The Right to Live Comfortably
How America and the world have been failing to live up to their potential, and how we can turn things around
In the final weeks before the fateful 2016 election, Saturday Night Live ran a segment of their recurring series “Black Jeopardy,” usually featuring two Black contestants and one white guest, recreating the popular game show format. Tom Hanks played this episode’s visitor, a white, blue-collar red-hat wearer named Doug, who, despite a few missteps, managed to relate to the host and other contestants, in part through his cynical repartees that iPhones asking for your thumbprint is “how they get ‘ya” and “they already decided who wins [elections] before it even happens.” That lasted until the Final Jeopardy category’s reveal, “Lives That Matter.” As Doug begins to respond, the segment ends as the host segues to an ad break, with the implication that the rest of his response would go over badly. In addition to being entertaining comedy, it straightforwardly poses a vital question: which lives matter? (alternatively phrased, whose lives matter?)
Really ask yourself that. At this moment, there is seemingly no right answer, and the lack of one is not only ruining American politics, but actively throwing world affairs into chaos.
With the last year’s resurgence of activism regarding racial injustice, arguably no phrase has been simultaneously rallied behind and criticized more than “Black Lives Matter.” The divide is ultimately due to a fundamental misunderstanding: the implied existence of a “Too” at the end, as opposed to a perceived “More.” It’s clear that the former is the intended meaning, and that it’s no different from how saying “save the Amazon” doesn’t mean you don’t also care about endangered coral reefs, for instance. If your answer to the above question was “all lives,” it inevitably comes across as invalidating the unique experiences of historically and currently marginalized communities. And yet, because of how the English language works, this extra context is needed to get the message across, a difficult ask in such a polarized environment.
In the United States, the two major parties represent fundamentally different, mutually irreconcilable responses to this question. It’s easy to see the Republicans’ answer, and as loudly as they might tell you otherwise, it certainly isn’t “all lives”: anyone struggling to make ends meet and in need of healthcare, anyone looking for a quality education (without getting shot), anyone seeking a better life in our country than what they had at home, gets called lazy and entitled at best, and murderers and rapists at worst. Nowhere in the leadership of the “Grand” Old Party is left any trace of compassion for anyone that doesn’t fit their extreme fundamentalist ideology (especially if you happen not to have the correct skin color, gender or political views).
The Democrats, on the other hand, for all of their shortcomings, will tell you that each of those people do matter, and that it’s the government’s moral duty to better their standard of living. Nowhere in their promotion of equal rights and opportunities do they advocate taking rights away from those who have them already, apart from the right to exploit other people with impunity. And yet, millions of people remain convinced that Democrats are enemies of the American way of life. What do people on the left need to do to reunite the country, not just ruling over Trumpers, but helping to deradicalize them?
One of the most important steps that our society can take is to depoliticize the truth. In the scientific community, certain concepts are regarded as self-evident, like Einstein’s theory of general relativity. As science relies on evidence, rather than proofs, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence in relativity’s favor is sufficient that its veracity can simply be taken as a given, despite the word theory in its name. Of course, it’s possible that one day a scientist will come along and develop a theory that will make relativity obsolete, just as Einstein did with Newton’s theory of gravitation (which is still accurate enough that it flew the Apollo missions to the Moon), but that doesn’t mean scientific conferences have to accommodate relativity deniers or gravitation skeptics, because there isn’t a debate about whether or not these are useful as models of the world; we just know they are.
Similarly, when objective proof is available, there is simply no more need for debate. For the first time in human history, people have actually been to space and confirmed what Eratosthenes derived over 2,000 years ago using crude distance measurements and trigonometry — that the Earth is round. Any “argument” to the contrary is invariably replete with logical fallacies, meaning that no self-respecting scientist would take it seriously, not because they’re part of some grand conspiracy, but because the jury is already in and it would be a waste of time.
Because decarbonizing the world’s industries would come at a cost to the business executives who benefit from the status quo, they mounted a far-reaching, well-documented campaign to create the image of a nuanced policy debate, rather than a definitive scientific consensus. In depoliticizing the truth, we would be able to shift the debate from whether or not the climate emergency is real, to what we ought to do about it, alongside many other issues, such as how to handle future pandemics.
However, the physical sciences aren’t the only kind that many people have come to habitually deny. Just as widely disregarded, and not as often promoted in these terms, is the science of how to run a society. Just as we now hold the scientific theory of relativity to be self-evident, we need a humanitarian theory of civil society upon which the rest of our politics would be built. By focusing on the big picture, and reframing individual issues (racial justice, wealth inequality, sustainability, etc.) as steps along the way, and inviting everybody to learn and participate, the left can make the promise of a better society irresistible.
