I'll Only Say This Once

I'm honestly not trying to horn in on Thersites' racket with all this metacommenting lately, but I had such an irksome experience commenting over at Adventus today, that I feel I have to explain something, even if it's mainly for my own benefit.

I've occasionally mentioned being vegan, not out of pride, or to be controversial, but just 'cause it sometimes gives me what I fancy are insights into certain situations. I happened to mention it re the abuse Robert M. Jeffers was taking from some chump who assumed that Jeffers was religious only because he'd never heard someone spout the standard dorm-room objections to religion. I mentioned that you get the same thing when you're vegan...people constantly think they have hard proof that you're foolish, inconsistent, or hypocritical, and that it's proof you've never heard before. In reality, of course, you've heard it many, many times; you've explained yourself to the people who'll listen, and (with luck) you've learned to extricate yourself from debating the people who won't, and there is nothing new under the sun.

Weirdly enough, I actually got an e-mail a couple days ago asking me why I didn't "promote" veganism. It's simple: I'm not a proselytizer by nature. I'm willing to explain myself if asked politely, and I'll usually defend myself if attacked, but I'm not cruising to win converts, and I never have been. I've gotten them, sure, but never through active proselytizing. Nonetheless, it's amazing how often people will attack me on the basis of the moral superiority they imagine I must feel (yeah, right...if they only knew!). Today, for instance, the moment I mentioned I was vegan, my worthy opponent knew pretty much everything there was to know about me - just like that - and immediately labored to let the mantle of guilt shroud me before a gogglin' world.

It's not my intent here to justify myself to that fine fellow. But if anyone else is curious, I can explain my deal pretty easily. First, I don't pretend to know how animals suffer, whether they "think," or what moral meaning their suffering has, if any. What I do know is that I'm comfortable being wrong about veganism, but I'm not comfortable being wrong about eating animals. That being the case, I do my best to live up to what I think is right - which involves a lot more, obviously, than being vegan - though the world is far from simple and few issues are completely black-and-white.

All morality involves the drawing of arbitrary lines; living requires compromise at every turn. Still, I don't accept the "in for a penny, in for a pound" argument that says that where a small evil exists, a greater evil is justifiable. I don't accept the idea that the theoretical suffering of plants, for instance, trumps the actual suffering of ducks being forcefed to make pate. I don't accept the idea presented to me today (and many times before), that I'm a murderer or a hypocrite or a phony for eating rice (which I very rarely eat in any case), because "rice production kills more animals than game-hunting would." I don't accept that kind of sophistry and bad-faith theorizing, which I think is designed less to promote better moral choices, than to make decent ones look shabby and hollow.

In opposing that type of argument, I'm not saying that everyone has to be just like me; I'm saying that my conscience is my own, and that since I respect other people's dietary choices, they should respect mine, or at least tolerate them politely. If we're truly liberals, we don't really have any other option than to do this for each other.

I despise the kind of elitist moral one-upmanship that scorns to make compromises with the "unenlightened," and I recognize it as a real problem on the left (and among vegans, in particular). I also despise the kind of priggish cynicism that attempts to glorify itself by pretending that other people's acts of charity and expressions of compassion are really caused by rampant egotism and selfishness, and will turn out disastrously in any case. Honestly, when you consider the incredible mess we've made of just about everything, whether by omission or commission, I'd think moral superiority would be the last thing anyone would be feeling. Speaking for myself, self-approbation is definitely not a feeling I know well!

Anyway, that's the last you'll hear from me on the matter. Tune in tomorrow, when I'll answer the question that's plagued mankind for decades: Who's stronger, Thor or the Hulk?

A Vexing Problem Solved, Free of Charge

Here's a clever idea that came to me while I was responding to a recent post by Echidne.

Suppose that in American public schools, all biology classes were to devote a day or two to exploring creation myths from around the world.

It'd be the sort of compromise that shows America's cultural pluralism at its best. Science would admit that it can't logically prove or disprove the existence of God, and fundamentalist Christianity would admit that there are multitudes of competing religious explanations for life on earth, and would also concede that many Christian sects have no problem with evolution.

Hell, the teachers could even discuss intelligent design for all I'd care, so long as they make it clear that ID theory is just as compatible with Buddhism, and Islam, and Judaism, and Hinduism, as it is with Christianity.

It seems reasonable to me. If fundamentalists want kids to be taught about "Young Earth" theories based on Biblical literalism, they'll also have to let them hear about how Pan Gu took his broad-axe and split open the black egg of the Cosmos; and about how the cow Audhumla was formed from thawing frost, and licked a salty ice block until the hair of Buri, the first man, appeared; and about Oparin's even more fanciful vision of "chemical evolution"; and about the rich pleasures and voluptuous horrors of Echidneism (the one true faith); and all the rest of it.

