A Thinking Reed

Category: Social and ethical issues

  • Items of interest from the JLE

    From this month’s Journal of Lutheran Ethics:

    First, an article on the neglect of spiritual practices in the ELCA and how, if the church doesn’t offer pathways to intimacy with God, people will seek them elsewhere. I can definitely sympathize with this. As someone who (re)turned to Christian faith as a young(ish) adult I was expecting to be drilled in spiritual practices and other ways of deepening my faith. Alas, most of the ELCA congregations I’ve been associated with have scarcely mentioned, much less inculcated, intentional pracitces of prayer, fasting, spiritual reading and so on.

    That’s one of the reasons I’ll always be grateful for my year attending the Church of the Advent, an Anglo-Catholic parish in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts. I was exposed to a very sacramental form of worship, the daily office, the rosary, and other spiritual practices that I’ve gotten a lot of nourishment from. Maybe as part of our full communion agreement with the Episcopal Church Lutherans will learn to be freer with borrowing form our Episcopal brothers and sisters, who seem to have preserved more of our shared heritage in this area from the undivided Western church.

    Second, a response from the former chaplain of Gustavus Adolphus College to Carl Braaten’s article from a couple of months ago (which I blogged on at some length here). This piece seeks to go beyond natural law and understand marriage, not as something that exists for purposes extrinsic to itself, but as a community that exists for its own sake as a union of two selves. I’m not sure I’d go all the way with this: doesn’t marriage, in Christian perspective, exist at least in part for the upbuilding of the community? But this in no way excludes same-sex couples, who manifestly do contribute to the upbuilding of communities of which they’re a part. If Christian marriage is partly a “school of sanctification,” then it seems to me that a Christian marriage should have an inherently “ecstatic” direction – the partners should be drawn out of themselves and give life to others. And this can have a variety of manifestations, including (but not limited to) the begetting and rearing of children.

  • Paul Zahl’s theology of grace

    Another newish book that I picked up almost on a whim is Paul Zahl’s Grace In Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life. Zahl was until recently dean of Trinity Episcopal Seminary, is a determined low-church evangelical and vocal opponent of revisionist moves on same-sex relationships. Despite some disagreement there, I’d read his Short Systematic Theology (and he means short – it’s less that 100 pages) and was intrigued enough to want to read more.

    I’d describe Zahl as a kind of Episcopal version of Gerhard Forde. He is proudly “long on grace and short on law.” This book is an expostion of Zahl’s theology and its application to daily living that is rigorously grace-centered. He defines grace simply as “one-way love,” the love of God for human beings who have done nothing to deserve it.

    Zahl unabashedly embraces the Law-Gospel hermenuetic in his approach to scripture. The law is the perfect picture of what human life should be, but it is unable to produce the obedience it demands. If anything, its demands incite rebellion. Consequently, the law takes the form of accusation: an accusation we experience in all the pressures and stresses of life as demands press down upon us:

    What the law requires is exactly what men and women need in order to be wise, happy, and secure. But the law cannot pull this off. The problem with the law is not its substance. The problem with the law is its instrumentality. The law is not up to the task it sets for itself. If the law says, “Jump,” I sit. If it says, “Run,” I walk. If it says, “Honor your father and mother,” I move…to Portland. If it say, “Do not covet” (Romans 7:7-8), I spend all day on the Home Shopping Channel. (p. 35)

    Only grace, God’s one-way love, can get us out of this jam. God’s unilateral forgiveness takes away our guilt and anxiety about not being able to measure up. And, as a bonus, grace produces the “fruits” of love that the law couldn’t. “The one-way love of grace is the essence of any lasting transformation that takes place in human experience” (p. 36).

