Transitive Morality

Can someone be a secular idealist and still be a Good person?  Of course they can.  But that is not the point.

New York Times editorials

Some aggressive atheists and many not-so-aggressive advocates of secularism have sought to defend their position against the criticism that “people who don’t believe in God can’t have a moral compass.”  This defense was discussed again in an article by Molly Worthen in the NY Times last week.  (“Wanted: A Theology of Atheism,” by Molly Worthen, The New York Times, May 30, 2015.)  And it was supported by a series of letters, published this morning (June 7th) on the Op Ed page.

I know lots of secular idealists.  (I defined this back in my blog post “Why Secular Idealism is Insufficient,” http://danswartzman.blogspot.com/2015/04/why-secular-idealism-is-insufficient.html.)  These are people who don’t believe in any kind of transcendent reality; this materialism makes them secular.  But they do believe in moral priorities, which makes them idealists.  And all of my friends and colleagues who fit this bill are kind, caring, trustworthy and moral people.  There is nothing in my worldview that makes this problematic.  So, I don’t believe that being a secular person means that you can’t be a Good person. 

(I do believe that thinking that there are moral priorities is difficult to reconcile with a thoroughly materialistic view, but that is not what I want to address here.) 

My problem with secular idealism is that it allows us to make only extremely limited prescriptive statements about how others should behave.  It is not a “transitive morality.”

The importance of transitive morality

Why is that important?  Well, somewhere around a third of the women and girls on our planet are treated not much better than animals or property.  Their dignity and their natural rights are denied by the societies and communities in which they live. 

And American corporations have exhibited morally reprehensible conduct in support of selling tobacco products and arguing against environmental controls.  Some former manufacturers of asbestos containing products knew that the manufacture and installation of their products was dangerous, but bribed scientists to keep the data hidden.

And awful people around the world prey on the innocent and powerless around them, for their own power, profit and glory.

And politicians like Hastert, Livingston, Hyde and Gingrich led cynical campaigns to impeach a President for sexual peccadillos that were no worse than their own behaviors.

And a ghastly number of children in the US, not to mention around the world, are hungry, as you read this, because we haven’t summoned the moral courage to demand justice from ourselves and others.

These are hideously immoral actions.  Do we have a responsibility to act?  Are you willing to accept the world’s monumental mistreatment of women and girls as something we can’t do anything about?  After all, a secular idealist might say, that is their custom, their culture, and who are we to judge them?  At most, we might hope to educate them, but we certainly can’t intervene.  On what moral basis would we support such intervention?

Exactly.  If there is no transcendent ground for morality, you might very well develop your own moral principles and live by them, but you are not able to act upon situations in which other people’s moral priorities are palpably offensive.  Your moral priorities may govern your own behavior, but they form no basis for prescriptive views of the behavior of others.

The ability to be prescriptive

This is what I mean by a “transitive morality.”  Does my moral philosophy allow me to prescribe and proscribe behavior by others?  If so, then there is a transitive quality to my morality.  The reason our moral priorities need a transcendent ground is so that we can offer moral condemnation of the behavior of others and demand correction.  Only moral priorities that transcend time, place, culture, can legitimately form the basis of corrective actions.

The final letter this morning in the Times suggests that everything will be fine as long as we all live by some version of the Golden Rule.  Yes, that would be fine, if we all did.  But what if others don’t agree with you that this is a good moral position?  What if some people wish to force others to conform to a specific moral code, and are willing to punish misbehavior by death?

What empowers the notion that we should not do what we would find hateful in our neighbors is that that notion is grounded in a tradition that respects the transcendental nature of moral values.  As long as there are immoral people in the world doing horrible things, and as long as we choose to act together in response to that immorality, we will need a transitive morality to call their immoral conduct into question and to unite us as a community in opposition to it.

Righteousness without self-righteousness

And, yes, I understand that believing in a transitive morality opens the door for my moral views to oppress others.  That is a responsibility that I, that we, have to live with.  We can not be so scared of self-righteousness that we walk away from the responsibility to be righteous.

Of course people who don’t believe in God can be moral people.  But can we, as a community, unite to act against immorality at home and abroad without a transcendent ground for our common moral priorities?  Of course not.

Driverless cars and my screwed up phone

Anything perfect in your life?

Do you have anything in your life that is both complex and works perfectly?  Any piece of equipment or software?  Or any social organization, like at work or in your community? 

I don’t.  I have a lot of things that work well in my life, some things that work very well.  But nothing is perfect.  And the more complex, the less likely to be perfect.

