Month: April 2010

The high cost of living “simply”

There’s a provocative column and thoughtful responses shaping up at In Character: A Journal of Everyday Virtues, about living simply.

We have been here and done this before:

  • Weekend hippies
  • Limousine liberals
  • Bobos in Paradise

Ah, the human capacity for self-delusion! I do not exempt myself by any means.

In the Orthodox “Trisagion Prayers” we ask:

All-holy Trinity have mercy on us. Lord, cleanse us from our sins. Master, pardon our iniquities. Holy God, visit and heal our infirmities for Thy Name’s sake.

I think of this not just as repetition, of which Orthodox piety has abundant supply, but of subtle distinctions among sin, iniquity and infirmity.

Our delusional lapses like consumerist simplicity strike me more as sinful (Greek amartia, “missing the mark”) or infirm than as iniquitous. Still, for those we implore cleansing and healing, respectively.

Nature and Humanity in Orthodox Christianity

Father Stephen this time mediates a YouTube video (okay, it’s two still photos, some text, and some appropriate background music) frame for one of the Twentieth Century’s great Saints’ poetic reflections on the nexus between (1) humankind’s various sins, transgressions and iniquities and (2) natural calamity:

I don’t think Saint Nikolai is saying “God is doing this stuff to punish us” or even “God is doing this stuff to get our attention so we’ll straighten out” (i.e., to chasten us). He says in conclusion, after all, that the Lord will come and set things right.

Nor is he drawing a cause and effect line between sin X and natural calamity Y, a la Pat Robertson.

I think, having now spent some 12+ years Orthodox, that he’s talking about a mystical connection between us and nature, consistent with Biblical anthropology that sees us as part of nature and yet apart from it as well, bearing the image of God and appointed as steward and priest over creation.

Others might fault this from Orthodox Wiki, but I personally couldn’t describe in prose the tradition I’m describing better that this, from Orthodoxwiki:

The Relationship between Man and Material Creation

Man as a microcosm

The idea of man as a microcosm is most commonly associated with St. Maximos the Confessor. In his Mystagogia he speaks of an indissoluble relationship and unity between man and world: “[St. Paul] put forward another suggestion, along the lines of the same imagery, that the whole world of visible and invisible things can be thought of as a man; and man, made up of body and soul, as a world” (Mystagogia, Chapter 7). Lars Thunberg, in his “Man and the Cosmos” describes St. Maximos’ understanding of man as a microcosm by virtue of his constitution and for the purpose of mediation. Being both material and spiritual, all things in the world are reflected in man, who then has the vocation to bring together mortal and immortal creatures, rational and non-rational beings. However, St. Maximos does not view this vocation of man in separation from God. Rather, he states that it is Christ who achieved this unity. Again Thunberg, analyzing the Ambigua, says that man needs to leave the sphere of creation behind and be united with God beyond his own nature. Thus, man’s mission in relation to creation can only be fulfilled in and through Christ: “Man created in the image of God is thus, according to Maximus, a key to understanding creation not only in order that he may understand it as it is, but also that by actively understanding it in his process of divinization he may elevate it to the supreme level of its full soteriological comprehension (Ambigua 10).” (Thunberg, “Man and the Cosmos, p.76)

St. Gregory of Nyssa also uses the image of man as microcosm, though his use of the expression is rather less uniform than for St. Maximus. In his conception, the parallelism seems to be limited to a common praise of God: “as the cosmos continuously lifts up a hymn of praise to God, so it is the duty of man to engage in continual psalmody and hymnody.” Metr. Paulos Gregorios postulates that St. Gregory’s reservation regarding a more in-depth parallelism stemmed from a concern that man’s high standing within creation not be attributed to his similarity to the universe (Gregorios, “Cosmic Man”). However, St. Gregory also views man as a mediator between creation and God whose mediation is made possible by the incarnation: “in Christ, Man, and through Man the whole creation, directly and without intermediaries participates in the creative energies of God Himself” (Gregorios, “Cosmic Man, p.103).

