27.9.03

Capitalism vs. the Second Commandment: Part II

The point of that long explanation of idolatry is that I think the role of capitalism in modern society can be thought of in terms of idolatry. The market is our golden calf. The problem is not the idol itself (the original calf was probably very pretty) so much as our relationship to it.

One common complaint about capitalism, and particularly about the multinational corporations that are the archetypal examples of capitalism in action, is that there's no accountability. In the extreme case, a portrait is painted of corporations running rampant over the world, with people and governments as little more than puppets made to dance by the propaganda, coercion, and dollars of Coke or Shell. However, I think even the most multinational of corporations is still critically accountable to at least three parties: the state, its stockholders, and its customers. The abdication of these parties' roles in holding corporations accountable is due in part to their idolatry.

Many of the excesses of corporations are due to collaboration with governments. The dominance of giant agrobusiness in the US is supported by agricultural subsidies. Deforestation in Brazil is made profitable for ranchers by government help. Corporations are able to exploit people and nature because the state creates spaces to allow that to happen, and in many instances specifically subsidizes capital's dirty work, or even directly carries it out. Corporations are greater than governments because governments made them that way. They engaged in idolatry by allowing capitalism to use the state, rather than the state using capitalism. Capitalism and development became ends in themselves, rather than means to making certain improvements in citizens' standard of living.

The most crucial accountability of corporations is to their customers. Classical economics makes this the foundation of the case for capitalism -- the market will favor enterprises that are socially useful because people will only buy products that are wanted. Corporations are powerful because they wield substantial chunks of money. But that money doesn't come from nowhere; it comes from millions of customers. To hear some critics tell it, corporations can easily produce all the demand they need through advertising propaganda, duping people into making purchases that are good for the corporation, rather than for the buyer or society as a whole. There is some truth to this, and it's important to remember that demand isn't an independent variable -- it's shaped by the process of production and marketing, just as voter preferences are shaped by the process of politics. Yet we should also not underestimate the importance of extra-corporate cultural forces in shaping demand, and hence holding the power of the market over corporations. Even the mighty Coca-Cola wasn't able to make people like the New Coke. Organized boycotts and publicity campaigns have pushed McDonald's to require higher animal welfare standards of its suppliers. Oil companies are starting to put on a green face for customers, grudgingly conceding the fight against the science of global warming. Obviously, such incidents are not common enough to set things right. There is idolatry at work here, too. Customers implicitly or explicitly surrender to the market, allowing it to rule them.

Saying that there's idolatry at work doesn't do much in the way of revealing where it came from, or how to root it out. There are a host of sedimented structural factors and collective action problems at work that unfortunately my latest brainstorm didn't untangle. Perhaps sometime down the road I'll have a part three in this series.
Stentor Danielson, 22:51,

Capitalism vs. the Second Commandment: Part I

Idolatry is a big theme in the Bible. The Ten Commandments prohibit graven images, and God's anger at the Israelites' infidelity to him in the Old Testament is generally expressed through commands to smash the idols of the other gods.

To modern Americans, idolatry seems a little distant. The big competitor with Christianity is not Caananite paganism, or even another transcendant religion*, but secularism. To make the sin relevant, Sunday School teachers like to point out forms of secular idolatry, particularly the "worship" of money.

To understand idolatry, we need to look at the distinction between the second commandment -- no graven images -- and the first -- no other gods. At first blush, the commandments seem repetitive -- isn't an idol just another god, who happens to be represented or encapsulated in a physical object? The usual explanation given for what makes idolatry wrong is that it places one of God's creations above God. To make an analogy between your relationship with God and your relationship with your spouse: the first commandment says not to cheat on your spouse with another person (including imaginary people like movie characters), the second says not to value something your spouse produces -- like their paycheck or their artistic works -- above the person. (This spouse-idolatry is essentially a violation of the second formulation of Kant's categorical imperative -- treat a person as an end, not a means.)

