a path toward Systemic Change

The Reverend Dr. King would have said something like: 'Oh, my friends, our aim must be not to defeat Mr. Bernard Arnault and his family, not to defeat Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison or Elon Musk. Our aim must be to defeat the evil that’s in them [the evil that is in the systems supporting exorbitant income gaps]. But our aim must be to win the friendship of Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk. We must come to the point of seeing that our ultimate aim is to live with all men as brothers and sisters under God, and not be their enemies....'

In 1957, Dr. King laid out four lessons for overcoming oppression. http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/mlk_birth.html 

We need to apply Dr. King's lessons in bringing about systemic change. We will not succeed if we simple-mindedly taxing the rich, nor by following the Democrats' formula, nor by defensively hiding from change like Conservatives!

1. Let us overcome identity politics (also called partisan politics). In identity politics a win for the others is seen as a loss for me. Scrap identity politics! Individual equity and reaching for individual potential should be universal aims, not equality among identity groups. We will never reach equality for all identity groups. The battles between identity groups simply means that society is endlessly pivoting instead of improving the settings and the lives of people. Meanwhile, for a person to reach one's potential can be achieved, can be achieved each time a person reaches a personal goal and then looks to see what else one can accomplish. 

2. Corporations are not citizens, they are owned internationally. We do not allow foreign citizens to advertise and campaign on ballot measures and elections. Those are meant solely for the nation's citizens. Stop the corporations from influencing our votes too. Drive out their money! Their money is directing our nation to do the bidding of corporate investors. Our governments, our legislatures and agencies need to bound to the best interests of the citizens.

3. Achieve an annual income cap, possibly at $15 million per person. With a 100% tax on all earnings after the first $15 million per year, we can change the incentives throughout the economy. No one will want to pay such a tax. What employers had ear-marked for excessive income can be kept by businesses. Then businesses can efficiently use that money in smart ways, smarter than governments can do with money. And if no one pays the tax on earnings above the income cap, then governments will not get those funds. 

4. Human Rights can be strengthened in a Civil Society where the exercise of Civil Liberties are encouraged. Thomas Jefferson was wrong to suggest "All . . . are endowed by their Creator with certain, inalienable rights . . . . " God did not give out rights during the lifetimes of Yosef (interpreter of dreams) or of Moses or of Jesus or of Mohammed or of Martin Luther. God did not change and God did not give out rights in the 1770s. People demanded respect from monarchies, and when citizens demonstrated they could be responsible when exercising their Civil Liberties, then Human Rights evolved. Those Rights evolved out of civil societies where civil liberties can be exercised. That is why human rights are in doubt in Myanmar, and Russia and Yemen and North Korea. God is not forsaking those societies. They have not achieved civility, so human rights are in doubt.

WE NEED SYSTEMIC CHANGE like these principles would usher into our nations. Let us tear apart the dominate partisan politics that aim to advance their own parties more than advancing the best interests of their citizens, allow #RegulateGreed to redirect the economies, and #Aim4Equity, individual equity in all that our governments do for citizens.  

What are the orgins of Human Rights?

 

               We should doubt the theology espoused by Thomas Jefferson. In the US Declaration of Independence, he wrote, “…all…are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We can be critical of this assertion that rights are a gift of the Creator.  

               God was not handing out such gifts, not before or after Yosef was first interpreting the dreams of Pharaoh, and especially not as Egypt brought nation after nation into slavery. God did not hand out such gifts as Moses led the Israelites out of bondage. The people of Jesus’ time knew little of the freedom of self expression, nor of freedom from fear and want. God did not hand out such gifts during the life time of Mohammad. Nor when 95 theses were nailed to a monastery door. Over all the ages, God has been a constant and has not changed. We need not believe Jefferson who, during the era of the Enlightenment, thought that human rights appeared from the hand of a changed God.  

               And why would we reduce human rights to the status of mere gifts?? All of us have been through the practices of gift giving. When the wrapped package first appears, the recipient acts humble and shows some level of disbelief. The pretty wrapping is dispensed with and the shock and wonderful excitement and gratitude are expressed. Finally, the gift is laid aside, to be put away later on. When the gift is brought back out, the occasion is a special time, not “every day,” and the giver is praised again for the gift. We should not be treating human rights like we treat physical gifts we have received! Human rights are to be part of everyday life, are to be recognized with us at all times, they are something more than a gift.  

               Around December of 1948, speaking about the adoption of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Hernán Santa Cruz of Chile, a member of the Declaration’s drafting sub-Committee, wrote: “…a consensus had been reached as to the supreme value of the human person, a value that did not originate in the decision of a worldly power, but rather in the fact of existing—which gave rise to the inalienable right to live free from want and oppression and to fully develop one’s personality.”  

               From Santa Cruz’s grasp of the matter, rights come into existence simply when a person exists. Are human rights actually provided to every human?? Are human rights hanging in the air at all times, around every human? Let us ask the people of Myanmar in the year 2023. Or ask the people of Russia as they are expected to serve a war that does not benefit but a few Russians. Or check in with those fleeing violence and desperate want in Central American countries as they begin the arduous and unpredictable immigration to the north. Or look to those people living through the strife of Sudan and Ethiopia. Do any of those people see human rights hanging in the air to be enjoyed simply because they are human? Or has God forsaken those people, this omnipresent and omnipotent Creator??

               As gifts or as flowing from the very existence of humans, these both appear to fall short in the role of giving us an origin of human rights, and begs the question, “If we can not be sure of their origins, how can we be secure in protecting and advancing human rights?” 

               From the history of the British Isles, I want to recall the importance of the Magna Carta. This is the start of "a worldly power" that eventually led to human rights. In effect, the Magna Carta was an effort by the noble families to pressure the British King to treat them with civility. Those noble families had suffered from whimsical and indifferent decisions from the King. In their Magna Carta, they demanded that the King stop mistreating them in that way. They were calling for a civil society between the royal family and all their noble families. In the course of their history, the House of Lords was created, in effect expanding the civil society on that exclusive level of community between ruler and nobles. Later a House of Commons was created, giving law-making abilities to a Parliament in British history, again advancing a civil society to even more of that island's population.  

               When Jefferson and his committee drafted the US Declaration of Independence, their demands were actually the result of more than 12 years of efforts to have the mother country in the British Isles treat the colonists better, to treat them in a more civil manner. Since the King and the Parliament were unwilling to heed those requests, the representatives of 13 colonies declared their separation from the colonial power, so they could explore self-governance and the creation of their own civil society.  

