Why is Cousin Vinnie So Angry? (Part 2)

Some of us young Jesuit seminarians were asked by Father Jack Egan to help him in his new parish in West Lawndale. This was a parish from which all the white people, many Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics, had fled when the neighborhood turned totally black and mostly Baptist in about 4 years. It was also, as predicted, becoming overcrowded, dilapidated, dirty, and dangerous.

The black families who had bought homes there were the last of the waves of immigrants that had come before. Instead of coming from Europe, they had come from the South to the promised land of the North.  But with them the pattern of immigration broke down. These were upwardly mobile African American families with steady jobs trying to get out of slums. Yet they seemed to have brought the slums with them.

We knocked on doors and talked to community leaders to do self-help projects--get a youth playground, work for a community clean up and regular garbage collection, do a block club or two.  We were trying to listen but had not heard. We heard African American people blaming themselves and their neighbors for their deteriorating condition and maybe the prejudiced white people who moved out: "but who can blame them when you look at what is happening here?"

Finally we did hear and began to discover what was really going on. Sure "culture of poverty among black folk" and "prejudice and fear among white folk" played a role. But behind all that were banks who refused conventional loans, a Federal Housing Authority which refused to insure loans, an insurance industry which refused to insure houses, and a group of realtors and savings and loan institutions ready to take advantage of the situation. They used contract buying to overcharge and keep the deed, bleeding the community and its families of assets. Local businesses couldn't get loans and ran.  And new unorganized residents had little political power in the Daley machine.

I had the opportunity to interview hundreds of families, black families who had moved in and white families who had moved out. I was also fortunate to later work, again through a Catholic parish, in a community further West where many of the white families had taken refuge.  I heard the anger and fear of both the black families and the white families, their desire for work, for education, and a safe community.

I saw that the anger of both the white people blaming black families and black people blaming themselves and white families was misdirected.  They didn't see the invisible structures which shaped their behavior and prejudices.  The patterns of behavior of financial, political, and cultural institutions, often run by "have blacks to dinner" white liberals or even African American machine politicians, that were working for some and not for many and that was destroying the commons.

What I learned was that sociology trumps psychology, institutions trump attitudes.  Yes, we have developed biologically and culturally sensitivities to in-groups and out-groups. Yes, our neurons light up tribal connections and fear of strangers. But the economic, political, and cultural habits, i.e. institutions, that we have fashioned are what reenforce our personal habits of behavior. And if we really want to change minds, we need to change the social habits (institutions) that sustain them.

Overcoming racism and poverty in Chicago was not a matter of black people meeting and getting along with white people, though that wouldn't be so bad.  It was a matter of changing the institutions and knocking down the obstacles that kept white and black families from seeing that the same institutions and the people running them were screwing them both.

I tell this story because it is not so different today.  Anger justified, but misdirected!

Why is Cousin Vinnie So Angry? (Part1)

Why is Cousin Vinnie so angry?

He absolutely hates President Obama who represents to him evil liberalism which consists in government taking away people's responsibilities. He totally agrees with Romney about the 47% who don't pay taxes, who consider themselves victims, and are dependent on government. He thinks they should be working as hard as he did and can't stand to see people who want to work not being able to find a job while our taxes pay for freeloaders who, because of government policies and their own laziness, get paid for not working, get free health care and housing, food stamps and other benefits they do not deserve because they have not contributed to the economy.

Bernie and I retired last year, she at 68, I at 73. We saved, have SS, and a monthly disbursement of our 401k which thankfully is maintaining itself in this stock market. Even in our elderhood, even with the mortgage tax breaks we get by refinancing our condo and giving to charity, we are paying at least 15% of our income in taxers.

I work through my church with an organization that is focused on keeping housing affordable and the neighborhood racially diverse in our fast gentrifying DC neighborhood. It is also focussed on assisting tenants, most of them African American, achieve some equity and the possibility of starting a business, getting additional education, and buying a home in their community. Yes, it gets me mad when I see people, especially younger people, gaming the system to avoid taking responsibility to improve themselves and their situation. We have some instances of three or four generations in this subsidized housing. They are taking places that others could use to get ahead.  Some who are working and making a good salary still stay in this Section 8 housing paying market rent just for the security in case they lose their job.

