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Mon 30 Jul, 2007 12:47 pm
In early 90s I met one of the most interesting person of my life, an American philosophy (university) and English (free lancing) teacher, probably the most liberal person I have met, too. He introduced me into the world of modern liberal Western values and although I struggled a bit at first, I almost entirely accepted that value framework later and still am very much influenced by it. This accepting American or Western liberal values have helped me a great deal to make friends with a lot of Westerners and I feel at home basically anywhere where democratic and liberal values are respected.
To make sure what I mean by liberal, I would like to sum up my friend's basic attitude toward some things.
He didn't care about starting a family. He was single at 37 and I think he has never married - I lost the track of his globetrotting history so I don't now what he is up to now. But to him to start a family was an option, not something that is a duty of a moral person.
I married once, but that was rather something of a practical joke than a serious marriage. Our marriage consisted of honeymoon, drinking beer and smoking pot, and sex of course. Soon we ran out of all reasons to be married seriously.
He had taken all kinds of drugs and mingled with all kinds of people - educated, rich, poor, criminals, mafia, prostitutes, bishops, senators.
So typical liberal attitude toward drugs here and was very curious about lifestyles of all kinds of social groups and loved to go where these groups would meet and he would chat and drink with them.
I have smoked pot - in the 90s quite often. I rarely smoke it now. Unlike my liberal friend, I didn't have enough courage to go to Harlem dive bars and mingle with locals. (As he encouraged me to do when I was in New York City, unfortunately he was not around at that time)That would be too difficult for me. Also he has incredible social and cultural sensitivity so he can afford to experiment and survive, but I am very awkward so I only tried to make friends with some
gypsy prostitutes in Prague, had a couple of drinks with them and chatted.
At least I tried to follow the example of my friend and culture teacher.
I haven't taken expensive drugs almost at all just because they are too expensive and also because my Buddhist experience nudges me
to find pleasure in simple moments rather than experiments with body and mind.
He was very critical of all kinds of sexist behavior. He hated and denounced looking down on women and objectifying them.
I have found a lot of fun in the field where men and women play and respect each other as equal. So I found something I would call the world of liberal sex. I don't look at women as slaves for men at all. When I look at porn, I respect their job, being models or porn actresses, as much as I respect the job of male porn models or actors.
He would go to sleep at 4 and got up at 1. That's at least when I was hanging out with him. Oh well, here my friend led me to a bit of hell cause I really tend to do it like that, but my Buddhist experience tells me to get up early and go to sleep before midnight. I am still struggling with this.
He was a pacifist, but although this is probably typical for liberal people I am not sure if pacifism really goes hand to hand with liberalism. I have never been a pacifist. But that is a complex issue I would drop for now.
So as I have already said, I accepted almost all of his values, not because I wanted a change or something, but because I felt these things were somehow natural and much more suitable to my innate tendencies and helped me to find a happier life style.
BTW my father is the opposite of those liberal values. You can imagine what a mess it has made in my development as a child and a teenager.
I have never gotten along with my father ever since I became a teenager.
He is the most conservative person you can imagine and I sometimes wonder how he happens to be my father being sooooo different from me.
But as Buddhist I respect his discipline, his reliability and his strict and regular routine. Anyway, his attitude toward women is outrageous, especially when he gets drunk, oh dear... don't want to hear his comments ... he yells at me, still although I am forty, when he finds out i got up at 12 on the weekend. He has never taken drugs other than alcohol and he can't figure out why am not married at 40 not coming with a bunch of grandchildren to please him. He hates different cultures and cannot respect people with lower social status. He hates his daughter's boyfriend just because he is a restaurant owner. Something too low for my father who made it ... let's keep things private here, say he is extremely successful, ok? Which is okay with me, but he should not look down on people with ordinary jobs.
Oh well, anyway, please tell me about your experience with being liberal or conservative, if you feel like it.
Are you liberal or conservative?
Yes.
Are you liberal or conservative?
Neither. I'm a Social-Democrat.
I sometimes do liberalities in a conservative way...
I see my friend was a bit extreme, but without his extreme input and inspiration I would be even more sheepish than I am now.
Oh, I would like to ignore the economic and political meaning of the terms, I am more interested in the philosophical meaning.
I think also, if you want to be as liberal as my friend was, you need a suitable job. For example being a university teacher is great for such a life style. You get a long holidays for your adventures and you probably don't have to get up so early every day.
I have to get up every day at six, at least since September, so at six in the morning I get up as a conservative, then teach as a liberal - telling kids about drugs, sex, racism, other cultures, then eat lunch with conservative colleagues trying to pretend I am also conservative and don't mention sex, drugs and racism at the table, then go home, prepare lessons, then meet my girlfriend, who was totally conservative when we met, now after all my awful femminist lectures, efforts to get along at wild parties, trying to make her roll a joint, introduce to a roller coaster ride of sex games, so now she is a conservative with a liberal outlook on the world.
I think people suffer a lot when they stick to one extreme as opposed to the other. My friend had two favorite words: open-minded and flexible.
He wore an ear-ring. So I also decided to wear an ear-ring - no wonder, at 23, still a chicken, I was looking up to him and wanted to be like him.
What was funny was that when I arrived in his beloved New York, the second person who talked to me was another friend's father. And the first thing he told me was: You wearing an ear-ring? There something wrong with you?
I was like: What? Is this New York? Actually, it was a town on Long Island . So there you go. Extremes clashing in New York.
im an anarchist. but i like liberals
i respect conservatives but they are boring. *yawn*
Could you guys from the US say that most people who voted for Bush as the president were conservative while most who hate him are liberal?
stach wrote:Could you guys from the US say that most people who voted for Bush as the president were conservative while most who hate him are liberal?
