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Editorials -
Special Essays
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.
TOP
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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