Is America Going Socialist?

 My wife’s Facebook universe is being utterly consumed by the post-election conspiracy wormhole of whether or not “still-free” America is going down the path of socialism, and whether this (or not) is going to provoke the Second Coming of Christ and/or the imminent dissolution of the E Pluribus Unum; so she naturally looked to her pagan philosopher of a husband (which would be me) to think some Big Thoughts on this topic. And so of course here They are. As any man can testify, marital bliss works a whole lot better when we do what our wives tell us.

The Basis of Democracy. One danger for republican democracy, but the only assured promise of its eventual success, resides in the individual; and not just in the individual as meat on the hoof, as sheer numbers in a mass; but rather the individual as conceived of by Aristotle, Descartes, Jefferson, and Kant – as the thinking thing. And if the American individual should ever commit to the path of thinking purposefully, as a student of bruta facta as opposed to an inert depository that accepts or believes the contents of every idiot fwd and email rumor monger that lands in our PC inboxes, or that takes things only at their face value, then our modern democracy will finally begin to mark its entry into the true matrix of unpredictability and opportunity, which is the predictable philosophical endgame of every democracy.

            A Thinking Individual is dangerous; but the T-I is also the only true potential for the philosophy of democracy, and it makes us uneasy. Rightly so; for as the American philosopher John Dewey wrote: “If we once start thinking no one can guarantee what will be the outcome, except that many objects, ends and institutions will be surely doomed. Every thinker puts some portion of an apparently stable world in peril, and no one can wholly predict what will emerge in its place.”

Recognition of a Problem. In some pockets of post-election America there has been, of late, a significant amount of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over the impressive shellacking taken by Governor Romney. The hue and cry, of course, has been wrapped around the familiar old McCarthy-era chestnut – that America is on the road to European Socialism, which, as we all know if we know anything at all, is only a hop, skip, and a jump away from pinko Communism; and the road is short, steep and slippery as hell! It is a “come-to-Jesus” moment in America; because it is just possible that this last American election, when seen for what some Americans think it is… as a people’s turning away from the God of democracy and toward Godless socialism, will be the straw that broke the camel’s back, which, when good and broken, will either induce the labor of the Christian Rapture and the Tribulation, or embolden Texans into finally getting around to seceding from the “maggot ridden” Union, whichever comes first. Yee-haw!

            One of my wife’s Facebook “friends” even got her knickers in a philosophical twist by resolutely affirming pre-election that her God would not allow a socialist Obama to be reelected. The philosophical conundrum is now obvious, or at the very least, the illogical cat has certainly scampered out of the proverbial bag – because this “friend’s” religious “argument” dictates that either Obama did not get reelected on November 6, 2012, or that her God, like Homer’s Zeus (e.g., Iliad I:428-487), was out to an exotic dinner party somewhere else and not paying much attention to America’s elections; either way, the philosophical outlook for such a religious point of view is not pretty.

            So, it would seem that a certain segment of the American people, the above segment that got roundly whammed in these elections, is pretty certain that the other segment, which won the election in a whamming kind of way, has an absolutely wrong-headed philosophical vision of America. Group One, the losers, thinks that Group Two, the winners, have a totally flawed conception of democracy in American as an ATM. On this reading, G-2ers voted democratic because “they wanted stuff” from the government, and not because they wanted to be the noble creators of State, like G-1ers would have been had they won. Of course, one is instantly flooded by all-too-recent memories of the halcyon days of the Bush-Cheney era, which brought us wars and rumors of wars, an economic meltdown to rival that of the Great Depression, a transference of wealth away from the middle and lower classes that probably gave many an overindulged economic forecaster indigestion, and which left so many, many Americans remarkably poorer by having known it and lived through it.

Government & Management Theory.  Irrespective the party or the administration, there is inherent to the Big Idea of people-participation in government a practical, if not to say obviously organizational problem, which will always be at the very heart of the function we call State. How does one go about organizing a big community? There is always going to be some “few” who will have to sort out, in a management sort of way, the “many”; in the community there are always going to be some who have more (stuff, money, land, brains, beauty, family connections, ambition, talent, you name it…), and some who have less.

            There is by necessity an ingrained division of labor in any form of organization or community governance; where labor has been divided, it is not brain-science to suggest that there will no longer be an Absolute Equity, because the labor of State is supposedly divided, in the best of all possible worlds, along the lines of disposition, and competence, and willingness, rather than equality. Therefore the American philosophes were wise to see the equity of men, not in their individuality (i.e., personal disposition, competence, and willingness), but through the eyes of the Universal Law that protects each one of the We the People. This reveals itself to be a wisdom indeed because, looking back, most attempts to engineer artificially into the social space other types of equity (affirmative action comes to mind), inevitably result in injustices. Inequality (i.e., difference) does not automatically equate to injustice.