Across from our condo are apartments in which there live a couple, clearly immigrants from some African or Caribbean county, who are going at it day and night.  Loud.  They obviously don't work. I don't know if they are getting housing and other subsidy--but how else could they be living, laughing, shouting, obviously drinking all the time.  Who is supporting them and their behavior. Me? Sometimes I am so pissed off, I yell at them and tell them to shut up and let people who work sleep.

In front of their apartments I am constantly picking up junk, papers, wrappers, and, worst of all, lottery stubs and putting them in the garbage cans which are only a few steps away. These people obviously don't care about their community. How can they afford playing the lottery? And I am probably supporting their habits--through government programs.  Bastards! And you know that many of the youth who are hanging out of the street are up to no good. If they are caught stealing or selling drugs, they will be sent to prison and I will be supporting them again--their board, their room, their food, their health. Double bastards.

What we have is a choice. Are we going to keep coddling these freeloaders and paying for their bad habits through government programs? Or are we going to get government to do just its essential functions--protect free markets and protect citizens against the exploitation of criminals here and abroad? And get government out of the social service game! That's our choice.

Go Cousin Vinnie!  No wonder white men like you and me are so angry.

___________________________

But first a little story about my experience in Chicago working in a Catholic Parish in West Lawndale (the "black ghetto").  Part 2 next.

Partisan

In an earlier meditation, I reflected on partisanship. I reflected that the founders of the US did not want parties. They were republicans who accepted that there would be "factions" or groups that would through accountable government advocate their interests, work out any differences, and come up with policies where everyone or at least most people, all of whom "were created equal," could achieve their common interests in "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."  

I suppose it was unrealistic of them to not expect political parties and, without a parliamentarian form of government, two dominant ones. The history of the parties is instructive and demonstrates an ongoing tension among a whole bunch of approaches.  When the Republican Party was formed it stood for the industrial North and strong central government over the agrarian South and states rights.

That all shifted when the Democratic Party championed Economic Reform and Civil Rights enforced by the central government, as LBJ said it would. But at least within the Parties were still "factions." The Peace movement (especially the anti-Vietnam war) pushed for limited government; and the community organization movement pushed for more locally accountable government in both parties. Republicans were essential in overcoming southern Democrats in Civil Rights.

My dad was a good Republican because he thought that party more represented his interests as a manager in General Motors. But he recognized the importance of strong unions and was the first to get African-Americans into management in GM, as a leader in the Catholic Council for Racial Justice.


In other words, there were still "factions" within the Parties and this made for more moderation and a search for common cause among the Parties. (Common Cause was started by John Gardner, a Republican.)

We've seen the party system change substantially since the 1980s as more and more polarization, ideological purity, and institutional loyalty have arisen, something you expect from religion (why the separation of church and state is so important), but not in politics.  

In today's newspaper was another article on the campaign. Here is a quote from that article:  "The poll found that a majority of voters embrace the president’s vision of a country that emphasizes community and shared responsibility over self-reliance and individual responsibility, a distinction at the core of the debate between the Republican and Democratic tickets about the proper role of government."

I think this does cut to a basic orientation in the parties today. And one worth discussing and one where good people can differ. For sure self-reliance, even self-interest, and individual responsibility are important goods in the nation. But do they take precedence over community and shared responsibility in the role of government at least in terms of emphasis? Perhaps the answer is at certain times and places, yes. In others, no. Or whose self-interest and self-reliance are we talking about? And whose individual responsibility within the community?

In Catholic Social Teaching and in what is called "social democracy" or even "social capitalism" or even "socialism" as understood in Canada and Europe, there is a "preferential option for the poor," that puts the emphasis in advancing those who have been "left behind," those at the lower end of the economic and political ladder, those with fewer assets or equity, or as Economist Joseph Stiglitz says: the 99% over the 1%. Also there is a general moral prohibition in identifying or subordinating public good to individual self-interest.

But there is also the prohibition against a totalitarian state in which individual rights and responsibilities are denied. And there is the teaching of "subsidiarity," the dealing with issues at the smallest or most local level possible.

In other words, hating Obama as an outsider or "socialist" or an "ass" (as my cousin Vinnie proclaims) is downright wrong--and I think anti-American. But so is hating Romney because he is a "vulture capitalist" or believes in cutting dependency on government. And most of the Internet characterizations within the extreme portions of the two camps undermine our republican form of government. 

