Perri Nelson's Website 

A busy day

Well today was a busy day. Tomorrow looks to be pretty busy too. I started the morning early, for me, with a cup of coffee and a little light blog reading.

Then came the work... We invaded my younger son's room and cleaned it. We cleared out the little alcove above the stairs in his room, which has an open wall over the stairwell, and a pull down privacy screen.

Then we moved my primary computer, peripherals and a couple of bookcases full of books into the alcove. This freed up some room in my bedroom, which was a good thing. Shortly after that we rearranged my bedroom.

Sometime around 3:00PM the cable guy showed up. After one of my satellite receivers stopped working almost a month ago my wife and I decided to go back to cable. I've been using Comcast High-speed Internet for several years, including a few years before Comcast bought the unit from AT&T. We've been using the Dish Network for television for a year and a half, and we've had several different telephone service providers and long distance services over the years.

The cable guy was here to change all of that. For less money than we had been paying for several years, they offered us High speed internet, Digital Voice (over I.P.) and the Digital Cable plus-pack. Now I have basic cable in two rooms and the digital cable plus-pack in my bedroom. My older son has the digital cable plus-pack in his room, and I have the digital cable plus-pack with HDTV and a DVR in the living room. I also get unlimited telephone service, including unlimited long distance. My internet connection is also about a megabit per second faster than before.

All of this for about $70.00 a month less than I was paying before. Even after the cable guy left, we still had a lot of work to do. We'll still be re-arranging furniture into tomorrow, but we already like the way things are looking. I've got another hour or so to go tonight before I can actually use the room, but things have gone far better than I expected.

I'm stiff, and tired... a good nights rest after this and then a few more hours to go at it. Tomorrow afternoon, I'm showing someone the Jr. Dragster. They're interested in buying it. The weekend is shaping up to be a good one.

I don't know what it is about springtime, but the last couple of weekends have been extremely busy. I'm amazed that I've managed to even find time to do a little blogging. I've got a bit of research to do for a couple of posts I'm working on, and I'm not sure where I'll find the time for that and the other site updates I have planned.

Still, it's a lot of fun getting all of this stuff done.

The attractiveness of liberalism

Why do you think it is that so many people are attracted to modern day liberalism? I'm not talking about classical liberalism here, but modern day liberalism. I'm talking about the collection of ideologies that we refer to these days as "the left".

To answer my question, I think we have to start by looking at the various components of liberalism. This is going to take a lot of discussion, and I know that there's no way we can cover it all in just one post. Some of you are going to look at the length of this post and think "Oh Lord, another long winded dissertation."

I'm sorry about that, but what can I say. This is my blog, and I think some things are simply too complex to leave to short "sound bite" posts. I'm not an expert on the subjects by any means, but I'd like to discuss them with you. Hopefully you'll want to discuss them with me too. I think I can learn a lot from the discussion, and I hope you will too.

Part of my intent here is to sort out the hard-core irrational ideologues on both sides of the debate from the rest of us and look at what motivates them and us. I want to look at the consequences of the opposing viewpoints and compare them on their merits, and not on the basis of personalities or ideologies.

I consider myself to be mostly a conservative, not entirely a conservative, but mostly a conservative. I also believe quite strongly that the modern trend toward socialism, especially world socialism as embodied by the U.N. and Europe is fundamentally a bad thing. The fact that so many liberals disagree with that viewpoint is a cause for concern to me.

A bigger cause for concern to me though is the vitriol and the polarization in today's "debate" on these subjects. I think that the radical and often profane personal attacks and name-calling from the far left as well as the name-calling and ridicule from the far right gets in the way of any kind of meaningful dialog. I think that it does both sides of the issues a disservice. It may not invalidate the arguments on either side, but it's often pretty hard to get past being called a "NAZI", or a "FASCIST", or a "LEFT-TARD", or a "WING-NUT". Those aren't arguments, they're insults, and you don't win a debate with insults, you just end any chance of having a meaningful discussion.

Before we get into what I believe explains the attraction of some people to liberalism I'd like to look at the labeling scheme again. You'll notice I said "collection of ideologies" when referencing the left. I really don't like the "liberal" vs. "conservative" character of the debate. Rush Limbaugh for example claims to know liberals "Like every square inch of my glorious naked body". He also frequently says that a "moderate" is someone that's constantly wetting their finger and sticking it up to see which way the wind blows.

I don't think that's true. It sure sounds good on the radio though. I think it also adds to the polarization. It's sort of the "If you're not with us, you're against us" approach to discussion. Maybe it's time to remember another expression or phrase... he that is not against us is for us.

Just as I believe that there's a fairly large collection of ideologies or approaches to issues that we've come to collectively describe as liberal, I also believe there's a fairly large collection of ideologies or approaches to issues that we've come to describe as conservative. Libertarians are fond of making this point, and of also looking at the approaches to the issues as either authoritarian or libertarian.

For that matter, Libertarians are fond of presenting a short little survey with a bunch of yes or no questions, somewhere around 20 or so in the examples I've seen, and using them to pigeonhole you into a point on an ideological plane. All of this is useful if you've really got the need to classify people, but in the end I think these classifications tend to do us all an injustice. I'm not really interested in discussing Libertarianism here anyway, maybe you are, but then that's what the comments are for.

Anyway, let's get back to the main question. Why are so many people attracted to modern day liberalism? I have to ask the question this way for a couple of reasons. First, I consider myself to be fairly conservative. And second, our nation today seems to be fairly evenly divided along the liberal-conservative axis of the ideological plane. At least it does if you consider the Democratic party to be essentially liberal in character and the Republican party to be essentially conservative in character.

