The eCrozier

The political polarization we’re experiencing right now has little to do with the particular policies each side espouses, rather it has more to do with how we view and understand human agency and responsibility. We normally bifurcate the question this way: Is it all on the individual or are there other forces out there preventing people from their ability to flourish? In other words, whose fault (we love laying blame) is it if someone struggles and then fails to take care of themselves and be responsible for their life?

This goes back to the old nature vs. nurture continuum. Are we born a certain way and that determines our fate or is it the environment in which we’re raised that will be most important in shaping us? Generally speaking, people who see themselves as progressives want to put more onus on people’s environment. It’s the “externals” that hold people back. If we just eliminated the negative isms out there, then people would thrive. Likewise, people who call themselves conservatives tend to focus more on the “internals” of the individual. It’s on the individual to make something of their life. They believe anyone can flourish if they just work hard enough.

Both of these are insufficient explanations. Their respective arguments lay the blame on whatever their default position happens to be without accounting for the complexity of human life. Besides, the extreme form of the “nature” argument leads to racist or sexist assumptions about innate superiority, claiming one race or gender is “naturally” superior to another. Similarly, the “nurture” argument doesn’t adequately account for an individual’s capacity to overcome challenges in life. In its extreme form, it would confine all who had difficult contexts in life to be objects of charity. That ends up objectifying them and can rob them of their God-given dignity as human beings.

As I wrote, neither goes deep enough because neither is willing to acknowledge human limitation. Both assume that if all the things that bind us, however they see them, were removed, then people would flourish. Progressives want to throw off the limits imposed by the isms in society. Conservatives desire to remove all limits to individual choice and achievement. So, they both believe once these limits, as they define them, are removed, then life will be good for everyone. That’s why both are deeply flawed assumptions.

Both sides are naïve and overly utopian because each is assuming something that’s just not true by observing human life. Even if all the “external” isms that bind us were removed, even if government “got out of the way” so the “internal” of each individual could thrive, we’d still have plenty of brokenness and failure to deal with as the human race. The sooner we learn that truth, the sooner we’ll quit the blame game that thrives in our current political culture, which prevents us from seeing our need for compassion and mercy toward others. Life is just plain hard and some of us just can’t make it through very well for myriad reasons. A society more interested in compassion and mercy rather than blaming and scorekeeping would understand that truth. And then we’d account for that truth in our common life. Our politics would focus as much on caring for the weak as it does for rewarding the strong. After all, life is hard.

+Scott