Freedom In The News

Welcome friends!

I read a couple of stories in the newspapers recently that brought me back to some of the themes I raised in my recent posts about freedom.  (November 1 and 28, 2013.)  One was a story about some new technology that apparently functions as a sort of autopilot for cars at least over certain stretches of road and also about the impact that sort of technology might have on transportation workers.  (Hint: It’s not good news.)  The other story was about some sort of political initiative in Switzerland that involves a proposal to provide every citizen a guaranteed minimum income whether they are working or not.  Interesting stuff.  So let’s take one at a time, shall we?

As you may have detected from my less than detailed technical synopsis I’m not really that interested in the specific details of how the new automobile technology actually works.  I mean, sure it sounds sort of cool, but at the moment I don’t really care.  No, what I’m interested in right now is the impact on society of technological change in general; in this case, the fact that this new technology, like many previous technological innovations and no doubt many technological innovations yet to come, is likely to displace many of the workers required under the previous technology, which in the case of cars with autopilots I suppose would be truck drivers and so on.

Now the thing that struck me as funny about this situation is that it seems to me we should all be rooting for new technology.  It seems so strange to me to think of someone saying, “Hey, I just found a way to reduce the labor required to do X (drive a car or whatever),” only to have someone else say, “Oh, hell!  That’s bad news, that is!”  I mean, it should be unequivocally better, right?  As a society we should be able to do more with less thus freeing up productive resources for other purposes.  Labor saving technology should allow us all some additional leisure time at any given level of needs and desires or alternatively allow us all to ratchet up our needs and desires to some new higher level in line with our new productive capacity.  But it doesn’t usually work out that way under our system, does it?  What usually happens is that a few people associated with the new technology, including the workers and investors to some degree, make some money and sometimes a great whopping boatload of money thus obtaining a greater degree of what we’ve been calling practical economic freedom, while the displaced workers lose their jobs and run around trying to find some new way to survive and typically suffering at least some loss of practical freedom at least in the short term and quite commonly in the long term as well.  In other words, in addition to generating additional economic freedom in some net or global sense these technological developments often also represent a reallocation of economic freedom away from the typically larger number of people associated with the old relatively labor intensive technology and to the much smaller number of people associated with the new labor saving technology.  So what’s the net impact?  Well, much like the situation involving the particular type of utility so beloved of economists, a lot of it depends on how one defines and measures “freedom.”  If you’re primarily interested in some measure of overall freedom without worrying about how particular people happen to be faring then I suppose the net impact on freedom might be favorable.  On the other the other hand, if you’re more interested in actual people and you plan on doing something like counting up how many people gain or lose freedom then it’s quite possible this type of technology might lead to a net decrease in freedom.

To me as a liberal this just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.  No one should fear or resent new technology.  We should be able to set up a distributional system in which everyone gains something from technological improvements and perhaps the people developing and working with the new technology gain somewhat more to provide incentives to do that sort of thing, but no one should be getting hit over the head in the process.  Our current system is just, I don’t know, not in proportion in some ways.  It allocates what I would call a surfeit of practical freedom to certain people for reasons I suspect go well beyond the need to provide incentives leading to an ever escalating gluttony of new needs and desires on the part of this group and it simultaneously restricts the modest amount of practical freedom allocated to other people to what I would consider in many cases completely unacceptable dimensions.  Of course, I suppose you realize this has been going on a long time now, right back to the start of the industrial revolution in the early years of the nineteenth century with the Luddites and their problems with the new fangled textile technology.  Anyway, this is one of the things I think is leading to the concentration of wealth and hence also freedom here in the US to an ever shrinking segment of the population.  And I don’t see any mechanism by which this sort of thing is going to go away on its own including by the way the much vaunted magic of the marketplace.  No, if history is any guide, the more probable situation is that without some sort of purposeful intervention it will get progressively worse until we get enough powerful egotistical self indulgent big shots and enough disgruntled powerless poor wage slaves that our democratic system begins to destabilize.  If that’s what happens then we’re really up the creek because in place of reasoned and carefully considered social and economic changes we’re likely to get hasty, uncontrolled, and probably ill-conceived changes.  Let’s just call it social mayhem.  It’s no way to do business.

