T. Carlos Anderson's Blog, page 4
April 18, 2021
Renewal in the Garden and Elsewhere
The snowpocalypse that hit Austin, Texas and its environs this past February claimed lives, damaged a number of homes and apartments, and thoroughly disrupted a large metro area’s way of life. It also killed plenty of plants and foliage. Prickly pear cacti – decades old and producing sublime yellow blooms every spring – turned to mush. Agave spines laid limp on the ground. Trimmed of these damaged spines, the large succulents with their remaining upright middle spines seemed to defiantly give the storm a one-fingered salute. But alas, the salute was short-lived. Many of these spines also slumped to the ground, unable to defy death.
At our South Austin home after the snow finally melted, a mature rosemary bush revealed itself as lifeless and brown. Three lady banks vines, typically lush with miniature white and yellow roses each spring, did the same. A favorite of mine, perennial portulaca grandiflora plants (moss roses) with delicate flowers of magenta and white, relishing the heat the previous fifteen summers in a rectangular patch of earth in our front yard, didn’t wake from their typical winter dormancy.
A generation ago, the Austin area was in Region 8 on the USDA’s climate zone map with a low temperature range down to 10* Fahrenheit. Because of warming temps in the last twenty years, we’re now in Region 9, with the low temperature range at 20*. For those, like me, filling vacated spots in yards and flower gardens with new plants, our options have narrowed. Newly placed plants must be hardy enough for the increased colder and hotter extremes on either end of the continuum.
As a pastor, I look to biblical stories for wisdom to help understand current realities. Even though the snowpocalypse and the Covid pandemic are unrelated events, their concurrence and commonality of deadly havoc will make them forever linked for Austin-area residents.
After Jesus’ death at the hands of all-powerful Rome, his disciples feared for their own lives. The catastrophe of Jesus hanging to death on a cross, the Roman instrument of capital punishment, terrified them and left them frozen in fear. Devastated and scared, they holed up together in isolation.
Luke’s gospel tells us that in the midst of the disciples’ collective anxiety, Jesus – as if a ghost – appeared to them. Initially, as we can imagine, his appearance didn’t quell his friends’ skittishness.
“Do you have anything to eat?” The disciples gave their guest some broiled fish which he consumed. His presence was real. His presence gave peace and assurance, a remedy for their fear and angst. Life was shown forth to conquer death – even an incredibly cruel death like his. They looked at Jesus and saw life and renewal.
“You are witnesses of these things,” he said to them. Death does not have the final word. Neither does the pandemic, we can add, nor the snowpocalypse.
I’m fortunate to be of such circumstances to renew life to my yard and garden. I’ll replant and reseed according to the new climate realities. I loved having pomegranate trees, bougainvillea, and an ocotillo bush in my yard the past decade or so, but those days are now but memories. I’ll have to travel to South Texas or Mexico or Big Bend to see these beloved species for their displays of spring blooms – magnificent, colorful and glorious.
We know that it’s not just yards and gardens that are in need of renewal. People’s livelihoods and their very lives, as the pandemic reaches fifteen months, have been ravaged. Renewal will be our communal work for some time to come.
Food pantries need donations and volunteers, renters and landlords need financial and legislative support, unhoused neighbors need a helping hand, children and schools need support of all kinds, and elderly neighbors need someone to say hello to them and bring groceries or other necessities. There’s plenty of renewal work to do anywhere you look.
One last glance at my yard reveals that a number of roses, sage, a sago palm, a Carolina jasmine, and two of the lady banks – after being pruned of dead foliage – are putting out new shoots from the ground. Life goes on, crazy as it seems, with or without us. Renewal is what we do with the life that we still have. Strength and perseverance to all who work together for renewal.
All of these are homegrown at our South Austin abode!
March 12, 2021
Restorative Justice – Face to Face
I spent the better parts of 2017 and 2018 working on what turned out to be There is a Balm in Huntsville. It tells the story of a misguided young man who, after killing two people in a drunk-driving wreck, received a forty-year prison sentence. He experienced transformation during imprisonment not because he decided to rehab his life, as if it was a do-it-yourself solo job. Through a gradual process accentuated by encounters he had with surviving victim family members, and other victims of crime, his healing was the direct result of face-to-face encounters with those deeply and innocently wounded by the ravages of his and other crimes.
State-sponsored retributive justice is a bedrock of modern Western society as understood in the colloquial phrase “You do the crime, you do the time.” Societal order and expectations are positively shaped by laws and corresponding punishments of their violations. In retributive justice theory, the state is the principal victim and consequent administrator of punishment.
Restorative justice—distinct from retributive justice—goes back to traditions that pre-date modern Western societies. Its goal is to restore the relationships damaged by crime and sustain the community where both victim and offender reside (usually the case). In restorative justice theory, the person violated is the principal victim, not the state. Face-to-face encounters between victim and offender aim to match victim needs and offender responsibilities as concerns confession, apology, information, restitution, reconciliation, and future security.
In restorative justice practice, offenders take responsibility for their crimes by acknowledging their debt to their victims and by paying them back, if possible, in concrete ways. A grade school teacher, for example, utilizes a restorative practice when she has two of her students, previously fighting, sit down face to face to work out their differences instead of sending them to the principal’s office for mandatory discipline.
A restorative approach is not applicable to all situations of crime victimization. Situations of sexual abuse, especially, are not suited to face-to-face encounters. Surrogate meetings, where victims encounter offenders—offenders of similar crimes but not the offender(s) in their particular case—are effective vehicles to positively impact both parties.
Two important points: 1) Many people mistakenly think that forgiveness is necessarily part of a restorative justice process. It’s a crime victim’s prerogative whether or not to offer forgiveness. 2) Restorative and retributive justice approaches are not mutually exclusive. They can work together.
