The Unreality of Personal Ambition

Is the realization of self about oneself?  Is the great motivation only about collecting things and changing money?  Or does the essence of satisfaction seem to lay elsewhere? ...

We don’t have a lot of detail on the day to day life of Jesus, unfortunately.  But in one familiar story he overturns the tables of the money changers who had infiltrated the halls of the temple, casting them out with a rare display of anger.  It seems that economics had gained an undesirable preference over morality.

And so it goes with the American system.  A human being, to whom we sometimes refer as labor, is a commodity to be used up and exploited.  We have witnessed exploitation in the form of unsafe working conditions, excessive hours, of a wage below the poverty line.  The idea of a “living wage” simply “does not compute” on Wall Street.  When wage “costs” become excessive, jobs and even entire industries are outsourced to a distant shore.  The displaced worker is not consulted.  When he cannot find a comparable paying job, he is ridiculed for being lazy, lacking initiative.  Moreover, little consideration is given either to the needs or desires of the locals in the new “work force.”  What ever happened to altruistic notions of paying a fair share, giving back and paying forward for the next generation?

Typically, the exploitation of a human being is accompanied by the exploitation of the environment and natural resources, without any thought given to sustainability.  Although global warming is now an in-progress fact of life, the powerful status quo continues to muddle the picture for the ordinary citizen, stubbornly refuting its proven scientific validity.  And as progress stalls, the privileged few who comprise the base of the status quo quietly add to their material conquest.  Conservation as a “National Duty” and policy as expressed by T.R. more than 100 years ago, based on “efficient use of finite resources and scientific management of renewable ones,” remains a utopian liberal plot.  It’s either economic prosperity, or the environment, but not both.

The violence of unregulated capitalism, which is portrayed in too many places in the nation’s heartland, produces sacrifice zones, areas that have been destroyed for quarterly profit. Think coal mining ventures in West Virginia, offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, fracking for natural gas in a multitude of geographical locations. Rich natural resources are extracted, yet the money is not funneled back into the communities that are sitting on top of, or next to those resources. Destruction is not limited to the environment. It includes communities, human beings, families. There appears to be no way to control corporate power. The system has broken down, whether it's Democrat or Republican. We’ve all become commodities.

Why is the value of labor in the human condition to be diminished?  Why does labor only seem to be an expense on the economic balance sheet – but not also an asset?  How is human welfare to be fairly measured, and acknowledged?  T.R. had felt that those who gave earnest thought to the matter saw that the problem of labor was not only an economic, but also a moral, a human problem.  A generation later, F.D.R. signaled the primary role of government was help for the dispossessed, especially in time of need.

But the crisis of a Great Depression occurs.  Then, it passes.  The calamity of a Great Recession of 2008 takes place and passes, too.  A sense of normalcy returns.  But no matter how hard we strive to create a more perfect union, collecting things and changing money remain the great motivation which obscures life’s true purpose.

Consider the story of the man who does yard work.  Taking a break, he drops the rake in a pile of leaves.  When the break ends, since it is partially hidden or perhaps forgetting that the rake is there, he carelessly steps on it.  But when the shaft springs up and strikes him square in the forehead, he is immediately reminded.  Startled, he makes a mental note never to do that again.

But inexplicably, we keep stepping on the same rake. In this way, the business of providing a fair shot for the many, of achieving equality of opportunity for all citizens, remains our great unfinished business. The president said as much in his recent remarks on the 50th anniversary of Dr. King’s march on Washington.

Yes, the challenge can seem daunting.  But can it be any more daunting than that facing the New Dealers who descended upon the grimness of Washington in the midst of 25% unemployment and the corresponding national fear and despair of 1933?  For the best of them, the satisfaction lay

in some deep sense of giving and sharing, … rooted in the relief of escaping the loneliness and boredom of oneself, and the unreality of personal ambition.  The satisfaction derived from sinking individual effort into the community itself, the common goal and the common end.  This is no escape from self; it is the realization of self.

Yet despite the New Deal’s accomplishment, 35 years later, what had really changed, if anything?  “For the many,” said Robert Kennedy, “roots of despair all feed at a common source.  …  Our gross national product … measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worth while."

