Following on from the last excerpt posted yesterday, it describes situations in the late 1980s when the book was written but there is a lot that sounds like current discussions in the United States. A similar scheme of youth employment has been discussed in some states, even as education, social services and welfare are cut.
So very much depends on a poor man's wage. At present there is a Youth Training Scheme in Britain to absorb the energies of unemployed school-leavers. Industries are encouraged to take on trainees in place of regular hiring. These youths are paid by the government at wages that about equal the dole. In other words, the government donates to industry the free use of unskilled labor. Without reference to the wealth these young people produce, their subsistence is counted as welfare spending, and they are thought of as the beneficiaries of this arrangement, from which it is hoped they will learn the value of honest work.
People in their teens are historically the most coveted workers in the British economy. They are relatively healthy, and from the government's point of view, they are cheap, because they have no dependents and normally live with their families. This scheme merely reproduces the ancient pattern, severing work from pay, making the wage a charity, while reducing work to an escape from the opprobrium of idleness.
Britain invests more money abroad per capita than any other country, and invested more in absolute terms, util Japan surpassed it in this decade. Those who control capital, whether banks or industries of the government itself, have always had the means to punish or starve policies they disapprove of, or to crown with success policies friendlier to their interests simply by leaving money at home or by siphoning it off to the United States or to South Africa or elsewhere.
Mrs. Thatcher was described in an essay by Bernard D. Nossiter in The New York Times (June 15, 1988* as arguing to a church assembly "that abundance, the rich, were blessed while poverty, the poor were not, and Creation proves it."
She has her reward. Britain is experiencing economic growth, of the hectic, selective, up-market kind which does not threaten to drive upward the cost of industrial labor or the demand of social services. British economics is a game of keep-away. Whence all the jiggling of statistics - it is easy to get a big percentage increase from a very small base, as in calculating wages and pensions, and it is easy to take away with one hand what is given with the other, to raise wages a little and cut benefits more, and it is easy to increase rates of saving and contribution to private pension plans by reducing benefits for the elderly or cutting back on the administration needed to deliver them or adding to the obstacles involved in obtaining them or threatening to phase them out altogether, as the Thatcher government has done.
Ralf Dahrendorf, in his book On Britain, quotes respectfully as follows from a book titled Equality, coauthored by Keith Joseph, an important figure in the Thatcher government: "Ultimately the capacity of any society to look after its poor is dependent on the total amount of its wealth, however distributed." One might object that the way in which wealth is distributed determines, in a society, how numerous "its poor" will be. To distribute wealth away from employed people, as the British do, creates poverty, which must be looked after, perpetuating the ancient relation of those who work to those who employ, which has analogues, or cousins, in slavery and forced labor.
Marilynne Robinson's contention that the Poor Law is still present or, at least, always threatens to be resurrected in Britain is clear. The language of it seems to be almost unconsciously encoded in the way we talk about work, wealth and economic rightness. We seemed to be learning new ways to think about those and talk about them, to break out of the Poor Law form of slavery. My fear is that has been regaining a presence in American thought since the Reagan administration and that, now, our "liberals" in the Democratic Party sound like conservatives of the 1930s.
[Note 2014, this debate over raising the minimum wage is still going on in Washington and state capitals around the country.] This week as Nancy Pelosi proposes to raise the minimum wage again, to certain opposition with the usual arguments that paying a fair wage inhibits employment, as the stock market floats to new highs over the stagnant unemployment figures and in a week after we found out who the worlds biggest billionaires are (with some having more than fifty billion dollars in personal wealth), How we've gotten to where we are and the kind of barely realized assumptions that allow us to tolerate it are worth thinking about very hard.
Update: Intellectual Materialism Is Just Sugar Poured On Vulgar Materialism
One of the worst successes of the rich and powerful is the extent to which they have gulled people, including themselves, into believing that the artificial rules for appropriating the products of other peoples' labor are laws of nature and, by sheer force of habituation, convince people that that is how things are, always were and always will be. The formation of habits in people who will accept injustice done to them is one of the most potent of means of oppression and injustice. The history of materialism, even that materialism which may have originally aspired to liberate workers from that system, is one of reinforcing the habits of taking that injustice as an atavistic fact of life. It was one of the bigger surprises I had over the past decade to realize that the habits that produce materialism are the same habits of thought that produce the ruthless treatment of people, animals, the biosphere as objects of commerce, including the habits that lead to that materialism allegedly of the left.
Justice depends on a transcendent view of life. If there is a law of nature involved, that is it. Whenever a life or life in general is seen in mechanical materialistic terms, justice will be pushed aside. Whenever justice is pushed aside, you will find vulgar materialism at the bottom of it. I have come to believe that the motives of intellectuals adopting materialism are, in every case I've looked at, based in motives of personal enrichment and the hope of social and financial advancement. That there may be other motives is possible but, based in what I've looked closely at, I think those must be quite rare.
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Monday, March 24, 2014
The Case Condemning Modernism
Rereading "Mother Country" again, it has to count as one of the most important essays written in the past century in the English language. So far as I have been able to find, it was republished, once, in paperback ten years after it was first published, I can't find that it was issued again, after that. You can buy it as an e-book, however and it is available in used copies and from libraries. Compared to any number of frivolous essays on pop culture or some ridiculous theory of "theory" about "culture" its subject and Ms. Robinson's treatment of it, couldn't be more important and more serious. But our culture, thoroughly steeped in the purposes and tactics - what replace methods - of modernism has ignored it for a quarter of a century.
The deep unseriousness of modernism is a practical demonstration of the results of a materialism that deems everything to be merely random, merely transiently deemed to be of importance, of everything to be the product of atavistic forces not, really of our choosing. I have come to see that the primary motivation of modernism is cowardice, of taking every excuse to not make choices, to not choose to believe our own experience, cowering behind some indeterminacy that is supposed to bring the methods of probabilistic science into our real lives of sensation and the experience of living. The appeal of that pose to people who have not had training in probability or the sciences that have to make recourse to those due to the limits of direct observation is clear. It allows them to pretend to following scientific methods when they don't even really know what those are. The appeal of it for scientists and mathematicians who should know better is the status they gain from the ignorance of the mass of those with an education or who aspire to be mistaken as such. Not to mention the opportunities to sell the products that scientists have a stake in on the alleged uncertainty of their harmful nature, what climate change denial and the pollution of the ocean by the British government and scientific establishment that Marilynne Robinson, in a act of genius, positively ties to the horrific history of British social policy.
In such a decadent, corrupt culture it is no surprise that an essay, laying out in detailed scholarship, resulting in a sold case, true indictment beyond any reasonable doubt, would be either incomprehensible or blacklisted from consideration. If the human species survives, the environmental destruction that resulted from the application of science within the demoralized culture of materialism will be item one in the condemnation of modernism. The reduction of human beings to material entities that are properly used up and disposed of in a way that refuses to address their rights and the moral obligation of those with power to respect those rights is an older indictment, one that, as Ms. Robinson shows, extends back into the medieval period in Britain. Modernism certainly didn't reject that ancient heritage, in the cases where that was successfully abandoned and condemned, it was, in almost every case, religious conviction that did it, as unmodernistic as it is possible to imagine.
Modernism is an ideology that has brought us the disaster that we face, the disaster of the potency of science unregulated and restrained and, in some cases, not made illegal, by the application of the old fashioned concepts of morality. It is a failure in any human terms, in any terms that life can continue under.
The deep unseriousness of modernism is a practical demonstration of the results of a materialism that deems everything to be merely random, merely transiently deemed to be of importance, of everything to be the product of atavistic forces not, really of our choosing. I have come to see that the primary motivation of modernism is cowardice, of taking every excuse to not make choices, to not choose to believe our own experience, cowering behind some indeterminacy that is supposed to bring the methods of probabilistic science into our real lives of sensation and the experience of living. The appeal of that pose to people who have not had training in probability or the sciences that have to make recourse to those due to the limits of direct observation is clear. It allows them to pretend to following scientific methods when they don't even really know what those are. The appeal of it for scientists and mathematicians who should know better is the status they gain from the ignorance of the mass of those with an education or who aspire to be mistaken as such. Not to mention the opportunities to sell the products that scientists have a stake in on the alleged uncertainty of their harmful nature, what climate change denial and the pollution of the ocean by the British government and scientific establishment that Marilynne Robinson, in a act of genius, positively ties to the horrific history of British social policy.
In such a decadent, corrupt culture it is no surprise that an essay, laying out in detailed scholarship, resulting in a sold case, true indictment beyond any reasonable doubt, would be either incomprehensible or blacklisted from consideration. If the human species survives, the environmental destruction that resulted from the application of science within the demoralized culture of materialism will be item one in the condemnation of modernism. The reduction of human beings to material entities that are properly used up and disposed of in a way that refuses to address their rights and the moral obligation of those with power to respect those rights is an older indictment, one that, as Ms. Robinson shows, extends back into the medieval period in Britain. Modernism certainly didn't reject that ancient heritage, in the cases where that was successfully abandoned and condemned, it was, in almost every case, religious conviction that did it, as unmodernistic as it is possible to imagine.
Modernism is an ideology that has brought us the disaster that we face, the disaster of the potency of science unregulated and restrained and, in some cases, not made illegal, by the application of the old fashioned concepts of morality. It is a failure in any human terms, in any terms that life can continue under.
Turning Every Good Thing Into a Mode of Exaction More from" Mother Country"
Note Update March 2014 below
We have never ceased to talk about overpopulation, though true instances of it seem very rare. The English workingman Francis Place, having contrived to educate himself under astonishingly unfavorable circumstances, became the first writer in English to argue for birth control. He accepted Malthus's view that workers were poor because there were too many of them, and he argued that their improvement lay in self-restraint. Of course, like poor people almost everywhere, they had children for their economic value. As late as the present century the prosperity of a family fluctuated with the number of employed people in it, and the early redundancy of the father, as well as such vicissitudes as sickness and injury, were more easily borne the more shoulders they fell on. Any glut of labor was the result of employing people from childhood, for sixteen hours a day or more, at wages that denied them any possibility of withholding their labor. A higher wage would have relieved the glut by allowing women to stay home with their new infants, or allowing families to keep older children at home to attend to younger children. Physical efficiency would have been enhanced at the same time.
But "working class" is the primary term in British social thought. The coercive implications of the phrase are glossed in every version and institution of the Poor Laws, right through Fabianism and the Welfare State, which is only the latest version of the ancient view that what the worker earns, his wage defined as subsistence, is not his by right, as property. The welfare system indeed assures that the wage will never amount to any specific sum of money but will be nuanced to provide subsistence itself, not in a money equivalent, however calculated. In other words, workers earn their existence by working. At the same time, their employment exists at the pleasure of those who employ, first of all, the government. The Welfare State, being designed for the employed, is designed for the less necessitous Those who do not work are historically regarded as a sort of scandalized aversion, exactly like people without caste in a society based on caste.
Place accepted the blame for poverty on behalf of the working people, and accepted the notion that there could be an excess of people relative to their economic usefulness, and that that excess should be eliminated by sexual abstinence so that it need not be carried off by disease and starvation. He accepted the notion that there was a natural balance, a marketplace of survival glutted with laborers.
