Re-Imagining America

Re-Imagining America: Finding Hope in Difficult Times, by Christopher Schaefer; (Hawthorne Press, 2019), 200 pages; Foreword by Eric Utne.

review by Douglas Sloan

Re-Imagining America: Finding Hope in Difficult Times by Christopher Schaefer is a gift to America, and the world. The phrase, “difficult times” almost rings as a euphemism for the horrific evil and suffering that now engulf so much of our country and peoples world-wide. Hope is essential if we are to rise to the challenge of these times. Central to the strength of Christopher Schaefer’s book is that, first, he addresses the challenges to hope in our times, without flinching and without softening their extent and seriousness. At the same time, he calls attention to the truly positive forces, individuals and organizations, actually working today to establish hope and bring it to fruition. He calls our attention also to the fact that many of these hopeful impulses come from outside the official and formal structures of power. The author writes with clear thinking and insight, grounded in solid evidence. He provides us, moreover, with a host of practical ideas, proposals, and analyses to illuminate both understanding and positive action.

Christopher Schaefer is clear: we must confront without drawing back or denying the actuality of the hope-destroying forces at work in our present situation. He also stresses, however, that genuine progress has been made in the modern world in the areas of disease, infant mortality, health and illness, illiteracy, women’srights, and others. These positive advances ought not to be forgotten. Christopher Schaefer, however, is also clear that we must confront the actuality of the many hope-destroying forces and events in our times. The idea of hope rings hollow if it cannot take into account the serious challenges to it. The list is long: climate change and collapse, pollution, the loss of forests, the extinction of species, the horrors of war, poverty, hunger, racism, and so forth.

These days many of us, or members of our family and friends, have been tempted to say, “I can’t watch or listen to the news anymore—it’s just too awful, and, besides, I can’t do anything about it.” It’s just this wanting to withdraw from the ugliness with its two contrasting consequences—despondency or frenetic anxiety—that the author shows is not necessary. What is necessary, to start with, however, is awareness and understanding.

Christopher Schaefer provides a basic guide to understanding and action in three important areas: 1) the American Empire Project; 2) the global economic crisis and the failure of capitalism; and 3) the overarching ideological patterns of oppression and anti-democracy. Planning for the projection of American power and military dominance on “land, sea, air, and space” began in earnest in the 1990s. This project had the support of conservative Republicans, Christian Evangelicals, key foreign policy personnel, and even some Democrats. It was recognized that this project would have critical domestic consequences, which fit into Republican conservative economic theory, for it would require huge increases in military spending, supported by massive tax cuts for the wealthy and the dissolution of entitlement programs, such as Social Security. All that was lacking to put these plans into action was a major event—a crisis—that would impel Congress and the American people to act—an event hoped for and even described in the early 1990s as a “New Pearl Harbor.” 9/11 was the event and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars followed immediately. Especially important is the author’s Chapter Three in which he lays out twenty “disturbing questions about 9/11 and the War on Terror.” These questions have not been acknowledged, let alone dealt with, by the appointed government fact-finding commissions, by any of the mainstream media, and by most, though not all, academics. Drawing on massive evidence compiled by independent experts, Christopher Schaefer concludes that in all likelihood “some form of governmental complicity in 9/11 occurred.” From 9/11 followed the “war on terror,” the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and the weakening of civil liberties under the passage of the Patriot Act and increased surveillance on the American people by the government.

A second major area encompassing both hope-destroying forces and hope-engendered positive possibilities for the future includes “the crisis of western capitalism” and “the global economic crisis.” The author analyzes the set of ideas—the ideology—at the heart of free-market capitalism known as “Neo-Liberalism.” Neo-Liberalism holds that competition and struggle are the central characteristics of human relationships, that people are primarily consumers, and that the market based on competition is essential to human wellbeing. Christopher Schaefer deftly analyzes and brings out clearly the individual and social consequences of the neo-liberal doctrines: huge economic and social inequality, the control of society by large corporations and the wealthy, the unrestrained exploitation of the earth for profit, the lowering of the health and life-expectancy of the population, and the debasement of the artistic and cultural life of society as a whole.

The author explores what it would entail to create a healthy economy based, as he puts it, on a “triple bottom line” encompassing “economic viability, environmental sustainability, and community responsibility.” He advances a number of concrete steps to make this possible, among them: a universal basic income for each person, a single payer health system for all, the expansion of social security, a Green Energy program, a Covenant of Democratic and Human Rights, the provision of grants for all students, and other proposals. Especially interesting is his recommendation of an Automatic Payment Transaction Tax to raise adequate revenue for all these proposals, a step that would also serve to reign in economic inequality.

All of these proposals will require careful weighing of the pros and cons involved, and of the best ways for implementing them. All should be of special interest to anthroposophists, for these proposals seek to offer concrete substance to Rudolf Steiner’s “Fundamental Social Law” and to his vision of the “Threefold Social Order”— content and substance responsive to the specific needs and conditions of our 21st century.

Christopher Schaefer underscores the importance of the individual in the re-imagining of America. The individual and society alike each has a dark side and a potentially light—enlightened—side. At a time when, in our national life together, the light side is in danger of being eclipsed, it is important to remember the history of America’s unique and genuine accomplishments for the betterment of humanity—and the author describes many of them. To remember and build anew on these positive contributions to the world can be essential in restoring hope and new beginnings in our difficult times. Similarly for the individual, the re-enlivening of hope in contributing to the good entails working to transform our dark side—our lower self—while nurturing our full potential—our higher self. Hope in this perspective, then, is not only an inner attitude but also an outward-directed practice. The author gives a number of suggestions of how we as individuals can “practice hope”—a practice that concretely takes away the illusion of being helpless, because in the doing it connects us with others as part of a growing, compassionate community of hope. And ultimately true hope reaches out to connect us with the spiritual reality of all being.

Hope is not wishful thinking. It is not even prediction of how things will turn out. In the words of Vaclav Havel, writing under the oppression of the Soviet control of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and quoted by the author, “Hope is a dimension of soul. . . . Hope is not prognostication. . . It is an orientation of the Spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.” Christopher Schaefer provides insightful, hardheaded, and compassionate guidance for action out of this hope for a truly human future.

Douglas Sloan is professor emeritus at Teachers College, Columbia University. He served as council president of the New York Branch of the ASA. In 2015 Lindisfarne Books published his The Redemption of the Animals: Their Evolution, Their Inner Life, and Our Future.