A Thinking Reed

Category: Environment

  • 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)

  • 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.

  • Political self ID – a Christian humanist?

    This is an exercise in bloggy narcissism (or is that a redundancy?) so feel free to skip this post.

    The other day a friend asked me to describe my political outlook and I couldn’t come up with a very satisfying answer. Having persued the blog he suggested religious conservative, but to me that sounds a bit too close to Jerry Falwell.

    I definitely thought of myself as a conservative at one point, though lately I’ve been toying with the idea of “Christian humanist” as the best descriptor of my overall outlook.

    Anyway, here are a handful of posts on my various statements of political principle and self-identification, if anyone’s interested.

    “Apologia pro vote sua” (On voting for the Green Party in 2004)

    “…on Sort of Going from Right to Left or How I Became a Quasi-Pacifist Conservative Vegetarian Pro-Lifer”

    “Am I a Conservative?”

    To me, what a “Christian humanist” position would emphasize is the dignity of the human person rooted in a transcendent moral order while at the same time recognizing human frailty and our limited apprehension of that order this side of the eschaton.

    This leads me to be in favor of strong limits on government power and to oppose, or at least be extremely wary of, the destruction of human life in the forms of abortion and euthanasia (traditional “conservative” views).

    On the other hand, economics was made for human beings not vice versa, so the idolatry of the free market has to go (see Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, Roepke’s A Humane Economy). State killing in the form of war and capital punishment is at least equally as troubling and difficult to justify as other threats to life. And human beings can’t flourish while despoiling the environment.

    Throw in a general skepticism about bio-engineering (see Lewis’ Abolition of Man, Huxley’s Brave New World) and trepidation about unchecked technology more generally (Borgmann, Jardine, Ellul) and you’ve got an electric conservative-liberal-green-libertarian stew.

  • Contra the contrarians

    Bradford Plumer debunks the claims of some of the recent debunkers of conventional wisdom about battling climate change, but concedes that they have a point in that navigating a “green” lifestyle is in fact a tricky thing to do (e.g. eating local food is a good rule of thumb, but there are exceptions). However, he also points out that serious political action (e.g. a carbon tax) would make this much simpler.

  • Libertarians and animal rights

    Jim Henley asked for a libertarian justification for animal cruelty laws here. Other libs have chimed in here and here.

    As it happens, I was recently reading an article by Stephen R. L. Clark called “Animals, Ecosystems, and the Liberal Ethic” (The Monist, Vol. 70:1, Jan. 1987) where he tries to articulate a rationale for protecting animals (and ecosystems) that arises out of liberal/libertarian ethic.

    We’ve already seen that Clark is something of an anarcho-conservative, and here he takes the tack of showing that a concern for libertarian style rights is by no means incompatible with concern for animal rights.

    What Clark suggests is, in essence, that we can’t assume that the differences between humans and animals are so great that the former always have a full complement of rights while the latter have none:

    First, it is implausible to claim that the only evil done in imprisoning, tormenting and killing even a rational agent is that we thereby interfere with her moral choices: much of the evil is simply that we do what she does not want done. That evil is also done if our victim is non-rational, not morally autonomous. What difference does it really make whether or not she has or could have a principled objection to our behaviour? If she has no will in the matter I do not violate her will, but I clearly violate her wishes.

    Secondly, what ground have we got to make so radical a distinction between wishes and the will, between the desires and projects of a nonhuman or sub-normal human and the principled will of a rational agent? Why should it be supposed that I make my claims upon the world as a carefully moral being, in some way that a non-rational being could not manage? “A cat who is being hurt will struggle, scratch and try to bite. Why is not this a claiming of its rights?” (Sprigge 1984 p. 442). Why isn’t a blackbird claiming his rights when he proclaims his territorial possession? What is lacking in too much discussion of these questions is any serious attention to what ‘animals’ are like, and what evidence there is for the vast difference in nature that humanists like [H.J.] McCloskey must conceive. It is quite inadequate to appeal to current English linguistic usage, as if that settled the question. If it is wrong (not merely imprudent) to batter human infants this may be partly because it seems likely to interfere with their future projects, but it is chiefly wrong because they do not like it, nor would they like its further consequences if they knew of them. The same wrong is done in battering baboons: who could imagine that baboons don’t mind?

