Christianity and Trump
Whether we are Christian, Muslim, Jewish or something else, a common tenant of faith communities is to be faithful to something greater than ourselves, not to place ourselves as supreme. Parents of all beliefs try to teach their children to believe this. Donald Trump has exploited certain Christian groups in unprecedented ways and in-so-doing has exposed the hypocrisy of trading Christ for power. I try to be a Christian, so I will comment in that context, but other religious traditions can make similar observations.
If we are really, truly Christian, we try to teach our children to love and follow Christ. The prophet, Micah (6:8) writes that the Lord requires only this: “to act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God” (NIV). John says that “Whoever does not love, does not know God, because God is Love.”- 1 John 4:8. God is Love, not hate. Peter said that all things that are excellent and good are of God. Paul had a lot to say. We are not “some of Peter and some of Paul and some of Apollos,” no we are ALL of one God (and He requires that we respect others who seek God from different traditions). We are all sinners, deserving one awful fate but hoping for a better one. None of us can “be of Christ” and also “be of” an avowed demagogue. Judas Iscariot was a member of a political sect called the Zealots. The Zealots were, well, zealous about having political power over the Romans and would do anything to get it.
Judas followed Jesus when he thought Jesus was seeking an earthly, political revolution, but when he saw that this was not the plan, he betrayed him. Any of us who abandon Christ and HIS teachings in favor of one who promises political power in exchange for loyalty is taking the road of Judas. There is no middle ground. Christ’s way, God the Father’s way, is love not hatred.
For some, Christianity has truly meant following Christ’s example of love and grace. For others, the “Christian” mantle is merely a vehicle for advancing a quest for power or preserving the pre-eminence of a white, rural, unevenly educated majority. They have sold out Jesus in favor of political power through Trump. Paul said that “they will know we are Christians by our love”. No real Christian could have anything to do with Trump’s doctrine of fear and hatred. No real Christian would ever lock a child in a cage away from his or her mother and father in order to “Make America Great Again”. If one claims allegiance to Christ, taking this path is an admission of apostacy. People in America who identify themselves as “Christian” need to consider that voting for such a person as Trump has something to do with their soul and salvation.
Jesus gave us the prescription for our lives in The Lord’s Prayer. God is God, and he has a paternal relationship with us. He is in heaven, which is a place, a place that is perfect in peace and forgiveness, and love. He is “holy” which means that he alone is Him. He isn’t a perfect example of love or power, or anything else. Those things exist because they come from Him, not He from them. We pray that His kingdom might come here to earth, a fallen place, not perfect like heaven. The Kingdom comes to the extent that we bring it by following the Father’s will and Christ’s example of love and forgiveness and mercy, and faith. We ask God the Father to gives us just what we need to get through the day and to forgive us for more or less continually making mistakes, “trespassing” upon his will, trying to take things into our hands instead of his. The condition for this is that we do the same for others, including others who don’t look or act like us, who don’t approach God in the manner that we do. We are not all of Peter, or Paul, or Apollos, or Mohammad, or Abraham, or Pope Francis, or the Dalai Lama, or Franklin Graham, or Jerry Falwell, or Trump, or Barney the big, purple dinosaur. We are all of God, who simply is whether we acknowledge His existence or not.
Paul also helps with understanding God’s love, but he has more to say about what it isn’t than what it is. It’s interesting that Paul knew the importance of confronting our urge to pull others down more than to help them up. From 1 Corinthians:13, “Love is patient and kind”. Yes, good start. But what is it not? “It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others. It is not self-seeking. It is not easily angered. It does not keep record of wrongs (hold grudges). It does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth.” What “love is not” reads like a list of the seven deadly sins: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Gluttony, Lust, Sloth, Greed. It reads like the clinical definition of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. It reads like Mr. Trump’s defining characteristics.
Jesus did not seek political power, he transcended it. The prophets did not seek political power, they transcended it. As for Jesus, as for the prophets, as for any disciple, it is hard. It is not the life of power and privilege that Trump or his sycophants crave. It is not the false gospel of “the victorious life”. No, for the actual, real disciple of Christ, this isn’t about who wins an election, it is about their soul and its destiny. For those who got lost in the moment in 2016, for those who meant to follow Christ and got led astray before, this is a chance at redemption or a chance to double down in following the way of Judas. It is about the way of Christ or the way of a demagogue. The way of a real disciple or the way of Judas. God’s Kingdom here on earth through our own actions or a demagogue’s agenda in exchange for personal power. The real cost (and reward) of discipleship or the path to the “blood field”. The Kingdom of God or the 30 pieces of silver. Neither is it about endorsing everything the alternative might support. That would just be picking another political agenda. It is about picking the decency of a man, Joe Biden, who does seek God vs Donald Trump, who proudly proclaims that he has done more than Jesus for his Evangelical base. It is about picking one who attempts to follow the path of discipleship, however imperfectly, over one who does not. It is about us seeking to live the life of real discipleship, trying to realize God’s Kingdom on earth through actions of faith, hope, charity, and love, not accepting uncritical membership in a demagogue’s club.
