Turning Our Backs on Hate and Cruelty

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  Turning our back on hate and cruelty.

   

  Sunday night’s hours long Trump rally in Madison Square Garden really should be described as a “rally of hate.”  Hate for immigrants, hate for Democrats, hate for everyone not beholden to Trump’s message. 

   

  I have felt for a long time that, in the end, the majority of the American public will turn its back on Trump’s hate and cruelty.  I turned this morning to the close of one of my favorite books of all time, Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America:  The Battle for our Better Angels.  In the conclusion, tagged by Meacham as “keep history in mind,” he takes us back to Joe McCarthy and words that Richard Rovere wrote in 1959, five years after McCarthy’s fall.  He was reflecting on the meaning of McCarthy:  “I cannot easily conceive of circumstances in which McCarthy, either faulted as he was or freed of his displayed disabling weaknesses, could have become President of the United States or could have seized the reins of power on any terms.  To visualize him in the White House, one has I think to imagine a radical change in the national character and will and taste.”  There was, though, no guarantee against such a radical  change, ,Rovere observed. “But if I am right in thinking we had been, by and large lucky “there is no assurance that our luck will hold.” 

  
  

  
  

  And it didn’t.

   

  Meacham writes that the past and the present tell us that demagogues can only thrive when a substantial portion of the people want them to.

  
  

  
  

  In the American commonwealth, James Bryce warned of the dangers of a renegade president.  Quoting Meacham, “Bryce’s view is not that the individual himself, from the White House, could overthrow the Constitution.  Disaster would come, Bryce believed, at the hands of a demagogic president with an enthusiastic public base.  “A bold president who knew himself to be supported by a majority in the country might be tempted to override the law, and the private minority of the population which the law affords,” Bryce wrote.  “He might be a tyrant, not against the masses, but with the masses.” 

  
  

  
  

  Again, Meacham:  “The cheery news is that hope is not lost.

  
  

  
  

  “ The people have often made mistakes,” Harry Truman said, “but given time and the facts, they will make the correction.”

   

  I hope and I believe now is the time when  the people have had enough of the facts that they will make the correction by rejecting the hate and venom embodied in this man, Donald J. Trump. 

   

  I embrace the paragraph with which Meacham concludes this great book:  “For all of our darker impulses, for all of our shortcomings, and for all of the dreams denied and deferred, the experiment begun so long ago, carried out so imperfectly, is worth the fight.  There is in fact no struggle more important, and none nobler, than the one we wage in the service of those better angels who, however, besieged, are always ready for battle.”

   

  As Kamala Harris is saying in her closing words to the American people:  “We will go forward; we will not turn back; we will win.”

  
  

  
  

  May we make it so. 

   

   

 

"How Can It Be"

 How

Walter Russell Meade on Hamiltonian State Craft

Walter Russell Mead has written an excellent essay in the most recent Foreign Affairs.  Its title:  " Return of Hamiltonian State Craft:  A Grand Strategy for a Turbulent World". 

 

This essay challenges some of my most fundamental ideas, particularly the drive for global governance.  Walter Russell Mead feels this is an illusory dream, other than limited governance agreements on specific issues that the participating nations see in their own self-interest.  

 

Hamiltonian State Craft rests on three beliefs according to Mead:

 

1.     The first business of government is to ensure the conditions that allow private business to flourish.  A solid currency, a stable financial system and deep capital markets, together with the rule of law, are key parts of the infrastructure that sustains American life. 

 

2.     The second big Hamiltonian idea is the critical role of the nation in national feeling.  Americans must embrace a duty of care toward one another.  Nationalism or patriotism is a moral necessity, not a moral failing.  Americans are not just citizens of the world, but also citizens of the American republic.  I believe my service in the Navy has built a deep commitment to this idea.  I also agree that we have obligations to our fellow citizens that do not extend in the same way to all of humankind.