    One of the interesting things Zahl does is attempt to rehabilitate the theory of substitutionary atonement in a way that speaks a graceful word rather than a judgmental one. He has, he says repeatedly, a very low anthropology and a very high soteriology. Human beings are bound, curved in on ourselves, and unable to do anything to release the load of guilt and judgment from our shoulders. Only Jesus’ substitutionary death on the cross releases us from this curse:

    The atonement of Christ on the cross is the mechanism by which God’s grace can be offered freely and without condition to strugglers in the battle of life. Grace is not offered by God as a fiat. We all wish that the innocent had not had to die for the guilty. We wish that a different road, a road less traveled in scars, had been taken. But we have been told that this was the necessary way by which God’s law and God’s grace would be resolved. It had to be resolved through a guilt-transfer, making it “possible” — the idea is almost beyond maintaining — for God to give the full scholarship to the candidate least qualified to receive it. (pp. 117-18)

    Not eveyone will be convinced by Zahl’s defense of penal substitution (I’m not sure I was), but it does preserve something that I think other atonement theories often miss. Too often, especially in liberal theology, the atonement is reduced to an example, or a way of life, which deprives it of its once-for-all efficacy that lifts the burden of guilt off the shoulders of poor sinners. Zahl’s surprisingly convincing defense of the un-free will and total depravity are the counterpoint to the all-sufficiency of Christ’s atonement. If the cross of Christ is just one more demand (“Live a life of radical justice and self-sacrifice!”), then it does nothing to free me from my sins and self-will.

    The more original part of Zahl’s book may be his application of the idea of grace to relationships, in family, society and church. One-way love, not law and its threats and demands is the natural “fruit” of our justification. The image of fruits is particularly important in understanding the dynamic here. You don’t get a plant to produce fruit by pulling on its branches. You have to nourish its roots, in this case with the living water of grace.

    In families the theology of grace takes the form of loving acceptance, not heaping demands on each other. Zahl applies this to relationships between spouses, between parents and children, and between siblings. He argues that many of the troubles that plague family life, from resentment, to control, to competition, are outgrowths of a legalistic approach to life together. Paradoxically, he says, the relativization of the nuclear family by Jesus actually constitutes its salvation:

    The end of the absolute claim of the nuclear family, for which grace strictly calls, emancipates the nuclear family from the very nerve of neurosis, which is the projection upon human beings of what belongs only to God. The grace of God releases the possibility of non-demanding love among men and women who are united by human blood. This is the salvation of the famous nuclear family. (p. 186)

    Zahl applies his theology of grace in particularly striking ways to social ethics. Zahl, a student of both Moltmann and Kasemann, jettisons the “two kingdom” ethics identified with traditional Lutheranism and comes to some surprising conclusions for someone identified with the “conservative” wing of Anglicanism:

    “What is grace in relation to war and peace? It is to support no war ever under any conceivable circumstances, and it is peace in all things, the passive peace of Christ-like nonreactivity, bound ot the never-passive operation of the Holy Spirit” (p. 203).

    “Total mercy, complete exoneration, and unconditional release: those are the marks of grace in relation to criminal justice” (p. 211).

    “A theology of grace invites a non-romanticized preferential option for the poor. The picture of this is probably soemthing like a moderate, non-ideological, and non-utopian form of socialism” (p. 217).

    “Just as this theology opposes the use of war in every case, it opposes the construction of malls in every case. One can imagine the construction of a “mall” that buys and sells in a normal and necessary way. One can imagine instances of a market that buys and sells, provides, and distributes. But the mall as we now know it is the “green tree” under which the firstborn of the Canaanites were sacrificed” (p. 222)

    Finally, Zahl addresses grace in church. Here he’s at his most provocative, openly avowing a “low” or even non-existent ecclesiology. Ecclesiology is trouble, both because it is secondary to other more important topics, “such as the saving inherent in the Christian drama” (p. 226) and because it actually does harm to the extent that it “places the human church in some kind of special zone — somehow distinct from real life — that appears to be worthy of special study and attention. The underlying idea is that the church is in a zone that is free, or at least more free, from original sin and total depravity than the rest of the world, but the facts prove otherwise” (p. 226).

