4. "Because I said so"

The third example of when dialogue harms comes from the world of popular politics and ethics. As the media tells it, America is in a moment of increasing division over fundamental values. Of the minority of people who care about politics and values at all, roughly half believe that America is about certain traditional moral principles: God, family, and country, as they are traditionally defined. A large percentage of this half of America belongs to evangelical, born-again, or other quasi-fundamentalist streams of Christianity, and they seem absolutely mystified how people can live fulfilling lives without the bedrock of faith and morality provided by these systems.

The other half thinks that America is about certain moral principles, but those principles are more about civil liberties and pluralism than any one particular moral law. These are the people who believe that abortion may be wrong but that it's up to the woman to choose and that free expression is more important than culture-wide moral expression. They believe, in short, what Voltaire wrote over two hundred years ago: "I may not agree with what you say, but I'll fight to the death your right to say it."

To be sure, the "left" -- the folks in the second paragraph, and most of the readers of this magazine -- also have positive moral values. Abstention from war and violence except where necessary; compassion for the weakest; an emphasis on remedying unjust structures of privilege, even if doing so comes at the expense of individual economic opportunity. But fundamentally, liberal values and conservative values are most at loggerheads when it comes to why we hold certain values, and what the state should do to promote them.

In most conceptions of philosophical thought, liberal values are more "evolved" than conservative ones. This doesn't mean that liberals are smarter than conservatives; one can grow back into conservative values after recognizing the liberal alternative, as we'll see in just a moment. But it does mean that the basic premise -- that you have to think for yourself, that there are multiple coherent value-systems in the world, and the best state is the one which allows them all -- is a higher order of intellectual sophistication than what one might call "unreconstructed" conservatism, which simply believes that some things are right, other things are wrong, and that's all there is to say about it.

Moreover, and here we come to the connection between this example and the previous two, it's not healthy to forever remain at the simple stage of pluralism. At some point, we recognize the multiplicity of our world views, but, as very well described by Ken Wilber in his various writings, also come to articulate moral views of our own. Mere pluralism, without more, is a kind of flatland in which no one has any claim to truth and nothing seems to matter -- it's the naive relativism of which naive conservative commentators complain. Ideally, you pass through stages. First, you have opinions. Then, you realize other people have different opinions, and that's okay. And then, at stage three, hopefully, you re-form your own opinions, not as absolute truth, but as guiding truths that you can defend, and argue about.

Without stage three, you're stuck. And yet, without talking about stage two, you're missing the point -- because a large part of American population is still at stage one. Recently, for example. on a plane, I heard a parent tell her child to do something "because I said so." The child had asked why, and the parent responded with authority. I'm not going to explain myself to you; this is how it is.

I don't want to judge that parent -- maybe the kid had been complaining all day --but I hope I never say that phrase to a child. I think it lays the groundwork for everything that's wrong with conservatism in both politics and religion: these are our values, and the book says so. It sets the wheels in motion: listen to authority; learn discipline by submission, not loving what's right; obey.

We have to teach stage two -- questioning authority, engaging in critical reasoning, recognizing multiple viewpoints. Now, at a certain point, nearly everyone who reads this magazine probably went through some kind of rebellious period, whether it was punk rock or reading "Catcher in the Rye" or whatever form of adolescent or post-adolescent rejection of authority was necessary. Hopefully we all read "Huckleberry Finn" or an equivalent book, and understood what Huck meant when he chose to go to hell rather than sell out Jim, the runaway slave who had become his friend. That point is so pivotal, in the novel and in the American experience. It's the first step of ethical maturity: realizing that sometimes, the values of authority are actually wrong. You have to develop for yourself the capacity of moral reasoning, and use it. This doesn't mean merely deciding what you feel like doing, as many young people seem to think today (so many of my high school and even college students say "that's just my opinion" when asked to defend a position, espousing an extreme relativism as if it were self-evident). But it does mean deciding.

This is a trite point, right? Think for yourself? But it's one about which, clearly, large numbers of Americans disagree. A large portion of voting Americans still believes that traditional values should be enforced by the state, and that deviance from those values is "wrong." Now, if we on the left want to engage with these people, we have to stop pretending that abstruse policy points, pointless philosophical debates, or leading edges of left-wing political thought has anything to do with how choices are made. We have to get back to basics, even though retreading really old ground may feel like condescension or worse.

Ought men and women be treated equally, or do their differences merit disparate treatment? Ought radically different moral choices really be respected, or will that hurt society? Is the Bible the only legitimate source of American values?

Addressing these questions may feel very alienating -- just like teaching basic meditation skills or rehashing the fact that my sexuality is not something I selected among various interesting options. It may even cause us to become trapped in earlier places on our intellectual journeys -- places of non-acceptance, non-growth, or non-sophistication. In order to grow, we have to move beyond these questions to newer, more complex, and more nurturing ones. But in order to communicate, we have to go backwards.

5. Marinate your brain with care

In essays such as this one, it's customary to end with some sort of resolution. "And then I realized, there is a way to accommodate everything and resolve the contradiction which I posited in the beginning and demonstrated by example..." However, I don't feel myself at a place of resolution on these issues. When I preach the gospel that sexuality is not chosen, I feel like I'm undermining my continuing journey of self-celebration. When I teach basic meditation practice, I hear myself saying things I'm not sure I even believe anymore. And when I try to re-invent the wheel of critical thinking, I hear myself over-simplifying, and cringe. Dialogue hurts.

