04.29.07

At Last. It’s Being Said Aloud.

Posted in Social at 6:35 pm by steve

Thanks to Hecate for first bringing it to my attention. And to TPM Cafe for having the full text with introductory comments. Rahm Emmanuel is finally calling the Bush administration on its pattern of corruption. This is an opening salvo that is not to be missed.

There are a lot of progressives who are rightfully scornful of Rahm for his destructive role in the 2006 election and for waiting to see which way the wind blows before taking a stand. But it is also true that the most effective politicians only commit to fighting battles they can win. Let’s hope that is the case here.

Rice doesn’t Know?

Posted in Social at 4:20 pm by steve

When Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice claimed on Face the Nation “I really don’t know what we were supposed to strike in Afghanistan,” what was she actually saying?

  • She doesn’t know what everyone else knows, namely who was responsible for 9/11 and where they were?
  • She is simply employing a rhetorical dodge.
  • She knows things that we don’t know that make the standard theory wrong.

The first interpretation is only believable of someone who is both extremely stupid and has been totally isolated from all the news in the last decade. It is an argument that might work for her husband boss; but we are led to believe that Rice might actually be the smartest person in this administration. And she is anything but isolated.

Interpretation two is suggestive of a rhetorical habit among Bush officials to make people say what they mean. What this does is put the burden of proof on them. It offers more avenues for counter-attack. So it is possible that Rice is simply employing a time-honored rhetorical device. Of course, if one takes her words literally and compares them to the standard theory of 9/11, what she is literally claiming is a boldfaced lie. She really does know.

Interpretation three, unlikely as it might be, is not impossible. It may be that Rice knows that striking Bin Laden - for whatever reason - would have made no material difference to the outcome on 9/11. Or that it would have posed some inconvenience to some important supporter or supporters.

In the first case, Rice would be grossly incompetent: stupid and uninformed. In the second, she would be manipulative and disingenuous. In the third she would be acting as an accesory after the fact to a major crime.

Sounds like neocon standard operating procedure. Americans may be stupid and greedy, but don’t we deserve better than this?

04.26.07

Currency Manipulation’s Costs

Posted in Policy at 3:53 pm by steve

Inflation - The Waterglass Analogy

Imagine a tall, cylindrical water glass. Put water in the glass until it is half full. Now put more water into the glass. What will happen. Even a three-year-old could predict that the water level in the glass will rise.

Now imagine a small isolated village. In this village all of the goods consumed by its 100 villagers are produced from locally available raw materials. It is remote. And there is absolutely not contact with the outside world. It is fully contained. Like a water glass. Now the villagers exist using a system of barter until one day each person finds on his kitchen table 100 silver coins. The villagers gather together and agree to use these coins for the purpose of trade. Each sets prices for the goods he manufactures. And the well being of the town remains roughly as it was. Perhaps a loaf of bred fetches one silver coin. A wel-made suit of clothes might fetch $50. And so on.

It is now three years year later, in the same town, with precisely the same people possessing the same productive capacities and tastes in goods. Each family again finds 100 silver coins on their kitchen tables. Aha, thinks each, I am twice as rich as I was before. I can afford twice as much. They all go out and buy new stuff. But almost instantly the stock of stuff is depleted. And at the same time people discover that to replace it requires twice the number of silver coins. Overnight the price of goods doubles. Why? becauses the silver coins were simply tokens representing how wealth was apportioned. They represent how much value we place in certain goods, and they represent the resources used in creating the good. They were not wealth itself. Or in the language of economics, the supply of currency doubled, but the real goods and services it represented remained fixed.

Currency in a closed economy works just like water in a glass. Double the amount of currency and the price of goods and services doubles.

Currency and Credit

Once, long ago and in a land far away, currency was paper money. Bank notes. And more than one nation realized that it could tax rich people with savings by simply inflating currency. It was simple. Print ever more money. And since savings was based on nominal value, not on any real value,* the real value of the savings would dwindle. There are stories, in fact, of people in the Weimar Republic getting paid twice per day, then rushing out to buy goods before the price went up. They took wheelbarrows of cash with them to do the daily food shopping.

Today, the largest portion of money is virtual. It is payments and credits that exist in accounts. So how does one create more money? Issue credit. Now if credit is issued to institutions and those institutions use it to increase productive capacity, then this creates more real goods. The increase in the amount of currency simply reflects the increase in the amount of goods available. But what happens when credit expands faster than the available goods. Inflation again. At least in a closed system.

Pangea and Gondwanaland - A Brief Case Study

Now imagine two countries Pangea and Gondwanaland. Pangea is a productive nation with high wages. Gondwanaland is impoverished and isolated, but larger in population. Its people are intelligent, diligent, dependable, energetic. Businesses in Pangea locate productive facilities in Gondwanaland and produce goods for less than they did before. The people of Pangea are a little worse off for the loss of productive capaciy. But this is partially compensated for the fact that goods are less expensive. People of Gondwanaland, are more productive and, given a long enough time, become well paid. On average everyone is better off. End of story. Right?

Not exactly. Imagine a point in time when Gondwanaland still materially underpays its employees and uses the difference to strengthen its economic position. What might it do. It might purchase currency of Pangea. This would make goods nominated in that currency artificially expensive on some hypothetical world market. And it would make goods made in Gondwanaland artificially inexpensive.

How would Pangea react? One rational reaction is to print more money. Or issue more credit. Whatever is required to create more currency. Now if most of the manufactued goods in Pangea were imported from Gondwanaland, the latter’s manipulation of the currency is aimed precisely at countering modestly sized moves by Pangea that might defile its currency, so the price of goods imported from Gondwanaland would stay relatively constant in Pangea. But the credit market would become awash in credit. Loans would be marketed to people who otherwise would not be considered creditworthy. The price of real estate would be driven artificially high.

Given Pangea’s attempt to make Gondwanaland’s currency manipulation more expensive, the latter is faced with a choice. Either it continues its policy and purchases the excess currency to maintain its unfair currency valuation. Or it quits the game. If it quits, it risks stalling a growing manufacturing economy. But if it continues, it widens the gap between the actual value of the Pangean currency and the apparent value. This means that when it cashes in the Pangean debt that it holds, it will be worth much less than it would have been had they sold that same debt earlier. But the real loss would be moderated considerably if the debt were secured by real property. So Gondwanaland might start buying mortgage-backed securities rather than government-guaranteed debt instruments.

The decision to continue the game or to quit depends upon the advantages in trade that accrue from currency manipulation compared to the cost of the loss of an investment. And it depends on Gondwanaland’s ambitions and capacities. If Gondwanaland is much larger in population and in its resource base is broader than is Pangea’s because it has been more effective in building long term relationships with resource-rich nations, then persisting in the game until Pangea’s productive capacities are small in comparison to Gondwanaland’s might prove to be a good strategy. At the end of the game, Gondwanaland simply writes off the investment in the currency of Pangea as a cost of becoming the world’s largest and most productive economy.

This brief case study Pangea has found it possible to defile its currency without actually suffering what looks like inflation. Rather, the value of its currency with respect to other floating currencies declines. And at the same time, it accrues huge debts to its main trading partner. Instead of paying more now, it pays more later. If those debts are secured by real property, and if Gondwanaland decides to collect on its debt abruptly, Pangea may have difficulty raising the capital to pay the debt. It will have to forfeit property and do so at firesale prices.

Printing more currency will do no good since nobody will buy it. So if the game goes on long enough and Gondwanaland becomes economically powerful enough compared to Pangea, and if the debt is called in abruptly, Pangea’s economy collapses overnight. Real assets are all it has left, but they are held by Gondwanaland as security on debt. Gondwanaland has acquired the real assets of Pangea for pennies on the dollar.

By this means Pangea, once a rich state has transformed itself into a vassal state of Gondwanaland. Of course, now Gondwanaland has vast holdings in Pangea. And finds itself investing there because it is cheaper to produce goods there. And the cycle works in reverse. If Pangea’s people are as diligent and well educated as were Gondwana’s at the the beginning of the story there is some hope of a good outcome.

How bad things get in Pangea before they begin to get better will depend on a number ot things including how close and exclusive the trading and financial ties are between Pangea and Gondwanaland. It will also depend and on dampening factors such as taxes, laws, and negotiated agreements that might prevent too profound a disequilibrium in currency value that could arise due to manipulation.

Pangea and Gondwanaland are mythical states and their stories are mythical stories. Yet they resemble real states in some meaningful ways. Anyone who cannot see the relevance of this primer should probably take up a trade that does not require much abstract thought like busting rocks, being a laissez affaire economist, Or writing for the M$M.

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* Nominal value is the number printed on the face of the bank note. Real value is the cost of a fixed basket of goods. When inflation is at rampant, a ten dollar bill today only buys five dollars’ worth of goods a few years (or months) later.

Must-Read

Posted in Uncategorized at 1:55 pm by steve

Fascism in America - 10 Easy Steps A time-proven ten step recipe for turning a free state into a fascist dictatorship.
US Border Patrol bans Psychotherapist A prominent psychotherapist who admits to having experimented with drugs once, long ago is barred from entering the US. The article discusses a dozen or so other cases.
A Culture of Fear Another American falls victim to fear and racial hatred, another person of color is targeted by police for leaving waste paper at a recycling location.
Network Hosting Rove’s e-Mail Hosted Ohio Election Returns The hosting company used by the Republican National Committee for White House political e-mails is evidently the same hosting company that accumulated the returns for Ohio’s 2004 presidential election.
Free-Trade Religion Meets its Nemesis A mathematician retires from a life of economic modelling for profit and neatly deflates the free-trade orthodoxy.

