Thanksgiving 2015

It is Thanksgiving day. After preparing some of the food to be cooked this afternoon, we took our dogs for a long walk in the words to the west of here. The woods are crisscrossed by stone walls; 100 or even 50 years ago what is now dense forest must have been open farmland. It connects us to the rural past that we remember on Thanksgiving Day when we are grateful for ample harvests and granaries filled for the coming wint

 We also remember the proud self-government our farmer ancestors imposed on themselves. They were free to run their farms as they thought best and together with their neighbors they took care of roads and schools and sent their representatives off to the state capital and to Washington DC to speak for them.

This is a gentle day. The few people we meet in the words wish us a happy Thanksgiving and peace and we answer with the same wishes. The world is content and strangers smiled at each other.

But overnight everything changes. On the next day the contentment is replaced by greedy needs and desires. We need more things; we need to buy them as cheaply as possible. From being glad with what we have accomplished and what we have, we are now dissatisfied, greedy for more possessions, for new technologies. Where yesterday our hearts were calm and content, today we are dissatisfied, satisfaction is not within reach and we need to incur serious debts in order to fill the gaping holes in our hearts. We have returned from the slightly nostalgic reaching back to our farming past. Today we are city people, rushed, dissatisfied, envious, competitive as we push ahead of others in the line to be first to spend our hard-earned money.

We usually describe such orgies of buying as symptoms of American consumerism. Individuals are being blamed for being avid consumers. If they just chose to stay home on black Friday everything would be okay. But that is a shallow way of considering the change that happens from Thursday to Friday.

The fantastic change we undergo overnight reminds us of the different kinds of people we Americans are. We are anchored in the virtues of country life and self-determination for a century or more (as well as in the racist and sexist vices of that older America). But we live today in a world that is very different, that makes a virtue of being dissatisfied. Everyone and everything must grow. No business is ever big enough. No rich person is ever rich enough. No powerful person can abide contented with their power; they must get more.

Growth, improvement, winning competitions, being the best, the most powerful, the loudest, the best-known are now compelling goals. Persons content with their lot, who are not striving to improve their condition, to find a better job, to buy a bigger house – such persons are lacking in ambition. It is no longer clear that they are good Americans.

Can we regain some of that earlier calm. Can we once again be content with what we have instead of needing more, more, more all the time?

This a very large question. The answers we have are only partial. Here is just one among many:

The imperative for business growth encourages companies to make their employees more and more productive. When you do the same thing over and over, you become very good at it and can work very fast and be very productive. But your job is not challenging, instead, it becomes really boring.

Seeking growth in every way possible, our employers make work really unpleasant. There is, then, some solace in buying new things when workdays are repetitive and tedious. Working in hierarchical and authoritarian settings, choosing what new things to buy can feel like an assertion of autonomy and freedom. The orgies of consumption become more attractive to people whose work life is unhappy and repetitive.

The tremendous technical ingenuity of many of our businesses should

not be devoted to making more money for stockholders but for automating tedious work and making work creative and challenging. Their job should leave people satisfied at the end of the day instead of leaving them feeling empty.

Do we get the democracy we deserve?

Doing interviews and surveys to prove that the American electorate is woefully uninformed of the most elementary facts about our politics is a cottage industry among social scientists and journalists. Again and again we are told that people who go to the polls, usually have no idea of who they are voting for and why.

As a result working people vote for governors who are openly anti-labor. Women passionately support candidates who are unabashedly sexist.

Voters are confused about the issues as illustrated by the Tea Partier who was reported to have said: “Don’t let the government mess with my Medicare.”

Ill-informed voters cast their votes pretty randomly. What we get is a government that acts pretty randomly. The Republican opposition to raising taxes and the Democratic nostrums for getting the economy going are not based on facts, on economic experience but on vague assumptions about what rich people will do with their money if their taxes are reduced, or what poor people would do if some government program would put a little bit more money in their pocket.

We do, indeed, get the government we deserve. A government elected by the uninformed is going to be a government of the uninformed.

And what should we be doing about that?

The most common answer to that question is: “education.” But education teaches only those who want to learn. You can have people sit in a classroom for a long time. If they are not interested in learning they are not going to learn anything. They may do all the work assigned, they may pass the exams with flying colors but if they don’t care about the subject, they will forget overnight what they knew yesterday.

The real problem is that people are not interested in our democracy. They find politics confusing, they find it boring, they find it, most of all, pointless.

Politics appears pointless because ordinary citizens do not have anything to say. Contrary to the story we tell about democracy, that it is “government of, for, and by the people” no one has asked my opinion lately. Did anyone ask you?

Politicians more or less eloquently talk at us, they will claim grandly that “the American people will not stand for….” And I hear this and say to myself: Did that person ask me? How does he know about what the American people will stand for if he does not ask and also if he does not listen?

It is not unreasonable to say that ours is a government of, for, and by politicians (and some other people we’ll mention later.) So it is of no interest to me, the ordinary citizen, because it does not have any effect on my life that I can do anything about.

The ordinary citizen’s refusal to participate in politics may well result from a certain resentment. No one cares about what I think. But a lot of people care about what the heads of large financial institutions, of large corporations think because they will drop several million dollars in political action committee coffers in order to push their own, private interests.

