From the Empirical Archives: Lincoln and Radical Defense of Liberty

Lincoln and Radical Defense of Liberty

Olav Bryant Smith

Originally published in the February 2013 issue of Empirical

On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln began a speech with these words at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

The speech became known as the Gettysburg Address. It is widely known as one of the great speeches in human history. One aspect of its greatness is that it re-asserts a principle of American political philosophy as the touchstone of our republic–this principle that “all men are created equal.”

Nations–as opposed to a collection of more-or-less isolated individuals, or individual states–must have some philosophical principles that guide it through thick and thin, and bind together an otherwise disparate population. Teddy Roosevelt astutely pointed to the real power of the presidency when he referred to his “bully pulpit.” Time and time again, it is the president’s primary role to rally and unify the nation around one or more foundational principles.

For Lincoln, it was the principles of liberty and equality, and the preservation of a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.” I turn to Lincoln in this issue partly because February is the month that we celebrate the birthdays of Washington (22nd) and Lincoln (12th). But I turn to Lincoln especially because the movie sensation of late autumn was Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, with a wonderful screenplay written by Tony Kushner, and with Lincoln portrayed by actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

In the first 26 days, Lincoln grossed almost $86 million in ticket sales. As I watched this film in a local theater, twice, I saw a wide variety of citizens (from young to old), wanting to participate in this democratic experiment of ours, on the edge of their seats as they waited anxiously to find out the resolution of a story that was in fact resolved 150 years ago. What was the hook? Why were we drawn to a movie about the struggle between a president and congressional leaders over a legislative action taken during the Civil War? What does this interest say about us as a people? Why are we drawn to the feet of Lincoln once again to learn what it is to be American?

One clue, I believe, is that Spielberg has repeatedly directed films that reveal heroes in struggles of good versus evil. The great dramas of world history are always struggles of good versus evil, though it is not always easy for those caught up in the struggles to recognize their own evil. World War II has provided the backdrop to a number of Spielberg’s films, such as Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. This time, Spielberg has clearly recognized an opportunity in something much closer to home. In his films about World War II, we never stray far from the fact and horror of the Holocaust.

In this film about Lincoln, we never stray far from the fact and horror of slavery. The film begins after Lincoln’s second term has begun and African-American troops had begun to serve in the Union Army. Using special war-time powers, Lincoln had freed slaves through executive fiat–The Emancipation Proclamation. But he was concerned that this would not hold up in the courts in the long run. Thus, a constitutional amendment was introduced, and had been passed by the Senate once, but had subsequently failed in the House. With the closing days of the war ahead, Lincoln was determined to see it through to passage this second time before reuniting with the southern states.

Familiar enough to contemporary ears, we learn of a divided Congress. Deals would have to be made to assure enough Democratic votes to reach the required majority of two-thirds. The amendment had failed the first time due to a vote strictly on party lines: Lincoln’s Republican Party voting in favor, and Democrats voting against. The film thus becomes an entertaining adventure of political wrestling and intrigue as Lincoln’s administration, led by Secretary of State Seward, unites various factions of Republicans and attempts to win over Democrats by any means possible.

The movie is great fun, and I leave it at that, recommending that you see it for yourself. Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Lincoln has left many of us in awe. Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals,1 when she saw the film, said that she felt like she’d seen the real Lincoln.

*

In real life, we are often confused by the issues. Lulled to sleep and complacency by the habits and ethos of our own culture and times, it is not always easy to see the evil in our midst. In fact, Lincoln once called a speech by Stephen Douglas about the harmlessness of leaving the issue of slavery to the voters in the new Kansas-Nebraska Territory a “lullaby.” We are too often lulled to sleep by words that suggest we can rest satisfied with lives where we have needed to sacrifice little.

In a time much nearer to us than the Civil War, it happened in Germany. But it is always easier to see the foibles of the distant past and one’s enemies. One wonders in retrospect how millions of otherwise good Germans could have allowed the gross inhumanity to man that the Nazis perpetrated against their Jewish population and others.

But it was accepted during “hard times” (and so many times are “hard times”) as a “necessary evil.” The German people were suffering, wanted a way forward, and were convinced by Nazi rhetoric that it was necessary to galvanize the German people into a military force opposed to the rest of Europe and against a significant portion of its own population.

In the same way, one wonders how millions of otherwise good Americans could have rested comfortably with the idea that so many of our African-American sisters and brothers were hopelessly enslaved for the entirety of their lives. The same sort of lulling to sleep and complacency of accepting a “necessary evil” was at work. Also, consciences were appeased with absurd rationalizations of the inhumanity of those with dark skin. In fact, we should not forget that these rationalizations were still widely used to support segregation in the south as late as the 1970s. Only concerted political challenge over decades led to the changing of the hearts and minds of a majority of southerners on that point.

Slavery had been an institution implicitly acknowledged in the US Constitution. That slaves (referred to as “all others” as opposed to “free persons”) were to count as 3/5 of a person was an ugly compromise of the Constitution that would later have to be amended. The Founding Fathers, North and South, were drawn together in the fight for liberty against a common foe: the King of England. The battle over slavery would have to wait, and hence the concept of states’ rights was born for this, among other reasons. Goodwin writes: At the time the Constitution was adopted, Lincoln pointed out, “the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the principle, and toleration, only by necessity” since slavery was already woven into the fabric of American society. Noting that neither the word “slave” nor “slavery” was ever mentioned in the Constitution, Lincoln claimed that the framers concealed it, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise nevertheless, that cutting may begin at the end of a given time.”

From a northern point of view, slavery was seen as a necessary evil that was to be contained like a disease until it came to a natural end. But a series of events suggested to Lincoln’s generation that the disease was spreading. Things almost came to a head in 1820 with the emergence of the new state of Missouri. But Henry Clay of Kentucky was among those who suggested the Missouri Compromise, allowing slavery in Missouri, but in no other state in the North.

Then, in 1845, many Northerners (such as Lincoln, Thoreau, and Emerson) opposed the Mexican-American War and the annexation of Texas as an unjust war threatening to expand slavery further south and west. Clay again oversaw the 1850 Compromise, which admitted California as a “free” state, but expanded slavery into other newly emerging western territories. Goodwin tells the story of Lincoln’s shocked reaction to the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act: He told his companion [a fellow circuit court counselor] – “I tell you, [T.L.] Dickey, this nation cannot exist halfslave and half-free.” Lincoln later affirmed that the successful passage of the bill roused him “as he had never been before.” It permanently recast his views on slavery. He could no longer maintain that slavery was on course to ultimate extinction. The repeal of the Missouri Compromise persuaded him that unless the North mobilized into action against the proslavery forces, free society itself was in peril.

Another factor that proved to be a tipping point for Lincoln and other northerners was the Fugitive Slave Act, which was part of the Compromise of 1850. As Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us: I had never in my life up to this time suffered from the Slave Institution. Slavery in Virginia or Carolina was like Slavery in Africa or the Feejees, for me. There was an old fugitive law, but it had become, or was fast becoming a dead letter, and by the genius and laws of Massachusetts, inoperative. The new Bill made it operative, required me to hunt slaves, and it found citizens in Massachusetts willing to act as judges and captors. Moreover, it discloses the secret of the new times, that Slavery was no longer mendicant, but was becoming aggressive and dangerous.

