Maybe Read a Book Before You Vote
Or at least listen to someone who has.
American politics has developed a peculiar intellectual problem. We have become extraordinarily certain about things we know almost nothing about. This is not particularly a Republican problem or a Democratic one. In fact, one of the few remaining areas of genuine bipartisan achievement is our ability to reach sweeping conclusions without doing the tedious work of understanding the subjects underneath them.
Consider religion in American history, where the left and right have camped out with strong political conclusions.
The conservative version says America was founded as a Christian nation. There is enough truth in that sentence to make it wonderfully misleading. Europe was Christian. Colonial America was overwhelmingly shaped by Christianity. Many of its settlers were Christians.
But quite a few of them had also left Christian Europe with little love lost. Some were the wrong kind of Christians. Some were religious zealots. Some belonged to sects that the Christians in power considered dangerous, heretical or intolerable. And once in America, the Christians continued demonstrating their Christian fellowship by excluding, fining, banishing and occasionally imprisoning other Christians. Some of the modern Americans most enthusiastic about returning to our “Christian” origins belong to denominations whose predecessors might have found themselves on the wrong side of the law in the Christian colonies they are romanticizing.
This does not prove America wasn’t Christian. It proves that “America was a Christian nation” isn’t an understanding of American history. It’s a conclusion about American history.
The left has its own version, in which liberal humanists reformed American society. Modern progressive history tends to make social progress sound like the gradual victory of enlightened humanism over religious ignorance. Women’s rights, abolition, racial equality and other causes are comfortably absorbed into the ancestry of modern secular liberalism.
Unfortunately for that tidy story, many of the people doing the actual work were Christians to the core.
John Brown didn’t merely dislike slavery. He believed slavery was an offense against God and that God had given him work to do about it. Eventually that work included trying to spark an armed slave uprising. The Quakers who spent generations agitating against slavery weren’t accidentally Quakers while doing it. Their religion was central to why they were doing it. The abolitionist movement is crawling with ministers, revivalists, biblical arguments and people whose religious convictions would make plenty of modern secular liberals slowly edge away from them at a cocktail party.
The history of women’s rights creates an even bigger problem for our modern political categories. Women did not spend most of human history subordinated because somebody invented Christianity. Their restricted legal, economic and social position was built into societies across cultures and centuries.
The first American women’s-rights movement did not emerge from a room full of secular humanists congratulating themselves for escaping Christianity. It grew directly out of abolitionist and religious reform networks. Quaker women were all over it. Lucretia Mott was a Quaker minister. Four of the five women who initially organized the Seneca Falls convention had Quaker backgrounds, and they held the convention in a Wesleyan Methodist chapel with deep connections to abolitionism.
Understanding any of this requires knowing something and knowing something takes considerably longer than having an opinion about it. Books are important because complicated subjects have an annoying tendency to be complicated. Read enough about colonial America and “Christian nation” stops being a terribly useful sentence. Read enough about abolition and the comfortable modern division between religious reactionaries and secular progressives starts falling apart.
Read enough about almost anything and something terrible eventually happens: your own political side becomes wrong about part of it. That may be the intellectual experience disappearing from American politics. We no longer seem to begin with a subject, learn about it, encounter contradictions and eventually form a tentative conclusion. We begin with the conclusion, then collect a few generalities to defend it.
And because the other side is doing the same thing, each group can constantly demonstrate how ignorant the other group is without noticing that it is looking into a mirror. The result is dangerous in a democracy: certainty without knowledge.
So maybe read a book and then form an opinion. Or, God forbid, consider listening to those who have. In the past, people more readily accepted an obvious proposition: someone who had spent years seriously studying something probably knew more about it than someone who had spent twenty minutes.
Smart people understand that a conclusion is the end of an inquiry, not the beginning.
~David Henson, Citizen Octopus
About the Author
David Henson is an inventor, publisher, writer and founder of Citizen Octopus, a site focused on analyzing systems, incentives, and how information shapes perception.