Here is why I am asking.  Google is involved in two things that are deeply inconsistent, and at least one of which asks us to trust our lives to their ability to develop something that is highly complex and is perfect, or near perfect.  I am referring to the “driverless car.” 

At the same time that they are asking us to rely upon their ability to turn out this perfectly safe product, they have just screwed up my smart phone.

Screwing up my phone

I have a Samsung Galaxy Note 3, which I have had for more than a year, and which I like a lot.  Recently, I was required to download the next version of the Android operating system that the Note 3 runs on.  This is Android 5.0 or “Lollipop.” 

Immediately, I started having problems with the phone.  My email wouldn’t send sometimes.  It took forever for my email list to come up.  My battery life has diminished substantially.  Random apps start when I was doing something else entirely, like disengaging from my calendar, and the phone would pop up.  Some apps simply didn’t work.  Apps would not remember their default status, like my calendar remembering that I like it in “week” mode.  Widgets would disappear, only to reappear after I had restarted the phone. 

When I called my service, AT&T, the nice woman heard my complaint, and asked me what kind of phone I had.  When I said “A Note 3,” she said, “Yeah, I thought so.”  Is there anything I can do about this, I asked.  “No.  There will probably be a fix come out soon.”  Do you have any information on how long “soon” will be?  “No.  There does not seem to be anything planned.”

Great!  So, you make me upgrade (a misnomer) and then the “upgrade” is a pain in the butt, and then you tell me, well, you may just have to live with that.

Sure, in the grand scheme of things, this is a minor irritation.  And the quintessential rich white person problem.  I have, in fact, checked my privilege.
 
From the same people who brought you a screwed up phone. . .
 
But at the same time that Google’s imperfection has screwed up my phone, they want us to buy a car that drives itself.  Really?  You can’t get my phone to work well, and you want me to trust your car will work just fine?  Because, if the driverless car works as well as my phone, we are in for some huge problems. 

Yes, I know that I am not a perfect driver.  Nor are the rest of you, who insist upon using the same roads as I.  But moving to driverless cars will probably not be an improvement, just a transition from the screw-ups human drivers make to the screw-ups that computer coders make.

When I first heard that people were going to start selling driverless cars, my reaction was one of incredulity.  Doesn’t everybody have as many examples of imperfection in their lives as I do in mine?  (See my posting on imperfectibility, http://tinyurl.com/n79d6os, and the two-part posting on the limits of measurement, http://tinyurl.com/mku4cnv and http://tinyurl.com/kf4dywp.)  Who really believes that a bunch of geeky, socially isolated twenty-somethings living in the unreality of Silicon Valley are, no matter how smart they might be, likely to produce something, like a driverless car, which by its nature has got to be really, really close to perfect?

Sooner or later, I am sure that the Google guys will figure out how to make my phone work better.  They’re not incompetent.  But neither are they perfect. 

So, I ask you again.  Am I the only one with abundant evidence in my life that things that human beings do are never going to be perfect, and that the more complex they are, the less close to perfect they will be?  And, if I am not, then why are we even thinking about letting Google and others put driverless cars on our roads?

My "next chapter"

In case you are wondering why I seem so happy these days, allow me to explain.

I am pleased to announce that I have been offered an appointment on the faculty in the Department of Health Systems, Leadership and Policy at Loyola’s Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing.  I will be teaching in the undergraduate program in Health Systems Management (US healthcare, management, law and policy, ethics) as well as working with other faculty on a variety of projects.  I will also maintain an appointment in the Department of Public Health Sciences of the Stritch School of Medicine, where I will teach health policy in the MPH program, help develop the JD/MPH program and a 4+1 MPH degree, and work on curriculum development and community engagement.  You can contact me at dswartzman@luc.edu, which I am now using as my main email.

I couldn’t be more excited about this new phase in my career.  I will be part of terrific faculties focused on health policy, quality of healthcare, and social justice.  It will be an opportunity to continue my teaching and writing (on ethics and policy through my blog at danswartzman.blogspot.com and on management of health organizations through preparation of a textbook in that area).  And it will provide an excellent “home base” for the project many of us are working on to investigate the impact of the Affordable Care Act in the Chicago area.

I will, however, have to figure out how what it will be like to teach undergraduates.  Suggestions are welcome!

Plus, this Fall, I will become the Chair of the Ethics Section of APHA.  We are working on four ambitious projects: revising the Ethics Code for APHA, assuring the teaching of public health ethics in all accredited institutions, working with journal editors to increase the quality of scholarship in the field, and becoming an important part of APHA’s policy development processes.

