I strongly recommend you read this post from Michael Reynolds of The Mighty Middle, a follow-up to the post of his on world government to which I linked last week. He’s playing my song. He makes the crucial statement:
We have these different points of view, each of which has a bit of the truth, and each of which includes a fatal virus. We need the liberal’s eagerness to understand, but not the impotent self-flagellation; we need the neo-con’s faith in freedom, without the credulousness and naivete; we need the paleo-con’s reluctance to leap into every fray, without the head-in-the-sand isolationism; and we need the realist’s readiness to occasionally accept moral ambiguity, but without their eagerness to embrace moral blindness.
Exactly right. It’s not that one of our voices is right and the others are wrong, it’s that the interplay of our ideas provides the necessary balance. E pluribus unum, baby!
Michael’s post has been cross-posted at Donklephant.
UPDATE:Â Callimachus has a related post at Winds of Change in which he discusses the taxonomy of opinion in Britain from Martin Caedels, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854-1945.