04.23.07

False Promises

Posted in Social at 5:11 pm by steve

What do Indian summers in December and the story of King Lear have in common? The question was answered for me this morning as I severely pruned a number of roses that were just about killed by this year’s peculiar winter.

For ten years of growing roses in the Northeast, I have wondered why the hardiest of roses have so frequently been the latest to sprout spring leaves. Those days in April when the air is warm and sunny and the ground is moist may be among the best for roses. After all, by mid summer the ground is bone-dry and rose fungal disease is rampant. So why would a rose not avail itself of the good weather? The question has bothered me for years.

This year I got the answer. We had an odd winter this year. It got cool, then cold at the normal time. Then, in December or early January, it got downright warm. Not for two or three days. It was more like two or three weeks. Daffodils grew from the ground and reached ten inches in height, in some locations. It was the kind of behavior that one normally associates with daffodils in late February or early March. But by the third week of January, winter came back with a vengeance.

It was not until I started doing spring cleanup that I realized the problem. The roses that had been lured into sprouting new growth in December had been decimated. Most of those roses that were not stone-cold dead, lost eithty to ninety percent of their wood. They might survive, if given ideal conditions. By contrast, the roses that emerge latest each spring came through completely unscathed.

This story reminds me of the tension in human attitudes between pessimistic and optimistic frames of mind. The pessimists tend to be cynical, see problems and the dark side of things. Like the roses that emerge late in spring, they forego some of the best conditions. It seems like a terrible waste. Meanwhile, optimists ignore signs of problems and dangerous conditions. They always make hay while the sun is shining. Under all favorable conditions, the optimists outdo the pessimists.

So, if one is thinking as an evolutionary biologist, one must ask “of what use are the pessimists?” And the answer must lie in a kind of inevitability of unfavorable conditions. In fact, if one takes a long view of history, one clearly sees that favorable conditions always give way to unfavorable ones. Frequently, it is favorable conditions that actually bring on the unfavorable ones. In a real sense, birth is the cause of death: if one is to have one, one must have the other. In the case of roses the false promise of spring in December was the apparently favorable condition that lured the uncautious roses to their doom.

False promise is the premise of King Lear, too. Lear has three daughters. He decides to divide up his kingdom and dispose it to them before he dies. He holds a ceremony. Two of his daughers give him highly flattering speeches. But the third simply tells her father that he knows she loves him, and a flattering speech would serve the purpose ill. He is outraged, and divides his kingdom between the two flatters, disposing it to them. But that is when the trouble starts. For neither daughter gives a whit for the old dotard. All of their flattering pronouncements were for the purpose of gettinig what power they could. Nor was either satisfied with just half a kingdom. Just like Indian summer in December, they made false promises of fealty in order to get power. And in the end, those false promises proved disastrous for the family and those nearby.

One might learn several lessons.

  • When the purpose of speech may reasonably be assumed to be the acquisisiton of political or economic might, we owe it to ourselves to listen with skepticism. We owe it to ourselves to ask good questions. We owe it to ourselves to question motives. To axiomatically equate truth with authority is to be at perpetual risk of ending as a precocious rose after a December warming spell or as Lear after being decieved by his daughers.
  • Being a skeptic, a cynic, a ne’er-do-well has its place in society. A society that fails to listen to its cynics, its skeptics, its pessimists, is a society that remains blind to its problems. It is blindsided by unfavorable conditions. And it is likely to be incapable of dealing with major problems that might put the whole society at risk.*

It is easy to compare America today to roses near the end of a cold winter that included an Indian summer. The people and institutions that bet the most on the false promises of the radical right - promises made in the ’80s and again in this decade - will stand to lose much. In fact, it was the lower-middle classes that voted most for Reagan. It is they who first lost their manufacturing jobs and had to take up as greeters at Wal-Mart for a fifth the pay and no benefits. America as a whole, to the extent that it bet its future on those false promises, has suffered and stands to suffer much more. When we examine the damage, we are sure to find more than we ever dreamed.

There is hope of a new growing season for the roses. And there is a similar hope for America. But in both cases it is contingent on the pomises being consistent with actual conditions. Most of my roses will survive for many more seasons. I wish I could be so sanguine about the prospects for just government in this nation.

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*This, btw, is a premise of the Worry Wart blog. And it is why it ought to be read by more than just 200 bots. Even if it is boring and repetitive and ucool.

04.17.07

The Social Contract

Posted in Philosophy &c at 8:04 pm by steve

The Chains of Discontent

People are born free, so why are they bound in chains? Rousseau starts his landmark work, The Social Contract with essentially this question. In it Rousseau reasons that the unhappy state of human affairs derives mostly from a failure of the social contract. According to Rousseau’s theory people bind themselves over to society in return for some promised good. But society fails to deliver. In other words, it’s a great swindle. He uses the concept of the natural man, one who has not joined society. But the concept is formulated as if man springs fully formed and educated from the naked earth.

While it is easy to see Rousseau’s point that there is an implicit contract among people en-masse in a large city or state, and that many of the great dissatisfactions of people living in such an organization arise from a denial of this implicit contract, the method of reasoning he uses to reach the conclusion seems wrong for a number of reasons.

We intend to argue that while man might be born free, by the time he has taken his first meal of mother’s milk he has begun accruing a debt to society. It is a strange kind of debt, one that can only be discharged properly by providing for his own offspring. And perhaps, if he is a man of good fortune and good conscience, for those of his contemporaries. But it is a large and very real debt. Man is bound to society, if not by this debt itself, then by hopes of discharging it by caring for his own children.

We intend to argue also that Rousseau’s conception of society was mistaken. Man is born into a natural society. But his dissatisfactions arise primarily from being part of a wider artificial society, one that arises from specialization made possible by particular agricultural practices as we argued in Fall of Man (below) He does not choose to enter society as a single, solitary free man free of history, hopes, ambitions, expectations, and personal relationships. Rather, he trades away a kind of natural society that actually is or is materially like, or really ought to resemble a close and caring family. And he expects in exchange a part in an artificial society that derives from specialization borne of agriculture.

Trading Natural Society for Artificial Society

When men move from the natural society to the artificial one, they do so imagining that the larger one offers the same material and psychological rewards as does the smaller one. Perhaps they understand cerebrally that they give up certain things that they value, but they frequently fail to recon the cost of the exchange. Part of the swindle comes from the fact that compensation tends to be more in a substitutional sense than in an actual one. They are paid in money, not in kind. And sometimes that payment is insufficient to fully compensate for the trade. The working classes left the farm in droves in eighteenth century England, happy to be paid many times more in wages than they earned down on the farm. But when the costs of surviving in the city were deducted, the deal often looked much less appealing.

The material rewards of the natural society are the things men take for granted if they live in tiny villages close to nature, namely the beauties of the natural world. In a dense city these may not be in evidence. And it is not long before they are sorely missed. I lived for three years in the Detroit metro area. And I understand what it is like to live where there are no parks. Michigan has many natural beauties and they are available to anyone who can drive five hours and take a few working days off.

But this is categorically different from being able to take a walk each morning where there are trees and shrubs, birds singing, and the sound of the wind rustling the trees, undisturbed by the scream of fighter jets, the whisltes railroad trains, the screach of police sirens and car alarms, the roar of tractor trailors, and the bone-rattling rumble of earthmoving equipment. It assumes air that smells of the must of the soil - good or bad - not of the sewer gas, decomposing mulch, the black belch of the diesel engine, the sulfurous emissions of the coal plant, wretched smell of decomposing dog, or the peculiar wreak of a grease-trap.

When people choose to uproot themselves from a small town and move to a city, they forget the attractions of nature that they leave behind. It may take some years to realize how much it is missed, but every person who has made the leap and who is honest with himself will come to realize that there is some cost to this choice. And that this cost is greater than was first reconned.

Moving to the city involves, too, leaving behind a network of friends and associates that one has accumulated. This is where the psychological costs begin to be realized. It is true that many of the people who leave small towns for large cities do so feeling that, for one reason or another, they simply do not fit into those small places. Many cities contain an assemblage of people who do not fit in smaller communities, and one entertains hope of joining a new and more suitable society, one more accepting of one’s unique qualities.

Often it works. But it is sometimes true that this process never quite completes itself satisfactorily. The connections one makes are sometimes not quite so durable or deep as those of childhood friends; not because there is less in common, but because man, as a fixating animal, fixates most on early experiences. The plasticity of fixation is is much diminished by age nine. By age twentyfive it is mostly gone. There is a sense in which one simply cannot forge a deep connection with a new place, its people, places, and ways, if one arrives there in midlife. This is certainly a cost that goes uncompensated. It is one very difficult to fully compensate.

If we are to be informed by the allegory of the Fall of Man, then we understand that humans are naturally fit to be bound closely into a caring society. And that the satisfactions of being human arise chiefly from this kind of close association. When it is not the family, it is some other group. The cost that requires compensation is not, as Rousseau argues, the cost of joining society. Rather, the cost is that of leaving a tightly bound and happy small society to join a new one. It is the cost of giving up a set of natural attractions in exchange for a set of more artificial ones.Artificial society does owe a debt to a person for the simple act of joining, it owes compensation in kind for what is left behind.

But more normally, the compensation for joining artificial society is monetary. Artificial society is formed around economic transactions. And those economic transactions give rise to cooperative behavior. That cooperative behavior, in turn, yields huge economic windfalls. And the question that has plagued artificial society from its inception is how to divide up that windfall in a way that is just. That is the ultimate question Rousseau is trying to answer in The Social Contract. It is the question that the Utilitarians Mill and Bentham were trying to answer. It is the question Gauthier sets out to answer in Morals by Agreement as does Rawls in A Theory of Justice .

