Proud to be an American?

In a recent ethics class one of the student presentations had been about Injustice and the State, and the discussion, naturally, slid over into torture and state-sponsored terrorism. As usual then, at least for those who know me even the slightest bit, at the end of the presentation Teacher held forth on the unacceptable-ness (an Aikenesque neologism) of State involvement in committing acts of injustice, and especially on the subject of America’s participation in such activities… complete with the usual, “We (i.e., Americans) should be better than that!,” and all—the whole enchilada. So it caught me a bit short when, on the way out at the end of class, a student asked me if I were still proud to be an American.

            I admit—the question took me by surprise. At first, looking at her a bit askance and askew as is my teacherly (another A-n) wont when unsure about whether I am being mocked, I could not decide whether or not she was being facetious with her question, as I had been cranking rather unambiguously on the U.S. critique-machine; so, frankly, irony could certainly have been in her mind. Even now I am undecided about whether the student intended to serve up a cold portion of irony with this question.

            At any rate, what she got from me in response was still my philosophical stock in trade answer – I am only proud of things when I actually have personal merit or involvement. As an erstwhile disciple of that old Stoic Slave-Master, Epictetus, there can be no other possible answer to such a question than his:

6. “Don't be prideful with any excellence that is not your own. […] What, then, is your own? Only your reaction to the appearances of things. Thus, when you behave conformably to nature in reaction to how things appear, you will be proud with reason; for you will take pride in some good of your own.”

Or again:

44. … These reasonings are connected: "I am richer than you, therefore my property is greater than yours;" "I am more eloquent than you, therefore my style is better than yours." But you, after all, are neither property nor style (as rendered by Ms. Carter on the MIT site).”

So the simple, and philosophically correct answer to my student’s question is that no, I am not in the least proud of some “condition” over which I had no control. My birthright is neither “mine” nor my “possession” in any normal or meaningful sense of that word, so it would be philosophically inappropriate for me to make it a subject of my pride. It is this same Stoic common-sensical (yet another A-n) critique that also makes social constructs such as {Patriotism + Pride=American value} so patently and philosophically meaningless.

            Being proud of where I am born is akin to being proud of having naturally curly hair or good skin… these are not personal “accomplishments” that demonstrate any particular character on my part. So one who is proud, or not proud, or who has any strong opinion whatsoever about where he is born, is exactly like the little mole who wanted to know who did a poo on his head, and who then proceeded to walk around beshat (beshatten? beshitten? beshyted?) for the entire duration of his investigation. What is frankly important here is not whose business it is, but what I personally do(o) about it now that I am besplattered. So let us choose to be different from our little molish friend, and, by asking the correct questions up front, try to draw out the best possible conclusions. Chances are much better that we will act well if we begin our quest by thinking well.

Answer by List. Perhaps there are other philosophical considerations relevant to my student’s question. How might it be meaningful to make the connection between personal and individual pride and the fact of being the fruit of American loins? This reflection then is an endorsement of no American party or of any candidate, but rather of a value – Justice.

·      In my generation it was trendy not to be proud of America’s involvement in Vietnam, for all the various and sundry reasons; it therefore stood to reason that I was not proud to be an American in that season, because it seemed to mean that I was implicated and therefore complicit in America’s Asian involvement.

            However, I was distinctly proud of the fact that individual Americans, including my younger self, would take to the streets to protest that war– I was proud to engage my thought, and my time, and my energy in the real-life working out of a people’s democracy.

·      I was not proud to be an American in the era of U.S. segregationist policies; but I was distinctly proud of the moment in America’s history when she was able to get beyond the issue of color in order to see the man—because I actively supported that transition into social justice in my political choices, and because, although racism is far from dead in America, I personally continue to refuse to allow racist opinions of all the ilks (gender, color, nationality, etc.,) to influence my thinking and my actions.

·      According to Human Rights Watch, America seems to have an active policy of putting its convicted youth in solitary confinement. So, while I have to admit that I have known some pretty rowdy and even out-of-control young people in my time, this particular American philosophe is not proud that he hales from a modern western 1^st world country that locks up its troubled young people in solitary confinement. If someone in prison needs medical or psychological attention, it would seem reasonable that we Americans could and should find a more appropriate manner that addresses these problems, which would include a whole range of professional approaches and solutions.

            This America does not make me proud; but the fact that I can actively and loudly join my critical voice to that of the people at Human Rights Watch makes me proud, because it gives me the opportunity to play a role, no matter how small, in creating an America that is good and just.

