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promoted by Rosi
Saint Luke tells us of a man who went to see a prophet, asking of him what is necessary to enter Paradise. The prophet simply asks the man a simple question - what were you taught you must do? The man replies, in essence, to love God and to do good to his neighbors. But the man then gets philosophical: Who, he asks, is our neighbor.
We don't know the name of the man in the story, but the prophet is Jesus of Nazareth. His answer to this philosophical question is known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan. I don't think I really have to go into a re-telling of the story. For the purpose of this post, let's just understand that the first two people who found the man on the road, beaten and battered, adhered to a view of the world as being brutal and probably viewed their actions as a realistic response to a dangerous world. The Samaritan looked at exactly the same facts and reached a different conclusion - amid the brutality of the world, he had a chance to make one man's life a little less brutal. At some cost to himself, he took the opportunity to make up for damage done by someone else.
You don't have to be a Christian to understand the parable. It doesn't matter if it was spoken by Jesus, Moses, or Mahatma Ghandi. It speaks of altering our fundamental view of the world - not by ignoring the danger of the world, but by embracing it and rejecting that brutality as a legitimate course of action. Knowing that he could not change the entire world, the Samaritan chooses a path of radical brotherhood and decides to change his small corner of the world.
I believe this view of radical brotherhood is a core value of what motivates Progressives to act. |
| Reactionaries like Alex DeCroce don't actually hate people. If Mr. DeCroce's brother were unemployed, I'm sure he'd step up to the plate and help pay his brother's bills. The problem is that Mr. DeCroce limits his view of responsibility at the genetic definition of "brother." He may be his brother's keeper - or at least part of his brother's safety net - but he is not, under any circumstances, part of your brother's safety net. Whoever said we were the keepers of our entire society?
Well, Progressives did. Folks like Gerrit Smith and Lysander Spooner championed the concepts of free soil, abolition, women's sufferage, and labor unions because they knew that the health of society as a whole depends on the health of its individual members. Smith, in particular, helped fund John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, paid for anti-slavery settlers to relocate to Kansas, created a legal defense fund for people charged with violating the Fugitive Slave Law, and advocated in support of the Civil War as an abolitionist war. But when the war was over, he helped fund a one million dollar bond to spring Jefferson Davis from the federal prison where he'd been held for two years without charges.
Spooner passed the Massachusetts Bar Exam without ever going to college and practiced law in defiance of legal licensing laws that defended the rights of the wealthy to deny those without wealth the ability to work in the legal profession. Spooner advised juries of their right to exercise "jury nullification" by simply refusing to convict a person of Fugitive Slave Law infractions, and could further rule a law unconstitutional if they so chose. As an alternative to the violence of war, Spooner argued for "compensated emancipation" where the government, and private citizens, could purchase slaves from slave-owners as a means of providing freedom for the slaves and compensation for the loss of property for slave-owners.
Spooner directly influenced such men as Frederick Douglass, who spoke at the twenty-fourth anniversary of emancipation, saying: "Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe." I can think of no pithier way to appeal to someone's sense of brotherhood than to include it as a core of self-preservation.
Progressives are often accused of seeking class warfare because of their insistence that wealthier people pay more in taxes. In fact, they are trying to shield those who are hurt most from taxes - the poor - from extinction at the hands of the government. They are the shield against blind class warfare, not the purveyors of it. They understand that we must pay for our government and we much have something to live on after we pay for it. The poor could be taxed to oblivion and beyond and never put a dent into the cost of a modern government. But when one percent of society accounts for nearly a quarter of all income in the country and the top ten percent accounts for more than half of all income, it is not simply folly to expect those at the bottom to pay more, it is an affront to common decency. It is an attack on the core values of Progressives.
Progressives have been losing the policy fight, and the election fight, because we haven't been engaging in the idea fight. Every human being understands the concept of brotherhood, and we understand that it is at the heart of compassion. As a means of organizing society and ordering the functions of government, it far outstrips the every-man-for-himself attitude of conservatives. We have no monopoly on brotherhood or compassion and the world will always have an abundance of cruelty. But we can change the world if we use our core belief in the brotherhood of humanity to ease that cruelty when it lies within our power to do so. To do otherwise is simply to enjoy the privilege of being on the side of the oppressor and assuage our guilt through childish levels of denial and justification. |
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