So what’s the problem?  Why can’t we apply our ingenuity to resolve this little issue?  Well, the problem in my opinion is that we seem to be unable or unwilling to talk seriously about distributional issues.  Mention the word distribution here in the US and the next thing you know some fat conservative windbag will be calling you a socialist and trying to get a mob together to go set your house on fire.  (Well, maybe that last part was a bit of exaggeration, but you know what I mean: they get all crazy.)  It’s like we’re under the spell of academic economists who feel, rightly in my opinion, that they are not intellectually equipped to deal with distributional issues but who manage to twist that fact into the idea that no one else is intellectually equipped to deal with distributional issues either and that therefore we shouldn’t discuss them or think about them in any way.  It’s just ridiculous.  Look, at some point we’re going to have get serious and start talking about what’s happening to actual people and give up this simple minded idea that whatever happens in a free market system is by definition socially optimal.  Our system isn’t some sort of delicate and mysterious clockwork mechanism that fell from the heavens one day and that no one dare attempt to adjust or manipulate in any way.  Nor should we put our horse before the cart and base our distributional goals on whatever happens rather than trying to get what happens to reflect our distributional goals.  I mean, if you know a new technology is going to generate some unfortunate distributional changes and economic hardship for some people then just get in there and do something about it.  At least provide the displaced workers with some help to get into something else.  I know we do some of that right now but not nearly enough.  We give people a few months of unemployment benefits and then basically send them off with hearty slap on the back.  And if they’re not able to locate suitable employment they end up living under a bridge and everyone throws up their hands like it’s some sort of unfortunate mystery of nature.  For me it’s just not good enough.  Hey, it’s not difficult to figure out.  People need money to survive.  People need jobs or they need money sans job.  If that means you need to reallocate some money that would otherwise go to people with jobs then I guess that’s what we need to do.  I’m sorry to get all socialistic on you but if you don’t give a damn what happens to your fellow citizens then brother you don’t really have much of a society, do you?

Which brings me to that story about Switzerland.  Crafty people, the Swiss.  They know how to make a buck, that’s for sure.  But apparently they’ve got some other interesting stuff going on as well, such as a couple of nationwide referendums that have resulted in strict limits on executive bonuses and so-called golden handshakes.  What prompted this socialistic assault on the free market in generally conservative Switzerland, you ask?  Well, one likely reason reported in the BBC article I was reading is that some of the biggest Swiss banks, such as USB, continued to pay their top executives huge bonuses even while the banks they were supposedly managing reported huge losses.  Ein bisschen komisch, nict wahr?  (Hint: When you get to executive pay you’re in a world that is apparently largely divorced from normal market forces so what these people get paid has precious little to do with what they actually do on the job.  I wrote a little about that phenomenon before, see my post from July 5, 2012, for example.)  But that’s not even the most interesting thing they’ve been up to recently for our purposes.  No, the most interesting thing is they’re now planning to vote on something that seems to me to be even more remarkable: a guaranteed minimum income for all citizens whether they’re working or not.  Talk about taking the bull by the alpenhorns.  Granted the income they’re talking about is apparently barely enough to survive in pricey Switzerland (about $2,800 per month), but that still represents a big difference from someplace like the US where our official policy is that we don’t really care if you survive or not.  (But I suppose that’s part of the problem, isn’t it?  What exactly does someone need to survive?  You mean survive like a caveman?  Or do you mean survive given the norms of an advanced society?  Are you surviving if you can’t afford rent?  How about a car?  Internet?  TV?  Phone?  Who’s deciding that anyway?  Or are we going down a blind alley here?  Would it be more relevant to just think about this issue in relative terms like some percentage of the average or something like that?  So many questions; so little discussion.)  Even more to the point for me is the rationale for the new bill expressed by a key supporter, Enno Schmidt, who opined “a society in which people work only because they have to have money is ‘no better than slavery.’”  Which is pretty much what I was discussing the other day.  But can a market economy really function without at least some wage slavery? What will happen to the jobs that just aren’t the nicest jobs in the world?  Will they go undone?  Will wages for those jobs rise enough to encourage people to take them up for reasons other than that they have no real choice because the rent is due?  Will it make no difference at all as people ratchet up their perceived needs and desires by the amount of the minimum income so that internally they still feel forced by their economic situation to take those jobs?  And how about the overall economy anyway?  Will this blatant “distortion” of the “natural” distribution of resources (I thought I’d be funny and talk like a conservative economist just then) lead to all manner of unfortunate unintended consequences?  Or will making sure everyone has at least some money to spend give a little demand side boost to the economy and enable otherwise unproductive people the luxury of actually being able to train to do something useful and to relocate and to just in general become more productive members of society?  If that vote passes it will certainly be something interesting to watch in the years to come, won’t it?

Well, looks like that’s about it for this year.  See you in the new one with ... well ... I suppose with pretty much more of the same.  Never seems to end, does it?  Well, never mind.  We’ll get through it together.  As for now, please allow me once again to wish you all a happy holiday and a great and fantastic new year!

References

Swiss to vote on incomes for all — working or not.  Imogen Foulkes.  BBC.  December 17, 2013.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25415501.

Merry Christmas 2013: Holier Than Thou

Welcome friends!

