The Right Word (2)

         Here and there in The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis seems to long wistfully for that future moment when all names return to their rightful owners.

         To call things by their rightful names is the privilege (and the distinguishing mark) of wisdom.  Lamentably, ours is not an age of wisdom, and that is nowhere more obvious than in the fact that we call the slow-motion barbarization, which is the main focus of our schools, “education.”  It is anything but.

         To understand that fact is not something you’d likely learn in most schools, at whatever level, from the pre-kindergarten to the post-graduate, because our schools themselves are the foremost advocates of barbarism in our entire culture, except perhaps Hollywood.

         To the degree that sloppy language makes sloppy thought possible, our verbal confusions engender confusions of countless sorts and results, none of which is exemplary.  Nearly all labels, normally useful things, are frayed at the edges and, for that reason, serve as impediments to wisdom, not as its support.  This degeneration of language is not accidental, not at all.

         It is the intentional purpose of leftist word warriors who would rather master others by means of language than simply to master language itself.  That’s why they want to police your speech.  They know that when the power of words is small, the power of thought is small.  So they set about outlawing your language.  That way you will have fewer words by which to conceive, articulate, or defend your ideas and worldview, which they hope to make, literally, impossible.

         So here’s the upshot:  Clarify your words as soon as possible, and thereby enable yourself to clarify your thoughts.  For clarity of thought there is no suitable mental substitute.  Do it or else suffer the burdens of foolishness and verbal tyranny.  That is the choice reality gives you.  Ideas have consequences.  Bad ideas have bad ones.  It’s that straight forward.

         But our culture wouldn’t recognize a bad idea even if it jumped up and bit us in the eye.  After all, we elected Bill Clinton and Barack Obama – twice.  Both made the country noticeably worse and got rewarded for doing so with a second term.  You do know, don’t you, that idiots elect idiots?  Both in the delivery room and at the polling place, we reproduce after our own kind.

Why Vote for the Lesser of Two Evils

          I often hear Christians ask why they should vote for the lesser of two evils.  Here’s why:

         “The lesser of two evils” is another way of saying “the better of two alternatives.”  The Bible is not opposed to you making the best choice available between imperfect alternatives.  In an imperfect world, when you choose between persons, your choices are always imperfect.  They always entail the lesser or the least of evils, whether two or more.  Given the depth and extent of human depravity and delusion, it can be no other way.  It never has been and it never will be otherwise.  No king, queen, prince, princess, premier, president, prime minister, senator, representative, governor, mayor, or school board member can possibly be an exception, whether they were born to the job or were elected to it.  Some choices might be better than others, but they always will be imperfect.  You always will be voting for the lesser or the least of two (or more) evils.  No other choice can ever present itself.

         Not only are the choices imperfect, but so also is the chooser.  No voter escapes imperfection.  No voter escapes personal or intellectual evil.  But one never hears -- or at least I never hear -- those who complain about “the lesser of two evils” apply that complaint to themselves and to other voters, only to candidates.  They complain about voting for the lesser of two evils, but not about letting “the lesser of two evils” vote.  If one is a purist and says we ought to vote only for someone who is better than the lesser of two evils then, by their principles, only those who are better than the lesser of two evils should vote.  The purists apply higher standards to candidates than they do to themselves and to other voters.

         An aside:  If you decline to vote for the lesser of two evils and vote instead for someone who has no reasonable chance of victory, or if you exclude yourself from voting altogether, you make at least two errors.

         (1) You prevent yourself from voting for one of the only two candidates who can win, leaving the choice of winner entirely to others, thus robbing yourself of any meaningful exercise of your franchise in this regard.  If the government prevented you from voting for the winner, you would call it tyranny.  But if you prevent yourself from voting, you call it principle.  You are wrong.  Of the two choices available to you -- voting for an imperfect winner or not -- you have chosen the worst of two evils, namely self-imposed disenfranchisement.

         (2) You have clearly misidentified who is and who is not the best available candidate.  If candidate X is doomed to failure, while candidates A and B are not, and you vote for X anyway, then you do not know either the better or the best.  “Doomed to failure” means that your candidate is not even the lesser of two evils, but is actually politically worse than the greater of two evils.