               Along with advancing the ideals of what a civil society could be, in each of these historic cases (Magna Carta, Parliament, US Declaration of Independence, UN Universals Declaration), those who demanded to be treated with civility also accepted some growing responsibilities. The responsibilities could be described along different dimensions. Through the Magna Carta, all those noble families promised each other that they would not abandon the principles they had set forth there. If some families had relinquished responsibilities, then the monarch might have moved back to their previous mistreatment of them all. By forming a Parliament, the Lords and the Commons agreed to rules of decorum and how they would stand behind the decisions they agreed to as a body. Building on independent decision making, the United States formed a brand new country that became a model for governments around the world, governments that wanted to aspire to self-governance and overthrow dictators and authoritarian forms of government. By taking up these never-ending responsibilities, those who were experimenting with self-governance, were exercising their civil liberties.  

               The existence of a civil society and the ongoing exercise of civil liberties then appear to be the source of human rights. Nations and other regions of people who cannot depend upon civil society, most probably will not find human rights, nor can they predict when their rights will be reliable. Plus, if no-one is free to exercise their civil liberties, and take responsibility for maintaining the civil society, they too might question how solidified their human rights are.  

               Meanwhile, if a civil society is strong, is reliably based on the institutions within it, and if people do routinely and intentionally exercise their civil liberties (unlike gifts you only bring out for special occasions), then the human rights can be offered to even those who can not exercise their civil liberties: infants, those with severe disabilities, new immigrants, people punished by living in cages, etc. 

               From this understanding of human rights, we need to concentrate our self-governing efforts on strengthening and maintaining our civil societies, and we need to recognize the importance of exercising civil liberties and responsibilities. 

Morality not Economics determines when exploitation happens

 

In the science of Economics, is there any way to measure the difference between take-advantage and exploitation, a demarcation between the two, a way of knowing when take-advantage turns into exploitation? I have never seen the articles that mark where the difference is. Yet we know that exploitation goes on in the economy. How do we know when it happens?

We can define take-advantage. The entire market economy works on a basis of take-advantage. When I go to the grocery, I could buy all the ingredients to bake my own loaves of bread. Those loaves would probably cost me $5 each, with my own efforts, my own kitchen, my own dishes to be washed, etc. They would never be as consistently sliced and good as those available from the grocery bakery aisle. The grocery sells loaves of bread for $3.50 each. So I take advantage of the grocery every time I buy a loaf a bread. The loaf of bread that is worth $5 to me sells for so much less than that. 

In that same transaction, the grocery takes advantage of me, the customer, and in a sense every customer. The grocery buys loaves of bread from a bakery, possibly at $2.50 per loaf. So the grocery is making a dollar of revenue greater than the cost of the loaf of bread. This is not profit, just revenue over cost. The grocery still needs to pay for rent, equipment upkeep, employees and their benefits, utilities, and more to keep the business going. Eventually, when all the sales of a week or year are measured against all the costs, the grocery does need to record a profit. If there is no profit, the grocery will go out of business.  The point is that throughout the market economy, every transaction is possible when both the buyer and seller can expect to take advantage and come away with an economic benefit. Think of it, even the bakery takes advantage of every grocery because the loaves of bread they sell might cost them $1.50 each to produce.

Even with employment, the market economy works because both employers and employees take advantage of each other, otherwise the relationships would not be formed. The employees provide their labor, skills, connections, loyalty and so many other possible qualities while creating value for their employers. They receive pay, but pay that is less valuable than what the employer measures as each employee creates. 

for each employee:
paycheck < value created

For the employers, each employee needs to create enough value to justify the paychecks they receive. In fact, if an employer sees that an employee is not pulling ones weight, not creating enough value, then the employer could be expected to fire that employee. An employer can not expect to lose money from an employee not contributing enough, not creating enough value for the business' success.

If the economy were that simple, based only on take-advantage transactions, then we would not expect to ever have recessions or busts or contagion bank failures? Exploitation happens when a person takes home pay excessively greater than the value one creates for their employer without any consequence for that exploitation. The results from systems of exploitation are those economic failures that are occurring so many times within one lifetime. Yet again, how do we measure where the line is crossed between take-advantage and exploitation? 

Exploitation happens when:
individual paycheck >>> value created

There are extreme cases we could identify as exploitation. If those examples can lead science and society to identify the systems of exploitation then ways could be found to possibly reduce the number of economic disasters, or they could be less severe, or . . . how much better? 

Here is an example. When all the parts are gathered at the start of a truck assembly line, there are fantastic amounts of value in the parts themselves. All the metallic alloys, all the tinted, tempered glass, the wiring and electronics, the different forms of plastic, the leather and other materials are all valuable, each on their own. Then think of the design and coordination required between all the parts, think of the engineering value to make the precision parts that integrate into so many systems in the truck. There is value in the designs, for the interior of the truck cabin, for the exterior lines and aero dynamics, for the powerful engine, for the dependability of the braking systems, etc. So many people have contributed their employment in creating value in the safety tests and in the inspections before the parts go into the assembly line. Remember too that modern truck models have variations to make them more attractive to different segments of the buying public. All of those and more considerations go into the value of the parts before the assembly begins. The assembly process itself can take as long as 25 hours for each truck, 25 hours of effort from all the diverse, coordinated and highly skilled teams, robots, automated paint sprayers, more inspectors, plus the utilities required by the assembly plant. In the end, a new pickup truck could cost as much as $50,000 to simply roll off the assembly line. (This is not a reference to the sales price, which would include transportation costs for the final product, and mark ups by the manufacturer and by the auto sales company.) The cost of producing the new pickup truck stands for all the contributions from so many sources, laborers and history, resulting in a $50,000 valuation.

What if there was a person who expected to be paid more than the value of a new pickup truck every working day of a year? Could any of those assembly team members, or anyone who sees the true value of their combined efforts in making a truck, could any such person stretch their imaginations to believe there is anywhere a person who creates more than the value of a new pickup truck, creates more than $50,000 for one’s employer and for the whole economy, every working day of the year??  The comparison is difficult to grasp. 

Could there be a situation where:
paycheck > $50,000 per day = value created by individual per day ??

Let’s be generous. Let’s imagine that a person works so hard and with such talents for 10 hours in each of 300 days a year. That would be an extraordinary, even superhuman effort! Such a person would get two weeks of vacation and only one day off each weekend, but work all the other days. That would allow for 300 days of work in a year. And if deserving of that level of pay, that person would take home more than $15 million per year. Does that level of pay then seem to fit the take-advantage level of market transactions? Or does accepting pay greater than $15 million per year sound like exploitation? Does such an paycheck mean that the individual is exploiting other employees, or exploiting earth systems, or exploiting the financial systems of banking or stock exchanges or some other community system?

In the vocabulary of some Economic theories, people may earn wages or may earn rent. In a sense, if a person invests in publicly traded stocks, and then sells the stock for a profit, those Economic theories might label those profits as rent. And if those profits are highly excessive, they would still be labeled as rent. The definitions offered by this essay are to suggest that maybe there is exploitation if pay rates and incomes for an individual actually total to more than $15 million per year. If the individual did not create value for the economy on levels in excess of $15 million per year, then that person is not participating in the economy through take-advantage transactions, but is exploiting some system or systems, and expecting other people to create enough value to allow for excessive pay rates and not allowing those who did create the value to be compensated for what they created.