Looks like this might be my last scheduled post before the Yuletide holiday, always a rather enjoyable time of year I think, at least if you can get out of the shops for a few minutes to actually enjoy it.  Unfortunately in addition to the seemingly ever increasing and unpleasant venal aspect our modern holiday also has the prominent Christian religious accretion that always gives me mixed feelings.  (Accretion?  You do realize there’s apparently no evidence that Jesus was born on December 25 right?  It’s what one might call a birthday of convenience most likely originally designed to put a Christian stamp on earlier celebrations designed no doubt to help people get through the dark days of the winter solstice but I’m sure similarly couched in various types of contemporary mumbo jumbo.)  You know, I’m not really celebrating a Christian religious rite over here and I must say it does annoy me just a little when other people interpret things that way.  I mean, it’s fine if that’s what you want to do, knock yourself out, but I’m celebrating a secular holiday despite it’s popular name (or one of its popular names anyway).  On the other hand, I don’t mean to suggest that I have some particular dislike for the Christian religion.  Oh heck, let me talk it through... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Freedom II: The Internal Dimension

Welcome friends!

I think I’ll go ahead and talk a little bit this time about what I’m calling the internal dimension of freedom.  Now I’m sure there are all sorts of philosophical and psychological aspects to the subject but today I’d like to just talk about one rather mundane aspect: the issue of one’s material needs and desires and how they affect one’s internal perception of freedom.  I know what you’re thinking.  Oh, that again?  Well, yes.  I probably mentioned before that I spent more years than I care to remember studying the dismal science (that would be economics) so these sorts of issues always seem to be in the back of my mind somewhere.  Anyway, when it comes to one’s personal freedom I think this particular aspect is fairly significant and there are some interesting issues to think about, so why not?

So what am I thinking about when I say the internal dimension of freedom as it relates to one’s material needs and desires?  Well, it seems to me that one important component of freedom is whether one is or perhaps more accurately perceives oneself to be restricted to engaging in certain activities because of material considerations... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

The Obamacare Crisis

Welcome friends!

I wanted to continue my thoughts from last time and move on to some fascinating observations on what I’m calling the internal dimension of freedom but let me just put that off for now because I feel I really must say a little something this time about an issue that just keeps popping up in the news: Obamacare.

From what I can see conservatives here in the US are once again in full faux scandal mode although I suppose in this case it’s more accurate to call it faux crisis mode but certainly still faux, which is the more important bit anyway... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Freedom I: The External Dimension

Welcome friends!

Ah yes, freedom.  I don’t know why but it’s been on mind a lot recently.  Such a complicated and elusive issue or that’s the way it seems to me anyway.  Just the type of thing I like to think about for my little blog posts.  You’ve got to think about something so you might as well think about something a little funny and messed up, right?  Simple issues are just so damned boring.  (Fortunately in my experience almost nothing is as simple as some people would have it be, but still …)  Anyway, a couple of random thoughts about freedom crossed my mind the other day so I thought I’d spend a few moments to jot them down.

My first thought is that the concept of freedom has both an external and internal dimension and both dimensions have their share of interesting features.  I considered just talking about both dimensions in this post but maybe that’s too much so let me just say a few words about the external dimension of freedom this time and next time I’ll take up the internal dimension (depending on what manner of lunacy hits the news in the interim, but in a future post anyway).

So what do I mean by the external dimension of freedom?  Well, I’m thinking of the sort of freedom that appears to emanate from one’s environment as opposed to emanating from one’s own head or heart.  Now this external dimension of freedom seems to me to also have two dimensions: what one might call a legal dimension and another I suppose one might call a material dimension.  That in turn leads me to my first observation about the external dimension of freedom.  For some reason or other I think people in the US and possibly other Western countries as well tend to think of external freedom primarily in terms of the legal dimension rather than the material dimension and even then only in a peculiarly restricted sense of the legal dimension.  And that’s just a recipe for confusion all around.

What the heck am I babbling about?  Well, let me just set up a little example to get the discussion going on a more concrete basis.  Let’s say some guy has fallen on hard times and is living under a bridge but sees a castle on a hill and says to himself, “I think I’ll go live in that castle.”  Lo and behold, he finds it impossible.  He actually makes it to the castle one day and forces the door but the police arrive and promptly cart him off to jail.  Consider the following question: Was this guy ever free to live in the castle?

You see where I’m going with this, right?  Hello!  Ambiguous language alert!  The answer clearly depends on what we mean by freedom in this context and that’s just not all that obvious to me.  One way to think about this issue would be to check if there were any government laws or edicts that expressly prohibited the guy from moving into the castle.  You know, something like, “It is hereby decreed no one living under the bridge shall henceforth live in the castle.”  If there were a law like that on the books I think we’d all be on the same page in saying, no, apparently this guy was not free to live in the castle.  That’s what I’m calling the legal dimension of the external dimension of freedom.  Is whatever it is allowed under the law?  (By the way, I hope having two levels of dimensions isn’t too confusing for anyone.  I’m just too lazy to get out the thesaurus right now.)

