Ideology, Zealotry, and Philosophy

Once again, in replying to another blog, Dave's Window, I found that I had yet another cogent string of thoughts that might make a decent blog entry. Enjoy!

"Zealotry is frightening on a number of levels. Pehaps the most disturbing for me personally is the level of trust and blind faith that these people have in an ideology which is so different from my own.

My own ideology is also somewhat blind and even I trust it most days but my commitment to it is not so absolute as to allow me the mental space to assume and even assert that I am absolutely right and you are absolutely wrong. Absolutes in any form beg to be challenged.

It's my opinion that we are engaged in a war of ideologies and that it is unlikely such war will end well - someone must always be right and someone always wrong. The struggle between absolutes is one of brute force - the unstoppable force meets the unmovable object. In such a conflict, the stronger and/or most capable always wins. We must, as a people, continue to refine the art of compromise and flexibility because even the mighty oak will shatter under a strong wind.

I think flexibility is a problem for us (humans) because we are unwilling to be wrong or accept that there might be multiple workable answers to a single problem favoring instead our own answer. I think the "War on Terror" can be won but I think the costs and consequences will extend well into the lives of my great-grandchildren and that winning will look nothing like what either side would envision.

I think these conflicts to be an expression of the growing pains of our civilization. It's an old story. Hopefully we will eventually learn that killing people is not an effective way to convince them, or ourselves, that we are right."

When neither side is even a little wrong, neither side is quite right.

I often pause to wonder how, why, and when it was that I came to believe in what I believe about any given thing. I sometimes then pause to look around me to figure out what other people think about the same thing and recognize that they too are looking for an answer and that that answer will likely spring from an equally complex font of experience and belief. As such, can any of us alone really be "right"? I submit that each of us contributes to a greater whole - that of the human civilization. I for one think that this obligates me to consider what I contribute - shit in = shit out.

RCS