We owe a great debt to Mr. Trump. God’s love is everything he is not, and he has made very clear for us the path that we, if we are to be disciples, simply cannot take. If Christians, that is REAL Christians, want to follow Christ, he or she must follow love. If we want to serve God’s Kingdom and define our own, we have only one way to go. It is not possible to approve of and follow Mr. Trump and his brand of self- deification and hatred at the same time. We must pick. God or Trump. God or hatred. God or ...
Trumpish- adj.:
We try to teach our children. It was simpler when there was not so much information and so many opinions, so available so fast. It is hard to keep up. There are so many role models and so many influences on our moral sensibilities.
John Locke, the 17th century physician who had such a great influence on our Founding Fathers, wrote in his “Second Treatise of Government,” that the purpose of government was to protect individual rights to “life, liberty and property.” but also to oblige every person not to harm “the life, the liberty, health, limb, or possessions” of others.
Most of us are decent people, and we try to hew to those obligations as we aspire to the attendant rights. We try to teach our children to be decent people too. It is a hard job at times. Some things are easy. “Don’t spit at people.” “Don’t bite.” Don’t light the neighbor’s dog on fire.” Other things are harder. There are many grey areas. As a shortcut, we sometimes simply buy into a school of thought. Be a Republican, or a Democrat, or a member of one or another religious group. It relieves us of so much work (and individual thought) to simply say, “whatever they say goes”. But that requires what the German-American philosopher Eric Hoffer called a weakness of mind and a certain lack of confidence or moral courage, and it can quietly slide from group allegiance to allegiance to a mob. The Nazi’s were originally a socially benevolent organization that was going to rebuild the social programs in Germany and ‘make Germany great again’, but then...
If we are really going to teach our children to be good people, we can’t just defer to others. We must have the moral courage to take a stand on things that matter. We can use models, heroes, anti-heroes. It’s curious that we assign those roles with an eye to whether they put themselves first or others. We try to inspire with heroes and warn with villains. Mother Teresa, Albert Schweizer, Abraham Lincoln, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Gandhi, Martin Büber, Martin Luther King, and countless others. History is filled with acts of heroism by other nameless, forgotten people who have served as models to inspire, to encourage, to sustain.
We try to explain goodness to our kids. We draw from our successes, but more often from our mistakes. We try to keep them from being fools for scammers, enablers for swindlers, suckers of various kinds. We try to show them that the internet is full of fakers, that some in entertainment are good but others are terrible, terrible people. The earth isn’t flat just because some rapper says so. Bigfoot isn’t real even if “a lot of people are saying” so. Elvis doesn’t live in Kalamazoo no matter who says so. Fame is not a barometer of wisdom or goodness.
So, to that end, we all, as parents and as a society, owe a great debt to Donald Trump.
We try and try to tell our kids to be a certain way or not to be a certain way, but sometimes it is hard to make the message clear. Trump is almost unique in recent American history not in ideology but in pure indecency. He is so purely clueless, so purely puerile, so purely selfish, so purely self-promoting, so purely untrustworthy, so purely....well, everything we try to lead our children not to be.
He is so purely “that” that he has actually given us a word.
“Trumpish”- adj.- To be devoid of any sense of human decency. To be devoid of any respect for knowledge or achievement, especially in others. To be utterly and baselessly cruel. To have an obsessive need for...well, everything. To be all that we can know from our human nature that we don’t want to be.
We can try until we are blue in the face to explain to our children how not to be bad, but when words fail, we can now simply say “just don’t be trumpish” and they will know exactly what we mean. He has done such a magnificent job throughout his life of modeling what it is to be perfectly crass, perfectly dishonest, perfectly everything that decent people seek not to be.
Do we have trouble not believing a scam? No problem. Mr. Trump has shown us what a scam looks and feels like, and in-so-doing has helped us to know that we simply need to watch out for “trumpishness”. Do we have trouble seeing moral error in our own lives? No problem. He has shown us what perfect moral depravity looks like. We simply need to avoid being “trumpish”. Not sure what the Founding Fathers had in mind in all those cherished, old documents? It’s simple. The common theme is to be fair and just and selfless; to be the opposite of “trumpish”.
He has helped us in another way. In any society, we know that there are good sides and bad sides, and in our society there are examples of each ACROSS the American political spectrum. There is a side that wants to give and a side wants only to take. There is a side that wants to offer grace and a side that wants to take advantage of every error and every weakness in others. There is a side that wants to pull others up and a side that wants to push others down. The “otherness” of those “others” depends on the times: too Jewish, too brown, too yellow, too “un-Christian”, too different from the “base”, too different but at the same time too close to the same.
