Politics, politick, Ayn Rand and vicious pricks...

With the upcoming presidential election, I have begun to get political again. I generally consider myself apolitical, preferring the curve of "a ballet dancer's leg" or a new film to the uninteresting infotainment, or propagandistic drivel that passes for news. Yet, as many pundits have noted, election years force people to define themselves and learn to clearly articulate what they truly believe. For me, this process has been a gradually evolving one which began when I was an adolescent.

My African-American grandparents, who lovingly raised me and whose values and ideas have shaped me more than those of anyone else, were both simultaneously New-Deal Democrats, altruists, and avowed individualists. Having lived through the Depression and Roosevelt's ostensible American Renaissance, they were convinced of the notion that government could be a force for good, and that America was the world's savior, a conviction which I accepted for most of my childhood and early adolescence. 

My parents were on opposing sides of the political spectrum. My mother had been a Black Panther in the 70's, but married my father (a Conservative-leaning,  Irish-Catholic) and thus left her party. 
As I had been an artsy kid with a hatred of authority, in high school my closest friends were far-left anarchists and some of their convictions certainly left (pardon the pun) their impact on me. Still, I felt as if none of these influences in particular seemed thoroughly thought out or in any way well articulated.

My wife and her family--Soviet Jews who escaped the Iron Curtain and fled to Israel--are Zionist moderates. Having experienced antisemitism and the failures of socialism firsthand, they believe wholeheartedly in the necessity of a Jewish state and in free markets--yet they are socially very liberal. Their views are very well thought out and have been relayed to me quite frequently, although I sometimes feel their insistence on Zionism to be more emotional than intellectual.

Originally, I fell in love with Judaism through a love for Israel: Israeli music and food being a kaleidoscope of cultures, the land haunted with history, and the gorgeous, beach-drenched people. Zionism became important to me, but I doubted the necessity of nation states. Jews needed a state because otherwise they would be in danger. I am not sure that I believe this anymore. After all, does any people really need its own state in the cosmopolitan West of which we are a part?

My blog is called "Platonic Blues." This is largely rooted in the influence of my undergraduate philosophy professor and mentor, Paul Guay, who is an avowed transcendentalist and Platonist and has influenced much of my own religious thought. "Blues" was added for aesthetic reasons--my favorite color juxtaposed with my years as a professional blues guitarist. However, my admiration for Plato stops in the political realm. Despite a love of Ezra Pound, I find the notion of a philosopher-king or any other lapse into fascism morally repulsive.

As I grow older, my own politics have become increasingly based in a conviction that politics, government, and any central authority are ineffective means in and of themselves because of the shortcomings of egoistic human beings. I have been asked as to why I am not a Marxist by leftist friends (a school of thought with which I was for a time somewhat enamored, but more so by the Bakunin, anarchist-left), to which my answer is simple--Marx advocates a change of the human spirit enabled by a new Communist order; although he was supposedly an atheist, this view betrays a religious and clearly messianic view of the world which I don't share. Collectivism only works if it begins in the human heart. 

I am firstly an individualist. We should all aspire toward the cultivation of virtue and altruism--this is the very meaning of existence and the state/action of eudaimonia of which Plato and Aristotle spoke so much; however, government cannot force us to be virtuous and any attempt to do so will lead to virtue's opposite--depravity, greed, and violence.

Hence, I am a libertarian. Despite a number of issues on which he and I disagree (abortion and immigration, to name two), and much to the dismay of many of my spiritual teachers, I supported Ron Paul's campaign both this year and in 2007. When he doesn't receive the Republican nomination :), I will gladly cast my ballot for Gary Johnson. However, I am not a Randian objectivist nor a Rothbardian market anarchist. I model my own libertarianism after my fellow progressive, spiritually-minded, non-conformist New Englander, Henry David Thoreau, who first said "that government is best which governs least." Thoreau was critical of both all forms of authority and materialism and wanted to be left alone in order to cultivate virtue.

Personally, I believe that you should by all means be voluntarily cultivating altruism and compassion for others through awareness of the unity of all, but in the meantime, you have the right to do whatever you want, whenever you want, with your person and property in absolute liberty--as long as your pursuit of happiness does not impinge on the liberty of others. Only after a given individual perpetrates an unprovoked act of violence does he or she relinquish that liberty. Liberty only exists in the relationship between individuals with others. A man on a deserted island is by definition free, yet he does not enjoy liberty. In my view, political, social, and religious liberty are the necessary prerequisites of existential liberation.

And where does government fit into this? Government has overstepped and continues to overstep its bounds. Government officials think they know best how an individual should live his life. And, much like government cannot force a person to be virtuous, religious coercion cannot liberate an individual from his ego; this must be a voluntary decision. In my opinion, much of Ayn Rand's anti-religious vitriol stems from a reductive view of religion and the belief that it is coercive and irrational. If I misunderstood religion as much as most atheists--and unfortunately, the majority of herd-mentality theists--I might share her critique.

Yet, reason only knows that which it is able to comprehend and if religion--or art--were merely ethical or rational, I wouldn't be interested in either. Rand tacitly concedes this in the Romantic emotionalism of her novels, but never grants it to her philosophy. No, religion and art represent a complex map of symbols that leads to personal revelation and transcendence. Rand couldn't make her peace with this and her near deification of reason (or "Reason") in itself betrays a bit of a religious view--in the sense that I understand it.

So, where do markets and capitalism come into my worldview? Isn't such a system oppressive and encouraging of egoism--which all religions rightfully claim must be negated or transcended as it doesn't truly exist--and superficiality? Well, yes. However, unlike in a government-led regime in which a citizen has no choice but to join the collective or face the consequence of violence, in a capitalist, Democratic system a person can always choose not to patronize unethical or simply poor quality businesses like McDonald's or Walmart, as I do, and consume (or not consume) based on his or her values. In a political system with few choices, perhaps our power as consumers and producers is the only real power we have to affect the world in which we live; and choosing to minimize either pursuit is also a legitimate choice.