A Second Bill of Rights

In the United States, people talk a lot about rights and freedoms. Often, however, the discussion is narrow in scope, as in freedom from external constraints or the interference of others. Thinkers such as Erich Fromm have referred to this concept as “negative freedom” for “freedom from.”

While these freedoms are important — some are inscribed in the Bill of Rights — they are incomplete. Positive freedom, sometimes called “freedom for” or “freedom to” is about the ability of people to act freely and develop their potential. It also implies the right of people to meet their basic needs as members of the human community.

Having one kind of freedom without the other is pretty cold comfort. As the French author Anatole France wryly noted, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

As World War II was winding down, President Franklin Roosevelt in an address to Congress explicitly recognized that negative freedom was not enough. “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

He called for a “Second Bill of Rights,” which would guarantee all Americans the right to such basics as employment, a living wage, education, health care, leisure and security in the event of sickness, age or disability.

Roosevelt died before he could advance this vision, but his call helped inspire the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which includes a pretty comprehensive enumeration of social, civil and economic rights.

Alas, it’s one thing to declare rights and quite another to actually exercise them.

Twenty years after the U.N. declaration, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. renewed Roosevelt’s call, saying that “We need an economic bill of rights. This would guarantee a job to all people who want to work and are able to work. It would also guarantee an income for all who are not able to work. Some people are too young, some are too old, some are physically disabled, and yet in order to live, they need income.”

The original Poor Peoples’ Campaign that King and allies initiated 50 years ago aimed to make those rights a reality.

As you may have noticed, we haven’t got there yet. Up until now, such demands and declarations have been matters of wish and aspiration rather than fact. In the real world, people only have those rights they can effectively realize, even in the face of opposition.

And that’s why the people and organizations from across America are participating in a revived Poor Peoples’ Campaign, which describes itself as “A National Call to Moral Revival.”

A basic demand of the campaign is that that everybody has the right to live: “Given the abundance that exists in this country and the fundamental dignity inherent to all humanity, every person in the United States has the right to housing, education, health care, welfare, decent and dignified jobs and the right to organize for the realization of these rights.”

It’s past time to make those rights and freedom a reality.

In West Virginia, we have a long tradition of fighting for those rights — and sometimes winning. That tradition reaches from the Great Rail Strike of 1877, which spread from Martinsburg across the nation, to the Mine Wars of the early 20th century to the Black Lung Movement of the 1970s to the W.Va. Teachers’ Strike of 2018, the ripples of which are still spreading across the nation. It’s a record to be proud of.

Those who came before us aimed high. Henry David Thoreau’s challenge to us is more relevant than ever: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

(This appeared as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.)

"Everybody's got a right to live"

"We need an economic bill of rights."--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In the United States, people talk a lot about rights and freedoms. Often, however, the discussion is narrow in scope, as in freedom from external constraints or the interference of others. Thinkers such as Erich Fromm have referred to this concept as “negative freedom” or “freedom from.”

While these freedoms are important—some are inscribed in the Bill of Rights—they are incomplete. Positive freedom, sometimes called “freedom for” or “freedom to” is about the ability of people to act freely and develop their potential. It also implies the right of people to meet their basic needs as members of the human community.

Having one kind of freedom without the other is pretty cold comfort. As the French author Anatole France wryly noted, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

As World War II was winding down, President Franklin Roosevelt in an address to Congress explicitly recognized that negative freedom was not enough. “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”

He called for a “Second Bill of Rights,” which would guarantee all Americans the right to such basics as employment, a living wage, education, health care, leisure, and security in the event of sickness, age or disability.

Roosevelt died before he could advance this vision, but his call helped inspire the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, which includes a pretty comprehensive enumeration of social, civil and economic rights.

Alas, it’s one thing to declare rights and quite another to actually exercise them.

Twenty years after the UN Declaration, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. renewed Roosevelt’s call, saying that “We need an economic bill of rights. This would guarantee a job to all people who want to work and are able to work. It would also guarantee an income for all who are not able to work. Some people are too young, some are too old, some are physically disabled, and yet in order to live, they need income.”

The original Poor Peoples’ Campaign that Dr. King and allies initiated 50 years ago aimed to make those rights a reality.

