CLEAVER AND SATAN

Black Caucus chairman Democrat Congressman Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri produced a headline-garnering sound bite following the passage in Congress of the debt ceiling compromise bill.

Even as this bill didn’t by any means manage to demonstrate Congress’s serious understanding of economic reality, Cleaver said that the bill amounts to "a  sugar-coated Satan sandwich" – by which he meant that it amounts to the defiance of centuries of teachings of the world’s greatest religions about how one must look out for the poor and needy as one lives one’s life.

The remark needed to be put in the sound bite form because any detailed investigation of those teachings would reveal something very different from what Cleaver had in mind.

Most religions do implore us to lend those in need a hand, to help the poor and indigent. Indeed, there is no ethical system that doesn’t make some room for this idea.

The secular "practical virtues" of Aristotle implore us to be generous, as we strive to achieve our happiness in life.[1] Most of the world’s religions have comparable teachings to Aristotle’s admonition that generosity or liberality is a virtue people ought to practice.

Yet the use to which Rep. Cleaver wants to put this idea is quite perverse. He doesn’t urge us to be generous, kind, compassionate, charitable and such. No, he urges us to engage in robbery and to use the loot we obtain by this means to provide help to those the robbers believe should get some of it.

Generosity and the like are supposed to be virtues that people ought to practice in their own lives. It’s individuals who ought to help out the needy. It is they who must voluntarily choose to be generous, charitable and such. Nothing less will serve as virtuous, ethical or moral conduct than good deeds that are freely  chosen by the agent.  Morality is a matter of choice.

Stealing from someone else and handing some of the loot to a needy individual will not do. It simply isn’t virtuous to do that since it is tainted by a serious immorality. Generosity or charity with other people’s labor or resources is impossible, for you cannot be virtuous by spending stolen money.

Both Representative Cleaver and President Obama have shown their utter misconception of the nature of generosity or charity by claiming that it involves robbing Peter so as to benefit Paul.

This is very similar to the widespread misunderstanding of the legend of Robin Hood who did not rob the rich to help the poor. Recall that the villain in the story is the Sheriff of Nottingham.  Robin Hood is the hero because he recovered the loot taken by the Sheriff of Nottingham and returned it to those who had been deprived of it by taxation.

Even the simplest common sense morality rejects that one can do good deeds on the backs of others. A good deed must come from oneself. It is into one’s very own pocket that a generous person must dig in order to earn moral credit for giving away his or her own labor or resources.

And that is certainly not what Rep. Cleaver has in mind. He is making devious and corrupt use of the idea that is taught by most of the world’s religions and moral systems, namely, that one ought to help those in dire straits. 

Putting a gun to other people’s heads and thus enabling oneself to ‘help’ others is morally wrong, plain and simple. It is a sign of how morally ignorant and perverse many in Congress and other centers of political power across the globe tend to be to hold otherwise.

Who is on Satan’s side, Mr. Cleaver?
 

Tibor Machan holds the R. C. Hoiles Chair of Business Ethics and Free Enterprise at the Argyros School of Business & Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California.  He is the author of three dozen books, among which is Generosity: Virtue in the Civil Society.

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[1]   The moral virtue of generosity, eleutheriotes, for Aristotle, is the mean between wastefulness and stinginess. A generous man will give to the appropriate person, in the appropriate amount, and at the appropriate time. See Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV, chapter 1.