When I was a student in the late sixties, Tijuana, Mexico, was the place for male college kids to go. They went there to get drunk, to patronize the many whorehouses operating openly, to get rowdy, and to blow off steam. Often they got jailed and had to bribe their way out.
So Tijuana was the West-Coast equivalent of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, during Spring Break. But there was a difference. Just across the Mexican border from San Diego, California, Tijuana was and is in a foreign country. It had much looser laws and customs, much greater corruption, and much worse poverty than here at home.
While in grad school in the late sixties, I discovered something shocking there. Just three blocks from the main drag, with all their brightly-lit and hawker-touted attractions for Gringo kids, people were living in packing crates. The poverty was appalling. I had traveled a lot around our own country and had never seen anything like that.
Fast forward to last year. I was driving to the Home Depot in Emeryville, California, nestled in a corner of Oakland. And what did I see? A five-block stretch of homeless people living in tents, makeshift shelters, RVs and pickup trucks.
There were no packing-crate residences that I could see. But the resemblance to Tijuana in the sixties was still shocking. Newspapers reported the same phenomenon across the Bay, in San Francisco.
So in half a century Tijuana had come to Northern California, among the wealthiest and most expensive areas in our entire country. Truly Birnam Wood had come to Dunsinane.
Less than a decade before my Tijuana experiences, in high school, I had learned about the Enlightenment. I never read the big tomes, but I still recall the words of Jeremy Bentham: “the greatest good for the greatest number.”
I was a budding “quant” then. My favorite courses were Physics and Advanced-Placement Calculus. I was destined to get a Ph.D. in physics and practice science and engineering for most of a decade, before changing careers and turning to the law.
So that simple verbal phrase, and the quasi-quantitative concept behind it, hit me with the force of divine revelation. If each of us is a psychological and moral universe unto ourself, isn’t the “greatest good for the greatest number”—the sum total of our individual happinesses, with individual miseries subtracted—the proper measure of a society? of human civilization? The answer to these questions seemed to me self-evident. It still seems that way to me now, at 78.
But now is different from then. Sure, things have improved in many ways. Jim Crow no longer rules the South. My cell phone has more power and more storage than the IBM 360s that I had had to program with punched cards back then. There are lots of admirable Black people in important positions in our country.
But today the distribution of wealth—of physical resources—around the globe is nothing less than sick. Elon Musk’s net worth is reportedly almost 97% of the entire projected 2023-2024 financial resources of the State of California, with its 39 million people, 11.7% of our nation’s population. Jeff Bezos’ net worth is reportedly 75%. With its solidly Democratic government, California is supposed to be one of our most “progressive” states. What happened to it, that Tijuana of the sixties should have come to the Bay Area? What happened to our nation and the “developed” world that, according to Oxfam, eight lone individuals, all of them men, in 2017 owned half the world’s wealth?
The historical causes are clear. Charming deceivers like Ronald Reagan taught us that greed and selfishness are good—contrary to every organized religion, including Islam. Clever propagandists-for-profit like Rupert Murdoch taught us much the same. With far greater success than Goebbels and Molotov, they taught us to obey our “betters,” do what we are told, and not to complain as our skilled jobs, our factories, and our industrial base got sold to China to enrich the few.
Our U.S. Supreme Court, in Citizens United, gave the rich and corporations legal carte blanche to propagandize us in their own interests. And if we doubted the “wisdom” they served us, they had the “lawless, godless, atheist Communist” bogeyman to scare us into line.
It turned out that propaganda for profit, aimed at the everyday person, is far more effective than were Goebbels’ “high-brow” films and news, produced in aid of Hitler. But eventually, intellectual sewage gets rancid, just like the real stuff. It all degenerated into the lies of Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones, leaving many voters puzzled how pundits they trusted could say one thing in public and quite another in private.
So we know what happened. All we have to do is watch the torrent of lies, misinformation, disinformation, and conspiratorial delusions—even products of foreign spooks!—that spews from our electronic media every day. How could people not trained from birth in skepticism and deep analysis possibly escape insanity? If you want to know why Donald J. Trump is still a leading candidate for the White House and by far the gravest threat to the Western Enlightenment in four centuries, you need look no further than that.
But how do we fight back? How do we save the philosophy, the fundamental Truth, of the Enlightenment in an age of deliberate media madness, overwhelming propaganda, and rampant, well-justified cynicism? How do we maintain a semblance of science, democracy and equality in the Second Gilded Age of Fox, Sinclair and X?
I think we rely on the people who value it most, whose family and group history of suffering is too powerful for mere media propaganda to overcome. Among them are our current Black leaders and recent immigrants.
For four centuries, Black people and their ancestors in America have struggled to achieve the equal treatment that Jefferson the Slaveholder impliedly promised in our Declaration of Independence. Now they have reached the cusp of power in America. Most, but not all, know what they are fighting for. I’ve written an earlier essay on this point, so I’ll just cite a few of the most prominent names here: Lloyd J. Austin III, Alvin Bragg, Charles Q. Brown, Jr., Ketanji Brown Jackson, Letitia James, Hakeem Jeffries, Wesley Moore, and Fani Willis.
One of the most important Black leaders is Hakeem Jeffries, now House Minority Leader. Last year he came within six votes, out of 435, of becoming Speaker of the House. We need to do everything we can to get him those six votes this year. We have ten months to do that.
