The Moral Universe – Self-Interest Well Understood

Okay, I do have to write about Alexis de Tocqueville again, so bear with me. You can blame him for being so wise in addressing issues that are universal and timeless and also for being so prophetic.
Have you ever practically flown out of your chair upon hearing a concept described that you had thought about for a long time but never knew there was a name for?

This happened to me while listening to the second set of CDs in the “Tocqueville and the American Experiment” Great Courses series.

“Self-interest well understood” is the term that Tocqueville gave to participation in political associations, meaning that when people are involved in serving others, they are also serving themselves. He does relate it fairly narrowly to the importance of participation in democracy and cites all kinds of ramifications in not doing so.

But the term hit me so hard because it is something I’ve given much thought to and had discussions about with my sister. It is a concept I started to define in my own mind in the run-up to the 2012 Presidential election, when we’d had almost four years of Tea Party campaigning and scare tactics. Since I had come to know people who self-defined as members of the Tea Party, I was trying to understand where they were coming from but finding it difficult to discern anything in their comments but fear and selfishness. The bulk of their objections to the Obama administration started with the words “My” or “I.” “My taxes,” “my health insurance,” “my guns,” etc.

I never heard concern expressed for others who aren’t members of the Tea Party. I heard nothing that expressed a zeitgeist that included one’s neighbors, the country as a whole, or the rest of the world.
As we talked on the telephone while awaiting the results of the 20I2 election, I said to my sister that I never remembered voting for someone because of what I thought that person could do for me personally, but what that person could do for the greater society, whether on a state or national or international level. Since I first voted for George McGovern in 1974, it just never occurred to me that my personal concerns had anything to do with my vote, but that my vote was meant to consider a broader constituency.

My sister felt the same way; I don’t know where we got this from, though we tend to credit our mother with much of the way we look at the world. erhaps growing up in the 1960s also had something to do with it. We protested the Vietnam war not because we personally were going to lose or gain by it, but because we thought it was an unfair, imperial action that was costing too much in terms of both American and Vietnamese lives.

We also grew up during the hottest part of the Cold War and were taught to be afraid, to be very afraid, of atom bombs raining down on us with just the meager protection of a schoolroom desk. That might have formed in us a selfish outlook and overarching concern for our personal safety; instead it taught us that atom bombs are bad for Planet Earth and every living thing on it.

We watched the evening news from an early age and saw black people being fire-hosed and set upon by police dogs and somewhere in our brains we formed the idea that, though those hoses and dogs were not set upon us, it was a bad thing for the country that anyone should be treated this way. We did take it personally when Martin Luther King Jr. and, shortly after, Bobby Kennedy were assassinated because we felt that the country needed them so desperately.

Ultimately, somehow and from whatever inspiration, we grew up feeling that what was good for the larger community was good for us. We had learned self-interest well understood. As adults now in our 60s, we are even more concerned about the reign of terror (I can’t really speak for Sally, but that’s how I have come to see it) unleashed by the hateful war waged against the Obama administration. It has not only paralyzed Congress from acting in any positive way, but it has also seemed to give bigots the audacity to act out their prejudices again as in the days of Jim Crow. Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Oscar Grant, Michael Brown, John Crawford and others have had to pay the ultimate price for the Tea Party’s fomenting of us vs. them.

I shall have much more to say about the NRA in a future blog, but what else but fear and selfishness allows people to think that their right to have military-grade weapons handy trumps innocent people’s right not to be killed by passing bullets and/or psychotics whose voices in their heads tell them to go to an elementary school and kill as many children as possible? It is the ultimate in self-interest not only not well understood, but ignored and trampled on.

It defies belief, but I have to hope it doesn’t defy the hope that if the Beloved Community that John Lewis wrote about really comes together and walks toward this problem, it can be solved. Too many futures have been shattered; we must see that other futures come to fruition.

The Moral Universe – By Cynthia Pease

I wept with joy the night of November 4, 2008, when Jon Stewart announced that Barack Obama had been elected the next President of the United States.

Stewart himself had tears in his eyes. I called my sister and she too was crying. Together we celebrated the vision of an African-American holding the highest office in the country. The United States, we thought, had begun to redeem itself of the shame of slavery and Jim Crow and lynching and institutionalized racism.

It did not take long, though, for forces of opposition to band together and begin a virulent campaign that, in my opinion, has bordered on treason to unseat the President. At first I thought it was a passing fad that would die a natural death after a while; instead, the Tea Party grew shriller and more vitriolic in its pronouncements, and members now stop at nothing, including outright lies, to smear the President.

During the same time, we’ve seen the murders of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis for breathing while being black. The James Byrd lynching was not all that long ago. The Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act in June 2013, and the vote was very obviously based on party lines. With states moving forward to gerrymandering voting districts and in other ways restricting minority voters’ access to the polls, I decided that I had to do more than just gripe about it on Facebook.

We are going backward as a country; the Tea Party has hijacked everything I loved about the United States on 11/4/08 and, like the anchorman on “Network,” I’m mad as hell.

I’ve spent the past two years reading almost exclusively about slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws, and lynching. I see what has happened to President Obama as cultural lynching and what happened to Trayvon and Jordan as physical lynching; denying people the right to vote and putting them through rigors that other people do not have to endure is a form of lynching as well. This blog will address the history of lynching as well as other aspects of racism in an attempt to revitalize the fight against any form of discrimination, any law that restricts full access to the rights of citizenship.

When I pondered an appropriate title for this blog, the statement “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” came up several times in my reading. Martin Luther King Jr. used this aphorism to paraphrase a 19th-century abolitionist, Theodore Parker. Parker said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

Then I came across this statement in Christopher Waldrep’s book, Racial Violence on Trial: “For decades white southerners argued for states’ rights, insisting that neighborhoods and local communities had a right to punish malefactors free of supervision by the wider society. “Such powerfully entrenched localism has long hobbled reformers, who base their appeals on universal, moral values.”(Page 104)

And there was my title. I do believe that the Tea Party as a political organization opposes President Obama and voting rights for reasons that are peculiar to their own special interests. I do not believe they can really be concerned about what is best for this country as a whole and indeed the wider world. They are holding the best that the US can be hostage to narrow ideologies that go against the grain of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Why would a white woman in her 60s in Massachusetts be so concerned as to start writing a blog about lynching and civil rights? As a newspaper columnist on Cape Cod, I wrote extensively about social justice issues, such as apartheid, homophobia and equal opportunities for youth of all backgrounds. I attended many diversity trainings. While knowing that I have been as infected by institutional racism as much as any white person, I have spent many years working on rooting it out of myself. By my faith and all that I profess, I do believe that I have a responsibility to do what I can to ensure that the horrors of the past do not happen again.

An important note: In all that I will be writing, I do not intend to portray the African-Americans of today as victims who need me to fight their battles for them. I am fighting for the country I so loved that night in 2008, for the redemption of wrongs sometimes too horrible to contemplate, and for the most profound belief I hold: that we are all children of God and therefore all brothers and sisters. I cannot enjoy, and do not want, any privilege that any of my brothers and sisters does not have.