truth--maintained and pursued

For what it’s worth, it seems to me that we all find it difficult knowing where to come down on a myriad of issues. Some liberal types expend great amounts of energy standing for, well, nothing . . . except for “everyone’s right to an opinion.” To be honest, they come across as spineless individuals, who lack conviction and spend a lot of time advocating that everyone else follow suit. Often (though not always) they are proponents of “political correctness,” though they would, no doubt, deny the accusation. Whatever the “talking heads” proclaim, whatever is the “acceptable” thing to do, that’s where their monies and mouths are. They are opposed to anything that sound too much like universal truth, and they seem too often to come down on the opposite side of common sense. When you spend an inordinate amount of time defending the rights of potential terrorists and opposing the freedoms of seemingly good people, something is amiss. These “do-gooders” are the self-proclaimed defenders of the Constitution, who fear that too much of the Christian God is a bad thing for everyone. These liberal types are opposed to dogmatism . . . unless of course it relates to their pseudo-intellectual and elitist agendas.

Then, there are the conservatives. Many of them are convinced, or so it seems, that everything is “black and white” and that they are the final arbiters as to which is which. Conservatives want to conserve, and so they often do so in every moral, spiritual, and cultural way imaginable. Likewise, they approach much of life in a defensive manner, perceiving that nearly everything is a battle to be won. Just the other day, I was observing a conservative commentator who was interviewing a liberal about his (the liberal’s) book. The conservative said that he admired the man’s ability to work through hard times to accomplish many things. But–and this irritated me–he had to state, to clarify for everyone, that he, the conservative, disagreed with the liberal man on almost everything. The conservative said (at least two times) something like this: “Though I disagree with you on just about everything, one thing I do like about your book is that it gives people hope.” It was like the conservative couldn’t just pay the man a compliment. It was his duty, or so he thought, to make sure everyone was clear that he was not about to compromise his conservative principles. Apart from the fact that no semi-normal person would need such clarification, it came across as mean . . . or at least forced and, I guess, weird. You should know, as well, that this man is a conservative host with whom I very often agree, a good man who does a lot of good things. Still, I could not believe that he couldn’t simply say a few nice things about his counterpart without also waving the conservative flag. At any rate, this man portrayed what I sometimes see among conservatives, an agenda of we have it right and we are going to defend it to the end.

Is there a way ahead? Perhaps, but I don’t think it is necessarily in a “middle-of-the-road” agenda, a supposedly unbiased and independent philosophy. While we must be aware of biases, none of us can escape them completely, and while we should have an independent attitude, this does not mean that, at the end of the day, we should avoid everything conservative (or liberal). Indeed, I think one way to look at these matters is to recognize that we would be fools to suppress our intuitive (God given) sense that truth is accessible at some level. That is, there are some things that we simply should believe and defend. Our list may change or may need to be tweaked from time to time, but there is, I think, an inner impulse in human beings, a yearning for some measure of stability and certainty. While we can know nothing perfectly, we can know some things adequately. To the degree that we locate these, we should (humbly!) conserve them. Then again, there are many things about which people disagree. Some of these are philosophical and others practical or even stylistic. At the very least, I think we must be willing to admit that there is a lot that we could know better than we do. Ignorance and partial knowledge are a part of the human fabric. Thus, we simply need to remain open in our quest to understand.

Here, then, are my tentative suggestions. Some things really ought to be protected and conserved, while other things are either debatable or matters of personal preference. So, in any society, there will always be a conservative and a liberal component. The key, however, is to recognize that we have been endowed by our God with a capacity for both knowing and learning, both defending the truth and searching for it, both standing for what is right and yet remaining open to new insights, both resting in what God has spoken and following the One who speaks.