Punishing the Poor

When I was in elementary school, we were living on my mother’s income of 50 cents/hour earned by working in a sweat shop seamstress job after my father’s death when I was two years old. In an otherwise limited and dreary existence, the brightest spot each week was going, in the company of most of my friends, to the double feature cowboy movies, with a cartoon and serial in between, on Saturday afternoons. At a 60th high school reunion I just attended there were numerous references to those Saturday afternoon movies with their preceding yo-yo contests. After the movies – which cost 10 cents - I would spend 15 cents on a chocolate ice cream soda. It made my week!  The 25 cents for my weekly orgy was scavenged by my mother from the $20 total her work brought her. She thought it worthwhile and always found a way. We were never on Welfare, but never far away from it either.

Vincent Van Gogh would have understood. In his youth, Van Gogh was a devout Dutch Reformed Church missionary among abjectly poor coal miners. He felt so passionately about their plight that he sometimes would take clothes off his own back to give to a miner in need. On hearing of this, his Church, which held the stern Calvinist view that the poor were poor because they deserved to be, kicked Van Gogh out, and he became a painter. The great art we admire today was a product of that stern insistence on the unworthiness of the poor. I wish I could say something else good was a product of that attitude, but I can’t.

The Dutch Reformed Church was replaced recently by the State of Kansas, when the Kansas Legislature passed a bill barring people on Welfare from using their money to go to the movies or buy ice cream. Kansas also restricted welfare recipients from withdrawing more than $25/day from their welfare account, even though opponents noted some subsidized rentals were as much as $600/month, which by itself would require $20/day be withdrawn. Going to a swimming pool while on welfare was also prohibited. The expressed goal of legislators was to get poor people to spend more responsibly.

Kansas is not alone. Somewhat similar restrictions are being pushed for by conservatives in Missouri and Yew York. Emily Badger wrote recently in the Washington Post about the double standard that creates, discriminating against the poor. Four times as much is spent by the government on the home mortgage interest deduction as is spent on subsidized housing, but subsidized housing is visible while the deduction appears mostly as a refund regarded as payback of taxes already paid. Welfare payments are visible, but the many subsidies to the wealthy often take the form of items simply not listed as income on the tax return. The result is placing inordinate burdens on the poor. Back when I was looking at the subject some years ago, a $25,000 farm subsidy required a one-paragraph application, while a food stamp application required three pages. Badger calls this the effect of visible versus submerged government spending. We see only the visible, not the invisible.

I have a harsher view. I call it punishing the poor. It is a byproduct of the Protestant Ethic we need to get past, and a direct product of the American Empathy Gap that I’ve mentioned before. In Calvin’s view, being wealthy was a sign that God had blessed you because you were destined for Heaven. By contrast, the poor obviously had moral failings condemning them to Hell and deserved punishment along the way. Our frontier heritage produced the empathy gap with the myth that rugged individuals survive without help from others, and to need help is a sign of weakness not deserving support. We think they are poor because, at the least, they lack good judgment and are incapable of making decisions on their own about when to buy ice cream, and don’t deserve ice cream anyway. The effect of an ice cream cone on the life of a child is not worth considering. The facts belie that. The great majority of the poor become poor because of adverse circumstance, not moral failure, and to think otherwise is simply to demonstrate moral blindness. Somewhere around 50 percent of women who are widowed, like my mother, or divorced have incomes below the poverty level in the years immediately following. We are entering a period as a nation where large numbers of baby boomers will enter retirement without adequate incomes after a lifetime of stagnant wages, the retirement often forced in the form of permanent unemployment. Our needs for community support of the poor will increase drastically and innovative ways of doing it are needed, not harsher punishments. We are a better people than that.

Seeing Beyond

This being poetry month, it’s hard, try as I might, not to think about Shelley. He is not my favorite poet. In fact, in high school the only grade I got less than an A came from an English Teacher who adored him, and who reacted quite negatively when I poked fun at the line in Ode to a Nightingale, “Bird thou never wert.” I called it the worst line of poetry in the English language, and her forbearance snapped. But Shelley was far better at explaining poetry than, in my regard, he was at writing it. His essay, “A Defence of Poetry”, which I highly admire, is the work which best gets at the essence of what poetry is all about.

