Tag: Social Inequality

Golfers – A Question of Form

On By T. Carlos "Tim" AndersonIn CommentaryLeave a comment

Nearly flawless as a golf announcer, Jim Nantz and his dulcet tone define Masters’ broadcasts for this generation. Nearly flawless . . . his man-crush on former college roomie Fred Couples is a concern, especially as it approaches white-hot intensity every April once Magnolia Lane opens to the patrons. “Back in ’89 when Freddie had that closing 67, we all remember how . . .” No, Jimmy, nobody but you, Freddie, and his caddie remember. But since Freddie is so cool (and good), Mr. Smooth gets a pass on the man-crush. I do have one issue to raise, however, with no forthcoming pass for the Well-Pitched-One. It’s his word choice when he refers, over and again, to his current and distinguished CBS booth partner as Sir Nick Faldo. Really, “Sir”?

faldo-nantz

Nothing against the six-time major champion and World Golf Hall of Famer, or his fellow Brits. Faldo, as far as this American can tell, deserves the honor of knighthood (received in 2009) as much as any other subject of the British empire. His contributions to the sport and representation of his country merit prominent recognition. I understand that Nantz’s gesture of using his partner’s royally endowed title is done out of respect. And respect, of course, is in the golf etiquette rota.

Let me raise, however, a slight protest – American style. Respect can still be had without stealing a smidge of the Queen’s English. Sir does have proper and common usage in American English when relationships are hierarchical – US military, younger-elder – or when commercial service is rendered. But it is never used as a title, only as a generic address. Sir as title is the propriety of our English cousin-society where the monarchy, booted out of our society in 1776, yet survives.

Jim Nantz is a class act, no question. I don’t mind an initial and respectful acknowledgement of Sir Nick Faldo – one time is sufficient – at the beginning of the broadcast. But, when used over and again . . . does our boy Nantz fancy himself an aristocrat? Hanging out at Augusta National all these years, perhaps so. I don’t hear David Feherty, or any other commentator, calling their CBS colleague Sir Nick on the air. Feherty, a native of Northern Ireland, became a U.S. citizen in 2010. He understands his adopted country’s history, in this particular area, perhaps a bit better than the lead announcer.

 

Want to read on? The front side was pretty easy . . . back side tougher!

Here’s a word (I’m surprised to find out) with which many Americans are unfamiliar: egalitarianism. Along with the ever-popular liberty, egalitarianism is a founding principle of American society. Egalitarianism is shown forth by Thomas Jefferson’s statement in the Declaration of Independence “All men (sic) are created equal.” Egalitarianism does not refer to equal distribution of goods, per se; it refers to equal status and worth, socially and politically, accorded to all. Favoritism via gender, race, family name, or inherited wealth be damned! America is the land where oversized concentrations of power – whether it be a king, an overzealous military general, or a business titan – are kept in check. That is egalitarianism, and it’s American as apple pie.

The last thirty-five years have seen a steep rise in social and income inequality in the United States. In my book, Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good, I refer to the current time period as one of three recent short eras of excess. (The other two are the Gilded Age of late 19th century and the Roaring ’20s.) Like a pendulum that swings back and forth, American society has oscillated between eras of excess and relative equality. Said so well by Gilded Age critic Henry Demarest Lloyd: “Liberty produces wealth, and wealth destroys liberty.” Egalitarianism and liberty have worked together in this society to balance out the other’s excesses. Too much liberty exacerbates inequalities. Too much egalitarianism stifles creativity and growth. Eras of excess are a throwback, essentially, to the days and societies of an earlier Europe that many of our ancestors, with no chance to improve their economic or social status, left behind.

American society, where previously only white property owners had the vote, has struggled with what egalitarianism and liberty have meant for all of its inhabitants: indigenous, slaves, women, children, immigrants, and minorities. Today the struggle continues for what these two foundational principles mean for gays. Egalitarianism and liberty together are the proper form in our society. Relative balance, as evidenced in Nick Faldo’s swing when in his prime, holds it all together.

 

Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good is available at the Blue Ocotillo Publishing website. Thanks for joining me for this outing!

 

 

 

 

The Fueling of Inequality

On By T. Carlos "Tim" AndersonIn Excerpts2 Comments

The following is an excerpt from Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good, available at the Blue Ocotillo Publishing website. This excerpt comes from chapter 7 – “Inequality is Regression.”

President Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech of July 1979 called Americans to self-discipline, sacrifice, and conservation. OPEC was driving up the price of oil, the Iranian Revolution was cresting, Russia would soon invade Afghanistan, and American confidence was waning. Carter never used the word malaise in the speech, but the description stuck, and critics claimed that Democratic defeatism was televised, watched by more than one hundred million Americans. This was a watershed moment for American politics of the last four decades. Ronald Reagan—treating conservation and material sacrifice like the plague—defeated Carter handily in the following year’s election. Since that time, Reagan’s summons has obliterated Carter’s: not one leading national politician has been brave enough (or foolish enough, politically) to question the ongoing sustainability of our lifestyle and to ask for limits on consumption.

                After more than thirty years of growing social and economic inequality, Carter’s speech, revisited, reveals certain insights more apropos of a social critic or philosopher than a president. “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.” Meaning, Carter intimated, isn’t sold at the mall.

                Carter’s speech was initially well received; Americans flooded the White House with approving phone calls and letters. But the tide turned quickly, and the newly elected Reagan contrasted his bold optimism with the supposed somber pessimism of his predecessor. Carter, however, was not announcing or advocating American demise. The speech has turned out to be a prophetic decree of daring that called the nation to self-examination. Its message harkened to the egalitarian spirit that helped forge American society. But the proclamation has been widely ignored. More than thirty years of unexamined commitment to unlimitedness, as if it’s the only way forward, begs critique. British epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett call for America and other wealthy nations to move away from the idea “in which people regard maximizing personal gains as a laudable aim in life.”*

 

Slightly more than one hundred years have passed since sales of gasoline became dominant among crude oil’s many derivatives. Gasoline, along with diesel and jet fuels, make up more than 75 percent of the typical refinery yield for a barrel of oil in today’s world. A by-product of twenty million years of marine biomass chemical transformation caused by underground heat and pressure, petroleum is a flammable substance that is essentially converted solar energy. All fossil fuels are stored solar energy. Plants use sunlight to grow and thrive, animals eat plants, and their fortuitous decay brought about the coal, natural gas, and petroleum that have fueled our modern industrial life for two hundred years . It won’t last forever. Joseph Tainter and Tad Patzek (authors of Drilling Down) say we’re living off “the geological equivalent of an endowment from a long-dead ancestor . . . a subsidy that allows us to support levels of complexity that otherwise we could not afford.”** In a sense, the way we live now (the wealthiest 20 percent of the world’s population consumes the majority of the world’s energy) is a heightened aberration of history, a radical departure from what has been the norm for nearly all of human history. We can’t and won’t go back to what used to be, but we can teach our children a truth that is widely overlooked in our modern world: high-gain energy (relatively easily attained and highly productive) is precious and rare, and it behooves our respect and right use for the common good. It is highly unlikely that this aberration will be ongoing. Just like a lucky run at the poker table, all good things do come to an end.

                The first chapter of this book covered  Rockefeller’s permission, which allowed for disparities of wealth previously unknown in the history of the world. We can now say that these disparities were made possible because of oil and other fossil fuels—their discovery and commercialization. The potential energy formed over millions of years in and by the earth has been unleashed over the past two centuries: it fueled the first and second industrial eras, forged the advances of Darby, supplied Edison and Ford with the power to innovate, made Carnegie the king of steel, produced Rockefeller’s titanic wealth, and provided the foundation for the incredible advances of the middle and latter parts of the twentieth century. On the other side of the ledger, however, the energy unleashed has also fueled economic  inequality, which has increased significantly in the last one hundred years, bringing along its accompanying social ills. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr said it so well: progress in better and in worse.

*Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, Bloomsbury Press (2009), 253.

**Joseph Tainter and Tadeusz Patzek, Drilling Down: The Gulf Oil Debacle and Our Energy Dilemma, Springer (2012), 188-89.

From Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good, Blue Ocotillo Publishing (2014), pages 160-61, 162. All rights reserved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

America’s Middle Class Falling Behind

On By T. Carlos "Tim" AndersonIn Commentary2 Comments

Like an exhausted sprint specialist vainly trying to finish strong in a 1500 meter race, the United States is getting lapped by opponents previously thought to be second rate. A recent New York Times study details the falling fortunes of America’s middle class, no longer the wealthiest middle class in the world. Nineteenth-century America gave improved definition to the term middle class, originally used in England during the 1850s. Historian Charles Morris says that in America – unlike aristocratic and socially stratified Europe – the term worker was a job description rather than a marker of class status.* For a long time, American social or economic mobility (work hard and move up) was also the envy of the world. That’s no longer the case; like the sprinter who can’t finish a distance race with any strength, America no longer leads its competition in social mobility.