And my thanks to all of you who have given me so much support over the last few years, as I begin this “next chapter” in my work. 

Decades, Part 2

The Eighties 

John Lennon was shot in 1980, which might be a convenient dividing point for the beginning of the next decade.  A personal turning point for me was the night of the Carter/Reagan debate and the day after.  That evening, my wife and I saw Carter embarrass Reagan.  The President wasn’t as glib as his challenger, but his understanding of the complexity of the problems we faced were highlighted by the simplistic worldview with which Ronald Reagan saw or, at least, portrayed the world.   We both felt a bit sorry for Reagan.  How odd, then, to find out in the newspapers and on TV the next day that most people thought that Reagan had won the debate rather handily.  

For its on-going impact on the future of U.S. policy making, our decision to elect Ronald Reagan as President is the clear beginning of the Eighties.  And here, finally, is the key thesis of this brief historical review: 

The Eighties began in November of 1980, and they haven’t ended!

As I write this, we are in the middle of the 35th  year of the Eighties.  I had real hope that the Eighties had ended when we elected the first black man as President.  He promised to be a transformative leader.  But he has not delivered on that promise.  While I am happier with Obama as President than the alternatives, he has shown himself to be a complete creature of the Eighties.  I believe the general attitude that makes up this horrible decade was not pushed aside.  For now, the Eighties continue on.
   
It is still a minority position to criticize Ronald Reagan.  A few years ago, the television viewing public selected Reagan as “The Greatest American,” over Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.  (Other top ten nominees were Elvis Presley and Oprah Winfrey, underlining the need to not take these results too seriously.)  Reagan is given credit (inappropriately) for “ending the Cold War.”  He supposedly “revolutionized” our view of the role of government in our lives.  If he is the cardinal figure of the Eighties, how bad could they be?
   
But Reagan, his entourage and his disciples have left the country with an intellectual legacy that is highly problematic.  As a result, we have raised a generation of Americans who think that life is perfectible and we don’t have to make any tough choices, that all problems start and end with the actions of individuals, that the measure of our country’s success is how much money is left in each individual’s pocket, that our complex problems don’t require serious choices, but can be fixed with simple-minded solutions. 

Their absurd and disingenuous promises to balance the budget, lower taxes and triple defense spending pandered to the desire of citizens to “have it all.”  Their over-reliance on the marketplace as the solely acceptable mechanism for the distribution of goods and services fostered an unseemly measure of selfishness and greed.  Their decrying government as “the problem,” never “the solution,” defined all social ills as arising from individual behavior and subject only to individual corrections.  If the world was a dangerous place, it only needed to be threatened into submission, and peace would simply follow.

The “ambient” ideology of the Eighties

Ronald Reagan’s legacy is the “ambient” ideology of the Eighties, a legacy which remains largely unquestioned in policy debate today.  That ideology is based upon:

    1.  An extreme individualism
    2.  Uncontrolled selfishness or greed
    3.  Unquestioned glorification of the private sector
    4.  Demonization of collective action
    5.  Unquestioned faith in the perfectability of human endeavors
    6.  Simple-mindedness in proposed solutions
    7.  Disingenuousness in policy proposals

In the last 35 years of the Eighties, this ideology has become, in Daniel Quinn’s language, “ambient”; that is, it has been stated so often and by so many, that it is very difficult to notice its pervasiveness.  Poverty will be eliminated by poor individuals working harder to get jobs.  The economy will flourish only if we all pursue our own self-interests.  “Greed is good,” says the slick-haired, expensively tailored corporate raider, Gordon Gecco, in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street. 

Our image of a hero is someone who “survives” made-up contests, set in a primordial locale, through deceit and dirty-dealing.   All problems have complete solutions, and no choices are difficult, as long as we maintain our faith in God, country and the marketplace.  You want to lower the federal deficits?  Cut taxes for wealthy shareholders.  You want to stimulate employment?  Cut taxes for corporations.  You want to clean up the environment?  Cut taxes for corporate polluters.

But isn’t this exactly what I was looking for in my youth?  Isn’t this a “good guy/bad guy” world that the Eighties is defining?  To a sad extent, that is true.  Sad, because it is a worldview that shares its lack of complexity with the simple, half-hour situation comedies and black and white horse operas that made such entertaining television in the Fifties.  But it is wholly uneducated by the lessons that we should have learned in the Sixties and the Seventies, that all of our big social problems are complex, that they are going to require shared sacrifice to address, that progress is achievable but slow, that, since these challenges are “group level” problems, we are all going to have to work together, as a community, to make that progress, and to make things better.  And that government is the legitimate agent of the community in addressing those problems.

