COMPASSION, COMMUNITY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS

© Rev. Joy Atkinson 2009
Mission Peak Unitarian Universalist Congregation
February 22, 2009

When the Rev. John Winthrop first arrived in the New World in 1630 with a band of Puritan refugees from religious oppression, and dropped anchor in Salem harbor, he preached a sermon from the deck of the ship, the Arabella, in which he said: "We must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill; the eyes of all people are upon us." His dream for America was of a sacred commonwealth, a city of justice and righteousness, in which people cared about one another's welfare. As Winthrop put it: "We must be knit together in this work as one...We must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others' necessities...We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our community as members of the same body." The Puritans proceeded to create their golden cities in New England, and although they often were theologically narrow and intolerant themselves, their self-governed communities did pave the way for the great experiment in freedom and democracy that is the United States. The foundation stone of their societies was their belief that one should sacrifice personal wealth and extravagance for the greater good of the whole community.

Last week, I found myself absent-mindedly thumbing through a retail store's catalogue. I even found myself looking a bit covetously at a few of the items, thinking: this looks nice, this is an interesting toy, I wouldn't mind having one of these, this would look nice in my home, etc. Ever find yourself in one of these little acquisitive stupors? I had another voice reminding me that I don't really need these things and shouldn't spend my limited resources on such frivolities. It felt like I was in a cartoon like the old Looney Tunes I grew up on - one of those in which there's a little cartoon devil perched on one shoulder and a little angel on other, both whispering advice in each ear. Fortunately, I snapped out of it before reaching for my credit card.

Of course, the state I was temporarily in is carefully cultivated by advertising agencies. They want us to want things. They drone on in print, on TV and radio about this jazzy little sports car, that cool pair of jeans, this indispensable gadget. They would have us believe that the "pursuit of happiness" in our Declaration of Independence is the pursuit of more and still more stuff! Happiness as self-gratification. A bumper sticker I once saw ironically sums up the underlying motivation of our lives, as cultivated by our consumer-oriented culture: "The one who dies with the most toys, wins!"

How many of you know about the Ferengi? Let's see a show of hands, (Several hands go up.) Clearly there are some Trekkies among you. The Ferengis of the Star Trek series are a race of humanoid beings from a planet called Ferenginar, who have placed greed and acquisitiveness at the center of their value system. They have a book of rules for behavior called The Rules of Acquisition, and I would like to share a few of these rules with you:

Rule #6: Never let family stand in the way of opportunity.
Rule #13: Anything worth doing is worth doing for money.
Rule #67: Enough is never enough.
Rule #115: Greed is eternal.
Rule #261: A wealthy man can afford anything except a conscience.

And then comes one rule that cuts to the quick, because it reveals where the writers got the idea for such a race of beings - from us, from our acquisitive nature - a facet of our humanness:

Unlike the Ferengi, however, we humans are not all about self-interest and acquisitiveness. I don't think that the pursuit of profit and material goods is what Jefferson and the other founders of this nation meant by stating that we are all entitled to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Significantly, Jefferson did not use philosopher John Locke's then familiar trilogy: "life, liberty and property." Property and the pursuit of happiness were not one and the same in the founders' minds. As one commentator on Jefferson wrote: "when Jefferson spoke of pursuing happiness, he had nothing vague or private in mind. He meant a public happiness which is measurable; which is, indeed the test and judgment of any government."

What a concept: that government is meant to make possible the happiness of the public - the happiness of as many of its citizens as possible. George Washington elaborated on this public-minded idea of happiness when he said, in his First Inaugural Address: "There is no truth more thoroughly established than that there exists in the economy and course of nature an indissoluble union between virtue and happiness, between duty and advantage, between the genuine maxims of an honest and magnanimous policy and the solid rewards of public prosperity and felicity."

A union between virtue and happiness! Duty and advantage! Generosity and public prosperity! The founders seemed to believe that with the liberty they fought so hard for should come a sense of responsibility, a duty to work for the public welfare, the common good. Now of course these same founders had some serious blind spots - they did not grant the same rights and responsibilities to those who were not landowners, or those who were not male, or those who were "owned" as slaves. But they did have a vision, even if an incomplete one, of a society in which the greater good, public happiness, was put in the foreground.

