We Must Go to the Root and Rethink Everything

I recently mentioned to a key official at the Minneapolis Public Schools the fact that my son (Ryan Davison-Reed) and I are true leftists who often hold our nose when voting for Democrats.


My frame of reference was of course most clearly related to education issues, on which Democrats (including members of the DFL) are just as bad as Republicans.


But I feel more revolutionary all the time and have ongoing disregard for most things that appear on my visual screen as I go to and fro in the world:


We have a great need to rethink everything.


I have thought about the necessity of revolutionary analysis and action in revaluating many activities and ideologies.  Contemporary life is very crude, essentially as a function of the brief experience of humanity on the planet.  Our crudeness is observable everywhere we turn.


Ryan and I are always talking about the need to go back to the root on everything.


Thus it is that conservative intellectuals such as Edmund Burke and George Will are wrong at the outset and have no chance ever to be correct on the strength of their main premises. That is to say that to want to conserve institutions that are so crude and upon assumptions about life that are so shallow and illusionary is to want to dwell forever in an artifice built upon human religious beliefs and material aspirations low in aesthetic and intellectual quality. Only occasionally have certain people moved the standard to higher aesthetic realms;  only in given works of creative and scientific inspiration and in the beauty of nature do we see possibilities into a better way of living.


We do indeed want to preserve these works of creative genius as a guide to further discovery in our ascent toward a higher level of knowledge and ethics; but very little do we want to conserve for static observance or conception as Ultimate Truth.


Thus is conservatism in its very nature invalid, and so is reactionary thinking morally repugnant. And liberals have traveled only a very short distance in pursuit of a better way. The pursuit of Truth falls to those moving leftward in the creation of constantly better approximations of Perfection.


Thus spoke not Zarathustra but Gary Marvin Davison.