What about the case where there is no such law or edict?  Well, now I think we’re starting to get into a more ambiguous and hence interesting situation.  One perspective might be to say, yes, the guy was free to live in the castle, he just didn’t have enough money to buy it and thus obtain the legal right to live there.  I suppose one might say he was free to live in the castle conditional on the fact that he came up with the money to buy it.  Hmm, so now in place of or in addition to our questions about freedom we have questions about conditional freedom.  I’m not sure we’ve made all that much progress because one thing we would probably want to check is whether there were any laws or edicts that prohibited the guy from coming up with the money to buy the castle.  Anyway, it would seem a little strange to me to say the guy was free to live in the castle conditional on his coming up with the money to buy the castle in the context of a law that prohibited him from obtaining the necessary funds.  In that situation I think the answer would again be pretty clear: the guy was apparently not free to live in the castle.  In that case we would still be dealing primarily with the legal dimension of freedom even though we would be starting to see the intrusion of a more material sense of freedom in terms of money and economic power serving as the intermediary between what this guy wants and what he can actually get.

What about the case where there is no such law or edict?  Well, market systems entail certain legal rules or if you want to use academic language institutions governing how one can legally obtain money, and they typically also come with requirements that one pay at least something in taxes, and those rules and requirements might theoretically have prevented the guy in question from accumulating enough dough to buy the castle.  You know, maybe if he could have just robbed a bank or skipped out on his taxes for a year or three he would have been in the place like a shot but since he was sticking to the rules then no.  So did the presence of these legal rules limit the guy’s freedom to live in the castle?  The situation is getting a little more interesting (to me anyway) because now we’re operating at the nexus of legal and material freedom and the language is starting to get a little weird.

If you’re thinking yes, those legal rules limited the guy’s freedom to live in the castle, and like most people you put a positive value on freedom, then you’re well on your way to developing that particular malady of the imagination known as anarchism in which one sees government and laws and property rights and so on as impediments to freedom rather than as expressions of or even requirements for freedom.  But surely that’s a funny way to look at the situation.  What would happen if we eliminated those rules?  Let’s say by hook or by crook the guy managed to rake in enough cash to buy the castle and move in.  Let’s say the following week a more heavily armed and better financed group of miscreants kicked in the front door and promptly threw the guy out the window.  Why not?  Certainly sounds to me like the guy wouldn’t have been free to live in the castle under those conditions.  He’s lying on the pavement at this point.  It seems to me we’re now talking strictly about the material dimension of freedom.  Laws have nothing to do with it but just try it sometime and see what happens.  By the way, you know the situation I’m describing here corresponds to how they actually managed things for centuries in the bad old days, right?  I’m not just making things up over here.  Heck, they’re probably still doing things this way is certain places around the globe right now.

On the other hand, if you’re thinking no, those legal rules did not limit the guy’s freedom to live in the castle and were, instead, what rendered it even theoretically possible for him to do so by creating the legal framework that would allow him to accumulate funds without getting ripped off and robbed by other people and that would also enforce his property rights if ever he got enough cash to buy the place.  So under this perspective the legal rules surrounding the market system supported the guy’s freedom to live in the castle.  However, the fact of the matter remains that under these rules the guy might still have been unable to accumulate the required amount of money, right?  If he wasn’t born to money, didn’t have a head for business and finance, wasn’t drawn to fields that were particularly lucrative, had the misfortune of living during a recession, depression, war, and so on, well then the guy would most likely have been out of luck.  So even with these rules and institutions the guy wouldn’t necessarily have been free to live in the castle in a material sense.

Of course, in order to accommodate the guy’s desire to live in the castle we could always have changed things around not only in terms of the legal framework surrounding how he could accumulate money and the policies affecting his overall economic situation but directly in terms of the distribution of castles.  For example, we could theoretically have said something like, look, a lot of people want to live in the castle and we think it’s important they all have that experience so we’re passing a law that everyone can live in the castle for a week.  (Yes, the guy was either living on a very small island or there were an awful lot of castles about, but that’s not important here.)  That would seem to me to render the guy free to live in the castle, at least for a few days.  But that would represent a rather limited sort of freedom, would it not?  He would still have to move out by the end of the week and in a sense such a rule would also limit his freedom to live in the castle for longer than a week.