The Texas criminal justice system was the first in the nation to offer a restorative approach for victims of violent crime—its program starting via profoundly unique circumstances in the early 1990s. A woman by the name of Cathy Phillips wanted to meet with the imprisoned killer of her daughter. She didn’t know the man but wanted to tell him face to face what her daughter meant to her and what his actions did her family. Anthony Yanez was sentenced to life without possibility of parole for the brutal kidnapping, rape, and murder of Brenda Phillips. Most of Phillips’s friends told her she was crazy, but she was undeterred. As there was no official means by which to pursue her desire, Phillips eventually appealed directly to Texas governor Ann Richards. Richards had previously appointed the first crime victim, Ellen Halbert, to the powerful Texas Board of Criminal Justice and Halbert’s advocacy led to Phillips having her day across the table from Yanez. The meeting, with a trained mediator present, allowed Phillips to unburden a part of her soul. It wasn’t about forgiveness or reconciliation—it was about honesty and disclosure: This is what you did to my family and you need to hear me out. The meeting occurred in 1991. Yanez offered an apology and Cathy Phillips said she felt better after the meeting, with some of her questions answered. She no longer had to play the “What you don’t know will drive you crazy” game.
The author with Ellen Halbert After Phillips’s encounter with Yanez, Halbert helped direct funding to the victim services unit of Texas’s criminal justice system and a victim-offender dialogue program was created and made available to victims of violent crime in 1993, the first of its kind in the nation. To date, more than thirty other state criminal justice systems have followed suit.
Balm tells its story in narrative fashion, the specific story of the 1996 wreck fitting into the larger story of Texas’s foray into state-sponsored restorative justice practices. My goal is to reveal the life-changing and -enhancing practices of restorative justice. Before I delved into this project, like many, I was only vaguely aware of restorative justice practices. This book has exposed many to its healing ways.
Not all restorative practices require face-to-face interaction between an offender and a crime victim. Restorative practices are not for everyone, but those who have benefitted from them say that restorative practices fill holes left by the retributive system.
I’ll be spending chunks of time in the next year or so working on a new restorative justice book. To be written in the same style and spirit of Balm, it will focus on the incredible healing journeys experienced by two crime victims.
T. Carlos “Tim” Anderson – I’m a Protestant minister and Director of Austin City Lutherans (ACL), the social ministry expression of a dozen ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) congregations in Austin, Texas. I’m the author of There is a Balm in Huntsville: A True Story of Tragedy and Restoration from the Heart of the Texas Prison System (Walnut Street Books, 2019). Readers describe it as “compelling,” “inspiring,” and “well written.”
I’m also the author of Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good (ACTA-Chicago, 2014), which traces the history of economic inequality in American society. Reviewing Just a Little Bit More, journalist Sam Pizzigati says, “Anderson, above all, writes with a purpose. He’s hoping to help Americans understand that an egalitarian ideal helped create the United States. We need that ideal, Anderson helps us see, now more than ever.”
February 28, 2021
Caste – Book Review
Even though I can’t remember her name, I’ll never forget what she had to say. We were participants at a church conference in Houston, where I was a young, white, bilingual Lutheran pastor. With three or four others, we sat circled together in a small breakout group. She was Black and told the group she was a retired teacher and a member of the Lutheran congregation in Houston’s Third Ward. Our group’s topic of discussion was racism.
She explained that she grew up during Jim Crow on land outside of Houston in the 1930s. Her father was a sharecropper, and the area where her family lived was populated by Blacks and whites. One year during the fall harvest, she remembered, white children walked to school as she and some of her siblings helped their father in the fields. Her segregated school wouldn’t start classes for a few weeks yet. She asked her father: “Why do the white children go to school already while we’re still working in the fields?”
Her daddy, she told us, answered her question in a quiet and measured tone: “It’s because it takes those white children longer to learn.”
Many things in America have changed since the 1930s, but not all things. Does it still take white children longer to learn? Isabel Wilkerson, author of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (Random House, 2020), answers the question as concerns issues related to racial equity. Her book focuses on racial justice through the lens of caste structure.
“Caste is more than rank, it is a state of mind that holds everyone captive, the dominant imprisoned in an illusion of their own entitlement, the subordinate trapped in the purgatory of someone else’s definition of who they are and who they should be” (p. 290, hardcover).
When most Americans think of caste, India and apartheid-era South Africa come to mind, or maybe Nazi Germany. Wilkerson asks Americans to think again about caste and peek into a mirror. Standing in stark opposition to this country’s upstanding ideals of equality and “liberty and justice for all” is the caste system, Wilkerson writes, with its 400-year run in America. Well-intentioned Americans responding to the markers of racism, white supremacy, and racial inequality yet present in this society often say: This is not who we are.
Caste forcefully asserts otherwise: Actually, this is who we are.
Wilkerson details many differences of lived experiences between Blacks and whites – home ownership and wealth, incarceration rates, life expectancy rates – to make her case that there is such a thing as an American caste system.
“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routine and unthinking expectations, patterns of social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things” (p. 70).
This society’s numerous virtues and contradictions – inalienable rights and slavery, freedom of opportunity and lynching, wealth creation and high rates of childhood poverty, and the consecutive elections of Obama and Trump – are the conversation points Wilkerson presents to her readers. “Caste does not explain everything in American life, but no aspect of American life can be fully understood without considering caste and embedded hierarchy” (p.324).
Wilkerson’s research reveals that Nazi leaders in the 1930s looked to the American South as the prime example by which to establish their racist system based in Aryan supremacy. The Nazis noticed the expanse of “white and colored” separation mandated in US southern states for schools, restaurants, public and private transportation, jails and prisons, in marriage and for sexual intercourse. The 1935 Nuremberg Laws, protecting “German blood and honor,” were inspired by the Jim Crow laws of the American South.
