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Moral and political attitudes - Part 2
4.0 POLITICAL ATTITUDES
In political discourses, the terms radical, liberal, moderate, conservative and reactionary are being used frequently. Radicals are people who find themselves extremely discontented with the status quo. Consequently, they wish an immediate and profound change in the existing order, advocating something new and different for society. In comparison to the radicals, the dissatisfaction of the liberals is less but they still wish to change the system significantly. Liberals believe in equality, intelligence, and competence of people. For the moderates however, little is wrong with the existing society. Hence there is a certain reluctance to change the existing status quo. Differing from liberals in most respects, conservatives are dubious about bold efforts to improve the world for fear that incompetent meddling might, indeed, make things worse. Reactionaries reject current institutions and modern values completely. They want to see society retrace its steps and adopt former political norms and policies.
4.1 Radicalism
The foundation of radicalism is extreme dissatisfaction with the society and the status quo. Radicalism is impatient with less than extreme proposals for changing it. Hence, all radicals favour an immediate and fundamental change in the society. Radicalism favours revolutionary change. The criterion that distinguishes one radical from another most clearly is the methods they would use to bring about a particular change. Within radicals, some groups consider violence as a legitimate tool for change whereas some groups completely reject violence as a means to achieve their ends.
Mohandas Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and labour leader Cesar Chavez are remarkable examples of non-violence within radicalism. Each leader organized great movements demanding immediate and profound change, yet each refused to use violence to reach his goals. Radicalism causes us to wonder whether we have really succeeded or have we settled for a less than perfect world just because it was more convenient. It tends to place everybody else on the defensive and hence it is received by the non-radicals with inordinately severe reactions. Based on the ideology and methods, Left Wing extremism in India can be categorised as violent radicalism. During the Indian Independence movement, the leaders of the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA) like Ramprasad Bismil, Chandrashekhar Azad and Bhagat Singh can also be categorised as violent radicalism.
Radicals are often feared with an intensity far beyond what is necessary to deal adequately with the challenge they pose. Accordingly, even though their numbers and influence do not demand such severe action, radical movements are often abjectly crushed. The official surveillance and harassment of leaders of the civil rights movement in America during the 1950s and 1960s would be a classic example of this.
4.2 Liberalism
Liberalism shares a common idea with radicalism because in liberalism also there is dissatisfaction with the status quo. However the dissatisfaction of liberals is much milder than the dissatisfaction of the radicals. Sometimes the term progressivism is also used to describe the idea of liberalism. Liberals, unlike radicals , appreciate the concept of law though they may want to change certain specific. Rather than violating the law, they seek to change the law using legal procedures. Liberals are quick to recognize deficiencies in society and therefore are anxious to reform the system, favouring rapid and relatively far-reaching, progressive changes. The no-changers pro-changers split in the Congress after the withdrawal of the Non Co-operation movement can be seen as a split between non-violent radicalism and liberalism.
Liberalism is one of the intellectual by-products of the Enlightenment, of the scientific method, and ultimately of the Industrial Revolution. The discoveries of inquisitive people such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton revolutionized people's attitudes toward themselves and their function in life. A new thought emerged that if physical difficulties could be solved through the use of human reason, perhaps the same could be done with social and political problems. Concentration of wealth has deposited vast power in the hands of those who control the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and they posit that people with economic power will use it, in part, to sustain and increase power in their own hands, thus placing at a disadvantage those without economic power. Liberalism believes that concentration of economic power is as oppressive as concentration of political power. Contemporary liberals believe government can be used by the economically weak to protect themselves against the oppression of the powerful. They tend to be egalitarian in their outlook.
4.3 Moderatism
Moderates are fundamentally satisfied with the society, although they agree that there is room for improvement and recognize several specific areas in need of modification. However, they insist that changes in the system should be made gradually and that no change should be so extreme as to disrupt the society.
Because moderates take a mild stand on issues there exists as conception that being a moderate is the easy way out of a problem. However, this conceptions is flawed. Being a moderate on an issue that evokes highly emotional responses from others can be very challenging task. For example, holding a moderate position on whether abortion should be legal could be problematic. In the USA affirmative action, the death penalty, feminism, and the war in Afghanistan are other examples of issues which have highly emotive responses and have been hardened over a period of time. A moderate stance on these issues can be perceived as faint-hearted, ambivalent, and uncommitted. In India, the Nirbhaya rape isuue bought out highly emotive responses among the people. The recent LOC violations along the India-Pakistan border is again an issue which evokes highly emotional responses from the people of India. Taking a moderate stand on these issues often invites ridicule and derision.
