Social Security

At 63 going on 64, I care about Social security. Of course, we should all care about Social Security. One of our perennial political problems has been that so many of the present beneficiaries of Social Security seem to care about it more than they seem to care about any other issue facing our country, and that their political clout has prevented the rest of society (including, therefore, those actually paying to sypport today's retirees) from caring enough to take on the challenge of making Social Security sustainable for the long term.

For better or for worse, we are all being told nowadays - and not just by the governor of Texas - that Social Security is a "Ponzi Scheme." Certainly Social security has some superficial resemblance to a "ponzi Scheme." That's not unlike the fact that - as a man and an American citizen - I have something in common with Barack Obama. But that resemblance is not sufficent to make me also President of the United States - much less thin and fit!

What Social Security is - has always been, in fact - is a transfer payment. In other words, it is a social welfare program. Today's workers pay to maintain today's retirees (yesterday's workers) - and hope that tomorrow's workers will in turn pay to support them, which they will do unless Americna law and present policy change. (Thus, Social Security is the main reason that seniors are among the least poor in our society, since they benefit from this massive transfer of wealth from the young to the old. This is true in less direct ways as well - ie., the short-changing of "discretionary" expenditures, such as education, while entitlements such as Social Security remain untouchable).

Social Security's resemblance to a proper "Ponzi Scheme" is real but superficial, because unlike a "Ponzi Scheme" Social Security's reliability rests on the credit - and credibility - of the United States of America, a sovereign state (and one which, unlike Greece for example, controls its own currency). As long as the United States remains committed to behaving as sovereign states are supposed to behave and thus remains committed to fulfilling its obligations to its citizens, Social Secuirty stands. That it would not do so has, of course, hitherto been unthinkable - at least until a significant segment of the Republican Party decided to advocate defaulting rather than paying our bills, as happened (to most of the world's amazement) this past summer.

The problem, then, is not some malevolent flaw at the heart of Social Security, but how to sustain it in the face of our society's demographic transformation - a larger senior cohort than ever before, living longer than ever before, and (this impacts Medicare) spending more of the country's money on health care than ever before. All Western society's have some variation on this problem. Those that are also committing demographic suicide by not having sufficently large families have the problem in an even more extreme form.

So, by all means, let us look at appropriate adjustments to entitlements to reflect the demographic transformation of our society, but let's start by stopping all the silly sloganeering!

"Class Warfare"

A time-honored substitute for debating the substance of an issue is sloganeering name-calling. The slogan of choice being thrown around right now seems to be “class warfare.” What exactly “class warfare” is remains somewhat undefined. In the current demagogic use of the term, it seems to refer to anyone who believes (1) that the government needs additional revenues to deal with the deficit created over the last decade by the previous (Republican) administration, and (2) that one obvious source of such revenue would be repealing the tax cuts for the wealthiest group of Americans, the very same tax cuts that helped cause the current deficit in the first place. In addition, (3) those who advocate this course of action are more likely (than those who don’t advocate it) to believe that our increasing social and economic inequality and its accompanying hardships on an increasingly larger percentage of the population are socially and politically destructive. In 1996, David Plotke (Building a Democratic Political Order) called that latter idea the “common sense” of American politics from the mid-30s through the mid-60’s (I’d say actually even further into the 70s).
Americans have always been squeamish about the concept of “class.” Unlike race and ethnicity, for example, which we have always been very conscious of, “class” has often had a foreign, essentially European sound to it. There is a good reason for this, of course, since, unlike Europe, the United States, for most of its history, has been much more culturally and politically egalitarian, both mirroring and supporting the reality of a relatively (again compared with the societies most Americans had immigrated from) high degree of social and economic mobility. Thus, we have the often remarked peculiarity that many Americans simultaneously denied the reality of class in America and were also likely to label themselves as “middle class.” When I was a political scientist, it was also argued that many of racial and ethnic divisions in our society were really (or at least also) class divisions, and that class conflict was, so to speak, hidden in our history of racial and ethnic conflict.
One result of all this has been the difficulty historically of creating a political ideology or organizing political activity around the concept of class. Hence, the chronic failure of the “Left,” understood in a European sense. To be sure, for much of the 20th century the US had a vigorous liberal-democratic “Left,” a coalition of which organized Labor was a key component. But a truly European-style social-democratic "Left" has always been much more marginal, and overtly Marxist and radical movements even more so. The 1960s renaissance of European-style leftist thought and radical movements, moreover, was largely found among students and intellectual types – more often than not separate from and even hostile to the traditional social and economic concerns of organized labor and its liberal-democratic political allies. One obvious consequence of this has been the intellectual Left’s increased preoccupation with cultural and moral concerns (abortion, gender issues, etc.). Such concerns were, of course, quite alien to the traditional liberal-democratic concerns associated, for example, with the Labor Movement, and have tended over time to crowd out such traditional social and economic concerns. The result has been an enfeebled liberal-democratic "Left," ill-equipped to respond coherently to the threat of increasing economic inequality. Meanwhile, the historic advocate for the “common sense” concern about social and economic inequality – the Democratic Party – has increasingly been seen as more responsive to its elites’ primary preoccupation with cultural and moral issues than to labor's traditional social and economic concerns.
FDR’s New Deal policies were admittedly less successful than it had been hoped they would be. (On the eve of the pre-WW II mobilization, unemployment - while down from what it had been when FDR took office in 1933 -was still 14%). But FDR’s New Deal policies did really help people. Perhaps even more to the point, they actually aided the victims of the Depression. President Obama’s policies, have also helped to some extent and certainly prevented the economic crisis from being even worse. But the aid went most noticeably not to the victims of the crisis (e.g., the unemployed, those being foreclosed out of their homes, etc.) but to the economic elite who, many believe, caused the problem in the first place (e.g., “bail-outs” to banks, Wall Street, etc.).
It’s not just that the President and his economic “team” are wealthy, well educated people, who frankly don’t identify all that easilywith the day-to-day difficulties of those less affluent and less educated. There is indeed something to that argument, which would as easily apply to a very large part of the political class. It points to a fundamental dilemma for a democratic society of the prominent part played by money – and the values associated with the culture of money – in our politics .