Even if the worst happens in the presidential election, having a Dem as skilled as Jeffries as Speaker will slow down Trump’s forced march to imperium. Besides re-electing President Biden by a landslide, it's hard to find anything else that would have quite the same effect. In one swift stroke, Jeffries as Speaker would: (1) marginalize the House’s crazies (Gaetz, Greene, Jordan, etc.) and take away their megaphones; (2) bring the Senate’s bipartisanship back to Congress as a whole, if only by breaking lock-step GOP “discipline” of its precarious majority; (3) halt the nonsense “investigations” based on what targets said, not what they did; and (4) give Enlightenment values a chance to creep back into the most dysfunctional Congress since our Civil War.
Jeffries is a skilled and personable pol, a progressive, and a gifted protégé of Speaker Pelosi. He can get the job done. He can bring sense, order and effectiveness back to Congress. So I don’t much care who the new Democratic members who will vote him might be. Let them even be “Blue Dogs,” i.e., moderates who sometimes vote “conservative.” But make sure they’ll vote for Jeffries as Speaker and get our Congress working for the people again.
The second general group that can help preserve the Enlightenment is immigrants. We need them to do the dirty work that native-born Americans increasingly won’t do. But we need them for far more than that. Unlike most of us born here, they have deep faith in our democracy and values. Without ever knowing the word “Enlightenment” or its historical importance, they believe that, if they can only get and stay here, our system will give them safety, a modicum of economic fairness, paid work, and hope for them and their families.
Are they deluded? I think not. With every callus shaped by rocks in the Darien Gap, they prove and strengthen their faith in America. We need them here, not just as workers, but as citizens and voters. Their faith in our system, based on lived experience and hardened in those calluses, just might overcome the constant drumbeat of propaganda that has driven many of us mad.
Far from “poisoning” our blood, as our Demagogue claimed (echoing Hitler), immigrants can renew it. Whether in assessing their own progress or our nation’s, they won’t look to Fox or the Internet cesspool. They’ll count the calluses on their feet and assess their families’ current welfare, compared to the misery they left behind abroad.
They say the darkest hour is just before dawn. So may it be with the dawn of a renewed Enlightenment. The coming election has many dangers. But it also has many opportunities.
Re-elect President Biden, and our Executive Branch will continue to curb corruption and sycophancy and serve Enlightenment values. Make Jeffries Speaker, and Congress will stop acting out political theater and start solving problems again.
Getting enough votes in the Senate to kill the filibuster forever is a heavier lift. But if we can manage it, federal legislation guaranteeing easy voting and reproductive rights, killing gerrymanders, fighting planetary heating harder, and making corporations and the rich pay their fair share of taxes won’t be far behind.
That’s why I don’t contribute much to individual campaigns anymore. Saving the Enlightenment is a group project with many moving parts. I’m neither smart enough or informed enough to see the big picture reliably. But there are those, like Stacey Abrams, who are and can.
So I put donation money into in-person Get-Out-The-Vote groups like hers, trusting that they will see the big picture. (A list of the ones I donate to appears below.) I don’t throw my money away on individual campaigns that will just cast it into the electronic cesspool in the form of overpriced thirty-second sound bites. Every credible Democratic candidate for the House has a role to play, and getting reluctant and occasional Democrats out to vote could turn the tide.
But make no mistake about it. What’s at stake is the Enlightenment itself.
The Enlightenment took a long time coming. It arose in part from the Protestant Reformation that Martin Luther kicked off in 1515, which broke the Church’s monopoly on thought and let individuals in. It gathered speed from Galileo’s work and the advent of science in the early 1600s. It rose to force on the notion that all people are equal genetically, confirmed today by microbiology, which tells us that all human DNA is 99.9% identical.
When you look at China, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Russia, and Yemen today—and at Brazil, Iraq, Hungary and Turkey (among others) teetering on the brink—you see the Enlightenment under unprecedented challenge worldwide.
But as Mark Twain once said about his own, its death is greatly exaggerated. With hope and trust in our best leaders, and in those who suffered unspeakable hardship to get here, believing in us, we can bring it back to life.
The Enlightenment belongs to no one nation, “race” or tribe. It’s a philosophy for all mankind. Its four pillars are human rights, democracy, science and equal treatment. Only it can help us cooperate, empathize, avoid war, and so survive the rise of viral pandemics and the perhaps self-sustaining planetary heating that we ourselves have caused. As its strongest modern adherent, the US owes it to our species and our history to sustain what’s left of the Enlightenment in this time of war, disease, corruption, strong-arming, kleptocracy, and populist demagoguery. This year is the cusp.
Endnote, My Donations List: Here’s the list of Get-Out-The-Vote and similar grass-roots organizations to which I contribute monthly during this election year: (1) Black Voters Matter Action PAC; (2) Fair Fight Action (Stacey Abrams’ old organization); (3) New Georgia Project (a spin-off of (2)); (4) Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda; (5) Democracy for America (DFA); (6) Democratic National Committee; (7) Progressive Turnout Project; (8) VPP; (9) Mijente (Hispanic GOTV organization); (10) Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC) Action Fund (which seeks to restore ex-felons’ voting rights); (11) Swing Left; and (12) Advance the Electorate PAC.
If any reader has favorites not on this list, please name them in a comment, along with a bit about what they do and where. We all need places to put our campaign money that won’t, by funding for-profit purveyors of propaganda, just make the problem worse. I think GOTV and grass-roots organizations like the ones Stacey Abrams helped found fill that bill.