Not only does no one listen to what you and I think, but they do listen to what the rich people think. That is clearly unfair, it is undemocratic and, in so far as democracy is an important part of America, it is unpatriotic. It makes me mad and therefore I won’t have anything to do with politics.

But there are other reasons for being indifferent to politics. In contemporary America that is what citizens are supposed to be. Our government is no longer a government of the people because people today are not supposed to participate.

Remember George Bush after 9/11? He told us all to go shopping. Responding to a major attack on our country we are told not to bother our poor little heads about what to do – let the government take care of that, our job is to spend money. And of course before you spend money you have to earn it. And that has become the main occupation of citizens.

In the past there were the Minutemen, the farmers and artisans, who left fields and workshops to take up their muskets and defend American independence against King George. In the past our liberties were for every citizen to protect. Not anymore. We now leave it to the government and go to the mall instead.

When politicians from the president on down talk about schools and education, they always say education is supposed to prepare us for jobs, for working, for making money, for being consumers. Very rarely does anyone talk about education as the preparation for being citizens.

The country faces many serious problems which are not easy to understand. But education does not prepare us to participate in thinking about those problems. It simply prepares us for being good employees, for being productive, for putting more money in the corporations' coffers.

It is the government itself that wages this campaign to discourage citizens from participating in politics. Not only don’t they pay attention to citizens except during election seasons, but they let it be known that we should not bother about politics because they would take care of it.

Are they taking care of it? You tell me.

And, what is worse, we are letting them make a mess of it by speechifying, posturing, pointing fingers at each other and making secret deals with people they get money from. We are allowing them to be incompetent, hypocritical, elitist and undemocratic.

It looks as if we were getting the democracy we deserve.

Mall of America or American Republic?

The authors of the Constitution, deliberating in Philadelphia in the 1780s disagreed on many issues. But they were unanimous in their opinion that the new Republic they were establishing, would survive only if its citizens were virtuous.

We do not use the word “virtue” much anymore. But it is clear what the generation of the Founders meant: virtuous citizens distinguished clearly between self interest and the common good. They tried to discover what was the common good and to support it. Virtuous citizens were incorruptible. They displayed their dedication to the well-being of the Republic by volunteering to assure its survival.

This spirit of working for the common good, even to the detriment of one's private interests is, of course still with us. Think of the lawyers and law students who spent countless hours researching the cases of convicts on death row and succeeded in proving in a significant number of cases that persons were due to be executed for crimes they had not committed. The unjustly condemned were set free often after long years of incarceration.

The most recent example of this dedication to the common good are the Occupy Wall Street protesters, in New York and 70 other cities, who subject themselves to considerable discomfort and, often, unpleasant confrontations with the police. All this in order to express clearly that they see America turning its back on its traditional ideals in order to enrich those who care only for money, and not for virtue, or for democracy and freedom.

Much has changed since the 1780s. America has gone capitalist. In business you do not consider the well-being of all. You need to protect yourself and your own interest against the threats posed by your competitors. The businessman who thinks too much about the common good may well end up bankrupt.

Most recently we have become a nation of shoppers. We work all week to earn the money to spend it at the mall over the weekend. At the mall you act on a whim. You buy whatever seems attractive at that moment. When you bring it home, your whim may have passed. The next day you return your purchase, following a different whim. In the mall everyone has his or her own opinion. Each opinion weighs as much as the next. You do not need to defend your tastes in clothing, or home furnishings, or food. Do you like caviar or cheeseburgers? It does not matter. Your preferences are clearly yours and yours alone.

Capitalism has not only made us into shoppers. It has made us into different kinds of people. It has made us selfish and indifferent to the common good. Being shoppers at the mall has made us irrational. We do not act reasonably. We cannot and do not want to give reasons for what we do or say. Political convictions and policies have become consumer items. We take them up if it pleases us and surrender them when they are no longer new and exciting.

The selfishness of capitalist competition and the self-indulgence of the mall have invaded our political life. Competition for public office is as cutthroat as any commercial competition. The question is no longer: “what does our country need?” but “what is to my advantage?” Commercial competition often skates perilously close to illegality; frequently it employs clearly illegal means. Witness the recent sub prime mortgage scandal. The same is true in politics: no one thinks anything of spreading false rumors about competing candidates – remember Sen. Kerry and the “swift boat” campaign – of avoiding serious deliberation about our problems by encapsulating complex issues in a few snappy words. No one hesitates to mislead voters. During electoral campaigns most candidates tell huge lies. Virtue is not on their mind.

The spirit of the Mall has also invaded our politics. Everyone has his or her own opinion in politics just as they do when they shop for bathroom deodorizers. Giving reasons for one's opinion, researching the facts, thinking carefully and discussing issues dispassionately are no longer part of the citizens repertory. There is no room for being public spirited in the mall because it is all about what I feel like. People make their political choices in the same spirit of self-involvement, refusal to consider facts, or trying to discover what might be good for all.

The Founders believed that if citizens were motivated, not by virtue, but by self interest and their whims, our republic would soon fail and we would lose our freedoms.

They may well have been right about that.