In this way, slavery became the focus of the 1860 election. Lincoln defeated Douglas, immediately prompting the secession of southern states. Lincoln offered continued containment as a way to avoid secession and war, but the South was determined to fight this out. Two years of bloody battles in the South, with little Union success, followed. Union forces fared better in the west under Ulysses S. Grant, but the heart of the war was in the east. Knowing that they must do more than endure Union attacks, the Confederate forces of General Robert E. Lee made their strike into the North. It was only with terrible losses at Antietam and Gettysburg that the tide of the war turned against the Confederate army.

It is widely known that Lincoln suffered many disappointments due to a lack of aggressiveness on the part of several generals, and that he finally brought Grant in from the West to take charge of the Union armies and end the war. It was with the end of the war in sight that Lincoln moved to make permanent through Constitutional amendment the freedoms he had already granted through executive fiat–the Emancipation Proclamation.

*

Usually there are deeper philosophical principles at work when things seem to be going awry. As different as Nazi Germany and the US are, the “lulling to sleep” I mentioned above may have similar roots. George Will, in his book Statecraft as Soulcraft, has pointed to a danger built into modern Western political thinking from Machiavelli and Hobbes, through Locke, and beyond to our times. Rejecting the classical theory of natural law and all it applies, these modern political philosophers started from the assumption that all human beings are motivated primarily by self-interest.

Rather than offering a suggestion to encourage a sense of the common good, and service thereto, many modern political philosophers have defined the “public good” (the common good by another name) as what arises spontaneously from individuals pursuing their own self-interest. Will argues that the West has slipped from a belief in natural law, with eternal principles and a divine source of guidance, to a belief in the construction of social institutions as the driver of history, to a belief in the power of individuals, sometimes “heroic” individuals alone, to chart the course of nations. Nietzsche’s philosophy of the “overman” may not have perfectly dovetailed with Nazism, but Nazism was able to build on Nietzsche’s destruction of “thou shalts” and his call to the primacy of the individual will of great men.

In the liberal democracies of the West, this theory of self-interest has been tied to the idea of free-market capitalism. The invisible hand guiding us, taught Adam Smith, brings our self-interested exchanges in the marketplace around to the best-to-be-hoped-for public good. Everything gets reduced to bargains in a marketplace. This is so much the case that Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that “the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get accepted in the competition of the market.”

Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s primary political rival at both the state and national levels, reduced the question of slavery to economics when he said in a campaign debate against Lincoln: We of Illinois have decided it for ourselves. We tried slavery, kept it for twelve years, and finding that it was not profitable we abolished it for that reason.

Upon hearing this, Lincoln responded: This declared indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery, I can not but hate. . . . I hate it because it deprives our republic an example of its just influence in the world–enables the enemies of free institutions, with plausibility, to taunt us as hypocrites causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because its forces so many really good men amongst ourselves into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty–criticising the Declaration of Independence, and insisting that there is no right principle of action but self-interest.

The hypocrisy of tolerating slavery while claiming that the nation was founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” defined the election of 1860 for Lincoln. It had to be overcome either by containment or war. He preferred the former, but was forced into the latter by the South. It may have been an economic issue for Douglas, but it was a deeply personal issue for Republicans like Lincoln and Henry Seward, who became his Secretary of State after losing the nomination to Lincoln.

Goodwin describes how Seward and his brilliant and influential wife Frances took a trip to Virginia in 1835, and were overwhelmed by what they saw. Henry Seward wrote, “How deeply the curse of slavery is set upon this venerated and storied region of the old dominion.” Henry recounted one experience that stayed with him through the rest of his life: Ten naked little boys, between six and twelve years old, tied together, two by two, by their wrists, were all fastened to a long rope, up the sad and weary little procession, drove it to the horse trough to drink, and thence to a shed, where they lay down on the ground and sobbed and moaned themselves to sleep. Frances demanded that they halt their journey and return to the North. She wrote: “Sick of slavery and the South, the evil effects constantly coming before me and marring everything.”

There are some things that matter more than money, and one of those things is the dignity of our fellow human beings before God and before the law. This is something that movie viewers want to be reminded of when they flock to Spielberg’s film. It is right to be concerned with the manipulative political power of money in our country, and the so-called “conservative” defense of the use of those powers at the expense of the rest of the nation. Could it be that the true conservative, as Will suggested, should be cautious about defining the government as a villain and defending laissez-faire economics? Should the true conservative be more concerned about values than money? And could it be that the government is useful in defining the character of our nation?

*

Lincoln was born in 1809. Thomas Jefferson’s presidency had just ended, and Madison’s was just beginning. Lincoln’s generation revered the Founding Fathers, and they saw themselves in a privileged position. With that privilege, they recognized a responsibility. They were determined to move beyond the limits their fathers’ generation had necessarily struggled under as they moved toward independence from Britain, to take advantage of the opportunities that had been won for them, and to spread that freedom to as much of the rest of mankind as possible. Goodwin writes: It was a country for young men. “We find ourselves,” the twenty-eight-year-old Lincoln told the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, “in the peaceful possession, of the fairest portion of the earth, as regards extent of territory, fertility of soil, and salubrity of climate.” The founding fathers had crafted a government more favorable to liberty “than any of which the history of former times tells us.” 

Now it was up to their children to preserve and expand the great experiment. These passages capture concisely, I believe, the spirit that draws us in to a film like Lincoln. We, too, generations later, find ourselves in the midst of “the great experiment,” and recognize the weight of that responsibility. The question now, as it was then, remains whether we can govern ourselves at all, in the first place, and, secondly, whether we can, and in what ways, expand that freedom. The question now, as it was then, is whether we are a people guided only by self-interest, or whether there are principles that transcend self-interest. As historical observers, we enter back into the fray of the Civil War to learn what lessons can be taught about the limits to freedom and how we, as a people, can learn to overcome them in the midst of contentious political dynamics.

Barry Goldwater, as the 1964 Republican presidential candidate, spoke these now famous words written by his speechwriter Karl Hess, who thereafter became one of the primary spokespersons for the libertarian movement in America: “I would remind you that extremism in the defensive of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” There are times when radical response is necessary, especially when justice is at stake. As John Cobb wrote in “The Importance of Being Radical” (Empirical, July 2012): [M]odern society has needed radicals as much as earlier. A century ago, few voices were pointing out that American society was rooted in racism and sexism. The vast majority of Americans dismissed such talk as ‘radical’ and therefore irrelevant. They were right that it was radical. But these radical voices finally forced themselves into the public consciousness. More and more people recognized that the call for radical change had truth and righteousness on its side…. The work of radicals has changed society radically. Even many who were once irritated and even angered by them are now grateful for their work.

In most cases, it is true that one can hardly go wrong abiding by principles of moderation. But in the face of extreme injustice, protected by the current ethos of a particular culture–especially when that culture has become blind to the evils of its own ethos–it is necessary to step outside of the common refrain and sound the radical call to change in one’s own time.