A few years ago, a study was published, titled The Day America Told the Truth, in which the results of extensive interviews were summarized. The researchers, James Patterson and Peter Kim, found that our moral fiber is eroding. We are sadly very far from the ideal of Washington and Jefferson, where the greater good is more important than getting goods. Most Americans admit to being willing to lie, cheat or steal for a few extra bucks, and 70% couldn't name even one modern moral hero. More than half of us have been victims of a major crime, and one in seven carries a weapon. The researchers concluded that, in their words, "The United States has become a meaner, greedier, colder, more selfish and uncaring place." Many are also uncaring, indifferent, or cynical even about exercising their right and responsibility to vote. In 1872, Susan B. Anthony illegally cast a vote. At the time, the vote was denied to "idiots, criminals, lunatics and women!" But the once hard-won right to vote is now taken for granted. Even in the last presidential election, although the turnout was the largest in the last 40 years, still nearly 40% of people who were eligible did not vote.

According to Dr. John Cobb, Professor emeritus at Claremont School of Theology, we in Europe and North America are now in the third epoch of the last thousand years of Western culture. The first epoch he calls the epoch of Christianism, in which most peoples' identity was tied up with being Christian, and many were willing to fight and die for Christianity, traveling many miles to foreign lands if necessary to engage in crusades to convert non-believers. Cobb says that after the religious wars of the 17th century between Protestants and Catholics, during which a third of central Europe's population was killed, Christians were less motivated to fight for religious turf, and they turned power over to political leaders. The church became less powerful than the state, and the age of nationalism began.

People in the Nationalist epoch identified themselves primarily as citizens of a particular country, for which they would fight and die as people once would for Christianity. The extremes of Nationalism became evident during World War II. And after that horror, nations bound themselves together to form the United Nations and to establish the World Bank and the International Money Fund. This ushered in the third epoch - the epoch of what Cobb calls "Economism."

Although religion and national identity are still important, Cobb says that the focus of our concern in the modern world is economics. Our decisions as individuals, as communities and as nations are now based on economic gain. Although there are some benefits to this era of Economism when compared with the extremes of Christianism and Nationalism, Cobb sees Economism overall as a recipe for disaster on a world scale. Free-trade agreements allow corporations to move their plants wherever they can do business the most cheaply, exploiting labor and polluting the environment. Small and once self-sufficient countries have become completely dependent on the world market, as the current global economic crisis has made so clear to us. A conversation I had on my recent trip to Egypt with a souvenir shop owner at the Cairo airport brought this point home to me. He anxiously asked several of us in the tour group how long we thought the U.S. economy would be in such a serious slump. When Western tourism declines, this man has to worry, on a daily basis, about supporting his family.

Economism in Western culture also fosters an extreme individualism. In earlier eras, people were more communal, sacrificing their own interests for their tribal, religious, ethnic or national community. Now we try like Ferengis to maximize our own individual economic advantage, and many seem to believe that pushing their own economic interests to the limit will somehow work to the benefit of everyone else as well.

You could certainly argue with the details of Cobb's broad characterizations of the three eras, but it seems to me that he got it right with respect to what motivates people in the U.S. today. All we have to do to see that we are in an era of economism is listen to what the politicians, just about all of them - Democrat, Republican, Independent - promise: rebates, fewer taxes or even tax cuts, so we can have more purchasing power to buy MORE STUFF, and they promise continuing economic expansion, even though this often takes a toll on the environment and digs us deeper into debt. Even when they dare to speak in support of environmental policies, politicians often feel constrained to use the argument that protecting the earth can be compatible with economic growth and development, if we do it right.

Nowadays, we measure our progress as a society by citing statistics like the Gross Domestic Product. The rule seems to be: when the economy is growing and the GDP is up, the economy and society is healthy, and when it's not growing, that signifies a lack of health. In the calculation of the GDP, which is the total of money spent in a given period of time, no one asks what is it being spent on, and are we better off, are we happier, because of it? As Dr. Gus Speth, Dean of Yale's School of Forestry, said in a recent interview in Orion Magazine:

"Capitalism is a growth machine. What it really cares about is earning a profit and reinvesting a large share of that and growing continually. Profits can be enhanced if the companies are not paying for the cost of their environmental destruction - so they fight tooth and nail. The companies themselves are now quite huge, quite powerful, quite global, and no longer just the main economic actors in our society. They are the main political actors also.

And so all of these things combine to produce a type of capitalism that really doesn't care about the environment, and doesn't really care about people much either. What it really cares about is profits and growth, and the rest is more or less incidental."

