I might seem obsessed with politics. Especially as this election nears its gotterdammerung.
But why? What is truly going on with me? For most people it’s barely a peripheral concern, thus treating it all so unseriously. And really, what does it matter to Joe Sixpack, or even to me, what transpires in Washington, or Ukraine, or Gaza. Those involve other people, far distant, who might as well be pebbles from the standpoint of our own lives. True, Washington events might impact our economy, and our pocketbooks. Yet still our individual lives will continue pretty much the same. And a single vote won’t affect much. Why be bothered?
Start with the self. A concept I (and philosophers) have endlessly wrestled with. I know what being me feels like. Sort of. But where does that come from? How do the inanimate muck and fibers in our brains, mere matter, somehow bring it forth? What does it mean to exist — and to know it? Philosophy has never solved this. Nor has neuroscience.
No man is an island, wrote poet John Donne. Yet one’s experiencing of life and the world is confined entirely to the tiny island, separate from the rest of the cosmos, within one’s own skull. And yet too that experiencing — most importantly — involves other islands. We are islands, but islands in a vast archipelago of meaning for us.
What the blazes am I getting at? A million years of evolution programmed us to look out for ourselves — but with a key tool for that being social solidarity, helping each other. I actually happen to be one of the most island-like of people. Never, as a child, getting the instruction manual for relating to others. Nevertheless I share those primordial genes, and even I powerfully view my existence as embedded within that universal sea of meaning that is human society.
Thus how I see that greater meaning shapes my psyche and life. I want to be part of a society fulfilling that salutary evolutionary imperative of mutual solidarity. A good society, composed of good people. One of truth, reason, and humanity.
That’s at the heart of this election. One side epitomizes that vision of the kind of society I want to inhabit. The other — astoundingly, unprecedentedly, depravedly — does not. Representing indeed its very antithesis.
We throw around such generalities. But let me illustrate with just one small concrete example. Trumpers charge Harris and Democrats with wanting “open borders” — “abolishing” the border even. Despite Harris pledging to sign the bipartisan border control bill, the toughest imaginable — that Republicans killed on orders from Trump, so he could continue ranting “open borders.”
Just one example of the dishonesty at the core of Trumpism — grotesquerie abusing in the most fundamental way the relations among people that undergird society.
What sort of existence would mine be among people so degraded as to reward that?
