A Thinking Reed

Month: September 2007

  • August reading notes

    Some highlights from the past month:

    I blogged a bit about Keith Ward’s latest, Re-Thinking Christianity here, here and here. Ward continues his streak of intelligent, accessible theology that straddles the popular and the academic. The takeaway lesson from RC is that there isn’t exactly an unchanging core of doctrine, but that Christianity has changed throughout its history, sometimes in quite radical ways. And yet, Ward doesn’t draw the conclusion that therefore Christianity is a sham; he maintains that the history of Christianity is properly seen as an ongoing response to the God disclosed and incarnate in Jesus.

    Andrew Linzey’s Christianity and the Rights of Animals is an earlier work (published in the late 80s) that anticipates many of the themes in his Animal Theology and Animal Gospel, but it delves more into the underlying assumptions of his theology: creation as gift with intrinsic value, God as fellow-sufferer and redeemer of all creation, animals as bearers of “theos-rights.” As such it’s a bit more systematic and synoptic, while being a relatively easy read. A good place to start for someone looking for an “animal-friendly” take on Christianity, though the conclusions Linzey draws are quite radical.

    I’m still working my way through George Monbiot’s Heat. Monbiot is both extremely pessimistic about the dangers of climate change and optimistic that it’s possible to actually cut our carbon emissions by the requisite 90% or so while still retaining something like a modern industrial economy. Monbiot is a very engaging writer, willing to admit when he’s not sure about something, unafraid to take on shibboleths, including those of environmentalists, and passionate about his cause. I may post some more about this in the near future.

  • Ends and means, again

    E.F. Schumacher on “Buddhist economics”:

    While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation. But Buddhism is “The Middle Way” and therefore in no way antagonistic to physical well-being. It is not wealth that stands in the way of liberation but the attachment to wealth; not the enjoyment of pleasurable things but the craving for them. The keynote of Buddhist economics, therefore, is simplicity and non-violence. From an economist’s point of view, the marvel of the Buddhist way of life is the utter rationality of its pattern–amazingly small means leading to extraordinarily satisfactory results.

    For the modern economist this is very difficult to understand. He is used to measuring the “standard of living” by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is “better off” than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption. […] The ownership and consumption of goods is a means to an end, and Buddhist economics is the systematic study of how to attain given ends with the minimum means.

    Modern economics, on the other hand, considers consumption to be the sole end and purpose of all economic activity, taking the factors of production–land, labour, and capital–as the means. The former, in short, tries to maximise human satisfactions by the optimal pattern of consumption, while the latter tries to maximise consumption by the optimal pattern of productive effort. It is easy to see that the effort needed to sustain a way of life which seeks to attain the optimal pattern of consumption is likely to be much smaller than the effort needed to sustain a drive for maximum consumption. (Small Is Beautiful, pp. 57-58)

  • The “preventive paradigm”

    “In isolation, neither the goal of preventing future attacks nor the tactic of using coercive measures is novel or troubling. All law enforcement seeks to prevent crime, and coercion is a necessary element of state power. However, when the end of prevention and the means of coercion are combined in the Administration’s preventive paradigm, they produce a troubling form of anticipatory state violence–undertaken before wrongdoing has actually occurred and often without good evidence for believing that wrongdoing will ever occur.” – David Cole & Jules Lobel (link)

  • Friday metal – Metallica, “Battery” (Live 1989)

    Ah, the classics never go out of style. The band is in their prime in this clip from 1989.

  • Bishops behaving badly

    Jack Spong publicly insults Rowan Williams and Nigerian bishop Isaac Orama says that gay and lesbian people are “not fit to live.” Of course, the former is merely bad taste while the latter is a moral monstrosity.

    UPDATE: I should note that doubt has been cast on whether Bp. Orama in fact said the things attributed to him. The UPI has pulled the story a spokesman for the Anglican Church of Nigeria has said that Orama denies making the comments in question. See here for more.

  • Link of the week

    7 Most Useless Transformers.

    I urge you, in the strongest possible terms, to watch the embedded video of the Japanese Transformers cartoon featuring karaoke(!).