At the end of the discussion, the teacher can say, "Those are some of the theories about how life got here. Now, for the rest of the semester, we're going to talk about how it works."

There you have it...the problem's solved, and everybody's happy!

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll tackle Israel and Palestine...

PS: Just for the record, I was being kinda facetious here. I know this isn't going to happen! But the thing is, we get locked into hopeless struggles all the time by letting opponents choose the terms of debate. The issue here isn't that Lefties want "atheism" taught in schools; the issue is that a certain subset of Christians wants to stop other types of religion from being discussed. If religion ends up in public-school curricula, it's got to be balanced; one form of it can't claim a privileged position over all the others. A comparative discussion of origin myths is education; teaching "Young Earth" Biblical literalism is indoctrination. If you want to win a debate, you need to go beyond simple "either/or" opposition, and start appropriating your opponent's strength. Instead of saying "You can't have this," you say, "You can have this under these conditions," and let your opponents reveal their true agenda by rejecting it. We come across as the bad guys by "stifling faith." So we need to make it plain that neutral discussion protects all faiths, and it's actually the fundies who are trying to limit religious freedoms.

Stiff 'Em All - Let God Pay 'Em Back!

The behavior of a fundamentalist Mormon sect may provide insight into the Bush administration's reasons for borrowing massive amounts of money and spending it on useless projects:

For more than a decade, a 9,000-member polygamist sect that believed civilization was about to end was borrowing money like there was no tomorrow.

Members of the sect - a renegade Mormon splinter group called the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - took out one loan after another from the small-town Bank of Ephraim for business ventures that would prove highly speculative, even half-baked.

[snip]

The Bank of Ephraim had profited for many years from higher-interest loans to the sect....But eventually the bank "got in too deep," investing heavily in increasingly risky ventures with sect members who "didn't have much to lose," Utah Banking Supervisor Jim Thomas said.

[snip]

Keith Church, who joined the bank as president in 2000, said that after it failed, he learned from several people in the business community that sect members had taken a secret oath in 2000 to borrow as much money as they could to prepare for the day that civilization - along with the financial markets - collapsed.

Almost Unparalleled Distress

A well-meaning but dismissive comment about Luddites over at Eschaton the other day reminded me what a shame it is that so few people on the Left understand who the Luddites were and what they did. The term is almost universally pejorative, a situation I think has to do more with the winners writing the history books than with any unforgivable flaw in Luddite thinking. Of course there can be differing views of the effectiveness and even the morality of the Luddites, but to dismiss them as irrational technophobes is to take the wrong side in a battle that continues today.

Though it refers to a specific revolutionary group active circa 1812, "Luddites" has become a blanket term for various groups of radicalized peasants who, during and for decades after the Napoleonic Wars, had been gradually divested of their land, thrown out of their employment, and turned into paupers. Luddites, properly so called, were concerned mainly with the textile trade. The "Swing" rebellion, which flared up as the Luddite rebellion disintegrated, was concerned with agriculture. Both groups broke machines in protest of labor conditions, though neither originated the practice.

Machine-breaking was accompanied by a demand for higher wages and full employment, and had nothing to do with technophobia. It was sporadic, too, especially during the Swing rebellion; arson, though itself rare, was far more common in those years. The machines chosen for destruction were those deemed "hurtful to commonality"; other machines were left alone.

The radicals' objection to spinning-jennies and threshing machines was neither superstitious, nor ignorant, nor even confined to the laboring classes. In November of 1830, at the height of the Swing rebellion, a group of magistrates wrote an open letter to the "Owners and Occupiers of Lands," asking them "to discontinue the use of Threshing Machines, and to increase the Wages of Labour to Ten Shillings a week for able bodied men."

Earlier, the poets Shelley and Byron had applauded the Luddites; on his first day in the House of Lords, Byron spoke out against anti-Luddite legislation, which had caused children as young as 12 to be hanged for machine-breaking. He said,

While these outrages must be admitted to exist to an alarming extent, it cannot be denied that they have arisen from circumstances of almost unparalleled distress: the perseverance of these miserable men in their proceedings tends to prove that nothing but absolute want could have driven a large, and once honest and industrious, body of the people into the commission of excesses so hazardous to themselves, their families and the community.

In his 1816 poem "Song for the Luddites," Byron was far more blunt: "Down with all Kings but King Ludd!"

In 1819, William Cobbett's discussion of the Luddite revolt also condemned the "almost unparalleled distress" of English peasant laborers, in words which have a certain resonance today:

Society ought not to exist, if not for the benefit of the whole. It is and must be against the law of nature, if it exists for the benefit of the few and for the misery of the many. I say, then, distinctly, that a society, in which the common labourer...cannot secure a sufficiency of food and raiment, is a society which ought not to exist; a society contrary to the law of nature; a society whose compact is dissolved.

