Small piece about politics

July 19, 2020

I agree with this piece on the importance of making distinctions.  The practice of making distinctions and weighing proportional significances can sound too much like casuistry, and casuistry can easily sound deeply, irredeemably corrupt.  (That seems to have been Pascal's view, for starters.)  But, as people who study ethics know, while casuistry can become corrupt, it is at least plausible to understand it as an inescapable part of deliberation, and   attempts to deny its presence lead you to doing it worse, because un-self-consciously, than you would other wise have done it.

Politics is about distinguishing between things, and also holding more than one idea in the mind simultaneously.  There is no such thing as "cancel culture" in the way the right means it, and some people on the left over-react to people holding different views than their own.  Recognizing the latter truth does not mean denying the former.