How to measure a civilization? By regular folks or ambitious boobies?

Henry David Thoreau is most famous for a book he wrote about building a cabin near a pond in the woods. In fact, we just celebrated the 180^th anniversary of his move-in day: July 4, 1845.

However, he also had some things to say about bigger structures – the pyramids in Egypt – and the people who built them.

Thoreau's cabin: $28.12

Thoreau has been on my mind recently as I contemplated the iconic structures by which we remember civilizations. Pyramids. Towers. Statues. Cathedrals. Skyscrapers. Dams, Bridges. Etc. Things you would see in a game of Sid Meier’s Civilization.

For the United States in the 21^st century, I do not think of any grand structures. I do not think of ambitious public works. We do not seem to build those now. One could say the iconic works of this century are corporations rather than structures. 

In 2018, Apple became the first corporation with a valuation of a trillion dollars. Now several companies surpass that amount, including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. 

Some of these entities are involved in the lives of possibly every American, especially inside the technology that we use daily. As the Orange King says, “Everything is computer!” I will focus on Amazon, though. Not everyone shops on Amazon, but everyone knows its logo and sees its delivery trucks each day.

When people think of the United States in the 21^st century, they might think of these corporations as its greatest accomplishment, and the leaders of these corporations might be considered its leading citizens. In fact, several of them were on stage during the coronation of the Orange King. In a past era they would have been called “titans of industry.” Author Thomas Wolfe might have called them “Masters of the Universe,” which is phrase from his novel Bonfire of the Vanities; it is a name for the men who steer the nation’s money and influence the nation’s fate -- and who are known for their extravagant lifestyles.

Thoreau would be disappointed in this lionizing of wealth-hoarders and what they have built. Thoreau asked people to evaluate the greatness of a civilization by the standard of living for its regular people rather than the achievements of its elites.

One of Bezos's yachts: $400 million

I agree with him.

In the first chapter of Walden, Thoreau writes that the workers who built the pyramids “were not decently buried themselves.” He suggests a mason in another era who “finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut…”  He writes, “It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish the generation are accomplished.”  

Much of Thoreau’s first chapter is devoted to asking why people spend their lives working rather than living. He questions the lifestyles people choose (or have forced upon them) that require so much labor. Returning to the topic of pyramids, he suggests the laborers had better things to do with their lives – like living them. In fact, rather than ask how could people build such marvelous structures, he asks why would people build them at all? In the second chapter of Walden, he writes: 

“As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.”

I suspect Bezos, an ambitious booby himself, would disagree with this sentiment. After all, he famously said he wanted his thousands of Amazon employees to “wake up every morning terrified” of not pleasing their customers. Bezos believes his company is worth the sacrifice of its workers’ lives and happiness.

Thoreau would judge American civilization not by the valuation of Amazon’s stock and Bezos’s wealth, but by whether his employees were treated well and felt their lives were being spent wisely.

Far from urging people to wake up terrified in sheets drenched in sweat, Thoreau urges his readers to be awakened by their “aspirations from within” rather than from without, by an alarm clock or “factory bells.” He urges us to awake in the morning “to a higher life than we fell asleep from.”

Again, I agree with him.

 

 

The populist president who works against the populous

 The motto of capitalism might be “Be careful what you wish for.”

It is an economic system that can generate great wealth, even widespread prosperity, but it also is prone to excesses and instability.

If capitalists manage to gain control of the political system as well as as the economic system, those excesses can get more extreme and more damaging. Capitalism also is prone to boom-and-bust cycles. If unchecked, capitalism can create bigger booms and bigger busts. With Trump in the White House, the bigger boom looks to be guaranteed only for the already-wealthy, and the bigger bust is for everyone else.

This is on my mind because I have been reading The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (and a Radical Plan to Rebuild It) by Michael A. McCarthy. In the book, McCarthy describes the ways the U.S. system of governance serves the needs of capitalists more than workers, something we are seeing vividly demonstrated by the Trump Administration. 

Until recently, mechanisms existed to curb some of capitalism’s excesses, and some of these mechanisms benefited workers directly — protecting them from exploitation or allowing them to share more of the wealth generated by their labor.

These mechanisms are called “flanking subsystems.” They are “state agencies, committees, programs (such as welfare), and quasi-governmental entities such as central banks, that actively intervene in relations of production, exchange, and investment” (35).

McCarthy writes, “… capitalist democracies pursue stabilizing interventions that overcome capitalism’s own anarchic and self-destructive tendencies” (35).

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal is perhaps the clearest example of “stabilizing interventions,” and we have many vestiges of it with us today (at least for now); for instance, Old Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance (Social Security), which has saved millions of people from poverty, and the National Labor Relations Act, which encouraged collective bargaining and protected workers who sought to organize unions. Later interventions protected people from discrimination and injury at their jobs. Others benefited everyone, not just workers, by protecting clean air and clean water from the capitalist penchant for polluting landscapes. The Bureau of Consumer Protection is one. Medicare and Medicaid are popular interventions. The Affordable Care Act is another.

However, since his election, Trump has been removing (or attempting to remove) many of the guardrails that keep capitalism from producing the anarchy and self-destruction McCarthy discusses.

Although capitalist interests may dominate U.S. politics, they have been kept in check, to some degree, by other interests, since until recently, the United States had a functioning democracy. McCarthy says these checks ultimately make capitalism sustainable, saving it from itself. He writes:

Sometimes what capitalists want is not what they need. And therefore, to effectively stabilize capitalist social relations, capitalist states need to govern on behalf of capitalism [but] not necessarily at the behest of capitalists…. It must protect capitalist relations of exploitation and domination from the very conditions those relations produce while also ensuring capitalist relations remain dominant in the political economy (36).

Trump is throwing all of this out the window. In many ways, he is giving the capitalists what they want rather than what they need: diminishing workers’ rights to organize, reducing protections from injuries at the workplace, undermining protections from discrimination, removing environmental regulations to allow more pollution of the water and the air, etc.

Promising great wealth for everyone, Trump is setting the capitalists loose while providing nothing for workers. While claiming to be their champion, he is making them more vulnerable.

In addition to making workers physically, emotionally, and financially vulnerable, his policies make their lives more precarious by many of his other decisions — closing Job Corps, which provides vocational training; closing down the Federal Emergency Management Agency; limiting information on disease outbreaks and rationing vaccinations against deadly diseases, etc.

If McCarthy is right, this may result in a deep crisis. Capitalism creates “monsters that it cannot fully control,” and it is dependent upon bureaucratic and democratic governance to be kept in check. Those monsters “also have the capacity to harm the thing that brought them into existence — that is, capitalism itself” (36).

A healthy capitalist system cannot be sustained by a nation of disempowered, unemployed, stressed, poisoned, ill, or abused workers.

Zealotry is unAmerican

 

I was born in 1961, and in the United States in which I grew up, people were suspicious of extremes. A “zealot” was something you did not want to be, religious or otherwise.

That is why the nation’s turn toward extremism in recent years seems surprising and dismaying.

Especially surprising and alarming is the combination of religious and political zealotry.

I saw an article in The Atlantic recently about the New Apostolic Reformation, “The Army of God Comes out of the Shadows” (February 2025). The subhead states: “Tens of millions of American Christians are embracing a charismatic movement known as the New Apostolic Reformation, which seeks to destroy the secular state.”

According to the article, this movement is on “a mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom [of God] as humanity barrels deeper into the End Times.” Anyone opposed to it is, by definition, opposed to God’s will, which makes them a heretic and invalidates their views (and perhaps their rights).

Its members see Donald Trump and MAGA as instruments for bringing about the kingdom. The feeling is mutual, according to the article. Trump (and Elon Musk) see them as instruments to attain their goal: acquiring political power to enrich themselves and avoid time in jail.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, and I do not recall anyone saying that Jesus wanted to create the Kingdom of God as a literal government. I certainly never heard that coercing Christian beliefs and behaviors on other people was advisable. Freedom was a core value: people were free to believe or not, and only those who believed were obligated to follow God’s teachings.

However, the New Apostolic Reformation has other ideas and is intent on creating a theocracy: a government based on their particular version of Christianity. The article states the movement seeks “aggressive social and institutional transformation.”

This strikes me as inherently unAmerican. The article cites a study indicating up to 40 percent of American Christians are part of or approve of the New Apostolic Reformation’s goals. That means they have abandoned freedom.

If freedom is out, then so is democracy.

This situation reminds me of “What Is An American?” by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur. This is the
title of a famous entry in his book Letters from an American Farmer, which was published in 1782. (I assume historian Heather Cox Richardson alludes to this book with the title of her newsletter, Letters from an American.)

Crevecoeur discussed religious fervor in “What is an American?” The American immigrant experience cooled it, and he found that to be a good thing.

One way America was better than Europe (a major topic for him) was “how the various Christian sects introduced wear out, and how religious indifference becomes prevalent.” He said intense religiosity was the source of conflict and division. See how many wars and oppression it had caused in Europe? He described how in a generation or two after immigrants arrived in the colonies, marriages between people of different denominations were common. What people believed was not the concern of others.

He wrote, “How does it concern the welfare of the country… what this man’s religious sentiments are, or really whether he has any at all? He is a good farmer, he is a sober, peaceable, good citizen…. This is the visible character, the invisible one is only guessed at, and is nobody’s business.”

Crevecoeur would be sadly surprised to see religious zeal burning again and to see the return of persecution of those who deviate from the beliefs and behaviors of self-appointed divine rulers – health professionals receiving permission to withhold treatment from others because of religious differences, county clerks refusing to process marriage certificates for people to whose lifestyles they object, books being removed from libraries, etc.

Making another person’s beliefs and lifestyle your business leads to trouble, and Crevecoeur celebrated the tolerance he found in America: “Persecution, religious pride, the love of contradiction are the food of what the world commonly calls religion. These motives have ceased here; zeal in Europe is confined; here it evaporates….”

I wish that were true again.

Using American Meritocracy to Criticize Donald Trump

 

I am conflicted about a recent op-ed that I saw in the Tampa Bay Times: "Don't erode what makes America great" by James Unnever.

 

On the plus side, I think he is speaking the language of right wingers, so they might be inclined to hear his criticism of Donald Trump. He says the United States is a meritocracy (I know, right?) and Trump's choices for his cabinet have not demonstrated any merit that warrants their nominations.

 

On the other hand, his speaking the language of the right wingers makes my head spin.

 

It starts when he suggests that "anyone can go from rags to riches" is a fundamental, common value among Americans. He might even believe it is foundational, that it was something the framers of the Constitution had in mind.

 

I think more Americans are challenging the concept of a meritocracy, because they realize the game is slanted toward the already-wealthy. Most Americans, I think, want enough to be healthy and happy, and not magnificent wealth.

 

The American Dream I grew up with was being able to buy a house and raise a family with comfort and security - not owning multiple yachts. When did that change?

 

Then he says, "Indeed, the Republican party's successful dismantling of affirmative action and its 'war on woke' are meant to reaffirm the United States is a meritocracy." 

 

Some people (such as myself) would counter that the attacks on social justice were waged to keep safe the Myth of American Meritocracy. Republicans have targeted social justice efforts in government and education because those things threatened to reveal how the playing field is not even, and so the rewards are not distributed fairly. Many people of merit have been denied rewards because of their gender, their sexual orientation, the color of their skin, etc. What he sees as meritocracy is white privilege, patriarchy, and colonization for other people. 

 

I was even more upset when I finished reading his column and saw in his biographical blurb that he is a "former professor of criminology." If anyone -- anyone -- knows about systemic inequities it should be a professor of criminology. Tell me you did not learn anything about your academic discipline without telling me you did not learn anything about your academic discipline.

 

Attacks on "woke" frequently include attacks on Critical Race Theory (those attacks also include misleading definitions of it). One of the truths revealed by CRT is how systems that are not explicitly racist can be racist in their results -- such as the criminal justice system in the United States. For instance, criminal laws may not target ethnic minorities in their language, but they do in their enforcement. The professor should know this.

 

People on the right would likely tune me out as soon as they saw the words "white privilege, patriarchy, and colonization," so perhaps someone like this guy is needed to make the criticism of Trump. He can appeal to their American illusions while disillusioning them about Trump's ability to govern.

 

 

OK, Boomer: Peggy Noonan needs to hear the rest of the story

I am 62 years old, but even I am tempted to tell Peggy Noonan, “OK, Boomer.”

That is because she recently published a column titled “Teach Children to Love America,” and although she did not use the word “woke” in her complaint about the current state of grade-school education, I suspect her words were shaped by the political sentiment that justice, fairness, and compassion are somehow bad.

Noonan believes that the nation is not teaching its children to love their country. She says they are “instructed in 100 different ways through 100 different portals that America is and always was a dark and scheming place.” She offers no details about these different ways or portals, she says, because “we all know it” to be true.

She did not win many debate team contests with that strategy: assuming that everyone agrees with you. If they did, there would be no reason to make your claims.

When Noonan and other people voice similar complaints about how and what young people are taught about U.S. history, I believe they are listening to only half of the lesson. When the state of Florida, for instance, makes books about Rosa Parks or Jackie Robinson difficult for young people to access, it seems to be hearing only the parts about oppression or racial prejudice; but those stories are told because Rosa Parks and Jackie Robinson prevailed. They encountered an unjust situation, they fought against it, and they won – and America is a better place because of them.

However, Noonan and others do not hear the whole story. She complains in her editorial that children are taught America’s story is “the history of pushing people around, often in an amoral quest for wealth but also because we aren’t very nice.” The stories children learn do not end there; the stories end with American society being changed, moved, if only a little, toward a wider scope of justice. America’s story is a history people fighting against being pushed around, fighting against being economically exploited by others, and trying to change the behavior of mean or selfish people.

Not long after her column appeared, the iconic baseball player Reggie Jackson attended a game that recognized the Negro Leagues. Speaking on Fox, he remarked on the racism he faced as a Black player in a predominantly White sport in the late 1960s and 1970s. He said, "The racism when I played here, the difficulty of going through different places where we traveled — fortunately I had a manager and I had players on the team that helped me get through it. But I wouldn't wish it on anybody.”

Someone like Noonan may only hear the negative, the description of the nation's recent history of racism. If she did, she is missing the inspiring part of the story: Jackson persevered, and he did so with the help of his manager (white) and fellow players (mostly white). Jackson’s story, like so many stories, is about the hard work of making a nation a better place.

She ends her brief review of the bad stuff by stating another supposed lesson for today’s young people: “And we never meant it about the Declaration.”

Noonan does not state what “we” never meant; she makes her reader assume this. I would venture the guess she is referring to the passage about “all men are created equal.” I assume this because so many people who complain about “wokeness” are really complaining about other Americans fighting for equal rights; those Americans are fighting to have their “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” recognized. The people doing the oppressing – or at least objecting to the extension of rights to others  – treat this request as somehow a denial of their own liberties.

Her mention of the Declaration of Independence reminded me of its famous reference to American Indians; they are described as “merciless Indian savages.” Noonan’s column appeared around the same time as the anniversary of the American Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. One hundred years ago, the United States finally recognized the citizenship of Native people born within its borders. Until then, being born within the U.S. borders to families that had lived here before those borders existed did not automatically bestow citizenship – despite that being the case for everyone else.

Again, a story of progress. Although some American Indians have differing opinions about the Citizenship Act, from the perspective of the expanding civil rights, this is a story of change that Noonan might overlook. The United States still makes life difficult for American Indian communities, but the transition from “merciless Indian savages” to U.S. citizenship illustrates positive change.

Noonan says her Memorial Day sermon was inspired by her recent reading of an old book: A Manual of Patriotism, for use in the public schools of New York, written by Charles Rufus Skinner and published in 1900.

More pressing than the lessons of social justice, according to Noonan, are anodyne lessons about patriotism, including the legends of Betsy Ross and Paul Revere. I write “legends,” because the stories she wants students to learn are generally accepted as fabrications or embellishments. Regardless of whether Betsy Ross sewed the flag used in the American Revolution or whether Paul Revere’s ride happened as described in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, I doubt anyone will be offended by their stories. Also, I would not be surprised to learn these stories are repeated in today’s classrooms, or at least these stories are available to students in their school libraries. That is, the stories favored by Noonan are not being censored.

I looked at the book Noonan likes. It includes some aspirational words from George Washington (surely Noonan would approve!). In describing elements that are required for the success of the new country he led, he wrote the nation needed:

“The prevalence of that pacific and friendly disposition among the people of the United States which will induce them to forget their local prejudices and politics; to make those mutual concessions which are requisite to the general prosperity; and, in some instances, to sacrifice their individual advantages to the interest of the community” (359).

Those opposed to “wokeness” seem to believe recognizing civil rights of people different from themselves somehow diminishes their own rights. Many of them resent being told they enjoy “white privilege” (a phrase the Heritage Foundation wants banished from all school texts), despite its obvious existence and influence – like Noonan says, “We all know it is true.” Washington’s words, if applied today, would be asking some people to “sacrifice their individual advantages,” such as white privilege, to benefit other people.

Washington has another interesting statement in Skinner’s book, another aspect he believed was essential to the nation’s existence and prosperity:

“A sacred regard to public justice” (359).

A scholar of Washington’s writings can correct me if I am wrong, but I interpret “public justice” to be something like “civil rights.” I assume a public justice is a right available to all members of the nation. That is definitely a worthy cause and something that young students should be taught to honor.

If it is sacred, we should treat it that way. Many sacred lessons, including those in the Bible, the importance of which Noonan professes early in her column, tell stories about an important value being violated and the consequences of that transgression; those lessons often are paired with examples of the value being honored and the benefits that follow. If we tell only the feel-good version of the story, we do not get the full lesson.

For instance, we should not ignore the fact that Washington wrote these compelling words while at the same time owning slaves. In his mind, some people did not deserve the public justice he claimed was sacred.

That does not mean we “cancel” Washington, but it gives us the opportunity to recognize our nation’s growth. We can separate the man from his words; we can see that the ideals he espoused were bigger than his own understanding of them.

A deep irony may be lost on those who oppose “wokeness” in the way Noonan and others do while espousing Christian values and traditions. Many times, they do not want any negative stories about American history to be taught, especially stories about injustices or suffering caused by white people. What would happen if they treated their sacred text in the same way? What if we eliminated from the Bible those stories that made humans look bad? What if we eliminated stories of misbehavior and transgression? What if people in church said those stories about human sinfulness made them feel bad about being human? There might not be much left of the Bible.

I grew up attending a Southern Baptist church, and we understood the Old Testament as being the story of God’s chosen people moving in and out of His favor, based on their behavior. I see this as analogous to the United States. Its history is one of forward and backward movement in the nation’s understanding of freedom and responsibility, of extending rights and recognition to an ever-widening circle of humanity. This expansion has been achieved with great difficulty and often with violent backlash. Yet we keep trying.