There's an excellent (but expensive!) new book compiling primary Luddite texts; you can find it here.

Thinking Cap

Here's a pretty amazing story:

Four people were able to control a computer using their thoughts and an electrode-studded "thinking cap," U.S. researchers reported on Monday.

While experiments have allowed a monkey to control a computer with its thoughts, electrodes were implanted into the animal's brain. This experiment...required no surgery and no implants.

One hardly knows what to say. This is one of those scientific breakthroughs that I find both exhilarating and terrifying.

Village of the Dammed

Suppose you lived near a nuclear plant that had some structural problems. Would you prefer to have the problems revealed and fixed, or would you prefer them to be concealed, so that terrorists wouldn't learn about them?

Suppose the plant didn't have structural problems, but was still vulnerable to earthquakes and terrorism. Should government agencies have access to maps of areas that would likely be contaminated with fallout in the event of a disaster?

While you're thinking about that, read this:

When Teton County Commissioner Bill Paddleford heard a researcher discuss the possibility that part of Jackson Lake Dam could liquefy in a large earthquake, he was both worried and miffed.

For two years, Paddleford said, he has been after the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to give county officials information on the safety of the dam and any potential threats to the structure. Local officials wanted it as part of their emergency planning.

Agency officials said the dam, a short distance upstream from the resort community of Jackson, was safe, but Paddleford said they refused to release specifics.

[snip]

The dispute highlights a problem faced by some local governments and groups since the terrorist attacks of 2001: It isn't just the general public that is finding it more difficult to get information from state and federal governments about dams, electric utilities or other structures in their areas - whether for safety, environmental or political concerns.

[snip]

The bureau argued the release could endanger both the dams and the safety of those living downstream, and that disclosure of areas that would be flooded was exempt under the Freedom of Information Act.

Apparently, Tommy Thompson can publicly give terrorists tips on where U.S. security is weakest, but a county government can't get information vital to its emergency planning, simply because the information might be of use to terrorists. That seems both high-handed and counterproductive.

Wyoming has had some experience with dam failures. In fact, the original Jackson Lake Dam failed in 1910; its replacement had to be reconstructed in the late eighties. In 1965, the Fontenelle Dam failed; fortunately, outlets were opened in time and the city of Green River was dampened, instead of being swept off the face of the earth. Jackson Lake Dam, like the destroyed Fontenelle Dam, is an earthfill dam; it holds back roughly 275 billion gallons of water. It's about seven miles east of the active Teton Fault, and there are a number of towns in its floodpath.

It seems to me that whether the dam is vulnerable to earthquakes or a terrorist attack or the immaculate wrath of Yahweh, there's no conceivable reason to conceal an inundation map from county officials. It's hard to see this as anything more than another cynical use of 9/11 as BushCo's ultimate argument-settler.

Messing With Texas

BushCo's war of attrition against the federalist ideal of states' rights continues, as the Justice Department fights tooth and nail for federal preemption of Texas state law, in order to protect Dow Chemical from a lawsuit by Texan farmers.

The name of the case is Dow v. Bates. It involves a lawsuit brought by 29 Texas peanut farmers, seeking compensation for crop damage they say was caused by a Dow Agrosciences weed killer named Strongarm. According to the farmers, who sued for damages in a Texas state court, the pesticide nearly wiped out their entire crop.

But Dow intervened in federal court, where it persuaded a judge to to halt the farmers' lawsuit on the ground that the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodentricide Act (FIFRA), preempts remedies provided under Texas state law. Hence the farmers would be prevented from winning damages under states' common law.

Now, with Dow v. Bates before the Supreme Court, the Bush Justice Department brief is arguing in favor of federal preemption over state law--which happens to be a reversal of its own established position against expansive federal preemption of state remedies under FIFRA.

Remember when conservatives were all about states' rights, that wise preventative against the centralization of power? Remember how, instead of consolidating power in Washington, federalism diffuses it through the fifty states, thus reducing the tyrannical effects of big government?

God knows the concept of states' rights was never perfect; among other things, it can allow state governments to become local tyrants that don't have to answer to federal law, segregation being the classic example. It also raises issues about how one state's rights affect its neighbors (as in the West's dispute over Colorado River water). Still, the fact that BushCo has delivered blow after blow against every aspect of states' rights, to the appaluse of self-proclaimed conservatives, tells us a lot about the Right's current view of centralized, big-government tyranny: they absolutely love it.

Beautiful Abstractions

It looks as though the GOP is gearing itself up to make some of those "hard" decisions - which they always seem to find so easy - between the environment and the economy. Animals are getting underfoot yet again; the sage grouse, in particular, is rampant and ululant. While some animals are self-solving problems in that they're edible, or large enough to make a satisfying sound when shot (a wise provision of nature indeed), others are mere obstacles; they have about as much claim on our sympathies as a tree that's fallen across a two-lane highway. Who are they to stand in the path of short-term profit? And who are their defenders to put sloppy emotionalism before rational self-interest?

