I don’t know what it is about politics, but it is the single subject area that stirs the most intense passions among us. Although similar in most every other respect–background, education, business orientation, family values (all still married and happy), we are evenly divided politically across the right-left spectrum. Three of us listen to talk radio and Fox News; three of us get our news from the New York Times. Since we value civility and comity above all other rhetorical flourishes, except comedy, we tread lightly into political discourse.
I vividly recall the running discussion twelve years ago over Bill Clinton’s alleged dalliance with some obscure intern named Monica Lewinsky. Half of us thought Clinton was an inveterate liar who had staged the suicide of Vincent Foster to cover up his involvement in the Whitewater scandal. The other half of us thought the sex charge was trumped up as a right wing conspiracy since Clinton would never be so stupid as to besmirch himself for the sake of a brief pleasure. This deep rift in our worldviews raged over the weeks and months that followed. I don’t have to describe how the table was set by half of us for serving the other half a meal of raw dead crow following the release of the news on the DNA test on “that woman’s” blue dress.
So, as the rest of the country during the past decade has careened into ever more ideologically-based denunciations of a false rationale for foreign war or for socialist interventions for bank bailouts and unconstitutional health care plans, we have learned to be more careful talking politics with each other.
Occasionally it helps to be reminded of America’s one big contribution to philosophical thought-the concept of pragmatism, which was articulated most prominently by William James. William James came of age in America in the decades following the Civil War. Although the nation was busy healing its most horrific wounds, the big ideological debates following the war were between science and religion. Science–and the philosophy that underpins science-is called “empiricism,” and is based on the belief that truth is what you can measure and experience. Religion is based on belief in ultimate truths–often a single truth–that is felt not quantified. Many people have shed blood over the bitter divide between science and politics. But William James stressed that religious and spiritual beliefs could coexist with empirical experience. Something could be true because it had been precisely observed and measured directly; it could also be true because it contributes to overall happiness-these need not be mutually exclusive ideas.
In our little corner of the ideological universe, we have found is that it is less important to be right than to be friends. Another pragmatic truth is that it is difficult to argue when you are breathing so hard your lungs hurt. Although we value “ideas” as passionately as anyone else, we have learned that embracing any idea too tightly leads inevitably to ideology, ideology leads to rigidity and rigidity is bad for your knees.
Although it is unlikely that the A-type personalities in places like Washington and Arizona or elsewhere are going to get up in the dark to go running with each other, it might improve our national discourse.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute in Rockland, Maine.