As you may have noticed, we haven’t got there yet. Up until now, such demands and declarations have been matters of wish and aspiration rather than fact. In the real world, people only have those rights they can effectively realize, even in the face of opposition. 

And that’s why the American Friends Service Committee is one of many organizations actively participating in a revived Poor Peoples’ Campaign, which describes itself as “A National Call to Moral Revival.”

A basic demand of the campaign is that that everybody has the right to live: “Given the abundance that exists in this country and the fundamental dignity inherent to all humanity, every person in the United States has the right to housing, education, health care, welfare, decent and dignified jobs and the right to organize for the realization of these rights.”

It's past time to make those rights and freedom a reality. We are committed to the struggle and we encourage you to get involved as well.

In my home state of West Virginia, we have a long tradition of fighting for those rights—and sometimes winning. That tradition reaches from the Great Rail Strike of 1877, which spread from Martinsburg across the nation, to the Mine Wars of the early 20th century to the Black Lung Movement of the 1970s to the WV Teachers’ Strike of 2018, the ripples of which are still spreading across the nation. I’m proud of the role AFSC has played and is continuing to play in supporting working people in several of those struggles.

Those who came before us aimed high. Henry David Thoreau’s challenge to us is more relevant than ever: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” 

(This originally appeared on the American Friends Service Committee website.)

Happy anniversary, Social Security

“We can never insure one-hundred percent of the population against one-hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life. But we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age. This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the united States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt, August 14, 1935

Today I hosted an event celebrating the 77th anniversary of the signing of the Social Security Act at a crowded Carpenter's local union hall in Huntington. Medicare and Medicaid hit their 47th anniversary a couple weeks back on July 30.

Congressman Nick Joe Rahall attended the event. A strong supporter of all three programs, Rahall said

 "... Social Security is a fortress of reliability. It has never missed a payment. Every dollar and benefit has been paid out on time and in full - how many 401-ks can tout that same record? Social security and Medicare are not the cause of our current budgetary woes and they should not be used as a piggy bank for unrelated spending, especially paying for more tax cuts for millionaires."

WV's senior senator Jay Rockefeller was not able to attend but sent a specially made video for the event, saying,

"I am so glad West Virginians from across the state are joining together to celebrate this important day in history. Seventy-seven years ago, on August 14, 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed a landmark piece of legislation creating our nation’s Social Security program. It is a program that protects so many West Virginians and has lifted millions of people out of poverty. Social Security was created during the Great Depression, a crucial time in our nation’s history. And, since then, it has provided life-saving benefits to widows, the children of deceased workers, people who are disabled, and the elderly. Social Security has proven to be one of our nation’s most successful programs, serving 451,000 West Virginians – including 41,000 children where one or both parents are deceased, disabled, or retired – and more than 50 million Americans each year. It is something we should all celebrate.”

Today's celebration took on a special significance in light of presidential candidate Mitt Romney's selection of congressman Paul Ryan as running mate. Ryan was an architect of President Bush's failed effort to privatize Social Security and has crafted similar or worse plans for Medicare and Medicaid.

Things are going to  get interesting, alas.

Deja vu again

It seems to me that President Obama isn't as lucky as FDR was in dealing with the last massive economic meltdown. The Crash of 1929 happened three years before Roosevelt was elected president. This gave Hoover plenty of time to own it and FDR quite a bit of leeway in dealing with it.

The Great Recession, on the other hand, started in late 2007 but it didn't really hit hard until 2008 and 2009. While it was brought on by the excesses of nearly 30 years of deregulation and supply side policies, that chain of cause and effect isn't visible to many Americans.

Paul Krugman sums things up pretty well in today's NY Times:

Here’s the situation: The U.S. economy has been crippled by a financial crisis. The president’s policies have limited the damage, but they were too cautious, and unemployment remains disastrously high. More action is clearly needed. Yet the public has soured on government activism, and seems poised to deal Democrats a severe defeat in the midterm elections.

Roosevelt hit a similar rough patch in 1937 and 1938. In the end, the Depression was ended through deficit spending associated with World War II. It will probably take additional deficit spending to spur job growth, at least until the economy is firing on all cylinders. Krugman again:

The economic moral is clear: when the economy is deeply depressed, the usual rules don’t apply. Austerity is self-defeating: when everyone tries to pay down debt at the same time, the result is depression and deflation, and debt problems grow even worse. And conversely, it is possible — indeed, necessary — for the nation as a whole to spend its way out of debt: a temporary surge of deficit spending, on a sufficient scale, can cure problems brought on by past excesses.

