Thursday, October 20, 2005
America needs ideological clarification
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Dennis J. Kilper
Kilper is professor of architecture at Virginia Tech.
There have been too many diatribes against liberals in the media, including your paper, for me to remain quiet.
Let's get some things clear. These are the ideological compartments in America since we dropped the party of the Tories that sought re-establishment of the British monarchy as the true head of American feudalism. They were then the "conservatives."
Today we have liberals, left-wingers, conservatives and reactionaries. We must understand the ideologies of all of these groups.
Liberals are inherent skeptics who accept no ideology. Truth for them is something to be argued.
Jesus was the classical liberal. He threw out the self-righteous from the temple and exalted the common sinners who would repent. He taught us we have no right to condemn another -- an adulterer, a gay or lesbian. Only goodness matters. We don't even know if Jesus was gay. He had 12 guys he loved and few women.
Liberals are skeptics, in the sense that they consider equally all positions without prejudice and come to opinions only after due consideration.
The university was formed to arbitrate competing concepts of truth. It was born in argument over truth. If you want an ideological institution, you want a seminary, not a university. A university decides what it will teach. When funding agencies presume to adjudicate what is taught, they destroy the university.
If you want your student to be fairly judged among his peers, you had better hope he is the student of a liberal teacher. The liberal teacher has no ideology to promote and mostly loses arguments with ideologues, because the ideologue is a dogmatist -- certain he is right without the need for argument. He picks and chooses from the Bible to support his arguments without regard for any difference between the New and Old Testaments.
Hence, liberals are often teachers -- with no ideology to promote they seek that their students will undertake projects they, the teachers, never dreamed.
The rest of the ideologues are the reactionaries.
Reactionaries believe in theocracy as a fantasy that our founding fathers invented, despite the Christian country they sought to escape in search of religious freedom. Pathetic, isn't it? Our founders did not invent a Christian nation -- they hoped to avoid it.
Conservatives are close to liberals, but they fear change of any kind, while for liberals their only hope is salvation through change.
Left-wingers are socialists. They have this going for them, however: There has never been a socialist or communist state. Russia and China have both been feudalist states with small bureaucracies of wealthy guys who plundered the abilities of the common people.
That's not socialism, nor is it communism. Marxism is based on the democratic idea of government of, by and for the people coupled with a like economy.
Our economy is essentially predatory. Our form of democracy is not likely to persist. The current tax cut for the rich is ample evidence. Things will get worse than now, and the people will no longer accept the "trickle-down theory." They will call it the falsehood it always was.
There are but three phrases necessary to preserve a democracy.
The first is "social awareness." It means the people of the democracy are aware of the inequity that surrounds them.
The second is "social conscience" -- belief that when one suffers we all suffer, and it is our communal responsibility to rectify the inequity.
The third phrase is "social responsibility" -- that we all bear the burden, and we should all have equal opportunity for success, education, health care and subsistence support when we are disabled or otherwise unable to provide for the well-being of our household.
The strange issue is taxation. Our founders gave the federal government powers of taxation not to take resources from the folk but to ensure that the cost of our communal responsibiity for maintaining a true democracy be fairly and justly apportioned. Any taxes relegated to the states are inherently unfair, because not all states have equivalent resources.
If you encounter any candidate for political office who promises to cut or not increase taxes, he is a liar or he accepts making your life worse just to be elected.
You might believe the Iraq war is an unnecessary and undue cost to the people. You might be right, but we need to worry about our friends, ourselves and our families.
Equal access to education, to health care, to safe highways and just getting about is due in a democracy, but we need to pay for it. Only federal taxes fairly distribute the cost. Too many states have either too many or too few taxpayers to compete with other states.