    Via.

  • Highlight of the week (so far)

    Yesterday, on my way to get a cup of coffee, I happened across a film crew shooting a scene right outside of Eastern Market – supposedly for an upcoming Russell Crowe/Leo DiCaprio movie – and got to watch them blow up a car! Pretty sweet.

  • Schumacher on the poverty of economics

    It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, with increasing affluence, economics has moved into the very center of public concern, and economic performance, economic growth, economic expansion, and so forth have become the abiding interest, if not the obsession, of all modern socieites. In the current vocabulary of condemnation there are few words as final and conclusive as the word “uneconomic.” If an activity has been branded as uneconomic, its right to existence is not merely questioned but energetically denied. Anything that is found to be an impediment to economic growth is a shameful thing, and if people cling to it, they are thought of as either saboteurs or fools. Call a thing immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations; as long as you have not shown it to be “uneconomic” you have not really questioned its right to exist, grow, and prosper. — E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, pp. 41-42

    Schumacher’s work holds up surprisingly well considering that it was published in the early 70s. The issues he identifies are still with us and, if anything, may have intensified in the last 30+ years. The chapter that this quote comes from addresses the fragmentary nature of economics – its inability to deal with subject matter that falls outside its methodology. This is worth recalling in a time where economics has taken on something like an aura of omnicompetence, and the bestseller list is full of books applying the principles of economics to everyday life.

    The argument is pretty straightforward: economics, valuable as it is within its own domain, presupposes a host of non-economic facts as given. And its quantitative nature renders it inadequate for dealing with questions of quality (or, we might say, value). Thus we get a model of “the Market” where there is an inexhaustible supply of goods, and everything is, in principle, convertible into everything else (i.e. there are no incommensurable values).

    The market therefore represents only the surface of society and its significance relates to the momentary situation as it exists there and then. There is no probing into the depths of things, into the natural or social facts that lie behind them. In a sense, the market is the institutionalisation of individualism and non-responsibility. Neither buyer nor seller is responsible for anything but himself. It would be “uneconomic” for a wealthy seller to reduce his prices to poor customers merely because they are in need, or for a wealthy buyer to pay an extra price merely because the supplier is poor. Equally, it would be “uneconomic” for a buyer to give preference to home-produced goods if imported goods are cheaper. He does not, and is not expected to, accept responsibility for the country’s balance of payments. (p. 44)

    What’s in question is not the usefulness of the model, but the consequences of mistaking the model for the reality:

    Economics deals with a virtually limitless variety of goods and services, produced and consumed by an equally limitless variety of people. It would obviously be impossible to develop any economic theory at all, unless one were prepared to disregard a vast array of qualitative distinctions. But it should be just as obvious that the total suppression of qualitative distinctions, while it makes theorising easy, at the same time makes it totally sterile. Most of the “conspicuous developments of economics in the last quarter of a century” (referred to by Professor Phelps Brown) are in the direction of quantification, at the expense of the understanding of qualitative differences. Indeed, one might say that economics has become increasingly intolerant of the latter, because they do not fit into its method and makes demands on the practical understanding and the power of insight of economists, which they are unable or unwilling to fulfill. For example, having established by his purely quantitative methods that the Gross National Product of a country has risen by, say, five per cent, the economist-turned-econometrician is unwilling, and generally unable, to face the question of whether this is to be taken as a good thing or a bad thing. He would lose all his certainties if he even entertained such a question: growth of GNP must be a good thing, irrespective of what has grown and who, if anyone, has benefited. The idea that there could be pathological growth, unhealthy growth, disruptive or destructive growth is to him a perverse idea which must not be allowed to surface. A small minority of economists is at present beginning to question how much further “growth” will be possible, since infinite growth in a finite environment is an obvious impossibility; but even they cannot get away from the purely quantitative growth concept. Instead of insisting on the primacy of qualitative distinctions, they simply substitute non-growth for growth, that is to say, one emptiness for another. (pp. 47-48)

    One of the most important qualitative distinctions Schumacher has in mind is that between primary and secondary goods. Primary goods are those which human beings don’t produce, i.e. natural resources. Secondary goods are the products and services which we make, but which have their ultimate origin in the natural world. To pretend that all goods are equal in the sense of being convertible in principle and given a monetary value is to fail to recognize the essential incommensurability between these different categories of goods.

