Syncretism
20 Apr. 2008
I had a conversation with Tim yesterday in which I managed to repel him by admitting that I'm currently trying to wean myself off caffeine. Things quickly degenerated, ending with him grunting about the end of civilization and something about prying coffee from his cold, dead hands.
I was thinking about this conversation a few moments ago as I was walking home from the nearby bagel shop, clutching a nice, warm cup of coffee in my hands. The crux of Tim's argument was that the act of drinking coffee is so intensely pleasurable, that he feels so magnificent after having just had a cup, that he can never bring himself to give it up. I didn't actually disagree with his assessment of the sybaritic pleasure of a cup of joe (hence why I was in the middle of imbibing even as I am trying to stop), but I realized as I was walking that my disagreement with him is over which aspect is so pleasurable. It's not the caffeine. It's not even the coffee itself. It's the ritual of having a favorite drink, at a certain time of day, and allowing yourself to momentarily do nothing but wallow in the ritual. When I drank Dr. Pepper, nothing could be as heavenly as the peppery, sweet bite in the back of my throat and the mild irritant of the fizzy water. When I switched to Italian soda, the sharp bite of the bubbles continued to please. And, now that I drink coffee, I delight in its warmth when I have it hot, and its creaminess when I have it cold. And always, always through the three I have engaged in my sinful little delight at the same times of day.
As I admired this intriguing little realization, it struck me that it's not at all unrelated to the whole host of other disagreements I am currently having with a whole host of other people and ideological positions. I've struggled recently - painfully unsuccessfully, I might add - to articulate to myself and others exactly why I'm having such a nasty break with so many positions I thought I held or that others expect me to hold. Why can't I bring myself to be a feminist if I'm both a lesbian and a liberal? (This particular failing has been especially infuriating to many people I come across, as I am apparently "supposed" to be a feminist.) Why have I suddenly decided I am against the death penalty when I had no problems with it before? Why do I suddenly think Democrats are absolutely 100% full of shit even as I continue to identify as liberal?
Let me back up just a bit before going on. Although the discussion Tim and I had is finally allowing me to answer all of these questions, it was preceded several nights ago by a different conversation that laid the foundation for my coffee-inspired realization. The conversation was over whether the death penalty is acceptable or not. I was surprised that, save one, all of my friends said it was. My argument against it was twofold.
The first part was that, although at any given time we must out of practical necessity put our faith into the fact that we are right, history consistently proves us wrong. We now know that the earth is not flat. There is no such thing as the ether or the vapors. Freud was mostly wrong. Newton's been proven inadequate and Einstein's starting to look a little shaky himself. Personally, I'd go so far as to say there may not be such a thing as truth, but that's beside the point - all of those theories and beliefs have proven immensely useful while they were in vogue. They worked. They allowed us to make decisions, create worldviews, get things done. They gave us a direction and let us put our shoes on in the morning. So I'm not saying that we should discard any effort to believe things or choose a position. But I am saying that you'd have to be just plain stupid not to exercise a level of humility when it comes to your beliefs. Greater men than you or I have been proven wrong by the cruelties of time and popular opinion, and I, for one, simply cannot bring myself to believe that I will escape that fate where they did not.
The crux of the second was the same - that you'd have to be just plain stupid not to exercise a level of humility when it comes to your beliefs - although in this case substituting the words "misguided and dangerous" for "stupid." I was struck fully by the repercussions of this when watching, of all things, the movie Jesus Camp. There's a scene in which the leader of the camp is discussing how her goal is to create "God's Army." When noting how that differs from, say, Muslims teaching their kids to lay down their lives for Islam, she laughs a slight, dismissive laugh, as though she can't believe the obviousness of the answer and says incredulously, "because...excuse me...because we have the truth!"
And, in essence, this understanding of the possibility of error is what I see the entire American democratic system being based on. The system is built to mitigate error through the use of checks and balances and through heterogeneity. The idea is that an unchallenged belief system becomes extreme because there is no way to identify errors. And, god forbid that belief system happens to be wrong, the possibility for disaster is increased exponentially. In essence, America is founded on the idealism that through reason and Enlightenment we can become greater than we are, even as it also relies heavily on the practical realization that people are fallible. The system relies on the use of heterogeneity to mitigate error, given that homogeneity magnifies them.
Given that, it seems to me that the death sentence is inherently un-American. It removes the ability to come back later and say, "Oops. Heh heh. Sorry we locked you in jail for 30 years. We fucked up." The person is dead - there is no rectifying that error. The death sentence wraps the judicial system in the mantle of infallibility and removes the ability to check or balance its decisions in retrospect. Likewise (to finally, finally bring this back around to what I was talking about initially), I find that many ideological positions wrap themselves in that same cloak. It's wrong, they say, for our opposition to engage in (fill in the blank - building armies, refusing to listen to outsider voices, discriminating, refusing to pay taxes for our cause - the list is endless), but because we're right, it's okay for us to do that.
So that's the ultimate realization I've had with regards to my inability to reconcile myself with any number of positions I feel like I ought to be taking but just can't. It's not that I necessarily have any problem with the theoretical position. It's that I have a problem with the practice of carrying the ideas to fruition. The air of infallibility taken on by practitioners, the willingness to engage in inherently dangerous and fascist behavior because we're Just. So. Sure. that we're right. Our society laughs behind its hands at Machiavelli, calls him wicked and wrong and says we'd never do that, yet to our peril we live his philosophy every day.
Given this, the only position I do find myself being able to take is the one that embraces - actually, truly embraces - the fact that opinions diverging from one's own are necessary and absolutely vital to a healthy society. To that end, I do buy into a lot of the Democratic party's platform. Diversity is vital to a vibrant, progressive, secure, and robust society, one that can withstand the most pressures from the most directions at any given time. And also to that end, I can't sit in a room with a bunch of Democrats vilifying "the enemy" or belittling divergent opinions as stupid or wrong. It's hypocritical and dangerous. Democrats wonder how they manage to blow it at the 11th hour every election cycle? It's because they don't practice what they preach and everyone realizes deep down that they're full of shit, their promises mere empty rhetoric. They say all the right things, they have all the right aims, but they don't look to the heart of why they are striving to achieve those goals.
In other words, they haven't analyzed their own positions. They think they want diversity, but they fail to appreciate why, and so they fail to realize when their own actions inhibit their ability to reach that goal. And when the chance for ritual presents itself, they pass it up, holding out, wrongly, for its pale shadow - a mere cup of coffee.