Locke’s great innovation was the idea of an implicit social
contract, based on inherent natural rights, whereby free individuals agree to constrain
the individual AND the state, by restricting individuals’ freedom to
dominate each other and restricting the state’s freedom to dominate
individuals.
… the common good cannot be divined objectively or
authoritatively by any one person or faction.
It must be constantly negotiated.
Jonathan
Rauch, Cross Purposes (Yale University Press)
________________________
It’s like a dance
This life
You can do it all by yourself
Making it up as you go along
No rules or constraints,
Just freedom!
But sometimes, most times
We do not dance alone
Like it or not, there are others
People like us, doing the same dance
People not like us
Different, sometimes incompatible
We must work together because we occupy the same space
the same homes, towns, states, and country
And yes world
We need each other
It seems
Left, right
Liberal, conservative
Secular and religious
Paul, in talking about that community we call the church
Said we are radically connected
Like the parts of a body
And the parts must work together
And value one another
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!”
And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”
Like it or not, we are interconnected
Even when we pretend as if we aren’t
Even when we sit on the poles of the political
Ideological or
Religious spectrum
We need each other
Too often, we pretend that we don’t
The liberals and progressives go rushing off
Leaving behind, rejecting
Too many things that are embraced by the other side
And become vague
The conservatives, in return, reject everything from
The libs and becoming fortified and closed
hard
And so here we are
And the question is this.
If we need each other
What is it that the liberals have that the conservatives
need
And what do the conservatives have that the liberals need
For without connection, balance and diversity are lost.
Liberal secularism and liberal faith have strong values
Tolerance, equality, and justice
We need those values,
But we need structures that maintain them and sustain them
And those values need to be rooted in something
Deeper than pragmatic idealism
Without the compassion and love of diversity from the left
(Yeah, I know, a paradox)
The right, even in the form of the church, becomes “a
divisive, fearful,
partisan, un-Christlike version of Christianity’
a cult of control and domination
Without the anchoring provided by the more conservative
Liberalism destroys the institutions and norms we need
Religion, faith, traditional values (the healthy ones)
Get eaten up in the cult of individualism
Liberalism destroys the structures and resources that
It cannot replenish.
The center cannot hold
Patrick Deneen declares: ‘Liberalism has failed – not
because it fell short.
But because it was true to itself. It has failed because it succeeded.” Ouch!
Conservatism loses its heart.
So what do we do?
Where do we go
Neither side seems willing to accept what is valuable
From the other
Both are locked down.
We have often heard of the middle way, or the third way
Perhaps that is what we need
We rebel against this
It feels like compromise and failure
It feels like enabling
But we cannot exist if we are living at the poles
Two vicious extremes
Cut off from one another
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you!”
And the head cannot say to the feet, “I don’t need you!”
We work best when we are part of each other
When we make a connection that creates balance
For in that balance
We find some limits and boundaries
Mostly in place to limit things like power and retribution
And sustain things such as justice,
And we find a freedom that allows us to change, grow, and
adapt
The freedom to love
and (above all) accept and embrace diversity
This is hard to live into
I know I have not yet
Found the ability to live in the abyss between the extremes
But it seems like a goal worth thinking about
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