We have always struggled to avoid trouble and avoid troublemakers, but they live among us, and sometimes they are us. Trump has helped by celebrating habitual troublemakers and also by showing us what behaviors in ourselves can make us into those people. By definition, 25% of society accounts for the least intelligent 25%. We know that ignorance breeds contempt and violence. Why learn anything if you can suppress those who have. Why respect others if you can push them down. Why not make up conspiracies if they serve your purpose. Isn’t it better to shout something until it seems true than to actually learn what is true?
Thanks to Trump, we now know that 25% of the country will believe anything that reinforces their fears or purpose. There is a base that believes every fear mongering scam, that embraces every get rich quick scam, that actually calls the number at the end of those Fox News ads, that believes that others have no worth if they don’t look or act like us, that believes that those with actual expertise are all out to get us, that believes Bigfoot is real and Elvis lives in Kalamazoo. They are largely the same 25% who have fallen for Trump’s scams and think he walks on water. These are not those who lean to Republican tradition and look at Trump as a necessary evil but those hardliners who believe him to be a messiah fighting pedophilic anarchists and Satanists. How convenient for the rest of us. At least we can now recognize that elusive 25%.
So, what are some elements of “trumpishness”? What defines our newfound rubric? What is its significance for trying to maintain decent and safe society?
We try to teach our kids to have character, to be responsible, to make things happen without looking for recognition, to not make excuses. Take responsibility. Don’t blame your sister. But in the adult world, under Trump, who does that anymore? Some do, to be sure. We do have heroes. You can find them easily as the ones who stand up to Trump when he says he “takes no responsibility for anything”. Some politicians. John McCain. Jeff Flake. Mitt Romney. Yes, Joe Biden. Sports leaders. Aaron Rodgers. JJ Watt, LeBron James, Serena Williams. Entertainers. George Clooney, Sandra Bullock, Sean Penn, Chadwick Boseman. Many others. There are people who dive in and try to get things done. Things go wrong sometimes. Real leaders take responsibility. The buck stops with them. They know that it’s not about what happens first.
It’s about what happens next. It’s not about what you do wrong. It’s about what you do about what you do wrong. It’s about that second effort. Real Christians (not the fake ones out for power and glory under their definitions) know that Jesus said that to follow Him, you must go the first mile to fulfil your obligations but do even better on the second mile. Trump, like his false-Christian posers, says “look at me, look at me” walking the “second mile” for show, after robbing you blind on the first mile done in the shadows.
Trumpish- adj.- To be one who takes and never gives. To accept credit even when knowing it belongs to another and never accept responsibility for negative events. To hold grudges and villainize anyone or anything that might shed light on one’s schemes or failures or shortcomings.
We want to teach our kids to be nice, not just to those who can give us something back but to everyone. Churchill said that “You can know a man’s character by observing what he will do for someone who can do him absolutely no good in return.” He also said that “someone who is nice to you but mean to the waiter is a mean person.” We also know that the strongest person is the gentlest person. Cruelty is a sign of weakness, not strength. Bullies, despots, and dictators, those whom Trump admires the most believe the opposite. We try to teach our children that the most admirable behavior and the most admirable people not only get the least recognition, they seek the least recognition. Martin Luther King probably didn’t know he was alluding to himself when he observed that , “10,000 men proclaim themselves into obscurity while one man neglects himself into immortality.” Hopefully, we will never celebrate a “Donald Trump Day” as a national holiday. It is probably in the works as we speak.
Trumpish- adj.- One who sees grace as weakness or foolishness and cruelty as strength. To consider the charitable person a rube, worthy of disdain. To consider one who has sacrificed anything to be a loser, including and especially those who have given all.
If we have faith in God, we try to teach our children about that faith, but what about religion that replaces faith in God with faith in political power? Judas Iscariot followed Jesus as a member of a political group called The Zealots because he thought that Jesus was their ticket to political power over the Romans. Sorry, there was a little misunderstanding there. When he realized that Jesus was talking about another Kingdom, he sold him out. That is what certain “Christian” leaders have done with Trump. For some, Christianity truly means seeking Christ, but for others, the “Christian” mantle is merely a vehicle for advancing one’s personal quest for power and/or preservation of the pre-eminence of a white, rural, often marginally educated majority. They have sold out Jesus in favor of political power through Trump. Paul said that “they will know we are Christians by our love”. No real Christian could have anything to do with Trump’s doctrine of fear and hatred. No real Christian would ever lock a child in a cage away from his or her mother and father in order to “Make America Great Again”. If one makes any claim to apostleship with Christ, subjugating Christ to political greatness is an admission of apostacy. People in America who identify themselves as “Christian” need to consider that voting for such a person has something to do with their souls and salvation.
Trumpish, adj.- To place one’s self above any greater power. To consider any greater power to be subservient to one’s own plan and desire. To accept the “victorious Christian” belief that by saying a few words once in your life, you can then lie cheat and steal as you see fit.
