The Ethical Atheist Candidate: Militant Moderation

Conservative, Liberal, Libertarian, Progressive, Democrat, Republican


The instant you start a political campaign, people will try to put you in a pigeon hole, and then interpret every sound bite that follows in the context of that hole.

In truth, with these political tribes, people tend to seek membership and identity. To become a member, you need to substantially agree with the dogma of that particular tribe. There may be room for some disagreement around the edges, but by and large you purchase membership in a tribe by conformity.

In this pseudo-campaign, I wish to start a new tribe. This tribe will be known as the Militant Moderates.

Militant moderates hold that no person is so intellectually gifted that they can count on their own infallibility in political matters. Militant moderats reject the common practice of saying, "I cannot possibly be wrong, nobody who disagrees with me can possibly be right. In virtue of my own perfection, I must never listen to or compromise with anybody else. Compromise can only bring something less than perfection."

Militant moderates reject the idea that "Everybody whose beliefs are different from my own is a traitor to humanity. Perhaps we are obligated to tolerate their opinions, but only to the extent that we will not round them all up and kill them - though certainly it would be to the benefit of humanity to do so. While we struggle to resist this tempatation, we will not deny that they are traitors to humanity."

The "militant" part of these militant moderates is that they find the arrogant presumption totally contemptible. They will soundly condemn, in no uncertain terms, anybody whose attitudes follow those described in the two paragraphs above.

Let us not close our eyes to exactly how common those attitudes are. Browse any major news site on the web, or turn on any cable news network, and you will be bombarded with examples of uncompromising arrogance.

This does not mean that militant moderates believe that all points of view are equally valid, or that there is no truth to the matter other than the truths each person invents for themselves. She believes that there are facts. A person can believe all they want in the virtues of a zero-calorie miracle diet, but he'll be dead in a month if he tries it.

However, each one of us is cursed with biases and interests, presumptions and assumptions embedded into our brains since childhood, and only a small fragment of the total amount of information relevant to any major political opinion. While truth exists, these limitations hide truth behind a fog through which none of us - not one of us - can see with absolute clarity.



As I see it, in any negotiation, I can bring to the table my small subset of total human information, along with my assumptions, interests, and biases. It is not as if I can leave them behind.

Others can do the same thing.

We can - and should - recognize that each of us has a far better ability to see the flaws in others' thinking than we do in our own. instead of presuming infallibility, I intend to take advantage of their greater insight into my mistakes by listening to them and learning where I might have gone wrong in my thinking.

At the same time, as a militant moderate, I will reminding others, "You are not an omniscient deity blessed with perfect knowledge and virtue. Do not dare sit there and presume that it cannot possibly be you who are wrong."

I believe in compromise.

I believe that, when a group of people, each with their own assumptions, interests, biased, and small fraction of human knowledge get together, it is to be hoped that they can come up with a conclusion grounded on a larger set of interests, assumptions, and knowledge than that which any one of them could have come up with as an individual.

I believe that anybody who does not believe in compromise is arrogant - and arrogance is no minor character flaw. One quality that every bloody dictator and terrorist has in common is arrogance. One quality that every war is built on is arrogance. The one quality that deadlocks our government and makes us incapable of solving even simple problems is arrogance. Listen the next time congress is deadlocked on an issue and you can see it - you can feel it - in nearly every utterance.

Arrogance poisons everything.

I promise you, as your elected representative, that I WILL compromise. I WILL listen to people who do not agree with me. I WILL respect the fact that they can find holes in my thinking that I am otherwise incapable of seeing due to the blindness of interest and presumption. I WILL remind myself every time somebody else speaks, "You may be right."