    To say we have no ecclesiology is not just a negation. To have no ecclesiology is to have an ecclesiology. What sort of ecclesiology is this? It is a noble one. It puts first things first. It puts Christ over the human church. It puts what Christ taught and said over the church. It puts grace over the church. It puts Christ’s saving work and the acute drama of the human predicament over the church. It puts the human hope of change over the church. It places the Holy Spirit over the church. (p. 227).

    The besetting temptation of the church is to elevate itself as an institution to a place of special prestige or power. In the impressiveness of its historical claims, or the purity of its doctrine, or the beauty of its liturgy it can become deceived into thinking that it’s an end in itself and has its foundation in itself. According to Zahl the church is properly seen as “a pneumatic, Spirit-led movement, always, like mercury in motion. Church is flux. A systematic theology of grace puts church in its right place. Church is at best the caboose to grace. It is its tail. Ecclesiology, on the other hand, makes church into the engine” (p. 228).

    Zahl calls this an “eccleisiology of suspicion,” which denies that there can be any “original sin-free zones” in this world. Those who put their faith in the church rather than God are bound to be bitterly disappointed. “A theology of grace, with its ecclesiology of suspicion, is the tonic and antidote to the church behaving badly” (p. 231). In a time when the church has been behaving badly (on all sides at different points), this strikes me as something that needs to be heard.

    Another noteworthy aspect of this book is that Zahl writes clearly and simply, with an almost whimsical tone. His text is littered with pop cultural references to old sci-fie movies, popular music, and even the plays of Tyler Perry, as well as examples drawn from everyday life. One is forced to wonder why more theologians can’t write like this.

    Despite some disagreements here and there, my overwhelming impression of this book was that Zahl is preaching a theology of grace that is desperately needed in the church and the world. This thirst for grace may be indicated by the fact that the book carries glowing blurbs from Peter J. Gomes of Harvard University and J. Ligon Duncan of the conservative Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. Liberals and conservatives have both embraced different forms of “political correctness” — whether that means fealty to the Millenium Development Goals or opposition to gay marriage and abortion — which threaten to overshadow the gospel of God’s forgiving grace. But Zahl argues persuasively that this the only meaningful possibility for genuine human transformation.

  • Another view

    I don’t have anything interesting to say about Mitt Romney’s religion speech, but, as it happens, yesterday I was hanging out with an out-of-town Mormon friend. I asked him what he thought of Romney’s speech. He didn’t like it because he doesn’t think Mormonism should strive to be mainstream. He said he has never thought of himself as a Christian and doesn’t like the idea of Mormonism being subsumed under a generic quasi-evangelical Christianity. He prefers, he said, that Mormonism remain on the margins. Also, he’s a liberal Democrat who is torn between supporting Clinton and Obama and complained that Romney is betraying Mormon values with his support of “enhanced interrogation,” Gitmo, etc. Though he readily concedes that his aren’t typical views among his co-religionists.

  • 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.

  • D.C. = most walkable

    Lucky for me as I walk pretty much everywhere I go. I might take the Metro once or twice a week, but we’re lucky enough to live in a neighborhood where pretty much all the necessities (and several of the luxuries) of life are within a couple blocks’ distance. Of course, we pay for that nice location in our expensive (and small!) apartment. But I love living somewhere that allows me to walk most places. I paid some serious commuting dues in the early 2000s living in the San Francisco Bay area and driving 1+ hour to work each way for over two years. So, I feel like I’ve earned living in a walkable city. 😉

    To make a broader point, creating walkable communities should surely be a priority for our future, shouldn’t it? Pick your poison (obesity, peak oil, global warming, social anomie) and getting people out on the sidewalks and on their feet is at least part of the solution. Obviously many of our cities and suburbs (not to mention rural areas) simply aren’t designed to accomodate pedestrians, and to some extent that can’t be helped. But surely if we can subsidize the auto industry with all that concrete infrastructure we ought to be able to do something to make our communities more pedestrian-friendly.

  • An end to the stem cell wars?