Fr. Stanley Harakas summarizes the Orthodox position thus far: “[t]he creation exists for the use of humanity; but humanity exists as a microcosm to sanctify creation and to draw it into the fullness of the life of the kingdom of God, to bring it into communion with its maker.” (The Integrity of Creation: Ethical Issues, in “Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation,” p.73)

While both St. Maximus and St. Gregory note that the mediation of man is directly related to Christ’s incarnation, the details of that mediation are filled in by modern day theologians.

Man as Priest of Creation

The Genesis passage which started this article is open to other interpretations. An interpretation which gives man a certain responsibility towards the environment, presents the commission which was given to man as a stewardship. K.M. George in his essay “Towards a Eucharistic Ecology” points out that good stewardship, in the sense of the Greek ‘oikonomos:’—manager or administrator of a house,—requires trustworthiness, dependability, and wisdom. He goes on to add: “[w]e offer the creation as a thank-offering to God in liturgy” (George, Towards a Eucharistic Theology, in “Justice, Peace and the Integrily of Creation”, p.46) This statement contains within it the seed for the idea of that several contemporary theologians, among them Vigen Guroian, Metr. Paulos Gregorios, and Metr. John_(Zizioulas)_of_Pergamon, consider as the most important in defining man’s relationship to creation: man as ‘priest of creation.’

Metr. Paulos Gregorios of the Orthodox Syrian Church of the East, who was one of the most ardent advocates of Christian ecology wrote, “Nature, man, and God are not three disjunct realities on the stage with a space-interval between their respective boundaries. […] Christ has become part of creation, and in his created body he lifted up the creation to God, and humankind must participate in this eternal priesthood of Christ” (Gregorios, “The Human Presence”) Metr. John Zizioulas adds: “The priest is the one who takes in his hands the world to refer it to God and who, in return brings God’s blessing to what he refers to God. Through this act creation is brought into communion with God himself. […] This role of the human being as the priest of creation, is absolutely necessary for creation itself, because without this reference of creation to God the whole created universe will die.” He goes on to argue that ethics, as commonly understood, cannot provide a solution for the environmental problem; this is the place of the Church. Metr. John argues that the solution to the environmental problem cannot be based on a set of impersonal principles. What is needed, rather is a particular way of life based on relationships with one another, with the material world, and with God. Specifically, the Metropolitan mentions fasting, respect for the material world and acknowledgement (within the Liturgy) that creation belongs to God, as specific means by which the Church can effect change (Zizioulas, Man the Priest of Creation: A Response to the Ecological Problem, in “Living Orthodoxy in the Modern World”).

The exercise of this priesthood encompasses both our lives within the church temple (the Liturgy) and outside of it (the liturgy before/after the liturgy).

This is the sort of thing, in the end, that may be better said poetically, as Saint Nikolai say it, than in dry propositions like my introduction or like Orthodoxwiki.

Do you know, my child, why the earth overturns restlessly
and why it spews forth into the sky?
Because men have overturned the voice of conscience
Calling evil good, and good evil
and have spewed forth hatred toward those who still speak truth.

UPDATE:

Bryan Graf, a photographer, meditates differently on the relationship of humankind and nature, presumably on the occasion of Earth Day (that’s today, isn’t it?).

Ahem! I prefer St. Nikolai’s version.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même. There’s no doubt in my mind that the Catholic Church gets extra scrutiny because it’s not 100% cool with modern prejudices and vices.

The Orthodox Church will get the same treatment as we grow and become better known. Orthodoxen: get used to it.

Yes, I just “compared” today’s sexual revolutionaries — i.e., about 90% now (or so it seems sometimes) — to Nazis, if you’re looking for merde to throw. No, I don’t think sexual revolution is Nazi or Nazi-inspired.

Goldman Sachs again: a defender and a “third way” step back

Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal rises to the defense of Goldman Sachs, and this time it’s not half-hearted. (You knew someone would, didn’t you? Some people are just contrary.)

Make no mistake: The gestalt behind the SEC case is that short selling is bad. Constructing deals to enable short sellers to bet against certain markets (as Goldman did) is bad. When longs lose money because of freely chosen participation in such trades, it’s bad. When shorts make money, it’s bad …

Remember, the long investors could have bought mortgages directly if they wanted to invest in housing. They wanted the more attractive premium stream from insuring mortgages for an investor who was betting they would fail. And only in hindsight has Mr. Paulson become the mastermind who made billions betting against what now is judged to have been a bubble.

