“Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down and beat you with experience.”
—Mark Twain
I’ve always loved the wisdom of the American cowboy, and by that I don’t mean the Hollywood archetypes played by Roy Rogers or John Wayne (although to be fair, Will Rogers was quite a wise and witty example). I grew up around a few real cowboys as a kid, and I count the World War II pilots that hung around with my grandfather as cowboys too, so really, I was surrounded by them.
The myth that the cowboy was automatically conservative is historically and categorically wrong. This is because the cowboy had to think from moment to moment, analyzing the weather, the landscape, his horse, the animals, the sources of food and water, and whether strangers were friend or foe. If anything, the cowboy was thinking with an extremely liberal mind, in that he had to use his mind to look at all the subtleties and nuances of every day life. In other words, few things were black and white, most things were complex, and every situation was unique to that experience. They, and the American Indian before them, were the original Zen masters of the American west, and they are still around us today—they just have different professions.
That’s what liberal thinking is really all about—using the mind as a flexible, malleable tool. I learned a lot about the art of conversation just from listening to those cowboys talk. Sometimes they would shoot the breeze and tell stories, but more often than not, that shooting of the breeze was a set up for a more honest conversation about something serious. In learning how to talk with one another, they learned how to listen as well, because the two are equally important and inseparable in real communication. Nowadays, it seems like everyone has lost their basic manners—if they were taught any in the first place. It’s just a lot of screaming, not much listening, and that sure won’t get any of us down the road very far.
Why is it then that folks refuse to listen to someone with an opposing view to try to understand their position? I’m speaking about the liberal versus the conservative way of thinking. I’m not talking about listening to white supremacists, neo-fascists, homophobes, misogynists, or bigots, because that’s not a legitimate conversation. Those people fall into Mark Twain’s category of idiots, and it’s best to follow his advice when dealing with those types. What I am talking about, however, is basic American civility, and most importantly, leaving religion entirely out of the equation where matters of state are involved. The wisdom of the cowboys and the Native Americans are the heart of this nation, those folks who were even-tempered, took the time to listen to their fellow man, and would never dream of screaming in someone’s face. More importantly, they had the goodness of heart to act on behalf of the people’s best interests, which is why that archetype appears in so many other places.
We used to have this conversational aspect in American politics, and it existed in people’s ability to present their views with an intelligent and thoughtful philosophy, eschewing animosity while the conversation took place. I would argue, based on fact rather than conjecture, that the vast majority of our greatest human achievements have been brought about by the liberal, progressive side of the political spectrum. The extremely conservative side usually tried to prevent that evolution from happening, instead favoring the status quo, which was, and still is, a kind of warped, male patriarchy. Still, a certain civility existed and a conversation took place that moved the country forward and into the realm of progress.
In my extended clan, we had family members and great friends from both sides of the spectrum. I grew up hearing some rather spirited debates between them, which were done around dinner tables, in kitchens, and occasionally outside at picnic tables, barbeques, and always during the holidays—nothing was sacred. I always paid attention because I had a proclivity for such things, and I learned much from just listening. However, since the era of destruction politics began in the 1990s, there has been a tendency by conservatives to engage in these debates with a certain kind of reductive, low effort thinking. This constricted mental state reasons a kind of false equivalency where blind ignorance and personal bias is somehow the same as the intelligence of an educated, experienced person. Or in a much simpler way of saying it—the ignorant racist/bigot somehow thinks his or her philosophy is as legitimate as the educated social reformer. It’s not.
This is, of course, utter nonsense and does not bear further explanation, because simply having an opinion does not make it legitimate, especially if that opinion is based on ignorance. Alas, it doesn’t stop these low effort thinkers from believing otherwise, so they’ll argue that global warming is a conspiracy, evolution is a myth, and intelligence is based on skin color. That’s the kind of ignorance we are dealing with.
As I was completing graduate school in 2008, the very last class I took was based on human rights. The professor had been a former head of Amnesty International and she was an expert in how human beings are treated in prisons around the world, especially in right-wing, authoritarian states. One of the first things we read in that class was the Universal Declaration Of Human Rights, the UDHR, which the United Nations adopted in 1948, right at the end of World War II. You should read the UDHR; it’s incredibly well written and historically very important. How sad, however, that much of its tenants have still not been adopted on the world stage, including in the United States.