    It follows, if the abstract argument for natural human rights must be extended to allow similar rights to other agents (even if not strictly ‘moral’ agents), that our property rights in non-human animals must often be suspect. A right that licenses the violation of a right is no right at all, and ‘self-owning’ is a category more widely extended than we had thought. A being ‘owns itself if its behaviour is the product of its own desires and beliefs, if it can locate itself within the physical and social world, and alter its behaviour to take account of other creature’s lives and policies (see Clark 1981). This, I take it, is [Tom] Regan’s concept of what it is to be ‘the subject of a life’, not merely living (1983 p. 243). Such self-owners are, in the relevant sense, equals, and a just, liberal society cannot allow them to be owned by others, even if it allows them to be employed on terms not strictly of their own making.

    The libertarian argument is that “self-owners” have the right not to be arbitrarily subjected to the will of another. Clark’s contention is that “self-owner” covers a wider range of creatures than just human beings. This is essentially a version of the so-called argument from marginal cases: it’s very difficult to specify a set of criteria for whatever morally important category you like (self-owner, person, rational agent, etc.) that includes all and only human beings. Either it will be drawn so narrowly as to exclude some classes of humans, or it will be drawn so widely that at least some non-human animals count.

    What’s noteworthy is that a lot of libertarians seem to want to maintain the traditional status of human beings as sole rights-bearers without the metaphysics to back it up. An Aristotelian worldview that insisted on big bright distinctions between natural kinds might be able to provide support for this view, as might some religious views. But a world of evolutionary development where living things exist along a continuum without sharp breaks seems to sit more comfortably with the idea of a continuum of moral rights.

    Clark’s distinction between animals being “owned” and being “employed on terms not strictly of their own making” injects some fuzziness into thinking about what might actually be entailed by all this. Is there a sense in which animals could be said to “consent” to at least some of the relationships that have evolved between them and human beings? Could domestication be understood as somehow analogous to the entering into of a partnership? Wherever we draw that line, though, some forms of wanton cruelty would seem to be easily ruled out. Also, I might add, would things like factory farming: an arrangement which is extremely difficult to see any animal “consenting” to in however attenuated a sense we can come up with.

  • Faith on the farm

    The New York Times looks at a variety of religiously-motivated farmers concened with good stewardship, humane treatment of animals, and fair treatment of farm workers.

    It’s always tough to know how widespread the phenomena discussed in these kinds of “trend” stories actually are, but it’s heartening to think that “environmentalism” is no longer a dirty word even among some very conservative religious believers. I think this may well be a function of age; an older generation of religious leaders may have dismissed environmental concerns as inimical to our glorious system of “free enterprise” or even condemned it as a kind of ersatz religion, but younger believers don’t seem to be carrying that baggage:

    “Food and the environment is the civil rights movement for people under the age of 40,” said the Rev. John Wimberly, pastor of the Western Presbyterian Church in Washington.

  • CO2 emissions for me, not for thee

    Ross Clark points out that certain high-profile policies in the developed world ostensibly aimed at reducing global warming actually function as a protectionist racket against the developing world.

    The two most significant that he mentions are the attempt to enforce caps on emissions on countries like China and India without taking per capita emissions into account and the popularization of “food miles” as short hand for carbon emissions – thus favoring local food over imported – when the reality is far more complex (Jim Mason and Peter Singer talk about this in their The Ethics of What We Eat – “buy local” may often serve as a good rule of thumb, but not as a hard-and-fast rule).

    The entire article is well worth a read. Clark worries that “increasingly the politics appear to be shifting the burden of cutting carbon emissions on to the world’s poor: they must be kept in a state of noble peasanthood so that we can carry on living pretty much as before.”

  • Asking the right questions

    “Eco-economist” Herman Daly tries to inject some clarity into the debate on climate change. Even if some of the details are up in the air, he says, the trajectory is clear and we need to ask if this is the direction we want to be going in.

