Month: May 2006

Philosopher Peter Singer has just published a new book, The Way We Eat: Why Our Food Choices Matter (Is it just me, or does there seem to be a lot of talk about food lately? Crunchy Cons, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, an entire issue of Sojourners dedicated to the topic; people seem to have food on the brain. Is food the new sex?).

Anyway, in this interview at Salon, he points out that “buying local,” as we’re often urged to do, may not be the best thing to do, all things considered:

In your book you say that socially responsible folks in San Francisco would do better to buy their rice from Bangladesh than from local growers in California. Could you explain?

This is in reference to the local food movement, and the idea that you can save fossil fuels by not transporting food long distances. This is a widespread belief, and of course it has some basis. Other things being equal, if your food is grown locally, you will save on fossil fuels. But other things are often not equal. California rice is produced using artificial irrigation and fertilizer that involves energy use. Bangladeshi rice takes advantage of the natural flooding of the rivers and doesn’t require artificial irrigation. It also doesn’t involve as much synthetic fertilizer because the rivers wash down nutrients, so it’s significantly less energy intensive to produce. Now, it’s then shipped across the world, but shipping is an extremely fuel-efficient form of transport. You can ship something 10,000 miles for the same amount of fuel necessary to truck it 1,000 miles. So if you’re getting your rice shipped to San Francisco from Bangladesh, fewer fossil fuels were used to get it there than if you bought it in California.

In the same vein, you argue that in the interests of alleviating world poverty, it’s better to buy food from Kenya than to buy locally, even if the Kenyan farmer only gets 2 cents on the dollar.

My argument is that we should not necessarily buy locally, because if we do, we cut out the opportunity for the poorest countries to trade with us, and agriculture is one of the things they can do, and which can help them develop. The objection to this, which I quote from Brian Halweil, one of the leading advocates of the local movement, is that very little of the money actually gets back to the Kenyan farmer. But my calculations show that even if as little as 2 cents on the dollar gets back to the Kenyan farmer, that could make a bigger difference to the Kenyan grower than an entire dollar would to a local grower. It’s the law of diminishing marginal utility. If you are only earning $300, 2 cents can make a bigger difference to you than a dollar can make to the person earning $30,000.

This seems like good news:

Sudan’s government said yesterday that its peace accord with Darfur’s main insurgent group allowed it to welcome U.N. peacekeepers to the troubled region, as mediators worked to persuade the rest of the fractured rebel movement to join the process.

The peace agreement, reached Friday in Abuja with one branch of the Sudan Liberation Army after two years of sporadic negotiations, aims to end ethnic bloodshed that has killed at least 180,000 people in three years and left about two million displaced.

The suggestion that it could pave the way for a deployment of U.N. peacekeepers overturns previous rejections by Khartoum, which so far has allowed only African Union peacekeepers.

[…]

The peace deal calls for a cease-fire, disarmament of government-linked militias, the integration of thousands of rebel fighters into Sudan’s armed forces, and a protection force for civilians in the immediate aftermath of the war.

Read more…

This is complicated by the fact that some of the rebel factions have rejected the peace accord because, in their view, it doesn’t provide for enough regional autonomy for Darfur and give the rebels sufficient representation in the government. Still, a hopeful sign.

Lucasfilms is releasing the original unaltered Star Wars trilogy on DVD this fall. Yes, I am a sucker and will buy them.

I actually don’t mind most of the changes that were made for the special edition versions that came out in the late 90s. Though, I could do without the CGI musical number in Return of the Jedi.

For the original DVD release Lucas made further changes, such as inserting Hayden Christiansen at the end of Jedi where Anakin, Yoda, and Obi-Wan appear as happy ghosts together. But there’s something about having the trilogy in its original pristine form that you remember from your childhood. (I do actually have the original version on VHS, but how will I be able to share them with my future children??)

Hopefully this will be the last fanboy/geek post of the day.

This is neat – the BBC has made one of C.S. Lewis’s wartime radio addresses available online. This is apparently the only surviving one; the broadcasts were ultimately published as Mere Christianity. They also have a clip of him introducing The Great Divorce.

Via Christianity Today.

Below I talked a bit about a certain leftward drift in my political outlook over the last few years. Another impetus for my move away from certain mainstream conservative positions, I think, has to do with trying to work out a consistent ethic of life. For about as long as I’ve given these things any thought I’ve found something morally problematic about abortion, even as an atheist.* I still don’t have a satisfying position on what abortion’s legal status should be, but I do think there should, as a rule, be a strong presumption in favor of life.

