A Thinking Reed

Category: Politics

  • Alterna-nomics

    I finally got my hands on a copy of Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy and I’m tempted to call it my non-fiction book of 2007. It manages to be both troubling and hopeful as it paints a bleak picture of what our present obsession with “growth” is doing to us and to the planet, while holding up examples of alternatives to full-speed-ahead globalism that actually seem to work.

    McKibben has written about environmental issues for years, publishing the first popular work about global warming back in the late 80s. But here he offers a critique of our entire modern economic system and its effects on body, soul and environment. His argument is actually very straightforward: conventional economics which seeks growth as its ultimate aim is failing us for three reasons. First, it breeds inequality, something which has acheived fairly staggering proportions. Second, it’s bumping up against the physical limits of the planet, both in the effects its having on the environment and its depedence on resources that are rapidly dwindling. Third, it’s not making us happy.

    It’s this last argument that offers a somewhat novel twist on an assessment that will be familiar to many. To critique go-go capitalism for creating inequality or ravaging the earth is nothing new (even if we still haven’t really accepted it). But the idea that all that stuff isn’t making us any happier flies in the face of some of the most fundamental assumptions of our political and economic system.

    His contention is that, for a long time, More and Better have come as a package deal. As we get richer we get happier. Someone who shares a tiny room with five other people, doesn’t get enough to eat, and works long hours of drugery isn’t likely to be happy. So, an increase in wealth can make a real difference for someone like that. The problem is that we in the prosperous West have largely overshot the point of diminishing returns: more isn’t better anymore. In fact, there’s evidence to suggest that Americans, for instance, are less happy on the whole than they were in, say, the 1950s despite tremendous increases in wealth.

    I tend to agree with Caleb Stegall who, in his review in the American Conservative, lamented McKibben’s reliance on the trendy new “science” of “happiness research,” but I suspect that McKibben is drawing from deeper wells than that. Virtually our entire religious and philosophical heritage has told us that riches aren’t the path to lasting happiness and satisfaction, and, in fact, are often obstacles to it. If “happiness studies” provides some measure of empirical verification of this tried truth, great. But I don’t think much in McKibben’s argument really hangs on it.

    Part of the problem, McKibben thinks, is that our greater wealth has come at the price of the erosion of our communities. Getter richer has meant working longer hours, being willing to move frequently in order to climb the ladder of success, and generally maintaining tenuous relationships with those around us. A recent Washington Post piece illustrates the point: busy professionals are actually outsourcing the tasks of daily life to professional “lifestyle managers.” McKibben calls this phenomenon “hyper indvidualism,” the way our wealth insulates us from the demands, but also the support, provided by community.

    McKibben recognizes that wealth and its attendant individualism has benefits, but he thinks the pendulum has swung too far away from community. Socialism was a failure, and the market works. But we need markets that are “embedded” in social contexts that tame and humanize them. McKibben’s favorite metaphor for his vision is the farmer’s market, a place where people come to buy and sell, but which is knit together by thicker relationships than those at the supermarket (or on the Internet).

    Localism becomes the key virtue in the alternative economics that McKibben is encouraging us to build. Not only are local economies more ecologically durable (globalism as we know it is probably dependent on what will turn out to be a one-shot binge of fossil fuels), but they enable communities to flourish and individuals to find contexts in which they can be at home. McKibben is at his best as a reporter and storyteller, and much of the book consists of his descriptions of local economies in action: a farmers’ co-op in Vermont, a community department store created as an intentional alternative to Wal-Mart, local radio, Cuban farmers forced to turn to sustainable agriculture once they could no longer depend on industrial subsidy from the Soviet Union, experiments with local currencies, and other attempts to live outside the channels of the global marketplace.

    To me one of the most important chapters is the final one, “The Durable Future.” The moral trump card that defenders of mainstream globalization inevitably use is the poor people of the Third World. Farmers markets and localism may be well and good, they say, but fast-paced industrial growth is the only way to lift the millions and millions of desperately poor people in the world up to a decent standard of living.