In his fine book Dominion, the conservative author Matthew Scully - who was once, amazingly, one of George W. Bush's speechwriters - complains about the modern conservative's amoral vision of environmental economics, in which "no human appetite goes unmet," no matter how base or destructive or irrational it is. Scully points out that this idealized form of free enterprise

...can at times cut against the conservative's own belief in man as a fundamentally moral and not merely economic actor, a creature accountable to reason and conscience and not driven by whim or appetite. Often, too, we find conservatives and libertarians bringing to animal and environmental issues their own unique brand of sentimentality, invested in the conquest of nature instead of in nature itself.

He's absolutely right. Conservatives pretend to a superior understanding of personal responsibility, of morality and self-control and rationality, but will scorn these ideals whenever and wherever they interfere with squandering natural resources. Scully correctly identifies this as vanity, and as a triumph of mere appetite over reason. (One might even call it "self-centered hedonism.")

He's also correct - and this is particularly astute of him, I think - that the idea of conquering nature involves a form of sentimentality to which the American Right often succumbs. It's somewhat along the lines of the timid, sickly, virginal Friedrich Nietzsche's observation that "man was made for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior." It's a sentimentality about power to which weaklings and cowards are especially prone, and it's also an expression of the naturalistic fallacy that confuses what does happen with what should happen. In the grip of these errors, conservatives draw moral distinctions between humans and nature that are no less strict for being arbitrary, and no less arbitrary for being the product of "rationality."

This is a subject I'll return to soon enough, but I'll let Scully have the last word, for now:

Conservatives are wary of environmentalism and its more radical strains of nature-worship. They would do well, however, to examine their own beautiful abstractions.

If Bush Believes It, It Must Not Be True

This is a kind of odd:

Bush Downplays Thompson's Terror Worries

By JENNIFER LOVEN, AP White House Correspondent

WASHINGTON - President Bush played down on Saturday a stark warning from his resigning health chief that the nation's food supply is largely unprotected from terror attack.

When I see the word "downplays" in this context, I expect to see some explanation of why Thompson is exaggerating or wrong. But there's nothing like that in the article. Quite the opposite. Behold:

Bush said that the government is doing what it can to safeguard the public from threats, but much work remains.

"We're a large country, with all kinds of avenues where somebody could inflict harm," said Bush....

That's an odd way of downplaying a threat. It gets even better, though:

Asked to respond to Thompson's comments, Bush neither criticized them nor implied that the food supply is safer than Thompson asserted.

Perhaps the logic here is that when Bush believes something, it immediately becomes less plausible; his agreement with a given proposition weakens it.

I suspect this article will read very differently in a few hours.

See No Evil, Or Else

A Republican member of Congress spouting cynical, mealymouthed, disingenuous nonsense in order to promote an anti-democratic law?

Believe it or not, it actually happened:

The lawmaker responsible for delaying by 24 hours the media’s reporting of combat deaths is now pushing for camera crews to be banned from covering direct combat actions. Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., said in a Nov. 29 letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that he worries the presence of camera crews could end up jeopardizing lives.

"There must be a balance between the need for media coverage and the difficult and complex missions being carried out by our brave troops," Jones wrote. "I pray that a Marine or soldier in the future will not lose their life because they hesitated due to concerns that their action would be recorded by the media, reported out of context and scrutinized by public opinion before all of the facts are presented."

Conservative Scaremongering

Sometimes it's hard to make the simplest connections. For instance, you always hear conservatives complaining that the Left is prone to "scaremongering." We're a pack of Chicken Littles, to hear them tell it, forever rushing around and shrieking that the sky is falling. Gregg Easterbrook's view is typical:

Fashionable alarmism may eventually create a Chicken Little backlash: as the years pass and Nature doesn't end, people may stop listening when environmentalists issue warnings.

But what's the reason that things like the precautionary principle are so bad, according to the Right? Why must this chemical not be banned, and that industry not be regulated? Why must this land not be protected from development, and that animal not be protected from extinction? Because doing so would "destroy the economy." It would ruin people's livelihoods, weaken the nation, and bring our deaths halfway to meet us.

That certainly sounds like scaremongering to me, but for some reason, alarmism of this type is perfectly reasonable and respectable.

Here's a classic example of conservative scaremongering: In 1977, California banned a nematicide called dibromochloropropane (DBCP) - which was widely used on grapes - because it caused atrophy of the testicles and other inconvenient problems. While the ban was being discussed, DBCP advocates worked themselves into a state of spittle-flecked hysteria that rivaled the worst panic attack of any "environazi" you'd care to name. California farmers had been using almost a million pounds of DBCP per year, and some of them actually claimed that it would be impossible to grow grapes without this chemical. On all sides, "experts" predicted staggering losses and economic upheaval if the ban were implemented. But as it turned out, not only was it possible to grow grapes without DBCP (just as it had been for millennia), but grape yields actually increased after the ban went into effect.