And so does all the money necessary to run a campaign. As I heard Republican Senator and Presidential candidate, John McCain, say: The Supreme Court "Citizens United" decision did more to undermine our republican form of government and strengthen our two-party system than any decision since the Dred Scott decision.

So good luck to us in November! I hope we can turn back to being a Republic rather than an Empire run by plutocrats. That is much more important to me than either Party.  

In Conclusion

To conclude or perhaps start over, let me offer a personal reflection (as if the preceding ones were not!) that will expose my bias.

I am a church-going non-theist. I do not see or want a supernatural entity, a God, a transcendent being, who is the Meaning and End of it all. Nor do I need or want a religion that claims to be the exclusive or even the best way to Truth and Goodness. But I do need and want a congregation that helps me keep faith.

Spouse Bernie and I found and belong to All Souls Unitarian/Universalist Church--a wonderfully diverse congregation, with a gay white man and an African-American women as ministers, which is committed to no fixed doctrine and whose mission is to repair and rebuild the world starting in their own neighborhood of Columbia Heights DC. As universalists, we espouse tolerance and find value in all religious expressions, their teachings, rituals, and stories, while recognizing the limited and often harmfulness of those expressions including our own.  By unitarian we do not mean One God or One Person in God. We simply mean that we will continue to attempt to discover what will bring us, the whole human family, together, what is common to all of us, and what will give us all meaning personally and collectively.

In his Pensées, Blaise Pascal, the 17th century mathematician, physicist, and Christian apologist, presented the wager--the most fundamental wager in life.

One interpretation of that wager (probably the accurate one) makes religious belief--including God, Church, Sacraments, and an afterlife of bliss or punishment--a reasonable choice.  Here is the introduction of game-theory as taught in business schools through which the risks and benefits of certain courses of action can be weighed.  Certainly it is more advantageous to bet on religious belief even if that means lessening a bit of the pleasure or happiness in this life rather than risking an eternity of loss and even pain in the next.

I remember many Christian retreats where the master would ask us to momento mori and compare an eternity of bliss with the temporality of worldly existence.  I know many of my relatives and friends in which the wager still operates. And using game-theory, it makes good sense. But not for me.

This position I think is based on the fear of death, loss, pain, or at least the unknown. Moreover I think it does withdraw at least a bit from the full engagement and enjoyment of this world, this time, this place, this existence. It is the position of all religions that promise heaven or paradise or everlasting life. And I simply reject these beliefs.

However, I advance an interpretation of Pascal's wager that I can support. As Pascal in his pensée 233 implies: we are in every moment of our lives at a point in which there is as much evidence for meaning as there is for non-meaning.  Reason by itself cannot overcome nihilism and the ultimate absurdity of our existence. (Some say Pascal was the first existentialist.) Not mathematics, nor science, nor philosophy, nor theology can dispel nihilism. Only faith--which is the choice for meaning and for continuing the search for knowledge, the decision to keep trying to repair what is broken in our lives, world, and society, the election to enjoy life to the fullest and, yes, to love in the present and hope in the future. It is that decision that tips the balance.

I also think that it is a decision which is revealed and heard as a call in the very in-tension of our human being--one that we can conveniently deny or happily affirm.  It is the most basic of options in everything that we think and do.

Now that's a wager I will make.

Follow your conscience

The Man for All Seasons, Sir Thomas More, is mostly celebrated not for his position as chancellor to the king, not for his writing, not for his wealth but for acting on his conscience.  I reflect on him during this time of political campaigning when candidates and their handlers often model a lack of conscience.

Conscience, as the word's roots indicate, is a "with knowing." It is the awareness of oneself acting in the world.  In another meditation, I showed that it is consciousness in crisis, decision, and action. It is the background experience of the person as intending to do right or good while she focuses on what she is doing or deciding to do.  It is the primary experience of a person's existence as in tension in the world.

Like Jimminy Cricket for Pinocchio, conscience is always there whether followed or not--the "little voice" we say telling us to do the right thing and be the right stuff. "Follow your conscience" is the sage's moral advice. And following one's conscience is the hero's way.

