In the fascinating rise and rise of Barack Obama, we see a resurgence of what the Americans call ‘liberalism’ and what we Australians don’t really have a decent name for, apart from the vague designation ‘leftist’. It’s a moral and political philosophy that takes an optimistic view of mankind and the human heart, and believes that if we all start afresh, work together, and change the way we do things, then together we can build a better America, a better Australia, a better world. Yes, we can.
According to liberalism, the real obstacle to human progress is ‘the system’. It’s the multinationals, big oil, corporate greed, the military machine, and the corrupt government insiders that ensure business as usual. It’s the Establishment—the Man. If only the right people could get hold of the levers of power, everything would be better.
Many liberals or leftists tend to abandon this faith as they grow older; as their optimism about the goodness of humanity gets mugged by reality. The playwright David Mamet, writing recently about his own drift from being “brain-dead liberal”, puts it down to a realization that his two core beliefs—that society is bad and needs changing, and that people are good at heart—were both insupportable:
This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.
But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.
And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.
I’d observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.1
Mamet is in no sense a Christian, but his observation of life at this point is one we share. The Bible teaches us that people are not good at heart: every part of us is tainted by sin. Nevertheless, neither we nor the world are totally and unremittingly evil, and, in the goodness of God, we often manage to work together to do and build good things (if not perfect things), and to live together with a degree of harmony—but only to a degree, and never without suffering and compromise. It’s not the system that’s the problem—such that if only we completely changed it, everything would be fine; it’s the people. As GK Chesterton so famously wrote when asked to comment on what was wrong with the world, “I am”.
Endnote
1. http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0811,why-i-am-no-longer-a-brain-dead-liberal,374064,1.html/full.↩