    McKibbon concedes that growth is necessary for the poorest people in the world. As we saw before, below a certain point misery and poverty certainly go together. But, he points out, there’s good reason to believe that the earth can’t handle everyone living like Americans. If everyone in China drove a car, for instance, the CO2 emissions from China alone would exceed the rest of the world combined. Not to mention soil erosion, pollution, water shortages, and the rest of the environmental strains that go along with rapid industrialization, which are making themselves felt in China now. It’s also not clear that the rest of the world can even absorb all the goods the Chinese (not to mention everyone else) need to produce in order to “grow” themselves out of poverty.

    Furthermore, growth in the developing world often occurs as a result of mining natural resources and converting peasant farming to commodity farming, both of which have severe negative “externalities” ranging from the degradation of ecosystems to mass unemployment and migration from the countryside to urban slums and shantytowns. Overall it’s far from clear that the tide can rise fast and furiously enough to lift all boats without drowning the people unable to climb aboard.

    Part of the problem is that the West is exporting through its cultural products a picture of the good life that is unattainable by all the world’s people, and which would likely result in diminishing returns in happiness even if it were. But what’s the alternative? McKibben argues that “developing” countries can benefit from a turn to the local just as “developed” ones can.

    What should that development look like? It should look to the local far more than to the global. It should concentrate on creating and sustaining strong communities, not creating a culture of economic individualism. It should worry less about what’s ideal from a classical economist’s view of markets, and far more about what’s ecologically possible. It should aim not at growth but at durability. It should avoid the romantic fantasies offered by the prophets of endless wealth in favor of the blunter realism of people looking out for each other, much as they have over the millennia of human existence. In other words, it won’t be all that different from what we need to acheive in the rich world, though we begin so unimaginably far apart that for a very long time North and South will continue to look very different. (pp. 197-8)

    McKibben offers a variety of examples of local economies in the developing world that depend on intermediate technology, local know-how, community enterprise, and ecological sensibilites. “The point is not ‘Old ways good, new ways bad,” Rather, each locality, instead of relying solely on Adam Smith as filtered through the World Trade Organization and the World Bank, needs to figure out what its mix of tradition and resources and hopes allows” (p. 217). Western models of “development,” operating from decidedly mixed motives, often assume that the goal should be to make poor people just like us.

    At the end of the day, though, the biggest problem is us. We have so much (as a society; there are of course pockets of inexcusably poverty even in the richest countries) and want more still. To imagine less, not to cheer when the economy grows, would requrie a transvaluation of values that would make Nietzsche blanch. Christians, in particular, ought to be receptive to this message since our theological tradition is nearly unanimous in commending frugality, and even downright ascetical lifestyles. It’s hard to imagine an ethos more at odds with the One who told us not to lay up treasure on earth than our modern American prosperity gospel. The irony is that it’s apparently not even making us happy, but like an addict we can’t even admit we have a problem.

  • Huckabee vs. torture

    It’s a depressing sign of the times when you feel like you should praise a politician who wants to hold America to a higher standard than, say, the Inquisition or the Khmer Rouge. Still, it’s good to see Mike Huckabee joining John McCain (and Ron Paul) as a Republican against torture:

    After the Iowa poll showed that Republican voters like him but found him much less “presidential” and “electable” than Romney, Huckabee sought to build his foreign policy credentials, meeting with a group of retired generals who are in Des Moines to urge the 2008 candidates to commit to opposing torture. After the meeting, Huckabee joined Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in declaring his opposition to the interrogation procedure known as “waterboarding,” and said he would support closing the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a contrast with the other leading Republicans.

