compassionate closure

It's the last day of the Bush administration, and it's making me think about an evening in the mid
80's. I was living in New York at the time, going to graduate school. Most of my spare time, as well
as far too much time that was not, went into volunteer work. I was raised very religulous, of the
mormonic flavor, and was only too devout. Part in parcel with that, I was also a staunch conservative.

As you may surmise, I am no longer either religious or conservative. I have come to
regard religion as a protection racket against imaginary dangers, and to see conservatism as
infected with the naivete that it is possible to empower others with the ability to deprive your
neighbors of their right to live their personal life as they choose, without at the same time
guaranteeing that they will have and use the power to deprive you of your right to conduct your
business and financial affairs as you choose. Liberals, of course, are infected with the complementary naivete. So you've guessed that I'm rather libertarian today; as such I'm infected with the naivete that it is possible to marshal the political support needed to secure all liberties, without offering to aid anyone in their desire to in some way enslave others. Freedom,
it seems, is a nearly zero sum game. Roosevelt freed the drinkers, by building a coalition eager to
enslave the merchants. Note that I'm not arguing here whether that's a bad thing, merely pointing
out the zero-sum character of the game.

But I digress. At that time I was conservative, and I believed that I was for all the right reasons. I believed in economic liberty because of the provable fact that everyone is better off
when choices are freely made. That's still true, in spite of the current economic crisis. The
problem with free markets is not, as I think Russell quipped, that they suffered the same defect
as Chrisianity in never having been tried. The problem with them is that precisely because they
generate massive economic efficiency, they create imbalances of power. Our species has a really
bad record with abusing imbalances of power. Genocide is not nearly as rare as we like to pretend.
If you've ever known a couple in that not uncommon situation, of an exceptional person from an
unexceptional family enticed to marry an unexceptional person from an exceptional family, I don't
have to let you in on the dirty Cinderella secret - that poor girl was a slave. The picture gets
starker when we look at the other chimps - in the common variety, where males have the upper hand,
the females are badly abused and their offspring are murdered and eaten. Among bonobos it's the
females who are the despotic abusers. So our instinct to fight such imbalances isn't a foolish one
nor is it, as economists might think, an irrational one. And psychologists have done the experiments that demonstrate our willingness to make ourselves poorer, if it keeps others from
getting the upper hand.

So before I had had all of these realizations, I regarded it as an act of virtue to support the
prosperity that freedom promises, and a venal act to oppose it.

When I watched CSPAN, however, I was disturbed by the conservative rhetoric I saw. Because I cared
(and care) about poor people, I advocated free markets as the surest way to make their lives better. But that wasn't the message I saw on CSPAN.

A curious feature of belonging, is the projection that comes with it. I noticed this as a missionary. I'd been raised to think of it as a service to them to try to persuade others to be
Mormon. When I found people willing to talk religion, I noticed that people wrongly assume that
their church teaches what they believe. It goes like "I am an X. I believe Y. Therefore, X's believe Y. Therefore, the X church teaches Y".

I've since become aware of the same phenomenon in politics. Since I was a Republican, and since I
believed in what I thought Republicans espouse for what to me were altruistic reasons, I assumed
that Republicans all shared those beliefs and motives.

There was some good that came of my religious background. I met some remarkable people that I
would not have ever known otherwise. One of them was a woman named Bonnie Spanvill. She was a
member of the Ballif clan, part of the family that owns the biggest family business in the state
of Utah - the Mormon church, and at one point, I think it was 11 of the 12 who make up its board
of directors, who were no more distantly related to her than second cousin. My meeting that night
was with a nephew of hers, who I think was a congressional aide, but at any rate was an up-and-coming political operative, who had left Utah and was now in Washington. Bonnie thought I would find Carl interesting, and he was certainly a bright guy.

I expressed to him my frustration, that as conservatives we should be saying "because we care"
in articulating our positions, rather than offering them apologetically or stoically. Needless
to say, I assumed that it was a rhetorical oversight rather than a difference in outlooks. I can't
say for sure what effect that conversation had. It seemed to me like I was making progress, but
that was the only time we spoke. I've been wondering lately, if his name is spelled Karl.