Being trumpish has nothing to do with any true ideology. How could it? Trump has no ideology other than a need to be in power and admired every minute. His ideology is himself. The diagnostic features of Narcissistic Personality Disorder (from the psychiatric literature) are:
- A grandiose sense of self-importance
- Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or
ideal love
1 When, in the original Greek of John’s Gospel, Jesus told Nicodemus that he must be “Born Again” to follow Him, he used the “aorist” tense of the word “born”, which is the tense of continuing action. In other words, Jesus was telling him that he must be CONTINUALLY born again and renounce earthly lusts and sins every day, to CONTINUALLY renounce selfishness, not to be born again once as a license to continue one’s fallen ways.)
- Belief that one is special and can only be understood by or associate with special people or institutions
- A need for excessive admiration
- A sense of entitlement (to special treatment)
- Exploitation of others
- A lack of empathy
- Envy of others or the belief that one is the object of envy
- Arrogant, haughty behavior or attitudes (DSM IV )
Sounds familiar. One can be trumpish on the fringe right or the fringe left. It is hard to be trumpish from the middle of a spectrum, because to be in the middle requires a willingness and desire to listen to other people with other ideas. One does not have to be a complete, certifiable narcissist, like Mr. Trump, to fall into some of these errors. We must all guard against this, regardless of our ideological beliefs.
Trumpish- adj.- To be utterly dismissive of any opinion but one’s own. To seek one’s own preservation and amplification over all else. To be like a stopped clock, having an opinion every minute but only be right twice a day. To cherish ignorance as essential and eschew knowledge as an impediment to fierce dogmatism. To cherish ignorance as fuel for dogmatic certainty.
Ignorance comes with its cousins: fear and superstition. We try to teach our children to resist such things. To Trump, fear and superstition are essential to fuel hatred, especially hatred of any “otherness”. To actually understand something requires work. To be ignorant is much easier. It allows the uncritical gullibility of simply believing anything that like-minded “ignorati” (e.g. a mob) believes. “Good” people in Salem Massachusetts believed that some women were witches, so they determined to just burn them at the stake. If a mob is frustrated by “foreigners” who are smart and hard-working and might out-compete the ignorati, then just call them rapists and murderers and be done with them. If experts are telling you something that threatens your power or convenience, then just suppose that anyone with knowledge is part of an elite conspiracy. If a mob wants to believe that only the mob gets to be patriotic, then sure, claim that mantle as the mob’s alone.
Trump wants everyone to be fearful of anything they haven’t accomplished or don’t understand. In its purist form, this is to be afraid of everything and deem that everything must be destroyed. How else can we get back to a “great America” where just being white and more numerous was all that was necessary to be in charge. If your mob can’t actually be more numerous, just make sure they are more numerous at the voting booth. That is after all how we “Make Mobs Great Again”. Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of “Enlightenment” (propaganda), said that the principle of manipulating the masses was to tell them that what you want them to do (hate Jews, foreigners, Gypsies or in present times Latinos, Muslims, blacks,
Trumpish- adj. – To stoke fear in others. To gather the fearful together and seek strength in numbers against enemies real or imagined. To use fear as a means of manipulating others to give one authority or power. To either seek to be the bully who gathers the weak and fearful as minions or to accept a role as one of those minions.
We try to teach our kids to be brave and think for themselves. Most of us would not want our children to be in a gang or a mob. We have a society of laws that we ALL agree to follow. People join gangs and mobs because they lack the courage to act on their own and because they want to enjoy rights that are only for members of the gang. Why think when you can borrow the thoughts of others. One of the most successful politicians of the 20th Century said that, “It is lucky for leaders when men do not think.” That was Adolf Hitler. Why pay the price of defending personal values when you can succeed better just following the strongest crowd, even if that crowd is stronger only at the expense of the vulnerable. Such a follower looks for a strongman to make all the calls. He or she sees the leader as strong because that leader first gives him others to fear and claims his title by bullying those others. Churchill observed that such a follower knows this but hopes that if he appeases the alligator, maybe it won’t eat him, or will at least eat him last. Such a minion can be called Patriotic if the leader claims that mantle as his alone. Oscar Wilde pointed out that “patriotism is the virtue of the vicious”. Eric Hoffer, who escaped the Nazi’s and became a leading philosopher in America, studied followers of mobs and movements in his seminal book “The True Believer”. To be a true believer, one must sacrifice individual values. To accept the cost of discipleship of the strongman, one must relinquish discipleship of anything else.
Trumpish- adj.- To be fearful of the other and the unknown and seek safety in sameness. To sacrifice thought and conviction for the safety of a group (or a mob). To choose to follow a leader who will say that others are the cause of one’s fear and who therefore deserve to be vanquished.
