quote:You believe this, you're a conservative at heart, Irami. The ideological differences are what you consider to be of value, not how you would cultivate and risk value.
It seems that their way of thinking about traditional institutions is inappropriate. Kat, I want to think about it, keep everything that is good, change what is bad, and too many conservatives want to keep what works and throw out everything that doesn't work, and predicate this on a suspect standard of results, necessarily without thinking. (For example, oil money goes to all the wrong people, but it's what we do, it's the way we live, and it works, who are those pesky liberals to tell us any different.)
It's funny, when one group of conservatives want to teach Faith in schools, and the other wants to take out everything that can't be easily tested with a scantron, we know there is a problem.
Education as faith and calculation, two sides of the same coin, crowd out thinking about what in the world calls for thought(which is everything important). And what I see of American conservatism is eagerness to reach for that fake coin. "Realists" love the existence of "idealists" because they vaildate each other, and neither have to think. And for me, that's American conservative politics, faith and an efficiency graph. That's ignoring everything good in the world. The pious engineer who goes to church and designs widgets, and really has not thought well about the peril and dignity that goes along with either. ___________
I'm going to take a little out on Jesse Jackson, to show that it happens on both sides. He wants to save black youth from jail by getting them into protestant churches. If you don't think about this, it sounds fine. If you don't think about the impropriety of using Jesus as leverage, for the sake of some other good, that's fine. If you don't think about the impropriety of basing expectations concerning public conduct on something as essentially private as faith, that's fine. If eternal salvation is a bargaining chip in the great horse trade of life, then that's fine. I don't know if any divinity worth its holiness should be worshiped for the sake of some other good. Instead of turning to thinking and talking about the rights, responsibilities, and duties we have as Americans to each other, we to give them Jesus and hope that faith in Him does the thinking for us, and forget what that presupposes about faith, education, law, responsibility, thinking, and duty. In addition, there is a strange side-effect in how much faith actually absolves us from our responsibilities, by misdirection.
__________________________________
There are two Kennedy quotes I wish Bush would think on:
I wish Bush spoke with this kind of conviction about oil independence. The closest he comes to this resolve is when he is talking about killing other people.
quote:We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
And Kennedy had a way of framing religion as that which as a way for us to roll up our sleeves and get to work:
quote: “With a good conscience our only sure reward, with history the final judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here on earth God’s work must truly be our own.”
That's what you get when you reject the wooden nickel of ideology vs. realism, a clear-sighted look at the world, and he was right.
posted
kat, I think your saying would be more accurate (as a caricature at least) if it stated that generic liberal philosophy is based on what "could" work, while generic conservative philosophy is based in what "has" worked.
I don't think anyone really knows how things are "currently" working to a high enough degree to attribute that to either side. Or rather, you can't really analyze the now, it's a moving target of billions of factors. You can really only base a philosophy on extrapolation (liberal), or recollection (conservative), both of which can be/are wrong, to some degree.
quote:I think your saying would be more accurate (as a caricature at least) if it stated that generic liberal philosophy is based on what "could" work, while generic conservative philosophy is based in what "has" worked.
Hmm...okay, I agree with that.
------------
Irami, every time you talk to me about religion, I know you're repeating an argument framed for someone else, because you argue against things I've never said and don't believe. It makes me feel like you don't really listen to what I'm saying. Maybe you are speaking to the audience and not directly to me, but just so you know, that's why I won't discuss it.
quote:The ideological differences are what you consider to be of value, not how you would cultivate and risk value.
I don't think you can split the two up. Let's say the issue is a husband's fidelity to his wife.
I think you ought to cultivate that from thinking on and understanding what husbands and a wives are, period. Those are more than just words.
If fidelity comes from being scared of any penalties, on earth or after, we have a problem. How we cultivate a sense of responsibilty is as important as the actual responsibilities one is aware of. It's not arbitrary, and it's not faith, and that's why everything is at stake in education.
quote: think your saying would be more accurate (as a caricature at least) if it stated that generic liberal philosophy is based on what "could" work, while generic conservative philosophy is based in what "has" worked.
I think this is the same problem. We are talking about what works, what does the job, as opposed to what is called for. When we speak in terms of what works or what could work, we are making the moral claim that efficiency and effects are what matter. An extreme example is those parents who give their infants booze to stop the kids from crying.
Pledging fealty to what has worked or what could work is a commitment that doesn't seem appropriate. One ignores the issue and reaches for a stock solution(be it faith or efficiency), the other ignores the issue and reaches for invention for the sake of invention(bad science fiction). They both ignore the problem as that which calls for thought, and that the solution is derivative from the problem. Both of the approaches look to the solutions first. It speaks to the false distinction I spoke of in previous posts.
quote: For a rant on lack of personal responsibility, I found this last line to be particularly funny. I went to public school too and can spell, write, and do math fairly well. So I don't think the problem is public schools....
I want my kids to go to your school. Posts: 278 | Registered: Apr 2004
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
