***
I was recently given a good collection of recent memories of Paris, where I lived and studied for a year in 1962-63, my junior year in college. The editors of this book had asked a large number of professional writers to write short pieces relating to how the great French capital had changed their lives, without necessarily analysing the nature of the change. My own experience in Paris when I was 20 and 21 certainly did change the "me" I have become, so I decided to recall several especially vivid memories from that year in Paris.
1
Part I of this exercise involves some early experiences with learning the French language. All the two dozen or so of us college students in my JYA group were first involved in a six-week language and orientation program, which began with the five-day trip via ocean liner.
The whole program was eventually littered with rules about speaking the language that may have had some logic behind them but no practicality whatsoever. Hmmm, "logical but not practical": now that I think of it, maybe these rules were part of our orientation to French culture!
The first rule of this sort was that we were all supposed to converse with each other at our meal tables using French only. I figured I would imitate a deaf mute, a stratagem I did later adopt for several months, as it turned out. In a strange quirk of my course selection at college, I had ended my sophomore year having taken only one semester of French Language, followed by just one semester of French Literature. Everyone else, not only at my college, but - as I discovered - everywhere else, took at least two semesters of Language before starting Literature, which itself took two semesters too.
So I was significantly disadvantaged compared to everyone else in my program. The so-called "beginners" had all completed two years of college French, compared to my one, and the "more advanced" students had started their French up to six years earlier, including all four years of high school French!
None of us knew each other until we first got on board in New York, and we were all pretty excited too, so to think we could confine ourselves to speaking French to our new American friends at any time was silly, especially during meals. What saved the day was that our only supervisor - the wife of our program's director - attempted to enforce the ban on English only at her own one table, which had places for only four. When all of us came to dine, therefore, three lucky folks got to sit and speak French with Mme S------. For the most advanced students, this was in fact a good opportunity to polish their skills, and they willingly filled the three empty places at her table at lunch and dinner.
But we happened to pass within 100 miles of a little hurricane after a day or two at sea, which made the ship more unstable than usual... the result of which was that for a while, not a full complement of students actually showed up for meals. Thank goodness sea-sickness was not one of my own problems. Coupled with the fact that we all stayed up half the night having fun every night, the ship's pitching meant that the breakfast crowd was especially small. I myself never missed.
Sooo, one morning I turned out to be the only person besides Mme. S------ who showed up for breakfast. It was my turn to sit with her and speak (and hear) French. Being a deaf mute was not an option.
We managed to exchange a pleasantry or two and ordered our breakfasts (I in English), until there we were, face-to-face. Somehow, by the grandest good fortune we ended up - Mme. S------ and I - having a rather animated conversation comparing Marilyn Monroe with Brigitte Bardot! She had to repeat, slow down, and rephrase everything, of course, and I had to think carefully and haltingly grind something out, with coaching from her... So that was enough to get us through breakfast. (By the way, my pronunciation was always pretty good, so it may actually have seemed I knew what I was doing better than I really did.)
When I told my new friends later than I'd been forced to have breakfast speaking French with our supervisor, everyone was especially sympathetic, sorry for me. But I was able to tell them sincerely it had actually been sort of like fun. Fortunately, the same situation never repeated itself! (Could Mme. S------ herself have stopped getting up early enough for breakfast?)
2
Our first month in Paris, every day we spent three or four hours in class at our little Institute and, as we did all year, had lunch together there. Mornings were spent doing language exercises; at least some afternoons were spent listening to talks by experts (really) on French culture: politics, existential philosophy, economics, some history, art, and so on. We were divided into a beginner group and a more advanced group. I couldn't believe it, but I ended up in the more advanced group. (I figured it was because of my pretty-good accent and that conversation about Bardot and Monroe.)
The teachers switched around, we supposed in order to expose us to a variety of different voices and accents. But we all agreed that by far the best teacher was a certain Mme. H---. Her name was not recognizably French, and she eventually told us that her husband was an American businessman who had lived in Paris since the war. She told us great stories, including one amusing anecdote showing how idioms were based on different metaphors in different languages.
It had to do with smoking (Mme. H--- being a smoker herself). To ask for a light or a match in French, you say, "Avez-vous feu?" [Literally: "Do you have fire?"]. During the war, when she was a young woman, Mme. H--- (Mlle. then, of course) had gone to a USO dance with American soldiers, a small group of whom she had approached with a cigarette between her fingers and said, in her best English: "Do you have fire for me, soldier?" We thought it was great that she could tell that story on herself.
3
One of Mme. H---'s homework questions was for each of us to come the next morning with an answer to the question (in French, of course), Why do I get up in the morning? Yes, it was dumb, but it was a good enough question for the purpose of challenging us to talk.
As luck would have it, Mme. H--- called on three of us that next morning. The first said something dumb but appropriate, like wanting to not waste valuable time. Mme. critiqued and then called on someone else, who did the same, saying something dumb but okay. Then, Mme. H--- turned to me, whom she had thus far left to my own devices. "M. Derique, Why do you get up in the morning?" My reply was a question: Comment dit-on en francais...? (i.e. "How do you say in French...?") then, in English, "a full bladder."
Everybody howled raucously, and Mme. H--- openly laughed too. I had escaped again.
The other regular teacher in the Institute orientation program, by contrast, was just awful. She was more scared of us than we were of her. She was ditsy too, and barely prepared every day. Mme. H--- seemed a professional, while Mme. la Comtesse (yes, a countess) did not. Still, it was she who had been selected to give us an afternoon talk on the topic of the relation between the American and French Revolutions. Unfortunately, her thesis was that there would have been no American Revolution if it had not been for the French Revolution. The Americans had feebly imitated the French's democratic initiative, she maintained. After 30 minutes of her lecture, no one had the heart to mention that by definition, in any language, to be a cause of an event, your event must come first.
4
Especially for me, one of the most memorable Paris events that year occurred on the first evening. We had arrived at each of our various residences, mine and three others' at a small boarding house near the Eiffel Tower, in the early afternoon. We were to gather at our little Institute near the Arch of Triumph for dinner (that day only) a few hours later.
A couple of weeks before I had left home for New York, my Dad had given me a guidebook to Paris that had been recommended by an old friend. It was filled with detailed maps on the right page, with information about the sites in that area on the left page. I took it with me. I must have looked that guidebook over and over again: at home, on the ship, and on that afternoon in my room. I especially didn't want to get lost on my way to dinner.
After our meal, about six of us decided to walk the couple of blocks up to l'Arc de Triomphe and take a look at the famous Champs-Elysees, which proceeded two and a half miles or so down from the Arch all the way to the Louvre Museum at the other end of downtown Paris. We were all very excited. It was obvious why Paris was known as the City of Lights, and everything seemed charmed.
Pretty soon, it turned out that I was leading the way. I was having an odd experience: as we came to each corner, I found I already knew what was there and what was near-by. I didn't remember it; I knew it, just as I would have known each street on the main drag in my home town.
We had not intended to walk all the way to the Jardins des Tuileries outside the big museum, and along the way one or two dropped out of our fast-talking, slow-walking party. At each street, I would say, "If you wanted to go to X, you would turn down this street to the left" or something like that. I was giving the others a tour.
I especially remember drawing near Rue Royale at the Place de la Concorde and saying that l'Eglise de la Madeleine was just one block to the left. When we got to the crossing and looked left, there it was, all lit up. The thing is, it looked just like I knew it would. It gave me the strangest thrill.
It gave me a sense that I was to feel the whole year to come. I felt I had come home.
***
Sunday, July 17, 2011
Friday, July 8, 2011
Making Sound Decisions
***
1
Americans, societies generally, or perhaps all human individuals, experience tension between the following:
Emotion and Reason
Superstition and Observation
Dogma and Analysis
Tradition and Knowledge.
About every issue and every choice, a person experiences a unique combination of these profound influences on his or her thinking and behavior. In every decision about one's personal life - such as, whether to go to college and which one, whether to choose where to settle down by geographic preference or by job possibilities, whether to marry and whom to marry, how to prepare for retirement, and so on - in making each decision, one feels a mixture of emotions and rational concerns, one applies a combination of habitual belief and step-by-step analysis, one considers family and cultural norms and what is known about relevant facts. When a decision is necessary, all influences come into play, whether the individual is highly intuitive making choices instantly or is more deliberative preferring to ponder each question for a while.
The same is true in making social, moral, and political choices - such as whether to wear sandals to a party, whether to tell a convenient lie or voice an uncomfortable truth, whether to vote for Candidate Y instead of Candidate X, and so on. The same tensions between what you can see at the moment and what your past experience would tell you, between your customary choices and different choices whose advantages you can see, between your "heart" and your "head"... all such tensions work together and against one another to push you in one direction or another.
2
How important the choice is - to you, not to others near you, and not to institutions to which you may belong - the importance of the choice to you may make the decision more difficult and may change the influences that are the most powerful in the particular instance. For example, if you hear a report that your best friend has secretly worked against your interest, your anger and sorrow may lead you to confront him or her without delay, despite the fact that your reason tells you that your friend would not do this to you and your analytical powers may help you dream up possible explanations for what you have heard.
By contrast, if someone you have known a long time but who has never been particularly close emotionally is said to have acted against your interest in some way, your surprise and perhaps a passing moment of self-doubt and your lack of first-hand knowledge may make you want to confront her or him, but if you have other, more important things on your mind, you may decide without much deliberation to go on as you customarily do, choosing to deal with this later, if at all. The choice of how to respond in either case is harder or easier to make because of how important the personal offense is.
If you have long defined yourself in part by membership in a particular group, toward whom your customary trust and preconceived ideas have been shaken by some new revelation, then deciding what to do - forgive and forget, agitate for change designed to prevent recurrences, join a protest movement, or quietly leave the group - choosing your action in such a situation will be harder than deciding how to respond to a sad discovery about a rival group, because your decision in the first instance is so much more important to you than in the second case.
The contest between competing influences - preconceived ideas vs. new knowledge, reasoned analysis vs. disgust or even fear, your wishes vs. your perceptions - these contrasting elements would be the same, whether the issue is important to you or not, but the important choice among the various influences would be much more difficult to make than the less important one.
3
Also, in such a difficult decision, the influences that most affect you may well be different from what most often guides your choices. In other words, if you are generally a person who feels most comfortable with life continuing tomorrow as it has always done, you would usually be most likely to be guided by tradition and by what others have taught you rather than by what you yourself perceive or experience and by considering all factors in play at the time, when making a decision that you feel is of profound significance even you may be influenced more by your rational analysis of everything involved and by your new knowledge than by habit or temperament.
The reverse is also true. Faced with shocking news, a usually reasonable and fact-based individual may respond without careful consideration, motivated by deep emotion. If a woman's grown son or daughter, for example, has made a choice that the mother instinctively questioned but whose benefits to the grown child do seem reasonable given the facts of the situation, then if she should learn that the daughter has been harmed as a result of her choice - humiliated, injured for life, or even killed - the mother herself (though normally cautious and deliberate) might actually experience despair, unable to call back to mind the analysis that prompted the son's or daughter's original decision.
In such a crisis situation, one may not only behave uncharacteristically but think and feel differently than before. In crisis decision-making, the balance point between the influences in tension - emotion and reason, belief and perception, preconceptions and analytical thinking, and customary views and new facts - in times of crisis, the balance point may differ radically from one's usual modes of making decisions.
4
So all choices are made under the same basic influences by each of us, whether the choice is personal or moral or social in nature, whether it is particularly important or not, and whether one's final decision is or is not as might have been expected; but just which influences will predominate as the choice is made depends on the particular circumstances.
5
Let us examine a few examples of decision-making.
In 1998, Joanne was a mature, single, professional woman. She prided herself on her reasonableness, pragmatism, and ability to get full value for her money. She had been raised in a comfortable but modest middle-class family, and after college had made steady progress in her career without pursuing professional success to the exclusion of other interests. When she took a week off for vacation, for example, it was characteristic of her that she would consider only activities that she could easily afford; she would seek relatively modest hotels and methods of travel and would plan carefully using comparison-shopping. She knew she would not enjoy herself on the trip if she had not planned carefully beforehand.
It was her custom to make decisions on rational grounds. Instead of basing choices on habit, she would make the effort to learn about the key factors in play at the time and make her decision based on prudent analysis of them. For many, we might think, this would not seem like "fun," but it was for her.
Joanne did not usually drive more than 5,000 - 6,000 miles a year, and in her experience it was necessary to replace her car every ten years or so. In that amount of time, she found that she did usually develop a sentimental attachment to her car, but she kept uppermost in her mind the fact that after a certain amount of time, it would not be intelligent to hang on to the old favorite when maintenance costs would no doubt soon begin to increase significantly.
In 1998, she began a deliberate search for a new car. She was replacing a durable, dark-blue, American-made compact sedan with reasonably good gas mileage that she had driven for 12 years. She felt like it was the best car she'd ever had, but its time had come. After a lengthy process of researching and looking at the cars at various dealerships, she was tending to focus on three or four choices. On one Saturday, she test drove them all. The closest thing to the same model of automobile as her current car turned out to seem tinny and spartan, unlike the modest comfort she had grown accustomed to. The model of the same make one step up seemed way too expensive, even though it was handsome and she trusted that auto-maker.
That brought her, at least for the moment, down to two choices. Surprising herself, one of the cars Joanne was actually considering was the new Volkswagen Beetle. It had a reasonable safety rating, was in her price range, and generally had been well received; so, even though it was smaller than her current car, something about it appealed to her. The other choice was a Chevy sedan, just the kind of car she would usually have taken: practical, reliable, safe, conservative.
After a day or two, Joanne returned to the dealer for another test drive of the sedan. Yes, it was just her kind of thing. But she still hesitated.
When she awoke the next morning, though, Joanne knew just what she was going to do. She went in to the dealer that evening, worked out what seemed a reasonable deal, and filled out the paperwork. She bought the Beetle. The one she ordered would be lavender.
This decision was so hard for Joanne to make because she felt that, this one time at least, she should respond to her personal, emotional impulse: she bought the Beetle mainly because she wanted to (and it wasn't outright stupid, from a practical perspective). Her emotion in this case was a more important influence than her tried and true, rational, step-by-step approach. And she just knew "in her heart" that it was the right thing to do.
b. Case #2, a personnel decision
The firm Bernard worked for emphasized values over and above job skills alone, character traits such as dedication, interaction with other employees, receptiveness to suggestion and/or direction, loyalty, and volunteering for informal in-company responsibilities. In employee merit evaluations, it was significant if, being candid, a supervisor or his V-P had to note that Employee X was great at his or her "core job" but needed to work harder to absorb the "company culture." That would not be good.