But FDR was very wealthy and a true American aristocrat. But somehow he was able to connect with his working class constituency in a way our present President unfortunately has not
I suspect that the difference is part that President Obama (for all his evident good intentions and despite his admirable moral character) really is a “postmodern” President – the first, but probably not our last. Apart from adhering (fairly faithfully if not with complete consistency) to the cultural and moral preoccupations of the secularized intellectual elite with which he obviously identifies, he seems to lack clear ("ideological") convictions about some of the fundamentals of traditional political philosophy. Like so many of his contemporaries, he knows what cultural and moral beliefs are mandated by political correctness, and which are supposed to be considered and treated as self-evident truths. Beyond that, however, he seems pragmatically post-ideological, post-principle as a matter of principle. This to me may explain some of his awkwardness when it comes to articulating a convincingly principled alternative vision to his opponents’ ideological principles.

Midland Memories

September, when one finally feels that welcome first hint of autumn, always reminds me of Canada, where I spent 6 years form 1994 to 2000 - first as a deacon at the Catholic Information Centre (as it was then named) and then as a priest at our Paulist parish in Toronto. There, September 26 is the feast of the Canadian Martyrs - – Jesuits Jean de Brebeuf, Isaac Jogues, Antony Daniel, Gabriel Lalemant, Charles Garnier, Noel Chabanel, and Jesuit Oblates Rene Goupil, and Jean de la Lande – whom the US calendar commemorates on October 19 (under the title “North American Martyrs”). Their feast also always reminds me of the beautiful and popular shrine of the Canadian Martyrs at Midland, Ontario – and the perhaps even more significant historical site of the Jesuits’ 17^th-cenury mission settlement of Sainte Marie that stands reconstructed in the shadow of the modern shrine church. It makes a great day trip from Toronto, and I remember well my memorable first visit there as a seminarian in 1984 with Paulist Father Jim Donovan and then later taking my own parents there in 1995.

In its time, Sainte Marie was the westernmost European settlement in North America (north of Mexico) and surely qualifies as an integral part of that glorious early history – that epopee des plus brillants exploits of which the French version of the Canadian anthem sings so movingly. But for those Jesuit “Blackrobes” and their associates who lived and labored there - 37 days by canoe from Quebec City, spending long cold winters in smoky “longhouses” in Indian villages and the hot summers in that settlement, following their rigorous religious routine of prayers and spiritual exercises (starting daily at 4:00 a.m.), it was a rough obscure life. It only importance in worldly terms proved, paradoxically, to be its undoing, as conflict between the warring European Powers’ Indian surrogates forced the French Jesuits to leave that outpost after 10 years of intense missionary effort – abandoning what they had earlier built with such undoubtedly high hopes.

At the time, the French Jesuits’ ambitious, impressive, powerful project appeared in worldly terms a colossal failure – as indeed, in the immediate shadow of the cross, must also have appeared the earthly mission of Jesus himself, in whose name those missionaries so heroically struggled.

Now that North America is again becoming mission territory, we do well to keep such apparent failures as well as the seeming successes in mind as we consider anew how to re-establish the Good News in this New World.