Darwin was likewise indebted to Malthus, and freely acknowledged his influence. Overbreeding relative to available food sources harrowed out those less well adapted to survive, in Darwin's view. Herbert Spencer, who was to Beatrice Webb as Aristotle to Alexander, seized upon the ida immediately as a model drawn from nature, which justified just such horrors as had been Malthus's point of departure one hundred years previously. Competition supposedly described the hard scrabble existence of the laboring classes, who sold their labor by the day and were constantly thrown out of work by a change of season or fashion, or the invention of a new machine It was a commonplace that they helped one another as best they could thorough these disasters. The idea nevertheless had great impact because it made death a legitimate part of the social and economic order, a function rather than a malfunction of political economy a measure of the extent to which the new industrial society cleaved to the ways of nature rather than departing from them. It affirmed the idea that there exited a human surplus, whose survival could only be secured at the cost of creatures worthier to survive. In such a context subsistence would be a positive reward, easily withdrawn, as in Darwinian nature.
The penchant for developing theories to account for the suffering and death proved useful. Press and parliamentary reports of the Victorian period describe a system of exploitation which ravaged the culture, extruded every ounce of labor from those able to work - including small children and women recently delivered - starved them, beat them, poisoned them, housed them in cellars into which sewage drained from the streets, taking from them everything that could be taken, turning every good thing into a mode of exaction.
If you read the passage above and noted something that seemed uncomfortably familiar you've been paying attention to the political and economic reports. The language is more modern and less explicit but the trend is to reenacting British social policy in the United States. Even as innocuous seeming a concept as Barack Obama's "Race to the Top" divides the deserving from the "undeserving", it sets even the deserving against each other in a competition for meager resources as a means of exacting an alleged benefit. The extent to which that kind of elite British thought pervades the ruling, Ivy League educated elite of the United States, from which our "liberal" ruling class is drawn, should be troubling. Read the speeches of Barack Obama and compare them with those of Lyndon Johnson to see how far the American tradition of liberalism has been overrun with a similar concept of the world laid out in these excerpts.
The Republican accusation that Obama is too European is, of course, ridiculous. If anything he's too British.
As an aside, it's pretty telling that in the thousands of hours of British costume drama that PBS and the movies have presented to us, I don't recall the Poor Law being mentioned once*. Not once. Considering the totalitarian impact it has had on the lives of the large majority of those who lived under it, you have to wonder why it's so effectively swept under the rug. Clearly, it's seen as something to be hidden.
* Update March 2014 Someone told me, though I am not able to confirm it, that last season's Downtown Abby mentioned work houses. And I can also say that there was one other example I can confirm, an episode of "Call the Midwife" mentioned the true depravity of the work houses that were an intrinsic part of the New Poor Law, though in its considerably less depraved, 20th century manifestation. The Poor Law, officially, ended in 1948, within living memory- though seldom mentioned as compared to scandal of the "Magdalene Laundries". British government depravity of that sort during our lifetimes is oddly ignored as compared to any that can be attributed to religious institutions. But only oddly if you discount the biases involved in popular culture.
My research last year, into the work houses, after I did this series, exposed me to the terrible fact that they were, in practice and, clearly, by intention DEATH CAMPS that were a prelude to those that would be established by Germany and the Soviet Union in the next century. The numbers of deaths listed in the horrific roles of deaths of internees in work houses, the numbers of those listed as dying of STARVATION months and years after the detainees were incarcerated in them, exposes their true nature. The literature dealing with the starvation and death of internees due to the purposely squalid and cruel conditions within them was entirely public and known at the time. Reading that literature, recalling that Charles Darwin regretted the existence of work houses and the poor law, NOT BECAUSE THEY WERE CRUEL AND CRIMINAL BUT BECAUSE THEY WOULD LEAVE TOO MANY OF THE POOR ALIVE TO HAVE CHILDREN OF THEIR OWN, was a definitive experience, entirely overturning the last part of my own willfully pretending that he was anything but a full supporter of even more depravity than the British law instituted.
We have never ceased to talk about overpopulation, though true instances of it seem very rare. The English workingman Francis Place, having contrived to educate himself under astonishingly unfavorable circumstances, became the first writer in English to argue for birth control. He accepted Malthus's view that workers were poor because there were too many of them, and he argued that their improvement lay in self-restraint. Of course, like poor people almost everywhere, they had children for their economic value. As late as the present century the prosperity of a family fluctuated with the number of employed people in it, and the early redundancy of the father, as well as such vicissitudes as sickness and injury, were more easily borne the more shoulders they fell on. Any glut of labor was the result of employing people from childhood, for sixteen hours a day or more, at wages that denied them any possibility of withholding their labor. A higher wage would have relieved the glut by allowing women to stay home with their new infants, or allowing families to keep older children at home to attend to younger children. Physical efficiency would have been enhanced at the same time.
But "working class" is the primary term in British social thought. The coercive implications of the phrase are glossed in every version and institution of the Poor Laws, right through Fabianism and the Welfare State, which is only the latest version of the ancient view that what the worker earns, his wage defined as subsistence, is not his by right, as property. The welfare system indeed assures that the wage will never amount to any specific sum of money but will be nuanced to provide subsistence itself, not in a money equivalent, however calculated. In other words, workers earn their existence by working. At the same time, their employment exists at the pleasure of those who employ, first of all, the government. The Welfare State, being designed for the employed, is designed for the less necessitous Those who do not work are historically regarded as a sort of scandalized aversion, exactly like people without caste in a society based on caste.
Place accepted the blame for poverty on behalf of the working people, and accepted the notion that there could be an excess of people relative to their economic usefulness, and that that excess should be eliminated by sexual abstinence so that it need not be carried off by disease and starvation. He accepted the notion that there was a natural balance, a marketplace of survival glutted with laborers.
Darwin was likewise indebted to Malthus, and freely acknowledged his influence. Overbreeding relative to available food sources harrowed out those less well adapted to survive, in Darwin's view. Herbert Spencer, who was to Beatrice Webb as Aristotle to Alexander, seized upon the ida immediately as a model drawn from nature, which justified just such horrors as had been Malthus's point of departure one hundred years previously. Competition supposedly described the hard scrabble existence of the laboring classes, who sold their labor by the day and were constantly thrown out of work by a change of season or fashion, or the invention of a new machine It was a commonplace that they helped one another as best they could thorough these disasters. The idea nevertheless had great impact because it made death a legitimate part of the social and economic order, a function rather than a malfunction of political economy a measure of the extent to which the new industrial society cleaved to the ways of nature rather than departing from them. It affirmed the idea that there exited a human surplus, whose survival could only be secured at the cost of creatures worthier to survive. In such a context subsistence would be a positive reward, easily withdrawn, as in Darwinian nature.
The penchant for developing theories to account for the suffering and death proved useful. Press and parliamentary reports of the Victorian period describe a system of exploitation which ravaged the culture, extruded every ounce of labor from those able to work - including small children and women recently delivered - starved them, beat them, poisoned them, housed them in cellars into which sewage drained from the streets, taking from them everything that could be taken, turning every good thing into a mode of exaction.
If you read the passage above and noted something that seemed uncomfortably familiar you've been paying attention to the political and economic reports. The language is more modern and less explicit but the trend is to reenacting British social policy in the United States. Even as innocuous seeming a concept as Barack Obama's "Race to the Top" divides the deserving from the "undeserving", it sets even the deserving against each other in a competition for meager resources as a means of exacting an alleged benefit. The extent to which that kind of elite British thought pervades the ruling, Ivy League educated elite of the United States, from which our "liberal" ruling class is drawn, should be troubling. Read the speeches of Barack Obama and compare them with those of Lyndon Johnson to see how far the American tradition of liberalism has been overrun with a similar concept of the world laid out in these excerpts.
The Republican accusation that Obama is too European is, of course, ridiculous. If anything he's too British.
As an aside, it's pretty telling that in the thousands of hours of British costume drama that PBS and the movies have presented to us, I don't recall the Poor Law being mentioned once*. Not once. Considering the totalitarian impact it has had on the lives of the large majority of those who lived under it, you have to wonder why it's so effectively swept under the rug. Clearly, it's seen as something to be hidden.
* Update March 2014 Someone told me, though I am not able to confirm it, that last season's Downtown Abby mentioned work houses. And I can also say that there was one other example I can confirm, an episode of "Call the Midwife" mentioned the true depravity of the work houses that were an intrinsic part of the New Poor Law, though in its considerably less depraved, 20th century manifestation. The Poor Law, officially, ended in 1948, within living memory- though seldom mentioned as compared to scandal of the "Magdalene Laundries". British government depravity of that sort during our lifetimes is oddly ignored as compared to any that can be attributed to religious institutions. But only oddly if you discount the biases involved in popular culture.
My research last year, into the work houses, after I did this series, exposed me to the terrible fact that they were, in practice and, clearly, by intention DEATH CAMPS that were a prelude to those that would be established by Germany and the Soviet Union in the next century. The numbers of deaths listed in the horrific roles of deaths of internees in work houses, the numbers of those listed as dying of STARVATION months and years after the detainees were incarcerated in them, exposes their true nature. The literature dealing with the starvation and death of internees due to the purposely squalid and cruel conditions within them was entirely public and known at the time. Reading that literature, recalling that Charles Darwin regretted the existence of work houses and the poor law, NOT BECAUSE THEY WERE CRUEL AND CRIMINAL BUT BECAUSE THEY WOULD LEAVE TOO MANY OF THE POOR ALIVE TO HAVE CHILDREN OF THEIR OWN, was a definitive experience, entirely overturning the last part of my own willfully pretending that he was anything but a full supporter of even more depravity than the British law instituted.
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Bartok Three Burlesques Sviatoslav Richter (played as encores)
I've only played the second one, wish I'd played all of them but I couldn't have played them nearly as well as Richter did.
Desmond Tutu Said It Better Than I Can
More Sundays than not, I should send Krista Tippett a thank you note because listening to her program, most weeks, she could provide me with a fantastic topic to write on. She and her guests do most of the work for me.
Today it is the great, living, saint, Bishop Desmond Tutu who has provided the strongest possible evidence to support one of the things I write on over and over again, that political freedom comes from a complete conviction that the metaphysical truths of inherent rights, equality and the moral obligation to respect those. I will add something else now because I have come to really believe it, that unless you believe those are an endowment of human beings by the grace of God, your belief in them will be insufficient to carry through to making them manifest in society and in politics. His example is as concrete in anything else in human experience, human experience, itself.
Ms. Tippett: Right. You had spiritual companions.
Archbishop Tutu: Yes. They are more than that. I mean, they are people who helped to form me. And then discovering that the Bible could be such dynamite. I subsequently used to say if these white people had intended keeping us under they shouldn't have given us the Bible. Because, whoa, I mean, it's almost as if it is written specifically just for your situation. I mean, the many parts of it that were so germane, so utterly to the point for us …
Ms. Tippett: Can you recall one of those early discoveries as the Bible as dynamite? Some teaching that you suddenly saw as so relevant?
Archbishop Tutu: Well, it's actually right the very first thing. I mean, when you discover that apartheid sought to mislead people into believing that what gave value to human beings was a biological irrelevance, really, skin color or ethnicity, and you saw how the scriptures say it is because we are created in the image of God, that each one of us is a God-carrier. No matter what our physical circumstances may be, no matter how awful, no matter how deprived you could be, it doesn't take away from you this intrinsic worth. One saw just how significant it was.
Although I was a bishop, I was working now for the Southern Council of Churches and had a small parish in Soweto. Most of my parishioners were domestic workers, not people who are very well educated. But I would say to them, "You know, mama, when they ask who are you" — you see, the white employer most frequently didn't use the person's name. They said the person's name was too difficult. And so most Africans, women would be called "Annie" and most black men really, you were "boy." And I would say to them, "When they ask who are you, you say, 'Me? I'm a God-carrier. I'm God's partner. I'm created in the image of God.'" And you could see those dear old ladies as they walked out of church on that occasion as if they were on cloud nine. You know, they walked with their backs slightly straighter. And, yeah, it was amazing.
