The lowly state of public discourse in our country is a concern for anyone who cares about civility and democracy, but one obvious source of the mean spiritedness so prevalent today is hiding in plain sight.
It is the philosophy of conservatism and its effect on people who embrace it.
While anyone can be judgmental, if you are a conservative, the likelihood that you are goes up dramatically.
That’s the effect conservatism has on people. Think about it.
The word conservative means “believing in the value of established and traditional practices in politics and society; not liking or accepting changes or new ideas; tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions.”
Being conservative means you don’t like change. You want things the way they are because you don’t want to alter your beliefs, circumstances, institutions you hold dear, or your way of life.
Anyone who thinks this way is more likely than not to be highly critical of anything that challenges tradition or undermines life as it now exists. In the realm of politics and religion this resistance takes the form of judgmentalism.
But let me be clear. The judgmentalism to which I am referring is not a matter of differing opinions or points of view. No, judgmentalism goes beyond such differences and attacks the person with whom one is disagreeing. Name calling or questioning an opponent’s patriotism or religious sincerity are some of the obvious signs of it.
That conservativism produces judgmental attitudes is why conservatives don’t simple disagree with liberal views. They consider liberals themselves a threat to what conservatives hold sacred.
To political conservatives, for example, liberals are not true patriots. Instead, they are socialists undermining the free enterprise system, which also means they just don’t love their country like they should. (For example, see the February online article by National Review editor, Rich Lowry, who says liberals are not the same kind of patriots conservatives are, which, according to his definition of patriotism, makes them less patriotic.)
In a similar way, religious conservatives don’t just see liberal beliefs as wrong, they believe liberals themselves are the enemy of faith. For them the line between the “saved” and “lost” is clear, and the stakes are too high not to use whatever means necessary to stop liberals before they destroy the fabric of our society.
Liberalism, on the other hand, is not compatible with judgmentalism. Its nature is to welcome new ideas or ways of behaving that challenge tradition or established points of view. A liberal mind sees broad-mindedness and diversity of views as virtues, but authoritarianism, orthodoxy, or traditional forms of thinking as stumbling blocks to progress.
To liberals, politics is the art of the possible, believing as it does that no one has all the truth, making compromise a necessary tool to progress. Conservatives see compromise as a betrayal of principles.
Religiously liberals may accept the existence of ultimate truth theoretically, but reject the notion that it is a realistic possibility practically. All beliefs, then, are by nature relative and should be treated as such.
Of course, what I am saying does not mean there are no judgmental liberals, not least because some people are predisposed to that kind of attitude whatever their philosophical persuasion may be.
But at the end of the day, conservativism is more likely to spawn political and religious judgmentalism than is liberalism, despite the widespread notion that in the current toxic climate of public debate both sides act the same way.
Liberalism has its own faults, but spawning and nurturing judgmentalism is not one of them. That fault lies solely with what it means to be conservative.
linnposts.com 