In our class, a high level of intellectual debate was expected, and we were encouraged to think of people as individual beings imbued with inalienable rights that are always at risk, especially by authoritarian governments. As you would expect, the percentage of prisoners in a nation, and how those prisoners are treated, is always the bellwether of how evolved a nation is or not. Unfortunately the United States is failing miserably in this category, with our privatized, corporate model of incarceration. The US has the world’s highest per capita incarceration rate, even higher than that of China or Russia. It’s a terrible, shocking truth that the conservatives have created in the United States, and it’s all about making privatized, corporate money. It’s never been about rehabilitating the prisoners.
As the semester came to a close, we were also nearing the end of George W. Bush’s disastrous 8-year presidency. I was approaching my 40th birthday, and I was remembering the conservative administrations going back to Nixon, Reagan, and both Bush’s. How had we been so easily deceived by the illegal policies and war crimes committed by these presidents and their underlings, especially when the evidence was readily available to the discerning mind? In the worst case scenarios, we knew we were being told lies, yet we continued to toe the party line even when our country was committing violence against innocent people around the world. How can one disregard the low moral character of a political leader, yet hold up the Christ as justification for such an unholy alliance? It does such dishonor to the teachings of Jesus, and is the worst kind of religious hypocrisy—Jesus was a liberal, after all.
When you really learn about liberal thinking, it’s not a political term so much as it’s a particular way of using the mind. The liberal progressive mind is very much the mind of the greatest thinkers in history, like the Greek philosopher Socrates and his student, Plato. In Socrates, we had a thinker who would only answer a question with another, deeper question, because asking questions forces the mind to go deeper in the search for truth. Or as he famously stated, “False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.”
The liberal progressive mind of Socrates wanted to seek truth and truth only, and to do so he had to ask many more questions to discover the nuances and subtleties that were not immediately obvious. Abraham Lincoln did exactly the same thing with his legendary “Team Of Rivals,” a cabinet made up of his political opponents. Lincoln wanted to understand every side of the enormous challenges the nation was facing with slavery and the onset of the Civil War. He realized that the best way to do that was to put allies and enemies on the same team, listen to all sides, and then make the most informed decisions he could possibly make. Thus, Lincoln found victory and also preserved the Union.
This is very much the mind that academics and Zenists use, as well as the original American cowboy, that salt of the Earth human being who knew that in order to survive in this world, you had to ask a lot of questions, make sound moral decisions, be a protector of the land, its animals, and the people, and always keep your personal honor clean. When did we forget these most basic moral principles?
It turns out that scientists, Zenists, and cowboys have a lot more in common than they probably realize. They are the philosopher/thinkers who care about finding the truth in all things. This flexibility of mind allows them to look at other ideas and decide if they are reasonable, practical, or perhaps neither. As Plato’s student Aristotle famously said, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
When you look at the greatest minds in history, they tend to be extremely liberal and progressive. They are scientists, professors, social theorists, writers, artists, musicians, and athletes—those who have been able to think and work far beyond their peers and go deeper into the unknown to bring back hidden and forgotten truths. It’s also why the more narrow-minded a person is, the less likely they are to be taken seriously by others, because of their inability to look deeper into the issues. They repeat the jingoistic catchphrases and pretzel logic philosophy heard from a radical ideologue, but they end up sounding like a parroting Myna bird instead. It has nothing to do with real mental effort or even, actual thinking.
If you’re a conservative leaning person, as some of my friends are, I would like you to consider what that means, as opposed to the liberal, discerning mind of Socrates, Plato, Abraham Lincoln, and the American cowboy—the mind that can hold a thought, entertain it, maybe not accept it, or perhaps embrace an idea that will change your life forever.
Maybe I’m thinking idealistically, but I’d like to believe that at some point, hopefully not too far in the distant future, we can all get back to that most basic conversation about what is best for the Earth and all her people.
I’m tired of listening to insane politicians, but I would like the wisdom of the American cowboy to make a real comeback.