Toward the end of the book, she quotes her friend Taylor Branch, the civil rights historian, from a recent conversation they had about the demographic change of whites losing majority status in the US in 2042 and becoming a minority. “If people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?”
It’s an excellent question for readers’ consideration, one of many such opportunities presented by Caste.
Wilkerson’s writing style ably reflects her status as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who previously worked for the New York Times. Her 2010 book, the highly regarded The Warmth of Other Suns, is a narrative nonfiction detailing the lives of three African Americans and their families during the twentieth century’s great migration of Blacks fleeing Jim Crow in southern states for northern cities.
In the 1950s, her mother-to-be migrated from Georgia and her father-to-be from Virginia to Washington D.C. where they would meet, marry, and raise their daughter. Wilkerson’s mother was a school teacher and her father a civil engineer. They hoped their daughter, Wilkerson writes, “might somehow escape the arrows of caste that they had to endure” (p.395).
That wasn’t to be. Yet, those arrows and the wounds they inflicted pointed to a life’s mission.
That was the case with the retired school teacher who I met at the church conference in Houston. She told us that her daddy’s words of subversive resistance inspired her to become a teacher, her way of combatting the racial inequities she experienced at such a young age.
Similarly, Wilkerson’s parents raised a daughter whose mission also was and is to teach, albeit through her writing. In Caste, Wilkerson lifts her impassioned voice against past and present racial injustices and advocates for “radical empathy” – “to educate oneself and to listen with a humble heart to understand another’s experience from their perspective” (p.386).
Who are we? Caste is a definitive must-read in answer to that question.
T. Carlos “Tim” Anderson – I’m a Protestant minister and Director of Austin City Lutherans (ACL), the social ministry expression of a dozen ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) congregations in Austin, Texas. I’m the author of There is a Balm in Huntsville: A True Story of Tragedy and Restoration from the Heart of the Texas Prison System (Walnut Street Books, 2019). Readers describe it as “compelling,” “inspiring,” and “well written.”
I’m also the author of Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good (ACTA-Chicago, 2014), which traces the history of economic inequality in American society. Reviewing Just a Little Bit More, journalist Sam Pizzigati says, “Anderson, above all, writes with a purpose. He’s hoping to help Americans understand that an egalitarian ideal helped create the United States. We need that ideal, Anderson helps us see, now more than ever.”
February 21, 2021
John Lewis, Crossing the Bridge, Then and Now
John Lewis, the fearless civil rights leader, was beaten mercilessly by police and vigilantes on the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama on Sunday, March 7, 1965 as he helped lead 600 marchers demanding voting rights for Black Alabamians. In the face of violence and hate, the marchers were not deterred. In the words of the civil rights’ folk song, they kept their “eyes on the prize.”
When the original 54-mile march to Montgomery, Alabama’s capitol, resumed two weeks later, under federal protection, people from around the country joined, including religious leaders. Among them, Rabbi Abraham Heschel famously reported that he felt as if he was praying with his feet. By the time the marchers reached the capitol steps after four days, they numbered 25,000. This historic march marshaled the political will President Lyndon Johnson needed to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The Bushes and Obamas with John Lewis in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 2015Fifty years later on the same bridge, Congressman John Lewis helped lead 40,000 marchers to commemorate “Bloody Sunday,” alongside Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, representing America’s vast diversity. Today, February 21, marks the 81st anniversary of this great American’s birth, who passed away in 2020.
As white clergy members, we want uplift two aspects of John Lewis’ legacy during Black History Month, his bridge-building and spirituality (Lewis was an ordained Baptist minister), and appeal to our fractured society, especially our white constituents.
Bridge-building, as embodied by Lewis and the marchers on the Pettus Bridge, is sorely needed in our ever-increasingly polarized society. There are deep chasms to cross: intractable racism, raw politicization, acute economic disparities, white privilege, and abandonment of civil discourse.
Our political leaders have gone astray, and we are complicit. Legitimate give-and-take partisanship has morphed into pitched battle lines, exacerbated by unrepresentative gerrymandering. Politics, rather than accomplishing the people’s business, has become a debauched and destructive blood sport.
Our ever-deepening alienation is raising the specter of even more political violence than we’ve recently witnessed.
Our divisions are deep and harsh, but not unbridgeable, as John Lewis showed. His profound spirituality and love are models for us. He lived through perilous and violent days, and strove to heal the deep wound of racial oppression. His commitment to non-violent, peaceful “good trouble” brought societal healing.
Jesus said, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Lewis stood tall on Jesus’ teaching while marching on the Pettus Bridge more than 50 years ago. If, as John Lewis described his own experience, he could look into the eyes of the trooper clubbing him, love the officer, and then work harder than ever to change the system that moved the officer to beat and hate Lewis, why can’t we, even if with small steps, adopt a similar type of love, compassion, and commitment to “good trouble” in order to help our society mend?
Certain matters are outside of debate. Racial equality is one. The only question is how to obtain this goal, not whether we should. The art of the possible – the best definition of politics in a democracy – succeeds best in a society that fosters a healthy political partisanship (or non-partisanship).
As we see it, democracy thrives only in a society that has the ability to bridge differences. Having a commitment to justice and love, whether from religious conviction or otherwise, guides the bridging task. In recent years, the admired American trait of liberty has too often devolved into toxic individualism. The commitment to love one another, another command of Jesus, makes for stronger communities in which individuals can flourish.
This, then, is our message that we take from John Lewis: embrace our connectedness in community; dialog with each other respectfully; work together compassionately toward justice; and “pray with our feet,” even if that means making non-violent “good trouble.”
T. Carlos “Tim” Anderson – I’m a Protestant minister and Director of Austin City Lutherans (ACL), the social ministry expression of a dozen ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) congregations in Austin, Texas. I’m the author of There is a Balm in Huntsville: A True Story of Tragedy and Restoration from the Heart of the Texas Prison System (Walnut Street Books, 2019). Readers describe it as “compelling,” “inspiring,” and “well written.”