If that conclusion is possible for profits from the sale of stocks, then similar arguments can be made about salaries in excess of $15 million per year, and for those who are paid by multiple companies to combine different sources of pay to exceed $15 million per year. If an executive for one corporation receives more pay by sitting on three boards for other corporations, could there be exploitation? With one set of knowledge, that person is assisting four corporations to garner value from extensive numbers of employees who are not being paid for all the value they create. Instead the value from underpaid employees is synergized and siphoned up to be paid to board members and executives and individual investors, adding to systems of exploitation.

To be more specific, John Munkirs studied and wrote about the Interlocks between Western corporations and industries that create organically operating Central Planning Mechanisms. The Interlocks result from every corporate board needing members who are aware of some facets of the suppliers and their plans, and of the customers and their plans. So customer corporations and supplier corporations offer the most strategically valuable members to have on a corporate board. Not only do those corporations have relationships with each other, their very decision models require that they interlock with each other, coordinate to ensure that each corporation around those Interlocks is succeeding. If one corporation starts to fail, it could mean an interruption in the supplies of other corporations. So if there is exploitation occurring, the Interlocks work to ensure all are creating exploitations and benefiting financially.

If some chain of morality could start to question the exploitation, then could the interlocks start a process where more and more corporations agree to work against exploitation?

An influential enough customer could possibly start this questioning of the exploitation. The governments of self-governing societies could require a cap on individual incomes from among those who sell to the governments. If defense contractors, and utilities, and state-sanctioned monopolies, and medical providers, and other industries that rely so heavily on government contracts and purchases could be brought to accept individual income caps, then their interlocks with other corporations and industries could reach some critical mass and start to undermine the systems of exploitation.

This does not suggest that corporate boards and executives give up any fiduciary responsibilities. The corporations and industries should continue to compete in the market economy and collect revenues greater than costs and demonstrate their capacity for profits at the same level as before any individual income caps. But since those corporations will not be paying their board members and executives and individual investors as much money, the corporations will have to find other uses for those funds. Simply put, those funds could be used to investigate where exploitation had been occurring, leading to stopping most forms of and systems of exploitation. Gender pay gaps could be ended. Greater safety, accident prevention and advanced training could be sought. Innovations could be developed. Those funds that use to line the pockets of top executives, or that were destined for overseas tax havens, could be repurposed as the corporations and business sense sees as profitable and beneficial to the long-term life of their companies. The emphasis would not be so heavily focused on short-term profits, but rather on long-term sustainability of the companies. Those executives who hit the income ceiling have no incentive to exploit right away in gaining another million dollars personally. They do have the incentives to ensure that for years to come they reliably reach that earnings ceiling every year. That in itself would be a systemic change to benefit individuals who are no longer in a “rat race”, benefit their peers, companies and the larger societies. Plus, we might see less volatility in the macro-economy.

A review of the book The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee

 One of the mistakes that Karl Marx made was in predicting that the proletariats would rise up to supersede the bourgeois. The proletariats do not act as one body. Within the proletariat class, individuals make their own choices and move on their own timing. Some individuals aim to become part of the bourgeois. Some individuals have no ambitions about raising their own status or raising up their cohort. The possibilities for individuals are just so numerous and the class as a whole could never rise up to dominate the employers, land-owners and business elite.

McGhee does a splendid job of describing and narrating some individual choices made by white citizens in the United States who continue to confound analysts. She notes that white citizens do not seem to understand the economic and social costs they are creating for themselves, hyper-exemplified by the filling in of swimming pools when communities decided to prevent Blacks from attending those community venues rather than allowing integration. McGhee has realized the limits of research and numbers in convincing people to act in their own best interests. The neo-classical economics view of rational decision making to maximize utility has been dashed against American rocks. Philosophers, writers and researchers need to pursue some other understanding of American consumer/voter’s psychology. “…questions of belonging, competition, and status {are} questions that in this country keep returning to race.” (page 9) Joe Bageant in his 2008 book Deer Hunting with Jesus and in other essays added other insights on the ways so many white citizens make purchase decisions, will campaign, rally and vote in ways that are counter-productive to their own best interests. I can highly recommend Bageant to McGhee!

So very similar to Michelle Alexander’s historical prespective in The New Jim Crow, McGhee identifies that the plantation owners and employers of the 1600s antagonized the distrust between racial cultures in order to have those of European descent accept lower and lower pay, and to marginalize those of African and of Native American descent into enslavement. ”Whatever form these rationales took, colonizers shaped their racist ideologies to fit the bill. The motive was greed; cultivated hatred followed.” (p. 23) Surprisingly, she also finds a contemporary of Cassius M. Clay (1810 – 1903) to argue against the institution of slavery. While Clay is praised as an abolitionist, McGhee’s example in Hinton Rowan Helper was an outspoke racist. In 1857 Helper noted in his publications that the Northern states invested a multiple times more in public goods and community services, enhancing the life of Northern citizens. Comparing the number and character to those public goods for Southern states, Helper blamed the institution of slavery for sapping the desire to improve their communities with libraries, public schools, transportation improvements and other ventures. Since the plantation owners had free labor through enslavement, under-educated white citizens who did not participate civically, and their only markets were international, the Southern decision makers and politicians could ignore public improvement efforts.  McGhee draws to a conclusion that the mindset seems to have continued into the 21st century.

As a counter point, in the 1850s, Cassius M. Clay (as described by Ronald White, Jr. in the book A. Lincoln: A Biography) saw slavery as leading to a strange monopolization of valuable skills. When Clay returned from New England where he amassed his own fortune, he saw in Kentucky that the poor whites were being offered no marketable skills, the Black enslaved people were becoming the master craftsmen in all arts, and the plantation owners were ignorant of these ramifications from their dependency on slavery. Clay then marshalled his academic skills and found that the US Declaration of Independence needed to be revived and brought it’s democratic principles to the forefront in his arguments for abolition. Clay’s thinking and arguments impressed Abraham Lincoln so much that he too adopted the Declaration of Independence as the base for his arguments against spreading slavery into the territories west of the Mississippi River.

Unfortunately as her thesis question, McGhee might have better pursued multiple causes and multiple answers instead of early on in her book asking for one answer, “what is the stubborn belief that needs to shift now for us to make progress against inequality?” (page 10) There is not only one stubborn belief. According to the vote count for Trump in 2020, there may be as many as 75 million stubborn beliefs to identify and rectify.

She did find some value in the concept of a zero-sum game. Yes, according to the evidence presented by  Michelle Alexander and by McGhee, the early plantation owners did set up a belief system that persists today. If one class of the population gains, then another class is losing to the same degree. Academically and historically and statistically we can dismiss such an absolute view of trade-offs. Yet many of those white citizens can not dismiss it so easily. Many are still of the mindset that status can be more important than financial well-being. Many of McGhee’s stories demonstrate how whites will sacrifice financially/economically in the hopes of maintaining their perceived status above the racial minorities.

