Garret Keizer - Preaching What the Choir Doesn't Want to Hear

[SingingMongoose]

One of my favorite Harper's Magazine writers is Garret Keizer.

The genius of Keizer is that he aims to make the most of his writing space. Writing in very-liberal Harper's Monthly, he doesn't simply rail on the evils of society that his readers will already agree with. He doesn't simply offer new details pertaining to old issues, leaving his readers factually educated but ideologically in the same place as where he started.

No, Garret Keizer is much more refined than anything that's as shallow and one-dimensional as "left vs. right." He has a strong command of his own political values, which we indeed would think of as "liberal," and uses them to challenge the ideology of other liberals.

Take, for example, his liberal argument for guns. I originally read this in the magazine, but for purposes of quoting it here, I found this tidbit about "progressives" through a google search that brought me to Underbelly: Garrett Keizer on "Progressives" and Guns.

Notice the telling grammatical shift by which the adjective "progressive" becomes a titular noun--comparable to a godly person who begins to speak of himself as a god. As the living embodiment of progress itself, a progressive is beyond rage, beyond "the politics of yesterday," and certainly beyond anything as retro as a gun. More than I fear fundamentalists who wish to teach religious myths in place of evolution, I fear progressives who wish to teach evolution in place of political science. Or, rather, who forget a central principle of evolutionary thought: that no species completely outgrows its origins.

--Garret Keizer, "Loaded" in id. 137-43, 139 (2007)
(Originally published in Harper's Magazine)

And continuing:

Like democracy, for example. What is that creature if not the offspring of literacy and ballistics? Once a peasant can shoot down a knight, the writing is on the wall, including the writing that says, "We hold these truths to be self-evident."

--Id. 139-40

Never mind his sparkling wit and eloquence - it's the context of these words that impresses me. He is writing to an audience that, because it agrees with his larger politics, is forced to actually listen to what he's saying and consider his arguments. He is doing what most political commentators never manage to, which is challenge an audience without completely alienating it.

His recent essay is called "Requiem for the private word." He called to light something that hadn't occurred to me - the nature of privacy in our politics. (I'll be quoting this directly from the August 08 issue of Harper's.)

Certainly NSA wiretapping, for example, is a major issue. He does open up the essay with an anecdote involving one of his neighbors, a lawyer who represents one of the inmates at Guantanamo Bay, and whose phones have been wire-tapped.

There are certainly times when his essay sounds like old arguments we have all heard before:

You are in an airport security line, wondering what outrages are about to be visited on your personal effects. Will it be the lingerie in your suitcase this time or the lingerie on your loins? How much further will it go? How much will the American people tolerate?

But what follows cuts deeper than shallow rhetoric.

The answer, to use the language of the Bible, is not far off but near at hand; it is in your heart and on your lips - or at least on the lips of the fellow shouting into his cell phone next to you. He is telling his girlfriend that she spends too much money. She is "always buying shit." His time away from home is no excuse. She knew when she moved in with him that his job involved travel. She should have known - as indeed every person within a radius of fifty feet now knows - the details of his life.

It may not be clear yet, how he is preaching what the choir doesn't want to hear - or what he's arguing, for that matter. Consider this:

..."Abortion is between a woman and her doctor," as the saying went at the time, a woman's right to privacy - like her testimony in a Saudi rape case - apparently too weak to stand alone. The privacy argument later took a bit of ironical ribbing from Planned Parenthood's controversial I HAD AN ABORTION T-shirt, which had an important point to make, no doubt, though a more pertinent point might have been made by a T-shirt reading WE HAD A LOBOTOMY.[/QUOTE

If he's pro-choice, as he seems very likely to be, then why would he include the bit about lobotomies? This is the kind of thing that confused the hell out of me as I was reading this piece. It challenged me and made me think.

...And yet one keeps hearing the emerging conceit that a truly progressive person no longer needs such obsolete encumbrances as confidentiality, copyright, or clothes. We live in a flat world now, in a global village, and we would do well to learn from hunter-gatherer societies like the !Kung, a people who have existed for tens of thousands of years without any notion of privacy at all.

Keizer is saying to "progressives:" "If you don't like being wire-tapped, then why have you practically asked for it?" He isn't just complaining about the NSA, but he is linking it to our cultural values, some of which are very "liberal." (Some certainly aren't, too - he's saying we're all guilty, "progressives," "conservatives," and apathetics alike.)

Truly some impressive stuff.

I think we can learn from this. Most of us would agree that it's important to take a nuanced look at one's own "side;" most would agree that thinking of politics in terms of "us vs. them" is very fallacious, but let's be honest with ourselves. I've always been against gun control, but before I read Keizer's essay on privacy, I had no idea about the conflict that existed in my own values. I had no consideration for the possibility that my sharing personal information may be a part of a larger social system, one that contributes to many things that I hate, like NSA wire-tapping.

This is the kind of thing we need to be doing. When speaking with people who agree with you, don't just go down the list of hot-button issues and repeat the same sound-byte crap. We need to be challenging ourselves, because the greatest conceit of all is to assume that we know all we need to know about the issues we care about.