 

Patriotism lends American business a legitimacy without which its future is insecure.  Companies like Procter & Gamble can certainly view themselves as a global company but it would be a mistake not to understand a commitment to our nation as a preeminent goal. 

 

3.     The third idea Mead draws from Hamilton’s legacy is the concept of realism in foreign policy.  Here, Mead gets to the nub of the matter.  Hamilton “did not believe that humanity was naturally good or naturally disposed to settle down in democratic and egalitarian societies, all harmoniously at peace with one another.  Short of divine intervention he did not expect the arrival of a perfectly just society, a perfectly honest government or a perfectly (constructed) national order".  Hamilton believed that people were naturally flawed.  They were “selfish, greedy, jealous, petty, vindictive and sometimes extraordinarily brutal and cruel.  Elites were arrogant and grasping; mobs were ignorant and emotional.”

 

All true, all this will be always true.  But it does not negate the need for imagination and discipline to change the order of things, even if we know it won’t be perfect.  How otherwise could the Common Market have come together?  How otherwise could we finally come to recognize the legitimacy and rightness of marriage between two races?

 

My saying this is in line with what Mead ascribes to Hamilton.  He “was not a determinist.”  He didn’t think there were any social science laws that governed everything. 

 

He believes that Hamiltonian policymakers can act ruthlessly in support of national interest and, at the same time, be models of enlightened state craft in bringing together the world on issues where the world must work together like nuclear proliferation and climate change.

 

 

There is great wisdom in what Mead writes.  My one caution, my one warning, is that this “ultimately realistic view of the world and people” not constrain us from trying to do what more we can in our own way whether that’s in our family, community, nation or world, to provide circumstances that not only ensure the safety and prosperity of the American people but also the people of the world, knowing that to the extent we can do it, it will be limited and knowing we will be advancing our own national cause as well.

  

Donald Trump--Unfit to be Our President

 I write this reluctantly, but with conviction and love for our country.

Donald Trump is UNFIIT for our Presidency. I judged that true 8 years ago. Now it is proven true. 

Proven lack of character. Lies non-stop. Utterly lacking in integrity.

Proven gross cruelty. To opponents, to friends, to everyone. We have had "mean" presidents before. Never one cruel like Trump. Utterly devoid of kindness. 

Declared "unfit"by 44 of 49 people who worked for him.

Increasingly losing it. Rambling, forgetful. I understand. I am old too. 

We cannot allow him to be our President.

We Are On A Slippery Slope to a Bigger and Bigger War

 

Wed, Oct 2 at 3:31 AM

We are on a slippery and dangerous slope in the Middle East. Iran launches an attack against Israel in response to the Israeli attack on Hezbollah. Israel promises a strong response to Iran’s  attack. We have been on a slippery slope for years and the speed of our descent is accelerating. 

There are many roots that brought us to where we are. But the fundamental and most proximate one I believe is Israel’s enduring apartheid subjugation of the Palestinians and the inability and unwillingness  of the Arab world and Israel and  world leaders to put their minds to achieve lasting peace, which, of course can only occur by granting self-determination and safety to both Israel and Palestine. Even to this moment, Netanyahu and his cabinet  are refusing to recognize and support the path to a two states solution.

The United States has lost any semblance of leverage to cure the situation.

In my opinion, a collection of world leaders from Israel, Palestine, the Arab world, the United States, and Europe , India, and ideally, China need to come together to demand and help fashion a road to peace. Even if not permanent, we need to put a solution in place that will stop the risk of this escalating to a  major war involving Iran, Israel, and the west. I fear we are on a potential path to that now. And the use of some form of nuclear weapons dare not be excluded.

"The Plague of the Other"

 

“The Plague of the Other”

 

 Ecstatic Nation by Brenda Wineapple is one of the finest histories I have ever read.  Numerous passages in this fine book bring to life “the plague of the other” which is at the root of so much evil and such an embedded part, sadly, of human nature.  It is a demonstration of that all-too-present human tendency to elevate ourselves by comparing ourselves invidiously with “another” different from us, perhaps even threatening us, with whom we compare ourselves, ever so positively, and whom, because of this feeling, we come to the belief that we have every right to exploit them.