Ms. Tippett: I think much of the world, and this has to do with my profession of journalism as well …
Archbishop Tutu: Yeah.
Ms. Tippett: … experienced the events in South Africa, those decades leading up to the end of apartheid, primarily as political happenings. But there was a great religious drama at the heart of it, right?
Archbishop Tutu: Yes.
Ms. Tippett: So on the one hand, the church, the Dutch Reform Church, the primary church in South Africa, sanctioned and sustained apartheid to near the end. And also, as you say, there was this parallel drama going on of religion, theology, the Bible becoming a great force of liberation.
Archbishop Tutu: Well, one of the wonderful things was how in fact we had this interfaith cooperation — Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus. And now, when you hear people speak disparagingly about, say, Islam, you say they've forgotten the men that that faith inspired people to great acts of courage.
Ms. Tippett: And that coalition, those friendships, were they building in those latter decades of the 20th century?
Archbishop Tutu: You discovered the thing you were fighting against was too big for divided churches, for divided religious community. And each of the different faith communities realized some of the very significant central teachings about the worth of a human being, about the unacceptability of injustice and oppression. Many times, actually, it was quite exhilarating. It was fun.
And, because I've got a lot to learn, here is what he says about the limits and problems of living with mere political freedom when society isn't structured to maximize the reality that all people are made in the image of God.
Ms. Tippett: Yeah. I like that. I wonder also, is it right you were 63 years old when you voted for the first time? What was that like?
Archbishop Tutu: How do you describe falling in love? I mean, people asked then when we voted for the first time. It was an incredible experience. For you, going to the poll box is really a political act. For us, it was a religious act. It was a spiritual experience because, you know, you walked into the polling booth one person with all of the history of oppression and injustice and all the baggage that we were carrying and you walk and you make your mark and you put the ballot into the box and you emerge on the other side. And you are a different person. You are transfigured. Now you actually count in your own country. You — hey, I mean, it really was a cloud nine experience. We were transformed from ciphers into persons.
Ms. Tippett: You know, one thing that I feel also runs throughout your writing is how freedom in terms of politics, I mean, this freedom to vote, is absolutely something you demanded and needed to demand, and yet you also knew people across the years who were free while they were imprisoned. And there's also this specter now of people who are politically free but not free in, I don't know, maybe the deepest Christian sense, for example.
Archbishop Tutu: Yes.
Ms. Tippett: So I wonder if you'd reflect a little bit on what you've learned about the limits of politics.
Archbishop Tutu: Well, you know, I mean, you've got prepositions. The preposition "from" — you are free from and then you are free for. We have gone to being free from, which turns out to be one of the slightly easier things to get to do, although it took so long.
Ms. Tippett: Yes.
Archbishop Tutu: The being free for, I tell you, is tough. You know?
Ms. Tippett: So what is the freedom for what that you now wish for, for your people?
Archbishop Tutu: I think many of us were involved. I often say you know what? We didn't struggle in order just to change the complexion of those who sit in the Union Buildings. The Union Buildings are something like your capitol and so on. Yeah. It wasn't to change the complexion; it was to change the quality of our community, society. That we wanted to see a society that was a compassionate society, a caring society, a society where you might not necessarily be madly rich but you knew that you counted. I don't think that we've got — yeah. I mean, we've got a number of the things, sort of material political things, not all of them. I mean, we have levels of poverty at home that are unacceptable. There's the crime, there's disease. We still do not, I think, have the kind of place where you say I really am proud to be here. I know that even when I don't have a big bank balance I count, I matter. What we have found is that original sin actually doesn't know very much about racial discrimination. Original sin infects all of us. I mean, when you see how so soon people have become corrupt, it leaves you feeling sad.
Just about everything he said was abundantly worth pointing out, you will certainly get something important from listening to the podcast and reading the transcript of his entire interview. It helps a lot to read the transcript.
Ok, one more point because at least a dozen times this week I've encountered what blog atheists believe is their ace up their sleeve, you know, their disproof of God that mentions Zeus, Odin, etc.
Archbishop Tutu: Yes. Do you really think that God would say, "Dalai Lama, you really are a great guy, man. What a shame you're not a Christian."?
[laughter]
Archbishop Tutu: I somehow don't think so. I think God is just thrilled because no faith, not even the Christian faith, can ever encompass God or even be able to communicate who God is. Only God can do that.
Today it is the great, living, saint, Bishop Desmond Tutu who has provided the strongest possible evidence to support one of the things I write on over and over again, that political freedom comes from a complete conviction that the metaphysical truths of inherent rights, equality and the moral obligation to respect those. I will add something else now because I have come to really believe it, that unless you believe those are an endowment of human beings by the grace of God, your belief in them will be insufficient to carry through to making them manifest in society and in politics. His example is as concrete in anything else in human experience, human experience, itself.
Ms. Tippett: Right. You had spiritual companions.
Archbishop Tutu: Yes. They are more than that. I mean, they are people who helped to form me. And then discovering that the Bible could be such dynamite. I subsequently used to say if these white people had intended keeping us under they shouldn't have given us the Bible. Because, whoa, I mean, it's almost as if it is written specifically just for your situation. I mean, the many parts of it that were so germane, so utterly to the point for us …
Ms. Tippett: Can you recall one of those early discoveries as the Bible as dynamite? Some teaching that you suddenly saw as so relevant?
Archbishop Tutu: Well, it's actually right the very first thing. I mean, when you discover that apartheid sought to mislead people into believing that what gave value to human beings was a biological irrelevance, really, skin color or ethnicity, and you saw how the scriptures say it is because we are created in the image of God, that each one of us is a God-carrier. No matter what our physical circumstances may be, no matter how awful, no matter how deprived you could be, it doesn't take away from you this intrinsic worth. One saw just how significant it was.
Although I was a bishop, I was working now for the Southern Council of Churches and had a small parish in Soweto. Most of my parishioners were domestic workers, not people who are very well educated. But I would say to them, "You know, mama, when they ask who are you" — you see, the white employer most frequently didn't use the person's name. They said the person's name was too difficult. And so most Africans, women would be called "Annie" and most black men really, you were "boy." And I would say to them, "When they ask who are you, you say, 'Me? I'm a God-carrier. I'm God's partner. I'm created in the image of God.'" And you could see those dear old ladies as they walked out of church on that occasion as if they were on cloud nine. You know, they walked with their backs slightly straighter. And, yeah, it was amazing.
Ms. Tippett: I think much of the world, and this has to do with my profession of journalism as well …
Archbishop Tutu: Yeah.
Ms. Tippett: … experienced the events in South Africa, those decades leading up to the end of apartheid, primarily as political happenings. But there was a great religious drama at the heart of it, right?
Archbishop Tutu: Yes.
Ms. Tippett: So on the one hand, the church, the Dutch Reform Church, the primary church in South Africa, sanctioned and sustained apartheid to near the end. And also, as you say, there was this parallel drama going on of religion, theology, the Bible becoming a great force of liberation.
Archbishop Tutu: Well, one of the wonderful things was how in fact we had this interfaith cooperation — Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus. And now, when you hear people speak disparagingly about, say, Islam, you say they've forgotten the men that that faith inspired people to great acts of courage.
Ms. Tippett: And that coalition, those friendships, were they building in those latter decades of the 20th century?
Archbishop Tutu: You discovered the thing you were fighting against was too big for divided churches, for divided religious community. And each of the different faith communities realized some of the very significant central teachings about the worth of a human being, about the unacceptability of injustice and oppression. Many times, actually, it was quite exhilarating. It was fun.
And, because I've got a lot to learn, here is what he says about the limits and problems of living with mere political freedom when society isn't structured to maximize the reality that all people are made in the image of God.
Ms. Tippett: Yeah. I like that. I wonder also, is it right you were 63 years old when you voted for the first time? What was that like?
Archbishop Tutu: How do you describe falling in love? I mean, people asked then when we voted for the first time. It was an incredible experience. For you, going to the poll box is really a political act. For us, it was a religious act. It was a spiritual experience because, you know, you walked into the polling booth one person with all of the history of oppression and injustice and all the baggage that we were carrying and you walk and you make your mark and you put the ballot into the box and you emerge on the other side. And you are a different person. You are transfigured. Now you actually count in your own country. You — hey, I mean, it really was a cloud nine experience. We were transformed from ciphers into persons.
Ms. Tippett: You know, one thing that I feel also runs throughout your writing is how freedom in terms of politics, I mean, this freedom to vote, is absolutely something you demanded and needed to demand, and yet you also knew people across the years who were free while they were imprisoned. And there's also this specter now of people who are politically free but not free in, I don't know, maybe the deepest Christian sense, for example.
Archbishop Tutu: Yes.
Ms. Tippett: So I wonder if you'd reflect a little bit on what you've learned about the limits of politics.
Archbishop Tutu: Well, you know, I mean, you've got prepositions. The preposition "from" — you are free from and then you are free for. We have gone to being free from, which turns out to be one of the slightly easier things to get to do, although it took so long.
Ms. Tippett: Yes.
Archbishop Tutu: The being free for, I tell you, is tough. You know?
Ms. Tippett: So what is the freedom for what that you now wish for, for your people?
Archbishop Tutu: I think many of us were involved. I often say you know what? We didn't struggle in order just to change the complexion of those who sit in the Union Buildings. The Union Buildings are something like your capitol and so on. Yeah. It wasn't to change the complexion; it was to change the quality of our community, society. That we wanted to see a society that was a compassionate society, a caring society, a society where you might not necessarily be madly rich but you knew that you counted. I don't think that we've got — yeah. I mean, we've got a number of the things, sort of material political things, not all of them. I mean, we have levels of poverty at home that are unacceptable. There's the crime, there's disease. We still do not, I think, have the kind of place where you say I really am proud to be here. I know that even when I don't have a big bank balance I count, I matter. What we have found is that original sin actually doesn't know very much about racial discrimination. Original sin infects all of us. I mean, when you see how so soon people have become corrupt, it leaves you feeling sad.
Just about everything he said was abundantly worth pointing out, you will certainly get something important from listening to the podcast and reading the transcript of his entire interview. It helps a lot to read the transcript.
Ok, one more point because at least a dozen times this week I've encountered what blog atheists believe is their ace up their sleeve, you know, their disproof of God that mentions Zeus, Odin, etc.
Archbishop Tutu: Yes. Do you really think that God would say, "Dalai Lama, you really are a great guy, man. What a shame you're not a Christian."?
[laughter]
Archbishop Tutu: I somehow don't think so. I think God is just thrilled because no faith, not even the Christian faith, can ever encompass God or even be able to communicate who God is. Only God can do that.
Saturday, March 22, 2014
Francesco Landini Ecco La Primavera
Anonymous 4
Behold, Spring. More a wish than a declaration, it's snowing here as I post this. I've often had peas and onions planted in the ground by this time of year.
Magical Thinking Pervades The Atheist Ideology
Since first noticing the bizarre practice of atheist cosmologists to create the most absurd, stupendously massive and entirely unevidenced "things" by intoning the word "probability" I've come to realize how much magic is done by those people who so despise and disdain "magical thinking." I call it "magic" because that is what it is, the creation of "things" that are to be taken as real and whose reality is not to be questioned and which are to be talked about seriously. How the discussion of Boltzmann brains differs from that of late medieval demonology in character is worth considering. And the creation of "things" by atheists intoning "probability" is far more ambitious than most of the earlier traditions of belief. You have to come up with some of the more extensive estimates of the dimensions of the highest level of Hindu deity to even approach the vastness of what the atheists are inventing these days. The admission reportedly made by Martin Rees, that the motive of atheist cosmologists in magic-ing up their greatest achievement, to date, the bazillions of universes under multi-universe theory, that it was done so they could figure out some way to have the fine tuning of this universe without a God, was honest, at least. That is the motivation of atheists using magic words as science. That is why the educated class of the West has been practicing a form of magical materialism for more than a hundred-sixty years.
