This [individual’s] story always makes me cry a little bit. Two million people die of Aids every year. It never has the same effect.
[from “Empathy’s Failures�� in I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That]

I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.

Thus I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. […] I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-12. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. […] During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three city districts. We Marines operated on three continents.

[-Common Sense, Vol. 4, No. 11 (November, 1935), p. 8; bold emphases added]

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.
When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

In all these struggles we must be assertive and challenging, combating the deep-seated tendency in Americans to be liberal, that is, to evade struggling over questions of principle for fear of creating tensions or becoming unpopular. Instead we must live by the fundamental dialectical principle: that progress comes only from struggling to resolve contradictions.

While feminist supporters like to think that feminism has been the motivating force behind changes in woman’s role, in actuality changes in the American capitalist economy have had the greatest impact on the status of women. More women than ever before are in America’s work force not because of feminism but because families can no longer rely on the income of the father. Feminism has been used as a psychological tool to make women think that work they might otherwise see as boring, tedious, and time consuming is liberating. For whether feminism exists or not, women must work.

Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria, therefore it was right that they should be cruel to her at times, just as she was cruel to those more negroid than herself in direct ratio to their negroness. Like the pecking-order in a chicken yard. Insensate cruelty to those you can whip, and groveling submission to those you can’t. Once having set up her idols and built altars to them it was inevitable that she would worship there. It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

Mrs. Turner, like all other believers had built an altar to the unattainable—Caucasian characteristics for all. Her god would smite her, would hurl her from pinnacles and lose her in deserts, but she would not forsake his altars. Behind her crude words was a belief that somehow she and others through worship could attain her paradise—a heaven of straighthaired, thin-lipped, high-nose boned white seraphs. The physical impossibilities in no way injured faith. That was the mystery and mysteries are the chores of gods.

“You know, honey, us colored folks is branches without roots and that makes things come round in queer ways. […] Ah was born back due in slavery so it wasn’t for me to fulfill my dreams of whut a woman oughta be and to do. Dat’s one of de hold-backs of slavery. But nothing can’t stop you from wishin��. You can’t beat nobody down so low till you can rob ’em of they will. Ah didn’t want to be used for a work-ox and a brood-sow and Ah didn’t want mah daughter used dat way neither. […] But, all de same Ah said thank God, Ah got another chance. Ah wanted to preach a great sermon about colored women sittin�� on high, but they wasn’t no pulpit for me. Freedom found me wid a baby daughter in mah arms, so Ah said Ah’d take a broom and a cook-pot and throw up a highway through de wilderness for her. […]��

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.
When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.

-Hélder Câmara

Over and over we hear the same familiar story: peasants down on their luck, whether due to natural disaster or the need to pay for a parent’s funeral—would fall into the hands of predatory lenders, who would seize their fields and houses, forcing them to work or pay rent in what had once been their own lands; the threat of rebellion would then drive the government to institute a dramatic program of reforms.

[…] China was for most of its history the ultimate anti-capitalist market state. Unlike later European princes, Chinese rulers systematically refused to team up with would-be Chinese capitalists (who always existed). Instead, like their officials, they saw them as destructive parasites--though, unlike the usurers, ones whose fundamental selfish and antisocial motivations could still be put to use in certain ways. In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were assumed to be driven largely by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people, but they were also necessary to defend the frontiers. Similarly, merchants were driven by greed and basically immoral; yet if kept under careful administrative supervision, they could be made to serve the public good. Whatever one might think of the principles, the results are hard to deny. For most of its history, China maintained the highest standard of living in the world--even England only really overtook it in perhaps the 1820s, well past the time of the Industrial Revolution.

After the war [WWI] ended, Boas’s professional problems only got worse. Science was a siren call, he felt. Improperly used, it would always draw policy makers into dangerous waters. He published an essay in The Nation calling out, although not naming, scholars he alleged had conducted espionage abroad under the guise of fieldwork and denouncing the use of anthropological research for any governmental purposes at all.

There might well be such a thing as a universal moral code, Boas taught, but no society—not even our own—has a lock on what it might contain. A given culture typically preens itself into believing that its foodways, family structure, religion, aesthetics, and political system are the truly logical ones. If there is any moral progress at all, it lies in our ability to break that habit: to develop an ever more capacious view of humanity itself—a widening web of beings who deserve our ethical conduct, whatever we deem ethical conduct to be.