The question needs to be answered well because the strength and durability of an artificial society derives entirely from the commitment of its members to that artifice. Compensate in too miserly a manner, and social problems start to boil over. Systematcally fail to adequately remunerate people for parting them from natural society and corporate sense of a unified society disintegrates, threatening the real thing.

On one hand, this societal debt to the individual is most effectively paid in kind, through close relationships that people forge by taking part in social institutions. Rousseau’s notion of participatory government proved a crucial notion. And we, as Americans enjoy the fruits of this idea. Or might if more of us had read and understood his work.

On the other hand, part of the expectation of joining the greater society - the one that is created by specialists and specialization and returns to scale and efficient methods of agriculture and industrial production - is the realization of a share in the wealth created by being a part of that society. A significant part of the tension within a society arises from how the returns on cooperation, the returns that accrue to society by virtue of a person’s participation, are fairly divvied up. Societies that manage to do this well tend to be happy societies. Those that adequately acknowledge and meet the material and psychological needs that would be met by a fully functioning natural societies can be strong, enduring, and generally happy ones. Artificial societies that fail by all these measures tend to disintegrate.

Natural State of Man

It might be argued that most people are not born in small, rural villages. They do not grow up in tiny, tightly-knit communities of caring, nurturing people. In fact, a tiny piece that I read recently suggested that just this year the world transitioned to one in which most people live in cities or large towns. They do not live close to nature. In short, a significant part of this concept of natural society fails to approach reality . If one goes to places that vaguely approach this model, such as the the remote towns of people indigenous to the Amazonian Rain Forest, one might observe their inhabitants not out among nature, but huddled around a flickering television set watching Star Trek. Nor is it axiomatic that such natural societies are happy ones.

It will also be argued correctly that the satisfactions of the natural society are mostly fictional, idealistic, overstated. If they were otherwise, then not all of those communal living experiements of the 1970’s would have failed. Nature is not nearly so beautiful as we imagine, and much more terrible. People in all societies are trivial and petty, stupid, selfish, inconsiderate, rude, uneducated, unrefined, boring, dishonest, shifty, unreliable, prone to rage, cold, distant, thoughtless, narrow-minded, ethnocentric, prejudiced, morose, wicked, dimwitted, and generally unlikable. So it is easy to overrate the compensations of natural society.

People everywhere are flawed. But one of the great satisfactions in life is to learn to love people as much for their flaws as for their strengths. It is an idea without much currency. But it is a good one nonetheless. People do get satisfaction out of close society regardless of flaws of character. And this satisfaction derives from close and regular contact.

We will freely admit that our model society is every bit as much an artificial construct as Robinson Crusoe, the natural man construct that Nozyck invokes in Anarchy, State, and Utopia. We also admit that the Crusoe figure possesses an odd attraction, probably for the fact that it remains totally unbound by societal conventions or other human expectations. Finally, we agree with Locke and Nozyck that this model allows us to learn something about the nature of ownership by virtue of one’s own exclusive efforts. Yet the Crusoe figure is arguably more of a fiction than our idealization of naturural society: no man arises fully formed and educated out of the naked earth. Each is a product of his society.

Even Romulus, legendary founder of Rome, was nurtured by wolves. It was not a typical natural society, but it was a natural society nonetheless. How interesting that legend should attribute the founding of arguably the most influencial civil society in the history of western civilization to a kind of Robinson Crusoe figure, a man firmly rooted in natural society. Perhaps only such a man is capable of setting high enough the level of compensation for joining artificial society. Perhaps only such a person is capable of correctly reconning the cost. Sometimes the man who stands on the shore perceives the oceans more profoundly than the fish who live in them. Sometimes society is most clearly seen from beyond its edges.

Humans crave society. The best proof is proof by counterexample. Among the severest punishments that can be inflicted on men is the punishment of solitary confinement. It is assumed within the penal system that every prisoner enjoys company of thieves and murderers far better than he takes to the state of solitude. And it would seem that this belief is held because it is so. People who interact with nobody tend to be the sadder for the fact. Even people who pursue solitary crafts such as painters will frequently be found to live vibrant, gregarious social lives. Picasso for example. By this measure, Robinson Crusoe proves to be a seriously flawed premise for social theory.

How do we deal with the issue that most people are born into the post-agrarian societies that we call here artificial societies? Most people do not actually choose to move from natural societies to artificial ones. Or is that true? By some measure the family is a natural society. And many people leave their families for other compensations. So even in an urban setting there is as sense of the natural society and the artificial one. Yet few families are actually capable of passing to their children the natural society that they embody. The reasons are many and complex and have little to do with this discussion.

There is a sense that most people born in urban or suburban settings do not realistically have the choice of following directly in their parent’s footsteps. They find the prospects of natural society so impoverished that artificial society would have to offer little to create a better circumstance. In short, most people don’t really see it as a choice. There really is no alternative. Even in Rousseau’s day, if one were to quit the world of artificial society, one would have to sail to the new world and live among the “savages.”

Therein lies the problem. Contracts only deal with voluntary dealings. They assume that one enters a contractual relationship on a purely voluntary and rational basis, without being threatened, or misled, or pressured, or cajoled. It assumes that the alternative to entering into a contract is viable. If a person must enter into a contract to stay alive, it is hard to argue that such a contract is entered upon voluntarily. That, in fact, is one of the definitions of involuntary. Contracts that are made under threat are invalid. The threat nead not be loss of life. Contracts do not bind those who are deceived or forced involuntarily into the agreement.

The contractual theory is an artifice: there is no actual contract for joining artificial society. But it is an important artifice, because if we build an artificial society that no person would choose to join, would we not be building a terrible thing? Or if we built a society that is bad enough that makes a reasonably small portion of people wish they were dead, is that not a terrible thing? Or if we built a society that possesses a level of injustice in which people blow themselves up simply to make a statement about the level of injustice, would that not also be a terrible thing? So we must imagine that this contractual sense is important.

The fundamental notion off a contract is an exchange of voluntary performance. Person A commits to perform in a certain way and person B commits to perform in a certain way. A and B both expect certain benefits to accrue from this cooperative performance. And those benefits are divided in rough accordance with what each brings to the agreement. To a significant degree it was a queston of how the benefits of the cooperative effort of artificial society are divided among its members that motivated Rousseau’s work. And it has been a question addressed by many workers since.

In the natural society, there is a strong communal sense. AWhen people bring to the communtity material excesses these are shared, and the person who brings them is typically rewarded with other considerations.

In the artificial society, common talents generally bring disproportionately small returns, uncommon talents sometimes bring disproportionately large returns. No person who has written seriously in this field since Locke seriously disputes that a person ought to be remunerated for his efforts. The consequence of doing so is manifestly unjust society. So unjust as to be essentially dysfumctional, essentially unfit to be called society. But not all remuneration that one receives in artificial society is by virtue of one’s own efforts. Most, in fact, is highly dependent upon the efforts of others. Some poerion derives from legacies and endowments ( an old dam or canal, a road, a house well built long ago, a park, a valuable vein of ore, the mineral rights to the land on which it is found). Some derives from the function of institutions ( business, hospitals, fire departments) . Some derives from capital (machines that multiply the efficiency of labor.)

Now it happens that in the contracting process adults agree to trade their labors for wages and other considerations. Adults who manage to convince the agents of this artificial society that their skills are both rare and valuable command larger fees. Those who do not, accept smaller ones. Again, few serious writers in this field assert today that there is another solution to the problem, some efforts are more valuable to society than others.

The problem becomes evident when one approaches it from a contracting point of view. The current practice works as if a person chooses his talents. It works as if a person chooses all of the conditions that exist when he sits down to negotiate his wage. Many serious workers in the field blithely pretend that it is so.

But which person chooses to be born? Which person chooses his parents? Which person chooses his genes? Which person chooses his natural capacities? Which person chooses the nation into which he is born? Which person chooses his parents’ social class? Which person chooses the age into which he is born or the social customs and practices of that age? Which person chooses the zip code in which his parents live? Which person chooses his parents friends, associates, and institutions of membership? Which person chooses which schools and teachers he will have? Which person chooses the people with whom he will get along in school? Which person chooses to look plain or ugly to most others? Which person chooses to be sickly, weak or unenergetic? Which person chooses to be afflicted with diseases that debilitate him or to get injuries that make much work for which he would be otherwise fit out of the question? Which person has complete and arbrirary choice over which institutions he will be part of after school? Which person has arbitrary choice over how they will approach the contracting stage as an adult?

While it is true that many of the specific outcomes remain to be determined by the time one enters artificial society as an adult, one’s possibilities have been materially circumscribed by pure hazard. There might be billions of possible trajectories for a person at that point, but probably those that remain possible amount to less than one part in 10 raised to 100 power compared to the possibiltities that exist for some hypothetical, arbitrary human being who exists only in the imagination of a novelist or essayist or philosopher, one for whom none of the above choices has yet been made.

So while it is true that some choice does exist, the assumption of choice, upon which contract theory might be based is false. There exist not viable alternatives to entering the contract. And the starting position for negotiation is, to a profound degree, a matter of pure hazard. It is unrealistic to suggest that man enters artificial society in a purely voluntary basis. That he enters it as the result of some fairly reasoned negotiation between equals. And it is unrealistic to argue that the outcome of the negotiation is primarily a result of a person’s choices. As a result, society too frequently offers an individual a rotten deal. This is not a result of a failure of contract theory itself. It is a result of our failure to rightly acknowledge the ways in which the real problem diverges from its simplest idealization.