    It seems to me that a lot of the climate change “skepticism” (which I put in scarequotes because much of it is an industry-funded attempt to muddy the waters, not a good faith pursuit of the truth; see the chapter on climate change skepticism/denial in George Monbiot’s Heat for some damning details) is about pouncing on uncertainty at the level of detail, whereas the big picture remains pretty clear. Take for instance the way that skeptics jumped on some recent minor revision by NASA of some temperature rankings for the US (see this post for some clarification, via Confessing Evangelical).

    As Daly says, if the big picture is clear, then by asking the right questions, like “can we systematically continue to emit increasing amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere without eventually provoking unacceptable climate changes?” or “what is it that is causing us to systematically emit ever more CO2 into the atmosphere?” or “does growth in GDP at the current margin and scale in the U.S. really make us richer? Might it not be increasing environmental and social costs faster than it increases production benefits, thereby making us poorer?” can yield a fairly definitive answer to the question of what direction we should be going in.

    As he puts it:

    Setting policy in accord with first principles allows us to act now without getting mired in endless delays caused by the uncertainties of complex empirical measurements and predictions. Of course, the uncertainties do not disappear. We will experience them as surprising consequences, both agreeable and disagreeable, necessitating mid-course correction to the policies enacted on the basis of first principles. But at least we will have begun moving in the right direction.

    I discussed Daly and theologian John Cobb’s book For the Common Good a bit here and here.

    In a similar vein, D.W. Congdon is asking some questions for churches about consumerism, which is surely relevant to this topic.

  • Christians and markets

    Here’s a smart article by Kathryn D. Blanchard, a professor of Religious Studies at Alma College. She argues that Christians, especially the Christian intelligensia, need to get beyond abstractions about “the market” and “capitalism” and look at the ways in which particular markets can serve or impede human flourishing.

    She makes some points that ought to be better known among Christian thinkers than they apparently are: that markets are as much about cooperation as competition, that in the real world human relationships, including market relationships, are better described by language more complex than that of narrow utility maximization, and that there is great potential for good and evil in the way markets work.

    Lately some Christian thinkers have taken to condemning “capitalism” or “the market” wholesale, but, instead of proposing some alternative system like communism or socialism, they propose the church itself as an embodiment of an alternative system of economic practice. No doubt there are good reasons for promoting alternative economic arrangements for various purposes, but Prof. Blanchard is surely right to point out that it’s folly to suppose that markets are evil per se or that one should try to extricate oneself from them:

    Most markets in the real world, however, tend to fall somewhere in the grey area between good and evil. They are the media by which moderately well-off, educated, responsible and well-intentioned Christians (you know who you are) acquire objects of ambivalence, such as organic food, liberal arts educations, modest homes, Italian wine, the internet, comfortable or even fashionable shoes, air conditioning, jogging strollers, or beds. These are items that most of us not only enjoy (or hope to enjoy someday) but—let’s be honest—believe we cannot live without, even if we feel somewhat sheepish about them.

    Later she writes:

    Quixotic attacks on a generalized capitalism can give way to fruitful interactions with particular markets and market behaviors, starting with our own and moving outward—especially with an eye toward the coercive externalities they may visit on our neighbors near and far. We must get up off the communion rail and bear witness to the “kin-dom” of God in small acts such as writing to our elected representatives about justice for migrant workers, supporting news sources that aim to reflect the truth, foregoing meat from factory farms or fresh blueberries in November, or buying carbon credits to offset the last flight we took to an annual meeting.

    With God’s help, such humble acts may lead us into bolder ones. It’s not enough to sit at our marketed computers in our market-sponsored offices writing marketable books and articles about how bad “the market” is. Like “the church,” the market is people. Our economic task is to create and support just markets, while crying out against and divesting from unjust markets.

    Obviously she isn’t proposing that the market should absorb all relationships. The error of at least some economists and libertarian types is to think that the unregulated market can effectively provide all the necessary goods for society. More sober thinkers realize the need for a strong moral, cultural, social and legal framework to keep the market “in the box.”

    Christians, I think, are often uneasy with markets in part because they rely on virtues less exalted than that of self-giving love. But Prof. Blanchard is surely correct when she says that the motives we have when we engage in behavior within markets (like in the rest of life) are more complicated than pure love or pure self-interest. As she wisely says, “the market is people” who are, decidedly, a mixed bag.