But does the creation-over-creator logic work for all forms of idolatry? Take money for instance. I don't think God specifically created money. Of course he created all the stuff that forms the basis for the existence of money, but to say God created money is like saying Microsoft created this blog post because I'm typing it in Internet Explorer. And this seems to apply to nearly all idolatry aside from the worship of natural sites (even those are, in a sense, socially constructed to the degree that picking them out, preserving them, and ascribing meaning to them is a human artifice). When the Israelites bowed down to the golden calf, they were worshipping the calf shape that Aaron made as much as they were worshipping the element Ag that God made.

Fear of idolatry has resulted in some sects engaging in iconoclasm -- the avoidance of creating any images that might be treated as idols. But of course people have to make things of one sort or another to survive, and as the money example shows, it can be the most mundane and utilitarian human creations, not just the religious or artistic ones, that can become idols -- indeed, they may be even more likely to become idols. But in becoming idols, they cease to be utilitarian. Money becomes a graven image when it's sought for its own sake, rather than because it's useful as a means of exchange. Idolatry, then, is the confusion of a means with an end.

A second important point about idolatry is the nature of worship. Worship consists of declaring that the thing being worshipped is greater than the worshipper. It's an act of submission. The mistake of idolatry, then, is to treat something that is less than the worshipper, as most human creations are, as if it were higher. This inverts the tool-user relationship. In the case of inanimate idols, this is especially problematic, since the idol doesn't have interests of its own, just those that the worshipper projects onto it.

*I don't believe all non-Judeo-Christian religions are necessarily idolatrous, even those that worship material items or places. Explaining why would be a long digression even by my standards.
Stentor Danielson, 22:51,

26.9.03

Break through the shell of oppression

Apparently the Greeks have been suffering under the tyranny of eggs:

"It [March 25, which is Greek independence day and the day of the Annunciation to Mary] is also remembered as the day the Greeks gained their independence from the Ottoman Empire. So on one hand you have the people shaking off the yolk of Ottoman oppression and also all men freed from the yolk of sin."

-- link via The Right Christians, who were more interested in the story's real focus on other religions' new years.
Stentor Danielson, 16:30,

Georgepetto and his puppet

My cartoon from this week's Scarlet:



Originally, I had planned to draw growth rings on Bush's face, as if he had already taken care of his own Pinocchio nose. But I couldn't get him to look like Bush without the distinctive nose. The alternate nose just made him look like a pig. So for the sake of art, I decided to forgo the extra snipe at the president. And maybe Nate Pierce will be happy, since I did a cartoon somewhat complimentary of Bush.

Then there's my commentary, "Does A Man Need A Woman?", with its cartoon. Art-wise, I think both cartoons came out quite well. This may be in part due to coming up with the ideas, and doing the sketches, before Wednesday night.
Stentor Danielson, 00:27,

25.9.03

The phantom "n"

Weird thing for the day: Go here and highlight everything on the screen.
Stentor Danielson, 19:48,

What is Kazakhstan learning from Palmerton?

Kazakhstanians visit Palmerton Palmerton had some special visitors, Tuesday, when 16 individuals from the country of Kazakhstan came to tour the borough and learn its industrial history. Their main concern was how a borough of 5,000 dealt with the environmental damage that likely resulted from decades of historic zinc smelting operations. ... While ECOLOGIA [ECOlogists Linked for Organizing Grassroots Initiatives and Action, the trip sponsor] brought the group to Palmerton, Palmerton Citizens for a Clean Environment (PCCE) guided them through the borough. ... While at Stoney Ridge, the group was informed about PCCE's role in the Palmerton Superfund Site, the regulations that are in place in the borough and how monitoring of industrial and governmental activities takes place.