That is what people are drawn to in the story of Lincoln. He is a bigger-than-life heroic figure who, along with Seward and other members of Lincoln’s “team of rivals,” answers the call of conscience to stand up to injustice–even at the cost of his own life. It is a story of the passionate pursuit of the attainment of liberty, and the expansion of that liberty. That is always a radical notion, coming (as it does) as a challenge to conventional wisdom.

Lincoln paid for his leadership soon thereafter with his life. The sadness of his loss reverberates through history to create a heaviness in our hearts almost 150 years later. The Civil War has become for us, as citizens of the United States of America, a mythological symbol of the fight of the forces of good against the forces of evil.

Myths, in the truest sense of the word (and not in the disparaging sense) are stories that lift up truths about reality that purely descriptive language can’t get at. We can participate in myths, allow those myths to become a part of us, and allow our own egos to give way to the higher ideals contained within the myths.

Thankfully, we have rid ourselves of the accursed disease that was institutional slavery. But we face other diseases in our midst that must be eliminated, including other kinds of slavery just as vile–human trafficking and the sweatshop labor that we support through the demand for cheap goods from overseas. History offers the possibility of a purification of the human spirit. The evils of our own time seem subtle and debatable to us only because we have become accustomed to them. They are part of our ethos, these “necessary evils” that we tolerate because they seem so difficult to overcome.

They are tolerated, too, because of individual self-interest and the worry that upsetting the proverbial apple cart will lead to personal economic adversity. May we reach a stage of maturity where we can do our own part to stand up to the injustices of our age. We must become radicals, reaching first for the root of those evils in our own hearts, only thereafter to see and remove the root of those evils in the world around us.

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From the Empirical Archives: Kung Fu and Spiritual Ground of the Martial Arts

Kung Fu and Spiritual Ground of the Martial Arts

Olav Bryant Smith

Originally published in the January 2013 issue of Empirical

When I was little, one of my many heroes was Bruce Lee. Not the version of Bruce Lee who the world primarily thinks of now, having become popular with films like Fists of Fury, and The Way of the Dragon in the ‘70s, but the earlier version–the Bruce Lee who played Kato, the sidekick of The Green Hornet in the ‘60s television series. The series, like its sister-series Batman, was a little comicbookish in retrospect, to be sure. But for a 7 to 8-year-old boy, this just made it better. The thing is that Bruce Lee, the actor and martial arts expert, brought something of the spiritual foundations of the martial arts even to that role. The Green Hornet may have been meant to be the primary hero of the series, but it was Kato who captured my imagination. The mysteries of eastern spirituality informed my growth from then on.

Another of my heroes was Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr., who changed his named to Muhammad Ali in the midst of “float(ing) like a butterfly,” and “sting(ing) like a bee.” Ali not only was a great athlete, certainly in the conversation on the finest boxers who ever lived, but he was centered in a spirituality and a political awareness that elevated him from the sports pages to the front pages of the major newspapers. I meditated on the movements of Ali–without realizing it was a meditation. I immersed myself in the feeling of what it was like to be centered in devotion to God while sharpening my body, mind, and spirit to defend my faith against all comers. He influenced me to investigate and to think kindly of Islam, long before the American relationship with Islam became so tainted by wars in the Middle East and terrorist attacks. There does not need to be endless antagonism between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam–“the people of the Book” as they are collectively called in Islam. But that is the stuff of another essay.

So, with these influences running deep in my life, I was primed for an open-armed reception of the series Kung Fu when it came to television in 1972, one year after Lee’s Fists of Fury had made such an impact. The series was directed by Jerry Thorpe, and written by Ed Spielman and Howard Friedlander. The main character, a half-American, half-Chinese man named Kwai Chang Caine was played by David Carradine, the son of the legendary actor John Carradine. 

I cannot tell you how many times I’ve met spiritually oriented people around my age who were greatly influenced by Kung Fu. Like another highly influential television series, Star Trek, it only survived for a few years. But in those few years, it managed to do something so special that its positive karmic affect continues to work its magic in the lives and creative imaginations of many who were fortunate enough to watch it. So let’s take a peek back at what was so magical about this humble film.

*

The key to its effectiveness, and the depth of the series, is its use of flashbacks from the late nineteenth-century Old West (California) setting that the adult Caine finds himself thrown into, to his earlier life in the Shaolin (Buddhist) Temple in Hunan Province in the southwest of China. From start to finish, we are gently introduced to the way a Zen Buddhist monk would incorporate his meditation and training into his daily life in the Western world. As we quickly learn to identify with this lonely figure thrust into a strange and often unfriendly land–and many of us, of course, often feel this way–we begin to meditate with Caine on these ways of integrating a spiritual understanding and awareness of reality with our daily activities.

The first frames of the film show the adult Caine walking across a desert in California, barefoot. The flashbacks show him as a boy standing outside of the Shaolin Temple, hoping to gain admission for training as a monk. The boy stands in the profane world of everyday life with a yearning for instruction in the sacred realm of the temple. He thirsts for a deeper understanding of life’s mysteries–not to escape this world, but to find ways of applying this deeper understanding to life.

As Caine stands outside the temple, it is sometimes raining, but the boy endures. This is then contrasted with walking across the vast expanse of the hot, dry desert as the images switches back and forth between his childhood in China and adulthood in California. Even before his official training, there is something in the boy that the monks are looking for. The Buddha calls it Right Intention. It is having one’s heart in the right place. 

Caine demonstrates sincerity and single-mindedness of purpose. He shows that he will genuinely appreciate the gift of training if he is accepted. We see some other young boys, however, who had been standing at the front door with Caine, giving up. They step off to the side and begin to play games. The monks inside, who are secretly keeping an eye out to see who really wants to get in, notice the distracted boys. The monk at the door comes outside and tells the boys, “Please go home.” They had not exhibited the character to gain admittance. Once inside, this character of Right Intention will be needed to advance further in spiritual training. This early determination, which we see by observing the adult Caine walking barefoot through the great expanse of the desert, has deepened into an almost superhuman ability to endure hardship in pursuit of an enlightened goal.

Several of the boys are admitted for an audience with the temple’s headmaster, or sifu. We see that early character-training, often through religious guidance, does matter in children’s lives. All of the boys are polite. They sit before the monk. They are served tea. The monk indicates through gesture that they may drink. And most of them do so. They’re hungry. They’re thirsty. They’ve waited a long time to get inside from the elements at this point. Of all the boys, Caine alone does not drink the tea, because the master had not begun to drink his. Because of this, Caine is allowed to stay for training, and the other boys are sent home. The master inquires where the boy has learned such good manners, prized perhaps more in Confucian cultures than others. Caine says that he learned from his grandfather.

In traditional cultures, the relationship between grandparents and young children is crucial to the development of children’s understanding of the world and their characters. Parents are often busy with maintaining their households. In fact, in India, where these relationships are clearly defined, the parents are said to be “householders.” The youngest children spend much of their time with their grandparents, who by then, are in the retirement phase of their lives. In the West, where children often never really get to know their grandparents well, much that is vital to the continuation of a civilization has been lost.