            In the above-linked ATM article, Lewis Lapham states the inescapable and axiomatic principle for this type of management distinction in government, which would be more abstract and philosophical if it were not so simple and confoundedly practical:

From Aristotle the founders borrowed the theorem that all government, no matter what its name or form, incorporates the means by which the privileged few arrange the distribution of law and property for the less-fortunate many. Recognizing in themselves the sort of people to whom James Madison assigned “the most wisdom to discern, and the most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society,” they undertook to draft a constitution that employed an aristocratic means to achieve a democratic end.

Statement of the Problem. What I would really like to know at this point, then, is something about the G-2 voters who dared to shock and awe the G-1 voters by winning these last elections. What is all the “stuff” they actually want from government, stuff that G-1 voters (the losers) would not take from government for love or money? In what ways is our post-election America now following a socialist agenda or moving toward a socialism, which will then tip over into a communism, which will then provoke either the Second Coming of Christ or the secession of Texas, along with potentially 30 other states, from the American Union?

Thinking Through the Problem. For almost two years my wife and I have been teaching and living in a country, the Netherlands, where the social contract is clearly defined in terms of a socialist philosophy, and frankly, I have only just recently seen a noticeable difference between this socialist county where we live and the “still-free” America that we left behind. As far as I can tell from living here, and can remember from my pay-stubs in America, in both social contract countries the State has the legal right, and indeed obligation, to use my tax-dollars 1) to staff and maintain the schools and universities and hospitals, 2) to keep up the roads and parks and public spaces, 3) to bring clean water and gas and electricity to my house, to take away sewage, and to maintain these infrastructures, 4) to empty the trash, and 5) to provide defense to the people (which might also include financing a foreign war or two, plus wars of a home-grown political sort: on Terror, on Drugs, on Poverty, on Karl Rove, as well as on miscellaneous other war-worthy causes, at least in the case of the US).

            On a side note for item 5): there has been something troubling me about this last warrior fact… The military budget for the Netherlands is expected to reach $10.77 billion by 2016, while the military budget for the U.S. is currently at $964.8 billion, which is expected to decline to $901.8 billion by 2016. Given this information, I still cannot quite figure out why I feel safer in the Netherlands—they are obviously not spending nearly enough money on my personal safety, and I am still awaiting, eagerly if not overly persuaded, their adoption of the equivalent of the American Patriot Act (whatever the budget!), so I can feel even safer yet! (This may be read with irony, if so desired…)

            So, schools and hospitals, trash, sewage, roads & other infrastructure, clean water, electricity, and wars—tax-wise, when all is said and done, it would seem that in both countries approximately the same amount of real money is gone from my paycheck every month, and that in both countries my tax dollars go to creating and enabling the practical possibilities of my life and well-being. Have I missed something? Did I miss the fact that the social philosophy of the Americans is comparable in its practical outworking to that of any other socialist State in Europe? Did I miss the fact that this is what pragmatic socialism looks like? Already long before this present generation America’s Socialism started with people-oriented, republican (i.e., non-monarchical) policies from the likes of Abraham Lincoln (Republican), Teddy Roosevelt (Republican), Franklin Roosevelt (Democrat), and Dwight Eisenhower (Republican). So for the question as to whether America has gotten to socialism yet… the answer is clearly: away and beyond. In fact, it would seem that America has been functioning on the principle of pragmatic socialism at least since the days of Honest Abe Lincoln.

More Thinking + Information. So, you might well ask, in addition to the pragmatic socialism inherent organizationally to republican democracy, what else does American socialism look like? Well, in the U.S. I have a tax rate of 28-32% for federal taxes, to which is added property taxes + sales and/or other state & local taxes, + (FICA, social security + Medicare), which is another 7.65%. So when the dust settles at the end of my American month, real money out of my pay going to tax-type liabilities, is between 40-50%. The Internet-God confirms this approximate figure: “Federal tax rates vary from 10% to 35% of taxable income. State and local tax rates vary widely by jurisdiction, from 0% to 12.696%.” 
            However, my liability is still not quite finished in the U.S. I also had to make monthly contributions to my health insurance, which changed according to my university’s contract negotiations: I went from about $100.00 a month for a single man in 1997, to about $650.00 a month for a single man in the early 2000s, then back to around $125.00 for a family of 4 (marital blended bliss set in…) around the end of that decade.

            In the Netherlands, on the other hand, and I say this in the interests of transparency, I qualify for diminished taxes (exonerated from the first 30% of my income) because I am a foreign employee. This is a cost-of-living type of compensation or adjustment, agreed upon contractually between the U.S. and the Netherlands, to encourage working exchanges between the two countries—workers from less expensive cost-of-living economies, like in the U.S., can actually afford to travel to, work and live in more expensive economies, like the Netherlands. Again according to the Internet-God, in the Netherlands: “Income tax is charged on a progressive basis on Box 1 income, at rates ranging from 2.5% to 52% (2007), at a rate of 22% on Box 2 income up to €250,000 and 25% on the excess (2007), and at a flat rate of 30% on Box 3 income.” Now, this gobbledygook (at least for those of us who are more philosophically inclined) does not mean much to me, but the “street” version is that the tax rate is roughly going to be around 52% for all and sundry, most likely under that threshold for many, but never over for anyone.

