A Thinking Reed

Month: June 2008

  • Stimulate me, baby

    I picked up the June issue of Harper’s before a train trip a few weeks ago because of the its interesting-looking cover story on the strife in the Episcopal Church. But only last night, as was I catching up on the rest of the issue, did I come across Jonathan Rowe’s “Our Phony Economy,” which was an abridged version of testimony he gave before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Subcommittee on Interstate Commerce. Rowe is identified as “codirector of West Marin Commons, a community-organizing group, in California.”

    The points Rowe makes are not unfamiliar ones, but they don’t seem to have sunk in to our collective consciousness, so they probably bear repeating. In essence, he is criticizing the use of GDP to measure economic well-being, making two major points about its limitations: it doesn’t count activities that exist outside of the formal cash economy, and it counts anything within that economy, whether constructive or destructive, as a contribution to well-being. In the guise of being “value neutral” it actually obscures an accurate picture of our economic life and the values it actually serves.

    Like I said, this is a point that has been made before, particularly by ecologically-minded thinkers. It’s reinforced by the fact that the human economy is only one part of what you might call the total earth economy, and any accounting of economic activity that neglects its impact on the ecosystem is partial and misleading.

    Rowe says:

    The purpose of an economy is to meet human needs in such a way that life becomes in some respect richer and better in the process. It is not simply to produce a lot of stuff. Stuff is a means, not an end. Yet current modes of economic measurement focus almost entirely on means. For example, an automobile is productive if it produces transportation. But today we look only at the cars produced per hour worked. More cars can mean more traffic and therefore a transportation system that is less productive. The medical system is the same. The aim should be healthy people, not the sale of more medical services and drugs. Now, however, we assess the economic contribution of the medical system on the basis of treatments rather than results. Economists see nothing wrong with this. They see no problem that the medical system is expected to produce 30 or 40 percent of new jobs over the next thirty years. “We have to spend our money on something,” shrugged a Stanford economist to the New York Times. This is more insanity. Next we will be hearing about “disease-led recovery.” To stimulate the economy we will have to encourage people to be sick so that the economy can be well.

    I read this just a couple of days after receiving my “economic stimulus check” from the Treasury, so this is timely. Purist free-marketeers may accuse Rowe of attacking a straw man here, but I think it’s pretty hard to argue that our policy isn’t to encourage consumption, without much regard for what is consumed.

    What the environmental and resource crunch may require, then, is for us to think about the ends served by our economic life. It’s not enough to simply take whatever desires human beings may happen to have (or have had socialized into them) as given and use the economy as a mechanism for satisfying them, because those desires are essentially infinite, and we live in a finite world. Instead, we might need to start distinguishing more between those desires that lead to beneficial ends and those that lead to destructive ones.

    Again, nothing particularly new. But the question for me is whether this can be done in a way that respects people’s freedom. Apart from obvious physical harms, distinguishing between beneficial and destructive activities is tricky, especially without a shared philosophical framework of some sort. This is the real strength of liberalism: it promises to deliver social peace without taking a stand on controversial questions about the purpose and higher ends of living. However, if unrestrained human desire begins to bump up against very real ecological limits, this kind of neutrality may no longer be possible. Can liberalism provide an argument for self-restraint?

    Or could it be that liberalism doesn’t need to provide this kind of argument? All it needs to do, you might say, is put a price on those “externalities” generated by our economy–environmental, medical, etc.–and let the market do its thing. When it costs to pollute, people will pollute less. QED. This all assumes, of course, that we can put a non-arbitrary price on pollution, not to mention things like species extinction, destruction of wilderness, etc. And, anyway, is the worth of everything else ultimately a function of human preference, or does it have its own intrinsic, objective value? At this point we’re getting into questions that are downright philosophical, if not theological, and my skepticism that we can simply avoid the debate about ends and values returns.