By this point you may be thinking yes, yes, I get it: lots of issues about freedom.  What’s the point?  Fair question.  It’s interesting to me because it seems to me many people get a little funny when they think about issues of the general type of people wanting to live in castles, that is, distributional issues.  In particular, many people seem to me to want to discuss these issues in the language of personal freedom but to me that just seems so confusing for the reasons I’ve just discussed.  You know, what kind of freedom?  Whose freedom?  It just seems so much clearer to me to talk about these distributional issues in terms of, well, the morality of distributing resources along certain dimensions.  Look, we’ve got a castle on a hill.  Who’s going to live there?  Why?  It’s all about how we specify the winners and losers under a given economic system for distributing scarce resources.  And I’m not saying it’s a simple issue by any means.  I certainly don’t know the answer, although I have some ideas we could discuss someday.  Maybe it involves future considerations such as incentives or the question of who can best care for the castle.  Maybe it involves who would get the most out of living in the castle.  Maybe it involves who has the strongest right to live in the castle.  But one thing seems clear to me: the only way to make the issue appear to hinge on freedom is to pretend other people don’t exist so the issue becomes merely what one wants to do and one’s freedom to do it.  But we all know other people actually do exist, right?  So we’re not going to get anywhere if all we can agree upon is that freedom is good.

If you’ve read my previous posts then you’ll recognize all I’m really doing here is going over yet again the liberal ethos I’m always talking about but this time from a slightly different angle.  Recall that under the liberal ethos there is a realm in which one’s actions do not have a significant effect on other people and in that realm it does, indeed, make sense to portray the basic issue as one of supporting or not supporting personal freedom as a sort of general abstract value.  But then there’s the other realm in which one’s actions do have a significant effect on other people.  That is the realm that includes economic issues like the distribution of scarce resources.  In that realm we’re talking about resolving interpersonal conflicts of needs and desires and in that realm it just doesn’t make sense to me to portray the issue as hinging on one’s attitude toward personal freedom.  Too many people are involved.  If you’re talking about personal freedom in this context all you’re probably doing is talking in circles by meandering willy nilly through various potential conceptions and dimensions of freedom and confusing the hell out of everyone including quite possibly yourself.  You’ve got to go beyond the value of freedom and into the messy details of these sorts of interpersonal conflicts.  I know, that’s a heck of a lot more work than just saying you support freedom, isn’t it?  But that’s the nature of the beast.  What else can we do?  Start babbling simplistic nonsense like some conservative libertarian or anarchist?  Life is complicated.  Let’s at least have some fun talking about it.

Halloween Has Gone To Hell

Welcome friends!

Well, it looks as though the latest political and economic crisis engineered by the bright lights of the Republican Party has finally abated so we can all breathe a sigh of relief over that.  Thankfully, President Obama and the Democrats in the Senate did not buckle under the Republican threat to bring the American economy to its knees unless we met their demands and rolled back laws previously enacted by Congress and signed by the President or engaged in other dangerous anti-democratic outrages and tomfoolery.  What a spectacle, right?  But I suppose it’s what the people who vote Republican time and time again demand.  No sense blaming the messengers.  The fact of the matter as I’ve pointed out in many previous posts is that a large swath of the American public appears to have no real understanding or appreciation of our democratic political system and seems to be interested in democracy only to the extent that it gets them what they want when they want it.  According to these people, mostly conservatives these days although that certainly wasn’t always the case, if you don’t get satisfaction through normal democratic procedures then you’re perfectly justified using any means available to get what you want, including such harmful and short-sighted stratagems as shutting down the government, wrecking the economy, and basically just trashing the place.  The sad news is that we’re apparently destined for another round of Banana Republican political shenanigans, posturing, and destabilizing brinksmanship this January and February.  Oh well, no sense wallowing in depression and fear.  Life goes on.  No, I think for this post I’d like to set aside all my various political and economic concerns for a little while and instead continue with my periodical critical commentary on some popular holidays.  This time out I’d like to take up a distinctively American holiday that seems to me to have deteriorated significantly during my lifetime: Halloween... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Jesus Loves You

Welcome friends!

