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-20^thCentury 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 20^th 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.

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.

Contingent Vegetarianism

“Premiss [sic; I guess the Brits spell “premise” with two esses] one: we don’t need to eat animals; premiss two: eating animals in the way we now eat them causes suffering on an unimaginable scale; premiss three: eating animals in the way we now eat them is environmentally catastrophic. Conclusion: we should not – for both moral and prudential reasons – eat animals in the way we now eat them.”

Thus a reviewer summarizes a recent book, Eating Animals, that argues for (or perhaps just bears testimony to the author’s) “contingent vegetarianism.” Contingent vegetarianism is vegetarianism that the author might reconsider if we raised and slaughtered our food animals differently.

Eating is about as basic an animal activity as there is. For humans – a unity of body and spirit – it is traditionally as basic a social activity as there is, and I admire those who live out that reality still today. I want no reductionist “refueling” metaphors to dominate my view of food and the fellowship that accompanies. How and what we eat is important.

The arguments for vegetarianism of late have focused on the current realities of what we used to call “animal husbandry,” which now frankly has become “factory farming.” That’s this author’s second and third “premiss.”

But there’s at least one other argument, current when I was a young adult, that is based on the inefficiency of turning sun, water and soil into concentrated food through the bellies of beasts. For instance, Diet for a Small Planet.

Going back another generation, one of my favorite authors, C.S. Lewis, worried a great deal about the ethics of vivisection. When did you last hear anyone worry about that? How many of you need a dictionary right now? Frankly, I need one to remember exactly what that refers to, though I know generally.

It worries me a lot that something of keen concern to a man of Lewis’s stature isn’t even on our radar screen any more. On my radar screen. Dare I suggest that we have a great capacity for tolerating ethically dubious practices that are convenient for us, from vivisection to factory farming, abortion on demand and embryonic stem cell research?

I have a metabolic disorder of longstanding, currently under control with a lot of expensive medicines, whereby a diet of almost pure meat and other animal protein (i.e., a very low carbohydrate diet) is a very attractive convenient option. It’s hard and time-consuming for me to fashion healthy meals without animal products, as we Orthodox do in Lent. I actually tend to gain weight in Lent with my “fasting,” and I frankly don’t want a lipid profile done immediately after Pascha. But I’m convinced that I could do it if I would take the time. An Orthodox friend lost his taste for meat during Lent, and now is essentially vegetarian year-round.

I could. Should I?

Afterthought: Bound up in my discomfort with factory farming is my antipathy to megacorporations generally. Tyson is not just a great producer of chicken waste, but a major political player in Arkansas – at the very least. And as the linked article shows, the factory farmers have stripped terms like “free range” of any real meaning (through the very cozy relationship megacorporations develop with their putative regulators). I’m flirting with distributist economic thought – “not fewer capitalists, but multiple more” – and I am just plain angry at bailouts of “too big to fail” corporations. So I’m not all that interested in questions like Wal-Mart versus Whole Foods; give me CitiFoods, please.