Let’s keep it real: there are two important considerations as this conversation continues. Firstly, let’s not feel sorry for the American middle class. To live in middle class America is to experience – within historical and current contexts – great blessings of material consequence. Middle class Americans have wide access to goods and opportunities; yesterday’s luxuries have become today’s necessities, and there are also plenty of new gadgets. Compared to other developed nations, the American middle class yet grades out far above average in most economic categories. The other important consideration, however, is that the share of wealth and income held by the very richest in America has increased, in the last thirty-five years, to historically dangerous levels. One only needs to look to the Gilded Age and the roaring ’20s (which helped create the Great Depression) to discover that an economic system top-heavy in rewards is not only unsustainable in the long run, but it exacerbates social inequalities.

Here’s a crucial overlooked reality: Income differences within a society matter more than income differences between countries. Does a middle class kid have it better in the United States than in China? By material measures: yes. But income inequalities have a tendency to increase status competition within a society, often times to the detriment of that society’s common good. Ever seen “poor” kids in the United States, whose parents might need food assistance to feed their families, wearing expensive sneakers? Status competition within a society influences a poor kid and his family to make a decision economically ill-advised but socially needful.

A question: Do you want to live in a society where the very richest continue to get far richer and social inequalities increase as a result? It hasn’t been like this for most of our history, but the United States in this current day is one of the most economically unequal countries on the face of the earth . . . that’s not a good race in which to be a front-runner.

 

 

 

 

 

Charles Morris, The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy, Holt (2006), 13-16.

No Foolin’

On By T. Carlos "Tim" AndersonIn Commentary3 Comments

Thank goodness for Tom Perkins! If you don’t know who he is . . . he’s the American venture capitalist who recently opined (in February) that the wealthy – paying more taxes – should get more votes at election time. It’s all part of his idea to make the country a better place: “You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes.” Perkins admitted to being purposely outrageous with his remarks at the California Commonwealth Club event . . . Outrageous?! No, au contraire; it’s about time someone doubled-down to stand up for the rich!

Yes, Mr. Perkins doubbledd-down!! In January he compared the current attack upon the wealthiest 1 percent in America to Nazi Germany’s kristallnacht. Racially motivated murder and incarceration, vandalism, arson, and expulsion – with government support and backing . . . these extreme measures suffered by Jews in Germany in 1938 have apparently resurfaced in 21st century America. I haven’t seen any such things (thankfully), but apparently Mr. Perkins has. Guess we need to take him at his word and thank him for sounding the alert! Twice!!

All this at a time when OXFAM reports that the richest 85 people in the world have just as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion – half of the world’s population. But don’t go about blaming this arrant and relentless inequality on Mr. Perkins – he’s not part of that exclusive club. He’s merely in the “top 200 richest” club! Now he did have at one time the biggest private yacht in the world, but he chose to sell it after the 2007-08 economic swoon . . . right around the time when this persecution of the rich movement started gathering its plebeian momentum.

But like I said – we can only thank our lucky stars that Tom has chosen this opportune time (while we are here to witness it!) to publically express his opinions about wealth and social inequality. Tom is “self-made” as they say – first in his family to go to college (MIT on a scholarship, no less!) – and that gives him the right to articulate his finely honed views on the world situation that only fifty years of being fabulously (and deservedly so, of course) wealthy can construct. Those of us who don’t have a million bucks (and pay only mere thousands in taxes)  – we oughta just shut up and listen to him. He’s rich and therefore probably a million times smarter and wiser than the rest of us! No foolin’! 

 

April Fools’ Day 2014

 

Remembering Ambrose of Milan

On By T. Carlos "Tim" AndersonIn Commentary2 Comments

The great religious systems of the world – and many regional indigenous strains – weave a harmonious montage in their admonitions against greed and materialism. This blog post is the first in a series highlighting religious unity against the type of values seen in the dominant religion of the land: the confluence of commerce, materialism, and consumerism. These posts are adapted from the book, Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good, available in May 2014.