It's interesting that, so far as the article mentioned, the only Palmertonians that the Kazakhs met with were members of PCCE. ECOLOGIA's website talks a lot about the importance of "local people" in environmental management. Yet they managed to overlook the other grassroots organization that has formed in Palmerton due to the pollution issue -- the Pro-Palmerton Coalition, which opposes the kind of large-scale cleanup actions in town that PCCE and the EPA favor. This is interesting considering that by most accounts, PPC more closely represents the opinions of most Palmertonians, particularly those who have lived in the town longer and thus have a stronger connection to the place. My speculation is that this is representative of a larger leftist academic conceit. I imagine that the members of ECOLOGIA relate more easily to the members of PCCE than to the members of PPC, due to their shared perspectives on the environment. This leads ECOLOGIA to favor PCCE as the more authentic voice of the people of Palmerton. For some (and I don't have enough information to support this claim in this particular case), it becomes a sort of circular logic -- the correctness of their views establishes their legitimacy, and their legitimacy is used to argue for the correctness of their views.

I agree that the environmental knowledge and values of "local people" ought to be central to human-environment research and theory. However, there is a tendency among those who share this stance to privilege the more progressive local views.
Stentor Danielson, 19:46,

I am N-O-T-H-I-N ...

Will Baude brings to my attention this post by Steve of Begging to Differ, which assails political fence-sitters:

I am frequently confronted with a person who claims to be neither liberal nor conservative. While I understand the reluctance to take on a label that does not fit, I think the American political class divides itself into two large factions loosely representing "left" and "right." Regardless of the labels you prefer, when push comes to shove, most of us take a side. This is as it should be. As Mason said to Dixon, "You gotta draw the line somewhere." You can't just hang there in the middle like a philosophical scrotum.

Baude rightly criticizes this from the perspective of the libertarian dilemma, that is, the position of someone who has definite political commitments (to libertarianism, but other political philosophies have their corresponding dilemmas) that aren't represented by either of the existing political parties. He's willing to take sides only as a short-term tactical move, specific to certain issues or certain times in which one side holds an advantage. It does not necessarily entail a full commitment to just one side.

But I don't think Baude's argument goes far enough. Consider me: I vote Democratic, and consistently express opinions which would be characterized as liberal. But in my own mind, I don't think of myself as a liberal.

What I'm faced with is an existential question: on what terms do I organize my identity and life history? These terms make sense of my past and present, and guide the actions through which I make my future. And I see no reason that one of those terms, those organizational principles of my life, must be a political ideology, much less one of the two dominant political ideologies of the early 21st century. My liberalism is a sort of side-effect of my other, more normative life commitments -- I just happen to be liberal. That's not to say that "he's a liberal" isn't at times a useful model for others, or even myself, to use in order to understand my political stance. But that doesn't make it a principle with causal efficacy in how I conduct or understand myself. It's not part of who I am.

note: I engaged in a bit of pragmatic anachronism for the sake of argument here. My strong stance about not being a liberal was true of me a year or two ago, and a similar stance remains in effect with regard to considering myself a Democrat. However, I have more recently begun to incorporate "liberal" as a real, though still minor, theme in my self-narrative.
Stentor Danielson, 18:45,

Kerry and his bike

John Kerry, meanwhile, is unrepentant about driving a polluting Harley. He comes off as much stronger on the environment than Dean, with a more coherent environmental vision and an emphasis on the economic benefits of environmentalism. However, he does come out with this odd bit:

Grist: In the face of war and terrorism, environmentalism has dropped considerably in the polls as a primary issue of public concern. How can we get this issue back on the map? Kerry: First of all, those polls often don't reflect people's real feelings. Polls are a snapshot of a moment. Poll results can be skewed by how questions are worded and how they are asked. When I say to audiences: Domestic, renewable sources are urgently needed now because they are entirely under our control, no foreign government can embargo them, no terrorist can seize control of them, no cartel can play games with them, no American soldier will have to risk his or her life to protect them -- audiences respond. I find that all over the country, people are responding to environmental concerns as I talk about it.

So we're going to tap into people's real concern about the environment by ... selling them an environmentally beneficial policy under the guise of national security. He gets better in his next few responses, connecting environmental issues to people's everyday experiences, but this was a weird moment.
Stentor Danielson, 02:58,

Like b in "bwuh?"

