A Thinking Reed

Month: July 2007

  • Localism versus/and nationalism?

    I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at least a little bit sympathetically disposed to Bill Kauffman’s paean to neo-secessionists in Vermont, but I’m not so sure that ultra-localism is the solution to the problems that the secessionists identify.

    For one thing, to the extent that they deplore the effects of the global marketplace, it’s not clear that smaller communities are able to effectively resist it.

    This is one of the reasons that Daly and Cobb give for their qualified nationalism. They actually hope to see a greater devolution of economic and political power, but believe that right now the nation-state is the only entity capable of putting checks on globalization that has some measure of democratic accountability:

    Nation-states are today extremely important societies. They are in many instances the only loci of power capable of asserting themselves effectively against those forces that erode all community. They do, in many instances, contribute strongly to the self-identification of their citizens, and at least some of them allow for considerable participation in governance. Most of them have concern for the well-being of their citizens, and some affirm the diversity among them. Hence nations can be communities, and some are quite good communities. At the present time we join [Dudley] Seers in calling for economics to serve national communities.

    It is important to see what difference this would make. The current economic ideal is that national boundaries not impede the global economy. Increasingly this means that economic decisions of determinative importance to the people of a nation are made by persons who are not responsible to them in any way. In short, whatever form of government the state may have, its people cannot participate in the most important decisions governing their daily lives. This weakens the possibility for a nation-state to be a community. With a national community, on the contrary, there is some possibility for the people through their government to share in decisions. A healthy national community is possible.

    There can be no effective national economy if a people cannot feed themselves and otherwise meet their essential needs. Hence a national economy for community will be a relatively self-sufficient economy. This does not preclude trade, but it does preclude dependence on trade, especially where the nation cannot participate in determining the terms of trade. (Daly and Cobb, For the Common Good, p. 173)

    Invoking the Catholic principle of subsidiarity, Daly and Cobb enunciate, as a general principle that decentralization is good if the community can effectively exercise control over its economic life:

    In many instances the nation-state is already too large and too remote from ordinary people for effective participation to be possible. Decentralization of the economy within the nation should accompany nationalization in relation to the global economy. Many regions within the United States could become relatively self-sufficient. With economic decentralization there could come political decentralization as well. The main formal point is that a political community cannot be healthy if it cannot exercise a significant measure of control over its economic life. The second formal point is that of the Catholic teaching of “subsidiarity”: power should be located as close ot the people as possible, that is, in the smallest units that are feasible. Our special emphasis is that except for a few functions, political power that cannot affect the economic order is ineffective. Hence we tie political decentralization to economic decentralization. (p. 174)

    The secessionists of the Second Vermont Republic, however, don’t see the nation-state as a potential ally. They see it as the enemy and themselves as the foes of “giantism” in all its forms.

    From Kauffman’s article:

    “The left-right thing has got to go,” declares Ian Baldwin, cofounder of Chelsea Green Publishing and publisher of Vermont Commons. “We’re decentralists and we are up against a monster.”

    What might replace left and right, liberal and conservative, as useful political bipolarities? Globalist and localist, perhaps, or placeless versus placeist. Baldwin argues that “peak oil and climate change are linked and irreversible events that will within a generation change how human beings live. The world economy will relocalize.” He dismisses homeland security as “fatherland security”—for “homeland,” with its Nazi-Soviet echoes, has never been what Americans call their country. What we need, says Baldwin, is “homestead security”: sustainable agriculture, small shops, a revival of craftsmanship, local citizenship, communal spirit. The vision is one of self-government. Independence from the empire but interdependence at the grassroots. Neighborliness. The other American Dream.

    Personally I like the idea of acheiving the ends of community and sustainability through noncoercive libertarian means. I’m just not sure it can be done. I certainly think that Daly and Cobb would agree with much of the spirit of the SVR folks, but their view is that the nation-state has to play an essential role in shielding local economies and communities from the ravages of the global marketplace. But the radical decentralists of the SVR are likely to reply that you can’t strengthen localities by concentrating more power in the center.