This zero-sum game means that if whites can not advance in some way for themselves, they must at least hold back the progress for the fuller society as a way of ensuring the racial minorities do not have greater opportunities to advance. Plus, McGhee’s evidence can be explained by a defensive nature to the actions of white individuals. More and more stubborn beliefs can be found and compound the complexity of these racial issues that McGhee uncovers throughout her book.

Meanwhile, I suggest that the Plutocrats and the extravagantly rich in the United States are still framing political problems as a zero-sum game to the conservative voters and to those economically struggling white citizens. The owning class still benefits from having the racial classes in clashing culturally, morally and physically against each other. Yet, that zero-sum could be turned against the Plutocrats. Our GDP has grown by less than 6 percent per year since 1985. For the foreseeable future, the GDP can not grow at any faster pace. There will be no exponential growth in the near-term. So our economic situation is a zero-sum game. If the top 10% of households take home 50% and then 52% and then 54% of the GDP in successive years, then the bottom 90% of households must be getting lower and lower proportions year after year. Based on such a seemingly-endless fear of losing out more and more every year, then the 90% can concentrate on the singular topic of income inequality and find ways to rectify that injustice.

Why is it an injustice?? According to McGhee and Michelle Alexander, the inequality in the Americas was started by plantation owners pitting racial groups against each other. Much of the racial strife we have experienced can be traced back to that zero-sum game invented by the earliest colonial Plutocrats. If we can place the racial groups on equal terms economically and remove the perceived threat for the white citizens, then possibly we can remove much of the future racial injustice. That is one facet of the injustice.

Another facet of the injustice is that the richest people can only claim such high incomes when they take advantage of and even exploit the employees who actually create the values that are sold by the businesses. I have identified this as Capillary Action in Micro-Economics. When a business hires an employee, that employee must create value in order to keep the employment. Specifically, each employee must over time create more value than the dollar value of one’s paycheck. If a particular employee is creating less value than one’s paycheck, then the business is losing money on that one employee. Every business owner knows that such a scenario is financially unstainable and such employees will need to be replaced or else the employer will go out of business. When employees coordinate with each other and equipment and inputs to create more value than the business’s costs, then the employer gets to accumulate the extra value as profits to be reinvested in the business or to be pocketed by the employer, owners and investors. That kind of advantage is acceptable because in a sense employees are taking advantage of the owners and investors who are facing the financial risks involved in running a business. The exploitation comes when employees are mistreated and denied fair compensation for the value they are creating, which leads to excessive earnings for owners and investors. Society could define what is excessive and exploitative, and how it rises to the level of injustice.

Eccentric incomes are also possible when customers and natural resources and financial systems are exploited. The Plutocrats usually are not being paid based on the value they create, but rather based upon their capital investments leveraging opportunities for exploitation.

In light of such injustices, the moral fight can be to #RegulateGreed with an income cap on all individuals. Or we might #RegulateGreed by setting an enforceable ratio so that top earners in any company can not earn more than say 300 times that of the lowest paid employee. If the top earners want to take home more money, then they will have to raise the pay of the lowest paid employees by the same proportion. Or other ideas can surface to #RegulateGreed. These types of direct actions to combat income inequality may eliminate the references to zero-sum games as employers and employees see their combined success as tied to each individual’s success.

Would You Allow someone at 34 to threaten a toddler named Civil Liberties?

 

Have you ever met the toddler named Civil Liberties?

An essay in support of Peter Joseph’s book The New Human Rights Movement

More than 1400 years before the time of Jesus of Nazareth, Yosef was sold into slavery by his half-brothers. Yosef became part of the house of Egypt’s Pharaoh where he earned a reputation for insight and for the interpretation of dreams. The Pharaoh was so impressed with Yosef’s prediction of seven years of bounty followed by seven years of plight, that Yosef was placed into a seat of power to administer the programs and planning to get the kingdom through those fourteen years. Yosef’s planning was an early example of codifying the possessions of the Pharaoh, giving birth to Property Rights. Property Rights were conceived long before then, whenever rich families or individuals demonstrated their authority over possessions, land, stored foods, livestock, women and the enslaved. By writing down those rules of acquisition, parceling out and disposing of foods and other property, Yosef and the Pharaoh advanced civilization within the Neolithic Era.

 The transition from nomadic lifestyles to agrarian, settled communities is well described by Peter Joseph.

Roughly 12,000 years ago the human species transitioned from nomadic hunter-gather societies (tribes foraging and hunting with no agricultural skills), to farm-cultivating, settled societies. This transition has been termed the Neolithic Revolution and set the stage for civilization as we know it today. This change marked a kind of technological shift. Like the advent of the mechanization in the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century, the discovery of agriculture was also the application of new economic technology. …When very large changes in applied technology occur, human culture and behavior tend to change as well. Page 60.

Nomadic people did not have the energy nor the technology to collect and carry with them great amounts of possessions. Due to this, theft was nearly non-existent since those met on the trails likely did not have much of value. If one nomadic clan earned a reputation for violence and theft, then they would lose out when simple trades were needed or when asking for assistance of any kind. Plus, societies were not highly stratified. There was general equality in strength, in ability, in health, and in the toil of living.

All of this changed through the Neolithic Revolution. Once an established farmer gathered a store of foods and staked a claim to a piece of productive land, then there was need to keep all trespassers away. When difficult weather arrived, the well-stocked farmer could stave off starvation and keep his family healthy only if outsiders were kept from his bounty. As families of farmers settled nearby to each other, then could collaborate on keeping out the nomadic clans, giving rise to skirmishes and battles and defensive measures. Farmers could become prosperous to the point of hiring or enslaving people who had no land or material possessions, having them work the fields for the wealthy who had claimed Property Rights. They could show their status and wealth in several ways, with clothing, shelter, and livestock. The wealthy could find days for rest and for cultural advancements while inequality grew between the haves and the have-nots.

Before Yosef’s time, there might have been rulers who had written down their records of possessions, or ancient courts may have justified the Property Rights of one person or group over the protests of others. Yosef’s effort is an example of those codified Property Rights that can be linked into the chain of events we call history. We can show a relationship between his time and actions, and the coming centuries of practices that have established Property Rights as a major concern of governments, courts, entrepreneurial efforts and the organization of families. Yosef’s time was 3400 years ago and Property Rights are now well established due to that longevity of historical precedence.