Let's start with the plight of the poor.

Since the beginning of recorded civilization, the poor have always been with us. There have always been some in every society that have more than others, and by extension there have always been some in every society that have less than others. The reasons for this aren't the issue, yet. It's the fact that there are those we consider to be the poor among us that is the issue.

I think it's fair to say that most of us are living a fairly comfortable lifestyle. The vast majority of us have some form of gainful employment, most of us have a good solid roof over our heads at night. We're warm, we're exceptionally well fed, and we're so entertained by one another that it's often boring. If you're reading this post, it's pretty much guaranteed that you have access to a computer and a telecommunications system.

By historical standards, it's probably safe to say that the vast majority of us are rich. Maybe not by the standards of today's society, but probably compared to just a few hundred years ago, and definitely compared to a couple of thousand years ago, or in comparison to the standards of some of the developing nations.

Who among us can walk down a city street and see a homeless family huddled together in an alleyway or standing on a street corner panhandling and not feel some compassion for them? How often though, do we stop to help them? How do you determine the difference between those that truly need and can benefit from some assistance and those that simply prey on your compassion? What if you simply can't help them because of obligations that you have elsewhere?

These aren't new questions. The answers to them aren't very comfortable either. Most of us who have grown up in Western Civilization have grown up exposed to Christianity. That isn't to say that we're all Christians, or that we all even believe in God or accept the idea of religion. But Western Civilization has its roots in Judeo-Christian religion and philosophies.

Those philosophies teach us that material riches make it difficult for a man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. They instruct us to be compassionate to the poor. They demand that we give help to those less fortunate than us. Christians, or at least people raised in nominally Christian families are taught, or at least exposed to the parable of the good Samaritan. The parable is presented in the Book of Luke, Chapter 10, verses 25 through 38.

If you read it, you'll find that just about all of the reasons why we might pass the needy by on the streets are answered there. Not directly or specifically, but the answer is there. The priest and the Levite, men from the elite classes, were both either to busy or too self-important to help. The Samaritan, a man that by all accounts the social elite of the day would have looked down upon, showed mercy and kindness to the man in need, at great personal expense. We are instructed "Go, and do thou likewise".

How many of us do? I have to admit that more often than not, I don't. Oh certainly, I occasionally do, but even so, I frequently don't. I doubt that I'm unusual in that respect.

And so we come to the beginning of an answer to our question. With regard to the poor and the downtrodden, we know that we ought to help all that we can. And we know that we often don't do enough, and so we sometimes feel guilty about it. Whether we accept the religious teachings we've been exposed to or not, we know we can do more than we have done, and we feel guilt for it. This prompts us to want to do something about the problem.

Can we all agree that maybe, just maybe deep down, the average conservative and the average liberal both have a desire to do what's right? We both agree that something needs to be done to help the poor and the needy.

Here's where I think conservatives and liberals begin to part company. There's a good chance I'm wrong about this, but I believe that liberals see the plight of the poor and think that it's up to society to solve the problem, while conservatives see the plight of the poor and think that it's up to individuals to recognize the problem and deal with it on a personal level.

There's a wide gap between these two approaches. I don't think that either approach, or even a combination of them both will ever solve the problem of poverty. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt it, at least on that point. Given that you might think it doesn't matter which approach we take. I think that the intractability of the problem actually gives us a clue as to which approach is right, but that's for another post.

I started this by asking what attracts people to liberalism. I noted that there are a lot of different components to the so-called liberal ideology, and I decided to tackle just one of the issues. I know I've gone far afield from actually tackling that issue, but I wanted to establish up front that this isn't really about which side is right and which is wrong. So to bring this to a close, I'm back at what attracts people to the liberal approach to the issue of poverty.

The liberal approach to the plight of the poor is to let society, in the form of government, solve the problem. This approach does have some facets that might make it attractive.

First of all, it puts the resources of society as a whole at the disposal of the problem solver. That's a whole lot of resources. When you compare that weight of resources to an individual need, the individual need seems considerably smaller.

Second, it reduces the need for personal commitment. If the problem really belongs to the government, then it's not my problem. If it's government's responsibility to take care of the needy, then I don't have to feel guilty when I don't personally do something about it.

This approach is great for helping to displace personal guilt in lots of ways. It lets us feel better about ourselves when we see someone wealthier than us. They must have acquired that wealth through underhanded means, they aren't as charitable as I am.

It lets us feel better about ourselves too when we take things away from someone else to give them to the poor and the downtrodden. After all, they're wealthy, they have an obligation to help the less fortunate.

Have you noticed a trend here? Maybe I'm a bit biased, but, except for the first attraction that this approach has, all of the rest of these feed a narcissistic attitude. We can feel good about ourselves without having personally done anything about our personal guilt.

The guilt remains though. And it's projected onto others and onto other issues as well.

So maybe you think it's not fair to look at it this way. If you believe that it's society's responsibility to care for the poor, and not an individual responsibility, then please, tell me in the comments why you believe that. What makes this approach attractive?

I've heard how the right wing doesn't care about the poor. I've heard about how the Republican party wants to starve the elderly, or make them eat dog food. I've heard that the Democratic party is the "party of the people".

If you believe those things, then tell me about it. Tell me why you believe that. I want to have the discussion. Maybe we can also discuss what attracts people to conservatism, and the conservative approaches.

Let's just try to keep it civil.