Oddly, I think that, for cosmology and physics, this form of magical thinking, giving the most extensive of creative powers to mathematics, is a survival from the previous faith of those two branches of science. Lord Kelvin, in his "Baltimore Lectures" given at Johns Hopkins University, His attempt to create a physical model of the aether displayed a similar faith in the power of mathematics under the 17th-19th century mechanical model of the universe. But within a few years Kelvin would admit that there were problems to be accounted for in that mechanical universe, especially the problems raised by the Michleson-Morley experiments, giving a practical refutation of Kelvin's declaration that he knew the aether was there because he could measure it. In a few years after that the mechanical model of the universe would be destroyed in Germany, but not the habits of thought built up under it. Those habits of the disposed of mechanical universe still pervade atheist culture and, I suspect, they always will. I think this kind of magical thinking among atheists today is an unadmitted aspect of that.
It was after realizing that use of magic in the physical sciences that I came to see that, beginning in the 1860s, atheists were using the phrase, "natural selection" as a magical incantation in much the same way. You can look at the publications of some of Darwin's most informed and sophisticated of followers and see how, with no evidence, whatsoever, they created all kinds of organisms and forces without any kind of observation by the application of "natural selection".
Ernst Haeckel, one of the most influential of all of Darwin's colleagues and followers immediately set about to inventing everything from micro-organisms, traits of embryology, right up to a complete and final and, he said, "triumphant" universal monist material system, all on the basis of "natural selection". And that form of creation has pervaded the life sciences and, even more so, the slippery sciences dealing with the non-material aspects of behavior and thought, right up till today. As I noted recently, hardly a day passes when some scientist won't be heard on NPR or PBS or even the commercial statements intoning the potent phrase "natural selection" inventing class inequality, gender inequality, class inequality, special abilities but, even more so "inabilities" that have the same effect of Haeckel's magic, propping up existing inequality, turning it into a real "thing" that is the right and immutable nature of things.
And since such things as "behaviors" and thoughts are easily transmuted into a form convenient to any purpose, the magic of such scientists is potent in a way that is most persuasive to those whose faith in everything called "science", who despise and disdain anything that is CALLED "magic" who believe that they are upholding the rational tradition that has left magic and other such superstition in the past. Their faith in "science" and their moderny materialist conception of the world blinds them to the obviously magical quality of the entire thing.
We have gone from a scientific tradition that understood the limits of its methods, that those were dependent, in the end, on observation of physical entities, to one that values the immaterial products of theory divorced from observation. Frequently the excuse is that physical observation is either impossible or that a real, non-subjectively evaluated observation is impossible. And instead of admitting that such things, no matter how much they would like, can't really enter into the same realm and share the same prestige as the science based on the adequate observation of actual things. Or, at least, that they shouldn't be admitted into that body of ideas that have, in fact, the reliability of those kinds of observations and evaluations. The desire to weasel even the wildest speculations on behaviors and the insanely issued promissory notes of materialism into the category "science" has won out over the most basic methods and requirements of science. I don't doubt that will continue because the interests of those involved, professionally, financially, in terms of status gained and through ideological desire, will sustain this means of introducing magic into science. But those of us not involved should call them on their hypocrisy and willful blindness of what they are making the real public understanding of science.
A Changeling Has Been Put In The Cradle of American Culture
It is tempting to go on with that last passage but I will jump ahead. After a long and fascinating passage about Americans in the period around the Civil War and the role Karl Marx certainly played in the thinking of American figures as iconic as Lincoln and Harriet Beecher Stowe Marilynne Robinson continues:
I am haunted by the sense that a changeling has been put in the cradle of American culture. Adam Smith, the supposed capitalist, whose influence among us is notorious, developed an economic system in which prison, the poorhouse, and starvation have no role and in which the flourishing of the people ( a term he prefers to "the poor") is the desired end. Compare the Fabians, those most sedulous of strainers of mercy, Why are Smith's proposals for public projects to enhance the economy, taxes that weigh less heavily on the poor than the rich, and education to alleviate the effects of industrial work, called capitalist, while subsidies of the cost of labor and visits of inspection to the homes of the poor to assure that their destitution was perfect before they were relieved - that women had sold their wedding rings, for example - are called socialist? Why do the Land Grant Act, the Homestead Act, and the G.I. Bill, three distributions of wealth to the public on a scale never contemplated in Britain, have no status among political events, when the dreary traffic in pittances institutionalized as the British Welfare State is hailed as an advance of socialism?
We must find a political and moral clarity that will enable us to address the starkest problems of survival, if the world is to have any hope. For a long time now, socialists have claimed an exceptional interest in the well-being of the generality of people, a special inclination to humanize collective life. But the history of socialism is disheartening. It is too strongly associated with repression, and these ties are too casually dismissed, for socialism to be conceded the special virtues it claims for itself. Plutonium manufacture and radioactive waste dumping are enterprises for the British government, and as good a proof as one could wish that government ownership in itself means nothing. The pattern identified by Adam Smith and Karl Marx, the accumulation of capital through the destruction of wealth is fully present in Sellafield. British socialism has always been no more than the left hand washing the right, and yet for years it has compelled the admiration of American socialists, who can find nothing in their own tradition to compare to it for moral grandeur.
The mainstream political tradition in America is represented insistently now as unrelievedly "capitalist" whatever Marx might have said about it, and as compromised grubbing and mean-spirited because of the supposed relative prevalence of "private property" - whatever Marx might have said about that. On both the right and the left, capitalism, not democracy is represented as the basis of our institutions. If Sellafield is sometime sold to private owners, as the government has long intended that it should be, then overnight it will become a classic capitalist enterprise by Marx's definition.
There is a third option, however, described by both Smith and Marx, and , as luck would have it, indigenous to America, of a society based upon individual autonomy, to be achieved through policies of government that by act or omission enhance the specific, tangible material well-being of individual people, by creating or protecting conditions of life that enhance vigor and morale. These include education, fair wages, wholesome food and water, and reasonable hope for one's children. These things correspond in a general way with what Americans consider to be "Western values," yet they have have never described, and do not now describe, the condition of life of ordinary British people. To the inevitable reaction, that people do not miss what they have never had, that the austerity of their lives has spared them the corruptions of materialism, that legal protections are needed only where society is a war of each against all that there is the dole to assure them security from cradle to grave, however tedious the passage, or however swift, the reply must be that the history and present condition of ordinary British people make it clear enough how they have been used and in that spirit, by capitalists and by socialists, in tacit or declared collaboration. The best American political impulses occur outside this sham opposition. 'they need to be rediscovered as valuable impulses. Certainly we need to rediscover the complexity of our own political history, which deserves vastly better than to be seized upon by capitalists or dismissed by socialists.
When Abraham Lincoln said of a hypothetical black woman that "in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands ... she is my equal, and the equal of all others," he expresses an economic proposition which is by no means the commonplace or inevitable. Lincoln based the woman's rights on what she earned, not what she needed, a departure from "subsistence theory" and an implicit acknowledgement that labor creates value - that is, a margin between the cost of the worker's subsistence and the amount of wealth she creates - and that she has a right to share in this overplus. One learns from Adam Smith, Thomas Carlyle, E.G. Wakefield, and others that subsistence was assured to slaves as it was not to free workers. In Britain before the Second World War, employers still felt day laborers' arms before they hired them, so that men who were frail or malnourished could be turned away. Under ordinary circumstances slaves would have had as much as economic theory, up to the time of Beveridge, promised or allowed fully employed working people in Britain - enough to maintain them in a condition of physical efficiency. Lincoln made the case, successfully, that in justice more was due anyone. If he had used Marx's language, he would have declared the right to "self-earned private property." Against a history in which vulnerability triggered the crudest abuse - the history of the British poor, into which Africans were swept up fairly late - so modest a statement as Lincoln's sounds like beatitude.
The most difficult struggle of our civilization has been to find the means to create autonomy for ordinary lives, so that they might not be plundered or disposed of according to the whims of more powerful people. Ideas like civil rights and personal liberty come directly from this struggle, which is not terribly well advanced at best, and which is untried, failed or abandoned in most of the world.
There has not been a president in fifty years who was more fitted by history to restore that characteristically American ideal than Barack Obama, it is doubtful that he will do it. Summers, Geithener and, now Lew, are not going to do it. I suspect that Obama's education, as the one I got, indoctrinated him out of either a knowledge of it or a serious consideration of it. I think, though, that in it lies a way out of the stalemate he finds himself in, in which he aspires to nothing more than a more efficient expression of neo-classical economics. Robinson's remarks about Adam Smith indicate how much of a distortion of his ideas "capitalism" in the modern style are. Thatcherism-Reaganism, millennial austerity... are bound to enslave us, the pseudo-socialism that has been seen as an alternative is, in fact, just the left hand washing the right, as it is so wonderfully put above. Life for middle class Americans is, ever more, resembling the dispirited, desperate condition that Marilynne Robinson prophetically held up for us to see almost a quarter of a century ago.
Note: March 2014 Don't Minimize The Role of TV In the Decline of the American Left
It is a really good question that is asked, why is it that the history of American democracy is not what the left didn't choose to continue building on instead of the overtly non-democratic Marxist theories or a romanticized version of the British left that had failed to produce even such benefits as Marilynne Robinson lists in this passage.
I would include land grant universities, which were an important way in which the children of the underclass were able to continue their educations to join the professions and to staff the most remote public schools with professional teachers.
But the children and the grand children of the people who were the first to benefit from those characteristically American forms of wealth redistribution were successfully taught to disdain those and what progress had been made in the United States. A great deal of that profligate abandonment of what could have turned into one of the strongest assets in appealing to the larger American population, on the basis of their own cultural tradition rested securely on the basis of fashion and a popular presentation of the far, far less appealing British and, to a lesser extent European socialist tradition.
Britian had achieved national health care, which isn't an inconsiderable fact in making that kind of appeal but, as Marilynne Robinson said, the remnants of the poor law, aided and abetted by the very "socialists" who had constructed the Welfare State, were also a part of that. And that made the British model of "socialism" less than a model for emulation than it was often presented as being.
Politically, the fashionable disdain of American traditions has not enhanced the electability of more liberal candidates successfully saddled with it. Americans who had saved Britian from the economic and political intrigues of its ruling elite, twice in the preceding half century might well resent the snooty dismissal of American achievements in political advancement, even as it was engaged in the struggle that would push off more of its baggage, racial and other forms of inequality.
The very period in which Britain was romantically looked to by the new educated elite, often through imported form from the BBC on the newly formed PBS, was the same period that the left in the United States achieved the end of its most productive period and soon found itself unpopular and failing in elections. If Republicans and right wing Democrats could appeal to lower income Americans through appeals to patriotism, the left helped them through failing to make their own appeals on the basis of American experience and traditions that were, in fact, worth building on. That a lot of the best in that tradition has been successfully transformed by the far right into something that seems alien to many Americans would not have been possible if the left had presented it as an achievement of American equality, a result of the best thing in our political tradition and the culture of The People.
