If we only knew what we wanted...

     COMMENTARY:     
   GEORGE TEMPLETON  

By George Templeton

Gazette Columnist

Metaphor

I was in Pune, India, working on a technical problem involving auto-rickshaws. My Hindustan taxi-cab left in the night. There were no lights of any sort, including signs, street lights, and home lights because all the electric power was allocated to industry. Holy cows and people wandered everywhere in the town’s dirt streets without accident. As my taxi proceeded out of town, the dust poured up forming a blanketing fog-like haze obscuring vision. We approached a large truck that was decorated like a surrey with a fringe on the top. It had a sign on the back proclaiming, “Horn please”. My driver hit the horn and suddenly pulled onto the other side of the road to pass, accelerating as fast as he could. From my window I could see the tires of the truck, as high as the roof of the taxi, and headlights of cars coming head-on from the opposite direction. I said a silent prayer as we rocketed by and I began to appreciate more deeply John’s description of Jesus as the light of the world. It must have been like this in the time of Christ after dark. I don’t think John was talking about the local torch vendor when he used this description. The power of the metaphor is that it is a truth universally, deeply, and instantly recognized by everyone and that it talks to each individual in the most important and uniquely personal way.

Affective Domain

I spent my life in an occupation that was not intuitive or visible. No one sees electrons or the Fermi level. An amazing and fascinating reality that could make predictions was ever present. Measurable objectives and results are king in business and education, but I have come to think that the most important things in life are not measurable or quantifiable.

Seven

Ron Paul said that you can’t legislate morality. Creative finance, internet gambling, and Darwinian capitalism are proof. We owe to Catholic consciousness the touchy-feely concept of the seven deadly sins. They did not come from lawyers. It is easy to change the minds of men, but difficult to change their hearts. We have all passed a school course, but that does not mean that we have internalized it, and can generalize and apply it in a variety of circumstances. When it was pointed out that a commercial sponsored by the Republican National Committee misrepresented the facts, an official declared: “Since when is a commercial supposed to be accurate?” Let the buyer beware is the American ethos. Manipulation, misrepresentation, and deception are accepted in business and politics and they thwart attempts to get the truth.

Family Values

John Wesley, a founder of the eighteenth century evangelical movement, maintained that all economic problems are primarily ethical and therefore religious. He believed that we should gain, save, and give abundantly. However, it is often forgotten that he also maintained that one should not harm their neighbor, or sell anything that impairs health.

Ad Hominem

A bumper sticker attacks the person rather than the policy claiming: “We hate everyone who isn’t us”. Romney commented that social support programs replace ambition with envy not realizing that he already has that problem. How many people have an undue concern about his taxes and would not support him simply because he is rich?

More Freedom

The Republicans claim they will give you more freedom. They would eliminate the consumer protection agency to help those friendly loan stores, already more common than taverns on a Milwaukee street intersection. Preventing fraud, identity theft, and educating the public on financial literacy threatens them. They would usurp the EPA under the guise of facilitating energy development, manufacturing, and employment. H. R. 2401 adds a dozen bureaucrats to make certain that environmental regulations do not encumber coal-fired power plants who would like to continue their emission of toxic mercury. You can be free of OSHA and safety regulations, free to breathe toxic air, drink poisoned water, free of food nutrition labels, free of the minimum wage and government support to health care and retirement. You won’t have to press one for English or worry about discrimination and fluorescent light bulbs and your children can consume nicotine candy and catch infectious diseases from unvaccinated classmates. You will be free from government but not from private power. You won’t be free of responsibility for consequences.

When Governor Perry spoke of Romney’s Bain Capital business as “vulture” capital instead of venture capital it showed that serious moral clarity contemplates shades of ethical behavior. Hillary Clinton claimed, “The market knows the price of everything but the value of nothing”. The problem is, free enterprise is not free, at least when the mortgage investment business is involved.

Thirty years of deregulation, tax cuts, and easy credit, brought on the Bush bail-outs, stimulus, and recession. The colossal fire spread around the world and it is still burning in spite of everyone’s efforts. We can’t believe Newt Gingrich’s assertion that President Obama “put” people onto food stamps. The unfortunate requested help. They could only hang on so long and should not feel ashamed about that. In the meantime, we are wasting immense amounts of money on political gossip ads.

Republicans blame the problem they caused on President Obama and claim that even more deregulation will restore the economy. For many retirees, the crash destroyed the equivalent of saving five years of their entire peak income assuming that they invested all of their earnings and used none of it to live on. The statistical models that optimize profit and encourage gambling are still in use. There is a new addition to the mix and it isn’t getting any better. It is the computing cloud. Some claim that with enough data the future can be predicted. But sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees. The data gets in the way. Wall-Street executives claim that they were doing God’s work and that creative financial transactions had to be hidden. Like casino gambling, it is an illusion that the little man can win in the long run. If you are fifty years old or more you should be concerned about how stimulating the economy by deregulation might impact your retirement.

Fundamentals

Constitutional fundamentalism centers on a revision of history, the ability to “channel” the ghosts of our Founding Fathers, the portrayal of the constitution as an anti-government manifesto, the belief that nothing has changed since 1781, and the desire to undo 100 years of interpretation by the courts. Federal government is “evil” but state government is “constitutional”. Consequently we must privatize schools, ignore Supreme Court decisions, call justices before congress to justify their decisions, and make roads, forests, and disaster relief up to the states. It has become a destructive Tea-Party cultural war, not politics, and not caused by President Obama.

Jimmy Carter’s book Our Endangered Values describes a religious fundamentalism that Liberals identify with. Whether some of us have doubts about the talking snake in Genesis misses the important point of the story. However, when congress picks pseudo-scientists and quacks to represent their politics and mislead the public we all are hurt. It is not a matter of unbelief, but rather whether our children will turn from science, thinking that it is an immoral heathen darkness put upon them by elite intellectuals.

Scientific Religion

Religion is about why things are. Science is about how reality works. They are not in conflict. There is a difference between belief and facts. The role of science in society is to provide the facts, the church to provide values, and policy makers to make the decisions. They must be kept free and separate. When the Ethics and Public Policy Center claims in its mission statement that “science must be thoughtful about the problems it provokes”, it fails to make this distinction. They would write you a ticket because you were going to speed. They would shoot the messenger because they did not like the message.

Political agenda can wear religious clothing. There is a danger when science becomes politics, beliefs become facts, and spirituality becomes apostate. There is a danger when religion becomes a sanctimonious face for policies that favor the rich and powerful. Religion and ideology combined can create its own reality. Power and ideology can mold the nature of truth itself.

Empathy

We can’t stand to see pain. It’s the Republican refrain. So, darlings, please don’t get hurt, because we will have to leave you lying there in the dirt! When welfare has no personal face and becomes just individual responsibility we can be proud, disrespectful, and demeaning. We think we don’t use it. But we don’t see the hidden government subsidies that benefit us. We think that we earned Medicare and are entitled to it forgetting that many receive more than they contributed.

Christians for a Sustainable Economy argues that the poor need to be protected from unwise, uncompassionate, and unjust federal welfare programs that demean them, destroy their families, trap them in poverty, dependency, and despair for generations. So, food stamps, school meals, head start, Medicaid, and children’s health insurance can now be seen as a conspiracy to oppress the poor!

Conclusion

The values of kindness, cooperation, humility, respect, competition, and meaningful personal contribution guide us to where we want to go, a less desperate, more hopeful world, if we only knew what we wanted.