Sunday, August 18, 2013

Liberal/conservative, fauxpro/regressive, balance/imbalance

Using the last post as a general frame, let's apply it to some political terms and ideologies. There is a dynamic tension in what is between what has been and what can be. This tension can manifest in healthy and dysfunctional ways. The healthy version is that conservatives want to retain what is good from the past, and liberals want to incorporate what is good from the emerging future. I'd call this overall healthy expression progressive balance, since it includes invaluable aspects of the conservative past but transcends them in a new structure and consciousness. This can go pathological (imbalance) when conservatives refuse to accept new developments and want to go back (regressive), as well as when liberals refuse to accept healthy aspects of the past and fly off into unduly abstract, unrealistic and disconnected visions of the future.


I'd need a new term for that, as I've described progressive as a healthy balance and not an opposition to regressive. Something that includes profusion, as in too much or extravagant armchair philosophy instead of front line street smarts? Or Lakoff says liberals rely on a disembodied, abstract and false reasoning, so perhaps something more like fauxprogressive? Fauxpro for short?

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