In God We Trust–Who Else?

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Faith is a virtue, but it is also word with multiple meanings.  Belief, trust, and loyalty are the most common ones.  Saint Paul’s use of the Greek word pistis is often translated as allegiance or loyalty, while the Latin version (credo) has come to mean belief (as in creeds).  These meanings are  not mutually exclusive.  However, to the extent that people interpret the term belief in a religious context as a set of statements about reality that they are asked to accept as factual truths, trust may be a more useful translation of faith as one of the core attitudinal virtues.

Loyalty is more a behavior than an attitude and is somewhat neutral as a potential virtue, because one can be loyal to something that is harmful or destructive. Our nation is currently deeply divided by mutual mistrust in politics, in part fostered and nurtured by individual and groups in furtherance of their own agenda.  In particular, they cultivate loyalty to their own group and distrust of everyone else—which supports the assertion that loyalty is not always a virtue. For our civic purposes, trust rather than belief or loyalty is the most useful interpretation of the virtue called faith.

Trust begins by listening to your gut, your instincts, but it does not end there.  There is also that all-important verify part when it comes to practicing trust in community.  Whom do you trust to listen and respectfully disagree, opening your mind to other ways of thinking?  What sources of information are credible? Just like active hope, cautious trust is an invaluable attitudinal virtue to cultivate and exercise for every aspect of our lives, not just governance. Democratic process is just “trust but verify” on a larger scale.  Knowing that there will be another election plays a key role in holding elected officials accountable to the public trust.

Trust lies somewhere between gullibility or naiveté as its extreme and paranoia or simply distrust as its opposite. Trust is not blind. Trust Allah but tie up your camel is an old Arab proverb. Former Soviet Leader Michael Gorbachev urged that both sides trust but verify. Doubt lies somewhere between trust and disbelief, and serves the purpose of calling us to ground trust in factual knowledge and demonstrated behavior by those people and institutions we have invited into positions of power and authority.

Trust is an important element of a nation’s social capital as described by Stiglitz et.al. in Measuring What Counts.  Social capital has been described as the glue that holds a society together—a shared history, sometimes a shared ancestry, holidays and celebrations, customs and usually language. Trust is a form of social capital that makes it possible to enter into agreements without spelling out all the details or constantly running to the courts to enforce them.  I recall a contract to build an addition on our home many decades ago.  The contract read, “build upstairs addition, $10,000.”  When he would tell me to go pick out light fixtures, or carpeting, I would say, “Do I pay for them?” He said  “No, it’s in the contract!” Contracts are less likely to be spelled out in detail in a small town where everyone knows everyone else.  I was a relative newcomer and had to learn the local customs, which were grounded in trust that was in turn grounded in networks of kinship and neighborhoods.

 Trust is not just an attitudinal virtue when it comes to civil society; it is also an asset that builds slowly but dissipates quickly. Inequality and diversity both can undermine trust in civic institutions., Inequality creates fear and resentment toward those who use money to gain power over others. Diversity encourages the creation of silos of people with a common heritage, and fosters distrust.

Trust begins by listening to your gut, your instincts, but it does not end there.  That’s the verify part.  Whom do you trust to listen and respectfully disagree, opening your mind to other ways of thinking?  What sources of information are credible? Just like active hope, cautious trust is an invaluable attitudinal virtue to cultivate and exercise for every aspect of our lives, not just governance. Democratic process is just “trust but verify” on a larger scale.  Knowing that there will be another election plays a key role in holding elected officials accountable to the public trust.

Historically, kings ruled by divine right, tyrants usurped authority and held on to it by force.  Only in modern times did the checks and balances of democratic constitutions provide a good reason to trust authority because no one had absolute power. In the United States, the division of authority among three branches of government and the sharing of power between the federal government and the states both offer constraints on abuse of power. But democracies have succumbed to dictatorship in the past. Our trust as citizens has been frequently undermined and challenged by social media and self-serving politicians who are careless of with the truth and opportunistic in the use of power, whose loyalty to party is placed above loyalty to the Constitution and the public. In a democracy, the survival of self-government or any other form of government depends on the faith, belief, and trust of its citizens in its elected leaders’ willingness and ability to govern in their interest.

Betrayal of that trust to seek to seize and retain power and/or exercise it for personal benefit will undermine authority. One of our biggest challenges as a nation is to affirm a “trust but verify” attitude as a habit of the heart that leads to respect for authority and for our fellow citizens,, civic participation, and willingness to compromise—all essential to the survival of democracy.

