What makes the Great American Depression of 2017
political?
I contend that our present national depression
is political, rather than economic or cultural or individual, because this
depression results from the depletion of public space. Individuals, even
groups of them, religions and other cultural phenomena, and the neoliberal
capitalist economy may persist and, for some, thrive. Many of us attain private
happiness, e.g. pleasure through the Sirens' songs or the odors of the lotus
fields, but we do not have public happiness, which includes a sense of
engagement and meaning in relation to a higher power beyond our individual
satisfaction.
______________
Positive psychologist Martin Seligman
claims that there are three levels of happiness: 1) Pleasure—the “feel good for
now” happiness of consumption represented by wealth, sex, health, fun, food and
drink (measured by amount of money). 2) Engagement with others,
friendship, relationships, and approval of others. 3)Meaning— experience of
having purpose which is the sense of being in touch or aligned with a higher
power. He is drawing upon Abraham Mazlow’s hierarchy of human needs which
starts from what is necessary to sustain life and is completed in
“self-actualization,” the fulfillment of the full potential of the person
This is an insightful tool and model for
positive psychologists to employ when treating individuals struck with the
mental illness of debilitating sadness or clinical depression, an illness that
is spreading geometrically like a contagion in modern society. But this
diagnosis misses an important distinction that underlies a fundamental
dimension in human existence. That distinction is “public” and
“private.”
Private happiness takes place in the household
(or “economy” in classical Greek). The economy is the realm of production and
consumption with pleasure measured by the accumulation of
wealth. The engagement with others occurs and is defined by
levels of authority or class. Its meaning is expressed in a
culture that values individual achievement of wealth through tribal religions
with household gods and through an education that fosters the rise from poorer,
more dependent classes to wealthier, more dominant classes.
Hannah Arendt maintains that the “pursuit of
happiness” in Jefferson's Declaration means public, over private,
happiness. Its pleasure comes not from consumption of material
goods, but from achievement of public good. Public happiness happens in
the engagement with others as equals in creating publics and
extending the public realm. It enjoys the meaning discovered
and constructed through the free inquiry, speech, and action of engaged
citizens.
___________________
We live and act in space-time. Some very learned
scientists and philosophers would argue that both space and time are
constructions of the human organism’s interaction with its environment. That
is, they are products of our existence in the universe. There is in human being
a tension that is time—the before and the-yet-to-come in the experience of
being now. And there is in human being a tension that is space—the
back-there and the over-there experience of being here.
And there is a tension between space and time in
which the human journey from past to future is both private and public. There
is no private without public. No privacy without publicity. And vice versa.
Notice how the lessening of the democratic commons is also a lessening of
privacy through autocracy.
There are two dimensions of human being. Two
sides of the proverbial coin of the realm. The private realm of living
(economy) and the public realm of action (politics). Liberty, the
absence of the necessity to be occupied in pursuit of life’s needs in the
private realm is one thing. Freedom, the capacity to participate
fully in the creation of public space is something else. Liberty is
freedom from. Freedom is liberty for.
The liberty to pursue private happiness has
temporal primacy as does biological life. It comes first in time. Freedom for
public happiness through action is first in space. Freedom has primacy
ontololgically, i.e. in order of importance for us as human beings. The private
realm is the place of power over. The public realm is the place of
power with.
There is both biography and history; and they
are interconnected. My journey from life to death is a part of the story of the
community, the nation, and the universe.
I personally cannot be totally free until all my
fellow travelers are free. My worth is deeply connected to the worth of
humankind. My personal peace requires social justice.
All this is saying that private happiness can
never be achieved fully unless there is public happiness.
My sense of helplessness, unworthiness, ennui,
insignificance is interdependent with others. My private personal happiness
requires public interpersonal happiness.
Life and the fulfilment of its needs, liberty to
engage with others voluntarily, and the pursuit of public happiness in freedom.
These are our rights and responsibilities in being human.
___________________
To overcome our political depression requires a
reckoning with our social habits or institutions that pull us down. Especially
the disorder that makes private happiness measured by individual wealth the
goal of our social order and the measure of its success. This is the disorder
of subjecting politics to economy, of making our community and its governance
dependent on private prosperity which in the America today is the domination
and destruction of democracy by neoliberal economics or American capitalism.
The confusion between liberty (free from) and
freedom (free for) explains the new anti-democrats who have arisen today. For
they teach that, when decisions are made, and the social order is constructed
democratically, people will be bound by limits and regulations and so lack
liberty. But democracy is exactly that space where all persons shape the social
order to limit liberty. For it is only within limits that all can be equal and
free. Even the commons, the space of freedom, the public has boundaries without
which there is no freedom. A free state is also a rule of law.
Liberty for autocrats, usually the rich and
would-be rich, abounds in a social order dominated by a liberal economy, i.e. a
plutocracy. Freedom abounds in a social order governed by all who see each
other as equals with dignity by nature rather than by race, religion, status,
or class. That is a democratic republic.
How can we enjoy both liberty and freedom in our
situation in America today? How can we reclaim democracy and resist
autocracy? Those are the same questions.
To cure our political depression, we accept that
democracy is threatened. Rich persons and large corporations reign and sell
their agenda to us the public who are being reduced to individual consumers. According
to the rulers, the measure of success is the quantity of production and
consumption, the worth of the dollar and of stocks, and the ability to force
this agenda on the rest of the world. We confront the plutocrats who engage in
economic and cultural wars to distract us from our political depression.
To cure our political depression, we acknowledge
our responsibility for this situation. We realize that we in concert have the
power to change this. To change our addiction to wealth, we rely on our higher
power which is the assembly of free citizens in an open and just society. We resist
the plutocratic, anti-democratic forces of the Republic for which we stand. We renew
and reassert our democratic principles and institutions. As
Jefferson advised, democratic rebellion is the responsibility of each
generation.
Finally, to answer the culturalists
(Bell, Marcuse,DuPuy) who have correctly probed the absence of the sacred and
the permanence of values in a one-dimensional consumer society shaped by
capitalism, we can reaffirm the sacred not in private devotion to some god in the sky, but in the restoration
of public space, the place of power and freedom, where persons in concert,
assuming each other’s dignity and equality, act together to progressively
transcend the limits of knowledge and freedom for all.
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thanks!
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ruanguji