If I Die at the Hands of Another: A Christian Case for Nonviolence

If I die at the hands of another, please do not let them say that I would have been better off killing first.  Please do not let them say that I would rethink my faith in Christ’s words, that “whoever seeks to preserve his life will lose it” (Lk 17:33).  Do not let them say that it was naïve to take seriously the commandment to “Put your sword back into its sheath, for all who take up the sword will perish by the sword” (Mt 26:52).  Do not let them say that this world would be any better, any safer or more decent, had I participated in the violence that occurs daily, here and across the world.  While many people do and may always disagree with me, I do not for one minute believe that a willingness, eagerness, or even preparedness to commit acts of violence makes me or you safer, and in the wake of the violence in Connecticut and the current debate over gun control, I feel compelled to explain why.

First, let me lend some personal credibility to my position.  A common response to words like the ones that I have written above, a response that I have received more than once, is that when it comes down to it and the world “goes to Hell” around me, I will change my tune.  I will be wishing that I had a gun in the holster, ready to aim and fire to protect myself and my own.  In response to this criticism, I want first to recount some of my own history in regards to gun violence.  When I graduated from college, I began teaching in an inner-city area of Birmingham, AL, which was at the time the sixth most dangerous city in the US (it is now tied for third).  Many of my students wrote in journal entries about relatives being shot and killed, and on multiple occasions I physically intervened in fights between teenage boys much bigger and stronger than myself.  Violence was very much a part of the reality that these kids lived in, and I became increasingly aware of that as I entered into their world.

One day during class, we heard helicopters flying overhead and police sirens flooding the neighborhood.  The school was put on lockdown.  I learned initially that there was a gunman on the loose in the neighborhood.  At some point, I found out that this person had called in a phony crime to report, and then opened fire on the responding officers.  At least one of those officers was killed.  As I was in the classroom with my students, responsible for their well-being, at no point did I feel that I or anyone else would be safer if I was carrying a firearm or any other weapon.  Nor did I feel afterwards that I ought to start carrying a weapon to work; that my students would benefit from guns in the classroom.  We went into lockdown, did what we could to keep the children safe, and thankfully none of our students or teachers were harmed.  (Another incident that stands out occurred last October, when I traveled to Haiti.  We were driving down a country road when a political demonstration stopped traffic.  Before we knew it, we were ducking down in our seats as heavily armed police forces fanned out and began firing live ammunition from assault weapons into the trees and bushes around us.  Again, I did not wish for a gun to clutch for safety.)

Of course, others may have had similar experiences and not felt the same way.  My point in sharing this is not to say how you or anyone should react, but merely to put to rest any notion that I am simply naïve about violence, or that my views are merely untested theories of how I would feel were my life in danger.  With that out of the way, I can address the question of where my views on violence, specifically as a means of personal protection, come from.  The answer is complex, a mix of faith, personal experience, and hard, sobering facts.  To briefly address the latter, the statistical evidence is clear about the dangers of gun ownership.  States with high levels of gun ownership have higher homicide rates (Harvard Injury Control Research Center); gun owners are 50% more likely to be shot dead by their own hand than by another person (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), and states with stricter gun-control laws have fewer deaths from gun-related violence (the Atlantic Magazine).   In terms of self-defense, in addition to the above-mentioned statistic about gun owners posing greater risk to themselves than a supposed attacker, a study by University of Pennsylvania found that people carrying guns were 4.5 times more likely to be shot during muggings than those without.

From the perspective of the Christian faith (a faith that I hold deeply), we should not be at all surprised that guns make us less safe, not more.  More broadly, we should know that meeting violence with violence is not the path set out by God: “You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on (your) right cheek, turn the other one to him as well” (Mt. 5:38-39).  It is not that Jesus welcomed death.  He had a mission to advance love, to advance justice, to promote peace and nonviolence, to foster solidarity among all people.  At times, death seemed near, but Jesus actively avoided it, escaping from the grasp of his would-be captors (Jn 10:39).  But sometimes following the call to love requires us to make that final choice between saving our own lives and following the conviction that violence and bloodshed are not the way of God, and having the faith to believe that God protects us even in death.  Jesus faced this choice.  He had told his disciples to turn the other cheek, but when the Romans came for him, one of those disciples pulled his sword to protect Christ himself.  In that moment, Jesus commanded him to put his sword away, went on to state clearly that the sword is not a means of salvation or even protection, and accepted that his mission necessitated that he face death.

