Friday metal - belated Sabbath-esque edition

The Sword - “Winter’s Wolves”

(this one’s for bs)

The Conservative Mind 2.0

The American Scene, formerly run by Ross Douthat and Reihan Salm, has a spiffy new design with a whole new raft of contributors. Looks like a great one-stop shop for smart, heterodox conservative blogging. (Salam continues to run TAS, while Douthat has moved on to a solo blog at The Atlantic.)

Who is my neighbor?

*Christopher has posted the text of a talk he recently gave on Christianity and the environment. It’s terrific stuff, with a very Lutheran and Benedictine flavor.

I think that rooting our ethics (including our environmental ethics) in our response to what God has first done for us is exactly right and it’s one of the insights of Reformational Christianity that I resonate the most with.

Andrew Linzey has written that one of the things that Christians can contribute to the movements for animal and environmental well-being is a sense of our solidarity in sin and our dependence upon grace. This can provide a powerful counterweight to temptations toward self-righteousness, as well as a motivation for doing good without falling into despair or utopianism.

More troops=more war

This is a few days old but still worth noting. Andrew Bacevich laments the bipartisan consensus among all the leading presidential candidates for expanding the size of the military. The problem, Bacevich says, is that “[a]ny politician who thinks that the chief lesson to be drawn from the last five years is that we need more Americans toting rifles and carrying rucksacks has learned nothing.”

The underlying problem is that the basic orientation of U.S. policy since 9/11 has been flat wrong. Bush’s conception of waging an open-ended global “war” to eliminate terrorism has failed, disastrously and irredeemably. Simply trying harder — no matter how many more soldiers we recruit and no matter how many more Muslim countries we invade and “liberate” — will not reverse that failure. More meddling will evoke more hatred.

Instead Bacevich advocates a policy of “containment” toward the virulent strain of Islamic radicalism that gives rise to terrorism: “The alternative to transformation is not surrender but quarantine.”

I think the point here is that a bigger military will create a nearly irresistible urge to use it. If it’s not used to invade the Middle East in a wrong-headed attempt to install Jeffersonian democracy, it will be used for the various “peacekeeping” and “humanitarian” wars dreamed up by progressives. After all, as Madeline Albright put it to Colin Powell, “What’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

The Humane Society vs. the farm bill

The Humane Society is opposing section 123 of the proposed 2007 Farm Bill which is supposed to be voted on by the House very soon.

The section says that:

Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no State or locality shall make any law prohibiting the use in commerce of an article that the Secretary of Agriculture has—
(1) inspected and passed; or
(2) determined to be of non-regulated status.

The HSUSA interprets this to mean that states and localities would be prohibited “from banning activities they deem to be contrary to public health, safety, and morals. Section 123 would undo bans on horse slaughter, intensive confinement of pigs and calves raised for veal, force-feeding of ducks and geese to make foie gras … [etc.]“

This piece at Grist describes further implications of this provision:

[T]his broad statement basically says that if the USDA says something is safe, a state or local government is not allowed to regulate it. For example, there have been a number of counties around the country that have banned genetically modified organisms from being produced within their borders. This preemption-style language, if it’s passed in the Farm Bill, would void those local laws.

This seems to me to be a bad idea both substantively and on grounds of democracy and local control. The HSUSA encourages people to contact the congressional representative about the provision here.

Fraser: against centralization

Giles Fraser writes (perhaps somewhat tongue-in-cheek?) about his recent “turn to the Right”:

Over the past few months, I have had something of a conversion to the Right. I no longer believe that the Left is capable of delivering on its progressive promises. I no longer trust the Left to sustain an inclusive vision of human togetherness. The culture wars in global Anglicanism have brought me to this.

The trouble with the Left is that it is always looking for the big picture, the overarching narrative of human community — hence big government. The problem is that the grand plan frequently involves casualties and betrayals. Ordinary people are squashed in the search for a utopia. But, because the cause is so noble, the casualties are easily justified. There is nothing more dangerous than people who are convinced of their own virtue.

The latest grand plan for Anglicanism is called the Covenant. The Primates of the Communion have fallen out, and have refused to share communion with each other. Their answer to this situation is that we vote them more decision-making power. It is like trying to put out a fire with petrol. But, because these Primates have whipped up an atmosphere of panic, they are persuading some people that theological martial law needs to be imposed.

My turn to the Right persuades me that Anglicanism does not need bigger church government. It does not need a new internationalism imposing uniformity top-down from a committee of Primates. My text is 1 Samuel 8: God instructs Samuel to tell his people that if they put too much power in one place, it will return to bite them. “When that day comes, you will cry out because of the king that you have chosen; but the Lord will not answer you.”

