When I think of the arguments for my political opinions
(I’ll not aggrandize them by calling them beliefs), they often run like this:
people have moral weight, therefore its not good to harm them, or through
inaction allow them to come to harm (apologies to Asimov). So now we’re
committed to helping others, and so we debate the best way to do that, the best
way to for it, and so on.
For example: we aren’t OK with people dying in the streets
because they can’t afford healthcare. So we (as a society) will guarantee that
doesn’t happen by some mechanism. But somebody has to pay for that mechanism. I
think the best (or perhaps it would be better to say, the best politically
feasible and sustainable) way to do that is through single-payer healthcare. But
it is more important to me that the problem is solved than that problem is
solved in the best possible way. So while we might disagree about the
appropriate mechanism, about how pays and how, but we recognize that there is a
problem caused by our moral commitments to other human beings, and we desire to
solve that problem in some way.
But when I interrogate this argument I notice a stumbling
block, which has, as I have grown older, seemed less like the exotic cruelty of
the sociopath and more the ordinary cruelty that Americans swim in. If I say
“Its not right to just let people die in the streets of some ordinary illness,
just because they haven’t got any money”, how many will say “Why not? I do not
know these people, they are not me, or my kin, why should I care?”. That
response chills me and leaves me dumbfounded. And perhaps after some flailing
argumentation, I will retreat into a long silence.
Because I do not have a good answer to that question. “Why
should I care about other people?”. I cannot explain it. Those with whom I have
political disagreements who do not think, cannot think to ask that question,
who do not see empathy and compassion as self-evident, I cannot disagree with
them about ways and means of attaining goals. I disagree with them about
beginnings and ends. To my mind, a person who simply does not care about other people, who cannot even muster up some
feeble excuse for their cruel indifference, such a person is simply a bad
person.
And all of this troubles me greatly, because it is hard to
square the common (in certain influential circles) refrain for bipartisanship
and compromise, that there are two (morally defensible) sides to every
argument, the popular belief among the apolitical that the truth always lies
between two extremes, and that political virtue involves giving all sides
weight, with the belief, even the knowledge that some of my political opponents
are simply bad people. This is
difficult for the apolitical and those who participate in politics while
disdaining it. Their minds rebel against the notion. This denial of the plain
facts is as much a barrier to reform and progress, to the concrete improvement
of the world, than the indifference of the cold-hearted to the suffering of
others.
Edmund Burke, that famous conservative, one said “All that
is required for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing”. I do not think
the apolitical are bad people. I am sure that in their private lives they are
by large as kind and decent as other folk, perhaps more so. But I think they
are very inclined to do nothing.