I’m also the author of Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good (ACTA-Chicago, 2014), which traces the history of economic inequality in American society. Reviewing Just a Little Bit More, journalist Sam Pizzigati says, “Anderson, above all, writes with a purpose. He’s hoping to help Americans understand that an egalitarian ideal helped create the United States. We need that ideal, Anderson helps us see, now more than ever.”
February 10, 2021
Grace Versus Merit
Who knew that merit as a value system has a dark side?
Last spring, I participated in a presentation political philosopher and author Michael Sandel gave via Zoom for leaders of Austin Interfaith, a network of community- and faith-based organizers. The meeting’s host, Ernesto Cortés, executive director of the Industrial Areas Foundation of the Southwest, invited the Harvard professor to present to our group of fifty. In run-up to the fall 2020 release of his book, The Tyranny of Merit, Sandel spoke to us about the American economic system based upon merit wherein actors are rewarded for their talent and effort.
Sandel conceded that merit is most often a beneficial societal value, but he also warned us that merit is two-faced.
I can read my own handwriting, most of the time. Notes from Zoom session with Dr. Michael Sandel – May 27, 2020.
Sandel explained his view that the American system of economic meritocracy in many ways is a secular version of the “prosperity gospel,” a biblical aberration of American origins claiming that God blesses the truly obedient with health and wealth. Those who suffer with poor health or light pocketbooks are understood to lack sufficient faith, which deems them deserving of divine punishment. (Houston’s Joel Osteen, for example, is a lead proponent.)
In his book, Sandel uses the example of Job from the Hebrew Bible to explain how a purely meritocratic way of thinking gives rise to harsh attitudes toward those who are unsuccessful. Job, who has lost family members and suffers extreme physical ailments, is interrogated by his friends (“counselors” in the biblical text) that he might confess a secret sin for which God has sent to Job his punishments, as if the universe is one big cosmic meritocracy devoid of grace, chance, fortune, and plain old luck – good or bad.
One of the morals of Job’s story is that human beings are not in complete control. Contrary to merit’s supposed wisdom, all outcomes are not necessarily rewards or punishments for human behavior. Today’s system of economic meritocracy becomes a tyrant, Sandel says, when it splits actors into two separate groups and assigns only blame to losers and only praise to winners.
When merit goes too far it thoroughly obliterates grace.
“The more we view ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient,” Sandel writes, “the less likely we are to care for the fate of those less fortunate than ourselves. If my success is my own doing, their failure must be their fault. This logic makes meritocracy corrosive of commonality” (hardcover, p. 59).
There are many in our society who feel left out or not needed. The coronavirus has exacerbated these sentiments along with having hardened the previously existing divides of social and economic inequalities.
“The greatest human need,” Sandel said during the presentation, “is to be needed by our fellow human beings.” One of Sandel’s antidotes to merit’s current tyranny is to re-orientate our politics to the dignity of work.
Toward the end of the book, Sandel introduces a term that was new to me: contributive justice. Work, at its best, Sandel says, is “a socially integrating activity, and arena of recognition, a way of honoring our obligation to contribute to the common good . . . theories of contributive justice teach us that we are most fully human when we contribute to the common good and earn the esteem of our fellow citizens for the contributions we make” (pgs. 211, 212).
To move away from merit’s overreach and tyranny, Sandel advocates a balancing out: more humility on the part of the economically successful and a purposeful expansion of opportunity for the economically disadvantaged.
A healthy commitment to contributive justice includes the recognition that fortune, luck, and grace are always in play. The economy, politics, and life itself are more than zero-sum games, and its actors are more than simply winners or losers.
On the last page of the book – spoiler alert – Sandel expands a familiar historical phrase: “There, but by the grace of God, or the accident of birth, or the tyranny of fate, go I.” A reclamation of the phrase’s sentiment by Americans, Sandel claims, would lead to a “less rancorous, and more generous public life” (p. 226).
T. Carlos “Tim” Anderson – I’m a Protestant minister and Director of Austin City Lutherans (ACL), the social ministry expression of a dozen ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) congregations in Austin, Texas. I’m the author of There is a Balm in Huntsville: A True Story of Tragedy and Restoration from the Heart of the Texas Prison System (Walnut Street Books, 2019). Readers describe it as “compelling,” “inspiring,” and “well written.”
I’m also the author of Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good (ACTA-Chicago, 2014), which traces the history of economic inequality in American society. Reviewing Just a Little Bit More, journalist Sam Pizzigati says, “Anderson, above all, writes with a purpose. He’s hoping to help Americans understand that an egalitarian ideal helped create the United States. We need that ideal, Anderson helps us see, now more than ever.”
February 1, 2021
A Sluggish Dream in America
Today’s American Dream: Go to school, work hard and keep your nose to the grindstone, and by golly, you’ll rise up. According to political philosopher and author Michael Sandel, the credo no longer fits the facts on the ground for a growing number of Americans.
Meritocracy, as defined in my first post on Sandel’s new book, The Tyranny of Merit, is the system of just rewards for talent and effort – part and parcel of the American Dream. What possibly could be wrong with this system?
“Meritocratic hubris,” Sandel writes, “reflects the tendency of winners to inhale too deeply of their success, to forget the luck and good fortune that helped them on their way. It is the smug conviction of those who land on the top that they deserve their fate, and that those on the bottom deserve theirs, too” (hardcover, p. 25).
It’s a good system that has benefitted multiple millions (mostly white males) for multiple decades. Yet, as American society since 1980 has increasingly tolerated a stifling and dividing inequality, this merit system has increasingly become more myth than reality – even for white males. If you are born into economic poverty today in the US, your chances of rising out of it are no greater than 4 percent.