In his essay, Shelley contrasts poetry with philosophy and poets with philosophers. Specifically, as a kind of tongue-in-cheek Irony, he finds Homer a better philosopher than Plato. It is Shelley's reasoning that gets to the heart of things. He sees that both philosophers and poets seek to find and express the transcendent. But while philosophers seek the transcendent “beyond”, for Plato in a world of Ideals, poets find it in the ordinary. Whitman was speaking to that in titling his work, "Leaves of Grass." You can see explicit expressions of it on my Poetry by Others page in Mark Doty’s poem, “A Green Crab’s Shell” or in Eamon Grennan’s poem, “Wing Road.”

Shelley’s insight goes beyond poetry. A trivial example was on view last night at the NCAA Basketball Championship when a tame eagle was released during the National Anthem, flopped around a bit and settled on his trainer’s shoulder. It was a kind of performance doggerel, illustrating our need, successful or not, to see something “beyond”.  Silly or not, it temporarily elevated vision beyond the event itself. We need that sense of beyond to counter the grinding down we encounter each day from the world around us, and both poetry and religion, in different ways, provide it.  Else we fall prey to seeing all those around us as simply complex heaps of dirt. Seeing only the dirt, we miss what Joseph Campbell called, “the light within the light bulb.” And that kind of devaluation of others is the underlying cause of many of the problems of the world.

That is reason enough to celebrate poetry – that it contributes to making the world a better place. Can you think of any great villain who was also a great poet? One famous critic’s definition of a good poem was that it is “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Argentina has found that music, so closely related to poetry, has, as a standard course in school, made the school a calmer place and reduced teenage violence. Who knows what a poetry course might do? But of course, one doesn't write either poetry or music just to achieve a social purpose. A good poem is an end in itself. Write one, and see.

The Premature Demise of War

There’s an old story about a preacher, sermonizing about the evils of hate, who asks rhetorically, “Is there anyone who doesn’t hate someone?” An ancient man sitting at the rear of the congregation rises feebly and says, “Pastor, I don’t hate anyone in the whole wide world.”  The astounded preacher asks him, “What is your secret, sir?” At which the man exclaims joyfully, “I outlived them all!” Reviewing the daily news from the Middle East and Eastern Europe and Asia, it’s hard not to think of that old man. We seem everywhere some days to proceed toward Mutually Assured Destruction scenarios, enjoying every step of the route. The saddest part of the picture is the crowd, including many members of our Congress, cheering along the way.

I wrote a couple of years ago, in “War and Peace and Money”, about how our proclivities for killing each other were very gradually being reduced by the increasing costs of warfare. Armies once totaling in the thousands were now measured in the millions, rifles replaced by million-dollar rockets. All this was to the profit of the military-industrial complex, but strangely enough, also to the profit of peace. Periods of no war had increased by almost 50 percent, the number of wars per century had declined, and the numbers killed were also dropping, all because of the expense of war. Fewer and fewer nations were able to afford it – it had become a luxury item. Even international standards to prevent war were gradually improving. But perhaps the news of war’s demise, like that of Mark Twain’s, was premature.

Alas, some in the complex seem to have seen the handwriting on the wall and have begun correcting the problem.  Their most notable achievement to date has been the development of drones. Devastation can be spread so much more cheaply! It’s an everyman kind of tool, as also, in its own way, is biological warfare. War has been downsized to become more affordable again. Researchers are also talking of such advanced notions as body-enhancement armor, warriors genetically modified to improve their killer abilities, robotic soldiers, etc. Eventually they may succeed in producing the situation where one former-human is left to crow triumphantly, “I’ve done it! They’re all destroyed”, - followed by a very long silence.

A saving grace is the emergence of cyber war. It’s so much cheaper it will likely be the favorite for the international corporations which some predict will soon overwhelm the already declining nation state. And there’s less likelihood with it of large-scale loss of customer base. Even lone terrorists may come to enjoy it. And perhaps the greatest, though distant, grace is the evolution of altruism. Biologists like E. O. Wilson are pointing out that forms of altruism are actually a product of advancing evolution. “Reciprocal cooperation” is also a trait anthropologists note that arises in harsh “prisoner’s dilemma” situations.  The lack of any concerted intelligent response to climate change is pointing toward more and more such harsh conditions as the next few hundred years wear on. Compassion has also been found to be a genetic trait shared at least in limited ways among all species that rear their young. As human “childhood” becomes more and more extended because of the learning and skills required in advanced societies, is it possible that greater compassion will evolve?

