Origins

What Divides Us

~ John ~ Leave a comment

This bloody week, like too many bloody weeks before it, we face the dread that Americans are descending into a state of deepening, unresolved conflict, and wonder how we can pull back from it.  It is entirely appropriate to line the streets in condemnation of presidential hate speech.  But we can do more.  We can cut our consumption of fear and ditch the word “they”.

The focus on Trump as one driver of our polarized society is readily understandable.  The president has positioned himself as a cyclone at the center of our politics, spinning off epithets and labeling opponents with heedless force, in an obvious – and highly successful – electoral strategy of divide and conquer.  We know from social science that fear makes people more conservative, so Trump sells fear.

But we should also acknowledge that progressives sell fear too, because for both sides, fear sells so well.  And progressives also sell division, both for honest reasons and for cynical ones.  As to the former, by ideology and by custom, progressives have practiced the politics of difference, as a way of honoring and making space for the diversity of human experience.  But now that Trump is successfully portraying this as the politics of division, and using it as a point of leverage to unify his own base, progressives have defended themselves by ramping up efforts to stereotype Trump’s cultural center and identifying religious conservatives with their racist fringe, in order to magnify the threat from the right.

How can this dynamic be de-escalated?  How can a broad array of Americans reclaim the discourse of democracy?

First, we have to start taking the belief systems of Trump’s base seriously, to understand what unites them.  According to Pew, fully half of Trump’s supporters call themselves “highly religious.” The Biblical worldview that God created Man in His image, that Woman was created from Man, and that Earth is God’s creation for Man’s bounty, is deeply and honestly held by millions of Americans.  It also has profound political ramifications.  One is that men and women are intrinsically different creatures.  Another is that the planet does not have an existence independent from the connection between God and Man.  From these precepts flow other, essentially political, conclusions.  One is that men are intrinsically prone to sinful behavior, for which they must be periodically punished, and more often forgiven, but it is utterly unrealistic to think that men can ever be fundamentally changed.  Another is that the planet’s degraded condition is fundamentally God’s will, and if the planet is to be consumed in fire, then that is a sign that the Apocalypse is at hand.  Polls indicate most evangelicals hold such “End Times” beliefs.

Opposed to this is the strictly scientific worldview, sometimes identified as atheism, which accounts for up to 25% of Americans, according to Gallup. It holds that humans are a biological species of animals on a planet that came into being by the evolutionary process of natural selection, that our genders are one of our many traits, and that we inhabit a planet which is alive insofar as it is a vast interconnected web of living things of which we are one small, but increasingly troublesome, part.  Among the political implications of these beliefs are that gender is not subject to political fiat, and that the moral claims of the other life forms on the planet, both now and in future generations, vastly outweigh any human claim  to short-term enjoyment of planetary resources.

In between these two is the ecumenical worldview, informed by both scientific knowledge and religious belief, and characterized by humility in the face of the mysteries of that which we do not understand; by the experience of a divine presence that science cannot explain, but the broadminded intelligence that accepts and engages with scientific inquiry and discovery.  This view swallows the biological pill that we’re animals, but chases it down with the moral liquor that we also possess souls.  It speaks from various demoninations, various faiths.  The political implications of these beliefs can be all over the map, depending on how that mixture goes down for each of us.

This spectrum of belief, and its corresponding political hues, have populated our country since at least the Scopes “monkey” trial of 1925, which tested the teaching of evolution in schools.  We will not ever dismantle it, any more than the Sunni will eradicate the Shia or the Bosnians will exterminate the Serbs. We should stop trying.  For better or worse, this is the American political family, the “pluribus” from which we must make an “unum” if our democracy is to survive.

What is new about our current political moment is that our president has encouraged – and many of the rest of us have succumbed to – an addictive cycle of fear, igniting dark impulses and awakening latent tendencies that cut across the spectrum described above, tearing old scars of race, gender and national origin into open wounds, and increasingly, open violence.  This confounding overlay turns fear into terror, and risks pushing polarization into war.

