Orphaning Children and Submerging Cities — the Inhumanity of Sociopathic Conservative Values

Separating immigrant children from their families to prove a point and stalling for decades on national legislation to help diminish the traumatizing impact of climate change on cities around the country and the world both stem from a conservative bias against regular, everyday human beings. It’s a bias that allows them to use what power conservatives have in order to sacrifice people by turning them into mere means to achieve their political and ideological ends.

The inhumane conservative bias sees people as expendable. It’s OK to traumatize a child and her parents to send a message to other parents not to try to “smuggle” their children into the United States. It’s OK for fossil fuel businesses to hire their own “scientists” and jury-rig information on climate change that favors the bottom line, wealth and the holy market place more than the lives of billions of irreplaceable human beings, soon to be displaced and made homeless by rising seas.

When Attorney General Jeff Sessions argued that separating parents and children caught coming into the country “illegally” would send a message to other parents not to try the same thing, he committed what Western moral philosophers consider to be something similar to cardinal sin. Innocent human beings are never meant to be used as tools, as slaves, as exploited means in pursuit of the ends of riches and power. All of us are valuable in and of ourselves, first and foremost. What kind of heartlessness does it take to use the loneliness, homesickness, profound anxiety and even terror of children, not to mention that of their parents, as a message, an act of propaganda, aimed at changing the behavior of other people?

Orphaning children, even temporarily, will scar them for the rest of their lives and leave their parents shaken to the core. If you can project yourself back into your own childhood, you can almost feel the helplessness, the panic, the shattering fear of being lost, perhaps forever. You can feel the despair of having to not only migrate through hostile territory to get to a place described as a promised land, but then to find yourself torn from the only love and security in your life. Tormenting children just to prove a point — it’s sadistic, the worst nightmare of a Dickensian child. All the things a child needs — familiarity, security, instinctive unconditional love, genuine affection and concern — are ripped away by an American uniformed officer of “the law.” Is this what we’ve become as a nation?

And to top it off, the Attorney General has pronounced that being a victim of domestic violence or on a hit list of drug cartels is not a valid reason for being granted asylum in the United States! So the message is, go home get battered, raped, mutilated by your spouse and the drug lord’s torturers who run your country through terror. Go back. We don’t give a damn about you or about the crimes that have been and will be committed against you. You and your kids don’t matter to us. You’re like flies to shoo away. A nation that can’t be concerned about the suffering of others is a nation that is not concerned about the suffering of its own people. It is a monster nation.

This is all grotesquely obvious if you’re at all familiar with Immanuel Kant’s “categorical imperative,” a concept that not long ago was almost the unconscious common property of every high school graduate, even if they couldn’t remember the exact words. Kant admonished us to “act only according to the maxim where by you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.” This is an expansion of the “golden rule.” Another translator says it this way: “Act as you would want all other people to act towards all other people.” Act in such a way that you want your action to become a universal law applying to everyone, even yourself and your family. And never use other people as a means to achieve your ends. All of us are ends in ourselves. The tormenting of children to achieve a political victory cannot become a universal maxim, unless you hate your own children.

The categorical imperative applies to corporate and government climate change denial as well — cooking the books of science and doubting the whole tradition of the scientific method to make things come out in a way that pads shareholder’s wallets. Is that what we want for everything? The grumps among us say that’s already the way it is, that one of the truths of the modern world is that bias, self-interest and bigotry supersede all else.

Sociopathic conservative values have created a world, from what the global community of science has told us, that could be uninhabitable in the way that we have come to know it in the not-too-distant future. In an extraordinary essay by Roger Scranton in the New York Times called “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” the man-made world of global climate disruption and the consequences of sociopathic conservative values are made clear without a doubt.

Scranton quotes a 2013 address by Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III to security specialists meeting near Boston, explaining that “global climate change was the greatest threat the United States faced — more dangerous than terrorism, Chinese hackers, and north Korean nuclear missiles. Upheaval from increased temperatures, rising seas and radical destabilization ‘is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen…that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.’” Scranton sees no difference in the outcomes of the destruction of Baghdad and havoc wreaked on New Orleans. Even the causes are the same — various forms of human absurdity. He writes, “Now, when I look into our future — into the Anthropocene — I see water rising up to wash out lower Manhattan. I see food riots, hurricanes and climate refugees…. I see grid failure, wrecked harbors, Fukushima waste and plagues. I see Baghdad.”

Will history blame Trumpian conservative values, and those who espouse them, for the role they played in allowing climate change to wreck our world? It probably will. But as usual, no one will be required to take personal responsibility, and not because they’ll all be dead. In the twisted logic of Trumpian conservatism, only helpless children are burdened with brutal penalties that we make them pay for their parents’ desire to give them a safe and healthy future.

In “The Plague,” Albert Camus has one of his characters say, “on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences” in whatever form they happen to take, be it the plague of microbes or the plague of politics without empathy, conscience or anything resembling loving kindness.

*Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it

(Image of child’s eyes derived from photo by Müjde ALGÜL Photograpy. Image of propaganda mural of Trump from Jacob Soboroff)