We would argue that contract theory, when it takes into consideration issues of hazard as Rawls does in his concept of “veil of ignorance” can be of great use in helping us determine whether the material benefits of artificial society are allocated fairly. But we also argue that to imagine that this is the singular, ultimate end of social justice is to fail to acknowledge the limited role that economic justice plays in society. We argue that economic justice is more important for what it symolizes than for what it actually is. Namely, it symbolizes a proper and respectful regard of all classes and groups of people for all other classes and groups.

The Really Big Problem with Contract Theory

But even the contracting issue misses the point somewhat. People contribute to society not because they expect something back but because that is the way people are. People do expect something back not so much because they contribute as because it is symbolic of being part of society. Participation in natural society is relational, not transactional. And this is the natural expectation that people have of artificial society.

The British notion of “position” or “place’ comes much closer to describing the notion than the American notion of “job.” In a way it is ironic since “positions” tended to pay in a more miserly way than “jobs.” But part of the difference was a kind of social insurance kept by the employer that would to some extent shield the employee from minor business setbacks that in contemporary America inevitably cause layoffs.

It is a categorical mistake to assume that a person sees pay as being an exchange for work done. Rather, pay is a symbol of being a member of an artificial society in a particular capacity. In a similar way, people expect to be part of society in other meaningful ways. They expect their roles to be meaningful, to make a difference. Society is not transactional. It is relational. The transaction serves as proxyl for the relationship. Where society fails to provide satisfaction it is freqently by making the categorical mistake of thinking that economic transactions are fundamentally economic in nature, and purely transactional.

And it is here where laissez affaire capitalism fails to apply to social theory. We argue elsewhere that it is almost impossible to find an economic transaction that actually satisfies the assumptions that underlie laissez affaier captitalism, so instead of it being a powerful general economic theory, it is a weak and isolated one. A kind of special case, or a point of departure in studying theories that are more representative of actual economic behavior. But we suggest here that what economic behavior that is legitimately covered by that idea along with much of the behavior and the ecomomic behavior that the theory claims illegitimately as its own is actually not properly understood purely in the transactional language of economic theory. Laissez affaire capitalism is not just a rather poor excuse for general economic theory, it is of almost not explanatory value when it comes to explaining the real satisfactions and disaffections with artificial society.

I am reminded of a story I read recently of an assembly-line worker. A manufacturing engineer for a car company noticed that a particular stud was regularly missing in the body of a certain model. The problem would be noticed far down the assembly line when the stud was used to mount other vital equipment. Autos that did not have this stud had to be pulled from the assembly line and reworked. And the rework was very expensive. He determined that there was a particular assemblyline worker who was responsible for that missing stud. When other workers were in that same position, they always installed the stud correctly. So one day he took that worker to the station where that stud was used to mount other equipment, and explained how the fact that it was missing would lead to costly rework and delays. “Oh,” commented the worker, “now I understand. I didn’t think it was important.” And the problem disappeared.

At the deepest level, the problem was one of a person failing to completely grasp how their own actions proved vitally important to the success of the society they were part of. The question was not about how the job was defined. The issue was not “you must insert this stud because it is your duty.” The issue was that inserting the stud was an act that added value to society. It was an act with societal importance. Realizing that societal importance dignified the act. The assmbly worker was paid for doing his job, yes. And the worker would not work without pay, probably, Similarly, if the worker refused to install the stud he would lose his job.

But pay was not the whole reason for work. Nor would the stud itself be the reason for firing. Pay did not motivate work. Nor did duty. Nor was pay the whole reward. Part of the reward lay in belonging to an institution, a society of people who made cars. Part of the reward lay in knowing one was making a valuable contribution to society. Understanding how this stud symbolized that was vital to solving the problem. The contract with the worker surely did not mention the stud. Nor could any contract have fully described all of the workers duties. In the end, the system functioned because of its societal nature, its resemblance to natural society.

When Russia reorganized in the 1990s there were a number of cases in which people reported to their jobs and did them with the normal amount of care and diligence for many weeks or even many months without getting paid. Why? Because they saw this as being their role in society. Yes, they probably did expect to be paid eventually. And as the time without pay ceased to be measured in months but started to be measured in years, the behavior changed. But were pay the only reason to be at work, they would have left much earlier. They left not because of lack of pay, per se, but because of what that symbolized.

These stories illustrate that people expect more from work than a paycheck. And they generally derive more from it. Work societies are a special kind of artificial society. They can tell us much about how cultures relate the work experience to the greater artificial society.

Germans who work in the United States are surprised by the informality of the workplace. They imagine work to be primarily a place to work, with other institutions providing other opportunities to be part of society. Germans imagine going to work, working intensely for the duration, and returning home at reasonable hours to take part in other societal roles. And they insist on getting six weeks off for vacation. They are paid very well, and for some years, until very recently, Germany was the world’s leading exporting nation.

Germans see Americans socializing and chatting at work and are aghast at how little work gets done during normal working hours. Perhaps German society, as does Japanese society, views work as a kind of sacred social act. In the German mind it might be a duty. But in the Japanese mind it might be more of a religious ritual. Both of these attitudes connect the acts of work with society in a rather profound way that Americans completely miss. They dignify work, putting it on a higher plane of social significance. The ironic result is that, at least in the German case, they spend much less time at it.

A friend works in a financial institution in NYC. He notes that people tend to show up at 10:00AM. They socialize until roughly 4:00, then they order out for sandwiches, go to their cubicles, and start their work. At ten or eleven they go home feeling self-righeous for putting in a fourteen or fifteen hour day, though they have actually worked for about six hours.

It would be a mistake to assume that what transpires between 10:00 and 4:00 adds no value either to society or to the institution paying these employees, Their social interactions bind them to each other, to their society, and to the institution that pays them. And their social cohesion will prove invaluable as they percolate up throught the various financial institions they will serve. But it is a uniquely American solution to the problem of a kind of paucity of institutions outside of work by which people can share a rich and fulfilling social life. And it involves a rather profound degree of self-deception.

Obligations of Society

We have argued so far that the expectation of people in an artificial society is that they be made to feel a legitimate and useful part of that society. Part is fair and effective government. Part is a livable environment. Part is fair pay and a sense of inclusion in vital institutions.

Rousseau, we presume, imagined that if one got the governmental part right, the rest might follow. That, one might reasonably argue, was what he was talking about when he argued for democracy and the means of determining the a corporate will of the people. It was a reasonable assumption. And it might be correct. But if it is correct, it is so for the wrong reason.

The only way to get the governmental part right is to have a well educated, enligthened society, a society both well informed and capable of complex ethical reasoning. In such a society, government and other institutions would reflect this good reasoning, and all three issues would naturally be addressed reasonably well. Good government is the product of good ethical reasoning informed by a strong sense of empathy. When it ceases to be this, it becomes little more than an institution of the powerful taking advantage of the less powerful.

It was to this condition the Rousseau was objecting in The Social Contract . Proper moral thought would suggest that, to the extent that artificial society makes people more miserable than they would be in a more natural state, it is actively evil. In religious language, artificial society in this case is responsible for a sin of commission. To the extent that artificial society fails to make people as happy as the society is capable of making them, it is neglectful. In this case, artificial society is responsible for a sin of omission.

Why should we care? Why should we be engaged in the question about how people derive satisfaction from their society? There are two personal reasons. One is because caring in and of itself humanizes us. It brings us into artificial society in a capacity that is similar to how we would rightly and most happily enter into a relationship with natural society. Unhappy natural societies fail in this respect. The second reason is because acts that result from our caring may occasionally touch other people’s lives in favorable ways. Caring might sometimes actually make a difference.

There is also one societal reason. A society that fails too profoundly to look after the needs of the most miserable 80% of its population fails in profoundly miserable ways. The French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions spring to mind. In all of these cases, the event was the natural and almost inevitable product of centuries of neglect of the social contract. Rousseau wrote decades before the revolution. And his reasoning was based not only on contemporary Paris, but historic Paris. The societal abuses of the lower classes were old by his time.

But lesser calamities befall societies for the same kinds of careless practices. There are good reasons to argue that such was the cause of the Great Depression. And if we find conditions deteriorating for the average person in America today, it is once again for many of the same reasons.

We do not wish this argument to be confusing. The social reason to act responsibly is not because of the threat of social upheaval. Threats are managed. The social reason is simply that ill-treatment eventually causes social upheaval. There is an inevitablity to the problem, at least so long as enough people ignore it long enough. One can only manage social dissatisfaction for so long. It is a symptom of profound dysfunction. Once things start to go over the edge, there is no stopping them. One understands this better by having a slight acquaintance with the French Revolution.

By the time of the French Revolution, every person who was anyone spent almost all his time in Paris angling to get closer to the monarch. For the monarch was the source of all political, economic, and social power in France. People were judged almost singularly on their abilities to gain social and political powers through their machinations at court. Those with most power tended to be those best at machinations. And those would tend to be the most ambitious. So when Louis XVI came to power and showed profound political weaknesses, a significant portion of the French uppercrust was happy enough to throw him to the wolves. They imagined they might exploit the situation to their advantage, maybe end up monarch. In this sense, the monarch had very few reliable friends or allies.

An abusive system of government had bred an abusive ruling class. An exploitative government had bred an exploitative ruling class. The revolution may have been triggered by students, intellectuals, and the disaffected working classes, but it was exploited by the ambitious in high places. This would be a natural result of a governmental system that was fundamentally exploitative. One that denied rather profoundly the existence of a social contract.

Obligations to Society

Woody Allen quipped long ago that eighty percent of success is showing up. At one level the idea strikes one as outrageous because it seems to deny the importance of natural capacities, of expertise and of hard work. But if one lives in a place where showing up proves to be a matter of some hazard, one begins to understand the issue.