The antidote is to remember bravely who we are.   George Washington wrote that the first principle of democracy is “that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately.”   In every one of our spiritual traditions described above is a common belief in the equal worth, dignity, divinity, or salvation – depending on the vocabulary each group might choose – of the individual person.  Rising from that bedrock of belief is the edifice of personal independence which differentiates America from other nations and attracts immigrants to our shores.  When conservatives call for the rights of religious freedom, and progressives champion the rights of gender diversity, aren’t they both proclaiming the basic rights of individuals to exercise liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

FDR, famous for the phrase “the only thing to fear is fear itself,” confronted a racist threat far more powerful than anything we face today.  His last public speech, undelivered because he died before he could speak it, contained the following:

“Today we are faced with the pre-eminent fact that, if civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships – the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together and work together, in the same world, at peace.  The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today.  Let us move forward with a strong and active faith.”

A monumental task — far greater than anything we would conceive today — which he knew would require both the “science of human relationships” and “strong and active faith.”  What FDR had no use for is the word “they.”

Love at the Edge of Loss

~ John ~ 5 Comments

I awoke this bright, sunny morning of my 58th birthday, feeling extraordinarily lucky and loved.  Facebook birthday greetings came chiming in. Beret brought me coffee, toast, brie, and the Times in bed.  The cat clamored for attention.  My daughter Paige WhatsApped from her Peace Corps posting in Panama.  I am warm, dry, safe, fed, loved.

Still, as I’ve contemplated the arrival of my birthday over the past week, and inevitably the year gone by, the song that’s been rattling around my heart is the Mark Knopfler/Emmylou Harris duet “If This Is Goodbye.”  Their album’s been in among the CDs in my car for about a month, and instead of getting progressively sick of it I’ve found myself obsessively homing in — until last week, driving home from a particularly exhausting divorce mediation, I had to pull over at the tourist lookout on the highway leading into my town, turn it up loud, and weep.  For basically no reason.

Or perhaps, for many reasons.  I’m coming to the end of the year of grieving my mother’s death – my siblings and I are going to Virginia next week to place her ashes.  Her last few days were spent in hospice in my house, after she’d announced her firm wish not to recover from her stroke.   And so, there was leave-taking before she went, and on another plane, there’s been more leave-taking since.

Then there’s what I do for a living.  The accumulated sorrow of mediating five to ten domestic relations cases a week does add up at times.

One can add the ignominy of our politics and culture, whose machines goad us to despise each others’ distended shadows, muffling our human cries, uttered just beyond view.

And finally, there is the suffering of the planet itself.  The new IPCC report on climate change brooks no poetry and accepts no apology.  It stands as a damnation of any of the puny works or professed values of the Boomer generation against the tidal judgment of the future.

What a depressing litany, right?   But when I think of these things, I actually don’t get sucked into sorrow.  When I wept on the highway, my deepest feeling was a pang of sweet appreciation.  Not that I lost my mother, but that I was with her at the end.  Not that there is marital carnage around me all the time, but that my own love, after 34 years, is still so tender.  Not that our democracy is so horribly imperiled, but that a surge of new voters could, just maybe, transform it.

After I developed epilepsy a few years ago, I came to manage the anxiety that my consciousness could be drastically altered at any moment, in the blink of an eye.  But it also taught me to live in the moment in a way no amount of philosophy could.  Beauty sprang out at me from ordinary places.  Now that my seizures are fully controlled, I still try to cultivate that awareness.  And at 58, living with an awareness of loss is easy to do.  Friends around me lose parents, partners, and – most excruciatingly – children; battle illness; endure separation; and go through all manner of other trials.  My birthday riches are sweetened by being at edge of — and surrounded by the brimming love attending — these other losses. They mirror our generation’s place in the world, and in history.

So here’s a duet from Mark and Emmylou.  I didn’t know until I sat down to write today that he composed it in memory of another bright fall morning – September 11.   Enjoy!

