Of being Liberal

I’ve been an "Illiberal Liberal" for a really long time now . “What’s that?”, you say. Well, let me quote a passage from Christopher Ricks Book called “Dylan’s Vision of Sin”.

“Most Dylan-Lovers are presumed to be liberals, and the big trap for liberals is always that our liberalism may make us very illiberal about other people’s sometimes letting us all down by declining to be liberals. The illiberal liberal has a way of pretending that the page that he would rather not read is illegible”

I’ve been there. Been where I’ve felt superior in my liberalism and un-accepting of people who weren’t as liberal of me. Maybe It was not so much un-accepting as disappointed. But by wanting everyone to be as liberal as me, I seemed to have lost the most important aspect of liberalism: Acceptance of different people with their own moral code. I had become a dogmatic liberal!

I’ve changes my values since then and become true to my more liberal self. And yet I had not been consciously aware of what had transpired, till before I read those lines. Now I know and am the happier for it.