So, an emerging prospect, though not yet certain, is of a very grim 21^st century, followed by the as yet faint glimmer of a happier distant future for humanity. But we are creatures of the 21^st century, as likely are our children and grandchildren. In such a long-term future, we are all dead. The situation reminds one of the science fiction story by C.S. Lewis in which an astronaut finds himself stranded on, I think, Venus in what is a veritable Garden of Eden. And the garden includes an Adam and Eve being tempted by a Satan. The despairing astronaut cries out, “God, do something. Don’t let that happen again!” To which God replies, “I did. I put you there.” Perhaps, at this Easter season, with Spring blossoming all around us, and the prospects, with work, of a still possible better future facing us all, that’s a good thing to remember.

The Global Rorschach Test

The Global Inkblot Test

As the old joke goes, a psychiatrist was administering the Rorschach Inkblot Test to a patient.  You remember that’s the test where the patient is asked to look at swirls of ink on a set of cards and tell the doctor what he sees in each swirl. This particular patient keeps seeing an obscene picture on each card, until the doctor bursts out, “Don’t you see anything but obscenities on those cards?” The patient responds, “I can’t help it, doctor. You’re the one who gave me the pornographic cards.” The joke of course is that the Rorschach cards are totally without any meaning except that which the patient puts into them in interpreting them.

I can’t help but think of that as I read and hear about all the troubles going on around the world. I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about Ukraine lately, from news articles, magazines, talking heads on TV and from a talk I attended recently by one of our former ambassadors there. The West is, depending on one’s point of view, either steadily eroding Russia’s sphere of influence, which it regards as a necessary buffer against a Europe that has launched two invasions its way, or it is struggling to contain an expansionist NovoRussia seeking to regain status as a superpower. Looked at one way, Putin is being an old-fashioned slavophilic Tsar, just seeking to consolidate his borders and maintain access to the sea against what he sees as a northward march by NATO and a “Westernization” of Russia.  Another view is of an adventuresome former KGB agent seeking to re-instigate the Cold War. Another interpretation is of a valiant new democracy in Ukraine going through its Valley Forge winter, striving to survive the continual pressure of “King George” Putin. Another is of a bunch of rascals on both sides milking the situation for their own individual benefit. One claim is that the recent cease fire is a cynically begotten failure from the start, another that it is reasonable progress toward a resolution. Yet another view is that it’s all just a necessary shaking down of northern Europe after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which will probably take a quarter-century before each party is reconciled to their situation. Meanwhile, of course, it’s the common citizen who will suffer through all of whatever it is.

A similar ambiguity pervades the Middle East. Each nation there, and its leaders, is a villain, a hero, or a hopeless dupe, depending on your point of view. The mutual executions and bombings going on, the continual exchange of threats and insults between parties too numerous to count , etc., lend an air of unending chaos to the whole area. And a similar debate goes on about the financial situation in the EU. Each of the world’s areas these days is a card depicting either obscenities or angels, depending on your point of view.

One of the insights of social psychology is that we each construct our own “history” of events and facts in our lives which leads us to label ourselves as victims, survivors, successes, failures, etc., and that self-labeling directs our future actions to perpetuate itself. Victims remain victims, survivors somehow manage to survive. The psychologist Eric Bern used to say that some people without money are “poor” while others are “temporarily without funds”; poorness and richness are states of mind, not factual conditions. So, often, is hostility.  An analogous, though obviously not exact, interpretation can be applied to our views of the various messes around the world.  John McCain seems to sense every situation as an opportunity for a good fight, John Kerry as an opportunity for a negotiation.  Over time negotiations may lead to more problem resolutions than do fights, though on occasion fights are necessary.  Viewing yourself, as Netanyahu seems to, as a permanent target of a permanently hostile Iran does not lead to resolution other than by total destruction of at least one of the opponents. Both Israel and Persia have been around a very long time, living along side each other sometimes amicably – after all, it was Persia which returned the Hebrews to Israel after their exile by Babylon, and it was Islam which provided refuge for Jews persecuted in Europe during the Middle Ages; it’s quite unlikely that either party will disappear. Current hostilities will pass; it’s a matter of how best to make that happen. The new Finance Minister of Greece has been described as a highly skilled professional making inroads into a disastrous European financial mess, or as an idiot on a fools errand, depending on which school of economics claims your allegiance.  The same can be said for Angela Merkel.