Before 1776 A.D., in Europe and in the Americas, enthusiasm was heightening around what we call the Age of Enlightenment. During the 1600’s and 1700’s ideals began to be advanced such as individual liberty, social progress, majority rule, identifying the unwavering rights of individuals protected from majority rule, constitutional forms of self-government, and the separation of church and state, along with the pre-eminent power of logic and science. With this idealism as a catalyst, some of the richest people in the British colonies of America staged an effort to gain independence from the most powerful nation in the world, Great Britain. To be truthful, these rich, white men were distraught over many practices of the government of King George III. Many of those practices had been sapping the wealth away from these upper-class colonists. Based on a number of previous colonial efforts to declare the practices of King George to be illegitimate, a committee of five (Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman) drafted a Declaration of the thirteen united States of America which was unanimously adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776 and printed for distribution on the following day.

Careful reading of the document and acknowledging the history of the delegates to this Continental Congress, we can understand that much of the impetus for adopting this declaration was to better preserve the Property Rights of these upper-class, white, male colonists. Meanwhile, interlaced in this declaration is also the birth of Civil Liberties, the codification of Human Rights for all the world’s advancement since we have all been “created equal.”

Along parallels, Property Rights and Civil Liberties were conceived of over long histories. If not codified first by Yosef, then certainly his example of Property Rights can be sited within the long chain of history for our present societies. Property Rights are at least 34 centuries old. Even if the Second Continental Congress did not mean to give such heightened importance to Civil Liberties when they adopted their Declaration of Independence, still less than 2 and a half centuries ago they gave birth to those ideals that have grown to be in conflict with Property Rights. Compared to one and other, Property Rights is like a 34 year-old adult lording over the toddler Civil Liberties which is not yet two and a half years old.

Why the name Civil Liberties and not Human Rights?

 Several components and meanings behind these words argue for the adoption of Civil Liberties. To suggest that rights are available to individual humans is to ignore the civil nature of our cultural and community existence, and layered underneath that are the social requirements each person has for being raised and for maturing into adulthood. If you could endure and live as a hermit, then you might claim human rights, but then who would you claim them from?? Property Rights could very easily be imagined as individualistic. We can all recall stories of a family or a single person living in such seclusion that they need not interact with others. They may live in an underground shelter or cavern stocked up with plenty of food, or on a piece of land that is heavily fortified and defended (envision moats or high stone walls), or they could live on an island without contact from others. Those Property Rights could be defended in those cases and we know they need not depend on anyone else to create their materials for living nor worry about how they dispose of and use up their material goods. We also know that their opportunities for technological advancements, for inventing new uses and expanding their appreciation of materials can be heavily restricted, because they are not being civil towards others. This is why we latch onto the word “civil” in place of “human.”

 We recognize that each individual must learn from others as to how to act and how to interact and how to grow in our own abilities and understandings. That requires a civil setting. Our individual and communal advancement require that we treat each other with civility. If we are warring against each other in order to get ahead, or if constantly competing with each other, then we will find ourselves diverging towards a hermit’s existence, only seeking superiority for oneself through the down-casting of others and triumphs over others. Those others will not support or under-gird our accomplishments, only seek to move away from such champions.

 All of our lives are drastically eased due to the technologies invented before our births. We have inherited highly complex medical procedures and equipment, computer components, energy capabilities, written languages and recorded knowledge and so much more! As Peter Joseph spells out if not for the cumulative social and civic nature of our existence:

                “…each human would need to reject the social reality and evolution of eco-scientific development and, upon birth, begin to create the entire world’s industrial network from scratch.” Page 270.

 We remain and are drawn to a civil way of life.

 In many respects, people expect “rights” to be given to them. The U.S. Declaration of Independence memorably has the phrase, “…endowed by their creator…” suggesting an implied gift from God. Too often people take for granted any gifts that are given freely.

 The owners of property are likely to respect their possessions by demonstrating a responsibility for upkeep and improvement and for maintaining productivity. When exercising their Property Rights, farmers will learn to not allow weeds and entanglements to grow reducing the health or the yield of their crops. They will take responsibility for the maintenance of their lands, killing the weeds early, treating the plants for blights and fungus growths, irrigating their fields for reliable amounts of water, and keeping animals and trespassers from eating their bounty before the proper harvest times. Property Rights demand responsible actions be taken otherwise the value of the property will deplete from neglect. Time and effort invested can result in losses unless the property owner takes responsibility.

 How can Civil Rights imply responsibility upon the citizens? By realizing that these are not gifts, but they are liberties. If citizens do not exercise those liberties, if they do not add to them and concentrate their efforts to ensure the healthy expression of those liberties, then those liberties will die away from us. A famous quote comes from George Bernard Shaw: “Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.”

 The “Free Press” is then not a free gift! Our Civil Liberties as expressed in the availability of newspapers, magazine and broadcast news implies that each citizen must responsibly and critically read the news and reward those media sources that honestly and fully present the most important information. Our religious choices and freedoms as Civil Liberties will cease to exist if we do not attend our religious duties and contribute to our houses of worship. Our freedom of speech will become worthless as Civil Liberties if we ignore the opportunities to march in parades and in demonstrations, and if we do not decry the invasion of foreign powers into the electoral campaigns that are to be the exclusive realm of citizens.¹  Over and over again, our Civil Liberties demand our attention, and we name this way to force the issue that every citizen take responsibility in bringing life to these liberties. Citizens do not set aside Civil Liberties, expecting to pick them up only once in a while.

 Can a 34 year-old threaten the viability of the toddler Civil Liberties?

Civil Liberties started out in a very odd way. With variations in each of the states, and by the time of adopting the U.S. Constitution in 1789, white men who owned land were given the fullest Civil Liberties including the right to vote in elections. How odd that the fullest Civil Liberties were only provided to those who could claim Property Rights. The framers of the young nation might have seen property as the proof necessary for distinguishing responsible actors from others, while not owning property marked some people as being less trustworthy.

The most essential part of “the American Experiment” was the concept of self-governance. All previous forms of democratically organized governments on this Earth had failed. All of the European dictatorships were keenly aware in the 1700’s and 1800’s that success for the American Experiment could threaten their long-standing forms of government, leading to revolts and the toppling of royal families. What gave the concept of self-governance any legitimacy was the power to vote. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in 1964 expressed in a majority decision that: “No right is more precious in a free country than that of having a voice in the election of those who make the laws under which, as good citizens, we must live. Other rights, even the most basic, are illusory if the right to vote is undermined.” (Wesberry v. Sanders) The founding fathers of the United States did not trust the common man with the vote, restricting that power to land owners. The slow pace of history took until 1856 (in time to elect the 15^th President) before every state allowed all white men to vote without requirements for property ownership^{2, 3}.

By 1870, the U.S. Constitution was amended to not restrict voting rights based on race, color, or previous conditions of servitude, at least on paper. Several states did turn away from their obligations, violently and systematically discriminating against Black citizens. Yet the conclusion of the U.S. Civil War did testify to the rest of the world that self-governance could survive after such a bloody challenge of secession. As early as 1804, colonies in the Caribbean Sea and other areas due south of the United States began claiming their independence from European rulers. Colonies in Africa, on Pacific Islands, in the Middle East and Eastern Europe also fought for independence based in some measure on the success of the U.S. Constitution. In time, all the European countries too created their own models of democratically organized governance owing to the example from the United States.

