Ideology and Dialectic

The apparent political dialectic between the conservative and liberal ends of the spectrum within the US is not a dialectic.  The term, of course, is loaded with Hegelian, and following Hegel, with Marxist overtones, and I should perhaps admit up front that, in using the term, I have no grand vision.  I am thinking neither of the Hegelian dialectic recently celebrated by Fukuyama, a grand historical process that culminates inevitably in liberal democracy more or less as we know it in the US, nor am I thinking of the Marxist dialectic celebrated by a host of celebrated 20th century writers, an even grander historical process that culminates inevitably in the communist state.  In short, I am not thinking of dialectic on a world historical scale at all.  I have something less grandiose in mind, a questing dialectic, something on the order of the Socratic dialectic before Plato appropriated it in service of immutable Truth and the Ideal State.  The dynamic is perhaps the same.  The thesis is advanced only to be challenged by its antithesis, and through the ensuing exchange something like a tentative synthesis, a consensus, emerges.  The Socratic dialectic always ended with a note of the provisional lingering in the air, if not the Good once and for all, then a good enough for now, at once a resting point and an anticipated point of departure.

This note of the provisional stems perhaps from Socratic humility.  As he put in his Apology, "although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is - for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him."   It is easy enough to up-end the Socratic stance, to read his disparagement of falsity as a commitment to the truth, but the Socratic humility is at once the Socratic arrogance.  The false, once unmasked, can never again be an object of faith without the most egregious and self-serving cynicism.  I am among those who "like to hear the pretenders examined," and and there is something of divine comeuppance in seeing the pretentious ego popped, and it does take some courage to be the one with the pin.  Socrates demonstrated that courage by going to his death before accepting the shibboleths of his day.  Yet too, there is a cowardice in it.  Perhaps, like Socrates, I am too tentative to see a grand historical pattern, too hesitant to step forward with a grand plan of action.  I can all too easily see myself as the next in a line of pretenders, and my skin is too thin for even the dullest of pins.

Consequently, I am far from an idealist either in the common or the philosophical sense of the word.  If history has taught us anything, it is that all ideals are contingent and transitory and ultimately victims of their own internal contradictions -- which is not to say that all things are relative and arbitrary.  I do, however, believe that there is a reality, both human and physical, and we are part and parcel of it.  Our statements about that reality are more or less true -- our actions are more or less efficacious to any given purpose -- more or less -- and as such, they remain contingent and transitory.  Anyone who has "played by the rules" and "done all the right things" -- anyone who, like Job, had enormous faith in the justice of his world and yet suffered unimagined consequences -- knows intuitively what I am driving at.  We may have a grasp on things, but things are slippery.  We may be in control, but never wholly in control.  Life is unfair, and while we crave fairness with nearly the same intensity that we crave food and sex, and we can indeed make our surround more or less fair, more or less just, but absolute fairness, absolute justice, once and for all, seems possible in theory, but always elusive in fact.