A woman was attacked and beaten by her husband, repeatedly. When he threatened her little boy, she mustered what resources she had and left her home, her relatives, and her country. She carried that boy on her back or in her arms for over a thousand miles. She protected him as best she could from downpours and blistering heat. Months later, when she finally arrived at the U.S. border, she sighed a breath of relief. She told the uniformed guard at the border entry station that she came for asylum. The guard took her statement—and her son. After instructing her to board a bus, he had held back her son.
There are so many stories like hers that I no longer can remember how many days or weeks elapsed before this woman’s toddler was returned to her. But the joy on her face was undeniable as she clung to her son. Most of us can remember a like experience when our mother picked us up after a fall or, as a grownup, when our mother wrapped us in a bear hug after a lengthy time between holiday visits. Mothers are like that. But this woman was one of the lucky mothers. Her child seemed mostly normal—suffering only nightmares when he woke up screaming for his mother.
Another mother-detainee saw her child ripped from his father’s arms and disappeared for 85 days. With the help of a lawyer, she finally was reunited with her son, though she hardly recognized him. He was filthy and covered with lice. At first, he seemed not to recognize her. He was bawling and screaming for his mother. She said she felt like a woman at an orphanage, looking to adopt her own son. Eventually, she was able to quiet and comfort her little guy. She cleaned him, dressed him, spoke gently and reassuringly to him. But he acted like he was still living in terror. He refused to leave her side, even for a moment. If she let loose of his hand, he would immediately start crying. His determent was now a permanent verdict—at least for the foreseeable future and perhaps beyond. Psychologists tell us that his trauma is more likely a life sentence.
The Trump Administration’s border policy is an attack against the sacred bonds of family, to include mothers and the most vulnerable amongst us, children. If 70,000 years of homo sapiens existence has taught us anything at all, it is that familial bonds are at the very heart of our common nature. That bond enables us to cooperate with and relate to other humans with understanding and compassion. We are all born of woman and reared in families. Raising and protecting family is the impetus that drove hunter gatherers, tool makers, and caretakers to form those larger bonds that gave us communities, nations, and empires. Without human families, we would no longer be human, but just another animal species, merely seeking to survive and extend the gene pool. We would never have considered sacrificing for other members of our species or organizing into a rules-based society to further its general welfare. As any sociologist would explain, families are the basic units of human society.
Separating children from families is inhuman. It pivots our species away from thousands of years of evolution. It denigrates what we have held as most sacred.
To make something sacred is to make it holy, as reflected in the word “sacrifice” (from the Latin, sacer, “holy,” and facere, “to make”). A woman carrying a small child over a thousand miles to secure her child’s safety sacrifices her body. Mohammed sacrificed to protect families and the Islamic community. Jesus sacrificed his humanity to protect his followers. And Siddhartha Gautama believed in and exemplified compassion for others. Like Jesus and Mohammed, he believed all humans were born with the potential to be good or evil. He taught that our “true nature” was pure, wise and perfect. I cannot think of a better definition of humanistic aspiration, though these mothers exemplify the reality. Could they make a more eloquent expression of the sacredness of humanity? Can we?
The events of the last few weeks have driven me into a writer’s block. How has America so twisted itself into this distorted funhouse mirror image? We are now gazing into a self-image reflective of 20th century horrors like Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany. Certainly, Karl Marx was a humanist who never anticipated that a communist society would become a soulless totalitarian state. And Nietzsche, likewise, was a humanist who could never have imagined Hitler and the extermination of six million Jews. Perhaps the seeds of America’s fall can be seen in its very beginning. Imbued with the spirit of the Enlightenment and the writings of social philosophers like Rousseau and Locke, Jefferson wrote that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” But Jefferson was a slave holder. And the founders of our democratic republic were mostly aristocrats. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, was the Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates of his time. His Franklin Institute persisted for a hundred years on the bounty created by his will. (It still exists today, though on its own merits.)
If we really want to understand our heritage we must recognize that it is an ideal to be realized. After a hot Philadelphia summer in 1787, Franklin emerged from the Constitutional Convention and confronted the question that was on every patriot’s mind. “What form of government did you create for us?” He responded, “a Republic, if you can keep it.” The preamble of the very Constitution he signed states its purpose as aspirational, “in order to form a more perfect union.” In truth, America began with slavery and lived through the Civil War, reconstruction, Jim Crow, Women’s Suffrage, the Civil Rights Movement, and myriad migration “crises” from the Chinese rail worker camps, the potato famine in Ireland, Eastern European displacements, and so on. The greatness of America is in its ideals and the willingness of its citizens to make those ideals its reality. In the past, we have been challenged by our prejudices, our crassness, and our tribalism. But we were able to respond to enlightened leadership and discover our better natures. What does seem different today is not just the absence of a Washington or Lincoln, but a government that represents our interests and our founding ideals. How could Jeffersonian humanism run so afoul as to produce immigrant internment camps, tender age shelters, and refugee tent cities? Maybe the answer is related to what happened to humanism in the 20th century.
