debitage

31.3.07

God Brought Baal-Worship On Himself

The story of the Plagues of Egypt is one of the more disturbing ones in the Bible. While many of God's other Old Testament abuses (genocides, etc.) can be glossed over as an allegory for disciplining the wicked, the Plagues show him at his most sadistic. After the first few signs, Pharaoh wants to let the Israelites go, but God uses his mind-control ray to harden his heart, thus providing an excuse for God to heap suffering on everything in the land of Egypt. It's no wonder the Gnostics decided that the God of the Old Testament is actually Satan*.

Don at the Evangelical Ecologist reminds me that the suffering of the plagues was not just visited upon the people of Egypt (who, under the organicist theory popular among terrorists and people fighting against terrorists, are arguably punishable for their leaders' sins), but also on their morally innnocent livestock. Don suggests that we could see this as God making a point against idolatry. He points out that animals and anthropomorphic deities were popular at the time -- witness the animal-headed Egyptian gods and the Israelites' own Golden Calf. So smiting a bunch of animals was God's way of saying "I am more powerful than any animal, so worship me, not them."

I'm not sure about the specific concern with animal worship, but I think Don is right to see the larger picture of the Plagues as being a case where God manufactured an opportunity to make a demonstration of his power, thereby cowing the Israelites into worshipping him.

Reading the rest of the Old Testament, it's clear that God's Shock and Awe strategy failed. The OT is a litany of time after time when the Israelites turn to idolatry (worshipping the Caananite gods Baal and Asherah), and God is forced to do some smiting to keep them in line. And in any event, the Plagues even failed to convert the Egyptains. But I think we can go farther than just saying that smiting is an ineffective deterrent -- I think it's also partly responsible for the temptation that Baal posed to the Israelites.

With the Plagues (and earlier nefarious acts like the Flood), God established a certain frame for choosing deities. That frame is one based on power. Worship the God who can smite your enemies, and who will smite you if you give up on him. God isn't making a moral plea ("worship me because I deserve it and because my decrees are just"). He's making a pragmatic demand ("worship me or you'll end up with boils or worse"). God sets himself up not as an altruist who wants what's best for his creation, but as a dictator who demands obeisance and will sacrifice his creation to get it.

But with this power-based frame in place, it's no wonder the Israelites kept turning to Baal. In the long run, God is more powerful than Baal and will engage in more thorough smiting. But Baal offered a great deal of more immediate power, both supernatural and socio-political. The benefits of Baal-worship were thus clear, whereas there was little other reason to stay loyal to God.

*It occurs to me that there's a parallel here with the way Pilate wanted to let Jesus go, but the crowd badgered him into signing off on the crucufixion. So perhaps the New Testament God is a bit Satanic as well. This is why I have trouble with the idea of seeing the crucifixion as a sacrifice demanded by God.

Stentor Danielson, 12:49, |

30.3.07

Environmental Injustice And Failed Community Involvement

South Phoenix is a classic example of environmental racism. The city's white leaders spent a century shoving its dirty industry and "dirty people" into the south part of the city. And while the kind of racism that people own up to began to fade in the 70s, the continuing neglect of the area, and its continued lack of effective zoning and construction of polluting transportation infrastructure (two major interstate highways and the airport) has not improved matters (For more of the historical background, see this article (pdf) in Human Ecology Review.)

The authorities recently had a chance to start to put things right, but it looks like they failed:

Five years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gave the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality a grant to clean up toxics in a 12-square-mile swath of south Phoenix. That largely low-income area has a high concentration of pollution-producing industrial facilities.

The DEQ set up a panel of community members and asked them to offer ideas on how they'd like to see toxic pollution reduced in their neighborhoods.

The community board spent more than a year crafting a list of 10 major steps they wanted regulators to take.

Most of the things they asked for - a study of the health risks posed to their neighborhoods, stricter enforcement at polluting facilities, better zoning to prevent industries from locating next to homes - never materialized.

DEQ's response is that on the one hand, they are doing things to improve the environment, and on the other hand, they don't have the authority to do some of the things the community wanted (like changing zoning laws).

