How are we to make sense of the awesome task of governing a nation like the USA? How to balance the often-competing interests of differing viewpoints, premises, and goals? How do we decide which arguments are legitimate or illegitimate?
Or, is that even the right question? In a representative democracy, a government of the people (by the people, for the people), i’m not sure we should concern ourselves with legitimacy of arguments, but rather a more simplistic formulation – truth, as in “is this true or not?”
Truth. That’s the starting point. If something is true, we shouldn’t care how the argument came about, or who first advanced it. Ideas matter. Labels don’t.
Sure, the Truth formulation merely begs the question of what is true. But that is what grown-ups do – sift through the competing assertions of truth, and make grown-up judgments about how we should govern ourselves, based on our best approximations of the “right thing”. If you disagree with my notion of truth, tell me why my truth is wrong, but don’t tell me that my truth is not allowed in the debate.
So drive a stake through the notion that religious-oriented political viewpoints are out of bounds in America. Arguments that all political viewpoints should be secular are supremely wrong-headed, and show a profound lack of understanding of American Government, of people in general, and of religious people specifically.
For how do we make those grown-up judgments about truth, without utilizing our own understandings of the world? If my understanding of the world is based on a belief that God exists, how can i NOT incorporate that into my ideas of truth? Anything less would be incoherent.
Taking this more specifically into the political realm today, if i believe that God created marriage to mean a certain thing, then i MUST use that as my starting point in deciding how to structure our society.
Notice that i have used the phrase “starting point” twice now. What else is there, besides truth? Surely a governing philosophy cannot be a simple translation of my understanding of truth in our laws. How do we grown-ups come together and properly sift through our differing truth formulations?
One way is majority rule, a core essence of our sort of government. While surely majority rule is prone to abuses, it is still a very simple idea – majority rule is better than minority rule.
Truth and majority rule. What else do we need? We need ways to protect those with minority viewpoints from abuse of themajority viewpoints. But wait, doesn’t that contradict our 2nd ingredient? On the contrary, our 3rd ingredient works in necessary concert with the 2nd. To be frank, democracy government creates “losers” – those in the minority on an issue, typically. No government can be stable if such losers are permanent, or feel so. The current American system does a decent job on this, with its checked-and-balanced branches, frequent elections, and free speech dogma.
But it still seems like something’s missing. Our dish needs more kneading, perhaps more flavoring. A liberal dash of pragmatism will do the trick, again for the sake of stability.
Take divorce as an example. A majority may believe it to be frequently morally wrong, but that does not necessarily mean that those same folks have to conclude that it should be legally wrong. While perfectly legitimate to conflate morality and law, it is not always required, either by God or this governing philosophy.
How do we decide when to conflate, and when not to? Ah, now we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty for American believers. This is the hard stuff, where we earn our chef’s hat. I’ll need to let this cook for a while. To be continued…
