"Empathy forms the basis for the progressive world-view. Empathy and responsibility combine to characterize the relationship between the common good and individual freedom. Empathy for those in need--connections to them as fellow human beings--requires us to have a form of government that is `for the people'." --George Lakoff
Exodus by Charles Bowden in this month's "Mother Jones" is an extraordinary chronicle relating through words and pictures the plight of a people crossing the desert on a highway to freedom. A people devoted to the struggle for freedom as well as to their fulfillment as human beings.
This article illustrates precisely how the deficiencies of a conservative worldview--namely lack of empathy and lack of appreciation of higher principles--man's capacity to grasp those principles---contributes to disconnection from humanity and freedom.
Bowden's article appears to operate on the well founded assumption that America is currently under the sway of the conservative world view and its frames. Adopting and adapting George Lakoff's use of frames and models in "Whose Freedom" to this essay:
Conservative Fundamental Frame
Private enterprise - corporate ideas pervasive in all aspects of life.
Privitized freedom of choice of a bounteous variety of goods that capitalism provides consumers.
Government for the profit.
Economic Theology
Dicicipline
Hierarchy
Competition
Empathy Lakoff says,
"though we come wired for it, that neural wiring (physiology of empathy) still has to be developed and used or it can decay or fail to develop further."
Here Bowden illustrates this phenomenon:
"For several decades now our economic theology has outsourced not only American jobs but also the reality that most people on this planet must endure. We buy cloths made by children and comment on the good price."
Sweatshop child-labor. Out of sight, out of mind. Little wonder then that the last fifty years has played witness to
"the divorce of the country's moral energies from its political thought and economic theory." (Lapham)
Getting back to "Exodus", Bowden describes
"All the solutions in political play are idiocy"
He's referring to the mounting heap of proposed solutions; worker permits, opening the border, building a wall and employer sanctions. He also goes through one by one the many varied and contradicting studies, plans, solutions and claims that "pile" up like bricks in stacks a dozen high and weigh in on the pros and cons of sharing or hording the American Dream. And he asserts
"But in the end, you don't get to pick solutions. You simply have the choices and by these choices you will discover who you really are."
Pausing mid paragraph--for the purpose of aiding discovery--geared for this essay, here's a liberal fundamental frame and model:
Liberal Fundamental Frame
Freedom:
It's used to "bind together the confusions and discordances of American life with a single, powerfully flexible noun"
-Daniel Rodgers
"Fundamental to Americans' sense of themselves"
-Eric Foner
Government:
Facilitates freedom
Common Good:
The whole has greater meaning than the sum of all of it's parts.
American Principles & Ideals
Empathy & Responsibility
Capacity for higher reason
Common Good & Individual Good
To understand who and what we are it is necessary to understand the philosophical assumptions of our form of democracy. Our `capacity for higher reason' indicates man's ability to utilize logic and reason to make informed decisions. Likewise, man has the capacity to "intuit what is good and what is evil". (Needleman)
It's this capacity that forms the basis for the relationship--that Lakoff referred to in the opening quote--between the communal and the individual ideals of self-government that seeks truth;
"devotion to the human being, his freedom and fulfillment; freedom which cannot be legislated, fulfillment that cannot be charted." (James Baldwin)
Additionally, a government's active participation with regard to individulal and communal ideals of freedom and the common good is crucial in it's role as agent "for we the people".
In contrast, informed decisions from the conservative perspective--if what we see today is any indication--are based on philosophy no deeper than the freedom to choose between a "bounteous variety of goods." (Nunberg)
Absent the crucial role of empathy, economic theology has no recourse but to rely solely on basic competitive instinct when it comes to choices. Competition however, according to Lakoff,
"Must be freely entered into by all parties and their rules must be fair--as empathy and responsibility require. So-called free-trade agreements often violate these conditions for competition. These agreements are often unfair, having been negotiated to the advantage of U.S. corporations leaving out the consent of the individuals governed, especially indigenous populations, subsistence farmers and factory workers in third world countries."
In other words, competition should be based not on instinct but on higher principles. Bowden, adhering to higher principles, concludes the paragraph with
"You can turn your back on poor people or you can open your arms and welcome them into an increasingly crowded country and exhausted landscape."
Empathy is perhaps the essential difference between the liberal and conservative viewpoints. In the "Mother Jones" article The Kids Are All Right James K. Galbraith, like Bowden, depicts solutions as choices that reveal who and what we are.
"What is the solution? For us: solidarity. We must stand with the immigrants. Their fate is our fate. We were them; they are us. We can be one country, with one people, citizens and voters. Or we can be a police state, ruled without hindrance by people who do not work and for whom politics is the business of controlling people who do. Either our immigrants will come, in time and with a certain reasonable effort, to enjoy full political and labor rights, or those rights will disappear for all, including the right to a meaningful vote. Most Americans seem to understand this, at some level. And this accounts, I think, for the great sympathy with which the marchers were met this spring."
The question is will Democrats own up to their philosophy and make a stand.
Bowden concludes the article with
"We want an answer, a solution. But there is only this fact: we either find a way to make their world better or they will come to our world. At the moment, we insist on the wrong answer to the wrong question. And so, the Border Patrol will grow. There will be a wall. Tougher laws will be passed by Congress. And people will keep coming."
In closing, again the words of James Baldwin:
"Humanity is our burden, our life; we need not battle for it; we need only to do what is infinitely more difficult--that is, accept it."