Bernard found that such character attributes came naturally to him, and he also understood the pragmatic benefits of them to the firm, as they improved teamwork and collaboration, ability to interact positively with the customer or the vendor, job satisfaction, and average length of employment with the firm. The traits were significant factors in Bernard's department's hiring decisions, and the CEO sometimes used his team as a model for other teams in this regard.
Information Technology was a critical field for an up-and-coming young firm with modest means, but there was more turnover in IT - Bernard's largest department - than in any other area, and successful searches were harder. When he was honest with himself, Bernard recognized that he had to make compromises in the "company culture" expectations in IT hiring than in any other field.
SuLynn's application stood out from the other applicatants'. She was originally from Bolivia though of Chinese origin. She listed as her "Native Language" both Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. She described her English as "Very Good." Her education and professional background looked right; she was in a similar IT position at a small family firm in the Midwest and had moved up to that level over 14 years, with 5- and 9-year stints at other firms in the East (where Bernard's firm was located). After reference checks and a good interview, she was hired.
Bernard's custom was to check out whether a new employee was still at work when he knocked off for the evening, for the first couple of days and then every so often after that. SuLynn was always there, which was remarked by her immediate supervisor as well. After only a couple of weeks, a staff member chairing a committee planning the annual company picnic emailed to say SuLynn had volunteered to help out. Bernard mentioned to the CEO that on the "company culture" side, SuLynn had made a good start.
Within the first several weeks, however, he got reports of mistakes in her work. Her supervisor said she was well-liked and she responded positively to feedback, but he was a little concerned. This pattern continued for a while. One morning SuLynn was waiting for Bernard when he got in at 7:45 a.m. She looked tired, scared, nervous, and sad.
She had to tell him that she'd somehow let her H1B1 visa expire. Her immigration attorney said that, with her skills and experience, as well as the shortage of qualified IT candidates, she would have no trouble getting it renewed, but it would take spending a month back in her native country where she would apply.
This was an odd enough situation that Bernard interrupted a one-on-one between the CEO and the head finance guy to explain that he was giving SuLynn a 30-day leave of absence to deal with the issue. It was her problem, not the firm's; the others in IT could work okay shorthanded for that long, especially for someone they liked, but the damn thing was, if she didn't improve her core job performance within three or four more months, he might end up letting her go anyway.
The CEO liked SuLynn for her dedication and positive attitude. All he said was to thank Bernard for keeping him in the loop. But the CFO, with a little glint in his eye, said: "Why don't we contact her in two weeks, down in Bolivia, and say we've decided to reorganize the department and no longer need her services?"
The CEO always wanted every employee to be given every chance to succeed; if they responded well to coaching, they should stay until it was hopeless. But he didn't respond to this suggestion right away. After a second Bernard himself broke the silence: "We're not going to do that, Tom."
"Why not?"
"We're not going to do it, because it would be wrong." The conference ended after a couple of minutes.
Even though Bernard spoke unhesitatingly, without taking time to think, all the usual influences shaped his decision. Company policy (tradition) was to help people to succeed, not to hurry them out the door, and besides SuLynn looked as though she embodied all the character traits they valued so highly. Bernard admired her having overcome obstacles in the past, although forgetting to renew the visa was really too much (emotion). He knew his team could get along without her for a few weeks, especially since she volunteered to keep up with some of her regular tasks via computer (analysis). And besides, all he had learned about the right way to treat others (established values) told him that the sneaky trick Tom had proposed was just reprehensible. Bernard was angry it had been suggested. Established beliefs and values, company tradition, practical analysis all led to the same conclusion: they would keep the position open for SuLynn.
c. Case #3, political engagement
I'm an American, Randy said emphatically to himself as he rode the mower around his lawn on the north side of his South Carolina home. I'm a free, white, American man, and you've taken advantage of me for the last time!
Randy had never been involved in politics. Why bother? he'd thought. They'll find a way to screw you over anyway. Those damn tax-and-spend democrats, he thought now, tightening his grip on the steering wheel. This time, he vowed, we'll show them who's in charge in a free democracy, with a free market system. Get the damn government out of our lives. Let people make their own decisions. Leave businesses alone so that they can put good Americans back to work.
As Lou had said last night, at least they still had their jobs. But the Democrats need to leave businesses free to right the ship and get moving again.
Randy and Lou soon attended their first political conference. His favorite talk show hosts had been promoting it. Randy knew there'd be nothing but friends and colleagues there, and all the leading figures who wanted to clean things up and clean them out in government were going to be speaking. What could be better?
Randy was the kind of person who made decisions quickly. He knew his own mind, and he didn't hesitate. He was now so mad he knew he had to do something. When he did vote, it was always for the most conservative candidate. When there wasn't anyone willing to take back America for the people, he just didn't vote. He'd always done it that way because that's who he was. He couldn't listen to the national news anymore; they always had the so-called experts saying blah-blah-blah. Why don't they just admit it: we're going to hell in a hand basket and we've had it up to here!
These days when he was on his break at work, he felt uneasy if he had to miss his afternoon 15 minutes with his favorite radio show. They might be saying something he ought to know, he thought, and it wouldn't be good if he missed it. Lou could tell him about it later, but she might get it wrong.
Randy's anger, his knowing his own mind, his sense that his conservative habits should always apply in every circumstance, and reliance on media personalities led him to decide to get involved for the first time in his life.
Up in Massachusetts, on the other hand, Wanda was also distressed about the economic mess we were in. Over and over again, she found her thoughts going back to the poor and the homeless and the unemployed. How could anyone just accept those widespread conditions? The rich don't carry their fair share, she felt. Big businesses look for huge, quick profits, and to hell with everybody else: that was her position. Who could turn things around?
When Wanda got a letter or an email asking for money to help unfortunates, she couldn't give much, but if she didn't send a small donation, she was afraid one more child or one more parent might be left out. We have to help those less fortunate than ourselves, she'd always felt; now that was even more necessary than ever. Democrats "get it," she felt sure. When the choice at the polls was between a good Democrat and any Republican these days, she didn't hesitate. She told her family and friends to be sure and vote, thinking they'd vote her way most often. If she missed an election herself, she was afraid the other candidate would be elected for sure.
Most times in these highly partisan days, Wanda made her political decisions quickly. She knew from experience, from her heart, and from everything she'd ever believed is right, and she knew what she ought to do as a result.
Although Randy and Wanda ended up with very different political positions, their decision-making was similar. The key influences in both cases were emotions, traditions, preconceived values, and a tendency toward a kind of magical thinking: if Wanda or Randy does not behave as she or he is inclined to do, rather than rationally analyzing the probable consequences based on observable facts, they each fear that the consequences of their inaction would be very bad for what they want to achieve.
6
Whether quickly or deliberately made, whether complex or simple, whether predictable or surprising, all decisions grow out of the interaction of rationality and passion, established belief systems and critical analysis, fear or anger and clear recognition of what one sees around oneself, and traditional patterns of behavior and new perceptions about reality.
The question whether or not one reaches "the right decision" is of lesser importance for those of us interested in the process of making any choice. But can we speculate about which influences should predominate in the various kinds of decisions we all have to make from time to time?
There are essentially two kinds of decision: those clearly and significantly affecting others and those affecting others only incidentally (if at all). For example, the decision of a single person living alone whether to have dinner at the usual time or either earlier or later does not affect anyone else. The example of Joanne's selecting a new car in Case #1 above does affect others (like the car dealers she is working with) but only incidentally and thus may also be considered a personal decision.
Failing to know whether or not one's decision may significantly affect others would be a problem. Here's why. Having little or no effect on others, a personal decision allows the individual to let emotions be a greater influence in making his or her choice than in the case of decisions affecting others. One's customs and one's established values or beliefs shouldn't be ignored even in such personal choices, and what the individual has learned from experience, training, or observation remains relevant and perhaps significant. But what "feels right," regardless of other factors, can still be the best guide, leading to the personal decision with the most positive (or least negative) long-term consequences.
On the other hand, if observation, knowledge, reason, or analysis is disregarded or ignored in making decisions that do have the potential for affecting others, one's decisions are much more likely to have unfortunate consequences in the long run and may be downright irresponsible. How the person feels about something, and how preconceived ideas and traditions would incline her or him to decide cannot and probably should not be overlooked altogether in making any type of choice. But decisions impacting more than incidentally anyone besides oneself should not be made solely on the basis of emotions, tradition, and pre-existing beliefs. If they are made on only these bases, decisions may be unfair, unjust, wrong, or at least insensitive.
Wanda and Randy in Case #3 above, for example, respond to political choices on the basis of emotion and on the basis of those influences most likely to stimulate and control one's emotions, namely tradition and preconceived beliefs or values. The elements required for independent thinking - so critical in a democracy - are observation, knowledge, analysis, and reason. In political decisions, without exercising the opposing force to one's passions (reason), one's superstitions (observation), one's fixed beliefs including biases (analysis), and one's inheritance from tradition (knowledge), one cannot hope to make the right choice - except by accident.
7
Decisions about whether an action is right or wrong - like the decision about SuLynn in case # 2 - are easily taken out of the individual's hands by inherited beliefs, values, or biases, by superstitions ("I will be punished if I make the wrong choice"), and by what others tell you, drawing on established traditions. And what a shame it is to avoid responsibility for one's morality by depending solely on these external influences. Unless their guidance is measured against their opposing influences' implications - observation and knowledge together with reasoned and independent analysis - they are unreliable guides just as likely to lead toward the opposite of what you wish to support in the long run as they are to lead toward it.
8
The United States of America is the product of what's often called "the Age of Enlightenment," the period in European cultures in the 17th and 18th centuries. Thoughtful people in this period - out of which not only our best social institutions but also our sciences were born - were serious about how one gains knowledge of the truth. In their time they were usually seeking certain knowledge, which is not a preoccupation of our time; in general, we understand that humans have to get along despite not being absolutely certain, about pretty much everything.
But what is useful for us still today is what Enlightenment writers identified as sources, not of knowledge, but of illusion and falsehood. Sound decisions, of course, must be based on the truth. For example, the 18th-century writers noted that one ordinarily understands that the source of most of what we know about the world is our sense observations: what we see, hear, feel, and touch (and so on). But sometimes we think we see this or that, when in fact we later come to learn we did not see it. Sense impressions, in other words, sometimes have to be corrected by something, perhaps simply by later observations, perhaps by reasoning, or by something else.
It was self-evident to Enlightenment philosophers, by the way, that emotion was unrelated to the gain of knowledge, perhaps an obstacle to learning, while reason was an essential tool in increasing our knowledge. Likewise, beliefs not founded on ordinary reality - superstitious beliefs (magic), for instance - could not be true or useful.
Many of these writers also came to believe that much of what they'd been taught by others did not hold up in light of their own experience and the combined experiences of those from other times and places. Their traditions had taught them much, but in some - perhaps many - cases, what they had been taught turned out to be untrue. One's own observations alone and tradition by itself are very possibly the source not of true understanding, they found, but more likely of falsehood or fantasy.
Much of what we are taught by others, of course, consists of the dogma of our time, our family, or our subculture. And like the other claims for truth that our forefathers contemplated, they found that such established beliefs were as likely to be untrue as they were to be valid.
These writers found that knowledge - on which good decisions rest - did not come from one's fantasies or passions, from one's traditions or the accepted beliefs of one's culture, or even from one's own perceptions (although as independently gathered, unfiltered by others, one's own observations are more likely to be true than what one inherits from others). The knowledge we can achieve and on which we must base all our actions comes from our independent observations, our analysis of how things influence each other, and our reason.
Sound decisions affecting others - whether apparently moral or political in nature - must be based on the knowledge gained from a combination of independent observation, analysis, and reason perhaps shaped to some degree by our traditions, established beliefs, and feelings. We may honorably and responsibly allow the latter three forces to influence implementation of our moral/social and political choices and decisions, but if we are to make progress over the long run, the decisions themselves must be grounded firmly in knowledge from observation of the facts, independent analysis of relevant factors, and careful reasoning about them.
***
1
Americans, societies generally, or perhaps all human individuals, experience tension between the following:
Emotion and Reason
Superstition and Observation
Dogma and Analysis
Tradition and Knowledge.
About every issue and every choice, a person experiences a unique combination of these profound influences on his or her thinking and behavior. In every decision about one's personal life - such as, whether to go to college and which one, whether to choose where to settle down by geographic preference or by job possibilities, whether to marry and whom to marry, how to prepare for retirement, and so on - in making each decision, one feels a mixture of emotions and rational concerns, one applies a combination of habitual belief and step-by-step analysis, one considers family and cultural norms and what is known about relevant facts. When a decision is necessary, all influences come into play, whether the individual is highly intuitive making choices instantly or is more deliberative preferring to ponder each question for a while.
The same is true in making social, moral, and political choices - such as whether to wear sandals to a party, whether to tell a convenient lie or voice an uncomfortable truth, whether to vote for Candidate Y instead of Candidate X, and so on. The same tensions between what you can see at the moment and what your past experience would tell you, between your customary choices and different choices whose advantages you can see, between your "heart" and your "head"... all such tensions work together and against one another to push you in one direction or another.
2
How important the choice is - to you, not to others near you, and not to institutions to which you may belong - the importance of the choice to you may make the decision more difficult and may change the influences that are the most powerful in the particular instance. For example, if you hear a report that your best friend has secretly worked against your interest, your anger and sorrow may lead you to confront him or her without delay, despite the fact that your reason tells you that your friend would not do this to you and your analytical powers may help you dream up possible explanations for what you have heard.
By contrast, if someone you have known a long time but who has never been particularly close emotionally is said to have acted against your interest in some way, your surprise and perhaps a passing moment of self-doubt and your lack of first-hand knowledge may make you want to confront her or him, but if you have other, more important things on your mind, you may decide without much deliberation to go on as you customarily do, choosing to deal with this later, if at all. The choice of how to respond in either case is harder or easier to make because of how important the personal offense is.