I’ll bet you thought I was going to talk about the Republican Party and the latest economic crisis they’ve managed to concoct, which if history is any guide I suppose will start to create havoc with the stock market any time now.  (I was just checking my records and I see the last time the Republicans used the threat of a debt default to terrorize people into doing their bidding in August 2011 the stock market crashed eleven percent.  Ouch!  Do they know I’d like to retire some day?  And I don’t even know the ripple effects on the economy at large but I’d bet they were also substantial.)  What a bunch of scoundrels.  Just every bad stereotype of an old time politician rolled into one.  You know, they don’t like a law passed by Congress and signed by the President so what’s their response?  Hey, we can screw up the budget process and take down the economy!  Take back that law or we’ll mess you up America, we’ll mess you up real bad!  Did you know our Constitution even allowed weird minority groups in Congress to sabotage the government and economy to get their way?  I didn’t.  I guess we just never had any elected officials with sufficient contempt for the institutions and people of the US to resort to these sorts of political machinations before, but I guess we do now.  You know, our system has worked pretty well in general over the past couple of hundred years but the Republican Party has apparently put their heads together and managed to come up with a way to screw it up.  Sorry for venting but it’s just frustrating as all hell to me that we have to allow this unscrupulous pack of over privileged ingrates continually threaten our livelihoods, investments, and retirements this way, but what choice do we have?  Advise the President and Congress to roll over and enter into hostage negotiations with them?  Throw democracy out the window?  I wouldn’t recommend it; I really wouldn’t.  Might patch things up in the short run but it’s no solution for the long run.  No, to put things in a nutshell for the common man and woman: we’re screwed.  Well, anyway, I hope the President’s legal team and the Justice Department and the Supreme Court and whoever else might have a say are taking a hard and sober look at what’s going on right now because at some point I think something will have to change.  We just can’t afford to allow the Republican Party to force us all to lurch from political crisis to political crises like some banana republic forever teetering on the brink of economic chaos and ruin.  But no, I’m not going to write about that.  You can find all the commentary and analysis you like in any newspaper.  Knock yourself out.  Instead I thought I’d just wrap up my little religion kick I’ve been on recently with one additional thought on spiritual matters that crossed my mind the other day.

So I was attending a village church fair recently... no, really ... I was visiting some people and we ended up at the local church fair.  Hey, life happens you know.  Anyway, as I was saying, I was attending a village church fair the other day and the priest or pastor or whoever it was got on the public address system to give his little sermon and I have to say it really caught my attention.  It wasn’t so much any particular thing he said as much as the whole tenor of his little monologue, which involved repeated references to Jesus wanting to have a “long term committed personal relationship” with people... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!

Social Conservatives, The Liberal Ethos, And A Funny Dream

Welcome friends!

I know I’ve been writing quite a bit about religion recently but maybe I can do just one more before I give it a little rest and turn to some other issues?  Because I wanted to talk this time about a little article I read a few years ago by conservative columnist Michael Gerson that I thought really demonstrated the conceptual difficulties many social conservatives seem to run into when they try to make sense of the liberal and secular humanist worldview.  This particular article was mostly about some sort of argument some people were having at some time about the influence or lack of influence of something called “dominionism” within conservative circles, which is something I’ve never actually heard about and don’t have any particular interest in delving into.  So let’s skip the ninety percent of the article that dealt with that topic and just go on to the bit that caught my eye, which was the very last paragraph in which Mr. Gerson concluded his discussion with what I believe is a rather common conservative perspective on liberalism and secularism.  In Mr. Gerson’s language, “…[S]ecularists often assume their view is the definition of neutrality and thus deserves a privileged public place.  The argument that religion is fundamentally illiberal thus provides an excuse to treat it illiberally.  Pluralism is defined as the silencing of religious people.”  One hears this sort of thing all the time from conservatives but honestly I think it’s all based on a bit of conceptual or possibly even linguistic confusion.  So let’s try to clear up a few things, OK?

Recall I’ve argued before that the core of the liberal ethos for me is the notion that we should allow one another do what we like unless our actions impinge in a serious way on other people in which case we need to get together via the democratic political system, debate about the ethics of whatever the situation happens to be, and come up with some kind of resolution.

Now to avoid any possible confusion about the issue let me just say I think it’s perfectly fine to have a debate about the liberal ethos and about whether there should or should not be a private realm in which government does not intrude, but let’s just be a little careful about how we talk about this issue.  If we define government neutrality in this case to mean the government is simply not involved and thus neutral with respect to whatever private decisions someone may wish to make in this private realm, then what we’re debating is whether the government should or should not be neutral in the context of this private realm.  In that case, I don’t think it would make a lot of sense to suggest those who support the liberal ethos are just assuming or pretending their position is more supportive of government neutrality than the opposing view.  Under this definition of neutrality, those who support the liberal ethos would be more supportive of government neutrality with respect to the private realm and the religious position that government should be involved would be less supportive of government neutrality.  Indeed, that’s what the whole debate would be about: the pros and cons of government neutrality in the private realm and the definition and boundaries of that private realm.

But there are other ways one might define neutrality and that’s where I’m afraid things start to get a little muddy.  If one defines government neutrality not in terms of government interference or lack of interference with the person actually doing some activity in the private realm but in terms of the consistency of the government’s activity or lack of activity with one or another ethical position such as that expressed by the liberal ethos or by various religious theories of the more intrusive kind then of course there could never really be any such thing as government neutrality because either government activity would be consistent with a given ethical system or it wouldn’t.  Either the government would get involved in the private realm or it would not.  In that case then yes, it would certainly be misleading to suggest the liberal ethos was about government neutrality.  Indeed, there would be no such thing as government neutrality.

