More talkin’ back from Liberal Street Fighter
There are multiple issues these days causing division in the country, within the Democratic Party and within the broader left. A disturbing trend is the way party leaders, writers, some activists and lately big bloggers, (as discussed so well here) demand that OTHER less desirable activists quiet down, for fear of offending some centrist idea of “values.”
They turn the crank on their tired organs, reedy calls for the hippies, the pacifists, the feminists and women’s studies crowd, the rabid queers and women and mothers and workers to all dance to their tired old tune. The tune gets louder when directed at the growing peace movement, activists for women’s health and GBLT activists.
We’re told over and over, even by supposed progressives, that “values” in this “conservative” nation are what has led to Republican hegemony in government. I would assert that it is the LACK of demonstrable values from the left that has led to our current straits. For me, those values are rooted in Humanism.
I’m a humanist. It took me some time to get here. I wanted a faith really badly when I was young. The other faiths, besides Christianity, especially ones rooted in a culture or place, felt like putting on drag. The more I read the bible, the more I saw how evil Christianity is. I’ll define “evil” in a moment.
Human beings are where I source value, because that’s the only thing left. After reading many of the religions, the whole new age movement, I knew that none of the Gods were real. Not in a metaphysical sense, but real in the sense that they could really matter to daily life, since we don’t all agree on them. Hell, Jesus is a different God to nearly every Christian who mouths His name.
So when I assert that something is “good” or “evil,” I have to base it on what I value in human beings. How can I do that without asserting the prominence of one human being over another?
By saying my rights, my judgements, my perogatives end in that small space between my fist and the tip of your nose. I would assert that beyond that all I offer is advice that everyone should take with a grain of salt. Each person has to consider their decisions on how they will look back on them. How will this affect me down the road? My children? My neighbors? Should I care about any of them but myself?
As I’ve made clear before, discovering Nietzsche’s writings on the impending modern era, his realization that all of the old illusions of shared Gods were dead, had a big influence on me. One such passage:
The greatest weight.
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!”
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?… Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
– Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, s.341, Walter Kaufmann transl
Here is where I define “evil.” Evil is when one human being decides they can make that decision posed by Nietzsche’s demon FOR YOU. At the moment that a society, a man, a church, takes away that essential choice from a woman about whether she will carry a baby to term they are committing evil on her by removing her humanity. Humanity is rooted in how we face that question, and morality is a system we devise for ourselves when we can look that demon in the eye and say:
“Thank you! Promise me that I will relive my greatest triumphs, and my darkets mistakes. Promise me that all that brought me to this point in my life where I know that what I’ve learned and done and experienced was all worth it, even the regrets. Promise me that I will be free when it happens all again to make my own choices, that someone else won’t step between you and myself and take this moment away from me. PROMISE ME.”
I reject and abhor ANYBODY who tells someone else what their inner moral choices MUST be.
And no, don’t respond that my position makes all public mores, all law, impossible, because it doesn’t. You see, when someone’s fist, or pollution, or whatever else, hits another person’s nose … THAT is where we are all justified to step in.
The woman has the sole choice in what to do w/ a zygote, w/ a fetus, because IT cannot face that demon. She has to face that demon for herself and the potential life growing within her. When she crosses the threshold from “I’m pregnant” to “this is my BABY” the entire equation changes FOR HER, but she’s still the only one that can make those choices.
Her.
Alone.
When we are faced with questions of war, we have to decide whether the reasons we are pursuing this course are worth the cost of robbing all of those people of the chance to make their own futures. We have to step in and raise our voices to stop this monumental crime.
A Democratic Party that really had values would step forward and offer people a way to preserve values rooted in humanism electorally, yet so many in the party, the DLC, NDN, many magazines and even leading blogs insist that the party CANNOT do that, and it is impertinent for anybody to demand that it does. They seek to mirror the strict lecturing father voices of the Republicans. To demand that unruly activists only dance when told, to behave like good little children.
Progressive values should be rooted in this willingness to fight for humanist values. The party leadership, in their constant calls for activists to fall in line for some promised future reward, believe that they are calling the tune. In actuality, they are the monkey, dancing to the right’s tune.
Leaving the rest of us to fight for ourselves.
photo from Zohar dancing dot com