I stated above that Nietzsche was a humanist. He is famously remembered for saying, “God is dead.” In place of that sacred personage, he elevated the super human whose will to gain power is expressed in intelligence, self-mastery, and creativity. Only this super human, he thought, would survive evolutionary selection. Although his evolutionary humanism spoke eloquently of human potential, Hitler falsified its import to justify his persecution of those he deemed inferior to the Aryan race. But Nietzsche was not advocating power over others, but power over oneself to attain personal superiority. His super human was a sacred ideal that required total commitment, in other words, a personal sacrifice. It raised the bar of “sacredness” and demanded more of the individual human to attain it. But would he hold the less accomplished among us as sacred? I suspect not. Hitler, of course, exploited that gap in Nietzsche’s thinking to establish only the Aryan race as superior. He would have agreed with Trump in considering brown people as an “infestation” that should be punished (zero tolerance) and separated from the superior race by imprisonment in internment camps, even “tender age shelters.” Trump’s initial solution for Latino immigrants at our southern border—to deport the parents and institutionalize their offspring—is a step less harsh than Auschwitz, but in the same vein. He demonstrates no respect for them as human beings.
Karl Marx was a contemporary of Nietzsche, though 26 years older. He believed that human history was created by the activity of human labor, not by ideas or religious ideals. Famously, he said of religion, “it is the opium of the people,” or simply an illusion to assuage depression and suffering. His economic theories glorified the role of labor and, differing from Adam Smith, he believed capitalism would self-destruct under the weight of class suppression of the proletariat. Once the proletariat rose up to seize the means of production, a new classless, egalitarian society would emerge. This society would represent another type of humanism, one represented by the collective. As a social philosophy, communism became quite popular by the beginning of the 20th century. But its actual application required an authoritative system to assure its uniform enforcement. In effect, this requirement was an open invitation for any authoritarian ruler or dictator who might clothe himself in the mantle of the state.
Trump identifies with a collective—his base—that mirrors his propensities, while ignoring the diversity within America as a whole. It is not the means of production he wants to overthrow, but the wheels of power. When he says he wants to “drain the swamp,” he means whoever stands between him and his authority. Europeans recognize this Trump predilection as the bullying tendency of a nationalist leader. He openly admires strong leaders who wield absolute power over a nation. Putin, one of his idols, maintains his power by a system of thought control or propaganda and persecution. Trump likewise attempts to control public perception with his tweets and outrageous attacks on all who oppose him. As Russia replaced Marx’s idealism with the anvil of state totalitarianism, Trump seems committed to rule America’s “teaming masses” by suppressing the free press, controlling the justice department, and transforming the Executive Branch into the single source of state power.
Recently, elected officials—mayors, House Representatives, and Senators—have been refused admittance to immigrant internment camps. They told press reporters that the “government” refused their request for admittance. But they are our government! Trump heads the Executive Branch and is Commander-and-Chief of the military. But he is not the government, as much as he might pretend to be. Most Americans, I believe, would not be willing to concede that much authority to this President.
As human culture drifted away from its god-centered axis after the scientific revolution, it experimented with differing human-centered world views. Collective humanism and evolutionary humanism rose and fell with communism and nationalist socialism. Marx was discredited with the advancement of capitalism. Nietzsche is largely forgotten. Hitler was defeated. And the Soviet Union collapsed. In their place, the human individual, personal freedom, equal opportunity and personal well-being became more dominant as sacred ideals. They comprise individual humanism. From “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” to liberte, egalite, fraternite, the ideas of the Enlightenment have dominated western civilization. Certainly, they were held as sacred by the end of the 18th century when America declared its independence from a monarchy and have become more so with the advancement of the Western Democracies. America has suffered wars and treasure to promote this form of humanism in the world. Today we call the result of its sacrifice the Pax Americana. The question before us today is whether that world order can survive Donald Trump.
Trump has strived to undermine this international expression of humanism. He will not adhere to treaties, the world court, or to any rules-based system designed for the resolution of trade disputes, the establishment of economic order, and the peaceful resolution of border disputes. Included in his agnostic position on world order is his withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council. That withdrawal coincides with his current zero tolerance immigration policy. He has put America in clear violation of human rights alongside such pariahs as North Korea and Syria. Separating children from parents is not only inhuman but recognized as such by most people and the community of nations. It reveals a man with no moral center and makes one wonder how he won the vote of some 62 million Americans.
The writer’s block I mentioned at the outset of this blog was not the result of a loss of words, but of a tsunami of thought lines. (I spared you my usual rant about money in politics.) Since passion is one of my motivators, it became maddeningly difficult to focus between anger and sorrow. I watched as a commentator unraveled on TV while attempting to read a breaking news report about tender age shelters. I saw children being escorted after midnight to shelters in far flung corners of America. Our own government was clandestinely hiding its actions. Elected officials were being turned away at the entrance of government internment camps. These are not the type of events we accept in a free and open society. And then there were those distraught mothers and crying children. As I cried along, my mind was blown with the realization that nobody knows how to right this wrong. One man’s decision has ruined the lives of thousands. And that man was elected by us.
A year and a half ago I wrote a blog entitled “Optimism for a Trump Presidency.” In it, I tried to make the case for that optimism. Today, that case has been trashed. Our hope for America rests with women who abhor the treatment of women under this President, with young people who protest the absence of common sense gun laws, with the one remaining branch of government willing to uphold our system of laws, and with the next elections. There are 62 million Americans who have put their faith in a man who shows no respect for humanity.
Is nothing sacred anymore?