The problem, of course, is that the current political situation makes that hard to do, and it will probably get harder in the future. This could lead to prolonged economic misery as well as social and political nastiness.

As Oliver Goldsmith put it in the 1700s, "Ill fares the land, to hast'ning ill a prey, Where wealth accumulates, and men decay..."

ONE GOOD COLUMN DESERVES ANOTHER. Here's E.J. Dionne on what the labor movement has meant to the building of the middle class.

WHY NOT ONE MORE? Here's Harold Meyerson while we're at it on the state of labor (short version: it isn't good).

STUDY THIS. New research on how people learn questions some old beliefs.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The paragon of animals

This quintessence of dust.

The off and on theme at Goat Rope these days is Hamlet, although you'll also find links and comments about current events.

There are a lot of great lines and speeches in that play, but one of my favorites is both a good description of depression and a hymn of praise to the human potential. It occurs in Act 2 Scene 2 in the course of a conversation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:

...I have of late—but wherefore
I know not—lost all my mirth, forgone all custom of
exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily with my
disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to
me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy,
the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament,
this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why,
it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent
congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man!
How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties,
in form and moving how express and admirable,
in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man
delights not me...

You'll have that some days.

JOBS, JOBS, JOBS. Here's an op-ed by yours truly about the need for job creation and public investments to get us through the recession. It mentions a mistake made by my hero FDR, who cut back on New Deal programs in 1937 thinking the Depression was over--and wound up extending it by several years.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, the unemployed in this recession may face years without jobs, according to this NY Times article.

STARVING THE BEAST. Here's Krugman on the current game of political chicken.

AND THEN THERE'S THIS. Speaking of playing political chicken, President Obama is convening a bipartisan health care summit this week.

THIS IS YOUR BRAIN on politics.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Four freedoms

"The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.

Jobs for those who can work.

Security for those who need it.

The ending of special privilege for the few.

The preservation of civil liberties for all.

The enjoyment -- The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, the basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.

Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement. As examples:

We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.

We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.

We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.

I have called for personal sacrifice, and I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call. A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my budget message I will recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying for today. No person should try, or be allowed to get rich out of the program, and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.

If the Congress maintains these principles the voters, putting patriotism ahead pocketbooks, will give you their applause.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression -- everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way -- everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants -- everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor -- anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called “new order” of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

To that new order we oppose the greater conception -- the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.

Since the beginning of our American history we have been engaged in change, in a perpetual, peaceful revolution, a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.

This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women, and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights and keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.

To that high concept there can be no end save victory."

--excerpt from Franklin Delano Roosevelt, State of the Union Message to Congress, Jan. 6, 1941

ALMOST BACK but not quite. El Cabrero is still off. This post was scheduled in advance and does not reflect any breaking news. I hope things are just peachy.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: MISUNDERESTIMATED

The test of our progress

"But here is the challenge to our democracy: In this nation I see tens of millions of its citizens—a substantial part of its whole population—who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life.

I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over them day by day.

I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm continue under conditions labeled indecent by a so-called polite society half a century ago.

I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their children.

I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying work and productiveness to many other millions.

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

But it is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope—because the nation, seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out. We are determined to make every American citizen the subject of his country’s interest and concern; and we will never regard any faithful law-abiding group within our borders as superfluous. The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address, Jan. 20, 1937

SOLID GONE. El Cabrero is still playing hookie, so there are no links or comments about current events. This post was scheduled in advance and won't reflect breaking news.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: INCOMMUNICABLE

The books of human fortitude

"An old English judge once said: "Necessitous men are not free men." Liberty requires opportunity to make a living—a living decent according to the standard of the time, a living which gives man not only enough to live by, but something to live for.

...

We are poor indeed if this Nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not needed in the world. We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in the books of human fortitude.

In the place of the palace of privilege we seek to build a temple out of faith and hope and charity.

