The Samaritan's Dilemma: Should Government Help Your Neighbor?

As folks watch the economy crumble, shake their heads in unison, worry about retirement in this uncertain time and about our national security in this increasingly globalized world, and sit around in doctors' waiting rooms swapping health care horror stories, it's hard not to admit that Americans are in this together.

A new book by Deborah Stone, a Dartmouth professor and founding editor of the American Prospect, comes at just the right moment -- when we're all becoming painfully aware of how interconnected our fate is as citizens of this country. In The Samaritan's Dilemma: Should Government Help Your Neighbor? she takes the reader on a journey through America's political and ethical history over the past 80 or so years, showing us the ways in which our altruistic instincts have been slowly eroded by a strategic smear campaign on the part of conservative GOP leaders.

Stone makes a cogent, inspiring argument that we must realign our deepest knowing -- that helping our neighbors is the right thing to do -- with our public policy. AlterNet picked her brain about social policy, the state of the economy and, of course, the upcoming election.

Courtney E. Martin: In your book, you make an argument for a renewed "politics of generosity" and a return to democracy's initial essence: "mutual dependency." Can you explain what you mean?

Deborah Stone: Democracy at its simplest means government by the people. To me, that means people collaborate on making rules to guide their individual behavior for the common good. It means people work together to solve common problems, especially the problems that are too big for any one person to lick. In a democracy, we're "mutually dependent" because we depend on each other to come up with good ideas and to cooperate on putting them into practice. We're also dependent on the scientific and cultural knowledge and the social institutions built by the people before us and around us.

Once we acknowledge our mutual dependence, our politics has to start from that place, too. We have to design policies for citizens who care about each other and for each other, and who feel gratitude, loyalty and sometimes devotion. A politics of generosity means we think of ourselves as helping others and contributing to the common good. We're willing to make sacrifices and compromises in order to benefit a larger purpose.

CEM: You argue that conservative leaders -- especially Reagan -- have convinced American voters that interdependence is weak and shameful and that rugged individualism is realistic. You also show the ways in which joyful interdependence plays out around us constantly in our personal lives. Why, given our everyday experiences of altruism, did we take to the notion that it was weak writ large?

DS: Partly, I think, the conservative notion of freedom (not having to do anything you don't choose to do) taps into the painful truth of human development. Each of us grows from a helpless, dependent and powerless creature to a reasonably competent and independent adult with a high degree of autonomy. From our teen years on, we savor that freedom from adult control, even as we watch our elders sometimes become frail and revert to childlike dependence. Perhaps that's why it's easy for leaders to evoke terror and shame in us by speaking of dependence.

Partly, too, our culture celebrates individual achievement. Even team sports hype their MVP awards. From the time we're born, when our parents get our Apgar scores of infant health, we are constantly subjected to measures of our individual merits -- athletic abilities, intellectual abilities, job performance and financial accumulations. Schools emphasize individual accomplishment, and teachers punish collaboration as "cheating." When parents, schools, employers and others reward people for individual achievement, this way of thinking pushes interdependence into the background of everyone's consciousness. We begin to believe that individuals can do it all on their own if they try hard enough, and we lose sight of all the ways people get help all the time.