The United States was among some of the last nations to outlaw slavery. That exceptional nation also was following behind many others when recognizing the suffrage rights of women by the 1920 amendment to the Constitution. This marks again the slow and sometimes unwilling rolling out of Civil Liberties in the advanced countries to those who “are created equal.” In the birthplace of Civil Liberties, 131 years passed between the Constitution of the United States and the offering of full Civil Liberties to the fifty percent of the adult population who are women. The suffragists and their supporters struggled for over 70 years to win the right for women to vote in the United States. Other struggles for Civil Liberties are continuing, notably for women and for minority races, for people with disabilities, for people of unique skin colors, for recent immigrants, for migrant workers, for the incarcerated and for those released from prison and for children.

Civil Liberties have been spreading throughout the world. In 1948, due to lessons learned over the years of World War II, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with 48 out of the 58 member states voting in favor of the Declaration.

The Declaration has served as the foundation for two binding UN human rights covenants: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,  and for the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The principles of the Declaration are elaborated in international treaties such as the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the International Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and many more. The Declaration continues to be widely cited by governments, academics, advocates, and constitutional courts, and by individuals who appeal to its principles for the protection of their recognized human rights. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Declaration_of_Human_Rights)   

Since 1948, two other declarations of human rights have been endorsed, addressing cultural needs of the Muslim religion, and another to address the uniqueness of eastern Asian cultures and Pacific Islanders.

For eighty years the offer of Civil Liberties has been extended to most of the earth’s population yet protections are not too extensive, especially when compared to the institutionalized protections for Property Rights. In many countries, Property Rights have four types of protections: incorporation and other business methods for reducing the risk of losses, systems of insurance, police protections, and court precedence that bases all remuneration on the transferring of property from the losing party to the winning party. Over 3400 years, our societies on earth have evolved to find ways to protect Property Rights, yet we have had less than 250 years to understand Civil Liberties and how to ensure that every person’s rights are guarded and safe. How will we come up with protections for Civil Liberties?

Incorporation is a method for limiting the risk for the owners to only the funds they have invested in the corporation. All their other possessions would be protected from lawsuits. Even if the corporation acts illegally or has liabilities for broken contracts, the owners can not be sued for any greater amounts than their investments. In the cases where the corporations financially succeed, then the owners can reap all the benefits, enriching themselves without risking everything they owned. Plus, owners can anonymously sell their shares and end their risk by a simple action. Can we ever dream up such levels of protections for Life (breathing, reliable food sources, shelter and healthcare), for Liberty and for the Pursuit of Happiness?

Individuals may purchase insurance policies to reduce their losses in case of natural disasters or crime or accidents or business decisions that cause major losses. Property Rights can be protected by this second method, yet we have not developed any similar protection for media outlets and the “free press.” Nor an insurance policy in case your voice and guarantees to speak your opinion are drown out by large corporations or diverted by social media that operates for their own interest instead of the Constitution.

The systems of policing have been developed to ensure Property Rights primarily. They will investigate civil crimes after they are committed. For the protection of property though they will dress in riot gear and form human barriers. To calm some racist ideas that immigrants and non-whites being the sources of the worst crimes, police will harass immigrant families and “stop and frisk” black men without probable cause, over-policing urban areas while suburbs are allowed to manage themselves unless a citizen calls in a complaint.

From our modern frame of reference, the ownership of land is quite understandable. Putting ourselves in to the mindsets of people 12,000 years ago, questions of land ownership would be very troublesome. Since people’s lives are so short and the land is eternal, how could one person claim that a piece of land was theirs and theirs exclusively? Slowly over generations of fences, plowing, profiteering, and legal arguments, the idea that land is available for ownership, for sale and for disposal has become the standard view. The court systems of the Western societies and their former colonies have been based on settling most every dispute over Property Rights, biasing their jurisprudence in those terms. Those Property Rights are based on at least 3400 years of precedence. Slowly the courts have been transforming to consider Civil Liberties in some ways, slowly building up that precedence beside the much larger Property Rights.

No such protections exist for Civil Liberties. The citizens of Hong Kong have been watching their Civil Liberties evaporate since 1997. They appear to have dwindling recourse as the authorities in Beijing expect to express power over the choices available to the residents of Hong Kong. The authorities in Beijing still wish to dominate based upon their Property Rights and are stifling or even eliminating the Civil Liberties of their citizens to ensure the Property Rights are fully expressed without distraction. People within the spheres of influence of Russia know that poisonings and deportation of opposition figures are the default methods for taking Civil Liberties away, included in Belarus and the Ukraine, and even reaching into the United Kingdom. Dictators and military rulers around the world are figuring out ways around the declarations of human rights. Even in the United States, police activities and federal troops threaten to end protests.

Coming up with ways to ensure the Civil Liberties will be a gigantic task that may take generations. For now, we need to remain vigilant, aware that the focus on Property Rights by some may override by the tides of this world, as Civil Liberties ebb and flow in advancing our freedoms.

END NOTES:

1. (here is one of my own pet peeves: corporations and enterprises of business ARE NOT citizens!! They should not be contributing to electoral campaigns!! Corporations should not be giving second and third and multiple voices to the opinions of their board members nor executives. Those board members and executives were given one voice only. Their corporations should not be drowning out the voices of other citizens. If we allow corporations to speak as if they were citizens, then true citizens are being alienating from their Civil Liberties, being crowded out from being heard! This is especially true for multi-national corporations and for those with stocks owned by foreigners!!)

2. Stanley L. Engerman, University of Rochester and NBER; Kenneth L. Sokoloff, University of California, Los Angeles and NBER (February 2005). "The Evolution of Suffrage Institutions in the New World" (PDF): 16, 35. “By 1840, only three states retained a property qualification, North Carolina (for some state-wide offices only), Rhode Island, and Virginia. In 1856 North Carolina was the last state to end the practice.”

3. Janda, Kenneth; Berry, Jeffrey M.; Goldman, Jerry (2008). The Challenge Of Democracy: Government In America (9. ed., updated ed.). Houghton Mifflin. p. 207. ISBN 978-0-618-99094-8.

 

Everything We Study Centers on Our Collective and Ever-Increasing Humanity

One in a Series of First Lectures

As we open our books and our minds to a new class this semester, I want to set out a broad universal-view as your starting point, and as my starting point. Everything we will study in this time together will center upon our humanity. What is our humanity? What is the definition of "humanity?"