    Additionally, he refers to meta-economic factors which are presupposed by economics but not adequately dealth with by its concepts. The entire natural environment, especially things not amenable to private appropriation like air, water, and soil, constitutes the framework that any economic activity depends on, but they typically fail to appear in economic calculation and therefore the damage that economic activity may cause them is ignored. This is a bit like sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.

    All of these considerations can, perhaps, be summed up under the heading of ends versus means. Economics can tell us what means are most efficient for acheiving given ends, but it can’t tell us what ends are worth pursuing. It may be that it’s not the economists who are at fault here, but the policy makers who are too timid to question the value of things like limitless growth. Debates about things like trade agreements or how best to address climate change are almost inevitably couched in economic terms, with the unspoken assumption being that anything which threatens aggregate economic growth is ipso facto bad and anything which promotes it is good, regardless of their effect on non-economic values.

    The trouble about valuing means above ends–which, as confirmed by Keynes, is the attitude of modern economics–is that it destroys man’s freedom and power to choose the ends he really favours; the development of means, as it were, dictates the choice of ends. Obvious examples are the pursuit of supersonic transport speeds and the immense efforts made to land men on the moon. The conception of these aims was not the result of any insight into real human needs and aspirations, which technology is meant to serve, but solely of the fact that the necessary technical means appeared to be available. (p. 51)

    It may be that in a diverse and pluralistic society “growing the GDP” provides a convenient lowest-common-denominator goal that (nearly) everyone can agree on. But I think it’s safe to say that in the last 30 years or so since Schumacher wrote this we’ve become more aware of the impact the pursuit of growth at all costs is having not only on the natural world, but on our communities and human happiness. What’s less clear is that we still have a public language for debating whether things are not only “uneconomic” but “immoral or ugly, soul-destroying or a degradation of man, a peril to the peace of the world or to the well-being of future generations.” “Mere” aesthetics, value judgments, philosophy, religion, etc. have been largely relegated, at least among the elite classes, to matters of private judgment or sheer preference, while economics retains its reputation as a hard-headed empirical science. As such, it seems to provide a more “objective” basis for policy-making, despite well-founded critiques like Schumacher’s.

  • Jesus and Hillary Clinton

    This story about Hillary Clinton’s religious convictions at Mother Jones starts out interesting but veers distinctly into paranoia.

    I carry no water for HRC’s candidacy, but it seems to me that what you see is pretty much what you get: a centrist-to-conservative Democrat, as amply demonstrated by her voting record. She is not the socialist harridan of so much right-wing imagination. But the idea that she’s some kind of crypto-Religious Right Manchurian Candidate is one of the least plausible accounts of her true motivations I’ve ever heard.

    Also, the suggestion that supposed HRC influences Reinhold Neibuhr and Paul Tillich taught that Christians should focus on individual piety instead of social change is laughable.

  • Subverting sacrifice

    In comments here Rick Ritchie and I were discussing the ways in which the Christian story may or may not subvert or transform conventional notions of “sacrifice.”

    Part of what I find so appealing about Christianity is the way it turns upside-down our “natural” expectations about the meanings of things like power, glory, love, etc. Instead of a God who lords it over us from a distant heaven above, we’re shown a God who comes down to us in the form of a “suffering servant.” Sometimes we forget what a radical concept that is and try to shoehorn this story into more conventional “religious” categories. This is what I at any rate understand Luther to be getting at when he talks about the “theology of the cross.”