If you have long defined yourself in part by membership in a particular group, toward whom your customary trust and preconceived ideas have been shaken by some new revelation, then deciding what to do - forgive and forget, agitate for change designed to prevent recurrences, join a protest movement, or quietly leave the group - choosing your action in such a situation will be harder than deciding how to respond to a sad discovery about a rival group, because your decision in the first instance is so much more important to you than in the second case.
The contest between competing influences - preconceived ideas vs. new knowledge, reasoned analysis vs. disgust or even fear, your wishes vs. your perceptions - these contrasting elements would be the same, whether the issue is important to you or not, but the important choice among the various influences would be much more difficult to make than the less important one.
3
Also, in such a difficult decision, the influences that most affect you may well be different from what most often guides your choices. In other words, if you are generally a person who feels most comfortable with life continuing tomorrow as it has always done, you would usually be most likely to be guided by tradition and by what others have taught you rather than by what you yourself perceive or experience and by considering all factors in play at the time, when making a decision that you feel is of profound significance even you may be influenced more by your rational analysis of everything involved and by your new knowledge than by habit or temperament.
The reverse is also true. Faced with shocking news, a usually reasonable and fact-based individual may respond without careful consideration, motivated by deep emotion. If a woman's grown son or daughter, for example, has made a choice that the mother instinctively questioned but whose benefits to the grown child do seem reasonable given the facts of the situation, then if she should learn that the daughter has been harmed as a result of her choice - humiliated, injured for life, or even killed - the mother herself (though normally cautious and deliberate) might actually experience despair, unable to call back to mind the analysis that prompted the son's or daughter's original decision.
In such a crisis situation, one may not only behave uncharacteristically but think and feel differently than before. In crisis decision-making, the balance point between the influences in tension - emotion and reason, belief and perception, preconceptions and analytical thinking, and customary views and new facts - in times of crisis, the balance point may differ radically from one's usual modes of making decisions.
4
So all choices are made under the same basic influences by each of us, whether the choice is personal or moral or social in nature, whether it is particularly important or not, and whether one's final decision is or is not as might have been expected; but just which influences will predominate as the choice is made depends on the particular circumstances.
5
Let us examine a few examples of decision-making.
In 1998, Joanne was a mature, single, professional woman. She prided herself on her reasonableness, pragmatism, and ability to get full value for her money. She had been raised in a comfortable but modest middle-class family, and after college had made steady progress in her career without pursuing professional success to the exclusion of other interests. When she took a week off for vacation, for example, it was characteristic of her that she would consider only activities that she could easily afford; she would seek relatively modest hotels and methods of travel and would plan carefully using comparison-shopping. She knew she would not enjoy herself on the trip if she had not planned carefully beforehand.
It was her custom to make decisions on rational grounds. Instead of basing choices on habit, she would make the effort to learn about the key factors in play at the time and make her decision based on prudent analysis of them. For many, we might think, this would not seem like "fun," but it was for her.
Joanne did not usually drive more than 5,000 - 6,000 miles a year, and in her experience it was necessary to replace her car every ten years or so. In that amount of time, she found that she did usually develop a sentimental attachment to her car, but she kept uppermost in her mind the fact that after a certain amount of time, it would not be intelligent to hang on to the old favorite when maintenance costs would no doubt soon begin to increase significantly.
In 1998, she began a deliberate search for a new car. She was replacing a durable, dark-blue, American-made compact sedan with reasonably good gas mileage that she had driven for 12 years. She felt like it was the best car she'd ever had, but its time had come. After a lengthy process of researching and looking at the cars at various dealerships, she was tending to focus on three or four choices. On one Saturday, she test drove them all. The closest thing to the same model of automobile as her current car turned out to seem tinny and spartan, unlike the modest comfort she had grown accustomed to. The model of the same make one step up seemed way too expensive, even though it was handsome and she trusted that auto-maker.
That brought her, at least for the moment, down to two choices. Surprising herself, one of the cars Joanne was actually considering was the new Volkswagen Beetle. It had a reasonable safety rating, was in her price range, and generally had been well received; so, even though it was smaller than her current car, something about it appealed to her. The other choice was a Chevy sedan, just the kind of car she would usually have taken: practical, reliable, safe, conservative.
After a day or two, Joanne returned to the dealer for another test drive of the sedan. Yes, it was just her kind of thing. But she still hesitated.
When she awoke the next morning, though, Joanne knew just what she was going to do. She went in to the dealer that evening, worked out what seemed a reasonable deal, and filled out the paperwork. She bought the Beetle. The one she ordered would be lavender.
This decision was so hard for Joanne to make because she felt that, this one time at least, she should respond to her personal, emotional impulse: she bought the Beetle mainly because she wanted to (and it wasn't outright stupid, from a practical perspective). Her emotion in this case was a more important influence than her tried and true, rational, step-by-step approach. And she just knew "in her heart" that it was the right thing to do.
b. Case #2, a personnel decision
The firm Bernard worked for emphasized values over and above job skills alone, character traits such as dedication, interaction with other employees, receptiveness to suggestion and/or direction, loyalty, and volunteering for informal in-company responsibilities. In employee merit evaluations, it was significant if, being candid, a supervisor or his V-P had to note that Employee X was great at his or her "core job" but needed to work harder to absorb the "company culture." That would not be good.
Bernard found that such character attributes came naturally to him, and he also understood the pragmatic benefits of them to the firm, as they improved teamwork and collaboration, ability to interact positively with the customer or the vendor, job satisfaction, and average length of employment with the firm. The traits were significant factors in Bernard's department's hiring decisions, and the CEO sometimes used his team as a model for other teams in this regard.
Information Technology was a critical field for an up-and-coming young firm with modest means, but there was more turnover in IT - Bernard's largest department - than in any other area, and successful searches were harder. When he was honest with himself, Bernard recognized that he had to make compromises in the "company culture" expectations in IT hiring than in any other field.
SuLynn's application stood out from the other applicatants'. She was originally from Bolivia though of Chinese origin. She listed as her "Native Language" both Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. She described her English as "Very Good." Her education and professional background looked right; she was in a similar IT position at a small family firm in the Midwest and had moved up to that level over 14 years, with 5- and 9-year stints at other firms in the East (where Bernard's firm was located). After reference checks and a good interview, she was hired.
Bernard's custom was to check out whether a new employee was still at work when he knocked off for the evening, for the first couple of days and then every so often after that. SuLynn was always there, which was remarked by her immediate supervisor as well. After only a couple of weeks, a staff member chairing a committee planning the annual company picnic emailed to say SuLynn had volunteered to help out. Bernard mentioned to the CEO that on the "company culture" side, SuLynn had made a good start.
Within the first several weeks, however, he got reports of mistakes in her work. Her supervisor said she was well-liked and she responded positively to feedback, but he was a little concerned. This pattern continued for a while. One morning SuLynn was waiting for Bernard when he got in at 7:45 a.m. She looked tired, scared, nervous, and sad.
She had to tell him that she'd somehow let her H1B1 visa expire. Her immigration attorney said that, with her skills and experience, as well as the shortage of qualified IT candidates, she would have no trouble getting it renewed, but it would take spending a month back in her native country where she would apply.
This was an odd enough situation that Bernard interrupted a one-on-one between the CEO and the head finance guy to explain that he was giving SuLynn a 30-day leave of absence to deal with the issue. It was her problem, not the firm's; the others in IT could work okay shorthanded for that long, especially for someone they liked, but the damn thing was, if she didn't improve her core job performance within three or four more months, he might end up letting her go anyway.
The CEO liked SuLynn for her dedication and positive attitude. All he said was to thank Bernard for keeping him in the loop. But the CFO, with a little glint in his eye, said: "Why don't we contact her in two weeks, down in Bolivia, and say we've decided to reorganize the department and no longer need her services?"
The CEO always wanted every employee to be given every chance to succeed; if they responded well to coaching, they should stay until it was hopeless. But he didn't respond to this suggestion right away. After a second Bernard himself broke the silence: "We're not going to do that, Tom."
"Why not?"
"We're not going to do it, because it would be wrong." The conference ended after a couple of minutes.
Even though Bernard spoke unhesitatingly, without taking time to think, all the usual influences shaped his decision. Company policy (tradition) was to help people to succeed, not to hurry them out the door, and besides SuLynn looked as though she embodied all the character traits they valued so highly. Bernard admired her having overcome obstacles in the past, although forgetting to renew the visa was really too much (emotion). He knew his team could get along without her for a few weeks, especially since she volunteered to keep up with some of her regular tasks via computer (analysis). And besides, all he had learned about the right way to treat others (established values) told him that the sneaky trick Tom had proposed was just reprehensible. Bernard was angry it had been suggested. Established beliefs and values, company tradition, practical analysis all led to the same conclusion: they would keep the position open for SuLynn.
c. Case #3, political engagement
I'm an American, Randy said emphatically to himself as he rode the mower around his lawn on the north side of his South Carolina home. I'm a free, white, American man, and you've taken advantage of me for the last time!
Randy had never been involved in politics. Why bother? he'd thought. They'll find a way to screw you over anyway. Those damn tax-and-spend democrats, he thought now, tightening his grip on the steering wheel. This time, he vowed, we'll show them who's in charge in a free democracy, with a free market system. Get the damn government out of our lives. Let people make their own decisions. Leave businesses alone so that they can put good Americans back to work.
As Lou had said last night, at least they still had their jobs. But the Democrats need to leave businesses free to right the ship and get moving again.
Randy and Lou soon attended their first political conference. His favorite talk show hosts had been promoting it. Randy knew there'd be nothing but friends and colleagues there, and all the leading figures who wanted to clean things up and clean them out in government were going to be speaking. What could be better?
Randy was the kind of person who made decisions quickly. He knew his own mind, and he didn't hesitate. He was now so mad he knew he had to do something. When he did vote, it was always for the most conservative candidate. When there wasn't anyone willing to take back America for the people, he just didn't vote. He'd always done it that way because that's who he was. He couldn't listen to the national news anymore; they always had the so-called experts saying blah-blah-blah. Why don't they just admit it: we're going to hell in a hand basket and we've had it up to here!
These days when he was on his break at work, he felt uneasy if he had to miss his afternoon 15 minutes with his favorite radio show. They might be saying something he ought to know, he thought, and it wouldn't be good if he missed it. Lou could tell him about it later, but she might get it wrong.
Randy's anger, his knowing his own mind, his sense that his conservative habits should always apply in every circumstance, and reliance on media personalities led him to decide to get involved for the first time in his life.
Up in Massachusetts, on the other hand, Wanda was also distressed about the economic mess we were in. Over and over again, she found her thoughts going back to the poor and the homeless and the unemployed. How could anyone just accept those widespread conditions? The rich don't carry their fair share, she felt. Big businesses look for huge, quick profits, and to hell with everybody else: that was her position. Who could turn things around?
When Wanda got a letter or an email asking for money to help unfortunates, she couldn't give much, but if she didn't send a small donation, she was afraid one more child or one more parent might be left out. We have to help those less fortunate than ourselves, she'd always felt; now that was even more necessary than ever. Democrats "get it," she felt sure. When the choice at the polls was between a good Democrat and any Republican these days, she didn't hesitate. She told her family and friends to be sure and vote, thinking they'd vote her way most often. If she missed an election herself, she was afraid the other candidate would be elected for sure.
Most times in these highly partisan days, Wanda made her political decisions quickly. She knew from experience, from her heart, and from everything she'd ever believed is right, and she knew what she ought to do as a result.
Although Randy and Wanda ended up with very different political positions, their decision-making was similar. The key influences in both cases were emotions, traditions, preconceived values, and a tendency toward a kind of magical thinking: if Wanda or Randy does not behave as she or he is inclined to do, rather than rationally analyzing the probable consequences based on observable facts, they each fear that the consequences of their inaction would be very bad for what they want to achieve.
6
Whether quickly or deliberately made, whether complex or simple, whether predictable or surprising, all decisions grow out of the interaction of rationality and passion, established belief systems and critical analysis, fear or anger and clear recognition of what one sees around oneself, and traditional patterns of behavior and new perceptions about reality.
The question whether or not one reaches "the right decision" is of lesser importance for those of us interested in the process of making any choice. But can we speculate about which influences should predominate in the various kinds of decisions we all have to make from time to time?
There are essentially two kinds of decision: those clearly and significantly affecting others and those affecting others only incidentally (if at all). For example, the decision of a single person living alone whether to have dinner at the usual time or either earlier or later does not affect anyone else. The example of Joanne's selecting a new car in Case #1 above does affect others (like the car dealers she is working with) but only incidentally and thus may also be considered a personal decision.
Failing to know whether or not one's decision may significantly affect others would be a problem. Here's why. Having little or no effect on others, a personal decision allows the individual to let emotions be a greater influence in making his or her choice than in the case of decisions affecting others. One's customs and one's established values or beliefs shouldn't be ignored even in such personal choices, and what the individual has learned from experience, training, or observation remains relevant and perhaps significant. But what "feels right," regardless of other factors, can still be the best guide, leading to the personal decision with the most positive (or least negative) long-term consequences.
On the other hand, if observation, knowledge, reason, or analysis is disregarded or ignored in making decisions that do have the potential for affecting others, one's decisions are much more likely to have unfortunate consequences in the long run and may be downright irresponsible. How the person feels about something, and how preconceived ideas and traditions would incline her or him to decide cannot and probably should not be overlooked altogether in making any type of choice. But decisions impacting more than incidentally anyone besides oneself should not be made solely on the basis of emotions, tradition, and pre-existing beliefs. If they are made on only these bases, decisions may be unfair, unjust, wrong, or at least insensitive.
Wanda and Randy in Case #3 above, for example, respond to political choices on the basis of emotion and on the basis of those influences most likely to stimulate and control one's emotions, namely tradition and preconceived beliefs or values. The elements required for independent thinking - so critical in a democracy - are observation, knowledge, analysis, and reason. In political decisions, without exercising the opposing force to one's passions (reason), one's superstitions (observation), one's fixed beliefs including biases (analysis), and one's inheritance from tradition (knowledge), one cannot hope to make the right choice - except by accident.