Ambrose served the populace in good manner as the governor of Milan, by appointment of the Roman emperor. When the bishop of Milan died in 373 CE, popular acclaim demanded Ambrose take the seat of bishop . . . except Ambrose had no interest in the ecclesial appointment. He even tried – unsuccessfully – to escape Milan to avoid the appointment. He quickly acceded however, and was baptized, ordained, and consecrated as bishop in a whirlwind eight-day process. A rare moment in church history: quick movement.

Ambrose wasn’t perfect (like Martin Luther later, he was involved with indiscretions against Jews) but he was adept at speaking truth to power. A riot in Thessalonica (modern day Greece) led to the death of the appointed Roman governor in that city. Emperor Theodosius, incensed at this outburst of disorder, ordered swift retaliation – even though Ambrose counseled the emperor toward patience and investigation. The bishop’s advice went ignored; retaliation came with the massacre of 7,000 Thessalonians. Later on, when Theodosius travelled to Milan, he attempted to enter church to celebrate mass. Ambrose stopped the emperor at the door and confronted him: no communion for the emperor until he repented of his sin. Remember, these were the days before widespread understanding of democratic sharing of power; Ambrose’s position was most vulnerable. Ambrose stood his ground, communion was withheld, and the emperor eventually repented. Theodosius later decreed a thirty-day wait period before executions were carried out in sentences of death.

Ambrose had an innate sense that clergy were called not only to confront abusive power, but to seek justice in support of the weak against the strong. From his Duties of the Clergy: “God has ordered all things to be produced, so that there should be food in common for all, and that the earth should be a common possession for all. Nature, therefore, has produced a common right for all, but greed has made it a right for a few” (italics mine). Rush Limbaugh, modern-day free market fundamentalist and bard of inequality, recently described the teachings of Pope Francis as “pure Marxism.” Sorry, Rush – Ambrose pre-dates Marx significantly and Pope Francis is simply propounding the historic social doctrine of the church. Ambrose helped to formulate it more than 1600 years ago: the church feeds the hungry and seeks to influence those whose decisions affect the greater common good.

Remembering Ambrose of Milan – who died Easter Sunday, April 4, 397 – teacher, preacher, composer of hymns, who stood for social justice in the face of inequality.

What Happened to Egalitarianism? Part 2

On By T. Carlos "Tim" AndersonIn CommentaryLeave a comment

We’re all familiar with the concept survival of the fittest. Have you ever heard of reverse dominance hierarchy? In his research on the origins of egalitarianism, evolutionary anthropologist Christopher Boehm coined the phrase and describes it: the weaker members in a community unite to thwart alpha-types from dominating.* Boehm witnessed it in primates, and concludes that egalitarian practice is not natural, but a learned behavior. Understood as such, egalitarianism has deep roots – a survival not necessarily of the fittest but of the united.

Nature displays hierarchies (ant colonies, for example); hierarchical organizations are not only natural and good, they accomplish manifold tasks. Hierarchy, however, can breed dominance. Egalitarianism – a group or community engaged in the struggle for self-determination and equal opportunity within a larger community or with a competing community – confronts subordinating dominance. Justly engaged, egalitarianism can permeate not only politics and social policy, but market economy as well.

Western philosophers and social commentators, going back to David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, assent that extreme inequalities can only have a destructive effect on society. Social dissention and fragmentation are the inevitable manifestations in a society that tolerates great disparities between its richest and poorest. The American Civil War was, in essence, a battle between egalitarianism and hierarchical domination. The (relatively) new nation was not to be like their European counterpart nations with their monarchies, aristocracies, serfdom, and church authority. American society has fought to put egalitarianism into practice – all the while struggling with what it has meant and means for its indigenous, ethnic minority, female, minor (children), foreign working, disabled, and gay populations.

Some libertarian voices, advocating personal liberty first and foremost, deride egalitarianism as a “revolt against nature” (Murray Rothbard). Might does not always make right – even though the laissez-faire market system has lifted millions from poverty and made others extremely rich, it doesn’t mean the market system can operate with impunity as concerns social outcomes. Egalitarianism is vigorous social progress; we’ve worked hard at it for generations and now is not the time to succumb to such an ardent antagonist. The just reversal of domination is a learned social skill naturally liberating.

*Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior, Harvard University Press (1999).

Click here to read What Happened to Egalitarianism? Part 1.