The role of the media in destroying the achievements of the American tradition, things that, as said above are "distributions of wealth to the public on a scale never contemplated in Britain" cannot be minimized or dismissed by intoning those magic words, "free press". The use that the owners of that "free press", the use of the rich people who own the massive and unprecedentedly politically effective electronic mass media to destroy that American tradition has been countered by a total capitulation by the libertarian-left. In order to do that they have had to suppress the basis of and the reason that print media was, originally, given that freedom, the need of free people for unbiased information in order for them to be able to cast an informed vote. I don't think that the steady diet of British TV and, later, radio fed into the United States has really helped much. Its role in the culture of what remains of the American left has been a bad one. British TV produced the Thatcher era in Britian, after all. If that kind of "press" were going to have a role here, that is the result that could be expected.
We have to rebuild a real American left, built on the remaining parts of the achievements of the American populist and liberal traditions of the past. It might be that the habits of thought and the appeals of equality, inherent rights and the moral obligation to respect those - which will not done except on the basis of effectively strong religious conviction - is still possible. It is certainly more worth trying than building on the failed lefts of other countries which have failed to protect what acheivements they have had. As Robinson points out, the American achievements of more equal distribution of wealth were more successful in the past, even as their left was fretting over how to make the lot of the destitute sufficiently miserable to be salubrious. That is a British tradition that the American right has successfully copied, aping the worst of the British system, even importing Rupert Murdoch in order to destroy the truly American heritage in line with more typically American ideals.
I am haunted by the sense that a changeling has been put in the cradle of American culture. Adam Smith, the supposed capitalist, whose influence among us is notorious, developed an economic system in which prison, the poorhouse, and starvation have no role and in which the flourishing of the people ( a term he prefers to "the poor") is the desired end. Compare the Fabians, those most sedulous of strainers of mercy, Why are Smith's proposals for public projects to enhance the economy, taxes that weigh less heavily on the poor than the rich, and education to alleviate the effects of industrial work, called capitalist, while subsidies of the cost of labor and visits of inspection to the homes of the poor to assure that their destitution was perfect before they were relieved - that women had sold their wedding rings, for example - are called socialist? Why do the Land Grant Act, the Homestead Act, and the G.I. Bill, three distributions of wealth to the public on a scale never contemplated in Britain, have no status among political events, when the dreary traffic in pittances institutionalized as the British Welfare State is hailed as an advance of socialism?
We must find a political and moral clarity that will enable us to address the starkest problems of survival, if the world is to have any hope. For a long time now, socialists have claimed an exceptional interest in the well-being of the generality of people, a special inclination to humanize collective life. But the history of socialism is disheartening. It is too strongly associated with repression, and these ties are too casually dismissed, for socialism to be conceded the special virtues it claims for itself. Plutonium manufacture and radioactive waste dumping are enterprises for the British government, and as good a proof as one could wish that government ownership in itself means nothing. The pattern identified by Adam Smith and Karl Marx, the accumulation of capital through the destruction of wealth is fully present in Sellafield. British socialism has always been no more than the left hand washing the right, and yet for years it has compelled the admiration of American socialists, who can find nothing in their own tradition to compare to it for moral grandeur.
The mainstream political tradition in America is represented insistently now as unrelievedly "capitalist" whatever Marx might have said about it, and as compromised grubbing and mean-spirited because of the supposed relative prevalence of "private property" - whatever Marx might have said about that. On both the right and the left, capitalism, not democracy is represented as the basis of our institutions. If Sellafield is sometime sold to private owners, as the government has long intended that it should be, then overnight it will become a classic capitalist enterprise by Marx's definition.
There is a third option, however, described by both Smith and Marx, and , as luck would have it, indigenous to America, of a society based upon individual autonomy, to be achieved through policies of government that by act or omission enhance the specific, tangible material well-being of individual people, by creating or protecting conditions of life that enhance vigor and morale. These include education, fair wages, wholesome food and water, and reasonable hope for one's children. These things correspond in a general way with what Americans consider to be "Western values," yet they have have never described, and do not now describe, the condition of life of ordinary British people. To the inevitable reaction, that people do not miss what they have never had, that the austerity of their lives has spared them the corruptions of materialism, that legal protections are needed only where society is a war of each against all that there is the dole to assure them security from cradle to grave, however tedious the passage, or however swift, the reply must be that the history and present condition of ordinary British people make it clear enough how they have been used and in that spirit, by capitalists and by socialists, in tacit or declared collaboration. The best American political impulses occur outside this sham opposition. 'they need to be rediscovered as valuable impulses. Certainly we need to rediscover the complexity of our own political history, which deserves vastly better than to be seized upon by capitalists or dismissed by socialists.
When Abraham Lincoln said of a hypothetical black woman that "in her natural right to eat the bread she earns with her own hands ... she is my equal, and the equal of all others," he expresses an economic proposition which is by no means the commonplace or inevitable. Lincoln based the woman's rights on what she earned, not what she needed, a departure from "subsistence theory" and an implicit acknowledgement that labor creates value - that is, a margin between the cost of the worker's subsistence and the amount of wealth she creates - and that she has a right to share in this overplus. One learns from Adam Smith, Thomas Carlyle, E.G. Wakefield, and others that subsistence was assured to slaves as it was not to free workers. In Britain before the Second World War, employers still felt day laborers' arms before they hired them, so that men who were frail or malnourished could be turned away. Under ordinary circumstances slaves would have had as much as economic theory, up to the time of Beveridge, promised or allowed fully employed working people in Britain - enough to maintain them in a condition of physical efficiency. Lincoln made the case, successfully, that in justice more was due anyone. If he had used Marx's language, he would have declared the right to "self-earned private property." Against a history in which vulnerability triggered the crudest abuse - the history of the British poor, into which Africans were swept up fairly late - so modest a statement as Lincoln's sounds like beatitude.
The most difficult struggle of our civilization has been to find the means to create autonomy for ordinary lives, so that they might not be plundered or disposed of according to the whims of more powerful people. Ideas like civil rights and personal liberty come directly from this struggle, which is not terribly well advanced at best, and which is untried, failed or abandoned in most of the world.
There has not been a president in fifty years who was more fitted by history to restore that characteristically American ideal than Barack Obama, it is doubtful that he will do it. Summers, Geithener and, now Lew, are not going to do it. I suspect that Obama's education, as the one I got, indoctrinated him out of either a knowledge of it or a serious consideration of it. I think, though, that in it lies a way out of the stalemate he finds himself in, in which he aspires to nothing more than a more efficient expression of neo-classical economics. Robinson's remarks about Adam Smith indicate how much of a distortion of his ideas "capitalism" in the modern style are. Thatcherism-Reaganism, millennial austerity... are bound to enslave us, the pseudo-socialism that has been seen as an alternative is, in fact, just the left hand washing the right, as it is so wonderfully put above. Life for middle class Americans is, ever more, resembling the dispirited, desperate condition that Marilynne Robinson prophetically held up for us to see almost a quarter of a century ago.
Note: March 2014 Don't Minimize The Role of TV In the Decline of the American Left
It is a really good question that is asked, why is it that the history of American democracy is not what the left didn't choose to continue building on instead of the overtly non-democratic Marxist theories or a romanticized version of the British left that had failed to produce even such benefits as Marilynne Robinson lists in this passage.
I would include land grant universities, which were an important way in which the children of the underclass were able to continue their educations to join the professions and to staff the most remote public schools with professional teachers.
But the children and the grand children of the people who were the first to benefit from those characteristically American forms of wealth redistribution were successfully taught to disdain those and what progress had been made in the United States. A great deal of that profligate abandonment of what could have turned into one of the strongest assets in appealing to the larger American population, on the basis of their own cultural tradition rested securely on the basis of fashion and a popular presentation of the far, far less appealing British and, to a lesser extent European socialist tradition.
Britian had achieved national health care, which isn't an inconsiderable fact in making that kind of appeal but, as Marilynne Robinson said, the remnants of the poor law, aided and abetted by the very "socialists" who had constructed the Welfare State, were also a part of that. And that made the British model of "socialism" less than a model for emulation than it was often presented as being.
Politically, the fashionable disdain of American traditions has not enhanced the electability of more liberal candidates successfully saddled with it. Americans who had saved Britian from the economic and political intrigues of its ruling elite, twice in the preceding half century might well resent the snooty dismissal of American achievements in political advancement, even as it was engaged in the struggle that would push off more of its baggage, racial and other forms of inequality.
The very period in which Britain was romantically looked to by the new educated elite, often through imported form from the BBC on the newly formed PBS, was the same period that the left in the United States achieved the end of its most productive period and soon found itself unpopular and failing in elections. If Republicans and right wing Democrats could appeal to lower income Americans through appeals to patriotism, the left helped them through failing to make their own appeals on the basis of American experience and traditions that were, in fact, worth building on. That a lot of the best in that tradition has been successfully transformed by the far right into something that seems alien to many Americans would not have been possible if the left had presented it as an achievement of American equality, a result of the best thing in our political tradition and the culture of The People.
The role of the media in destroying the achievements of the American tradition, things that, as said above are "distributions of wealth to the public on a scale never contemplated in Britain" cannot be minimized or dismissed by intoning those magic words, "free press". The use that the owners of that "free press", the use of the rich people who own the massive and unprecedentedly politically effective electronic mass media to destroy that American tradition has been countered by a total capitulation by the libertarian-left. In order to do that they have had to suppress the basis of and the reason that print media was, originally, given that freedom, the need of free people for unbiased information in order for them to be able to cast an informed vote. I don't think that the steady diet of British TV and, later, radio fed into the United States has really helped much. Its role in the culture of what remains of the American left has been a bad one. British TV produced the Thatcher era in Britian, after all. If that kind of "press" were going to have a role here, that is the result that could be expected.
We have to rebuild a real American left, built on the remaining parts of the achievements of the American populist and liberal traditions of the past. It might be that the habits of thought and the appeals of equality, inherent rights and the moral obligation to respect those - which will not done except on the basis of effectively strong religious conviction - is still possible. It is certainly more worth trying than building on the failed lefts of other countries which have failed to protect what acheivements they have had. As Robinson points out, the American achievements of more equal distribution of wealth were more successful in the past, even as their left was fretting over how to make the lot of the destitute sufficiently miserable to be salubrious. That is a British tradition that the American right has successfully copied, aping the worst of the British system, even importing Rupert Murdoch in order to destroy the truly American heritage in line with more typically American ideals.
Friday, March 21, 2014
More from Mother Country by Marilynne Robinson
The First questions that arise in attempting to understand Sellafield, and more generally the nuclear and environmental policies of the British government, are: How have they gotten away with so much? and Why on Earth would they want to get away with it? To put it in other terms, why should the relationship of those who govern Britain to its land and population be that of a shrewd adversary contriving to do harm for profit? For decades the British government has presided over the release of deadly toxins into its own environment, for money, using secrecy, scientism, and public trust or passivity to preclude resistance or criticism and to quiet fears. Such extraordinary behavior cannot have a motive in any usual sense, since it is in no one's interest It has, however, an etiology and a history, in which the institutions which expedite it and the relations it expresses evolve together. This is of more than casual interest to Americans, because there is no stronger cultural force than atavism. our past is a good commentary on the future we seem to be preparing for ourselves.
It is often said that Britain has no written constitution. If a constitution is a body of law that defines the fundamental relations among the elements of a society, then Britain has an ancient one indeed, solidly encoded, enshrined in literature, in history and in the array of institutions. The core of British culture is Poor Law, which emerged in the fourteenth century and was reformed once, in 1834, when it became the Victorians' notorious New Poor Law. It remained in force until 1948. Then it was superseded by the Welfare State, in which its features were plainly discernible.