For those born after 1980, American inequality, as if the air we breathe, is completely ubiquitous. Today, the American Dream is alive and well in places like Denmark, Norway and Canada. There’s a caveat: The listed countries are also better than the US at progressively taxing their rich citizens in order to redistribute wealth and economic outcomes, significantly mitigating socio-economic inequalities.
These countries have accepted the reality that in the 21st century’s advanced economies, mobility – up or down – is difficult. In the US, we perpetually await the next big wave of economic growth that make all of us, including those who have been left out economically, prosperous and secure.
According to economist Robert Gordon, this type of economic growth will never come. In The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton University Press, 2016), Gordon has one major message that he wants to get across: The great inventions and innovations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that created the incredible economic growth that in turn drove the standard of living higher in the United States was “a revolution that could only happen once.” (Link here to my posts on Gordon’s book.)
Sandel, Gordon and others label the belief that the economy will cure all ills as “market triumphalism.” Part of this belief system includes the conviction (based in meritocratic hubris) that those of us on the top are not required to do anything – volunteer at a food pantry, give charitably or philanthropically to organizations that assist the economically disadvantaged, or advocate for policy changes (like progressive taxation) – to change fortunes for those on the bottom. The market will get it done. Those left out, if they want to get ahead, simply need to play the game by the rules: Go to school, get a job, keep their nose to the grindstone . . .
In previous generations, a majority of American men (and some women) ably supported themselves and their families without the benefit of a college degree. Those egalitarian days are long gone.
Since the end of WW II, the college graduation rate for Americans has steadily risen. In 1980, 20 percent of Americans, twenty-five years of age and older, had a four-year college degree. Today, 36 percent of Americans have a four-year college degree. This current figure broken down racially: 40 percent for whites, 26 percent for Blacks, 58 percent for Asian-Americans, and 19 percent for Hispanics. Each year since 2014, women have outnumbered men in the attainment of college degrees.
These figures are the highest they’ve ever been in this country. I went to college and met my future spouse there. We both graduated. Both our fathers graduated from college a generation before we did. My wife and I have three children, all eventually attaining a four-year college degree. All three of them wanted to go to college – it would have been a difficult situation in our household if one of them had wanted to veer off the designated track.
As a bilingual parish pastor for more than twenty-five years, I helped shepherd a number of Hispanic teenagers to college where they became the first ones in their families to not only attend but graduate from college.
Going to college, more often than not, seems the best option for a high school grad. But student debt in the US has skyrocketed, and economic and social inequalities have increased while social mobility has stalled. The American Dream has become sluggish, even for those who are playing the game by the rules.
Sandel counsels those of us on the upside of the “diploma divide” in this country to be slower to judge those on the other side of it. “The more we view ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, the less likely we are to care for the fate of those less fortunate than ourselves. If my success is my own doing, their failure must be their fault. This logic makes meritocracy corrosive of commonality” (p. 59).
These are threatening and precarious times for democracy. We live in an era of “winners and losers,” and Sandel says the odds are already stacked in favor of those on the upside.
“If,” he states, “I truly believe my success is due to my good fortune rather than my own doing, I am more likely to feel an obligation to share this good fortune with others” (p. 143).
It’s time for us to embrace a notion of common good more comprehensive than the consumerist one the market has sold us. More on that in the upcoming third and final post on this book.
T. Carlos “Tim” Anderson – I’m a Protestant minister and Director of Austin City Lutherans (ACL), the social ministry expression of a dozen ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) congregations in Austin, Texas. I’m the author of There is a Balm in Huntsville: A True Story of Tragedy and Restoration from the Heart of the Texas Prison System (Walnut Street Books, 2019). Readers describe it as “compelling,” “inspiring,” and “well written.”
I’m also the author of Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good (ACTA-Chicago, 2014), which traces the history of economic inequality in American society. Reviewing Just a Little Bit More, journalist Sam Pizzigati says, “Anderson, above all, writes with a purpose. He’s hoping to help Americans understand that an egalitarian ideal helped create the United States. We need that ideal, Anderson helps us see, now more than ever.”
January 23, 2021
The Tyranny of Merit – Book Review
Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) is the best book I’ve read in some time. Besides covering America’s standing (for better and for worse) as a meritocracy, the book also delves into inequality, the “diploma divide,” and the populist distrust of government that helped fuel the election of America’s 45th president. Sandel covers Donald Trump’s electability better than anyone else I’ve read.
Sandel teaches political philosophy at Harvard. His class, “Justice: What’s the Right Thing To Do?,” is one of the most popular classes at the exclusive university and is widely available on the Internet. “Justice” has more than 12 million views on YouTube. Pretty good for a philosophy class.
Meritocracy – a system where talent and effort are justly rewarded – is the American antidote to old Europe’s monarchies and aristocracies. Meritocracy gave America its ballyhooed economic mobility and forged the American Dream. But the list of caveats affixed to America’s meritocratic realities distorts their original purpose. Historically, Blacks, browns, and women have been largely excluded. And in the last forty years, economic gains siphoning upward to the wealthiest Americans have produced a highly unequal society that now ranks in the bottom half among the thirty-six OECD countries in economic mobility.
Sandel adds another caveat to the list: the tyranny of merit.
“A perfect meritocracy banishes all sense of gift or grace. It diminishes our capacity to see ourselves as sharing a common fate. It leaves little room for the solidarity that can arise when we reflect on the contingency of our talents and fortunes. This is what makes merit a kind of tyranny, or unjust rule” (hardcover, p. 25).
In order to unpack Sandel’s comment, let’s reconsider the presidential election victory of Donald J. Trump on November 8, 2016.
Sandel devotes a chapter of the book to what he calls the “rhetoric of rising.” Derived from the meritocratic ideal, the phrase asserts that success is readily available to all though effort and striving. “You can make it if you try,” President Barack Obama was fond of saying (140 times during his tenure). The claim, while partly true for many people, has an underside: Those not “succeeding” are deemed solely responsible for their own failure.