            So it would seem that in this socialist country, with my foreign worker status, I am actually paying less in the way of taxes than I would in the U.S.; and without the special foreign worker status, I would be paying approximately the same as I was paying at my former teaching position—from 40-50%. Health insurance costs are additional in NL, like they were for me in the U.S.; but the cost of the health plan seems to be stable countrywide—at about €99 per person per month for the basic plan.

Conclusions? What do I deduce from this short but tedious comparison of my tax-life in the U.S. and my tax-life in the Netherlands? That 1) my tax liability, and what I get for my tax dollars/euros, is approximately the same in both the U.S. and in the Netherlands; and that 2) either America and the Netherlands are both and have been for a very long time socialist states, or that neither are socialisms in any way that should be bothersome to anyone living in American. It certainly does not seem to bother the Dutch very much. Perhaps I should also add a third obvious deduction: 3) that I am excluding from my equation that category of American that thinks the government should have no right to take money out of our wallets for taxation purposes.

Perhaps it would be informative at this point, to reflect on the ways the U.S. and the Netherlands differ in their social philosophies. I suggested earlier in this Reflection that I only just recently learned about a noticeable difference between this socialist county where my wife and I live and the “still-free” (=supposedly non-socialist) American nation that we left behind.

            Big Difference #One is that in the Netherlands EVERYONE has access to the justice system, and one pays according to income. For instance, my blended daughter is a graduate student here, and she is having “issues” with Dutch Immigration (IND) right now. She is in the process of legally appealing a rather pompous bureaucratic decision not to allow her to immigrate to Holland as a family member—apparently in the Netherlands you cease being a family member at the age of 18 and if you have ever had an independent income. Anyway, based on her funds/revenue, her appeal will cost her a whopping €76. The courts will hire the attorneys, make the case, etc., and… we will see what we will see.

            In America on the other hand, and I say this in shame, the citizen has very limited access to individual justice. According to the World Justice Project’s “Rule of Law Index,” in fact, the U.S. placed 20th out of 35 nations in terms of access to legal counsel. How charming. And it should be noted for the record that “limited access” does not mean that the doorways to lawyers’ offices are just too narrow to accommodate the throngs of all of America’s tired, poor, and “huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” (per our Statue of Liberty); no, the entry into the hallowed Halls of Justice by the “wretched refuse” on America’s “teeming shore” is limited by the exorbitant price of justice in America—justice, a top-shelf item with a hefty price tag, costs real money in America, real $ dollars and not credit cards. Sell your house and you might be able to afford Justice in the land of the free and home of the brave.

            So, as we remember back to my blended child’s legal contortions with Dutch immigration, if you have ever had dealings of any sort with the U.S. Immigration Service, “things” are really quite Short and Sweet: you leave on your own initiative or you are deported—fairly traditional American black & white. There is not enough money in the universe to pay for attorney’s fees and wait the years on end for justice to happen in terms of American immigration.

Big Difference #One, then, is that Justice is accessible to all and sundry, or to anyone who can scrape together the €76, in the NL; and We the People do not pay a single euro extra for this clearly socialist benefit. ‘Nuf said though about the costs of justice behind America’s “golden door.”

A second difference in how the social State is expressed and practiced in the Netherlands as compared to the U.S., is access to health care. In the Netherlands there is no need for a social safety net, because every single person living in the Netherlands, Dutch and other, is socially safe. Everyone pays, even those on unemployment pay for health insurance out of their unemployment benefit; and those who need to use the various services less, actually help defray the costs for those who use the services more. I do not suppose this is actually brain-science economics.

            In the U.S., on the other hand, there is the need of a social safety net, such as hospital emergency rooms and “free” clinics, all of which is paid for out of taxpayer dollars. It would probably be cheaper, dollar-wise, to have a more well organized health care program in the U.S., where all the citizens would have to pay, because the taxpayer pays anyway whether he wants to or not. As it stands at this point in the U.S., it is true that Obama-care is improving people’s access to healthcare, and that the number of Americans without health care declined in 2011; so now there are only about 48.6 million Americans without coverage.  An improvement in fact, compared to the numbers in pre-Obama America!

            So what does 48.6 million people without health care, let alone Americans without health care, look like? Well, this number looks a whole lot like a number that equals or surpasses the total individual populations of the following countries:  South Africa, Ukraine, Colombia, Spain, Argentina, Poland, Tanzania, Sudan, Kenya, Algeria, Canada, Morocco, Afghanistan, Uganda, Iraq, Peru, Nepal, Venezuela, Uzbekistan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Republic of China (Taiwan), North Korea, Ghana, Romania, Yemen, Sri Lanka, Australia, ad nauseam… In fact, there are only 25 countries in the entire world that have total populations larger than the U.S. population of uninsured citizens (i.e., 48.6 million), which means that the uninsured American population beats the total individual populations of 171 countries, hands down. I suppose this could be considered a record of some sort.

