RCAH 292 - Citizenship

Now Serving caaaafffeeeeeiiinnnnnnee as a disclaimer

The middle class is shifting into reverse.

It's driving itself, wholly backwards, down a highway in Michigan. We see it pass the prosperous Flint of years past, on its way to the Flint of today that begins to grow larger in the rear-view mirror. We see that the driver is facing forwards, gazing down the road, apparently not noticing that the yellow dashes are flitting towards the horizon rather than from it. We are concerned for the safety of the passengers, as driving backwards on the highway is generally thought to be somewhat unsafe, but our concerns are wasted - the middle class rolls in a station wagon built like a tank, and even if it weren't, this Michigan highway on which the middle class drives recently installed a system that doesn't allow cars to stray from the paved path. There is absolute safety and negligible effort.

Getting off the metaphors, it's clear that the American middle class faces a significant list of problems. More and more, members of the middle class are finding themselves not only in debt, but without an understanding of how debt works. We are privy not to knowledge about world events, but rather to infinitely inferior news (which, unlike the objective reality of the world, is more or less artificial). We have a commonly held belief that work is meant to be a suffering experience for which we're compensated by a paycheck. Our apathy regarding world events, finally, translates to an apathy for participation in government. This means that we no longer see ourselves as owners of the government, but rather as subjects.

To put it most dramatically, it seems to me that we're slipping very slowly into serfdom. So when I read Peter Block's argument that we should "define ourselves as citizens," I saw a connection.

In theory, all the citizens of our Republic are joint and equal owners of the government. (If you've ever wondered why "public" sometimes seems to be synonymous with "government," that would be why.) It's no secret that this isn't the case in reality, but if we hold ourselves to that ideal, it can have a number of positive results for us. Considering ourselves citizens will familiarize us with the idea that we have a right to influence public policy, as well as the duty to do so. It reminds us that we are equal under the law, and when we see the law applied unequally based on class or race, keeping ourselves grounded in the idea of citizenship allows us to react to that unfairness with outrage, even after we've seen it so many times as to be unsurprised. A citizen demands justice; a serf accepts injustice. Or as Block puts it, a citizen acts on their values; a serf acts on the principle of survival.

Here now is another significant problem regarding the direction of the middle class. We will see if citizenship can help us address it. The world of the middle class is a world of security; our experience of mortal danger is so rare (thanks to our own efforts) that some of us never face it in the entirety of our existence. It follows that we do not expect to face mortal danger personally; it might even be said that we have forgotten our own mortality. Could there be a set of circumstances under which death becomes more terrifying?

Our mortality hasn't forgotten us of course, and while our experience of mortal danger is rare,
our experience of death is not: we are surrounded by stories of frightful disasters or terrorist plots, which each painfully remind us (having forgotten) that we will die. The way in which this fear contributes to our slide into serfdom is obvious; the role of a feudal Lord in his relationship with peasants is that of protection.

Citizenship may be able to help us regarding this by way of its duties. Where the subjects would demand the ruler's protection, the citizens demand this protection of each other. In grounding ourselves in the notion that we are all citizens, we see that the protectors of our country (the President, a significant bureaucracy, and of course the military) are our legal equals; citizens protect citizens. Again, this is obviously only true in theory, but as before, holding ourselves to an ideal enables us to continue striving for it.

Separation of Church From - wait, "from?"

Now Serving an unfinished Rough Draft, and bad philosophy jokes

I'm finding "from" to be one of those words that sounds odd when you really look at it. That's not at all the reason why I used it in the title of this post. But it's time to do some old school philosophy - philosophy that's done because of having time on your hands. (The kind that's a little amateurish, too, unless you yourself are old school enough to be founding the subject...)

~

The separation of church and state is generally understood to be a two-way wall, preventing each side from interfering with the business of the other. But when there's talk of religion interfering with government, it almost always seems that we're talking about those sneaky Evangelical Christians implementing sinister plots of theocratic purpose. I have yet to see any consideration of the idea that the whole of American religious beliefs, acting in unison, might interfere with the government. It follows obviously that I've neither seen any consideration of that idea without its being immediately judged a bad one.

So, going against every bone in my very secular body (eh, it's late), I'd like to entertain, without passing judgement upon, the idea of a national council representing all (or most) American religious beliefs.

I use "religious beliefs" rather than "religions" to clarify my meaning: Atheism and Agnosticism are no more religions than black and white are colors, but they're certainly beliefs regarding religion. (This should additionally make clear that beliefs*, as I use the word, may be based in fact as well as faith.) So this national religious council would not be limited to religions like Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc.; Atheism, Agnosticism, Secular Humanism, and all manner of beliefs regarding religion would have a place on the council.

With that in mind, we come to the first objection: if all religious beliefs are represented, doesn't this council actually represent every single American, and thereby become an absurdly redundant expansion of government? Again, the meaning of "religious beliefs" should be clarified: not all people are involved with their own religious belief. There are millions of casual Christians who hardly ever attend church, atheists who have gone their entire lives without significant religious exposure, and Jews who are confused every time their dad calls to wish them a happy new year outside of January. (Sorry dad!**) I maintain that this kind of casual belief doesn't really constitute a belief at all: casual believers (as I use "casual") necessarily haven't considered the possibility that their beliefs are wrong, are not regularly involved with their belief-groups, and have not experienced a significant spiritual experience (or in secular cases, have not experienced a significant epiphany related to their belief). There are ambiguities with that definition, but they do not hinder its service of my argument. Regardless of where we draw my definition's line on the spectrums of regularity and significance, it's uncontroversial that some people exist who meet all of those criteria.

(I should clarify that a true believer can be unchallenged, irregular or inexperienced - as per the criteria above - but cannot be all at once.)

Having distinguished between casual and true believers, and having limited our national religious council to the representation of true believers, the council is no longer a repetition of existing government. It does face a new problem, however, which may be at the heart of the matter: if the council only represents true believers, it necessarily gives true believers more power than casual believers. Is that something that we want?

~

That's not the end of the essay, but it seems that my leisure time is at an end: I need to get some sleep, and that last question opens up a can of worms that might be more accurately described as a can of graboids. And if you're wondering where to follow those asterisks (now there's a funny word), I couldn't figure out where to put them, the essay not having reached its end. So I saved the, uh...you know...what do you call the thingies that asterisks lead to? Yeah, they're in a TextEdit document waiting for me to finish up here.

Chocolate Chips in Your Internets

Now Serving Trader Joe's Assam Tea

"Dude...he's got cookies."
"Is that true?"
"Yeah, we've got cookies."

"...alright, I'm in."
It doesn't take much to make a man sell out. Ask Will Wright, creator of "The Sims." What started in satire ended with an in-game McDonald's ad and enough expansion packs to fill a bookcase. And "weaknesspays" is a SimCity 4 cheat code. Coincidence? I think not.

And look at me. I've plugged three products already (four if you count cookies) in the middle of the independent-expression blogosphere, like baking Chips Ahoy! chocolate chips into your internets. To be fair, one of them completely deserves the love, and the other two I dissed. But if negative publicity is still good publicity, there's going to be a lot of good publicity in this blog. And delicious tea.