·      Also according to the HRW, America got away with torture during the Bush Administration (2001-2008). This was a violation of both US and international law, not to speak of the U.S. Army Field Manual (since 1956 until its revision in 2006 under the Bush Administration); but to address all the arguments relevant to torture and our need for intelligence in one fell swoop—at the end of the day it does not even matter whether or not torture “works” in getting that all-too-important intelligence we keep hearing about. It is ILLEGAL, a violation of American constitutional law, and therefore we Americans should not be practicing it. I am not proud of America’s renegade conduct in this matter.

            By the way, the science is in – torture should be out, unless we are just absolutely dead-set on creating the next generation of terrorists by means of our own state-sanctioned terrorist conduct. On the other hand, if America should wish to practice torture, then it should follow the legal and political channels of American democracy to have torture voted into law and ourselves voted to be taken out of the U.N. This is how the people work in a democracy.

            However, because this step toward the legalization of torture has not yet occurred in the U.S., I am therefore delighted that this current President decided that America and her president should act within the confines of the U.S. Constitution, as well as in agreement with the treaties the U.S. has signed with the United Nations; and I am proud that I cast my vote on the side of a man of this character that values Justice, who still has a vision of America that reflects the America I have known in my life. So nix to Gitmo and torture—almost…

·      There are approximately 196 countries in the world, and, in theory, we all, each and every one, individually as well as nationally, at least pay lip-service to the idea of Justice in the world. I am proud to be of this number. Also, I know of no one, personally, who has ever convincingly made the case that we humans should not strive for Justice.

            Of these 196 nations in our world, 193 are members of the United Nations. I am proud to say that America is of this (latter) number, and that I have also played my part by teaching students the importance of justice and civilized conduct in our relationships, both close to home and beyond our shores.

·      However, in publishing its 2012 Facts and Figures, Amnesty International supplies a corrective to my rose-colored understanding of America’s engagement for Justice in the international community, because the country of my birth is plainly playing a non-supportive role in the theater of global justice. I am not proud of this side of America. The International Criminal Court (ICC) was founded in 2002 with the following transnational statement of value: “The investigation and prosecution of international crimes—including genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes—is a fundamental component of transitional justice.”

            To date, 121 nations of the world have signed up to the ICC; simple math tells me that 75 have not, which includes the United States. It would seem that on the question of International Justice the U.S. is playing keep-up-with-the-Joneses with North Korea and Somalia, two bad boys of the world’s most repressive societies. Sheesch… Even Uganda, of Idi Amin fame, and Nigeria, perhaps the most historically corrupt country on the planet, are signatories to the ICC. I am not proud of this American fact.

            According to the Internet-God on this question, the Clinton Administration signed the original Rome Statute in 2000, but failed to submit the treaty to the U.S. Senate for ratification; and the Bush Administration, again according to the above source, made quite clear that the U.S. would not join the ICC. For these two facts I am not proud, because this does not reflect the justice I value for America and for the world community of nations.

            However, I am proud that the current American Administration has reestablished a working relationship with the ICC. My pride about this comes from the fact that I have not only taught my students about Justice, but that I have also worked together with other people who value justice to choose this current President as the representative of an America of Justice.

            It is when we support just men and just women that we create Justice in our world.

While we all may hope that God might bless these United States of America, per the Greenwood song, you and I, My Fellow Americans, must still not fail in our day job—which is to create everyday in our own personal actions an America where, in Dr. King’s words, “justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Freedom in the Land of the E Pluribus Unum.

Sometimes it is difficult to know whether what you are thinking and writing is a thought-provoking philosophical accounting, or simply a crazed intuition transformed into rant-gone-wild. In this respect, sometimes philosophers are like crazed Dutch hairdressers (or at least the one that I know). This might be one of those equivocal times for all of us, for me the author as well as for you the reader.

            It also comes to mind that this reflection might be destined primarily for American readers; so if you are among those who find this ‘thought-provoking philosophical accounting’ cum ‘rant-gone-wild’ to be only of marginal interest, chances are good that you are a European who has government-organized and sponsored health care. Freedom, in the American sense of the term, does not concern such as you.

