Whose Freedom?: The Battle over America's Most Important Idea Page 16
The economic liberty myth says nothing of the role of cultural capital in financial success. It is about discipline, about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, not about using your family connections and your upper-class background. The reason is that the economic liberty myth is a populist myth, meant to apply to ordinary poor and middle-class people who have strict father morality—though the myth actually benefits conservative elites the most.
THE ECONOMIC LIBERTY AND OWNERSHIP
SOCIETY MYTHS ARE SHAMS
To put it bluntly, the economic liberty and ownership society myths are shams. They hide truths that completely undermine them. Yet they are powerful and popular. They are powerful because they draw upon strict father morality, which defines self-identity for a great many Americans. They are popular because they have been repeated over and over for nearly thirty years by the right-wing message machine until they have changed the brains of tens of millions of Americans. The mere fact that they are fallacious is not sufficient to overcome their status as defining common sense for all those people. And arguing against them merely reinforces them.
Instead it is necessary to tell these truths in the form of a coherent progressive story. Here is an outline of what that story might be like.
The Progressive Story of Economic Freedom
Since the days of the Commonwealths of Virginia and Massachusetts, it has been part of the genius of America to put together the common wealth for the common good to provide an infrastructure that everyone needs and can use to achieve his or her individual goals. That’s what taxes are about, and without them we would not have that infrastructure: highways, the Internet, public education, scientific research, the banking and court systems, the stock market, public buildings, levees to hold back floodwaters. Without such an infrastructure, America would break down, no business could flourish, and there would be little or no individual success. Without the commonwealth—government for our common good—there would be no America.
America has always had a progressive work ethic based on fairness: If you work for a living, you should earn a living. Work is a contribution to society in general, and those who work should be compensated for their contributions to our overall well-being. The cheap labor trap is immoral and we must find a way to eliminate it.
Adequate early childhood education provides an essential form of cultural capital and it should be available free to all children.
The vast transfers of wealth from ordinary taxpayers to the wealthy have been unconscionable and must be stopped and, if possible, reversed.
The business of America is business. Trust is central to American business practice, and trust comes from the exercise of property responsibilities.
Large corporations should be understood as being like governments—using vast amounts of taxpayers’ money, bureaucratic, impersonal, often wasteful, and making decisions governing the everyday lives and the safety of the general public.
Institutions that govern our lives should be accountable to the public. Governing power should not be transferred from publicly accountable forms of government to private, unaccountable forms of government.
The civil justice system is there to protect us, and we must protect it.
The great engines of wealth creation in America are public education and the diversity of ideas that starts with cultural diversity and the creativity it fosters.
Markets are constructed and they are inherently moral instruments that should serve the common good.
These are the minimal guidelines for economic freedom, progressive style.
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RELIGION AND FREEDOM
Religion has taken center stage in American politics. But it isn’t just any religion: Fundamentalist Christians have made political issues out of abortion, gay marriage, stem-cell research, school prayer, the Pledge of Allegiance, evolution (and science in general), the separation of church and state, the right to proselytize, and even … Christmas! And they have done all this in the name of “freedom” and “liberty.”
The basic difference between progressive and fundamentalist Christians is in their central metaphor for God. If God is seen as a nurturant parent, you get a progressive Christianity. If God is understood as a strict father, you get a fundamentalist Christianity.
As we have seen in general in the case of strict and nurturant moral models, we all have both models, either actively or passively. And many people are biconceptual, having one model active in some aspects of their lives and the other active in other aspects of life. We expect nothing less of religion: views in which God is conceptualized as fully nurturant (the Unitarian Universalists), views in which God is conceptualized as fully strict (the fundamentalists of various denominations), and views where God is conceptualized as nurturant in some respects and strict in others.
Fundamentalists are a minority of American Christians, but they wield enormous organizational, political, and media power. One of their most powerful weapons is language—language that makes it seem as if they are not just the typical Christians, but the real Christians, the ones who read the Bible literally and correctly and act from moral convictions to promote the Truth of the Gospel. They deploy a simple logic: Americans are mostly Christians, fundamentalists are both typical Christians and ideally moral Christians, therefore they are both typical and ideally moral Americans. They seem to want the word “Christian” to mean fundamentalist. And they are in the process of convincing the media of that logic: To be a good American is to be a good Christian is to be a fundamentalist Christian, whose idea of freedom is the correct view of freedom—the Gospel Truth. It is all empirically false, but if they can establish this frame, the truth won’t matter.
To keep conservative Christians from dominating the religious discourse, we need to understand a set of complicated issues: What, exactly, are the differences between progressive and conservative Christianity? How does the concept of freedom differ in these traditions? And how do these differences show up in politics?
