obrieke’s Recent Comments

• Click here to view comment in original post

  How do we change it?

  I couldn't agree more about the abuse of moral language as the central disappointment of this election.  Whether it's true or not, most of the media seems to sum things up as blue states having voted for some policy or another while red states have voted for "values."  And my lord is that frustrating.

  How anyone can believe that there's a sharp disconnect between values and policy is beyond me.  The majority of us here most likely think that mercury in our fish and science banished from the halls of government are deeply moral issues.  And those of us who don't want to make laws against gay people living together probably have moral foundations for those ideas, too.  But such thoughts are seen, in public discourse, as something different from morality.

  I don't know why and I can't make sense of it, but the fact that I don't get it doesn't mean that something needs to be done to fix it.  We need to get the message that it's not enough to be right, we also have to find a way to be righteous.  Responsibly, tolerantly righteous, but righteous nonetheless.  I'd be really interested to hear others' ideas about what could be done in this direction.  A few of mine are:

  -We in the environmental movement need to talk, openly and a lot, about morality and values.  If we are working from deep commitments, we should find ways to be comfortable talking about them.  Of course, we don't want to become the opposition too much by assuming that everyone works from the same values.  But if we all share some moral ideas, we need to make that really public.  And even if we don't, we need to show the rest of the country that we are morally serious and values-driven people.

  -We in the environmental movement need to talk, openly and a lot, about religion.  Whether we like it or not,  faith and values are intimately linked in most people's minds.  So those of us who work for the environment from religious motivation need to be absolutely clear about that.  And those of us who don't have religious motivation need to be clear that we can be tolerant of the religious and respect morality from diverse sources.  

  -We need to find issues that sell as moral issues.  If a key to this election was to use gay marriage and abortion to get scads of people to the polls, we need to figure out what issues might be as clear and effective for us.  The religious right has lots of policy initiatives and long-ranging plans, but they bring in heavy support by concentrating on issues that people get behind.  We should consider doing the same.  I believe really deeply in sustainability and biodiversity, but I'm not sure either is yet at a point yet where it's going to be massively popular in this country.  I wonder if child asthma rates and energy independence might be better bridge issues?

  -We need to rethink our connection to the Democratic Party as it currently exists.  One key to this Republicans-as-moral idea hasn't been talked about much:   A residual effect of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinski/Kenneth Starr nonsense that (wrongly!) convinced so many people that democrats just don't have morals.  We might just accept this and distance ourselves from the Democrats; there are plenty of good environmentalist reasons to leave that party behind.  Or we might work to redeem it, but make it clear that the transformation is one that makes it more moral rather than just smarter.

  I'm convinced that the response to this election needs to be more hard work.  And I hope that part of that work can be to change the assumption that people who work on "liberal" ideas like the environment may have good ideas, but don't have good values.  Ultimately, I hope we can prove that good ideas and good values go hand in hand, and that the very idea of voting for only one or the other is ridiculous.  On Moral values posted 5 years ago 7 Responses