On Being a 'Save the World' Type

Edward J. Dodson

[Written and submitted to the Philadelphia Inquirer as a guest commentary, mid-2004. This essay was accepted for publication but, without explanation, never appeared in the Inquirer]

When my wife of more than twenty years describes me to people who do not know me, she tells them: "Well, he's a save the world type." I guess there are a fair number of us who, for diverse reasons, fit this characterization because we are less than content to allow the status quo to continue unchallenged. In my own case, as a young person reaching adulthood during the years of the United States military and political intervention in Southeast Asia, my initial entry into the activist ranks surprised even me. Because of a medical problem I did not have to face the possibility of military service; however, I learned a good deal about what was happening in Vietnam from friends drafted into the army and returned after surviving their tour of duty. Several of them became actively involved in the peace movement, joining Vietnam Veterans Against the War. From that experience, I learned just how little I understood about how the world worked. My college professors and studies helped to stimulate my interest in history and political philosophy, but for the most part I joined my peers preparing for the job market. My discovery of those ideas that would direct my future actions was yet to occur. The commitments to which I thereafter was drawn influenced one life decision after another - to this day.

Involvement often leads to remarkable experiences. There was nothing special about my early life growing up in a typical suburban community, a member of a working class family. Something drove me to question authority, to look beyond surface explanations and the rhetoric of political leaders for an understanding of what was occurring around me. There was much to worry over in the early 1970s. What seems remarkable to me today is that we somehow survived the nuclear arms race between the Soviets and the West. Remarkable also is the fact that we learned so very little from the implosion of state-socialism. And, even more remarkable is the fact that so few of the opinion leaders in our society over the last sixty years have understood the intense desire on the part of oppressed peoples around the globe to rid themselves of oligarchies and military dictatorships (including the dictatorships we supported because they pandered to knee-jerk U.S. anti-communist and some rather exploitative corporate interests).

Many of us 'save the world types' reacted to the war in Southeast Asia largely on emotion. We only began to learn later how the Eisenhower administration channeled funds to the French to help them regain their dissolving empire. Daniel Ellsburg provided the primer on U.S. covert operations. Jonathan Kwitny's book, Endless Enemies, appeared in the mid-1980s and filled in many of the details. By then, however, my reasons for activism shifted from being against so much of what was happening to being for a set of reforms I came to believe could change the course of history - for the better.

Many of us 'save the world types' come to believe we have discovered truth. Some believe truth is divinely revealed to them. In my case, a very patient and persuasive teacher directed me to read and study the works of one of our clearest thinking moral philosophers - a newspaper editor self-educated in the science of political economy named Henry George. From very modest and even difficult beginnings, Henry George emerged late in the nineteenth century as leader of a movement for societal reform that deeply affected many activists of his own generation -- men of letters such as George Bernard Shaw and Leo Tolstoy, political leaders such as Winston Churchill and Sun Yat-sen. As had many others before me, I absorbed George's great work, Progress and Poverty, first published in 1879. In a later work titled Social Problems, he advised: "I ask no one who may read this book to accept my views. I ask him to think for himself." Yet, in the same way that the words of Thomas Paine affected those who read or heard them, Henry George offered a very uncommon degree of common sense.

I soon learned that the central truths Henry George wrote about had a long history. Many others had covered much the same ground, if not quite so eloquently or movingly. One of central moral principles espoused by George is that the earth is the birthright of all persons, equally. If one accepts this principle as right and just, then we are left to agree with George that one of the greatest injustices to be addressed is the set of laws in every society that results in the concentrated control over land and natural resources by a privileged few. Working to end this injustice became, for me, the focus of my own writing and activism. After a year of study at the Philadelphia extension of the Henry George School of Social Science, I was invited to join the school's volunteer faculty. On and off I have continued to teach at the school ever since - taking time off to earn a masters degree in liberal arts at Temple University and then begin to undertake the research associated with a project that eventually became a three-volume work titled The Discovery of First Principles (the first two volumes of which have been published by iUniverse).

From the first decades of the twentieth century, proponents of Henry George's analysis somewhat uncomfortably accepted the name Georgists. After associating with Georgists for a number of years and researching the history of this social movement, I learned that a small group established an experimental community on Mobile Bay in Alabama incorporating Henry George's principal idea of holding land in common and charging ground rents to residents. They referred to the principles of their new community as cooperative individualism, a term I felt very accurately described the socio-political philosophy espoused by Henry George (and others, especially Thomas Paine). Cooperative individualism became my cause, and in 1997 I established an education and research website called The School of Cooperative Individualism (www.cooperativeindividualism.org) which has had some modest success, experiencing an average of around 25,000 "hits" each month.

The journey continues. And, while I am fearful over the course our society and others are following, I am confident the ideals I have come to share with a growing number of other 'save the world types' are the right ones. Perhaps Albert Einstein said it better than almost anyone else:

"Men like Henry George are rare, unfortunately. One cannot imagine a more beautiful combination of intellectual keenness, artistic form, and fervent love of justice. Every line is written as if for our generation. The spreading of these works is a really deserving cause, for our generation especially has many and important things to learn from Henry George."