We do seem to be living in "interesting times" (or is this just an expression of my personal "contemporary historical significance bias"?).
Our civilization seems to be in the midst of a nervous breakdown in the early 21st century, what with 9/11, the IPCC, GHG emissions, LGBTIQ, BLM, CRT, Brexit, Trump, COVID19, Biden, Xi, Putin, J6, and the Insidious Acronym Plague (IAP).
Amongst other crazy ideas, personal identity has now become a big deal in our public domain. The former aspirational liberal ideal of racial, gender, ethic, disability and religious blindness as the way to live and interact in a fair and proper non-prejudiced way, has now been inverted by the prevalence of the confounding and contradictory idea that unless you demonstrably display preference and sympathy for certain specific, but seemingly ever changing, categories of people and opinions, you are evil, wrong and undeserving of an audience.
For many centuries there has been a confusing English royal motto: Honi soit qi mal y pense. This is an old French Norman maxim that, I am told, means evil be those who evil think there be. I interpret this jumble of words to be saying something like: if you think the State is doing evil then it is your thinking that is evil. This maxim does seem to have a conspicuous problem, because, if you apply it to itself, it appears to be saying that the maxim itself is evil. Evil be those who think that people are evil who think evil of the State. The point that the maxim seems to want to make is that we should cede that decision makers are trying to do their best for people even when they get it wrong or you disagree with them, so don't think evil of them. Now sure, this is self serving for those promulgating the idea (see crown immunity), but it does help us all most of the time to think the best of others. What seems to have happened recently is that this maxim has been turned upside down. We are now implored by our self appointed moral superiors to assume that authorities who make decisions we disagree with are are evil for deliberately suppressing those who they make decisions about. There's an emerging new maxim now potentially in the making: All those whose opinions we disagree with are evil. This type of thinking isn't likely to engender civility or confidence in and acceptance of the our system of government. Could this be one of the contributors to why we are experiencing so much more discord and division in Western society?
Some might say that this is the fruit of the emergent post-modern axiom that everything is relative and mostly self serving. Accordingly nearly any interested sentient being with access to the swirling mass of ideas now has easy licence to confidently form a view that all systems are bad, including the existing one, and therefore it should be undermined.
Churchill once said ... Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried... How can we communicate at large the idea that, yes, we know our government and justice system is sub-optimal, but liberal democracy, for all its faults, is better than all known alternatives? And it is better to live with this imperfect system than live in the greater chaos of doubt, inconsistency, capriciousness and injustice that comes from pursuing absolutism. Actively seeking to undermine this least worst form of society that we as humans have been able to conceive and deliver so far, is an own goal. I seem to recall that humans fought some horrific and barbarous wars at great cost last century, in order to establish this idea, and now we seem to be losing our grasp on it.
That ours is the least worst system that is available to us, may not be a very compelling message on its own. It's inherent complexity and nuance is there to be gamed by those seeking its downfall and their own advancement. We humans crave certainties and truth, so those who passionately sell us their various absolutisms have a big advantage over the noisy, messy, disputational melting pot of compromises and idealism that is the battle of ideas in a liberal democracy.
Liberal democracy does tend to foster differences, but in the process it gives us more opportunities to deliver better lives for most of humanity. Rather than further contributing to increasing partisan divisions by belittling our adversaries, wouldn't it be better to, amongst other things, more conspicuously celebrate our differences and uncertainties?
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