    It may be, then, that democracy–understood not just as sheer majority rule but as a process for deliberating about shared goods–is necessary to fence in an economy that threatens to overturn all limits. But can our actually existing democracy even be said to approximate such a process? The jostling of interest groups and the lies of spinmeisters bear little resemblence to the ideal of a high-minded New England town meeting so beloved of proponents of deliberative democracy. Moreover, can democratic reasoning about ends, expressing itself in communal self-determination, coexist with a generous sphere of liberty for personal action? I have both libertarian and communitarian impulses, but I’m not sure there’s a politics that doesn’t require some kind of tradeoff between them. My thoughts on this are very much in flux at this point…

  • An ethic of sustainable use

    I got an e-mail with a link to this interview with Michael Pollan (You too can subscribe to the Michael Pollan e-mail list!) at this new site sponsored by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

    Three points stood out for me. One, the primary distinction between food systems is fossil fuel-based vs. solar energy based. Two, food is inherently a political issue because “your health is inseparable from the health of whole food chain that you’re a part of.” Three, there is a tension between the “wildnerness ethic” of classical environmetnalism and the “sustainability ethic” that is more focused on how we should live in the world which we inevitably change by being here. Bill McKibben describes this as the tension between the Edward Abbey outlook and the Wendell Berry outlook. Both are necessary, he says, but one emphasizes a “hands off” approach to nature while the other emphasizes the notion of good stewardship in the ways that we cultivate nature.

    Pollan thinks that we’re living in a time when we need more emphasis on the sustainability ethic:

    We’ve had in this country what I call a wilderness ethic that’s been very good at telling us what to preserve. You know, eight percent of the American landmass we’ve kind of locked up and thrown away the key. That’s a wonderful achievement and has given us things like the wilderness park.

    This is one of our great contributions to world culture, this idea of wilderness. On the other hand, it’s had nothing to say of any value for the ninety-two percent of the landscape that we cannot help but change because this is where we live. This is where we grow our food, this is where we work. Essentially the tendency of the wilderness ethic is to write that all off. Land is either virgin or raped. It’s an all or nothing ethic. It’s either in the realm of pristine, preserved wilderness, or it’s development — parking lot, lawn.

    That seems right to me. As I mentioned in my previous post, Tzachi Zamir distinguishes between using and exploiting animals, where the former is sometimes permissible. We can, he says, enter into reciprocal relationships with animals that we benefit from, but which the animals also benefit from in a way that makes them better off than they would’ve been in the wild. Keeping some kinds of pets, he argues, are examples of this kind of relationship. Exploitation, on the other hand, is when the animal is made worse off than it would’ve been otherwise – we benefit at the animal’s expense.

    I’m not sure this distinction is completely generalizable, but it might help in thinking about what an ethic of sustainability (vs. one of exploitation) would look like. Organic farming vs. farming that sucks the nutrients out of land and requires chemical fertilizers to keep it arable might be an example of “use” vs. “exploitation.”

    UPDATE: Thinking about this a bit more – obviously there’s a sense in which it’s difficult to think of “the land” as having interests in the same way that animals do, nevertheless it still seems reasonable to say that it can be made better or worse off in an objective, if not subjective sense. What I mean is that the land, understood as an ecosystem, has a certain telos that can be frustrated by things we do to it. The more interesting question is whether the land can actually be made better off by us than it would’ve been if we’d simply left it alone. Or is any development simply a concession to our needs? From a theological perspective, there are reasons for thinking that the cultivated garden is superior to sheer wilderness, but there are also reasons for thinking that the wilderness is as God intended it to be. Worth thinking about some more…

  • June reading notes

    In lieu of full-on book blogging, here are capsule reviews of some books I’ve read over the past month or so:

    A Moral Climate, Michael Northcott A theological ethicist and priest of the Episcopal Church of Scotland on climate change. Well-informed by the science (as far as I can judge), but also provides a specifically theological perspective. In particular, he suggests ways in which certain Christian practices (pilgrimage, feasting) can provide alternatives to the way of life encouraged by hyper-industrial capitalism that can both help us live more gently on the world and witness to God’s order of things. I wasn’t, however, convinced by his wholesale denunciation of capitalism and industrialism; he appears to think that changing the way we consume things, particularly energy, is insufficient and at times I got the impression that he thinks we should all return to simple pre-industrial village life. A little too much romanticizing of pre-modern communal subsistence for my taste.

