A Thinking Reed

Category: Simplicity

  • Catch-all blog update post

    Sorry about the dearth of posting: a confluence of extreme busyness, travel, and computer issues has put a cramp in my blogging style. Although one perk is that I’ve been forced to detach from the various teapot-sized tempests roilling the blogosphere, which is always a benefit of time away from the computer.

    We’re in Indiana visiting the in-laws for Christmas and enjoying some much needed R&R. In my free time I’ve been reading C. S. Lewis’ The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature. This is a marvelous little book in which Lewis delineates the worldview that underlies the literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Sometimes I think Lewis has (unjustly) gotten a reputation as something of a shallow thinker due to the popular nature of his apologetic works, but in this book his incredible erudition is on full display, though tempered with his lucid and homey prose.

    I’ve also been catching up on my magazine reading – that is, actual printed matter. I recommend this interesting article from Mother Jones on Ron Paul’s online following, as well as the current issue’s cover story (which doesn’t seem to be online yet), detailing the environmental consequences of China’s amazing economic growth. Also, Jason Byassee has a provocative article on pornography and “Christian eroticism” in this month’s First Things that is well worth checking out.

    Other highlights of the trip so far: hanging out with my brother-in-law and his wife, a trip to Half Price Books (yea!), and taking in a civic theatre production of Joseph and the Amazing Technocolor Dreamcoat.

    Here’s a few of the notable links I’ve come across in the last couple of days: Wayne Pacelle on Animals and Christmas, two posts on Scripture from Elizaphanian, Marvin writes about stopping global warming, Christopher on recapturing the joy of the Christmas message and Christian living and in defense of the Virgin Birth.

    I’m looking forward to the Christ Mass tonight at a local Anglo-Catholic Episcopal parish – the same one we attended last year. For a variety of reasons I’ve had a hard time getting into the spirit this Christmas, but I think this will be just what the doctor ordered.

    I hope everyone reading has a verry Merry Christmas!

  • 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.

  • October reading notes

    A smattering of theology, philosophy, and even some fiction this month:

    The Environment and Christian Ethics by Michael Northcott. This is part of Cambridge University Press’s “New Studies in Christian Ethics” series. Northcott is (at least at the time of this book’s publication) a lecturer in theology at the University of Edinburgh. This text is a nice overview of environmental problems, a survey of the common philosophical and theological approaches to environmental ethics, and a defense of the notion that a traditional Christian outlook can ground concern for, and fairly radical positions on, the environment (as opposed to approaches of a lot of eco-theology which are fairly revisionist). Northcott also argues that social justice for human beings is not in opposition to care for the earth, but an essential component of it.

    Small Is Still Beautiful, Joseph Pearce. Reviewed here.

    Animals and Their Moral Standing, Stephen R. L. Clark. A collection of papers dealing with various aspects of the moral problems associated with non-human animals. Hits most of the uniquely Clarkean themes: a traditionalist philosophical and theological orientation combined with radicial views on animal welfare. (A nice companion to Northcott’s book come to think of it.)

    A Case of Conscience by James Blish. I mentioned this book here. I’ve also just started The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell, who seems, to say the least, to have borrowed some ideas from Blish as both books revolve around Jesuit priests who have disastrous encounters with alien civilizations. Russell’s book is contemporary, while Blish wrote his in the 50s. It’ll be interesting to compare the two.

    Early this mont the Templeton Foundation Press reissued Keith Ward’s Divine Action, which had been out of print virtually from the time of its original publication due to a publishing acquisition. This is his account of how modern science and philosophy allow us to give a coherent account of how God can act in the world. While taking some ideas from process thought, Ward goes beyond the view of many process theologians that God acts sheerly “persuasively” on the world. Ward argues that modern physics has given us a picture of the physical world that is much “looser” than that of classical Newtonian physics, and that, in principle, God can act in the world in ways that would make a real difference, but be undetectable by the methods of science. He also offers persuasive and insightful accounts of miracles, the Incarnation, and the relation of Christianity to other religions under the rubric of ways that God acts in the world.

    Also currently working on Wandering Home by Bill McKibben, which narrates his hike from the Champlain river valley in Vermont into the Adiorondacks in New York. Along the way McKibben encounters various friends and acquaintances trying to find new ways of living sustainably, from localist vinters making wine for the region to an Earth First!-er living in an electricity- and plumbing-free shack in the woods. All of this provides much fodder for McKibben’s ruminations on possibilities of treading more lightly on the earth.