Now I personally think it makes a lot more sense to think about government neutrality in the former sense and to think about the ethical debate over the liberal ethos as being in part about whether government should or should not be neutral with respect to activity taking place in the private realm.  It just seems a little odd and confusing to me to say the government is not really being neutral when it lets someone do whatever he or she wants because the idea that government should do that is consistent with some ethical systems and not others or with the wishes of those who support some ethical systems and not with the wishes of those who support others.  To me that way of thinking is just so confusing because it really just pushes everything back a level.  After determining there is no such thing as government neutrality under this definition of neutrality we would then still have to talk about whether government should allow people to do whatever they like in the private realm, although we’d obviously have to come up with some other terminology to describe what the government would be doing in that case.  I mean come on, we’re never going to get anywhere at that rate.

Another problem with trying to transmute a debate about the liberal ethos into a debate about religion is that the relationship between the two issues is just very loosey goosey and thus liable to generate confusion.  For example, someone who supports the liberal ethos would logically support the right of someone who wishes to apply religious precepts to his or her own behavior in the private realm because under the liberal ethos that would be the latter person’s personal choice.  So it just seems a little weird to me to suggest that someone who supports the liberal ethos in this context is setting himself or herself in opposition to religion in some global sense.  I mean, yes and no.  I know I’ve argued plenty of times that many religions tend to have some (well, OK, usually a lot of) difficulty with the liberal ethos and a distinctive feature of many religions is that they don’t really make any distinction between the private realm and public realm.  Instead, they typically provide some rules and precepts one is supposed to follow in one’s private and public life and those rules sometimes explicitly or implicitly involve one’s ostensible responsibility to get other people to follow those same rules never mind about the ethical or religious views of those other people.  But religion doesn’t have to be that way.  I think there are plenty of religious people, at least in this country, who manage to hold religious views and yet reconcile those views with the liberal ethos using the general proposition that religion does not give one carte blanche to meddle in other people’s private affairs and that everyone is ultimately responsible for their own ethical and religious choices.  In other words, I think it’s a little confusing to suggest the reason secular liberals don’t want government intruding into the private realm is that religions typically support that type of thing and they are opposed to religion.  To my mind it’s more that liberals don’t want government intruding into the private realm because of their social ethics and views on the proper relationship of the government and the individual and one of the things they find troubling about many religions is that those religions advocate systems of social ethics that are inconsistent with those views.  In other words, I think trying to make it be all about religion is putting one’s cart before one’s horse.

So let’s move on to the second potentially relevant context under the liberal ethos: the realm in which one’s actions have a significant effect on other people and we therefore need to get into a debate about the ethics of the situation and decide how we think we should resolve it through government action if necessary.  (That’s the way of civilization, anyway.  I suppose we could also just let the people in question duke it out however they might and may the best man or woman win, which I suppose one could say is the way of anarchy, but you know I’m not a big fan of anarchy, right?  Actually I’m not that bad a shot but my martial arts skills just aren’t where they need to be just yet.)  Now in this context I don’t think the liberal argument is that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with trying to apply one’s religious views to the issue at hand.  I think it’s typically more about the merits of the religious thought being thus applied, which I think is rather a different issue.  That is to say, liberals and secular humanists typically have their own liberal and secular ways of thinking about these issues, which they obviously feel are superior to the religious way, and they are engaging in the sort of debate one would expect and encourage in that situation.  Appeals to authority and supernatural goings on are just not very compelling bases for ethical systems for many people.  Nor do I think many liberals would conceive of government as being neutral in this case.  If we’re using government to resolve an interpersonal conflict of this type then someone is going to win and someone is going to lose.  They both can’t get what they want.  That’s the whole problem.  So the resolution can hardly be neutral with respect to the interests of the parties to the conflict.  I suppose it could still be neutral in other ways, such as applying the same resolution regardless of the identities of the people involved, but that’s yet another issue.  And since we don’t have neutrality with respect to the parties that are actually involved how easy it must be to get a little confused and start talking about a comparable lack of neutrality with respect to third parties advocating various resolutions to the conflict.  And how easy in that case to attempt to apply the same argument to activity taking place in the private realm where third parties may of course still have different ideas but there is no compelling direct interpersonal conflict that would call forth government activity in the first place.  Wait a minute, is that what’s going on?  Shifting perspectives combined with shifting contexts that render the shifting perspectives sometimes significant and sometimes not?  So tricky to keep these things straight.

Well, my head is starting to hurt just a little bit so let me wind things up with an amusing little dream I had the other night that touches on some of these issues.  In this dream I was sitting in a cafe in central Tehran one sunny afternoon sipping some delightful mint tea and listening to a fascinating monologue by someone calling himself Abu al-Gersoni and in walks this cowboy.

al-Gersoni:  Verily, the government should chop the head off anyone who fails to observe correct behavior in his or her private life!