One of the subtle and most pernicious messages of the Eighties is that “Doing Good” is somehow misguided.  If Gecco is right and “Greed is Good,” because it drives the engine of commerce, then altruism is suspect.  The dominant ideology of the Eighties teaches that we can care for our families, and maybe for our neighbors, but that caring for “the other” is just misplaced psychological need.  And when called upon to help, we rely upon voluntarism.  Calling upon the community to meet these “group level” challenges, through its agent, government, is very passé, so Sixties. 

One of the most pernicious consequences of Eighties thinking is how we react to those for whom the system has not worked.  If we are all running a race on an un-biased race course, to use the cliche, then whomever wins deserves to win.  The dangerous corollary, which we see expressed so often today, is that those who didn’t win are not deserving. 

Giving up or embarrassed silence

Ask a child of the Eighties why they want to get a graduate degree in public health or social work or education.  They will hem and haw, look down at their shoes, stumble through a half-hearted defense of “career advancement.” 

Don’t you want to do something Good for other people, you might ask.  Well, yes, they will say, but it is too hokey to put it that way.  Wanting to integrate into your professional life the doing of Good for others is now a source of embarrassment.  Welcome to the Eighties!

For us children of the Sixties, the seemingly endless Eighties make an almost convincing case for giving up.  For caring children of the Eighties with the moral imagination to see beyond the ambient ideology, the only worldview they have known embarrasses them into silence. 

One of the theses of these blogs is that there is a rich and powerful intellectual foundation for caring for “the Other,” for pursuing “the Public Good.”  Rather than give up or shrink in mortification, we should embrace these ideas and recognize the nobility of the calling to which we are responding.  Doing Good is a good thing to do, and I intend these postings to make clear why that has always been and why it continues to be true.  Rather than moving to the back of the bus, those of us who wish to be champions of moral priorities must demand that our leaders make the choices necessary to address the community’s needs.

But, I will argue, the public policy making institutions of our country have pulled back from the willingness to make moral choices, and that the consequences of that are severe and pervasive.

Rejecting the pervasive ideology that says Doing Good should be left only to individual behavior, to “a thousand points of light,” to enlightened self-interest as expressed in the marketplace, is a struggle to many of us.  But it is a struggle worth facing.  If there is an intellectual foundation for not giving up, for not being embarrassed, then finding it will empower that urge so many of us feel, the urge to care for the other.  The urge to choose the public good.
   
But this won’t happen without leadership.  The task of transformative leaders is to pull us out of the Eighties, and to establish a progressive center of policy debate that is respectful of community and governmental action.

Do you think that is do-able?  Is leadership powerful enough to get us to that point?  We will talk about that in the next posting.

Decades, Part 1

Sometimes you wonder if it is possible for a progressive agenda to be argued for and implemented in the US at this time.  The central tendency of the public debate is so far to the right, and there seems to be so little room for moving things leftward.  Some bright spots appear on the national scene, like Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Sherrod Brown, and Mayor Bill DeBlasio, but it is hard to work up much hope for their success.  There is a consistent voice for progressive policies from MSNBC, albeit one not listened to by all that many people.  And Barach Obama, circa 2007, gave us all some hope for transformative leadership.  But that seems like a long time ago.

For decades, I have been telling my students that we are stuck in a timewarp, a skewed and corrupted decade from which exit seems difficult.  Let me explain.

The Fifties

I grew up in the Fifties.  In the Fifties, I grew up thinking that there were good guys and bad guys.   The child of a Holocaust survivor, I knew that Hitler was a bad guy.  So were Stalin and Khrushchev.  The Communists were the biggest bad guys we faced.  Television provided me with a long list of good guys, fathers who knew best, masked cowboys who captured outlaws, superheros who fought for truth, justice and the American way.  The science fiction books I read non-stop had good buy/bad guy plots; you rooted for the good guys and were happy when the bad guys lost, as they always did.   The President of the United States was one of the chief good guys.  Over the next few decades, this easy understanding of “good” and “bad” became more complicated.

Decades are not numerical.  They are cultural.  So, the Fifties probably didn’t start in 1951, the year of my birth.  I believe they probably started in August of 1945, when we used the atomic bomb on Japan.  We ended the war, but we began the Cold War.  With that explosion, America became a dominant force on the world scene. 

