We English majors are used to
hearing consistency damned and inconsistency extolled. From Shakespeare to Fitzgerald, writers
have commented on the value of contradiction. Shakespeare loved to embody two opposite points of view in
his characters, and let the audience decide whether one or both made sense. So, in King Lear the Duke of Gloucester, determined
to give up and die, says to his son Edgar: No further, sir. A man may rot even
here.” Edgar
replies, “What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure/ Their going hence, even
as their coming hither;/ Ripeness is all. Come on. Gloucester concedes, “And that's true too.” And they exit.
Fast forward to the nineteenth
century. Keats praised the
capacity of “negative capability, by which he meant “being in uncertainties,
Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact &
reason.” Emerson called “a foolish
consistency…the hobgoblin of little minds,” and Whitman proudly asked, “Do I
contradict myself? Very well,
then, I contradict myself. I am
large; I contain multitudes.” Even
more recently, F. Scott Fitzgerald said “The test of a
first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the
same time and still retain the ability to function.”
Philosophers, scientists, and
others have made progress through inconsistency. Wittgenstein revolutionized philosophy twice, starting two
different schools of thought with his Tractatus
and his Philosophical Investigations. Freud threw out hypothesis after
hypothesis, and some of them stuck.
But when it comes to politics,
inconsistency is rarely a virtue.
An April Fool’s parody I found on Zite, for example, explained that Mitt
Romney is the first “quantum candidate.”
He can be both a conservative and a liberal the way light can be both a
wave and a particle, and you can’t locate both his position and his velocity at
any given moment. (Wait, maybe it wasn't a parody at all.)
But what’s really on my mind is
that a number of Republican representatives recently stepped up to explain why
we should continue oil subsidies.
The basic argument? If we
didn’t subsidize oil, prices would go up.
Then people would have to pay more at the pump.
The more I thought about this, the
stranger I found it. Aren’t
Republicans the people who object to any interference with the free
market? And don’t subsidies
interfere with the free market’s magic mantra of supply and demand? (Never mind that gasoline doesn’t seem
to follow the rules anyway. In the
past several years we have increased U.S. oil production, decreased gasoline
use, and nearly doubled gas prices.)
The strangest thing about the
Republican position, though, is that it removes choice from the equation. If the government subsidizes the oil
companies, everyone pays, even those who have no car, heat with wood, and stay
as far away from fossil fuels as they can. But if oil prices rise, most of us have a choice whether to
buy oil products of not: smaller cars, public transportation, more walking,
lowering the house temperature, using fans instead of air conditioning. (Obviously, big industries have a good
deal less choice, so they benefit much less from the free market approach.)
We’re engaged in a debate about
whether the government can force us to buy health insurance, but the same
people who think that’s a dreadful infringement on our rights think nothing of
forcing us to pay for oil and gas that we have no intention of using. And you wonder why a reader weeps?