When you're explaining how to pronounce letters in foreign languages, it's often helpful to compare the sound to the sound of certain letters in English words. However, it is not helpful to compare them to the sound of letters in words that do not exist, viz:

g 2) middle of word like English g in bargen

Stentor Danielson, 02:24,

24.9.03

Dean and his SUV

The Dean Nation blog points to this interview with Howard Dean, in which interviewer Charlie Gibson asks him what his favorite car is:

Favorite car? Oh, my goodness. Well, the politically correct answer is a Toyota Prius, but I would have to say Chevy Blazer.

On the one hand, I can understand the strategy of explicitly not giving a politically correct answer. A big part of Dean's appeal is his aura of authenticity and refusal to base his stance on what he thinks people want to hear. Citing the Blazer makes Dean seem more like a regular guy. On the other hand, he's had to squirm around his automobile choices before, trying to retain his ability to wear the environmentalist mantle while driving an SUV. I'm sure Dean, like most people, has a lot of other things in mind when he thinks about a car than just gas mileage and pollution emissions. But for better or worse, the SUV has become the symbol of environmentally destructive personal behavior, so the widsom of citing one of them as your favorite car seems questionable.
Stentor Danielson, 19:16,

Gender complementarity and gay marriage

Eve Tushnet has a response up to Ampersand's excellent post criticizing the "gender complementarity" rationale for exclusively heterosexual marriage. She says:

We're talking about marriage, and therefore we're talking about sex. And in heterosexual relationships, yes, the sexes do need to be reconciled. The risks they take are very different. The possibility of pregnancy (including the fact that women have a shorter reproductive life than men) is only one reason for these sharply differing risks. One of the reasons I didn't write this post yesterday--besides the inzombia thing--was that I didn't think I could be non-bitchy about it after a much longer than usual session of follow-up calls for the pregnancy center. Do my calls for me, then we'll talk about how men and women in sexual relationships don't need any structures to reconcile their differing risks, needs, desires, and interests. (Was that non-bitchy? Maybe a little bitchy?)

There's a difference between needing reconciliation (i.e. needing to resolve conflicts in an already-existing relationship) and needing complementing (i.e. needing to create a relationship because you're incomplete on your own). If you have two people with different risks, needs, desires, and interests, obviously those things will need to be reconciled in some way -- some structure to their interaction -- so that their relationship can be productive. This applies to any relationship, not just sexual ones. So we have things like employment contracts, parent-child responsibilities, rental agreements, and marriage.

But this is, if anything, an argument for gay marriage. Two people of the same gender can still have widely varying risks, needs, desires, and interests, the importance of which is greatly increased by long-term sexual and emotional intimacy. And thus they have a need for some structure to help them reconcile their differences. Marriage is an excellent option (if it's available), since it combines the commitments of the parties involved with the support of the wider society and legal system.
Stentor Danielson, 09:25,

23.9.03

Nature versus environment

I had to write a little about the meanings of the words "nature" and "environment" for my Political Ecology class. Instead, I wrote a lot. I figured I'd put it up here since I may want to refer to it in the future.

Both nature and environment are used to refer primarily to ecological systems. However, their broader applications – in phrases like “human nature” and “social environment” -- indicate that they reflect larger views of the relationship between the self and the other.

Nature is that which stands outside the sphere of human agency. The archetype of Nature is the Newtonian worldview, in which things operate according to fixed rules, ordained either by God or by the laws of physics, chemistry, etc. Nature is the world deprived of the agency and will that it had in an animist or pagan system (religious visions of Nature draw on a Judeo-Christian God whose free agency has been stunted by Neoplatonic concepts of him as the ultimate necessary being). In contrast, humans experience their own existence as characterized by free will and agency (at least, enough people with enough power experience enough agency to establish this as the commonsense understanding in the modern west). Nature provides a fixed substrate upon which human action takes place. Because Nature can, on its own, be no other way than it is, it acquires normative force. Human agency, on the other hand, is dangerously open to making mistakes, which can damage the Natural order (see, for example, the Christian idea that we all inevitably sin and fall short of the glory of God).