Similar right-wing alarmism greeted 1972's DDT ban, with some experts predicting a fifty-percent drop in US agricultural production. It didn't happen, and output of US agricultural products increased in the years after the DDT ban. Once again, the conservative Chicken Littles couldn't have been more wrong.

Conservative scaremongering also fails to consider opportunity cost (i.e., the cost of choosing one course of action over another). For example, the belief that grapes can't be grown without DBCP, besides being irrational, acts as a barrier to innovation. That harms everyone, not least because DBCP was a relatively inefficient nematicide and actually reduced crop yields in some circumstances.

Needless to say, when it comes to the environment, environmentalists have done a much better job of predicting outcomes than industry-funded research groups have. In most cases, the financial savings that would've been realized by following sustainable agriculture practices dwarf any financial benefit of a chemical like DBCP (unless, of course, you're a shareholder in Shell or Dow Chemical). In fact, DBCP remains one of California's worst environmental problems, appearing in up to 80 percent of the state's polluted groundwater. Here's a description of the situation twenty years after the DBCP ban:

DBCP, or dibromochloropropane, is a potent carcinogen and perhaps the most powerful testicular toxin ever made. The pesticide causes genetic mutations and cancer in every species of animal on which it has been tested. According to University of California researchers, a single dose can cause permanent testicular malfunction in test animals. DBCP has been banned nationwide for 20 years, but is still found in hundreds of Central Valley water supplies. In connection with a lawsuit by families of children who drank DBCP-tainted water at school in Bakersfield, researchers have found a high rate of sterility or abnormally small testicles among the former pupils.

Agribusiness has long since moved on; its Chicken Little hysteria over the DBCP ban is a dim memory, and it has plenty of new battles to fight. Unfortunately, millions of residents of California are finding it considerably more difficult to put the issue behind them.

Friday Nudibranch Bloggling

Kierkegaard: God's Implacable Foe

Here's a comical bit of know-nothing nonsense from Phil Brennan, one of the sanctimonious scolds at NewsMax, on the topic of "secular humanists":

In their intellectual egotism they echo Søren Kierkegaard's personal declaration of independence: that the thought of the existence of a Deity put a limit on his intelligence. Poor Søren, humbled by a higher being than himself.

Unfortunately for this braying chump, the "limit" on intelligence that Kierkegaard talks about has to do with the point at which faith must take over from reason, allowing recognition of religious truths that the intellect, in its limitation, dismisses as "absurd."

And he also said that "asserting the self without relation to God" is one of the pre-eminent forms of despair, despair being synonymous with sin, in his view.

Isn't it funny how a guy like Kierkegaard can devote his entire life to promoting Christianity, and still get called an arrogant atheist by right-wing cretins? If Kierkegaard can't live up to the moral standards of these folks, that certainly bodes ill for the rest of us!

Perhaps their real beef with Kierkegaard has to do with his having attacked the hypocrisy of state religion, particularly in its nationalist mode, which he viewed as a "forgery" of faith.

Corporate Psychopaths

A Canadian psychologist estimates that 1 out of every 100 North Americans is a psychopath, and points out that they tend to thrive particularly well in the business world.

"Corporate psychopaths" use arrogance and superficial charm to scale the top of the ladder, knocking off whoever gets in their way, Prof Hare explained.

[snip]

"People might say he or she is charismatic, high profile or 'gets things done'. We have a whole series of euphemisms for the individual who may be self centred, grandiose, lacking in empathy and does not give a damn about everybody else," he added.

Sounds about right. However, I think we're culturally less inclined to apologetic euphemism than to starry-eyed, slack-jawed worship.

For some reason, this story calls to mind Engels' classic anecdote about his visit to Manchester:

One day I walked with one of these middle-class gentlemen into Manchester. I spoke to him about the disgraceful unhealthy slums and drew his attention to the disgusting condition of that part of town in which the factory workers lived. I declared that I had never seen so badly built a town in my life. He listened patiently and at the corner of the street at which we parted company, he remarked: "And yet there is a great deal of money made here. Good morning, Sir!"

Adam Smith: Lying Socialist Weasel

I just stumbled upon an Internet ad for an "Adam Smith" tie; I knew they were popular in the eighties, but I had no idea people were still selling them (let alone claiming that they're desirable because Dick Armey wears one). And yet:

Conservative leaders like House Majority Leader Dick Armey, former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, Nobel laureate Milton Friedman and National Right to Work Committee president Reed Larson regularly wear Adam Smith ties. It's the club tie of the conservative movement.