Historically, kings ruled by divine right, tyrants usurped authority and held on to it by force.  Only in modern times did the checks and balances of democratic constitutions provide a reason to trust authority because no one had absolute power. In the United States, the division of authority among three branches of government and the sharing of power between the federal government and the states both offer constraints on abuse of power. But democracies have succumbed to dictatorship in the past.

Our trust as citizens has been frequently undermined and challenged by social media and self-serving politicians who are careless of with the truth and opportunistic in the use of power, whose loyalty to party is placed above loyalty to the Constitution and the public. In a democracy, the survival of self-government or any other form of government depends on the faith, belief, and trust of its citizens in its elected leaders’ willingness and ability to govern in their interest.

In what or whom should we trust? Our instincts. Our doubts. And those voices and people an sources that have proved trustworthy in the past,whether they are scientists, public officials, personal friends, news sources, or communities and organizations that are open to other views and different perspectives. Trust is the foundation of democracy. Don’t let distrust take away our most precious possession as a nation.

When Hope is Hard to Find

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Today’s virtue is hope. That title is from a hymn called “ Come sing a song with me,” and the line is “and I’ll bring you hope, when hope is hard to find.” Hope is a virtue, a habit of the heart in the words of sociologist Robert Bellah. It is one of four attitudinal virtues—hope, faith, love, and grace.  Three from Saint Paul and one more that are the ground for all the behavioral virtues that we observe in ourselves and others.

Like all virtues, hope lies at the golden mean between its opposite—despair or pessimism—and its extreme—optimism. I used to think of myself as an optimist, but that was before I learned the difference between optimism and hope. Optimism is just expecting things to turn out well.  Hope, or what theologian Joanna Macy calls Active Hope, means having a vision of how things might be, could be, should be, and working to bring it about. Hope in the heart is the mother of virtues like courage, responsibility, engagement. Hope’s motto is Yes, I can, or even better, Yes, we can.

Hope requires two tools to direct and sustain active hopeful engagement.  One is a vision of a better way, a better life, a better world.  The other is a community that can share or at least “catch” the hope and provide mutual support in working toward it. Vision embraced by a community is how we put our hope to work.

Hope has to confront risk and move beyond it.  One of the most fascinating concepts in statistics is the two types of error.  Type I is accepting a hypothesis as true when it is, in fact, false.  Type II error is rejecting as false a hypothesis that is, in fact, true.  A high standard for truth, which is the goal of science, minimizes the first risk but increases the second.  Hope means accepting a certain amount of risk of being wrong in order to move on.  Risk invites fear, and fear can paralyze active hope. All the great heroes of history and literature kept hope alive, confronting an even embracing risk in order to achieve what they did—Mandala in ending apartheid in South Africa, suffragists in the 72 year struggle for voting rights for women, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement.

So where do we find hope when hope is hard to find?  First, in having a big enough vision that the most we can do is propel it in the right direction. Second, in being part of a community that shares that vision and passes it on. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr reminds us that Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.  The suffragists in Seneca Falls in 1848 did not get to vote, but my great grandmother, born in 1854, marched for women’s suffrage with countless others and voted in the presidential elections in 1920 and 1924.  She was saved by hope, which she caught from her foremothers and passed on to her grandchildren.

Hopes need to be big hopes, shared hopes, inspiring hopes.  Restoring civility to our nation. Protecting democracy. Reducing violence. Resisting climate change. Caring for the vulnerable. Pick one or two hopes for the future and find companions to work toward them.   Which hope will you embrace and work for both alone and in community to bring about?

Dwelling Together in Peace (?)

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Economist Albert Hirschman wrote a classic book in the 1970s called Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. He explored decisions to stay or leave, and if we stay, how we might try to  bring about change by speaking up or speaking out.  His examples range from divorce, to social clubs, where we work or shop, to where we live, to the Mafia, which is quite risky to leave. A good friend once called exiting by physically relocating “the geographic solution,” moving to the other side of the fence where the grass is greener only to find that you brought the same dissatisfied self along. So sometimes adapting to the culture and its values is the best choice. If you have a reasonable alternative—another job, another place to live—exit is less costly, but if the alternatives are unsatisfactory or costly, you may decide to grit your teeth, hang in there, and try to bring about change.  