Big Difference #Two, then, is that health care is accessible, indeed mandatory, to all and sundry in the NL; and We the People do not pay a single euro extra for this clearly socialist benefit. ‘Nuf said though about the costs of health care behind America’s “golden door.”

            As a side note: this type of social benefit, or pragmatic socialism, is a recognition that it is not only the citizen who has an obligation to the State in the social contract, but that the State has obligations vis-à-vis the citizen as well; because for work, and therefore production and productivity to continue to maintain the viability of the State in the world, a thriving and healthy class that works must exist. This, also, is not brain-science economics; but it is a benefit of socialism in the NL that is only now beginning to come to America, thanks to her current socialist president.

Big Difference #Three: university tuition costs about € 1,700 per annum for students in any university in the Netherlands; but tuition fees vary according to individual countries in the European social community.

            In the U.S. the average costs of tuition have gone up around 15%, with top universities logging in at between $36,000 - $43,000 per annum. ‘Nuf said.

With respect to Big Difference #Three the U.S. enters a Plea of Nolo Contendere.

America does not like to lose, and does not lose often; but when she loses, she loses Big Time.

Piggyback Worlds

Sometimes the life we live is not completely our own. My life, for example, is simply too full of moments when my own personal experience, in addition to being my own, is so representative of just about everyone’s experience of the Human Condition, that I become, even if merely for the blink of an eye, Everyman.

Dream a Little Dream of Me. The other morning my wife informed me that I, yet again, woke her up in the middle of the night with another of my dream-world lectures. Now I am obviously dead asleep at the time and have to trust my wife that she is in fact telling me the truth, but apparently I hold forth as only a sleeping philosopher can—on the damnedest subjects. So my wife, with a giggle, was telling me that on this particular middle-of-the-night my theme was “Wielding his sword,” in which I was discoursing on some Epic Hero, as is my wont, but then the point of my oration (so I am assured, anyway) was that this hero’s “sword” was not really his sword, but rather a metaphor for the hero “wielding” some other, more untoward, object of incision.

            Even afterwards, as I read this paragraph aloud to her, she reminded me in a very sniggering and distinctly ungracious tone, that she had told me the story truly, and that the sword was not a sword at all, but some interestingly comparable human body-part apparently gone berserk.

            So this is a reflection about piggyback worlds; worlds that contain a surplus of realities none of which are ever exactly what they seem; worlds within worlds, or more precisely, worlds in which every other world carries along with it, inseparably and almost indistinguishably, still more other worlds – piggyback worlds. Like the Story told by his wife to the dreamer, who dreamed unawares the Story of an Epic Hero holding a sword which may also have been a sword, but which was certainly perceived by the Dreamer (and giggling wife) to be something rather more. Intruding realities from piggyback worlds are always somewhat vague, their boundaries fluid and unclear; and sometimes these essences of a piggyback sort will be less, but most of the time they will be more than they seem. The piggyback nature of our Worlds is nicely reflected in the classic onion metaphor where, peeling back layer after interminable thin layer of enfolding skins of meaning, we discover a rather small and not terribly tasty “tendril-like” root hiding at the core.

“Being” Invisible. There are many things that I do in the world. I do the things that a teacher does, a husband, a dog-owner, a philosophical blogger, a hardy olive-tree planter, an untalented house painter, a laborer, a traveler—all of which are noun descriptors of a verbalizing sort being used appositionally, which is to say that they point back to the subject/individual in the midst of some function. The verbalizing nouns may then also be strengthened afterwards by adding any number of adjectives, depending on how much obfuscation is desired.

            These verbalizing nouns describe, in fact and in deed, how I am performing my life; but they also collectively beg the question as to whether there is any “tendril-like” “being” invisibly stashed underneath all these actions… some true and authentic “I” that has integrity and inherent worth apart from these myriad life-actions. How are we to interpret or understand the individual body-being who is acting out the functions of living? Some philosophers, like Heraclitus, clearly think that the individual, as such, is not a “thing” separable from its acting; indeed, the individual self has no distinct or unique being apart from its performance of it-self. Therefore, Heraclitus famously writes, “What we do habitually is who we are or who we become.” What- or who-ever I think I am is inseparable from what I do, an observation that has, in Heraclitus’ eyes, almost as much importance metaphysically as ethically. This observation about individual authenticity, of course, will resurge many centuries later to become the “tendril-like” root out of which the tree of modern existential thought will spring.

            As I think of all the things I “am,” what I come up with are the typical interpretive anthropological categories of sex, gender, race, religion, color, etc., etc., etc. (remember to pronounce this like Yule Brenner in the King and I just for the fun of it!), which are really not “me,” but rather piggyback groups that normalize qualities of all who are such-as-me. On this view I “am” by analogy.

            Alternatively, as I think of all the things I “am,” I peel back an almost infinite number of layers of all the things I can be or become as a result of my actions. Through my actions I can position my-doing-“self” in a variety of narrative categories or Archetypes, as Hero, Anti-hero, Villain, Rascal, or Savior. In this case I “am” allegorically.

