Let’s imagine that we are in a lifeboat, you and I. It’s a rather large lifeboat, with a few hundred other people. The seas are choppy, but we are in no immediate danger of capsizing. We figure that sooner or later we’ll be rescued, but it may take some time. Our immediate needs are for food, water and shelter, but the weather is temperate. We’ve each managed to bring some rations, and although some of us are hungry, none of us is starving. There is a supply of water, and we are happy to be alive.
At one end of the lifeboat we see that a very few among us are exceptionally well-provided for. They have not only water but champagne, not just hard-tack but buttery croissants, not just peanut butter but foie gras. They are living it up while floating with us on this lifeboat, adrift on uncertain seas.
For a while, we just sit there, observing the party at the other end of the boat. We hear their laughter even though they, like us, are aware that a rogue wave may sweep over us, a storm may descend from the skies, the weather may turn foul. But for the moment, those favored few are celebrating their good fortune. They’ve got inflatable life rafts, should the need arise, while we have only our lifejackets, some in poor condition. As night descends, they light candles and pop open more champagne, while we sit in relative darkness and wonder how we’ll make it through the night.
Occasionally, someone throws over some extra food to us. But others are smug in the belief that they have earned their favored position in life – or their parents or grandparents, at least, have earned it – through hard work and being very smart. They are unwilling to share what they have because they are convinced that their largess will be squandered by the rest of us. They think that we are where we are in life because we have made bad choices. They think that we have only ourselves to blame for not having made it to the better end of the boat. And, in truth, some of us have bought into that same view.
We tolerate this obvious inequity, in part, because we believe that they have guns and can defend their privileged position against any attempt to force them to share their resources with the rest of us. But a number of us are resigned to inequity as an inevitable part of life. The wealthy might as well enjoy what they’ve got because, well, it is what it is. And who said life was fair?
I believe many of us are repelled by this scenario. We would hope that if we were really in a lifeboat, a more egalitarian spirit would prevail – that we would share in the effort to keep us all alive. That we would view one another as fellow human beings rather than as individuals spaced out across a spectrum of undeserving to entitled.
Guess what? We actually are in this lifeboat, together with the rest of our fellow citizens and, in fact, with the rest of humanity.
We who are relatively secure financially – our mortgage is almost paid off, our kids are launched, our retirement savings enough to see us through – may look with scorn at the ostentatious flaunting by the very wealthy. But we are unwilling to challenge the inherent inequities of the very system that has made us relatively comfortable – to “rock the boat,” as it were.
We don’t have much faith in radical alternatives, or that sharing our wealth with others would truly lead to a compassionate and peaceful society. Or it may just be that we are reluctant to share our hard-won sense of comfort with others who may have made bad choices. Or perhaps we cannot see a better system than that which relies primarily on “market forces.” If charity is called for, we want to decide whom to donate to rather than have the government take more from us to give to others. Or it may just be that we have positioned ourselves such that “those others” are invisible.
As the gap in wealth has expanded immensely in the past several decades, there has come with it a serious decline in the sense of comity, the belief that we Americans are all in this together. Ostentatious display of wealth has become socially acceptable. America, after all, was settled by men and women who spurned the aristocracies of Europe and who believed in the doctrine of hard work and limitless opportunity. But isn’t it true that excessive wealth and its ostentatious manifestations can only persist when those in possession of such wealth dehumanize others? At some point this view becomes a form of “social Darwinism,” a belief in the “survival of the fittest,” a view that tacitly implies the eventual extinction of the “less than fit.”
How do we explain, to our children or grandchildren, the obscene gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent? How do we countenance the arrogance of those who insist upon maximizing and displaying their wealth above any realistic measure of what they need? What happened to the censure that once characterized our public disdain for opulence?
Examples surround us. Recently NPR reported on a magnate who scooped up thousands of foreclosed homes during the great recession, turned them into rental properties for former homeowners, sold shares to hedge- fund investors, and whose company continued to raise rents while refusing to make repairs, and who is now building himself a 75,000-square-foot mansion with two swimming pools. That same report mentioned that due to this recession, African Americans had lost, on the whole, every bit of the wealth they had painstakingly accrued since the civil rights gains of the 1960s. It seems that all the predators have to do is to cry “shareholder value” and the ethical foundation of a business washes away like a sand castle.
Are we missing a vital gene that might safeguard our species us against the perils of overconsumption by the few amid the privation of others and the indifference of the rest?
Oh, I know the adage that if the world’s wealth were somehow evenly distributed, within a week it would all be back in a few hands due to human frailty combined with craftiness. It is an appallingly absurd assumption. But focusing on the excesses of the 1 percent cannot shield us from our own moral responsibilities in the political and personal sphere. We have to challenge our propensity to change the subject, to ignore inequity while privately castigating those whose ostentation is so much greater than our own.
I believe that such a change of heart comes with a price tag, that the only workable route to dealing with massive inequality is to impose higher taxes on wealth, including inherited wealth, that would provide all our citizens with:
A high-quality education, with free day care, schools and colleges that provide people of all ages with genuine opportunities for success and personal growth;
Adequate medical, dental and mental health care, including a focus on preventive health measures that increase the quality, productivity and longevity of our lives;
A robust program of housing and home-ownership that would reverse a century of deliberate racial discrimination in housing;
Job creation through such investments as infrastructure rebuilding, meaningful paid apprenticeships and sophisticated retraining for workers displaced by automation, along with a living-wage requirement to raise full-time workers above the poverty line.
There is a misperception that all this equals “Big Government,” that it subverts resources necessary to propel our economy forward, that it amounts to punishing the entrepreneurs essential to national development. This is patent nonsense, a myth perpetrated by those for whom the pursuit of greed – of excess beyond comfort and security – amounts to a competitive sport. Americans know well how to combine the public and private sectors, together with faith communities and non-profits, to achieve sensible but fundamental change in how we treat one another. It happens after every flood or tornado or hurricane.
It is high time for us to come together and recognize that we are, after all, in the same boat, and that unless we row together, we face some very rough seas in our future as a nation.
(Robert L. Fried of Concord is a retired educator who is now a writer, gardener and tinkerer. He can be reached by email at rob.fried@gmail.com.)