In short, we the people, whose views will shape the preferences of the decision makers, are being administered a kind of global Rorschach Test. What we see says as much or more about who we are as it does about what is actually going on. The lives of millions, and of our grandchildren, will be shaped by the images we see in highly ambiguous situations and events. Look closely, and don't be distracted by the shouting. This is a test we don’t want to flunk.

The Complexities of Ingratitude

At the end of the Napoleonic wars, a foreign diplomat remarked to the Austrian foreign minister that Austria should be grateful for the efforts of other nations to free Austria from Napoleon. The response was, “The world will be astounded at the magnitude of Austria’s ingratitude.” We hear echoes of that in the current jaw-clinched impasse between Germany and Greece over German insistence that Greece maintain a severe austerity regimen despite 27% unemployment or have its loans revoked by German controlled banks. For Germans seem to have forgotten completely the days following WWII and the Marshall Plan.

It’s easy to do: you have to be over 65 to have been there when it was all happening.  Angela Merkel would have been just a baby. But back then was when Germany was reeling with the agonies of recovery from WWII, and those who had just defeated her not only forgave half her foreign debt, they specified repayment of the remainder only as a portion of proceeds from Germany’s exports, then proceeded through the Marshall Plan to rebuild German infrastructure and stimulate the German economy with cheap imports to gain the health it enjoys today. And Greece, just devastated itself by Germany, was one of the 20 nations who joined in doing so. Talk about magnitudes of ingratitude.

Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post wrote today of those wild and wooly times, an instructive reminder of how Germany itself, and all of post-war Europe, was saved by the opposite of austerity. He doesn’t mention, though, an equally instructive part of that tale that the Germans back then would not have been necessarily aware of. For in the U.S. itself, leading the charge to restore the German people and the German economy generated a boom which, added to the post-war baby boom, helped stimulate the American economy for a decade. To some extent the golden 50’s were a product of helping Germany. As was the European Common Market, predecessor of the EU.

Germany today is struggling with its own stagnant economy – a partial product of self-imposed austerity.  And it is struggling to save the EU, severely fractured by the bitter divide on austerity. What better way to stimulate its own economy than by funding a recovering Greece to enable purchasing imports. It doesn’t even need to be half as forgiving as Greece was to Germany. And healing the divide is at least as important.

Of course, the issues and solution apply far beyond Europe. The World Bank worries about a stagnant world economy. Some economists worry about a century of declining economies. I’ve mentioned before that third world economies are being starved of the ability to continue expanding by the reluctance of the Deutsche Banks of the world to fund them. It’s the EU austerity problem writ very large. And solutions are similar.  Not long ago the World Bank president spoke of the desirability of a Marshall Plan for the world. Think about it.

The Price of Stereotyping

A friend once, at Christmastime, commented that in Boston, Christmas lights on Protestant houses tended to be multi-colored while Catholic houses tended to have white lights. I noted that in Maryland it tended to be the opposite way, with white on Protestant houses and multi-colored on Catholic. We both of course were stereotyping. It’s so easy.  It was even easier to do so by religion rather than by location-based cultural differences, though those too would be stereotypes. It was harmless for us, since no malice was meant or perceived by either of us. But the Charlie Hebdo situation reinforces how costly such stereotyping can become.

I have emphasized my views about the strains of modernization tearing at the Middle East. A proud culture had its golden age torn apart in the 13^th century by the Crusades, the Mongol and Turkic invasions, and immediately thereafter by the Black Death, which killed a higher percentage of the population there than it did in Europe.  It was natural to blame faithlessness and foreign influences for everything – after all did not the Torah blame the Babylonian Exile on faithlessness also? -  and the Arabic culture withdrew into a shell lasting for centuries and eventually resulting in Sunni Wahhabism. Now western modernization has reached the Arabic Middle-East, and the backlash against that modernization has produced the terrorism by small Islamic minorities akin to the KKK movement in the southern U.S. after the American Civil War. For make no mistake, there is an Arab Civil War raging now, akin to Europe’s Thirty Years War, which eventually will give way to a modern Middle East. Nowhere are the dangers of religious stereotyping better illustrated than by modern Indonesia, the largest Islamic nation, whose modern Islamic culture is further removed from that of Wahhabic Saudi-Arabia than Liberal Episcopalians are from Primitive Baptists in America. Yet we, and many Muslims, persist in harboring grudges against Islam or Christianity as though each were a gigantic monolith.