In essence, Poor Law restricted people who lived by their labor to the parish where they were born, and mandated assistance from the parish for those who were needy and deemed deserving of help, while wages were depressed to a level that made recourse to such help frequent. This often meant entering a poorhouse, institutions hose wretchedness made them, over centuries, objects of the minutest study to generations of philanthropists Working people who were forced to accept parish assistance, and whose destitution was absolute, and who were found otherwise worthy of aid, surrendered whatever rights they may have had. Or the fact that they had no rights was thoroughly and ingeniously exploited once the accepted this status. Under the Old Poor Law, before the 1834 reforms that made the operation of the system more punitive and severe, child paupers, that is, the children of destitute parents, were given to employers, each with a little bonus to reward the employer for relieving the public of this burden. The children would be worked brutally, because with each new pauper child the employer received another little bonus. To starve such children was entirely in the interest of those who set them to work. Aside from all the work the child performed under duress, its death brought the reward that came with a new child The authorities asserted an absolute right to disrupt families, and to expose young children to imprisonment and forced labor. The invasiveness of the Poor Laws was never impeded by the development of any system of assured rights, with which the entire institution would have been wholly incompatible and out of sympathy. Leslie Scarman, a member of the House of Lords and a legal authority, has written: "It is the helplessness of the law in [the] face of the legislative sovereignty of Parliament which makes it difficult for the legal system to accommodate the concept of fundamental and inviolable human rights." More to the point, the social history of Britain has never reflected any sense of the unconditional value of human lives or any respect for the modest baggage of person and property, the little circumference of inviolability on which personal rights depend.
The indigent who were considered worthy of parish assistance were called paupers. The unworthy, those who were considered able-bodied but shiftless, were not to be relieved, though in fact they were often assisted on the same terms as the "deserving poor," that is, meagerly and punitively, since the system was in any case preoccupied with the need to withhold charity, considered the great source of moral corruption of the poor and therefore the great source of poverty. So late and well reputed a social thinker of the young William Beveridge urged that starvation be left as a final incentive to industry among the shiftless poor. Beveridge was to become the father of the Welfare State.
The mandate of Poor Law charity was only to provide subsistence because if the recipient of charity were to do as well as the independent worker, the worker too, would become demoralized and slide into pauperism. At the same time a very important article of economic faith was that the wages of workers could not exceed subsistence - if it did, the depletion of capital would cause a decline in investment and employment that would return the worker unceremoniously to something less than the level of subsistence. So it was difficult to make the situation of paupers less desirable than the situation of the employed, especially considering the horrendous conditions under which most work was done. Paupers were subjected to the miseries of the separation of their families and they were auctioned off or forced into emigration, depending on the improvisations of local authorities determined to keep relief recipients to an absolute minimum. To assure that parish assistance would be limited to those who were qualified by birth or legal settlement to receive it, the movement of workers was narrowly restricted
One of the great benefits of reading Mother Country is that a lot of what you have read in British literature and history makes far more sense knowing what it contains. And reading the essay was a revelation in understanding what I had read of Darwin and Huxley and other British scientists even up to W. D. Hamilton. Knowing how truly horrible the New Poor Law was made my understanding of Darwin's complaint that it kept too many of the "weaker members" of society alive far more complete than if I hadn't read it.
One of the problems in posting these passages is what to choose and how far to go with it. Every page is of value in understanding the real horrors of the British system but, as Ms. Robinson notes in the first paragraph above, it is also relevant to understanding the United States. That relevance grew in the 1990s and 2000s to the point where much of the current discussion of "entitlements," the minimum wage, the environment and related issues is stronger than it was when it was written.
I don't know the role that the growth in the promotion of Anglophilia to the popular imagination will have on voters choices. I suspect that any effect will be a bad one. It is clear that the journalistic and media elite have fallen into a quite similar mode of discourse. That Rupert Murdoch has flourished in the United States during that time might be a coincidence, or it might not. I tend to believe he came here from Britain and was allowed to become a citizen with a clear purpose. His record of promoting the far right in Britain was known. The exact kind of callous indifference to human suffering recorded in Mother Country, of the reduction of people from possessors of inviolable rights to units of commerce has arisen in ways I never would have believed forty years ago. I find quite a bit of what has come from the Obama administration to be alarmingly resonant with much of such British thinking as is found in that record. Listening to Jimmy Carter on the radio this afternoon, I can't recall ever hearing those same resounding notes from him.
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Can't Shake This Virus
I've got some kind of respiratory system virus, or something, that is making me lazy.
A year ago I was posting excerpts from the great essay by Marilynne Robinson, Mother Country. I'll post some of that and, who knows, maybe it will inspire me to type more of it into the computer.
Anyone who reads much of what I've written will know that there is no living writer who I respect more than Marilynne Robinson, the great novelist and, I say, even greater essayist. In her writing the finest style is motivated by and matched with honesty, intellectual rigor and an enormous effort in researching her subjects. But none of those is an end in itself, all of that is in service to a deep and simple moral purpose, to tell the truth in service of the common good, to witness to a religious faith that is thoroughly relevant to today's life. She achieves that relevance not by joining up with some ideological project of modernism but by telling the truth to the best of her considerable ability. The truth is always and eternally up to date. When a writer so thoroughly believes in the value of telling the truth, they place themselves above changing fashion and calculations of career promotion. There is no more worth while writing than that, though it will escape the confines of respectability, it is more likely to get forced out of that cage, the door locked behind it. And then there is legal suppression.*
Her great, suppressed long essay, Mother Country, indicts the cultural and intellectual conditions that allowed the massive British environmental crime of polluting the ocean with plutonium and other nuclear waste. Her case, citing the ancient English Poor Law in its several iterations down till today, her indictment of British intellectuals and alleged charities is one of the major revelations of my life. Her case against the Fabians turns the received, required POV on the left on its head. Her explanation of how the aristocratic British "radicals" constructed a socialism that had the effect of reinforcing and intensifying the British class system is brilliant and fearless. She takes down some of the biggest names, including many I have respected in the past. Those revelations hurt, I will admit it, but it is invariably better to face the reality about people than to admire them on the basis of self-serving PR. I will excerpt it below in order to promote the revival of the book, its reading and the message it contains.
As the Obama administration seems poised to approve the tar sands oil pipeline, the civil trial of the company formerly known as British Petroleum is beginning and the ongoing human rush to murder suicide, not impossibly destroying life on Earth, I can't think of a more important thing to do with my week.
Here is some of Robinson's revealing, condensed history of British social thought and its real motives.
____
British social thought can well be imagined as occurring this way. It takes place in a country house built and furnished to accord with conventions polished by use, a house filled with guests, great and minor luminaries, ornaments of literature, the sciences, the church and of philosophy and politics. Most of them, not coincidentally, are cousins at some remove. They are charmed to find in one another just that streak of intuitive brilliance they had always admired in themselves and to be confirmed in their sense that they are true members of a group in which there are no impostors by a very great similarity of taste, of interest of sympathy. It is a leisurely visit, some centuries in length, and in due course everyone has confessed his weakness for Hesiod, and admired the garden, and regretted the weather. The evenings would perhaps have begun to weigh, if someone had not suggested a game called Philanthropy. The rules of the game are very simple. One must justify things as they are by attacking things as they are. It is a philosophic game, perfectly suited to showing off a fine wit. It has even the thrill of risk, since it invites subversive ideas. But the point is always, of course, to achieve a resolution that will bring the argument right back where it began.
This distinguished party warms to the challenge. And how affecting it is to hear them, one after another, in the language of statesman and moralist decry the sufferings of the poor, until it seems that the very table they sit round must be made into splints and crutches and the topiary garden planted in potatoes. Then, just when the pleasure of participation in this virtuous fantasy is at its height, that is to say, just when the temptations of virtue are most intense, then the play er reveals the illusion: This "virtue" is not a virtue at all, but an evil to be scrupulously avoided. A little thrill of relief passes over the company when their world is safely restored to them. But the risk is never as great as it may seem. Any strategy is sufficient in defending the moon from the wolves.
It is a distinguished company, and everyone seems willing to hold up his part in the game. Daniel Defoe, Bernard de Mandeville, Henry Fielding, Adam smith (who did not understand the point of it, and was given a hearty cheer and sent off to bed). There is no need to observe chronology, since at this table Jeremy Bentham might find himself seated by Beatrice Webb, and Herbert Spencer by John Stuart Mill. This is only to say that their reflections on the subject accumulate rather than develop, in the manner characteristic of rationalizations. Their disputations produce a welter of harmonious contradiction, the sort of thing that happens when any argument is welcome that will prop a valued conclusion. So the centuries pass.
The influence of this genteel assembly can hardly be overstated. Only consider how important the notion of excess population - basically the artifact of an odd and unsavory history - has been to Britain, and therefore to the world. Malthus felt he observed the fact of population being restored to equilibrium with food supply in the misery of the poor, but at the time he wrote the importation of wheat - bread was the food of the British poor - was restricted, and land had been converted to pasture which had formerly been used for growing food, and both industrial and agricultural workers had lost access to independent means of subsistence, the first by being crowded into urban slums where there was no corner of open land, the second by being crowded into rural slums where no bit of land was conceded to them. Social reformers early in this century wrote dreamily of the little garden plots of Belgian workers, who throve better on, of course, lower wages than their British counterparts. But the British laborer had no little plot of land. Irish immigrants shared quarters with their notorious pigs, which they slaughtered for food, but that was considered degraded. In fact, British workers, rural and urban, died of exclusive dependency on a meager wage, made up in part, especially among farm laborers, of parish relief, more parsimonious because it was paid by ratepayers rather than employers, and because, being "charity," it always remained discretionary. The relation of population growth to the productivity of land, which Malthus tidily but meaninglessly described as increasing geometrically in the first case and arithmetically in the second, had nothing to do with the the misery and vice he set out to account for. His was merely an early insistence on the tendency to refer to the consequences of a remarkably artificial situation to the hard laws of nature.
-----
It is interesting to read how William Cobbett, one of Malthus' severest contemporary critics had to say about the use of barley to make bread instead of the more expensive wheat and potatoes, which he disdained. Particularly noteworthy is how as sympathetic a writer as Cobbett believed that British laborers, and, especially, their also laboring wives, were in more control of their meager domestic economy than they could have been.
Unless I get a cease and desist order, I hope to post more long passages from Mother Country, one of the most important and entirely neglected books of the past quarter of a century. It should be reprinted, at the very least, if not updated. If I can renew interest in it, the risk is worth it.
I can't think of a book with more to say in a country with a "liberal" administration regularly does the bidding of the banking and oil industry, which has appointed Summers, Geithner and Lew to its top economic posts, which is constantly putting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on a negotiating table. The total fraud that the official version of British social reform, exposed in all of its sordid and explicit depravity is being recreated in the United States by the current crop of The Best and the Brightest, who never have to worry about the consequences of its advocacy. And maybe this is what is needed to cure a self-regarding intelligentsia,of sorts, that has taken Downtown Abbey to its collective breast -PBS and the BBC have done more to paper over the real history of Britain than any overt propagandists. If that college educated intelligentsia learned the truth about Britain and the real history of American liberalism they wouldn't buy that stuff.
*Robinson has written Mother Country (1989), an exposé of Britain's nuclear pollution of the North Sea and a book which also skewered the environmentalist group Greenpeace to the extent that Robinson was sued for libel by Greenpeace and, rather than retract her statements, saw her book banned from sale in England.
