Society & Politics
2 mo

Charlie Kirk - A call for discourse.

Charlie Kirk - A call for discourse.

I really don’t care much for politics. I find the subscription to tribes to be rather primitive and, well, tribal. In my experience most people do not fully align perfectly with every ideal attributed to their “side” and so political affiliations have always struck me as an arbitrary matter of degrees. “I’m a conservative” or “I’m a democrat” have never once actually told me what someone’s true beliefs are on any given issue. At best all I can do with that information is assign a purely subjective guess at the likelihood one agrees with one position or another.

So I do not care, at all, what “side” you’re on. What I do care about is what you have to say. Are your facts straight? Is your logic sound? Are you willing to engage earnestly, and honestly? Do you care about what’s right, both in the sense of what is in fact the truth and in the sense of moral philosophy? The answers to these questions tell me if it is even possible to have a conversation with you at all, much less if it would ever be one worth having.


I, like many, did not agree with everything Charlie had to say on a variety of issues. And where we did agree on a point in general we rarely agreed on the details. Charlie’s reasoning was grounded firmly in his beliefs as a Christian. And much of what he had to say came from that fundamental position. I do not subscribe to any supernatural beliefs and so obviously we would never have agreed on the fundamentals of any position.


Except, perhaps, one. That the right to speak your mind, regardless of the content of that speech, is at the very bedrock of the functionality of the modern world. No, it’s deeper than just the bedrock, it’s utterly subatomic. It is not possible to build the world we have today, nor any world we ever wish to inhabit, without that right, that freedom, underlying every facet of every action we ever take.


Does that guarantee that incensing speech will arise from time to time? Of course it does. Charlie was not a trained debater. He was not a trained philosopher. His arguments often required real intellectual work to fully understand his true point. And to anyone intellectually ill equipped or simply uninterested in paying attention, his statements could be easily misconstrued.


I have, of course, seen the….let’s be inexcusably charitable and call it “response” that some of Charlie’s opposition has had to his assassination. I’m not going to play the game of condemnation. It honestly does not seem as though it would serve any purpose. No one in need of condemnation will suddenly see the light and no one who does not need condemnation is having any trouble figuring out who does.


What I will say, is that according to these “responses” Charlie’s true crime was not in what he had to say about his beliefs, but in his effectiveness at swaying others to adopt them. There are of course plenty of people with far more provocative beliefs than Charlie had and there have been no celebrations of their deaths. Nor even anyone going deliberately out of their way to make declarations that their deaths didn’t pull particularly hard on their heart strings.


Those actions were reserved for Charlie. Who, only by virtue of his popularity, inspired the need to not just experience joy at his death by so many, but to declare it. Acts no doubt seen as true signals of virtue in the communities they wish to court. Blind of course to the truth that they court only oblivion.


Even so I, and I suspect Charlie would as well, see these responses as being both equally as challenging to tolerate as Charlie was to those that made them. And equally in need of protection from those who would seek to annihilate the closest thing to sacred an unreligious like me has. Freedom.


I have also seen a multitude of people making posts that ask anyone who they deem sufficiently evil to please remove themselves from their friends lists, social circles, subscriptions, etc. And I get it. It is a vanishingly small cadre of people who would choose, willingly, to keep in their company, the sort of person they could never sleep near without one eye open. Nevertheless, and however few, I would count myself among them.


No matter your side. No matter your take. No matter your opinion. I want to talk to you. I don’t want to change your mind. And I couldn’t even if I wanted to. If your mind is going to change you will do that on your own. And if you change mine then I will be happy to have gained a new perspective. All I want to do is understand what you think, and why you think it.


Where matters of fact are in question I will work with you to find the best source for them that is available. Where context or nuance are missing I will do my best to provide them fairly, accurately, and most importantly, with as much bias removed as I am capable of.


And on matters of opinion, I will try hard only to ask and never to tell. To ask why, what, and how you think. Not to tell you what, when, or where to think. I won’t tell you your opinion is wrong. I won’t tell you which opinion to think is right. And I most certainly will not tell you you’re bad for thinking whatever it is that you think.


The only thing I want is to understand.

Charlie Kirk - A call for discourse.
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