7
Decisions about whether an action is right or wrong - like the decision about SuLynn in case # 2 - are easily taken out of the individual's hands by inherited beliefs, values, or biases, by superstitions ("I will be punished if I make the wrong choice"), and by what others tell you, drawing on established traditions. And what a shame it is to avoid responsibility for one's morality by depending solely on these external influences. Unless their guidance is measured against their opposing influences' implications - observation and knowledge together with reasoned and independent analysis - they are unreliable guides just as likely to lead toward the opposite of what you wish to support in the long run as they are to lead toward it.
8
The United States of America is the product of what's often called "the Age of Enlightenment," the period in European cultures in the 17th and 18th centuries. Thoughtful people in this period - out of which not only our best social institutions but also our sciences were born - were serious about how one gains knowledge of the truth. In their time they were usually seeking certain knowledge, which is not a preoccupation of our time; in general, we understand that humans have to get along despite not being absolutely certain, about pretty much everything.
But what is useful for us still today is what Enlightenment writers identified as sources, not of knowledge, but of illusion and falsehood. Sound decisions, of course, must be based on the truth. For example, the 18th-century writers noted that one ordinarily understands that the source of most of what we know about the world is our sense observations: what we see, hear, feel, and touch (and so on). But sometimes we think we see this or that, when in fact we later come to learn we did not see it. Sense impressions, in other words, sometimes have to be corrected by something, perhaps simply by later observations, perhaps by reasoning, or by something else.
It was self-evident to Enlightenment philosophers, by the way, that emotion was unrelated to the gain of knowledge, perhaps an obstacle to learning, while reason was an essential tool in increasing our knowledge. Likewise, beliefs not founded on ordinary reality - superstitious beliefs (magic), for instance - could not be true or useful.
Many of these writers also came to believe that much of what they'd been taught by others did not hold up in light of their own experience and the combined experiences of those from other times and places. Their traditions had taught them much, but in some - perhaps many - cases, what they had been taught turned out to be untrue. One's own observations alone and tradition by itself are very possibly the source not of true understanding, they found, but more likely of falsehood or fantasy.
Much of what we are taught by others, of course, consists of the dogma of our time, our family, or our subculture. And like the other claims for truth that our forefathers contemplated, they found that such established beliefs were as likely to be untrue as they were to be valid.
These writers found that knowledge - on which good decisions rest - did not come from one's fantasies or passions, from one's traditions or the accepted beliefs of one's culture, or even from one's own perceptions (although as independently gathered, unfiltered by others, one's own observations are more likely to be true than what one inherits from others). The knowledge we can achieve and on which we must base all our actions comes from our independent observations, our analysis of how things influence each other, and our reason.
Sound decisions affecting others - whether apparently moral or political in nature - must be based on the knowledge gained from a combination of independent observation, analysis, and reason perhaps shaped to some degree by our traditions, established beliefs, and feelings. We may honorably and responsibly allow the latter three forces to influence implementation of our moral/social and political choices and decisions, but if we are to make progress over the long run, the decisions themselves must be grounded firmly in knowledge from observation of the facts, independent analysis of relevant factors, and careful reasoning about them.
***
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
America's Core Values... Today
***
1
Our nation today is caught in a highly partisan welter of conflicting claims and opinions. At the same time, we are witnessing what appears to be a significant conflict of basic values. (NB,This may not be in fact true in the general public, but certain interests seem determined to create this impression.)
In such a time, we all need to remind ourselves of America's core values - peace, prosperity, equality (at least of opportunity), liberty, and justice... for all.
The first two of these fundamental values, peace and prosperity, we share with just about all people, of all cultures, in all times. The remaining three ideals - equality, liberty, and justice - are distinctly American values, first articulated in the American Declaration of Independence. For some time these three values were unique in the world, though nearly every day now, they are shared more and more, by more people and more nations around the world.
In this time in our own society of apparently competing goals and ideals, all of us - thinking for ourselves - should judge every significant action or policy proposed for America, and evaluate every leader, politician, or current affairs media personality, by reference primarily and predominantly to these core values: peace, prosperity, equality of opportunity, liberty (or freedom), and justice for all.
Every policy proposed or action taken is worthy of our support only to the degree that it advances us - all of us - toward greater attainment of our core ideals. Every action taken and policy proposed that does not advance our country on that path is worthy of our opposition and active dissent.
2
So how is America doing today, in terms of our core values?
Obviously, we do not live in peaceful, prosperous times. On the contrary. The United States is ensnared in two agonizing struggles thousands of miles away. One of these is a war most Americans today believe we never should have started. Iraq was reasonably "peaceful" in the year 2000, and was making reasonable progress toward some prosperity, although among ordinary Iraqis, there was limited opportunity for personal advancement, an unjust system of laws, and little individual freedom.
Since our invasion, there has been less peace in Iraq, less prosperity, along with about ,the same or even, for some, less equality of opportunity, justice, or freedom (despite our best efforts and our fervent hopes). Also, we know now that there was no particular threat to our country posed by Iraq in the first place. With a little historical perspective, we can now see that this action actually took us farther from our goal of peace, not toward it, and is worthy of our criticism.
Afghanistan, on the other hand, did pose an ongoing threat to our peace by supporting fanatical Islamic terrorists bent on our destruction. But in that country too, the prospects for enduring peace today are hard to find, although the Taliban would be hard-pressed to reassert at the same level again its denial of equality, freedom, and justice to the Afghan people. All in all, this part of our war-torn world is a dark enigma, when judged by our core values. It just is not clear what to do.
3
It is also obvious that we are less prosperous today than we have been and expect to be. Even during the first seven or eight years of the Twenty-First Century, when the American economy was generating more and more wealth, the income and accumulated wealth of the American middle class did not grow, remaining stagnant, and the number of Americans living below the poverty line increased significantly. The best we can say about America's economic growth since 2000 is that a few have prospered, while the great majority of the population has not.
Since 2008, of course, the whole world has also been reeling from The Great Recession, the deepest and longest-sustained period of economic hardship in seven decades. Again, however, in America the very rich suffered the least and only for a short time, while many Americans have been placed in jeopardy of losing their life savings, their homes, their livelihood, and their confidence both in themselves and in America's economy. Minority citizens and young people cannot find work, and older citizens cannot afford to retire as they had planned. Many others have simply been laid off.
4
We thus have to conclude that in terms of the two basic values widely shared around the world for many generations - peace and prosperity - we Americans (and many millions of others) are failing to march forward. On the contrary.
What of those other core values, those ideals that have tended to characterize America and Americans more than other nations and other peoples? In 2000, America can fairly be described as having afforded to its citizens a reasonable degree of justice, freedom, and equality of opportunity. But what of today?
a
In discussing equality in America at the present time, we must begin by recalling the broad principle that wealth is power. In a democracy, each of us has two different kinds of wealth. We have our own individual property and income, and we share the public wealth which, through taxes, we have invested in federal, state, county, and local governments. The public wealth is ours in a real, if limited sense, since we have a say in how it is spent. Together, our personal and public wealth is the source of our ability to do just about anything we can in fact do. With little (or no) property or income of any kind, we can do little; our opportunities are severely limited. With more wealth, property, and/or higher income, we can do a lot more.
The reason we traditionally say that our goal for all Americans is equal opportunity, rather than equality itself (as the Declaration implies), is that we recognize that even as an ideal, universal equality is not attainable and may not even be desirable, even pursuit of it having negative practical results.
On the other hand, there has proven to be also a practical limit to just how extreme the unequal distribution of wealth and income can be before our capitalist economy ceases to function efficiently. At every time in our history when wealth and income have become concentrated in the hands of a very few to an extreme degree, we Americans have been subject to periods of financial insecurity, going from "boom" to "bust" abruptly, periods of stagnation among the middle class and suffering among the poor, of widespread and shameless corruption, and of rapacious mega-corporations' swallowing up competing smaller businesses.
This was true in the periods between about 1875 and 1895, between about 1915 and 1935, and between 2000 and 2002 (the "dot.com boom") and between 2008 and today (The Great Recession). The extreme inequality in distribution of wealth and income in these periods has created inequality of opportunity in society generally. Poor and mid-income Americans at such times cannot compete with the super-rich, not only for luxuries (as one would expect), but even for the basic necessities of food and shelter, health care, education, and political influence.
Since distribution of wealth and income in America today is more concentrated in the hands of the few than in any time in our nation's history, we are seeing extreme inequality of opportunity as well.
b
What of freedom for all?
A person with no property, weak education, little or no income, poor nutrition and no health insurance cannot be fairly described as "free." Such a person is imprisoned in poor quality housing, low-paying jobs (if not unemployment), social discrimination, and ill health from an early age all the way to a perhaps premature death. For some in this condition, crime may seem the only realistic option, which in many cases will mean that he or she will be literally imprisoned.
Compared to the poor, those with middle-level jobs and incomes do have opportunities beyond this desperate level, but middle-class opportunities are still far inferior to the untroubled confidence, the financial security, the luxuries, and the political power of the very rich. Thus, extreme inequality in the distribution of wealth and income creates extreme inequality in both individual opportunity and individual liberty itself.
c
Finally, do most if not virtually all of us experience equal justice in America? It seems clear that most of us would say we do not.
Take taxes, for example.
The power of the mega-corporations and the very rich give them legal advantages over the rest of us and over small-business men and women. We have all learned that many of the biggest traditionally American corporations pay little or even no income taxes. They may have hundreds of tax accountants and attorneys each year filing thousands of pages to be submitted as their tax returns. Super-rich executives of these corporations can also afford such sophisticated counsel in their own personal attempts to minimize their individual income tax obligations.
Compare that to the rest of us, who seek aid in filing our taxes - whether individual or business tax - from a software package or from a single individual who works briefly for us while also counseling dozens of others, or fill simply out our own returns. We actually end up paying income taxes at a higher percentage of our wealth and income than the super-rich and the mega-corporations. Surely, this cannot be considered fair or just, and it defeats the purpose of the graduated income tax.
Likewise, if we are accused of breaking the law, the legal support we can afford is far more limited than a wealthy person or wealthy firm can afford. Today too, in the workplace the old adage "You can't fight City Hall" could be changed to "You can't fight the big corporation." If one of us ordinary Americans has to file suit against either a much wealthier individual or a big corporation, the odds are stacked against us. This situation is not just either.
Contrast the degree of accountability an individual worker feels toward the employer in doing her or his job, with the degree of accountability the large corporation feels toward its customers or to the general public.
And contrast too the degree to which a politician is likely to feel the influence of the average voter who makes a small donation to his or her campaign, to that expected by the billionaire or the well-heeled corporation who gives millions. The number of small campaign donations required to match the size of a single one of the largest donations by the wealthy is inconceivable. At a certain point, excesses in wealth outweigh the so-called "power in numbers." In a democracy, even the common sensical assumption that the "majority rules" can be subverted by extreme concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few.
Isn't that true in our country today? We are headed on the path away from "justice for all," not toward it.
5
We are regrettably forced to conclude that, when compared to where we were in 2000 (or even earlier), in our pursuit of America's core ideals - peace, prosperity, equality, freedom, and justice for all - our society today seems clearly headed toward more and more inequality, in all areas, which undermines all that we hold or used to hold most dear.
***
1
Our nation today is caught in a highly partisan welter of conflicting claims and opinions. At the same time, we are witnessing what appears to be a significant conflict of basic values. (NB,This may not be in fact true in the general public, but certain interests seem determined to create this impression.)
In such a time, we all need to remind ourselves of America's core values - peace, prosperity, equality (at least of opportunity), liberty, and justice... for all.
The first two of these fundamental values, peace and prosperity, we share with just about all people, of all cultures, in all times. The remaining three ideals - equality, liberty, and justice - are distinctly American values, first articulated in the American Declaration of Independence. For some time these three values were unique in the world, though nearly every day now, they are shared more and more, by more people and more nations around the world.
In this time in our own society of apparently competing goals and ideals, all of us - thinking for ourselves - should judge every significant action or policy proposed for America, and evaluate every leader, politician, or current affairs media personality, by reference primarily and predominantly to these core values: peace, prosperity, equality of opportunity, liberty (or freedom), and justice for all.
Every policy proposed or action taken is worthy of our support only to the degree that it advances us - all of us - toward greater attainment of our core ideals. Every action taken and policy proposed that does not advance our country on that path is worthy of our opposition and active dissent.
2
So how is America doing today, in terms of our core values?
Obviously, we do not live in peaceful, prosperous times. On the contrary. The United States is ensnared in two agonizing struggles thousands of miles away. One of these is a war most Americans today believe we never should have started. Iraq was reasonably "peaceful" in the year 2000, and was making reasonable progress toward some prosperity, although among ordinary Iraqis, there was limited opportunity for personal advancement, an unjust system of laws, and little individual freedom.
Since our invasion, there has been less peace in Iraq, less prosperity, along with about ,the same or even, for some, less equality of opportunity, justice, or freedom (despite our best efforts and our fervent hopes). Also, we know now that there was no particular threat to our country posed by Iraq in the first place. With a little historical perspective, we can now see that this action actually took us farther from our goal of peace, not toward it, and is worthy of our criticism.
Afghanistan, on the other hand, did pose an ongoing threat to our peace by supporting fanatical Islamic terrorists bent on our destruction. But in that country too, the prospects for enduring peace today are hard to find, although the Taliban would be hard-pressed to reassert at the same level again its denial of equality, freedom, and justice to the Afghan people. All in all, this part of our war-torn world is a dark enigma, when judged by our core values. It just is not clear what to do.
3
It is also obvious that we are less prosperous today than we have been and expect to be. Even during the first seven or eight years of the Twenty-First Century, when the American economy was generating more and more wealth, the income and accumulated wealth of the American middle class did not grow, remaining stagnant, and the number of Americans living below the poverty line increased significantly. The best we can say about America's economic growth since 2000 is that a few have prospered, while the great majority of the population has not.
Since 2008, of course, the whole world has also been reeling from The Great Recession, the deepest and longest-sustained period of economic hardship in seven decades. Again, however, in America the very rich suffered the least and only for a short time, while many Americans have been placed in jeopardy of losing their life savings, their homes, their livelihood, and their confidence both in themselves and in America's economy. Minority citizens and young people cannot find work, and older citizens cannot afford to retire as they had planned. Many others have simply been laid off.
4
We thus have to conclude that in terms of the two basic values widely shared around the world for many generations - peace and prosperity - we Americans (and many millions of others) are failing to march forward. On the contrary.