A year ago I was posting excerpts from the great essay by Marilynne Robinson, Mother Country. I'll post some of that and, who knows, maybe it will inspire me to type more of it into the computer.
Anyone who reads much of what I've written will know that there is no living writer who I respect more than Marilynne Robinson, the great novelist and, I say, even greater essayist. In her writing the finest style is motivated by and matched with honesty, intellectual rigor and an enormous effort in researching her subjects. But none of those is an end in itself, all of that is in service to a deep and simple moral purpose, to tell the truth in service of the common good, to witness to a religious faith that is thoroughly relevant to today's life. She achieves that relevance not by joining up with some ideological project of modernism but by telling the truth to the best of her considerable ability. The truth is always and eternally up to date. When a writer so thoroughly believes in the value of telling the truth, they place themselves above changing fashion and calculations of career promotion. There is no more worth while writing than that, though it will escape the confines of respectability, it is more likely to get forced out of that cage, the door locked behind it. And then there is legal suppression.*
Her great, suppressed long essay, Mother Country, indicts the cultural and intellectual conditions that allowed the massive British environmental crime of polluting the ocean with plutonium and other nuclear waste. Her case, citing the ancient English Poor Law in its several iterations down till today, her indictment of British intellectuals and alleged charities is one of the major revelations of my life. Her case against the Fabians turns the received, required POV on the left on its head. Her explanation of how the aristocratic British "radicals" constructed a socialism that had the effect of reinforcing and intensifying the British class system is brilliant and fearless. She takes down some of the biggest names, including many I have respected in the past. Those revelations hurt, I will admit it, but it is invariably better to face the reality about people than to admire them on the basis of self-serving PR. I will excerpt it below in order to promote the revival of the book, its reading and the message it contains.
As the Obama administration seems poised to approve the tar sands oil pipeline, the civil trial of the company formerly known as British Petroleum is beginning and the ongoing human rush to murder suicide, not impossibly destroying life on Earth, I can't think of a more important thing to do with my week.
Here is some of Robinson's revealing, condensed history of British social thought and its real motives.
____
British social thought can well be imagined as occurring this way. It takes place in a country house built and furnished to accord with conventions polished by use, a house filled with guests, great and minor luminaries, ornaments of literature, the sciences, the church and of philosophy and politics. Most of them, not coincidentally, are cousins at some remove. They are charmed to find in one another just that streak of intuitive brilliance they had always admired in themselves and to be confirmed in their sense that they are true members of a group in which there are no impostors by a very great similarity of taste, of interest of sympathy. It is a leisurely visit, some centuries in length, and in due course everyone has confessed his weakness for Hesiod, and admired the garden, and regretted the weather. The evenings would perhaps have begun to weigh, if someone had not suggested a game called Philanthropy. The rules of the game are very simple. One must justify things as they are by attacking things as they are. It is a philosophic game, perfectly suited to showing off a fine wit. It has even the thrill of risk, since it invites subversive ideas. But the point is always, of course, to achieve a resolution that will bring the argument right back where it began.
This distinguished party warms to the challenge. And how affecting it is to hear them, one after another, in the language of statesman and moralist decry the sufferings of the poor, until it seems that the very table they sit round must be made into splints and crutches and the topiary garden planted in potatoes. Then, just when the pleasure of participation in this virtuous fantasy is at its height, that is to say, just when the temptations of virtue are most intense, then the play er reveals the illusion: This "virtue" is not a virtue at all, but an evil to be scrupulously avoided. A little thrill of relief passes over the company when their world is safely restored to them. But the risk is never as great as it may seem. Any strategy is sufficient in defending the moon from the wolves.
It is a distinguished company, and everyone seems willing to hold up his part in the game. Daniel Defoe, Bernard de Mandeville, Henry Fielding, Adam smith (who did not understand the point of it, and was given a hearty cheer and sent off to bed). There is no need to observe chronology, since at this table Jeremy Bentham might find himself seated by Beatrice Webb, and Herbert Spencer by John Stuart Mill. This is only to say that their reflections on the subject accumulate rather than develop, in the manner characteristic of rationalizations. Their disputations produce a welter of harmonious contradiction, the sort of thing that happens when any argument is welcome that will prop a valued conclusion. So the centuries pass.
The influence of this genteel assembly can hardly be overstated. Only consider how important the notion of excess population - basically the artifact of an odd and unsavory history - has been to Britain, and therefore to the world. Malthus felt he observed the fact of population being restored to equilibrium with food supply in the misery of the poor, but at the time he wrote the importation of wheat - bread was the food of the British poor - was restricted, and land had been converted to pasture which had formerly been used for growing food, and both industrial and agricultural workers had lost access to independent means of subsistence, the first by being crowded into urban slums where there was no corner of open land, the second by being crowded into rural slums where no bit of land was conceded to them. Social reformers early in this century wrote dreamily of the little garden plots of Belgian workers, who throve better on, of course, lower wages than their British counterparts. But the British laborer had no little plot of land. Irish immigrants shared quarters with their notorious pigs, which they slaughtered for food, but that was considered degraded. In fact, British workers, rural and urban, died of exclusive dependency on a meager wage, made up in part, especially among farm laborers, of parish relief, more parsimonious because it was paid by ratepayers rather than employers, and because, being "charity," it always remained discretionary. The relation of population growth to the productivity of land, which Malthus tidily but meaninglessly described as increasing geometrically in the first case and arithmetically in the second, had nothing to do with the the misery and vice he set out to account for. His was merely an early insistence on the tendency to refer to the consequences of a remarkably artificial situation to the hard laws of nature.
-----
It is interesting to read how William Cobbett, one of Malthus' severest contemporary critics had to say about the use of barley to make bread instead of the more expensive wheat and potatoes, which he disdained. Particularly noteworthy is how as sympathetic a writer as Cobbett believed that British laborers, and, especially, their also laboring wives, were in more control of their meager domestic economy than they could have been.
Unless I get a cease and desist order, I hope to post more long passages from Mother Country, one of the most important and entirely neglected books of the past quarter of a century. It should be reprinted, at the very least, if not updated. If I can renew interest in it, the risk is worth it.
I can't think of a book with more to say in a country with a "liberal" administration regularly does the bidding of the banking and oil industry, which has appointed Summers, Geithner and Lew to its top economic posts, which is constantly putting Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on a negotiating table. The total fraud that the official version of British social reform, exposed in all of its sordid and explicit depravity is being recreated in the United States by the current crop of The Best and the Brightest, who never have to worry about the consequences of its advocacy. And maybe this is what is needed to cure a self-regarding intelligentsia,of sorts, that has taken Downtown Abbey to its collective breast -PBS and the BBC have done more to paper over the real history of Britain than any overt propagandists. If that college educated intelligentsia learned the truth about Britain and the real history of American liberalism they wouldn't buy that stuff.
*Robinson has written Mother Country (1989), an exposé of Britain's nuclear pollution of the North Sea and a book which also skewered the environmentalist group Greenpeace to the extent that Robinson was sued for libel by Greenpeace and, rather than retract her statements, saw her book banned from sale in England.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
After Reading Several Articles Written By Atheists
Before I went online I would never have entertained the thought that atheists were any more prone to lying than other people. The values of equality and giving people the benefit of the doubt would have made that thought impossible. But that was in the absence of experience of the direct thought of many atheists. After reading thousands of atheists online, unedited, unfiltered, I have to say that I now believe atheists are far more likely to lie because they don't believe that it is a sin to lie. And that includes the "editing" they've organized to do at Wikipedia, the thing is useless on any topic that has been subjected to atheist editing.
I think the idea of reliable information, the ability to safely depend on information presented as being reliable that history, science and other areas of intellectual culture is based in depends on a sense that it is a sin to lie, that it is wrong to lie. After the past decade plus of seeing things, I don't think that is sustainable in a culture permeated by atheism in which there is no sin. I think the online atheist "community" is a good indication of what a wider atheist culture would be and it is a dishonest, cynical place which will produce no good.
I think the idea of reliable information, the ability to safely depend on information presented as being reliable that history, science and other areas of intellectual culture is based in depends on a sense that it is a sin to lie, that it is wrong to lie. After the past decade plus of seeing things, I don't think that is sustainable in a culture permeated by atheism in which there is no sin. I think the online atheist "community" is a good indication of what a wider atheist culture would be and it is a dishonest, cynical place which will produce no good.
Monday, March 17, 2014
Honor St. Patrick by Working Against Modern Slavery
As my fellow Irish Americans set about to dishonor St. Patrick by doing their best to live up to the most malicious stereotypes of us that the Anglo Saxon nativists invented, it's good to remember that St. Patrick was an escaped slave. As such it's not surprising that the evil of slavery was of special importance to him, one of the most certain things we know about him. One of the few documents that scholars believe is reliably from him is his letter to the soldiers of King Coroticus effectively excommunicating them along with Coroticus because they abducted and enslaved a number of Irish Christians under Patrick's care. His language in his excommunication is remarkably strong and firey considering the mildness and humility of the other document reliably attributed to him, his Confession.
American St. Patrick's day is as disgusting as American Christmas and American Halloween. There isn't anything honorable about it. St. Patrick, escaped slave returned to convert his enslavers and one of the earliest campaigners against slavery deserves a lot better than being used as an excuse to get drunk and participate in parades that become an annual celebration of bigotry and discrimination. Not to mention that disgusting political roast held in Boston every year. Do something to fight against modern slavery, to refuse to buy products made by slave labor in the third world and here. Refuse to ignore the sexual slavery that is so widespread today. That kind of commerce and sexual slavery during his lifetime were condemned by St. Patrick, after all, mentioned specifically as a sin damning Coroticus and his "gangsters".
American St. Patrick's day is as disgusting as American Christmas and American Halloween. There isn't anything honorable about it. St. Patrick, escaped slave returned to convert his enslavers and one of the earliest campaigners against slavery deserves a lot better than being used as an excuse to get drunk and participate in parades that become an annual celebration of bigotry and discrimination. Not to mention that disgusting political roast held in Boston every year. Do something to fight against modern slavery, to refuse to buy products made by slave labor in the third world and here. Refuse to ignore the sexual slavery that is so widespread today. That kind of commerce and sexual slavery during his lifetime were condemned by St. Patrick, after all, mentioned specifically as a sin damning Coroticus and his "gangsters".
Sunday, March 16, 2014
You Can't Live Long in a Carnival The Blessed Community Won't Be One
Last year, in a conversation with a friend of mine who is a Congregationalist, I shocked him by mentioning that Pius XII called Karl Barth the most significant theologian since Thomas Aquinas. Since, the Catholic Church back then, and especially under his ultra-conservative, neo-medieval pontificate, Aquinas's theology was THE OFFICIAL Catholic theology, him saying that about a Reformed theologian would be entirely unexpected. Catholics were still being told that it was a sin to enter a protestant church around here. My mouth might have fallen open when I read it a few years back. I mean, Pius XII was more Catholic than the Pope. The lesson of this is that things in even the most conservative of Christianity has often been a lot more open than it's believed to be.
Oh, when Barth was told about the nice things that Pius said about his writing, he said, "This proves the infallibility of the Pope."
I was fascinated to hear this interview with Brian McLaren, a figure in the emergent Christianity movement, usually described as a part of the evangelical branch of Protestantism, something which, I'll admit, I haven't paid a lot of attention to. His description of how he went from an ultra-conservative fundamentalist church, The Plymouth Brethren, to breaking with that over evolution, through a conversion experience in the Jesus Movement of the 60-70s, and to the spontaneous formation of a house church and on to where his Christianity is radically different from what he began with. Especially interesting to me is how his radical change was based in looking more deeply at the Bible, of reading more of the words, the things that, as he mentions he missed due to what he concentrated on before.
