Those on the left and those on the right disagree about a hell of a lot of things. You name it - guns, taxes, abortion, capital punishment (or any other form of punishment really), drug laws - and positions that appear to be completely incompatible abound. I would like to suggest, perhaps optimistically, that the conflict is often more about perspective than about fundamental disagreement on what's right and what's wrong.
Back in late September, when debating his opponent in the impending Presidential election, John McCain said, "I'm afraid Senator Obama doesn't understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy." It was, of course, a silly thing to say. Senator Obama certainly understands the difference between a tactic and a strategy. Most adults do. And even those who confuse the two words don't usually have any difficulty grasping the definitions once they're laid out, because the concepts themselves are fundamental tools that almost all use to approach life. I suspect, too, that most people can recall a time early in their working lives when the distinction between the two suddenly became very clear, in practical terms, and needed to be applied to their job if it were to be done properly.
One of the interesting things about strategy and tactics is that they can yield very different answers to identical questions. Looking for the best tactic, without regard to strategy, will produce a good result in the short term, and in a small area. Strategy, taking a longer term view and looking at the wider context, might dictate a tactic that would otherwise not seem as effective.
The point? Strategy and tactics are different perspectives. They are the forest and the trees, the big picture and the small picture. Above all, there is absolutely nothing wrong with them contradicting one another, and it is not a sign of mental inconsistency to have one position from a tactical (or small-picture) standpoint, and another from a strategic (or big-picture) standpoint.
Here's what I think: some of the most fraught left-right issues we are up in arms about today arise from a general inability to accept that we can think one way when we look at the big picture, and another way when we look at the small picture. For some reason, even though our differences are driven by familiar and well recognised alternative perspectives, we think those differences are fundamental.
It's something that came to light for me when debating (I assume everyone debates this over dinner) about capital punishment. Although on balance I am against this, I find it very easy to favour capital punishment in selected individual cases. A serial rapist and murderer of children doesn't get much compassion from me, and I see no upside to keeping him alive. He has nothing to offer and amply deserves death, asap. But when it comes to society as a whole, I have all kinds of concerns. How can the government be trusted with the power to take citizens' lives? We all know where that can lead. How can verdicts from the justice system be relied upon as truth? Clearly, juries are very often wrong. So in one sense, I have two conflicting positions on capital punishment. But put it in terms of strategy/tactics, or big-picture/small-picture, and it's really not an inner conflict at all. It's just a rational, normal, and sensible thing to look at the same question from two well-established, but distinct, perspectives. It is not nutty to call them parallel, rather than opposed, positions.
Once you start looking at things this way, you realise that a lot of arguments happening out there take place between people who are talking about completely different things. It's dead easy to make individual cases for gun rights. Why on earth should a person who has never displayed violent tendencies, with no criminal history of any kind, who is plainly sane and an upstanding citizen, be denied the choice of carrying a concealed handgun? Looked at from a small-picture perspective, she is entirely right to say, "who the hell are you to take my gun away?". That's the pro-gun argument, an argument about individual rights, and we find it articulated, in heated debate, against an argument that goes, "There are too many guns out there, and they fall too easily into the hands of criminals. Our murder rate from firearms is through the roof!" The mistake, I feel, lies not so much in either of those positions per se, but in the assumption that it makes sense to pit them against one another as opposites. One is small-picture, the other is big-picture. If we can understand the difference between strategy and tactics, we should be able to understand that difference in perspective too.
I don't think it's hard to find similar cases where parallel positions are treated as if they were opposed positions. It's not absurd or self-contradictory to demand a harsh penalty system for violent criminals, while at the same time asking, "what did society do wrong to allow these young men to grow up so violent?" Yet it is only too common for such a "how did society contribute?" question to be ridiculed as "making excuses" for criminals. And yet the two positions are not really opposed.
At the risk of triggering condemnation, I would say that for myself, it seems desirable, from a big-picture standpoint, to reduce the rate of abortions, while at the same time being firmly in favour, from small-picture standpoint, of an individual's right to choose whether or not to have one.
On taxes - why should a hard-working individual have her income taken away? But then, given that poverty breeds social exclusion which breeds terrible communities, who wants to live in a country that doesn't "spread the wealth around" at least enough to ensure that every child has a chance?
I know this isn't a grand unifying theory that can dispense with the entire "culture war". There are many debates that really are bipolar and where it is just too much of a stretch to put say that the left and right are just coming from different perspectives. But I do think that many of us are denying ourselves the opportunity to hold multiple, but entirely valid, positions on certain topics, because we think that it isn't intellectually rigorous to do so. I also think we'd be well served by stopping, from time to time, and saying, "Hang on - we're arguing about completely different things. We sound like we disagree but we really don't."
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Comments
Some of what you ascribe to differences between strategy and tactics I'd agree with. Humans are not exactly an orderly species, and our minds aren't, either. I think the ability to entertain and even sometimes to act upon contradictory ideas or information is a hallmark of adulthood.
A great many people seem to spend their time avoiding that sort of intellectual messiness themselves, and outsource it to other institutions--and I disagree with that.
That desire for a clean, simple, well-ordered world, country, city, house, bedroom, or mind is understandable...but it shouldn't take the place of individual moral exploration.
Anyway, I can already think of many examples of this strategy/tactics distinction, one being a current dilemma I'm in now: I'm a long-term substitute for a 5th grade teacher who's out until February. I have a class loaded with low-performers and attentional issues (not my opinion, deliberately divided that way so one teacher got all the problems and the other got the "gifted"). Anyway, my style is different from Old Teacher, who "kept them under her thumb" and used behaviorism--tossing out candy like fish to dolphins in SeaWorld and throwing around detentions at the first peep--while I prefer a focus on content over form (compliance issues). So, while my belief is that most of these kids are hard-wired to have difficulty sitting still and listening and should really not be punished harshly for their different learning styles, when they're all together, classroom management becomes impossible, impeding any learning whatsoever. In spite of my ethical objections to some of the behaviorist tactics for any given individual, I have to think of the larger environment, so I may indeed begin to employ some tactics I find abhorrent as a parent in terms of my individual children. (This is my first long-term subbing gig; I suppose most teachers have come to this conclusion long ago).
Another example: I hated thinking about the forest level when canvassing and phone-banking for Obama in my conservative town. I know I don't like intrusions and don't respond well to that kind of "persuasion," but I kept telling myself to think of the trees/big picture: studies clearly show that, large-scale, these kinds of efforts work. For example, one out of every 12 doorhangers on the day of the election results in a voter turning out who otherwise wouldn't have. Thinking about individual people, though, it's hard to imagine it bringing any results.
I could go on and on--thanks for the post. And I like your point about tactics/strategy not really amounting to philosophical differences, although perhaps there is a philosophical difference in terms of when to apply each. I wonder, for example, if idealistic people are more likely to look at the big picture while pragmatic types talk about the small more often. And then, I wonder if the political parties match up somehow with the idealistic/pragmatic divide.
(Jason, I think it's funny that you were writing on my blog while I was writing on yours. I started this but then went to finish dinner. When I came back, I saw you had visited me :)