 

The first of these examples lies in the mind and words of Alexander Stephens, who became Vice-President of the Confederacy, having served in Congress for many years.

 

The “cornerstone” of the Confederate States, he said, “rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery—subordination to the superior race—is his natural and normal condition.”  Speaking impromptu in Savannah, GA a few weeks after the inauguration of the Confederate government, he enthusiastically called the new Confederate government “the first in the history of the world, based upon this great philosophical, and moral truth.”  Its constitution has “put at rest forever all agitating questions relating to our peculiar institution—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the Negro in our form of civilization.”  

 

Roll the clock forward and we come to our treatment of the Native Americans. General Sherman, the same general that had waged war so effectively against the Confederacy in his march to Atlanta and the sea, declared, as Brenda Wineapple says so acutely “with typical amoral clarity” the following:  “The country is so large and the advantage of the Indian so great, that we cannot make a single war and end it.  From the nature of things we must take chances and clear out Indians as we encounter them.”  (General Sheridan, a Union General who fought the Confederacy, mirrored Sherman’s attitude as he remarked:  “The only good Indians I know are dead.”) 

 

The justification for this was deeply embedded in the warped minds of many people who, looked at today, we would say should have known better.  Take Francis Amasa Walker.  Walker served as Commissioner in the government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1871-72.  He was a well-known economist and Eugenicist and, if that wasn’t enough of a pedigree, he later was the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  

 

This well-educated and well-positioned man had this to say about the Indian:  “The Indian is unfortunately disposed to submit himself to the lower and baser elements of civilized society and to acquire the vices and not the virtues of the whites.”  

 

One journalist had this to say:  “To talk of the rights of the Indian today requires the same nerve and moral courage and conscientiousness it did 20 years ago to talk of the rights of the slave and the man who has searched them is considered just as mad, foolish and visionary as were the Abolitionists of 1840 or 1850.”

 

The New York Herald had this contentious comment to make about Wendell Phillips, the long-suffering, courageous leader for freedom of all sorts, including the African-American and Native American:  “Wendell Phillips’ new nigger is the ‘noble Redman’.”

 

Wendell Phillips had it right as he said:  “All the great points of the epoch have arisen out of this hatred between the races.”  To which Brenda Wineapple reprises:  “Race was, had been and would continue to be the issue dividing the United States.”  

 

The plague of “the other.”  On and on it goes.  Throughout all time.  To be resisted in each of our lives.  We see it today with Sunni vs. Shiite, right-wingers vs. left-wingers, rich vs. poor.  “We should never be able to be just to other races (or I’d add, any people who are different from ourselves), or will reap the full benefit of their neighborhood, till we unlearn contempt,” Wendell Phillips said.  

 

More positively, I would say:  “Let us never fail to strive to see the other person in ourselves and ourselves in others.”

 

My Latest Book

Friends, 

I have just published my last and likely final collection of personal essays and reflections: "Pepperspectives: The Final Chapter". Available on Amazon on Kindle and soft back.

Best, John 

Where Do We Ground Our Ethical beliefs? A Personal View

The Case for Grounding Ethics in Human Nature and Experience rather than Religion and Divine Commands???

 

Over the years, I have thought deeply about the basis for my ethical beliefs.  To what extent is it based on my alignment with what Jesus preached and what Christianity is at its best (loving God and treating your neighbor as yourself) relative to the alternative of basing my ethical behavior on the realization that we as humans are “continuous with nature” and that as argued by the German philosopher, writer and anthropologist Ludwig Feuerbach, rooting our behavior in physical and social realities and observance of the importance of human relationships and dialogue. 

