“Do as I say, not as I do.” Do you remember that expression? It’s stuck in my memory from childhood days. Lately it has been popping up in my head because of contradictory news stories and political happenings. Maybe it’s because I’m so dismayed at the attention being paid to a dead baseball player. Okay, Stan Musial was “the man,” but really?  The St. Louis Basilica?  Naming a bridge after him? Seriously?

We tell kids to study hard, do well in school, get good grades in college and choose a career with strong potential for financial success. Or at least choose something worthwhile to advance the progress of human civilization.  But then we spend hundreds of dollars to attend sporting events, buy all the apparel and memorabilia and practically worship the players who make the most touchdowns or hit the most home runs.

We argue about funding for education and talk about how kids need to learn math and science so America can compete in the global marketplace. But how often to do we have parades honoring a hero of science? We not only ignore their amazing successes, we allow politicians with a hidden agenda to bad mouth them in public without so much as a whimper of protest.

Look at the local news. Sports heroes from tiny tykes on up make it on the big screen. Okay, once a year the winner of the national spelling bee also gets a few minutes of fame. But really, think about how much air time is given to kids who do well in sports and how little attention the scholars get. Obviously this is what the viewers want to see and hear about or the networks wouldn’t send reporters and camera crews out to hobunk high school to interview athletes and their coaches.

I read recently that one St. Louis area school lets their middle school students out earlier than they used to because most of the middle school teachers are coaches and need to get to the high school for warmups and practice. No, I didn’t make this up. And it’s not because I was turned down for a job teaching history at a local high school because I wasn’t able to coach a sport. That turned out to be a gift because I then landed a job teaching at the college level.

Don’t you ever wonder about those athletes who travel to so many away games and how they have time to study? Or maybe I’m totally out of touch,  thinking they should be studying and working toward an academic degree.   Yes, I know there are some very bright athletes who take their studies seriously. Wouldn’t it be of some benefit to younger kids if we honored those student athletes for their scholastic accomplishments as much as we shower them with attention for doing well in sports?  Imagine a society where the “heroes” are not just good at running, jumping, hitting something or somebody but are also praised to high heaven for their genius at math and science. If this is what we really want young people to aspire to, shouldn’t we offer them chances to see how much we value those pursuits?

Imagine the parking lot of a local high school overflowing with families coming to watch science in action. Imagine booster clubs for math teams and closed circuit TV parties celebrating the winners of scholastic contests. Imagine a parade down Market Street for the researcher who breaks the genetic code identifying the most common form of cancer.

Imagine climate scientists drawing huge crowds eager to learn more about how “Six Degrees Could Change the World” a video produced by the National Geographic Society. And then imagine those huge crowds demanding that we speed up the shift to renewable energy sources like wind and solar. And ending subsidies to Big Oil. And stopping the Keystone Pipeline.

What do you think the chances are that these things will ever happen?  Maybe we’re too far down the path of celebrity intoxication to recover our senses. But there was a day when inventors, scientists and geniuses were our heroes and celebrated across the nation, so I know it’s possible. There’s probably a lot more to this whole question of our society’s priorities. At the very least, we should be honest with our children and not  tell them one thing and do another.

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I was pretty content in my younger conservative days. I don’t know if that was a reflection of political apathy, ignorance, or naivete on my part; I had an abundance of all the above. I also had religion, a decent education, and a narrow view of the world. When I started adding kids to the mix, everything changed in unexpected ways.

Being from a conservative, politically mixed family in small town Missouri meant that “family values” were most often associated with religious Republican families. It was with some trepidation that I evolved into the liberal stay-at-home suburban St. Louis mom I am now. I was a pro-death penalty, pro-guns, anti-gay marriage, pro-life, church-going conservative Democrat. It sounds unbelievable, even to me.  I hold the complete opposite viewpoints 15 years later.

What some of my liberal peers don’t always understand is that being conservative doesn’t necessarily mean emotional detachment or uncaring. I cared as much then as I do now. Shortly before getting married, my then-boyfriend and I once took in a perfect stranger who lost her apartment when her roommates suddenly moved out. She stayed with us a few weeks until she was on her feet and was unwittingly an accomplice to losing my religion, but that is another story.