    It may be that what’s needed is a mixture of both approaches. In reviewing WorldChanging, a vast compendium of ideas for saving the planet (and a pretty nifty book that we received as a gift from some friends), Bill McKibben writes:

    If there’s one flaw in the WorldChanging method, I think it might be a general distrust of the idea that government could help make things happen. There’s a Silicon Valley air to the WorldChanging enterprise – over the years it’s been closely connected with Wired magazine, the bible of the digerati and a publication almost as paranoid about government interference and regulation as the Wall Street Journal. Like Internet entrepreneurs, they distrust both government intentions and abilities – bureaucrats tend, after all, to come from the ranks of those neither bold nor smart enough to innovate. A libertarian streak shines through: “When we redesign our personal lives in such a way that we’re doing the right thing and having a hell of a good time,” Steffen writes, “we act as one-person beacons to the idea that green can be bright, that worldchanging can be lifechanging.” I’m sympathetic to this strain of thinking; I believe we’re going to need more local and more nimble decision-making in the future to build strong, survivable communities. But it also makes it a little harder to be as optimistic as you’d like to be when reading these pages, which are filled with good ideas that, chances are, won’t come to all that much without the support of government and a system of incentives for investment.

    Frankly I’m not sure what the right balance is. It may be that one of the necessary functions of government is to create a protective framework or space within which communities can flourish. This wouldn’t have to entail either bureaucratic micro-management or utter laissez-faire. Rather, what may be needed is some way to permit communities to freely experiment in different ways of living while enjoying a measure of protection from the levelling effects of the market.

  • Fowl play

    Speaking of chickens, this review of a new book about the treatment of chickens under the conditions of industrial farming utterly fails to engage with the moral issue at hand.

    The author, Mick Hume, seems to think that factory farming is a mark of progress and anyone who questions whether the end (cheap meat) justifies the means (untold suffering of millions of sentient creatures) is nothing more than a know-nothing hater of humanity and enlightenment.

    At no point in the article does Hume consider whether we have any moral duties to animals. Nor does he try to argue that they can’t suffer or feel pain. He simply asserts a version of might makes right: people “need” cheap meat, so whatever we do to provide that is ipso facto a mark of progress.

    Hume seeks to discredit concerns about factory farming by asserting that what critics “really” oppose is industrialism and material progress per se:

    Like many issues to do with food and farming today, this chicken debate is not really about the details of different techniques for raising them. It is pecking at bigger targets: industrialised farming and, by implication, the social and economic advance of our society. The demand that we should all ‘reconnect’ with the animals that provide our food, for example, is really a call to turn back the clock on a social division of labour that has been developed over centuries.

    Of course, this is argument by armchair psychoanalysis and Hume has done nothing to prove this point. I’m not saying that there aren’t environmentalists and animal rights advocates who don’t look askance at our industiral economy, but one hardly needs to be a luddite to question whether the suffering we inflict on animals is justifiable, especially in light of the fact that, at least for most people in the Western world, meat is hardly essential to be healthy. It’s ridiculous on its face to claim that “complain[ing] about the ‘injustice’ done by humans to chickens … is to call into question the entire basis of human civilisation.”

    Interestingly, Hume writes that “Regular readers will know that, in an anthropomorphic age when those who suggest that man is superior to beast are branded ‘speciesists’, spiked writers rightly insist upon drawing a clear and uncrossable line between humanity and the ‘animal kingdom’.” As far as I’ve ever been able to tell, spiked is a resolutely secular publication, so I’m curious on what grounds they draw this “clear and uncrossable line.”

    But as C.S. Lewis once pointed out, once you’ve given up the idea that there is a metaphysical difference between human beings and other animals and you’ve embraced the doctrine that we can do whatever we like to them, it’s hard to see why, in principle, “might makes right” can’t be extended to other classes, races, or whatever other group stands between us and our interests.

    One tires of pointing this out, but it’s possible to recognize degees of moral considerability among various creautres. That one can recognize that animals are wronged when they are treated in the ways characteristic of modern factory farming doesn’t imply that there is no significant moral difference between a chicken and a human being.