Generational bonding and unity is part of the glue that holds cultures together. And as Herman Daly wrote in his article “The Renewal of Ignorance,” in the December issue of Empirical, every generation of elders must decide what is most important to pass on to young people. Equally, every generation of young people decide what is most important to make the effort to learn. This transmission of wisdom and knowledge from one generation to the next goes through this double filter. We are always one step away, Daly warns us, from losing the basis of our culture and civilization. 

It is a precarious business, and there is no guarantee of continual progress.

*

When Caine arrives at a town in California, if you are able to watch these frames in slow-motion, you will see that the director arranges for Caine’s image to immediately merge together with an elder Chinese man named Han Fei. Not only will their paths intersect in the way we usually think of this, but this also illustrates the interconnectedness of all beings. They have not met yet, but they live in a world of continual mutual influence. As the English poet John Donne understood, “No man is an island/Entire of itself.” We are all parts of a greater whole, interconnected.

Thirsty, Caine approaches a saloon. Again, if you are paying close attention, you will see him peek into the saloon through a side window first. He does not walk blindly into this new situation. He practices Right Awareness, and looks to see what he’s getting himself into as best he can. Inside, he asks for a drink of water and adds some minerals to it that he has carried with him in a small pouch. The bartender inquires where he has come from, but scoffs when told that he has just walked across the desert. “Liar!” he retorts and laughs. He doesn’t understand the disciplined and simple life that the monk has been trained to sustain. He doesn’t realize the inner resources that Caine has developed over time before arriving there.

Han Fei, having seen Caine enter the bar, is alarmed. He does not know Caine, but he empathizes with him (a trait emphasized by Confucius) and has compassion for him (a trait emphasized by the Buddha). Han Fei knows that someone who is Chinese will not be welcome in this saloon, so he sticks his head just inside the door to warn Caine, but is rudely told to leave at once by the barroom bully. Having gotten rid of Han Fei, this stout, bigoted ruffian takes notice of Caine, and though he is only half-Chinese, decides Caine must leave as well.

He attempts to remove Caine by force, and fails. But we do not witness the typical barroom brawl here. Caine uses his highly developed martial arts skills to side-step and neutralize every attempt to remove him. It is clear that he could inflict severe damage on the bully, but he does not. He applies the great guiding principle of every spiritually grounded martial art–to restore order with the least amount of force necessary. For the aim in spiritually grounded martial arts is purely defensive. The ethically superior martial artist does not seek to show off his abilities, but rather uses them modestly and only when needed. The great founder of the martial art Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba, insisted that his training was really “the art of peace.”

Having gotten his drink of water, and countered the effort to remove him forcibly, Caine then goes on his way peacefully. Han Fei greets him outside, and is thrilled, saying that he’s heard of advanced skills like this before, but has never seen them in practice. Caine is not full of himself. He is humble and honors the older man, who had risked his safety to warn him. Each has his own role to play. They enjoy mutual respect immediately. And each has something to give to the other. Saying that he is in need of work, Han Fei arranges for Caine to go to work, as so many Chinese and Sikh workers did at that time, on a railroad line laying ties.

*

Caine climbs onto the back of a horse-drawn wagon, about to embark on a new chapter of his life. Immediately, we see a flashback to the Shaolin Temple, where Caine had experienced new beginnings before as a boy. There, his head was shaved.

This is somewhat like baptism in Christianity.

It symbolizes a previous life that is shed and left behind. It symbolizes cleanliness and simplicity in the new life. And it symbolizes a commitment to the new beginning being embarked upon.

We observe Caine doing chores around the temple–tasks like sweeping the steps of sand and snow in different seasons. We also see him scrubbing the floors. These are more than necessary jobs to help the temple community to continue to function. These become for the monks an active meditation.

There are various kinds of meditation.

One can meditate with the chanting of a mantra. There are recitations of sacred writings in passage meditations. Many kinds of meditation begin with the most basic of all–a sitting meditation. In a sitting meditation, one learns through various techniques to still the mind and find the sacred center within.

For some, such as Zen Buddhists, the emphasis is placed on this sitting meditation.

In an active meditation, one attempts to take what one finds in the sitting meditation, and apply it to our work in the world. Perhaps the most well-known of the active meditations in the Western world is hatha yoga, which comes from India. Another, which I have practiced for many years, is the latihan kejiwaan of Subud. But an active meditation, if it comes from the right place within us, can take place in any activity that we do, such as these basic chores of a monk at the monastery.

Ideally, according to the teaching of Right Livelihood, one should be able to operate from one’s compassionate, creative center in our work in the world. We should endeavor to spread our peace and love to the world around us through our activities. At the railroad camp where Caine begins to work as an adult, we are shown a conflict arising in a simple morality play between a good-hearted geologist and the camp’s supervisor. 

The geologist predicted that the railroad workers were likely to hit pockets of an explosive gas if they continued on the path they were going. The supervisor understood what was being said, but did not allow the facts to get in the way of his goal. He pointed out that it would take too much time and cost too much money to change the route of the railroad, and it was his job to see the rail through. The lives of the workers were not a major concern for the supervisor.

Today, in the United States, we have reached a crossroad in our attitude toward labor. After a nearly century of progress, those gains have been scaled back. Instead of aiming for an ideal relationship between employers and employees, we sometimes seem to be racing toward the lowest common denominator by pitting our workers in competition against the most poorly treated workers around the world.

As we watch the immigrant laborers in Kung Fu laying ties for the railroad, we should remember the value of labor, which we cannot do without. There are class systems around the world that are quite oppressive with regard to labor. In India, for instance, those in the lowest class have been called “outcastes” because they’re seen as so low that they exist outside of the caste system. Where others saw only worthless “untouchables,” the Mahatma (great soul) Mohandas K. Gandhi saw “Harijan” (children of God). In the United States, generations of Africans were forcibly put on ships and imported like objects into this country to serve tyrannical masters. A war between North and South had to be fought largely to assure the liberty of our African-American brothers and sisters. We should look to this history and remember the often thin lines that run between marginally subsistence wages and slavery. And we should ask ourselves if we really want to support a system that depends on such slavery or quasi-slavery.

*

This was the situation that Caine was thrown into when he joined the crew of railroad workers. The camp was at a crisis point. They were cold. They were not fed well. And their lives were in danger. The workers were looking for leadership. One of Caine’s fellow laborers, Fong, ridiculed him for keeping silent. He was looking for Caine to step forward with his observations, if not a plan for action. And he didn’t know if he could trust someone so quiet.

But Caine responded to this criticism by saying that “If one’s words are not better than silence, one should keep silent.” This is in keeping with the Buddha’s teaching on Right Speech. The foundation of Buddhist ethics is the restraint from harming others. With regard to one’s work, one should do work that is helpful to others, and certainly not work that is harmful. The same principle should be applied to speech–to do some good with our words, or to remain silent.

Caine was also practicing the principle of Right Awareness here. He had to observe the situation at the camp carefully before taking action. This point will come up again, soon, when Fong presses him again for action.

Soon after this, Caine is recognized and honored as the Shaolin monk that he is when a wagon load of supplies comes into the camp. As one crate begins to fall from the wagon, Caine reached up to catch it, thus exposing the tiger and the dragon branded into his forearms. The tiger, symbol of the powers of the earth, and the dragon, symbol of the powers of the sky, were the signs of completed training at the Shaolin monastery. His fellow workers bowed with reverence at the discovery of this identity. A man of special gifts was in their midst.