This leads naturally to skepticism about things like cloning and embryonic stem-cell research and genetic manipulation of humans,** not to mention euthanasia and assisted sucicide, pretty standard conservative fare (though libertarians strongly object to this kind of “bio-Luddism” as an affront to personal autonomy). But I’ve also been forced to reexamine my beliefs about what happens at the other end of life. I used to be more or less in favor of capital punishment (with the usual caveats about applying it fairly – something easier said than done!), but am now pretty firmly against it.

And, as regular readers may be aware, I’ve put a lot of effort into thinking about when lethal force is permissible for self-defense and protection of others. While not a convinced pacifist, I do think the issues of proportionality and noncombatant immunity in particular make modern war problematic. I’m probably now closest to what seems to be the position of the current and recent popes that there is a strong presumption against war, which should only be undertaken as a last resort.

Finally, I’ve found that it makes sense to extend concern about the protection of innocent life beyond human beings, and this is really where most conservatives get off the train (though former Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully is a notable exception). If one takes seriously the idea that the non-human creation isn’t simply there for our purposes, but has an integrity of its own, then practices like factory farming and animal experimentation are called into question, as is our shoddy treatment of the natural environment, something many conservatives are loath to deal with (and hence my qualified sympathy for crunchy connery). Granted that these are complicated issues which often don’t have straightforward solutions, respect for life shouldn’t end with our own species. Of course, start going down this road and you might find yourself questioning our entire Western commitment to technological progress. Heck, you might even find youself voting for the Green Party four years after voting for George Bush.

What I would like to think is that I’m learning to think about these things in a way that’s rooted in my faith more than in loyalty to a particular party or ideology. But I have to remind myself that Christians can and do disagree on just about every political issue under the sun, and I’m in no position to be dictating to others what the proper Christain stance on any given issue is. But I do think we do ourselves a disservice when we let ourselves get boxed into traditional categories of “left” and “right.”
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*Curiously, you frequently see accusations that pro-lifers want to apply a narrow, sectarian religious view on everyone else. But all the really convincing anti-abortion arguments I’m familiar with rest on secular premises (even if the people making the arguments have strong religious convictions). I’m not even sure what a strictly religious argument against abortion would look like, nor does it seem to me that pro-lifers usually makes their arguments in religious terms.

**I’m a big fan of both Huxley’s Brave New World and C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man, both of which deal with the question of to what extent we should try to alter human nature itself.

A friend who’s a student at the Kennedy School of Government sends along a link to their brand new Africa Policy Journal. It aims to discuss Africa-related issues and policy from the perspective of Africans.

You can view the inagural issue here.

The Christian Century reports on a recent speech by Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois, a staunch conservative Republican, warning against overconfidence in our power to remake the world:

“It is a truism that power breeds arrogance. A far greater danger, however, stems from the self-delusion that is the more certain companion. For individuals and countries alike, power inevitably distorts perceptions of the world by insulating them in a soothing cocoon that is impervious to what scientists term ‘disconfirming evidence.’

[…]

“There is no evidence that we or anyone can guide from afar revolutions we have set in motion. We can more easily destabilize friends and others and give life to chaos and to avowed enemies than ensure outcomes in service of our interests and security. . . . In a world where the ratios of strength narrow, the consequences of miscalculation will become progressively more debilitating. The costs of golden theories will be paid for in the base coin of our interests.

[…]

“To allow our enormous power to delude us into seeing the world as a passive thing waiting for us to re-create it in an image of our choosing will hasten the day when we have little freedom to choose anything at all.”

Meanwhile, libertarian Jim Henley ruminates on the decline of limited government conservatism. The culprits? War, resentment of the left, and nationalism.

If you had asked me in, say, 2000 I would’ve said I was basically a small-government conservative: pro-free trade, pro-limited and accountable government, in favor of a “more humble” foreign policy as promised at the time by candidate Bush. I voted with little enthusiasm for Bush in 2000, sensing that he was far more comfortable in the pro-business, country club wing of the GOP (with a few sops for the Christian right) than anywhere else.

But what “actually existing” conservatism under a Bush White House and Republican-controlled Congress has turned out to depart from tradtional conservatism even more than I expected: massive increases in pork spending, giveaways to well-connected friends and donors, pro-corporate (as opposed to pro-free-market) economic policies, assertions of unchecked executive power, and a globe-straddling military presence.

I think I’ve probably drifted leftward in the last few years, but I’m not sure how much of that is genuine ideological evolution and how much is simply finding myself opposed to what the current administration is doing (particularly when it comes to things like war and peace, torture, civil liberties, etc.), and therefore ending up “on the left” sort of by default.

Addendum: I haven’t read it yet, but the Cato Institute recently released a report (PDF) on the Bush Administration’s record on that whole “defend and uphold the Constitution” thing.