    If this holds up it’s surely good news since, in addition to whatever medical advances result, it means that the controversy over ESCR should evaporate.

  • The political Christian

    American Christians tend to be a bit schizophrenic about politics. They swing from utopian optimism (“Christianizing the social order,” “restoring America as a Christian nation”) to extreme pessimism when the inevitable disillusion sets in about the limits of what politics can accomplish. This recent post at the Christian Century blog by David Heim offers a more sober perspective:

    Skepticism about politics is always healthy. But it strikes me that [David] Kuo’s and [Gregory] Boyd’s comments reflect a broad, unhelpful tendency in American Christianity to oscillate between two poles: either a fervent engagement in politics for the sake of the gospel and the world, or an equally fervent detachment for the sake of the purity of the gospel and the health of the church. Isn’t there something between the two poles?

    Heim goes on to argue that Christians should see politics as a vocation that some have (and that all of us have some of the time) to participate in making improvements in the social order. He cautions against the churches corporately making pronouncements on specific political issues, but encourages individual Christians to be engaged in the public sphere:

    Meanwhile, however, individual Christians have their particular vocations. In a democracy, all people have the vocation of citizen and so are in some degree called to the work of politics. Beyond that, a certain number of individual Christians are called to a more specific vocation: to study, analyze or participate in the day-to-day workings of politics. They make arguments and pay attention to data. They look for affinities between the gospel and political philosophies and programs. They listen to what constituents say and arguments other people make. Their work is fallible, limited, pervaded by sin, always subject to revision—but so are lots of vocations.

    This decidedly non-utopian approach to politics would recognize that it’s about caring for the neighbor and making the social orde a place where all people can have a chance at leading decent lives. A backlash against “Constantinianism” has soured some Christians on any involvement in politics, but there’s no reason that a chastened political engagement that recognizes the fact of pluralism and the limits of what politics can accomplish isn’t a legitimate vocation for Christians.

    However, I think there’s still a role for the church acting corporately to equip its members for their various vocations in the world. While it doesn’t necessarily have the expertise to make judgments about particular issues, the church ought to form its members in a way that helps them approach politics with a gospel-shaped vision. For instance, I think it’s entirely appropriate for Chrisitans to evaluate public policy with an eye to how it affects the most vulnerable members of society. This kind of formation might come as a result of experience serving such vulnerable people by participating in the church’s corporal works of mercy.

    There’s also a long tradition of Chrisitan moral reflection that forbids certain means in the pursuit of even worthwhile ends. Just war theory is an example that applies to foreign affairs. In most cases these constraints probably won’t dictate a single policy, but they might rule out some options. Well-formed Christians are not going to support a military policy that targets innocent civilians, or acquiesces in torture.

    So, I agree with Heim that Christians can chart a middle course between Constantinianism and sectarianism. This involves seeking the good of the neighbor in a way that is shaped by an awareness of our own fallibility and the limits of politics, but is also formed by the gospel of God’s gracious love.

  • Jesus vs. marriage

    I had the same thought about the Gospel reading this Sunday that Derek did. I don’t know why it never struck me this way before – maybe it was the translation I was reading/hearing it in. But it sounds for all the world like Jesus is saying that his followers–“those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead”–don’t (shouldn’t?) marry. Although Jesus’ words elsewhere in the NT (not to mention his presence at/wine catering for the wedding at Cana) suggest a more positive view of marriage.

    We’re familiar enough with the idea that Paul seems to give marriage only a grudging thumbs up. I wonder if this represents a wrestling with an earlier more stringent apocalyptic ethic in light of a delayed parousia?

    Lutheranism has usually seen the institutions of the world as ordered toward human flourishing but also as provisional. Marriage would seem then to be part of the kingdom of the left and of the world that is passing away. This seems to me to argue for a more flexible approach to marriage – to being willing to tinker with the institution in light of new experiences. This would be in line with Paul’s seeming pragmatism (“it is better to marry than burn” etc.).

