We've heard a lot about the alleged attack on Christmas (and Christianity), especially from Bill O'Reilly. Here's a site that suggests what it would really be like if there were a war on Chistianity in the U.S.
Americans work a lot. According to this chart, we work 400 hours more per year than workers in many European countries. In fact, we work the equivalent of 10 workweeks per year more. What would you say if your boss walked into your office and asked you whether you would like to have an additional 10 weeks of vacation per year?
According to Juliet Schor, author of the overworked American (1991), American productivity has more than doubled since 1948. We could thus produce our 1948 standard of living in less than half the time that it took in 1948. The average worker could now be taking off every other year with pay. We do not use any of this increase in productivity to reduce our hours, however. Instead, we have continued to work harder and harder (many of us work two jobs) in order to have or maintain higher material standard of living.
Schor raises this question: “what if satisfaction depends, not on absolute levels of consumption, but on one’s level relative to others?” She suggests that our “consumerist treadmill” and hour-long our jobs have combined to form in “insidious cycle of work and spend.”
We often work hard only after commuting long distances. And we have to pay for those expensive cars and the fuel goes in them. The net result is another decrease in leisure time. According to Schor, between 1960 and 1986, the time parents actually had available to do with children fell at least 10 hours …
Dangerous idea, that.
If you were in charge–if you were King–what would do? What would fix? What would you ignore?
The Socratic ideal is the philosopher king, whose first act upon accession to the throne is to abdicate. The idea being that a truly ethical thinker would refuse to accept the responsibility to rule a nation.
Pity the world doesn’t work that way.
The problem with such systems–and there are many, including those proposed by certain self-proclaimed Libertarians–is that human nature refuses to cooperate. There’s a kind of Malthusian coefficient involved–population growth always outstrips the potential for ideal behavior. All such utopian systems are based on one fallacy that keeps gumming up all the works of any system anyone cares to name.
The fallacy is that We’re All Alike.
It’s a widely touted formula–the things that we have in common outnumber those that divide us; underneath we’re all the same; people are people. The Libertarians believe as an article of faith that if government got out of everybody’s way, we’d all be fine because people basically know what’s best for themselves and their immediate circle of intimates. Socialists believe (mostly) that without class structures, everyone would get along quite nicely. Communists like to assume avarice is an aberration that can somehow be bred out of the species.
If only.
It’s not so much that we’re so very different–but that we’re alike in such individualized ways.
The fact is, we come in all shapes, sizes, talents, capacities, points of view, …
Sometimes we get it, sometimes we don’t. We’re only human, after all. In my life journey I have beliefs that sometimes conflict with observable reality. The issue, then, is whether to conform my beliefs to observable reality. Too often, I don’t. I assemble the facts and weigh them, often discarding compelling proofs that what I hold are mythical beliefs. But we all do this.
I will cite an example: my belief in the fundamental goodness of human beings.
I didn’t begin to drive until I was 40. I had lived in St. Louis 35 years before that and my friends either didn’t know or didn’t care that I didn’t drive (to be honest, I had occasionally operated a car but, only in emergency situations where my lack of skills was outweighed by other more pressing concerns). I also lived or spent time in Washington, D.C., New York City and Boston, where there’s real public transportation. But here in St. Louis I used public transit. Or I rode a bike, ran or walked, if traveling less than two miles. For most of that period I got around St. Louis (and the rest of the country) by hitchhiking. After high school, I hitched around the country and stayed in various places–I’d call home collect to let my family know I was alive. My most frequently traveled routes were between home and Colorado and home and Chicago.
I saw a bumper sticker the other day. “Caution: Christian On Board”
I thought, yeah, I’ll be careful. These days christians can be dangerous.
What follows may be a bit on the intolerant side, but I’m sometimes convinced our condemnation of intolerance makes us too unwilling to be simply impatient. We “tolerate” a lot of nonsense because we don’t want to be accused of intolerance.
Rumsfeld is gone now, and I’ve been thinking about unanswered questions, assumptions made on our behalf which led to a holy mess. I remember when Abu Ghraib broke. I’m thinking about the obscenities from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. People expressed shock, outrage. The president, Rumsfeld, the generals, they were all duly unhinged. They did not approve this. They did not order it or condone it. Congress has them answering questions now as to how such things could happen.
Frankly, the wrong questions were and are being asked. Senators wanted to know who to blame for either condoning it or for “allowing it to happen”–a phrase I find ludicrous in practical terms. It’s like the phrase you hear lawyers and legislators use, you know the one “You failed to do such and such.” Every time I hear that phrase I think “No he didn’t. He didn’t fail. To fail implies that at some point an attempt was made to do something. The attempt failed. He didn’t fail to tell the truth–he simply didn’t do it. He succeeded in not doing it. Failure was entirely part …