Election
So we've had the NZ elections.
A big rightward swing: National displaces Labour as main party, ACT (effectively Libertarians for any Americans following the game at home) goes from one to five seats, Greens up two to eight seats. Maori Party goes to five seats, and Winston Peters' New Zealand First flames out entirely, game over. No tears there I'm afraid - poor Winnie has been a slick operator and told one too many outright lie to the press, as well as flirting with outright racism, and got justly burned for it.
I can quite understand why people might have voted against Helen Clark since she's pulled a few too many slick ones herself (such as ramming through prostitution decriminalisation with the slimmest of margins, I think it came down to one vote) and retroactively legalising illegal acts done by her MPs -- but given how National were fawning all over George W a few years ago and chomping at the bit to go bomb some Iraqis, as well as slavering at the chance to strip and sell off what remains of our country's infrastructure, I personally couldn't bring myself to vote for them for the rest of my lifetime. I guess it comes down to a matter of juggling priorities of evil; for me, war ranks at the top of the list, and trusting proven untrustworthy market forces right next to it. Other people presumably have different moral calculi.
But it's the people who voted ACT -- the hard-core Ayn Rand acolytes -- who I find it hardest to forgive. Surely the world financial crisis has demonstrated for all to see that bankers are not to be trusted with anything more real than a Monopoly set? How is it possible to NOT see that 'economics as usual' has brought the earth to the brink of destruction, and is pushing us beyond? I can't understand the kind of wilful blindness to reality which would make people say 'give us more of that good stuff'.
On social issues, yes, I can understand being torn. I personally vote with the Greens because they are the only party that values nonviolence and peacemaking, which seem to me to be at the core fo the Christian attitude to life. But I cannot yet bring myself to actively campaign for them, because they are also the party that fights hardest to 1) decriminalise prostitution, 2) keep on-demand abortion legal, and 3) make smacking illegal. I cannot understand that trio of stances as philosophically coherent.
I can understand being in favour of decriminalising everything, on principle, even acts I don't personally agree with. But in that case, smacking should remain legal. How can it conceivably be legally consistent to *kill* an embryo but not to *smack* a child? Only, it seems to me, if you have a definition of human life which is false, and which believes that the point of restraining family violence is to protect *society* rather than the individual - a dead baby won't grow up to be a child abuser, but a smacked baby might. Which is too much like pragmatic ends-justifies-means thinking -- and far too much, in its own mirror-image way, like the hard Right's 'lock 'em up and throw away the key' stance on crime -- for me to accept in a minority, consciously values-based party.
But of course I can't really argue, and don't particularly want to, that abortion should be *recriminalised*, since using state violence in that way also seems an anti-Christian way of approaching things, let alone the whole complexity of feminism and women's rights which would suggest that as a male, I should have no voice in what is ultimately a woman's choice, and to a point I can respect that. I believe I *can* make a principled argument that abortion can be best seen as a horribly misguided modernist medical procedure, like electroshock and lobotomy, which has massive consequences to the mother which the medical profession has not yet addressed, and that a more enlightened future society will view it with distaste. And the flip side of seeing abortion as an evil is also that I should be in favour of policies that support as much as possible unmarried mothers who choose to raise children, since it's a huge sacrifice being asked of them; and for that reason, the Labour and Green stance in favour of state funds for families with children seems like both a moral and just use of my tax money, and as a single person myself, not really doing much to further the human race, it seems like part of my income is justly owed to those who do have children.
So I have no problem with taxes, and in fact I'm very suspicious of any party offering tax *cuts* since it seems like that's the government asking me to turn *my* back on those who Christ is asking me to support. I'd much rather have higher taxes, as long as I knew they were being used wisely to purchase collective services at a fair price and supporting those who need them, than higher discretionary income, and then a casino-like maze of lying private hucksters that I have to waste *my* valuable time deciphering in order to work out where to best spend my money. Some things are best left to the individual; but buying large-scale services like national healthcare and housing and infrastructure, where I don't have any personal expertise, are probably not among them, and further privatisation will most likely hurt me rather than improve my life.
I'm frankly terrified of all the right-wing rhetoric about 'making our streets safe' and 'three strikes and you're out', because again, this seems like it will do nothing but increase the violence level in our society, and I'm definitely against that.
If the Green party asks me to agree philosophically with a wider agenda of absolute sexual permissivism, and claim that all consensual sex acts are by definition *moral* and must be described as such, no, sorry, I can't agree with that, due to a fundamental conflict with my understanding of Christian values; however, that same Christian value system as I understand it tells me that society should be less violent, and to the extent that criminalising *any* activity adds to social violence, we should probably make more immoral things legal rather than less; and while I don't agree that morality is completely relative (that's a contradiction in terms to me - if something is *moral* it is by definition an *absolute*, otherwise it's just a *preference* or a local *adaptation* and talk of morals does not apply), I'm not in favour of *imposing* morality by law, since I don't believe it can be.
So I end up coming to a similar voting position to Greens on many social issues, except for starting from completely different axioms and not really being able to share a common language - which is why campaigning and discussing policy becomes hugely emotionally painful, because the religiously-based moral framework I come from is considered backward and frankly evil to many of my Left friends, and their moral system on sexuality is equally alien to me. (But I feel equally alienated not just from the Left, but from most of society today, even the Right.)
On the other hand, I'm deeply in favour of caring for the Earth, and working to make our society more energy efficient and locally-based, and the Greens are again about the only party which takes localisation, fair trade, ethical purchasing, animal welfare, and climate change seriously.
So that's my labryinthine internal anguish which leads me to my voting decision, ill-fitting as it often seems, and I assume other people make similar complex choices. At least I hope they do; sometimes I ungraciously suspect my fellow citizens of doing the equivalent of tossing darts at a dartboard and saying 'I'll vote for John Key because he has a nice honest face and a clean tie, and you can always trust a banker, can't you?
Well, I can't, and I fear for the next three years, because it seems like the same people who got the world into its current mess are going to be the ones trying to get us out; that doesn't seem like a recipe for success.
And in any case, I'm not sure that we necessarily *want* the economy to be 'functioning' again just like before, because even at full power it's still just a frighteningly efficient planet-wrecking machine. We need an economy based on *reality* -- ecology and spirituality, the things that underly all our social inventions -- rather than self-referential 'economics'.
Nevertheless, we've made our national political bed and are going to be stuck with it, and I'm no particular fan of violent insurrection, so the next question is how to reconcile my fears for the future and my distrust of the present and my bitterness toward those people whose choices of governance seem to me to be utterly without serious thought and moral merit -- how to reconcile all this with a theology that says 'actually, when it comes down to it, God is present everywhere in everything and even mistakes work out for good, and nothing is ever actually broken forever'. And love those with whom I disagree, on all sides of the political spectrum.