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February 18, 2003

Empowerment and Truth

I have often struggled, in talking to people with more traditional political views, to explain how truth and empowerment work as the central organizing principles for my politics. Here's one attempt:

In Scott Peck's The Road Less Traveled, the book that in many ways kicked off the self-help phenomenon (but from which that movement strayed very far), he says that when people "blame someone else – a spouse, a child, a friend, a parent, an employer – or something else – bad influences, the schools, the government, racism, sexism, society, the 'system' – for their problems, these problems persist. Nothing has been accomplished. By casting away their responsibility they may feel comfortable with themselves, but they have ceased to solve the problems of living, have ceased to grow spiritually, and have become dead weight for society. They have cast their pain onto society."

I would add the wonderful caveat from Marianne Williamson that while it used to be enough to follow Lao Tzu's advice, "give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime," now, in this modern capitalist world, we must also ask who owns the fishing pond.

In other words, one of the most frequent complaints about New Age views like Peck's that focus on self-empowerment is that they ignore the crushing inequality of the playing field. The point is to focus on empowerment, on teaching to fish, and to never let go of that being the central goal. That doesn't mean you let the playing field remain savagely unfair, or fail to give food to starving people, or condone the idea of private ownership of natural resources. But if you have two options to address unfairness or alleviate suffering, and one is empowering and the other is not, or one is neutral and the other is disempowering, then you go with the more empowering one. Where bureaucracy becomes the enemy here is that the more empowering option is usually messier or harder to manage, so when bureaucrats are making the choices they tend to favor disempowering, authoritative solutions. Local communities and neighbors are much more in touch with the humanity of the people they're helping, so they are likely to favor empowering solutions.

On truth: I don't believe in an Absolute Truth or reality, but truth is essential to me and is in some ways my ultimate ethical organizing principle. My devotion to this principle is deep and unflinching. I would prefer to expose lies than gain the best short-term advantage for my side, because I believe the best long-term result will be achieved through total honesty. I understand the view that to work counter to one's goals is wrong, almost unethical, even if it's in service to truth — a view which ultimately supports propaganda for causes one believes in — but I cannot embrace it. My idea of truthfulness is a big part of the ethical system I constructed for myself to replace my childhood one. It starkly contrasts with my upbringing, which was dishonest directly because of alcoholism, but also indirectly with lectures from my enabling mother about the moral superiority of using white lies to be nice to people, while witnessing her private talk about how much she disrespected them. I'm not going to argue that rigid truthfulness is the only approach that works, but I do believe that it is a sound and morally defensible one, and to the extent that it comes closest to reality while also being fundamentally fair, that it is one I am very comfortable defending.

I do think that my belief system is more self-invented than most people's because of how little indoctrination I received "thanks" to minimal parenting, no childhood religion and no community or extended family. Being free of a childhood belief system I was able to define one without bias and presuppositions, based purely on reality. Undeniably, though, there are these influences: Milton Friedman's libertarianism, Christopher Lasch's classical liberalism, Barbara Ehrenreich's compassionate socialism, Peck's and Schaef's Program-rooted analysis of societal dysfunctions, Quakerism's emphasis on seeing the good in others, Catholic monasticism's contemplativeness, Buddhism's and existentialism's detatchment from the craziness of the modern world, deep ecology's systemic view, and a plethora of other works. (Or did I hold these beliefs more deeply and merely find a way of articulating them through these exposures? I don't know.) I don't believe in moral relativism and do believe that empowerment and truth are essential, but I'm sure others have other mixes that are just as good. This is what works best for me.