This idea that Smith is the prophet of modern economic conservatism would be funny if it hadn't been getting people killed for decades, and if it hadn't been debunked time and again. The modern conservative's approach to Smith is similar to the average 1970s socialist's approach to Marx: don't bother reading him, just listen to someone else describe what he said. But at least in the case of socialists, they had some idea of where Marx's sympathies actually were. For self-serving and vicious perversity, the conservative movement's misreading of Smith is second only to the Religious Right's misreading of the Gospels.

Here are a few highly pertinent quotes of his; see if you can imagine anyone in the Bush White House reading them, or hearing them read aloud, without a Cheneyesque sneer of contempt:

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

That has a nice ring to it, eh? I think it would look good on a t-shirt, right under a drawing of Smith. Can someone get right on that, please?

Here's Smith on regulating workers and their masters:

When the regulation, therefore, is in favour of the workmen, it is always just and equitable; but it is sometimes otherwise when in favour of the masters.

If that's not wild-eyed pinko claptrap, what on earth is? Is there a conservative alive who would be surprised to see that sentiment attributed to Karl Marx?

Here's Smith on the evils of income inequality:

Our merchants and master manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people.

Here's Smith engaging in class warfare, like the sniveling socialist demogogue he was:

Wherever there is great property there is great inequality. For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.

Here's Smith on government's obligation to fund public institutions and public works for the good of all:

The third and last duty of the sovereign or commonwealth is that of erecting and maintaining those public institutions and those public works, which, though they may be in the highest degree advantageous to a great society, are, however, of such a nature that the profit could never repay the expense to any individual or small number of individuals, and which it therefore cannot be expected that any individual or small number of individuals should erect or maintain.

Here's Smith on the fleeting and contingent nature of power, and its tendency to destroy those who devote their lives to gaining and keeping it:

Power and riches appear then to be, what they are, enormous and operose machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniencies to the body, consisting of springs the most nice and delicate, which must be kept in order with the most anxious attention, and which in spite of all our care are ready every moment to burst into pieces, and to crush in their ruins their unfortunate possessor.

And last, here's Smith on altruism, that ultimate rationality which views all people as equals obligated to one another by common humanity:

[W]hat is it which prompts the generous, upon all occasions, and the mean upon many, to sacrifice their own interests to the greater interests of others?....It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others, calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration.

That's fairly stern stuff, I'd say. And I think we can all agree that were Adam Smith to lurch forth from his grave - his dessicated cortex suddenly flickering with coruscations of sentience, his spavined limbs tingling under the influence of some modern-day Frankenstein's galvanic rays - and say things like these on some cable news show, he'd receive tens of thousands of death threats, and William Safire and Bob Novak would laboriously take him to task in several consecutive columns, and Ann Coulter would call him a traitor, and the FReepers would hound him so mercilessly and illiterately that his only wish would be to know again the cold comfort of the grave.

Open Lagoons of Liquefied Manure

If you've so much as glanced once or twice at this blog, you've probably noticed me complaining about market-driven examples of false economy: practices and processes that keep prices artificially low, by ignoring high costs that arise predictably, in accordance with the perfectly straightforward causal relationship between bad decisions and bad results.

Factory farms are the best possible proof of this. Let's consider the problem with the H5N1 virus currently circulating in Asia, to use a favorite example. The Asian poultry industry relies on economies of scale to keep prices low; huge numbers of birds and pigs are crammed together into a tiny space, beak by jowl with huge numbers of low-paid workers. The result is exactly what you'd expect: a highly efficient laboratory for breeding new diseases. The flu costs every country on earth a lot of money in a normal year; H5N1, however, has the potential to kill tens of millions of people, destroy the economies and paralyze the infrastructures of any number of countries, and push an unstable world into total chaos. If you factored the cost of such events into the price of a single chicken raised on one of these farms, it'd cost hundreds - if not thousands - of dollars.

And now, here's a ghastly story about factory farming from Ohio. It explains how Ohio's factory farms have destroyed residents' health, poisoned the environment, broken federal laws, and destroyed independent family farms, without offering much of anything in return...except, of course, artificially low prices that take none of this devastation into account.

One of the biggest problems, oddly enough, is the practice of "ponding" incomprehensibly large amounts of manure:

Its presence in gargantuan quantities plays havoc with quality of life. Open lagoons of liquefied manure smell, and manure management glitches - associated exclusively with the dairies - are a constant threat to the water supply. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said that three dairies - Schilderink, Nine Mornings and White Gold - have violated the Clean Water Act.

Sounds about right to me. As it happens, factory farms contribute more to water pollution than all other American industries combined. Not surprising, when you consider that the typical hog farm produces as much solid waste per day as a small city, and doesn't have a sewage treatment system.