My current working solution is actually very primitive: I spend some time on one side of the fence, in order to pursue my activist or teaching goals, and then go back to the other side in order to nurture my soul. So, yes, to return to the first example, I routinely make the argument that sexuality is not chosen and that therefore it is not a right or wrong moral choice at all. But when I catch myself in "I can't help it" mode, I try to do a spiritual or physical practice that reminds me that sexuality is not a predicament, but a conduit to the sacred and to the kind of love which affirms life. And likewise with the other topics I have explored.

Still, I get caught a lot. In the political realm, the "square one" of basic liberalism -- that you have to think for yourself -- remains so challenging for so many people that it takes a while to make the argument, and I often lose. On the question of sexuality, some people just cannot accept that this is part of someone's basic psychological and biological nature. It conflicts with values they hold dear -- and which soothe deep, primal fears -- and so it just can't be so. (Indeed, in the coming year, we are about to be treated to yet another wave of halachic responsa outrageously claiming, with no basis in reliable science and in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that sexuality is to some degree chosen.) As a result, I spend a lot of time articulating "Square One," because that is the cutting edge of popular discourse.

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a master of the psychological metaphor, once said that the brain is like tofu; it takes the flavor of what it marinates in. We erroneously suppose, Reb Zalman says, that we are fully-formed beings, wandering through space and time and only affected by our context when we intend to be. Yet we also know this is not so. Spend a few months working in a high-pressured business office, and you'll experience the world in a high-pressured way, with little patience for "softer" concerns. Spend the same amount of time on spiritual retreat and you'll see the rat-race as a form of collective psychosis. We are constituted by our discourses, and our discourses are shaped by our contexts. Maybe that's why the Jewish tradition places so much emphasis on choosing your friends carefully.

I've come to a deep appreciation of my communities -- intellectual, sexual, spiritual, and political. They nourish me, and give me the strength to leave those safe spaces and engage with people who think and feel differently. To do so in an authentic way involves risk, because dialogue changes us, sometimes for the worse. But not to do so is to abdicate the responsibility to shape the future, to hide in the comfortable parochialism of the ghetto or the cave, rather than emerge into the light, where you'll meet people who threaten the bedrock of your beliefs, where you have much to teach and to learn, and thus, where real change is possible.

[1]       [2]       3 Top image: Jay Michaelson, Shape of a Dog Lower image: Jay Michaelson, Jonah's Waiting Providence

Jay Michaelson is chief editor of Zeek, director of Nehirim: A Spiritual Initiative for GLBT Jews, and a teacher of Kabbalah and embodied spirituality.

Email us your comments

Related:

Discipline Jay Michaelson
April, 2005

Shakey: An Essay on Anger Jay Michaelson
March, 2005

God's Unchanging Hand Daniel Cohen
A review of Esther Kaplan's With God on their Side
March, 2005

I Still Believe that People are Good at Heart Jay Michaelson
On the anthropology of contemplative practice
February, 2005

Let them Eat Myth Douglas Rushkoff
Should liberals compromise their ideals in order to remain relevant?
January, 2005

Am I Religious? Jay Michaelson
November, 2004

Where Left and Right Collide Dan Friedman
A debate between the author of "A Jewish Critique of Bushism" and the head of "L.A. for Bush"
October, 2004

How can you be gay and Jewish? Jay Michaelson
September, 2004

Life During Wartime Jay Michaelson
Freedom and the Ordinary
April, 2004

You are God in Drag Jay Michaelson
Notes from and after retreat
February, 2004

Thinking Despite Doubt, Feeling Despite Truth Jay Michaelson
Between contemplation and affirmation
January, 2004

Are the Ten Commandments Really Carved in Stone? Joel Shurkin
The ambiguous truth behind the two stone tablets, recently removed from Alabama's judicial building.
December, 2003

Meditation and Sensuality Jay Michaelson
Sex, drugs, and God in all
July, 2003

I hear America Bling-blinging Jay Michaelson
Hypercapitalism as Satanism
June, 2003

Constriction Jay Michaelson
Dick Cheney and the New Age
March, 2003

What the World is... Jay Michaelson
...and what to do about it
February, 2003

Strasbourg Cathedral Michael Shurkin
The soft borders between Jewish particularism and universalism
February, 2003

Quality of Life Jay Michaelson
What my grandmother's suffering teaches
January, 2003

Go as Far as Possible Jay Michaelson
Life beyond the idea of limits
December, 2002

Manufacturing Dissent Chad Beck
For the Left's voice to be heard, it needs to play by the rules
November, 2002

Are we all asleep? Jay Michaelson
When life seems irresolvably absurd
November, 2002

Top Ten Lessons for New Homosexuals Jay Michaelson
Tips and advice from my first gay year
October, 2002

The Warm, Impossible, Wall-less Summer World Jay Michaelson
Summer days, summer nights are gone...
September, 2002

From previous issues:

Counterculture and Democracy
Jay Michaelson

The Failure of Anti-Despotism
Justin Weitz

Shtupping in the Shadow of the Bomb
Marissa Pareles

Web www.zeek.net