Are Two Heads Better Than One?
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of loans–and groans–and politics–
Of cabbages–and kings–
And why the sea is boiling hot–
And whether pigs have wings.”
When America was formed by the founding fathers, it was never intended to be run by politicians from a warring two party system. In fact, our first two presidents, particularly George Washington, abhorred the ideas of “party lines” and dividing the populace between those who supported states’ rights and those that favored the power of the federal government, or even between those that favored slavery over those that did not. First and foremost, we were all Americans, and that truth–in the minds of these great men–was the one and only factor a political party should ever concern itself with. Alas, we barely made it through a decade before it was clear such a wholesome, united vision of America’s future would be cleaved in two: the Federalists falling to one side (and soon to perish entirely) and the mighty Jeffersonian Republicans on the other. The rest is, as they say, history.
The question I propose now is thus: if the unified party structure was truly so deficient in its ability to represent the will of the people that we had to create a schism clean through to the foundation of our republic (i.e., down to the men who fought for it), why were the originators of this great and lasting (fingers crossed, right?) body politic so keen on sticking to it? Were they blinded by the discontent of the southern states — some of whom had gone begrudgingly into war with Britain when talk of independence first sprouted — who wanted nothing more than to keep to themselves and their cotton fields and large plantations, thank-you-very-much? Perhaps they simply shrugged off the complaints they heard over the taxes and tariffs from those states, knowing in their hearts that they were steering the country on the correct path — away from foreign wars and towards control of its own borders — and that the southerners, just like anyone else, could never truly be satisfied with any concession given to them. (The old story of giving a moose a muffin springs to mind.) But could these noble patriots really have the gall and audacity to give their compatriots the cold shoulder “for the good of the country”?
The answer, I think, is that they were, in fact, worried about the demands of the south and the dichotomy of life in the northern, industrial states versus that in the southern, rural states. With a nation so young, having just finished a war for its own independence, could the government withstand infighting much less appeasement of each and every embittered male landowner? No, I do not think so.
The situation is not so very different today. Our government must choose to punish some (the wealthy, the landowners, the elderly, and more importantly the auto industry), while aiding others (the union workers, the lower class, the unemployed, etc.) in what are ultimately small steps in a very large plan to salvage our economy, as well as our nation, from the perilous decline which has shaken the great powers of the world to their cores.
Do I think that Obama is the same as Washington or Adams, struggling to keep our nation out of conflicts while wrestling with the demands placed on him at home as well as abroad? Not entirely. Obama has inherited a war, not avoided one (a la Adams), and if anything his speeches last November should lead us to believe that more conflict, not less, will be in our country’s future as we fight to restore peace (or rather the facade of peace) to countries in the Middle East and crush the Taliban before it can ever again bring harm upon innocent lives. I think there is a dormant aggression in our new leader that many choose to overlook, or even ignore. A man does not get to become President of the United States with sweaty hands and knocking knees; there is a ferocity hidden in even the most tame of democrats (though Van Buren was a bit of nancy boy). Woodrow Wilson, for one, despised war and believed adamantly in the power of diplomacy to resolve disputes (he set the standard for rulers of today, some argue), but still lead our country valiantly to the defense of France and Britain in the First World War. In fact, I think Obama has inherited many traits from his democratic ancestor, including that passion for diplomacy and a strong versing in literature and oratory. But that is a subject for another, very different blog post.
What moves me today is a concern for the divide spreading through the heart of our country. More and more, Americans are picking sides in a war of words and opinions and they are being fueled on by the inflammatory and outrageous political media. If you were to talk to a moderate or conservative American citizen today, I would bet dollars to doughnuts that they would express some sort of opinion that the media tends to lean to the left and that it is in some way rotting away the values of our nation, perhaps even harming our children. My counter to these claims is, of course, that for every wrong or falsehood expounded by a “liberal” outlet, there is an equally wrong claim from Fox News. For a station that began its tenure under the slogan “fair and balanced” — a campaign they still use today, if I am not mistaken — to be so boldly and daftly conservative in its news coverage, I would say that either someone needs to calibrate the scales or Rupert Murdoch is laughing all the way to the bank. But it is too easy to sit here and criticize a media outlet for doing its job in what I must confess is a very effective manner. Fox News, for good or ill, provides a service that people of certain persuasions find entertaining if not informative, and no different can be said of the other cable news channels such as CNN and MSNBC. It is not the messengers that I have my quarrel with, for they can poison both sides if the viewers are not discerning enough. No, my fight is with you, the people.
Let’s wind the clock back a bit, first.