    On deck is James Alison’s The Joy of Being Wrong: Original Sin Through Easter Eyes. I blogged about Alison’s Raising Abel a bit here. Although impressed by the way Alison’s Girard-inspired exegesis sheds new light on the biblical texts, I expressed some skepticism about aspects of his project. But, inspired in part by this review of Alison’s work from Charles Hefling that Christopher tipped me off to, I decided it was worth delving in more deeply.

  • Subversive slowness

    Here’s a lovely essay by Rebecca Solnit on “slowness [as] an act of resistance” to the cult of efficiency, speed, innovation, and techno-mastery. (Via James Poulos @ the American Scene)

  • Book review: Small Is Still Beautiful

    Joseph Pearce is a noted English Catholic writer who has written books on G. K. Chesterton, Oscar Wilde, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis among others. In Small Is Still Beautiful: Economics as if Families Mattered, Pearce seeks to update the wisdom of E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful for the 21st century.

    Small Is Still Beautiful is one among a recent spate of books re-thinking what it means to be conservative in light of the apparent triumph of global capitalism and the preeminence of America as global hegemon. Fans of Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons (review here) and Bill Kauffman’s Look Homeward, America (review here) will find much to like here, as Pearce upholds the small, familiar and local against the forces of globalized homogeneity.

    Pearce doesn’t break much new ground in terms of fundamental ideas; this book is more of an update of Schumacher’s original. But this actually works well since Schumacher’s ideas seem just as timely now as they did thirty years ago. The issues that this book grapples with – our insatiable appetite for growth, environmental despoilation, and the plight of local communities – have gained a new resonance in recent years.

    If you had to boil down Schumacher’s (and Pearce’s) message into a pithy maxim, I think it would be that “Economics was made for man, not man for economics.” Schumacher’s vision was rooted in a view of humankind as having transcendent worth, but also part of an ordered cosmos that has its own beauty and integrity. For Schumacher, much of the problem of conventional economic thinking was that it subordinated the ends of human life to the means of economic production – a complete reversal of the proper order of things.

    Pearce sees both cause for worry and celebration in the events that have transpired since Small Is Beautiful was originally published. On the one hand, many of the worrying trends Schumacher identified have only accelerated: neoliberal globalization and its attendant monoculture, skewed theories of development that privilege intensive industrial production and agriculture, and, of course, the worship of centralization and “giantism.” On the other hand, a counter-movement of organic farmers, craft brewers, proponents of local economies, co-ops, and movements for political decentralization have also made a surprising amount of headway.

    The underlying premise of Schumacher’s work is that unlimited economic growth in the pursuit of meeting a never-ending stream of consumer demands is “unnatrual” in the deepest possible sense. It goes against the grain of human nature in that it won’t satisfy our deepest longings, and it threatens to destroy the fragile biosphere upon which we and all other life depend. Only a reorientation of our economic and political life toward proper human ends – joy, wisdom, peace – can stave off an ecological disaster.

    This view is both radical and conservative in that it requires a massive re-thinking of the political and economic status quo, but does so in the name of a very traditional, even religious, view of human beings and their destiny. Schumacher’s less-known work, A Guide for the Perplexed, actually presents the key to his thought here. His aim in that work was to recover the traditional metaphysical view of humanity and the universe that underlies what Huston Smith calls the “wisdom traditions” of the world. This philosophia perennis stands in stark opposition to the materialism of post-Englightenment modernity.

    Pearce, like Schumacher, is a practicing Catholic who combines what we’d call social conservatism with economic positions well to the “left” of most Democrats, much less Republicans. He opposes “free trade” and thinks government policy should favor small businesses and local producers. He takes the issue of climate change and environmental degradation with the utmost seriousness, seeing them as direct consequences of growth-oriented and inequitable economic policy. He excoriates the World Bank and IMF and their regimes of “structural adjustment” programs for developing nations. And he opts for organic farming as the only way to save the land from destruction at the hands of intensive agriculture.