No one said that faith is easy.  The question for those of us who follow the Christian faith is whether we take Christ at his word, and, if so, whether we have the courage to follow in his footsteps and the faith to believe in the promise of new life.  Do we believe in Jesus’ vision of the Reign of God?  Certainly we have examples of others that have tried to follow in those footsteps, and in our society we honor those men and women as witnesses to a better world.  We honor and remember Martin Luther King, Jr., who died committed to nonviolence but also played a pivotal role in making the US are equal nation; Mahatma Gandhi, who, too, lived a life of peaceful resistance and died a violent death, but also blazed a path to Indian independence; Archbishop Oscar Romero, who opposed the soldiers that eventually murdered him, but also challenged the indigenous Salvadorans that were being oppressed to abandon violence as part of their resistance.  We remember and honor the other martyred women and men of Central America, who knew that their deaths were imminent, yet stood by the people that they served with love and nonviolent resistance.  We rightly recognize these people as heroes and servants of God.  We do not see them as weak, as running towards death, as refusing to take responsibility for their lives or the lives of others.  Quite the opposite: we see them as affirming life, working diligently to protect it, and sacrificing their own lives for the sake of a better world, one in which violence is not embraced as a path to peace.

The fact is not only that nonviolence is the way of Christ, but that by telling ourselves otherwise, telling ourselves that a gun in the holster will protect us and make our world safer, we are clinging to the illusion that our lives will always be in our own hands.  We are striving to reject the reality of death, refusing to accept that there may come a time when we simply are not in a position to protect ourselves.  This truth certainly frightens me, but in succumbing to that fear, in clutching a gun to gain peace of mind, I am endangering myself and the people that I love far more than any gunman, for the gun that I own is so much more likely to harm myself or them than to protect us.  Innocent men, women, and children die on the streets of our cities, die by accident in their homes and vehicles, and die in schools like Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Sandy Hook.

The day of the tragedy at Sandy Hook, I was in a hospital room with a very ill six-week-old niece and her mother.  Standing next to her bed at Children’s Hospital, watching the events unfold on the television, learning with horror the confirmed death count and the ages of the victims, I was struck with the conviction that no child should suffer if it can be avoided.  I was in a building filled with sick children, most of which were there through nobody’s fault, and hearing of the deaths of children who died because we did not try hard enough to protect them.  Yes, one man committed this act, but we have seen this happen time and time and time again, and done virtually nothing to prevent it.  I, personally, over the last few years have been more strongly committed to nonviolence than ever before, more convinced of the dangers that guns pose to society, and yet where was I after seventeen people were shot in Tuscon?  Where was I after seventy people were shot in Aurora?

We need to build community, we need to live lives of love and compassion, and we need to care for our brothers and sisters suffering from mental illness.  But we also need to abandon the myth that violence will protect us.  We need to look at the facts of gun violence, and those of us of any faith need to examine with clear heads and honest consciences what that faith tells us about the path to life and peace.   And yes, we need to limit the number of guns in our homes and streets, eradicate the most dangerous of them, and recognize that guns are dangerous not only in the hands of the most violent of us, but of people in general.

If I die by a gun or a knife, or by some other form of violent attack, please do not let them tell you that I would have been safer with a gun, safer trying to kill or be killed, safer ignoring the hard facts, ignoring the tenets of my faith, safer in refusing to stand up for the very Christ that stood up for all of us with his life and death.  We take a stand by working to build a better, safer, more loving and responsible world, not by letting this world frighten us into endangering ourselves, our families, and our communities.  Our salvation is not to plunge into the darkness of violence, but to walk in the light of peace.

The Secret of My Success: Be Lazy, Have Good Parents

I have a confession to make: I was a lazy child. I'm not proud of it, but it may have been a blessing in disguise, for it informs my understanding that this world - and yes, even our dear United States - is fundamentally unfair. Put simply, I really have no business being successful and happy.

