A Thinking Reed

Category: Politics

  • Put not your trust in princes, the continuing series…

    Andrew Bacevich writes that we need a wholesale repudiation of the Bush legacy in foreign policy – preventive war, “enhanced” interrogation, the metastasizing national security state, the black hole version of the executive that draws all power to itself, etc. McCain, with minor modifications, represents a continuation of the Bush legacy. It falls, then, to Obama to radically change course:

    The challenge facing Obama is clear: he must go beyond merely pointing out the folly of the Iraq war; he must demonstrate that Iraq represents the truest manifestation of an approach to national security that is fundamentally flawed, thereby helping Americans discern the correct lessons of that misbegotten conflict.

    By showing that Bush has put the country on a path pointing to permanent war, ever increasing debt and dependency, and further abuses of executive authority, Obama can transform the election into a referendum on the current administration’s entire national security legacy. By articulating a set of principles that will safeguard the country’s vital interests, both today and in the long run, at a price we can afford while preserving rather than distorting the Constitution, Obama can persuade Americans to repudiate the Bush legacy and to choose another course.

    Of course I don’t think, and I doubt Bacevich thinks, that Obama will actually do this. Most of what he’s said so far indicates a much more cautious revision to the post-9/11 national security consensus.

    I still think Obama is preferable to McCain for a host of reasons, but I’m not going to get my hopes up that he’ll heed Professor Bacevich’s sound advice.

  • 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…

  • 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.

  • Dangerous nonsense

    I’d like to register my protest at the now-widespread tendency to refer to the President as “the commander-in-chief” or worse “our commander-in-chief,” full stop. To my ear, the connotations are perilously close to those of the Roman title imperator and it makes the President sound like some kind of warrior-king.

    As the Constitution makes clear, the President is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and the rest of us haven’t been drafted yet.

  • Is same-sex marriage a threat to religious freedom?

    In the argument over same-sex marriage, social conservatives have seen a string of defeats. For all intents and purposes, they have lost the argument based on straightforward morality (“gay sex is wrong”) and the argument based on social harm (“it will undermine straight marriage”). But the last-ditch argument that, in the wake of the California ruling, seems to be getting more play is the religious freedom argument. The idea here is that traditional religious believers will be coerced into compromising their beliefs in order to accomodate gay couples. I’ve even seen some extremely hysterical people (mostly confined to blog comment threads, unsurprisingly) talking about “persecution,” the death of religious freedom in America, and so on.

    This post at the Volokh Conspiracy offers a reasoned response to all this. It examines several recent examples where SSM opponents have identified a looming threat to religious freedom and points out that, in nearly all the cases, it was either a question of a religious organization providing a public service and/or the pertinent laws were non-discrimination laws that had nothing to do with marriage per se. In other words, these were not cases of churches being forced to perform marriages between people of the same sex. The issue at hand was generally whether organizations providing public services or accomodations (whether religious or not) are free to flout anti-discrimination laws that cover sexual orientation.

    This isn’t to deny that there may at times be a genuine conflict between religious principle and politically enshrined rights. But the angst about gay marriage being the death knell of religious freedom seems to be greatly overdone.

  • A Christian defense of liberty

    The Christian Century reviews Glenn Tinder’s recent book on liberty. I haven’t read the book, but I’m a big fan of Tinder’s earlier work, The Political Meaning of Christianity, which has been aptly characterized as combining the insights of both Niebuhrs: H. Richard and Reinhold.

    From the review:

    What makes Tinder’s discussion so refreshing and timely is not merely his resistance to simplistic answers, but his willingness to explore these supremely philosophical issues from an explicitly Christian point of view. Tinder believes that arguments about liberty take on new resonance when they are voiced from within the Christian context. While the dignity of the individual can be grounded in humanistic principles, for example, those principles do not provide its best defense. For Christians, the dignity of an individual reflects the creative act of a God who made humanity in God’s own image.

    If Christ is the Logos and humans are given reason by God, then an unreasoning Christianity is a self-contradiction. Christians are by nature not dogmatic but rather “Socratic,” Tinder tells us. They fulfill their religious character through free engagement with and respect for others. “A strong faith would not recoil from dialogue” but would promote it. Thus individual liberty is an essential component of the Christian life. Protecting individual liberties is a Christian value.

    The irony here, Tinder explains, is that the positive goods of the Christian life are perhaps best realized through the Christian’s support of negative liberty. Negative liberty is freedom from constraint—from limitations imposed by the state, society, corporations and, yes, religion. It is the freedom to do what one wishes to do, and this negative liberty is reflected in the political and legal apparatus through which individuals gain license to worship freely as well as to engage in all kinds of “non-Christian” acts: premarital sex, substance abuse, adultery.

    This is timely as there seem to be a lot of Christians afoot these days disparaging “mere” negative freedom as a bourgeois, individualistic, modernist snare. “True” freedom is freedom for, they say–freedom to obey God’s will.

    Undoubtedly, obedience to God’s will can be said to be a “higher” freedom. But two qualifications need to be registered. First, negative freedom, or freedom from constaint, seems to be a necessary condition for the higher form of freedom. Obedience that is compelled isn’t obedience worthy of the gospel. Second, when people talk about true freedom being found in obedience to God, they often elide the thorny issue of how we discern God’s will and who has the authority to interpret it. All too often in the church’s history, the freedom of obedience to God has been the “freedom” to obey some particular group of people who’ve set themselves up as God’s official spokesmen.

  • Handful o’ links

    Britain’s Labour Party needs to reinvent itself as a new liberal party.

    Obama vs. McCain on climate and energy policy – not the same.

    Animals as gentically modified drug machines.

    Is Google re-wiring our brains?

    Obama: what kind of liberal?