            “Me” by analogy or “me” by allegory – in either case Heraclitus called it correctly: “me” equals the sum of all the piggyback versions of me-interpreted and me-doing or me-having-done.

The Acts of Living. What a philosopher Shakespeare was… and a phenomenologist of Heraclitean persuasion to boot! Remember Jaques in As You Like It, (Act 2, Scene 7) who translates Heraclitus’ vision of man into theatrical terms: 

“All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.”

Theater (or film or literature) is a wonderful analogy for the piggyback nature both of Human Understanding and of the Human Condition. In the best of cases, the analogy is informative precisely because theatrical re-presentation tends to blur the lines between the layers of our onion-worlds as easily as it blurs the lines between genres, and it seldom makes any pretense of finding some “tendril-like” essence at the center.

            The winner of the Golden Bear at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival was the Italian film, Cesar Must Die (Cesare deve morire). What makes this film so challenging, which is also precisely what makes it so very interesting, is that it seems deliberately to confuse the “edges” between metaphor, allegory, social philosophy, cinema, and straightforward theatre. This film, which used real (and some formerly real dangerous) prison convicts as the actors, can be construed to be a meta-type applied-reworking of Shakespeare’s Julius Cesar; or to be a docu-drama, although in a radio interview aired on France Inter’s Cosmopolitaine (Sunday, 21 October 2012) the director brothers denied this interpretation. Likewise, Cesar Must Die can also be considered an updating of Shakespeare’s piece, i.e., a recasting of the Julius Cesar narrative in the modern arena for modern viewers; or, again, as a statement about social politics and the penal system. So what are we members of the audience actually supposed to do with this narrative? How are we intended by the directors to interpret this Story, and is there only one interpretation, or even a best interpretation? Are we supposed to seek some kind of meaningful application to our lives through this narrative, or to become informed on issues of social justice and redemption? Or are we simply to let the visual event wash over us as “entertainment,” with no more thought or value than we might attribute to a Mozart divertimento?

            This brings us to one of the very interesting problems associated with theatrical devices, like metaphor, in marketing and advertising, where the goal is to get the dollars out of our pockets and into someone else’s bank accounts. Oh, the dangers of irony on this stage of our world, which becomes even more pocked should advertisers become “playful” with the already blurry lines between motivated information, i.e., information with an agenda, and deliberate dis- or misinformation.

Sometimes the life we are living is not fully our own. The edges of all of our lives, and the identity of the various personae we play in the course of those lives, are not clear and distinct essences, as a Descartes might have said, but rather are full of blurred lines and abandoned layers of onion peels. Heraclitus gives the preferential reading on the question of our human authenticity: ours is more of a fire-sort of reality. It is inevitable, then, that the roles we play will cross over the boundaries of tragedy and comedy, farce and drama, and that all of our lives will be plagued by interpretations and misinterpretations, hearings and mis-hearings, takings and mis-takings, errors and corrections.

Dying Things Sing the Blues.

My wife was lying very quietly in bed the other morning waiting for me to wake up—her stare boring intently into my left ear. She had been staring silently and patiently at the side of my slumbering head for quite some time until I finally stirred. It was early. With not even a “good morning” or a “by your leave” to warm the cockles of her waking husband’s heart, her opening broadside salvo went something like this: “I know you don’t necessarily agree with my position, but I just wanted to make sure that you really understood my argument about Achilles’ wrath in Homer’s Iliad. The real reason for his anger was a deep-seated rage against his own mortality...”

            She was right, of course – I did not agree with her psychologizing interpretation of Achilles’ rage; but that is a subject perhaps for another blog. So began my morning, even before the coffee, which I had to get up and make myself.

Most of us have heard or at least heard of “the blues” as a musical expression (my cultural reference is Lady Sings the Blues, based on the life story of blues singer Billy Holliday); but have you ever wondered why the expression, “the blues”, came to be linked to music? Have you ever had a feeling of sadness after watching a great movie or finishing a good book? The Internet-God gave 28,800,000 results to that question after only 0.26 seconds. The English novelist, Charlotte Bronte, wrote: “In the midst of life we are in death”; but Gandhi also reminds us that Janus has another face, and that “In the midst of death life persists.”

            Then, of course, the medical corporation also adds their two-cents to the “blues” question by “problematizing” the phenomenon, and we learn that around 19 million American adults are majorly depressed, which does not even include all the other types of depressions (minorly and in-betweenly types) with which one could be diagnosed. This, in addition to all the other types of medically defined “blues” linked to depression, such as separation anxiety (an original form of existentialism) and the blueness event associated with the post-coital condition.

 There is, at the very least, one clear piece of information that we can salvage from this jungle of cultural expressions and medical definitions surrounding our emotional persona: that nostalgia, or the sadness of living, is on everyone’s mind. Our ambient cultural voices show us ways that we might meaningfully express our blues, while our various medical industries seek to cure us of the blues. Normal people generally seem inclined, culturally, to muddle along through their blue periods by giving voice to them, and our medical professionals see the blues as a health problem to be fixed through drugs and other types of therapy.