    (Note, I’m not vouching for the book under review, which I haven’t read. And thanks to Chip Frontz for sending along the link.)

  • A veggie Fourth

    Grist has a good article offering suggestions for meat-free twists on summer classics.

    Parenthetically, it’s interesting how people who curtail their meat consumption for environmental reasons differ in their approach from those who are primarily concerned about animal welfare. Not that the two positions are mutually exclusive, mind you. But enviros, I’ve noticed, tend to focus on red meat, presumably because cattle ranching has a greater environmental impact than raising say pigs or chickens (although the environmental impact of commercial fishing is also severe). Animal welfare concerns, however, would incline one to say that chickens, followed closely by pigs, are treated the worst of commercially raised animals and should therefore be the first to go from one’s diet. Cattle, by contrast, are at least relatively better off.

  • Peak oil and the end of liberalism

    Patrick Deneen writes that modern liberalism – “the philosophy premised upon a belief in individual autonomy, one that rejected the centrality of culture and tradition, that eschewed the goal or aim of cultivation toward the good established by dint of (human) nature itself, that regarded all groups and communities as arbitrarily formed and therefore alterable at will, that emphasized the primacy of economic growth as a precondition of the good society and upon that base developed a theory of progress (material as well as moral), and one that valorized the human will itself as the source of sufficient justification for the human mastery of nature, including human nature (e.g., bio-technological improvement of the species)” – rests ultimately on our ability to exploit fossil fuels. All that freedom, autonomy, and material progress is a one-shot affair since the reservoir of energy that made it possible took hundreds of millions of years to build up.

    Deneen says that the view of life that underlies liberalism is profoundly anti-natural:

    Oil has been the silent but world-altering source of our collective delusion that we could live in this way and get away with it. It has allowed us to contrive a civilization based upon a theoretical fantasy, and to make it functional for about a century, during which time we took the exceptional for the ordinary, the unnatural for the given, the hubristic for the norm. We have reshaped the world to accord with a self-delusive fantasy, with the only stipulation being that there continue to be unlimited quantities of this external power source that would let growth and its attendant power over nature go on forever. Most of us assume there’s no problem with this basic presupposition – except that we are about to discover that you can only defy gravity for so long, as the example of Icarus ought to have served as a reminder.

    Conservatism, while a salutary reaction against the excesses of liberalism, usually fails to grasp the underlying economic realities that make those excesses possible:

    Conservatives rightly decry the decline of culture, the assault on the family and the unlimited infanticide of our abortion regime, but find nothing else wrong with the basic arrangement and largely do not question whether our political and economic arrangements have contributed to what we denounce. Books will be written about how this could have happened. But, perhaps we are not long from the day when conservatives will realize the fantasy they have themselves been purveying, and will demand that we prepare ourselves now for a post-petroleum reinstatement of human culture, cultivation, and tradition.

    I take peak oil and global warming catastrophists with a grain of salt if only because their predictions of what will happen post-catastrophe seem to align so neatly with the kind of society they would like to see. Still, the fossil fuel binge does seem like it will have to come to an end at some point, so it’s well worth thinking about what that implies.

  • Globalization from above

    This interesting piece by NYU economist William Easterly calls bs on the “Ideology of Development” – the notion that all nations can become “developed” by instituting reforms orchestrated by elite technicians and experts from the IMF-World Bank-UN axis.

    Easterly points out that 1) the countries that have most closely followed the advice of the experts have the worst track record in developing economically and 2) the countries that have done the best have frequently ignored that same advice. His essential point is that there are many paths to development and, since societies differ in many ways, letting them chart their own course is vastly preferable to the imposition of a one-size-fits-all technical fix.

    He also contends that this Developmentalist ideology is frequently seen as a kind of neo-colonialism which gives rise to backlash in the form of illiberal leftist and populist movements. When the development schemes fail people not unreasonably blame the outsiders and self-appointed experts who have taken it upon themselves to run other people’s countries.

    (via The American Scene)