A deficit of trust exists in this country, between its citizens and their government institutions. It seems to me, and others I listen to as well
Each of us is born into an indifferent world. Give him a name, feed and protect him, get him a basic education, grow him up into an adult, nudge him to be productive, obey the laws of the land, then send him off and wish him good fortune. Copy/paste the next one in the bassinet. That is as much good will as we might reasonably expect a stranger to extend to a newborn in this world. This is because care for a new person’s well being falls off roughly in proportion to genetic distance from the parents. It is a simple fact of the human condition that beyond grandparents, possibly aunts and uncles as well, every newborn begins life in a world populated by indifferent strangers. Care is a finite resource, nobody possesses a bottomless well of it. Providing care for those in your genetic orbit moves your needle closer to empty, and one hopes one’s tank doesn’t run dry before the kids learn to care for themselves
A second fact of the human condition: no one of us can, in a way that ensures a durable outcome, care for all the world’s children. One can say she cares about a stranger’s well being, but the mere expression of caring about something is not equivalent to the action of caring for something. Some of the most affluent individuals in this world will incorporate to provide resources to strangers, some of whom will be children, sure – drilling deep wells in sub-Saharan Africa to provide clean water for example – but that is a kind of second hand care that I’m not talking about. A parent who reads to her child is evidence of care for the child, purchasing a dairy cow for a family halfway around the world is to care about caring. A person who knits you a cap cares for you; the hallmark birthday card merely says, thinking about you
A third fact of the human condition is the axiomatic if not also alarming truth that by simply being born into this world, the individual has assented to the preexisting social contract
Facts four and five are death and taxes
Facts three through five set you in relation to the government, which doesn’t care for you, or even, really, about you, they just want you to uphold your side of the contract, be productive and pay your fair share of taxes. In return, the government promises to keep you safe. When you’re born, they assign you a nine-digit number to keep track of you. If you never become productive, or stop being productive in old age, there’s something called the safety net. In times of war the government will select some people from the population, those most able to fight, and put them in harm’s way, reducing their individual safety, in order to keep the rest of the population overall safe. So they say anyway
Over many years, surely as long as I’ve been alive, we TheAmericanPeople have been endlessly reminded by the president that keeping us safe is his highest charge. Good day, citizens of America, presidents have always said. I will work tirelessly to keep you safe, that is my responsibility, your safety is my highest cause, no more beyond. Most often we hear this spoken during auspicious ceremonial speeches, like on inauguration day, or during solemn conversations with the country with the president seated in a high-back chair, aside a stone hearth, legs comfortably crossed, gentle flames lapping and embers crackling. Only the most cynical citizen or ideological anarchist would push back on this, the president’s oath
Somewhere along the way, though, trust in the government was broken. Certain intellectuals in society today believe this represents the largest existential crisis the country has encountered in modern times. Others are more sanguine, and more of the mind that this, too, shall pass. I’m not sure where I come down on this
From time to time, as noted earlier, certain AmericanPeople are going to have to be made unsafe to keep the rest safe. In doing so, some of these individuals will die while fighting to keep others safe, or return home wishing they had, or enter a lifelong battle with a constellation of incurable mental health disorders, maybe treatable with psychedelic drugs, nobody knows for sure
