A Liberal Manifesto
OK. I'll admit it. I've been keeping my 'liberal bias' in the closet for too long now. Staying cooped up is starting to chafe too severely, so I just have to let it out. I find myself writing ever more frequently about diversity and how essential it is to a truly conscious and humane life. I'd go so far as to say that accepting — no, embracing — diversity holds the unique key to our survival. We stand at a global crossroads where the choice continually confronts us to change, evolve, and progress or to cower in fear.
Humanity as a whole has to choose between cowering in fear within the illusory 'security' of a past safety and homogeneity (that never really existed except in carefully whitewashed memories of the 'good ol' days'), and a future fraught with adventure and peril. One way leads to progress and survival, the other to extinction. The choice is anything but trivial.
We need look no farther than the history of the universe itself to see the broad pattern: everything that we can experience has come to be what it is from an original, nearly homogeneous plasma — an energized soup of proto-matter — that, even in its homogeneity, had just enough diversity to begin a process of accretion that continues down to the present. Simply by looking at the changes in the universe over the billions of years of its existence, we can see the basic processes at work: diversification, complexification, organization, and the emergence of awareness. In these four patterns, we can personally observe the Hand of God at work.
What about the so-called 'conservative' approach? Culturally, we can see in it what sociologist Geert Hofstede (Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind) calls high 'uncertainty avoidance'. Many people cling to this approach in an attempt to avoid the sense of lacking control over their own destiny. On a deeper level still, its roots can be found in a denial of death: the ultimate uncertainty. In this one man's estimation, conservatism is also the ultimate cowardice for that one simple reason.
By seeking to stop the clock, or to turn it back to a fondly (if erroneously) remembered past, when things were supposedly simpler and lines were more clearly drawn between good and evil, frightened people attempt to bury diversity in an invented homogeneity ("He's a 'real' American") and escape uncertainty in a simplistic, dualistic ('us vs. them') worldview. Walt Kelly's cartoon character, Pogo, expressed it best when he said, "We've met the enemy and they is us."
I see this anti-evolutionary anti-diversity uncertainty avoidance in so many areas of our human life that it has become deeply troubling to me. I really wonder if we humans have the guts to embrace fully our God-given gift of humanity. I firmly believe that God loves and respects his creation (us) so much that he's entrusted into our hands the seeds of our own self-destruction: fear. Regardless of our belief systems, I don't think that we've taken our faith in God seriously enough. God, whoever God is — however we define 'love' — must be utterly fearless. As humans, I don't think we can grasp that at all: it's a concept so far from our experience. Yet, we continually seem to be trying to second-guess God, to pretend to know what the 'Will of God' is, and, if anything should be clear to us, it's that we certainly don't.
If conservatism means reducing reality to a comprehensible, homogenic whole where the lines between right and wrong, good and evil, 'us' and 'them', orthodoxy and heresy are clearly drawn, then I reject it wholeheartedly as an affront to the intrinsic wildness of the Spirit of God in which all of creation (including you and me) participates. If liberalism means promoting diversity and embracing the uncertainty that forms the core of life and of all existence, then call me nothing other than a 'liberal'. Here I stand, I can do no other.
H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown
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