In 2016, along came Hillary Clinton in Obama’s wake. On cue, the candidate pushed the rhetoric of rising. “The fundamental belief in America” is that “you should have the chance to go as far as your hard work and dreams will take you.” Sandel claims the candidate and her team were unaware that for a great number of Americans the rhetoric of rising had lost its capacity to inspire.
In contrast, candidate Trump on the campaign trail, according to Sandel’s analysis, never once spoke of American mobility or rising. Rather he bluntly spoke of winners and losers and of making America great again – not by meritocratic rising – but through a renewal of national sovereignty, identity, and pride. This message resonated, especially, with white males who didn’t have college degrees. Rising?? These voters, after a thirty-five year pickling in the brine of inequality, took Ms. Clinton’s incantation as a slap in the face. They voted for Trump in droves.
Sandel explains: “This populist complaint is not without warrant. For decades, meritocratic elites intoned the mantra that those who work hard and play by the rules can rise as far as their talents will take them. They did not notice that for those stuck at the bottom or struggling to stay afloat, the rhetoric of rising was less a promise than a taunt” (p. 72, italics mine).
Sandel suggests that a similar dynamic in Britain produced the 2016 Brexit vote result for the UK to leave the European Union.
According to Sandel, the tyranny of merit has helped solidify the divides in our country between rich and poor, rural and urban, the well-educated and not-as-uneducated. In great measure, it also produced the presidency of Trump.
I’ll have more to say about this timely and insightful book in the coming weeks . . . stay tuned.
T. Carlos “Tim” Anderson – I’m a Protestant minister and Director of Austin City Lutherans (ACL), the social ministry expression of a dozen ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) congregations in Austin, Texas. I’m the author of There is a Balm in Huntsville: A True Story of Tragedy and Restoration from the Heart of the Texas Prison System (Walnut Street Books, 2019). Readers describe it as “compelling,” “inspiring,” and “well written.”
I’m also the author of Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good (ACTA-Chicago, 2014), which traces the history of economic inequality in American society. Reviewing Just a Little Bit More, journalist Sam Pizzigati says, “Anderson, above all, writes with a purpose. He’s hoping to help Americans understand that an egalitarian ideal helped create the United States. We need that ideal, Anderson helps us see, now more than ever.”
January 9, 2021
Misrule, Inequality, and the Strangest Christmas Ever
This recent Christmas season we, perhaps like you, decorated our tree and strung up our lights earlier than usual. We left the lights plugged in all night and sometimes during the day, previously considered in our household a foolish waste of electricity. And we left the tree, the lights, and other decorations up later than usual, past Epiphany’s official end to the season. To wit, our tree started to turn brown. But we didn’t care – we needed these Christmas accoutrements to soothe us a bit longer. Covid and its debris field of death, fear, isolation, and economic uncertainty – along with plenty of political turmoil – provided a full measure of gloom to the season. With no doubt, December 2020 will be remembered – hands down and sanitized – as one of the strangest Christmas seasons ever.
X-mas 2020 was quiet in our South Austin abodeWhatever the Christmas season might mean to each of us, it’s now something – lesson learned – that a number of us will no longer take for granted. We’re not guaranteed or entitled to gather and celebrate with loved ones, sing carols and hymns with other worshippers, or venture out to watch a newly released movie (a Christmas tradition in our household). These events, God willing in December 2021, will carry much joy and greater gravitas.
What does Christmas mean for you? The essence of Christmas for me: light shining in the darkness for those who need it most.
Twenty years ago this past December, I read Stephen Nissenbaum’s The Battle for Christmas (Knopf, 1997). This excellent history revealed to me numerous insights into the cherished holiday season. That year, I used part of the book’s message – recasting Jesus’s coming as misrule – as the basis for my Christmas Eve sermon at the church I served.
Misrule, as explained by Nissenbaum, is best understood within the historical context (in the Northern Hemisphere) of year-end crop harvest, the availability of freshly slaughtered meat facilitated by cooler weather, and the culmination of beer and wine fermentation. For millennia, this time of the year – coinciding with December 21, the calendar’s shortest day – has been a time of celebration, leisure, and even revelry as people enjoyed the rewards of their labor at year’s end.
Misrule, historically, was a moment of social inversion when the wealthy and powerful deferred to their dependents and poorer neighbors. Practiced in Europe and early America, misrule gave social permission – during a few days in December and January – for the poor to enter the homes of the well-to-do demanding to be served with food, drink, and money as if the peasants themselves were the well-to-do. Misrule consisted of rowdy public displays of excessive eating and drinking, the mocking of established authority, and demands made upon the rich by the working class.
Understanding misrule helps one decipher the downright bizarre lyrics of the carol “We Wish You a Merry Christmas.” The song originated in 16th-century England. Now bring us some figgy pudding . . . We won’t go until we get some – and bring it right here! The Puritans of New England – yes, it’s true – banned the celebration of Christmas in the mid-1600s not because they had issues with the legendary December birth of Jesus, but because misrule had a tendency to get out of hand. So bring it right here!
One of the unwritten rules of misrule was the continuation of a social bargain. The peasants, satisfied with the brief turning of the tables during misrule, were to offer their goodwill and deference to the wealthy and powerful for the rest of the year. If you’ve ever received a Christmas bonus at a job where you felt you were underpaid, you can see that misrule is still with us. It’s the misrule bargain: accept your year-end bonus and do not grumble about your low pay for the balance of the year – a gift given in exchange for goodwill.
Misrule was a way to mitigate the social inequality that existed in the mercantile age. Misrule upset the natural order, but only momentarily.
Perhaps you can see where I went with my Christmas Eve sermon in 2000.