Stereotyping makes us cast the Charlie Hebdo tragedy as Mohammed versus Freedom of Expression. Yet Fareed Zakaria points out that most Islamic scholars agree that there is no reference to or repudiation of blasphemy in the Koran, and that picturing Mohammed as an offensive act is a tenet of Wahhabism only, not Islam in general. And when we teach our two-year-old to use an “inside voice” or our older children not to use profanity at the dinner table or grade movies as X or PG, are we not limiting Freedom of Expression? The price of stereotyping is that it limits our awareness of the nuances of behavior and our sensitivity to the need to respect differences.

A January 14 article in the Washington Post by Yasmine Bahrani, a Journalism Professor at the American University in Dubai, and today’s comments by Pope Francis both speak to that need to respect differences. Bahrani writes of how stereotyping causes her students, who largely are “modern Muslims” who feel shame at backward practices like segregating women, to take seriously such claims as that the CIA organized fake vaccination drives in Pakistan and that the prosecution of Tsarnaev in Boston is a set-up. To them, America lacks credibility – and they are the Arabs who should be leaning toward, not away from, us.

Pope Francis speaks to the essence of the Freedom of Expression issue when he, like Giuseppe Mazzini long before him, reminds us to look not to our rights, but to our obligations to others. The killings at Charlie Hebdo were inexcusable and tragic, but the killings by a small minority of Muslims do not justify giving deliberate offense to what we believe, erroneously, are the views of all Muslims in the name of Freedom of Expression. Just as we might avoid challenging an elderly relative’s views on FDR or Reagan at the Thanksgiving dinner table both to be civil and because we love them, we need to remember our obligation to respect cultural differences. Yes, you have a right to Freedom of Expression, and yes, you have an obligation to avoid speech which you know is deliberately and unnecessarily offensive. J.S. Mill, the “Father of Modern Liberalism”, wrote that the only political speech that is truly offensive is a personally derogatory remark about an opponent. When stereotyping both on your part and on an Arab’s part causes both of you to regard picturing Mohammed to be offensive, then you have the right to do so anyway, but you have the obligation to respect cultural sensitivities. The relationships between all parts of an increasingly complex global society need to be strengthened, not attacked. We share the world together.

George Will and Santa

Well George, it’s that time of year again. Sleigh bells ring. Are you listening?  When I think of you at this time of year, I can’t help but recall my favorite seat cushion, “Dear Santa, I can explain.” You have a lot of explaining to do this year, and Santa won’t be happy. Perhaps that’s ok with you – after all, there are a lot of desperate people in mid-winter looking for heat, and selling coal by the lump could be quite profitable. And besides, your model for behavior, Ebenezer, never used to think much of Christmas either. Nevertheless, we worry about you.

Some of what you did this year could have been sheer absent mindedness. For example, when you were busy chastising dentists for enforcing dentistry practices the way doctors do, you called it an abridgment of freedom as the evil economic practice of “rent seeking.” The fact that you support rent seeking all the time when corporations do it must surely just have slipped your mind. And the increasing gun volleys outside your windows from the freedom to keep and bear arms you so strongly support must be so far away – you live in the quiet part of town, after all – that you just haven’t noticed yet. I’m sure Santa will understand. He can’t be too happy though that Christmas has become the biggest gun buying time of year: it frightens the children, and some of them miss their parents terribly. Besides, coming down that chimney has become a real hazard.

Santa must have notes on his list though about some of the other things you did this year. Your continuing full-throated opposition to raising the minimum wage is a lot closer to the old Ebenezer than it is to Christmas Present. How do the children get presents? They can’t all come down the chimney. And your opposition to the Justice Department’s insistence on a rule in Wisconsin that would require all schools to provide adequate facilities for disabled children must have upset Tiny Tim.

Your criticism of young women on college campuses who had been raped, for enjoying playing the victim, will really require fast talking when Santa arrives. Everyone noticed that one. However, you are good at fast talking.  Even Santa may admire the way you managed to support your opposition to Obama’s action to prevent children from being separated from their parents in the name of enforcing immigration law. You claimed Obama’s action upset “a planetary balance akin to that of the solar system” between legislative and executive powers. You really know how to transcend reality! But Santa may not be fooled. That balance wasn’t making his job any easier.

