Ron Coleman Has an Epiphany: We Live in Different Moral Universes, and We Are No Longer Even Close to Being One People
I guess I had an epiphany. It is funny how we think we're "based now," but are, really, still stuck in old mindsets.
On the way to my new office I drive past the office of a relative whose law office I once worked in as an intern, many years ago. He was kind and generous.
Though we never grew close, I was always grateful for his early guidance and exposure to law practice. He is pretty successful. We have lived nearby, and stay in touch a bit.
But politics... politics, like sex, changes everything.
He is a committed Clintonite.
And as my public persona has become more and more political in recent years, we have clashed.
I have tried to avoid personal conflict with him, but above all I have been astonished at his intellectual dishonesty about the people and causes he supports.
And what I am often trying to do is justify myself, show him his attacks on my views (say, on Facebook, where they are mostly likely to be found) are based on mistaken premises, etc.
I always liked him. But now I am driving by his office regularly, and I don't stop in.
And I thought about this, and another relationship came to mind - one with a former college professor of mine whom I respect and like a lot. He is a liberal, too, but he is also fighting an important public cultural fight against a particularly ugly LW myth that is about.
We recently renewed our relationship when Mrs. C picked up his book on this topic, and we attended a public lecture of his nearby, and it was really very pleasant.
(This is why you go to the great universities, by the way.)
And we started corresponding.
And I should have known trouble was brewing because at this lecture, involving a topic in American history, there was a Q&A session, and inevitably Trump came up, and inevitably he reassured the audience that Trump was awful and deserved to be removed.
And we chalked this up to, well, the social milieu. He "has to say that." He even has to believe it.
Everyone can have his blind spots, and politics is, well, funny. After all, his generation was raised to believe that Nixon was the antichrist.
Nixon was not the antichrist.
But in the course of our correspondence about the culture war, in which we agreed about just about everything, the politics crept in, inevitably.
And rather than excerpt his comments, presumably meant to be private, let's just say what I hoped was not the case, is the case:
We do not live in the same moral universe.
This cannot be a matter of how we understand or perceive facts. The way people on the left describe facts is a manifestation of an outlook that is a set of choices.
These choices are not defensible any more, if they ever were.
And I was writing in this mode of trying to find common ground - and to his credit, he was, too... except that his "factual" premises (merely political conclusions) were just absurd. They were no more reasonable or measured, in and of themselves, than a Twitter exchange.
Although, again, the tone was, and this is not for nothing.
And I thanked him for this thoughts, and promised I would write back.
I have not written back.
I guess am tired of doing the work with ... these people.
"These people" who I like, as people. Who have been generous to me, who have extended themselves personally, who are humane and generous... but in the hyper-politicized world we all live in, it is I who have to prove to them, constantly, that no, I'm still ok!
I am certainly not going to go out of my way to antagonize "these people." I at least owe them that much.
But I guess I am tired of going out of my way to assuage them, reassure them, be the moderate one, pretend to think their takes could be reasonable.
To pretend.
Why I am pretending to tolerate people who believe I am in league with Literal Nazis and that in supporting Trump I am supporting, as another academic I have known for years said of him on Facebook, "the worst person who ever lived"?
He has tenure, and he wrote this publicly.
You can't go home again.
I don't know if I can ever stop in at that office halfway between my home and my work where I had my summer internship 35 years ago. I like my dad's cousin, because I like most people.
But I do not respect him. He does not respect me.
Is this a proper epiphany, though? Should we be as Marxists and indeed politicize everything and every relationship, even when there are common and human reasons to want to maintain them?
Or is it just rational to avoid inevitable conflict and inevitable retreat?
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