The Sixties

I grew up in the Fifties, but I came of age in the Sixties.  You can get a lot of discussion on when the Fifties ended and the Sixties began.  Maybe when President Eisenhower warned us of the “military-industrial complex.”  Or when we elected Kennedy.  A good argument could be made for the unheralded moment in 1962 when U.S. troops first accompanied Vietnamese forces on a raid.  We might choose November of 1963, when Kennedy is shot.

But the cultural tone that enlivened the Sixties can’t have started without the music.  I think the best date for the beginning of the Sixties was February 9, 1964, when the Beatles first performed on the Ed Sullivan show.

The Sixties turned out to be quite a challenge for those of us who believed in the potential triumph of the good guys, but ultimately the lesson was that “doing Good” was still a worthy goal, and that struggles for justice and reason could prevail.  As the Sixties started, the country was already deeply and, apparently, inextricably involved in the Viet Nam War, but most of us didn’t know it, as the Good Guy in Chief had not shared this information. 

Of course, good guys wouldn’t have pursued a war they knew was unwinnable, at extraordinary cost to our treasury and the inexcusable loss of life on all sides.  Good guys would have told us the truth about our interests and our prospects.  When the total bill of that misadventure is calculated, it would be a grave mistake to underestimate the cost to American policy-making of the cynicism that arose as a result of those lies.     

While the Sixties were a time of social conflict, they were also a time of great idealism.  We learned that a struggle for civil rights could move a powerful and, at times, deeply prejudiced majority to cede rights to a minority.  We declared a war on poverty, recognized that women were a minority group, turned the nation away from an ill-conceived war.  We virtually eliminated poverty among the elderly by paying for their healthcare through Medicare.  We promised healthcare for some of the poor, with Medicaid.  And the early successes of the fledgling environmental movement demonstrated that caring for the future of our ecological niche might have broad appeal. 

Even the War provided some hope, as a generation learned that sometimes being a good guy meant you had to “take it to the streets” and, if you did, others would listen.  It was a generation that learned two important lessons: if you aren’t cynical enough, you will be a victim of those in power, but if you are too cynical, you will be paralyzed to work for change.  Changing the world was a valid and admirable ambition, and many young adults decided to try to blend this calling into their professional plans.  Some of us decided that we needed to “do Good” as our life’s work.  Being an efficacious good guy seemed a noble and an obtainable goal.  We went to the Moon in the Sixties, and, after all, if we can go to the Moon. . . . 

The Seventies tried to change that view.

The Seventies

There is some reasonable debate on when the Sixties ended and the Seventies began.  Arguable candidates are the early 1968 Tet Offensive, when the notion that the War was winnable became hard for almost everybody to hold onto.  Later that year, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy did great damage to our hope, but their messages continued to inspire us.

Maybe the Sixties ended the day we first elected Richard Nixon.  After all, good guys wouldn’t have appealed to our North Vietnamese enemies to delay peace talks until after the Presidential election, or secretly bombed Cambodia,  or broken into the offices of their political opponents and then covered up their involvement.  But in that first election, Nixon did promise to extract us from Viet Nam, and in his first term he did establish, by executive order, the U.S. Environmental Protection. 

A compelling case could be made that the Kent State killings in May of 1970 should mark the end of the Sixties.  Many of us still can’t see the picture of the student wailing over the body of her fallen friend without an urge to cry along with her. 

Maybe the Sixties ended when the Beatles split up.  That would provide some sense of balance. But by then, their catalog of music was voluminous and so much an unquestioned part of our lives that their break-up didn’t seem to end anything with finality.  Forty years later, that catalog is well-known by kids the age we were when the group called it quits.  Nothing really seemed to end with their decision. 

My best guess is that the Sixties ended in November of 1972, when we re-elected Richard Nixon in an overwhelming landslide over an opponent, George McGovern, who was widely ridiculed at the time, but whose proposed policies have almost all been adopted by future administrations. 

My, but the Seventies tried to grind out of us our faith in the potential achievement of “the Good,” but they couldn’t quite do it.  The Watergate scandal gave us an uncomfortable look into the unseemliness of presidential behavior, but it also showed that the bad guys still lose, or at least resign in disgrace. 

A whirlwind of inflation buffeted us and the gas lines of the energy crisis reduced our sense of exceptionalism.   We started the Seventies with that most cynical of foreign policies, Henry Kissinger’s realpolitik, where it didn’t matter how bad a country or its leader was behaving, they would get our support if our interests demanded it.  And no matter how much an international good guy might struggle, if their struggle did not advance our global interests, they were irrelevant. 

