The Sum of Our Parts

Robert C. Koehler

Here's the problem: We're of value to others for reasons other than our souls. Someone wants our pocket change, for instance, or our sexuality. Or our vote.

Our world isn't organized in such a way that we can easily stand in continual, prayerful awe of one another, or of nature. Mostly, people reduce the world beyond themselves to what they can handle, control and benefit from. This isn't a moral judgment, just an observation about how society functions -- in a state of dynamic compromise between enterprise and worship. Unfortunately, this tension breaks down all the time and hustlers forget they're accountable for the long-term consequences of their decisions.

The least we can do is to keep life's moral dilemmas in sharp focus, so our need to grub for advantage in the short term -- to satisfy our hungers, make our profits, win our wars -- is held in reasonable check and the decisions we make are tested against the touchstone of our ideals. When we fail to do so, "necessary evil" settles over the land and ends justify means. In short, the cynics win.

A while ago, I came across a useful concept for maintaining this focus, for measuring the gap between what we allow ourselves to see and what's really there. Benjamin Kunkel, reviewing J.M. Coetzee's book "The Lives of Animals in the Nation," made this statement: "Plutarch finds that cruelty to animals fosters cruelty to humans; Carol Adams' feminist version of this argument is to suggest that we abstract meat from animals analogous to our abstraction of sex from women."

I've been haunted by this concept for a year now: our power to abstract and "harvest" something incidental from a whole being, human or otherwise, to the (possibly fatal) detriment of that whole. Doing so strikes me as the ultimate in short-term blindness, especially when, even in the short term, connecting with the whole being -- connecting soul to soul -- produces far more benefit to all concerned, even the exploiter.

A lifelong vague uneasiness suddenly crystallized in this concept and I now see its manifestation everywhere. For instance, do we not abstract:

-- Intelligence from the child? This is the "business" of schools -- to produce high scores on standardized tests. A back-to-school photo in a local paper showed a line of student "convicts" filing through a metal detector gate while their book bags were thoroughly searched; in the same issue, Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley was quoted as saying he would no longer "tolerate" below-grade-level reading scores in city schools, sounding like the manager of a chicken farm complaining about egg production.

-- The working stiff from the creator? Labor Day is a worthy holiday and an honest day's work fills the soul, but a recent survey found that one in four of us hated our jobs and workplace aggression was on the rise. Too often what is asked of us engages a mere fraction of what we're capable of. "What does it take to be a good plumber? You gotta own it, just like you have to own being a dad." So said my friend Jim as he showed me around a job site. When he peels open a wall and looks at the plumbing behind it, "I see a work of art." Work that denies us such satisfaction is a mockery.

-- The vote from the voter? "Winning is the name of the game," as the apologists put it, justifying the fact that the campaign process in presidential elections isn't real political engagement. The special interests and their money are going through the bare minimum of democratic charade to abstract our single, quadrennial act of approval, a vote; then it's back to whatever government is really about (profit for someone).

Sometimes we have to suspend our awe at the immensity of life in order to get on with the little matters, like getting the needle threaded and getting the bills paid, but our larger selves atrophy without daily exercise. And our future shrinks when we devalue the present.

Available at Amazon.com:

American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People

Broke, USA: From Pawnshops to Poverty, Inc.How the Working Poor Became Big Business

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life

The Disappearing Center: Engaged Citizens, Polarization, and American Democracy

The Virtues of Mendacity: On Lying in Politics

Bush on the Home Front: Domestic Policy Triumphs and Setbacks

The Political Fix: Changing the Game of American Democracy, from the Grassroots to the White House

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