Thomas Hobbes, a famous philosopher, originated the theory of the Social Contract. In short, this theory claims that before humans enter into what we would call a society, there is an agreement, or rather a concession, made by all involved parties to abide by certain principles and forgo certain civil liberties. For instance, we can say that as a society we will continue to work for our own selfish interests (e.g. money, cars, women, booze) and not for those of a collective (communism lost the war, remember?), but at the same time we won’t kill our neighbor if they happen to borrow a pair of hedge clippers without asking. Even though that guy with the dachshund throws really loud parties on weeknights and your pretty sure he’s stealing cable, you leave him alone because that’s what society demands of you. Now here’s the rub, which Hobbes was also cognizant enough to point out (unlike some other philosophers like Kant who just believe they’re right and don’t address arguments): even though we are taught and/or forced to restrict these desires by the social contract, it does not remove them. In other words, you can’t take the jungle out of the tiger. So while we can all line up at the voting booths each November and be cordial to one another as we submit our ballots and walk off with the firm belief that our candidates will be the winner, the truth is many of us could quite easily turn these “civil” elections into far more barbarous occasions. In America, we often hear the social contract referred to as “the Christian thing to do,” or something similar; irregardless of the title, it is clear that logic and education are what keep civilized man civil — if you want to call it God, well, that works too.
But what happens when we remove the contract, or God, from the equation? (Yes yes, He is omnipotent and omnipresent, I know, just play along.) Well, it just so happens there are many such examples of this transpiring in human history, some of which you’ve probably heard of (Nazi death camps, the battle of Little Big Horn, pretty much all of the crusades). So let’s pick one you may not be familiar with.
On July 2, 1816, a French frigate by the name of Medusa was shipwrecked off the western coast of Africa. The ship has run close along the shore and, despite warnings from the crew, the captain proceeded farther and farther into the shallows until the ship at last ran aground. As if the situation were not horrific enough for the passengers, the Medusa had been grounded during a spring high tide, making it very hard to re-float the frigate. To exacerbate the problem, the captain refused to remove the ship’s cannons, weighing over a dozen tons a piece, and so after vain attempts to dislodge ship from sand, the crew began preparing to abandon the vessel. Though 17 men stayed with the ship and a few others made made the 60 mile trek to shore, the majority of the crew found themselves in either the frigate’s lifeboats, or on a raft which was hastily assembled from parts of the Medusa. When a storm threatened to break up the grounded ship, 146 men and one woman hurried aboard the raft and, along with the lifeboats, took to the sea.
The story of the raft can be found in much more detail in either book form or even on Wikipedia, but the pertinent details come from the raft’s next few weeks on the open sea. With half of the raft underwater at almost all times, no drinking water to be found (only wine), and the inescapable burning of the sun overhead, the survivors took very little time to break with whatever social contract they once enjoyed, and soon found themselves in a gruesome, terrifying struggle. Abandoned by the lifeboats, whose passengers had feared being overtaken by the men on the raft, twenty people were killed or committed suicide the first night at sea. More died trying to fight toward the raft’s center, the only part which was not completely or partially submerged, or by being cast off the raft from the turbulent weather. After four days, only 67 men remained. With no food, cannibalism began to tempt the minds and stomachs of the refugees. By day eight, only fifty men remained.
When I first read this story a few months ago, I was reminded of something from the movie The Dark Knight. In the final showdown between the Batman and the Joker, Heath Ledger’s villain, despite having been fully thwarted by both the people of Gotham and the Batman, remains adamant that society is just a loose set of rules and ideals binding people into living dull, ordinary, and sane lives. “Madness is like gravity,” he explains. “All it takes is a little push.” Are the ties that bind us together really so fragile?
In today’s world, the threats we deal with are not as extreme as isolation on the open seas or massive acts of terrorism by a costumed villain. Instead, they come from disturbed youths bringing weapons into their schools or religious radicals asserting their world views through violence. But most importantly, they come from fear.
The media is quick to cover stories in which something terrible has happened, and for good reason: our right brain is designed to feed on primal urges, and the coverage of violence, death, or panic locks in our attention with a kind of animal magnetism. In an industry fueled by market share and ratings, it would be remiss of us to condemn them for taking these actions. Sure, the swine flu scare has been overexposed and most likely has been played up well beyond even its theoretical potency, but with whom does the blame truly lie? Do we assume that the viewer, affixed to his television with unwavering attention, is the victim? Or is it his need for this sort of stimulus which created the broadcasts in the first place? There’s a saying in the business world that one must let no need go unsatisfied, and as entrepreneurs it is ultimately your goal to find one or many unfulfilled needs and provide the product or service that fulfills them. Like most things in the universe, the forces of supply and demand desire to be in equilibrium — hence why television, music, clothing, and culture continue to adapt and react to one another, year after year, decade after decade. We are all, inevitably, in search of our own sort of personal “happy medium.” The problem is, a perfect equilibrium is an impossibility in this world, and so we continue to adjust and make due with the changes over time — to roll with the punches, if you will. Thus, I stand by my statement earlier that the media is not the issue, as it is ultimately a force seeking to help some of us find that balance.