Sometimes we exit and then use voice to express our frustration after our departure. Other times we try to use voice and when that fails to bring about change, we reluctantly exit. Voice is the primary tool of the political scientist, exit the strategy favored by economists.

Loyalty is a factor in staying or leaving.  That’s why advertisers try to develop brand loyalty, why organizations have high entrance fees or departure penalties, why colleges and churches stress the community and identity components of the experience they offer in order to encourage people to remain (for colleges, as supportive alumni). Many organizations—social, civic, commercial, religious—stress that they are held together by shared values, and belonging to that group becomes a part of your identity.

States and nations have shared civic values. Sometimes those values that don’t reflect our personal preferences. The state or nation in which we are born is often hard to leave, because of the bonds of shared culture, family and friends, the comfort of familiar surroundings, a shared history and language. Often it feels like a take it or leave it situation. Someone else has defined the values and the priority among those values, and you feel like you had no voice in shaping or changing them.

High costs or serious drawbacks to leaving can help a city (or a college, or a congregation, or a business, or a family) that is going through difficult times  recover and change in a positive way, because those who find exit difficult will use voice instead. They will make their concerns known and encourage others to do likewise. If they don’t like their city government, it is less costly  to run for city council than to sell your house and move to another town. Feeling trapped in a marriage, they may choose marriage counseling over divorce. Rather than taking a store off the shopping list, customers can talk to the management about why they are thinking of leaving. 

Americans arrived in North America from many different places.  Except for the African Americans who arrived as slaves, most of those who emigrated to American made the decision to come for one of two driving reasons.  After all, it takes a pretty powerful motive to cross a very big ocean, knowing that it you may never again see your homeland and some of your loved ones.  Some were driven by war, revolution, or disaster—the Irish potato famine, for example. Others came because they had a taste for adventure, to try something new. They were people tended to who value freedom over security. 

That preference has left its mark on our shared DNA. It leads to favoring the geographic solution to dissatisfaction, a pattern that continued until we ran out of frontiers, but until recently was still reflected in a high rate of geographic mobility among Americans. Mobile Americans assumed that they did not have to bloom where we were planted, but could  uproot themselves and start over somewhere else. Exit was a viable option.

As the frontier closed, and the effects of being transient took a toll of family life and children’s sense of security, American mobility within the country has declined. Psychologist Bella de Paula[1] writes that “only about 10 percent of Americans — or even fewer — change homes in any given year. Twenty years ago, in the year 2000, about 15 percent moved. Twenty years before that, in 1980, about 18 percent changed homes. And in 1950, about 20 percent of Americans moved — about twice as many as today. What’s more, when people move, it is usually not very far…geography professor Thomas Cooke found that most people who move stay within the same county, fewer move to a different county within the same state, and fewer still move to a different state. In 2019, only 1.5% of Americans moved to a different state.” She cites technology that enables us to access resources without relocating, the high cost of moving, two-career families, and the joy of “rootedness” as reasons for the decline. 

Americans today are less likely to exit and more likely to use voice to bring about change from within. That reduced mobility calls for learning to live with others who do not see the world the way we do, and to focus on those values that we do share. Instead, in our current political environment, it also often results in voice being expressed as violence and polarization, feeling that we are stuck with a bunch of fellow citizens that just don’t get us—on both sides.

As I write this, we are headed toward an election that will continue the polarization regardless of the outcome.  So this blog is the first of a series of five on the core civic virtues and how practicing them might help us to restore civility, respect,  and a willingness to compromise to our public dialogue. Next week: Active hope.

[1] https://psychcentral.com/blog/the-psychology-of-staying-put-why-mobility-in-the-u-s-has-been-declining-for-decades/.

Causes, Heroes, and Statues

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One of my favorite living heroes, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, died this week.  It happened while I was working on a sermon for October 11th called After Columbus, about statues  (that will be my next blog). Her death led me to reflect on what makes someone a hero. In brief, showing courage and dedication in a noble cause.  That heroism may be in spite of various flaws, but the courage, dedication, and noble cause are all required.  That third criterion is what distinguishes Washington and Jefferson from Robert E. Lee in the great battle over statues.

I started by enumerating noble causes, and I came up with four that date back to at least the early nineteenth century and are still with us today: Abolition and civil rights, suffrage and feminism, humanitarian support, and environmental protection. You may have others.  Certainly there are heroes of a more intellectual bent who made pioneering contributions to science, medicine, engineering, astronomy, mathematics, biology.  Courage was not always evident, but it certainly was for Galileo and Darwin.  However, for me, the four noble causes are enough. 