But most sages also add: "follow your informed conscience."They recognize that conscience can be false and needs to be examined from time to time. For conscience is more than a moral experience, it is also a moral judgment. Judgment means application, reflection, and testing in situations. Conscience is informed by discussions in one's clan or congregation or community. It is informed by religion, art, and myth, especially the stories of heroes and anti-heroes in film, novels, and legends. It is informed by the study of sages and most of all by thinking.

Saint Thomas Moore acted on his conscience, not only by holding true to his oath to a higher power than the king, but also when he burned books of and punished heretics. Saint and Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, S.J. was following his conscience when prosecuting Galileo or assenting to the burning of Giodarno Bruno and John of Prague. I accept that Roosevelt was following his conscience when interning Japanese Americans, Truman when deciding to drop the bomb, Kennedy pursuing the war in Vietnam, and Bush when invading Iraq. But that does not make these persons or their actions right.

Nor does it make them evil unless they did not consider or care about the implications of resolving the tensions of their being in this particular situation and in this particular way or unless they refused or neglected information that might give them cause to reconsider their actions. Adolf Hitler's evil was the suppression of conscience because it got in the way of his personal ambitions. Adolf Eichmann's evil, according to Arendt, was rooted in his suppression of conscience by his failure to think.

Conscience is the awareness of one's intentional existence. My conscience is my very existence  intending good in this particular situation--and in tension between what is good for myself and for others, what is true between the past and the future, what is one between my inner world of knowledge and the outer world of actuality, and what is whole between my real and my ideal.

Whether you believe that it was infused in the soul by a supernatural entity or is the result of adaptation by natural selection, conscience develops and belongs to every human being (unless abnormal through defect or illness) and I argue belongs to us as a social group. I would also argue that there is no absolute moral prescription or prohibition or principle except for conscience itself.

I cannot think of a moral maxim or commandment that cannot be overturned by conscience. Certainly all the Judeo-Christian ten commandments have exceptions. The Hippocratic "do no harm" must be carefully interpreted.  The only prohibition I think can claim some degree of absoluteness is against cruelty which includes slavery, child abuse, sex trafficking, and other acts of dehumanization. But capital punishment, saturation bombing, and torture are still advocated by good individuals even as our social conscience develops.

So, Sir Thomas, while a man of your times, a 16th century humanist with all the limitations of your understanding, your works, and your society, you are indeed a man for all seasons in your affirmation of the primacy of thoughtful conscience which is ironically the root of reformation and the renewal of our institutions and world.

Close the Gap

The disparity between rich and poor in and between nations is obscene. This has been well documented by experts of all political persuasions. I really recommend Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality.

There are many organizations, public and private, religious and secular, local, national and international, whose mission is to bring all persons out of poverty and close the inequality gap. Yet despite all the financial, volunteer, and governmental action, the inequality and its costs to all of us continue to grow. It is a matter of will, yes, but it is also a matter of how our institutions, both economic and political, are working or not working.

I cannot think of a more important mission than confronting this obscenity in order to bring all people into full human development. But how?

I don't know; but I propose four principles and corresponding policies for consideration in determining our action.  (I have argued elsewhere for the universality and source of these principles.)

Four Principles:

1.  The Principle of Personal Right: Life, Freedom, the Pursuit of Happiness.

Life: Every person who is born into the world and into the human family should have all the material and biological means to survive and grow simply because he or she exists.

Freedom: Every person should have the means to exercise his or her ability to be free from oppression (liberty) and free for (power) co-creating their world.

Pursuit of Happiness:  Every person should have the means and opportunity to pursue personal wealth and public development including the ability to engage with others in the shaping of their common space (polis).

2.  The Principle of Personal Responsibility.

Every person must ensure that every other person has the right to life, freedom, and pursuit of happiness within his or her ability to respond.  The ability to respond is determined by the limits of space, time, and knowledge.

3.  The Public Principle.

Every person achieves full human development in a social order that accepts and actualizes the above two principles. Private self-interest (personal wealth) must be subordinated to mutual self-interest (public good). While a person may understand that her development includes the accumulation of wealth beyond life's basic needs, this accumulation cannot be at the expense of the public.  Government should not be identified as the public but as a means to guaranteed personal right and responsibility and to achieve a true public (where all have the ability to act together). This means publicly accountable government and other social institutions.

