"I think that there is a general agreement that something must be done, in
a lot of matters politically, socially, and environmentally. How we take
care of everything and still sleep soundly at night? Well that’s the
magic question......."
This, in an e-mail from my daughter Jessica, now a Mother, got me
thinking about that "magic question". How, although all of us, Liberal
and Conservative alike, are finally--despite the governments attempts
to keep us all confused and in denial--no longer able to escape the
fact that we are responsible for what's to come. So, now what?
Being the only known Liberal in my family--of origin or offspring I
believe, I remembered a talk I had heard recently by Thom Hartman,
author, talk radio host, and environmentalist. It had helped me get
a better understanding of my beloveds on the other side of the fence.
The wrong side obviously :>), a little personal bias being allowed
because it's my blog after all:>)
"Love and compassion are necessities and not luxuries, or the world
cannot survive." So says the Dalai Lama and I whole-heartedly
agree. We cannot limit ourselves only to those who agree with us.
We're all in this together and it will take all our resources and great
minds if we hope to succeed. If we're going to save this world it's
going to have to come as a consequence of political activity and
co-operation.
We all want the same things. We want a better world for our kids
and our grandchildren than the one we grew up in. I am a child of
the sixties. All the things we struggled for and against are still with
us, they are coming to fruition perhaps a little slower than we
imagined during our rebellions at that time but, here they are.
Staring us straight in the face.
We are all human beings, in every nation, on every continent and
what kind of society do we want to live in?
Thom reminded me that this country is not designed for
leaders and leadership, we don't elect leaders, we elect
representatives, we live in a representative democracy. The people
we elect are supposed to be doing what we want them to do, not
what they want to do.
We must become politically involved and we must learn to
communicate effectively with each other. Communication is the
most powerful tool that we have--more powerful than bombs. Using
it wisely we might hope to stop the bombs. But we must learn to
communicate effectively in order to become agents of change.
We live in an absolutely crucial and pivitol time. I recently heard
that 50% of the world's species may become extinct within the next
30 years. That is the lifetime of my grandchildren, your
children and grandchildren. They will be in the prime of their lives.
A new report I only heard this morning says that the production of
biofuels had pushed up food costs by 75%--not the 3% the
government has been telling us. Our brothers and sisters are
starving!
So where did this fracture, this deep divide that even insinuates
itself between family members come from? From whence does it
originate? I thought perhaps the womb, perhaps I dropped into the
world with this obstinate bias..........imagine my suprise when I
learned that I could lay it squarely at the feet of our Founding
Fathers. Or even prior, the story goes way back to.......
--the aboriginal and indigenous societies, that made up more than
50% or the worlds' peoples until around the mid-1700's have a
very Liberal worldview. They live in "we" societies, interdependent
on each other and the Earth. The kind of society--in my humble
opinion, that we must return to.
About 7000 years ago when modern city-state civilization erupted in
Mesopotamia (now Northern Iraq), the Conservative worldview came
into being. This worldview, though not central to Conservatives,
as some believe, holds that hierarchy is appropriate, that patriarchy
is appropriate, that there have to be leaders and the lead, those on
the top and those on the bottom, and that greed is a good thing,
that it is a good and primary motivator.
It held that God acted through people on earth, specifically Kings
and Queens. This pretty much held the thinking of "civilized people"
until the 1600's. A lot of people still fundamentally believe this.
In the 1600's a Liberal revolution occurred, starting with Thomas
Hobbs in the 1630's. He was the first person since the Greeks, in
almost 3000 years, to suggest, the completely at the time,
radical view that "all men are created equal". That there was some
sort of inherent human equality. This was the beginning of the Liberal
revolution that we refer to today as the Enlightenment. He then went
the next step and in so doing defined modern day Conservatism. In
the second step Hobbs claimed that the intrinsic nature of humans is
evil; that all of nature may have goodness built into it, that balance in
nature is well and good, but that humans are unique, special--and
we're evil.
In speaking of what would happen in human society without either an
all-powerful state or an all-powerful Church, Hobbs said "in such a
condition without people being ruled by the iron fist of Church or King,
there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain
and consequently no culture on the earth. No navigation nor use of the
commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious buildings,
no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much
force, no knowledge on the face of the earth. No account of time, no
arts, no letters, no society and which is worst of all, continual fear and
danger of violent death. And the life of man would be solitary and poor,
nasty, brutish and short."--the same notion that's echoed in many of
our religions, that man is essentially flawed and sinful.
A generation later, another British philosopher, John Locke came along
with his treatistes on government, basically saying that although
Hobbs had the equality part right, that his notion of humans as
evil was wrong.
