Implicit Entitlement

Give us courage to change what must be altered,
serenity to accept what cannot be helped,
and the insight to know the one from the other.
—Reinhold Niebuhr

The official statistics alone can feel overwhelming:  10.1 million Americans out of work by the end of last month, directly attributable to the pandemic, an unemployment level of 6.3%.  Yet as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell recently pointed out, the actual situation is much grimmer, and it is worth revisiting his precise words:

Published unemployment rates during COVID have dramatically understated the deterioration in the labor market. Most importantly, the pandemic has led to the largest 12-month decline in labor force participation since at least 1948.  Fear of the virus and the disappearance of employment opportunities in the sectors most affected by it, such as restaurants, hotels, and entertainment venues, have led many to withdraw from the workforce. At the same time, virtual schooling has forced many parents to leave the work force to provide all-day care for their children. All told, nearly 5 million people say the pandemic prevented them from looking for work in January. In addition, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that many unemployed individuals have been misclassified as employed. Correcting this misclassification and counting those who have left the labor force since last February as unemployed would boost the unemployment rate to close to 10 percent in January.

I share all of this because at a recent all-school employee meeting, the Head of my school had to share the news that our school’s board had needed to make a tough decision.  As beneficiaries of the Paycheck Protection Program, the school as a small business had been able to cover significant amounts of the financial deficits encumbered since March of 2020 and projected through the 2021-2022 school year.  But the total amount of the PPP loan does not cover the full deficit for next year, and therefore, we were told that starting in August, the school’s contributions to the TIAA/CREF retirement funding would need to be paused to make up the difference in the school’s projected debt so that the school could remain a viable business—with an emphasis on “paused,” not permanently taken away.

Now, I need to put things in perspective before continuing.  The 7%-of-salary retirement contribution is on top of our salaries and independent of any contributions we might individually choose to make.  It is not a matching contribution; it is a salary perk which the majority of small businesses in this country—schools or otherwise—simply do not offer at all.  Therefore, what the board was effectively telling us is as follows:

• that they were not going to mess with our health care (which I know from being unemployed for the duration of my sabbatical costs nearly $9,000 annually for an individual, let alone a family!). 
• that the faculty tuition remission for faculty children would remain in effect. 
• that they were even going to be able to offer a small raise of 2% after freezing salaries the past two years. 
• AND—perhaps most importantly of all—that they were going to be able to keep every single one of us employed for at least another year. 
• All for the cost of losing this retirement contribution for a year.

Well, you would have sworn that my Head of School had just announced that we were each being asked to donate a kidney! I have seldom witnessed so many in a group get so upset so fast! And while on the one hand, I could empathize how difficult it was to hear this news after how much ridiculously harder we have all had to work as educators this year; on the other hand, knowing the impact of the pandemic on unemployment in general, I couldn’t help wondering:  you all do understand that this means we get to keep our jobs, right?? That unlike two other area private schools, IND and Wilkes, we are not being forced to close our doors forever and lay off an entire community of educators and staff?? That we get to remain getting paid to do what we love and enjoy doing—something most workers in most jobs only fantasize about??

Granted, I was (and am) coming at the entire situation from what was probably a very different perspective.  When I “retired” from my former school in response to the moral bankruptcy and general incompetency of the new administration that I was witnessing and could no longer support, I knew full well the risk I was taking.  A year-long sabbatical from the classroom without a guaranteed job waiting for me meant that I might not teach again.  At 57, someone with even my credentials is no longer as attractive a candidate for a position, and so I have simply been deeply grateful to be employed once more as an educator.  Toss in the realities of the existing job market, and I am just grateful to be employed, period!

But this personal situation made the disconnect I was witnessing feel all the stranger.  How could the awareness so many of my colleagues have expressed about the economic realities for so many in this country right now not lead to an understanding that those same realities could apply to them, too?  Which got me to wondering what the source of this disconnect might be.  No one is escaping unscathed from the current situation any more than a person can escape from the inevitable eventuality of death, and yet somehow, many of those present were behaving as if this decision by the school shouldn’t be happening to them.

Certainly, a rather large percentage of our faculty are closer to the ends of their careers than their beginnings, and the loss of the extra savings for the year will not be without consequence—myself included! But I couldn’t shake the sense that at least some of the voices I was hearing were basically saying that they were owed a certain level of economic security and that this was unfair.  There seemed to be a subtle almost unconscious sense of entitlement at work in the situation, and that caused me to ask:  like hidden biases, are their implicit entitlements? And if so, where did this particular implicit entitlement come from?

Notions of entitlement, of course, are baked into our cultural DNA.  Thomas Jefferson stated the sentiments of his fellow peers quite succinctly when he wrote: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”  Hence, from our very founding, we have felt we were inherently owed something just by our very existence; something we didn’t have to earn.

However, it is critically important to remember that Jefferson and the other Enlightenment thinkers who informed him understood these words quite differently than they are often represented today.  “Endowed” for them meant “possesses rationality,” and thus, what made certain rights unalienable was the human ability to think logically and wisely about the conditions for a fair and just society.  “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” were not understood by the Founders as something the universe itself somehow owed individuals; they were understood as political entitlements that a rational government would protect.

