What irritates me is the irrationality of it all. No one is making strong arguments, everyone is just looking to win a seat or sway mass opinion with emotionally or religiously charged rhetoric. Now I don't want to completely bash on emotional rhetoric, because when things are very right or very wrong, we should stand up and say so, not just with our heads, but with our hearts. What bothers me is when emotional rhetoric distracts from concrete action and change and when its effect is to blur thinking and create division.
Part of my frustration, also, I'm realizing, is my own inability to sort out the rhetoric from the truth. I tend to always play devil's advocate and be the moderating force. But there are some things that are just right or just wrong, and I don't want to be ambivalent about those. I don't want to be plagued with doubt when it's time to stand for something.
In his book, Generous Justice (which I first started reading to figure out what the connection was between the evangelical gospel and social justice, but that's a huge and happy topic I'll write about later) Tim Keller explains that one of the reasons we can't come to an agreement on "justice" issues is because we don't have a common standard or definition for the idea. He uses a helpful framework from a book by Harvard Professor Michael Sandel called Justice: by "justice" a person may mean 1) "maximizing welfare" (as in JS Mill's Utilitarianism: the greatest good for the greatest number of people), 2)"respecting freedom" (bill of rights type stuff), or 3) "promoting virtue"
So, being me, I want to create a systematic way to answer all these questions of US policy debates. (Something, of course, that mankind has debated for thousands of years, I know!) but I'm pretty sure I can come up with some working theories for how to think through questions.
So I've dived into it all by starting Michael Sandel's lecture series on YouTube.
No comments:
Post a Comment