Ideas worth entertaining (and not)
Clive Davis
Originally uploaded by dynamist.
I had lunch today with Clive Davis - the journalist, not the music mogul. We ate at Hardy’s, an unpretentious place in Dorset Street to which I will invite as many people as possible for meetings in future, as it’s so near to where I live. (The fishcakes were great, the accompanying hollandaise perfect but not overly abundant.)
Clive and I talked about our respective political shifts, both of us being formerly of the left. He believes more than I do in the ability of the government to be a force for good in peoples’ lives, but otherwise our evolutions have been similar. We’ve both had a lot of arguments with friends over politics, some of which have altered those friendships irrevocably.
I’m much less invested in such discussions now, because I understand a lot more just how utterly different my worldview is from 95 per cent (or so) of people in the world. There was a time when I would have bothered to debate someone who writes that “By ceding to government a tiny piece of our liberty to always do as we wish, we allow it to ensure we all lead safer, better lives,” but now I know that we may as well be living on different planets. If I don’t accept the basis of your assertions and you don’t accept the basis of mine, then we have to discuss where we’re coming from; that’s generally a less fraught conversation, but most people want to fight about specific policies or laws.
As I talked about with Clive, one of the things about blogging which I appreciate most is the ability to examine so many different viewpoints of various issues, viewpoints which I mull over and put to Antoine or Perry or Adriana (or all three of them, and others), and which spur some great conversations and explosive arguments at times. I love that. But the debates are less frustrating because I’m not dealing with some yahoo who thinks that money makes life worse not better, or who believes that personal freedom is a bonus not a necessity. Life’s too short for humouring ideas like that, especially when one should be ridiculing them.
Coming soon: Why I wish Karl Marx had lived to blog.
Filed under: Life
[…] Jackie Danicki has taken note of my earlier reaction to her post about liberalism and other such things. […]
No need to debate it, but wish bit of this do you not agree with:
By ceding to government a tiny piece of our liberty to always do as we wish, we allow it to ensure we all lead safer, better lives,”
As surely this is an argument for (if nothing else) some defence spending?
Matthew, I guess I was taking the quote in context with everything else the writer was saying - something that wasn’t clear from the way I presented it in my post. My bad.