Thursday, February 11, 2010
Is God a Political Centrist?
In a recent post, Patrick Brennan wrote: “I like to think of MOJ as a community where we are working to be that ‘perhaps not numerous center’ that will count -- big enough and painstaking enough not to rest in the past nor to be scattered and captivated by anything less than the truth, which is neither left nor right.” The claim that truth is somewhere in the center has an Aristotelian rhetorical appeal. And it trades on the conceit that people on the left and right are ideologues. But people of the religious right believe that they are following God’s will; so too with people on the religious left. The claim that God’s truth is in the center might be correct, but it is by no means obvious.
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2010/02/is-god-a-political-centrist.html
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Absolute truth is neither Left nor Right, but perspectival and relative truths* in politics and econsomics, as elsewhere, which is all we are fitted by nature or God to possess as human beings, can be discovered in various sections of Mirabeau's "geography of the assembly," and there's nothing that precludes the more important and urgent truths being found, as I and others believe, predominantly on the Left, at least in our time and place. Furthermore, the extent to which I identify myself as a Marxist does not rule out the fact that I can learn "truths" of a kind from, say, Edmund Burke or Confucius. For me, at any rate, "the Right" over the last several hundred years is virtually synonymous with what Albert Hirschman famously described as (in the title of his book) The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy (1991). The "truths" of contemporary conservatism are analyzed with clarity and wit in Ted Honderich's Conservatism: Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair? (2005 ed.).
*On what I mean by perspectival and relative truths, please see, first, here: http://ratiojuris.blogspot.com/2009/09/jaina-propaedeutic-for-metaphysical.html
and then, here: http://ratiojuris.blogspot.com/2009/09/facts-values-truth-objectivity_22.html