As we see Caine pondering his position in this difficult and frightening situation at the railroad camp, it is not coincidental, I think, that we are then taken through another flashback to the heart of his training at the Shaolin Temple. More than anyone else at the Shaolin Temple, Caine was influenced by the blind Master Po. At first, Caine is inclined to dismiss Master Po as a simple, blind old man. But on their first encounter, Po hands Caine a broom and tells the young boy to attack him with it. Caine is reluctant, but the old man insists. 

Time and again, Caine rushes Master Po with the broom, only to be thwarted with deft movements. With a new-found admiration and feeling for Master Po, Caine comments that “Of all things, to live in darkness must be the worst.” Master Po smiles and brushes this sympathy aside, saying “Fear is the greatest darkness.” Several years later, we would see for the first time Yoda, in a similar role, telling the apprentice Luke Skywalker that “Fear is the path to the dark side.”

Master Po had smiled because he knew that he had not only overcome the lesser darkness of blindness, but the greater darkness of fear. And he invited Caine to follow him on a journey that starts with a quiet and humble awareness of everything that was going on in and around him. This, to me, is the spirit of radical empiricism.

“Never assume,” said Master Po, “that because a man has no eyes he cannot see.” Such an idea is shocking to the ordinary empiricist, for whom visual affirmation means so much. Master Po then directed Caine’s awareness. “Close your eyes,” he commanded. “What do you hear?”

Caine obeys. “I hear the water. I hear the birds.”

“Do you hear your own heartbeat?” Po asks.

“No,” admits the boy.

“Do you hear the grasshopper at your feet?” asks Po.

Caine opens his eyes and sees the grasshopper there. Amazed, he asks, “Old man, how is it that you hear these things?”

Po responds: “Young man, how is it that you do not?”

It is clearly implied here, though, that there is something more going on that extraordinarily acute hearing. The suggestion is that Master Po’s awareness has grown to such heights that he has developed a kind of “sixth sense.” We see this clearly in another scene where Caine as a boy is introduced to the practice of walking on rice paper. He is told that if he can learn to walk across it without tearing it, then his approach cannot be heard. So, when Caine as a young man finally accomplishes this feat, he goes to Master Po to test his skill. 

Master Po is aware of Caine’s approach anyway.

To many in the West, such phenomena are mere fairy tales. But as skeptical an observer as Jean Paul Sartre pointed to the truth of such awareness in human beings. He pointed to the phenomenon of what he referred to as “The Look.” We’ve all had experiences of sitting somewhere and having the “feeling” that someone is looking at us. We turn to see if it is true, and sure enough, someone had been looking at us–“burning,” as some say, “a hole in the back of my head.”

This awareness of connectedness to the world around us comes through careful phenomenological observation made acute through meditative practice. Again, such phenomenological observation allows us greater awareness of the paradoxes of time. 

A monk asks Caine at one point how long he’d been at the temple. The quick reply was “a long time,” for surely it seemed such to the young monk. But asked again how long, the boy thought about it. “Not long,” was the second response. The elder monk was pleased, and said, “Soon you will learn.” How is that he could have been there both a short time and a long time?

What does this mean?

Saint Augustine, in his Confessions, says that he knows what time is until someone asks him. Then he wonders if time really exists at all. For the past is no more, the future is not yet, and the present would be eternal if it did not slip into the past where it is also no more. Augustine concludes that if the present and future really exist, they exist in the tri-fold present where we experience a past-present and a future-present.

Again, this is a gift of careful observation.

We begin to glimpse in these observations a steady march of temporal transitioning from one present duration to another–or, as Alfred North Whitehead put it, a transition from one actual occasion of experience to another.

*

After observation, comes action. And with action comes decisions of import that we do not always get right. In many cases, we’re not even sure ourselves whether we have done the right thing. Life is teaching us many lessons at once.

In one of the more straightforwardly philosophical moments in the film, Han Fei and Caine discuss the seeming paradox between destiny and free will. Are our actions determined by our destiny, or are we free to act as we please? Han Fei’s conclusion, though he admits that he doesn’t know how it works, is that both are at play and that they somehow go together.

In Alfred North Whitehead’s process system of metaphysics, we are guided by an ideal at each moment of our lives, and our decisions are influenced by the weight of all the decisions we and others have made in the past. But in the end, we still have a choice to make between a range of options, including our felt perception of the given ideal for that circumstance. After our decisions are made, we inevitably find ourselves comparing what we have done with our awareness of that ideal.

It turns out that Caine had not simply come to America out of curiosity. He was fleeing the wrath of the Emperor of China for having killed his nephew. Joining Master Po on the road to the Forbidden City, the old master was fatally shot by the Emperor’s nephew. Caine, seeking to stop the violence, killed the imperial nephew with the throw of a spear. Dying, Master Po, told Caine that he was like a son to him, handed over his pouch with his few possessions, and instructed Caine to leave the country.

Fong heard through the grapevine of an imperial search in America for a Shaolin monk for murder. There is a price on Caine’s head. One of the other Chinese laborers in the camp, who has sold out as a spy, or informant, to management, overhears this and takes this new information to the supervisor of the camp. In exchange for this information, he is given a little warm, nutritious food. Abraham Maslow wrote about a hierarchy of needs. When human beings do not have their basic survival needs met, it is much more unlikely that they will seek to develop their higher human capacities, including their spiritual life. So, the Chinese government is informed from afar, and we realize that it’s only a matter of time before Caine is confronted by their representatives.

In this way, the web of life is spun. Many people acting for different reasons with different goals. The effects of their actions overlap, and people are hurt along the way. It is not always immediately clear as people do what they think is best for themselves, their families, their friends, and their countries, what is right and what is wrong.

Having seen too many of his fellow workers die, Fong understandably becomes frustrated and wants to take action quickly before any others die. He is ready to use violent means to take the camp away from the camp management. Caine, partly because he knows that management has the means to put down such a rebellion, urges Fong to remain calm, but he fails. Fong is now hot-headed, and the supervisor’s men shoot Fong after he takes but one step in their direction. The other men are obviously angered by this killing. But Caine urges restraint. They must wait for another time, and not rush to their deaths unwisely and needlessly.

Caine’s willingness to wait for action also reveals a trust in the way of nature. There is an old saying that “good things come to one who waits.” Such a belief implies implicit faith that the universe is good, and that with time, even the most evil things must fall before the forces of good. This type of crisis is what Caine had been trained to deal with. He was taught to avoid conflicts like these when possible. But when unavoidable, they have to be dealt with in the right way.

Three great spiritual philosophers taught of the importance of the middle way in governing our actions. Both Confucius and the Buddha taught of middle way ethical theories. Aristotle, who referred to his own middle way theory as the golden mean, used the virtue of courage as his primary example. In most situations, it is possible to either do too much of something or too little. The real key is to learn to get it just right–in the middle. Most of us, he taught, shy away from something that is frightening. To the extreme, this is called cowardice. In overcoming this tendency toward cowardice, it’s possible to overcompensate and rush into confrontation with something that is frightening. This is often called rashness. Fong, in this scene, acted rashly. He got himself killed needlessly.

