Month: March 2010

Lighting an Economic Candle

If it’s better to light one candle than curse the darkness, Allan Carlson, an Editor at Large over at the Porch (and a pretty major figure is real conservative American thought for decades now), has done a better thing recently, and I the curser of darkness pass it along.

Carlson’s keynote address for a University lecture series starts, necessarily, with a little darkness-cursing to set the stage:

Eighteen months of severe recession have brought to the surface old truths that many chose to forget when times seemed to be good:  the business cycle has not been eliminated; finance capitalism is by its nature unstable; politically-connected corporations commonly escape market discipline; and there is nothing conservative about the “creative destruction” of a capitalist economy.

…As one commentator noted in the mid 1930’s, the label “conservative” had then been thoroughly “discredited,” twisted by the “apostles of plutocracy” into a defense of “gamblers and promoters.”

He then turns to the more illuminating task at hand, noting recent historic

seekers after a “Third Way,” a social and economic system that in important respects would be neither capitalist nor socialist.

In Europe, these seekers included:  Great Britain’s Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, architects of the Distributist program [to which I will return]; the Russian agrarian economist Alexander Chayanov, who crafted a remarkable theory of “the Natural Family Economy”; the Bulgarian peasant leader Alexander Stamboliski, who turned his nation into a model agrarian republic and co-founded the “Green International” in 1923; Nancy Eriksson, a Member of Sweden’s Parliament who defended a curious political movement that might be accurately labeled, “The Desperate Swedish Socialist Housewives”; and Gilbert Dru, Etienne Gilson, and Wilhelm Roepke, architects of a vibrant mid-20thCentury Christian Democracy that aimed to build a Humane Economy.  These episodes effervesced in events of brilliance and excitement, sometimes reaching fruition, only to fade in the face of the two main 20th Century ideological contestants:  capitalism and communism.

Then he summarizes the true core of his talk:

Tonight, I want to tell you about three American writers and activists who also have been part of this quest for a Third Way:  Ralph Borsodi; Herbert Agar; and Wendell Berry.  I will also suggest ways in which their examples and ideas may help us understand the current economic crisis and point toward an alternate Conservatism for the decades ahead, one combining a preferential option for the natural family with a more decentralized, human scale economy and a curtailing of the “national security state.”

There’s enough thereafter to make almost anyone squirm. Anyone who thinks Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity are genuine conservatives may go postal upon reading it. But it challenges me, too: can my vision of walkable cities and food co-ops survive except as parasitic of those who live in rural areas and burn fossil fuel to get their edibles to my cozy co-op or picturesque farmers’ market? But what becomes of community and “Front Porch” conversations if everyone’s sitting on their own 40 acres with their mule?

I don’t think I can commend it too highly or excerpt its treasures adequately. My PDF version for my archives is already heavily marked up.  You must read it yourself if you, like I, suspect that we’re toast economically in the short term but hope for a humane life beyond the coming collapse.

Categories added

It must be disorienting wondering what side of the bed I got up on before blogging, so I’ve added “Attitude” categories that so far include “Intrigued,” “Jeremiad” and “Sweetness’n’Light” – sort of like MPAA movie ratings: ‘Don’t like bile? Don’t read this jeremiad!”

Does economic growth rot the culture?

Georgetown political theorist Patrick Deneen thinks genuine conservatism is incompatible with global capitalism and that confusion of the two is a cold war artifact. I’ll not equivocate about this one: I very strongly suspect he’s right.

Other stimulating excerpts:

My goal has been (I hope) in particular to deepen some of our political understanding and vocabulary, to make visible to more readers some of the deepest presuppositions of modern politics and even the deeper philosophical ideas that inform discrete political issues.  By enlarging the view and elongating the perspective, I also hoped that some other overlooked possibilities might be entertained – particularly beyond the worn and largely unproductive contemporary political positions adopted by the Right and the Left.

…

[M]any modern proponents of democracy believe that true democracy will only be achieved when we have overcome all “particularity.”  The root of the contradiction of modern democratic theory is the idea that there are only two justifiable and desirable conditions of humankind – the radically individuated monad and the globalized world community.  Any intermediate grouping or belonging is seen as arbitrary and the locus of limitations – hence, unjust.

…

Technology aids and abets the modern project of eviscerating attachments to local places and cultures.  Not long ago, thinkers like Emerson and Dewey praised the liberating and transformative potential of the railroads and telegraph; today, it is the internet and Facebook. [No, the irony is not lost on me.]

…

I think there is great systemic danger in the not-distant future due to a coming (or already arrived) energy crisis.  This will be a traumatic experience for a civilization that has been built around the assumption of permanently cheap energy.  I would submit that our economic crisis, our debt crisis, and our moral crisis are all pieces of this larger energy crisis.  Because our way of thinking treats problems as separate and discrete, we tend not to see their deeper connections.  I would be happy to elaborate on this, but won’t presume to take up the space to lay this out in this venue.  The thinker who has best articulated the contemporary tendency to treat all problems as “parts” while ignoring the whole is Wendell Berry.