4.  The Strategic Principle.

Strategies for achieving true publics are inclusive (open to all), institutional (relating to existing institutions and building new ones), affirming (focusing on building up, rather tearing down except to remove obstacles), knowledgeable (informed by science, thoughtful, doable or pragmatic over dogmatic).

Four Corresponding Policies:

1.  Set and insure the minimum threshold of income and assets (income, health, education, housing, mobility) needed for biological survival defined within the locality and insured by the public.

2.  Reform income and asset taxes and provide public investment to leverage private investment in institutions of learning, working, housing, food, and clean energy to guarantee public and private resources for achieving the minimum threshold.

3.  Affirm democratic republicanism over plutocracy or oligarchy by removing the influence of private wealth on public decision-making. Reform government and its agencies so that they are accountable to publics not special private interests.

4.  Public/Private organizing and planning. Organize local publics linked to local institutions and interrelate them nationally on a strategy to encourage full human development and attack economic and political disparity. Develop a movement that is organized outside political partisanship linking what is best in existing NGOs.

Next Steps:

• One on ones with representatives of national and international non-governmental organizations.
• Assessment of the assets, contributions, and effectiveness of these organizations.
• Identify and recruit partners.
• Design what might fit into or hold together these efforts into a bold, measurable strategy.  

Illusions of the Righteous Mind.

While awaiting Bernie shopping for a dress, I amused myself in one of my favorite pastimes: wandering the floors of Barnes and Noble. Guess which new books were prominently displayed during this time of political conventions. Here was a book demonstrating how Obama is ruining the nation next to another identifying all the lies they are telling about the President. There was one opening the doors of the White House to show all its detail and another discussing White House secrets. Here was one on Mitt Romney showing his great leadership in building fortunes for the rich and another portraying the real Romney. And the various books by economists and fortune hunters both supporting and attacking whatever policy you could think of.  Now step over to the religious and inspirational section!

Righteous minds, indeed!

"This class in archeology is about facts. If you want to deal with truth, go down the hall to Professor Dawson's philosophy class," (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). But we pick our facts and arrange and see them the way we want. Mostly based on our own interests, affiliations, and values. So I am afraid there is little truth even in Professor Dawson's philosophy class--much less in all the books, slogans, ads, speeches, and emailed slop in a political campaign. My cousin Vinnie says I am stupid in my liberal leanings, but of course I know that he is. And so we do not talk, much less listen.

One of the methods that science uses to at least approach truth is dispelling illusions. All these campaign-timed books think they are doing just that. Yet it is often easier, the Jesus saying goes, to see the sliver in your enemy's eye than the beam in your own.

A few blogs ago, I summarized the tensions in the human nature that we have become and said that each of these tensions carried its own illusions. Let me elaborate on this as a way of stepping back from the political fray to try to understand how Vinnie and me and all of us can be so stupid--especially in discussing and doing politics and religion.

The four tensions I considered, you might remember, were 1) sociality, the tension between self and other, 2) spatiality, the tension between inner awareness and outer things, 3) temporality, the tension between our memories and our projections, and 4) ideality, the tension between the world as we are living it and the world as we think or would like it to be.

I feel we are living in such an exciting age when evolutionary biology and psychology and neuroscience are dispelling the illusions we have in our human universe just as physics, astrology, and quantum mechanics have been doing in our physical universe.  And then, through a higher viewpoint, they inquire as to how these universes are the same multiverse.

So through science we have dispelled some illusions about the sun going around the earth, the place of the earth and us in relation to everything else, the age of the earth, universe, life and our species, and even what we are all made of and came to be. But now let's look at the illusions that are at the foundation of all these and other illusions because they arise from the very dynamics in the nature of humanity.

1) Sociality and the illusion of the Self.  As the baby feels, sees, and learns to imitate mother and other caregivers, both the self and the other are gradually distinguished. It is not long after and for sure as bodily and verbal gesture are being acquired that the child takes on three illusions that may last his lifetime. There is the illusion of an independent, permanent, self-directed, free-willed ("self-made" if he becomes a Libertarian) Self. An immortal soul that was created at conception or perhaps earlier and makes it murder and a mortal sin to have an abortion. Then with theory of mind and maybe mirror neurons, there is the illusion of other selves starting with parents and siblings which are also self-contained, permanent, changing only accidentally (e.g. by adding or removing stains), never substantially. And finally there is the illusion of invisible and supernatural agents that make things happen that are outside human control. Child psychologist Paul Bloom describes the process well in Descartes' Baby. The wholly constituted self (including the other as self, free will, and invisible free self-directed agents) is the illusion from which a sense of "righteousness" easily arises. What is there of course are emerging, growing, changing, interacting organisms with the developing capacity for self-awareness and symbolic expression.