First, a little history. When I hit about fourth grade, I stopped doing my homework. Having been a teacher, I know that some kids do not do their homework because they do not understand it, some because they have busy after school lives and don't prioritize it, and some do not do it for the mere fact that they are lazy. I was solidly in the latter category, a trend that continued up through high school. In my defense at the time, I hated school. Thus, in all my adolescent maturity, it stood to reason that I should not be forced to do things that I do not actually enjoy doing. In addition, I was blessed with a solid capacity to memorize a great deal of information in a short period of time, and to then remember that information at least through the next day. Thus the time in high school drama class when I neglected learning my monologue until the night before - ironic, since that is something which I enjoyed, but by that time my laziness was well-ingrained.

This also made cramming for tests fairly standard, though of course I learned little. I remember once when I wrote an essay on the influence of Irish immigrants on US history, and my teacher politely accused me of plagiarism because he had never seen me display any measure of effort or competency in anything, let alone a ten-page essay. But this all begs the question: why did I even cram for tests or write essays in the first place? What prevented my laziness from taking hold entirely? Part of the answer lies in the fact that certain tasks, like writing essays, appealed to me (go figure), and that, through a more-than-decent education, I had somehow acquired the skills to do so effectively. Even more fundamentally, though, is the fact of my parents. They may not have been able to sway me from willful mediocrity (and anyone who knows kids can hardly blame them), but even I had limits, and outright failure was not an option.

Of course, I also, as many young ones do, had an outsized view of my own abilities and wisdom. In that wisdom, I decided firmly that I would not go to college. Now, in my actual defense, this was not an act of laziness. I sincerely hated school, and had visions of making it in the world of socially conscious, indy hop hop. (Hmmm...maybe not such a solid defense after all.) In any case, my parents were having none of it. They insisted that I apply at least to one college, and by some stroke of luck I got in. Moreover, they so valued education and my future that they risked paying for me to go to college, despite my previous track record with education.

It was probably the single most important that anyone ever made for me. I flourished in college: I worked hard, earned a 3.8 overall GPA, and held a job in which I was working about 30 hours a week by the time that senior year rolled around. After college, I entered a volunteer teaching program and earned my Master's in education. I do not list these accomplishments to brag - quite the opposite, it's all pretty shameful to me. Though those who know me well know that there were several other bumps along the way - loss, grief, health issues, unemployment - they also know that I am extremely happy now, work hard at job that I am blessed to have, married to a wonderful woman, and that I recently bought a house.

In short, I may be going to Hell. How can I be in this position when I so willfully avoided success for so long? Moreover, any number of circumstances may have done me in: had my parents not been able to send me to good schools, be they elementary, high school, or university; had my parents not both been well-educated and valued education; had I not been born with certain intellectual gifts that helped me skate by; had one of my parents become unemployed or died while I was young - any number of events or realities could have derailed my success. And yet, things somehow turned out this way, nonetheless.

This may be the fundamental reason, then, that I do not buy the argument that anyone in this country can succeed through a little hard work. To be clear, while laziness should have done me in, I am not arguing that I think that the poor are lazy. Instead, I am pointing out that, primarily through luck of birth, I as an entirely non-exceptional student was protected from failure and ultimately able to succeed. We make much in this country of those exceptional people that pull themselves out of poverty as an example of the justice of it all, as do we of our own hard work and the ludicrous contention that any of us are successful due only to our own work ethic. Many people work hard their entire lives and seem to get nowhere. And, increasingly, the jobs that allowed immigrant groups to rise out of poverty are disappearing.

Take the example of my wife. She grew up in circumstances very different from my own - she grew up in a steel mill town, her parents migrated from Puerto Rico, her father found a grueling but steady job in the mills. She, in my mind, is an exceptional person both in intelligence and work ethic. She was able to get into and graduate from the University of Notre Dame with both a bachelor's and master's degree. But even she was fortunate enough to be blessed with a level of economic and familial security growing up that many around her did not have. (And where are all of those steel mill jobs going?)

So, when people tell me that hard work is all it takes, I cannot help but reflect on my own good fortune, as well as the good and misfortune of those whom I have met. When I worked in Birmingham, AL, with inner-city kids, I saw that many of them had behavior problems stemming from family situations, learning challenges stemming from a poor education, developmental challenges that we their teachers were not equipped to address, family members that had been killed or arrested, anger problems that they had not learned to resolve constructively, a willingness to learn that was often disrupted by the more troubled and troublesome students in the classroom, and language and writing issues that will likely severely limit the type of employment they can find, or what colleges, if any, would take them. Not to mention, of course, economic problems that would make attending college highly unlikely.