A person brings to society what he can. And in a well-run society these capacities are used to best advantage. In functional societies people find places that make the most of what they bring to society. In dysfunctional societies, by contrast, entitlement of the rich and powerful tends to make it more difficult for people to progress on the basis of merit. People who do show up, who do have training, who do have expertise, who do work hard are overlooked for political reasons. But in a fair society one shows up.

By showing up, we mean that people contribute in accordance with their natural gifts and talents. We also mean in a rathe profound sense, in accordance to his own pleasure. The contribution properly ought to be pleasurable. Not in the sense of a nice soak in the hot tub, but in the sense of gaining real satisfaction from a job well done. Each person has natural gifts and talents. While there is not a perfect correspondence between talents and places in society, in a well-managed society there might be multiple institutions that allow people to contribute in various ways, not always for monetary compensations.

A person’s obligation to himself as a part of an artificial society is to join institutions and contribute to them in ways consistent with his talents. The talent of showing up is one that ought not be underestimated. Though far from being sufficient for fulfilling obligations, it is necessary.

Apart from this, people’s obligations are to the preservation of the goods that society offers, and a commitment to being able to see its ills and work to overcome them. One assumes a commitment to working cooperatively to improve one’s own lot. And to do the same for others through this effort.

It would be convenient to define obligations and duties in some closed and formal sense. The duty to vote, the duty to support loved ones, and so on. But enumeration of these has too many problems. Proper action flows naturally from proper thought, proper attitude. People having different capacities and living in different natural settings will naturally define for themselves different natural duties and obligations.

Remains

So we get to the end of the argument and what are we left with? Not much, really. Show up. Be kind. It is what individuals owe society. As for what society owes individuals? Be kind. Treat the least of society as you would be treated. All the other rules flow from this. These maxims suggest the goal of a fair and just society.

How does one judge whether a society is just? John Rawls in A Theory of Justice develops a whole method to do just this. Early on one engages in a thought experiment that takes proper account of the hazards that affect the contracting outcome but over which a person has not choice. The idea he refers to as “veil of ignorance.” Think of all of the things that determine who you are as a person that are not consequences of your own choices. Your parents, your society, and so on. Now imagine that you have not yet been born. The conditions of every single person on this planet are or may be potentially known to you. You could choose, for instance, to be born into a prominent Boston family, one rich, influencial powerful, and endowed with great intelligence and charm. You could be born into a poor immigrant family in Bronx, one that understands or speaks not a word of English. You could be born into an impoverished rural Indian family. You could be born in a tiny Siberian town. And so on.

Effectively, Rawls system of thought asks the question, “under what condition would you be indifferent to the choice?” What would have to be true about all of these situations in order for you to not care? What would have to be true in order that, after you have made the choice, you do not say “No, I definitely would rather have lived under other circumstances?”

In a completely fair society, greater responsibilities might imply greater pressure on one’s person, greater intrusion on one’s personal life, loss of privacy, and so on. And all of these things might be compensated by greater wealth or influence. In some societies, certain positions might be overcompensated. Insurance salesman, physician, or corporate CEO might be examples. In some societies certain positions might be undercompensated, short-order cook or waitress, for example.* In some societies children might be pressed into labor by their parents, compromising their eductional opportunities. The only compensation for such a swindle would then be to carry it out on the next generation. Would that be a society into which one would choose to be born? If not, then what geographical and cultural forces predispose this behavior? Is there a societal solution that makes this all more fair?

Not everyone is likely to make the judgment in the same way. But to the extent that there were substantially more people who chose to be doctors in this game than there was need for doctors in a society, it would be indicative of a society that overcompensated doctors either by reputation or by pay or by both. The harm in this is that some people will choose the profession less because of their interests and aptitudes than because they feel able to exploit an unfairness of the system by becoming a doctor. This degrades the moral authority of the position and it degrades the effectiveness of the practitioners. Everyone loses. The cost is not just the opportunity cost associated with overpayment of doctors and the resulting unavailability of funds for fund public health programs that we know for a fact would have more impact.

Unjust society has financial costs. A trillion dollars wasted in Iraq might be a starting point for that argument. But injustice’s greater costs lie in societal dissatisfaction. It festers and causes societal fevers and aches. And if it is not excised by carefully and designed acts of fairness, the injury may turn cancerous and bring society to an end.

The council of Jimmy Stewart’s character in the movie about an imaginary friend, Harvey, comes to mind. Paraphrased, it might sound like this. “You can make your way in the world in one of two ways, either by being really smart, or by consistently being kind.” Smartness devoid of kindness, if it does not breed failure, breeds discontent. So long as we fail to show kindness in our determination of national policy we shall be bound by the chains of discontent.

—–

* We are struck at this point by a realization that Nozyck in “Anarchy, State and Utopia” has got it wrong once again. He spends some effort objecting to the imposition some arbitrary, fixed income-distribution system. But Rawls does not do this Rawls is actually trying to rationalize the marketplace. He is actually making the argument that the free market assumes we have free choice over a body of things that, in fact, we do not have free choice over: who our parents are, into what nation we are born, into which zip code. He is simply arguing, “suppose our condition were, as economic theory assumes, completely based upon our rational choices, what would the marketplace look like?”

Fall of Man

Posted in Philosophy &c at 5:58 am by steve

Allegory of the Fall

A recent e-mail reminded me of the allegory of Adam and Eve, the garden of Eden, and the fall of man. Adam and Eve, in this allegory, are cast out of the Garden of Eden because they eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And they do this because they are persuaded by the devil himself who takes the form of a serpent to make the argument.

Ever since I can remember - and I can remember much of my life at six and some at two and three - I have been amused that people take the Adam and Eve story literally. It is clearly allegorical. We know this from the talking animals. In allegories animals talk. If the serpent were not meant symbolically, it would be cast as a person. The tree, too, is a symbol of something, its fruit is a symbol of something. Proper interpretation of the allegory requires proper interpretation of the symbols.

There are plenty of biblical and theological interpretations of this allegory. And I am afraid that the one or two to which I have been exposed have fallen far short of impressing me as being in the same league as the allegory itself. All of them possess a “Cinderella’s sister” sense. Cinderella’s sisters had feet that were simply too big to fit into the crystal slipper, despite the strongest of motivations and the most punishing of efforts. Most interpretations simply don’t deal with the issues that frame the allegory Nor do they deal with all of its parts. They simply don’t fit.

I wish to offer a different interpretation, one that is integrally tied to the two conditions of man that the allegory connects and contrasts in the experience of Adam and Eve. In order to understand the interpretation, one must understand in a fairly profound way the differences between pre-agricultural society and post agricultural society. One must understand not just the material outward manifestations of the differences, but also the differences in societal structure, the differences in culture, the differences in human experience.

In the former case, man exists in an unencumbered state, gathering food as he needs it, spending his days in leisure, communing with his maker. It is rarely an existence of great, magnificent bounty. It is frequently an existence characterized by some amount of want. But it is also rarely an existence characterized by profound want. We intend to argue that such a state hews very closely to the definition of the Garden of Eden. Jared Diamond comes close to suggesting the same in his descriptions of the lives of the indigenous people of the Chatham Island in Guns, Germs, Steel. On this small, remote South Pacific island people existed in an egalitarian society, plucking fish and shellfish from the seas when they are hungry, and dealing with each other as equals. There were no soldiers. There was no government. There was no powerful authority. There were no priests or religious rituals. There was no agriculture. There were no sacrifices involving blood.

In the latter case, by contrast, man exists by virtue of the cultivation of grain in fields. He must plow furrows, plant grain, cultivate it to suppress weeds, fertilize it with the blood of animals or humans, wait for the harvest, harvest the grain, thresh it, mill it, and cook it into bread. All of this requires toil. And the reason it exists is because such toil produces huge amounts of food, allowing huge populations. Civilizations with such populations tend to overwhelm those that exist outside the bounds of agricultural society.

There is, then, a kind of evolutionary inevitability to agricultural societies. Once the process is started, man is sentenced evermore to “live by the sweat of his brow.” It is a life of toil and of uncertainty. And as man reproduces and presses the earth’s natural resources ever harder for sustenance, his toils must similarly either grow ever more productive either through greater diligence or through greater use of knowledge. One either works longer hours behind the plow or before a book. In lands where population densities are high and have been for hundreds of generations one frequently finds a kind of frenetic activity that is less evident in lands that have recently been frontiers, or lands where populations have historically been checked by severe diseases and other similar natural phenomena.

The story of the fall of man, then, is an allegory describing how man’s life changes as societies change from being tiny, local, low-density hunter-gatherer societies where people live in villages, knowing and being known, to being large scale societies where people live in cities and exist without reputation, toiling away in specialized jobs that have little obvious connection to the needs of society. This transition has a meaningful existence in place and time. It coincides very roughly with the first wriitings in the Old Testament.

The Frontiers of Agriculture

Geography and history frame it. In a Western context, the transition might have occurred first in the lower Nile region of Egypt six or eight millennia ago. The Sphynx has been dated to that time, and it is clearly the product of an agrarian society organized on a rather large scale. The same transition to farming communities occurred next in Mesopotamia, in the fertile crescent. Later in Persia. It occurred next in Greece. Then in Italy two and a half millennia ago. In Spain. In France. Then in England. These same agricultural methods, adapted through millenia of practice, reached North America two to four hundred years ago. And North America has been civilization’s frontier now as Greece was in Aristotle’s day.

