to me that only someone who inherited a multinational corporation could voice unqualified support for capitalism with regulation, and only a grad student or tenured professor could do the same for socialism.
For the rest of us, a middle ground would be nice.
That's kind of what this interview captured for me. Only with the mixing of politics and spirituality, rather than economics.
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