    Anyway, my thinking and reading on the matter has led me to the same conclusion when it comes to the question of “sacrifice.” The “religious” idea of sacrifice is that we humans provide something satisfying to God in order to get into his good graces. This can be understood in “primitive” terms (literal sacrifices – human or animal) or in more “refined” ethical terms (we’re good so God rewards us).

    But Christianity turns this on its head in a number of ways: God initiates the sacrifice by coming to rescue us from our sin and folly, much like the gracious father who rushes out to embrace his prodigal son. And God, rather than demanding sacrifice from us as the “price of admission” to his love, actually sacrifices himself. He “takes our place.” Rather than insisting that sinners be made into saints before entering into fellowship with them, he enters into fellowship with them resulting in their sanctification (Anders Nygren says this is the essential difference between Catholicism and Protestantism, but I’m sure that’s not entirely fair), paying the price for creating the possibility of fellowship himself.

    Now, clearly certain Christians have tried to apply the standard “religious” idea of sacrifice to what happens in the death and resurrection of Jesus. That is, God is pictured as requiring a sacrifice before he can forgive our sins, and this sacrifice is provided by the death of Jesus. But, as many have pointed out, since this sacrifice originates in the will of God and in God’s love for us, it’s far from clear it was “required” in the sense of a prerequisite for forgiveness.

    Moreover, is this “religious” view of sacrifice sufficiently radical in appreciating what God does? I’ve been meaning for a while to dig into the work of Catholic theologian James Alison. He came up again in a sermon I heard this weekend, and yesterday I finally sat down and read his article “Some thoughts on the Atonement.” Alison, building on the thought of Rene Girard, contends that God’s work in Christ subverts and explodes what he calls the “Aztec” view of sacrifice (i.e. what I’ve been calling the standard “religious” view), and that this radical reconfiguring of sacrifice is presaged in the rite of Atonement from Leviticus.

    I can’t do justice to Alison’s argument, but I think what he’s getting at, if I understand him, does capture some of the radical topsy-turvyness that I’ve been talking about. Alison talks about the story of David handing over the sons of Saul to the Gibeonites to be executed as an expiation for their father’s sins against that people. He continues:

    The interesting thing about [this story] is that it reminds us of what we often forget: the language of expiation. Here King David is expiating something, offering propitiation to the Gibeonites. In other words, the Gibeonites have a right to demand vengeance. Can you remember where this passage comes into the NT? St Paul seems to know about this: “What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not also give us all things with him?” (Rom 8:31-32) Do you see what St Paul is playing with there? St Paul is saying that God, unlike King David, did not seek someone else as a stand-in sacrifice to placate us, but gave his own son to be the expiation, putting forth the propitiation.

    In that text, who is propitiating whom? King David is propitiating the Gibeonites by means of Saul’s sons. God is propitiating us. In other words, who is the angry divinity in the story? We are. That is the purpose of the atonement. We are the angry divinity. We are the ones inclined to dwell in wrath and think we need vengeance in order to survive. God was occupying the space of our victim so as to show us that we need never do this again. This turns on its head the Aztec understanding of the atonement. In fact it turns on its head what has passed as our penal substitutionary theory of atonement, which always presupposes that it is us satisfying God, that God needs satisfying, that there is vengeance in God. Whereas it is quite clear from the NT that what was really exciting to Paul was that it was quite clear from Jesus’ self-giving, and the “out-pouring of Jesus’ blood”, that this was the revelation of who God was: God was entirely without vengeance, entirely without substitutionary tricks; and that he was giving himself entirely without ambivalence and ambiguity for us, towards us, in order to set us “free from our sins” – “our sins” being our way of being bound up with each other in death, vengeance, violence and what is commonly called “wrath”.

    I’m not sure I’d go all the way with Alison’s Girardian analysis here, but this is the kind of thing I was thinking of when I wrote that “I wonder how much of that language [of sacrifice, expiation, etc.] has its meaning radically subverted by the event of God becoming incarnate and suffering? For instance, sacrifice is usually understood as humans offering something to God in order to assuage the divine anger. But here God provides the sacrifice, which seems to at least call into question the transactional connotations that the language of sacrifice often carries.”