Frontiers arose and declined. New lands gave rise to a glorious flowering of civilization, expressed with some freshness in each case. And in each case, just as the civilization flowered and fruited, it declined. The causes were many. In some cases the decline was a result of environmental degredation brought on by destructive agricultural practices. In almost all cases, as populations soared above the levels that provided vast agricultural excesses social pressures mounted as did preasures on public health. Great dislocations such as the black plague or the French revolution resulted. And as climates warmed and made soils of these regions drier and less inherently fertile, the areas at the trailing edge of the frontier have had to deal to some extent, with shortage, dwindling resources, perpetual want. Plato was already complaining about the decline of fertility of Greek land, roughly two and half millennia ago. Whatever are the merits of the western frontier civilization phenomenon, its weakness seems to include taking for granted the very gifts of nature that make the whole thing possible in the first place.

In the history of the West, arrival of agricultural methods to fertile and underpopulated frontiers necessarily created a temporary flowering of civilization. What distinguishes European civilization from civilizations that have flowered and collapsed completely, is that European civilization has been fueled by an ever-expanding resource frontier. It is fueled by the discovery of the Americas and the development of colonies in Africa and Asia as sources of natural resources that proved hundreds of times as broad and deep as Europe herself offered.

An observation by Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations is useful here. He points out that most of the lands of Europe were once forested. And that while forests provide rich sources of shelter and fuel, they are poor sources of food. Grasslands, by comparison, are poor sources of shelter and fuel, but rich sources of food. Thus, if one wishes to find highly dense human populations, one finds lands that support the agricultural practice of farming grain. But if the standard of living is to be high, with warm and well decorated housing, woodland must figure into the equation. It is, in fact, a generally accepted fundamental condition for all of what we call civilization, that man cultivates grain. A person on a frontier is capable of growing enough grain for twenty or more people. This makes it easy to support other kinds of activities - those of artisans, relgious and political leaders, and soldiers. Jared Diamond makes this point anew in his Guns, Germs, Steel.

There are two ways in which lands are transformed from forests to grasslands. In Europe it was by the activity of man. Man cut down the trees and used the clear-cut land as farm land. Access to iron tools in the late middle ages sped this process. Clearing of forests was also part of the agricultural development of North America. And it is now part of the development of equatorial South America, equatorial Africa, and Indonesia.

It may have been the same in the middle east four or six millennia ago. Or the trees may have given way to grassland with natural changes in climate that have been going on for the last twelve millennia. The earth has been getting warmer since the last ice age. Twelve or fifteen millennia back, northern Europe would have been glaciated, southern Europe would have been cold. And there is reason to believe that parts of the Sahara may have been vast grasslands. So if one imagines the globe to be divided into climatic bands that shift in time, the line demarcating glacier from forest moves northward. So, too, the line demarcating forest from grasslands, and grassland from desert. It is reasonable to assume that one or more of these lines might have crossed parts of the mideast in the last five millennia.

The description of “the promised land” describes a land rich with fruiting plants. There is a sense of lushness to the account that is suggestive a long term change of climate to warmer and drier: those same lands approach desert-like conditions today.

The allegory of Adam and Eve would be set in a middle eastern setting that is no less rich and fertile than the legendary land of Canaan, flowing with milk and honey. Since it is an allegory, the setting is prototypical, not actual. This fortunate couple would have lived in a place rich with fruiting plants and animal life. They would have lived in a place where gathering food was not a matter of toil, but of discovery and joy. They would have lived in a place sunny but well watered. They would have enjoyed open grassy spaces, fruiting and flowering shrubs, and trees bearing fruits and nuts. They would have lived by a river, probably with comfortably worn bolders and a nice waterfall.

Adam and Eve are sometimes taken to be actual people, but again, this is an allegory. And allegories are fictional, mythological. Nor are they meant to represent particular people so much as cultural prototypes. They are representatives of a culture that undergoes a fundamental change. And the fundamental change is from being hunter gatherers to being farmers and city-dwellers.

They are warned “not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.” There has been a practice among religious mystics and theologians to interpret this in a particular way. But the way that it is interpreted creates the premises for a series of rather bizarre and ugly theological arguments. We might reject some of the theological arguments because of their effects alone. For instance, the argument that women bear some differential responsibility for the fall of man. It is like arguing “the devil made me do it.” It is an argument justifying a cultural practice that arises naturally from the same forces that create the need for the rest of the Biblical writing - a need for law and for morally informed behavior arising from social conditions.

We intend not to venture onto that ground. We admit to an unpreparedness to take on theological arguments. Only theologians are allowed to do that, and one is only allowed to be a theologian if one accepts a number of premises that derive in whole or in part from the mistaken interpretation of the allegory. If one frames the whole work of the Bible incorrectly, it is hard to recover from the mistake.

We intend to offer a very different approach. We intend to argue instead that the invocation of God in this allegory is actually a sort of flashing neon sign or a gruff teacher yelling “pay attention.” And the “fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil” is just that. It is a kind of functional knowledge of good and evil that can only be arrived at through first hand experience, direct acquaintance, as compared to being arrived at through study, reading essays, thinking about ethical questions.

One only understands what it is like to be the victim of a theft if one has actually lost something to that practice. On the other hand, if one lives in a society where the idea of personal property is not taken very seriously and all the acts of goodness that earn one property in a post-agrarian society are rewarded in kind, theft is a meaningless category. It cannot exist.

The experience of Adam and Eve is a purposeful contrast of the pre-agrarian society with the post-agrarian one. In the first society agriculture does not exist. Personal property amounts to what one can make and carry, if it exists at all. In the second society agriculture does exist. Food, at least for some time, is plentiful. And as a result much of society becomes artisans. Artisans make goods of all sorts, some of which might be houses and buildings, others might be the decorations and furnishings for those places, others yet might be cultural arts, music, and literature. The kinds of property that exist is great and varied. And almost every object made by man manages to have some attraction to another person.

When a man tills fields, he must own the fruits his labors, else he would not do it. The practical way to organize such a world is to establish ownership of land as a permamanent thing. There are rare cultures in which the cultivation of land constitutes the defacto claim to its fruits. But when land requires time in fallows to recover fertility, this presents certain logistical problems. In western civilization and in most other civilizations with written records, land then becomes property and is passed along from generation to generation, either dividing in equal portions to children as is the case in Rwanda and certain other countries in sub-saharan Africa, or staying in large estates passing to the first-born child as was the case in feudal Europe.

The rules of ownership and the orderly passage of property from one generation to the next has profound powers over the long term shape of society. In a system with fixed geographical boundaries. the fair methods of the Rwandans reduce everyone to destitution, given enough time. The less fair methods of the feudal Europeans only reduce 95% - 98% of people to destitution. The remaining lords and ladies congregate in cities creating what was once referred to as civilized society.

Hunter-gatherers, meanwhile, may live in the same mean conditions as those of the poor in agricultural societies, but they are not strapped to the yoke like oxen. They may enjoy their destitution in leisure. It is one thing to starve for lack of food, a failure of providence to provide. It is another entirely to starve for lack of proper compensation for labor.

We have assumed here a kind of Malthusian world that arrives at uniform poverty. The world is not perpetually in such a state; but it is more so than recent western history might suggest. History of the West over the last four millennia denies Malthusian equilibrium as a perpetual state of man. But the reason for the whole arc of western history can be traced to an expanding frontier brought on by climate change and discovery. Yet it is not every five hundred years that a population - in this case the Europeans - discovers a fertile frontier ten times as large as the one it currently inhabits, manages to colonize it, and to effectively extract its resources; food, fiber, and mineral wealth. This is not a complaint by any means. America has done well doing exactly this. America does provide a compelling set of reasons why Europe did not succumb to Malthusian limits, at least not for long.

But the model is not a sustainable one:

There is no such frontier on our own planet. Nor is there one in our own solar system. Nor are we aware of one in another solar system. So the last five hundred years of western history are not necessarily representative of the history of man. Nor for that matter of fact are the previous three millennia. Nor are they properly representative of what we can expect of the future.

All of what we read that depends on reasoning that is completely reliant on the expanding western frontier - whether that is something drawn from Greeks, Romans, French, English, or Americans, must be measured against a skepticism about sustainability in the absence of new frontiers. All of western thought is built within the context of exploiting a fertile, expanding new frontier. But the world has just about run out of these.

One of the attractive features of the garden of Eden was its inherent sustainability. It is a feature that is not quite so strongly evident in a Western agricultural model - not one built on the implicit assumption of expanding frontiers, anyway.

History Sans Frontiers

One of the metaphors that thrived in middle age Europe was of the cyclic nature of everything. All the universe was a closed system, operating in complex but predictable cycles that had an almost perfect analogue in the way stars moved in the heavens. A culture informed by such ideas is one that has gotten used to the idea of being closed, isolated, static. Even the Europe that had recently been a frontier, grew to a point of relative stasis and accepted the rather profound limitations imposed by a static, locally bounded society. But this kind of thought ceased when the New World was discovered.

The sense of living in a closed system and the sense of a cyclic nature to history are more pronounced if one looks at Chinese history. The Chinese have had civilization for roughly five millennia. The civilization is older, but its written history is at least that old. Chinese history suggests distinct phases. The society goes through cycles of growth, stagnation, collapse, and rebirth periodically.

A recent Economist article on China’s recent rebirth showed that in the seventeenth century China accounted for fully 35% of the world’s GNP. By 1870 it had dropped to half that. By WWII it was less that a quarter of that number. But it has grown strongly since 1972. And today China is the world’s leading exporter, just in the last six months surpassing Germany. China today approaches the level it held prior to the industrial revolution in Europe. Stagnation may have already been affecting China in the seventeeth century, so the collapse that lasted from the 1870’s to the 1950’s was preceded by several centuries of stagnation. What has occurred since the 1950’s is a resurgence

To the extent that this is an industrial resurgence it is the first to be fuelled by a look outward. China, for almost four decades, has been cultivating relationships with far flung nations, nations that harbor vital natural resources. And it has been looking to the west for business models, technology, and investment capital. China’s success has come to a large extent by adopting all of the ideas that worked for Europeans. This resurgence, then, depends to a great deal on the exploitation of external resources.