Politics, as the perceptive French politician Georges Clemenceau observed, is "the art of the possible": In politics, the ideal is often not possible.
4.4 Conservatism
Conservatives are the most supportive of the status quo and therefore are reluctant to see it changed. Being content with things as they are does not suggest that conservatives are necessarily happy with the existing system, however. Conservatives support the status quo not so much because they like it but because they believe that it is the best that can be achieved at the moment.
The difference between conservatives and liberals is not because the latter dream of achieving a better world, whereas the former think the status quo is the best conceivable existence. In fact, conservatives may desire a future no less pleasant than that of the liberals-a future free of human conflict and suffering. The essential difference between the two viewpoints rests on their respective confidence in when (or, indeed, whether) the ideal can be accomplished. Conservatives lack confidence in society's ability to achieve improvements through bold policy initiatives, most conservatives support only very slow, incremental, and superficial alteration of the system. The most cautious of them often resist even seemingly minor change. They tend to see an intrinsic value in existing institutions and are unwilling to tamper with them, claiming that to do so might seriously damage that which tradition has perfected. The main rationale for this is that conservatives do not believe human reason is powerful enough to even completely understand, let alone solve, society's problems because man is a complex being composed of moral and immoral; rational and irrational impulses. Conservatives are the law and order advocates in society. They believe that harsh laws are essential to instil a fear of crime in the minds of people which would deter them. Unlike liberals, conservatives believe that though people are biologically similar, there are enormous variations in the qualities among people which assume more significance than biological similarities.
4.5 Reactionism
Reactionism proposes retrogressive change; that is, reactionaries favor a policy that would return society to a previous condition or even a former value system. For example, we witnessed a reactionary revolution with the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979. Ayatollah Khomeini's advocacy of a return to a literal application of the ancient laws in the Koran was clearly a reactionary legal posture. The policies of former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Taliban's emergence in Afghanistan in the 1990s and the ISIS are also reactionary movements.
All reactionaries reject claims to human equality and favour distributing wealth and power unequally on the basis of race, social class, intelligence, or some other criterion. By definition, reactionaries reject notions of social progress as defined by contemporary thinkers and look backwards to other, previously held norms or values. The neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and extreme Christian fundamentalist sects like the Christian Identity Movement are powerful examples of reactionism.
5.0 CONCLUSION
Morality belongs to the individual. The individual acts according to his morals, and through his actions, he affects others and is thus political. Politics belongs to the public. The public's collective opinions determine policies, and through these polic ies, the individual is affected. Morality then,seems to connect the individual to politics. It drives the individual to contribute to public opinion, opinion that impacts back on the individual through policies. And indeed, morality dominates discussion on recent political issues.
Previously "moral-light" areas such as foreign affairs, health care, economics and in particular high-end tax reductions, now join traditional moral flashpoints such as abortion, biological research, and gay rights. These issues and others are all framed in terms of morality, or at least appeal implicitly to moral undercurrents.
Questions are raised. Is this morality-focused approach something new? What morally-charged language saturates recent political discourse? Why can morality dominate discussion in so many seemingly unrelated areas? Is this morality-driven exchange healthy for politics?
Morality is not a new political element, even though the meaning of morality evolved from absolute personal morality to relative social morality. The moral phrases that dominate recent political discourse correspond to major political camps, carry confrontational connotations that originate from two seemingly irreconcilable family models, and posses a simplicity that allows confrontations in morality discourse to become entrenched as confrontation in morality ideas. Morality can dominate discussion in many issues because everyone can understand and relate to moral arguments, whereas only specialists can decipher and verify complex social-economic arguments.
Morality introduces a wide moral divide that hinders government effectiveness, as well as inviting demagogues to abuse morality debates to further their political ambitions. On the other hand, the common moral principles underlying morality discourse offers opportunities for closing the moral divide. In addition, morality dominated politics lead to effective governments that can solve long term problems, as well as increased and more balanced political participation.
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