But we can't do anything differently. Hell, that'd cost money. And higher costs mean higher consumer prices. And if we get to a point where poverty-wage workers can't afford McDonald's burgers anymore, what are they supposed to eat instead? And if they starve, who's going to work in our slaughterhouses and meat-packing plants? Who's going to work with our open lagoons of liquefied manure? Obviously, our hands are tied.

Can These Bones Live?

Rick Mercier has written a terrific article called The Hypocrisy of the Religious Right in America. He says things we already know, but he says them so eloquently that I can't help quoting him at length. What impressed me most was his concluding discussion of the GOP's "moral values," and the destructive role they're likely to play in a culture already crippled by self-inflicted moral idiocy:

For political operatives, the phrase's beauty lies in its meaninglessness. It can be made to mean anything, and, in a culture with no meaningful moral narratives, it can be turned into a cudgel that's useful for political ends but has nothing to do with any coherent religious tradition.

In the spiritual vacuum that exists in this country, the Christian right is well-positioned to argue that its menagerie of fears and chauvinisms--piled into a box labeled "moral values"--constitutes a serious moral narrative. It doesn't, but the Religious Right's contribution to the denigration of Christianity will continue unabated until other Christian communities come up with a compelling alternative.

The trouble is, our society seems to lack the kind of exemplars who could build that alternative. What we need are the spiritual descendants of Martin Luther King Jr. and Dorothy Day, people who are willing to endure the enmity and scorn of the political establishment and mainstream culture.

Maybe those people are out there, but I don't see them. That's why I'm not optimistic about the survival of the Christian tradition in our culture. What many view as a great spiritual revival looks a lot to me like another stage of rot in American Christianity's corpse.

Can the cadaver rise up? It doesn't seem hopeful. In contemporary America, the Jewish Palestinian whom many call their messiah has become just another Middle Easterner to be ignored or reviled.

Choose the Blue

Here's a nice new site that tells you which businesses donate the most money to Democrats, so that you can plan your shopping accordingly. According to the site's creators,

If each American who voted for John Kerry spends $100 in 2005 on a Blue company instead of a Red company, we can move $5 Billion away from Republican companies and add $5 Billion to the income of companies who donate to Democrats.

Well worth looking into, I'd say.

Stop Them Before They're Imagined Again!

George W. Bush's successful destruction of a character loosely based on Saddam Hussein, who appeared in a work of fiction written by Ahmed Chalabi, has emboldened at least one Republican lawmaker to take a similarly uncompromising stand against figments of other people's imagination:

An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries, including university libraries. A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda."

[snip]

Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists...would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed.

Now, before you go calling this guy a "book-burning Nazi," note this:

"I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said.

Der Kulturkampf

To hear the media tell it, this country's Culture War is over sexual morality and gender roles. They’ve placed this supposed conflict in a Judeo-Christian context, which conveniently explains it, ennobles it, and protects its adherents from a certain amount of questioning.

There are other aspects of Der Kulturkampf, though...a lot of which have to do with questioning the truth-values of science and logic. As far as I can tell, the consensus on the Left is that the people who are calling accepted truths of science and logic into question are neo-Medieval theocrats who want to replace rationality with irrational, myth-based thinking.

There may be some truth to this. But I find that the various, seemingly contradictory aims of Bush's inner circle are better explained by fascism than by religion per se.

Professor Roger Griffin makes the essential point that fascism is irrational and mythic by definition. This is in part a function of what he calls "palingenetic ultra-nationalism." Palingenesis is, among other things, a term for rebirth; it's most apposite, here, in its alchemical sense of rebirth from ashes. Fascists propose that the nation must be reborn from the ashes of cultural decadence, a process which they see in resolutely mystical – though not necessarily supernatural - terms. They’re utopians, and they have the utopian’s impatience with whatever "facts" stand in their way. If logic and science impede the fascist's progress towards Destiny, then they must be overthrown.

In that sense, 9/11 itself was a palingenesis: a new America rose from the ashes, and proclaimed that the former things had passed away. Part of that rebirth involved renaming the world and the things in it, purging it of all ambiguities and complexities. The writer Dubravka Ugrešić described how a similar process took place in war-ravaged Croatia:

The business of building begins with naming. This is a house; this is the homeland; this is black; this is white....[I]t appears to be intended to convince oneself and others of the actual existence of the new reality. It is only in firm coordinates, in a clear and named world, that we shall not be lost, not threatened by the chaos of madness, ambiguity, multiple truths.

Among other things, the fascistic urge towards a "clear and named world" involves championing an idealized form of peasant values. Peasants in the fascist imagination are simple, vigorous, anti-intellectual, and driven by instincts that come from their innate sense of "natural law." Peasants don't want democracy, because they have enough humility to know their place and to accept the guidance of their betters. A peasant who aspires to more than this has become corrupt and decadent; to complain about poverty or injustice is tantamount to wanting "to be fed on turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon," as Dickens put it in Hard Times.