Here are my heroes. If you haven’t heard of some of them, Google them.

For abolition and civil rights: Frederick Douglass, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King jr., the Grimke sisters, Robert Smalls, Theodore Parker, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman.

For suffrage and feminism: Abigail Adams, the Grimke sisters and Frederick Douglass again, Alice Paul, Lucretia Mott, Gloria Steinem, Margaret Sanger, Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

For humanitarian work: Jimmy Carter, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jane Addams, Mahatma Gandhi, Dag Hammerskjold, Bryan Stevenson, Dorothea Dix.

For environmental protection: Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Rachel Carson, All Gore, and countless Native American tribes.

What are your causes and who are your heroes? What are you doing to follow in their footsteps, which is a better way to honor them than by erecting a statue or naming a building?

Putting “Defects” to Work

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My gardening friend says that a weed is just a flower in the wrong place.  I wish I could cultivate her positive attitude toward weeds.  But it is true that some of us struggle to blossom in the right place, the one where we are an ornament rather than an irritation.  Finding our niche, our calling, our self-expression is an important task that follows us through life. It requires us to be aware of certain of our inborn (or sometimes cultivated traits.  I have one of my own and one of my granddaughter’s in mind when I think about finding our niche, our vocation, the place where our gifts meet our passions.  Sometimes those gifts masquerade as failures or faults.

My granddaughter has been diagnosed as “on the spectrum,” with elements of autism that include obsessive compulsive disorder (CD).  Her mother remarked that she hoped Abby could channel her OCD into something that would enable her to succeed, like her other grandmother, who was also OCD, and  raised eight children and cared for dozens of others and eventually entered library work.  Abby has been at loose ends after getting her AA degree and has been happily working in a pizza place for two years., but she is thinking about her future  She is taking the initial steps toward becoming a pharmacy tech.  I am sort of at the opposite end of the spectrum, so it wouldn’t appeal to me and I wouldn’t be good at it, but if there is one valuable trait in a person who manages prescriptions and keeps track of pharmaceuticals, it is OCD.  I have high hopes for her.

My particular trait that is not always valued in my chosen profession of academic/policy economist is linked to my “butterfly” personality on the Enneagram, easily distracted, interested in everything, having trouble narrowing myself to a limited range of ideas and interests. Traditional academia values focus, specialization, intensive over extensive, and frowns on interdisciplinary work (although that is beginning to change). I loved economics but was also very interested in its relationship to other disciplines, especially psychology, sociology, history,  and political science. And eventually theology, with a focus on ethics, when I got a post retirement degree in theological studies.

That breadth rather than depth of interest made me particularly good at the underappreciated academic skill of synthesis, held up as a form of scholarship in the Carnegie Report several decades ago.  It made me a good teacher because my lectures connected economics to many aspects of life and related disciplines. It made me a good textbook writer. It made me a good policy analyst, because it gave me a broader context to examine the impact of alternative policy choices.  When I went back to teaching, I put together the threads of the emerging sub-discipline of behavioral economics in order to teach a graduate class in Political Economy and Public Policy that integrated those other disciplines.

So here is a question for each of you to ponder.  What quality in yourself do others complain about? Procrastination?  Maybe you are just letting things simmer and develop rather than rushing to completion. Inability to work alone? Maybe you are meant to be a team member. One crazy scheme after another?  They said that about Edison.

Whether it is your own inner qualities or those of your children, students, or friends, hold up a mirror that helps them see that quality and its potential in the right choices of work, hobbies, civic engagement or anything else they want to be part of their lives.  They will be richer for it, and so will the rest of us.

I Own This Space

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When it’s my turn, it’s my turn, and when it’s your turn, I have to wait.  We learned that in kindergarten.  We may not be as good as the Brits about queuing up, but by and large our kindergarten training kicks in.  Except when it doesn’t.  So here are a few of my recent pet peeves.

I was one of seven speakers at an event last week at the state Capitol.  The host person went first, and I was second.  It was clear from the printed agenda both when it was my turn and how long I was to talk and I obediently followed instructions, saying my three minutes worth.  I was the only one to do so.  The others, all of whom had been informed about the three minutes, rattled on until they had read their entire prepared speeches, frequently duplicating each other. The ”backdrop people” on the capitol steps stood patiently in the hot South Carolina sun through the whole thing. 

