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Editorials

from The Ethical Humanist - the monthly newsletter of the Ethical Society of Boston.

 

The Way It Is - May

by Marvin Miller

Race, Sex, Class

 

"Races" are artificial, socially constructed categories. They have no biological basis in reality. Modern anthropological research tells us that we are all of African descent. Years ago people used to speak of the "English race" or the "French race", referring to the residents of a specific country. Notoriously, Germans used to speak of the "Aryan race", referring to residents of a group of countries. Someone who would be classified as "black" under the former racist laws of parts of our country would be classified not as "black" but in a separate class called "colored" under the racist laws of South Africa of the same period. "Races" are artificial but racism is real.

 

Laws, customs, and attitudes regarding relationships between people of different "races" were created to establish and maintain differences in social status between groups of people. These differences were often enforced with terrorist violence. Emmett Till, a "black" teenager, was brutally murdered for expressing appreciation of the attractiveness of a "white" woman. Jesse Jackson, addressing hypothetical "white" men, said "You say you don't want us to marry your daughters. We have always been marrying your daughters. It's your wives' daughters you don't want us to marry." He was referring to the well-known fact that from the beginning of the slavery period, "white" masters treated their "black" slave women as their concubines. Children resulting from these couplings were placed in their mothers' "race." An example is Thomas Jefferson, who was (probably accurately) "accused" of having a sexual relationship with Sally Hemings, who was one of his slaves and the half-sister of his wife.


The distinction between male and female is the oldest distinction in human culture. Cultural bias tells us that in a social or sexual relationship between a male and a female, the male is dominant and the female inferior. Hence, in racist society, sexual relationships such as concubinage, prostitution, or rape between males of the dominant "race" and females of the subordinate "race" are condoned, but not marriage, which implies social equality. The feminist and gay rights movements challenge this bias, asserting equality of status between the two participants in the relationship. This threatens the self-image of those who have a psychological investment in their higher status under the traditional bias. Bias for male over female or "white" over "black" status may play a role in this year's presidential election. In our country, class is generally considered to be an economic category. In countries with a feudal heritage, it is also a social category. We have seen the put-down epithets "social climber" and "nouveau-riche", referring to people who have acquired wealth and seek social acceptance by those who have inherited upper-class status. In some of these societies there exist titles of "nobility" or their vestiges, such as the words "de", "di" or "von" in people's names. Class bias is embedded in our language. The word "nobility" carries an implication with respect to character. Class is also a political category. In all but the smallest, simplest social groups, and sometimes even in these, there are those who make the rules and those who have to live under the rules that others make. Of course, power differences lead to corresponding differences in wealth, privilege, and social status. Democratic ideology challenges this distinction. It says that everyone ought to have as nearly equal as feasible a part in making the rules.


Advocates for the elimination or reduction of differences in power, wealth, privilege, or social status are often libeled as "envious." To do that is to willfully miss the point. To be envious is not to seek elimination of class differences, but to wish oneself in the upper class, enjoying its benefits.


My experience in Ethical Culture tells me that Ethical Culture is a democratic ideology. When we say "bring out the best in others" we don't mean some others but not other others. We mean all others, irrespective of economic, ethnic, linguistic, national, political, racial, sexual, or social status. Our ethical principle is the principle of equality. We define progress as change in the direction of greater equality and favor such changes.

 

 

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The Way It Is - April

by Marvin Miller

Housing, Taxes, Environment

 

We present the April column lost last month in the vast recesses of computer land. Marvin came home from Florida and sent us a copy. This time we put it in these pages immediately, before some gremlin came and decided to eat it for breakfast. So here, we are happy to say, is more of Marvin’s food for thought.

Lisa Court, a member of the Ethical Society, who died much too young in the late 1990s, was an activist for affordable housing in Cambridge. It was a struggle which was ultimately lost when the landlord lobby pushed through a statewide referendum prohibiting the three municipalities which then had rent control, Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge, or any others in the state, from controlling rents.

The most recent census (or estimate) of homelessness in Boston put the number of homeless people at over 6,000. It would be unreasonable to deny the connection between unaffordable housing and homelessness. The real estate section of the newspaper tells us that a minimal apartment in the Boston area costs $800-900 a month, which is over half of what a minimum-wage worker would earn before taxes in a month of 40-hour work weeks, with no unemployment, sick or layoff time cutting into earnings. It isn't surprising that some of the homeless people are full-time workers.

Federal fiscal (tax and spending) policy is biased toward the homeowner class and against the renter class. There is a valuable income tax deduction for real estate taxes and home mortgage interest paid. This is effectively a subsidy from the Federal government to those who make these payments, the middle and upper classes. There is no comparable subsidy for renters, mostly poor people. Federal housing subsidies for poor renters were essentially eliminated by the Reagan administration and not restored since. (There is a state income tax deduction for rent, worth $159 a year or less to those who pay at least that amount in state income taxes, which the poorest families don't. It was inserted into Proposition 2-1/2, the local-tax-limiting referendum which is now squeezing municipal services all across the state, to gain political support from renters.)