We teach our children to study and value learning. Many in the current base that admires Trump’s disdain for “the intellectual elite” have in their own lives fought for their children to “do better than we did” by getting educated. And yet, like the “Know-Nothings”, a political coalition in the mid-1800s (that led up to the Civil War), Trump leads a coalition that is required to dismiss anything that comes from any kind of an expert. We are to follow his every inane retweet from conspiracy theorists, but not follow our incredible national intelligence community or healthcare heroes such as Dr. Fauci or other experts in their fields. We are to believe that Joe Biden is being led by “people you’ve never heard of” to coordinate riots because someone in Idaho saw a group in black clothing coming off of a plane in Idaho. We are to believe a game show host interviewed on Fox News pontificating about Covid but not the World Health Organization, a group of hard-working, apolitical scientists and physicians fighting to coordinate the global fight against all sorts of disease. So, what are we to do? Encourage our children to work and learn from people who try to work and learn empirical, provable knowledge? Or, do we tell them to spurn that and just follow the ever-churning sea of kooks and conspiracy theorists on the Internet, the Trumps, and Kanye’s, the Kardashians, the glitterati, and every other sort of self-styled cultural oracle. Why learn, why strive, why try to make the world better and more peaceful when you can join the crowd and make a quick buck scamming others?
Trumpish- adj.- To be one who spurns hard-earned knowledge of things that can actually be proven. To castigate those who have learned or accomplished anything of value. To value volume over substance, and aggression over understanding.
Regardless of who wins the election, there will still be many people who not only value what Trump manifests but seek it aggressively and with force and violence (either physical or otherwise). They have always been there. They believe conspiracies because they are convenient and because they are ridiculous to the more knowledgeable. They believe that conspiracies are proof that the more knowledgeable are either wrong or hiding something. They believe that tabloid journalism, like the National Enquirer and Fox News and Breitbart, are the actually legitimate but that evidence-based journalism is not. In Trump, they now have a face and an infamously powerful voice. At least now we can better tell who this fringe is. The question we must continually ask ourselves is, “is that who we are”?
Regardless of who wins the election, we will have to deal with this faction. Do we teach our children to join in, like the young boy in the movie “42” about Jackie Robinson who learned to yell “Nigger, we don’t want you here!” because he saw his dad yelling it? Or, do we teach our children to spurn such hatred, internet scams, get-rich-quick schemes, cringe-worthy behavior from athletes, entertainers, Internet personalities, and now a President in favor of learning real things culled out over the centuries as true and beautiful. Do we teach them and show them art, and peace, and beauty and athletic accomplishment, or do we teach them to emulate the Trumps and the Putins, and the Hitlers, and the Stalins, and the Kim Jung Uns, and various glitterati and Internet trolls who spurn those things in favor of money and power and oppression and suppression.
We have an opportunity in this negative role model of Trump to lead them in right directions. We need to be resolved. We need to keep leading our children toward truth and knowledge and accomplishment and faith. When we cannot find the right words, we now have the perfect touchstone, “Just don’t be trumpish”. They’ll know just what we mean, and hopefully that will help guide them away from the pettiness and evil that always lurks.
Finally, once again, we also need to remember that being “trumpish” has nothing to do with political ideology. It is just as easy to be those things from the extreme left as the extreme right. The key word there is probably “extreme”. Various sages over the years have been correct that “the greater the ignorance, the greater the dogmatism”. Andre Gide, an 18th century French author advised to “follow those seeking the truth, but avoid those who (say they’ve) found it.” Time tested truth is true and it doesn’t change, but our view of it is sometimes clouded. Paul was right in Corinthians, we do look through a cloudy glass. Truth is something that continues to be so even after it ceases to benefit us. To find truth and beauty, that which helps us to have a peaceful and just society, we MUST look at the whole reality. We must consider our perceptions as well as others’. That means that we MUST listen to the “other side”. Extreme views think they’ve found a truth that requires exclusion of the “other side”. From there, it is a slippery slope down into seeking absolute power, into the belief that “if we just have all the power, we can figure things out later.” That is despotism no matter who is doing it. That is Hitler, Stalin, Amin, Putin, Trump, and many, many others. We need to teach our children to learn and also to listen, regardless of who is in power. And for our part, we need to chose leaders who are decent and fair, and mature, and who seek and value knowledge. The American political spectrum is arbitrary and independent of the spectrum from decency to indecency. We must choose decency first. Before even considering what they believe, we need to consider how they believe it. We need to choose decency and intellectual honesty and selflessness over dogmatism of any type. We need to choose people who are not trumpish, for our sake and for the sake of our children.
The Sky is Falling
But a spark of nationalism, of pride in the past and a return to the heady days of world leadership remained. True believers must lead, not watered down moderates and certainly not the liberals or socialists. Supported by aristocrats of industry, with the blessing and encouragement of the Christian evangelical community, a new movement was born. Even the Catholic Church signed on. You let us do our thing, you do your thing. Finally, and critically, a loyal media outlet was created that would define the enemy, speak pride to weakness, expose the liberal status quo, and set things right again.