2) Spatiality and the illusion of the Object.  The human capacity par excellence is that of symbolic expression which includes imagination--making images and using them to get hold of and deal with the environment. Language, art, myth, religion, science--our ways of forming, enjoying, knowing a world.  In expression through symbolic forms, e.g. artifacts, we confront objects and experience ourselves as subjects confronting objects.  But our focus is on objects, things out there, as if they are the whole of reality. It is what John Dewey described as the "objectivistic fallacy." We believe that the symbols that we have collectively, historically created to deal with our environment are the non-artifacted things in themselves. This is the source of our icons and idols and our corresponding and often warring ideologies and iconoclasms. Simply part of the human condition? Yes, but so also is the hope that we can pass beyond these illusions. We have been trying to do at least since the Axial Age (see Karl Jaspers and Karen Armstrong)--the age of Confucius and Buddha, Lao Tsu and Zarathustra, Moses and Jesus, Socrates and Zeno.

3) Temporality and the illusion of the Absolute. We always know ourselves in the now. We live between our memories and our hopes, short-term and long-term. But our sense of the past and the future is often expressed as though they are separate from us. We believe that the founders, the saints, the gods did it all right, but we have departed from their ways. We believe that if we live correctly, if we sacrifice, confess, become martyrs, follow the right path, say the right words, and join the right group, we will come to the promised land. We often express the past mythologically as a golden age, a paradise before the fall, or the future as heaven, a paradise after redemption. The illusion is of a past and future that is separate from our interpretation and anticipation, distant from who we are and what we do now.  It is an illusion of a time outside of time, without beginning and end, before and after we exist and the universe is. The illusion is of an absolute beyond ambiguity. This is an illusion that shows itself in the religion of condemnation and salvation and in the politics of restoration and revolution, the ancienne regime and the novo saeculum saeculorum, the righteous Right and the righteous Left.

4) Ideality and the illusion of the Real. The fourth is a really a composition of the first three. Just put the Self, the Object, and the Absolute all together. There they are in the convention speech and many a Sunday sermon. The notion of Reality as out-there-separate from what we are imagining it to be is  greatest obstacle to life, freedom, and the pursuit of happiness.  And yet that illusion is part of our species greatest and defining power: our ability to express, communicate, imagine, symbolize which is also our ability to think and act together--the very definition of power.

On the one side, this illusion is confusing the real with the ideal, expecting the world as we live it to be the world as we think it should be.  On the other side, the illusion is separating the real and the ideal, forgetting that what we see as real is in fact the results of our imaging or idealizing.  As in most queries, the task is to distinguish but not separate.

So in conclusion:

These are the illusions behind those Barnes and Nobel books fueling our political and religious passion and intolerance, partisanship and exclusion.  It's okay.  We are all in the stretch, the pulling and pushing bands of the tension between self and other, inner and outer, past and future, real and ideal.  We may often believe so, but none of us are at the term or resolution of the tension.  The tension may be a problem, but it is also our solution--since we are the tension.

Our goal and our happiness is not to escape the ambiguity of existence, to step outside time and space and interdependence, to attain the "mind of God."  On the contrary, it is to fully engage in our time, space, and community in all its ambiguity, relativity, and messiness.  It is as I have often declared to transcend beliefs through faith.  Beliefs divide; faith unites.

If only we could recognize this, we could all get along with ourselves and each other, here and now.

And tone it down, right? And laugh!

The Conservative Advantage

#2.  But don't liberals value authority, loyalty, and purity as much as conservatives?

Let's define liberal and conservative.  That's difficult because of various uses of the words not only in America and Europe and US and Canada, but also within the US itself.  European and Canadian use of "liberal" generally focuses on free market without government regulations but also accountable government without class differences.  Even deeply conservative Americans promote liberalism in Eastern Europe, China, and the mid-East--in fact in every country but their own.  "Socialism"in Europe (as in the Labor Party of UK or the New Democratic Party of Canada) promotes the free market but also government programs to "level the playing field," i.e. promote greater economic equality in opportunity and results. Soviet and Chinese "communism" is the market in which the Party (controlling the State) has control of capital and profits and should not be confused with socialism as it has been defined in America or Europe.