Amnesty International has released a report stating that torture and inhumane treatment are “widespread” under U.S. custody. This goes against the “a few bad apples” line that Washington has pushed.

See also this reflection from theologian George Hunsinger.

Lots of well-intentioned folks are urging us to “do something” about the crisis in Darfur. And, heaven knows, there’s a lot of bad stuff going down. Just recently it was reported that the UN had to cut its rations to refugees there due to inadequate funding. That seems like something that could, and should, be remedied relatively easily by an influx of cash.

But there’s something a little troubling to me about some of the rhetoric, the talk of “saving” Darfur, as if all we, as enlightened westerners, have to do is go in there and straighten things out. Let’s recall that our history of going into troubled spots around the globe and successfully straightening things out is a mixed one, to put it mildly. Given our success at creating peace and brotherhood in Iraq (Kosovo, Somalia, etc.), maybe Sudan should be spared our ministrations.

And, almost inevitably it seems, we end up, in our zeal for separating every conflict into good guys and bad guys, siding with some pretty dubious characters (see, inter alia., our interventions in Central America and Afghanistan in the 80s and Kosovo in the 90s). Clearly the civilians being attacked are innocent, but if we intervene are we going to be forced to broker some sort of arrangement between the government and the various rebel groups, who no doubt come in various degrees of unsavoriness? Are we going to be picking winners and losers in the new Sudanese order? And what happens when the winners we pick start in with their human rights abuses? Not to mention the U.S.A. in particular should be wary of opening yet another front in the Muslim world; apparently Osama bin Laden is already calling on mujahedin to get ready to smite the “crusader plunderers” in Sudan.

I’m not saying that the U.S. should do nothing. For one thing, there do appear to be options short of military action. But if intervention is on the table, I would at least like to know straight up what exactly is being called for. A “peacekeeping” mission only makes sense if there’s peace to be kept. Otherwise let’s be honest and call it war. Are we willing to fight, if necessary, the government militias, and perhaps the Sudanese government itself? Are we talking regime change? Followed by occupation? How many troops do you suppose it would take to “pacify” all of Sudan, geographically the largest country in Africa (and more than twice the size of Iraq)?

Just asking.

Swedish Lutheran theologian Anders Nygren is best known for his book Agape and Eros, which argued for agape as the essence of divine love in Christianity. But his little book The Essence of Christianity: Two Essays is worth reading too. For my purposes I want to focus on the second essay, “The Atonement as a Work of God.”

Nygren begins by distinguishing between pre- or non-Christian and Christian ideas of atonement. The fundamental religious problem, he says, is fellowship with God. We recognize that we aren’t worthy to stand in the presence of God, that there is a barrier to fellowship caused by our unworthiness. This gives rise to various attempts at making atonement. At the most “primitive” level we have the literal offering of sacrifices. Then we move to an ethical or moral approach where people attempt to have fellowship with God on the basis of their good works. Finally, sensing the failure of these other methods, there is an attempt to base fellowship on an offering of humility and contrition.

What all of these attempts have in common, he says, is that atonement and fellowship with God are understood to have their basis in something we do:

All these different kinds of sacrifice have something about them which disqualifies them as means of reconciliation. Every attempt on man’s part to put himself right with God and make himself acceptable to God, conceals ultimately a piece of human presumption. There is an inner contradiction in all human attempts to make atonement and effect reconciliation. For by the very fact that he seeks reconciliation, man acknowledges God’s right to make demands on him, acknowledges Him to be God. Yet at the same time he denies the divinity of God, when he imagines that by means of something of his own–his gifts, his righteousness, or his humility–he can put himself right with God. (p. 90)

By contrast, the Christian idea of atonement is that reconciliation is rooted in God’s love and is, from beginning to end, God’s work. Agape, in Nygren’s account, consists of four elements: it is spontaneous, it is not motivated by any value intrinsic to its object, it is creative, and it establishes fellowship with God. From this Nygren can say that, far from having its basis in our holiness, our fellowship with God has its basis in sin! To our natural way of thinking it seems fitting that we should become holy or pure before entering into fellowship with God. But the Christian scandal is that God wills to have fellowship with us as sinners.

Nygren draws a distinction (perhaps too starkly) between Catholic and Evangelical (i.e. Protestant) understandings of how fellowship with God is acheived. In his telling, Catholicism founds our fellowship with God on the righteousness in us. We aren’t fit for communion with God until we are actually made holy. This isn’t Pelagianism since our holiness is wrought by grace, but it differs from the Evangelical approach because it makes our holiness the basis of fellowship. The Evangelical perspective, on the other hand, is that God “stoops down to sinful man and seeks fellowship with him” (p. 108). We don’t rise up to God, even if by grace, God comes down to us. Fellowship is established by God and is fellowship with sinners, preceding any holiness of our own.