Later that day, I was part of a long Zoom meeting with seven of us needing to make a pitch briefly at the end for our particular project.  We were told we each had two minutes.  This time I was last.  After the others had gone on for three, five, six, seven minutes each, I quietly clicked on “leave meeting.” My day’s tolerance for inconsiderate behavior had been exhausted. Ronald Reagan’s line about “I paid for this microphone” lives on even when we have not, in fact, paid for the microphone.  (Reagan had.)

The same happens at any place where a line is formed.  Once a person get to the bank teller, or the checkout clerk, or whoever is processing the line, a sense of ownership of that time and space often takes over, with no consideration for the people behind you in line.  Take your time, change your mind, ask stupid questions.  You own this space and this person’s attention.

Yet another form that this sense of entitlement can be observed is in traffic.  When it becomes evident that this lane is going to be blocked ahead, people in that lane turn on their signals and persuade some kindly driver to let them merge.  Or not.  Some pass all the patiently (?) waiting cars in the adjacent lane until they get to the point of blockage and then turn on their signal to take a place in line ahead of all those they have passed. And someone lets them in.  I don’t.

Places like doctor’s offices and Social Security offices and doughnut shops and the Department of Motor Vehicles  have smartened up and don’t ask the question “Who’s next?”  Instead, they give you a number, and you don’t get your turn until your number is called.  But in much of the world, aggressors will do their best to get to the head of the line and keep their place once they get there until they run out of things to say. These various forms of rudeness are endemic in our individualistic society.

So how are we to respond?  I have a short fuse, which I try to keep under control. Looking at my watch may offer a gentle suggestion, if the perp is paying attention.  It doesn’t do any good to express or give in to anger when it won’t change things.  Time for the Reinhold Niebuhr prayer about the patience to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change those we  can, and the wisdom to know the difference.  But I also recognize that these assertive acts are a form of bullying, and tolerating bullying is a form of enabling.  It’s quite okay to say, I’m sorry, I was next.  Or not let that car that just raced past you into your lane.  He (it’s usually a he) can just wait until the last car he passed on that sprint has passed him. And above all, to raise our children, teach our students, and model good behavior as a way to  try to change a society of self-absorbed people into the kind of fellow citizens we want to live with.

Any other thoughts on how to respond to this highly contagious social disease?

Passionately Moderate

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How, my oldest daughter asks, can you call yourself passionately moderate? I thought you were a liberal.  Yes, I answered, my personal preferences are liberal. Universal health care, a woman’s right to reproductive choice, a tax system that doesn’t favor the wealthy, affordable college and affordable housing…the list goes on. But I realize that a sizeable chunk of my city, state and nation subscribes to a different set of priorities and preferences, overlapping in some cases and diametrically opposite in others.  And even if my views were those of the majority, which they are in some cases, I don’t want to impose them on a frustrated and probably angry minority.  I am willing to compromise, to settle for the good or even the good enough for now rather than holding out for the very best. I am passionate about that openness to compromise, the give and take so that none of us get exactly what we want personally but what may be good enough, at least for now.  That makes me a liberal in theory and a moderate in practice.

Moderation lies at the core of the two academic disciplines I love the most and have taught to several generations of college students   I have a Ph.D. in economics from my early days and worked as an academic economist for 30 years.  Then I went to seminary and got a master’s degrees in theology with a concentration in ethics, which helped me to get my economic head and my theological heart on the same page. It also gave me the opportunity to teach ethics and public policy for 15 years to graduate students in policy studies because I was able to bring these two  disciplines together.

As both an economist and a theologian, I was interested in very practical questions about how we live our lives, and in particular, how we live in community.  For an economist, that means a focus on policy—making and implemented decisions that affect our material well-being in our common life.  For theology, my focus has been ethics, which was my concentration in seminary.  Theological ethics explores how our faith understanding guides our participation in governance in a democratic society. In the process of studying ethics, I fell in love with virtue ethics.

 The heart of Aristotelian virtue ethics, infused into late medieval scholasticism by Thomas Aquinas,  is moderation.  Moderation is fulcrum on which Aristotle’s golden mean rests. Aristotle’s golden mean contends that each virtue lies at the midpoint between two vices (or sins, in Christian/Jewish language).  One vice is the virtue’s extreme, the other its opposite.  His notion of the golden mean fit perfectly into the decision processes of my economic mind and my progressive heart.