Take just the first one, for example:  Life.  Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, and the others did not believe that the universe owed individuals the right to exist in the first place.  What they believed is that properly structured government owes a person who happens to be alive protection from harm to that life.  Rights and other political entitlements were about the abridgement of power, not the proactive use of it, and indeed, the Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution is basically a long list of abridgements of power, areas of life in which you are entitled to have the government not interfere.

Recognizing that this is how the start of our society understood the notion of entitlement is important because along the journey from then to now, we started as a society understanding entitlements as things we were actively owed.  For instance, the idea that children have the right to an education is a common and non-controversial one in today’s world.  But this right is not understood as “the government should abridge its power and not interfere with how children are educated;” it is understood as “the government owes every child an education” (but with the caveat that that is only to a certain level!).  We even have governmental programs today that are openly referred to as “entitlement programs” such as Social Security and Medicare because the ideas informing their creation was that people have the right to a minimal level of support and care in their old age.

However, this change in our understanding of entitlement has come at a cost that is not merely the literal ones paid for by our taxes, and of the many things the pandemic has revealed, it is this other cost that I would argue may be the most dangerous to our long-term survival as a society.  I have discussed at length already how our history of individualism and the deliberate designs of modern digital technology have contributed to the rise in the amount of narcissistic behavior in our country.  But I want to argue here that this rise in narcissism combined with the way we understand rights today has led to an implicit entitlement that operates in too many of our lives: that the world should work the way I want it to work, whenever I want it to do so. 

Somehow, those of us with privilege (and to a lesser extent even those without) have developed this hidden notion that there simply shouldn’t ever be any inconvenience in our lives and that when there is, we are owed rectification of the situation immediately.  We even get angry when inconvenience happens—as if the universe has somehow violated its contract with us.  It is what happened with my colleagues upset by the school’s decision; their long-term economic plans were going to be inconvenienced and “that just wasn’t fair.”  It is what is happening with the vaccine rollout in this country.  The laws of physics and chemistry put limits on how fast anything can be manufactured, but that’s inconvenient; we want things fixed now.  So the anger and resentment grows.

Moreover, before I am accused of polishing my halo, I am in no way immune to this implicit entitlement at work in our collective brains; no one is.  Just because this particular inconvenience was outweighed for me by the gratitude of being employed does not mean I have not had my own moments of road rage at a car I thought was going too slow when I was in a hurry or exploded at the discovery of a dripping faucet “because I just don’t have time to deal with this right now!”  Like hidden bias, today’s implicit entitlement is buried deep in our unconscious, and like such bias, it will only be by deliberately unpacking this entitlement that we will be able to resist it.

And resist it we must! As I said, the pandemic has revealed the true cost of believing that the world owes someone the inconvenience free life he, she, or they want.  Don’t like masks? Damn if I’ll wear one! Don’t like social distancing? I’ll party with whoever and how many I want! Don’t like the scientific truths about the virus and its spread? I’m entitled to listen to whatever falsehoods I wish! Don’t like the results of a fairly held and fairly counted election?….

You get the picture.  We will likely pass 600,000 dead in this country before the pandemic stage of this disease is over—a greater percentage of our population than any other country in the word!—and an entire generation of children will bear the economic cost of a lost school year for the rest of their lives.  We had to wreck our economy because to a degree, we could not trust people to work for the common good by deliberately inconveniencing themselves, and what few people seem to grasp is that the vaccine does not fix any of this; it only makes it so that the number of lives it “inconveniences” is limited to where our society can generally function again.

Yet, what the pandemic has revealed is also the opportunity to change, and if ever there was a time for Niebuhr’s famous prayer, it is now.  Now is our chance to develop resilience and empathy for the reality that life is messy and what little control we do have is illusionary at best.  It is the time to develop acceptance of our limits and the grace to acknowledge the limits of others.  It is our moment to tear down our inequities and rebuild a country where “with justice for all” truly is for all.  And most importantly, it is our reminder to care genuinely for the Other and not just the fellow members of our tribe. 

Our very lives depend on it.

References

Bowie, L.; Wood, P.; & Oyefusi, D. (May 5, 2020) Maryland’s Oldest Catholic Girls School, Institute of Notre Dame Announces Closing.  The Baltimore Sun.  https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-institute-notre-dame-closing-20200505-iviuyq5k5zfo5ke3zqytgv3o4u-story.html.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (Feb. 5, 2021) U.S. Department of Labor.  https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf.

Jefferson, T. (1776) Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.  National Archives.  https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.

Kaplan, D. (June 22, 2020) Wilkes School, a Casualty of Pandemic, Will be Missed. The Baltimore Sun.  https://www.baltimoresun.com/opinion/readers-respond/bs-ed-rr-wilkes-school-letter-20200622-2mfbx2hmqzel5i4nglwxef4r6u-story.html.

Keohane, N. (1980) Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Locke, J. (1980) Second Treatise of Government; ed. by C. B. Macpherson. Indianapolis:  Hackett Publishing Company.

Powell, J. (Feb. 10, 2021) Getting Back to a Strong Labor Market. Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/powell20210210a.htm.

Richter, M. (1977) The Political Theory of Montesquieu. New York: Cambridge University Press.