    Somewhat confusingly, and despite the subtitle, Pearce says little directly about families. There are a few asides about the ways in which market capitalism breaks up social bonds, leaving atomized individuals in its wake. But very little is said about how families in particular are affected. For instance, it seems to me that Pearce could’ve made a lot of hay out of the way that our current economic practices force parents to work long hours, depriving them of the opportunities to spend time with their children as well as to participate in their communities.

    I have to say that this book likely won’t convince anyone who isn’t already at least somewhat familiar with and somewhat sympathetic to Schumacher’s original arguments. But Pearce has done us a service even if the only effect of his book is to send people (particularly the more conservative-leaning people likely to read this) back to Schumacher’s original works. And beyond that, it’s nice to see Schumacherian principles applied to the current scence, giving us a picture of their continuing relevance.

    P.S.     Dear Publishers: I would be happy to review books like this when they come out instead of waiting till they’re available at the library. Please feel free to send review copies. 😉

  • 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)

  • Compassionate eating as Christian discipleship

    Here’s a good lecture on our relationship to animals from a Christian perspective by Matthew Halteman, a Calvin College philosopher. He also contributes to a blog on these themes here.

    Prof. Halteman conceptualizes “compassionate eating” as a Christian discipline, which he defines as a repetitive daily practice undertaken to narrow the gap between who we are and who we should be. In terms of diet, compassionate eating is a holistic approach to eating that is sensitive to human, animal, and environmental concerns. Halteman says that there are a continuum of responses to the issue of factory farming, from eating humanely raised meat, to vegetarianism, to veganism, but the baseline is opposition to a system of food production that causes extreme animal suffering, degrades the environment, and fosters inequity and exploitation. While his own preferred position is a vegan one, there’s no reason that anyone can’t take incremental steps toward more compassionate eating without committing to a wholesale vegan lifestyle. (The talk was originally given on Ash Wednesday, and he suggest restricting animal products during Lent as a start.)

    While making more responsible choices doesn’t extricate us from responsibility for all the ills that our system of industrial agriculture contributes to, it can be a “symbolic commitment to seeking authenticity in imitation of Christ as a witness, agent, and evidence of the coming kingdom.” This stance helps us, he thinks, to avoid self-righteousness and a kind of moral utopianism that thinks that we can fix all the ills of a fallen world. That said, he thinks that being more intentional about our food choices can have many practical beneficial effects, like improving our personal health, connecting us with those who produce our food (by, e.g. patronizing farmers’ markets), increasing our sense of compassion for all sentient creatures, etc.

  • Lent for nerds or The desire to possess as alienation from God

    Part of my Lenten fast is that I’m not going to buy any books. This may sound silly, but I’ve found that I often crave books in the way that other people might crave a new pair of shoes or something for their house. Although I (eventually!) read most of the books I buy, I think there’s some deeper and more disreputable feeling that buying stuff serves to alleviate. A sort of anxiousness that the new possession momentarily drives away. Or maybe an Is this a relic of our evolutionary past where securing an important article might have meant the difference between life and death? Or is it an artifact of our capitalist economy and the need to generate new “needs”?

    I’ve also pledged to get rid of some of the books I already have. This has a practical dimension since we’re going to be moving in a few months, but hopefully the letting go of things is a way to combat the desire to possess. I have this pet theory that the anxiousness associated with our desire for security is a important symptom of original sin. Our intended state is to trust our heavenly Father for all that we need, but in our alienation from and inability to trust God we cling to things in a distorted way, and often resort to evil means to secure our being and worth. “Security,” whether it be financial or national, is something of a shibboleth in our culture. By contrast, Jesus’ admonition not to worry about what we will wear or where our food will come from seems the height of hippie irresponsibility.

    The ability to live in this way, though, would have to arise out of a reorientation of our relationship with God. Luther pointed out that, apart from revelation, we’re just as likely to imagine that God has it in for us as that he’s our loving father. So at least one reason for the Incarnation is to demonstrate God’s love for us and to create trust (a.k.a. faith) in us whereby we can live in a restored relationship with God. And the fruit of that restored relationship should be less anxiety about securing our place in this world. This, in turn, should allow us to sit more lightly to what we have, share more freely, and live more joyfully. Given the stubborn persistence of the old Adam, I think we can expect this to be a constant struggle, and one of the benefits of a season like Lent is that we can practice at it.