The idea of environment results from a breaking down of the separation between human agency and natural determinism, on both technical and intellectual levels. Technologically, we have a growing power to inject human agency into more and more of the workings of nature. Intellectually, we have come to see how ideas of what constitutes Nature are socially constructed, particularly ideas about “human nature.” The power to change nature (both its actuality and its manifestation through our understanding of it), not just accept it as given by external forces, forces us to be reflexive about it, questioning what meaning we will make of it (the environment’s existence precedes its essence, so to speak). The word “environment” was originally a synonym for “surroundings,” and thus conveys the idea of a context that activity is wrapped up in. Taken too far, the idea of environment saps its referent of the remainder of Nature, putting all control into the hands of human agents. This has led some to propose giving the environment back not only the quasi-agency that comes from determination by outside laws, but also actual agency, turning the environment into a Mother Earth that can bite back.
Stentor Danielson, 13:20,

Finnish wisdom for the day

... the English are of course free to create a language lacking logic and consistency, but I consider myself equally free to mutilate it at my own risk. -- Henri Hakkarainen

Stentor Danielson, 00:25,

22.9.03

Oops

It just occurred to me that I never blogged my cartoon and commentary from last week's Scarlet. So here we go:



"The Second Coming Of Clinton", with its cartoon.
Stentor Danielson, 15:09,

Go and make disciples of all worlds

E.T. And God The discovery of alien superbeings might not be so corrosive to religion if human beings could still claim special spiritual status. After all, religion is concerned primarily with people's relationship to God, rather than with their biological or intellectual qualities. It is possible to imagine alien beings who are smarter and wiser than we are but who are spiritually inferior, or just plain evil. However, it is more likely that any civilization that had surpassed us scientifically would have improved on our level of moral development, too. One may even speculate that an advanced alien society would sooner or later find some way to genetically eliminate evil behavior, resulting in a race of saintly beings. Suppose, then, that E.T. is far ahead of us not only scientifically and technologically but spiritually, too. Where does that leave mankind's presumed special relationship with God? This conundrum poses a particular difficulty for Christians, because of the unique nature of the Incarnation. Of all the world's major religions, Christianity is the most species-specific. Jesus Christ was humanity's savior and redeemer. He did not die for the dolphins or the gorillas, and certainly not for the proverbial little green men. But what of deeply spiritual aliens? Are they not to be saved? Can we contemplate a universe that contains perhaps a trillion worlds of saintly beings, but in which the only beings eligible for salvation inhabit a planet where murder, rape, and other evils remain rife?

If aliens have engineered themselves not to sin, I don't think that makes them more spiritually advanced than humans, from a traditional Christian perspective. Christian spirituality is rooted in the fact of free will -- that we must choose to do good, and that our good works are meaningful because we could have chosen evil. Aliens who are incapable of sin may be happier and healthier, but spiritually they're just machines.

My first reaction to this article was that finding extraterrestrials shouldn't be any more of a problem for Christianity than discovering new continents on Earth was. Granted, the discovery of the Americas and Australia was a major issue, and there were long debates over whether Indians and Aborigines were spiritually human (and many atrocities committed by those who picked the wrong answer). But ultimately, the conclusion was reached that new human populations were just another group to evangelize to. Jesus gave his message to a fairly small group of people, and left it to his followers to spread it across the world. So why not take that one step further, and simply start evangelizing to the aliens?

One problem, which the article hints at in its discussion of panspermia, is the issue of origins. In a traditional Christian framework, Jesus' message is predicated on Adam and Eve's sin. Indians and Aborigines needed to be preached to because they, like Europeans, were descendants of Adam and Eve and thus shared in that sinful heritage. Aliens, presumably, are not descended from Adam and Eve. This suggests that the Christian message might be irrelevant to them -- Jesus was only sent to fix the original sin that occurred on Earth.

