A former aide to Sen. Daniel Moynihan, Joshua Brook, has written a fascinating article in the Summer 2007 World Policy Journal, called "Red World, Blue World." (Understand, WPJ staff are slightly slacker, so their summer issue did not hit the stands until December.) No, this is not Brook trying to describe which nations and groups in the world are more or less like Democrats and Republicans. Rather, he starts from the red-state/blue-state model to show how most cultures have certain character types that either fit into the blue notion of belief systems that are malleable based on facts on the ground, or red notions of strict political, cultural, or religious beliefs that are adhered to, regardless of what visible evidence may suggest.Brook's analysis helps to explain why blue people may assume red people are lying, when in reality they are accepting their faith as a higher truth that somehow negates what happens right in front of their eyes (and notice the similarities between religious folks' "higher truth" and Leninists' "revolutionary truth.") For example, he said, Wahhabists who supported the 9/11 attacks could simultaneously say "Islam is the religion of peace" while supporting the attacks as the will of Allah, without experiencing cognitive dissonance.
Similarly, when President Bush says, "We do not torture," he is neither in traditional denial, nor lying as bald-facedly as some progressive may believe. Instead, he has internalized the belief that the U.S. is inherently the home of democracy and human rights, and therefore the government does not torture by definition, regardless of what visible evidence may tell us.
What this suggests is that red people simply cannot be swayed by facts, because they do not care about facts. The question for those of us who lean toward blue, and believe that belief systems should adapt to what our world experiences tell us, is how can we reach people when their core belief systems go terribly wrong? Will devout Christians, Jews, Muslims, Marxists, simply follow the core belief off the edge of a cliff? Are blue people so squishy in their "moral relativity" that they cannot make a case for abandoning strict faith-based belief? I don't want to be like Richard Dawkins and the militant atheists who make fun of anyone harboring strong spirituality. I want to find a way to promote militant Enlightenment thought without offending people of faith (though I still insist that blasphemy cannot and should not be a crime in any nation).
Oddly, I'll give some kudos here to the Mormon Church. When recent DNA evidence proved the Mormon belief on American Indian origins to be wrong, Church elders got together and changed the doctrine to accommodate the evidence. How many "red" people would be willing to do such a thing?
