Bears will be bears

I read an article in the local paper today about a woman who was killed by a bear she had cared for for years. She was feeding the bear when it turned on her, mauled her, and killed her. Forgetting that the bear might have been sore about being kept in a small cage for years on end, one would ask "Why would a bear kill the person who feeds him?"
The answer is, of course, because bears are -- when you get right down to it -- bears. You can train a bear to balance a ball on its nose, but when the conditions are right, a bear acts like a bear.
From the bear story, I turned to the editorial page and found Jack Krugman rubbing his hands in glee and taking it to conservatives over what he calls "The politics of spite." I knew without reading the story what it was about. We lost the bid for the Olympic Games in spite (because of?) President Obama's efforts. Krugman was blasting Limbaugh et al for gloating.
Let's put aside the obvious fact that Krugman was practicing the very thing he was decrying, and think about bears for a moment.
Liberals will be liberals. Conservatives will be conservative. But being a Liberal today doesn't make one liberal (Note the upper case). Being a Conservative doesn't make one conservative. Liberals are just as pinch-face and purse-mouth as conservatives, and Conservatives are just as prune-face and pucker-mouth as liberals.
It's not about positions. It's about nailing the other guy. It's about getting your kicks by kicking the other side.
Even bears know better than that.

On left and right

When I first set up this blog, I assumed that political stances were a spectrum, with Liberal on one side and Conservative on the other. I had further assumed that I tended to slide back and forth on this spectrum, now little pink, now baby blue, now and then no color at all.
I've come to question this. It is, after all, a very one-dimensional way of looking at things.
There's a classic treatise called Flatland, that discusses, among other things, how the world must look to two-dimensional beings. They can see left and right, but not over. Wonderful discussion, and I think it might apply to political thought.
How, for instance, can I be at the same time an environmentalist and a hunter? A conservative who wants universal health care? A man who understands why fundamentalists do the things they do but would waste the whole tribe anyway?
I have a friend who believes the earth is 6000 years old. We go outside and see clearly, the striations in the landscape, the buckling of the earth, the eons-old erosion patterns, the seashells at 7000 feet. What about them? A cosmic quiz; God did it to test our faith.
If I'm liberal, I see things as a liberal sees them, in one dimension (ditto conservative, of course).
I think in order to see things straight, we need to see them widely, rather than narrowly.

Born again liberal

Steven Pinker (whom I greatly admire) indicates in his book How the Mind Works that many of our mental stances are inborn, including whether one is liberal or conservative.
Let's for a moment accept this as a working hypothesis. Now, it's clear that one isn't born with genes for liberalism, so it has to be something else, something that is not liberal or conservative but which leads in one direction or the other. I'd think it is a way of looking at the world. I've long since decided that the fundamental difference between liberals and conservatives is their attitude toward the present. The conservatives like things the way they are (or were), and the liberals think we need to change things.
If this is so, then the whole reason for the vicious fighting between the two thought patterns comes down to the fact that liberals are born to view the world as imperfect and conservatives are born to view the world as fine the way it is.
Now, as with all things genetic, mental, and what have you, there is a caveat necessary. What our genes give is, in many cases, is not an absolute, overwhelming mandate (You must be a conservative), but a tendency. So, we could say that some people are born to tend toward liberalism, others are born to tend toward conservatism.
Since I am somewhat of a biological determinist, this makes lots of sense to me. It also makes it easier to forgive my liberal friends, and gives me reason to doubt both ends of the spectrum.
And, darn it, the half full/half empty glass metaphor is so after all.

Looking forwards and backwards, and sideways

I think I've given my contention that conservatives worship a past that never was and liberals worship a future that will never be. One of the consequences of these views is in how we view contemporary events, say race relations or gender equity. The liberal seems to always be saying, "Look how far we have to go," and the conservative seems to be always saying, "Look how far we have come." Liberals come off sounding petulant and conservatives come off sounding smug. A larger problem is that, because the two groups are looking past each other, they have trouble speaking to each other. Each side thinks, "How can those bozos be so mistaken about the nature of things?" Because we tend to concentrate on how other opinions differ from ours, we tend to lose sight of some pertinent facts. For one thing, we lose sight of the fact that conservatives are by and large people of good will. We lose sight of the fact that liberals are by and large people of good will. I think I could cheerfully put up with the fact that I am a foot dragger (conservative) or impatient (liberal) if I knew my compatriots across the spectrum appreciated that I actually want pretty much the same things that they want.

Reactions

One of the tenets I believe is that liberals and conservatives have built-in approaches to problems, which usually results in something that doesn't work.
Two examples. First is the emergency preparedness plan my university is developing. It's billed as a plan for almost anything, but it's really what the university will do if someone comes onto campus and starts shooting up the joint. The liberal approach (which the university is taking) is to let the authorities handle it. It's a complex early-warning and communication system that cannot possibly work. Suppose Joe Nutcase walks into a classroom with a Glock 9mm and four extra clips. It would be about a minute before anyone in the building would know what was happening, another minute to get the news out, and maybe (at best) five minutes before the cops come. By then it's all over. Try it. Walk around your living room for a minute pointing your finger and going "bang." You can kill a lot of knicknacks in a minute.
How would conservatives respond? By putting an armed guard in the hall, or a man with a doberman patrolling the hall, gun at the ready. Would this work? There are two possibilities: yes (but probably not), in which case we've got a police state, or no (probably) because Joe Nutcase will simply target the cop first.
The other example is the mess we are in with money. The university has to cut a zillion dollars from its budget RIGHT NOW, and plans to do so by cutting everybody's salary by a little. This is the liberal option: punish everybody a little. The conservative option would be to save most of us and sacrifice a few-- just get rid of 'em.
Quite frankly, I don't like either option in either case.

Snobs

There are all sorts of snobs in the world. I may have mentioned this before. There are coffee snobs, tea snobs, wine snobs, literature snobs (oh yeah!), cycling snobs and recycling snobs, canoeing snobs and kayaking snobs, sailing snobs and motorboat snobs, car snobs and anti-car snobs.
Snobs all have a couple of things in common. The first is that they possess some special knowledge about whatever they are snobbing, something that sets them apart from the others in their particular arena. Sail snobs are aware of the subtle differences between "true" sailboats, which have fixed keels, and the sailboats of hoi polloi, which have swing keels. A good coffee snob is aware not only of the secret of fresh grinding beans in a stone grinder, but of using a French press so that the oils are not trapped in the filter and lost.
The second thing that snobs have is the assurance that their knowledge makes them better than the others. I see a person sailing in a ####### sailboat, and know that this person is not a real sailor, and I can sit back comfortably and bask in my superior status.
Because it's an election year, the political snobs are coming out into the sunlight, far from their smokey rooms. Conservative and liberal alike, they cherish their special knowledge. Liberals know that they, and only they, possess true charity. They are the party of forgiveness, of understanding, and it makes them righteous as all get out, and insufferable to boot.
Conservatives on the other hand, cherish the knowledge that they are the true realists, the savvy thinkers. They are the party of logic, of business, of hard decisions, and it makes them righteous as all get out, and insufferable to boot.
The problem for me is that, while I can see a case for compassion, and I can see a case for hard decisions, I don't really like the people advocating either. Sigh