His point that The Lord's Prayer explicitly calls for The Kingdom of God to be formed on Earth, something that hasn't seemed to be noticed by hundreds of millions of Christians who probably recite the words weekly, if not several times a day.
Oh, what an amazing time to be alive. So I'm sure I can't be exhaustive in this, but I'll just give you a couple that quickly come to mind. So 100 years ago, Walter Rauschenbusch, this German Baptist pastor — Walter Rauschenbusch goes back and reads the Gospels and realizes, wow, Jesus had this message called the Kingdom of God.
And for so many Christians, Kingdom of God had been reduced to going to heaven after you die and he made this slight observation that, in the Lord's Prayer, it says "may your kingdom come, may you will be done down here on earth." In other words, the direction of the Bible was downward, not upward. I mean, that changes the world. Martin Luther King, Jr. got hold of that. Others got hold of that.
That was one of the most transformative ideas of my life. I grew up in the church all my life. It wasn't until I was in my 40s that I realized that the Kingdom of God was not going to heaven after you die. Oh, my goodness. Then you add to that the insights of liberation theology from Latin America and places in Africa, this obvious, obvious discovery that the primary biblical narrative is exodus, that when God made a decision to support slaves, not slave owners, that's one of the most radical ideas in the world.
Just as an aside, this would be interesting to bring up to right-wing evangelicals as well as allegedly left wing people who heap denigration "evangelicals". There are few people who are more converted to do good with the power of evangelicals who see the light.
The same people have made the most appalling accommodations to imperial systems, to oppressive systems that are the opposite of what The Kingdom of God, the place where the blessed community, would life. As Brian McLaren points out, Christianity's great sin has been the pragmatic and violent adoption of the program of most earthy and wealth based systems, resulting in deaths and oppression around the world. That massive list of sins that atheists are always bringing up, the sins that Christians have not adequately confessed and abandoned. They might pray for the coming of the Kingdom on Earth but they have no intention of living in a way that would embody that coming. In that they betray that they don't really believe it.
_____
Brian McLaren talked about the lessons he learned from his gay son and the difficulty he ran into when he participated in his son's wedding to another man. And in that I will offer my congratulations but will also make a point about difficulties in any rapprochement and between Christians and gay folks, and not just gay folks.
I grew up a liberal in New England, my parents were Eleanor Roosevelt liberals who grew over the course of their lives to become increasingly liberal, while remaining Catholics. Their Catholicism was the kind that embraced Vatican II and the fresh air it let in. After The Blessed Good Pope John died and Paul VI slowed down the change, I became increasingly disillusioned with the hierarchy, though certainly not Catholics in general, and I stopped going to church. I didn't stop supporting Maryknoll and The Medical Missionaries of Mary or the United Farmworkers Movement. I became officially agnostic, realizing that there was no way to know the answer to whether or not God was real and studied Theravada Buddhism.
Then, about twelve years ago, I had what I now realize was a conversion experience, or maybe it was more an integration of all of the things I'd learned from my parents, from the example of other good people. It was a sudden realization that most if not all of the evil humans do is based in regarding other people, other animals, other living beings as objects of commerce and utility.
That conversion was the product of a confrontation of the gay porn that was, inevitably, encountered while reading gay media online. It forced an admission that the message of gay porn was that other men were objects for use. That casual, anonymous sex of the kind that oppression had made normal for gay men had that as a basis. And that the emergent culture that was being presented to the world as "gay culture" in all its gaudy, unserious, decadent amorality contained all that was wrong with straight culture.* Only the determinant in who did the using and who was used was based on physical strength, comparative ruthlessness, deception, exploitation of levels of experience, and exploitation of the mentally ill and damaged. The fact that they shared a gender and a sexual orientation made exactly no difference, that they shared a wider experience of oppression only provided the stronger men the expression of their oppression and the weaker ones, the understanding of their role in their own oppression. With that realization, the bright shiny veneer of modernism that had covered up the real nature of so much of what I'd come to accept as good was destroyed, though it took me most of the last decade to realize that.
There are two hands holding down gay people, one is that of the remnants of cultural hatred, what is expressed by the Republican Party, even as it dies in the general culture. The other is the habits of thought built up over the combination of internalized hatred and modeling our relationships on the same dynamics that oppress women. That must be broke if we are to be truly free. I have come to believe that the only force that will do that is religious conversion of the type that is ongoing in my life. It is only through that that sex, in general, gay or straight, can go from the commodification of one and the consumption of another to an expression of mutual love.
The horrific amount of spiritual damage that hatred of gay people, especially gay men, is seen all the more clearly for the removal of legal and even political restrictions on us. Healing that won't be easy, especially due to the mutual hostilities built up between religion and gay people, though most of the gay people I have known have, in fact, been religious. The greatest force to accomplish that is contained in the tradition of Justice that powered the civil rights movement, the thing that empowered the Christians who laid their lives on the line to make enormous changes in the face of overwhelming opposition. If that tradition of justice is absent, any liberation will merely be the reproduction of former systems of oppression with the characters, the oppressors and the oppressed, being changed.
* I've had many straight people who are anything from outraged to confused when I criticize that "gay culture" until they are asked if they would like to be treated in those prescribed ways, to be considered as the "bottom" is treated in those presentations, if they would like to be presented as a superficial and frivolous figure of entertainment instead of as a full person with a full range of possibilities and entitlements. Women seem to have an easier time understanding the point than straight men do.
Oh, when Barth was told about the nice things that Pius said about his writing, he said, "This proves the infallibility of the Pope."
I was fascinated to hear this interview with Brian McLaren, a figure in the emergent Christianity movement, usually described as a part of the evangelical branch of Protestantism, something which, I'll admit, I haven't paid a lot of attention to. His description of how he went from an ultra-conservative fundamentalist church, The Plymouth Brethren, to breaking with that over evolution, through a conversion experience in the Jesus Movement of the 60-70s, and to the spontaneous formation of a house church and on to where his Christianity is radically different from what he began with. Especially interesting to me is how his radical change was based in looking more deeply at the Bible, of reading more of the words, the things that, as he mentions he missed due to what he concentrated on before.
His point that The Lord's Prayer explicitly calls for The Kingdom of God to be formed on Earth, something that hasn't seemed to be noticed by hundreds of millions of Christians who probably recite the words weekly, if not several times a day.
Oh, what an amazing time to be alive. So I'm sure I can't be exhaustive in this, but I'll just give you a couple that quickly come to mind. So 100 years ago, Walter Rauschenbusch, this German Baptist pastor — Walter Rauschenbusch goes back and reads the Gospels and realizes, wow, Jesus had this message called the Kingdom of God.
And for so many Christians, Kingdom of God had been reduced to going to heaven after you die and he made this slight observation that, in the Lord's Prayer, it says "may your kingdom come, may you will be done down here on earth." In other words, the direction of the Bible was downward, not upward. I mean, that changes the world. Martin Luther King, Jr. got hold of that. Others got hold of that.
That was one of the most transformative ideas of my life. I grew up in the church all my life. It wasn't until I was in my 40s that I realized that the Kingdom of God was not going to heaven after you die. Oh, my goodness. Then you add to that the insights of liberation theology from Latin America and places in Africa, this obvious, obvious discovery that the primary biblical narrative is exodus, that when God made a decision to support slaves, not slave owners, that's one of the most radical ideas in the world.
Just as an aside, this would be interesting to bring up to right-wing evangelicals as well as allegedly left wing people who heap denigration "evangelicals". There are few people who are more converted to do good with the power of evangelicals who see the light.
The same people have made the most appalling accommodations to imperial systems, to oppressive systems that are the opposite of what The Kingdom of God, the place where the blessed community, would life. As Brian McLaren points out, Christianity's great sin has been the pragmatic and violent adoption of the program of most earthy and wealth based systems, resulting in deaths and oppression around the world. That massive list of sins that atheists are always bringing up, the sins that Christians have not adequately confessed and abandoned. They might pray for the coming of the Kingdom on Earth but they have no intention of living in a way that would embody that coming. In that they betray that they don't really believe it.
_____
Brian McLaren talked about the lessons he learned from his gay son and the difficulty he ran into when he participated in his son's wedding to another man. And in that I will offer my congratulations but will also make a point about difficulties in any rapprochement and between Christians and gay folks, and not just gay folks.
I grew up a liberal in New England, my parents were Eleanor Roosevelt liberals who grew over the course of their lives to become increasingly liberal, while remaining Catholics. Their Catholicism was the kind that embraced Vatican II and the fresh air it let in. After The Blessed Good Pope John died and Paul VI slowed down the change, I became increasingly disillusioned with the hierarchy, though certainly not Catholics in general, and I stopped going to church. I didn't stop supporting Maryknoll and The Medical Missionaries of Mary or the United Farmworkers Movement. I became officially agnostic, realizing that there was no way to know the answer to whether or not God was real and studied Theravada Buddhism.
Then, about twelve years ago, I had what I now realize was a conversion experience, or maybe it was more an integration of all of the things I'd learned from my parents, from the example of other good people. It was a sudden realization that most if not all of the evil humans do is based in regarding other people, other animals, other living beings as objects of commerce and utility.
That conversion was the product of a confrontation of the gay porn that was, inevitably, encountered while reading gay media online. It forced an admission that the message of gay porn was that other men were objects for use. That casual, anonymous sex of the kind that oppression had made normal for gay men had that as a basis. And that the emergent culture that was being presented to the world as "gay culture" in all its gaudy, unserious, decadent amorality contained all that was wrong with straight culture.* Only the determinant in who did the using and who was used was based on physical strength, comparative ruthlessness, deception, exploitation of levels of experience, and exploitation of the mentally ill and damaged. The fact that they shared a gender and a sexual orientation made exactly no difference, that they shared a wider experience of oppression only provided the stronger men the expression of their oppression and the weaker ones, the understanding of their role in their own oppression. With that realization, the bright shiny veneer of modernism that had covered up the real nature of so much of what I'd come to accept as good was destroyed, though it took me most of the last decade to realize that.
There are two hands holding down gay people, one is that of the remnants of cultural hatred, what is expressed by the Republican Party, even as it dies in the general culture. The other is the habits of thought built up over the combination of internalized hatred and modeling our relationships on the same dynamics that oppress women. That must be broke if we are to be truly free. I have come to believe that the only force that will do that is religious conversion of the type that is ongoing in my life. It is only through that that sex, in general, gay or straight, can go from the commodification of one and the consumption of another to an expression of mutual love.
The horrific amount of spiritual damage that hatred of gay people, especially gay men, is seen all the more clearly for the removal of legal and even political restrictions on us. Healing that won't be easy, especially due to the mutual hostilities built up between religion and gay people, though most of the gay people I have known have, in fact, been religious. The greatest force to accomplish that is contained in the tradition of Justice that powered the civil rights movement, the thing that empowered the Christians who laid their lives on the line to make enormous changes in the face of overwhelming opposition. If that tradition of justice is absent, any liberation will merely be the reproduction of former systems of oppression with the characters, the oppressors and the oppressed, being changed.
* I've had many straight people who are anything from outraged to confused when I criticize that "gay culture" until they are asked if they would like to be treated in those prescribed ways, to be considered as the "bottom" is treated in those presentations, if they would like to be presented as a superficial and frivolous figure of entertainment instead of as a full person with a full range of possibilities and entitlements. Women seem to have an easier time understanding the point than straight men do.
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