What this situation looks like is a clear failure of community involvement. DEQ created the form of a community involvement process by creating the community panel. Unfortunately, the substance of community involvement appears to have been lacking. A successful community involvement process requires engagement from all of the responsible parties. The community has to be at the table with DEQ, as well as with the city's zoning board, and any other entity with power over an aspect of the issue.

The reasoning here is effectively entailed by the reasoning for involving the community. The cleanup is being done for the benefit of the community, so the people doing it need to hear what the community thinks will benefit it. On the other hand, the community's proposals need to be shaped by the context of who has the ability to do what. This is more than just recognizing the limits of an agency's power and thus not asking for unreasonable things -- it's about getting committments from the various stakeholders to do their parts.

What appears to have happened in the South Phoenix case is a disjuncture between the planning and implementation. Without engagement and buy-in from the responsible parties, the community ended up making two kinds of recommendations -- those that DEQ can't implement, and those that they won't. The ones they can't implement are a result of the community involvement process's failure to enable the community to address their concerns to the right people (e.g. the zoning board). The ones they won't implement are the result of a lack of buy-in that allows DEQ to say they've "considered" the community's proposals, but does not create the sense of ownership or mechanisms of accountability that would give the community's plan any teeth. The key fact that encapsulates the failure here is that after the community made its recommendations, DEQ went on to write its own toxics reduction plan with the community plan as just one input. DEQ effectively distracted the community with some play-acting while sheltering itself from any commitment to substantive involvement.

Ultimately, the situation in South Phoenix is doubly racist. It's racist at the distributive justice level because the city's black and Latino neighborhoods are bearing a disproportionate share of toxic pollution. And it's racist at the democratic justice level because DEQ, EPA, and the city are failing to respect those communities' right to determine their own fate.

Stentor Danielson, 23:19, |

28.3.07

The Sins Of Your Ancestors

Hugo Schwyzer has a long and sometimes grating meditation* on the question of reparations for slavery and other racial oppression. He frames it as a question of responsibility for the sins of one's ancestors.

The "sins of your ancestors" frame has some utility in drawing attention to how the present system was historically constructed, and thereby highlighting precisely what kind of wrongs need to be righted. And it has utility in reminding us that those ancestors were in fact sinners -- and sinners in quite specific and often brutal ways, not just in a lip-service "we're all sinners" sort of way. But I think "sins of the ancestors" is problematic as a frame for thinking about the responsibilities of present-day descendants.

The problem with "sins of the ancestors" is that responsibility is not strictly about ancestry. Schwyzer is an upper-class descendant of a long line of upper-class people, and he owns up to the slave-owners and capitalist racial exploiters in his family tree. I, on the other hand, am the descendant of dirt-poor New Englanders and post-Civil War immigrants. So my family tree's responsibility for engineering racial oppression is tiny compared to Schwyzer's**. If I accept the "sins of the ancestors" frame, I could easily become one of those annoying people who whine about how none of my ancestors were slave owners.

But despite the great difference in ancestral guilt, Schwyzer and I recieve very similar amounts of white privilege, and thereby have similar levels of responsibility. The amount of privilege that's handed down as strictly consanguinial inheritance is small compared with the amount that's distributed as a sort of public good to everyone in the beneficiary class. The argument that's used to make descendants responsible for the sins of their ancestors -- you unfairly benefit from their sins -- must carry us further to the recognition that ancestry is no criterion at all. Responsibility is proportional to the scale of the descendant's benefit, not to the scale of the individual's particular ancestors' personal sin.

*Though this is one of the few posts on his blog that he doesn't describe in the title as a "long meditation." The post is actually, it turns out, a "rambling response."

**Which is not at all to say they were totally innocent. I should also note that I am distantly related to presidents Andrew Jackson and Franklin Pierce, two of our least racially enlightened commanders in chief. And in double-checking the Andrew Jackson connection in the family history book my maternal grandmother wrote, I was reminded that it's likely that one set of my great-great-great-great grandparents did have slaves, and their son was a Confederate soldier who later deserted to the Union side. (This is the anomalous slice of my family tree, as they hailed from South Carolina.)

Stentor Danielson, 00:54, |