The signature feature of agape is that it loves without respect to any qualities of the beloved. The good news is that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. In fact, Nygren says, agape and atonement are essentially the same thing. Atonement just is God’s love coming among us to establish fellowship with us sinners. “God’s love is in its essential nature Agape-love; it is downward-moving love, a love which seeks the lost and wills to have fellowship with sinners, a love which is spontaneous and creative of fellowship” (p. 113).

But this raises the question, Why then talk of Atonement at all? If God’s love is unconditional love that forgives by its very nature, why the sacrifice of Jesus? Why the Cross? Why, as is often asked, can’t God simply up and forgive our sins without requiring the death of his Son?

Nygren responds that this question misunderstands both the nature of God’s love and the nature of sin. First, God’s love is not an indulgent, sentimental love; it is by its very nature opposed to sin. But to see why, we have to get clear on what sin is. Sin isn’t simply a series of discrete misdeeds which God could just overlook. Sin, as Luther and others saw, is a fundamental disposition or orientation of the self. The self that is “curved in on itself.” A self in such a condition simply can’t love God; it doesn’t want to, except perhaps when it sees God as a means to some end (such as happiness, wealth, self-improvement, etc.). This is what Luther meant by the “bondage of the will” – not that we can’t will, but that what we will is, inescapably, to be our own. If God is love and sin is selfishness, there can be nothing but contradiction between them.

Into this world that is closed against Him, indifferent to Him, God wills to bring His love. Here above all it becomes clear that it is precisely God’s love that makes it impossible for forgiveness to be the superficial, easy-going and self-evident thing commonly called by that name, and that forgiveness can only exist in inseparable connection with a real atonement. The sin that has to be forgiven is not simply a matter of a few moral misdemeanours standing in the way of God’s loving purposes; therefore forgiveness cannot simply mean that God magnanimously overlooks these faults and pursues His purpose of love without regard to them. The sin consists precisely in the fact that man selfishly shuts himself up against God’s love, showing no interest in it, and in so far as he seeks God at all, he seeks Him for selfish ends, so that–as Luther puts it–‘even in God he seeks only his own.’ (pp. 121-2)

If it were possible for us to simply give up our selfishness and love God, we would have atonement and fellowship based on our acheivement. But selfishness isn’t prepared to do that – how could it? Selfishness can’t sacrifice itself! So love sacrifices itself instead:

God, the divine love, takes the sacrifice upon Himself instead. ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.’ Here in the most literal sense it is possible to speak of vicarious sacrifice and vicarious suffering. When selfish human life refuses to conform to the divine love, God’s love does not refuse to submit to the conditions of selfish human life. The question may be raised whether such a procedure is worthy of the divine love, and from an ordinary human point of view the answer must be that it is not. But such is divine love, such is God’s Agape, that it does not allow even human selfishness to set a limit to its giving and self-giving. It comes down into the world of sin and does not hesitate to give itself away to selfishness. It becomes a sacrifice in a new and deeper sense than that in which the lover always sacrifices himself for his beloved. It suffers itself to become lost love, a love spurned and trampled underfoot by selfishness. That is the way of divine atonement. (pp. 124-5)

God’s sacrifice is that he expends his love on this selfish world, even though it may end up as “lost love.” “But God’s love does not come to an end, God does not cease loving, because his love is spurned and trampled on by human selfishness, so that it becomes quite literally outcast and lost” (p. 126). Jesus’ entire life is this sacrifice, this spilling of God’s love upon often ungrateful sinners, and it culminates at the cross:

But where does divine love meet us as lost love more truly than in the Cross of Christ? Yet the love which does not cease to be love even when it is lost, is for that very reason the victory over all that stands against it. Here, and only here, is there any room for talk of the omnipotence of love. The way between God and a world fast bound in selfishness has been opened. Therefore the Christian faith sees in the atoning work of Christ the unshakable foundation of our fellowship with God. (p. 126, emphasis added)

I think the strength of Nygren’s position is that it roots the atonement squarely in God’s love. Some crude versions of atonement theory have seemed to imply that God was changed from wrathful to loving by what happened on the cross. Nygren makes it clear that it is entriely a work of God’s love. He repeatedly quotes Paul that “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself.” It’s God who initiates reconciliation.

Questions for Nygren’s account: Does it overlook the penal element in atonemnt? (Is there a penal element in atonement?) Also, he doesn’t talk about the Resurrection; can an account of atonement stand independently from the Resurrection? Does the Resurrection simply ratify or validate what happened on the cross? And what about the cosmic aspect of reconciliation? Nygren seems to focus almost exclusively on human fellowship with God, but doesn’t the work of Christ have implications for all of creation?