In one sense, then, the business of fascism is to prevent peasants and workers from "ruining" themselves through exposure to dangerous ideas. In contrast to its view of the unspoiled peasant who adheres to natural law, fascism tends to see the "masses" as feminized or childlike, and in desperate need of guidance from a leader who is an incarnation of the "male principle." In this context, I think it's fair to recall Andrew Card's statement that Bush views America as a "10-year-old child" in need of his parental protection.

In his book The Intellectuals and the Masses, John Carey notes that one of the most common refrains of pre-WWII intellectuals was that the masses should not be educated, lest knowledge engender dissatisfaction with the unreflecting, purely physical life for which nature intended them. Similarly, as Umberto Eco points out, fascism "depends on the cult of action for action's sake....Thinking is a form of emasculation." Behind all this is a profound insecurity about masculinity itself...a fear that masculinity is in danger of being irrevocably feminized by a sexually inverted enemy.

This fixation on an enemy that is simultaneously contemptible for its emasculate weakness and terrifying for its ability to destroy is typical of fascist thought, which tends to see the enemy in terms of contagion or decay. The enemy labors in secret like termites; its evil spreads like a sickness; it conquers not through its own strength, but by weakening the strong surreptitiously. War with such an enemy will be eternal, and yet always on the verge of victory. Defeat is imminent, and yet impossible. This leads to a form of emotional extremism that’s similar to religious hysteria, except that it tends to be both materialistic and amoral; it’s focused firmly on the here-and-now, and postulates that reality is created not by God, but by the will to power of "great men." Unlike religion, its long-term view may be utterly nihilistic; many fascist thinkers have welcomed the idea of mass extinction as "glorious." Thus, fascism often devolves into a death cult that offers no salvation or resurrection, particularly since the promised rebirth of culture never actually comes.

This is not to say that there can't be a religious component to the fascist's emotional extremism. However, fascism requires this kind of emotional extremism, while religion does not. Fascism is a sort of syncretic emotional vampirism that can subsume a wide variety of free-floating anxieties and hysterias, intensify them, and channel them towards its twin utopian goals of destroying "decadence" and hastening towards an ever-retreating new age. It guides religion towards a crusading messianism, and patriotism towards ultra-nationalism and racism. It channels sexual insecurity into state-sanctioned misogyny and anti-gay bigotry, and economic insecurity into divisive paranoia and resentment. Whatever it can work with, it will appropriate and bend to its own ends. It's highly adaptive and protean in a way that revealed religion tends not to be, probably because fascism is firmly oriented towards getting its reward in this world.

This conception of fascism is helpful, I think, because it unifies and explains disparate phenomena that leftists tend to see as unrelated or contradictory. Irrationality, in this context, is not some sort of inadvertant error or human failing; it's a choice based on a specific set of values, by people who have traditionally seen it as a strength. Messianism; militarism; misogyny; obsession with defining and enforcing "natural" behavior; valuing action over thought, physical fitness over reading, faith over planning, and impulse over reflection; disbelief in culture, science, and history; obsession with masculinity and father-figures; psychosexual paranoia about "effeminacy"; promoting socially exploitative materialism; hating modernity while worshipping technology; condemning decadence while wallowing in wealth; exalting individuality while promoting an unquestioning herd mentality; viewing life as a struggle in which the weak must perish; viewing compassion as weakness and charity as dangerous; praising freedom while limiting it...all of these are typical of fascism, and all of them together comprise the orientation of this administration. Accordingly, I think we need to stop thinking of Der Kulturkampf as nascent theocracy, and start thinking of it as present-day fascism.

Why does it matter? Well, suppose Bush and his cronies aren't theocrats; suppose they just play them on TV. In the current political situation, I think it's more damning to reveal them as false theocrats than as real ones. Their impersonation of people who have strong moral values is obviously beneficial to them, not just in spite of our attacks, but possibly even because of them. The GOP seems absolutely thrilled that there's a debate over the role of religion in government; I haven't noticed them being on the defensive, or stammering out reassurances that they believe in secular governance, or any of that. On the contrary, they seem as happy as pigs in shit, as the saying is.

My view is simple: any time the Republicans offer people a choice, it's a false choice. Thus, we can invade Iraq or do nothing; we can privatize social security, or lose it; we can support the Patriot Act, or prostrate ourselves at Osama's feet. All of these false dichotomies benefit BushCo, and I think the current false religious dichotomies are no different. Bush will use the fundies, certainly, and his brand of fascism will dovetail nicely with their misogyny, anti-intellectualism, and sense of mission. But ultimately, the fundies are mere tools to be picked up and thrown down at will.