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America began life as an offspring of the Enlightenment, a time when European nations aspired to emulate the ancient Greek (Athenian) model of a "civilized society" governed by reason versus passion, and the ideals of democracy, social justice and the rule of law. For the next two centuries, we were the model for these ideals in the rest of the world. Now we are faltering.
True, there have been many lapses in this country during the past 220 plus years, and there are still many flaws and imperfections. But we have also made great progress. We approved a Bill of Rights that remains a beacon to other nations; we abolished slavery; we liberated women from a condition of near-bondage and expanded voter suffrage; we enacted sweeping civil rights legislation, and we created a social safety net to provide economic support for the involuntarily unemployed, the needy, the sick, and the elderly. We have even institutionalized disaster relief in FEMA, though it has recently been overwhelmed with emergencies in the age of global climate change and extreme weather.
But now there seems to be an ominous black cloud of social anger and even hostility toward the victims in our society. First, there are the full-scale attacks on the safety net from the political right - from Presidential candidate and Texas Governor Rick Perry's charge that Social Security is a "Ponzi scheme" to proposals to turn Medicare and Medicaid into a "block grants" to the states to use as they wish and, most disturbing, opposition to extending unemployment benefits during the worst jobs crisis since the Great Depression. At a time when poverty has soared in this country to 46 million people, the highest number in 50 years, this national disaster has aroused antagonism in some quarters rather than compassion, as though the victims are to blame for their condition.
But perhaps most disturbing are the signs of vengefulness toward convicted criminals (the now infamous "Texas death penalty cheer" for Governor Perry's record number of executions -- including some cases where wrongful convictions were strongly suspected), and then last week the signs of antagonism toward those who are sick. When Rep. Ron Paul in the latest GOP TV debate suggested that we should let an uninsured sick person die rather than provide free treatment, he got cheered by the audience for saying so.
As various critics have pointed out, the overwhelming majority of those without health insurance (almost 50 million and climbing) cannot afford it. They're not free riders. But this hardly matters to some people. These incidents, and many others of a similar nature, are in fact symptoms of a severe social distress, a consequence of the deep economic hardship and insecurity in our society. The ambient anger that is out there can undermine compassion and any sense of fairness.
It is reminiscent of the guillotine era in post-revolutionary France, when an impoverished and angry populace cheered at the public executions of the nobility (and their sympathizers). In a similar fashion, many Germans in the 1930s, when their defeated and humiliated country was suffering from a ruinous economic depression, lashed out at the Jews in their society. We all know how that ended.
A warning about where this kind of social pathology can lead was suggested in the classic - and at the time shocking - study of the Ik in Uganda by anthropologist Colin Turnbull in the 1970s. The Ik were traditional hunters and gatherers who had been forced by the Uganda government to change to a settled, farming way of life in a mountainous area with poor soil fertility and frequent droughts, and they were prohibited from going back to hunting and gathering in what had been declared a national park.
Under these severe political and ecological pressures, the Ik society unraveled and became a libertarian nightmare. Every man for himself meant just that - no help even for close neighbors or relatives, incessant conflicts, wife beatings, stealing of food, hostility toward those in need, rejection of the old or infirm, and even the abandonment of children. Turnbull concluded that "It is certainly difficult...to establish any rules of conduct that could be called social, the prime maxim of all Ik being that each man should do what he wants to do, [and] that he should do anything else only if he is forced to."
The dark lesson of the Ik story is that a philosophy of every man for himself (and every woman) is a pathway to anarchy - not the benign utopian socialist or free market kind of society but an ugly Hobbesian "war of each against all." This is surely not what any of us want.