We gave rides to homeless hitchhikers, gave our meager spare dollars to charitable causes, volunteered time, and stopped to help stranded motorists. Not much has changed in that respect. Then, as now, we couldn’t look desperation in the face and keep walking.

The pivotal moment in personal politics

For a time after our first baby joined the family, we closed ranks. As a new parent, my priorities changed abruptly; most of them becoming centered on someone other than myself. I started to think more about the political and global issues that affected my daughter, the choices she would have, the legacy my generation would leave for our children’s children. Having children gave me a sense of responsibility for others, which is different than simply caring and in many ways a lot tougher.

When our second child was not yet two years old, terrorists attacked and towers were toppled. Terrified and heartbroken, we lived through the horror of the attacks and weeks following shell-shocked and out of sorts. It wasn’t until President Bush announced we were going to war that the fog began to lift.

I started thinking, “It could have been my husband or my children who were victims of the attacks.” Or it could be my children going off to war. It wasn’t. They were others’ husbands, wives, daughters, and sons. That too horrified me and filled me with apprehension about the wars.

The “war on terror” stopped making any sense to me around the time I became more fearful for the children of Iraq and Afghanistan than for my own. It occurred to me that we might seem like terrorists to them with our tanks and missiles, night raids, and mortar shells. Could it be possible that everything those children knew and trusted and took for granted was suddenly and irrevocably shattered? Were their parents distraught with helplessness and loss? I knew the feeling.

As my awareness grew and my perceptions of the world changed, so did the way I interacted with the world. One of my favorite sayings is “think globally, act locally”. That used to be a foreign concept to me. I was thinking locally, acting locally, and primarily helping those in my direct line of sight. That was fine for the smaller community we were part of, but what of the rest of the world? If I cared and felt responsible for everyone, I needed to think globally while acting locally.

What being a Liberal is to me

Enter the pigeon-holed liberal values of environmentalism, peace, human rights, and freedom. These are things I not only care about but issues that affect everyone. Certainly these are things I want my children to be aware of. Not that family values, tradition, and community service are bad, but they stopped being enough for me. Some of these values weren’t a good fit for a conservative like me. Not many of my former conservative peers were on board with women’s reproductive choices and LGBT equality, for example. Who else cared and wanted to do something about it?

I began to see that conservative ideology tends to be expressed in ways that are exclusive, not inclusive, and thus of the localized variety. Others’ idea of what family values meant no longer meshed with the things my family values, such as tolerance.

People who knew us pre-parenthood thought we were naïve and idealistic. Funny so many of the same people still think that way, though their reasoning has changed. They don’t seem to understand that being liberal doesn’t mean I gave up on family values and lost my sense of community. My family and community expanded to include several billion more people, so if anything those things became much more important.

We still care about tradition, which is why we’ve started so many new ones. We still help the local community through volunteering and donating. And a few times, buying that homeless guy lunch. Who said there’s no such thing as a free lunch? (Disclaimer: I plead ignorance of any past, present, or future ordinances against feeding the homeless in public)

The process of going from point A on the political spectrum to point Liberal was completely natural. Because evolution is a slow but steady process, my opinions and beliefs are always changing with new input. And new kids; we have four now. I’m always going to be grateful to them for rocking my political world.

An aside for the Todd Akin’s of the world: liberalism is first and foremost a compassionate ideology, not dogma. Like it or not, government is the means through which ideologies of all types are shared and spread. And whether I like it or not, that includes some ideologies with narrow and limited scope. We all have an opportunity and a duty to promote tolerance and unity. As a public servant, you can do that simply by hearing what all of your constituents have to say. What have you got to lose?

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A Question of Values is Morris Berman’s seventh book of cultural history and social criticism and his first book of essays, which were written between 2007 and 2010.  The book covers four general topics: American culture and politics, the human existential condition, the nature of progress, and thoughts on where we are headed. (He thinks not a good place.)  He feels our problems are as much ethical as they are political.