But it is also fueled by a normalization of agriculture. Whereas China’s industrial resurgence is based on a new phenomenon, its agricultural resurgence is based on an old one. Agricultural land ownership goes through cycles that roughly approximate the growth cycles in China. During growth cycles, plots of land move from common ownership or widely held individual ownership into more highly concentrated holdings. Single owners own or control increasingly large plots of land. This process of concentration comes as the ones most successful gain advantages over those who are less so. The process of concentration itself is a process that leads to higher output. It can also lead to returns to scale which also increase the effectiveness of agriculture. So while the process is going on, agricultural production tends to grow in a robust manner, providing plenty of food.

But the advantages are not perpetual or automatic. Eventually the large land owners become less interested in the process of agriculture than they are in other pursuits. Land becomes an exponent of power rather than a competitive tool whose wise husbandry brings economic advantages. Large land owners grow less interested in competitive advantages. They stop being interested in being maximally productive. Food production stabilizes or declines. But while the harvests were plentiful the population will have bourgeoned. If food production plateaus too quickly the cycle reaches a point of bourgeoning population but static or declining food production. Famine is the result.

In any case, after a few centuries of expansion, food becomes scarce to major portions of society, and large land holdings characterize the wealthy. This static condition can go on for centuries, but so long as the condition persists, the land-holding class typically drifts out of contact with the lowly labor class. Their interests diverge. Eventually this causes social instabilities, institutions fracture and fail, and society collapses. These collapses are not characterized by brief moments in time. The last one lasted more than a century.

The collapses necessarily bring some sort of change of government. Sometimes the new rulers have implemented social changes that affected the structure of land ownership, occasionally redistributing land ownership to the people who actually worked it.

In the latest instance, large land holdings were broken up and allocated as collective farms by Mao in the 1950’s. This was a painful experience for China because collective farms were actually less productive than the large land holdings that preceded them. Tens of millions starved. Yet the resurgence of China today is built on the privatization of these same collectives. It depends strongly on the widely held vested interests of the rural farmer in the success of the harvest. The current resurgence of Chinese agriculture owes much to the alignment of interests and to a kind of hopefulness that success will bring more success. And so long as those interests remain effectively aligned there is hope that further developments in the realm of privatization will lead to still more improvements in outcome.

On the high grassy plains of Africa and on the high grassy plains of Mexico vast fires send up billows of smoke many miles wide once a year. These vast conflagrations occur just weeks before the rainy season. It is a destruction of the old and degraded to make room for the new. From burnt fields fresh blades of grass emerge with the rains. It is an agricultural process of rebirth that serves as a metaphor for the process of changing agricultural land ownership in China. Mao’s collectivization destroyed much. It was very painful. Perhaps it was even morally depraved. But the very wake of destruction itself made room for fresh new growth. It set the stage for China’s resurgence. And the cycle repeats once again.

Has Beans

Not all civilizations endure agricultural collapse and rebirth in the way China’s seems to do. Jared Diamond in Collapse discusses a number of civilizations that collapsed permanently. Some disappeared without a trace: the Chaco Canyon people, for instance, disappeared completely with just a few year’s worth of almost total crop failures. Other civilizations collapse and take on odd hybrid forms.

Some decades ago I watched a television program about some indigenous inhabitants of Mesoamerica. This particular tribe once flourished, built a great city, or several. Then it collapsed. Its descendents occupy the same lands. They live now primarily by hunting and gathering. They also grow beans. Growing beans is not unusual in and of itself. In fact, Thoreau advocates a bean-centric way of life. But this particular culture had a unique way of doing it. Men were allowed to eat beans, but they were not allowed to plant or tend them.

Why should this be? What is it about men and beans that wouldn’t work? One would have to look at the history of this culture. As ever, we don’ t know the answer but we are ready with an idea. The culture had an ascendent period driven by agriculture. Then agriculture failed and the culture collapsed. We do not know what led to the failure and collapse. We can only conclude that the rules about agriculture are informed by this history.

We speculate that one of the factors in the collapse of the civilization might have been failure of a grain crop, in this case corn. Corn is highly productive. It produces more food per acre than almost any other crop, except rice. But it is a hungry plant. It requires intense fertilization. Today we fertilize corn with nitrogenous fertilizers derived from natural gas. Michael Pollan writes in Omnivore’s Dilemma that fully 15% of a typical American’s calories derive indirectly from natural gas and its role in fertilizing farmland. The Aztec, too, cultivated corn intensively. They, too, understood that corn was a hungry plant. They, too, fertilized corn with nitrogenous fertilizer. They, however, used the blood extracted from human sacrifice. They used people of other tribes - people who didn’t count - to fertilize their crops. As Americans do Iraqis.

So one notable departure of this remnant civilization is its practice of eschewing grain as an agricultural material. Presumaby because of its hidden costs.

Another notable departure is its cultural practice. The practice of not allowing men to practice agriculture prevents a kind of land-ownership society that starts out with great promise but leads to great inequities. Those cycles of growth, decay, bloody revolution, and resurgence that characterize Chinese history no longer are part of the permanent history of a society. The development is small, its culture local. Because agriculture is on a scale that is almost incidental and because it is carried out by women, land ownership is not an issue.

Henry George in Progress and Poverty makes a solid case for the negative economic consequences of land ownership. He does a fine job describing how land ownership devolves into high levels of inequality. And of how this inequality leads to social inequity and unhappiness. It is an unhappiness that might be traced to the practice of allowing men to cultivate the soil.

When men cultivate the soil, there are two effects. One effect is to create food. This is common to all cultures that cultivate food. But the other effect of allowing men to cultivate grain is to set up a societal game that differentiates males on the basis of their success as farmers. It creates the idea of land ownership, territory, patriarchy.

It also creates a society whose body of law and social order derives from patriarchy and land ownership rules. In such a society one needs not only the writings of the Bible or some such work to convince people to behave in constructive ways, one needs a body of mythology to justify the relative places of men and women in society. The allegory attempts to do just this.

Defining the Post-Agrarian Order

When agricultural societies grow successful, they enable cities. And when people live in cities they tend to be anonymous. Not totally anonymous, but substantially so. Being anonymous tempts behaviors that are unthinkable in a society where people are essentially equal and well known to each other by name and reputation.* In these large-scale societies, cooperative behavior can only exist so long as rules of cooperative behavior are enforced fairly and consistently.

If people consistently gain substantial advantages by violent means or by methods that are obviously unfair, over the long term such behavior becomes more widespread, and eventually the institutions that support the civilizations are degraded into non-functionality and the civilization collapses partially or completely. It is for this reason that it is in a society’s self-interest to preserve cooperative behaviors to the extent that they can be identified and enforced. And to the extent that such enforcement does not materially degrade the ability of the society to create and express vital new ideas or constructive political dissent.

The distinction between these two kinds of behaviors - being fundamentally cooperative and fundamentally undermining cooperative behavior in society - amounts to the difference between good and evil. Knowledge that allows one to distinguish between them is knowledge of good and evil. The tree that produces this knowledge is the society in which cooperative and anti-cooperative behaviors and attitudes exist. One comes to know this distinction only when one has exposure to both kinds of behavior. This is the knowledge of good and evil. Thus, the agricultural society by enabling the city gives man his taste of the knowledge of good and evil.

Full Circle

So far we have argued that the story of the fall is an allegory that creates a narrative distinguishing two states of man and establishes a causal connection between them. In one state he is a hunter-gatherer. Or, in the eyes of the ninteenth century romantics, a “noble savage.” In another state he lives in an agricultural society, or a post-agricultural society where, in the words of Rousseau, he finds himself “bound in chains.”

In the former state he lives a life of leisure and relative balance. He lives with people he knows. He establishes deeply meaningful relationships. He knows and is known. In the latter state, food is derived by the painstaking and intense cultivation of grasslands through toil. Productive lands allow many people to live in high-density cities in which they need to learn how to cooperate with people they do not know. They frequently live anonymously. They are tempted by bad behavior. Sometimes they do behave badly.

In a close-knit society, one does best if one gets along with others. Good behavior is naturally rewarded; bad behavior is punished naturally by earning one ill-will. While this is never completely sufficient to cause good behavior or to eliminate bad behavior, reputation proves a powerful force in motivating good behavior in communities where people are known.

But these forces are absent in large communities where people are largely anonymous to each other. Such situations set up the conditions that are less naturally reinforcing of cooperative behavior. If the same behavior is to prevail, behaviors that exploit weaknesses of others for gain must be regulated by some other means. Otherwise the society devolves into chaos.

What we call good is essentially cooperative behavior. It is behavior that is socially constructive. It is behavior that most people naturally find satisfying.. Evil is an act or a state of being that is essentially corrosive of cooperative behaviors and destructive of the fruits of such behaviors. It is behavior that violates Kant’s categorical imperative. It is behavior that violates the Golden Rule.

So at one level we have the operation of law. Law identifies a class of acts that are inherently anti-cooperative. But law always fails to fully describe the boundary between socially constructive and socially destructive behavior. Ethical thought manages to bridge most of the gap. One can arrive at reasonably good ethical convictions either through religious training or through philosophical inquiry. Too frequently the former fails miserably to inculcate critical ethical inquiry. Too rarely is the latter part of education. So ethical reasoning is a skill much too rarely developed in the contemporary west, one with almost no currency in popular culture.

The allegory describes for us the fall of man. It describes why we need systems of law and moral thought. If we listen carefully, we will here it telling us “We’re not in Eden anymore, Toto.”