Barry Goldwater got  it wrong when, running for president in 1964, he said,  “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue”. Extremism is tempting, but Goldwater lost in a landslide. BErnie Sanders, running for the Democratic nomination, took absolute positoins on health care, free college education, and other issues and met a similar fate. Moderation, along with patience, is a more likely path to human flourishing.

Thirty years ago, economist Alan Blinder wrote a book called Hard Heads, Soft Hearts, arguing that the Republicans were the party of hard heads, hard hearts, while the Democrats were the party of soft heads, soft hearts. What we needed,he wrote, was hard heads and soft hearts, rational decision processes tempered by compassion and empathy for others. The same dichotomy exists between economists and theologians—and in my head and heart.  That same dichotomy also exists between theologians of right and left and economists of right and left.  It is in the middle that we engage both head and heart in dialogue with each other.

 The core of economic decision-making is a balancing act, weighing costs and benefit, pain and pleasure, and steering a middle course rather than going to the extremes.  In fact, economics embodies utilitarian ethics, the greatest good for the greatest number.  It’s all about getting to get good outcomes.

In political economy (the old name of economics as a guide guide to public policy), moderation is not just a principle, it’s a survival strategy. The successful candidate is ever in search of the median voter, constantly resisting the pull of the extremes where few voters reside.  Yes, there is lure of standing tall for what you believe, whether it’s an extreme version of the second amendment or free college for all;  rigid and unyielding in the face of pressure to compromise. It’s high drama, but it doesn’t create or sustain communities in which we can dwell together in peace and enable humans to be nurtured and flourish.   So if you value a healthy and sustainable human community, please consider join me in declaring yourself a passionate moderate. With this qualification from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Moderation in all things, including moderation.”

The golden mean applies not just to virtue, but to other qualities of being.  I have friends who are perfectionists, which is frustrating for them because it is impossible to always be perfect, and so often the perfect keeps us from getting to the good enough. Perfection is the opposite of moderation.  Carelessness, indifference, apatheia represent the extreme.  I vacillate between appreciating the gift perfectionists bring and exasperation at the lack of big picture, the delays while everything is revisited one more time.  I have worked with perfectionists, and it has never been easy for either of us.

My passion for moderation is a passion for process, not outcomes.  In order to practice moderation as a commitment to good process, you have to let your inner Buddha guide you in letting go of attachment to outcomes. I do believe that in most cases that good processes are more likely to lead to good outcomes. Not best outcomes. Not perfect outcomes.  But again, outcomes that are steps in the right direction, or good enough for now. 

Note: This blog is an excerpt from the opening chapter of a book in progress.

Shouting the Battle Cry of Freedom

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That title is from a Civil War song that begins

Yes we’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again

Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

We will rally from the hillside, we’ll gather from the plain

Shouting the battle cry of freedom!

Although these lyrics were written for a Union song, there is ironically also a Confederate version, pitting the freedom to own slaves against the freeing of the slaves. Americans claim many shared values, but none is bandied about nearly as much by both sides of issues like abortion, gun safety, wearing masks during a pandemic and the right of the citizens peaceably to assemble and petition for a redress of grievances. (Is that language familiar? It’s in the first amendment.)

July is the month of revolutions—American, French and Cuban.  Freedom was a rallying cry in all three—from oppression, from taxation without representation, from autocratic rule, from gross inequities in access to opportunities and resources.

Freedom is held in higher esteem or at least gets more lip service than any other value in American society.  Freedom has been invoked in claiming rights to gun ownership (the right to bear arms) and the right to an abortion, because both the political right and the political left invoke freedom on opposite sides of the same issue. Freedom is central to the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution. They focus on protecting us from government interventions not only in free speech and religion, free press and the right to protest, but also the right to bear arms, to be safe from unreasonable searches and seizures, to refuse to incriminate ourselves in a court of law.  All of these freedoms, however, were not available to enslaved people, and many of those freedoms were not available to Native Americans or women.