To understand these issues, even at a basic level, we will need a bit of background. The contemporary discourse about religion and politics uses ideas like virtue, character, and morality. We need to understand better what is meant by these ideas in the progressive and conservative Christian traditions. In addition, there are two ideas that are central to the fundamentalist tradition: essence and teleology.
ESSENCE
Human beings around the world tend to have a common folk theory of nature in which everything in the world is a kind of thing, a member of a category. We attribute to each kind of thing an essence, some property or set of properties that makes something the kind of thing it is. Essences are part of the nature of things; things would not be what they are without their essences. Elephants wouldn’t be elephants without trunks, horses wouldn’t be horses without hooves, chairs wouldn’t be chairs without seats (or a surface to sit on).
Essences define the kinds of things there are in the world. It is assumed that everything has a given essence or it doesn’t. That means that categories have clear boundaries. Every animal is either an elephant or it isn’t.
Essences have causal powers: They determine the natural behavior of things. Part of the essence of a tree is to be made of wood, which is a substance that behaves in a certain way: It burns, you can carve it with a knife, etc. Therefore, a tree will burn and it can be carved with a knife.
In classical Greek philosophy, essences were typically divided into substance, form, and pattern of change. Trees are made of a substance: wood. Trees have a form: roots, trunk, limbs, branches, leaves, and fruit. Trees have a pattern of change: They grow from seeds, sprout, grow tall and develop a limb structure, grow leaves, and eventually die and fall over.
The natural behavior of trees is seen as following from these essences: They burn because they are made of wood, you can climb them because they have a trunk and limbs, and you can plant and cultivate them because they develop from seeds and bear fruit.
Accor
ding to the theory of essences, the oak is already there in the acorn, since the pattern of change is inherent in the acorn: The acorn will naturally develop into the oak. Apply this to people: The person is there in the fertilized egg—at conception—since the fertilized egg, in the womb, will naturally develop into a child.
This idea, as we will see, is central to debates over abortion and stem-cell research.
TELEOLOGY
Teleology is the idea that things don’t just happen; they are part of some larger coherent whole that has a built-in purpose or an end state that events are moving toward. Typically, you do not know what that purpose or end state is.
Teleology for living things is bound up with the notion of flourishing, doing well given the kind of thing you are. Thus, flowers are supposed to grow and bloom, fish are supposed to swim, birds (not counting penguins and ostriches) are supposed to fly and sing their songs—and all three are supposed to grow and reproduce.
Evolution explains this without teleology, of course: Things that flourish in their habitat tend to survive. But science or no science, people will always think in terms of teleology, because that is how the human mind works. Take a sentence such as “We developed thumbs so that we could pick things up better.” This is teleological thinking. It assumes that it was determined in advance that human beings should be able to pick things up easily, and that thumbs developed so that this end state could be realized.
If you see a complex organism made up of simple parts that function in an ingenious way, like the human eye, you may well view it—using teleology—as having an “intelligent design” created by a “designer.” This designer put together from scratch all the individual elements of the eye so that it could fulfill its purpose, which is to see. In the fundamentalist tradition, that designer is God.
Teleology as a folk theory is widespread around the world. It arises naturally, first because there really are in the world a great many natural processes with natural end states, and second because we have plans and purposes and we tend to project the notion of plans and purposes onto the world. In fundamentalist religion, teleology appears as God’s plan, and all of creation is unfolding according to God’s plan.
VIRTUE ETHICS
Aristotle made the ideas of essences, teleology, and flourishing central to his theory of ethics—virtue ethics. Flourishing for an individual person is that person fulfilling his or her potential—developing and using his or her gifts to best advantage and becoming happy through doing so. Aristotle, the founder of systematic biology, understood that just as plants need to be cultivated in order to flourish, so human beings need some “cultivation” as well. Aristotle believed that people could develop certain traits—called virtues—that would help them flourish and be happy. These are personal virtues, since they apply to individuals. What is flourishing for one person may not be flourishing for another, and so different people may require different personal virtues.
Other virtues are social in nature, as required for a good society, for example, honesty and compassion. A good society, for Aristotle, is one that helps people fulfill their potential and flourish. Here we see a precursor to progressive thought, to the idea that the state has a responsibility to help citizens flourish and that good citizenship—civic virtue—is required for the state to fulfill that function.
Notice that virtue ethics uses the ideas of essence and teleology for individuals, as well as for people in general. Different people have different essences and thus different natural modes of flourishing. And of course, there are vices as well as virtues. The potential to be a liar, a thief, or a murderer—that is, one who interferes with the flourishing of others—does not count as worthy of flourishing.
