There is a moment in James Baldwin’s interview with Dr. Kenneth Clark on May 24, 1963, that keeps drawing my attention. Against the backdrop of the horrors of Birmingham and in the immediate aftermath of a meeting with Robert Kennedy who, with a kind of insufferable arrogance, dismissed the idea of his brother escorting a small Black girl to school in the deep South as a “meaningless moral gesture,” Baldwin judged the character of the country and found it corrupted.
Babies had been beaten. Dogs sicced on innocents. Firehoses, with enough pressure to rip the bark off trees, were directed at children. Ours, in his view, was a nation full of “moral monsters.”
This moral apathy – this death of the heart – strikes me as a particularly apt description of our current days. Cruelty, selfishness, greed, and hatred have overrun our politics and policies. Children are thrown in detention centers. People disappeared. And politicians post photographs of men in chains with the caption, “Next Stop, Haiti.”
We talk about an epidemic of loneliness and what it portends for our democracy: that people are isolated and lack meaningful social connections. But what of the epidemic of selfishness, the death of the heart, that makes men and women so cruel?
Over the last forty years or so, this country has been guided by a political and economic philosophy that has centered selfishness as the key to well-being. We have been transformed from people in community with others into self-interested persons in competition and rivalry with each other. The sole measure of value has been material gain. The role of government reduced to ensuring the efficient workings of the economy and national defense (often in the service of American corporations). Social safety nets shredded as the most vulnerable among us have been demonized. We have seen the massive transfer of wealth from working people to the richest of the rich. And we now confront the monstrous consequences of it all.
Liberty stands as a synonym for selfishness. Empathy considered a sin.
Much of this has been motivated by the ongoing effort to undo the gains of the freedom movements of the mid-20th century. The inheritors of the people Baldwin described in 1963 as moral monsters now seek to rip apart the very idea of the state that emerged in the aftermath of the civil rights movement.
That hatefulness joined with a view of political economy gave birth to this “zombie democracy.” A nation full of the walking dead (no wonder “wokeness” presents such a threat).
Appeals to charity and philanthropy as an indication of the goodness of American character won’t hide the reality of this deep malaise. These are often sentimental gestures. Virtue performances mostly. A gift masquerading as justice. Sentimentality buries the harsh reality underneath what Wallace Stevens called “a failure of feeling.” It masks cruelty.
But in our days people don’t even hide behind sentimentality. They are simply mean-spirited and cruel.
Something more is required to address this epidemic of selfishness. We must attack the root causes: the idea that the country belongs only to white people, an economic system that assumes that some people are disposable, that material gain is our primary source of value, and that government’s responsibility is limited to economics and defense.
We have to imagine a robust idea of the public good that assumes that every human being has dignity and standing. We need a revival in this country that gives voice to a social contract that states our basic obligations to one another. Not to retrieve some idea of an Edenic past. The fantasy of American goodness will only seal our fate. But a revival of our moral and political imaginations to make real, once and for all, the Beloved Community. A new politics for a new America.
That will require an antidote to the selfishness – the death of the heart – that has covered the land in the darkness and made moral monsters of so many.
That clip of James Baldwin is heartbreaking. This epidemic of selfishness you write about is not so much a new disease but a chronic condition we've carried with us from the beginning of the country. With greed as our god, with consumption as our goal, we promote, have always promoted, immorality and selfishness. We pretend to have a moral conscience. The few times we have shown ourselves to be compassionate---those were lapses. I find it interesting that you write about selfishness just like Gil Duran in his book The Nerd Reich---it's the greed that will kill us. And it's all the more disturbing that the villains claim to be sent by a higher power. Thanks, as always, for your truth.
Thank you for saying so clearly that liberty is code for selfishness. In my mind, libertarians are like a kids who got a whiff of “freedom” when they first got out into the world—went to the movies with friends, learned to drive—and thought “I’m free! I can do anything I want.” It’s a child’s way of thinking that you’re supposed to grow out of.
My son was asked to define “freedom” in his liberal arts college, and came up with this: “I will be free once I fully understand how to live in a way that works best for me and everyone else around me.” He nailed it. Freedom linked to community by definition.