What of those other core values, those ideals that have tended to characterize America and Americans more than other nations and other peoples? In 2000, America can fairly be described as having afforded to its citizens a reasonable degree of justice, freedom, and equality of opportunity. But what of today?
a
In discussing equality in America at the present time, we must begin by recalling the broad principle that wealth is power. In a democracy, each of us has two different kinds of wealth. We have our own individual property and income, and we share the public wealth which, through taxes, we have invested in federal, state, county, and local governments. The public wealth is ours in a real, if limited sense, since we have a say in how it is spent. Together, our personal and public wealth is the source of our ability to do just about anything we can in fact do. With little (or no) property or income of any kind, we can do little; our opportunities are severely limited. With more wealth, property, and/or higher income, we can do a lot more.
The reason we traditionally say that our goal for all Americans is equal opportunity, rather than equality itself (as the Declaration implies), is that we recognize that even as an ideal, universal equality is not attainable and may not even be desirable, even pursuit of it having negative practical results.
On the other hand, there has proven to be also a practical limit to just how extreme the unequal distribution of wealth and income can be before our capitalist economy ceases to function efficiently. At every time in our history when wealth and income have become concentrated in the hands of a very few to an extreme degree, we Americans have been subject to periods of financial insecurity, going from "boom" to "bust" abruptly, periods of stagnation among the middle class and suffering among the poor, of widespread and shameless corruption, and of rapacious mega-corporations' swallowing up competing smaller businesses.
This was true in the periods between about 1875 and 1895, between about 1915 and 1935, and between 2000 and 2002 (the "dot.com boom") and between 2008 and today (The Great Recession). The extreme inequality in distribution of wealth and income in these periods has created inequality of opportunity in society generally. Poor and mid-income Americans at such times cannot compete with the super-rich, not only for luxuries (as one would expect), but even for the basic necessities of food and shelter, health care, education, and political influence.
Since distribution of wealth and income in America today is more concentrated in the hands of the few than in any time in our nation's history, we are seeing extreme inequality of opportunity as well.
b
What of freedom for all?
A person with no property, weak education, little or no income, poor nutrition and no health insurance cannot be fairly described as "free." Such a person is imprisoned in poor quality housing, low-paying jobs (if not unemployment), social discrimination, and ill health from an early age all the way to a perhaps premature death. For some in this condition, crime may seem the only realistic option, which in many cases will mean that he or she will be literally imprisoned.
Compared to the poor, those with middle-level jobs and incomes do have opportunities beyond this desperate level, but middle-class opportunities are still far inferior to the untroubled confidence, the financial security, the luxuries, and the political power of the very rich. Thus, extreme inequality in the distribution of wealth and income creates extreme inequality in both individual opportunity and individual liberty itself.
c
Finally, do most if not virtually all of us experience equal justice in America? It seems clear that most of us would say we do not.
Take taxes, for example.
The power of the mega-corporations and the very rich give them legal advantages over the rest of us and over small-business men and women. We have all learned that many of the biggest traditionally American corporations pay little or even no income taxes. They may have hundreds of tax accountants and attorneys each year filing thousands of pages to be submitted as their tax returns. Super-rich executives of these corporations can also afford such sophisticated counsel in their own personal attempts to minimize their individual income tax obligations.
Compare that to the rest of us, who seek aid in filing our taxes - whether individual or business tax - from a software package or from a single individual who works briefly for us while also counseling dozens of others, or fill simply out our own returns. We actually end up paying income taxes at a higher percentage of our wealth and income than the super-rich and the mega-corporations. Surely, this cannot be considered fair or just, and it defeats the purpose of the graduated income tax.
Likewise, if we are accused of breaking the law, the legal support we can afford is far more limited than a wealthy person or wealthy firm can afford. Today too, in the workplace the old adage "You can't fight City Hall" could be changed to "You can't fight the big corporation." If one of us ordinary Americans has to file suit against either a much wealthier individual or a big corporation, the odds are stacked against us. This situation is not just either.
Contrast the degree of accountability an individual worker feels toward the employer in doing her or his job, with the degree of accountability the large corporation feels toward its customers or to the general public.
And contrast too the degree to which a politician is likely to feel the influence of the average voter who makes a small donation to his or her campaign, to that expected by the billionaire or the well-heeled corporation who gives millions. The number of small campaign donations required to match the size of a single one of the largest donations by the wealthy is inconceivable. At a certain point, excesses in wealth outweigh the so-called "power in numbers." In a democracy, even the common sensical assumption that the "majority rules" can be subverted by extreme concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few.
Isn't that true in our country today? We are headed on the path away from "justice for all," not toward it.
5
We are regrettably forced to conclude that, when compared to where we were in 2000 (or even earlier), in our pursuit of America's core ideals - peace, prosperity, equality, freedom, and justice for all - our society today seems clearly headed toward more and more inequality, in all areas, which undermines all that we hold or used to hold most dear.
***
Tuesday, June 7, 2011
Wise Sayings 5 from Ron Lucius
***
1
If a little
.....is good,
A lot
.....is not.
……………………………………………………………………Ron Lucius
2
More
.....is not enough.
Less
.....is more.
Enough
....is enough.
All
.....are true.
Which is it
.....today?
……………………………………………………………………Ron Lucius
***
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Reminisence: Childhood Reading, Part 1
***
1
My parents were readers. There were always books on their bedside tables. I didn't see them reading in bed until I must have been in high school... because I was sent to bed before they went to bed. But I always knew they would be reading just before going to sleep, probably every night.
Dad would usually have one or more of his magazines on his table, or under the windows at the side of his bed. He'd have Newsweek, for example, or maybe the Reader's Digest.
Both parents liked mysteries, and novels by Nevil Shute. Sometimes they bought them, and often they would get them from the library.
2
To a little boy, our city's public library was an imposing structure. It was beautiful with a wide expanse of white stone steps leading up to the large wooden door. The library faced a quiet little park too, with a white gazebo or bandstand in its center in the shade under the big live-oak trees.
I don't think I was more than five or so when Mother would regularly drop me off at the foot of all those steps at the library and stay there in the car as I climbed up and eventually opened the big door. Then I would turn and watch her drive away. "Don't leave the children's section," she would tell me in the car, so that she could be sure to find me later. By that time, I must have known the Children's Room pretty well. It was down the hall to the left.
When I would go in the front door, I wouldn't look at the people up there behind the big circulation desk. Sometimes, one of them would say sweetly, "Hello there! How are you today?" And I would feel right at home.
3
They had a limit on the number of books you could check out for a week. Otherwise, I would have gotten more than six, even if that meant making two trips down and up those big steps just to carry them all. There was a long series of books for children about great Americans. I read them all, six at a time, many of them more than once. Those are the books I most associate in my memory with that library.
I remember "George Washington Carver: Boy Scientist," and "Tom Edison: Boy Inventor." I guess they made it seem that each of these great Americans had started out on their eventual career while they were still in short pants. I wonder if I imagined a book about me one day, "Byron Derrick: Boy Reader"?
But there were dozens of these wonderful books: "Clara Barton: Girl Nurse," "Meriwether Lewis: Boy Explorer," "Kit Carson: Boy Trapper," "Wilbur and Orville Wright: Boy Fliers," and so on...
I imagine that these little biographies would seem naive and even silly today, even to a child; but they set my imagination zooming, taking me from state to state, from culture to culture, from profession to profession, from era to era in ways that felt liberating and inspiring. That must have been the goal, and at least with me, it worked.
I don't recall one of these books about George Washington. Would it have been called "George Washington: Boy Father of Our Country"? Or "George Washington: Boy First President"? Or what about Andrew Jackson, "Boy Indian Hater"? "Babe Ruth: Boy Sultan of Swat" or "Boy Bambino"? What about "Susan B. Anthony: Girl Feminist"?
4
I must have read lots of other books from the public library. It was a big room with a Children's Librarian watchful and helpful. I used to sit at the side tables and look through, or read, the encyclopedias. My favorite was Collier's. It did have pictures, but that wasn't that unusual. I seem to remember liking the boldness of the print and the page layout, that sort of thing. So many subjects seemed so interesting. I must have looked up each of the "Great Americans" too. Sitting Bull, Davy Crockett, Jim Thorpe, Helen Keller, William Penn, Pocahontas...
The other encyclopedias were the Britannica Jr. and Compton's (too bulky, print too small, margins too narrow) and of course The World Book, which Mother eventually bought for my sister and me when my sister entered 9th or 10th grade. At the library I looked at that one too, but thought it looked like it had been written for kids!
It's not possible now to sort out which books I read from the public library, and which ones came from the school libraries... Some just must have been available in both places, the ones at the public library being in better shape, cleaner and less worn...
5
My elementary school was small, with only two classes for each grade. But the library seemed large enough, double the size of the classrooms (as it seems in my memory now). I think that the children started going to the library in the 4th grade or so. I don't think you were allowed to stay more than a few minutes each time, and you could take out only one book at a time.
In my memory I associate with the school library at elementary school fond experiences with the historical novels of an author called Stephen W. Meader. I had learned from my mother that it was a good idea to commit to memory the name of the author of any favorite book, so that the next time or at another library you could maybe find another book by the same man or woman. This was a new strategy for me. At the public library I had (at first) settled on that one long series of biographies. I paid no attention to who the author was.
But I still remenber some specific novels by Mr. Meader. One was about Paul Revere's famous ride, Who Rides in the Dark? Another was about the development of the railroads across 19th century America: The Long Trains Roll. I found one of Meader's books particularly exciting; it was about a submarine. The Sea Snake it was called. I also remember Down the Big River, the title of which is all I do recall; it must have been about the Mississippi. I could look up Meader - in fact, I will look him up - but his name and these titles have stayed with me in my memory for 50 or 60 years.
[The local public library system where I live now has a variety of children's books by Stephen W. Meader, most of them co-authored. The earliest is dated 1920 (The Black Buccaneer) and the latest (A Blow for Liberty), which is labeled a first edition, dated 1965. He is said to have lived from 1892 to 1977, pretty close to my Dad's years.
Among the titles at my library are some that seem familiar, like Lumberjack, Boy With a Pack, T-Model Tommy (I just know I read that one), Clear for Action!, Whaler Round the Horn, and "Guns for the Saratoga." That one was published in 1955 when I would have been 13 (a little old for that sort of thing, as it now seems to me). The last Meader book that I had remembered without prompting - The Sea Snake - was published in 1944 when I was two.]
6
I didn't own many books, but I remember many others from one library or another. There were sports books, for instance, like Flashing Spikes by Frank O'Rourke. His name is one I learned since that particular book of his was such a favorite. Mother would sometimes say, "Why Derrick, haven't you read this one before?" Maybe she thought I took six every week just to be doing it. "I just want to read it again," I must have said.
Another author's name I still remember was John R. Tunis. I have the sense I read quite a few of his; the only title I remember is The Iron Duke, about an Olympic track star (could it have been in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin?). But I think most of the ones I remember enjoying were about baseball. One of them was called The Kid From Tomlinston. At least I think that one was also by Tunis; it was certainly one of my favorites.
I also liked some animal stories, a lot of them about dogs, I think. Eventually they included Jack London's White Fang books and The Call of the Wild. Two that were given to me as Christmas presents were Kazan, the Wolf Dog and Son of Kazan. These were written by a man named Albert Payson Terhune. Having three names may have been the thing for dogs boy-book novelists; another name I remember was (really) James Oliver Curwood.
Back in the school library, I remember often looking through a reference book called Twentieth-Century Authors. I don't remember what exactly drew me to that one, along with the encyclopedias, but I had the habit of thumbing through it from time to time, especially when I couldn't find a book to check out.
7
The living room at home had bookshelves on most walls, with Mother's and Dad's old books on them. Mostly Dad's, I thought (why I don't know). A few shelves were devoted to old National Geographics, but I didn't look at them much. There also were always current issues of magazines on the coffee table in front of the couch, including the Saturday Evening Post (whose cartoons were the best) and Reader's Digest (whose little jokes at the bottom of many pages were also favorites), as well as the Look, Collliers, or Newsweek that my Dad didn't have upstairs.
On the same bookcase on that side of the room were some anthologies, one of them with entertaining short stories and little poems, edited by Clifton Fadiman (only a name on a book spine to me at the time). I remember that a hilarious story by James Thurber was in that collection. Nearby on the shelf was also a complete collection of Shakespeare's plays. It had an ornate dark blue cover with silver highlights. It was published, as I recall, in the United States (not in New York... Chicago maybe?), in 1889 or something like that. My Dad was never a rich man, had in fact lived in real poverty until his thirties, so he must have bought this volume used. He had even put in it - as he had with several of the classics - a book plate into which he had typed his name (not printed for him, you know). He must have been proud to own his own collection of Shakespeare's plays...
1
My parents were readers. There were always books on their bedside tables. I didn't see them reading in bed until I must have been in high school... because I was sent to bed before they went to bed. But I always knew they would be reading just before going to sleep, probably every night.
Dad would usually have one or more of his magazines on his table, or under the windows at the side of his bed. He'd have Newsweek, for example, or maybe the Reader's Digest.
Both parents liked mysteries, and novels by Nevil Shute. Sometimes they bought them, and often they would get them from the library.
2
To a little boy, our city's public library was an imposing structure. It was beautiful with a wide expanse of white stone steps leading up to the large wooden door. The library faced a quiet little park too, with a white gazebo or bandstand in its center in the shade under the big live-oak trees.
I don't think I was more than five or so when Mother would regularly drop me off at the foot of all those steps at the library and stay there in the car as I climbed up and eventually opened the big door. Then I would turn and watch her drive away. "Don't leave the children's section," she would tell me in the car, so that she could be sure to find me later. By that time, I must have known the Children's Room pretty well. It was down the hall to the left.
When I would go in the front door, I wouldn't look at the people up there behind the big circulation desk. Sometimes, one of them would say sweetly, "Hello there! How are you today?" And I would feel right at home.
3
They had a limit on the number of books you could check out for a week. Otherwise, I would have gotten more than six, even if that meant making two trips down and up those big steps just to carry them all. There was a long series of books for children about great Americans. I read them all, six at a time, many of them more than once. Those are the books I most associate in my memory with that library.