Like any abstract ideal, when it comes to freedom, the devil is in the details.  What happens when your freedom encroaches on mine?  What happens when exercising our freedom takes away the freedom of others? What good is freedom without food and a roof over our head?   The four freedoms, made famous by President Franklin Roosevelt in a 1941 speech, are freedom of speech and religion, freedom from want and fear. Those last two freedoms recall the words of Anatole France who famously (and sarcastically) reminded the French in 1894 that “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”   

Freedom conflicts with other values that are also important. Equality (all men are created equal) as well as the inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.  The ideal of equality, or its less demanding cousin, fairness, may means that your freedom to keep everything you earn has to be qualified by progressive taxation in order to provide opportunities for others.  The freedom to succeed needs to be accompanied by the freedom to fail, but in practice we provide lots of protections against the actual consequences of failure, at least for corporations, or for debtors other than those who owe student loans.

The right to choose how we govern ourselves was another key part of that document. Today we interpret that to mean fair elections without suppressing or diluting the vote with political gerrymandering, Voter ID laws, too few polling places, or discouraging voting by mail.

Other core communal values are spelled out in the Preamble to the Constitution, which calls Americans to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Note the other values that share the stage with freedom or liberty—justice, domestic tranquility, defense, and general welfare.  

The other two July revolutions had similar vision of the good society. The French revolution’s motto was liberté, egalité, fraternité—freedom, equality, brotherhood. The Cuban revolution had similar goals, although both the French and Cuban revolutions were quickly sidetracked into new forms of oppression.   In this month of revolutions, it may be time for each of us to examine the content of our patriotism.  Where do we stand on the balance of freedom, equality and community (a nonsexist version of brotherhood)?  What limitations on personal freedom—wearing masks, gun safety laws, requiring states to make voting more accessible—do we support in the name of equality and community? As we transition from a month of revolutions to a season of elections, these are important questions to consider.

We Are What We Believe We Are

~ purplesage41 ~ 1 Comment

As an economist, I have always been puzzled by the basic assumption that we are all pursuing our own self-interest.  And fascinated by studies that suggest that the study of economics makes people more self-interested and less altruistic. I also questioned the dominant assumption of economists since the mid-20th century that the human mind is just a giant cost-benefit calculating machine. So I was relieved to reconnect with a long tradition in economics that challenged that pair of assumptions about humans. 

One part of that challenge questioned the capability of the human mind as an efficient calculating machine.  We would make better (if still self-interested) decisions if we fed all the data into a computer along with our preferences.  A lot of behavioral economics has been devoted to examining that assumption, questioning our ability to choose wisely or well from either an altruistic or self-interested perspective.  Having too many choices confuses us. We are influenced by the context in which the choice is made and are very bad at estimating probability, which plays an important role in making good choices. (For example, we insure too much against low dollar risks and not enough against infrequent but very expensive losses.)

Far harder to dislodge is the first assumption, self-interest.  Always competition, never co-operation. Every generation a Me generation. From Greek cynicism and Christianity’s doctrine of original sin, we are encouraged by our culture to believe the worst about human nature.  That view is reinforced by the news, by economists, and by political leaders who are, as it is fashionable to say, on the spectrum.  Not the autism spectrum, the self-interested spectrum. After all, many people run for office because they want power and control, so why are we surprised when they abuse it? 

But there are also people running for office because they find it a venue in which to work to make the world a better place, just like nurses and firefighters and teachers and other helping professions. They seek power both for their own satisfaction and to do good in the world. Yes, we are all a mix of self-interest and altruism, but if we are told that greed is good, self-interest is normal, and other people and institutions can’t be trusted, we begin to internalize that view of ourselves and others.  It leads to defeatism and hopelessness and a lot of sales of insurance policies to protect ourselves against a hostile world.

But is it, in fact, actually true? Dutch author Rutgers Bregman in his new book Humankind has single -handedly enabled me to affirm my alternative view of the world, which believes that most of us lie on the hopeful, trusting, at least somewhat altruistic range of the spectrum of human personality. That we are a mixture of original sin and original blessing, and it is up to our families, or institutions and our culture to focus our attention on the glass half-full, the original blessing part.  I know my hopeful view is shared by my family and close friends, in part because my husband and I  conveyed that understanding to our family and chose our friends because they shared that world view.  It calls us to rejoice in the success of others, come to their aid in times of crisis, to share their sorrows and try to create more peace, joy, hope, love, and generosity in the world.