Many of their parents would frustrate me - those that didn't seem to value education; those that encouraged their children to resolve conflicts violently. I would find myself judging these people, blaming them for their children's behavior. But once I stepped back, I was able to reflect on what types of parents that the people before must have had, what type of challenges that they must have faced growing up, what types of challenges they now face. And it is because I know that I, as a non-exceptional person, may well have been beat down by these challenges, and because I know that it is only through circumstance that I had the opportunity and skills to succeed, that I cannot merely label others as not taking full advantage of a supposed abundance of opportunity.

I have had times in my adult life in which I have fought hard to transcend my circumstances, but I was only able to do so because for so much of my youth, my circumstances transcended me. I believe that people should work hard; I encouraged my students every day to become better writers, thinkers, and people. But I recognize that for even the brightest and hardest-working among them, the fight to transcend those circumstances will be grueling, disheartening, and yes, for a good number, potentially fruitless. I believe, though, that if those of us who are more fortunate care about the people we so easily could have been, that if we learn to love, respect, and listen to these people, that if we commit to working with, serving, and learning from these people, that we can address these injustices. Not because we feel sorry for them, not because we have any secrets to success that they merely need heed, but simply because they are human beings that deserve the same opportunities that we had, and because it is right. That was another thing, by the way, that I learned from my parents: love others and do what's fair and right.

Reimagining Excellence: Beyond Wealth and Power

I once found myself in the impossibly wealthy beach community of Hilton Head, South Carolina. I had been working at an inner-city school outside of Birmingham, AL, and the trip to a house in Hilton Head, owned by the relatives of a roommate, was an odd but mostly welcomed respite from an extremely tough year, both professionally and personally. Though beautiful, the contrast between prominent ghettos and poor rural communities of much of the South, and the serene yet lavish beachfront properties of the South Carolina coast made me more than a little uncomfortable, and even a little guilty. The first night there we went to a bar, where one of my housemates heard some of the local inhabitants make a racist remark about another of our housemates, who is black. Though this exacerbated to my discomfort at our surroundings, it somehow has not since nagged at me in the way of another, much more innocuous occurrence. Specifically, a yacht that I discovered docked in the marina, with a single phrase scrawled across the hull: “Pursuit of Excellence.”

For some time, the name of this yacht has bothered me. Initially, I mocked it as an almost cartoonish stereotype: I imagined the smug millionaire proudly sporting a blue blazer and starched captain’s hat as he steered his prized vessel. Whatever my motivations, this image was a cheap source of entertainment for me, based solely on my assumptions of a complete an utter stranger. I had imposed judgment on this person knowing nothing about him or her, other than that he or she owned a yacht, and had chosen to emblazon it with a phrase which, in all honesty, should be fairly inoffensive. I was reflecting upon that phrase recently, however, and what it means for my own life and society at large. We make much in my country of excellence, and how those that pursue it will reap the benefits of their noble efforts. In fact, much of our concept of freedom – economic, educational, vocational, etc. – is based largely on the notion that we as a society must protect the right of the individual to pursue excellence. Furthermore, we often argue that an excellent society will necessarily erupt when that individual freedom is ensured.

But what does excellence mean? If we fail to define it and its ramifications, then we will continually fail to understand, persuade, and cooperate with one another towards its achievement. I see this most strikingly in current debates about poverty and prevailing models of capitalism, domestically and globally. Are businesses that seek to maximize profits for shareholders, no matter the cost to employees, acting unethically, or merely answering the call to perform in an exemplary manner? Is demanding that employees work twelve hour days merely expecting an appropriately rigorous commitment to their work, or actually destroying a rigorous commitment to family and the community? How can we agree on how to design social welfare programs if we cannot express what people ought to be able to achieve and how they might do so?

I do not aim here to answer all of those questions, but instead to propose a notion of human excellence, one which guides much of my thinking on political and social matters. Let me first say that this notion is predicated and two fundamental understandings arising out of my faith: firstly, that human beings are made in the image and likeness of God, and secondly, that God is love. While this may not appeal to those of you that do not share my faith, they are fundamental to my thinking. It is also important to note that, for me, this means that even those that do not share mine or any religious faith are still constructed in this way, and are thus oriented towards love and solidarity. In a more secular vein, I can say that I believe that humans are intrinsically social, that we seek justice, and that we are most content when we live in peaceful, just, free societies centered on solidarity between all people. Based on this understanding, I would argue that the pursuit of excellence is actually the cultivation of the moral/spiritual, intellectual, and even physical self towards advancing peace, justice, and freedom rooted in the common bonds of love. I will tackle each of these categories of excellence and their ramifications in reverse order.