 

Feuerbach in his work, The Essence of Christianity (1841) advocated for a shift from God-centered to human-centered ethics.  He promoted a new philosophy that made man, with the inclusion of nature as the foundation of man, “unique, universal and the highest object of philosophy.”  He wanted to ground ethics in human nature and experience rather than divine commands. 

 

He argues that the concept of God is a projection of human qualities, something we have created. 

 

He advocated the pursuit of happiness but argued that, in pursuing that goal, it was necessary to recognize the importance of the happiness of others.

 

This all raises the question.  Is a secular, human-centered approach to ethics and morality one that can result in a more peaceful world and coexistence among peoples?  We know that the pursuit of religion has often resulted in wars and there is no reason to feel that will end.

 

Where do I come out on all of this?  What have I personally found to be true?

 

First, I take nourishment from viewing all of us as human beings as part of nature.  It would be unrealistic to do otherwise.  It’s a reality.  But I also see no evidence that a nature-based human rights philosophy will, in fact, lead to a more peaceful world.

 

What I have concluded is that there is no getting around the inherent human tendency to pit ourselves against and elevate ourselves relative to other people.  It’s ego-driven selfishness; it’s inextricable.  This tendency co-exists with beneficent instincts too.  Our task is, in proverbial terms, to live by the better angels of our nature.

 

What helps one do that?  It will vary by individual, of course.  For me, religion or, more precisely, the preaching of Jesus and what He stood for, which I find co-terminus with the foundational principles of other religions, has been of enormous help.  I recognize that this foundation of belief may well be something I’ve created to serve as a proverbial crutch to improve my behavior.  I accept that.  I have no problem with it.  But for me it is more than that. It is an inspiration to pursue what is good in life. 

 

As beguiling and perhaps intellectually correct as the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach may be I do not retreat for a moment from my commitment to try to follow as best I can the preaching and actions of Jesus.

 

The Glory of a Relationship Where Your Mutual Affection and Respect Are Unconditional and Unquestioned

 

I was moved to write this reflection twenty years ago because of a coming together of conversations with my wife, Francie, and children and in particular at that time with my daughter, Susie.

 

"I have found that you reach a point in a relationship where your affection and respect for another person grows to a point that it becomes unconditional and unquestioned.

 

You reach this point by seeing a person’s integrity revealed again and again.  You reach it by experiencing a feeling of caring and trust that is deep and jointly shared.  You reach it as you experience a greater sense of wholeness, of pleasure, and of personal fulfillment in the company of the other person.

 

You reach it as you enter a relationship that allows you to share not only the everyday issues and concerns, but those that matter the most to you.

 

You reach that point and never lose it, one hopes with your spouse and with your children and, if you’re lucky, over the course of a lifetime, you reach it with a few business associates and friends.

 

When you reach this point there is nothing you won’t do to help another person.  You only hope that they realize this to the point of being willing to reach out for that help in the instance when you may not be aware of the need".

Revealing the Essential Qualities of George Washington

 Joseph Ellis’ biography of George Washington, His Excellency is a good example, at about 270 pages, how less can be better.  I compare it to the biography of Ronald Chernow, twice the size, but frankly not helping me understand Washington any better and, in some ways, less than I did reading Ellis’ book.

 

Ellis managed to convert Washington from the impenetrable marble bust that we see, or the unbeatable general crossing the Delaware, to a human being of great strengths but flaws like every person and every “great man,” too.

 

You come to the end of the book, the final 10 pages, and Ellis shines a bright light on what made Washington tick.  It was clear from the beginning that his height (6’3”), large body size and regal appearance made him stand out as a leader.  And he carried himself as a leader, with confidence and few uncertainties, at least ones he ever displayed or revealed in his diaries.

 

He was at the center of the two distinctive creative moments in American founding, Ellis writes:  “The winning of independence and the invention of nationhood.  No one else in the founding generation could match these revolutionary credentials, so no one else could plausibly challenge his place atop the American version of Mount Olympus.”

