By oneself is wrong done,
By oneself is one defiled.
By oneself wrong is not done,
By oneself, surely, is one cleansed.
One cannot purify another;
Purity and impurity are in oneself.
—The Dhammapada
On July 15, 1979, then President Jimmy Carter gave a televised address to the nation that history would come to call the “Crisis of Confidence” speech. In it, President Carter laid out the case that our society was suffering from a malaise of self-indulgence where “too many of us now worship consumption” and “human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.” He argued that as a country, we had adopted the mistaken understanding of freedom as “the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others,” and he astutely observed that “that path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.”
Well, here we are, nearly 50 years later, and as Ron Lieber of the New York Times recently pointed out, we are well on our way to that failure. He is worth quoting extensively here:
Consider how our children feel after we’re mostly done raising and educating them. The Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the University of California, Los Angeles, surveys first-year college students every year. The percentage who named being “very well off financially” as an important goal doubled from 1967 to 2019. Those who wanted to develop a “meaningful philosophy of life” decreased by nearly half…
Research by Tim Kasser and Jean Twenge showed that materialism among 12th graders increased over time, peaking in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Generation X, and then stayed at those historically high levels among millennials. “There was a trend underway at the time Carter was making this speech, and it basically just amplifies in the next 10 years rather than being suppressed,” said Mr. Kasser, an emeritus professor of psychology at Knox College, [who] watched these developments with a sense of foreboding, because his research has shown that higher levels of materialism are associated with societal instability…
And finally:
We will be tested again. Next time it may be a climate-related catastrophe, driven in part by the very patterns of consumption that Mr. Carter warned against in his speech. He called for turning down the thermostat in the winter and for 20 percent of the nation’s energy to come from solar power by 2000 — all these years later, we’ve done neither.
Which turns out to be truer than even I would have thought when I recently learned from a story in the local press of a couple paying nearly $900 for their heating bill this past month. This for a row house in the urban heat island that is the city even in winter. This for a place less exposed than my own three walls (I’m a duplex) and with fewer square feet. $900. What temperature, I thought, do you keep your house at??? For perspective, my largest heating bill ever was a little over $200.
However, putting my (self-righteous?) indignation aside, as we prepare to eulogize and bury President Carter this month, what strikes me most about his words all those years ago and the world we’ve created since is that the “village” has clearly been falling down on the job of “raising its children.” I may agree with the words attributed to the Buddha at the start of this essay that each of us is solely accountable for our individual moral character. Yet as I read these same words again, they remind me, too, that our moral nature is also a social construct. There truly is no such thing as a “oneself” in utter and absolute isolation; it takes indeed a “village” to make a self. What is more, it takes that same “village” to hold that same self individually morally accountable, and the paradox of this great truth is what our culture stumbles so badly over.
Take my discipline, for example. Everyone is rightly concerned about the declines in language and math skills seen since (and attributable to) the pandemic. But the interventions have focused almost exclusively on tutoring and other individualist efforts when the larger cause—absenteeism—has received proportionally little attention. “Chronic absenteeism [however] is not just bad for kids; it is bad for society. Learning is first and foremost a social endeavor, and kids learn to be part of a cohesive community by going to one every day” (Anderson & Winthrop). In other words, unless one is an integral part of the “village,” neither “village” nor “child” can thrive.
Which is the power of ex-President Carter’s example to us following his loss to Ronald Reagn in 1980. He chose to remain part of the “village” to the day of his death, holding both himself and others accountable for their choices and their actions and the impact of these on the larger world. With his hands, heart, and mind, he built literal villages as well as metaphorical ones, and those in turn helped raise tens of thousands out of poverty and into more participatory lives in their communities. He fundamentally embraced the paradox of the moral character of the relationship between “village” and “child,” and the lives he touched both directly and indirectly remain the better for that. His was very much a life worthy of modelling.
Would that the same could be said of all the political leaders in our lives.
References
Anderson, J. & Winthrop, R. (Jan. 2, 2025) Giving Kids Some Autonomy Has Surprising Results. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/opinion/children-choices-goal-setting.html.
Carter, J. (July 15, 1979) Crisis of Confidence. PBS American Experience. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/carter-crisis/.
Lieber, R. (Dec. 29, 2024) Jimmy Carter Was Right About Materialism But, Alas, Wrong About Us. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/29/your-money/jimmy-carter-legacy-materialism.html.
Prudente, T. & Gardner, H. (Jan. 5, 2025) Think Your BGE Bill is High? Rates are Rising. The Baltimore Banner. https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/local-news/bge-rates-maryland-utility-winter-storm-ZT4JQLC3OZCCTMHPWNAVVS2LHY/.
Light a Candle 