  • The case for McCain

    CPA makes it. I’ve come around, somewhat to my own surprise, to the view that, of all the likely GOP nominees, McCain is the best option. Initially I thought Romney might be the least damaging of the crop since I reasoned that he would govern as a northeastern Rockefeller Republican (far from my favorite ideological grouping, but preferable to some of the alternatives). Instead he’s decided to pander to the Jack Bauer wing of the party.

    McCain has the soundest views on torture, has a realistic view of the threat of climate change, and is actually something of a principled fiscal conservative. The problem, of course, is that his views on foreign policy are roughly 180 degrees away from mine. He doesn’t seem to have ever seen a foreign conflict he didn’t think the U.S. should be involved in. But, as I mentioned in a comment to CPA’s post, he would be the best, I think, on jus in bello issues if not jus ad bellum. That’s no small thing.

    Which is not to say that I’d actually vote for him. I think the GOP needs to lose in 2008. I’m not crazy about any of the Dems, but eight years of Republican leadership hasn’t been good for us. The GOP needs a time out to think about what they’ve done. But it’s better for all of us if both parties put forward relatively decent candidates.

  • Elizabeth Kucinich talks Ron Paul

    As a follow up to the other day’s post, Elizabeth Kucinich praises Ron Paul (via YF). And is Mrs. K a total babe, or what? Wow!

  • Huck on the environment

    Better than most of the other Republicans (except possibly McCain). Still, I think this is an argument that might appeal to conservative Christians otherwise inclined toward skepticism about climate change:

    Do you believe that human beings are the primary drivers of climate change?

    The honest answer is I don’t know. And for me, that’s not the issue. Instead of being wrapped into this political discussion of, “Is there global warming, and who caused it?,” what we need to be saying is, “Look, let’s agree that we all have responsibility to present a better planet to the next generation.” Whether or not you want to believe that it’s caused by driving to work, let’s agree that we need to take better care of the planet. Being a conservationist is the proper way to live, whether there is human-based global warming or not.

    This still doesn’t go far enough, in my view, because what policies you support will be a function of what you think the facts are. Huckabee’s reluctance to talk about the necessity of government regulation is one outcome of this agnosticism. But I also like this:

    This world doesn’t belong to me. I’m a guest here. I don’t have a right to abuse it, any more than I have a right to abuse someone else’s property if they were to let me stay in their apartment for a weekend. It’s a sin against future generations for me to act as if there are no future generations that should enjoy the world as I do.

    I love the outdoors. We have a beautiful, magnificent world: rivers and streams and mountains. I find myself overwhelmed when I look at it. I want my great-great-great-grandchildren to one day go out and smell the same fresh air, fish in wonderful streams, and be able to see the same mountains I see. I sure don’t want them to have it in worse shape and wonder why I didn’t do a better job of handing it down to them.

  • Clinton and Iraq

    Michael at Levellers expresses some well-justified outrage at Bill Clinton’s recent attempts to whitewash history and portray himself as an early opponent of the Iraq war. But as I mentioned in a comment to Michael’s post, not only did Clinton not oppose the war, his Iraq policy made it much more likely than it otherwise would’ve been.

    His administration did everything it could to hype the danger posed by Saddam’s regime, talked up the threat of WMDs, officially supported a policy of regime change, etc. After 9/11 happened Saddam was already poised as the Hitler du jour in the minds of most policymakers and pundits. Clinton did as much as anyone to promote the idea of Saddam as a great menace to the U.S. and world peace.

    Needless to say, this had numerous real-world consequences, such as the no-fly zone enforcement and the UN-approved sanctions regime. The human toll of this exercise in “soft power” is disputed, but no one denies that the people of Iraq suffered terribly, not least because they were prevented from rebuilding their country’s infrastructure which had been so badly damaged during the first Gulf War. So, far from being “opposed” to war with Iraq, the Clinton administration carried on a low-grade war against Iraq for nearly ten years.

