THE SECRET TO ACHIEVING SOCIAL JUSTICE: TREAT OUR CHILDREN WELL

In recent year people have been exhorted to “Vote as if your life depended on it”. While I am in sympathy with this sentiment, I believe it needs some changes to it to make it more powerful and persuasive. The first is to remove “as if”. This is because these words imply that the persons addressed are dealing with a hypothetical situation. There is nothing “as if” about the dangers we confront. In actuality, the choices we make at this critical juncture in our history have a very real impact on our very survival. Those choices surely include whom we vote for, but encompass something much broader. In truth, the choices both large and small that we make everyday influence personal, social, political, economic and environmental matters that have great bearing on our future. Electing leaders who acknowledge the issues that threaten our survival and are genuinely committed to dealing with them is a much-needed step we must take. But to expect that they will bear sole responsibility for doing what needs to be done is a fool’s dream. We are all complicit in contributing to the imminent disasters that confront us. We all need to be part of the solution.

Another change I would make to this admonition is to take out the words “your life”. I can understand how highlighting the personal impact of income inequality, corporate greed, exploitation, and climate change is persuasive and can move people to mount resistance. However, this focus also has some serious pitfalls. This becomes clear when we realize how deeply we have been inculcated with a neoliberal ideology that has fostered a highly exaggerated emphasis on individualism. This elevation of the moral primacy of the individual over the collective can be traced back to the Protestant Reformation and Enlightenment. But under neoliberalism it has been taken to extreme and obscene heights.

The ideal image held forth by neoliberalism of what every person should strive to be emphasizes independence, autonomy, individual freedom to choose, and self-reliance. The beliefs inculcated include:

· The free pursuit of personal goals to maximize happiness and realize one’s potential.

· Doing one’s own thinking.

· Looking out for #1.

· Bearing sole responsibility for the consequences of one’s choices.

This virulent form of narcissism has a number of documented adverse consequences. Under neoliberalism, individuals demonstrate excessive self-preoccupation, an exaggerated sense of self-importance, and a lack of empathy for others. Their sense of competitiveness and entitlement creates a sense of isolation and alienation from others. A nagging sense of emptiness gives rise to insatiable desires fueling rampant consumption. And the emphasis on personal responsibility one-sidedly situates the cause of personal unhappiness and misconduct in the individual rather than in extant social structures and practices.

Thus, restricting persons’ focus on the impact of today’s destructive and dehumanizing conditions to the confines of “me” is doomed to fail. It will only serve to support and sustain neoliberal hegemony. It ensures that any meanings attributed to life events are skewed and distorted by selfish preoccupations. It obliterates human beings’ appreciation of their fundamental social nature. What impacts any individual invariably impacts the many. The actions of any individual inevitably ripples out in ways that have consequences for the entire human race and the natural world. The clear establishment of the interdependence of all life poses an incontrovertible blow to the extreme individualism preached by neoliberalism. If we are unable to free ourselves from the shackles of our extreme narcissism, we will have little, if any, understanding of what actions we must take to avert looming disasters.

To remedy this, I propose that the exhortation be changed as follows: “Take actions in response to today’s issues based on the well-being of our children depending on them.” Why choose children? The painful and troubling truth is that because of their vulnerability and dependence, children are the most oppressed class of persons. Further, not only are children already being cruelly and unfairly victimized by the excesses of neoliberalism, but they will suffer even-greater dire consequences in the years ahead. In an earlier Medium post entitled “Condemned at birth: Income inequality is destroying our children,” I described one cogent body of evidence for this. A person’s life chances are substantially determined by the accident of his or her birth. As a consequence of the morally unjustifiable magnitude of inequality that exists in the United States and many other countries, environmental deprivation and the impact of other environmental factors on the course of human development leads to a host of adverse medical and psychological conditions. This is connected to the extensive body of evidence on the role of social determinants of health. To make matters worse, children do not choose the circumstances of their birth. However, that does not prevent individual, including politicians and policy-makers, from essentially blaming them (or their parents) for problems actually created by socioeconomic conditions.

This morally unjustifiable state of affairs is only one indication of a highly disturbing lack of empathy and compassion that is currently shown to children. Childhood does not have some fixed and universal meaning but is socially and politically constructed. That means that childhood at present is understood from a neoliberal ideology and so plagued by the same harmful biases and assumptions noted earlier. World-wide 150 million children work for wages — typically wages at a starvation level. They are exploited to promote the insatiable greed of transnational corporations. Children in the United States are willfully exposed to toxic water and other environmental conditions that have permanent and devastating consequences for their health. Children are being killed in school shootings at an alarming rate. They are being deprived of health care. Billions of dollars are spent annual to commodify them. And through it all their life experiences are being invalidated, they are disenfranchised and have no political voice, and are deemed as not taking responsibility while also expected to comply with what authorities demand that they do.

The Chinese philosophy, Mencius (approx. 372–298 BCE), who was a disciple of Confucius espoused that human beings possessed an innate capacity for compassion. As a result, they cannot bear to see others suffer. To support his contention, he stated that any person upon seeing a child about to fall into a well, would have a feeling of horror and distress. This feeling, he said, is not based on sympathy for the parents of the child or to avoid being seen in a negative light by others if one did not act. It is what Mencius called the first sign of humanity which becomes the basis of justice. Mencius’ argument speaks once more to our fundamentally social nature and how human beings needed to experience this fellow-feeling with others in order to cooperate and thus better ensure their survival as a species.

Looking at today’s world, one can well ask what has happened to the horror and distress we would feel upon seeing any child facing certain peril. How has it come to pass that we feel nothing about the plight of the millions of children doomed to poverty? That people in power callously work to deprive them of decent conditions of life, well-funded schools, and access to health care and then condemn them to the inhumane conditions of prison because they are responsible for bad choices and beyond redemption. That corporations see them solely as means to someday exploit as low-paid workers and as mindless consumers to increase their profits. That governments rain down weapons of mass destruction upon them by the millions.

I cannot offer a simple and straightforward answer to these questions. Cruelty to children has regrettably not been unique to our time. However, I feel utterly convinced that this cruelty has reached proportions that threaten the long-term survival of the human race. This is surely an extremely disturbing fact that few people appear willing to squarely face and sit with. And our unwillingness to be present to that discomfort lies at the heart of how we have come to this calamitous point in history. We must recover the horror and distress that Mencius described. Not because it is what we are supposed to do. Not because it would put us in a positive light and make us feel good about ourselves. But because those are precisely the feelings naturally stirred in us when we see that our most vulnerable and dependent fellow human beings are suffering. We must cease to harden our hearts and feel their suffering as if it were our own. That is the one and only path we must take in order to make the admonition, “Take actions in response to today’s issues based on the well-being of our children depending on them” a powerful stimulus to restoring justice and assuring a future for them and those who come after them.