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Human Being and Citizen

Posted by Zentrist on Tuesday, January 06, 2009 2:05:11 PM

I borrow the title from a book by George Anastaplo, human being and citizen. Like many books, his is perhaps in a roundabout way nothing more and nothing less than autobiography. Thank you, George.

Plato knew it, and Aristotle too: We are both human beings and citizens. Yet, if so, there is clearly a tension there, a potential and actual conflict of interest.

The human being in Socrates was at odds with the citizen within him, even though, we learn, he fought bravely for his city when it was at war. He had been a soldier before he became famous as Socrates, or so it would seem. Perhaps he did not like being a soldier--and that experience had something to do with his becoming Socrates. Solzhenitsyn in our time was a soldier who not only fought but thought as well, just like Socrates. To read "August, 1914" is to read the story of a man who has mixed feelings about military life or rather--the military establishment. But it is like any other job in many respects, this military way of life. Leaving aside the extreme cases of bloodshed on a large scale, the life is full of regular people doing a job. When the time comes, however, decisions of import by individuals have to be made. Their characters have pretty much been set. Then, at the crucial juncture, they act. He makes a decision, and carries it out--say, this general or lieutenant. Solzhenitsyn puts these men and women under a microscope, so to speak. He gets a closer look at the good, the bad and the ugly. First of all, one sees that there is a good versus a bad. A noble over against a cowardly. A right in the face of a wrong. The lieutenant whose name I'll abbreviate with the letter V, becomes one of the normative characters in S's epic. When another, apparently younger officer encounters this V in the described Russian retreat (from the Germans), we find yet another "normative" character, a young human being/soldier/officer--an intellectual. But V, too, is an intellectual. Not all intellectuals are the same. Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn were certainly not the same and they did not stand for the same ideas; rather they stood and stand for very different ideas. They also stand for the same idea, or the same reality, rather, namely, Russia, Holy Mother Russia. In this sense, both "intellectuals" were and are citizens and human beings.

In Plato's "Apology," the human being makes a stand against the city while defending the city--very ironic.

As practicing Christians we make our stands every day against some aspect or other of the City of Man. For example, I might speak out in some way, maybe on a blog like this, against the reality that I have to pay taxes for policies I consider immoral, unjust. I may object to federal spending on certain placements of our troops. Which I do.

I do object to the fact that our troops are stationed all over the place. Some of these "places" are offended, the people are offended, by the presence of our troops. It would be helpful, I think, in my perhaps naive way, if we could just remove our military from sites perceived to be sacred to others. The human being in me thinks this way. But also the citizen.

(For Christmas I received a nice new copy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Julie or La Nouvelle Heloise." Thank you, dear. I'm looking forward to seeing for myself just how this great thinker-artist thought about an aspect of the question, The Human Being and the Citizen.)

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The Angry Whopper

Posted by Zentrist on Sunday, January 04, 2009 12:00:00 AM

The marketing genius of Burger King is now promoting something (part of me would like) called The Angry Whopper. The visual in the restaurant I visited recently is arresting: a humongous, fat-filled delight with double everything, all the stuff--and The Way You Want It.

If this isn't a sign of our times, I don't know what is.

Many of our most gifted artists, poets, psychologists--are in marketing these days. Let me add: prophets.

We are living in angry times, very angry times. Just try to get through that local retail giant discount store on a Sunday without a minor "fender bender." More tragically, come visit our "loop" or LBJ freeway and survive the drive. What with the road rage.

Actually, our TV court rooms are helping, quite a bit, with the nation's anger. All praise to Judge Judy, The People's Court, Family Court, Judge Penny, Judge Karen, Judge Mathis et. al. Kudos to Dr. Phil and Larry King and Oprah. Thanks, many thanks, to Donahue and Geraldo and that former Ohio mayor. I'm serious.

These folks have put before our eyes...ourselves. They've held the Shakespearean "mirror," for our troubled, dysfunctional times,
"up to nature." They've forced us to look at ourselves, to search our very souls. You may be unemployed, or working the second shift or retired or on your break at Wal-Mart. Judge Karen is helping you to see who you are in terms of "what is was like, what happened, and what it is like now," as they say in AA. The Secular City is the stage, the set. The backdrop is Lincoln's "civil religion." No Bible preaching here. But, nonetheless, human dignity is honored, left and right. Long live Judge Penny, Judge Karen, Judge Mathis and all the lawyers. Please don't hang all the lawyers. They know something. They know what they were taught in kindergarten, and they know what was drilled into them in law school: there is a strange, sort of secular transcendence about human dignity and honor. This spiritual thing comes out, for example, when Judge Penny holds up a photo of a young woman who is dressed up like a hooker. They young woman, the "defendent," hides her face--in shame. The people in the courtroom witness this human drama, this "turning" (for the young woman literally turned her back on the photo of herself, dressed up like a whore). Judge Penny showed the person herself--and I don't mind if all America watches, for a moment, at this young person's expense. (She signed up, after all.) Without going into all the details, this young person had to agree to not show up, at certain extended family gatherings, dressed up like this anymore. No more "working girls" will be allowed to show up looking like that, at Christmas.

The photo at the Burger King of this remarkable new Angry Whopper--this spectacle too, in its own way, may be attempting to teach us all a lesson about what makes us tick. I don't know. I do know this: I have a long way to go before I stop my meat-eating, arguably a sin . And I have a long way to go before I stop all the fault-finding, resentment and anger to the boiling point. Please join me in my typically American effort...to reform myself. (Or, if you happen to be Catholic, to become a saint.)