The Chicken and the Egg

Ideology is the expression of a fixed position or set of values that is relatively inflexible, unchanging, and often in plain contradiction to reality or rational thought.

As a thought system, extreme politics, by definition is ideological. It is divisive by nature, often reactive, negative, socially and culturally polarizing, highly visceral, and relentlessly irrational.

Yet extreme political beliefs often impel us toward necessary and important social advances. But they also lead to widespread bias, rationalization, and obscuring of truth. Extreme politics encourages dangerous mutants such as fascism, fundamentalism, and ‘political correctness’.

Although political institutions are the primary means we have of negotiating social change, they are blunt instruments, frighteningly rudimentary in their methods and often reproachable in their results.

Science and art are connective, integrative, unifying. Like everything in culture, politics invades and infects art and science in a variety of ways, erecting barriers that block the pathways to knowledge and understanding.

In a global environment of information and consilience, rational thought combined with emotional intelligence can become a substitute for political ideology.

Becoming politicized is easy, often simplistic. Learning from the natural world, from broad observation, from the arts and sciences is more difficult, more complex, more time consuming.

To the extent that extreme politics is diminished or eliminated from the context of art and science, culture will be able to experience increased benefits to humanity and the environment.

Therefore I propose a new amendment to the United States Constitution that encourages the separation of art and science from the expression of politics.

(July 4, 2006
Lexington, Massachusetts)