Just watched a documentary on modern-day hippies in the northwest: Back to the Garden. Some very inspiring and admirable characters in the film, but a few comments that made me think a little more critically about it than I had expected to going in. This might all sound a hypocritically preachy (a soap box rant about other’s uses of soap boxes?), but here it is anyway. I am all for peace, love, happiness, and green-living, but when it crosses into the realm of judging or discounting another individual’s conceptions of what that means, I say that is decidedly NOT hippie. It’s one thing to counter-culture and to speak truth to power, it’s another to berate and judge a person who is truly doing what they think is right, or at least what they believe to be inoffensive to their surrounding world.
I’m one of those post-modernists who believes nothing is benign, that all of our actions have consequences that we could never fully understand, but most people are probably not too concerned with all of their unintended consequences. I think we’re limited in what we can consider day-to-day, in terms of balancing the big picture & the mundane, the sacred & the profane. If someone is doing justice or goodness in the world as they interpret it, or conversely is expending the majority of their time & energy dealing with substantial daily challenges in their life that I can’t even imagine, what if that’s enough? I think to some degree those folks need a pass on whether they recycle every piece of waste they have, or inadvertently spend their money supporting oppressive multi-nationals, or are able to research varying perspectives on whatever hot-button issue is hitting the news.
Has anyone ever seen the movie, “The Ballad of Jack and Rose”? It’s disturbing in a few ways, i.e. a pretty questionable father / daughter relationship, but there is a scene that I’ve never been able to shake. Been a while, but my recollection: The main character is Jack, played by Daniel Day Lewis, an off-grid eco-warrior clinging to high ideals of sustainability, harmony with the earth in human development and altruism. He has this monumental revelation with a real estate developer, where he considers for the first time that this man is also doing what he thinks is right for his family and his world, and is probably well-intentioned and defensibly just, in his own perspective. It’s incredibly well done, and the empathy (and probably guilt) of Jack is so tangible it hits you like a thick fog. This gets at the kind of sensitivity and non-judgmental approach to one’s ideals way better than I could right about it – a great vignette on a concept I haven’t really seen explored elsewhere.
But it occurred to me that I probably have seen this explored before, just under a different name. It sounds a bit like what I've heard in conservative pundits criticisms of the "liberal elite". Yes there are poor, down-trodden fringe radicals who have devoted their entire lives to this - criticizing the errors of society writ-large via individual verbal assaults and campaigns. That's what I was thinking when I wrote the above. But more generally, wealthy & well-educated liberals can fall into the same camp, that of criticizing the poor right who purportedly "vote against their interest" or otherwise behave badly in their easy, mainstream day-to-day lives. It doesn't change my policy views, and I'll probably still defend & appreciate what is pejoratively referred to as the "liberal elite," but I think I'm getting the criticism a little better now...
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