A caring father forbids his young daughter from taking a 10:00 PM run in Central Park. The daughter complains: It’s a city park, Dad, open to all, I have a right to run in that park whenever I want, you ought to let me go! Dad sits his daughter down, briefs her on what Aristotle meant in the Nicomachean Ethics by the prudent versus the practical. He adds that his ne plus ultra charge as a father is to protect his family from harm. The most practical way to avoid getting mauled by a bear is to stay out of the bear’s den, he says. You have rights, honey, but the bear has teeth and claws and doesn’t even care about you, or your rights. There are no bears in Central Park, Dad. Sure, he says, but bad actors in this world may take many forms. Dad, maybe if we learned more about bears we could understand why they want to maul us. Timothy Treadwell tried that in Alaska, honey, but the bear killed and ate him anyway, and his girlfriend, too. Maybe there’s a different approach that would work, Dad? I can’t rule it out, he says, but you can’t expect every extant danger to your safety in this world to be rendered benign simply because you come to understand its motivation to harm you. Wouldn’t you agree it is more prudent to run where, and when, you are less likely to encounter bad actors? Dad, no where is 100% safe. Indeed, we live in scary world. All our practical efforts to enjoy a good life are posed with risks to our safety, we ought to prioritize the safety of our values. So far as you and I are concerned, as my daughter you make my life good, by bringing you into this world I committed myself to keep you safe, and it follows you ought to keep yourself safe. Think of it as a kind of contract between us. By the way, back to your question about a different approach, even if you could practically de-fang every bad actor who may do you harm there are new people being added to this world all the time. You’d never get them all and it only takes one. Dad, I see what you’re saying, but isn’t avoiding bad actors the same thing as appeasing them? I don’t think so, honey. Giving in to bad actors, substituting their values for yours, is the ethics of Pacifism. If while out for a run you are accosted by a bad actor, unprovoked, who would do you harm, and you don’t resist, or fight back, that’s pacifism. On the other hand, avoiding the encounter in the first place does not involve the surrender of your values, it’s a prudential approach to protect them
Bravery is often recognized from afar, sometimes conflated with heroism, valor, concepts with no touch point in reality, what philosophers call floating abstractions. Have you noticed how readily a hero dismisses his label? Hell, I’m no hero, I wasn’t brave, I did what I did because I could not do otherwise
In various spiritual traditions pride is seen as a character flaw. They are wrong. Pride is an intentional property you keep to yourself. Nobody else is ever entitled to assign the value of that psychological feature in you. Actions some call brave others will view as shameful. That’s the problem with most moral judgements, people who make them suppose others are the authors of their own thoughts (and actions)
A dog returns to a burning house, licks his owner awake, along with the dog the owner makes it out, avoiding certain death by asphyxiation. No one calls the dog brave. There are no “genes” for bravery, no material basis whatsoever for bravery, not in the dog, and there’s no evidence that 50 million years of brain evolution added the property in the human brain. It’s merely a conceptual salve for the human condition, a metaphysical story we tell ourselves. Worse, is when you become the subject of someone else’s story. Tell your own story
Any world traveler will tell you to act prudently in your adventures to foreign lands. Even the government, in its publication of cautions and alerts to its citizen travelers, knows this. Another way it tries to keep you safe. Regardless of customs and traditions of the people living in those foreign lands, whether you like them or not, for goodness sake be careful, be prudential in your peregrinations, where you go, when you go, who you interact with, etc.
Maybe instead of bravery what we ought to admire about the soldier is his skill? But when the secretary of war is caught humming Onward Christian Soldiers prior to a press briefing no one is surprised, because it does not seem the man is able to understand the world outside his parochial moral framework. Amusingly, a very similar theocratic framework he says is the corrupt basis of America’s enemy du jour, only the deity is different. This is a laddish dry drunk who is a member of a church whose leader has stated on network TV in no uncertain terms that he would like to see the United States become a Christian nation, without any public school option whatsoever, where straight men marry straight women whose role is to submit to the husband and breed more Christians. He was asked: What about citizens who would resist? Well, he said, that will be a problem for the church’s missionaries to solve, wink wink. God works in mysterious ways and all that. And now, more recently, the vPOTUS has become, in addition to America’s fraud czar, a foreign missionary as well, traveling to Europe to admonish its leaders to steer their countries back to becoming more God-like, the right God, of course, not the one the POTUS mocked in a tweet, wherein he said in order to liberate Iranians from a murderous regime, he will need to annihilate them. Just Don being Don
A deficit of trust exists in this country, between its citizens and their government institutions