Our humanity is the sum total of all of our emotions and how we express those emotions. By all of our emotions, I am not talking about you only assessing your own, and each of the others assessing only ones own emotions. No! Since we are social animals, because we are capable of empathy and sympathy and we can each extend our understanding to approach each other, and each others' understandings, and have some sense of what the other might be feeling, then to say "all of our emotions" means the sum total of all emotions of all human beings, of all human beings that have ever lived up to this point.

Additionally our humanity includes every method we have for expressing and sharing our emotions. Our arts and our fashions can be seen as methods of expressing emotions. How we talk and interact with each other expresses emotions. Even our graphs and our physical sciences express emotions.

So humanity as the sum total of all our emotions, encompassing all the emotions ever felt by any human being and every way we have of expressing and sharing those emotions. Our humanity includes thinking back to the experiences of families that lived in caves some 30,000 years before our time. Our humanity includes the stage performances of actors following some Utopian script of a playwright, or musical score and choreography. This includes real-life hatred and anger, bigotry, and radical racism, and faking an orgasm. The pride of a child showing a simple crayon drawing to grandparents is as much a part of our humanity, as the frustration of a person lost in the wilderness unable to catch fish for food.

Suddenly, you and I can agree that this definition of humanity and this opening lecture can apply to any class that might be offered in an educational setting. The learning exercises in storytelling for literature and the study of language arts (foreign languages and grammar and public speaking, etc.) all are more topically interesting by playing out the human emotions. Each of us (learner and the learning leader) take the lessons more to heart if we see that we can share in the emotions, and we have relationships to the emotions being examined.

For art classes and the study of music, the application has to be quite obvious: music is the expression of emotions, art evokes emotions.

Further than that, history classes, social studies and political science can be re-defined and given an interesting light when we think of each case study as an expression of humanity: Nixon, Catherine the Great, Alexander the Great, King Tutankhamen, Joan of Arc, Confucius, Bolivar, etc.

Physical sciences are also given a rejuvenating perspective when we recast them as expressions of emotion and as refining the methods for expressing those emotions. Geology is the study of minerals and rocks. We have advanced in our study of soils, ground nutrients, bedrock, volcanic formations, and the bonds between sediments over the centuries. At one time Western science divided all matter into earth, wind, fire and water. Today scientists are agreed on more sophisticated views of matter, and we pursue our interests in this field while following the leads of our emotions, following what inspires us to tease out one chain of questions, or another chain of questions, thoughts and excitements.

Through math we can express our joys at doubling or tripling the recipe for a massive batch of chocolate-chip cookies. If that is not our emotion over mathematics, then possibly we find our challenges in trigonometry, or astro-physic applications of Euclidean models. Or some might feel amazement at y=mx+b formulas graphed upon a two-dimensional plane. Again these offer examples of how every study we may take can be sharpened and provided more meaning, become more meaningful when we identify our emotions entangled in the study, any study at all.

The Smoldering American Civil War© of the Twenty-First Century

INCOMPLETE DRAFT

The Smoldering American Civil War© of the Twenty-First Century

Under a pile of forest debris, a fire can linger, quietly and unsuspectedly burning at a low intensity. Smoke might be seen rising up from a few places and animals might avoid the hot spots in the debris, yet no one would think to put out something that was not producing flames. Now turning the analogy in our minds, do we really think a modern political conflict can be “put out” like a campfire? Or does any such smoldering conflict have to burn through its own historic route? Do the very elemental conflicts in human nature and within our shared national values have to burn with all intensity before we realize the epoch we live, and realize its meaning to our shared life as a nation?

The thrust of this article is that the differences between American citizens is not stark, is not lining us up on warring sides. The differences are not so volatile until the political gamesmanship of the Congress, White House, lobbyists, state legislatures, issue-driven groups, journalists and talk show hosts, etc. start jockeying for position, competing to outdo each other over the issues of liberty and community life. When the rhetoric turns hostile under those considerations, and civilians beyond those halls of rhetoric begin internalizing the diametrically opposing views from the media, then we can see people picking up arms against each other. To avoid war, can we find some middle grounds for dialogue, for discussions, for education, for empathy with the fears expressed by others?

Calling our current epoch a Civil War is a way of referring back to the Civil War of 1861 – 1865. That war had a smoldering beginning too. The young nation was learning of its own prosperity and its ability to self-govern without royalty or lords or despots. All of the European principalities and colonists, Russia, the Turkish Empires were watching to see if this American experiment would last or if it would collapse for some reason, offer some proof this democracy was a flash-in-the-pan, destined to fail as it had in the ancient Roman example.

The young nation had serious setbacks too!! The War of Independence had cost them dearly, in treasure, debt, infrastructure, relations with the Mother Country England and lives, valuable lives. Then the new nation tried out their Articles of Confederation (1777) which failed miserably by 1787. A new constitutional convention did convene. They wrote a Constitution based on a great deal of learning and the experiment of the first ten years of running the nation. This Constitution spelled out civil rights for citizens in the ten Bill of Rights, voting and balloting privileges for land-owning men, a census for counting people and counting those enslaved people who were calculated as only three-fifths of a person each. The Constitution set up three branches of government to check and balance out the power between each other. The document also noted that the powers not specifically assigned to the federal government were to be allowed to the states to perform and oversee. This was an experiment, The American Experiment, and we have been living through that experiment ever since, still testing individual liberty within collective progress.

Individually, each land-owning man could feel like a king in these United States. Prosperity was wide spread between the European descendants, and even for some of African descent. The populace agreed in a feeling that their own generation and communities could have improved lifes, better than the previous generation. The American model, the American dream was coming to fruition for countless people, and quickly (relatively speaking). At another time, in more discussions and another space, we should face the truth that much of this prosperity was based on theft from the native people, and enslavement of foreign people. To the privileged of European descent, the prosperity was remarkable and reason enough to be proud and expectant for the economic benefits to only grow.

This was the belief for both sides of the 1860’s Civil War. The Confederates and the Unionists both believed in the prosperity they had earned and deserved. Their views on how that prosperity was generated brought on the schism that led to bloodshed and war. The Unionists held tight to the American experiment, that national strength and common bond allowed for this prosperity in a market based economy. The Confederates agreed to those ideas but they clung to slavery and their perception that very cheap labour was absolutely necessary for the prosperity to continue at the current pace of growth.

Cassius M. Clay, a scion from the same family as the Senator Henry Clay, returned to his Kentucky home after growing his own personal fortune in New England and foresaw a dystopia for the enslaving Southern states of the US. The population of Kentucky and all states south of it were being segmented into three extreme classes: the plantation owners, the skilled craftsmen who were enslaved, and the white poor who were relegated to overseeing the field workers or scraping by on subsistence farming on the least productive land. In Clay’s future-vision, the white poor could not expect to gain anything from education since they could never offer their labour at a lower cost than the enslaved tradesmen. These tradesmen were specializing in leather-work, animal husbandry and veterinary medicine, blacksmithing, musical performances, culinary arts, and all the valuable economic pursuits. All the highly skilled trades would surely be monopolized by the enslaved people unless slavery came to an end. America could be imagined as departing from a market-based economy and returning to serfdom with the vicious attributes of slavery included. So Cassius M. Clay went to studying and searching for the fundamental arguments to support the end of slavery.