That foreign policy has played out to America’s horrible disadvantage over the intervening decades, as the rest of the world has come to see us as cynical and self-centered and greedy, hardly the archetype good guy.  But the Seventies also brought us a catalog of federal environmental laws, Supreme Court decisions that recognized reproductive rights, and Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy, where the central organizing principle was human rights. 

For a brief moment in the latter part of that decade, we stood for something noble on the world stage.  Yes, there were a lot of bad guys around the world. And, yes, sometimes we had to associate with them, and at other times we had to fight them.  But our eyes would be focused in the long run on supporting the birthrights of all humans to food, shelter, education, healthcare, meaningful work. 

The values embedded in the Carter domestic and foreign agendas gave many of us children of the Sixties hope, even as we were daunted by the problems we faced: stagflation, interest rates that made home ownership difficult, energy costs, environmental degradation, competition with the Soviets, and the early foreshadowing of Islamicist violence in the Iranian embassy takeover.  We were daunted, but we also had a sense that we were led by people who were doing their best to be good guys.  When the Seventies ended, our hope was bruised, but we were still ready for a fight.\

Then came the Eighties.

Chocolate Mint Cake

Chocolate Mint Cake
by Dan Swartzman

My mother used to make this for every birthday celebration in our house.  It was my father’s favorite.  I think she got the recipe from a Pillsbury Bake-Off in the 1950's.  The interesting part of the recipe is that you make the frosting, and then you convert half of the frosting into the rest of the cake.  Plus, anything with a brick of cream cheese in it can’t be all bad!

I didn’t make this case for 25 years, just kind of forgetting about it.  When I finally made it again, it was so popular with my family that Arlene was angry with me for withholding it from them for so many years.  This recipe makes a layer cake, but I have also done it as a sheet cake.  Sami usually makes it as cupcakes.  Never tried that, but I bet they would be great.

Ingredients

1 package (8 oz) of cream cheese
½ lb of butter, room temperature
½ t of vanilla
½ t of peppermint flavoring
6 cups (about 1.5 lbs) of powdered sugar
1/4 c hot water
4 squares (4 oz) of unsweetened chocolate
1/4 c of butter, room temperature
3 eggs
2 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1½ t baking soda
pinch of table salt
3/4 c milk

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Cream the cream cheese, ½ lb of butter, vanilla and peppermint flavoring in a mixer.  (Don’t be tempted to add “just a bit more” of the mint extract.  A little goes a long way.  I tried the recipe using spearmint flavoring once.  Don’t do that.)  Set aside.

Put the chocolate in a double boiler and melt completely.  Cool slightly.

While the chocolate is melting, sift the powdered sugar into a large bowl.  Add half of the sugar to the cheese mixture and mix gently.  Then add the rest of the powdered sugar and the hot water into the mixer bowl, alternating between the two (using the standard approach: 1/3 dry, ½ of wet, 1/3 dry, ½ of wet, 1/3 dry).

After the chocolate has cooled a bit, add it into the mixing bowl and mix until the chocolate and the rest of the mixture is homogenized, scraping the side of the bowl when needed.

The result is the frosting for the cake.

However, you now take half of this mixture and put it into a bowl and set it aside.  (I usually eyeball this, but it causes some anxiety to do so, and I keep promising myself I will divide it by weight or by volume.  I recommend that, but I haven’t ever done it.  If you leave too much as frosting, the cake will be small.  If you take to much for the cake, there will not be enough frosting.  Either measure or do what I do – live on the edge!)

Into the half of the mixture that is left in the mixer bowl, add in the 1/4 cup of butter.  Then beat in each egg, one at a time until it is thoroughly mixed in.  (About a minute.) 

Whisk together the flour, baking soda and salt.  Add into the blender, alternating with the milk.  (Follow the standard approach, above.)  Do this on low speed. 

Mix until everything is combined, scraping the sides as necessary.  You have now made the batter.

Put the batter into two 9" cake pans.  Bake in center of the oven for about 25 to 35 minutes.  Use the toothpick method to see if it is done.

Let cool for 10 minutes, then take out of the pans and put on a cooling rack.  When completely cooled, ice as a layer cake.  (Don’t try to ice it before it is cooled, or the frosting will break into a terrible mess.)  Keep it in the refrigerator if it is going to be a while before you serve it or if it is especially hot out.

This cake freezes very well.  Cut into slices and place on a sheet pan.  Freeze solid.  Wrap loosely with wax paper, and then place in a freezer bag.  Defrosts in seconds. 