To the extent that I take an interest in intra-Anglican ecclesiastical conflicts (which is to say: not that much), I’m generally with Fraser here. I’m very cautious of imposing some kind of ecclesiastical “big government” as he puts it. And it strikes me as more than a little bit ironic that Anglicans would be in a rush to institute a centralized form of church governance given the origins of Anglicanism.

It’s also ironic, however, that, at least in recent US history, the nominal party of the Right has been characterized by increasing centralization. I was very much convniced by the kind of anti-centralization arguments offered by conservative and libertarian thinkers when I was first exposed to their ideas. It’s just that I don’t see that understanding much reflected in the current GOP.

Economics for community

As I mentioned previously, Daly and Cobb’s central concern is that the abstractions of economics leave out aspects of reality that are crucial to understanding the world and shaping the economy in a way that nourishes community and is sustainable in the long run. Following A.N. Whitehead, they refer to the phenomenon of treating an abstraction as exhaustive of the reality it describes as the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”

Chief among these abstractions is the market. While the free exchange of goods and services is key to any flourishing economy, treating “the market” in isolation has some built in limitations. These include the tendency for competition to be self-eliminating (monopoly), the corrosive affect of encouraging the pursuit of self-interest on the moral context necessary to sustain the virtues the market order requires, the need for public goods and the existence of public “bads” (externalities), and the market’s blindness to judgments of value such as those pertaining to the distribution of wealth or the overall scale of the economy in relation to the surrounding ecosystem.

Daly and Cobb also criticize the reliance on GNP as a measure of economic well-being. They argue that it doesn’t accurately reflect income, much less genuine economic welfare. Homo economicus is the model of the human self posited by much economic thought. It assumes a human being who’s interested primarily in maximizing utility understood in terms of consumption. Economics qua economics forbids us from making value judgments about individual preferences and seeks instead to understand how those preferences can be maximized. Finally, “land,” the economic stand-in for all of non-human nature, rather than being seen as a productive and living system with its own intrinsic value, is reduced to a largely passive and inert commodity. An overly idealistic point of view tends to see all resources as having their ultimate source in human ingenuity, presdisposing economics to ignore the question of the finitude of resources.

All of these abstractions, Daly and Cobb contend, serve to create an overly individualistic and short-term picture of the world and lends support to similarly constituted policies. Their goal is to reconceive the context of economic life as being in service to community, including the wider community of non-human nature.

To this end, they advocate a shift from short-term to long-term thinking, with particular attention to the scale of the economy. Their argument here is fairly simple: the economy is situated within an ecosystem which is finite in size (i.e in terms of resources). Therefore, the economy cannot grow indefinitely. They define “scale” as population x per capita resource use rate and maintain that our trajectory of growth is pushing against the limits imposed by the natural ecosystem within which our economic life exists.

Consequently, what they think is necessary is an economy that is oriented away from growth and toward more of a steady-state model. Economic well-being shouldn’t be measured in terms of increasing consumption, but by a combination of economic and non-economic welfare. Individualism should be replaced by a vision of human beings as persons-in-community whose relationships to others are seen as constitutive of their identity. Economic development should focus on the well-being of the community as a whole rather than individuals.

Concerning this last point, Daly and Cobb see communities as the fundamental building blocks of a sound economic order. But they are also decentralists who would like to see a revival of local communities over against the atomized cosmopolitanism that globalization promises. They envision a world in which one’s primary loyalty is to one’s local community, with increasing and overlapping circles of loyalty expanding outward. Unlike many on the Left, they have no particular affinity for “post-national” globalism.

In fact, Daly and Cobb acknowledge that in our world the only entities currently able to resist globalization and foster steps toward an economic order more in line with their aspirations is the nation. They are more or less unapologetic nationalists, resulting in some surprising policy prescriptions that would put them at odds with much of the Left. They are against free trade and for protectionism for domestic industries by means of tariffs, they favor population control, and the form they advocate for most developed countries, including the US, is a curtailment of immigration, particularly illegal immigration. Sounding for all the world like Pat Buchanan, they argue that a chief function of the nation-state is to secure its borders against unwanted immigrants. They oppose not only economic entanglements with foreign nations, but also foreign aid. All nations need to be self-sufficient, at least in essentials. Finally, the support a defense policy of what could fairly be called non-interventionism and suggest that a United States less enmeshed in a global market would have less cause for foreign meddling.

The keystone of Daly and Cobb’s position, then, is a community of more or less self-reliant communities whose economic life is geared to stability and self-sufficiency rather than expanded growth. This is rooted in what they describe as a biocentric and theistic vision that sees all of creation as related to a good God and having value apart from human needs and interests. Their emphasis on the value of the biosphere leads them to support sustainable and organic agriculture and to favor subsistence agriculture over agriculture for commodity export as well as a tax system similar to that proposed by Henry George that treats land as a trust rather than a commodity.