And, since Mark’s singing in particular is maddeningly indistinct in this version, here are the lyrics:

My famous last words
Are laying around in tatters
Sounding absurd
Whatever I try
But I love you
And that’s all that really matters
If this is goodbye
If this is goodbye

Your bright shining sun
Would light up the way before me
You were the one
Made me feel I could fly
And I love you
Whatever is waiting for me
If this is goodbye
If this is goodbye

Who knows how long we’ve got
Or what were made out of
Who knows if there’s a plan or not
There is our love
I know there is our love

My famous last words
Could never tell the story
Spinning unheard
In the dark of the sky
But I love you
And this is our glory
If this is goodbye
If this is goodbye

Coins of the Realm

~ John ~ Leave a comment

So what is an American?

People of diverse political stripes have lately invoked the ghost of Sen. John McCain — which has barely had time to escape his mortal remains — to bless one agenda or another.  Then last Wednesday, an anonymous senior White House official turned NYT editorialist joined the chorus, asking in McCain’s name for “everyday citizens” to shed their partisan labels “in favor of a common one: Americans.”  Reading these words on air the other night, Rachel Maddow pronounced herself perplexed: “I mean, being an ‘American’ does not exactly come with a set of instructions.”

My high school required a tenth grade civics/history class called “What is an American?”  It featured eyewitness accounts of the American Revolution, contemporary racist justifications for slavery, and original sources on the Civil War.  The question in the course title wasn’t meant to have a single answer, or perhaps any answer at all.  It was the 1970s, and everything was, you know, relative.  A conservative might argue that this cultural relativity was exactly the problem leading us down the path to Rachel Maddow’s peaked eyebrows.

Still, relativity is baked into McCain’s patriotism, in the same sense that it’s minted into every coin we carry in our pockets, with the words E Pluribus Unum.  The phrase derives from Cicero: “When each person loves the other as much as himself, it makes one out of many (unus fiat ex pluribus).”  Of course, the actual practice of such selfless love is as common in today’s politics as, well, quoting Cicero.  In the original Latin.  While wearing a toga.

It’s more common to understand the phrase as celebrating diversity: the elixir of our one-ness flowing from the fountains of our many-ness.  It’s a change from the original Latin meaning, but not really a stretch from the Founders’ rallying cry, as they tried to pull together a nation state out of diverse colonial enclaves. Nowadays liberals will stress the pluribus while conservatives stress the unum, with the net result that as a nation we fail at both.

Still, there’s one aspect of the Founders’ gloss on E pluribus unum in which McCain always believed, but with which other conservatives have long disagreed: that the unum of America is a universal set of ideas, and not a territorial birthright.  The difference between these two ideas about where rights come from traces from a philosophical clash between the conservative icon Edmund Burke on one hand, and the revolutionary icon Jean Jacques Rousseau on the other. Hannah Arendt, whose Origins of Totalitarianism grows more relevant by the day, sums up this conflict as “the Rights of Englishmen versus the Rights of Man.”  She points out that once you conclude that rights derive, not from your humanity, but from where you were born, it is a short stride to believing that races of humans originating from other places have no rights at all.

These two contradictory strands of belief have fought a silent war inside the word pluribus for over 200 years.  Our democracy has thus far survived.  Now, though, there are 7.6 billion people on Earth, and fears over mass northward migrations have sharpened this conflict to a dangerous edge.  Changing US demographics are bending our politics to the point of inflection into a new world.  Leaders are rewarded for gunning our economy past the redline, regardless of long-term consequence. Scrambles for resources, environmental and food crises exacerbated by climate change, and worsening income inequality are all likely to challenge the next generation in ways that will further stress our political institutions.

It is therefore understandable that many Americans want to retreat into the safe harbor of Burke’s “rights of Englishmen” mentality, and to restrict the entitlements of the American idea to those born on our soil. But John McCain, who was, after all, born in Panama and spent his most formative years in Vietnam, believed that America is more idea than place.

Our generation has reached a fateful moment in history, for we can no longer have it both ways.  We can choose universal rights, and keep our democracy. Or we can choose lifeboat ethics, and let it go.