One of my mentors, Saul Alinsky, much maligned by Newt Gingrich who clearly does not know who or what he is talking about, attacked liberals and liberalism in America as rhetoric without substance and talk without action.  He was no socialist however.  He decried the American welfare system for creating dependence as would any conservative.  But he strongly believed in political and economic justice that could only be attained through organizing, both at the work place and at the living place, to hold both industry and government accountable.

The Founders of the American Republic accepted and provided for "factions" (Hamilton's term), but not parties. They ensured accountability by structuring government as a balance of powers, local and national, legislative, executive, and judicial, with a clear distinction between cultures/religions and the political space wherein private self-interests (including industries) could be contained.

But in the transition from Republic to World Power (Empire?), two contesting parties have become predominant, both beholden to large donations by the private sector (especially wealthy individuals, large industries, and their lobbying arms).  So we are in the throws of polarization, competing but similar gangs and large monied players that control the political process.

Haidt would reduce the polarization in discourse and hopefully in policy not so much through "framing" political language by attention to ideas of child-rearing, cognitive therapy, and culture (a la George Lakoff), but by recognition of the six biological foundations of morality that influence politics.  Because conservatives use all six fairly equally and liberals mainly use only three, liberals are at a disadvantage and need to learn to appeal to the other three, i.e. authority, loyalty, and purity.  Haidt has used this understanding to critique and write political speeches for candidates that help them articulate their policies and make them more appealing.

Reflecting on this, I propose a diagram that may help in understanding the polarization of ideas that advance present policy towards overcoming that polarization by having people on either side appreciate  people on the other side.

Accepting Haidt's framework, I think that Liberals use all six foundations as much as Conservatives.  They too appeal to authority (just a different one than Conservatives).  They too value loyalty--but they choose a different group with whom they most want a good reputation.  And they too suffer from "political correctness" and see themselves as pure (e.g. in eating, in conservation, in language).  Certainly it would help civil discourse if the various players understood their own interests and values and how these related to persons they see in the other camp.

_______________

But frankly, as much as I hold to the importance of language and other forms of symbolic behavior, I do not think that framing arguments or writing speeches will make much of a difference.  Our words and worldviews are captive of the institutions we have built and take their meanings within the structures to which we have uncritically committed ourselves.  The parties now dominate our politics including all its governmental and nongovernmental agencies; our economics are controlled in a corporate hegemony consisting of Wall Street, the Chamber of Commerce, and wealthy private interest lobbying associations and foundations; an American religion of economic growth structures our culture, contained in churches led by mega-church populist preachers, denominational bishops, and media moguls.

Discourse and language alone will not influence the American civil religion as Robert Bellah has long understood.  Nor will it influence our political-economy.  Only independent, self-determining organizations will challenge the institutions and structures of our society.  Voluntary associations that start with personal self-interests, shared values, and community affiliations through which people learn and fight for their long-ranged common interests and values will not only hold present institutions accountable, but restructure them to be more inclusive and just.  But of course that takes a lot of nitty-gritty work in the work place, in the churches, and on in the streets.

So as much as I appreciate Haidt's project, without the restoration of true politics and rescuing it from partisan political, economic, and cultural institutions, I do think it will not solve the American dilemma. Thoughtful inquiry in academia can assist, but is hardly sufficient.

Many of us voted for Obama as a change we could believe in.  I do not regret my vote, my financial support, or my canvassing.  But I know that unless the institutions, including the parties and government agencies change, American democracy and republicanism will not achieve its potential and will continue to sink into the plutocracy it has become.

Having fought government for over 30 years and then worked for government for over 14 years, I can see the changes that must be made and I believe I see how they might happen. But that is for another blog later.

Integrity and the Foundations of Morality

#3.  Is Haidt's theory compatible with mine?

I've already applauded Jonathan Haidt on his score of the six foundations of morality. Let me summarize my Integrity Theory of Ethics and see how it might improvise with his.