PHYSICAL EXCELLENCE

First, I am making explicit mention of the need for physical excellence, and the ability for citizens of a free society to pursue it. I recognize the dangers inherent to this emphasis: that we can become overly motivated by vanity or the pursuit of power. However, you cannot separate the pursuit from the end goal of fulfilling our capacity to love, nor can you separate a single area of excellence from the others or the whole. To take care of our bodies, then, through exercise, proper diet, and appropriate rest, is actually aimed at making us more able to commit ourselves to others. We are happier when we eat healthily and exercise regularly, and we are more productive and attentive to the needs of others when we are properly rested. On a sheer existential level, we are also only able to fully focus on intellectual and moral/spiritual cultivation when our basic physical needs – rest, shelter, nutrition – are met.

Of course, when we shift from pursuing physical excellence to physical perfection, we become too inwardly focused and lose sight of the overall goal. Personally, I struggle with this balance. I try to exercise for one hour three or four days a week, and to walk my dog twice daily. Too often, though, I become transfixed with critiquing my physical appearance, especially as someone that has dealt with weight issues since adolescence. The point, though, is to be healthy in a way that allows me to fulfill my capacity to love and care for others. In the recent past, an illness consumed my life, and consequently that of my wife in caring for me, eventually leading to the loss of employment and massive medical debt. Even after returning to physical health, the debt alone hindered me in the ability to be of service to others.

The social ramifications of the importance of physical excellence, then, are huge. Most Americans believe in the ability to pursue happiness as a central human right. If human happiness is at least partially dependent on physical well-being, then we need to guarantee the ability to pursue genuine physical health. This that means providing access to affordable, healthy food becomes vital to our social well-being. This means that affordable health care becomes a central right for all citizens. This means re-orienting our concept of work to prevent exhaustion and excessive time away from friends, family, and exercise. This means limiting environmental hazards in our air, water, and food supply. I think that we all would agree that it is important to encourage physical health, but we need to step back and grapple with the question of whether and how we as a society fully allow it.

INTELLECTUAL EXCELLENCE

The second area of excellence which I wish to highlight is intellectual excellence. Here, I think that the quality and purpose of that excellence may be subject to debate. People that have known me for any length of time know that I love to debate multiple subjects (sometimes, it seems, any subject). Because it is my nature to challenge, question, and contradict, I continually grapple with the challenge of abandoning argument for its own sake, and orienting myself towards uncovering truth in the pursuit of love and justice. I believe that a willingness and ability to debate are intellectual gifts with which I have been endowed and which I am responsible to pursue, both for my own health and to play a positive social function. Again, that positive social function is the critical goal, and will ultimately fulfill me in that as a human being I am naturally oriented towards serving others.

We err in highlighting and pursuing intellectual excellence for its own sake. In my case, this could mean using any knowledge or debate tactic merely to win an argument, as opposed to uncover and promote justice based in truth. For others, this may mean using leadership skills solely to amass power or wealth, social intelligence to take advantage of rather than empower others, scientific or engineering expertise to engender hate or destruction rather than peace or positive creation – the list goes on. On a societal level, the recognition of the value of true intellectual excellence to the human person and humanity itself requires that we both encourage an intelligence that is focused on the common good, and allow as many people to pursue their intellectual gifts as possible. This requires, at minimum, a truly free and fair education for all, one which helps people succeed no matter their economic, family, regional, or national situation. It requires an education system that is oriented not only towards monetary success, but deep intellectual growth. It also requires a social/work structure that allows people to cultivate and pursue their intellectual gifts. This means guaranteeing access to knowledge, forming strong community centers, and shifting radically away from the work-survive-rest expectation for individual existence, especially for those whose employment does not offer sufficient intellectual challenge and growth.