            However, as we look to the philosophers and poets for some kind of clarification on this question of the blues, it would seem that the wise of the world have not understood the blues as some kind of problem to be fixed; but rather, as a deep-seated reaction that gushes up and wells-out, in the face of a common experience of Living and Dying, from some hidden place in our body.

In a rather famous moment in poetic history, Homer renders a conversation that is taking place in the middle of a dangerous and bloody battlefield between two enemies who should have been friends because their fathers had been befriended. Glaukos, who is fighting on the Trojan side, and Diomedes, who is a great hero on the Greek side, meet on the battlefield, recognize each other, agree not to fight, and exchange the promise and gifts of friendship. And although Diomedes gets the better gifts from Glaukos, for which Homer ridicules this latter, Glaukos certainly gets the nobler lines in response to Diomedes’ question as to his father’s people: “…why ask of my generation? As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity. The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning. So one generation of men will grow while another dies.” (Iliad VI. 146-150).

            Where I have disagreement with my very-early-morning-lying-in-wait-to-ambush-me wife on the question of Achilles is that, like every Greek of antiquity, Achilles knew that we are dying things, that death attends us all sooner or later. What burdens Achilles, again like all Greeks, is not the fact of our day-to-day dying, but rather to determine what a thnetos, a dying one, an ephemeros, a creature that lives but for a day, can best accomplish between this moment right now and its last day in order to mark its passage in the world.

            For Achilles the warrior, the accomplishments were linked to the doing of great deeds of war that men would remember afterwards in poems and songs. For the religiously-minded Socrates, the accomplishment was to teach men philosophy—the life lived justly and honorably: “Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy, exhorting anyone whom I meet after my manner, and convincing him, saying: O my friend, why do you who are a citizen of the great and mighty and wise city of Athens, care so much about laying up the greatest amount of money and honor and reputation, and so little about wisdom and truth and the greatest improvement of the soul, which you never regard or heed at all?” (Plato’s Apology 29d).

            Another Greek who is interesting to interrogate on the question, “What is man?”, is Epictetus, a former slave. According to this freed slave turned philosopher, we Dying Things must never forget, especially when we get caught up in the routines of living out our days, that we are and remain things that are dying surrounded by other things that only live for a day. So in Enchiridion 3 it is recorded that he taught: “With regard to whatever objects give you delight, are useful, or are deeply loved, remember to tell yourself of what general nature they are, beginning from the most insignificant things. If, for example, you are fond of a specific ceramic cup, remind yourself that it is only ceramic cups in general of which you are fond. Then, if it breaks, you will not be disturbed. If you kiss your child, or your wife, say that you only kiss things which are human, and thus you will not be disturbed when either of them dies” (aÓpoqano/ntoß).

            Even the New Testament, which is in some very important ways a text of Greek antiquity, consistently refers to the human body as a mortal, which is to say dying, thing. It is equally true however, by way of caveat, that the NT never speaks about singing the blues.

Nietzsche was a philosopher of the modern world, dying at the dawn of the 20^th century, and lover of ancient languages who helped this ancient Greek world-view to find again its nostalgic, if not to say romantic voice in and for this contemporary world. In Birth of Tragedy §3, Nietzsche recounts an ancient legend of the Greeks that should serve to remind us that human existence was never meant to be more than a blues tune, sung by each one of us, that would linger in the air for just a little while:

“There is an old legend that king Midas for a long time hunted the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, in the forests, without catching him. When Silenus finally fell into the king’s hands, the king asked what was the best thing of all for men, the very finest. The daemon remained silent, motionless and inflexible, until, compelled by the king, he finally broke out into shrill laughter and said these words, “Suffering creature, born for a day, child of accident and toil, why are you forcing me to say what would give you the greatest pleasure not to hear? The very best thing for you is totally unreachable: not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing. The second best thing for you, however, is this—to die soon.”’

For those of you who rejoice in the exotic beauty of other languages, Nietzsche’s poetical outcry is this: »Elendes Eintagsgeschlecht, des Zufalls Kinder und der Mühsal, was zwingst du mich dir zu sagen, was nicht zu hören für dich das Ersprießlichste ist? Das Allerbeste ist für dich gänzlich unerreichbar: nicht geboren zu sein, nicht zu sein, nichts zu sein. Das Zweitbeste aber ist für dich – bald zu sterben.«

The people of culture are driven to express the blues; the people of medicine seek to heal this sickness unto death that will know no healing until we have run our course. On the other hand, our philosophers and poets, our wise ones, remind us that we are Dying Things and that, in order for contentment to attend us, we must make peace with our dying during the days of our living. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he spoke these words for the simple people: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.”

            So, we Dying Things are invited to be peacemakers, to reconcile ourselves philosophically to what it means to be man. Every day we are invited to contribute our own gentle variations to the Blues of Life; to make peace with ourselves. In a funny, sad sort of way, a piece of the puzzle of living is also grieving about the end of living; we are grieving, in a bluesy kind of way, because Loss is an integral part of who we are and of who we are destined to become. The blues, though, are not simply about the end of living; they are also the expression of our own personal lamentation for what we wish might have or could have been.

