I’ve been reading Christopher Hitchen’s Letters to a Young Contrarian, and it has given me some interesting topics to think about. Say what you will about Hitchens, but he is one of the smartest contemporary media figures we have, and he is not oft to neglect an issue out of expedience. The least expedient issue of all is probably the colossal domination of stupidity and injustice in every aspect of society. Justice systems, politics, religions, the media, and popular culture are all saturated not only with disastrous norms, but with people who, if not cruelly self-serving, lack anything resembling what we might classify as common sense, let alone the motivation to use it. Taking offense to this is not arrogance, as the arrogant would not resent their disproportionate intelligence and virtue. To take issue with the majority is the only way to provoke progress. The arrogant are the ones who retreat from the tide and distance themselves from the unseemly aspects of the world. Think of how many people threatened to move to Canada, whether in jest or not, if George W. Bush was reelected. Think of how out of touch your average professors are. Think about where you want your children to go to school.
Hitchens quoted Dr. Israel Shahak, when asked about his impression of recent events, as saying, “There are some encouraging signs of polarization.” Consider American politics. Barack Obama faced one of the most dogmatic and and zealously dangerous American electorates ever, and won thanks to the opposition and previous administration. When you have caricatures like Sarah Palin and George W. Bush acting crass and jingoistic, the reasonably intelligent will know to vote for anyone else. That said, Obama is realistically no better than Bush when you compare foreign policy (renewed military engagements and reassertion of some form of the War on Terror), civil liberties (“prolonged detainment” and upholding Bush’s “No Constitution Zone” encompassing two thirds of the US population), and the failed drug prohibition programs both domestically and abroad (flippantly dismissed the most popular questions regarding drugs in four out of the five of the given topics in the most recent town hall meeting). Polarization in each of these topics has led to more interest and accountability, even if we have a long way to go.
What can we do, aside from recognizing the problems? We can live “as if” we were in the world we want to live in. Hitchens describes the efforts of Rosa Parks and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as in this vein. They acted as if they were in situations that were just and reasoned, even though they were not. This could also take on the guise of privately acting in defiance of established norms or laws. It need not come to conflict, but when it does, it often helps to further the goals of the dissenter by pointing out how unjust the norms or laws are. If you think the laws regarding intellectual property rights are unjust, you may continue, in opposition to the law, to illegally download music. When the RIAA sues children and old women for everything they own because they may have shared a few songs, they will appear crass and the disparate wrongs of song sharing versus large companies suing the livelihoods away from average Americans is illustrated. If that absurd cyber-bullying act that I have previously written about somehow passes, I will continue to operate Unfollow Friday unfettered, and I will happily defend my civil liberties against knee-jerk stupidity and political maneuvering openly in court.