Stories had begun to come back from overseas about indigenous
peoples living well with good societies, thus "the noble savage". In
the late 1500's and early 1600's news was coming back from overseas
about aboriginal peoples whose lives were good, having perhaps
something to teach us!
Locke, the most extreme of the radical philosophers presented this
totally outside-the-box concept that yes, all people are created equal
and people at their core are fundamentally good. Every government
in the world rejected it.
Locke coined the phrase "life, liberty and estate" and intimated that
every man is entitled to this. It was this philosophy that inspired the
founders of this country.
Jefferson absolutely believed that humans were intrinsically good and
that nature was intrinsically good as well.
George Washington agreed with him, Ben Franklin agreed with him.
Many of his peers, including John Adams and Alexander Hamilton,
disagreed. The first Constitutional convention said that Presidents
should be elected for life and have far more power, essentially the
power of a King. John Adams referred to the rabble. But,
they all agreed that what was going on in England was intolerable so
they banded together and the nation was born.
In the original Declaration of Independence, Jefferson wrote about
"Nature's God", he speaks of the "Laws of Nature" and "Nature's God".
He insisted that he saw God in everything. He saw the sanctity and
divinity of nature. Adams and Ben Franklin, considering Jefferson to
be a pagan, replaced that with "the Christian God". God's up there!"
This fundamental disagreement between whether the intrinsic nature
of humans is good and that we are inter-penetrated by nature, we are
part of nature was subscribed to by the Liberals among the founders
of this nation--Jefferson, Madison, Carter, Washington and Monroe.
The Conservative founders believed that the intrinsic nature of
humans was to be evil, that you should have a "veneer" of democracy
but not too much.
That debate still goes on today and is the reason why some people
are willing to believe that the solution to our environmental problems
is found in the free market, in the marketplace, that we should just
leave it to the Corporations.
But markets exist within the context of society, a culture.
There are devices within the market, institutions that operate
on a single morality--and that morality is "profit"--to make the most
profit. These institutions are called "Corporations".
If people are fundamentally evil, as is the Conservative view, then an
instrument entirely controlled by "we the people" (also known as a
Democratic government) must also be fundamentally flawed. But an
institution that answers to a single morality of profit is "amoral"--it
doesn't have a morality and therefore it's better than the immorality
of humans.
Similarly this is why Liberals would look at a Corporation and insist
that we must control this Corporation--because it is amoral. We the
people, through the instrument of government need to put regulations
and limits on these things. As "moral", intrinsically good human beings
we need to limit these "amoral" instruments.
When we understand this basis for why Conservatives would want to
hand over to Corporations, basically, the governance of our country,
the reason they think we should outsource our military to Blackwater,
why they think that we should privatize our road systems, and our
national parks and our schools and everything else is because they
believe that people are fundamentally evil, the communication can
begin.
We had a major transition in the US, the new deal era from the
1930's until 1981, was a liberal one when we believed that the
institutions of government could do and change things--and they
did. The big change happened in the election of 1980 when Jimmy
Carter lost to Ronald Reagan. In 1979, Carter announced that he
was putting in place energy policies ensuring that we would never
again import into the US more oil than we did in 1976. He also put
into place a solar bank to have 20% of the nations' electricity
generated by solar power by 2000.
Reagan came in and said this is nonsense, it's socialism, the
government won't do this, private industry will. So he did away
with the programs and set the solar industry back by 30 years.
Both wanted the same outcome but saw different ways of getting
there. I believe history has demonstrated that Carter was right.
One of the other big stories is that of "freedom". In 1936,
Roosevelt gave a speech saying "a necessitous man is not a free
man". Freedom requires a minimum access to things. If you're
hungry--you're not free. If you're about to be thrown out of your
home--you're not free. If you're one pay check away from disaster--
you're not free. If you're one illness away from being homeless--
you're not free. And he set about to create that baseline of freedom.
On the other hand, those currently in power believe that freedom
means freedom from government, freedom from the institutions that
would provide that cushion......so, the whole concept of using freedom
to advance ecology, using freedom to stop global warming. The
Conservative worldview is that the environment's going to magically
be fixed by this wondrous free market.
But this is just too big, these problems are so large that they
require all of us, not just individuals and we can't just hope that GE
and Exxon are going to fix it.
Europeans use one-seventh as much carbon as Americans and they're
not poor. It's just simple lifestyle changes. We must all give a
little. People are waking up in record numbers across the world. Will
we waken quickly enough?
To whom much is given, much is also expected!
**much direct quote from Thom Hartman speech**