(Applause and ululating from the crowd.)

Cowboy: Dag nab it all, don’t y’all ever think about yer personal freedom?  The gubment should allow people to make their own choices with respect to behavior that’s got no significant impact on other people.  Why don’t you give that a try some time?

al-Gersoni: The corruption of the West has indeed affected your reason my strangely dressed friend.  By suggesting the government should act in a way that is consistent with your beliefs and not mine you are arguing against my personal freedom to have the government do as I wish.  I say to the government, kill!  You say, do not kill!  But the government can only do one, can it not?  Thus, how can the government support the personal freedom of us both?  Your theory that government could ever be consistent with personal freedom is a sham!

(More applause and ululating, plus someone fires a gun into the ceiling.)

Cowboy: Yep, I reckon you’re right pardner.  If you think about it thataway the gubment really is just a tool people can use to force other people to do what they want, such as allowing other people to do what they want!  There ain’t no such thing as personal freedom or gubment neutrality when it comes to personal behavior!  It’s them lying liberals agin’.  I’m a goin’ home, buying me a bigger gun, and joining that thar Tea Party!  No more gubment!

al-Gersoni: That’s not really where I was going with it but sure, I suppose that works too.  The main point is that the only choice is anarchy or an oppressive authoritarian state.  Conservatives of the world, unite!  Wait, that didn’t come out right.  Let the camel of conservatism eat in all our gardens!

(Applause, ululating, whooping, and more shooting.  A lot more shooting.)

That was the end of the dream.  I awoke in a cold sweat with this great hankering for a falafel burger.  I know, it was weird.

References

Michael Gerson.  August 22, 2011.  An unholy war on the Tea Party.  http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-08-22/opinions/35271813_1_michele-bachmann-dominionist-bachmann-or-perry.

Islam and Murder

Welcome friends!

I wonder if we could talk a little bit this time about a rather awkward issue that I think is threatening to become something of an elephant in the room of Western public discourse.  Yes, I’m sorry to bring it up, but this time out I thought I might say a few words about the relationship between murder and Islam.  What got me thinking about this issue was a recent story I read in the papers about OFCOM, the UK regulatory agency responsible for media and communications, fining an Islamic TV channel, Noor TV, the equivalent of about one hundred and thirty thousand dollars for inciting violence during one of their television broadcasts.  Yes, it turns out the presenter for this particular program, some bloke with the rather impressive moniker Allama Muhummad Farooq Nizami, told his viewers that it was perfectly acceptable and even the duty of Muslims to kill people who disrespect the Prophet Mohammed.  Yes indeed.  According to Mr. Nizami’s understanding of the issue it wasn’t even close.  He explained on TV that “there is no disagreement about this” and “there is absolutely no doubt about it that the punishment for the person who shows disrespect for the Prophet is death.”  As if to illustrate his point he then went on to laud the Indian bodyguard who murdered Punjab Governor Salmaan Taseer in 2011 because Mr. Taseer had been advocating amending the country’s blasphemy law to allow for a modicum of free speech on religious matters.  So why did the owners of the program in question, Al Ehya Digital TV operating out of Birmingham England, employ such an extremist hot head to serve as host for this program?  (You weren’t expecting Birmingham, were you?  Oh, you were?)  Was the management of Al Ehya Digital TV on the murder bandwagon as well?  No, no.  According to their account Mr. Nizami’s comments were “totally unforeseen and could not be anticipated.” Apparently they thought he was just your average run of the mill Muslim for the five years he had been working there until one fine day he started spouting off about murdering people.  Scary.  Oh, and by the way, in case you thought this was a one off, I suppose I should mention OFCOM had previously levied a similarly sized fine against a different local TV channel, DM Digital operating out of Manchester England and calling itself on its website “one of the largest Asian television networks in the UK.”  (I bet you weren’t expecting ... oh never mind.)  Yes, this fine was for a different broadcast in which someone else, in this case a person described by the BBC article as an “Islamic scholar,” similarly explained on air that Muslims had a duty to kill people who insulted Mohammed.  Oh my gosh.  Seems we’ve got people advocating murder all over the place these days, don’t we?  Did you know?  Well, it got me thinking once again about the thorny issue of the relationship of religion and the liberal ethos and more specifically about the problem of Islam and the West... Sorry but only selected archived (previous year) posts are currently available full text on this website.  All posts including this one are available in my annual anthology ebook series available at the Amazon Kindle Bookstore for a nominal fee.  Hey, we all need to make a buck somehow, right?  If you find my timeless jewels of wisdom amusing or perhaps even amusingly irritating throw me a bone now and then.  Thank you my friends!