The whole house will smell of chocolate and mint.  One of the side benefits of this recipe!

Telling my parents' stories, in portrait and in landscape, Part Two

A Second Telling, In Landscape

After my classes had heard the first telling of my family’s stories, I suggested that I wanted to tell the stories again.  Only this time, I want to make clear how much of the outcome was due to the intervention in my family’s lives of other people.  The first time the stories were told in “portrait.”  Now I want to tell them in “landscape.”

There were the Russian soldiers who stopped Josef and Rosa as they fled Odessa, and who exhibited sufficient humanity to be charmed by three-year-old Alex’s bravura.  Yes, they robbed my family, but they let them live.  So many other fleeing Jews were not so “well treated.” 

My grandmother Rosa was staying with gentile friends in Warsaw, waiting for my father to come get her.  Those friends were risking their lives housing a Jew, as were the Polish farmer and his wife who took my feverish father in and cared for him and lied to the soldiers for him.  If any of them had been found out, they would have been killed, summarily.  They and their entire families
When my father and grandparents made it to Lithuania, they were welcomed into a community of Jewish refugees funded largely by the Joint Distribution Committee, an international coordinating body of Jewish philanthropy.  Jews from around the world and throughout recent decades had given money that “the Joint” might be able to help my father and his parents.  

Zwartendijk and Sugihara

The Curacao visa came by way of Jan Zwartendijk, a Dutch diplomat in Lithuania.  Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese official whom many consider “the Japanese Schindler,” had asked his superiors in Japan for permission to help the Jews.  They refused.  But he did it anyway.  He saved as many as 10,000 Eastern European Jews by granting them the “paper” with which to travel across the Soviet Union to possible freedom.

I had long suspected that my father was someone that was helped by Sugihara.  Many years ago, on a trip to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., while entering the names of my great uncles Adam, Henrik, and Leon Szwarcman into the database of Holocaust victims and Solomon Szwarcman’s name into the list of survivors, I casually asked the man at the desk if he knew how I could find a list of names of those who got Sugihara’s visas.  “Well, we have the list right here,” he said. 

He handed me the twenty or so pages bound unceremoniously in a black cardboard folder.  There I found the names: Josef Szwarcman, Aleksandr Szwarcman and Golda Szwarcman.  He made copies for me, and I walked with eyes brimming with tears towards the quiet “Hall of Remembrance.”  I sat and wept uncontrollably, for more than 20 minutes, holding the photocopied pages, sobbing over them.

Sugihara appears to have been a man of character.  He was part of the consular team representing Japan in Manchukuo (at the time my mother was growing up in Harbin), and ended up in Europe because he asked to be reassigned, in response to the atrocities he witnessed during that occupation.  He had nothing to gain by helping the Jews of Eastern Europe, and reportedly his career suffered when the truth came out. 

This man, who couldn’t have anticipated my existence, was in every way responsible for it.  He had sufficient moral imagination to care for “the other,” these Jewish farmers, oddly clothed, marching with their scrolls, praying in their dead language.  Tribal people from the American West or Sub-Saharan Africa might have been more foreign to him, but even they might fit better with Japanese feudal mythology.

And yet, as different as they might be, he cared about them.  One estimate is that there are 40,000 descendants of the Jews that Sugihara cared about.  And all of my father’s story and mine, all of the successes of the grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and now the great-great-grandchildren of Josef and Rosa, are made possible because of that caring, because of Chiune Sugihara’s moral imagination.

Shanghai’s Jews

When my father got to Shanghai, he and his parents were given food and shelter by the Jews who were already there.  At the end of the 19th Century, hundreds of Jews, mostly from Iraq, seeking business opportunities, ended up in Shanghai and prospered.  They were of a different branch of the religion and a very different social class than their co-religionists from Eastern Europe and might have looked down their noses on their apparently ignorant, mostly rural cousins. 

Instead, they donated money and goods and time to assure that the newly arrived had a chance to start fresh.  Also helping with the relocation was HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society.  Decades of contributions to HIAS by anonymous Jews were now used to feed, clothe and shelter my father and his parents.

And there was the Henkin family, who were willing to overlook the brashness and over-confidence of this young man and who offered him a job and a career as a salesman.  It was Mr. Henkin who advised my father to take hair-nets, not currency.  (I have always suspected that he might have been the source of the $700, too.)  

