I’m 26, which is pretty old in the grand scheme of things. I used to look up at 26 year old people when I was maybe 10 and think how old and mature they seemed. Of course, I was 10, and when you’re 10 you don’t exactly have an accurate outlook on the world. I was probably mistaking the confidence that generally comes with age for maturity or something.

All I know is that some revelations come disappointingly late in life. For instance, I’ve looked at the world as it were somehow binary for the longest time. It isn’t, of course, though sometimes it is. There isn’t this one great liberal political issue, and this one great conservative issue, around which entire countries revolve. The categories “liberal” and “conservative” are almost meaningless in Canada anyway. There’s no particularly sound reason a conservative can’t care about the environment and social justice, and there’s no reason a liberal can’t want sane financial management.

What I’m describing sounds a bit like a middle-of-the-road thing, but truth be told, I’m not sure that politics or life or marriage or anything can be defined in terms of roads. I used to have discussions with friends where we’d say “okay, we’ve fallen into this ditch, but we have to make sure we don’t fall in the other ditch”, as if somehow the safest thing was to stay in the middle of the road.

That’s so limiting. As if somehow everything falls into one spectrum and can be described as a point on a line. People thought this sort of thing about genetics before Mendel opened that particular door with his (apocryphal?) bean plants; you mix two things and you get a combination of two things. Yet, this isn’t true. You mix two things and you get something different, something recessive or dominant.

Biology seems aware that everything would simply fall to the median if pre-Mendelian genetics were true: diversity is good, it contributes in a large way to the health of the biosphere. In the same way when you mix liberal and conservative you don’t get some weak-kneed hybrid. You get something new, something above liberal and conservative, something that critique both and praise both and take the good from both.

Isn’t the alternative less like a position and more like a cage? As a conservative American (or even worse, a conservative American Christian), you can feel as if you positions are written for you. But are they really? Do you have to believe in trickle-down economics? Individualism? The “war on terror”? Do you have to support a neo-conservative president like Mr Bush, even when his worst excesses tower over his strengths? Are you somehow required to believe that your nation is the culmination of history, the focal point of Christianity, and the beacon for freedom the world over?

Maybe. I mean, if those things are good, by all means. I happen to think they’re not. I certainly don’t like what a lot of liberals espouse. But I don’t want to be trapped in this one mode of thinking that says “this philosophy is good” and “this philosophy is bad”.

Tags: conservatism, liberalism, philosophy, politics