On the other hand, wouldn't the aliens have their own original sin? If they didn't, presumably they'd still be happily hanging out in their extraterrestrial Garden of Eden, with no reason to be contacting other worlds. If they did, that raises the question of whether God is trying to save them. Perhaps Jesus' message is for anyone affected by any original sin, whether committed by Adam or by Adzork-5, returning us to the "preach to the cosmos" idea (a religious justification for more NASA spending). Alternately, they could have their own saviors, which is potentially problematic for the "God's only son" bit. However, it seems as easy to stick in a "... that came to earth" after "God's only son" as it is to reconcile the creation story with evolution and geology. It's also possible that aliens could have been created as sinless spiritual machines (perhaps able to do bad, but not to sin, like Earthly animals) in the first place, so salvation was never an issue.

From my personal perspective, aliens are not a problem. I take a particularistic view of Christianity -- that it can be good for Christians, but need not be the one and only religion. Since I'm not requiring the conversion even of all Earthlings, adding aliens to the mix doesn't present any new quandaries.
Stentor Danielson, 11:26,

21.9.03

Scientists turned pundits

I'm writing a personal statement for an application for an NSF grant, in which I talk about my commentaries and blogging as an important adjunct to my academic pursuits (communicating with the public and so forth). I took a break to surf the web, and I happened to run across an apropos post by Brian Leiter. He's complaining about how nearly all pundits are former journalists:

Why not former scientists? sociologists? psychologists? philosophers? even political scientists? Who--other than journalists, that is--would think years of being a journalist qualifies you to have substantial opinions about the affairs of the world?

This phenomenon is part of what made me hesitant to pursue journalism. What I really want to do is punditry (and layout), but I wasn't sure I was prepared to pay my dues as a reporter for years before I could get the promotion (if I even did get it, since I'm not that great a reporter). I can understand the requirement if you see it as a choice between reporters-turned-pundits and rookies-turned-pundits. Longtime reporters presumably have more experience in the worlds they're writing about, which they can draw on as a sort of expertise in commenting. As bad as Tom Friedman is, I imagine the opinions he would have written before spending years as a Middle East correspondent would be worse. So in this respect, it's just an issue of narrow horizons.

The other thing that reporting experience gets you, which other sources of expertise don't, is writing skills -- specifically, "writing so that normal people can read it" skills. The badness of academic writing can certainly be overestimated, especially when academics write outside the confines of academic formats (see, for example, the guys at Crooked Timber), but I've edited enough faculty opinion columns to know some of them should stick to Journal of Climate. Between the myth and the reality of poor academic writing, editors probably figure that their best bet is people whose ability to write a pithy 700 words is proven.

Nevertheless, Brian is right that the public debate would benefit from more people with other relevant experience (not necessarily limited to academic expertise) being given a forum for punditry. Perhaps we can hope that the success of scholar-blogs will lead to more people following in Matthew Yglesias's footsteps from blogosphere to dead-trees-sphere. Academia would benefit as well. This is perhaps less true for, say, theoretical physics, but in disciplines such as risk/hazards, the days of top-down expert management are over. And the days of communicating to the public and gaining their consent are hopefully ending. It's necessary today for researchers to be engaged with non-specialists as a leader among equals, learning as much from lay people as they learn from the scientist. This kind of participatory research has been implemented widely in the data-gathering stage. But it ought to go further, with public engagement a constant responsibility of a good researcher. And one way to do that is to be a pundit.

So my final response to Leiter would be: what do you mean former scientists? We need current scientists in the ranks of the pundits.

UPDATE: A further factor is the question of how many scientists want to be pundits. Unfortunately, non-academic writing does little for you professionally if you're an academic, so there's motivation not to get involved in inefficient commitments. If I was a better journalist or scientist, I'd probably call up some editors and find out how they go about searching for and selecting new pundits, so that I'd have actual data.
Stentor Danielson, 22:09,