The Empty Minds of the Political Elite

Senator Trent Lott must have been trying to make some point when he illustrated immigration issues with his troubles in keeping his goats on his property, but no one is quite sure what it is. The honours committee that selected Salmon Rushdie for knighthood claims to be startled that the selection of Salmon Rushdie caused a furore in the Islamic world. There is of course the well known lack of subtly and depth in U.S. president George W. Bush or the socialist French President candidate Ségolène Royal, who was luckily defeated, but still got 47% of the vote. Utter cluelessness transcends nation and political philosophy in Western nations. Why?

The ability to think about political issues is intimately related to the ability to think about moral issues. Morality addresses the question of how we are live together in a shared world. Sadly we are not taught to think about morality. Instead, we learn the morality consist of simple rules. On the left, we have "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten" by Fulghum and such feel good rot. On the right, we have simple-mindedness posing as intellectual depth in discussion of "objective morality". Let's pause for a second on the "intellectually deep" right talk about objective morality. Objective morality is the idea that morality consists of the simple minded application of a small set of rules without any consideration of context. It sounds intellectually to me. In discourse, the right loves to criticize the left for having a relative morality, yet leftist "anti-racism" is as objective as morality gets. Furthermore, the right does think about moral context, except when it doesn't. It depends on the context. We are lucky that the right gets over it objective morality insanity that killing anything homo sapien--even fetuses--when it comes to war.

Instead, of simple mindedness, we need honest conversation about morality so we can have honest political conversation. Of course, part of this is simply get over simple minded hatefulness like assuming that either George Bush or Hilary Clinton are wrong about everything. (I do believe both are wrong about almost everything, but I'm aware of how hard it is to be right.)

For us to have serious political conversation where we address the many complex facets around each issues, in which we admit that have to compromise and that some bad as will as some good will come out of the compromise, we need to start by learning to talk about morality. We should teach logical argumentation about morality in our high school literature classes. Most literature has serious moral components and people can learn to enjoy talking about them. Obviously, high school students will come to many bad answers, but once they learn to think about the questions, they can do a better job as they age. It will take a long time for this program to change society, but the empty headedness of our political elite suggests we can only go up.