Re: Townhall.com – 2/6/2009 – “Where Have All the Tough Guys Gone?” – Dan Kennedy

Most any philosophy pushed too far is absurd. Real life is complex and no single solution solves all problems --- the real trick is to know what solutions are most likely to work for each specific kind of problem, and to know at what level of abstraction a philosophy becomes just dogmatic verbal pronouncements rather than a reliable guide to action.

Assuming that everyone else is incompetent so you (the only person who is competent) must make all the decisions for others is dumb --- if everyone else is incompetent, chances are you are too, and even if you are more competent than most, chances are your not more competent every person at every single thing. Clearly the liberal attitude of helping people who cannot help themselves, taken to the extreme where everyone needs help in everything from everybody, is absurd.

But the conservative position that people helping themselves is always better than people being helped, taken to the extreme where no one needs help in anything, is just as absurd. If people should just help themselves (and others should not help them help themselves) then charity would be a sin and a good Samaritan would be a bad Samaritan and police protection would be unconstitutional. No reasonable conservative actually believes that in some cases people should not act to help others by providing temporary assistance to those who are temporarily unable to help themselves. In my experience, conservatives are just as likely to support charitable causes as are liberals. And in my experience, conservatives generally consider themselves even more charitable than liberals, but this is something I have not observed to be true. And even on issues of private vs government control, conservatives have issues that they like government to decide rather than leave the issue to the private sector, especially issues enforcing their views on religious and personal behavior and in actively supporting business over labor and consumers.

No liberal believes anything like “charity and/or government can fix all problems”. No  liberal believes that personal responsibility is not a necessary component of a successful society.

Liberals and conservatives differ mainly at drawing the line where self help alone becomes inadequate in solving problems and where public and/or private charity becomes necessary, and of course, how much of that help should be provided by government and how much by private charity.

A football team requires the individual physical and mental skills of the players as well as the coordination of individual actions imposed by the coaching staff. Jim Brown could not have run unimpeded thru a defense without offensive blocking, nor could he have run at all if the coaches never called on him to carry the ball in their plays or the quarterback never handed him the ball. In some ways, society is like football. Individuals in society need to use all their physical and mental skills, but even for the most able of us, such skills are insufficient. There must be a structure of rules (football’s rules and the coaches’ plays) and support (the “blocking” his offensive line gave Jim Brown), and it is to provide a structure of rules that “Governments are instituted among Men”. Too much structure and players become unmotivated and the team looses. Too little structure and you’ve got a lot of people running around with no observable unified purpose and the team looses. Winning teams have a delicate balance between structure and individual performance, and so to do winning societies.

Non-extremists conservatives and non-extremist liberals should get together to find that proper balance rather than sit around and listen to the extreme conservatives and extreme liberals hurl insults at one another. Both non-extremist conservatives and non-extremist liberals should stop letting the extremists speak for them.