Reflections on Ignorance-Political Discourse and Exasperation

     A mantra of our age is that politics is one of the "big three" taboos in polite discussion. Full disclosure, I know very little about politics as it is conceived of in our time. I generally do not follow the day-to-day happenings of political candidates or figures that populate the hellscape that is US politics. I was very interested in these things at one time, but that quickly faded in college. Don't get me wrong, I am interested in politics, but not the reductionist indignation fuel that masquerades as politics on our screens. 

    Wow, I am very high and mighty in my dismissal of a very common concern. That is not my intention! Although I certainly tend towards a pessimistic attitude about the state of US politics, I do think it is worthy of concern. I could whine and complain about this for pages upon pages of text, but I just want to make a simple point in this blog post. I think the reason I have found myself so estranged from contemporary political discourse is because everyone is talking past each other. I don't think this is because people are not listening to each other. Sure, I think that certainly happens, and it is certainly a problem, but even that glazes over the core issue. More and more we have "opportunities for discourse" and "open forums and dialogue", but even these instances of political "listening" seem futile to me. Why is that? 

    I had the opportunity to read part of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue my junior year of college. I was able to finish this work, as well as another important work in political philosophy from D.C. Schindler (The Politics of the Real), just this past spring. These two books have completely reshaped my understanding of politics. Schindler's work, in my estimation, relies heavily, although not explicitly so, on the work of MacIntyre. They both point out that under the political philosophy of liberalism, which almost exclusively rules the West, does not establish an authentically common good. This point is especially highlighted by Schindler, but it is nascently present in MacIntyre's work. Given the "death" of metaphysics that began in the modern era, humans cannot establish what is truly good. This is genuinely problematic. A classical (pre-modern) understanding of society has an established, identifiable good that each individual, and consequently the society as a whole, strives after. Liberalism welcomes an incoherent pluralistic understanding of good that arises from a self-determined account of what is true. Now there are competing understandings of what the fundamental purpose of our society exists for. Is our society made for maximizing comfort? Is it made for deconstructing inequality? Is it made for making space for individual self-determination? These ideas, to me, cannot happily coexist, and so we see people from these individual paradigms trying to assert the purposes of human existence against the formulations of others. This is what I see troubling the heart of our discourse, and I am guilty of it! I have tried in vain to talk to others about these issues without acknowledging our very essential metaphysical disagreements, and this devolves into pride and indignation on my part in the face of the apparent "ignorance" of the other. What are we to do in order to solve this? I am still working on understanding that answer.