What is the role of the serpent in this allegory? In one sense, the serpent is an object of innate fear. There is a sense, in this allegory, that we ought to fear the fall of man in much the same way that we fear the serpent. Judged from the contrasting states of man in the allegory, the consequence of this transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian are as much to be feared as the serpent itself. So one purpose is to associate the fear of the serpent with the fear of a patriarchical agrarian or post-agrarian society. But humans tend to hate what we fear. So the serpent stands to make us hate the dysfunction that can arise from an agrarian or post-agrarian society: its abuses, scams, cheats, and acts that cheapen human life.

The serpent is useful in another way. One can live with a snake, but one must understand one’s relationship with it. So, too, can one live with the post-agrarian society. And so, too, must the one’s relationship with society be properly defined. The role of the allegory is to set the stage for doing exactly this in the body of law that follows. The analogy breaks down in one sense, and that is that if the whole of society behaves cooperatively even in high density cities, then the snake, if it is not essentially defanged, is at least asleep deep in the earth, or hypnotized into a harmless state by the snake charmer. But there really is no chance of the snake going out of existence, because it is in man’s nature to think of himself first and to defend his own interests even to the extent that this means making life for many others much more difficult. Just like his powers of empathy, this is a fact of man’s construction.

If one looks at this allegory as being a way of framing the work of the Bible, it succeeds rather well. The rise of agriculture that characterized the time and place of the Old Testament’s writing was probably temporally close to the transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian farmer lifestyle. The Bible, in this sense, suggests a way to obviate the dissatisfactions of this new lifestyle. It creates bodies of law and bodies of ethics. And it creates governing institutions and rituals that sustain those institutions. It is a whole blueprint for agrarian and post-agrarian living. Though it fails to distinguish properly between religious practice and ethical thought or between religious institutions and governmental ones, and though it implicily accepts certain forms of servitude which we have since rejected, it addresses a rather substantial portion of the fundamental issues that arise complex societies - even ones of social and economic justice.

The context of the allegory suggests that societies organized around other principles of justice - primitive societies for instance - still live in a kind of state of nature that predates the fall of man. In such cultures the gospel may or may not make sense. Who is most disposed to hear it and respond genuinely is the villager arriving in the city and finding his anonymity and facelessness threatening. Those satisfied being nameless and faceless in a large city are lost already. Those who stay in the village may benefit from the transformation if they understand it correctly. But if they fail to grasp its charity, it does little but reinforce a preexisting tendency toward ethnocentrism.

The allegory also suggests a method of redemption, namely, restoring people to the state of caring for each other. At its most fundamental level it requires doing no harm - a sort of state of behavior consistent with following the ten commandments or the whole of the law. But this is a rather empty end. If one reads all the way to through the book one discovers that it also requires treating each other with a profound respect that is necessary for satisfaction in close-knit communities. Being open, cooperative, and trusting are all part of the equation. This is the message of redemption. It is substantially different from “do no harm.”

Failure to have and to follow a well constructed body of law predisposes a society to fail, to disolve into bloody chaos. Following law slavishly or without being informed by its spirit may create a more durable society, but it will be a sad and opressive one - one where men are perpetually chafed by the chains that bind them. Following the spirit of the laws promises a somewhat happier existence.

In a psychological sense, the snake in the grass, the one that we rightly ought to fear according to this body of mythology, is our impulse to act. We rightly measure our acts, performing them as we see them fit for good society. Yet if we do this purely from a sense of duty, or obligation, or fear of punishment or reprisal or loss of face, then we live brutally meaningless lives. We live lives savaged by tensions between what we ought to do and what we want to do. We live lives rendered sick and dysfunctional by neuroses.

If, on the other hand, we understand how our acts enrich the lives of others, how they connect with others, how they validate others, we regain our primal selves. Instead of being lost to fear we lose fear. And we are redeemed.

—-

* It will be argued that some of the largest cities have lower crime rates than rural areas. Or that within a given culture people are no more or less violent to each other inside cities than in rural villages. We know that some cultures tend to be more violent than others; violent crime in America is more pervasive than violent crime in England, for instance. Detroit is approximately 100 times more violent than London. We also imagine that cultures in which people have a long history of getting along in large cities - old oriental and European cultures for instance - will have fewer problems with urban crime and violence than cultures in which the large city is a newer development, and social cooperative structures and attitudes have not created a fully functional, cohesive, and comprehensive social ethos. A peaceful and calm city is indicative of a well adjusted society. Or of a highly repressed one.

04.15.07

Thanks for the Fish

Posted in Uncategorized at 4:55 pm by steve

We wish to thank the three people who, over the better part of a year took the time to leave comments here. And we wish to thank the several others who have returned here from time to time to listen to our ravings. The silence at this end, however, has been deafening and we have decided to pursue other projects.

Potential projects might include a website that teaches history backwards. Or one that talks about big ideas - ideas that shape societies. Or we might work on cooking or gardening sites. We have ideas for big projects, but we are struck by a kind of lack of variety in sources that inspire our work here. Most of them have begun to seem too one-dimensional, even when we agree with them. This has led to a general dwindling of ideas about things to write about. But within the last week ideas have become really scarce. The immediate paucity of ideas stems from an acute need to focus on spring planting of perennials and bulbs, and from a need to perform spring cleanup, making up for a lack of activity in fall. It seems that our worrying has caused us to fall behind in other areas. And we need to catch up there if we are to make sense other places.

When we started Worry Wart we saw it as an extension of Devils Dictionary Defiled, an inherently political work, and we hoped that the two together might help address certain social and political problems. At the time we were very concerned about a widespread denial of those problems. An almost uniform and systematic denial, in fact. Over the last year things have changed a bit. There is a growing sense that things are not all perfect, and recognition of the imperfections is moving people to take action. Even better, we find that there are voices that carry farther than our own, voices more articulate and more popular. Voices advocating for solutions we believe in.

We remain interested in a number of topics that have informed our writing here. And we will write about them from time to time. But the days of regular postings at Worry Wart are numbered. Again, thank you all, few or many, for visiting. I hope you will keep working to make the world a better place.

04.10.07

What’s Wrong with This Picture?

Posted in Rant and Rave at 4:54 pm by steve

I]t’s a different time, Imus … it’s different than it was even a few years ago, politically,” and added that “some of the stuff that you used to do, you probably can’t do anymore.” Fineman continued, “I mean, just looking specifically at the African-American situation. I mean, hello, [Sen.] Barack Obama’s [D-IL] got twice the number of contributors as anybody else in the race,” and added, “[T]hings have changed. And the kind of — some of the kind of humor that you used to do you can’t do anymore. And that’s just the way it is.”

This is Howard Fineman speaking on the Imus show, quoted here. So what’s the first question? Who sent Fineman onto the show? Why Fineman? This speech apears to be two things. At one level it is a kind of public excoriation of Imus. Fineman is taking Imus to the woodshed. Why? because sin deserves punishment. If Imus is not publically punished in this way, he must be sacrificed. And the powers-that-be at his network don’t want that. So they call Fineman in.

Fineman’s speech accomplishes another thing, presumably. It might deliver a message to Imus that what he did was not okay. Maybe Imus will get the message. Maybe he will behave differently.

But it’s the wrong message. Why? What reason does Fineman give for Imus’ action being wrong?

Power.

“There’s a black guy running for the presidency. You’ll get yourself in trouble with the authorities by talking like this. Oh, once it was fine to talk like this. Once it was fine to be racist, bigoted, narrow-minded, hateful. But now, no.”

What’s wrong with that? It suggests that the reason one ought to treat people with respect is that they have the power to hurt you. The corollary to that idea is “if one can place a group of people in a position where they cannot hurt you you can treat them as you please.” This is an uncharitable idea. No. It rightly ought to be an unthinkable idea. It is not consistent with Old Testament teaching. It is not consistent with New Testament teaching. It is not consistent with teaching of any known religion, not even Confuscian teaching which established four different kinds of relationships, one of which was a relationship between a person of authority and his underling. It is not consistent with humanism. It is not consistent with Enlightenment ideals upon which this nation was founded. There is no body of ethical reasoning in which this kind of thinking would not be categorically rejected. Why? Because it necessarily predisposes to a society to resemble the Wiemar Republic.

So if we look at Howard Fineman’s visit on Imus we must ask who sent him? And what was he to accomplish? Is Fineman’s message purposeful? Does he have some agenda about power that he wishes to push on Imus’ audience? Or is Imus’ audience so far from moral redemption that they respect only power? And are the only people they will listen to those who abuse it? Is it possible that Fineman’s message that “only power is real” is a message purposefully propagated by the M$M? Or is this unfortunate point of view pervasive in the M$M purely by accident? Why does it remind us of our definition of neo-con?

I find myself as outraged by the network’s remedy as I am by the illness it was to cure. There is a sense in which Fineman’s message is nothing but a veiled justification for Imus’ behavior. There is a sense in which this is much more dangerous because compared to Imus’ message we are less prone to reject it outright, even though it is no less objectionable. Fineman’s thinking justifies Imus’ race-baiting misogyny while fooling us into thinking it doesn’t. The media owes this society better.

No Fly

Posted in Social at 2:53 pm by steve

The Patriot Act - which we are tempted to call a refuge for a bunch of scoundrels - prohibits prosecution (and presumably differential treatment) on the basis of acts of speech, acts protected by the first amendment. So what do we make of this story? Is anyone disturbed by the idea that in order to be considered a legitimate American with full rights one must have served in the Marine corps? Or that one fellow at Wired appears to be arguing that it can’t be true because he doesn’t believe it? Does everyone find that a persuasive argument?

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