I remember "George Washington Carver: Boy Scientist," and "Tom Edison: Boy Inventor." I guess they made it seem that each of these great Americans had started out on their eventual career while they were still in short pants. I wonder if I imagined a book about me one day, "Byron Derrick: Boy Reader"?
But there were dozens of these wonderful books: "Clara Barton: Girl Nurse," "Meriwether Lewis: Boy Explorer," "Kit Carson: Boy Trapper," "Wilbur and Orville Wright: Boy Fliers," and so on...
I imagine that these little biographies would seem naive and even silly today, even to a child; but they set my imagination zooming, taking me from state to state, from culture to culture, from profession to profession, from era to era in ways that felt liberating and inspiring. That must have been the goal, and at least with me, it worked.
I don't recall one of these books about George Washington. Would it have been called "George Washington: Boy Father of Our Country"? Or "George Washington: Boy First President"? Or what about Andrew Jackson, "Boy Indian Hater"? "Babe Ruth: Boy Sultan of Swat" or "Boy Bambino"? What about "Susan B. Anthony: Girl Feminist"?
4
I must have read lots of other books from the public library. It was a big room with a Children's Librarian watchful and helpful. I used to sit at the side tables and look through, or read, the encyclopedias. My favorite was Collier's. It did have pictures, but that wasn't that unusual. I seem to remember liking the boldness of the print and the page layout, that sort of thing. So many subjects seemed so interesting. I must have looked up each of the "Great Americans" too. Sitting Bull, Davy Crockett, Jim Thorpe, Helen Keller, William Penn, Pocahontas...
The other encyclopedias were the Britannica Jr. and Compton's (too bulky, print too small, margins too narrow) and of course The World Book, which Mother eventually bought for my sister and me when my sister entered 9th or 10th grade. At the library I looked at that one too, but thought it looked like it had been written for kids!
It's not possible now to sort out which books I read from the public library, and which ones came from the school libraries... Some just must have been available in both places, the ones at the public library being in better shape, cleaner and less worn...
5
My elementary school was small, with only two classes for each grade. But the library seemed large enough, double the size of the classrooms (as it seems in my memory now). I think that the children started going to the library in the 4th grade or so. I don't think you were allowed to stay more than a few minutes each time, and you could take out only one book at a time.
In my memory I associate with the school library at elementary school fond experiences with the historical novels of an author called Stephen W. Meader. I had learned from my mother that it was a good idea to commit to memory the name of the author of any favorite book, so that the next time or at another library you could maybe find another book by the same man or woman. This was a new strategy for me. At the public library I had (at first) settled on that one long series of biographies. I paid no attention to who the author was.
But I still remenber some specific novels by Mr. Meader. One was about Paul Revere's famous ride, Who Rides in the Dark? Another was about the development of the railroads across 19th century America: The Long Trains Roll. I found one of Meader's books particularly exciting; it was about a submarine. The Sea Snake it was called. I also remember Down the Big River, the title of which is all I do recall; it must have been about the Mississippi. I could look up Meader - in fact, I will look him up - but his name and these titles have stayed with me in my memory for 50 or 60 years.
[The local public library system where I live now has a variety of children's books by Stephen W. Meader, most of them co-authored. The earliest is dated 1920 (The Black Buccaneer) and the latest (A Blow for Liberty), which is labeled a first edition, dated 1965. He is said to have lived from 1892 to 1977, pretty close to my Dad's years.
Among the titles at my library are some that seem familiar, like Lumberjack, Boy With a Pack, T-Model Tommy (I just know I read that one), Clear for Action!, Whaler Round the Horn, and "Guns for the Saratoga." That one was published in 1955 when I would have been 13 (a little old for that sort of thing, as it now seems to me). The last Meader book that I had remembered without prompting - The Sea Snake - was published in 1944 when I was two.]
6
I didn't own many books, but I remember many others from one library or another. There were sports books, for instance, like Flashing Spikes by Frank O'Rourke. His name is one I learned since that particular book of his was such a favorite. Mother would sometimes say, "Why Derrick, haven't you read this one before?" Maybe she thought I took six every week just to be doing it. "I just want to read it again," I must have said.
Another author's name I still remember was John R. Tunis. I have the sense I read quite a few of his; the only title I remember is The Iron Duke, about an Olympic track star (could it have been in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin?). But I think most of the ones I remember enjoying were about baseball. One of them was called The Kid From Tomlinston. At least I think that one was also by Tunis; it was certainly one of my favorites.
I also liked some animal stories, a lot of them about dogs, I think. Eventually they included Jack London's White Fang books and The Call of the Wild. Two that were given to me as Christmas presents were Kazan, the Wolf Dog and Son of Kazan. These were written by a man named Albert Payson Terhune. Having three names may have been the thing for dogs boy-book novelists; another name I remember was (really) James Oliver Curwood.
Back in the school library, I remember often looking through a reference book called Twentieth-Century Authors. I don't remember what exactly drew me to that one, along with the encyclopedias, but I had the habit of thumbing through it from time to time, especially when I couldn't find a book to check out.
7
The living room at home had bookshelves on most walls, with Mother's and Dad's old books on them. Mostly Dad's, I thought (why I don't know). A few shelves were devoted to old National Geographics, but I didn't look at them much. There also were always current issues of magazines on the coffee table in front of the couch, including the Saturday Evening Post (whose cartoons were the best) and Reader's Digest (whose little jokes at the bottom of many pages were also favorites), as well as the Look, Collliers, or Newsweek that my Dad didn't have upstairs.
There were Tarzan novels, one of my Dad’s youthful entertainments. He told me that at one time – probably during college, now that I think of it – he thought he could write an interesting article on Edgar Rice Burroughs. But that little collection of older paperbacks was as much an aberration as the old National Geographics.
Above those old things, my parents’ enjoyment in reading mysteries was reflected. There was a whole shelf of The Saint books, light blue. (I tried, but as an early and then a later adolescent, I just couldn’t get into them. Maybe now?) And there were a lot of books with black covers that had a little man logo with a magnifying glass, printed at the bottom of the spine in red against the black, and the words “Crime Club.” My recollection is that these were all terrific. Several were by Philip MacDonald. I’m not sure of any other authors, but one other title was The Seven Keys to Bald Pate. (I liked that one too.) Most of these had been published before 1940, and most stories were set in England.
Nearby, as well as all the way across the room, were some classics. There was one collection of Modern Library editions, for instance, with Somerset Maugham and Thomas Mann and Zola. Dad had also collected those inexpensive editions before we'd been born. There was a large collection of all the Stories of O. Henry; I liked them quite a bit, maybe even a little more than those in the big volume of stories of Maupassant.
At one point as I neared completion of high school, I decided that I should read the longest novel in the house (i.e. living room). Les Miserables was edged out for that honor by what turned out to be a historical novel by Hervey (was it pronounced as though it were "Harvey"?) Allen called Anthony Adverse. I barely remember it, I’m sorry to say. Another of the longer ones I read was Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. That was not what I’d anticipated – which could have been what, exactly? – but I found it gripping, intense, and fascinating.
Sanders of the River (I think the river was the Congo) was another sort of thing entirely, an adventure novel. I admired it, enjoyed reading it enough that I looked for another novel by Edgar Wallace at the library. Whatever I found there was disappointing, however.
On the same bookcase on that side of the room were some anthologies, one of them with entertaining short stories and little poems, edited by Clifton Fadiman (only a name on a book spine to me at the time). I remember that a hilarious story by James Thurber was in that collection. Nearby on the shelf was also a complete collection of Shakespeare's plays. It had an ornate dark blue cover with silver highlights. It was published, as I recall, in the United States (not in New York... Chicago maybe?), in 1889 or something like that. My Dad was never a rich man, had in fact lived in real poverty until his thirties, so he must have bought this volume used. He had even put in it - as he had with several of the classics - a book plate into which he had typed his name (not printed for him, you know). He must have been proud to own his own collection of Shakespeare's plays...
Also on those shelves was a regular favorite of mine that, over a number of years, I would take down now and then when I had a few minutes to fill, waiting for something to happen in the living room... maybe supper in the kitchen nearby? It was The Best Loved Poems of the American People.
"Casey at the Bat" was in that volume, as well as other poems that just about everyone was familiar with: "The Man on the Flying Trapeze," "The Raven," "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," "The Charge of the Light Brigade." Maybe it was there that I first saw Kipling's "On the Road to Mandalay," which was also a song in my mother's youth. She liked to play it for me on the old upright piano we had in the living room... when I would always beg her to play "American Patrol" too.
8
I'm having much too much fun reminiscing about my early reading experiences. Too much, that is, to try to continue all the way till I finish with the subject. I will call this piece "Part One." And continue some time later.
But before closing Part One, let me add that several years ago, I actually bought for myself a used copy of The Best Loved Poems of the American People, published in 1936. But when I first got it, I went through the Table of Contents and made a check in the margin by the names of those poems I remembered as childhood favorites. Among those old favorites I have already mentioned were these others: "Guilty Or Not Guilty?," "The Bank Thief," "If," "I have a Rendezvous with Death" and "In Flanders Fields," "Old Ironsides," and "Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog."
Extra special favorites, along with those I first mentioned, include "Hell in Texas" (like the "Mad Dog" poem, a comic piece) and "Invictus" which, as captain of my soul, I still think of as one of my favorites.
to be continued
***
"Casey at the Bat" was in that volume, as well as other poems that just about everyone was familiar with: "The Man on the Flying Trapeze," "The Raven," "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," "The Charge of the Light Brigade." Maybe it was there that I first saw Kipling's "On the Road to Mandalay," which was also a song in my mother's youth. She liked to play it for me on the old upright piano we had in the living room... when I would always beg her to play "American Patrol" too.
8
I'm having much too much fun reminiscing about my early reading experiences. Too much, that is, to try to continue all the way till I finish with the subject. I will call this piece "Part One." And continue some time later.
But before closing Part One, let me add that several years ago, I actually bought for myself a used copy of The Best Loved Poems of the American People, published in 1936. But when I first got it, I went through the Table of Contents and made a check in the margin by the names of those poems I remembered as childhood favorites. Among those old favorites I have already mentioned were these others: "Guilty Or Not Guilty?," "The Bank Thief," "If," "I have a Rendezvous with Death" and "In Flanders Fields," "Old Ironsides," and "Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog."
Extra special favorites, along with those I first mentioned, include "Hell in Texas" (like the "Mad Dog" poem, a comic piece) and "Invictus" which, as captain of my soul, I still think of as one of my favorites.
to be continued
***
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Freedom and Power
***
1
Freedom and Power are intimately connected. In the extreme case, if a person were all-powerful she or he would be utterly free, while a person who was completely powerless and could not act in any way, would have no freedom. We could ask, "Are Freedom and Power, at base, the same thing?"
2
Thomas Jefferson defined "Liberty," another word for Freedom, as "unobstructed action according to our will." Without power, we might say, there is no freedom, since a person who is prevented (or "obstructed") from acting as he or she wishes (or "wills") has little or no freedom. Conversely, without freedom to do as a person wishes, a person's power is significantly curtailed.
We U. S. Americans are proud to say, "We are a free people." However, that can be true only to the degree that as a people, we are empowered to act as we wish - to vote, to change jobs or residences, to buy what we need, to make love or not, to raise children or to live without children, to do virtually anything we want. (Only "virtually," of course, because we are not free morally or legally to harm others.)
So the first important question is, Are U. S. Americans in 2011 empowered to do as they please, so long as their actions do not harm others? We would hope we could give a resounding Yes to that question.
And the second key question is, Do U. S. Americans in 2011 have a roughly equal opportunity to do as they please (without harming others)? Surely most of us would hope to be able to say Yes to that question also... because if we cannot say, honestly and truthfully, that both conditions - both power and freedom - are present to virtually everyone of us, then we are not the free people we want and claim to be. Even if a few or some people are empowered to do most of what they want to do, we are not a "free people" unless all of us have a roughly equal chance to achieve enough economic, social, and political power to do most of what we want.
3
Like those in other modern societies, Americans are proud to contrast themselves, with respect to power and freedom, with many cultures of the past. For instance, we take pride in the difference between our culture and medieval societies, in which what power and freedom there was, was concentrated in the nobility, while serfs or peasants had very little of either, and artisans and merchants had barely more. All people's station in life was not determined by their personal abilities, efforts, or achievements but by inheritance. From the first, Americans have been proud to say that is not true here.
The medieval peasants farmed the nobleman's fields. They were not free to move to other towns or other career opportunities; they could not realistically aspire to join the rich nobility, ever. They worked hard even when they were ill, old, or infirm. They were poor, subject to famine and disease. They lived in homes that, even for that day, were primitive, unclean, cold, and cramped. They owned little, perhaps not even the tools they used to work the fields. They had no money or property, and were powerless to make significant changes in that situation. In other words, they had neither power nor freedom.
Compared to the peasants as well as to the artisans and merchants who made up a small, "middle-class" group, the nobles were powerful and free. They also inherited their social rank. Nobles controlled the servants and peasants who worked for them. They meted out what justice there was, not according to laws or even precedents, but according to their own interest and that of their neighboring nobles and allies. If they had reason to, they could join the relatively comfortable clergy. Their power brought them wealth, allowed them to eat well and to live in at least relative comfort. Much more than the others in their society, they could do what they wanted; at least they were relatively more free than anyone else. Also, at least in a small region, their power was virtually absolute.
4
Today, U. S. Americans think those in our society have far more power over their own lives - or in others words, are far more free - than most people in medieval times.
That has not always been true, of course. For many generations, many southern Americans owned black slaves. These unfortunates were, like medieval peasants, neither powerful nor free.
In America now, however, we like to say, "Anyone can grow up to become President," which if true or true of most Americans would indicate a remarkably wide distribution of political power. America may be the only culture in which it is a cliche to ask a child, "And what do you want to be when you grow up?" implying that to Americans, every possibility is open. This would indicate a remarkably widespread degree of individual freedom.
It would seem that in order to feel comfortable claiming that U. S. Americans are "a free people," we would ask ourselves a few hard questions. Asking them would help us determine to what degree Americans are in fact empowered to a sufficient degree to be considered free, able to act, unobstructed, to do pretty well what they please.
5
What would prevent people from being empowered to this extent?