    The Big Questions in Science and Religion, Keith Ward Characterisitically clear and accessible philosophical theology from ATR favorite Ward. Each chapter deals with a particularly knotty issue raised by the science-religion intersection (e.g. creation, the soul, free will), which Ward seeks to untangle in generally pro-religion ways. In essence, he argues that science may require some revision of the way we think about spiritual matters, but the claims of reductionist materialism are vastly overblown. A particular strength of this book is that Ward considers different religious perspectives on science, not just Christian or Western ones. For instance, he discusses how a Buddhist and a Christian might respond differently to questions about the self and its relation to brain science. In this he’s continuing the method he pioneered in his four-volume comparative theology. I’m hard pressed to think of many other contemporary theologians who’ve given such detailed attention to non-Christian faiths.

    Christ and Culture, H. Richard Niebuhr There’s not much I could say about this book–a recognized classic–that hasn’t been said elsewhere. I thoroughly enjoyed it though and really appreciated how Niebuhr was able to sympathetically enter into the five perspectives on “Christ and culture.” Personally, I found myself most in sympathy with the “Christ and culture in paradox” and the “Christ above culture” stances, but I can see the reasons for as well as the limitations of all of them. I was reading the 50th anniversary edition, but, with Christians continuing to argue about their witness to the wider culture, this book is still relevant.

    Saving Belief, Austin Farrer I mentioned this book in a post the other day. Farrer’s primer on Christian belief is a small gem of classical Anglican lucidity. Both orthodox and liberal, and reformed and catholic, in the best sense. I found his explanation of the Atonement particularly compelling.

    Ethics and the Beast, Tzachi Zamir This brief book by philosopher Zamir makes the case for animal liberation from an explicitly “speciesist” perspective. By this he means that radical reform in our treatment of animals doesn’t require an equally radical rearranging of our conceptual furniture. We can maintain that human beings are superior to non-human animals, but still embrace the goals of animal liberation. He does this by showing that common moral beliefs that in no way contradict our speciesist intuitions lead to unexpectedly radical conclusions about our treatment of animals. Noteworthy too are his discussions of vegetarianism vs. veganism (an animal-friendly utopia, he maintains, will stilll allow for egg and dairy production, suitably reformed) and using vs. exploiting animals.

    Currently reading:

    Red Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson This is the first book in an award-winning trilogy about human colonists on Mars in the mid-to-late 21st century. It’s what the kids call “hard” SF, I belive. Everything is, at least to me, based on plausible near-future science. Very compelling characters and thematic threads about creating a new society and trying leave some of Earth’s violent baggage behind. As a skeptic about both human nature and space colonization I think it’s doomed to failure, of course. But we’ll see where things go in the second and third books.

    The Message and the Kingdom, Richard Horsley and Neil Asher Silberman My pastor recommended this social history of early Christianity. It tries to put Jesus, Paul, and the early Christian movement in the socio-political context of the Roman Empire in the 1st century. I have a feeling that the none-too-subtle left-wing politics (the back cover bears blurbs from John Dominic Crossan and John Shelby Spong) may get kind of annoying, but so far I’m finding this an informative read.

    Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, Michael Moynihan and Didrik Soderlind Part music history, part true crime story – this tells the tale of the “black metal” scene centered in Norway in the 1990s. Some of the participants started to take the whole “evil” thing a little too seriously, resulting in church burnings, murder, and various occult activities. Promises to be fascinating.

    Finally, our public library had a nice, two-volume paperback edition of Schleiermacher’s The Christian Faith, which I checked out. I’m not sure I’ll be equal to the task, but I thought it would be good to stretch my mind by spending some time with a bona fide theological classic. Plus, it’s a period of theology I know very little about and I can’t help but think that all the bad press Schleiermacher has gotten in 20th century theology is a bit one-sided.

  • The crunchy libertarian

    While we’re on the subject of food, I’m very much looking forward to John Schwenkler‘s upcoming article on “culinary conservatism” for the American Conservative, which he mentions here. In the same post, John makes the case for what I think it’s fair to call a libertarian approach to food production, the idea being that our current system is the result of excessive government intervention in the form of subsidies, tariffs, foolish regulations, etc. (as amply documented by Michael Pollan and others) and that small, local and organic farms would be in a better position to compete with WalMart and big ag under a more laissez-faire regime. I plead ignorance as to whether this would actually work, and I think that some regulation (at least to limit harm in the form of environmental externalities, animal cruelty, worker exploitation and so forth) is necessary, but I do find the aspiration of attaining green ends by libertarian means an appealing one.