So, all in all, it hasn’t been a good year George.  I know you hate to be tethered to mere reality, but try looking around you at what’s actually going on in the world and it may give you some ideas of how to do better next year. Perhaps Santa can arrange a visit from Christmas Future. Have a glass of syllabub and think about it. Merry Christmas!

Beginning Immigration Reform

Like many Americans, but possibly for opposite reasons, I have mixed feelings about the recent immigration announcement from President Obama. I applaud the action as a simple statement of our common humanity. It is a stain upon our national honor that we separate children from their parents in the name of enforcing dubious law. I applaud it also as a forcing action to generate real reform activity in a Congress otherwise so caught in its own death spiral that it is no longer concerned with real legislation for real people. As a regulatory action Obama’s action was no more out of line than numerous Presidential actions throughout American history that are now regarded as marks of Presidential greatness. As a political action, it was a way of forcing Republican opponents to take a stand on a topic they have continually avoided.

But I take seriously Jefferson’s warning that creating an underclass of residents allowed to work here but without the benefits of full citizenship could only result in societal instability. The lessons of Europe today reinforce that warning. From France to Greece to Scandinavia, a semi-permanent migrant worker class is creating permanent social turmoil.  Obama’s action by itself leads in that direction: it can be healthy only to the extent it forces movement toward full citizenship available without severely limiting quotas and a twenty year wait. What will count is the reform action that follows, not the temporary Presidential regulations.

One of America’s great glories and equally great problems is its sense of uniqueness. America sees itself as unlike others in that it is a melting pot, a “nation of immigrants” as emphasized by Obama. At its best, America dares things no other nation will simply because it feels uniquely fitted to do so. At its worst America ignores the hard-earned experiences and valuable insights of other societies simply because they are not “made in America.” We are already into a global period of extensive labor migration, forced by the globalization of capital and commerce. When capital flows elsewhere, labor follows. The impacts are being felt around the world, from massive country-to-city movement in China, North-African emigration to Scandinavia and immigration out of Latin America into the U.S. Added to those are the migrations because of war that we term refugee movements. Not handled properly, as is usually the case, they create a vicious cycle of further war and migration that continues for decades.

Some of the migration experiences are positive: I marvel all the time at how quietly and successfully The Philippines has become a nation which funds much of its economy on the work its citizens do elsewhere: Philippine workers are so common in America that no one even notices them anymore; each one I’ve talked with is reasonably happy with what they’re doing but expresses the intent to return back to their family when finished here.  At my age I have numerous doctors; the majority of them are ethnic Asian or Middle-Eastern.  Neither group could be mistaken for a “standard” Northern-European heritage American, but has successfully blended into life here.  Viewed that way, the turmoil over Mexican immigration is an aberration.

Other migration experiences, like the turmoil in France over acceptance of Islamic workers or the Greek resistance to Albanian and Bulgarian workers, serve as hard lessons on how not to proceed. All these experiences, good and bad, are worth looking at when immigration reform legislation is being developed. Nothing like that is likely to happen.

In a larger context, global climate change will force massive migration throughout this century. Some nations may vanish while others become places of refuge.  There is unlikely ever to be a global plan for how to handle this. Humans just don’t operate that way. But we could do far better than we are setting out to do today.  Global migration needs to be a topic for the UN and for the G-20. Parameters should be set by international law about how to handle migration. It is a topic no one nation can handle by itself.  

Which brings me back to Obama’s immigration announcement. It is a step forward, but true reform will need to go well beyond simple arguments about building walls along the Rio Grande. Real immigration reform will need to get rid of the current quota system, redefine requirements and waiting periods for citizenship and speak to both the need of the country for a younger worker population, the global commerce issues that generate labor movement and the human needs that drive the waves of migration. It will need to look beyond our borders to what is happening elsewhere. We cannot wall out the world.

Chilhood's End

Arthur C. Clarke’s epic sci-fi novel Childhood’s End centers around the disappearance of all children from the Earth, leaving behind only bewildered adults. It turns out in the novel that the children have been transported into membership in a galactic civilization, a kind of Biblical “Rapture”, which the adults are deemed unfit to possess.  The supreme irony of course is that it is the children who have become galactic adults, while the human adults are left behind to squabble “like children” over the broken toys of politics, ethnic differences, finance, nuclear armaments, etc., all vainly  seeking to satisfy their own desires at the expense of others.  The children have gone beyond.

