It seems to me that Americans agree on one thing: That the future is a black plain under a hellish sky. One camp looks forward to wearing the jackboots and deciding where to lay the barbed wire.
The other wants to postpone this future for which it can propose many alternatives and yet cannot agree on any of them.
From socio-economics, to social issues, to crime and punishment, and of course to the environment, minds hold incredible nihilism that makes 1984 seem quaint and appealing in its supposition that a totalitarian government should even care what individuals feel, much less manage to provide for the general welfare.
Manifest Destiny is a powerful notion in this country. It follows that the strongest shared fantasy would become that destiny. Much has been said about the decline of political optimism but little is done. Instead many people look to the politician with the grin and mistake vague hope, for the ability to do something about real problems, and to keep the worse imagined ones from becoming real eventually. What is missing is a strong, clear, agreeable dream.
Let us return for a few beats to Exhibit A, the Nightmare. It is a world in which at last the strong and free, the meek and innocent, those who put others before themselves and those who excel above all others, are safe. Secure. Safe and secure from what, you ask? Why from whatever you are afraid of, because this is your fantasy. Mine too. And your neighbors'.
Then there is the environment: That which we define as something other than ourselves, our homes, the products prepared for our consumption, and the waste we variously produce. There is a distinct difference of opinion about what's to be done with this enviornment thing, but all seem to agree something must be done. And the fear on both sides is really very similar. The fear is that the other side wants to take it away. Either by locking it off from human use or by exhausting it, the fear is the same, and the rhetoric of wise use is the same as the rhetoric of sustainability is to the other side: The stuff of public relations campaigns but not the underlying stuff of real fears.
Similarly then, there are social values. That is to say, the worth, worthlessness, or unwelcome penalty that people ascribe to the things people want. Typically, they value what they themselves want very highly. Unless of course they are taught that half of their wishes can be ascribed to Satan whispering in their ear, or some similar secular embodiment of the unacceptable, and these things they shun.
Of course hypocrisy is only part of the story since some people will never be gay, crave whale meat, or need a gun to feel like an in-charge adult. The progressive can point out that guns greatly increase mortal risks to friends and family, and the conservatives can point out that gaiety raises risks of AIDS.
That gun ownership and gaiety are not abstractions but undertakings of responsible individuals is not seen as relevant to a side that views the other as abstract.
Everything, when you talk about values, is in the abstract. It's math or grammar, but argued without any real logic or system, since none is possible for that which cannot truly be so simplified. Human desire is not so knowable and controllable that it can be addressed mechanically. Such as with a variety of metal and plastic appliances, and content piped through these, or roads on which to convey them?
And that's where human desire, always interesting in the realm of the real, gets at last uninteresting. The proud animal is coralled, then stuck in a small stall, until... Things get interesting again, but terrifying. Because the abstract can take the place of the real entirely, but furthermore, can be the only reality from the first. Thus one might no longer want a TV to be informed about the world and culture, but TV tells the world what to be, and people want to be informed about what TV is, what solely happens there, what could only happen there.
The problem with this scenario is that people are so predisposed to seeing different creeds as abstract. And of course, to viewing the abstract as literal; if not real than promisary of reality. And every other abstraction is a threat therefore to their own, something that may devalue or render it meaningless.
Why people think this way should be clear. Mathematics is taught to people as if it could describe anything, and its tenets are then misapplied to social politics in particular. The next time you suspect a twisted description of some progressive aim is Rovian framing, reconsider. Likelier it is merely the working of what is taught in elementary school regarding math.
Everything is better and easier when reduced to its simplest form, be it fractions or an algebraic equation or an arithmatic problem. Everything is a problem. Every problem has a solution. And finally, not only can numbers respresent individuals as if these were interchangeable and completely predictable, but furthermore ultimately the symbols one uses in math need not be real numbers at all even, no individual "integers" need even be enumerated, only collectively named. And thus can all the trees in a forest or all the people in the city, or everyone with freckles, be reduced to any generality that can be added into an equation. These aren't graded, remember, only the methodology is important here. It has no truth or utility that isn't forced into existence harmfully.
Such a method perforce yields estimations of other points of view, estimations of people, other types of people, other cultures, nations, and persuasions, as an implicitly incompatible threat to ones' one, and also a ridiculous oversimplified caricature of of it. Worst still, another math, statistics, suggests that just a little knowledge of an issue, from talk radio perhaps, can be extrapolated into quite an accurate understanding of it.
This is not an indictment of scientific thought, of course, or of mathematics specifically. Math is considered the unassailable science. Unfortunately its very flawlessness leads its lessons to be misused through misapplication. Most people don't know very much about math really, and know even less about logic. What they do know, though, is how to take a few bits and pieces of what they have picked up and spin these into elaborate, authoritative arguments, rather like composing a book report of a set number of pages from a grudging session of skimming, Cliff's notes, or film-version viewing, if not pure hearsay.
The quality of the BS is higher at the university level but the essential BS-iness of it is only concentrated as a result. The thesis format requires that the writer make an argument and support it. Or at best, make a collection of observations and condense these to a conclusion. This is not a recipe for open minds or for a foundation for future jurisprudence. Rather it is a way to learn how to pick a conclusion that one's supervisor within an institution will like best. And it is a way to keep on viewing reality as up for grabs to whomever can abstract it in the terms most favorable to one's self, and most damning to the others.
That wouldn't be quite so bad except that the aspect of simplification is so great that ones interpretation of others' is so unrealistically harsh, while one's one "conclusion" is so stark and simple too, that it is both a bludgeon of pure conviction toward others' and to oneself, always open to expedient interpretation because there, of course, things are complicated.
Of course there were generations of Utopian dreamers conversant in math, logic, and grammar. What was different though in their world? The depth and degree of hard knowledge we have? No. Rather, we may have that knowledge available to us, but we too often assume that we know enough of it ourselves or have heard enough objective reduction of it to have any idea what it contains. We have, today, a certainty that we know, to varying depths and degrees but never far off the mark, just about everything about everything.
And yet, what we really have, are choices about which biased, self-serving BS we are going to believe in as if it were religious dogma in the middle ages, and not today when religious dogma is ignored but the plain truth, which everyone supposedly agress upon, is as clear as day.
Utopia, therefore, requires humility. It requires not faith or hope, but pragmatism. Because what but Utopia is an acceptable aspiration for people who are drivien to make things better generally, rather than to merely make things worse for their supposed enemies?
You might be hoping for a Utopian vision here in closing. But it is only of a renaissance of respect for the unknown and genuine curiosity about other people, and not a merely feeling beset by other points of view as threatening as rapiers bristling amid a horde.