(I found the interview linked above through Deneen’s own summary at Front Porch Republic, which also reminds me that he was interviewed by Ken Myers at Mars Hill Audio Journal, an excellent resource for commuters or people who like something other than frenetic music on the iPod when they work out, walk, bike or whatever.)

Why would a Muslim (or, f’rinstance, a Druid) become Christian?

Mosab Hassan Yousef, now 32, was the son of a key Hamas leader, who he seems still to admire despite having secretly embraced Christianity and then becoming a spy for Israel’s Shin Bet:

He’s a very moderate, logical person. What matters is not whether my father is a fanatic or not, he’s doing the will of a fanatic God. It doesn’t matter if he’s a terrorist or a traditional Muslim.

Living now around San Diego, Yousef

says he had reached the conclusion that terrorism can’t be defeated without a new understanding of Islam. Here he echoes other defectors from Islam such as the former Dutch parliamentarian and writer Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

So much for his theories about terrorism and Islam, which I offer to introduce Yousef and to provoke thought about Islam if the reader be so inclined.

What’s really interesting to me is Yousef’s reason for embracing Christianity:

“I found that I was really drawn to the grace, love and humility that Jesus talked about,” he says in “Son of Hamas.”

Mr. Yousef has some of the evangelist in him, even as he insists he is not a particularly devoted Christian and is still learning about his new religion. He wants Palestinians and Israelis to learn what he did from the Christian God.

…

“I converted to Christianity because I was convinced by Jesus Christ as a character, as a personality. I loved him, his wisdom, his love, his unconditional love. I didn’t leave [the Islamic] religion to put myself in another box of religion. At the same time it’s a beautiful thing to see my God exist in my life and see the change in my life. I see that when he does exist in other Middle Easterners there will be a change.

“I’m not trying to convert the entire nation of Israel and the entire nation of Palestine to Christianity. But at least if you can educate them about the ideology of love, the ideology of forgiveness, the ideology of grace. Those principles are great regardless, but we can’t deny they came from Christianity as well.”

I have an enduring intuition that there are millions in the United States – Muslims, Jews, New Agers, Wiccans, Druids, self-declared Agnostics and Atheists, and even lapsed Christians – who are secretly drawn to Jesus Christ “as a character, as a personality,” and who love him, his wisdom, his unconditional love.

But they hear from some prominent Churches (or is it many? I’ve lost touch with that subculture, but I know it was around within my lifetime) a message that sounds too much like Jonathan Edwards’ “Angry God,” a staple of English lit classes when I was younger.

Or just as likely, they see in mainstream Christianity or in the Megachurches (the effete spiritual descendants of Edwards; “Entropy: It’s Not Just About Physics Any More”) a moralistic therapeutic deism that they can do quite well without, thank you. I have an often-oblivious, sometimes-perceptive friend who was frank and perceptive when he said that the sermons in his mainstream Church were such smarmy encouragement they weren’t worth his time. He could do better, quicker, elsewhere if he wanted a pep talk.

Or maybe they catch on that their emotions are being manipulated, not their spirit nourished, through the praise band and other hubbub. Or maybe pick up a total con man, who promises fabulous wealth in return for a “word of faith” backed up with a generous donation. That’s a massive turnoff.

So such Christ-admirers must choose, they think, between (1) the Jesus they see in the New Testament, or (2) the Churches they know. There’s something seriously wrong with that picture. Christ promised, after all, to build and preserve His Church, so how can it be in conflict with Him?

I have another enduring intuition that the heart-longing of such conflicted people will find its home in Orthodox Christianity, which is not like anything most people in America have ever seen. Contrary to what it connoted to me 15 years ago (forbidding ritualism of some sort coupled with doctrinal rigidity), is all about Jesus Christ (“it is sooooo not ‘about me’!” one visitor exclaimed) and becoming His worthy image and likeness by the healing of the human soul (Greek “nous”). (Matthew Gallatin coincidentally has a current podcast that vividly but fairly contrasts the Orthodox view of salvation from that typified by Jonathan Edwards. Orthodoxy’s different on the surface partly because it’s different deep down on such things.)

Do I dissemble? Didn’t I just tacitly fault “moralistic therapeutic deism”? How does Orthodox “healing of the soul” differ from MTD?

Well, first, it’s not moralistic. Really. (Once you really get the hang of it, you live far more by love than by rule.)

Second, it’s not deism.

Third, the therapy/healing in Orthodoxy starts not with faddish self-esteem and positive thinking, as in MTD, but with repentance.

John Romanides, in the posthumous collection of his Greek University Lectures on Patristic Theology, summarized Orthodox dogma:

  1. God became man. (No deism there!)
  2. There’s no repentance after death.

I don’t think either point is ever lost in any Orthodox Church, or could ever be lost if the cycle of services is maintained, though it can be obscured by human foibles.

Though repentance may sound grim (that presumably is why is has disappeared from Krustianity), it is a seed, and then a spiritual horticulture, that flowers into the glorious and all-laudable Saints. There’s no shortcut.