            As I write the lament of my life into the Blues Song of the World, there will be musical phrases woven around Ideas that I wish I could have believed, because so many around me believe them, but I simply do not find them credible. I would very much have liked in my life to be able to wrap myself in the comforting cultural cloak of Christian faith; but my philosophical mind does not acknowledge that irrational stories should be accepted as “mysteries of faith”. I find, for example, that I am simply unable to comprehend in what way it is possible to construe Jesus as a teacher of ethics, because I do not find either the Sermon on the Mount narrative realistic or the Jesus-ethic real-world functional. We should actively “turn the other cheek” with each one who offends us—so Jesus becomes the only known teacher of ethics in the entire world to do away with the fundamentally human notion of justice (i.e., accountability)?! Likewise, I could never quite extrapolate from the Christian narrative in precisely what way I am defective (i.e., a sinner) in my person, and therefore offensive to The Great One—I find no persuasive narrative, argument, or other evidence that my existence, as such, is an offense of any sort, let alone an offense against the Supreme One who is supposed to have breathed life into these nostrils. Nor do I accept as reasonable the notion that I carry some sort of Debt of being offensive to The Divine, or to the Universe at large, simply because one of my idiot ancestors stole a crummy apple from the wrong Guy’s garden.

            As I write the lament of my life into the Blues Song of the World, there are phrases that speak of what I am becoming, of what I have created during and with the days of my life. Because along with my own aging and experiences of loss (of parents, family, friends, innocence, and of flexibility in my joints), comes the wondering whether, and the deep personal conviction that, I have become the type of human that would have made my parents proud, that would have made my grandmother proud.

            As I write the lament of my life into the Blues Song of the World, you will hear in my life-tune a repetitive blues phrase crying out the Realization that there will not be enough days in my life to discover answers for all the Big Questions that I have been studying, relentlessly, for as long as I can recall. This phrase expresses my dismay that all my education has not informed me concerning what is true about the world, but rather concerning what I have learned about the world as I have grown up that is not true.

            The blues singer of Psalm 8 reminds us to keep in our minds a question, which is both rhetorical and yet profoundly reflective of the bluesy nature of the Human Condition: What is man that we should be mindful of him?

America’s Founding Fathers

Toland's (1696) Deistic Tract

Why is there such continued interest in showing whether or not America’s Founding Fathers were Christian? Does it really matter, to anyone anywhere (even to the odd revisionist or  orthodox scholar of US history---really?!), whether George Washington was a deist, theist, Christian, or just all-around better than average military leader? (This is the question my wife woke me up with this morning, instead of just bringing me coffee in bed like I had hoped!).

            But the web is abuzz and atwitter with the question, ranging from the scholarly to the much less scholarly – provoking even simpler grass-roots, tea-party loving Americans to a non-sequitur defense of their much-loved deist/theist/therefore-Christian, Thomas Paine. In this grass-roots link the distinction between deist, theist, and Christian is initially important to the Washington argument, because Lillback (the above revisionist [sic] historian) is apparently somewhat “too” arbitrary in defining his terms; but then our grass-roots guide to American history assures us, textually, that Thomas Paine, who was a deist of the theistic persuasion believing in the God Providence (one of the five deities of Christianity) and founding the Church of Theophilanthropists, by virtue of being a deist/theist, was therefore also Christian, because anyone who believes in Providential Deity in a Thomas Painean kind of way is de facto Christian. It’s enough to befuddle even the clearest-minded among us.

            Well, what is my pre-coffee reflection on this question? It seems like my first and only-a-little snide response is pretty simple – it certainly doesn’t matter to George Washington himself, who, at this point, has already had a fairly decent amount of time to make his peace with his belief choices. Less snidely, though (because I’ve gotten up to make my own coffee! Sigh…), while George Washington was a fine military man, no one, historian or lay, has tried seriously making the case that Washington was an intellectual beacon among the Founding Fathers. So I think it is pretty safe to say that the philosophical framers of our constitution – who were for the most part our American version of the French philosophes-- called on Washington when they needed a swift sword and a winning military strategy, but not when it came to sweating out the ideas, words and phrases that would become, “We the people…”

            Which brings us back ‘round to the crux of my wife’s question. What is gained by the debate about whether or not the Founding Fathers were Christian? For the record, while I certainly concur that the vast majority of the American Fathers (even Thomas Jefferson) were church-goers (they are listed on the church rolls, paid tithes, etc.,), evidence suggests that this is more significant from a societal point of view than from an informed philosophical conviction of metaphysical reality. No one would dispute the fact that (1) church pews are replete with church-goers, nor that (2) many of those who occupy the pews do not necessarily do the work of the church, nor that (finally!) many church-goers find comfort in attending church (a social event) but not necessarily in believing the church stories (a philosophical event). So my concurring that America’s Founders were church-goers, although not necessarily Christian believers in a modern evangelical kind of way, should pose no inordinate problems.