The effect of the subsidy for home ownership over tenancy is to make the cost of owning more closely comparable to that of renting, for those whose incomes allow the choice. The consequence is to shift the demand for housing from rental toward resident-owned property. Most new housing is built for sale rather than for rent. It isn't profitable to build or own housing that poor people can afford without subsidy. Much of the state's new "affordable" (affordable by middle-income people, not poor people) housing is built by developers who can avoid the restrictions of local zoning laws by including some such units in their developments.

A news story illustrating the extreme disparity in housing appeared a few months ago. A wealthy owner of a sports team is having a monster $26 million "home" built for his family of three or four people. Its size is enough to house literally hundreds of poor people. The news report of this construction has no hint of judgment of the ethics of this use of resources.


Americans use about twice as much energy and emit more carbon dioxide per capita than people in other technologically advanced countries. A major reason for this is that our housing is much more spread out than theirs and our public transportation systems are much
inferior to theirs. This dispersion requires more heating and cooling, more electric power, and more automobile use than elsewhere in the first world. This dispersion didn't just happen. Government policies since the Second World War (determined largely by the influence of those who stood to gain by it), including homeownership subsidies, road building, and public transportation demolition, played a major role in creating it. Ethical principles require an assessment of these policies and a decision concerning actions to retain or change them.

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Board Member's Column -

by Mildred Siegel

Hearing and Listening

The Ethical Society of Boston has had a Book Discussion Group for more than 43 years. Stan Wayne told me the Society had an active Book Group when he first came to Boston and joined the Ethical Society 43 years ago. In the early days the books read were mostly about Comparative Religion and Philosophy. Sometime in the past twenty years or so this changed and the selections now range toward political and social issues and memoirs, with some fiction and poetry, the latter mostly led by Ed Locke.

 

With Stan, I have been coordinating the Book Group meetings for about ten years. Generally one of our members will suggest a book and offer to lead the discussion. Then we talk about the book, and the members present decide whether they like the book or not; they practically always do like it. Most of us get a chance to lead a discussion each year, no one is overworked, and we seem to get a fine selection of interesting books this way.

 

We have a few rules that we sometimes announce at the beginning of meetings when we have new people present or when it seems like a good time for a brush-up for all of us. Our rules are mainly about listening, and taking turns politely. We are a pretty feisty crowd and everybody has a lot to contribute most of the time. We pretty much adopted the system the Society uses in the Question and Answer part of our Sunday Platform Meetings, of having someone keep track of who wanted to speak, and call on them in turn. At first we thought it would be constraining in our more informal environment but is actually the opposite. Our soft-spoken members aren’t in competition with the louder and faster talkers.To get their turn to talk they just put up a hand, wave, or gesture instead of talking louder and faster. They don’t need to rush to finish their thoughts because they know they won’t be interrupted. The happy result has been that we have more input from these more quiet members, which is a joy and benefit to them and to us.

 

I think a lot about listening because of the book discussion group where usually everyone has a lot to say and has to wait to say it and worries about losing his train of thought. Listening is difficult and complicated.  Alan Alda in his biography, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed, tells about his pivotal experiences as an actor in learning how to listen. "What I do in a scene is not as important as what happens between me and the other person. And listening is what lets it happen. It’s almost always the other person who causes you to say what you say next. You don't have to figure out how you'll say it.

 

You have to listen so simply, so innocently, that the other person brings about a change in you that makes you say it and informs the way you say it. The difference in listening and pretending to listen, I discovered, is enormous. One is fluid, the other is rigid. One is alive, the other is stuffed. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. … Like so much of what I learned in the theatre, this turned out to be how life works, too." The power of listening can be life enhancing.

 

Benjamin Franklin had come to understand that "knowledge was obtained rather by the use of the ear than of the tongue." His partiality for listening was most beneficial to the small club he formed, called the Junto, where the twelve members together discussed issues of the day, philosophical topics, and worked on projects. He instituted rules of conduct having to do with conversation (and listening). Discussions were to be conducted as soft Socratic dialogues “without fondness for dispute or desire of victory.” He deplored people who talked too much, seemed uninterested and interrupted others. Benjamin Franklin and his Junto continued together with their civil discussions and civic projects for thirty years. Out of the Junto were created a volunteer fire department, the academy that later became the University of Pennsylvania, America’s first subscription Library and many other projects. My dictionary says that "listen" means: To hear attentively: to give ear to; to pay attention to. To listen well is such hard work but the reward can be so great.

 

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Special Essays

Poverty and Wealth by Russell Doane

Social Reason:  Resolving "Irreconcilable" Differences - Milton W. Raymond

 


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