Saint Paul, with whom I have some issues, got it right when he said, Faith, hope, love, these three abide, but the greatest of these is love. I would add a fourth, grace (or gratitude) as the four essential attitudes (or virtues) that are the foundation for a positive view of human nature.  Faith, or trust—in ourselves, in the sacred, in humanity, in the reality of goodness.  Hope, or as theologian Joanna Macy would qualify it, active hope-belief that the world can become a better place if we do our part.  Love, the mother of kindness, compassion, justice that make life worth living. Grace or gratitude, the belief that everything we have –our health, our loved ones, our food, nature, our skills, our opportunities, even our challenges—are free gifts that we can use to live wisely and well for ourselves and others. 

So, reading this book, I resolved to mostly turn off the news, which focuses on the negative in the world and in humanity.  Maybe PBS News Hour is enough. I resolved to assume the best intentions in others and to affirm my own best intentions.  I think it will contribute to my inner peace. And as Lao-Tse reminds us, if there is to be peace in the world, there must first be peace in the heart, then in the home, among neighbors in the cities, among the nations. 

Let it begin with me. And you.

And read the book, it’s really good.

Pagan Fusion

~ purplesage41 ~ Leave a comment

 

We all know that many of our holiday customs have pagan origins.  Easter eggs and rabbits and lilies, trick or treat at Halloween, yule logs and Christmas trees.  But I think that the pagan influence is deeper and wider.  What are the top four holidays in this country? Christmas, Easter, 4th of July, and either Halloween or Thanksgiving (which is too close to Christmas).  Each one of them arguably is a blend of the eight holidays on the wheel of the year, blending traditions from the two closest pagan holidays.  Four sky holidays—the solstices and equinoxes)–share the wheel with the earth-based cross-quarter holidays of Imbolc, Beltane, Lammas, and Samhain, which (respectively) celebrate the signs of earth’s renewal, fertility, first harvest, and descent into winter..

Starting the year at Christmas in the deep winter only a  few  days after the solstice, we bring nature indoors.  Winter solstice was celebrated at midnight, a custom that survives in midnight mass.  The greenery comes indoors and we light candles to entice the returning sun.  Some of the winter holiday blend spills over to trying to hasten the signs of spring (easy when you live in the South as I do). The fit of spring cleaning takes place at that time as it did in the ancient time of Imbolc.  At Imbolc the holiday greens were discarded and the house prepared for spring.  So if you are late in taking down your decorations, just blame it on the pagans.

The next pair is the spring equinox and Beltane, with Easter conveniently falling in between.  The spring equinox is celebrated at sunrise—sunrise Easter service, anyone? It’s also a fertility festival as the earth renew itself along with Jesus’s resurrection. Fertility symbols—rabbits, eggs—migrated from Norse paganism to attach themselves to Easter. The fertility part spills past the X-rated celebration of Beltane (May 1st) to add the more sedate and sentimental Mothers’ Day to the mix.

The shift of the two summer holidays attached itself,  not to a Christian festival but to a national holiday in the United States, Independence Day.  Summer solstice was celebrated with bonfires at noon.  We have the 4th of July picnic at noon, celebrating the harvest foods of corn and watermelon that connect us to the Lammas first harvest on August 1st, although the fireworks replacing the bonfire have to wait till after dark to be fully appreciated. The solstice, around the 21st or 22nd of June, often coincides with Fathers’ Day.  In the Celtic tradition, earth is female, sun is male, so it is appropriate to celebrate fathers at the summer solstice as the sun is at the height of his powers, shedding warmth and light on all below.

The autumnal equinox is the most neglected of the four sky holidays, but it does mark the turn toward winter, which becomes more pronounced at Samhain or Halloween.  Samhain marked the return of the flocks from the fields, some to be wintered and others to be slaughtered.  Only the turkey—one pardoned, others roasted– reminds us of that aspect of wintering, along with the final harvest that also migrates to thanksgiving.  The autumn equinox was celebrated at dusk, which is the time to go trick or treating, or if you wait till much later, to eat the leftovers from the Thanksgiving feast.  The baptizing of Halloween into all saints and all souls days is a reminder of the darkness and ending of the cycle of the year before we begin again. In fact, both the Jews and the Celts celebrated the new year at this time of year.  Just as the Jewish sabbath began at sundown, going into and emerging from the darkness into the light, so it was with the seasons for both Jews and Celts.

The blending of holidays does not diminish either their Christian significance or their pagan significance. Rahter, the holiday cycle is a multi-dimensional celebration of human history,  faith, and tradition alongside a connection to the earth and the heavens and the turning of the seasons.  It’s not a binary choice.  We can do both without dishonoring either, because both traditions enrich the textures of our individual and common lives.