MORAL/SPIRITUAL EXCELLENCE

The final category of excellence that I am touching upon here is, in some way, notable in its absence from much of our concept of excellence. When I read the name of that yacht in Hilton Head, for instance, the idea of moral and/or spiritual excellence did not even cross my mind. Moral/spiritual excellence is more profoundly distinct, however, in that the ideal stands most firmly outside of the individual. I realize that many might balk at this claim: we often frame either moral conduct or spiritual leanings as personal – my personal values, my personal relationship with God, etc. While morality and spirituality will always be framed by personal experience and understandings, it does not negate the fact that there are non-relative rights and wrongs, nor does it negate the reality of God.

The religious claim may be easier to make. God is God, and how we ought to act in the world is necessarily defined by our being made in God’s image, not God in our own. On a strictly moral level, while acting ethically in the world is not always a clear-cut proposition, we do accept certain moral truths, such as the inherent dignity and equality of the human person, that stand as self-evident. Thus, whereas the heights of my possible physical and intellectual excellence will always be limited by my inherent capacities – I will never, for instance, play professional sports or work for NASA – moral and spiritual truths are inherent to themselves. That does not mean, however, that I can ever fully grasp them. Because we recognize our own limitations, we must recognize that we are at best moving towards moral/spiritual excellence, but remain extremely far from achieving it.

Again, it is of the utmost importance that we encourage and allow all people to pursue moral excellence, both for their own well-being and the well-being of the human race. This may at times dramatically challenge our notions of excellence itself: if I am not producing as many products as possible, working as hard as possible, earning as much money as possible, am I succeeding? The answer will vary between person and situation, because it will be contingent upon the ability of the individual to grasp and execute that answer. The key is that we need to instill the importance of asking these questions in the first place, provide a solid framework for people to engage in answering them, and to allow people to make moral decisions without undue harm.

I would argue that the social implications of this last point are massive. When people face a severe and insurmountable existential threat for acting ethically, we are not truly allowing for the pursuit of moral excellence. For instance, those who spoke out against racial segregation in the United States in the 1950’s and 1960’s were routinely beaten and killed for acting upon the moral truth of human equality. In many cases, the severity of the consequence for moral opposition was so great that many oppressed people understandably chose life and security for themselves and for their families over further violence and death. Society is charged with ensuring to the furthest possible extent that people are able to act morally without severe existential consequences. This means, for instance, that people should not have to choose between crime and basic survival. People should not have to choose between advocating for livable wages and keeping their jobs. People should not have to choose between getting the illness of a family member treated and being able to afford their rent or mortgage. Although there will always be times when people will choose to suffer excessive or even deadly consequences for a moral/spiritual stance, we have a social imperative to identify and eliminate these injustices at every turn.

CONCLUSION

We orient so much of our personal and collective lives towards excellence and the exceptional that I wanted here to engage in a discussion of what this truly means, what we truly aspire to, and what this requires of us both as individuals and as a human race. Every individual has a responsibility towards the social pursuit of excellence, and every society is charged with encouraging and allowing the individual pursuit of excellence. However, I feel that, too often, excellence is defined in terms of end gains that are not grounded in the pursuit of love, peace and justice. If we accept that a free society must ensure the ability of all of its members to freely pursue excellence, then we need to be abundantly clear about what excellence truly means.

I would argue that a system that views excellence as the endless pursuit of material gains is fundamentally misguided. In fact, I would go so far as to say that this system actually inhibits our pursuit of excellence. For those struggling economically, it forces all energy towards survival, and for those prospering economically it denies the ability of their true moral/spiritual, intellectual, and physical self to come to life. It is critical to note that I am indeed discussing a single self. Our physical well-being is prerequisite to our intellectual and moral/spiritual well-being, our intellectual well-being requires that we are morally grounded, and our moral/spiritual well-being requires strengthening our intellectual health. Of course, each individual may face limitations in certain areas, but it is vital to that individual and society that he or she be allowed to excel in each and every way to the furthest extent possible. Only then will we become truly excellent as individuals, societies, and a human family.

A Free-Market Meritocracy? Survival of the Fortunate

With the struggling economy still the central issue in American society, especially in this election year, it is an apt time to discuss some of the central (and detrimental) myths of our capitalist system. To be clear, I believe that these myths have been borne out and visible through history. However, the current reality allows for a more productive discussion, since so many previously devout Americans are for themselves now seeing the limitations of the free-market, especially as those limitations contradict the collective mythology of the United States.