It is a sobering thing, my friends, to be a servant of this great cause. We try in our daily work to remember that the cause belongs not to us, but to the people. The standard is not in the hands of you and me alone. It is carried by America. We seek daily to profit from experience, to learn to do better as our task proceeds.

Governments can err, Presidents do make mistakes, but the immortal Dante tells us that divine justice weighs the sins of the cold-blooded and the sins of the warm-hearted in different scales.

Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in the ice of its own indifference."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, excerpt from the Acceptance Speech, June 27, 1936

STILL GONE. El Cabrero is hiding out at an undisclosed location this week so there will be no links and comments. This post was scheduled in advance and won't reflect breaking news. Well may the world go.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: CLASSIFIED

Restoring the temple

“The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy and moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves and to our fellow men.

Recognition of the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success goes hand in hand with the abandonment of the false belief that public office and high political position are to be valued only by the standards of pride of place and personal profit; and there must be an end to a conduct in banking and in business which too often has given to a sacred trust the likeness of callous and selfish wrongdoing. Small wonder that confidence languishes, for it thrives only on honesty, on honor, on the sacredness of obligations, on faithful protection, on unselfish performance; without them it cannot live."--Franklin Delano Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933

OFF THE GRID. El Cabrero is taking this week off so there will be no links and comments. Posts were scheduled in advance and won't reflect any breaking news.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: UNKNOWN

Nothing to fear but fear itself

The week before last, I visited Washington along with hundreds of fellow West Virginians and thousands of people around the country to rampage around about health care reform.

We rolled in at about 8 in the morning and had some free time, so three of us decided to walk over to the FDR Memorial. We were unaware at the time of the distance between Union Station and FDR. It turned out to be a few miles away, but it was a pilgrimage after all.

I have often referred here to my lifelong fascination with President Roosevelt and the New Deal. My parents grew up in the Depression and were ardent New Deal supporters. And New Deal programs built much of the infrastructure of my state. Growing up, it was less risky for me to make a sacrilegious joke than to dis the Roosevelts.

Recently, I've gone on another FDR reading jag, including Jerry Bruce Thomas' An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression and Jean Edward Smith's FDR. Thomas grew up in southern WV and Smith is a history professor at El Cabrero's alma mater Marshall University. I'm in the middle of a bio of Frances Perkins.

Over the next few days, I'm going to be posting on related topics.

NO LINKS THIS WEEK. El Cabrero is taking a week off. There will be regular posts this week but no links.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: UNKNOWN

THE JINGLE-MAN

Welcome to Edgar Allan Poe Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

In some ways, Edgar Allan Poe is the Rodney Dangerfield of American literature--he don't get no respect.

T.S. Eliot said some snarky things about him, for example, once stating that Poe "had the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty."

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the literary eminence of the early and mid 1800s, famously referred to him in a letter as "the jingle-man." To be fair, if you do read or hear more than the proper measure of his poetry, the jingles are very audible.

But here's the deal, Ralphie and Tommy Boy: more people know The Telltale Heart and The Raven than Self Reliance or The Waste Land.

(Note: I'm not implying that this is necessarily good thing.)

John Allan, his foster father, had a pretty sharp take on Poe's genius: "His talents are of an order that can never prove a comfort to their possessor."

Here's James Russell Lowell's take in verse:

"There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge,
Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters,
In a way to make people of common sense damn metres,
Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,
But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind."

The snooty Henry James--who was nowhere near as cool as his brother William--wrote that

With all due respect to the very original genius of the author of the Tales of Mystery, it seems to us that to take him with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one's self. An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.

Walt Whitman was more charitable:

Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page—and, by final judgment, probably belong among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat. There is an indescribable magnetism about the poet’s life and reminiscences, as well as the poems.

(If it's any consolation, they loved him in France. But then they liked Jerry Lewis and Derrida over there too.)

But here's the deal: it doesn't really matter what the critics think. Poe has won the verdict of popularity. He was the father of the modern detective story and horror tale and a major early influence on science fiction. Those are three of the most popular literary genres (i.e. they are things people read voluntarily).

The accursed heart still beats...

AN ANNIVERSARY TO REMEMBER. Seventy five years ago this month, FDR--peace be unto him--was elected to the presidency.

THE SCIENCE OF MORALITY is the subject of this article from Time.