I identify four dynamics in human nature and behavior--sociality, spatiality, temporality, ideality--each of which has an experimental scientific base. I do not mean to be exclusive nor dogmatic about these; they could be increased or expressed differently. However, I think they are falsifiable; I think they are useful for further inquiry; and I think they can be related to Haidt's six foundations. Another question is whether we are talking about one or many principles for ethics with which I will deal at the end.

I start with sociality which is the tension in our existence (human nature as dynamic) between individual self and social collective. I adopt Wilson and his study of ants as my prime authority. But I also liked Paul Seabright's The Company of Strangers and Marco Iacoboni Mirroring People. And of course the whole tradition of social psychology from Kurt Goldstein on. Wilson finds that in our evolutionary adaptation is the acquisition of traits for both selection as individual and as group. He also claims that this is a tension that will never be resolved as long as our species is around.

Then there is spatiality which is a dynamic tension between inner and outer space that is part and parcel with our symbolic behavior, our adaptation to our environment and knowledge of our world through artificial forms or images (language, art, religion, science). There are lots of good authorities on this especially in psychology and philosophy and more recently in neuroscience.  A new favorite for me is Terrence Deacon's The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain.

Thirdly, there is temporality which is the dynamic tension between memory and projection. Memory of course, both unconscious and conscious, has been a prevalent focus of study for neuroscience especially using fMRI, as well as the use of memory in producing and projecting images whether on the wall of a cave or in an urban general plan. Intuition (direct experience) has always found the past and the future in the now stretching backwards and forwards at the same time. Memory is directly related to language, learning, cognition, imaging, and of course the recognition of self and others and of inner and outer space.

Fourthly, I propose ideality which is the dynamic tension between the real and the ideal or the virtual or the dreamt. (Though elsewhere I point out how one can say with Hegel that the Real is the Ideal, and with quantum theorists that the Real is the Virtual, and with Eastern religions that the Real is the Dream.) Politically this is the tension between the world as we find it and the world as we want it to be.  I think this dynamic tension cuts across and is a synthesis of the other three. I think it also connects to the dynamic tension between the universal and the particular, science and technology, transcendence and immanence.

I also think that consciousness (and here I take as my authorities Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained and Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject) is a function and product of human existence with these (and maybe more than) four dimensions. But David Deutsch is my mentor (after Merleau-Ponty) of human existence and consciousness as transcending, as the "beginning of infinity." For in our activity of dealing with the world in the company of others in the present, we open ourselves to an unlimited future.

I have discussed each of the four dimensions more at length earlier. I have also shown that each of them can explain the illusions that we must overcome in our progressive dance to infinity. The dimension of sociality gives rise to the illusion of supernatural agency (see Paul Bloom, "Is God an Accident?" in the Atlantic and also Descartes' Baby). The dimension of spatiality gives rise to the "illusion of the absolute" (Merleau-Ponty) or the "objectivistic fallacy" (Dewey) in our failure to distinguished the expressed from the expressing, the parlée from the parole. The dimension of temporality has us denying ambiguity and hoping for the "golden age" or for "utopia." And ideality combines all these in the confusion of the world as it is with the world as we want it to be, the idolatry of the particular as universal, eternity out there instead of in the now.

It is the integration of these dynamics in our action here, now, with others where we find the foundation of this-worldly ethics and politics. Human existence (the dynamic nature of human nature with its fourfold tension) is the principle of ethics and politics. The categorical imperative is the striving for integrity: the holding and dealing with the many tensions of our existence.
______________

So how does this relate to Haidt's six foundations?

Here is an attempt.

What I am trying to show is that Haidt's six foundations of morality are not antithetical with my four tensions of human nature, and indeed confirm them. Loyalty and authority pertain to our groupishness.  Care and Fairness pertain to the empathic aspect of our interaction with others in expression. Liberation  from oppression pertain to our progression advance in time. And sanctity/purity to ideality and the world without evil.

Both the Theory of Moral Foundations and the Ethical Theory of Integrity can be useful to our politics as I will show in the next blog.
_____________

Finally I want to deal with Haidt's assertion that there is no one principle, but many for human morality.  I do agree with this. But at the same time I think there is one principle for ethics which is human existence, in all its dynamic complexity, itself. I also think it is important to distinguish between principles as expressions, e.g. moral maxims, and principles as the unexpressed source of human behavior in human existence.