With that in mind, I was considering the notion of "survival of the fittest" as an inescapable economic and social reality. Ignoring (for the moment) the question of whether a "social Darwinist" system is just, I instead want to question whether it is even practically possible for such a system to exist, especially in any lasting capacity. Specifically, the wealthy class that emerges from a free-market socio-economic model will ultimately seek to maintain that wealth by any means necessary, and be endowed with the economic, political, and social resources to do so. This devolves into a system in which nepotism, cronyism, and political collusion ensure that power and wealth are passed down between the generations and to limited social circles.

We can see this borne out intentionally when someone like James Murdoch is groomed to run his father's company, or an average-to-sub par student is admitted into Yale due to the prominence of his father. It is also evident, of course, in the social reality that economic opportunity is opened up largely through family and other social connections, whether as intentional policy or merely a natural outcome of competition. This presents the fundamental challenge to the myth of the meritocracy: as favor is given to the less-able but well-connected, those same opportunities are necessarily denied to more-able people. Some would argue that this is both an inescapable reality and inconsequential in terms of breadth of opportunity, at least in the United States. However, this tendency expands beyond immediate connections to shape large-scale social realities such as the strength of entire school districts, tax policy, regulations on certain industries, and a slew of other social and economic legislation, such that, with each passing generation, the wealthy class becomes even more solidified in its standing and wealth, to the detriment of the rest of society. For these reasons, we now face a situation where the greatest percentage of Americans is in poverty since the 1950's, while a massive amount of wealth lies firmly in the hands of a tiny percentage of Americans.

This not only debunks the myth of a lasting meritocracy, but also poses serious economic and societal challenges. Because those in power and those with wealth are largely one and the same, and those with wealth increasingly attain that wealth not through merit but through social inheritance, we find ourselves in a situation in which the leaders of our nation are increasingly not the "best and brightest," but merely the most fortunate. Considering this, as well as the earlier-mentioned tendency to protect wealth at all costs, it is perhaps not surprising that many of these same people lacked the economic foresight to avoid short-term, profitable transactions designed in such a way as to inevitably collapse. And because the fortunes of the many are so intimately tied to the decisions - and fate - of this wealthy/powerful class, its failure necessarily imperils the rest of us.

Again, although I am deeply concerned with the moral ramifications of this system, I am here only pointing out the economic consequences. Because of these inherent dangers, we need to then consider the role of government in protecting against economic collapse. It is telling that society in the United States formed to produce a democracy, and not some sort of feudal system of concentrated wealth and power. In rebelling against the crown, the colonists proclaimed a desire for economic liberty (indeed, much of the rift was due to a perceived injustice in taxation). Still, out of this came a system of government modeled on representation of the people with both local and federal authority. It is fundamental to our understanding of human life that some sort of system of governance must be formed to ensure the protection of the short- and long-term viability of the society, that this requires oversight of and, at times, direct influence upon commerce, and that the interests of all citizens should be considered, regardless of class. A democracy, especially, is designed to protect against a system in which a powerful few hold undue influence. While we have struggled to attain that ideal throughout our history, it remains the ideal, nonetheless.

This is why distracting debates over supposed "socialism" and "distribution of wealth" are so counterproductive and insidious. They allow those with wealth to present themselves as protectors of the meritocracy, as opposed to obstacles to it. Instead, we should discuss whether it is necessary to the health of our society to ensure the distribution of opportunity. This poses a number of challenges due to the ramifications: equal opportunity would require a decent education for all and an educational system that does not favor social standing, a decent living wage for all working Americans, a health care system that allows the ill and their families to avoid insurmountable debt due to medical bills and loss of work, etc.

Of course, our original national ideals already speak to the role of government in ensuring this reality, since it is fundamental to our government's mandate that it protect the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" of all Americans. Our current political-economic model threatens and denies those rights, imperiling the long-term survival of our society and, increasingly, the short-term survival of its citizens. Instead, the government must, at times, enact proactive and corrective measures on commerce to ensure that it does not imperil these rights for the general public. Because these measures were not in place, the government was recently left with the choice of bailing out those whom, under a true meritocracy, ought to fail due to poor decisions, or deny their fundamental mandate even further by allowing an economic collapse that would devestate its citizenry to massive effect.

The irony, of course, is that in order to protect a capitalist system, limits and modifications must by placed on it. If we allow our democratic principles to take a back seat to our meritocratic principles, we inevitably sacrifice both.