Of course, you can’t go wrong betting on the media’s unwillingness to unwrap itself from the errors of hindsight bias—that bet by the SEC has paid off. But there are bigger fish being fried. For more than a year, certain knowledgeable bloggers and investigative reporters have argued that such deals—Goldman’s was hardly unique—exacerbated the bubble, with special focus on the activities of a Chicago hedge fund called Magnetar.

It’s true that such deals gave housing bulls an additional way to lose money. But to blame shorts for making the bubble worse comes close to saying salvation for the markets is to exclude participants who are bearish.

This is especially peculiar since the bubble’s true Rosetta Stone is being ignored, though it has been hammered away at by a member of Washington’s own Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, in the person of Peter Wallison.

Mr. Wallison has publicized new data showing that Fannie, Freddie and FHA financed a lot more subprime and Alt-A loans than anyone realized (because they were mislabeled). It turns out almost half of the $10.6 trillion in U.S. mortgages outstanding in 2008 were low quality. This is the data that might have changed investors’ minds—suggesting that the American public’s capacity to shoulder housing debt was far more saturated than anybody knew.

I don’t think any account of the housing bubble collapse is even near complete without factoring in the role of the federal government and its creations, Fannie, Freddie and FHA, in encouraging subprime mortgages to make homeowners of more people. That is turn is driven by lobbyists from the real estate industry. It is part of the crony capitalism I blogged about yesterday.

Is it evil to want to empower people to own their homes? No. Is it fraught with unforeseen consequences? You bet.

(Full disclosure: I’m a sucker for writers who use “gestalt.”)

Meanwhile, out of the mainstream, a Distributist economist, John Médaille, invokes Aristotle and Aquinas as worthy bank regulators:

Not too long ago, a Prominent Economist told me that Aristotle had nothing to teach us about modern finance. I beg to differ; Aristotle, and the Scholastics who adopted his approach to economics, were surprisingly sophisticated on these topics, while so many Prominent Economists are surprisingly naïve. Indeed, Aristotle left us a principle of commerce that serves very well as a principle of regulation. This principle is the distinction he makes between natural and unnatural exchange. Modern commentators, who make no distinctions, have viewed this as a mere primitive hostility to business; actually, it was a shrewd appreciation of commerce. For Aristotle, natural exchange was that which was necessary for the provisioning of the family (the true meaning of economics.) Unnatural exchange that which had only money as it object.

The former is “natural” because it limits itself; that later unnatural because is has no natural limits. For example, a man wishing to buy bread for his family will buy only as much as he needs; this is a natural exchange. But a man wishing only to make money in the bread biz may wish to buy up all the bread and corner the market so as to raise prices and make a fortune on others’ necessities; this is an unnatural exchange. When applied to finance, a transaction is natural when it is when it is firmly and directly tied to the production of some actual product; it is unnatural the more abstract and derivative it becomes, and when its only object is to make money rather than profit from production. Thus, we may say that banks directly financing home purchases or construction are natural transactions, and less natural when they become “securitized,” bundled together and sold in packages to remote investors who will have no contact with the actual homes, banks, or borrowers. The situation becomes even more abstract when you speak of securitizing the securities (“CDO-Squared” or even “CDO-Cubed”) or with CDSs, which become pure speculative bets on the market. The more abstract the instrument, the more closely it should be scrutinized.

As things now stand, we have reversed Aristotle’s order: the natural exchanges are highly regulated, while the unnatural ones are often unregulated. In more normal times, when you went to George Bailey to get a mortgage, he squinted at you real hard to see if you are the kind of person who will pay him back for 30 years. George needs little oversight to encourage him to be prudent, since he has the bank’s capital and the depositors’ money at risk. But if George merely intends to securitize the loan, then he merely glances at you to see if you are the kind of person who will pay for two weeks, because after that you are somebody else’s problem.

(Full disclosure: (1) Tipsy is intoxicated by Distributism, a “third way” economic theory, like wine to the head of a teetotaler  – see masthead. (2) Tipsy is part owner of a title insurance company that was formed partly because mortgage loans were routinely being sold out of the community, and consequently old-fashioned county-seat-lawyer abstract opinions weren’t worth jack any more.)