            So, on to our crux… Why might it be important for Modern America to re-discover or to re-invent for itself a Christian foundation? The question itself suggests to me that there is a not-so-subtle theocratic or religious junta afoot in American, an attempt to control or influence the social voice of the people by imposing upon (or inserting into) the American foundation myths a supposedly ‘original’, and therefore truly American, religious heritage, which is Christian. Yet, I teach in my Introduction to Philosophy classes that America was never/is not a Christian country – not because I particularly care about any America’s (Early or Modern) religious convictions, but because it is important philosophically to understand that the architects who framed the American Constitution (1) very deliberately avoided allowing any type of power to be consolidated in the various institutions of state (hence the separation of powers), and (2) argued for the absolute separation of the church from the state, to avoid establishing a religious-political entity, which is to say a theocracy (a god-powered state), with a Deity as head of state. Nor can one dispute that the supreme philosophical contribution of the Founding Fathers to the western thought tradition was the disestablishment of religion in general, and Christianity in particular. This is just history. The very framing of the American political structure is, philosophically and fundamentally, anti-theocratic in nature!

            When we consider Iran, for example, or other religious states such as the Vatican, they are theocracies, which means that acts of state, i.e., political and legislative decisions, are dictated and controlled by the Keepers of the sacred text (such as the Koran or the Bible and/or Papal Tradition). In theocracies, questions of right and wrong are grounded in absolute and unchanging metaphysical truths, which are pronounced and announced by the Religious Interpreters; so ethical questions are not in the least influenced by political, social, or international expediency (ethical philosophers call this moral absolutism).

            In democracies, on the other hand, which are people-powered states, questions of right and wrong have no permanent or absolute answers; instead, the answers to ethical questions are grounded in the flow of social and political consensus, which evolves with the changing convictions of the ongoing generations (this is called moral relativism). Understanding this concept of a people-centered government as morally relative, is also useful in explaining Jefferson’s emphatic devotion to education-- to educate the public is the sacred duty of a state governed by the people, because education is the last redoubt for the American citizen against the permutation of power into all types of tyranny, political as well as religious (see Jefferson’s letter to Joseph C. Cabell, 1818, FE 10:99; for a reference to Papal tyranny, see Adam’s letter to Thomas Jefferson, December 2, 1813, CAPPON, vol. 2, p. 404).

            This is the type of enlightenment government, grounded in reason and reasoned argument, that was established by the American Founding Fathers, and which all political players are called upon to protect when they are sworn in to office. According to this source, in Article 6 of the US Constitution:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

In enlightenment democracies of this American type, then, relativist consensus building looks a whole lot like public involvement, ballot initiatives, elections, and voting. Thus, to use a provocative example, up until 1973 it was criminal in the United States for a woman to have an abortion, but in January of 1973 the right to abortion became written into the American Constitution, thereby becoming an inalienable constitutional right for all Americans, until another generation should be persuaded to vote differently on the question. So unlike in a theocracy, in a morally relativist political state like America the truth-value of any specific ‘act’ (like abortion, or gun control, or individual health care, or any other issue-act) ebbs and flows with the changing will of the voting public. It is for this reason that I tell my students that it does not matter what their/my private opinion is about the act of abortion- we the people have the private right to our private convictions, and it is so intended and so designed in American that we citizens should be engaged in the public arena to try to persuade other citizens to our view. But any politician or political entity who/which erects a political campaign formally committed to overturning inalienable constitutional rights (in my provocative example the pro-choice platform), is engaged in some type of religious or personal proselytization that is clearly opposed to, actively committed to subverting by any and all means, and unwilling to uphold, rights guaranteed to all Americans under the constitution (specifically those broad rights as defined in the 9^th and 14^th Amendments). And such politicians, I tell my students, to whatever degree they fail to give adequate reason and argument for their position, should therefore be voted out of political office as quickly as possible so they can assume their rightful calling among the religious voices of America.

            For the record: In secular (read: non-theocratic) America, arguments grounded in reason do not begin with anything resembling the following phrase: “The Bible says…” or “God…” If this enlightenment axiom were respected, it would take some significant degree of philosophical ingenuity and persuasion to make an ethical case against abortion (as opposed to a medical case, or other). This is why most pro-life politicians who take a public/political stand against abortion, simply issue a statement either that they are morally opposed to “it”, giving no reason for their opposition, or they issue a statement that their opposition is based on moral reasons, but then there is bewildered and confused argument when it comes to stating those reasons for the record. Yet, from my philosopher’s point of view, in this American Republic there should be no shame or fear in taking a philosophical stance against a given position; shame should only be present when American politicians’ private religious convictions override their public/political and moral duty to defend the rights guaranteed to all citizens protected by the American Constitution.

            This, it seems to me, is the reason for all the fuss about whether or not, or which of, the Founding Fathers were/were not/might have been/could have been Christian.