EACH AND ALL AND BOTH

Wisdom Wherever You Find It
 
Democracy is not an a la carte system. You must value the common good.     Peggy Noonan
Liberal democratic politics is dependent on our other identities.   Michael Walzer
 
I had a hard time choosing between these two pieces of wisdom to inspire this column, so I chose them both.  It seems to me they express the same essential insights, though from different perspectives.
 
Peggy Noonan is a Roman Catholic, Michael Walzer is a Jew.  Noonan is conservative, Walzer is liberal.  She is a capitalist, and he leans toward socialism and communitarianism.  She is mostly Republican, and he is more likely to support Democrats.  Both are proud to be Americans.
 
They see eye to eye on an essential truth that is melting in the heat of our current rhetorical intensity.
 
One of the blessings of the American ethos is the lifting up of the worth of the individual.  When the Declaration of Independence declares that “all men are created equal,” we understand (today, after processing this claim for hundreds of years) that it means “each person is created equal.”  In legislative and judicial halls and in political contests, we have debated and refined the notion of equality.  In fact, I might even claim we have come to appreciate what my colleague Rabbi Jeremy Winaker calls “radical equality.”  I know that for some folks, the word “radical” is a red flag.  But here, I mean it in its generic meaning – taking the concept of equality to its logical limits.
 
In recent years, equity has been added to the concept.  Many claim (and I agree) that before people can claim to guarantee equality, the playing field must be level.  An illustration I saw showed two kids standing behind the fence around a ballfield, watching the game.  The ground was flat, but the kids were of different heights.  In that sense, they were equal.  But the short kid couldn’t see the field.  So, a box was place for the short kid to stand on.  That’s equity that leads to equality.
 
All of that is well and good in theory, and few among us would object to such simple measures to ensure equal opportunity.  Yet the circumstances that Noonan and Walzer talk about are not so easily resolved.  Those that feel entitled to their rights and privileges are sometimes unwilling to create equitable and equal circumstances for others if they fear losing the full measure of those rights and privileges.  Before you get too judgey about others, consider that we all have those tendencies – the very few among us would elect to live in reduced circumstances as a way of making things more even. However, the idea that saves us from devolving into a dog-eat-dog society is the common good, the by-product of liberal democratic politics.
 
To their dismay – and mine – that commitment to promote the general welfare is what feels like it is slipping away.  Everybody, I think, endorses the notion of the general welfare (as long as it’s not what some people call subsidized unemployment), but the hyper-individualism that afflicts us makes each person’s definition of it more a reflection of the life they want to live rather than the common good.
 
Peggy Noonan suggests that the democracy we seek to preserve is not divisible into component parts which any given person sorts into like-and-dislike piles. The ability to live your best life is dependent on equitable opportunities for others to do the same.  You might get away with a me-first approach for a while, but it is the fool who doesn’t recognize the fragility life that ignores the totality for the sake of the particular.
 
Michael Walzer insists that our society, a liberal democracy (liberal, like radical, in its generic meaning) demands that each of us bring the whole self to the party, needs and gifts alike, commonalities and distinctiveness together.  The individual has, in turn, the rightful expectation that such wholeness will be embraced.  Denying or concealing the unique aspects of identity shortchanges the body politic and disables the interactions that allow our democracy to thrive.
 
I think Noonan and Walzer would laugh if I suggested they had the same message on any level other than general principle.  But I will take the chance at causing them a little entertainment.  Equality, leavened with a commitment to equity, can be achieved in different ways (which may be their point of mutual departure).  However we get there, the destination for each of us is a place of commonality that values the essence of who we are.