There's a curious irony that hasn't been lost on many of us: many of the corporate leaders who have extolled the virtue of the free market for years, some of whom got us into the current mess by taking the free market credit habit to its extremes - overextending credit when they didn't have the funds to back it up - some of these free market capitalists are now using public money to bail them out of the mess. We are so oriented to a consumerist way of life, to a getting and spending and lending mentality, to endless growth and the pursuit of profit, that neither Republicans nor Democrats nor most economists of any persuasion seem to be asking a more basic, fundamental question - is there any other way that a national economy might work, a way that would put the common good ahead of profits and unexamined growth? This kind of values reexamination is being discussed in some theological circles, but most economists are just talking about how to get back to American business as usual.

Theologian John Cobb has recently made some suggestions that could nudge us toward a different kind of economy, one that serves more people and avoids concentrating wealth and therefore power in the hands of a few:

"Around the edges there has been another discussion of whether the [bailout] money might be spent in ways that would benefit more people. For example, we could focus on helping those who are unable to pay their mortgages. This would keep people in their homes and keep money flowing to the immediate lenders, even if not at the high interest rate they anticipated. It would hasten the recovery of the housing market...We could require that lending institutions lend only the money that their depositors entrust with them. This would then leave all creation of money in the hands of the government. The government could then both spend and lend into existence the amount needed for the economy to function. The result could be an end to government borrowing and a great deal more freedom for the government to take care of infrastructure, education, health care, and social services. Banks would become service institutions to society rather than concentrations of wealth and power."

Not being an economist, I can't say I fully understand how all of this might work, or even how the present economy is supposed to work. But one thing is clear: it is currently far from providing the safe and secure foundation that can foster greater happiness - the non-material happiness that the founders of this nation believed we should all be able to enjoy.

It is certainly not unreasonable for us to be concerned with our own individual economic well-being, especially now that many individuals are losing retirement funds, jobs, even homes. But when economic self-interest is the major focus of our national politics, we can lose sight of the communal and compassionate dimensions of our being, which I believe are still latent within most of us, whatever our political stripe. In Scandinavian democracies, people who are economically successful expect to pay a very large share of their incomes in taxes. They see it as their duty as responsible citizens, to help those who are less fortunate. And, I am told, they are not given to whining about taxes the way Americans do.

I would love to hear American politicians be direct and frank about this, to say: "Because more than 20% of our children are born into poverty, because we need to be fiscally responsible to future generations and must reduce our national deficit, because education is so important to help people help themselves, because we need to protect our environment for our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, folks - honestly, we must raise your taxes for the common good. And I promise you that the funds we collect from all of you who can pay will go to help those who are in need, and will help protect the earth which so generously sustains us all." Even our new President, Barach Obama, bold as he has been in some significant ways - insisting on a cap on the ridiculous executive salaries that a few of the wealthy enjoy, proposing a raise in the capital gains tax and help for families who are facing foreclosures - even he treads very lightly, you may have noticed, around the area of raising taxes for the rest of us. It would be political suicide to be too bold and out front, because Americans are still living with the delusion that we can have it all, even as we watch it slip away.

On the current crisis, business columnist Loren Steffy wrote,

"This is a crisis spawned, in large part, by our own delusion. We wanted to believe in ever-rising stocks, in a shop-till-the-terrorists-are-defeated foreign policy, and homes that were worth whatever our mortgage broker told us. For eight years, our government borrowed to pay for wars, tax cuts and prescription drugs, while we borrowed to pay for HDTVs, iPhones and Xboxes. Buy now, pay later wasn't just a sales pitch, it was fiscal policy. Later is now. To fix our economy we first must change our views of debt and savings. That will take sacrifice, the one word from the president-elect's speech that we must hear before all others. Sacrifice, after all, is the prefix for change."

So perhaps our current crisis, rough as it is, will provide us with an opportunity to change our ways, to save more and spend less, to happily pay more of our resources to help people in need. Already, individual savings rates are up for the first time in a long while. And what if more Americans went into voting booths each time, aware of that little cartoon devil and angel balanced on each shoulder? What if each person, at the voting booth or in the department store, listened carefully to what both voices, the voice of self-interest and the voice of compassion, had to say, and what if each person would vote according to the voice of compassion at least as often as that other voice, following the dictates of the voice that asks for sacrifice, the whispering angel that speaks for common good?

I offer you this closing thought: You may have heard it said that the one who dies with the most toys is the winner, but that's a lie. The one who dies with the most love, that's the one who wins!

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