Jesus’s coming into the world – especially in Luke’s gospel – upsets the regular order, and permanently so. His birth was first announced to shepherds, low-status workers, and not to royalty – certainly not to conniving King Herod and his ilk. Later, Jesus’s first sermon (Luke 4) focuses on social changes for peasant folks, like shepherds: I bring good news to the poor as I proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed. I proclaim to you the Jubilee year of the Lord.
If you’re unaware, the “Jubilee year of the Lord” refers to the book of Leviticus’s decree that every fifty years in the community of God’s people there shall be the cancellation of all debts, the release of slaves, and the equitable sharing of land. Radical? Absolutely.
As if a reboot, the year of Jubilee existed for the sake of the society’s common good which included the mitigation of the potentially devastating effects of generational inequality.
In his first sermon, Jesus spells out his mission by the precepts of Jubilee year. It was a big chunk of light shining in the darkness for people who needed it most. His first sermon still inspires the same type of mission thinking and action some two thousand years later.
Today, US society suffers from a forty-year run on inequality, now exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. Many who are rich have experienced gains; many who are poor are in worse shape. What to do?
Individually and collectively, we need lights to shine. The darkness, you know, has never yet been able to stand up to light. That’s just the way it is. At this point – the light of compassion, the light of love, the light of kindness, the light of self-sacrifice for neighbor or for greater good – any type of light will do.
T. Carlos “Tim” Anderson – I’m a Protestant minister and Director of Austin City Lutherans (ACL), the social ministry expression of a dozen ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) congregations in Austin, Texas. I’m the author of There is a Balm in Huntsville: A True Story of Tragedy and Restoration from the Heart of the Texas Prison System (Walnut Street Books, 2019). Readers describe it as “compelling,” “inspiring,” and “well written.”
I’m also the author of Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good (ACTA-Chicago, 2014), which traces the history of economic inequality in American society. Reviewing Just a Little Bit More, journalist Sam Pizzigati says, “Anderson, above all, writes with a purpose. He’s hoping to help Americans understand that an egalitarian ideal helped create the United States. We need that ideal, Anderson helps us see, now more than ever.”
January 3, 2021
Blessed Dryuary
Five years ago during Christmas, our daughter Alex shared her upcoming new-year endeavor : “Dryuary.” I had never heard the word before but understood it instantly – dry January. Alex, a vegetarian and daily exerciser, proceeded to converse with me and her mother, Denise, about the wisdom of bodily and mental detox after December’s season of excesses. It made an impression. A year later, Denise and I jumped on the Dryuary bandwagon and we thanked Alex for role-modeling the idea. Alex yet practices Dryuary as do other family members. This year will mark Denise’s and my fourth year to do Dryuary together.
As 2020 wound down, I especially looked forward to Dryuary’s hiatus on alcohol. Denise and I have wine with most dinners . . . but with Covid-induced staying at home and fewer evening meetings on my schedule, I’ve consumed more wine with dinners – and afterwards – than in previous years. Dryuary not only gives a mild cleanse to one’s psychological and physical states, but also a chance to reset them.
I’m in resetting mode and, to boot, there are good historical reasons that make the case for Dryuary and its invitation to reclaim the wisdom of moderation.
The winter solstice, December 21 – the shortest day in the Northern Hemisphere – has a deep cultural history related to the rhythms of year-end harvest. For millennia, the period preceding and following the solstice (what we moderns call October, November, December, and January) has been the time of gathering in harvests, slaughtering for fresh meat, and enjoying the products of fermentation, beer and wine. December was and is the time for excess – eating, drinking, celebrating, leisure – a time to enjoy labor’s rewards at year’s end.
Our modern-day December holiday season with gifts and the exaltation of consumerism, rich food and libations, and celebrations simply follows suit. Santa Claus, with his round belly and deep laugh, is the iconic representative of our modern season of excesses. (For those wondering about how December’s religious aspect – namely, the baby Jesus – fits into this topic, I’ll cover that in the next blog post.)
Have you ever put on a few pounds during the winter holidays? Have you ever signed up for a gym membership in January? If so, you’ve experienced the natural rhythms of this time of the year. There’s nothing wrong with occasional excesses. The hundreds of seeds produced by my garden’s basil and cilantro plants when they flower – in anticipation of next season’s reproduction – is a prime example of the goodness of excess.
When excess, however, becomes a way of life – addiction being excess’s most devious manifestation – problems multiply for individuals so afflicted and for the society in which they live. Eating, drinking, consumerism – all necessary parts of the human enterprise – are best done in general and overall moderation. This is the basic theme and message of my first book, Just a Little Bit More.
As we age, we slow down and our habits – both the good and bad ones – become more engrained. Youth’s ability to shrug off mistakes and pivot to new possibilities has diminished. Hopefully, for those of us in the aging mode, the wisdom of the years has accumulated and produced effective strategies for dealing with the vagaries of life. As we’ve heard it said: “For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.”
I have, God willing, good plans for 2021: multiple house projects, recovering my dormant golf game, writing another book, continuing the meaningful social ministry work I’m able to do with fantastic partners, and – along with everyone else – I look forward to the end of the pandemic. Dryuary helps me get a head start on these good ambitions where needed.
Even though Twitter is awash with Dryuary bashing – “I made it 8 hours into this year’s #Dryuary before a bottle of reserve Rioja was calling my name . . . ” – I’m not persuaded otherwise. The pendulum has swung away from December into blessed Dryuary. I raise my glass of iced hibiscus tea with fresh mint to the new year!
T. Carlos “Tim” Anderson – I’m a Protestant minister and Director of Austin City Lutherans (ACL), the social ministry expression of a dozen ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) congregations in Austin, Texas. I’m the author of There is a Balm in Huntsville: A True Story of Tragedy and Restoration from the Heart of the Texas Prison System (Walnut Street Books, 2019). Readers describe it as “compelling,” “inspiring,” and “well written.”