Bold enough to speak out, brave enough to address the issues, the true believers would rise again. There were national threats. Other ethnic groups were taking jobs from deserving citizens with a natural birthright. Worse, they were polluting a national identity that had been won over generations. The liberal politicians were giving away the country’s natural right to world leadership. The national defense had been whittled down and was becoming dangerously weak. The sky was falling. There was much to fear and it was vital that the populace saw it and felt it.
Germany, 1933.
Time to act. A devil’s bargain was made with the very socialists so hated in the east. Poland would be divided up. France would be short work, Britain an afterthought. World conquest would follow, turning on the previous socialist “ally” in an extreme conservative revival, all in the name of returning Germany to its rightful place as the leader of the developed world. By using fear in everything not German, by channeling it with a controlled media, the Nazi’s could inspire the nation that they alone could and would save the country from ruin and return the pride that had been lost at Versailles.
But another kind of conservative, another believer in national pride and tradition, had another idea. Churchill’s view was not of conservative, despotic power but of a legacy of stewardship. His patriotism was not authoritarian but rather a love of freedom and a way of life, of protecting first the dignity and the freedom of all. The truth that he fought to protect was not a truth of dogma or an ideology defined and pitched by a media outlet, but a truth proven in the decency of humanity and in the resolve of humanity to live free. And he believed that the sky would not fall. The truth holds up even a heavy sky.
And he won the fight in collaboration with a liberal. Franklin Roosevelt was a practical man like Churchill with the same belief that while beliefs are good, ideas are better than ideology. They shared a passion that right is right, something to be discovered not dictated. A passion that right would win, that the sky would not, and in fact could not, fall.
Hope was the fuel, not fear. Where despots manipulate with fear, leaders inspire with hope. Despots frighten people. Leaders empower them. Despots arbitrate truth. Leaders search for it.
Truth. It always bubbles up. It finds a way. Like grass through cracks in the concrete. God blesses the grass. He blesses truth. Truth prevails. The sky never falls, because truth never falls.
What lessons are there from history? We have to learn from it or we will repeat it.
- That hope is better than fear.
- That truth is something worth the trouble to seek, rather than taking the easy way out and just defining it.
Once Upon a Time…in American Education
Then a tidal wave of kids showed up, unannounced, in 1949, when the baby boom hit school age, and kindergarten was born out of necessity. And, again out of necessity, kids were segregated into single aged classrooms to keep things organized. And mentoring didn’t seem so important, but competition did. And, out of necessity (or was it convenience?), we catered to the mediocre and left the most needy and the most gifted to fend for themselves because it seemed like the democratic thing to do.
And once you can measure something, by God you’d better measure it. And if you’ve got the data, you’d better normalize it, which is another way of saying standardize it, which is another way of saying govern it. And if teachers are now running kinder-factories, shouldn’t they have the same collective powers as other factory workers, and the same job security, and don’t bother us with performance when we’re talking about workers’ rights here.
And schools became institutions where commodities are made and measured and boxed up according to grade and size and shipped, and don’t ever stop us to look at what’s best for the commodity, and don’t tell us its not a commodity because we’ve got more coming and we can’t stop and neither can they, just to get it right.
And somewhere along the way education as we once knew it stopped. As did mentoring, and recognizing the educational value of homes, and cherishing the emotional needs of little people, who didn’t sign up for this and sure as hell aren’t to blame for our shortchanging them.
And education stopped being the main thing. The industry did, the textbooks, the teacher’s unions, the politicians, the budget….
And to preserve these status quos, we started getting “efficient”, cutting nutrition, programs, arts, sports, socializing skills, home support, anything that didn’t have a lobbyist to protect it. We retained every nut and bolt in the education-industry “car”, but we entirely forgot that the point of it all was that our kids might know where to drive it!
But somewhere along the way, a spark survived, a lingering idea that there was beauty in a child’s mind. An idea that maybe Einstein was right in observing that, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” And maybe after years of worsening failure, maybe we have finally dared to consider that maybe the politicians and the regulators and the lobbyists, and the unions and the lawyers might not know best.
Maybe, just maybe, the kids do, and the teachers who do care, of which there are still many, and the moms and dads, and the artists, and the athletes who still love athletics for athletics. Maybe, just maybe, it is no accident that home-schooling when done well knocks the socks off of most public education. Maybe it is not enough to preserve the nuts and bolts of education and forget about what the nuts and bolts are for, especially when stripping the institutional experience of any social nurturing leaves only a shell that is emotionally and too often physically dangerous.
So we’ve cut arts and music and athletics and everything that is enriching and made the institutions into factories churning out a culturally vacuous product. To preserve what we are used to, the disastrous status quo, we’ve left home schooling and other educational models as often daunting but none-the-less necessary alternatives.
