Becoming Amba-Dextrous
By amba | Related entries in Blogging, General PoliticsFor a while now I’ve been watching this lighted boat, hearing friends’ voices float across the water and thinking, “That sounds like one hell of a centrist party� (if not yet a Centrist Party). So I’m delighted to be invited on board, and I thank Justin Gardner for the invitation.
I’ve never blogged my “conversion story� on AmbivaBlog, so maybe now’s the time by way of introducing myself. Mine is almost as dramatic as Neo-Neocon’s. There are differences, though. I did not see the light either in the Reagan ‘80s or on 9/11. My awakening came deep in Monica Time, when I helped a highly original conservative write a book. Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D., a Jewish neuropsychiatrist and expert on obsessive-compulsive disorder, had studied Theravada Buddhist texts in Pali and done vipassana meditation daily for twenty-five years. (Today he’s thinking that the radical Christianity of Bonhoeffer and Kierkegaard is the next step beyond Buddhism.) The book, A Return to Innocence (Dear Patrick in paperback), was based on letters and life lessons Dr. Schwartz had written to a 16-year-old, who happened to be publisher Judith Regan’s son. But that’s another story.
I’d spent my life among unquestioning liberals. We thought we were thinking, but we never ventured outside the borders of our assumptions: if it’s Natural it’s Good, if it’s Business it’s Bad, Victimhood is Virtue, Peace Now. To help write the book in Jeff’s voice, I had to channel conservative ideas through my own mind. At first they were alien and repellent, and I recoiled from them. Then came a moment when I realized that they were true.
The arguments I was making – about moral pollution being as destructive as environmental pollution, about self-gratification not being synonymous with fulfillment, about the shaping power of incentives and consequences – convinced me. I was startled and refreshed to find myself being braced by Burke and nauseated by Rousseau. Suddenly I’d walk down the New York streets and flinch at the casual, fashionable brutality of the overheard conversation: “So I told that fuckin’ fuck, fuck you, motherfucker, and it was like a fuckin’ joke, fuck the fuckin’ fuckfuckfuck.� I became more conscious and shy about deploying the F-word myself. (I save it now, mostly, for plumbing emergencies, crying it skyward with plunger raised to the heavens.)
And yet I did not become a conservative. Where so many converts did a 180, I did a 90. I wasn’t knocked off my ass and onto my posterior by a blinding flash of light. I just got my feet on the ground and walked away. My new concern for the moral environment did not obliterate my concern for the natural environment. My new respect for traditional wisdom did not increase my patience for traditional nonsense and authoritarianism. It began to seem to me that conservatism and liberalism represented two versions of the past – the premodern and the modern, both dead as dodos – and that the way of the future would have to be a third way.
On the quest for that third way, I’ve ended up combining some less common parts of the anatomy of the burro and the pachyderm: mixed-economy, cosmopolitan (in Kwame Appiah’s sense – what I love most about America is that the whole world is here), queasy hawk, unapologetic tree-hugger, open to intelligent Intelligent Design, and social moderate (pro-early choice yet anti-abortion; favor saving sex for adulthood and for love, but not necessarily for marriage). I guess that makes me a Donklephant – one of the riotously varied experiments who don’t have to hide our Frankenstein scars and graft sites here.
I feel at home, and look forward to joining the fray.
This entry was posted on Saturday, April 8th, 2006 and is filed under Blogging, General Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 8th, 2006 at 1:24 pm
The “lighted” boat just started glowing even more brightly. I’ll take more Amba anywhere I can find her.
Way to go, Justin–and Amba.
April 8th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
this site is getting better and better.
April 9th, 2006 at 10:38 am
Just as Amba was turned toward the center by Jeffrey Schwartz, I’ve been turned toward it by her beautifully written, well-reasoned, world-scanning blog and by others like it. I’ve had Donklephant on my blogroll for some time but I’ll be visiting it more often because she’s here. As a reader, I want to be on this party boat too — and that’s an example of Amba wonderful gift for metaphor, which readers here will see frequently and delight in.
April 9th, 2006 at 4:24 pm
Good Lord, you’re here, too? This should be interesting : )
April 10th, 2006 at 8:27 am
Welcome Amba! Your other blog is already on my roll too. Donklephant sure is attracting a lot of blogging talent!
April 10th, 2006 at 10:05 pm
It’s a bad moment (month) to be on dial-up and disappoint such a glorious welcome because I’m blogging through a snorkel, which will make me sound like the duck in the wolf’s stomach in “Peter and the Wolf.” Drat!
April 11th, 2006 at 5:55 pm
Marvelous. We need this.