Anyone remember Sydney J Harris?

Opposing Principles Help Balance Society

I DEVOUTLY WISH we could get rid of two words in the popular lexicon: liberal and conservative. Both are beautiful and useful words in their origins, but now each is used (and misused) as an epithet by its political enemies.

Liberal means liberating - it implies more freedom, more openness, more flexibility, more humaneness, more willingness to change when change is called for.

Conservative means conserving - it implies preserving what is best and most valuable from the past, a decent respect for tradition, a reluctance to change merely for its own sake.

Both attributes, in a fruitful tension, are necessary for the welfare of any social order. Liberalism alone can degenerate into mere permissiveness and anarchy. Conservatism alone is prone to harden into reaction and repression. As Lord Acton brilliantly put it: "Every institution tends to fail by an excess of its own basic principle."

Yet, in the rhetoric of their opponents, both liberal and conservative have turned into dirty words. Liberals become "bleeding hearts"; conservatives want "to turn the clock back." But sometimes hearts should bleed; sometimes it would profit us to run the clock back if it is spinning too fast.

Radical, of course, has become the dirtiest of words, flung around carelessly and sometimes maliciously. Today it is usually applied to the left by the right - but the right is often as "radical" in its own way.

The word originally meant "going to the roots" and was a metaphor drawn from the radish, which grows underground. We stiff speak of "radical surgery," which is undertaken when lesser measures seem futile. The American Revolution, indeed, was a radical step taken to ensure a conservative government, when every other effort had failed.

Dorothy Thompson was right on target when she remarked that her ideal was to be "a radical as a thinker, a conservative as to program, and a liberal as to temper." In this way she hoped to combine the best and most productive in each attitude, while avoiding the pitfalls of each.

Society is like a pot of soup: It needs different, and contrasting, ingredients to give it body and flavor and lasting nourishment. It is compound, not simple; not like wine that drugs us, or caffeine that agitates us, but a blend to satisfy the most divergent palates.

Of course, this is an ideal, an impossible vision never to be fully realized in any given society. But it is what we should aim at, rather than promoting some brew that is to one taste alone. It may take another thousand years to get the recipe just right. The question is: Do we have the time?