A Study in Contrasts

During my six months' stay in San Francisco last year, I rented a room in a house owned by someone with strong opinions on just about everything. A self-avowed leftist who favored Dennis Kucinich for the presidency, this woman insisted that none of the mainstream media could be trusted at all, that American policymakers had no legitimate reason to criticize Russia's attack on Georgia, and that the only possible beneficiaries of genetically-engineered food were its manufacturers.

More recently, Facebook has allowed a former high-school acquaintance of mine to re-establish contact with me after a stretch of nearly thirty years. A self-professed conservative who has named his son after Ronald Reagan, this guy asserts that Barack Obama's economic plan is doomed to fail, that blame for the current crisis rests almost exclusively with the Democrats, and that American-style capitalism represents the zenith of human social development.

Any face-to-face confrontation between these two individuals would clearly lead to verbal fireworks, if not to actual physical assault. Yet in fact both share one overwhelming trait -- a trait common to virtually all ideologues: they are singularly close-minded. Convinced that they and they alone know "the truth," that they and they alone have the proper solutions to the world's problems, that anyone who disagrees with them is misguided at best and downright evil at worst. Such rigidity of thought -- or, rather, of sentiment, since ideology at bottom serves as a convenient substitute for the hard work of thinking -- makes the pursuit of human betterment -- whether on an economic, a political, a social, a physical, or an aesthetic plane -- that much more difficult.

This is not to suggest that every idea merits equal respect, or that every person deserves an equal hearing. But when it comes to rendering "human civilization" a contradiction in terms, ideologues of both the left and the right can certainly claim equal credit. As a non-ideological reading of history will demonstrate time and time again . . .