Short Brin Thought

This little tidbit by David Brin, one of my favorites, he made in the comments section of his blog post on "Horizon Theory" - his idea that our (American) social and political landscape is best described as competition between groups with wider and narrower horizons of inclusion. The actual comment is a little more than halfway down the page as it stands on July 3 06.

"If you take a pan-spectrum of attitudes across the weird neocon alliance, only one parameter seems to unite social reactionaries, Straussian platonists, kleptocrats, and blinkered libertarians... they all have much closer-in horizons ... of worry, time and otherness-inclusion...

Hyper-patriotism? Anti-environmentalism? Opposition to science? Jingoist demolition of alliances? Emp[hasis of actual war over readiness? Theft and bitter partisanship? And above all, exclusionary demonizing of half of the country in hate-filled, billious "culture war"? Horizons all over the place...

I call it the Jesus Effect, because his sermons were relentlessly and passionately horizon-stretching (even to a degree that violated rational self-interest)...

We should view CW ["Culture War" -howie] as a mental health problem and do whatever we can to ease our countrymens' fears, helping their horizons to expand, not helping them to contract!

Dr. Brin is writing very casually in the comments section of his own blog, but I'm familiar with his body of work and feel qualified to clarify his point. The "Jesus Effect" he describes is the relentlessly horizon-expanding message that Jesus claimed; really, the whole Gospel - that God loves everyone. Women, Gentiles, people who are sick or poor... and who next? Our fathers and mothers said "African-Americans!" Today my generation is saying "Gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender persons!" Or even "Muslims! Hindus!" That's the expanding horizon, the ever-widening circle of love and inclusion.

Brin sees that some major forces in our national social and political scene have quite narrow horizons, and that's a cause of worry I share. We're preoccupied with the question of how best to help others expand the way they define their "circle" or "tribe."

How wide our horizons are varies. But the call from Jesus, and for the sake of our own thriving, is clearly to constantly grow our horizons.