The problem is with the players, not how the game is being played. According to the social contract, or in less abstract terms the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, we all enter society as equals (“all men are created equal”). However, the benefits given to us as individuals are perfectly heterogeneous — that is, not one person will share the same education, family background, interests, hobbies, skills, etc. as another. By adulthood, we are no longer a nation of “united” states, but rather individual states.
And herein lies the problem with union, be it the Union that is the good ol’ U.S. of A. or the union between you and a friend. Because we are all our own persons — something I am personally a big fan of; monotony sucks — eventually there will arise an issue that two people cannot agree upon. Expand this to a massive scale, and, tada!, you have just found yourself in the battle between Democrats and Republicans. While one side clamors for the end of abortion, the other shouts that individuals rights and beliefs are what make this argument even possible, and therefore the practice should be upheld as a legal option for a mother and her child (or to be permitted by the social contract, you could say). For these same reasons, we can find ourselves caught in conundrums. A right-leaning college educated male who is a devout Christian can support the death penalty, even though his religion forbids murder. Why does he support it, even if his education and spiritual beliefs tell him otherwise? Perhaps his father was gunned down in a convenience store robbery, and he feels justice must sometimes be exacted at the “eye for an eye” level. Or perhaps it’s just a result of the chemical composition in his brain, as a scientist might argue (sometime scientists suck, I know).
(A quick aside: in preparing for this post, I joked with a friend that the only perfectly harmonious society that has ever existed, to my knowledge, was the jellyfish, which in some species will actually link up to form massive colonies that work sort of like a school of fish. The catch is that jellyfish have no brains, and so any decision they make to live as a colony is purely out of some sort of reaction on the chemical level, thus proving my point once again that allowing people, or at least certain people, to think is the source of all our problems. Why is Paris Hilton famous again?)
I know that these are challenging ideas and very large concepts that I am attempting to condense into a very abstract argument, but if you’re still with me, I am grateful. My point today, or rather the idea that I hope to impress to you readers, is that if there is ever to be a reconciliation, a redrawing of the social contract, it has to begin at the most fundamental level–with you and I. The more we make ourselves aware of why we take certain actions, the more capable we are of controlling those actions and not letting those actions control us. Much like my last politically-charged post, think of this as a sort of call to arms. The next time you find yourself nodding in agreement with one of the talking heads on TV, take a minute to try to reason out why it is that you’re nodding. Our minds are always looking to solve puzzles and make the irrational world make sense. Try to harness that ability on a conscious level. It’s like one of those draw-by-numbers books: you start off just connecting the dots, and by the time you finish, there’s a freaking Pegasus leaping off the page.
Believe it or not, this is the principle upon with our government was built. Why do you think people joke about writing a letter to your congressman? Because, a long time ago, it actually did more than jack and shit. Our politicians are representatives of the will of the people, and therefore the power of the country lies in us, not them. We can sit by and watch as the Dems and Reps on Capitol Hill bicker with one another about the future of our country, or we can use our voices and speak up. I’m not saying you need to start watching C-SPAN — I’m not a sadist. But if we want to stop party politics from becoming the new class lines, ignorance is not an option. In the future, will Romeo not be allowed to marry Juliet because his family supports gay marriage and hers still calls African Americans “colored” people? A difference of opinion can be a great thing in a friendship, or even a relationship. Lord knows I don’t agree with my friends on every issue (though most of the time it’s because they’re just utterly wrong), but we’re still friends all the same. Just because your religion tells you homosexuality is wrong does not mean all gays are riding shotgun with Lucifer on the highway to hell. But still I see the judgment in people’s eyes when two guys seem a little too close to each other. I’m sorry, I thought it was the 21st century. Haven’t we gotten past this yet?
Bottom line: the code of conduct in our society is not written in words, but in actions. Do not let ignorance and fear act as controlling forces in your mind. We do not need to be categorized by party, social class, or sexual interest — labels are a shortcut to help make expressing negative opinions easier. Fight them. Think through your actions and understand the sources of your beliefs. Deduction, my dear Watson, is a wonderful thing.
Pay attention to your surroundings; don’t let things happen to you, let yourself be the one who dictates the change. There is no way to please everyone, so focus on doing what’s right for yourself; more often than not, it will be what’s best for everyone.
And for the love of God, if you get shipwrecked somewhere, don’t eat the person next to you. He might have swine flu.