True courage involves the wisdom of holding one’s center in the midst of something frightening. This is why Hemingway identified courage as “grace under pressure.” Caine also had been taught to recognize the difference between a subtle strength, energy, or life force called chi, and the more obvious, gross strength of the physical body. The latter depends on youth and muscle mass, and fades in old age. The former can be carefully refined and developed throughout one’s life. The acute awareness that comes through meditation increases one’s ability to develop the use of this subtle energy. In turn, one’s awareness is increased through attunement to this subtle energy. Caine’s actions would have to be guided by careful attunement with this chi, or what in Star Wars became popularly identified (just a few years later) as the force. This often involves an appropriate channeling of energies. You learn not to confront an aggressive force head-on, but to redirect those energies and thereby neutralize their destructiveness. Nature is full of such lessons, and the careful observation of nature can be the best classroom.

*

I wish I could say that after watching this series, one could clearly see when self-defense is appropriate and when it is not. Alas, it is as muddled for us as it is for the characters. Caine defends himself in the end against the Shaolin monk turned bounty-hunter who is sent after Caine by the Emperor. Caine emerges victorious, but says “there is no honor in the taking of a human life.” We do find ourselves in conflict in the world. 

Sometimes it is unavoidable.

And sometimes we are right, but at other times, we are wrong. It is a murky business filled with pain and danger. At least we can see in “Kung Fu” that Caine is saddened by the web of conflict that he finds himself in. He does not revel in it. And perhaps that is the best lesson to be taken away about the violence. Yes, people step on each other’s toes in this world. Yes, people get into conflicts. But the proper and wisest attitude to have toward these conflicts is to avoid them when possible, to redirect aggressive energies in ways that neutralize their damaging effects, and only use as much force as is necessary to restore harmony to the situation. Our judgments may not always be accurate, and we may not achieve the ideal we were aiming for, but we will minimize the damage when acting on these principles.

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Letter from the Editors: May 2013 -- The Beginning, Again

PHOTO: Olav Bryant Smith

THE BEGINNING, AGAIN

This issue begins our second year of publication and a new era for Empirical. As Dylan said, “the times they are a-changin’.” An amazing amount of work went into bringing you a new magazine that looks, feels, and reads the way we, and the growing Empirical community, want a magazine to look, feel, and read. We started in October 2011 with this daring idea that we could produce a magazine that fills a niche no one else is filling. Actually, to go back even further, we were talking about the ‘dream’ of starting a magazine in April 2005 when Tara and I first met in Portland. I had done some research on this myself before we’d met, but put it on the back-burner while I focused on keeping my teaching career going in these lean times of budget cuts. Little did I know when I first brought it up that Tara would eventually start editing for a lifestyle magazine and that she would start seriously thinking about carrying out our dream.

When we first started on this path, it seemed so natural for us in a way. Tara and I had both had years of editing experience. We are both writers. We’d both worked for publications. I had some design experience. Tara had worked at printers and knew about ink, papers, and other printing issues. I’ve only dabbled at fiction and poetry, but this was Tara’s love, and she has an MA in creative writing. My forte was the nonfiction side. I have an MA in Philosophy and a PhD in Philosophy of Religion. I’ve been reading, writing, and blogging about social and political issues for years. Our talents and interests both intersected and complemented one another’s.

THE NAME “EMPIRICAL”: THE RISK OF MISUNDERSTANDING

William James

The name ‘Empirical’ came to Tara in a flash. I could tell this flash of inspiration had really hooked her, and she was convinced this was the name. For my part, an entire philosophical controversy came flooding into my thoughts and feelings all at once with the name ‘Empirical.’ On the philosophical side of things, I knew that many would misinterpret the name. ‘Empiricism’ and ‘science’ are almost synonymous for many people. After what Alfred North Whitehead called the “unbridled rationalism” of the medieval period in Europe, with the pendulum swinging more toward theory than fact, thinkers of both the Reformation and the Renaissance urged a return to gathering and re-examining the evidence. With the rise of modern science, the emphasis was on limiting acceptable evidence to what one can observe with the five physical senses. This proved spectacularly helpful in weeding out highly speculative theories that didn’t really match the evidence empiricists began to present. This approach has its limits even within science. But many people are completely and unabashedly behind this spirit of scientific advance; they are all in favor of shoving other avenues to knowledge aside. In fact, there are many of this persuasion who would say there is no other path to knowledge. So what, I thought, would these people make of our more poetic and spiritual approach to things? They might not find what they were looking for in our pages on the basis of the title alone. The other side of the same issue is that those who would most appreciate our approach might shy away from our magazine because of the name, assuming it is narrowly empirical when they desire the more holistic approach that we offer.

RADICALLY EMPIRICAL

Alfred North Whitehead

It was a risk, but I saw an opportunity in this name–an opportunity to create a discussion about what it really means to be ‘empirical.’ As a philosopher in the process and classical-American traditions, I’d long been persuaded–by Willetter from the editors William James and Alfred North Whitehead in particular–that we should embrace what James called a ‘radical empiricism’ that examines all of the evidence of experience and not just the narrow band of experience acceptable to what we now call ‘science.’ James, Whitehead, and others pointed out (as Berkeley, Hume, and others had before them) how the narrow brand of empiricism leads to skepticism about our own existence, the world’s existence, causality, and thus  undermines science itself. Most scientists ignore this because they’re busy doing science and don’t care about Hume’s arguments.

Many scientists are even religious themselves and compartmentalize their scientific and religious lives because of basis intuitions that transcend their discipline. But others ignore this because they’re motivated by anti-religious reasons. James, however, embarked on studies of religious experience and parapsychology.

Whitehead explained how our fundamental, felt, preconscious experience of an interconnected world at the
very least explains things like memory and knowledge of the actual world – unexplainable by narrow empiricism. So, it is important to grasp that our understanding of ‘empirical’ is different than the standard conception. Empirical’s mission statement of purpose thus reads:

An international literary and current affairs magazine with the openness and pioneering spirit of its home in the Pacific Northwest, Empirical aspires for truth by boldly introducing thought-provoking points of view and new paradigms. A forum for discourse on contemporary issues, the magazine is “radically empirical” in considering the broad range of human experience.

Being ‘radically empirical’ is progressive; it is tolerant of new ideas and experiments in living. It is not fear-based. It is hope-based. It embraces different expressions of spiritual experience–in art and elsewhere–and stands against the dogmatic suppression of this variety of spiritual experience by both those who embrace more mainstream religious practices and those who pride themselves on participating in the goal of the
destruction of religions and the banishment of all reports of meaningful human experience as “subjective.” And in the end, the ideal is to bring science and spirituality together in a unified view.