Just as the theory of relativity enables us to make predictions about the interactions of matter on a cosmic scale, what might a theory of civil society tell us, if we had one? I believe it might say that for a society to thrive, or even function well, access to each of the following six necessities, in order of increasing complexity, must be unconditionally and non-negotiably guaranteed to every single one of its people:
- Water — essential to all life on Earth, without which survival is impossible. Around 785 million people, or over one in ten humans worldwide, lack access to clean water and sanitation services.
- Food — similar to water, humans cannot thrive without nourishment. Around 821 million people, or close to one in nine humans, experience chronic hunger.
- Safety — the ability to live knowing that one won’t be placed in physical jeopardy, be it in the household, the workplace or the public square. Around 1.6 billion people, or over one in five humans, live in inadequate housing conditions, and an estimated 415 million children, or close to one in five kids worldwide, are growing up in active war zones, nearly double the amount in the early 1990s.
- Infrastructure — in addition to helping address the previous three, many different kinds of infrastructure exist, ranging from electricity for lighting, heating, cooking and access to the internet, to railroads and highways, which provide greater freedom of movement, to public green spaces in cities, shown to be beneficial for mental and physical health. Around 840 million people, or close to one in nine humans, lack access to electricity, and 55% of the world’s population now lives in cities, projected to expand to 68% by 2050.
- Healthcare — if one experiences a chronic condition, is caught in an accident or is violently assaulted, modern medicine can help them return to their normal life, to say nothing of its crucial role during a pandemic. Several billion people, or around one in two humans, lack access to essential health services.
- Education — a way for people to gain an understanding of the world around them, expand their opportunities, and become responsible citizens. Around 260 million children, or over one in nine kids, lack access to primary education, and an estimated 773 million adults are illiterate.
Almost every challenge the modern world is currently facing can probably be traced to some deficiency in the above six necessities. As you might imagine, these astronomical shortages are far from distributed equally, with a significant majority belonging to the so-called Global South, covering most of sub-Saharan Africa, southern Asia and Latin America — the formerly colonized world. Many countries, as a result of not having these six resources already, simply lack the means to put them in place, creating a seemingly impossible-to-break-out-of cycle.
The United States, despite being the richest country in history, also continues to fail on all six counts, from the ubiquity of food deserts to the medical and student debt crises, with the brunt similarly falling disproportionately on certain communities. All of the above has been exacerbated by the pandemic, and will continue to be by the effects of the climate emergency. Over the past year, the pervading sense of society’s sudden out-of-controlness (which really began for many during the 2008 Great Recession) has directly contributed to the proliferation of extremism and conspiracy theories, sometimes leading to the election of politicians whose actions also serve to entrench the cycle, just as it did in Germany ninety years ago in the fallout of the Great Depression.
Despite the UN’s repeated initiatives pushing for change, such as the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, meaningful progress can’t happen without significant commitments from countries themselves, which the UN remains unable to actually enforce. The result is an international community that pays lip service to human rights, but allows untold atrocities to play out with little interference; in other words, that still has a quite exclusive answer to the question, whose lives matter?
Many people might reasonably ask how providing the six necessities to everyone would be paid for. The resources to do so certainly exist, and many potential solutions, such as taxing the rich higher or decreasing military spending, have already been discussed at length. But why are such things so expensive in the first place? Think of the cost of doing something like building a wind farm. Congress passes a bill allocating $10 million of our tax money to Nebrakota Windmills, Inc., and the President signs it. What is that company going to do with the money? They’re going to pay their employees (hopefully, at least) in exchange for them carrying out a specific set of tasks with the end result of a completed wind farm. What do those employees need the money for, though? It’s not like you throw dollar bills at the parts and a windmill assembles itself. They need the money to pay the rent, buy food, save up for their kids’ education — especially because they know that if they can’t, there very well might be no one to step in and help them out other than a handful of anonymous GoFundMe donors. (Realistically, a lot more money is also going to Nebrakota’s CEO and board of trustees than they actually need, while their employees are barely scraping by).
That’s also why Republicans were so resistant to “shutting down the economy” even momentarily in order to curb the spread of Covid — it was a tacit admission that the economy runs more and more heavily on people who have no choice but to work exorbitant hours, much like serfs under feudalism, which they don’t plan to do anything about. We can see how a key part of the challenge is the aforementioned cycle that creates the impression that things can’t be achieved without having them already, i.e. much of the reason it would cost so much money to implement such a system is because the people who would do the work to create it need money in order to ensure their own access to the six necessities, and a lot of people would need to be involved. In many cases, though, that may be all it is — an impression. A lot of the time, just ripping off the band-aid with an initial deficit-producing investment is more than worth the long-term benefit, as a California town’s recent experiment with universal basic income to address houselessness showed:
An exclusive new analysis of data from the demonstration project shows that a lack of resources is its own miserable trap. The best way to get people out of poverty is just to get them out of poverty; the best way to offer families more resources is just to offer them more resources.