In our history of being a slave-owning society, a significant obstruction to freedom has been discriminatory laws, laws that are applied differently to different people or groups of people. Today, part of the supreme law of the land - for all people, in all states - says explicitly that it would be illegal (unconstitutional) to apply laws inequitably in such a way. Have we achieved this ideal, or are we as a people making good progress toward it?
The discriminating laws imprisoning slaves in bondage until 1863 consciously prevented slaves from moving toward freedom by prohibiting their learning to read and write. Are there U. S. Americans today who are effectively prevented from moving toward freedom by their limited opportunity to get a good education? Are we at least making progress in that direction?
A person who is sick or handicapped cannot be said to be - during that time of infirmity - to be free to do mostly as he or she wishes. The infirmity itself is an obstacle in the way of empowering freedom. Are U. S. Americans generally free of infirmity; are we a healthy people, generally speaking? Are there many of us or are significant groups of us whose health is unnaturally low because of unhealthy environments or inadequate or unavailable heath care? Are we making progress to be sure this is not true?
It seems obvious that someone whose wealth or income is so small as to be barely adequate to provide food - or smaller than even that - is not free to do as she or he wishes. A free people would have few such individuals and would work to eliminate poverty as much as possible. Are we progressing toward our ideals in this regard?
6
Do virtually all Americans today at least have a roughly equal opportunity - equal power - to attain financial security, good health care, a sound education, and an absence of laws enforced in ways discriminating against them?
If not, we cannot rightfully claim to be "a free people," and unless we are at least making good progress toward being a society of secure, well-educated, relatively strong, and equally advantaged people, then - despite our Pledge of Allegiance - we have abandoned the pursuit of "liberty and justice for all."
Americans who, like their parents, are trapped in poverty, badly educated, unemployed and financially insecure, vulnerable to injury and illness, and living in a violence-ridden neighborhood are virtually powerless to do what they might do and what they want to do. The millions of Americans in this predicament cannot be considered free.
And it is unfortunately not true that "America is the land of the free."
***
1
Freedom and Power are intimately connected. In the extreme case, if a person were all-powerful she or he would be utterly free, while a person who was completely powerless and could not act in any way, would have no freedom. We could ask, "Are Freedom and Power, at base, the same thing?"
2
Thomas Jefferson defined "Liberty," another word for Freedom, as "unobstructed action according to our will." Without power, we might say, there is no freedom, since a person who is prevented (or "obstructed") from acting as he or she wishes (or "wills") has little or no freedom. Conversely, without freedom to do as a person wishes, a person's power is significantly curtailed.
We U. S. Americans are proud to say, "We are a free people." However, that can be true only to the degree that as a people, we are empowered to act as we wish - to vote, to change jobs or residences, to buy what we need, to make love or not, to raise children or to live without children, to do virtually anything we want. (Only "virtually," of course, because we are not free morally or legally to harm others.)
So the first important question is, Are U. S. Americans in 2011 empowered to do as they please, so long as their actions do not harm others? We would hope we could give a resounding Yes to that question.
And the second key question is, Do U. S. Americans in 2011 have a roughly equal opportunity to do as they please (without harming others)? Surely most of us would hope to be able to say Yes to that question also... because if we cannot say, honestly and truthfully, that both conditions - both power and freedom - are present to virtually everyone of us, then we are not the free people we want and claim to be. Even if a few or some people are empowered to do most of what they want to do, we are not a "free people" unless all of us have a roughly equal chance to achieve enough economic, social, and political power to do most of what we want.
3
Like those in other modern societies, Americans are proud to contrast themselves, with respect to power and freedom, with many cultures of the past. For instance, we take pride in the difference between our culture and medieval societies, in which what power and freedom there was, was concentrated in the nobility, while serfs or peasants had very little of either, and artisans and merchants had barely more. All people's station in life was not determined by their personal abilities, efforts, or achievements but by inheritance. From the first, Americans have been proud to say that is not true here.
The medieval peasants farmed the nobleman's fields. They were not free to move to other towns or other career opportunities; they could not realistically aspire to join the rich nobility, ever. They worked hard even when they were ill, old, or infirm. They were poor, subject to famine and disease. They lived in homes that, even for that day, were primitive, unclean, cold, and cramped. They owned little, perhaps not even the tools they used to work the fields. They had no money or property, and were powerless to make significant changes in that situation. In other words, they had neither power nor freedom.
Compared to the peasants as well as to the artisans and merchants who made up a small, "middle-class" group, the nobles were powerful and free. They also inherited their social rank. Nobles controlled the servants and peasants who worked for them. They meted out what justice there was, not according to laws or even precedents, but according to their own interest and that of their neighboring nobles and allies. If they had reason to, they could join the relatively comfortable clergy. Their power brought them wealth, allowed them to eat well and to live in at least relative comfort. Much more than the others in their society, they could do what they wanted; at least they were relatively more free than anyone else. Also, at least in a small region, their power was virtually absolute.
4
Today, U. S. Americans think those in our society have far more power over their own lives - or in others words, are far more free - than most people in medieval times.
That has not always been true, of course. For many generations, many southern Americans owned black slaves. These unfortunates were, like medieval peasants, neither powerful nor free.
In America now, however, we like to say, "Anyone can grow up to become President," which if true or true of most Americans would indicate a remarkably wide distribution of political power. America may be the only culture in which it is a cliche to ask a child, "And what do you want to be when you grow up?" implying that to Americans, every possibility is open. This would indicate a remarkably widespread degree of individual freedom.
It would seem that in order to feel comfortable claiming that U. S. Americans are "a free people," we would ask ourselves a few hard questions. Asking them would help us determine to what degree Americans are in fact empowered to a sufficient degree to be considered free, able to act, unobstructed, to do pretty well what they please.
5
What would prevent people from being empowered to this extent?
In our history of being a slave-owning society, a significant obstruction to freedom has been discriminatory laws, laws that are applied differently to different people or groups of people. Today, part of the supreme law of the land - for all people, in all states - says explicitly that it would be illegal (unconstitutional) to apply laws inequitably in such a way. Have we achieved this ideal, or are we as a people making good progress toward it?
The discriminating laws imprisoning slaves in bondage until 1863 consciously prevented slaves from moving toward freedom by prohibiting their learning to read and write. Are there U. S. Americans today who are effectively prevented from moving toward freedom by their limited opportunity to get a good education? Are we at least making progress in that direction?
A person who is sick or handicapped cannot be said to be - during that time of infirmity - to be free to do mostly as he or she wishes. The infirmity itself is an obstacle in the way of empowering freedom. Are U. S. Americans generally free of infirmity; are we a healthy people, generally speaking? Are there many of us or are significant groups of us whose health is unnaturally low because of unhealthy environments or inadequate or unavailable heath care? Are we making progress to be sure this is not true?
It seems obvious that someone whose wealth or income is so small as to be barely adequate to provide food - or smaller than even that - is not free to do as she or he wishes. A free people would have few such individuals and would work to eliminate poverty as much as possible. Are we progressing toward our ideals in this regard?
6
Do virtually all Americans today at least have a roughly equal opportunity - equal power - to attain financial security, good health care, a sound education, and an absence of laws enforced in ways discriminating against them?
If not, we cannot rightfully claim to be "a free people," and unless we are at least making good progress toward being a society of secure, well-educated, relatively strong, and equally advantaged people, then - despite our Pledge of Allegiance - we have abandoned the pursuit of "liberty and justice for all."
Americans who, like their parents, are trapped in poverty, badly educated, unemployed and financially insecure, vulnerable to injury and illness, and living in a violence-ridden neighborhood are virtually powerless to do what they might do and what they want to do. The millions of Americans in this predicament cannot be considered free.
And it is unfortunately not true that "America is the land of the free."
***
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Conservatives, Liberals, and the "American Way"
***
1
Last November I wrote about the historical meaning of the words "liberal" and "conservative." Today, despite some apparent confusion, these meanings still seem relevant.
I wrote then:
The word "liberal" ... comes from the Latin word meaning "free," just as the word "liberty" comes from the Latin for "freedom." ...[The word] "conservative" comes from the Latin, meaning "to keep intact" or "to guard."
"Liberalism" means a belief in the paramount value of freedom.
...A "Conservative" person ... wants to keep social order, to maintain or restore traditions, and to protect established customs and practices.
And, in November, I added this comment:
...We struggle to find the right balance between the value of the individual's freedom and the value of the social order. ...Liberals tend to value individual freedom more than Conservatives, and Conservatives tend to place a higher value than Liberals do on maintaining traditional standards and social order.
However, both Liberals and Conservatives ... agree that in certain instances, the good of society should be emphasized over the freedom of the individual. ... Both Conservatives and Liberals also agree that individuals have civil rights, protected by the supreme law of the land, the U. S. Constitution. Where is the proper balance between the needs of the social order and the rights of the individual? A Conservative would generally place the balance point closer to the side of tradition and social order, while the Liberal would tend to place the balance point closer to the side of the individual and free choice.
How are the root meanings of these terms, which after all refer to the basic political division dividing our culture at the present time, still relevant?
2
The contrast between Conservatives and Liberals today tends to highlight Conservatives' inclination to focus on our need to pursue economic prosperity, while Liberals are inclined to emphasize our desire for social justice. Here again, of course, this contrast is not absolute. Conservatives may well value social justice to a degree, and Liberals certainly value economic prosperity as well.
Both groups value both goals to varying degrees; but while Liberals would sacrifice a degree of personal prosperity in order to achieve a higher degree of social justice, Conservatives would sacrifice a certain degree of social justice - as in the distribution of wealth, for example - in order to achieve a higher degree of what they perceive as economic prosperity or the pathway to it.
To apply the original meanings of "Conservative" coming from "guardian" and "Liberal" coming from "liberty," it is convenient to focus first on their contrasting approaches to social or moral questions, reserving discussing of financial and political issues for later.
3
Conservatives tend to see themselves as the guardians of traditional practices and values. Established religion, for instance, is seen as the source of the highest wisdom regarding personal choice and behavior. Those whom we call "Fundamentalist Christians," who regard the Bible as the literal truth and as the only reliable guidance to morality, can also be called "Conservatives." It is the duty of Conservatives not only to determine their own actions by means of tried and true religious teachings but also to work toward moral order in society by requiring all people - even those of different faiths, or no religious belief at all - to behave as their established or conservative religious teachings require.
For instance, it is not only necessary for such Conservatives to control their own personal behavior by refusing to abort even an unexpected or unhealthy fetus; it also seems their responsibility to prevent others from doing so. If the law of the land does not conform with their religious customs in this and other ways, then Conservatives - in order to preserve tradition and establish the social and moral order which they seek - see it as their responsibility to change the law.
Same-sex relations are likewise not only to be avoided, but to be positively prohibited for everyone.
Liberals, on the other hand, stress the need for all individuals to be free to make their own decisions, even on such deeply significant matters as birth and sex. Social or moral order, for Liberals, is less significant than individuals' liberty to choose for themselves.
Note: it is an anomaly of our time that "Libertarians," who value individual choice (i. e. freedom) to an extreme, should tend to align themselves with Conservatives.
Of course, even Liberals recognize the need for society to protect itself from foreign aggression, from theft, from assault and other threats to security, restraining the freedom of would-be criminals and aggressors. Conservatives in turn recognize that all individuals have the capacity to violate traditional religious taboos and must be held individually responsible for their immoral actions.
The balance between the pursuit of individual liberty and the need for social and moral order is in a different place for Conservatives and for Liberals.
4
The contrast between Conservative and Liberal values on political and economic concerns is less evident and more complex than the contrast between them on social and moral issues. But this contrast too reveals that the difference between the two groups lies in where each finds the proper balance between contrasting goals both of whose value is acknowledged by everyone in each group.
Conservatives highlight what they call "the free market" because such an economic system allows - or even promotes - the generation of wealth and prosperity. The fact that the wealth generated may become concentrated among a relative few is not particularly troubling. Also of little concern is the fact that one result of "the free market" tends to be cycles of "boom" and "bust," huge swings from high employment and rising mean incomes for the many, to widespread low employment rates and falling wages.
Such would be of more concern to Liberals, who stress the value of social justice where all individuals have a real opportunity to prosper based on their personal abilities and ambitions and on their having the freedom to pursue their own interests.
In a time of financial downturn, the Liberal most regrets the greater number's loss of freedom to pursue their own interests. In such a time, on the other hand, the Conservative most regrets the loss by those in economic power of their ability to continue increasing their fortunes.
Conservatives might even be ready to believe that such a concentrated accumulation of wealth benefits society generally, as in the saying "A rising tide lifts all boats," even if experience continues to show this is not true. Liberals, on the other hand, may be tempted to intervene in "the free market" to such an extreme that everyone's opportunity to pursue their own interests is hampered by stifled ambition.
5
Ironically, extremist alternatives, whether Liberal or Conservative, have proven to limit progress toward the very goal being pursued.
For instance, an extreme degree of control over the economy in order to free individuals from financial constraints can in fact lead to individuals' loss of freedom to perform in the economy as one would wish, limiting individual initiatives; thus, a Liberal temptation to pursue freedom can cause its very loss.
On the other hand, an extreme absence of control over the economy tends to lead to the growth of huge corporations with enough power to limit or even eliminate competition from other firms. This result of such "free market" activity can thus lead to the economic system's losing the capacity to respond to new opportunities "freely" and therefore to weaken.
In both instances, extremism leads to self-defeat.
6
When the Conservative says he values freedom, it may seem to Liberals that he is lying, because concentration of wealth in the hands of the few constrains the potential freedom of most individuals. But this Liberal reaction would indicate a misunderstanding of the Conservative's intent.
Two things are worth pointing out here about the sort of freedom the Conservative pursues most aggressively. (1) The "freedom" the Conservative seeks lies exclusively in the economic realm, not in the moral realm, where restraints of individual freedom are in fact the goal. (2) And within the economic realm for the Conservative, the "freedom" he values is, in particular, freedom from control over financial dealings and economic initiatives, which control he would call "government interference."
While the Liberal would seek to manage the economy in order to preserve the economic opportunities of the most people possible, the Conservative would seek to free those established in economic power from public restraint in order to generate as much new wealth as possible.
In this realm too, however, all but extremists - whether Liberal or Conservative - recognize the value of both opposing goals. The sensible Liberal understands the need for the economy to operate with enough freedom from interference to insure continuing prosperity. The Conservative - except for extremists - understands how economic opportunity must be distributed widely enough to maximize creativity and innovation which are necessary for the economy to grow as efficiently as possible.
