You get to pick your values in this life, and the ones I have chosen are love and kindness. 1 Consciously choosing such things causes me to feel a host of emotions, and one in particular stands out as unpleasant: guilt. Sometimes I don't "live up to" those values, or even act contrary to them. Sometimes I am unkind or even hateful. Still, I need something to live up to and live for - more on that later. But writing a public declaration of those values causes me some real problems. Because telling you that I have them, and allowing you to believe that I am a loving or a kind person when I know that I am not always such things, makes me feel like a hypocrite. I don't want to just play the part, but I'm lazy and selfish in most of my actions. It's easy enough to say such things and not do much towards them, and then I feel like "playing the part" is all that I am doing. But that's not the core problem I want to explore. If you decide to be a loving and kind person then you necessarily decide to act in a loving and kind way; how do you do that? More specifically, what does that even mean when we are living in such globally "unkind" times, where, for instance, your energy consumption habits indirectly cause people in other parts of the globe to have to leave their homes after they've become uninhabitable due to climate change? (And that very same lifestyle, in a different area with a different energy source, might have no such impact.) Climate change isn't the only such "globally unkind" problem. Let's try another example: does it still "count" to practice kindness to your neighbors if your day job is benefiting a company that destroys local communities? New research has shown something about Walmart what some people have always felt - that it makes poorer the communities they operate in. 2 Is someone who works there necessarily unkind or unloving if, knowing this, they continue to work there? Or what about the reverse, does it "count" just as much or more or less if a person takes a stand to boycott a community-damaging organization regardless of how they treat the people they interact with? Is it enough to only practice love and kindness "locally" to those people immediately around you or to those able to directly interact with you, or must every action be measured against this extraordinary and "global" standard?
In some ways my mind thinks there is an "obvious right answer". I'll let you reflect on what that might be or if there even is one. But for me, I'm already wondering if my interest in these questions are really just distractions. So long as I am busy thinking about and writing about carbon emissions or microeconomics I can continue to be selfish and lazy and not actually practice any love or kindness towards people around me. The time spent writing this, after all, is time spent in isolation from any interactions with people. It's time spent where I have no opportunities to be loving or kind to someone else. Even my motivation is suspect - I'm writing to get the affirmation of strangers on the internet, of a few people who have met me in person, and of the imaginary audience inside my head. So maybe I am just playing a part.
Maybe. These values don't come out of thin air. I'm Christian - in the sense that I believe in a God who created space and time and a Jesus who is God-incarnate and who died for our sins and rose again. A lot of my personal theology - even the idea of "sin" - has changed from when I first became a Christian. Where salvation used to mean to me an event and a litmus test it now means a process that unfolds over a lifetime, and the idea of "living up to" those values is really just watching that process unfold as I learn how to be more loving and more kind. Those values are a logical consequence of that theology, and while I don't care to show my work for that assertion in this essay, it is important for me to let you know that. It means that those values aren't arbitrary for me, that they flow directly from those beliefs and are imbued with a certain transcendental quality. When I chose to act in a loving and kind way, versus the alternative, I am not just upholding my values but also acting in a way that transcends time and space and everything therein. I know that I am not the only one who has arrived at these values, and many of you who have didn't get here from any religious inspiration. 3 Whatever path we took to get here, I suspect that we have similar struggles: what does it mean to be loving and kind in a world full of such unkind hate? How much of your life should be spent on the "global" forms of love and how much should we focus on being kind in the "local"? 4 While my explorations of these questions are rooted in my religious beliefs, I am writing this in hopes that it might help others, too. 5 So please accept this offering of love and kindness.
Actually, my latest ideas on these questions are hardly religious at all. Rather, they follow from thoughts about democracies, how they function, and when they go awry. 6 7 I used to feel very smug about having thought that I understood what makes democracy work and would tell anyone who would listen what I had found: that proportional representation is best, that parliamentary systems of government were more resilient than presidential systems, and that these "global" 8 structures of government matter. Therefore I thought that what was needed for any political improvements anywhere were changes to voting systems, or constitutions, or EU treaties, or something of that sort. And maybe changes to those things do matter, but I've changed my mind since feeling so smug and now believe that those things only matter on the margins. The exact details aren't all that important so long as (1) there is some mechanism to transfer power peacefully through reason and persuasion and not through force or coercion 9 and (2) the people have a strong respect for this mechanism. When you look at where democracies have worked to preserve liberty and where they have turned into violations of human rights or into authoritarianism, the key variable isn't the structure of government or the mechanism of voting but how much the people being governed have had a culture of democracy. 10 If you think about the question "How much do love and kindness need to be expressed locally around you versus how much should you try to exercise them by affecting global change?" then the analogous question could be "How much does local civic involvement matter in preserving democracy and liberty and how much does it matter to try to affect change in the structure of government itself?"