There are many people who would question what makes pursuing such “ambitious” ideals a worthwhile goal. To them, things like poverty and pandemics are, at least for the foreseeable future, unavoidable facts of life that we just have to learn to live with. Even though that may very well have been true for much of history, this fatalistic worldview, taken to its natural conclusion, can very easily be taken to mean that people are ultimately powerless over their destinies and that nothing we do or experience matters in the long run. I don’t claim to have conclusive evidence showing that that’s not true, but often times, this view is influenced by our modern astronomical discoveries, which have illustrated the Earth’s seeming insignificance compared to the vastness of the universe. One of the most well-known examples of this is the Pale Blue Dot photograph, famously narrated by Carl Sagan:
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. — Carl Sagan, 1994
When faced with knowledge like this, it’s easy to jump to the conclusion that the human experience really is meaningless, but that’s not how I interpret it at all. In a universe seemingly so inhospitable to life, I believe our blue oasis is all the more important because we live here, and that the highest ideal we can aspire to is to build a world that works more often than not for everyone who lives on it; it’s just the right thing to do.
Many people don’t realize how this is in everybody’s self-interest. In a world where random acts of injustice prevail, who’s to say that you or someone close to you won’t be next, regardless of who you happen to be? The planet-wide tragedy of the commons that we’re heading towards is being precipitated by a misguided perception of what it means to act in one’s own self-interest, i.e. to take advantage of the most resources, land and people in an endlessly competitive struggle to insulate oneself from becoming a target of injustice, when in reality, no one can stay on top like that indefinitely, especially not when everyone does it. The “invisible hand” of the market isn’t looking 50 years ahead, it’s quite often only looking toward the next quarter.
All you need to do to see how well things have been going without a theory of civil society is look around. Ever since Reagan imbued the ideal of “small government” into American politics, the social security system inherited from FDR’s New Deal (which successfully helped facilitate the recovery from the Great Depression) has been steadily dismantled in the name of “rugged individualism.” The Republican Party has radicalized to the point where even asking someone to do anything to contribute to others, like something as simple as putting on a mask, is seen as tantamount to a violent assault on their freedoms, as if being made to get unnecessarily exposed to Covid isn’t (let alone things like getting exploited into working exorbitant hours). Even when they themselves end up paying the price, they just pretend as if things are fine. The national — and worldwide — experiment on what happens if you leave everyone to fend for themselves; what happens if you systematically refuse to provide for people’s needs, pursuing policies of “austerity” instead; what happens if you bury your head in the sand in times of national and international crisis, has delivered unequivocal results: it’s the societal equivalent of bloodletting, which doctors don’t do anymore because they know better now; it’s been conclusively shown that it does exactly the opposite of the intended goal, generating stagnation rather than progress. As the past year has made abundantly clear, this way objectively doesn’t work.
At this moment, as a result of the sheer incompetency that was on full display under Trump and the severe consequences thereof, the new administration has an opportunity to demonstrate the good that government can do. A clear demonstration of this is the fact that hundreds of millions of people have been able to receive a Covid vaccine at absolutely no cost to them other than transportation. Polls have repeatedly shown that the Democratic agenda enjoys a wide majority of support across the country (in some cases, even among Republicans, if not Republican elected officials). Even though many Trumpers would likely be hard-pressed to admit that they might have been wrong, it could go a long way for Democrats to make real, substantial improvements to their quality of life. Until then, because progressives and elected officials can’t just snap their fingers and make these things happen, one of the most important things you can do is to get involved, whatever that looks like for you, especially now as we finally approach the end of the pandemic.
There’s a reason why science fiction stories like Star Trek, and space travel accomplishments in general, are seen as so inspiring. They represent a future in which humanity has successfully made the transition to a wise, mature and responsible steward of our planet and the space beyond; where things like poverty and pandemics are read about in the history books, not experienced in day-to-day life; where every person’s life matters, not just in principle, but in practice. Star Trek’s flawed but still utopian United Federation of Planets is actually everything the real-life UN aspires to be.
That’s within the realm of possibility for us, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy. After all, it’s barely been attempted throughout most of history. Right now, we have a once-in-a-civilization opportunity to bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice. If we squander it, and allow the climate emergency to set us back centuries or millennia, it would be a betrayal of everything we say we stand for. We have to collectively adopt as a guiding principle the idea that there may be in fact no such thing as a problem with society that lacks an equitable and just solution, even if the means to enact it currently remain beyond our reach.
As for Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot quote, the first paragraph is usually the only part that’s included, but his final paragraph is arguably the most important:
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