Two Sons

The familiar words we just heard from Saint Paul [Philippians 2:1-11] were written from prison to the Christian community Paul had founded and left behind at Philippi, to thank them for their generosity in the past and to encourage them to face the future.
Have the same attitude that is also in Christ Jesus, Paul advised them. Paul’s idea of encouragement was to identify with the fundamental truth about Jesus, which he proceeded to express – not in his own words but with what most likely was already a well known Christian hymn, an early profession of faith in Jesus:
Who, though he was in the form of God did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave … becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend … and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
In direct and conspicuous contrast to typical, ordinary, normal, human behavior, Jesus was unselfish, humble, and obedient. In contrast to the typical, ordinary, normal, human self-centered narcissism, which dominates and directs most of human history (one need only look at Wall Street, but one need not even look that far), Jesus’ obedience has made it possible to undo that destructive pattern and alter the course of human history, by creating new possibilities for us, both in relation to God and to one another.
Jesus’ obedience to his Father was not some isolated act. It was a total attitude that characterized his whole self. That was how God originally intended all of us to live. We cannot return to that original innocence; but, with God’s help, we can change course – like the first son in the parable in today’s Gospel [Matthew 21:28-32], who first answered, “I will not,” but who then afterwards changed his mind.
It is certainly true that we cannot undo the past. How well we know that! But that can also become an excuse, a rather lame excuse, and a particularly poisonous excuse, to do nothing, becoming a sort of silent spectator in the story of one’s life. How often have we heard someone say – or perhaps have said it ourselves – “What can I do? That’s just the way it is,” or worse “That’s just the way I am. I just can’t change!”
It’s true, of course, that we cannot undo the past; and that we are in some sense always products of our past and may be burdened by our past. But the good news of the Gospel is that there is no sin that we can’t break away from. We cannot undo the past, but we can change course in the present, by remodeling ourselves in the image of God’s Son and so share in his new life – already here and now in the community of his Church on earth and then forever when our risen selves are joined with Christ completely in the kingdom of the Father.
In telling us a parable about two sons, Jesus makes clear that he does not want us to focus forever on our first response, on our initial (and however often repeated) failure to follow; but rather to do like the first son and change. Let’s get going, Jesus is telling us, into that vineyard where his own life and example are leading us!
Homily for the 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Immaculate Conception Church, Knoxville, TN, September 25, 2001.

Fall (Finally)

At 5:05 a.m. today, the sun made its annual passage over the equator, an alignment we call the autumn equinox - equinox, because as a consequence the entire planet purportedly experiences a day and a night of equal length, and autumn, because it heralds the season that serves as the transition from the heat of summer to the cold of winter.
Seasons are natural phenomena, of course. On the other hand, how we choose to label and demarcate them is somewhat arbitary - arbitary in the narrower, literal sense of being a matter of some choice, not necessarily in the connotative sense of being completely a matter of whim. The old European "Celtic" calendar counted seasons as the period that surrounded the solar year's 4 cardinal dates (the 2 solstices and the 2 equinoxs). According to that way of computing things, autumn began on August 1, winter on November 1, etc. The medieval calendar reflected this with Lammas Day (until 1960 also the feast of St. Peter in Chains) on August 1, All Saints Day on November 1, Candlemas Day on February 2, and May Day on May 1. Our preferred way of computing the seasons starts with the solstice or equinox. Three of those dates became cardinal points not only of the natural solar year but of the liturgical year, giving us Christmas, Annunciaiton, and the Birth of John the Baptist of December 25, March 25, and June 24 respectively.

Except for Christmas, those religious dates now pass virtually unnoticed now. Indeed, in our post-natural world of atificial lighting and climate-controlled homes and indoor workplaces, these seasonal changes mean so much less than they used to for our ancestors. So the solstices and equinoxes, while still acknowledged, signify relatively little for ordianry life in our resolutely post-natural world. (Of course, climate change and its attendant calamities could make us more sensitive again to the cycle of nature, but since we currently inhabit a political culture that seems hell-bent on denying both the reality and the consequences of climate change even that modest outcome seems unlikely, at least in the short term).

Even so, some seasonal sensibility still sticks with us and still catches our attention. A week or so ago, I was watching a local news program where the lead item was an expected earlier-than-usual begining of the fall colors. While hardly the most pressing issue in the news, fall foliage is one of those vestiges of the natural world that still gets people's attention.

While every season undoutedly has its particular charm, which deserves to be savored, my favorites are autumn and winter. Seasons happen naturally, but the symbolic human associations each season has come to carry are cultural creations. Thus, after the killing heat of summer, the autumn rains brought new life to Israel's desert climate and hence made fall the right time to begin a new year. In so many areas of life (schools, most obviously), fall remains for us the season of new beginnings and resumed activities.

Already in the last week or so, the temperature has droped from the 90s we were still having at the beginning of September. If only it would drop further and really cool off! Then Fall could be experienced in all its glory!