 

Ellis makes clear the errors in judgment and the missteps Washington made along the way.  Participating in the massacre of Indians.  Losing more battles in the Revolutionary War than he won.  Recognizing that the biggest win, Yorktown, was really a French victory.  But somehow or other, it is fair to say, as Ellis writes, that he was “invariably proved prescient as if he had known where history was headed; or perhaps as if the future had felt compelled to align itself with his choices.”  That overstates the reality, I believe, of the situation, but there is truth to it.

 

Washington was a supremely realistic visionary.  Ellis rightly observes that “Washington’s power of judgment derived in part from the fact that his mind was uncluttered with sophisticated intellectual preconceptions.”  Washington’s education was elemental.  From his very first experience on the Virginia frontier, he had “internalized a visceral understanding of the arbitrary and capricious ways of the world...he had concluded that men and nations were driven by interests rather than ideals, and surrendering control to another was invariably harmful, often fateful.  Armed with these basic convictions, he was capable of a remarkably unblinkered and unburdened response to the increasingly consequential decisions that history placed before him.”

 

I think it’s fair to say, as Ellis writes, that Washington had no part of “the grand illusion of the age that there was a natural order in human affairs that would generate perfect harmony.  The Revolution was not about destroying political power as it was for Jefferson, but rather seizing it and using it wisely.”

From the beginning, recognizing the need for a Federally-supported Army, he was with Hamilton in wanting to have a strong national state.  

 

I find a similarity in Washington to Lyndon Johnson.  Like Johnson, “his life was all about power:  facing it, attaining it, channeling it, and projecting it.” 

 

Self-interest was never far from Washington’s mind.  We see that in his accumulating of land from his very earliest days.  We see it in how he handled the slavery issue:  condemning it as a moral aberration but being tentative all the way to his death in actually providing freedom to his slaves.  To be sure, he could not allow for him having an enslaved family broken up.  But he stopped short of freeing his slaves.  After all, for him they were assets. 

 

Washington’s deeply realistic approach to foreign affairs is well-illustrated by his attitude toward France following the onset of the French Revolution.  Although he knew that we probably would not have won the Revolutionary War if it were not for France, he was determined to prevent his affection for Lafayette or his memories of all that the French armies and sailors did to help achieve independence influence his judgment about not forming a long-term supportive relationship with France.  He was focused, like Jefferson, with laser-like intensity, on expanding the nation to the west.

 

His attitude toward foreign relations is well-captured in these key words he uttered, “There can be no greater error to expect, or calculate upon real favors from Nation to Nation.”  He asserted that the relationship between nations was not like the relationship between individuals, which could periodically be conducted on the basis of mutual trust.  Nations always had and always would behave, he believed, solely on the basis of their own interest.

 

A strength of Washington was his willingness to change his mind.  His willingness to do so in the case of the Revolutionary War saved the country from disaster.  In the beginning, every instinct of Washington was to undertake a frontal attack on the British.  In fact, he had tried that in New York with great losses.  General Greene opposed this.  He advocated a “Fabian strategy”: preserve your Army, be selective in attacking the enemy.  After a lot of pleading and cajoling, Washington followed Greene's conviction.

 

Another strength of Washington—he knew when one of his associates like Madison and Hamilton were better equipped than he was to accomplish a job.  A great example of this concerns the Bill of Rights.  He left the writing of that entirely to Madison.  Washington followed the same path when it came to the economy, establishing the Federal Bank and other financial matters.  Here, he followed Hamilton.

 

 

Washington had a very hierarchical view of people.  There was no love lost between him, his fellow senior officers, and the soldiers who spent that brutal winter in Valley Forge.  He enforced very harsh discipline.  Drunkenness received up to a thousand lashes, and deserters faced death by hanging. 

 

He was a tight manager, too.  A stickler for details of how Mount Vernon and his other farms operated.  A supreme and hard-nosed realist in this area, as in all others.