My sister-in-law, who struggled through life fighting the necessary battles of the “feminist revolution”, hates Freud.  She gets particularly irate at his many put-downs of women (a vice of his time and place), and derides his now substantially superseded views of the psyche. Many of Freud’s concepts do seem antiquated after 100 years, but it is a mistake to toss them all. Some are timeless, and his social psychology, particularly that in Civilization and its Discontents, is both memorable and dangerous to forget.  Freud particularly speaks to our current times by pointing out that civilization itself is based on deferred gratification, a term he coined.  I was reminded of that last night while reading an article by Paul Roberts in The American Scholar, entitled “Instant Gratification”, for it deals extensively with what Roberts sees as a vicious societal feedback loop in which we as a society are being trained by our own inventions to surrender to our individual impulses at the expense of the society itself. We, according to Roberts, are victims of our own successes in devising things that control us and that we cannot control.

Roberts’ article is actually a condensation of his recent book by the same title, and deals with the effects on American society of the accelerating pressures to act impulsively. Roberts places some of the blame on the pressures of the computer and the internet, but traces the beginnings back to warnings in the 1970s by sociologists such as Daniel Bell. Those first warnings were based on the emerging effects of mass marketing, which later were compounded by the efficiencies of the computer. He notes that the typical grocery store which in 1950 marketed about 3000 products became the 1990’s supermarket with a product list of 30,000 items (and is morphing into the online Amazon whose offerings become uncountable.)  When so many offerings compete, nothing stands in the way, especially scruples. Roberts emphasizes my old theme of runaway Capitalism operating without a brake and destroying everything it hits along the way (I must admit it gives me warm and fuzzy feelings for him.)

Roberts cites a Madison Avenue marketer as claiming that marketers have discovered the shortest route to your wallet is through your lower “reptilian” brain which evolved in an age of survival by blood, claw and dominance at whatever cost to others, and mass marketing is designed to stimulate this urge for dominance by aggressive action. The future is always discounted in favor of immediate personal reward through impulsive action.  Egged on by marketing, an addiction to impulse develops. When this mentality inevitably creeps into other spheres, then societal institutions cease to restrain unsocial behavior, and finance becomes preying on the weak. Roberts notes that management compensation has become inextricably tied to share value, and that – consequently? - between 1992 and 2006, the number of SEC filings implying a prior possibly fraudulent misstatement of corporate earnings increased from 6 annually to 1200. Peaceful solutions to global conflicts are discounted, climate change becomes part of an inconsequential future, politics becomes libertarian denial of mutual responsibilities or extreme statements aimed only at short-term wins, and community is replaced by isolated individualism.  In short, Freud’s deferred gratification as social glue no longer binds, and societal disintegration proceeds.

If that were the total picture, Roberts’ warnings could be discounted like those of Malthus and Marx as showing the right concern but the wrong long-term vision.  For new technologies like mass marketing and the internet force value shifts and always cause temporary societal upheavals berated by critics and lauded by advocates that later become merely another strand of living. Reading was a revolutionary skill after Gutenberg, and fueled the Protestant Reformation, the modernization of Europe and the writings of Casanova and Rabelais; now we take it for granted in a six-year-old. The new technologies are used well, like the use of mass marketing to support individuality, and poorly, like the appeal to the “reptilian brain.” Society adjusts to both. Roberts himself notes that millennials are beginning to react against some of the worst excesses, and hopes that points to a brighter future.

We have to take account, though, that Roberts is describing a problem of advanced societies, but we are emerging into a global society. He has pinpointed a cultural lag problem in one area of a world beset by differing cultural lag problems everywhere. While we struggle with mass marketing, Africa struggles with how to enable its cultures to handle AIDS, Malaria and Ebola, parts of the Middle East struggle with how to transform a 12^th century worldview into one viable in the 21^st century, and the whole globe tries to work on common problems like climate change, extreme hunger, migrations and ethnic hatreds which require communication and cooperation among all. We can no longer afford to “play alongside” other societies, like toddlers. That is the really big problem Roberts did not address – how to adjust, and help other societies adjust, to our own and their cultural lags as we integrate the globe. If we limit our own world view to the dominance through bloodshed perspective of the reptilian brain, we help neither ourselves nor the Middle East, and 30,000 grocery items are not a solution to world hunger. It is time to leave our societal childhoods behind. We have adult tasks to accomplish.