  • Eating local vs. going meatless

    An interesting, though longish, post at the “Ethicurean” reporting on a new study that contends that how food is produced is more important than how far it has traveled (“food miles”) as far as greenhouse gas emissions go. Specifically, reducing your meat consumption can go further than buying local toward reducing your footprint. Not that there aren’t other good reasons for buying local, as the post points out.

    My hunch, though, is that, as far as individual consumers go, this all remains largely guesswork until we put a price on greenhouse emissions, whether through a tax or some cap-and-trade scheme. Not least because it’s often difficult if not impossible for individuals to know how their food was produced or how far it traveled to get to their plate.

  • Humane California

    As far as California ballot initiatives go this year, all eyes will undoubtedly be on the one to overturn the state supreme court’s recent decision on same-sex marriage. But allow me to draw your attention to another ballot intitiative of potentially far-reaching consequence: the Prevention of Farm Animal Cruelty Act, which would phase out phase out veal crates, gestation crates, and battery cages. As Erik Marcus puts it, “There’s probably never been a more important campaign in the animal protection movement’s history, both in terms of the number of animals affected and the precedent it will set for outlawing factory farming cruelties elsewhere in the United States.” Unsurprisingly, an industry group–called, ironically, Calfornians for Safe Food–is raising funds to defeat the measure. Wayne Pacell of the Humane Society details those efforts here.

    Opposition to the most egregious practices of factory farming is something that I think pretty much all people of good will can get behind. You don’t need to be a vegan or vegetarian to think that the animals we raise for food shouldn’t be subjected to extreme confinement and their attendant cruelties. Not to mention the fact that factory farms are huge contributers to environmental despoilation and, arguably, the destruction of rural communities.

    I’m not much of a proselytizer, but if you’re a resident of the Golden State, you might want to consider voting yes on this measure. The rest of us can, if we’re so inclined, contribute to the effort here.

  • “Food nannyism” and animal cruelty

    Jim Henley offers the obvious, but no less sound for that, rebuttle to worries that lump things like banning trans fats and foie gras into the category of “food nannysim”:

    In a video bemoaning food nannies, Baylen Linnekin, who is a good guy and whose writing I enjoy, begs a question. He declares NYC’s bans on trans fats and foie gras to be the same kind of lamentable “Nanny State” restriction. This is surely true if geese are like lipids and smearing pans or mixing foodstuffs with fats is like forcing food down the throats of living birds. But if they’re not, we have issues.

    A lot of anti-animal rights arguments, especially those produced by (ahem, industry funded) think tanks, make much hay out of “nanny statism” and the supposed infringement on consumer freedom that would result from serious animal welfare measures. But, as Mr. Henley makes plain, the equation changes once sentient creatures are involved. Whatever we might think of paternalistic measures like trans fat bans, animal abuse is not a victimless crime.

  • A democracy of sinners

    Via Christopher, a meditation on violence, redemption, and the importance of holding on to our doctrine of sin:

    There is Good News hidden in the doctrine of sin. Sin is the great equalizer. Sin levels the playing field and throws us back on God’s loving kindness. In Paul’s vision, Jews are no better and certainly no worse than Gentiles. In other words, insiders are neither better nor worse than outsiders. We have been called but not because we deserve it. We have been chosen—not for privilege but for service.

    This makes me think of Alan Jacobs’ “universal democracy of sinners” that Jeremy blogged about a while ago.

  • The price of not having cable

    One week later, and I’m still waiting for the Sci Fi Channel to post the Battlestar Galactica (sort of) season finale to their website (which, by all accounts, was mind-blowing). Grumble.

  • Whither the ELCA blogosphere?

    Maybe it’s bad form to call out bloggers who haven’t posted anything in a while, but I can’t help but notice that several bloggers from my sidebar who’ve been inactive for months are ELCA Lutherans! I’m talking about Chip Frontz, Andy of Sinning Boldly, and Thomas of Without Authority. What’s the deal here, fellas? What opportunities and pleasures does “real life” offer that can’t be substituted for with blogging? Huh? Are you trying to drive me into the arms of the Episcopalians? We’ve gotta represent here!