I’m also the author of Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good (ACTA-Chicago, 2014), which traces the history of economic inequality in American society. Reviewing Just a Little Bit More, journalist Sam Pizzigati says, “Anderson, above all, writes with a purpose. He’s hoping to help Americans understand that an egalitarian ideal helped create the United States. We need that ideal, Anderson helps us see, now more than ever.”
December 15, 2020
Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown
I was almost four years old when the CBS network debuted A Charlie Brown Christmas on December 9, 1965. From the living room of a house that my parents rented on Grand Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota, I most likely watched its premiere. My dad was a second-year seminary student at the time, and, like many of his classmates, a big fan of Charles Schulz and his Peanuts comic strip. As my dad completed his education and began his career as a pastor and chaplain – prompting a family move to Portland, Oregon, a return to Minneapolis-St. Paul, and then a permanent relocation to the Chicago area – Christmas seasons for our family consistently centered upon snow, lights, a tree, presents, church, and plenty of anticipation. Watching A Charlie Brown Christmas, a show that incorporated all of these themes, was a high point of each Christmas celebration in my childhood home as our family grew to include my younger brothers and sister.
A generation later, my wife, Denise, and I lived in Houston with our three young children where I worked as a pastor. A cherished copy of A Charlie Brown Christmas was prominent in our VCR tape collection alongside copies of Disney classics that the kids watched over and again. As Christmas 1992 approached, it occurred to me that I needed more than the VCR copy of the Peanuts’ gang Christmas. I had to get a copy of the soundtrack. Those wondrous bits of jazz piano, bass and drums that undergirded the animated TV special beckoned me. I had heard its notes sway and its chords swing from my earliest days. There had to be a recording of these songs where the musicians stretched out.
These were pre-Amazon days. The CD era was cresting, but even so, it wasn’t until I went to a fourth or fifth “record store” (that’s what we called them back then) that I found a cooperative store manager who promised to order me (from an inventory catalog pulled down from a shelf) a CD of the Vince Guaraldi Trio’s A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Bingo – Guaraldi and his bandmates stretched out magnificently, matching my expectations.
The next few Christmas seasons, I purchased additional copies of the CD and gifted them to family and friends. Then, in 1995, it was my turn to preach the Christmas Eve sermon at the church, Holy Cross Lutheran, I served in Houston. There was no question as to what I’d do for the message that year: a recapitulation of A Charlie Brown Christmas. It was a bit of a risk – telling a child’s tale for one of the largest worshipping crowds of the year. But I had the blessing of my pastoral colleague Gene Fogt and – even though the animation has no adult characters – I knew Charlie Brown’s story wasn’t just for kids.
The opening scene of the special features Charlie Brown confiding to his buddy Linus van Pelt: “I just don’t understand Christmas, I guess. I like getting presents . . . but I’m still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.”
Writer Charles Schulz wonderfully develops a twenty-two minute animated homily from this starting confession to convey his own sense of Christmas’s true meaning: not the glitz and glitter of over-commercialization – which ultimately doesn’t deliver on its promise – but human and divine solidarity through the birth of a child. “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger,” Linus tells Charlie Brown, quoting Luke 2.
A recently retired USAF colonel, Rolf Smith, was visiting the congregation that Christmas Eve with his family. He loved the sermon (as he told me later) and returned to Sunday worship services in the new year. As we got to know each other, I learned that Rolf had spearheaded the launch of “innovation” as a corporate strategy for the air force. To him, recasting A Charlie Brown Christmas for a sermon was “highly innovative.” That spring, he and his spouse, Julie, joined the church.
Another congregant, however, expressed her disdain to me about the sermon. She deemed a rendering of “a cartoon” as inappropriate for Christmas Eve worship. It wasn’t until a few years later that I discovered that a family member of hers struggled mightily with depression. The message was too close to home. For Christmas Eve worship, I surmised, she had not wanted any mention of depression and its effects.
Producer Lee Mendelson, Peanuts’ creator Charles Schulz, and animator José Cuahtomec “Bill” MelendezCharles Schulz, from his Sebastopol, California studio, collaborated with producer Lee Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez after Coca-Cola agreed to underwrite the special in the summer of 1965. Adhering to a fast-tracked schedule, Schulz and Melendez drew out 13,000 stills for the animation. Mendelson, having met and worked with the Grammy award-winning Guaraldi the previous year, commissioned the jazz pianist to record the soundtrack. A children’s choir from an Episcopal church sang for two of the tracks. Mendelson himself wrote the lyrics to Guaraldi’s tune Christmas Time is Here, now covered by hundreds of musicians the world over.
Peanuts’ piano players: Schroeder and Vince GuaraldiA Charlie Brown Christmas is now playing its 55th Christmas season, and still going strong even for new generations.
When my son, Mitch, who was born in 1991, comes home to see us at Christmas, one of his first requests after hugging his mother is to hear some Christmas music – “the Snoopy and Charlie Brown disc.” I always oblige – he’s heard it every Christmas since he can remember. Lucky guy.
T. Carlos “Tim” Anderson – I’m a Protestant minister and Director of Austin City Lutherans (ACL), the social ministry expression of a dozen ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) congregations in Austin, Texas. I’m the author of There is a Balm in Huntsville: A True Story of Tragedy and Restoration from the Heart of the Texas Prison System (Walnut Street Books, 2019). Readers describe it as “compelling,” “inspiring,” and “well written.”
I’m also the author of Just a Little Bit More: The Culture of Excess and the Fate of the Common Good (ACTA-Chicago, 2014), which traces the history of economic inequality in American society. Reviewing Just a Little Bit More, journalist Sam Pizzigati says, “Anderson, above all, writes with a purpose. He’s hoping to help Americans understand that an egalitarian ideal helped create the United States. We need that ideal, Anderson helps us see, now more than ever.”