‘Freedom’ is the most abstract of concepts, even in moments of extreme philosophical lucidity. The Greek philosophers, for example, did not make the philosophical case for freedom… (Elevtheria!!!! I can still hear the cynical battle cry of one of my former racquetball partners ringing in my ears… he taught romantic literature, of course, in addition to beating me on the r-b court!); because Greeks of the ancient sort did not believe themselves to be free. Rather, they lived in a world tragically conceived, where powerful Gods dominate and control, as invisible and formidable causal forces. In such a tragic world the actions of Gods and men are inextricably intertwined, and although men like Achilles and Socrates understood themselves to be ethically autonomous, i.e., masters of their own choices within the confines of their restricted human knowledge, they did not conceive of themselves as ‘free’ players on the Divine Chessboard. In antiquity, Autonomy tempered by human ignorance as to what the Gods were up to, was not equivalent to this contemporary notion of Freedom.

            In that ancient world, which is explicit in the epic poetry of Homer and elevated to a metaphysical principle in the great tragic poets, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, the actions of men could never be free of that external and all-determining causal environment created by the very presence of the unseen, active, and very powerful external causal Forces who/which necessarily controlled every aspect of the world of men.

            Freedom was a value created rationally by philosophers of the world become Christian (post-B.C.E.). In the Christian argument, Freedom is the keystone concept wedged in-between the idea of a God who, unlike any of the other Gods of Antiquity, is good, i.e., moral, and the idea of human moral accountability vis-à-vis this God. For this philosophical conceptualization and argumentation to work, the God can only make morally weighted demands on men if men are meaningfully free—i.e., uninfluenced by the God in their judgments and choices. This (new world) obviously isn’t Kansas anymore, Socrates!

So the philosophically minded in contemporary America might ask, what does it actually mean to be free? In the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave we believe in this Big Idea; we strive for it (because we tend to equate ‘it’ with happiness); we fight for it; we suffer for it; we die for it; and even more cynically, we encourage others to die for it. Yet what does Freedom mean in the good old (unofficial) E Pluribus Unum?

            I suppose it is best to start conversations such as this by asking the question, what can be known clearly about the idea of Freedom?, a question that is, in turn, perhaps best pondered by asking precisely the opposite question: in what ways are Americans not free? (For a justification concerning this convoluted approach to understanding the Universe at large, please see the above reference to sometime philosophers and crazed Dutch hairdressers…).

            In this American ‘Home, Home on the Plains’, which declared its Independence from British despotism in terms of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, we know for example that, while we may be free with respect to our own life, we are not personally ‘free’ to own our own death, yet. However, the ‘freedom to own our death’ discussion in America, which has the formal and somewhat pejorative tag, Assisted Suicide, is now fairly consistently on the national radar thanks to a variety of initiatives.

            There was Dr. Jack (a.k.a. Doctor Death) Kevorkian’s willingness to risk doing jail-time in the battle for Americans’ right to die. After multiple corpses began showing up at the entrances of Detroit area hospitals, in 1999 Dr. Kevorkian was sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison for 2^nd degree murder for physician assisted suicide, and he did 8 years of that sentence before being eligible for parole. Beginning right around the same time there was the national saturation coverage of the Terry Schaivo, case (1998-2005), which highlighted the Nation’s philosophical free-for-all in a desperate search to define what types of principles should be given priority in cases of prolonged life-support, where a third party, e.g., the husband in this case, but it could equally have been a doctor, or the State, or the insurance company, or…, makes a life/death decision on behalf of (read: in the place of) a person, who is no longer capable of making decisions for herself (e.g., who is in a persistent vegetative state). The husband won on the principle of legal next of kin; the parents lost, and the State lost.

            There have also been a variety of right-to-die organizations, such as the Hemlock Society (although its name has since been changed), whose stated mission is to inform about the rights of the dying, as well as to back any type of legislation that will advance the right to die of Americans.

            Finally, it might come as some relief to some to know that straightforward, self-determined suicide in the United States no longer carries the Common Law penalty of ‘Forfeiture of all the goods and chattels of the offender.’ This piece of information, however, would not have relieved the narrative tension in the reasoning of Arthur Miller’s disheartened Death of a Salesman protagonist, Willy Lomen. For purposes of theatrical tension, Lomen decides not to commit suicide because this would not help his family, but would instead simply invalidate his life-insurance policy—no breadwinner and no life-insurance money would not be an improvement for the family finances. For purposes of real-life tension, this also happens to be generally true about life-insurance.