There's a period of American history that helped change my mind, and that I think helps to illustrate this analogy between "love and kindness to those around you versus on global issues" on the one hand and "local civic engagement versus government reform" on the other. It's a slice of American history covering roughly the span of one adult lifetime, from the start of the Gilded Age in 1870 to the end of the Progressive Era in the 1920s, and to understand the analogy we need to sketch a brief course of the political problems of the period and how solutions evolved. It's a truism at this point that our current era has many similarities with the turn of the 20th century, especially in geopolitics (e.g. irredentism is back in style) and in anxieties about how technology is driving socioeconomic change (e.g. people were reflecting then on how global trade and faster communication were changing how we live). 11 Those technological advances also drove unprecedented levels of wealth inequality, with entire industries being dominated by single oligarchs - think of J.P. Morgan, Vanderbilt, or Rockefeller. Immigration and urbanization rabidly changed the landscape. Denver, a new Western city, grew twenty-fold in the same number of years while Chicago went from a village to a city of millions, with many of these new immigrants coming from South and Southeastern Europe. With all this wealth inequality, technological innovation, and social change came opportunities for corruption. Political machines - local parties controlled by a boss who had the support and backing of the aforementioned oligarchs - controlled urban politics. When these machines could successfully mobilize their vote and win elections, the "spoils system" meant that lucrative government jobs went to loyal supporters who would then protect the oligarch's business interests. Merit and competency were not often considered. Though I lack the skills in sociology to describe how ordinary people lived through the start to the end of this period, I can draw some inferences from statistics and vital data. Even while the economy boomed and technological innovation pushed GDP to higher and higher levels, the poor governance that resulted from corruption and wealth inequality pushed living standards down. Infant mortality, for instance, actually rose from 1870 to 1880, and real income stagnated from the 1870s through to the early 20th century. 12
Yet by the end of our period in the 1920s infant mortality had nearly been cut in half, real wages increased, anti-trust legislation helped reduce (not eliminate) corruption and unfair business practices, children were educated in schools instead of working in mines or factories, and workers had gotten weekends, 8 hour days, pensions, and other protections. Naively, you could point to a number of large-scale government reforms that brought about this increase in the standard of living. Women had gotten the right to vote and senators were directly elected rather than appointed by corrupt business interests. Yet this high-level view misses several important details. The _organization_ behind the women's suffrage movement had its roots in reading groups that appeared near the start of our period of interest. These groups shifted from literary pursuits to civic and social issues. 13 In fact, the start of our period saw a flurry of local, civically minded groups form. From the Knights of Columbus to Big Brothers to Rotary to Boy Scouts to the YMCA, all of these organizations started as local groups in this period. It was only after the establishment of these groups, or even after the revitalization of churches, that we started to see local political change at the state level: secret ballots in Kentucky, popular referenda in South Dakota, and so on. And afterwards, only at the end of our period, do we see national reform like women's suffrage or the direct election of senators.
The narrative I've painted, at least, makes it clear that those national changes started not from efforts on affecting global change but from local civic organizations working with the people near them on the problems that affected them. If the analogy between practicing love and kindness locally versus globally holds then we have some answers. If local civic involvement over time leads to national political reform, high living standards, and lower corruption then maybe practicing love and kindness to our neighbors can lead to a kinder world. It isn't clear at all the mechanism by which looking out for your neighbors would stop wars or prevent climate change, but those participating in a women's reading group after the American Civil War probably didn't foresee that reading Dante's Inferno would a few decades later change the Constitution to make certain they had the right to vote.
There's also some counter examples here. I had named a few local, civically-minded groups but I neglected a big one. The Ku Klux Klan started in our period, and its members certainly would have felt they were banding together for a local, civic interest in protecting their white heritage - and now we have an example of local civic involvement leading to anti-democratic, anti-human rights, and anti-liberty changes. If we had a hypothetical person who is interested in local civic issues joining the KKK, then the analogous person on the love/kindness side might be a person interesting in practicing love and kindness to those around them but who also works for Big Tobacco, or a health care company or insurance company engaged in profit gouging, or any other (less hateful and anti-democratic than the KKK perhaps, but still unkind) industry. Even this counter-example is illustrative, however. As on both sides of the analogy we can see a problem with the narrow definition of "local" - the KKK joiner excludes black people from their definition of local and the Big Tobacco employee excludes customers from their recipients of kindness. So maybe it isn't a focus on global issues that is necessary to prevent such hatred, maybe what is needed is an ever-expanding definition of local, to ensure that we don't have any blind spots in determining who is our neighbor that we need to love.
This analogy between politics and practicing love and kindness is more than just illustrative for our local versus global question, they also support each other. All politics is effectively local, and these "global issues" require political action at the local level. If local civic involvement is the key to better politics, and ultimately improved lives, then how else could that start except by practicing love and kindness to one's local neighbors? I had started by stating that my values of love and kindness came from my Christian faith. The American Protestant Evangelical church in our times has merged its politics with its beliefs, but those politics are divisive and focused on national reform. 14 It turns out that Jesus' commandment to "love your neighbor" is better theology, better practice, and even better politics.