  • The Huckster and neo-populism

    As Mike Huckabee continues to gain on Mitt Romney in Iowa, he seems to be steadily moving from a second to first-tier (or at least 1 and a half tier) candidate. Whether this is a function of his performance in the debates or his Chuck Norris endorsement remains to be seen.

    Over the last couple of days I’ve read a couple of at least partly admiring profiles of Huckabee by liberal writers in Rolling Stone and The New Yorker. These writers inevitably express shock that Huckabee doesn’t seem to be a monster despite being a crazy right-wing evangelical who doesn’t believe in evolution. But beyond his personal affability, these writers pick up on the fact that Huckabee has made some enemies on the fiscal right who’ve tagged him (rather implausibly) as a big-spending liberal.

    Personally I’m not too partial to Huckabee. He hasn’t done anything to distinguish himself from the Bush-GOP line on war, torture, and the national security state. Nor am I particularly a fan of his cultural politics.

    But what does make him interesting is that he seems to be groping toward a different economics than most of his competitors. His instincts seem to be for the working class and he’s raised issues of inequality and economic security that would otherwise not even register on the GOP’s radar. Now, this doesn’t seem to translate into a particularly coherent policy stance: for instance, he’s on record as supporting a national consumption tax in place of the income tax, which is a pretty regressive proposal. But his popularity still suggests that his rhetoric is resonating with voters.

    Michael Lind, a sharp left-of-center political analyst, argued recently that the economic “center” in American politics is shifting to the left. With the end of the Cold War, libertarianism and neoliberalism appeared to define the endpoints of the respectable spectrum on economic issues, but recent years, he says, have seen a resurgence of economic populism as a force to be reckoned with:

    Libertarians succeeded in promoting deregulation and the liberalisation of trade and finance. But, partly as a result of their success, the popular anxiety caused by globalisation doomed far more radical libertarian reforms.

    Even as libertarianism was losing its political lustre, economic populism came to life in US politics for the first time since the 1930s. Unlike the reactionary populism of Patrick Buchanan in the 1980s and 1990s, the middle-class populism represented by CNN’s Lou Dobbs cannot be dismissed as marginal. The decline of libertarianism and the revival of populism are already reshaping politics in the US and similar societies.

    What formerly was the left – welfare-state liberalism – is once again the ­centre. To its left (in economic, not social, terms) is protectionist ­populism; to its right, neoliberalism.

    If this is right, Huckabee may represent the future of the GOP as it scrambles to catch up with these new realities. Most of the other candidates are peddling the same old low-tax, anti-regulatory gospel, but if voters, even Republican ones, are increasingly feeling the pinch of economic anxiety, they may not be buying.

    What was originally called the “New Right” – the blue-collar former Democrats who came into the Republican coalition in the 70s and 80s was never really distinguished by its fealty to laissez-faire. It was motivated more by cultural politics, crime, welfare, and other concerns associated with the middle and working classes. These concerns were able to fit under the philosophical tent of antistatism because it was thought that government bureaucrats were the primary villains responsible for undermining sound virtues by meddling in communities.

    Previous to this the intellectual Right was elitist, Anglophilic and often characterized by a high-church religiosity. By contrast, the “New” Right was populist, blue-collar and less committed to the virtues of laissez-faire and individualism. Christopher Lasch brilliantly criticized the co-opting of populism by laissez-faire Republicans in his The True and Only Heaven. Lasch largely accepted the populist criticism of the Left and the welfare state, but he argued that capitalism and the state work in tandem to rob ordinary working people and their communities of their capacity for self-government and self-determination. Reaganomics was not, in his view, the true ally of populism, but the apogee of liberal individualism which corrodes communities in the name of “choice.”

    If evangelical Protestants are the heirs of the old “New” Right, then the turn toward economic populism may make sense. The “economic royalists” of the GOP (as the New Yorker piece calls them) have enjoyed the support of evangelical voters without really giving them much in the way of actual power. But if these folks now constitute most of the base of the party, then the populist chickens may be coming home to roost. I don’t know if Huckabee is the right vehicle for a conservative neo-populism, but he’s at least providing an interesting challenge to the status quo.