  • The evangelical crack-up: not all it’s cracked up to be

    An honest-to-goodness evangelical pours some cold water on David Kirkpatrick’s NY Times Magazine piece on the splintering of political evangelicalism. (via Jeremy)

    I’ve seen a number of outlets assume that evangelical dissatisfaction with Bush and the GOP must be dissatisfaction from the Left. While younger evangelicals may indeed have a newfound concern for issues like global warming and AIDS, this doesn’t mean they’re becoming liberal per se. And, as the threats of Dobson, et al. to bolt to a third party indicate, much of the dissatisfaction is from the Right.

    David Sessions, the author of the Slate article, makes the interesting suggestion that the growing popularity of Reformed theology in conservative evangelical circles may account for the newfound focus on broader social issues. Neo-Calvinists like Abraham Kuyper were very big on Christ as the Lord of all and that his reign should encompass the entire social sphere. This is in sharp contrast to a kind of Left Behind theology that emphasizes snatching souls out of a society firmly ensconsed in a hell-bound handbasket. In this respect neo-Calvinism has a lot in common with Catholic social thought.

    Lutherans, meanwhile, have historically been more skittish about this kind of thing. Obviously God is sovereign over all, but God relates to us in two ways. The two kingdoms doesn’t refer to distinct spheres of church and state, but to these two ways in which God relates to creation: redemption and conservation. The kingdom of the right, God’s “proper work,” is calling people to faith and repentance through the preaching of the Gospel. The kingdom of the left, meanwhile, refers to the way in which God upholds and conserves the structures of creation and society to provide for and promote human well-being in this life. Politics, for Lutherans, is not redemptive, but pertains to penultimate matters, to serving the neighbor in her concrete needs in this age. To Lutheran ears, the talk of “building God’s kingdom” that you sometimes get from both the evangelical Right and Left smacks of Calvinist-inspired Puritanism.

  • Greener markets?

    Gristmill ran a rejoinder to the post I linked to last week advocating a localized, greener economy. The author, Ryan Avent, takes issue with the “buy local” mantra, arguing that local economies would reduce standards of living and that international trade and markets are compatible with reducing our ecological footprint.

    I’m not confident in my ability to adjudicate this dispute, but I am reminded of something in Peter Singer and Jim Mason’s The Ethics of What We Eat. Singer and Mason examine the eating habits of several American families in order to determine what the most “ethical” diet is, with respect to things like environmental damage, worker’s rights, animal well-being, etc.

    One of the points they make is that it’s very difficult, if not impossible, for most individuals to actually make an accurate assessment of the impact the food they buy has on the environment. For instance, food imported from halfway around the world might nevertheless have been produced in a less intensive way than more local products and may have been transported in a way (by ship, e.g.) that actually creates a smaller carbon footprint than, say, food trucked in from elsewhere in the country.

    But if free-market economics has taught us anything, it’s that the market is a vast transmitter of information. The price of goods reflects the cost of their production and make available knowledge that no single person possesses and that this enables a spontaneous order to emerge as people adjust to fluctuations in prices.

    However, as things stand now, many costs, such as environmental ones, aren’t incorporated into the prices of things we buy. But there are ways of rectifying this. A carbon tax, for instance, would mean that the CO2 emissions were reflected in the price of things we buy, so there would be no need for us to try and determine the exact conditions under which they were produced, at least with respect to this one area.

    A similar approach is reflected in various labelling schemes like those proposed by Jeff Leslie and Cass Sunstein for creating markets in animal welfare. This involves using the market rather than fighting against it. While their plan requires that consumers are willing to seek out animal products produced in a more humane fashion, it still works on the same principle of making information available to the consumer at the point of purchase, and works within the market rather than against it.

    Now, it’s possible that a carbon tax would actually result in more local production simply because products shipped in from around the world could become prohibitively expensive. At the very least it would seem to create incentives for more local production of a lot of things. But deciding how to produce things in an ecologically sounder way would be left up to the market, that is, people making use of the widely dispersed knowledge and information it makes available.