It's really a mistake to label the American electorate. Basically, all Americans express varying degrees of conservatism. Only the "radical fringe" of "liberals" actually resemble those known as the left-wing elsewhere in the world (and in most places in the world, liberal does not necessarily mean left-wing). Probably the most reliable source of left-wing individuals in this (or any) nation is among the young, and in the United States, the young commonly don't vote. When Bush was elected in 2000, he got just slightly less than 50% of the popular vote when less than 50% of the electorate turned out to vote--which translates as fewer than 25% of
eligible voters voting for him. In 2004 he did better, and there was a higher voter turn-out, but he still only polled less than 35% of every who could have voted. So it is not entirely reasonable to assume that Bush's election is evidence that Americans are conservative in their own terms. In the terms of much of the rest of the world, almost all Americans are conservative, rendering the question meaningless.
Americans don't vote party allegiance with the same reliable predictability as people do in other nations. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected by a significant majority, beating Carter by 10% of the vote. Nevertheless, that was just over 50% of those who voted in that election. Significantly, John Anderson (Independent) and the Libertarian Candidate polled between them more than 6,500,000 votes--and most of those votes would like have gone to Reagan. The Republicans also managed to take over the Senate.
But, the House of Representatives remained in Democratic hands, and would do so for the next 14 years. It is common in American history to see the electorate deliver the White House to one party, and the Congress, or a portion of the Congress, to the other party.
I would say I am most closely assoicated with the Libertarian group - didn't know it as I considered myself a moderate, but when I described my viewpoints some one pointed out that is what a Libertarian is.
Any how - it depends which I am closer to - conservative or liberal. A friend of mine described it best - I live like a conservative, in other words I live a conservative lifestyle (not that I always did), but now, however, I am liberal in attitude towards others. In other words, I don't hold others to my lifestyle.
And I think most people have some of both in them.
Linkat- I too consider myself a libertarian. As such, I am extremely conservative economically, and extremely liberal socially.
As I once so succinctly put it, "A person should be free to do what he pleases, unless it impinges on the rights of other people..........................but not with my money".
Phoenix32890 wrote:Linkat- I too consider myself a libertarian. As such, I am extremely conservative economically, and extremely liberal socially.
As I once so succinctly put it, "A person should be free to do what he pleases, unless it impinges on the rights of other people..........................but not with my money".
You said it girl! Exactly the way I feel.
And that's what you call "extremely liberal socially"? :wink:
i have a tattoo and five earrings. sometimes i wear heavy makeup, and dress crazy. does that make me a liberal?
Conservative means conserving, not deviating from,
and rigidly adhering to some standard, or to some rule or body of rules.
Liberal means not conservative.
Liberal means not rigidly adhering to some standard, or to some rule or body of rules
Liberal and conservative mean nothing, in and of themselves.
They are RELATIVE words;
accordingly, they have meaning only in relation to something else.
The Founders of America were very liberal and radical
relative to the authority of the Hanoverian Monarchy,
in that they DEVIATED from it and rejected it.
America was founded upon principles of personal liberty,
having rejected the ideals of authoritarianism as manifested in the English Monarchy.
The Founders of America respected and admired the principles
of John Locke inter alia that human existence PRECEDED the existence of government;
that government was brought into existence by individuals who
contracted among themselves ( the social contract ) creating
an imaginary entity called government, to which they ceded some limited
amount of their personal freedom.
That government, a creature of contract, had ONLY that power
that was granted to it in the contract that brought it into existence.
All other freedom was reserved to its creators, the INDIVIDUALS.
( See 9th and 10th Amendments US Constitution )
Society, and its henchman, government were the little children created by INDIVIDUALS.
Those individuals were stingy in the amount of freedom that
they surrendered to the power government.
They knew that personal freedom and ( domestic ) government power are INVERSELY PROPORTIONAL.
To the extent that government rigidly adheres to the limitations
on its power, it is conservative, not deviating from the terms
of the instrument ( Constitution ) that gave it existence.
To the extent that it exercises power beyond
those limits, it is being liberal, taking a flexible view of those limits.
For instance, if W were to declare that he 'll remain in office
for an extra 3 weeks, beyond his 4 year term, that 'd be liberal.
David
dagmaraka wrote:i have a tattoo and five earrings. sometimes i wear heavy makeup, and dress crazy.
does that make me a liberal?
Yes.
Relative to the standard of dress and personal appearance,
it makes u liberal.
By dressing that way u r
not beging bad.
However, if u agree to a contract with someone
whereby he has given u his car,
and in return, u promise to paint 5 rooms of his house,
but then paint only 3 of them, u keep the car,
declaring " that 's close enuf " then
you are being liberal,
and in so doing,
you are violating his contractual rights.
That is bad.
David
.
OmSigDAVID wrote:However, if u agree to a contract with someone
whereby he has given u his car,and in return, u promise to paint 5 rooms of his house, but then paint only 3 of them, u keep the car, declaring " that 's close enuf " then you are being liberal, and in so doing, you are violating his contractual rights.
That is bad.
David
.
what on earth does that have to do with liberalism? you are musing, not defining. laziness and cheating have nothing to do with liberalism. They are laziness and cheating, no more, no less. Not something else.
And dress or tattoos do not make anyone a liberal either. Especially not in this day and age. What used to be 'deviating' is becoming more mainstream. However, belief in the supremacy of human rights, both individual and collective, would indeed indicate I might be one. Of course you'd need to know much more about my thoughts. One belief is not gonna do it, unless you're into random labeling of people.
Besides, if we were to really get into it, we'd have to discuss the original meaning of liberalism as it developed in Western Europe and its development in America, which is radically different in terms of its basic philosophical premises and political consequences... But it's 1am, and it just doesn't seem a worthwhile investment of time and energy to me.
Well said - though it's early morning here - , dagmaraka!
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