Mike Suggestion: Polyticks

As with almost every major decision you'll make in your life I feel that your political affiliation should be, at it's root, the result of your basic world-view- of the basic assumptions that guide who you are, not pure practicality or what your party your parents were in (or weren't in) etc. This I don't think is too controversial, but what people seem to get confused about is this modern idea of philosophy being impractical. Philosophizing is used more and more as a synonym for "doing nothing" or just dicking around. People laugh at philosophy majors. The irony is that philosophy is the most practical endeavor you can engage in.

You have to determine what you should be doing before you can choose what to do and the reason most people don't care for philosophy is that theirs, however vague and wrong they might be, is pretty settled. Earning money is what they should do. Having wealth and a career is what they should do. And so, naturally, because they already have these built in assumptions, of the innate good of wealth, work, and health, they have no need for philosophy. They don't realize that there must be assumptions, important ones, before you can form a world-view, and that making sense of the world should be our top priority. It is as if we all woke up in a room, locked in, completely naked with a couple 12 packs, wearing nothing but party hats. And everyone instantly decides, "Well clearly we have to have an orgy and drink mad beerz". When, yes, those are thing you could do, but nowhere is it implied that that is anymore what you are supposed to do than say, spend your entire time finding a way out of the room.

The problem the latter train of thought entails is that intention "i.e. that we should do something" means that a will outside of our own has become involved and this was C.S. Lewis's proof of God in his very famous Mere Christianity. That we have a purpose at all, seems to me at least, to basically entail this concept of an will behind the universe, a neccesary God. The modern world's solution is generally to ignore this implication or, when it's arm is twisted, to simply throw up it's hands and declare everything meaningless. I can't say I know which is right, but rather the attitude behind most of modern philosophy is what I have the most problems with. I don't quite want to get into that, I just wanted to show the types of problems we encounter when really thinking about ourselves and how the most basic questions like "What can we know?" which sound like boring sophistry, are in fact incredibly vital to forming any kind of coherent direction to ones world.

Anyway, my rant thus far has probably seemed very unhelpful to giving any information to Mike on how I picked the Republican Party. To be more direct about it I would say a big factor is that I see the vaguely defined "right" in America as the only side with some sense of moral coherency. What I mean by this is the sense I see in Constitutional originalism, most Christian morality and the ideals of rights and responsibility intended as the basis of our country.

I'll try to explain one of these and maybe in the process hint at why all of them matter. Constitutional orginalism is a constitutional philosophy in opposition to the very, very corny concept of a "Living Document" which is what the more liberal side of America tends to advocate. A living constitution basically means that the constitution should be allowed to be interpreted by each generation on it's own terms, that what the founding fathers meant to right could be used sometimes maybe for figuring out what some part of the document says about such and such, but overall it's up to the people alive now to go with what they think is best. This is somewhat similar to Protestant ideas of "common-sense" interpretation of the Bible. Both are quite clumsy. Originalism, in comparison, of course recognizes the need for Supreme Court justices to be the judges and interpreters of the Constitution, but the entire purpose of that interpretation is to figure out what exactly the writers and signers of the document intended when they wrote it. It does not matter to originalists what a certain word might mean to us now, or which way an interpretation might be more popular to the American people, what matters is what was the intention of the founders as best we can understand it. The reason this makes so much more sense is hard to explain but it's very solid. If you think about what the "Living Constitution" theory would really mean, it makes the constitution almost transparent, it becomes a tool for Supreme Court justices to apply their own beliefs instead of doing their honest best to figure out what the beliefs of the writers were. You would know a good Supreme Court justice if they said something like "Man, I wish we had this right, but in the Constitution it pretty clearly says we don't so I definitely have to vote against it." A more liberal justice never has to say this.

I'll give one more example of my thinking and then let you go bewildered as to how this answers Mike's inquiry at all. G.K. Chesterton explains it perfectly in a book he wrote about traveling to America (he was, of course, a Briton)

"America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. That creed is set forth with dogmatic and even theological lucidity in the Declaration of Independence; perhaps the only piece of practical politics that is also theoretical politics and also great literature. It enunciates that all men are equal in their claim to justice, that governments exist to give them that justice, and that their authority is for that reason just. It certainly does condemn anarchism. and it does also by inference condemn atheism, since it clearly names the Creator as the ultimate authority from whom these equal rights are derived."

Now, the best way I can explain what matters in this statement, in relation to modern politics, would be to say that the Left talks the most about rights and the Right talks the most about God. But you get the feeling the Left would quickly leave out talking about God as long as the rights were left in. Yet without a Creator granting such rights the only logical place they could come from is the state and once that becomes the understanding...God help us. I have heard many people my age talk as if the latter is already the case. Some friends even, Gary in particular (bragghh) would seem to believe that the state does indeed grant our rights. And even if that isn't extremely untrue and dangerous thinking as I believe it is, it is at the very least, demonstrably Un-American.