SPEAKING OF MORALITY AND SCIENCE, here's a good slam on economic libertarianism with a science slant.

FOR A 425 MILLION YEAR OLD PETRIFIED VELVET WORM UPDATE click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ARRIGATO!

Caption: "...how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless child..." King Lear

The theme of this week's Goat Rope--yesterday's possum recipe excepted--is gratitude and ingratitude. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier posts.

It is El Cabrero's theory that the key to a sense of gratitude is a pessimistic streak. When you realize that things can be and often are really, really bad, it makes you appreciate it when they're not.

One of my pet peeves is the temperamental ingratitude of some activist types. These are the people who, when you work you @$$ off for some small victory, complain that it didn't go far enough.

An example that happened almost two years ago was our WV campaign to raise the minimum wage. After one hell of a fight, we finally did. There were all kinds of loopholes and it only covered a small fraction of minimum wage workers--maybe 2000 at first.

There were those who complained about it and were dismissive of it. (Usually these weren't the people who really worked hard on it.) It made me wonder whether perhaps they were spoiled brats as children who were used to getting anything they wanted.

I wasn't raised that way.

I was happy we could impact that many people. And that little win added momentum to the eventually successful effort to raise it at the national level.

El Cabrero has two rules of gratitude when it comes to working for social justice:

One, savor the small victories. They may be all you get. In Monday's post, I quoted one of Alice Walker's characters who said it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it. Little victories are part of the color purple.

Two, stop for a minute and think of all the nasty things that have happened all too frequently to people who challenged the status quo. If that's not happening right here and right now, then be grateful, dammit.

And by the way, you're welcome....

CAN I HAVE ONE? This came out a couple of days ago but the thought of an 8 foot sea scorpion is pretty cool.

A FRIEND IN THE WHITEHOUSE? It happened at least one once. Here's Bill Moyers on FDR.

ANTHROPOLOGY GOES TO WAR in more ways than one. Here's the latest in the ongoing controversy over the use of social sciences by the military in the Human Terrain System program.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

GODS AND EARTH GIANTS

Caption: Seamus McGoogle is a keen student of the science of hummingbirds.

It's interesting that some of the current debates on the nature of science and knowledge have ancient roots.

Consider the following questions: does science give objective knowledge about the world that is certain, universal and necessary? Or are all it's results provisional and tentative?

Other ways of putting it might consist of asking whether "laws" of science are discovered or made up? Is it about what is true or what seems to work best to account for experience?

This one goes all the way back to Plato, and probably farther. Plato, inspired by his teacher Socrates, believed that universal knowledge of truth was possible beyond the realm of senses or opinion. His main enemies were the sophists, traveling teachers of reasoning and rhetoric, who tended to be relativistic and pragmatic.

One such was Protagoras, who said "Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not." Plato was not amused.

In his dialogue The Sophist, Plato, through the character of the Stranger, describes this controversy as a war between gods and giants:

There appears to be a sort of war of Giants and Gods going on amongst them; they are fighting with one another about the nature of essence...

Some of them are dragging down all things from heaven and from the unseen to earth, and they literally grasp in their hands rocks and oaks; of these they lay hold, and obstinately maintain, that the things only which can be touched or handled have being or essence, because they define being and body as one, and if any one else says that what is not a body exists they altogether despise him, and will hear of nothing but body...

And that is the reason why their opponents cautiously defend themselves from above, out of an unseen world, mightily contending that true essence consists of certain intelligible and incorporeal ideas; the bodies of the materialists, which by them are maintained to be the very truth, they break up into little bits by their arguments, and affirm them to be, not essence, but generation and motion. Between the two armies, Theaetetus, there is always an endless conflict raging concerning these matters.

Plato, of course, thought he was on the side of the gods. It looks like the earth giants have won a few lately though.

SPEAKING OF GIANTS, congratulations to Jean Edward Smith, professor of history at El Cabrero's alma mater, Marshall University. Smith has won kudos for his recent biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt--peace be unto him. The title is FDR and the publisher is Random House. It has gained many positive reviews around the country.

Dr. Smith was quoted in the Marshall Magazine as saying "Washington, Lincoln and Roosevelt stand head and shoulders about the 40 other men who (have) occupied the White House. Washington founded the country, Lincoln preserved it and Roosevelt revived it." Amen.

