ON FISH AND COMPASSION

Liberals like to think of themselves as compassionate. It might surprise them to know that conservatives do too. The divide comes in the areas of how we think it should be defined and implemented. Having been on both sides of the divide, I understand it well.

Liberals want to help the underdog by smoothing out real and perceived inequalities in material possession. The more needy the downtrodden and the more insanely wealthy the privileged, the more it fuels their angst. The inescapable truth that a percentage of the most wealthy have acquired it through nefarious means only fuels the sense of being on a righteous crusade. They see government as the means of righting this intolerable inequity. The attendant corruption and crony capitalism are an unfortunate byproduct.

Conservatives want to help the underdog by improving processes. They believe in equality of opportunity, not outcomes. They have seen billions after billions poured into the war on poverty, education, and thousands of often untested government programs with often demonstrably worse outcomes. They subscribe to the maxim, “a rising tide raises all boats,” and believe that the marketplace is smarter than government and must be protected from (sometimes) well-intentioned meddling that not infrequently results in unintended consequences. Conservatives are perceived as favoring the wealthy at the expense of the downtrodden and ignoring corruption when its origin is Wall Street.

When liberal thinking is applied to something such as the illegal (aka “undocumented”) immigration issue, it plays out as concern for a poor, third world nation abutting an economic (hopefully, not soon-to-be erstwhile) giant. It’s easy to make a case for the poor. It’s much harder to make the case that compassion has a cost, and we no more have the ability to single-handedly lift Mexico with its ponderously corrupt government out of poverty than we have the ability to force other nations to adopt the ideology of liberty and democracy through coercion.

Compassion must look beyond individual suffering to the processes that abet it, if there is to be any hope of finding a lasting solution. The old saying, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,” is as true today as the day it was penned.

It’s time we shuttered the fish store and gassed up the trawler.

GETTING DOWN TO BEDROCK

When analyzing the fetid morass we call the economy I found it useful, as I did for the health care system, to try to look for root causes. Fix them, and you have a chance at healing the system; ignore them, and you endlessly kick the can down the road until the road ends. And it always ends. But overly large government, derivatives, Wall Street corruption, Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac aren’t true root causes. The foundation underlying all these travesties is more basic and can be summed up in one word: morality.

Our Founding Fathers recognized that without basically good people seeking to do good things, no system could survive. For them, religion was the underpinning of a just society and in the Declaration of Independence declared that we are endowed by our “Creator” with inalienable rights. They held a higher power above government. Still, they had the wisdom to recognize the importance of keeping the machinery of government secular so that freedom of worship was preserved. While there are moral people that are not religious, I believe that the religion and the belief in a higher power are the greatest force for keeping in check the baser instincts of a large number of people in this world. Atheists will cite the atrocities committed throughout human history in the name of God and religion as evidence of the fallacy of my assertion. Their argument, to me, has always been inherently flawed. Giving a Satanic cult the cloak of religion and calling a Satanic entity God had always been a way of confusing otherwise sensible people. In the Middle Ages it was a bastardization of Catholicism; today it is Islamic fundamentalism masquerading as the Muslim faith. The existence of these corruptions does not diminish the value of a God-based faith that truly lives by the standard of “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

So why am I venturing into the charged and hazy realm of the metaphysical? No system, even one as good as a republic, can survive the weight of rampant immorality without being crushed. It’s also clear that you can’t legislate morality. We can make it more difficult for bad people to do bad things, assuming those miscreants haven’t corrupted the very guardians whose job it is to stop them, but bad has a disconcerting way of resurfacing in innovative ways if there aren’t enough good folks around to rise up and stop it.

The bottom line is we need a resurgence of the values that made us great in the first place—values instilled by family, community, and, in most cases, religion. If a non-bible-thumping, secular guy like me can see this, hopefully others can too.

Next: What’s coming