A Decent Society

I know it's bad form to quote wholesale from a previously published article, and it's not something I would normally do, on this or any site. But the following is from an article published in Parade Magazine, of all places, in 1991 (pre-internet). It was an article that my father cut out and saved, being the old school FDR-Harry-Emerson-Fosdick liberal that he was. (In fact, the older he got, the more liberal he became, although he watched Crossfire religiously because, as he said, he wanted to know what the other side thought.) At any rate, he saved this article because it meant something to him ... it described him. I've looked for it for some time, and finally stumbled across it (as Sidney Harris used to say) while looking for something else.

My father died in 2001, and coming across this article has brought back some warm memories of the man who had more of an influence on my socio-poliitico-spiritual life than anyone else ... and a man whom I still miss deeply for his wisdom and his humor. I share it here simply as an offering.

Here is a link to a PDF of the below article.

Parade Magazine, November 24, 1991

We Can Create a Decent Society
by James A. Michener

As I approached the age of 82, I was confronted by a savage rejection of everything decent I had stood for. In the 1988 election, President Reagan announced that anyone who was a liberal—he used the phrase “the L word” as if it were fatally contaminated—was outside the mainstream of American life and intimated that the liberal’s patriotism was suspect. Vice President Bush, seeking our highest office, went a lot farther by shouting that anyone who did not wish to recite the Pledge of Allegiance daily was probably false to the honored traditions of our nation; and his running mate, Senator Quayle, declared: “Michael Dukakis is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, while George Bush is a member of the National Rifle Association,” as if that made the former a loathsome traitor and the latter a great patriot. I found all this denigration of liberals personally offensive.

As I was being rejected from the mainstream of American life, I stumbled into a situation which forced me to evaluate aspects of my political life. I was living in Florida so as to be near the Caribbean Sea, about which I was doing extensive research. Because I wanted to catch the flavor of the area, I not only read newspapers and watched television but also listened for the first time in my life to what is accurately termed “talk radio,” keeping my set tuned permanently to a small station that provided a running report on topics of real concern to the local citizens. What I learned from this listening was invaluable...

After describing the right wing talk show host, a man whom he described as "soft-spoken, congenial, well-informed," Michener goes on to share his conclusions ... and this, I think, was the part my father most identified with.

I decided that I was both a humanist and a liberal, each of the most dangerous and vilified type, and so I shall be increasingly until I die.

I am a humanist because I think humanity can, with constant moral guidance, create reasonably decent societies. I think that young people who want to understand the world can profit from studying the works of Plato and Socrates, the austere analyses of Immanuel Kant, ahe behavior of the three Thomases—Aquinas, More and Jefferson—and the political leadership of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. I like the educational theories of John Dewey and the pragmatism of William James. I am terrified of restrictive religious doctrine, having learned from history that when men who adhere to any form of it are in control, common men like me are in peril. I do not believe that pure reason can solve the perpetual problems unless it is modified by poetry and art and social vision. ...

So I am a humanist. And if you want to charge me with being the most virulent kind—a secular humanist—I accept the accusation, but I do not want to be accused of atheism. No man who loves the book of Deuteronomy and the first chapter of the General Epistle of St. James, as I do, can be totally anti-religious.

A charge that can be lodged against me is that I am a knee-jerk liberal, for I confess to that sin. When I find that a widow has been left penniless and alone with three children, my knee jerks. When I learn that funds for a library have been diminished almost to the vanishing point, my knee jerks. When I find that a playground for children is being closed down while a bowling alley for grown men is being opened, my knee jerks. When men of ill intent cut back on teachers’ salaries and lunches for children, my knee jerks. When the free flow of ideas is restricted, when health services are denied to whole segments of the population, when universities double their fees, my knee jerks. When I hear that all the universities in Texas, combined, graduated two future teachers qualified to teach calculus but more than 500 trained to coach football, my knee jerks. And I hope never to grow so old or indifferent that I can listen to wrong and immoral choices being made without my knee flashing a warning.

Why does it jerk? To alert me that I have been passive and inattentive too long, to remind me that one of the noblest purposes for which human beings are put on earth is to strive to make their societies better, to see to it that gross inequalities are not perpetuated. ...

When I have been dead 10 years and a family comes to tend the flowers on the grave next to mine, and they talk about the latest pitiful inequity plaguing their town, they will hear a rattling from my grave and can properly say: “That’s Jim again. His knee is still jerking.”

The entire article is worth a read. You can find a link to the .pdf here.