A lifelong community

My mother had similar encounters with helping communities.  She fled Siberia for the unknown in Harbin.  She arrived as a toddler, but on the first day of class, she was adopted by her desk mate, Luba Patent, Luba’s loud brother Joe and their friends Vera and Nura.  All members of Harbin’s resident Jewish population, they took in this little hick shiksa and made her part of their extended family.  She became a sister, a full-fledged member of their community.  I grew up with the children of these friends as my cousins.  Friendships that were made when my mother was four lasted for almost 80 years across two continents, until only death ended them.

America

In the “ambient” American mythology, Alex and Tamara and Eric and Alice would cross the Pacific and arrive penniless, knowing no one, but, spirited and plucky and talented, would persevere from hard work alone.  In fact, without trying to take anything away from my parents’ talents or pluckiness, I know that, when they arrived in San Francisco, they were met by representatives of HIAS and by “the Joint.” Both organizations made sure that they had a place to stay, food to eat, clothing and medicine for their children, a sense of security.  Someone from the Joint found two possible jobs for my father, one in Seattle and one in Houston. 

And aren’t these provisions, available to my parents without request,  the birthrights we ought to promise to every human being: shelter, food, clothing, healthcare, safety, work?

Once my father was established as a salesman, his customers became a community, too.  They looked forward to his visits, opened their homes to him, invited him to their children’s weddings.  One child of a former customer visited my elderly father in a suburb of Chicago, 2,000 miles away from this son’s home, because “Alec” was an important part of their “family.” 

Of course, much of my father’s success was due to his knowledge of his products, his understanding of his customer’s business and his ability to communicate this to them.  But thinking he was successful on individual achievement alone is to ignore the community of good will and caring in which his work was embedded.

Communities for Eric and Alice

I could go on.  My brother benefitted from the insight and good management at NCR, who looked past his lack of education and saw the talent in him.  He married into a warm and loving clan that took and still takes very seriously the notion of “family.”  If anyone ever wanted to find a group to capture in a documentary on the role of family in the stability and prosperity of its members, Janie’s family would be the perfect focus. 

My loud and “foreign” parents were always welcomed with warmth and grace by Jane’s parents.  When Jane’s mother insisted on staying at the family farm in Minnesota, in spite of her blindness and the lack of any family members near by, the entire family, children and grand-children, scattered across the western half of the country, re-arranged their lives so that there was always some one who could stay at the farm with Mrs. Wiggert. 

My sister, so deserving of help, got the assistance she needed, because generations of people who had contributed to Brown University made possible a fully paid scholarship for the education of this quiet, talented immigrant girl from 3,000 miles away.   And those same funds paid for the fledgling computers from which she found her profession.

Communities for me and my children

My children, too, benefitted from the thousands of alumni of their elite colleges whose contributions helped us afford their tuition.  I could name, as could you, a dozen teachers and mentors who paid special attention to my development.  There is a legion of friends, mentors, teachers, communities that are, in part, responsible for my success and that of my brother and sister and our children and grandchildren.

As I have hinted above, I imagine that working closely with my father could, at times, be a bit thorny.  But Ray and Jeanette Wachter, the owners of the business for whom he worked for 25 years, supported him and his work.  And his family.  It wasn’t until about 15 years ago that I learned that it was the Wachters who actually sent me to law school.  Every semester when the tuition bill came due, my father found a bonus waiting in his paycheck.  They never let me know that they did this; they never made themselves available for my thanks.  They died before I knew.  But my schooling, my career, are made possible by, are built upon their decency and caring.  Upon their moral imagination.

We, all of us, stand on the shoulders of historical and geographical communities.  Yes, our success is ours.  But it is also, always, an expression of the caring of these communities in which we are inevitably embedded.  When we only tell our stories in portrait, we miss this contribution.

By telling family stories twice, once in portrait and once in landscape, we can all regain contact with the moral imagination of those communities in which we are embedded.  After all, to the unnamed and unknown people who helped my parents survive and whose compassion is responsible for my existence, I am “the truly other.”  But for the moral imagination of generations of caring people, none of us would prosper. 

We should all tell our family's stories.  Twice.  Maybe your stories are not quite as dramatic as my father's and mother's, but the same thing will happen.  You will connect with the people and the communities that were the foundations upon which your family succeeded.

In a way, my father was right.  The American Dream isn’t a myth.  It is the illusion of solely individual achievement that is the fairy tale.  We have been telling the myth solely as portraiture, while ignoring the landscape.  Of late, Americans seem to have forgotten that there is no success without community, that embeddedness in community is our common and universal experience, that when someone fails, it is quite likely, in part, a failure of his or her community, and that we forget this basic truth at our peril, for people who don’t understand the debt they owe to community are bound to neglect it.