PACIFIC NORTHWEST

San Francisco
PHOTO by Curtis Fry

Thus, it also made sense for Tara and me–because we met while we were both living in Portland and now live in Northern California–to connect our project with the Pacific Northwest. My year’s sojourn into what most people consider to be the Pacific Northwest, including mainly Oregon and Washington State, convince me that there is much that connects Northern California with the Pacific Northwest. In many ways, Northern California – particularly including the San Francisco Bay Area – has more in common with Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver BC than it has with the cities of Southern California. So, in addition stretching the common understanding of ‘empirical,’ we are also–intentionally and purposefully trying to stretch the common notion of the community of the ‘Pacific Northwest.’ There is a community that stretches from San Francisco to Vancouver BC that is highly technological, innovative, tolerant, inclusive, progressive, and broadly spiritual. We strive to achieve new paradigms and welcome experiments in lifestyle–not for just for the sake of experiment or to be ‘different,’ but because we live in the spirit of hope for a better tomorrow. We are a part of that community and so much of our vision has to do with sharing our perspective of the world with everyone else.

At the same time, it should be understood that we are not a regional magazine. Our focus is on the world. But one of the things that Tara and I realized when we started out on this project was that most magazines of this type have a New York or Northeast perspective. Empirical contributes to our ongoing effort to understand ourselves and the world we live in from a particular point of view: a Pacific Northwest  perspective. We recognize that, are proud of that, and very openly acknowledge that we’re expressing a vision from a community that is bigger than the two of us. But it’s about the world and its varieties of experience, written and illustrated by authors and artists from around the world.

GOING DIGITAL

Our desire was to be in print, and to compliment that with the new wave of digital access. But to be in print for long, we would have to win over a distributor and then attract an investor or investors. Moreover, we’d have to attract customers quickly. We succeeded in the first two, which is no small thing. By February 2012, we’d produced a prototype that attracted the attention of Rider Circulation Service in Los Angeles. When we saw them face-to-face and showed them on a laptop what we were up to, they were excited about the possibilities and told us enthusiastically that they wanted to distribute Empirical. That prototype issue was dated May 2012, and we have been in bookstores throughout the US and around the world since our first actual monthly issue of June 2012. And we have recently been honored by the Library Journal as one of the top ten new magazines of 2012–an honor indeed.

An award like that helps spread the word about the good things we’re doing, but it didn’t come quickly enough to help us stay in print. Our circulation is growing, but not enough people heard about us quickly and frequently enough to keep up with the enormous costs of printing and shipping. That’s just reality.

We’d been seeing others turn toward digital publication at an accelerating pace. Holding a magazine in one’s hands has practical and aesthetic value. We appreciate that fully. But the fact is that our economy is shifting toward the spread of information through electronic means. The true cost of getting a printed quality
publication, which we competitively estimated at seven dollars per issue, or fifty-five dollars per year, is beyond what many people are able or willing to spend right now.

So, facing these realities, we are looking at the positive side of this transition. It’s time to look forward and not back. We are going to continue bringing you more of the best writing in the world, exploring human experience from new points of view, and growing the Empirical community. We’ll be able to do that with even more brilliant color than ever.

I’ve been hard at work redesigning the magazine in a shorter, wider format with larger fonts so that it’s easier to see and use on our screens. And, the bottom line, we can do all of this for the much more affordable price of one dollar per issue, or ten dollars per year. Times are tough. But now nearly everyone who wants to join and support our Empirical community of readers can afford that. 

THIS ISSUE: MAY 2013

We lead off our second year of publication with another article by Dorion Sagan, son of the astronomer Carl Sagan and biologist Lynn Margulis. Dorion wrote for us the first time in September (see “Lynn Margulis and the Pursuit of Knowledge”). This time, Dorion explores–in “The Problem of Intelligence”– the idea that human beings may be overestimating their intelligence, asking, “Is not an ecosystem–whose different species, with different skills and specialties, combine to make sustainable biological systems–arguably more intelligent, smarter, than a single species which overruns its environment, risking extinction?” Building on themes related to Huxley’s Brave New World, and pointing to the danger of social Darwinist theories, Sagan shows us how it may be time to look to the wisdom of nature for true clues about survival. 

Dave Lewit, writing for Empirical for the first time, discusses the central importance of economics in history and the control over the money supply in the US. Noting the Fed’s enormous bailouts of banks, Lewit makes positive suggestions about a way forward through similar investments in workers and the creation of public banks that are overseen by more publicly-minded virtues than the Fed and private banks value.

Frequent contributor Hugh Mercer Curtler writes this month “On Being Judgmental.” Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the war-crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann led to her shock at being considered too judgmental in her coverage of Holocaust atrocities. Curtler builds on this, and comments on our descent toward amoralism through the phenomenon of eschewing judgment. But Curtler points out that to think is to judge. And thinking people, he argues, do not need to pit one culture against another to uphold core values that are widely embraced around the world.

The March and April issues of Empirical saw the beginning of a three-part series on Cuba by Andrea St. Amand. That series is concluded in this issue with “Cuban Life Without Bribery: Lessons From Estonia, Part III.” The Estonian connection is Andrea’s husband. On their trip to Cuba, and based on her husband’s first-hand experience of the transition to democracy and capitalism after the fall of the Soviet Union, Andrea speculates about how life might be with more economic freedom in Cuba’s near future.

This month’s fiction includes “Sun Boxes” by Phyllis Green and “Children of the Tides” by Frank Scozzari.
May’s poetry includes “Mink” by Wally Swist; “Out to Win The World For God: Howard Finster” by Patrick Milian; “among the families of the earth,” Richard Thompson; “Plaint For Rattus norvegicus” by Elisavietta Ritchie; and “Contender” by Monique Roussell. Our featured photographer section is “A Moment
With Wonderlane.” I discovered her work while searching for Buddhist photography, and have since found her work extremely helpful for illustrations of many of our articles. We finally got a chance to interview her and hear her interesting story. As always, our pages conclude with recipes from Tara and Rafaela.

Empirical is committed to continuing to bringing you the best, and we also wish you the best. As we make this transition to exclusive digital publication, please let us know what we can do to improve our service to you; and please spread the word about the quality you find here. We can’t do it without you. 

Happy Birthday: Olav

February Excerpt: Lincoln and the Radical Defense of Liberty by Olav Bryant Smith

Lincoln and the Radical Defense of Liberty

Olav Bryant Smith

Lincoln Memorial
PHOTO: Anna Fox

On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln began a speech with these words at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania: “Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The speech became known as the Gettysburg Address. It is widely known as one of the great speeches in human history. One aspect of its greatness is that it re-asserts a principle of American political philosophy as the touchstone of our republic–this principle that “all men are created equal.”

Nations–as opposed to a collection of more-or-less isolated individuals, or individual states–must have some philosophical principles that guide it through thick and thin, and bind together an otherwise disparate population. Teddy Roosevelt astutely pointed to the real power of the presidency when he referred to his “bully pulpit.” Time and time again, it is the president’s primary role to rally and unify the nation around one or more foundational principles. For Lincoln, it was the principles of liberty and equality, and the preservation of a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

I turn to Lincoln in this issue partly because February is the month that we celebrate the birthdays of Washington (22nd) and Lincoln (12th). But I turn to Lincoln especially because the movie sensation of late autumn was Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, with a wonderful screenplay written by Tony Kushner, and with Lincoln portrayed by actor Daniel Day-Lewis. In the first 26 days, Lincoln grossed almost $86 million in ticket sales. As I watched this film in a local theater, twice, I saw a wide variety of citizens (from young to old), wanting to participate in this democratic experiment of ours, on the edge of their seats as they waited anxiously to find out the resolution of a story that was in fact resolved 150 years ago. What was the hook? Why were we drawn to a movie about the struggle between a president and congressional leaders over a legislative action taken during the Civil War? What does this interest say about us as a people? Why are we drawn to the feet of Lincoln once again to learn what it is to be American?