In the second essay in the book “conspiracy vs. Conspiracy in American History” Berman outlines four American values that he feels are problematic and that are at the core of our accelerating decline.  He suggests these four values or “unconscious mythologies” negatively influence how we behave with each other and the rest of the world. No matter where we are politically, whether we reject them or not, these mythologies are part of our DNA. Because of that reality, Berman feels we need to bring to consciousness the following notions that are not serving us well.

The first is the idea of Americans as the “chosen people,” and of the nation as a “City on a Hill.” He attributes this notion to the future governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony John Winthrop who said: “ He [God] shall make us praise and glory. . . .For we must Consider that we shall be as a City upon a Hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.”

In other words, the idea is that it is our unique mission to bring democracy to all the peoples of the earth because the American way of life is superior to all others. Berman underscores that the idea of American exceptionalism—that America is the manifestation of God’s will on earth—runs deep in the American psyche. It was the belief in American exceptionalism that eventually sold Americans on the Iraq War, which after the weapons of mass destruction lie failed, transformed into a mission to bring American democracy and the American way of life to the Middle East.

Berman’s second unconscious mythology is of the existence in the United States of what he calls a “civil religion.” Even though Americans claim to be highly religious, the real religion of the American people is America itself.

To be an American is regarded (unconsciously by Americans) as an ideological/religious commitment, not an accident of birth. This is why critics of the United States are immediately labeled “un-American,” and are practically regarded as traitors. (Quite ridiculous, when your think about it: can you imagine a Swedish critic of Sweden, for example, being attacked as “un-Sweedish?”)  The historian Sidney Mead pegged it correctly when he called America “the nation with the soul of a church,” while another historian, Richard Hofstadter, declared that “It has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one.”  Quite obviously, this is not a position that encourages self-reflection.

The third unconscious mythology, according to Berman is the existence of a “supposedly endless frontier into which the American people would expand geographically. Eventually, it became an economic frontier, and finally an imperial one—Manifest Destiny gone global. . . .The American Dream envisions a world without limits, in which the goal, as the gangster (played by Edward G. Robinson) tells Humphrey Bogart in Key Largo, is simply ‘more.’”

Finally, Berman identifies us as having a national character based on extreme individualism—Emerson’s “Self Reliance.” He notes a shift occurred in the definition of the word “virtue” in the Colonies in the 1790s. Previous to this time, the word virtue referred to the European idea of the capacity to rise above personal interest and devote oneself to the public good. But, he says, by 1800, the definition was reversed. Virtue came to mean the ability to “further oneself in an opportunistic environment.” Jeffersonian Republicans championed this idea as a way to break with all things European. “Life was not to be about service to the community, but about competition and the acquisition of goods.. . .The “self-made man” is expected to make it on his own.”

Berman goes on to say that

American history can be seen as the story of a nation consistently choosing individual solutions over collective ones. One American who did dissent, however, was Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. In Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions he wrote: “The philosophy of self-sufficiency is not paying off. Plainly enough, it is a bone-crushing juggernaut whose final achievement is ruin.”

As if to underscore Berman’s point, on October 11, 2008, Harold Bloom wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times titled “Out of Panic, Self-Reliance.” In it he said, referring to the economic crash and the upcoming election:”

Regardless of these differences, whoever is elected will have to forge a solution to today’s panic through his own understanding of self-reliance. As Emerson knew in his glory and sorrow, both of himself and all Americans: “The wealth of the universe is for me. Every thing is explicable and practical for me …. I am defeated all the time; yet to victory I am born.”

Interesting, that Bloom didn’t question the “wealth of the universe is for me” mentality that contributed to the economic crisis, but, instead, celebrated it.

Berman acknowledges that these same unconscious mythologies drove technological innovation and the “Yankee can-do mentality.” However, he feels that “in dialectical fashion, they have begun to turn against us, and the crash of 2008 is merely the tip of the iceberg.”

Morris Berman is a well-known cultural historian and social critic. He has taught in a number of universities in Europe, North America and Mexico. Berman won the Governor’s Writer’s Award for Washington State in 1990, and the Rollo May Center Grant for Humanistic Studies in 1992. In 2000, his book Twilight of American Culture was named a “Notable Book” by The New York Times.  http://morrisberman.blogspot.com/

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