He had plenty of examples of moral arguments towards that end in the work of the third political group in the young country, the Abolitionists. To the Unionists and the Confederates, the Abolitionists were a bother and were to be brushed aside. In a nation that believed without remorse in the ideals of white supremacy, the Abolitionist cause was without grounds and without a redeemable (little lone worthwhile) end-goal. Without taking up their cause, and without endorsing their rationales, Clay looked back to the "dead document" called the Declaration of Independence for his legal arguments against slavery. He lectured around the country on the fundamental truths of the Declaration and how its undergirding to our Constitution and to all other laws of the nation and its states obligated us to see all people born on this soil as free and equal by the endowment of their Creator.

In July of 1854, Cassius M. Clay was invited to speak at the Illinois State House. Once he was in town due to growing tensions about his abolitionist messages, he was uninvited. He spoke anyway, outdoors for more than two hours. Abraham Lincoln listened to his lecture and was inspired by the legal arguments along with many other reasons for absolutely opposing the spread of slavery. When Lincoln entered the 1858 campaign for the US Senate and opposed the “Little Giant” Senator Stephen Douglas, he incorporated the arguments from Clay into that series of great debates chronicled between the two candidates. Here are Lincoln’s words that demonstrate his acceptance of white supremacy but also demonstrate his reasons for halting the spread of slavery:

I will say here, while upon this subject, that I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects-certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man. (https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate1.htm) 

He did not see any way to end slavery, but instead wanted to stop it from spreading. In other speeches, Lincoln questioned the basis for enslaving one group of people instead of enslaving another group of people. Here Lincoln was also afraid of losing the American Experiment, afraid of departing from the market-based economy and returning to an economy based on serfdom. If the nation were to adopt serfdom with the edge of violent slavery, then who would say what new bases would be adopted by the plantation owners for enslaving more and more groups of people?

July 1, 1854: Fragment on Slavery

Lincoln often encountered views supporting slavery. In this fragment, he countered the arguments that slavery was justified based on color and intellect.

“If A. can prove, however conclusively, that he may, of right, enslave B. -- why may not B. snatch the same argument, and prove equally, that he may enslave A?--  You say A. is white, and B. is black. It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly?--You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own. But, say you, it is a question of interest; and, if you can make it your interest, you have the right to enslave another. Very well. And if he can make it his interest, he has the right to enslave you.” (https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/slavery.htm)

This was the call that forced the Confederates to secede from the nation after the election of Abraham Lincoln to be President of the United States two years after the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The differences between the Unionists and the Confederates could have been glossed over except for the formulation of political power in the US Congress and in the state legislatures. The Confederate leaders were gaining absolute power in the slave-owning states, and their representatives in Congress knew that to ensure their political power, they had to work for new states (such as Kansas and Nebraska and all the other territories to the west) to allow for enslavement. If the growth of slavery were halted, then Confederates would become the minority in the Congress and lose all future political battles. The Unionists of the northern states were working against that expansion of slavery again largely for their own political benefit, and Abraham Lincoln was the most articulate politician on this cause.

During his train trip in 1861 to Washington DC for his first inauguration he committed himself to ensuring the sanctity of slavery in the states where it was already practiced. Abiding to the interpreted wishes of the Founding Fathers, slavery could not be allowed to spread beyond those established states. He proposed an amendment to the Constitution enshrining slavery where it already existed. That could not have pleased the Confederates who were concerned about their political power in the Congress.

Lincoln did slowly mature in his view of African Americans as equal in every respect to white people. Unfortunately the battles waged and people died in the bloodiest war for the United States while Lincoln contemplated the questions and tried to figure out how to fight this war. His Emancipation Proclamation was a strategic measure to allow for the recruitment of black soldiers by the Union and to take away some economic might from the rebel states. Not until Lincoln came into a friendship with Frederick Douglass and drafted the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution did he publicly demonstrate his realization of the equality between the races. Then he maneuvered to pass that Amendment, finally fully adopting the moral code of the Abolitionists. Did he force the nation into accepting equality between the races, and this was well before the self-governing citizens were ready for that social change? Yes, most definitely he and his followers did codify equality too early, too quickly, and without the education necessary to fully accept the change. The nation has continued to struggle in developing the morality and understanding and values necessary to live out the ideals of equality between the races. 

That racial filament runs throughout the culture of the United States, even to the point where some individuals from minority ethnic groups carry and live out racist views about themselves and about others in their own castes. Today, I say the Smoldering Civil War is not about race, and is not about returning to any form of slavery. No. The dividing lines are splitting us between urban and rural (based on voting records). We are allowing greater riffs and gulfs to grow between Republicans and Democrats. Looking at the voting patterns between those counties throughout the states is what worries me. Our divisions may even be understood as lining up the sides between protecting conservative liberty and seeking segmented or fragmentary or factional progress.

Conservative liberty to my mind is a specific type of liberty, a specific view of the liberties that are under threat by the needs of urban life, requiring some historically unusual adaptations to allow for greater density of population. Unregulated gun ownership is highly problematic in a densely populated city, while having less companion concerns in a rural community. On another issue, community efforts which too often become government regulations to curb obesity, caloric intake (i.e. sugary sodas), diabetes, smoking related disease, diseases related to stress, and communicable diseases are of high importance in a city, but less so in rural areas where manual labor can be a daily expectation and open spaces do not result in smog and concentrations of toxins. Yet economic opportunities are disappearing in the rural areas, forcing many of the younger generations to seek livelihoods in the cities, and leaving the rural populations all the more worried about the threats to conservative liberties.

Meanwhile, progressives have uphill battles trying to win over some hoped-for-society that is potential but untried. If greater gender diversity leads to same-sex marriage, what are all the implications for society and future generations. No one can say for sure, and so conservative liberty often sets against that progress for a fragment of the population. With a one-payer system of healthcare, will the pattern for losing the numbers of doctors and medical facilities in the rural areas be stopped, or will rural populations be all the more forced to travel for medical attention? How can progressive advocates reassure those fighting for conservative liberty? The progressive causes can be named and supposed over several pages and hours of discussions. Many progressive campaigns seem to be unrelated to the others. They do not coordinate into any unifying grand vision. In the current political environment then we can understand generally why proponents of conservative liberty oppose the progress, hold fast to the status quo, and are suspect of anyone opposing their traditions and worldview. 

These generalized differences between conservative liberties and factional progress can be pushed to a warring cause when one party holds super majorities in state after state legislature, teamed up with politically aligned governors and court judges who champion the same causes as the elected officials. This sets us to the point of having a Smoldering Civil War.