MORAL LAW
Virtue ethics contrasts sharply with moral law, an approach to morality in which certain actions are defined as absolutely right and others as absolutely wrong. There are many systems of moral laws, both in America and around the world. They all have lists of rules to follow.
Virtue ethics does not require such a list of rules. In moral law theory, obedience to the law, performing an action prescribed as “right,” may very well conflict with flourishing and happiness, and with what virtue ethics considers a good society. If it does, then flourishing, happiness, and the good society are seen as wrong, and doing what will make you flourish or your society “good” can be considered evil.
Consider, for example, assisting with the suicide of a patient with a terminal disease, horrible pain, no hope of recovery, and nothing to live for. A particular system of moral law may ban assisted suicide, but in a system of virtue ethics, the virtues of empathy and responsibility may see it as moral in such a case. Or consider a fetus that develops with a genetic defect that leaves it with no brain. If born without a brain, it would soon die outside the womb and, even with life support, could never lead anything like a human life. Suppose, in addition, that the birth would endanger the life of the mother. Abortion is banned by some systems of moral law, but under virtue ethics, the virtues of empathy and responsibility may very well lead one to see terminating the pregnancy as highly moral in such a case.
Many people live by a moral law that requires absolute nonviolence, and yet in some situations violence may be required to save the lives of others. In such a case, under virtue ethics, empathy for a potential murder victim could declare certain violence moral, where the given moral law would not.
Moral law very often requires discipline and sacrifice, because what is best for your individual flourishing, and even survival, can violate some precept of moral law. This is a form of discipline—negative discipline—that can be diametrically opposed to your flourishing. Virtue ethics also requires discipline, but it is usually a different kind: one that supports and makes possible flourishing—positive discipline.
Within the idea of moral law, developing “character” is developing negative discipline—the moral strength to say no to your desires and to make sacrifices for the sake of obeying the moral law. Virtue, in a moral law system, consists in obeying moral laws, and virtues are traits that help you obey moral laws even under difficult conditions. This is what is meant by virtues when used by ultraconservative writers like William Bennett and Rick Santorum. They are social virtues appropriate for all, rather than personal virtues, which are not taken seriously by conservatives. As Dick Cheney said in rejecting the very idea of including conservation of energy as government policy, “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”
Character is very different in virtue ethics than in a morality based on moral law: Character consists in having the right social virtues—empathy, responsibility, honesty, etc.—as well as the focus and the energy, to function virtuously under trying circumstances and not give up.
Causation is also a part of character in the two models. Moral law is about direct causation, about individuals obeying the law, about individual action or individual ability to refrain from action. Character in moral law requires the ability to control direct causation. Character in virtue ethics is about both direct and systemic causation, the ability to understand the complexity of social systems, to judge complex situations, to understand the complex effects of one’s actions, and then to do what is most ethical according to both personal and social virtues.
Virtue ethics and moral law are both moral systems. Neither is relativistic, neither says that anything goes. Virtue ethics has the advantage of promoting a recognition of systemic causation and hence of allowing many complex realities to be recognized that might be ignored under moral law. And there are systems where both occur and one is given priority.
Essence, teleology, virtue ethics, and moral law are everyday ideas that have shaped philosophy and, in so doing, have had a major impact on religion and politics.
We are now in a position to see how these ideas function in progressive and conservative Christianity—and in politics.
Let us begin
our discussion with progressive Christianity. It is the Christianity of American freedom—of the abolitionists, the suffragists, and the civil rights movement.
PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIANITY
Progressive Christians see God as a nurturant parent, offering unconditional love and grace. Grace, for progressive Christians, is metaphorical nurturance: You have to be close to God to get grace, you can’t earn grace, you have to actively accept grace to get it, you are filled with grace, you are healed by grace, you are made a moral being by grace. Christ, in the progressive tradition, offers a model for living—the embodiment of the progressive values of empathy and responsibility. Progressive Christians tend to focus not on the apocalyptic strain of the New Testament but on Jesus’ acts and the values they represent.
These values are tied up with flourishing and with a kind of virtue ethics. If you empathize with someone, you want him or her to flourish. If you are responsible to yourself and others, you want to work for a society that maximizes flourishing for all. God’s grace—His nurturance—helps you flourish. You can’t earn grace, but you can do what is necessary: get close to God, by following in Christ’s footsteps and living a Christian life.
What is a Christian life, one lived according to the moral teachings of Jesus? Renounce violence (turn the other cheek), don’t try to dominate others (the meek shall inherit the earth), be tolerant (judge not lest ye be judged), offer forgiveness (who will cast the first stone?), love your neighbor as yourself, heal the sick, help the poor and helpless.