Maybe the solution is right in front of us. George Orwell was right when he noted that, “sometimes it requires all of our effort to see what is right in front of us.” Or maybe the system is just as corrupt as it seems. Maybe getting back to home-centered schooling is the answer. It seems to work the best anyway. Maybe the teachers need to get back to being extensions of life-learning rather than its replacement. It was like that before this disastrous experiment started in the fifties with the industrialization of education. And now we have the Internet, which has proven itself as a powerful enabler of home education. Maybe we need to support and develop this, which can be done at a tiny fraction of the cost current practices. School buildings can use this model too, to give kids a safe place to go and access focused self-paced, teacher-assisted education if both parents have to work.
Maybe the real value of the institutions isn’t rote education at all, but rather the very arts and athletics and music and other social interactions that have been banished. Teach “the basics” on line in the home or in safe environments for those students who need them. Make them self-paced and therefore multi-yeared experiences where students can get back to helping each other. Students of different ages and abilities who are doing the same work but maybe have differing skills and maturity levels that they can share. Above all, make the institutions into cultural centers that don’t banish the arts and athletics but rather specialize in them. They should be places where culture and society can again be celebrated, practiced, and taught using the skills that students can demonstrate that they have mastered on their own. It would be cheaper. It would utilize the immense educational resources and communications capabilities of the web. It would emulate the learning metaphors that kids have already adopted on their own. And it would dismantle the violent and emotionally and physically dangerous cauldrons that have become our public schools in so very many instances.
The Death of Integrity
Ca. 2010…The US economy in a shambles.
There is an unquestioned assumption that the solution is complex and expensive. In reality what is most complex and expensive is preserving the status quo. This is what the status quo wants, which is why those with power and privilege are fighting tooth and nail against any new order. The genesis of our problems is not found in structural economics. The real genesis of all this is the death of honesty and accountability in society. The death of integrity.
We keep judging the effectiveness of the latest government intervention by how the markets respond, forgetting that the people in the market trenches may not be as smart as the strategizers and if they are, they are most likely judging the intervention on whether it will restore what they know. Wall Street isn’t “not responding” to efforts at intervention because it lacks faith that the intervention will work. Wall Street is not responding, because the financial industry correctly feels that “the jig is up”. They don’t want to change the system, and they’ll be damned if they’re going to respond positively to any attempt to regulate the orgy to which they’ve become accustomed.
That orgy is defined by the mantra from the movie “Wall Street” that “Greed is Good”. Everyone on “The Street” may not be making millions in obscene bonuses by looting their own companies and in turn the clients they serve…..but even those who aren’t too often aspire to. Because of this, they are happy to accept the inaccurate assumption that we can fix this with an incrementally tweaked version of “business as usual”.
Well, you know what? Greed isn’t good. Good business management isn’t about getting an MBA to learn how best to prop up your business for the short term and then loot it on its way down the drain. Good business management isn’t about doing anything you can get away with to maximize profits “for the good of our shareholders”.
Good business management is about being a good steward. It is about growing a strong company and strong industries within the context of what is good for your workers, your clients, your shareholders, and the economic ecosystem within which you live. CEO’s used to have a stewardship ethic. Now, too many see themselves as rock stars who deserve 21 million dollar offices and private plane rides to everything from ski lodges to bailout hearings. We have lost that sense of stewardship, and we need it back. The old system is broken and we shouldn’t want it back. The only people who do are those who had the advantage in that system, those who lack the vision to move ahead not only into new markets but also into old values.
We have fallen into a snake hole wherein what is right is defined by what you can get away with. Financial people skimming clients and companies. Ponzi schemes. Bonuses and luxury junkets on taxpayer money. Athletes making more in 10 minutes than teachers make in a year, while they too often set examples that destroy the efforts of those teachers. I am an eye surgeon. Too often, I see patients from other practices with healthy eyes that have had unnecessary surgery because “who’s gonna find out?”. I see doctors who withhold accepted therapies in order to sell patients into drug company marketing projects disguised as “studies”. This is not addressed as it should be because, frankly, the drug companies have infiltrated the medical industry and government so thoroughly that even those who would fight too often throw up their hands in frustration, or hopelessness, or fear. The phenomenon portrayed in the movie “The Insider” is very real.
Well, you know what? There is a right and a wrong in most things. CS Lewis wryly argued that we can all agree on the “right” as that thing which most of us fight against doing. I would argue that we can get pretty close to doing right by remaining accountable to the values that define our roles, our own “stories”. Our stories are defined by what we are: doctors in service of our patients, lawyers in service of the law, business people in service to clients, politicians in service to constituents rather than lobbyists. Anyone in service to another. Not that you can’t benefit in the process. We all deserve to make a living, but when you’re primarily out for “number one” at the expense of another, that’s a red flag.
We can get back on track, but it’s not by throwing trillions at the status quo. The stimulus is valid to the extent that it helps people victimized by others’ greed or helps people build new productivity, such as green energy, but make no mistake: The reason the financial sector doesn’t like the new order is that it challenges the old order. When “they” say it won’t work, what they mean is that it won’t get them back to where they can make billions on the backs of the common man. The shakers and movers who got us into this mess, who until the crash were so admired by their minions, have become accustomed to the era of mutual funds and online trading that has allowed the individual investor to become the “easy money” for these pros at the Wall Street Casino.
