A Buddhist monk once advised his students that when they made their way in the world they should consider themselves in a “land of friendly cannibals.” What he meant was that just because strangers can be nice doesn’t mean they have our best interests at heart. Indeed, it’ss part and parcel of one’s coming-of-age to realize that everyone has his or her own agenda, and often it’s at odds with our own.
As writer Caroline Zelonka put it, “People aren’t against you; they are for themselves. It is easy to fall into the trap of believing everything should and does revolve around our wants and needs. However, the reality is just the opposite. People rarely care about what we want and need and look more towards what they need and what works for them.”
Thus clergyman William Ellery Channing’s comment, “How the ‘I’ pervades all things!” – for it is part and parcel to being human that what matters most is what “I” want and what “I” need. And since everyone feels that way, if we don’t take care of ourselves no one else will. As comedienne Lily Tomlin observed, “We’re all in this together – by ourselves.”
This down-to-earth, pragmatic view of human nature is the bedrock of Conservatism. Self-interest is understood as the driving force behind not just human life but all life. And nature shows us that only the fittest survive. We must capitalize on opportunities and conserve our personal resources. We are surrounded, after all, by cannibals. In a dog-eat-dog world it’s eat or be eaten. Yes, this results in a lot of suffering by those less able to wrest what they need from others. But that’s the way human life is.
Only it isn’t. Archaeologists in Africa, for example, have found the million-year-old remains of a severely injured hominid whose wounds showed clear signs of healing. This means that other hominids took care of this individual – even that long ago, he had been cared for, something no other species would do.
Compassion for others is a hallmark of humanity. Thomas Jefferson was absolutely correct when he observed that “Morality, compassion, generosity are innate elements of the human constitution.” To deny these qualities for the sake of the “I” is to retreat back into the primeval jungle.
Today our society is being torn apart by the question of whether government has a responsibility to help all its citizens. Yet if we simply take one step back, and ask instead if humans have a responsibility to help one another, there is little disagreement. Compassion is so part and parcel to what makes us human that society has labeled those who lack empathy for others as being mentally ill, as being sociopaths.
Where liberals and conservatives stand divided is in how to help others. Conservatives believe that church charities and emergency rooms can provide the help capitalism’s casualties need. Liberals believe only government has the ability to help the millions of senior citizens, disabled people and the unemployed who would otherwise fall through the cracks.
What we need is for both liberals and conservatives to admit their failures. Sweeping programs to help the disadvantaged too often give rise to dependency and abuse, while giving more and more money to the rich in hopes it will “trickle down” has led to the greatest disparity in wealth this country has ever seen. Yes, it’s a dog-eat-dog world. But as humans we alone among earth’s creatures are capable of rising above Nature’s cold brutality. We thus have a responsibility to see that everyone has enough to eat, has access to medical care and gets a decent education. As humans, we should be past arguing about this; we should instead be finding workable ways to make it happen.
While Democracy has much to recommend it, it does have its weaknesses. If voters don’t understand the complexities of government and thus which candidates can best grapple with those complexities, then just because a government was elected democratically doesn’t mean it will function well.
A case in point would be Egypt. After protestors overthrew dictator Hosni Mubarak, they held democratic elections to choose a new government. Being a Muslim country, many of the candidates for a variety of government offices belonged to the Islamic Muslim Brotherhood. To many voters religious candidates seemed like “good men” and thus the Muslim Brotherhood won the majority of races.
Yet just because someone is religious doesn’t mean he’s an expert in managing a governmental agency. He is, though, generally more apt to be guided by religious tenets, and in the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, these tenants are based on a medieval world-view. Despite their piety, these men proved unable to run a modern nation. In time, millions of the same people who had elected it rose up and removed the Muslim Brotherhood from power.
People have a right to functional government. This requires leadership by competent politicians rather than ideologues obsessed with changing the government to conform to their rigid views.
For decades now those on America’s political right have grown increasingly rigid and conservative in their views — and increasingly successful in their attempt to implement them through the democratic process.
Yet despite all of their promises to make this country better, these ultra-conservatives have proven incapable of governing. After gerrymandering their way to a majority in the House, Republicans are preventing our federal government from functioning by blocking virtually everything that comes up and are currently threatening to shut the government down completely. They say they are staying true to their ideological beliefs – that government should do as little as possible to help the people it serves in order to keep taxes low on the rich.
Republicans are particularly obsessed with repealing Obamacare, an imperfect but needed effort to provide healthcare to tens of millions of uninsured Americans. Though the Obamacare approach was initially developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation and successfully implemented in Massachusetts by then-governor Mitt Romney, Republicans hate it with a particular passion. Apparently they think it better that 38 million Americans be denied adequate medical attention than that we join the rest of the industrialized world by providing healthcare for everyone.
Many people are puzzled by this rabid hatred of broader healthcare with some pundits suggesting the Republicans are terrified that, despite its flaws, Obamacare will work. But there seems to be another reason – money. If one looks carefully at recent Republican budget proposals, they want to eliminate all the healthcare Obamacare would provide WITHOUT eliminating the taxes that would help pay for it! These budgets would, at the same time they cut Social Security, Medicare and a host of other safety net programs, redistribute the Obamacare tax revenues in the form of new tax cuts for the very wealthy.
It’s hard to tell if Republican ideology is really as extreme as it appears or if it’s instead a cynical way of whipping up grassroots support for shifting even more wealth away from America’s lower and middle class families. But one thing’s for sure, these rigid ideologues are proving just as incapable of governing as their Muslim counterparts in the Middle East. For American democracy to endure, voters need to take their responsibility seriously and start electing people interested in helping America rather than people intent on tearing it apart for economic gain.