  • Kucinich/Paul in ’08!

    In the – ahem – unlikely event that he secures his party’s nomination, Dennis Kucinich has suggested that – wait for it – Ron Paul might make a good running mate.

    “I’m thinking about Ron Paul” as a running mate, Kucinich told a crowd of about 70 supporters at a house party here, one of numerous stops throughout New Hampshire over the Thanksgiving weekend. A Kucinich-Paul administration could bring people together “to balance the energies in this country,” Kucinich said.

    The Paul campaign has demurred, however.

    Unlikely as it sounds, I’ve long thought that a left-right fusion movement based around opposition to global interventionism, a defense of civil liberties, and a genuine populist critique of government and corporate elites could provide a healthy counterpoint to our current bipartisan consensus. And who better to lead it than these two gadflies?

  • Thanksgiving re-post

    I wrote this a couple of years ago, but I think it holds up pretty well:


    It’s interesting that Thanksgiving is the only secular holiday in the American calendar that has explicitly religious overtones (we might say that holidays like 4th of July and Memorial Day have implicit religious overtones, but that’s another matter). That is, Thanksgiving implies Someone to whom we give thanks, but it’s not an explicitly Christian holiday like Christmas or Easter (i.e. it isn’t part of the liturgical calendar, is not tied to any event in sacred history, is not shared by the universal church, etc.).

    While the original Puritan thanksgiving feast was a religious event rooted in a very specific Christian tradition, Thanksgiving didn’t become a national holiday until 1863 (although many individual states had their own Thanksgiving holidays prior to that). In the early years of the Republic, days of thanksgiving were proclaimed in response to particular events, including military victories (by Presidents Washington and Madison).

    President Lincoln’s proclamation of a national Thanksgiving holiday in 1863 was prompted by gratitude for the blessings the country enjoyed even in the midst of a brutal and bloody civil war. It’s noteworthy that Lincoln spoke of it in terms that are difficult to imagine coming from any contemporary U.S. politician:

    No human counsel hath devised nor hath any mortal hand worked out these great things. They are the gracious gifts of the Most High God, who, while dealing with us in anger for our sins, hath nevertheless remembered mercy.

    It has seemed to me fit and proper that they should be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people. I do therefore invite my fellow citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next, as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens. And I recommend to them that while offering up the ascriptions justly due to Him for such singular deliverances and blessings, they do also, with humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience, commend to his tender care all those who have become widows, orphans, mourners or sufferers in the lamentable civil strife in which we are unavoidably engaged, and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquillity and Union.

    Nowadays politicians trip over each other to proclaim the innate goodness and downright wonderfulness of the American people. Can you imagine any politician today encouraging us to adopt a spirit of “humble penitence for our national perverseness and disobedience”?

    Christians have good reasons to be suspicious of civil religion, but the version articulated by Lincoln is remarkably robust compared to anemic pleas for posting the Ten Commandments in a court house or ritual invocations of “God Bless America.” The God invoked by Lincoln is not the laissez-faire God of the deists, but a mysterious providence whose will can’t be straightforwardly identified with any human cause.

    It would be a pretty radical thing to do for some public figure to suggest that we not only give thanks for all our blessings, but actually engage in self-examination to see where we have been “perverse and disobedient,” individually and as a nation. Not that I particularly want politicians to assume the mantle of the preacher, but it would be a refreshing change from the feel-goodism of so much civil religion that seeks to merely put a stamp of divine approval on the American Way of Life.

  • We’re doomed

    I’m not sure what I think about the whole Peak Oil issue, but Georgetown political scientist Patrick Deneen has thought a lot about it and has a – “sobering” is too mild a word; “apocalyptic” maybe? – post up about the relationship between oil and food and the implications that might have for world population.