The Screaming Leftist
I love it when I find a weblog I can recommend and Joseph Duemer's reading & writing is definitely one.
A poet, a pragmatist, and self described screaming leftist.
He is a pundit in the best sense of the word, a sharp contrast to the self-absorbed, self-righteous, delusional hoard on the right.
Here are a couple of excerpts from his recent postings.
First part of a piece addressing the issue of Iraq
Basically, I was questioning Marshall's rejection of a containment policy. Behind this question is my own lack of solid evidence for what, exactly Saddam might be planning. I read the newspapers & the newsblogs & the political magazines & I still can't get a handle on this. Perhaps even more important to think about is whether a post-Saddam Iraq would leave the region--& US interests--better or worse off. I don't deny that Saddam is a bad guy & I'm not a pacifist, though I remain extremely skeptical about the use of American military power to extend American political values. I'm a child of the Vietnam War. In fact, I just got off the phone with a Vietnamese friend who a couple of years ago took me to her family's home village outside Saigon. "That's where the school I went to used to be," she said, pointing up into the air. "The bombs blew the hill away." In my experience, the use of American force leads to evil shit going down. Maybe if we lived by our own values it would be different.
And this sage advice about the nature of truth.
I grew up among dogmatists who insisted they knew what the truth was; yet, they caused me & others I know grievous pain & psychological disfigurement. Is it any wonder then that I am suspicious of dogmatism in all its forms, or that I have adopted, partly intuitively & partly through study what amounts to a philosophy of radical pluralism: essentially, that no single point of view is an adequate description of reality, including moral reality. The only descriptions that approach adequacy are plural, multiple. Which is why I insist that we cannot, in the current political debate, focus only on the pain of the Israelis, but must also learn to imagine the suffering of the Palestinians. In my own thinking about the middle east, I have been trying to imagine the lives, not just of the "good" Israelis & Palestinians who renounce violence, but also to imagine what it must be like to be a radical Jewish fundamentalist or a Palestinian suicide bomber. To imagine these lives is not to give them moral sanction; furthermore, unless we begin to imagine them, we will never have anything like moral clarity (a phrase, coming from an ideologue like Wm. Bennett, I think we need to be very careful of.)
Comments
Yes that is very good writing (he says wishing he could be so succinct in his own). Dogmatism, whatever its political stripe, seems to be the majority position. I suppose its because it'easier to be dogmatic than it is to actually stop and think about a subject. I don't know if this is a natural human trait or a socially evolved one.
My tendency would be to at least partly lay the blame on organized religion, there being few human activities more dogmatic than that. For most of us we are taught from birth to have an unquestioning belief in faith X, Y or Z and I think that preconditions us to believe in the concept of one "truth" being more valid than others and that we then apply that conditioning to all parts of our lives. It's so much easier to not think, to ridicule those who hold divergent opinions and to insist to all that there is only one true way and that you are the bearer of that knowledge.
Then again maybe it is genetic. Maybe it relates back to our most distant ancestors and the leadership of the alpha male. Maybe we are so hardwired to accept the leadership of alpha males and to copy them (in the hopes of becoming one ourselves)that this translates into blindly following those more powerful than us. I don't know, it's 2 am and I need to get some sleep :-)