KEY POINTS:
At first I thought I was losing my work-life balance. I kept falling over, at the most inopportune and embarrassing moments. The chiropractor and the x-rays confirmed the awful truth. I was definitely pitching to the right. This was worrying. I'd always thought I was more left than
right, but then again, I've always had trouble telling my left from my right. It's a family thing.
No worries, though. For a not inconsiderable sum of money, the chiropractor could restore my sense of balance, and return me to the perfectly centred person I'd apparently never been. This was a relief as I was finding my spinal shift to the right a little disorienting. After all, a columnist needs to be clear on where she stands, or sits, on the issues of the day. People want to know where they can place you on the continuum of opinions, so they can save themselves the trouble of reading on if you're about to say something they don't like.
Left or right? Conservative or liberal? Capitalist or socialist? Religious or secular? Love Helen or hate her? This is about as far as inquiring minds want to go these days.
What we really want is a confirmation of our prejudices by people who think exactly as we do. The world wide web may have opened up endless possibilities for searching out knowledge and opinion that might challenge our thinking, but most of us aren't venturing beyond our like-minded circles, where we can be assured of hearing only what we want. Unless, of course, we're spoiling for a fight.
Forget real debates, where we can pick the bones of an argument until we've cleaned it of the last bit of meat; we pick an ideological camp with which to side, and stick with it come hell or high water.
No wonder we make such slow progress when it comes to big ticket issues like education, poverty, social breakdown and crime. We reduce complex social questions to black and white issues, and then wonder why we keep failing to find the right answers.
The more I tune in to so-called debates, many of them played endlessly on talkback radio, the blogosphere or talkback-in-print, as one reader describes the Herald Online's readers' views, the more convinced I am that the way we argue isn't helping us.
The so-called poverty debate is a point in case. As American pastor, Jim Wallis, has written, the poor aren't trapped in poverty - they're trapped in the debate about poverty. Thus, the right talks about personal responsibility and ignores both the extent of the problem and the role the state plays in policy decisions that make it harder to climb out of poverty; while the left, equally mistakenly, talks only of government responsibility and leaves personal responsibility out.
In the ideological battleground, solving the problem comes a distant second to winning the political battle.
Of course, real life and human beings seldom fall into such neat divisions, so I'm not sure why we're always surprised when we find that people and issues aren't as easily pigeon-holed as we'd imagined.
Take the opposition by the Human Rights Commission to the controversial Electoral Finance Bill. The commission, led by a former trade unionist, Rosslyn Noonan, and newspaper editor turned lawyer and academic, Judy McGregor, have put forward a persuasive case against the bill, calling it a "dramatic assault" on freedom of expression and the right of New Zealanders to participate in an election, and a clear breach of the Bill of Rights Act 1990.
This is, of course, the kind of principled defence of New Zealanders' rights that the commission has always undertaken - and which a Labour-led Government should be very reluctant to ignore - but, suddenly, its stance has won both the commission and the Bill of Rights admiring fans from those on the so-called right, who've gone from dismissing the commission as "a creature of the left", and the Bill of Rights as "a charter of selfishness", to seeing both as champions of freedom of expression.
Does this mean the "right" doesn't listen unless you agree with them? They're not the only ones. Helen Clark seemed determined earlier this week to push through the bill, rejecting suggestions that it should get the same treatment from the Law Commission as the anti-terrorism laws, and telling reporters that "the National Party benefits enormously from big money in New Zealand politics".
Actually, what National is benefiting from most is Labour's apparent intractability and hubris. I don't believe that this is about Labour wanting to stack the odds in its favour, but even if you buy the idea, as I do, that the rich and powerful shouldn't have a disproportionate influence on elections, the bill goes too far. If there is a stronger argument, Labour is failing to make it.