CLS/Hastings update

The arguments were had before the Supremes yesterday, after my post and bold-if-not-foolish prediction.

Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal summarizes nicely here:

Presumably Gays & Lesbians for Individual Liberty do not share the CLS view of human sexuality. But they understand exactly where Dean Martinez’s logic is taking us.

“[U]nder Hastings’ forced membership policy, only majority viewpoints (or those viewpoints too banal to interest the majority) are actually assured a voice in Hastings’ forum,” argues their brief. “That is a patently unreasonable way to ‘promote a diversity of viewpoints.'”

Sadly, it appears that this is shaping up in the popular press as a case about the legal status anti-gay bigotry if religiously motivated. Few in the press note that the CLS sexuality standards bar from office unrepentant straight fornicators as well as unrepentant gay fornicators.

As well it should: so far, the sexual revolution and no-fault divorce have done a heckuva lot more damage to the formation of Christian consciences and the institution of marriage than has the gay rights movement.

Crony capitalism

I haven’t yet, and probably never will, fully think through this editorial from today’s Wall Street Journal, titled An Economy of Liars. The author is from the Cato Institute, a right-libertarian group, so read it discerningly for that bias.

Thomas Carlyle, the 19th century Victorian essayist, unflatteringly described classical liberalism as “anarchy plus a constable.” As a romanticist, Carlyle hated the system—but described it accurately …

The idea that multiplying rules and statutes can protect consumers and investors is surely one of the great intellectual failures of the 20th century. Any static rule will be circumvented or manipulated to evade its application. Better than multiplying rules, financial accounting should be governed by the traditional principle that one has an affirmative duty to present the true condition fairly and accurately—not withstanding what any rule might otherwise allow. And financial institutions should have a duty of care to their customers. Lawyers tell me that would get us closer to the common law approach to fraud and bad dealing …

Hayek’s mentor, Ludwig von Mises, predicted in the 1930s that communism would eventually fail because it did not rely on prices to allocate resources. He predicted that the wrong goods would be produced: too many of some, too few of others. He was proven correct.

In the U.S today, we are moving away from reliance on honest pricing. The federal government controls 90% of housing finance. Policies to encourage home ownership remain on the books, and more have been added. Fed policies of low interest rates result in capital being misallocated across time. Low interest rates particularly impact housing because a home is a pre-eminent long-lived asset whose value is enhanced by low interest rates.

Distorted prices and interest rates no longer serve as accurate indicators of the relative importance of goods. Crony capitalism ensures the special access of protected firms and industries to capital. Businesses that stumble in the process of doing what is politically favored are bailed out.

Note through this that it’s not just big business lying. Big business and government are in bed together.

But “financial institutions should have a duty of care to their customers”? And “Deregulation is not some kind of libertarian mantra but an absolute necessity if we are to exit crony capitalism”?

Yes, but who will enforce that if not the “cognitively captive” regulators? Class action lawyers? Sheesh! They’re as unpopular as bureaucrats, and justifiably so in many, many (most?) cases. Dismantling regulation per se is not an adequate response. That will only leave us captive to megacorp or to a new cartel of judges and shysters with a chaotic jumble of 50 different rules, one per state.

On the other hand, a local bank, not answerable to a Mother Ship in New York City, might behave itself without massive, Washington-based regulation and without big gun bullshit slingers like the Breck Girl, John Edwards, to sue them if they do get out of line.

Isn’t this another indicator that we need some trust busting of the “too big to fail”? Then we can deregulate. Right?

Travelogoblog

Retired Indianopolis Elder Law attorney Phillip Price will set out, volcano (and God) willing, on a 500 mile hike in France and Spain, blogging merrily as he goes:

Join me on my Camino de Santiago (Way of St James).  My journey begins  April 28, 2010 departing from Indianapolis, IN.  I start walking on April 30 in St Jean Pied de Port, France, cross through a mountain pass in the Pyrenees and walk westward to Santiago de Compostela, Spain about 497 miles of walking over 36 days.

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