And ironically, that soul healing in the end really is about the worshipper, whose real, deepest needs are met, after years of worship and asceticism (that’s what deep repentance looks like), even if the Divine Liturgy does not immediately appear much of a balm for yesterday’s pink slip, dust-up with a lover or such. (I do recall, though, in addition to a riot of sensory impressions at my first Orthodox Liturgy, my first taste of Orthodoxy’s healing calm.)

I pray, too, that Yousef may find Orthodox Christianity, as I think he’ll find some real Krustian shortcomings in Southern California Evangelicalism. (Some of it in his vocabulary in the interview may foreshadow that, though he acknowledges that he’s “still learning about his new religion.”)

Is self-expression a good thing?

I didn’t know whether I  – a mere scribbler – should feel flattered that I was deemed worthy of the scatological venom of professors (not all of them from minor institutions, and some of them quite eminent).

Theodore Dalrymple recounts and reflects on the oft-remarked lack of civility on the internet. What made him, a mere scribbler, worthy of the venom of professors? An astringent piece about about Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw, the latter of whom disbelieved the germ theory of disease and vilified Pasteur and Lister.

I suspect that he had that contrarian mindset that supposes that the truth must be the opposite of what everyone thinks, instead of the judicious mindset that supposes that the truth might be the opposite of what everyone thinks.

I have nothing to add except that spam and vitriol make the net less pleasant than it could be. Oh, yeah: I like his distinction between contrariness and judiciousness, too. I tend to be contrary, I fear, though I’ve never gone so far as holocaust denial, 911 Truthers, or those who are convinced that HIV was manufactured in a lab to commit genocide against whoever.

Better cabs through innovation

From the Financial Times, an interesting article on the competition between the “Black Cabs” of London (with their legal privileges, tradition, and undeniable Knowledge of their drivers) and an upstart company, Addison Lee, that is challenging the Black Cabs on several fronts. For instance, the story opens with how Russians are working with Addison Lee to collect GPS data, the better to predict trip length, preferred routes, and fleet allocation.

We all no doubt tend to find confirmation of our prejudices wherever we can. Climate scientists claim corroboration in a winter weather pattern that coincides with global warming theory, but then, seemingly inconsistently, deny that a weather pattern to the contrary is evidence of anything. Heads, we win; tails, inconclusive.

So take it with a grain of salt however big you like that I find in this story evidence that if we regulate an industry, we should think very hard before granting it any outright monopoly. The innovation potential of allowing upstarts is especially prominent in this story. What if the regulators had crushed the upstarts, especially since they tended to be a bit shady?

Dare I think of this story even as being evidence of the virtues of policies that promote small-scale innovation so as to prevent even “free market” success from creating excessive concentrations of corporate power? (Most of our megabusinesses like Wal-Mart, ConAgra, Archer Daniels Midland and such, owe a great deal to cozy relationships with legislators and regulators – hardly examples of pure free market success. But that’s a story for another day.)

Education as counter-hegemonic

Over on the Porch, much of the talk is about education. Two recent posts there highlight some of the changes in higher education of which, it often seems, many are unaware because the change has been over maybe five decades or more.

For instance, Ted McAllister, one of the less active Porchers, riffs briefly on Pepperdine’s substitution of “first year” for “freshman:”

I’m struck by how thoroughly universities have largely given up any sense that they should serve as repositories of tradition, of heritage, of inherited wisdom, replaced by an embarrassingly old-fashioned and moralizing (and hence not morally serious) crusade to be institutions of social transformation.

Jason Peters focuses not on the crusade to be institutions of social transformation, but the pervasive money orientation of the whole enterprise:

What makes all of this so disheartening is that it is cast in monetary terms in the first place—and exclusively. Clearly the value of an education must be realized in dollars. Education is no longer an end but a means only—and a vulgar one. In such talk as we meet here it is impossible to make sense of knowledge “acted upon, informed, or . . . impregnated by Reason.”

“Repositories of tradition, of heritage, of inherited wisdom” are deeply counter-cultural in a consumerist society. We need our institutions of higher learning to be such repositories, not agents of faddish social transformation.

Greedy, but gratuitous, too

I’ve mentioned my antipathy to “too big to fail,” which notably included banks. But Grameen Bank  interests me as much for the anthropology behind it – its view of human nature – as for its localist angle and “Small Is Beautiful” aesthetic:

Dr. Yunus came to realize … that all economic theory was built on considering only half of what men really are. It is built on the fact that men are selfish. And so they are. But that is not all that they are. Men are also unselfish, because without that, no social order—and no economy—would be possible or sustainable. So the good Dr. set out to found an economics, and a bank, built on the whole man, and not just the half-human.

Can we trust peer-review? Still?

Interesting thoughts on the scientific idea of “peer review.” This is not meant to bash “climate science” in particular, though it is a recent, high-profile example of a peer review process that may have been rigged. (I have no horse in the climate-science race because we’re running out of fossil-fuels and need major adjustments in how we live regardless of climate effects.)

That self-interest skews the peer review process shows, I think, the folly of thinking that a process (e.g., peer review) can ever make virtue (e.g., gimlet-eyed objectivity and honesty) obsolete. Virtue is, among other things, what allows us to do the right thing even when it’s not in our self-interest.