Philosophy in Tights

Before I begin, let me state clearly for the record, that I spent a good portion of my meaningful brain time today pouring over Chapter 5 of Andrew Sullivan's "The Conservative Soul", which is a deeply spiritual, moving, thought-provoking, philosophically challenging and meaningful chapters of a book I've ever read...so please keep that in mind when I relate the following...ok?

Tonight I totally got my inner-fanboy geekdom charged while watching the episode "Justice" of Smallville.
It's the episode that aired (and I missed) while we were flying down to the States. It involves, essentially, the unspoken creation of the Justice League with Green Arrow, Cyborg, Flash, and Aquaman teaming up with Clark. It also has references to Lex starting the Legion of Doom.
Yes I'm a completely Justice League (old school) geek. I actually never really read comic books as a kid, but I loved the Superfriends cartoon especially the years they battled the LoD. Yes, this is why I'm a 38 year-old loser...because there are moments when I'm completely 14 again.

However, you try to digest the following passage from Conservative Soul and tell me you wouldn't need some mindless play:

"This is what time is....it is the universe in which practical life has to occur. One thing leads to another, and every moment presents us with choices of how to act and what to do. Yes, there are constraints; the historically contingent pattern you are born into; the genetic lottery; the hazards of physical life. But in the end, practical life does not relent in offering every individual a constant array of choices, trivial and profound, that she has to make. Even not making a decision is a decision."

Sullivan spends a great amount of time in this chapter on his intellectual hero, Oakeshott, and I have to confess there are times Oakeshott goes right over my head. But I think I pluck enough of it out to understand the idea of 'the conservatism of doubt'. After all it is that 'conservatism of doubt' that I believe infuses the Constitution to which I basically have pledged my life to study. Where Sullivan and Oakeshott make the grandest point is in critiquing both the secular and religious fundamentalism that imperils truly free societies. Both the religious (what Sullivan calls "Christianism", the sort of James Dobson-Pat Robertson brand of fundamentalist evangelicalism) and secular (Marxism as the prime example) are both 'fundamentalist' in nature because they believe (preach, portend) some type on inevitable, pre-determined outcome. To the religious fundamentalist it is the End of Days, or final judgment of some kind where good ultimately prevails over evil; to the secular fundamentalist it is the inevitable progress of a society to its pure state (for Marx through the struggle of the working classes).

If one strips away the veneer of religious or political themes, the two ideas are clearly the same- both posit an endgame where the right side is triumphant.

I've read so much in the last year that critizes the 'neo-conservative' ideology, namely that it sets up a black and white world. Of course it does, and it is perhaps the greatest weakness of the Bush Administation that it does. Ask yourself how many times you've heard (or maybe even felt yourself) the derision at Bush's 'you're with us or against us' speech.

But then look deeply at say the environmental activist who says "If you aren't part of the solution, you are part of the problem". Where is there a difference in the rhetoric? None.

The 'fundamentalist' mindset is "there is only one answer and this is it" and thus, if you don't accept it you obviously are flawed.

What Sullivan argues is that a conservative (a true conservative in the small 'c' broader philosophical definition) believes the answers are unknowable, and what is more, that it is ultimately okay that the answers are unknowable. The true conservative does not say one should not seek the answers, only that the journey is more important than the destination. [Conservatism meets Buddhism, perhaps]

To the fundamentalist, the journey doesn't matter in so long as it ultimately arrives at the destination- thus ends justify means. On the surface this doesn't sound like the religious fundamentalism you might have pictured in your mind because their doctrine concerns itself, it seems, with nothing BUT the means. However the means are actually just points of control. Control is needed because the individual is otherwise doomed, because they are powerless in the battle between good and evil (God and the Devil, or in the case of the secular fundamentalist greed and charity, dystopia and utopia, commerce and art etc.)

I am philosiphically a pragmatist. Pragmatism is often passed off as a milquetoast response to harsh decisions, but this is a false impression. What the pragmatist sees is that absolutism is the devil's plaything. A pragmatist does NOT believe there is no 'truth' only that the 'truth' is unknowable and completely subjective. Pragmatism is a search for empiricism and practicality. Unlike the fundamentalist who is only concerned with a pre-determined outcome whose means are largely irrelevant, the pragmatist believes that both the means AND the end are important and that both require choices that involve value judgments based on the sum of knowledge to that given point.

Whereas the fundamentalist sees the human mind as an agent of potential downfall that must be controlled lest 'sin' or 'doubt' creep in, the pragmatist sees the human mind as the ultimate salvation through its constant synthesis of time, history, evidence, and expermient. It is not exactly the Hegelian model of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, because I think a pragmatist would reject the idea of antithesis as a necessary ingredient. Antithesis to the pragmatist would likely be viewed as a possible (if not probable) result of empiricism.

So see...I did have stuff on my mind that did not involve the Justice League...though now I'm thinking that the very idea of the Justice League and the Legion of Doom as its natural antagonist isn't very much a fundamentalist worldview...hmm...

I should probably sleep now huh?