-Michael D’Angelo

When the Moral Issue Is "Secondary" (Part Two)

(Editor’s note:  This is the second and concluding segment in a two part series.  The first segment reflected on how one ordinary citizen’s pursuit of happiness is often at another’s peril.  Historically, this could be demonstrated best, perhaps, through the peculiar institution of slavery, coming as it did from the devil.)

Moral issues:  When are they merely "secondary?"  Although both sides in the Civil War claimed God to be on their side, was it not more important in the end, as Lincoln himself had emphasized, to be on God’s side? …

Lincoln claimed that secession was unconstitutional, since the voluntary "compact" among the states was intended to be a permanent, binding arrangement.  This permanent compact could not be legally broken, absent the unanimous agreement of the states to permit secession.

After the results of the 1860 election were known, some held out an olive branch of compromise to the point of exhaustion to keep the Union intact.  But Lincoln believed that no appeasement should be entertained regarding the extension of slavery, after an election had just been carried on principles fairly stated to the people.  To surrender the government to those we have beaten, "is the end of us."  Lincoln hoped against hope that "right would make might."

It was then, and only as a last resort, that Lincoln played his final card, the one that bespoke "morality."  Unlike 1776, the motto, according to Lincoln, was not liberty, but slavery.  Lincoln reasoned that

the right of revolution, is never a legal right.  At most, it is but a moral right, when exercised for a morally justifiable cause.  When exercised without such a cause, revolution is no right, but simply a wicked exercise of physical power.

The South was not persuaded.  It stuck doggedly to the argument that it was about states’ rights over federal under the constitution and the loss of some $4 billion in property rights (that the slave labor purportedly represented).  An exasperated Lincoln was compelled to pose the direct question:  "How about the morality of slavery?"

But the South remained unmoved.  As even the casual observer of drug and substance abuse addiction well knows, dependency will play evil tricks on an otherwise sensible, rationally thinking mind.  And so the South's response rang with an air of determined finality:  "The moral issue is secondary."

The idea that the South saw the moral issue of slavery as secondary is generally attributed to the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, the stakes being an Illinois US Senate seat.  Lincoln had won the Republican Party’s nomination for the seat, which put him head-to-head in a race with the powerful US Senator, Stephen A. Douglas, an incumbent, who was running for a third term as a Democrat.  A series of seven debates between Lincoln and Douglas in towns across Illinois ensued over the next 10 weeks.

The debates attracted national attention for several reasons.  First, Douglas had enjoyed a reputation as the “Little Giant” of the Democratic Party and its best stump speaker.  Together with Henry Clay, he had been one of the key figures behind the Compromise of 1850.  The national debate over slavery was also reaching a boiling point.  Responding to the fervor, journalists accompanied the candidates, writing detailed articles and offering editorial commentary that was unprecedented in American political history to that point.  Consequently, the whole country watched the debates unfold.

Lincoln had boldly announced that slavery was simply immoral and had to be dealt with forthrightly by Congress.  For Lincoln, slavery violated the fundamental assertion of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, arguing that its continued existence and support ran counter to the wishes of the Founding Fathers.  Ultimately, only the power of the federal government could resolve the issue by extinguishing slavery from the nation.  Although Lincoln contended that there existed no constitutional way of interfering with slavery where it presently existed, he believed that it should not be allowed to expand westward.  For him, the matter was a question of right and wrong, with Douglas indifferent to a moral wrong.

Douglas met the challenge by trying to portray Lincoln as a radical abolitionist, disagreeing with Lincoln's claim that the Founding Fathers had opposed slavery.  Douglas pointed out that many of them, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, had owned slaves.  He played down the moral issue, saying that the power to decide about the existence of slavery should be dealt with on the local level.  And he argued that slavery would never be able to survive outside of the South for simple economic reasons in any case.  He warned the nation not to try to judge political issues on moral grounds, lest emotions spill over into civil war.  Ultimately, Douglas argued that the issue came down to conflicting ideologies: a view of the nation as a confederacy of sovereign and equal states vs. a federalist empire of consolidated states.

Although both sides claimed God to be on their side during the ensuing carnage of the Civil War, Lincoln’s concern was not so much whether God was on his side but, rather, whether he was on God’s side.  As fate would have it, however, his own fame for preserving the Union through perseverance on the side of the right would not be secured in the conscience of the reunited nation until many decades following his death.


-Michael D'Angelo