In El Cabrero's childhood home, it was less risky to make irreverent religious jokes than to dis the Roosevelts. It is now safer for my (legally) adult kids to do the same in my presence.

SPEAKING OF MARSHALL, the same issue of the magazine has an interesting article about how public investments in research at Marshall is starting to (literally) pay dividends. This is yet another example if any is needed of the vital role that public investments in education, research and infrastructure can lead to a high road approach to economic development--in contrast to the low roaders who want to cut these investment, eliminate the minimum wage, and eliminate regulations that protect workers from injury and death on the job.

NATTERING NABOBS OF NEGATIVISM. On a similar note, here's an op-ed by yours truly from yesterday's Gazette about the good things that are happening in WV that can get and keep us on the high road.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FINDING THE BALANCE

Caption: Seamus, like his fellow rebel, Frida Kahlo, fights for bread and roses.

I don't get to Washington very often, but when I do I gravitate to three monuments.

One is dedicated to Jefferson, the brilliant but flawed poet of freedom. Another is dedicated to Lincoln, its suffering servant.

The third is for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who demonstrated that in modern societies, freedom and economic and social justice are compatible.

Roosevelt's reforms not only helped save the nation from depression, competing totalitarian visions, and the unrestrained greed of what he called the "economic royalists"--they have made possible a better, more dignified life for working people, the elderly, and the less fortunate.

Recently, I came across this passage by Latvian-born British philosopher Isaiah Berlin which elegantly sums up his accomplishments:

...Roosevelt's greatest service to mankind (after ensuring the victory against the enemies of freedom) consists in the fact that he showed that it is possible to be politically effective and yet benevolent and human; that the fierce left- and right-wing propaganda of the 1930s, according to which the conquest and retention of political power is not compatible with human qualities, but necessarily demands from those who pursue it seriously the sacrifice of their lives upon the altar of some ruthless ideology, or the practice of despotism--this propaganda, which filled the art and talk of the day, was simply untrue. Roosevelt's example strengthened democracy everywhere, that is to say the view that the promotion of social justice and individual liberty does not necessarily mean the end of all efficient government; that power and order are not identical with a strait-jacket of doctrine, whether economic or political; that it its possible to reconcile individual liberty--a loose texture of society--with the indispensible minimum of organizing and authority; and in this belief lies what Roosevelt's greatest predecessor once describes as 'the last best hope of earth.'

For the last few decades, we've been force-fed the poisonous notion that justice and freedom cannot mix--and as a result both have suffered. Roosevelt showed that both are not only necessary but possible.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

STONES THAT SPEAK

El Cabrero lives in what can safely be called the middle of nowhere, as in so far out there ain't no cable, fast internet, or newspaper delivery. But if I walk a mile from the head of the holler to the "main" road (main being strictly relative out here), there's a reminder of the kinds of things this country once did and could do again.

There, just below a country church is a stone wall that keeps the hillside from sliding into the road. On that wall is chiseled the following message: "WPA 1938."

The WPA of course stands for the Works Progress Administration, a landmark of FDR's New Deal. It provided work at decent wages for over 3 million unemployed Americans during the Great Depression and built a great deal of the infrastructure not only for El Cabrero's beloved state of West Virginia but for the country at large.

Several years ago, I interviewed some relatives who worked on the WPA in rural West Virginia. One woman recalled that "We lived and lived happy on it." Her husband, who build roads and bridges for the program said "It wasn't like it is now. They didn't just take people who were down and out and try to stomp them down deeper--they tried to help the people."

And they got a lot of work done. Here's a partial list of WPA accomplishments as reported in the Nov. 2006 issue of The Hightower Lowdown:

78,000 bridges

700 miles of airport runways

116,000 public buildings

24 million trees planted

650,000 miles of road

8,000 parks

4,383 new schools

9,000 miles of sewer lines

Not too shabby. And these accomplishments are important to remember today after we've been bombarded for over 25 years with right wing propaganda about the inability of government to act constructively. The disastrous aftermath of Hurricane Katrina shows what happens when we allow the government to be run by people who don't believe government can do anything and act accordingly.

We can do better. We have done better.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED