The Pity Party (9 page)

What is true across time is also true across distance. An exponent of this position was Adam Smith, in
The Wealth of Nations
:

By necessaries I understand, not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. . . . Custom . . . has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England. The poorest creditable person of either sex would be ashamed to appear in public without them. In Scotland, custom has rendered them a necessary of life to the lowest order of men; but not to the same order of women, who may, without any discredit, walk about bare-footed. In France, they are necessaries neither to men nor to women; the lowest rank of both sexes appearing there publicly, without any discredit, sometimes in wooden shoes, and sometimes bare-footed. Under necessaries therefore, I comprehend, not only those things which nature, but those things which the established rules of decency have rendered necessary to the lowest rank of people.

It will be noted that the point of this discussion was taxation, not any eighteenth-century forerunner of the welfare state. Smith was not urging Parliament to enact a Shoe Stamps program, one that would have been obviated by the established rules of decency in France. His point, rather, was that taxes should do no more to encumber people of modest means than the state's fiscal circumstances require. “It must always be remembered . . . that it is the luxurious and not the necessary expence of the inferior ranks of people that ought ever to be taxed.”
⁹
The modern tax code adheres to Smith's logic by exempting some income from taxation. For example, the federal income tax exemption, currently $3,700 per person, leaves a large portion of a poor family's income exempt from income taxes, but only a fraction of a prosperous family's. States and cities that exempt groceries and medications from sales taxes adhere to the same principle.

Clearly, however, the idea that deprivation is relative rather than just absolute lends itself to the expanded government responsibilities that include giving things to people, as well as taxing them away. A Social Security Administration researcher came up with the first “poverty line” in 1965 by calculating the cost of a spare but adequate diet for a year, then multiplying that total by three, based on Department of Agriculture studies showing that the typical family devoted one-third of its spending to food. Lyndon Johnson declared unconditional war on poverty in 1964 and the Office of Economic Opportunity, the agency he created to wage it, began using the new poverty line in 1965, four years before it became “the federal government's official statistical definition of poverty.”
¹⁰
Almost from the start, however, activists and experts have called for a relative poverty line—40, 50, or 60 percent of the median income are the measures most commonly advocated—to supplement or even supplant the absolute one. A relative poverty line, according to an advocate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, does “a better job” than any absolute measure at “capturing the change over time in broad public consensus . . . on the minimum amount of income that an American family needs to ‘get along' in their local community.”
¹¹

If the poverty that should really concern us is always relative, however, certain paradoxes become unavoidable. A relative definition, Minogue points out, can have “the perverse effect of showing poverty on the increase in times of prosperity and on the decrease in times of depression when the average goes down.”
¹²
A family can, that is, become simultaneously better off (in absolute terms) and worse off (in relative terms) if its quality of life is improving, but improving less rapidly than the standards of the other families with which it compares itself. By the same logic, it can be said to be prospering if its situation is deteriorating more slowly than that of other families. Furthermore, a relative poverty line affects a moral amalgamation of the suffering brought about by one's own economic setbacks and the suffering caused by the gnawing awareness of others' gains. Whenever a friend succeeds, Gore Vidal once said, a little something in me dies. This is a shaky foundation on which to build a friendship, but an even worse one for governing a nation.

And, to return to this chapter's central paradox, relativizing poverty and suffering has the effect of soothing rather than prodding Americans' consciences. There is no “broad public consensus” on the minimum income a generic global family needs to get along in a generic local community. In its absence, stipulating that the suffering that truly compassionate people work to alleviate is deprivation relative to whatever the “custom of the country renders indecent for creditable people” necessarily sanctions slight regard for Mpinga's troubles by sensitive souls who lie awake at night tormented by thoughts of Betsy's.

It remains impossible, however, to believe that any self-congratulatory liberal actually does congratulate himself on having so little empathy left over for Mpinga. The most elemental gratification of
being
a liberal, after all, is to regard oneself superior to the cold, callous bastards who are always so adept at coming up with reasons for feeling little and doing less about other people's suffering. The thought of resembling such troglodytes is intolerable.

This tension, which makes Betsy Wilson's needs more urgent than Mpinga Bomboku's while also leaving liberals with a troubled conscience about their treatment of Mpinga, could be easily resolved by making patriotism a powerful variable in the moral equations. Betsy is an American, Mpinga isn't. Therefore, Americans have no need to be defensive about making her needs a high priority and his a much lower one.

Liberals do not, however, wish to draw deeply from this well. Liberal compassion derives from a belief in human affinity beneath the skin, which could solve many problems thought insoluble if only we would let it. Any appeal to patriotism takes us, according to that logic, in the direction of greater particularism and distrust, rather than greater cooperation and empathy. Patriots—both people devoted to a particular country and, more generally, those who believe devotion to any decent regime is honorable—are challenged by liberalism to demonstrate that patriotism is different from, or does not necessarily culminate in, jingoism, imperialism, ethnocentrism, and racism. Patriots are burdened in this task by the progress liberalism has made in setting the terms of the debate, in which respect for equality and fraternity proscribes favoritism toward any subset of the race rather than embracing all as equal, valued members of the human family.

“Should we not begin to redefine patriotism?” asked the historian Howard Zinn in 2003. Zinn was the type of leftist who makes liberals uncomfortable, less because they disagreed with things he said than because his unmodulated formulations extrapolated their principles in ways they found awkward to endorse. Zinn was a hero to those columnist Ross Douthat described as “street liberals,” for whom “[p]rotests and activism aren't just hobbies . . . or a chance to go slumming with the working class—they're a way of life.” Zinn was
not
, by virtue of complicating their political labors and self-regard, a hero to Douthat's “parlor liberals,” who “are ultimately well disposed to the world and to their privileged place in it, believing that what injustices there are can be righted without too much political upheaval and unrest. . . .”
¹³

Zinn made the pacifism and globalism inherent in liberalism uncomfortably clear when he called for expanding patriotism “beyond that narrow nationalism which has caused so much death and suffering. If national boundaries should not be obstacles to trade—we call it globalization—should they also not be obstacles to compassion and generosity?” Strobe Talbott, a parlor liberal of unsurpassable respectability—veteran of
Time
magazine, deputy secretary of state under President Bill Clinton, and president of the Brookings Institution since 2002—was sufficiently cautious, when writing in 1992, to frame his hope for a world where “nationhood as we know it will be obsolete [and] all states will recognize a single, global authority,” as a
prediction
about a future that would be realized by the year 2100, rather than a demand to get on with the delegitimizing and dismantling of nation-states forthwith.
¹⁴

Still, his intent was unmistakable. It took the terrors of the twentieth century, Talbott argued, to “clinch the case for world government.” That future marks the final turn away from the organized savagery that is nationalism. Validated by myths and symbols, it has defined and deformed human history:

The forerunner of the nation was a prehistoric band clustered around a fire beside a river in a valley. Its members had a language, a set of supernatural beliefs and a repertoire of legends about their ancestors. Eventually they forged primitive weapons and set off over the mountain, mumbling phrases that could be loosely translated as having something to do with “vital national interests” and “manifest destiny.” When they reached the next valley, they massacred and enslaved some weaker band of people they found clustered around some smaller fire and thus became the world's first imperialists.
¹⁵

Talbott's disdain for the nation-state marks no radical departure from liberal thinking. His argument, rather, is fully congruent with the worldview of Woodrow Wilson. “The Wilsonian vision,” Walter Lippmann wrote in 1952, “is of a world in which there are no lasting rivalries, where there are no deep conflicts of interest, where no compromises of principle have to be made, where there are no separate spheres of influence, and no alliances. In this world there will be no wars except universal war against criminal governments who rebel against the universal order.” Thus, “In the Wilsonian ideology an aggression is an armed rebellion against the universal and eternal principles of the world society.” In the Wilsonian spirit, FDR's secretary of state Cordell Hull proclaimed in 1943 that the Allies, including Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, had settled on a post–World War II framework that would hasten the day when “there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements by which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests.”
¹⁶

Geopolitics is a particularly fraught enterprise for liberals, given their misgivings about patriotism as such. Assessing, in 1999, how the Clinton administration was trying after the Cold War to realize the vision Cordell Hull had embraced before it, Charles Krauthammer found it necessary to point out, “Foreign policy is not social work.” Clinton, along with his advisors and admirers, had turned the most basic principles of international politics inside out, Krauthammer argued: the moral test of any foreign intervention had become how
little
it mattered to the United States. This stance followed directly from “an abiding liberal antipathy to any notion of national interest”: “Indeed, in the new liberal orthodoxy, it is only disinterested intervention—in a word, humanitarianism—that is pristine enough to justify the use of force. Violence undertaken for the purpose of securing interests is not.”
¹⁷

Purely humanitarian interventions, however, are subject to the same compassion trap as are domestic policy measures: the suffering that really needs to be alleviated is the beholders', not that endured by the beheld. This was the acid judgment of German author Peter Schneider in 1995 regarding NATO's ineffectual, dithering response to Serbian atrocities against Bosnian Muslims:

We knew from the beginning of the war what can no longer be concealed: Western threats and initiatives were meant primarily to ease the suffering of the European onlookers rather than that of the victims themselves. These initiatives followed a domestic-policy logic typical among wealthy nations: the main intent was to pacify citizens on the home front.
¹⁸

If the true liberal is not too sure that he's right, as Learned Hand argued, then the true patriot is not too sure that his country is right. When announcing his candidacy for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination, Senator George McGovern said, “Thoughtful Americans understand that the highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one's country deep enough to call her to a higher standard.”
¹⁹
That formulation of the problem came naturally to McGovern, who grew up the son of a Methodist minister and enrolled in seminary himself before commencing academic and, later, political careers. There are higher truths and duties than those defined by loyalty to a particular nation.

The solution—at least in abstract terms—to the problem patriotism poses for liberals is to insist that the patriot's duty is to bring the nation he loves into closer conformity with those higher truths, rather than to acquiesce in compromising those transcendent truths for the sake of national pride or unity. To oppose an unjust war, as McGovern understood himself to be doing with respect to Vietnam, was the very opposite, then, of being a disloyal fifth columnist. When a nation conducted a misbegotten, indefensible war, it was unpatriotic to prolong it for the sake of “staying the course” or “peace with honor.” Instead, the patriotic imperative was to oppose it by “call[ing] America home to the ideals that nourished us from the beginning,” as McGovern said in his 1972 acceptance speech.
²⁰

The higher patriotism, fixed on standards above national interest, is a concept that can be traced back to the New Testament. In three of the four gospels Jesus escapes the Pharisees' efforts to “entangle” him with a question about paying tribute to Caesar by saying, “Render theretofore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's.” Jesus's implication that divine obligations are distinct from and may take precedence over secular political ones is clear, but the questions of
which
things are Caesar's, which are God's, and what to do when the two conflict remain.