Intellectual Seriousness: Part II

Intellectual Seriousness, Part II: Patience and Ideas in America

In my last post, I talked about intellectual seriousness, and as a follow up, let’s add intellectual patience to the list.

We’ve all heard about the “town halls”, with the anger, misinformation, fear, and antagonism that many of us hoped and expected the last presidential election would put behind us.

The hopes, fears, and illusions around health care have proved that intellectual patience in the United States is in as short supply as ever, even with (or in spite of?) a public intellectual who can speak the people’s language as President.

I suppose the problem with the cult of the personality that surrounds presidential politics today is that so much hope and fear surrounds candidates, and Barack Obama is the largest repository of hope and fear imaginable. He appeared and still appears to personify so much possibility or so much danger, depending on your point of view, that people forget about their own responsibility as citizens to think, read, and talk to their representatives. After all, representatives make laws. The President only enforces them, or, that’s what’s supposed to happen. But we left that constitutional viewpoint in the rearview mirror a long time ago.

Unfortunately, Barack Obama appears to be a “strict constructionalist” or Constitutional literalist in that regard. He hoped to be a facilitator in this regard, but people expect him to lead, put out his own plan, and let the individuals of Congress pick it to pieces. After all, that, too, is a representative’s job. The Founders wanted, above all, a decentralization of power, or “checks and balances”, if you will.

But I digress. Intellectual seriousness…

Right.
Intellectual patience.

Right.

I have often thought that in this most impatient of societies that two issues around which people do show intellectual patience around is the Constitution, with its complexity, and baseball. I find it remarkable that such an impetuous populace as the American one can consider baseball, the game of the lazy days of summer, with its lack of a time limit, its endless nuance, its amazing and bewildering serious of required decisions and possibilities, as the National Pastime.

But the health care debate has brought out the constituents into the streets, the Talk Show hosts, with their aging and passionate storm troopers, vs. the equally hard-charging partisans on the left, such as Moveon.org.

Lost in the discussion about health care, is the discussion of cost and health insurance, the yelling about which has drowned out the word “care” in any meaningful sense.

(By the way, I urge people to read two wonderful articles on health care, emphasizing the word care, attempting to divorce care from insurance, because the partisans on both sides are missing the boat, and enforcing a dialogue of the deaf that will necessitate that real reform from a CARE point of view will not happen.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200909/health-care

These two authors talk in the sort of depth and complexity that we all need to in order to fix health CARE, as well as health INSURANCE. They’re not the same thing, and only intellectual patience will get us to understand that.)

After all the shouting stops, we will have no one to blame but ourselves for what we get.
Keep thinking and grappling, people. Avoid easy answers, and get out of your comfort zone, including and particularly your intellectual and political one.

Stay tuned.