Beyond Common Ground

“Without contraries is no progression.”

-William Blake

Over and over again I’ve read too many times to keep track of (I’ll do some digging in the NY Times stacks at the library to find some article links) about how the big problem our country and government face is that we can’t seem to find common ground. “Let’s stop looking at each as liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, put our differences aside, and work together for the common good.” Or as Cal Thomas, typical arch-conservative icon and columnist wrote today about President Obama, “he needs to find common ground with Republicans, not scorched Earth.” Besides being cliché and mundane, this ubiquitous mindset fails to realize that all cultures are based on a common ground; if there were no common ground (like the speaking of English or use of silverware instead of chopsticks) there would be no coherent culture. While the common ground may not be visible or explicit or consciously recognized, it is there just like the polluted air we breathe or the potholes we drive over or the desolate infrastructure through which we traverse or the media and advertising in which we are all saturated.

The problem is not that we don’t have common ground. It’s that we can’t get beyond it.

There is no reason why, nor is it possible or desirable, we should agree on or hold common views on everything. In fact, such a condition is unsustainable (humans are too complex and varied) not to mention incompatible with a democratic society or any other benevolent political system antithetical to tyranny.

In a country as geographically vast as ours, there is no reason we shouldn’t have some anything-goes-liberal territories and others that are keep-it-the-same-do-it-the-same oppressive and boring conservative territories. Depending on your preference (a reference to J.S. Mill’s seminal 1859 essay On Liberty), you can have your pick. That’s right: choice! Imagine that in a free country! For example, I concede the entire state of Utah (Colorado is just as beautiful with way better people), the South, and the Midwest. But there ought to not be just little specs but entire regions of this country that can come out of the shadows and be full of fun, experimentation, open-mindedness, curiosity, and intellectual vibrancy, not clouded by military goons who have nothing better to do but become cops and take their PTSD out on a completely harmless, if not partially unsavory, local population. For people who don’t like a place like that, take your guns and get the fuck out. Or better, do the rest of us a favor and kill yourselves.

The so-called health care debate exemplifies the folly of the “common ground” trope. As I said earlier in our blog (see “Massachusucks”) there is no common ground or political middle ground when it comes to health care: either you think everyone should have health care and receive world-class medical treatment when they need or you do not. There is no compromise there. When Obama blandly declared last fall that the key to health care reform was “to bring together the best ideas of both parties” he was not seeking common ground; he was giving in, surrendering. Republicans do not want universal health care and will do everything to make sure it will never happen (and this being an extremely conservative country dominated by Republican politics and priorities, they will win as always). Consistent with the proverb above from Blake, the predictable result from Obama’s complacency has been that no progress has been made. Obama, in quintessential Democrat tradition, refuses to assert himself as a contrary to the Republicans, so everything stalls and nothing happens.

When nothing happens during an administration that campaigned on the platform of “change,” that betrays the common ground the country and government refuse to go beyond: the conservative principle of preserving the status quo—at all costs, no matter how obvious it is the status quo sucks. Imagine you have been a “productive” employee for a company for a number of years. While your tax dollars are appropriated by the government to bailout incredibly rich people whose obsessive greed has wrecked the economy, you get fired because your company is not a giant investment bank—a coded term for a branch of the treasury—so you lose your health care plan. You or a loved one then come down with an illness that would be treatable with either medication or surgery, but guess what? Can’t help ya! It’s too much to ask! We need to build schools and bridges and hospitals in Iraq and Afghanistan because of the billions of dollars we’ve already spent blowing those countries up. This is a scenario that clearly sucks and can only improve if it is changed, that is, if we move beyond the common ground that increasingly feels like a prison built on quicksand.

Below I’ve itemized twenty examples of prevailing ideas that define the rigid and miserable common ground that is 21^st century America:

1) Adult life has little purpose or meaning beyond having a job and making money.

2) A job is necessarily something alienating, stressful, and mundane, offering little or no reward beyond monetary compensation.

3) All human conflict must be dealt with through violence, punishment, and criminal justice.

4) To take an intellectual, thoughtful approach toward daunting problems like terrorism, or one’s relationship with food and the environment, is a waste of time;

5) Worse still, such an approach is regarded as deviance from our government and corporate leaders who have already told us how we will deal with these problems, and thus a clear sign that one hates America.

6) Science is something one “believes in” or not.

7) All good ideas have already been thought of—and it is ridiculous to think of our current economic and political systems as antiquated and in need of overhaul.

8) Despite the fact our financial banking system ruined the economy, still the one people in the country who have any credibility or the brains to deal with problems in the “real world” are superrich businesspeople.

