It never ceases to amaze me how a good idea from somewhere in the world sometimes simply doesn’t make it to other countries.
Take the American refusal to enact any form of universal health care, despite the ample evidence showing it consistently delivers better overall outcomes for less spending.
Or tonight’s somewhat more obscure surprise, when I learned just how primitive and dangerous many European train car couplings are. They’re still commonly using designs that were outmoded 125 years ago by the invention of automatic couplings that are far safer for workers (no need to step between cars and risk being crushed), more economical for the railroads (faster and less labor-intensive operate), and technologically superior (significantly greater load limits).
It’s particularly surprising given how European railroads are generally more technologically advanced than their North American counterparts.
Speaking of trains:
Imagine that you are riding comfortably on a sleek train. You look out the window and see that not too far ahead the tracks end abruptly and that the train will derail if it continues moving ahead. You suggest that the train stop immediately and that the passengers go forward on foot. This will require a major shift in everyone’s way of traveling, of course, but it appears to you to be the only realistic option; to continue barreling forward is to court catastrophic consequences. But when you propose this course of action, others who have grown comfortable riding on the train say, “Well, we like the train, and arguing that we should get off is not realistic.”More.
I’m working my way to the south Oregon coast in a rental car, listening to OPB Radio broadcast a call-in interview with Dr. Robert Thurman.
Most of the stuff Thurman discusses I actually agree quite a bit with. I’ve read about Buddhist philosophy and there’s actually quite a bit of it that I agree with (and which has been useful to me). He’s quite the intelligent and thoughtful person.
But, oh, the dogmatism and the ideological blind spots. One caller brought up the issue I’d have raised had I called in: the F-word. Feudalism. Extremely unjust feudalism. In Tibet, of all places.
And on went the ideological blinders, and out came the denial rhetoric, proving once again just how right Orwell was.
It also shows just how limiting any one school of thought is. Buddhism is actually far better than most, but even its apparently innocuous focus on introspection and human happiness has a pitfall: it can foster a Brave New World where self-programmed happiness replaces drugs but serves the same end of enabling a people to endure tyranny in happiness.
Peace and happiness are good things, but there are no simple and complete formulas for the good life. A dose of anger, discord, and conflict can be useful at times, if it enables people to throw off a tyranny and make progress towards greater freedom.
Leftists often talk about selfishness as if it’s some sort of unvarnished evil that gets in the way of people pursuing the greater good.
What’s strange is that this hatred for the pursuit of rational self-interest is actually a relatively new development. If you look at the writings of Marx and other old-guard leftists, they assumed that a rational measure of selfishness would work to foster class consciousness, since those at the bottom of society would realize that the capitalist class hierarchy is not in their personal self-interest.
Indeed, there’s an elaborate propaganda machinery to get people to identify more with constructs like nation of birth, racial group, and religious faith than one’s own economic well-being. Ironically, these surrogate identifications are all to collective entities, despite all the individualist rhetoric the Right spews on the surface.
To that can be added the fantasy rhetoric, asking people to imagine no longer being at or near the bottom of society. While class mobility is real and does indeed happen (it’s why they’re called classes and not castes), it doesn’t happen to most. Back in 1776, Adam Smith observed that most people estimate they are luckier than the norm (else lotteries would not be the successes they are). Not much has changed since then in this regard.
Cue to today, where Obama is polling ahead in what have been considered to be “red states,” anecdotes of battered pickup trucks with gun racks sporting Obama stickers, and good old boys saying things like “Yes, but that doesn’t matter, because my taxes will be lower under Obama” when wedge issues are brought up.
Despite my cynicism about the guy, there’s the glimmerings of something quite positive in this development. The question is, can it build, or will the inevitable disappointments of an Obama presidency cause these newfound Obama voters to revert to their previous patterns of political (in)activity?
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