A lot of what’s contained in this volume will be familiar to anyone who’s paid much attention to debates about the economics of sustainability. What I find appealing about Daly and Cobb is their desire to foster a more decentralized, humane, and participatory economy instead of increased centralization. I also think they’re more realistic than some in viewing the nation-state as the best hope for gaining some measure of democratic control over economic life. Too often folks on the Left put what appears to me as an unrealistic hope in international institutions like the UN which, after all, are even further removed from popular control and participation than most national governments.

However, I still can’t help but have some reservations about Daly and Cobb’s vision. On a sheerly factual level, I wish they’d spent more time making the case of a finite economy. To a certain extent they seem to cherry-pick their opponents, using the most extreme-sounding quotes from people like George Gilder. I would’ve liked to see more engagement with serious opponents of their view. Secondly, they seem to me at times insufficiently appreciative of the real benefits of liberal individualism. Like many who oppose “community” to “individualism” they tend to paint the former almost exclusively in glowing terms that downplay the genuine difficulties of close-knit community. There’s a real tension between individual liberty and community control, however democratic. To the extent that the community exercises control over a particular area of life, it leaves less room for indvidual discretion. There’s a genuine balancing act there and I’m not sure Daly and Cobb have paid much attention to it (their discussion of population control, for instance, is disturbingly sanguine about China’s coercive policies without actually advocating them). Finally, they don’t, in my view, deal adequately with the objection that participation in an expanding economy is necessary for many people in the world to escape from grinding poverty.

Overall, though, Daly and Cobb seem to me to be asking the right questions: Is an ever-expanding economy consistent with the limits imposed by ecological fragility? How do we reconcile the need for democratic control over the economy with individual freedom? What kind of balance should be struck between ties to local community and a more cosmopolitan outlook? How do we honor the value of God’s creation without sacrificing vital human interests? These all strike me as among the most important questions we face in the 21st century, even if I’m not satisfied in every case with Daly and Cobb’s answers.

Back

We had big fun in Los Angeles. One of the highlights was our friends taking us to this Tiki bar on Sunset Blvd. to enjoy some fruity cocktails in an atmosphere redolent of the high tide of mid 20th-century Tiki culture.

I enjoy LA in that “nice place to visit, wouldn’t want to live there” kind of way. I always expected to dislike it for the familiar reasons (superficial Hollywood culture, traffic, sprawl), but it definitely has a cool and appealing vibe. And of course there’s the weather.

Now we have one week of packing frenzy before the move to DC this weekend. Posting may be light - we’ll see how things go. I’m hoping to post my review of Daly & Cobb’s For the Common Good soonish.

Checking in

Still on vacation - currently staying with some friends outside of the City of Angels. Boy, the California livin’ seems easy when the sun’s shining and the breeze is blowing. A little warm for my blood, but there you are.

Tomorrow we fly back to Boston and then have exactly one week to pack before our move to Washington, DC. The ATR household will be spending at least the next year in our nation’s capital.

I’ve been reading the Daly/Cobb book while on vacation. Very interesting stuff so far. They want to call attention to the limitations of the abstractions employed by economics that tend to isolate the workings of the market from real life. I think they make a good case, but am just getting into the section on the concrete implications of their vision. Their strongest point so far is that the size of the economy in relation to the larger ecosystem matters and that economics isn’t very good at taking this into account.

Here’s a little Friday metal. More substantive posting will hopefully resume next week.

UNEARTH - “Sanctity Of Brothers”

Economics as if people (and other living things) mattered

I’m in Indianapolis visiting family, and one of the things I like to do whenever I’m here is make a trip to Half Price Books.

Yesterday I picked up a copy of For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future by World Bank economist Herman Daly and process theologian John Cobb.

My views on economics have been in flux for the past few years. I was at one time attracted to the libertarian exaltation of the free market, but I’ve become increasingly convinced of the limitations of that view.

The conservative side of me is skeptical that a system based on acquisitiveness can really be conducive to virtue, especially as the logic of the market threatens to take over more and more areas of life. The liberal side of me is unconvinced that the rising tide will really lift all boats, at least at a rate fast enough to forestall ecological disaster. As I’ve become more interested in environmental issues I’ve been exposed to the arguments of those who maintain that unlimited growth is a dead end, literally.

Daly and Cobb seem to be following in the footsteps of thinkers like E.F. Schumacher. They embrace the market and recognize that central planning is unworkable, but they also want to situate the market within a social and moral framework that respects the integrity of communities, both national and more local ones.

In this respect their project seems to hark back to the decentralized “humane economy” of conservative Swiss economist Wilhelm Roepke, a thinker I admire a lot. Their goal is to rethink economic policy in a way that treats human beings as more than an abstract homo economicus, as well as being sensitive to what, following Wendell Berry, they call the “Great Economy” of all life on Earth.

I’ve only read the introduction, but I’m eager to see where Daly and Cobb go with their project and will probably post more on these ideas as I go.