I was pondering this morning a question that has been burning the brain this morning, it arose out of reading Ruth Gledhill's blog about the fire that the Archbp of Canterbury has received for his inability, as the blog reads, to admit "that al-Qaeda in Iraq kill Arab Christians for being Christians, he would have to accept that their persecution isn’t the responsibility of Britain and America, but of the psychopathic adherents of theocratic ideology."
When did Liberalism, and it's sister humanism (secular or otherwise) which includes the halmarks of persisting in reason, demanding equality and living in the liberty of truth give way to Passive Relativism? Of course the simple answer is with the rise of Post-Modernism - the answer is deeper than that and without writing a disertation, it's roots were in the failings of Modernity and IMHO the sheddings of the ideals of Locke in favor of two competing ideologies of Liberalism that don't embrace humanism - a perverse form of Hobbism (a form of Negative liberty theory) and of course Marxism (which is apparently a form of Positive Liberty Theory).
So I took one of those policitical quizzes with the results being as followed:
It reads thusly: My West-East economic plotting would be a -4.25 which puts me towards the Liberal (left, go figure) side of economic philosophies, and on the North-South social plotting, I'm -2.31 towards Libertarianism. Now before Dogwood gets upset - I'm not like our friend across the way who sits in the State House - i.e. Gov. Mark Sanford he would more likely be plotted much further south and east of my position on the grid. From here I went to Wikipedia and applied my scoring to their [European]Policital Spectrum. It's actually flipped (the north would be libertarianism and the south authauritarian.
On this grid I would fall somewhere between Social Liberalism and Social Democracy. This suits me well and at least is a diversion from my previously stated problem at hand of where did we on the left go wrong.
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