For the last few years, I've made it something of a project (okay, it also entertains me) to read several blogs/websites which vary widely over the political spectrum. Most of them have a religious angle, because I take seriously both Christianity and what people inside and outside the church think of it, and because while I'm interested in politics, I'm not so interested in politics as such but its relation to ethics and social issues. I actually read a lot of the comments as well, because I'm interested not only in what the authors think, but in their communities' reactions to it, and to each other. Today I'm going to talk a little about what I've learned from all this -- probably in a very unorganized and haphazard way, but it beats spending hours trying to figure out the best way to organize it.
For those who are interested, I've been reading the following on average at least once a week (at least recently), categorized roughly by political leanings (very simplistically, but it should give you an idea).
Right-leaning:
Boundless (Focus on the Family, conservative evangelical; focused on relationships)
John C. Wright (conservative Catholic; politics, philosophy and science fiction -- thanks to CPE for the link to this one)
Christianity Today (mainstream/conservative evangelical; politics, social and church issues. The women's blog is moderate but the rest of the magazine is right-leaning.)
Moderate:
Internet Monk ("post-evangelical" and ecumenical; church and social issues, theology, pastoral care)
Left-leaning:
Slactivist (liberal evangelical; social and economic issues, church and politics)
The Slactiverse (liberal and religiously diverse -- run in the old blog location of the above and a continuation of that commenting community; social and economic issues, religion in general, feminism)
A few other minor blogs related to the above, including some feminist blogs (which I don't read as often individually)
I also used to (but no longer) read TheologyWeb, a theology forum, which has got to win some sort of award for most polarized internet community, both politically and religiously (though the majority of their posters are politically conservative and evangelical Christian). It is also the only one of these at which I've posted myself, though that was largely back in undergrad.
At any rate, I've learned a lot from all this lurking -- about myself, about the political and religious issues involved, and about how people and communities on different parts of the political and religious spectrum think. In no particular order:
1. Extreme positions can be uncomfortable, but there is no bigger turnoff than the demonization of people who take opposing positions. You can have productive dialog between marxists and capitalists, or between fundamentalists and convinced atheists, but there is no possibility of conversation with someone who thinks that everything "liberal" is evil and the work of Satan, or with someone who asserts that believing same-sex sexual activity to be wrong automatically makes one an evil bigot and oppressor. These kinds of attitudes tend to push me in the opposite direction -- and a community full of them is a sure sign of a dangerous echo chamber, because assuming that your opponents are never speaking in good faith is a sure way to insulate yourself from any possibility of correction.
2. There's a lot of political diversity that people don't seem to realize is there. To a left-wing community, all "right-wingers" are practically the same, and vice versa -- which is of course not true. You'd think this is obvious, but I've seen people get treated as though they were the worst stereotype of the opposition for presuming to disagree with the community consensus on the topic du jour.
3. Related to this, an observation: acting as though everyone who makes an opposing comment is a troll / evil / acting in bad faith / fanatic for the other side / etc. is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Reasonable members of the opposition (or even people who mostly agree with you, except on this one point) will be deterred or chased away, while the fanatics, actual trolls, and people without enough self-control (who tend to be less coherent) will still remain, and possibly even be encouraged.
4. I've gained an appreciation for how unreliable a marker of actual reasonableness the local window of acceptable thought (cf. Overton window) can be. What is considered fringe or radical in one group can easily be considered moderate, or even a fringe view in the other direction, in a different group. This occurs on a large scale (famously, what is considered left-wing in the US would be center-right in northern/western Europe, and successful and uncontroversial policies there are considered hopelessly radical by a large portion of the populace here), but also on a smaller scale as well. On Boundless, complementarianism and male agency is the "normal" position, complete with ideas such as that a man should ask a woman's father for permission to court her (and that it's unacceptable for a woman to ask a man out), that a woman's primary role is to help her husband, or that female clergy are "obviously" unacceptable, being easily within the normal discourse and promoted in the official posts as well as by commentariat. (Not everyone agrees with these, but they are uncontroversially the normal and reasonable positions to take, and many people in the community see them as the only Biblical positions.) At Slacktivist, all of these are completely beyond the pale, clear signs of misogyny or oppression of women, and complementarianism is considered to be a make-nice code word for patriarchy.
5. I think there are two kinds of temptations for processing the field of viewpoints. One is to identify with one "side" or the other, vilify the opposite "side", and dig in one's heels against the obvious evil of opposing views. It should be obvious why this is bad for truth-seeking: it leads to echo chambers, groupthink, and radicalization. (This is *not* limited to the right or left wing. I've seen more of it on the right than on the left, but by no means is the left immune to it.) The opposite temptation is to try to find the "golden mean" by interpolating a moderate position, on the principal that both sides are radicalized and the truth is somewhere in the middle. This is more pleasant in terms of getting along with people, but almost as bad for truth-seeking, because it bases what is reasonable not on what is true, but on what people in surrounding communities think -- see the above comment on how unreliable that window of acceptable thought can be. Moreover, this inclination gets exploited by radicalizing elements: if what previously was moderate can be made to seem fringe, then this "moderating" impulse moves people away from it. The right wing in the US has been successfully exploiting this in issues of economic policy in recent decades; witness previously uncontroversially moderate/compromise positions being denounced as "socialism" or "communism".
6. I tend to have more of the moderating impulse than the taking-sides impulse. So reading a large distribution of perspectives has been very useful, but not without its dangers. I have to continually remind myself that what I'm looking for is what is true, not a weighted average of positions that ends up to the right of the "left-wing" and the left of the "right-wing".
7. Directional descriptors (conservative, liberal, etc) as terms of opprobrium or approval are bad. It's one thing to categorize viewpoints (though it is a simplification), but dismissing them because of their categorization is anti-truth. So many times people have shut themselves off from learning because an idea got labelled as "liberal" or "reactionary" and they thus wanted nothing to do with it.
8. I used to describe my political views as economically liberal and socially conservative. I no longer think that this is an accurate description. This seems kind of odd to me, because I have a lot of traditional/conservative values and beliefs, and my life reflects that. But I don't think that I have a right to enforce those beliefs on other people. I'd like it if others believed as I do, and (largely) I think they ought to, but I don't think that government should be an enforcer of morality. That this is somehow the "liberal" position makes me rather uncomfortable. I would still describe my economic views as liberal, though not because I have a particular attachment to an economic theory or have any particular love for institutional socialism (I don't). Rather, I strongly believe that social and economic justice -- a safety net, so that no one need live in fear of ruin and so that the poor are well taken care of, and an active defense of the poor and weak against injustices imposed on them by the rich and powerful -- are of both paramount importance and one of the proper roles of government. Apparently, this too is "liberal", and growing more so (rather, more and more being viewed so); I cannot see myself voting for a Republican, for any office, in the foreseeable future, because the party seems to have become uniformly opposed to governmental action on behalf of the poor and powerless, and their spokespeople, at least, seem to have lost all empathy for the poor and suffering. (Of course, I do not think that all, or most, Republicans are without empathy -- as, unfortunately, some on the left seem to think. That position would be uncharitable as well as absurd. I'm speaking only of the expressed views and policies of the spokespeople and leaders in the party, which are, after all, what one has to consider when voting.) At any rate, I now think that a better description, at least relative to others in the US, is that I am conservative in my personal views and life, but politically left-wing.
Since most of this has been sitting not-posted on my computer for more than a week now, I will go ahead and post it, even though I am sure that there are things I meant to write but I have forgotten. I suppose that is what future posts are for.