In the Land of Independently-minded Americans we also know without a shadow of a doubt that we are not ‘free’ to act outside the structures provided by the Constitution and the Laws of the Land. So, for example, it would come as no surprise to normally reasoning Americans that the Bush Administration should come under scrutiny by legal minds for issues regarding torture, which has been illegal for a very long time now, both by US law and by a variety of UN conventions, from 1948, 1975, et al, to each of which America affixed her signature. If we recall that the individual who assumes the mantel of the office of the President of the United States swears to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”, the conflict of ethico-legal interest becomes obvious.

            Constitutional constraint (non-freedom) in America also takes the form of Selective Service, or the draft, the legality of which has repeatedly weathered a variety of legal challenges (1918, 1919, 1920, 1968, 1971, and 1981). Idem the persistently sustained legality of the American government’s right to impose an income tax upon its free citizens, a fact in which all Americans undoubtedly rejoice.

More abstractly, in this Land-of-the-Free we Americans can also know clearly, if we just think about it for a little while, that we are not ‘free’ not to conform to social demands (ok… a double negative, but at least the infinitive is not split!). This type of non-freedom is a bit more philosophically lofty, so we can turn to Friedrich Nietzsche for clarity on the question – Kultur is like a prison, he might say, or a cookie-cutter. Following through on this second simile, when we are born we are dropped like so many pieces of dough into a (cultural) baking bowl (called America); and from the very first day we enter into the bowl we are all pressed together and kneaded into a homogenous ‘plop’ of American dough. From this sameness, the various cultural cookie-cutters, i.e., family, language, friends, school, etc., transforms individual bodies into an enculturated entity called An American human. Within a demonstrable range, we Americans all dress similarly (because we all have access primarily to the same clothing stores); we all speak similarly, having the same range of vocabulary (12-20 thousand words, depending on the source), which is actually pretty limited (read: restricting, constraining, non-freeing) when one considers that by most counts English has about three-quarters of a million words at its disposal; we all read roughly the same books, use the same money, think within the same value parameters.

            In other words, we are not ‘free’ to ‘be’ without culture (a-cultural), because Kultur defines the very thing each individual is beyond its human-ness—this is an American human, this a Dutch human, this a French human, etc. And although former President Bill Clinton reminded us in a 2000 White House speech that 99.9% of Human Genome is the same, which is to say that there is statistically speaking no significant racial or material difference among the peoples of the world, there are nonetheless very real cultural differences between them.

           

In another example of non-freedom, we can also know clearly that we are not ‘free’ to choose to live without an economic framework of some sort, whether money or barter or trade. We may be free to own cars, if we can afford to buy them, but we are not free not to pay the local Secretary of State for the license plates, or not to have insurance, or, perhaps, depending on the state, not to have regular inspections that the individual must pay for. Idem for our homes, guns, education, and any other of our possessions that we may ‘freely’ own, albeit in a regulated sort of way, if we can freely afford such things.

We can also know clearly that we are not ‘free’ to function outside the confines of our biology – remember in the film Birdy the protagonist was so distressed by the world of men with their insane wars that he wanted to join the world of his beloved, and peaceful, birds; but his own biology did not allow him that freedom, and in the face of his insistence, his society locked him away in a lunatic asylum. Our only freedom from our biology, and this has little to do with being culturally American, would be for us to understand the use of technology, perhaps in an Avatar kind of way, and the (new and different) constraints to our freedom that they carry with them. P.S.- Scuba divers tend not to forget to take underwater breathing apparatuses on their dives!

            It is clear that Americans, and perhaps one or two others as well, struggle culturally and philosophically with the question, what does it mean to be free? That this is a generalized question in culture, American and other, is clear from such film phenomena as The Truman Show, or The Matrix (1999), this latter of which, according to the Internet-God, received a number of awards and achieved a number of record-breaking financial objectives, thereby demonstrating its importance culturally and philosophically. The premise of the film, of course, is that the entire framework of our perception of reality (and not simply our enculturation) is an artificial environment—that we are everything (someone Else wants), except Free.

So, we have been reflecting on some of the ways in which we Americans are not free; and yet all who are America-minded continue to be deeply stirred by Reverend King’s famous words reminding us of our historical calling to American Freedom:

“This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"”

These are moving American words about the promissory note of Freedom in the Land of E Pluribus Unum, and they continue to speak to our guts when we hear them anew. But the ‘job’ of the citizens in contemporary American does not end in inspired feelings of Freedom—the task has now become ours to discover how these words of Freedom might speak to the minds of this generation of American people, so they might be translated into real-world actions.