Faith in Positive, Progressive Humanity

The news is always bad. This is a simple, reassuring truism, although it often is uttered as a lament.

“News,” by definition, is the label journalists give to the exceptional. The ordinary is rarely considered to be newsworthy. That the news is generally negative should be taken as a signal that positive events—with the exception of the truly extraordinary—are viewed as the norm. We don’t get exciting about routine goodness; we expect it. Despite all of the world’s ills, this is reassuring. Positive is normal, negative is not.

So, one feels compelled to ask, why does negativity appeal to a large—and largely conservative—segment of the American population? I am not talking about negative campaigning here. Both conservative and liberal campaigns stoop to mudslinging. Rather, I am talking about the fundamental positions held on the left and the right: the “pro” and “anti” positions that undergird our opposing political parties’ philosophies.

By far, conservatives rack up more negatives than do liberals. The farther right, the more negative conservative positions are likely to be. The Right can be counted on, for example, to be anti-tax, anti-gun control, anti-immigrant, antigay, and anti any number of other things.

But, hang on, what about pro-life?

The veneer of “pro-life” overlies a thoroughly negative underbelly. Pro-life actually means pro-fetus; the “pro” does not extend to life after birth. Anti-universal health care (more recently, anti-Obamacare) accounts in large measure for the position of the United States in the statistics on infant mortality: 34th in a field of 194 nations, behind the European countries, Australia, New Zealand, and some unlikely nations, such as the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Brunei, Croatia, and Cuba. This is according to the United Nations. The 2012 CIA World Factbook puts the United States at 49th among 222 countries. These are dismal showings for the richest nation on earth.

“Pro-life,” incidentally, does not include pro-life imprisonment; and pro-death penalty can hardly be counted as a positive. Perhaps (tongue firmly in cheek here) it’s the “pro” in “progressive” that conservatives are responding to so negatively. It’s truly a bleak vision of the world, this country, and our population. It’s a black-and-white view where black predominates.

Theodore Roosevelt said, “A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy.” Sloganized patriotism—“America First,” “We’re Number One”—belies the facts in many aspects of our commonality that we are not at the top of our game as a great democracy. We have made strides in expanding civil equality and the “right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” spoken about in the Declaration of Independence, mostly uphill against the persistent tide of regressive conservatism. But there is much left to do.

American positivism, rooted in the core belief in democratic progressiveness, as expressed by Roosevelt and many others, is an essential attribute in the struggle for the common good, whether it be in terms of civil rights expansion, the welcome we give new immigrants to our immigrant-created nation, or the extension of adequate health care to all our citizens. It is our civil faith and our national ideal, though it falls short of universal acceptance.