I’m thinking that people used to have a lot more time on their hands. Then again, there used to be a lot fewer people so it was not so hard to do some things for other folk and still have time to do your own thing. Unless, of course, you worked in a woollen mill, in which case you probably didn’t have time for much of anything but keeping all of your appendages intact. Maybe you could give up a toe, and hopefully the small one. All you need that for is standing head to knee pose, which you probably wouldn’t be doing because if you work in a stinky hot woollen mill all day, you are not going to go to stinky hot yoga after.
Your also not going to spend a whole lot of time thinking about ideal political systems, but someone who is wearing a topcoat made from that wool you wove, someone who could afford that coat on a clerk’s salary because you wove the wool on a machine rather than by hand, is probably sitting in a coffee house while you are working and that guy is thinking about politics. That guy might be John Locke or Jean-Jacque Rousseau or, heaven forbid, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes would not be the one to choose to hang out with because Hobbes was a bummer. He did, however, could up with a pretty nifty idea: the social contract. Locke expanded on that idea to say that people (he probably used the term “men” and did it without meaning all people) made an agreement between themselves and their government to be governed in order to protect “life, liberty, and property.” Sounds familiar, don’t it? It sounded good to Rousseau, but there was a minor amendment he chose to suggest: that people enter into a social contract not because it is a logical step, but because it is a pragmatic or even emotional one. People form society because it works better to be in a group, or because they are, in the words of Reverend Al Green, “so tired of being alone.”
And so it is on, a great debate on why government exists and who it should serve. The radical thing to keep in mind, by the way, is that the question is asked at all. The prior assumption had been that the state, and its people, exist to serve the King. That’s before anyone had the time to sit around in coffee houses talking about it. Once they did start talking, you basically had to choose. Do you want a government that makes sense? or do you want a government that works? I know that the two are not mutually exclusive, but those are the lines along which, I would suggest, our notions of liberal and conservative have come to be drawn. Liberals want a pragmatic, compassionate government while conservatives would like a principled, restrained government. I totally get both and can be drawn both ways at the same time. I am, after all, a Gemini.
What I don’t get, however, is why the Republican party seems to have abandoned the standard of logical, principled debate that they once held. What I’m talking about, specifically, is the individual mandate for health insurance. It’s that thing the Supreme Court may well strike down tomorrow. It was a Republican idea. It was the Republican alternative to the Clinton health proposal. It was the plan Mitt Romney got passed in Massachusetts. It’s now a tool of the devil, apparently. Same is true of deficit financing of public stimulus, which did get passed under George W. Bush. Or we could talk about Cap and Trade, another Republican idea which a Democratic Party brought to the center by Bill Clinton offered to take up but was roundly rejected by Republicans for no reason that I can discern.
Not that my being able to discern the motivation of a political party is in any way a reliable barometer of the moral health of that party. I will say, however, that it is particularly disappointing to see a party once so rooted in bringing constancy, reliability, and order to the process and execution of government go so far in the contradiction of those values. The tactics of Atwater, Rove, and company have been so focused on winning that they have lost sight of all other goals. Now, to be honest, I am more prone to go the pragmatic/ compassionate route, but when I and mine come to the middle, I think it is only honorable, only reasonable that we be met there.