Once again, the difference between these two groups lies more in where they find the right balance between opposing values than in single-minded pursuit of one goal or the other.
7
I have referred to the apparent anomaly of today's Libertarians' tending to align themselves with Conservatives, rather than with Liberals who - like them - value freedom above other social ideals. This often does seem contradictory.
Like the Liberal, the Libertarian wishes to preserve the individual's ability to choose his or her own actions. Like the Conservative, the Libertarian opposes the Liberal's initiatives to control or manage the actions of the few, in order to maintain a relative amount of economic opportunity among the many. Such management, according to the Libertarian, would constrain some individuals' ability to do as they please. This should not be done, even if some individuals choose to consolidate their individual economic power, which may constrain the economic opportunity of many, or to pursue economic behaviors that may put the whole economy at risk.
Within the economic realm, maximum freedom for the "superior" individual - i.e. the more powerful individual - is the Libertarian's goal. As in the other groups, of course, there are some extremists among Liberetarians who do not seem to value at all the freedom of most individuals - including the less powerful and the powerless - from the bondage of ignorance, poor health, and poverty.
Seeking to free some individuals from economic restraint, even at the risk of reducing the freedom of most people, is more important to Libertarians than other economic considerations.
8
Although it is complex, we can see that this political and economic position of the Libertarian does have a certrain logic. It does not seem to make sense, however, for Libertarians to align themselves with Conservatives on social and moral issues.
In the moral realm one would think they would share with Liberals the greater emphasis on maintaining the individual's ability to choose freely than on safeguarding traditional moral restraints, even when the free choice does not threaten harm to others (as in gay marriage, for instance). Since Libertarians claim to value individual liberty above all, it would seem consistent for them to align themselves with the Liberals.
9
Now more than ever, it seems, we must beware of political, economic, and even religious leaders who seek to confuse us about their priorities among values or who are themselves confused about what their values actually are or about the consequences of the actions they desire.
One might even say that it sometimes seems that we have Conservative leaders "pretending" to uphold liberal values or Liberals "pretending" to uphold conservative values.
The debate over budget deficits may provide some examples of this appearance of hypocrisy. Liberal leaders maintain that they are committed to reducing the now-habitual custom of the federal government's spending more than it takes in. Such an effort would be to pursue a conservative goal.
Liberals, however, would point out that reducing the annual and the accumulated deficit is of high importance right now because of our unusual current circumstances. And they would further point out that even today, for them reducing the debt is still not more important than establishing and maintaining as equal as possible a degree opportunity for all to be economically independent. They would go so far as to say that, in order to provide for the greatest degree of freedom from want and from restraint of the majority's pursuing their own economic interests, the deficit should be reduced by somewhat increasing the taxes paid by the richest few. Their pursuit of budget balance and reduction of a smaller debt is not inconsistent with their core economic values.
Conservative leaders, on the other hand, maintain that they are committed to reducing the level of unemployment in order to serve the economic interests of the many. Such an effort would be to pursue a liberal goal.
10
Observers of Conservatives, however, would point out that they are vehemently opposed to allowing to expire the recently-established tax reductions on the richest few, even though to renew them will make it much harder to achieve the goal of budget balance. They are of course also willing to sacrifice some supports of the majority in making progress toward balancing the budget. Protecting the interests of the most economically powerful at the sacrifice of the lesser economic power of the many is consistent with the Conservative value of freeing the wealthy from government restraint so that the fast accumulation of wealth may continue as much as possible.
Balancing the budget is important for Conservatives and Liberals alike - in itself a conservative goal - but Conservatives place even more importance on protecting the interests of the rich just as Liberals place even more importance on sharing economic independence as broadly as possible.
Both groups are behaving consistently with the core values that distinguish them from each other.
***
1
Last November I wrote about the historical meaning of the words "liberal" and "conservative." Today, despite some apparent confusion, these meanings still seem relevant.
I wrote then:
The word "liberal" ... comes from the Latin word meaning "free," just as the word "liberty" comes from the Latin for "freedom." ...[The word] "conservative" comes from the Latin, meaning "to keep intact" or "to guard."
"Liberalism" means a belief in the paramount value of freedom.
...A "Conservative" person ... wants to keep social order, to maintain or restore traditions, and to protect established customs and practices.
And, in November, I added this comment:
...We struggle to find the right balance between the value of the individual's freedom and the value of the social order. ...Liberals tend to value individual freedom more than Conservatives, and Conservatives tend to place a higher value than Liberals do on maintaining traditional standards and social order.
However, both Liberals and Conservatives ... agree that in certain instances, the good of society should be emphasized over the freedom of the individual. ... Both Conservatives and Liberals also agree that individuals have civil rights, protected by the supreme law of the land, the U. S. Constitution. Where is the proper balance between the needs of the social order and the rights of the individual? A Conservative would generally place the balance point closer to the side of tradition and social order, while the Liberal would tend to place the balance point closer to the side of the individual and free choice.
How are the root meanings of these terms, which after all refer to the basic political division dividing our culture at the present time, still relevant?
2
The contrast between Conservatives and Liberals today tends to highlight Conservatives' inclination to focus on our need to pursue economic prosperity, while Liberals are inclined to emphasize our desire for social justice. Here again, of course, this contrast is not absolute. Conservatives may well value social justice to a degree, and Liberals certainly value economic prosperity as well.
Both groups value both goals to varying degrees; but while Liberals would sacrifice a degree of personal prosperity in order to achieve a higher degree of social justice, Conservatives would sacrifice a certain degree of social justice - as in the distribution of wealth, for example - in order to achieve a higher degree of what they perceive as economic prosperity or the pathway to it.
To apply the original meanings of "Conservative" coming from "guardian" and "Liberal" coming from "liberty," it is convenient to focus first on their contrasting approaches to social or moral questions, reserving discussing of financial and political issues for later.
3
Conservatives tend to see themselves as the guardians of traditional practices and values. Established religion, for instance, is seen as the source of the highest wisdom regarding personal choice and behavior. Those whom we call "Fundamentalist Christians," who regard the Bible as the literal truth and as the only reliable guidance to morality, can also be called "Conservatives." It is the duty of Conservatives not only to determine their own actions by means of tried and true religious teachings but also to work toward moral order in society by requiring all people - even those of different faiths, or no religious belief at all - to behave as their established or conservative religious teachings require.
For instance, it is not only necessary for such Conservatives to control their own personal behavior by refusing to abort even an unexpected or unhealthy fetus; it also seems their responsibility to prevent others from doing so. If the law of the land does not conform with their religious customs in this and other ways, then Conservatives - in order to preserve tradition and establish the social and moral order which they seek - see it as their responsibility to change the law.
Same-sex relations are likewise not only to be avoided, but to be positively prohibited for everyone.
Liberals, on the other hand, stress the need for all individuals to be free to make their own decisions, even on such deeply significant matters as birth and sex. Social or moral order, for Liberals, is less significant than individuals' liberty to choose for themselves.
Note: it is an anomaly of our time that "Libertarians," who value individual choice (i. e. freedom) to an extreme, should tend to align themselves with Conservatives.
Of course, even Liberals recognize the need for society to protect itself from foreign aggression, from theft, from assault and other threats to security, restraining the freedom of would-be criminals and aggressors. Conservatives in turn recognize that all individuals have the capacity to violate traditional religious taboos and must be held individually responsible for their immoral actions.
The balance between the pursuit of individual liberty and the need for social and moral order is in a different place for Conservatives and for Liberals.
4
The contrast between Conservative and Liberal values on political and economic concerns is less evident and more complex than the contrast between them on social and moral issues. But this contrast too reveals that the difference between the two groups lies in where each finds the proper balance between contrasting goals both of whose value is acknowledged by everyone in each group.
Conservatives highlight what they call "the free market" because such an economic system allows - or even promotes - the generation of wealth and prosperity. The fact that the wealth generated may become concentrated among a relative few is not particularly troubling. Also of little concern is the fact that one result of "the free market" tends to be cycles of "boom" and "bust," huge swings from high employment and rising mean incomes for the many, to widespread low employment rates and falling wages.
Such would be of more concern to Liberals, who stress the value of social justice where all individuals have a real opportunity to prosper based on their personal abilities and ambitions and on their having the freedom to pursue their own interests.
In a time of financial downturn, the Liberal most regrets the greater number's loss of freedom to pursue their own interests. In such a time, on the other hand, the Conservative most regrets the loss by those in economic power of their ability to continue increasing their fortunes.
Conservatives might even be ready to believe that such a concentrated accumulation of wealth benefits society generally, as in the saying "A rising tide lifts all boats," even if experience continues to show this is not true. Liberals, on the other hand, may be tempted to intervene in "the free market" to such an extreme that everyone's opportunity to pursue their own interests is hampered by stifled ambition.
5
Ironically, extremist alternatives, whether Liberal or Conservative, have proven to limit progress toward the very goal being pursued.
For instance, an extreme degree of control over the economy in order to free individuals from financial constraints can in fact lead to individuals' loss of freedom to perform in the economy as one would wish, limiting individual initiatives; thus, a Liberal temptation to pursue freedom can cause its very loss.
On the other hand, an extreme absence of control over the economy tends to lead to the growth of huge corporations with enough power to limit or even eliminate competition from other firms. This result of such "free market" activity can thus lead to the economic system's losing the capacity to respond to new opportunities "freely" and therefore to weaken.
In both instances, extremism leads to self-defeat.
6
When the Conservative says he values freedom, it may seem to Liberals that he is lying, because concentration of wealth in the hands of the few constrains the potential freedom of most individuals. But this Liberal reaction would indicate a misunderstanding of the Conservative's intent.
Two things are worth pointing out here about the sort of freedom the Conservative pursues most aggressively. (1) The "freedom" the Conservative seeks lies exclusively in the economic realm, not in the moral realm, where restraints of individual freedom are in fact the goal. (2) And within the economic realm for the Conservative, the "freedom" he values is, in particular, freedom from control over financial dealings and economic initiatives, which control he would call "government interference."
While the Liberal would seek to manage the economy in order to preserve the economic opportunities of the most people possible, the Conservative would seek to free those established in economic power from public restraint in order to generate as much new wealth as possible.
In this realm too, however, all but extremists - whether Liberal or Conservative - recognize the value of both opposing goals. The sensible Liberal understands the need for the economy to operate with enough freedom from interference to insure continuing prosperity. The Conservative - except for extremists - understands how economic opportunity must be distributed widely enough to maximize creativity and innovation which are necessary for the economy to grow as efficiently as possible.
Once again, the difference between these two groups lies more in where they find the right balance between opposing values than in single-minded pursuit of one goal or the other.
7
I have referred to the apparent anomaly of today's Libertarians' tending to align themselves with Conservatives, rather than with Liberals who - like them - value freedom above other social ideals. This often does seem contradictory.
Like the Liberal, the Libertarian wishes to preserve the individual's ability to choose his or her own actions. Like the Conservative, the Libertarian opposes the Liberal's initiatives to control or manage the actions of the few, in order to maintain a relative amount of economic opportunity among the many. Such management, according to the Libertarian, would constrain some individuals' ability to do as they please. This should not be done, even if some individuals choose to consolidate their individual economic power, which may constrain the economic opportunity of many, or to pursue economic behaviors that may put the whole economy at risk.
Within the economic realm, maximum freedom for the "superior" individual - i.e. the more powerful individual - is the Libertarian's goal. As in the other groups, of course, there are some extremists among Liberetarians who do not seem to value at all the freedom of most individuals - including the less powerful and the powerless - from the bondage of ignorance, poor health, and poverty.
Seeking to free some individuals from economic restraint, even at the risk of reducing the freedom of most people, is more important to Libertarians than other economic considerations.
8
Although it is complex, we can see that this political and economic position of the Libertarian does have a certrain logic. It does not seem to make sense, however, for Libertarians to align themselves with Conservatives on social and moral issues.
In the moral realm one would think they would share with Liberals the greater emphasis on maintaining the individual's ability to choose freely than on safeguarding traditional moral restraints, even when the free choice does not threaten harm to others (as in gay marriage, for instance). Since Libertarians claim to value individual liberty above all, it would seem consistent for them to align themselves with the Liberals.
9
Now more than ever, it seems, we must beware of political, economic, and even religious leaders who seek to confuse us about their priorities among values or who are themselves confused about what their values actually are or about the consequences of the actions they desire.
One might even say that it sometimes seems that we have Conservative leaders "pretending" to uphold liberal values or Liberals "pretending" to uphold conservative values.
The debate over budget deficits may provide some examples of this appearance of hypocrisy. Liberal leaders maintain that they are committed to reducing the now-habitual custom of the federal government's spending more than it takes in. Such an effort would be to pursue a conservative goal.
Liberals, however, would point out that reducing the annual and the accumulated deficit is of high importance right now because of our unusual current circumstances. And they would further point out that even today, for them reducing the debt is still not more important than establishing and maintaining as equal as possible a degree opportunity for all to be economically independent. They would go so far as to say that, in order to provide for the greatest degree of freedom from want and from restraint of the majority's pursuing their own economic interests, the deficit should be reduced by somewhat increasing the taxes paid by the richest few. Their pursuit of budget balance and reduction of a smaller debt is not inconsistent with their core economic values.
Conservative leaders, on the other hand, maintain that they are committed to reducing the level of unemployment in order to serve the economic interests of the many. Such an effort would be to pursue a liberal goal.
10
Observers of Conservatives, however, would point out that they are vehemently opposed to allowing to expire the recently-established tax reductions on the richest few, even though to renew them will make it much harder to achieve the goal of budget balance. They are of course also willing to sacrifice some supports of the majority in making progress toward balancing the budget. Protecting the interests of the most economically powerful at the sacrifice of the lesser economic power of the many is consistent with the Conservative value of freeing the wealthy from government restraint so that the fast accumulation of wealth may continue as much as possible.
Balancing the budget is important for Conservatives and Liberals alike - in itself a conservative goal - but Conservatives place even more importance on protecting the interests of the rich just as Liberals place even more importance on sharing economic independence as broadly as possible.
Both groups are behaving consistently with the core values that distinguish them from each other.
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