I’m sure it’s not hard to figure out that I’m a liberal. I like to think that hard core right- and left-wingers are black and/or white and that liberals come not only in many shades of gray but in purples and oranges and blues and that we can shift our shades as we learn more. I hope that we are liberals because we “question assumptions” as they used to say in the sixties, even our own. Sometimes liberals are scorned as relativists: as relativists to such a degree that we have no cores. As a liberal, I’m not into absolute relativism: I don’t think that all belief systems are equal and that you can believe anything you want and live anyway you want as long as it doesn’t bother me. A long time ago, Walter Cronkite defined, if I remember correctly, a liberal as someone who had some firmly held principles and examined critically the proposals for solving problems: that dogma did not guide a liberal to solutions, and in fact following dogma didn't do anything but lead down a dark hole.
Among the principles I hold as a liberal are that the earth needs to be
treated with respect, that we should husband its resources, not plunder them;
that humans are part of nature, not separate from it and that as such, we are
ultimately utterly dependent on its health for our own; that there is no reason some
people should be rolling in wealth while far more people don’t have enough to
eat and are riddled with sickness and poverty; that we should be looking for
ways to enhance the side of our nature that recognizes that we need to care for
the rest of our pack and its home and that we need to tame the side that wants
to go it alone while recognizing its need for protection, its uniqueness and its value as a fount of creativity and love. For those who are fierce
individualists and are proud of it, I would simply ask how they would do if
they literally were alone: if they had to make it by themselves in the desert of West Texas, for instance. Or even alone on some beautiful, rich uncultivated land in Oregon without all the stuff dreamed up and made by other people: without ploughs and hoes, even, or a well. Or how they will do when they are old and infirm? Or how, for that matter, would they have made it as infants? Finally but no less important I believe that people should never be enslaved, should never have to live with their necks under the boot of a master, that we have to know in our gut that workers are at least as important as owners who could get nowhere without them. Recently I was reminded that Paul Tillich said that no human being should be treated as a "thing." I would agree with this, too, and I would add that maybe we should say the same thing about any living creature who can feel pain.
So these views inform
my outlook on what drives the good ole U.S. of A. Currently, economics is at the center of a lot of what does. I mean economics as a philosophy, if you
will, and economics as a system, and unfortunately economics as an ideology, all of which run like blood through our national
discussions about everything from taking care of our elderly and sick to why we were
urged to go out and spend, spend, spend after 9/11, to why so many are against
taxes and see government as the enemy, to why some people think we have to slice off mountain tops and sully the arctic to survive, and to why some believe that people in Africa or China have to work under terrible conditions and die young from pollution-caused diseases because globalization as we define it is not only inevitable but good for them.
But I realized that
while I had some hazy ideas about capitalism, the national budget, why the
national debt might be bad on the one hand, but wait a minute, not so bad, and
while my “instincts” (George Bush trusts his gut, remember) said that
in the name of free markets which are somehow essential to our survival, we were destroying the planet, I couldn’t put things into
focus. So I
started to read. And I want to share
some of what I have learned so that if you are where I was, you can perhaps learn some of what I have learned
and be able to talk from knowledge as well as instinct about how we got ourselves into this mess.
My first steps were to
look into some practical, immediate issues that I didn’t understand: for
instance, the national debt and the GDP/GNP which I’ve already talked about on
this blog. But they were only pieces
without roots to a bigger understanding. So I learned more about revenue and the
Federal Reserve System and business cycles and so forth. And I went back into history to find out how
we came to believe so strongly in individualism, in whatever the free market
is, and in capitalism as if it were a religion. Remember, I think we all need to study history not simply so we don’t
repeat the past but to knock down our dogmas because dogmas often did not start
out that way: ideas and systems and wrong beliefs harden into dogma over time. We humans have not come close to finding any
sort of perfect system for running our lives, and in fact our very natures may
preclude that we ever can, but we can use our heads and our hearts and our guts to try to fashion a compassionate world. Of course , as Buddhists would say, we need to be mindful: we need to watch how we decide what we decide.
So I am going to spend several posts weaving back and forth from the present into the past
to try to make sense of how and why our system is what it is, all with the goal
of making us better citizens by helping us inform ourselves. That may be one belief I hold as dogma: that
for our country to function as a democracy, our citizens need to know what the
hell is going on in it, and to understand and be able to criticize the
arguments of politicians and economists and come up with some of our own. We can and must know enough about economics in this country to guide our often foolish leaders.
In conclusion, I want to say that I am certainly willing to question my own assumptions and listen to other arguments even if I get grumpy while doing it.