9) Anything associated with being liberal is bad, and “big government.”

10) To value family, neighborhood, and community is antiquated and utopian.

11) Saturation in digital media environments is normal and the only effective way to communicate or sustain relationships.

12) War is the answer and victory is always achievable.

13) Anything enriching to human experience, any form of play or private meditation is wrong and irresponsible.

14) Despite its obvious dangers and the considerable expense and toll it takes on the planet’s resources, getting around by car all the time to do everything is normal, the best and only practical way to get around.

15) By constantly being at war, having more police, putting more people in prison, and taking away more rights and liberties, we are maximizing our freedom.

16) Efficiency and profit are the only worthwhile value systems and any other approach to life or value system is worthless, childish, and impractical, and must be squashed (see #3).

17) Only those with lots of money should have any rights or a voice in how society should work.

18) By extension, intelligent and educated people are elitist and should not be trusted, since they value enlightenment instead of profit and wish to impose their views on everyone else.

19) The planet Earth is an obstacle to optimum economic performance.

20) America is the greatest country ever in the history of the world, and it is nothing short of sheer treasonous insanity (that’s what happens when them hippies to do too much of that dope and LSD) to propose that other countries have better policies concerning education, health care, and the economy, and that America might be well served to learn from and to some extent emulate these other countries.

Yes, yes, I know: not every single American agrees with all of these viewpoints. But I’m talking about a culture, not individuals. As my MoPod colleague has aptly observed, people are idiots everywhere. But the difference in cultures is in how people come together, not the percentage of them who are war-mongering morons. While any number of you out there may disagree with these ideological hubs of America’s common ground, it doesn’t matter: these are the ideas that have shaped American politics for my entire conscious life and show no signs of giving way. One reason America cannot get beyond common ground, I think, is that so many Americans fail to make the distinction between individual Americans and American culture—since they know so many people who “aren’t like that” they refuse to look at the big picture and thus take seriously the need to change it. For me, this is just another form of conservatism, which is the prevailing ideology of this incredibly conservative country. There is more to being a conservative than being a fiscal (the rich should have all the money, pay no taxes, and control everything) or social (anyone who is not an uptight Christian should be thrown in jail) conservative. A huge amount of America’s conservative population is made up of people I would call “the apathetic”—people who, no matter how bad things get or how obvious it should be to have a sense of urgency to move beyond the status quo, seem genetically incapable of the slightest sentiment or civic concern. They’re assholes, basically, but in a more insidious way than the in-your-face types that characterize the fiscal and social conservatives. They’re simply just all about themselves. You don’t have to protest, join the Peace Corps, or stop bathing (I do still occasionally bathe) to be a remotely community-oriented human being. Just refusing to believe the avalanche of bullshit our corporate-state controlled media shits down our throats non-stop, thinking about things like the economy and education, and mainly just making time to socialize and listen to the people around you instead of treating them as transparent décor can actually make an important difference in your neo, quasi, on-life-support-community, and yes, to satiate your chronic solipsism, your own suckshit life. Sometimes I think remembering that you are a part of something much larger than yourself actually helps to see that’s exactly why you are important, not why you don’t matter. I got that feeling a lot out in Colorado, when every day I traversed the beautiful Earth beneath 14,100 feet of mountain. I was—and still am, I guess, connected to that, and connected to the stars and galaxies beyond.

In closing, I would like to emphasize that by going beyond common ground I do not mean to leave behind all the good things upon which healthy traditions have been based. What’s important for a culture to stay vital is to add new to the old. The old is has been around for a long time for a reason: it’s good; it has offered sustainable pleasure and value for the human experience. Rural electrification (new) of the family farm (old) is an example of what I’m talking about; getting rid of the family farm is obviously very bad, and something I will discuss at greater length in an upcoming blog entry. In other words, just because one moves beyond common ground doesn’t mean the ground beneath us caves in. It means, as nomads, we have room to grow, to discover, to be ourselves, to be different from one another—a fundamental trait of humanity, in all its glorious strangeness. The common ground will always be there for those of you who want nothing out of life but conformity and self-aggrandizement (e.g. those of you who suck). There are still some of us out there who haven’t forgotten the need for a private, meditative inner world that has no need for affirmation or permission. To reference one of the clichés discussed at the opening, in many ways there is no “common good.” Humans are not identical in their needs and backgrounds. What I need, what is good for me, is not for everyone, not even necessarily understandable to everyone. I don’t need everyone else to understand me anyway and God knows I will never find most other Americans likeable, much less understandable. And until we move beyond common ground, you guess it . . .

. . . nothing good is ever going to happen again.