The way back will depend on a return to honesty and integrity. It will require a return to accountability and stewardship. Given the degree of corruption we have come to, it will require a return to regulation. This does not mean socialism. Socialism deteriorates to arbitrary governmental control of society that is just as self-serving and corrupt as unprincipled and unregulated corporate self-interest. Regulation is simply the act of codifying the values that we can all agree protect us as individuals and as a fair and free society, and then holding our institutions and each other accountable to those values.
Getting back can be at least partially self-funding. There is enough fraud built into the system now to get a good start on funding the new order. We have pumped billions into the banking system only to see hoarding and 18 billion in year-end bonuses. We need to pass legislation requiring these institutions to pass on money to qualified borrowers. Lending to no one on the pretense that the lenders are “just being careful” is a self serving copout. Legislate them. Mr. Obama’s foreclosure protection plan has merit, but proposing 75 billion to prop up predatory subprime mortgages misses the point. Simply recast all of the troubled mortgages to 40 year terms with interest rates capped at 7 %. A 100,000 loan at 9% and 15 years costs $1014.00 per month. At 7% and 40 years this decreases to $621.00. Almost all mortgage payers would once again be solvent, lenders would be hurt but not killed, and once the crisis was under control, we could always look at recasting again to shorter terms.
And health care? Health care is ruined at many levels but there is low hanging fruit that could get us back on track. Reinventing healthcare from the ground up at this point would be prohibitively complex, but there are things we could do that would at least get us solvent and back to a fixable mess. There are 50 million uninsured Americans. Individual HMO coverage costs around $3600.00 per year. That would be 180 billion per year to give every uninsured person basic coverage not even considering that family coverage rates offer significant savings. A huge amount, but “chump change” compared to bailing out AIG alone. There is enough fraud in the pharmaceutical industry alone to pay for almost all of that bill. This has been extensively documented in scholarly and well researched books such as “The Truth about the Drug Companies”, “On the Take”, “Hooked”, and many others. There are additional savings in liability reform and reigning in defensive medicine. Embracing true evidence based medicine would help, but what we have now is the bastard child of EBM, where the “evidence” upon which doctors are supposed to make decisions is often defined by the marketing departments of the drug companies who fund much of the research.
Another costly source of waste is that we simply don’t use the things we already know. In many cases we actively suppress known inexpensive therapies in favor of equivalent or inferior but new and more profitable ones. Pharmaceutical and device companies defend their exorbitant pricing as necessary to fund ever more research to replace therapies as their patents expire. Consider the development of Nexium when Prilosec went generic. Now consider that Nexium and Prilosec are the same molecule. Nexium is just the isomeric form of the molecule, enough of a difference to renew the patent and quadruple the price. Another example is the comparative study of the newest and most expensive blood pressure meds, a study in which good old thiazide came in first at pennies a dose. Then there is the eye drug Lucentis, the ultimate me-too drug in that the “me” version, Avastin, is actively suppressed because it was already approved in much higher doses for cancer and was therefore priced too cheaply to make money in ophthalmology.
The truth is that if we simply worked to fully utilize and keep proven treatments, we would do better at a small fraction of the cost.
Much of this corruption is made possible by the same kind of deregulation that has brought the financial system to ruin. If the government was willing to declare independence from pharmaceutical industry purse strings, we could easily re-establish regulations that would rein in the fraud, remove the entanglements between this industry and doctors, again protect patients from predatory and dishonest marketing, and in the process, we could pay for universal healthcare without reinventing a 2 trillion dollar industry. At that point, we could reinvestigate further reforms. The task would then look more doable.
I had voted Republican much of my life, until Mr. Bush and the neo-cons highjacked the party in the service of their own hegemony and self interest. Historically, the Republicans have been the party of individual responsibility and accountability. The past eight years has seen its conversion to the party of deregulation and wanton self interest. I believe in Mr. Obama as a post-partisan, which I know some would see as naïve. Time will tell, but it is also naïve not to see that with Democratic majorities in both houses, the Republicans have decided that they can oppose things that they know must pass simply so they can point fingers if something doesn’t work. It is politically pragmatic but also cowardly to play this game with the country’s future. Part of the integrity we need back is for politicians to consider that the country is where we all live and not a chess board upon which to play games of partisan brinksmanship. It is time for all of us to be post-partisan and take issues for what they are instead of being arbitrarily packaged and traded in endless quid pro quos.
We need to get back to the best traditions of America, to live with integrity, and honesty, and accountability to our values and to each other. Our leaders need to be stewards and models, because it is right to be so. We need to have values that respect each other. We need to be a bit less fancy and less obsessed with the big score. We need to rediscover a sense of conscience, and of shame. We need to get back to fundamentals. The way forward to a self-sustaining future is to go back to the values and self-control that made us great in the first place.