One clue, I believe, is that Spielberg has repeatedly directed films that reveal heroes in struggles of good versus evil. The great dramas of world history are always struggles of good versus evil, though it is not always easy for those caught up in the struggles to recognize their own evil. World War II has provided the backdrop to a number of Spielberg’s films, such as Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan. This time, Spielberg has clearly recognized an opportunity in something much closer to home. In his films about World War II, we never stray far from the fact and horror of the Holocaust. In this film about Lincoln, we never stray far from the fact and horror of slavery.

The film begins after Lincoln’s second term has begun and African-American troops had begun to serve in the Union Army. Using special war-time powers, Lincoln had freed slaves through executive fiat–The Emancipation Proclamation. But he was concerned that this would not hold up in the courts in the long run. Thus, a constitutional amendment was introduced, and had been passed by the Senate once, but had subsequently failed in the House. With the closing days of the war ahead, Lincoln was determined to see it through to passage this second time before reuniting with the southern states.

Familiar enough to contemporary ears, we learn of a divided Congress. Deals would have to be made to assure enough Democratic votes to reach the required majority of two-thirds. The amendment had failed the first time due to a vote strictly on party lines: Lincoln’s Republican Party voting in favor, and Democrats voting against. The film thus becomes an entertaining adventure of political wrestling and intrigue as Lincoln’s administration, led by Secretary of State Seward, unites various factions of Republicans and attempts to win over Democrats by any means possible. The movie is great fun, and I leave it at that, recommending that you see it for yourself. Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Lincoln has left many of us in awe. Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals, when she saw the film, said that she felt like she’d seen the real Lincoln.

If you would like to read more of this article in Empirical, the February issue is now available at your local bookstore and online at our website.

From the Empirical Archives: Considering "The Seven Biggest Economic Lies"

Considering "The Seven Biggest Economic Lies"

Olav Bryant Smith

ILLUSTRATION: Steve Ferchaud

Originally Published in the May 2012 Issue of Empirical

One of the leading progressive voices in contemporary economics is Robert Reich, the former Secretary of Labor from the Clinton Administration and Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. Recently, he launched a YouTube video that went viral. The reason for its popularity is clear. In seven simple steps, or in just two and a half minutes as Dr. Reich proudly announces at its commencement, this video entitled “The Seven Biggest Economic Lies” directly confronts the dubious claims we are most likely to hear from what he calls the “regressive forces” at work in our country. What faster way could there be to gain some enlightenment in economics? Ah, the blessings of YouTube.

“Big lies,” Professor Reich begins, “begin to be believed unless they are rebutted with the truth.” So, one dubious claim at a time, he counters with the facts. Please check out his video sometime. But in the meantime, this summary can get you started, and may be useful in remembering his points.

1

“Tax cuts for the rich trickle down to everyone else.”

The facts:

• Taxes were cut under both the Reagan and first Bush administrations.
• Median hourly wages stagnated and dropped.

Reich calls this trickle-down claim “boloney” and “a cruel joke.” It should be remembered, too, that the senior George W. Bush, when campaigning against Ronald Reagan, called this approach “voodoo economics.”

2 

“Higher taxes on the rich would hurt the economy and slow down job growth.”

The facts:

• The top tax rate was over 70% between World War II and 1981.
• Taxes have decreased considerably since 1981.
• The economy grew faster prior to 1981 than it has since.
• Most jobs are created by small businesses.
• Fewer than 2% of small business owners are in the top tax bracket.

On his blog, considering the same topic, Reich lays out in more detail that “From the end of World War II until 1981, the richest Americans faced a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent or above. Under Dwight Eisenhower, it was 91 percent. Even after all deductions and credits, the top taxes on the very rich were far higher than they’ve been since. Yet the economy grew faster during those years than it has since.” Also, so many of our neighbors who are small business owners need help. They do not need higher taxes right now. The conversation about higher taxes does not include them.

3

“Shrinking government generates more jobs.”

The facts :

• Smaller government actually translates into fewer teachers, firefighters, social workers, police officers, and other deliverers of social services.
• Indirectly, smaller government then results in fewer contracts to private companies that help to build our infrastructure.

On his blog, Reich further explains that “According to Moody’s economist Mark Zandi, a campaign advisor to John McCain, the $61 billion in spending cuts proposed by the House GOP will cost the economy 700,000 jobs.”

The fact is that when the economic players who have the big money, like many of our banks and major corporations, are unwilling to spend due to lack of confidence in our economy, the government is more important as a spender than at any other time. If the government stops spending money and lays off employees, less money gets to our communities. Just ask anyone, for example, who lives in a university town.

4

“Cutting the deficit now is more important than boosting the economy.”

The facts :

• The real long-term goal should be to reduce the percentage of debt in relationship to economic production.
• Jobs are most important right now, because without job and economic growth, the debt, in proportion to the overall economy, will only get worse.
• We need more job creation before we can bring the deficit down.

If the government were to make cutting the deficit its priority, this would lead to fewer jobs. Adding to the already high unemployment our nation is experiencing exacerbates the problem by reducing the number of tax payers. And, as noted above, when the government cuts back on the employment of government workers and private contractors, less money reaches our communities.

5

“Medicare and Medicaid are killing the budget.”

The facts :

• Medicare and Medicaid costs are rising because health care costs are rising.
• Health care costs can be curtailed by using Medicare’s bargaining power to get lower prices on drugs, medical supplies, and hospitals.
• Medicare can also bargain for a transition from fee-for-services to fee-for-health-outcomes.
• Medicare has lower administrative costs than private health insurance.
• The Medicare model, given these assets, should be opened to everyone.

So, not only does a single-payer model make more sense morally, it also makes more sense economically.

6

“Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme.”

The facts :

• Social Security is currently estimated to be solvent for the next 26 years.
• It would be solvent for the next century if we lifted the ceiling on Social Security taxes from its current income level of $106,800.
• A “Ponzi Scheme” is a plan to defraud investors; under such a plan, it is known in advance that there will be no money left to pay the investors back. This cannot be said of Social Security if it is still solvent. And it will only become insolvent if the political will to support it collapses.

7

“It’s unfair that lower-income Americans don’t pay income tax.”

The facts :

• Low-income Americans pay a much bigger proportion of their income in social security taxes, sales taxes, user fees, and tolls.

This fact is what is truly unfair, insists Reich.

These facts transcend distinctions between liberals and true conservatives—as opposed to “regressive forces” Reich has spoken of. They are facts that independently-minded voters need to know and consider. And there is nothing truly conservative in the destruction of the middle class or in huge transfers of wealth to the richest among us. Nor is there anything truly conservative about running the large deficits that accompany a dogmatic stance on taxes. It is time to learn from our mistaken adherence to such “lies.”