Practicing Liberty in a Dangerous World

Tom Friedman, a few years ago in The World is Hot, Flat and Crowded, remarked that if he could be dictator for one day, the problems of managing climate change could be readily solved.  He could have added “Dangerous” to that book title and generalized the remark to cover a number of topics and been even more correct.  In all major global problem areas, solutions are known to exist, but no one has the power to take the needed actions. In a world filled with terrorism, disease, ethnic hatreds, unknown challenges ahead from climate change, growing income inequality and global recession, there is a longing for the security in knowing that someone knowledgeable and wise is in charge who knows just what to do and has the power to get it done immediately.  Popular demand has just forced the White House to name an Ebola Czar. The President has quite responsibly called him a “point person” – a coordinator – but the message is clear: benevolent dictators are all the rage. And police are arming themselves like small armies, equipping themselves in advance for totalitarian rule.

How did the country that valued Liberty above all else – even above Life according to Patrick Henry – come to ignore Ben Franklin’s warning that “the nation that values security above liberty will soon find it has neither”?  It seems to me that it is because we have forgotten that Liberty itself has demands. Along with Jefferson’s price of eternal vigilance comes an even greater one – constant responsible action.  We have adopted the libertarian ideal of unrestrained freedom of action as our modern definition of Liberty.  We are free to do anything or nothing at all so long as some minimal law does not require otherwise. We are free to go routinely above the speed limit, to resist paying taxes to maintain the roads we use or to drive low-mileage SUVs in the face of pollution and climate change. We are free to deny civil rights to others, we are free to buy or sell radar detectors, assault rifles, etc., we are free to hop on a plane for a shopping trip to Cleveland while under Ebola watch, because no one told us we shouldn’t.  When the results become immediately and visibly catastrophic, we then want to appoint someone to tell us to do otherwise. We want a stern parent – the kind we avoid being at home these days.

Long ago, when I was a child, we had this weird course called Civics class where we were reminded of our responsibilities as citizens, and we had citizenship prizes to reward us for being good ones. Our society was wrong on many things back then, but we knew fixing them required our participation and the efforts ranged from civil rights marches to buying savings bonds to plain old voting. We had writers such as the Italian Giuseppe Mazzini to remind us that satisfying our obligations to others was just as important as protecting our own rights.  We still have government classes in our high schools but they seem more concerned with the mechanics of government than with its spirit.  Our Constitution is partly based on the writings of Montesquieu. He, for example, inspired the idea of the three equal branches of government and the bicameral legislature, and his 1747 The Spirit of the Laws argued that the most important element of a democracy is the spirit of responsible participation in governance among its citizens. Without that, a democracy is dead. But the view of government as the enemy is more rampant now than it was during Reagan’s time, and good citizenship is seen by many as finding ways to destroy government, not support it.  Perhaps, these days, an appropriate addition to the SATs would be a section containing case studies on responsible citizenship.

I don’t often agree with the Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer.  But the other day he said, approximately, that the political processes of democracy involve balancing a continuing tension between the needs for executive action and for individual liberty, and he was right.  Right now, the tilt is far toward individual self-interest, and our democracy is sick. The center of the political spectrum should be promoting ways of achieving responsible liberty, and it is not there. We lack community.  The problem of course is that communities exclude, unless they can see beyond themselves, and we are seeking more and more as a society to be inclusive. But global terrors are interrupting our individual partying, and the pressures are rising for a fortress America that can party on forever.  Only it can’t.

We need a national dialogue about the responsibilities of Liberty. We need positive regulation that rewards responsible action instead of just punishing law breakers. For example, in Australia, gun laws permit the purchase of any gun, EXCEPT for the purpose of self-defense – that is a police responsibility. That enables hunting, recreational target practice, etc., but excludes such things as assault rifles. It recognizes both individual rights and community responsibilities, And the Australian gun homicide rate is one-tenth the per-capita rate in America.  I've mentioned before laws that decrease food inspection requirements for businesses with extended periods of non-violation. And we need citizenship training that emphasizes responsibilities for graduation from high school. Right now, new immigrants to this country seem to have a better sense of responsible citizenship than our average high school graduate. A mandatory public service requirement as is found in other countries may be an idea whose time has come.  In short, as citizens, we need to get our act together.  We live in dangerous times.