Greater and Lesser Utopias

The world is a crazy place these days. For example, there’s Pope Benedict looking like the ghost of Tiger Woods, going around dressed as the spirit of confessions past. Then there are the Tea Partiers, who held a convention down here in Phoenix (July 2010), revealing once and for all they are the party of whites. No diversity there to distract them from their dreams of Utopia—small government, health care to the deserving, longevity to those who can afford it, and success to those who impose their economic imperatives untrammeled on the world.

Utopia’s an interesting concept. The first one I read, Sir Thomas More’s version of the same name, talked about an ideal world that had never existed and, given human nature, never could. It was a paean to a golden time when human beings might get beyond their greed (gold and precious stones were treated with contempt) and lack of care for one other. In fact, Utopia was an ideal society based on Christian principles—and, gasp, it turned out to be Christian socialism. There’s that dirty word—socialism. Self-proclaimed Christians hate to hear it yet fail to realize it is a logical extension of their own professed beliefs. In America these days, Christianity is all very well as long as it doesn’t interfere with kicking the crap out of illegals, doing away with social security so the elderly poor can starve or freeze because they failed to save enough for their old age, and leaving all social programs up to charities (as long as the half-way houses and shelters aren’t in “respectable” back yards).

The Arizona Statesman reported on the Tea Part rally in today’s paper and commented that most loose organizations of enthusiasts seldom last for very long. I’d love to believe so, but this group, if one may call it that, has revealed an American underpinning of self-delusion and unkindness that may lead to some longevity. For one thing, they have an amazing tolerance for hypocrisy.

They wish government out of people’s lives, yet want legislation to ban abortions: the government it seems should look into other people’s lives just not the Tea Partiers’. They want individual liberty yet want to give long prison sentences for relatively minor failures to conform and God help the Gays who don’t conform to their assumptions about marriage and sex. They want to believe in the perfectability of human beings, rather like the 19th Century idea of the Noble Savage who has been damaged by the polluting laws of civilization and who can rise again to his old glory if only freed of the chains that hold him back. (I wonder if any one of them has read “The Lord of the Flies.”)

They want to pick and choose what they are willing to pay taxes for without understanding that wherever the money is spent it drives the same number of jobs. John Ruskin once commented that complaining about the rich buying luxury goods was senseless because the luxury trade provided livelihoods for just as many people as if the rich had spent their money only on basic necessities. Government spending provides jobs. They don’t consider that many more people will be out of work if they shrink government. Who will pick up the slack? Will corporate America come rushing forward to provide new jobs—we know where they stand on sending jobs abroad. For this, the Partiers have no answer beyond platitudes. Sometimes I think there will be no peace until the country is either on the breadlines or involved in another Civil War.

It has always been my understanding that government’s job is not to protect our guilty bastions of self-interest but, like wiser parents, to prevent us from killing one another—plenty of which has happened in the past, and not just in the incessant wars that government involves us in. Now there’s my gripe—where you have a government, can war be far behind? This is a government of the people, not of Churches, not of corporations, and not of special interests, no matter how flattering these interests may be to who we think we are or could be.

Sir Thomas made neither the error of mistaking self-righteousness for morality nor believing that Utopias could ever be reality. A Christian life is a communal life, he said. Wow. This coming from someone who gave his life for his religion—executed because he would not put his king above his conscience. Let’s see some of these Tea Partiers give up something of theirs for their beliefs instead of just hitting the rest of us over the head with them. If this is indeed a nation under God, just where is all the other, inconvenient stuff such as loving others instead of promoting calculated self-interest as the way of the world?