Grace

There’s no shame in ownership. It’s what everyone wants for himself. When Micah prophesied of messianic times, he forecast a future when “every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.” Too often, ownership is thought to be something about which to feel guilty, when if equality is the desired goal, it must be recognized that those whom you would have enjoy an improved situation wish to live just like you; you can’t immiserate yourself in guilt over those who have less without taking time to enjoy what you are privileged to have, because otherwise you defeat in your own person that enjoyment which you would extend to everyone. Put bluntly, it is better that some should enjoy than none, and you should not deny your good fortune, lest you be met with a smile and counted a fool by rich and poor alike.

What did Americans do when settling the land but parcel out pieces to homesteaders? What do Latin American reformers propose but that haciendas should be broken up in order to distribute land to those who have none? One visitor to the Soviet Union observed that equality had been achieved not by abolishing poverty, but by abolishing wealth. The goal is not for everyone to feel equally as guilty as you and direct themselves to revolutionary politics with an aim to help another. At least some of the time, you are the other who needs to be helped. There is a balance to be struck, and religion makes charity an institution in order to facilitate it, so that it should be possible to pursue one’s own well-being without being crippled by guilt over others’ ill fortune.

The indigenous peoples who lived in the Americas were expropriated by the Europeans, but there are surely as many rascally individuals among the tribes who first lived here as there are among the rest of us, and it is not to be lamented unduly that the history of the country came to pass as it did, for if one truly felt guilt down to the roots about occupying someone else’s land, there is always the route open to leave. Where would you go? And so you must make peace with the history that has made it possible for you to occupy your particular patch of land.

It’s a myth that colonialism and imperialism are endemic to Western European civilization. Myanmar is in the news because of the overthrow of the democratically elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, who had been a cause célèbre while under house arrest by the army, until after her release and election she defended an unwritten policy of violent expulsion of a national minority by that very army. (Now she has been arrested again.) China is in the process of dissolving Tibetan and Uighur identities by Han Chinese settlement in those regions and reeducation of their native populations, forcibly, if need be. The Hindus are in the process of transforming a democratic India into a stridently nationalistic India, virulently anti-Muslim. And all of these nations are erstwhile subjects of Western colonialism. If globalism means anything, it means that there is no neat distinction between oppressors and oppressed. Everyone is equally capable of doing wrong. And nation-states are arguably at a different level than individuals when it comes to morality, the United States being alone in supposing its conduct among nations uniquely virtuous, a claim frankly doubted by many. All the attacks against and defenses of the Israelis are so much hot air, because, caught in the center of the world, between West and East, they are continually turned round about like a compass needle amidst moral polar switches.

But the idea of us and them is everywhere the rule, and always an underlying and legitimating rationale for violence. This is why Micah prophesies the retreat of fear from the land as desirable. It could be that conditions of peace are fleeting, but they are what we strive for, an equilibrium in which everyone has a share of material good. The Declaration of Independence announced, as a high-flown rationale for a decision made in advance, that all men are created equal, a revolutionary line penned by a slaveholder. The Constitution is less ambitious, and its opening line aims at the insurance of domestic tranquility, an ambition no less messianic for being pedestrian.