As someone else wisely wrote, we have dueling signs at our borders with Mexico: "Keep Out" and "Help Wanted." We spend billions to catch and return "illegals" and billions more to hire and pay "undocumented workers" to labor in our fields, slaughter houses, construction sites, nursing homes, yards and houses. At least in the latter case some useful work gets done; work most Americans avidly shun in good times and bad.
Neither a justifiable desire to "control our borders" nor a sentimental appeal to our history as a "nation of immigrants" quite cuts through the knot of this problem, overwhelmingly one we share with our southern neighbor. That it is a crime to cross our borders without permission is a relatively new concept in our history. Our ancestors were welcomed one and all, especially if young and healthy, although we proundly proclaimed our "open door" to "your tired. your poor, your huddled masses." What our predecessors did routinely is now a crime. Perhaps now that is as it should be.
For by some measures of sustainability we have too many people already, and census numbers show that we have become the third most populous country on earth by immigration, not reproduction. We are not the rich "empty" land of our beginnings. Yet immigration of the young, productive and able is often posited as the solution to caring for an aging population. Many "illegals" are doing just that. Perhaps that is also as we would like -- even need -- it to be.
As we work to curb the visible influx we also dam the largly ignored outward flow. Workers who once returned at picking season's end to the old village and family hearth instead put down roots -- and send for their families -- to ensure next season's employment. Thus we trap them behind our barriers to entry, perversely swelling the ranks of the uninvited in a limbo of our choosing as much as of theirs. Perhaps we should encourage them to come and go rather than come and stay.
According to a civil war era amendment to our constitution, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens. . ." It's purpose was to make citizens of former slaves. Today it makes citizens of children born to parents who are here without right or permission. While the popular belief that pregnant women continually sneak across our porous borders to make citizens of their offspring on our dime is mostly myth, there is a sizeable and growing population of families with both legal and illegal members here long term. A recent Supreme Court decision holds that it's lawful to break up these families by deporting the illegals. Usually this leaves children bereft of one or both parents or of the only country and culture they have ever known. This outcome is hard to defend.
As our border defenses have improved the cost of evading them has risen. Smugglers, called "coyotes," charge not only what the traffic will bear, but what is required to evade the increased vigilance. Drug dealers recruit "mules" more easily from these desperate ranks to carry illegal drugs in payment for their precarious passage. Thus we make erstwhile law abiding people into criminals twice over to feed our craving for drugs and our appetite for cheap docile labor. This outcome, too, is hard to defend.
But, you might say, these people are criminals who have broken our laws and should be punished, not rewarded. Technically true enough, but it is hard to view people whose only "crime" is to seek a better life in exactly the same way our ancestors did, as deserving of years behind bars with burglars, armed robbers, embezzelers and the like.
The current Great Recession has slowed the flow of illegal workers considerably because jobs have dwindled and wages have declined. Conceivably, illegal immigration would disappear entirely if American wages dropped far enough. Conversely, if Mexican workers at home were paid US level wages the illegal flow would also dry up. In time one of these two solutions will prevail. Which world would we prefer to create?
But even on the day the cross border flows cease we will have an estimated 11 million uninvited immigrants already inhabiting our farms, cities and jails. The notion that we could find, let alone deport, them all is laughable, although the idea has its earnest supporters. If we attempted so draconian a solution we would -- if history is any guide -- cause an epic tragedy. Other mass expulsions have killed millions, such as when Pol Pot's Kymer Rouge drove Cambodians from the cities and into the killing fields; China attempted a "great leap forward;" India divided into Hundu and Muslem states as the British left after World War II; Stalin rejuggled ethnic populations across Soviet Russia in the 1930's; the Turks expelled the Armenians in the wake of World War I.
Our much smaller attrocities involved the removal of eastern Indian tribes to "their" territory (now the state of Oklahoma) via the pathetic "trail of tears" and the relocation of American citizens of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps in the wake of Pearl Harbor. These are stains enough on our honor, and remind us of what we are capable. Loose talk about sending the illegals back home can end horribly if allowed to catch on. We literally have no choice but to give the bulk of them a path to citizenship. Perhaps we should acknowledge what they actually are: dual citizens.
To unravel this tangle -- decades in the making -- will require slow, panient experimentation by an impatient nation prone to seeking silver bullet solutions. It will also require cooperation between Mexico and the United States absent the dictatorial posture we have adopted in the past. Mexico for its part needs to face squarely the reasons why its citizens flee in such abundant numbers rather than being not so secretly glad that they do. For only an end to the economic disparity between our counties will halt the one sided flow, and perhaps even reverse it.
Fortunately, the necessary experimentation is under way. It is called NAFTA. The North American Free Trade Agreement, is one of the many underappreciated achievements for which Bill Clinton deserves credit. But NAFTA is more criticized than studied. It is viewed as a mechanism for exporting American jobs, not as a way to give Mexican workers reasons to stay home. Clearly, it potentially does both and will continue to do so until standards of living on both sides of the border are roughly equal. The question is: do we help Mexico up to our economic level or settle for meeting them half way down?
In theory we should both benefit from free expanded trade, for economics is not a zero sum game. I do not have to lose in order for you to win. But in the short run the more wealthy trading partner will always feel some pain; jobs have to be in place and people at work before wealth can be created. And, in the long run, as John M. Keynes so famously said, we are all dead.
It will take political will, a focus on the long term and abundant Christian compassion, which ought not to be in short supply in this most Christian populated of nations, to steadily alleviate the relative poverty that drives people from their birthright across borders to strange cultures, languages and geography, and bring our two nations into a sufficiently equitable economic balance.
Once that goal is finally achieved we can confidently start on the rest of the world -- having figured out how.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Monday, November 22, 2010
Separation of Church and My State of Mind
A Look Back .
We were new, both as a family and in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the beating heart of the Bible Belt, and the question was, not what faith would we profess, but what church would we “go to?”
“There’s the big church on the hill,” my new father said.
“Is it Baptist? Mother wondered. “No, Methodist. Let’s try it and see if we like it.”
And that’s how I came to belong through childhood and adolescence to the Boston Avenue Methodist Church, an art deco edifice crowned by a towering phallus, easily the most prominent in town (See www.bostonavenue.org) .
It wasn’t my choice. I was not quite five, newly enrolled in kindergarten, and was seldom included in choices. And, no, I am not depending on perfect recall from that age for those quotes. My mother recounted the story consistently and often and I have no reason to doubt her version.
I also learned later that we went as a family, introducing ourselves as a mom and dad married the requisite number of years to have produced a legitimate five-year-old, and transferred to Tulsa from the Chicago office of the CIT, a financial corporation.
In truth, my mother was newly divorced and remarried. My father had left her scant months after I was born. She waited for him to return until my step-father’s proposal of marriage and a new life forced her to choose. Their secret held for over 50 years until the end of their lives,, but that’s another story.
Except for a couple of years when Dad played golf both Saturday and Sunday mornings – to Mother’s frequent and vocal disapproval – we attended church faithfully. Probably I liked being dumped into that den of vociferous cubs of my age called Sunday school.
Gradually my parents dropped church for Sunday school, notably the Married Folks' Class, taught by a bible thumping “teacher,” deemed much more inspiring than Dr. Watts, the church’s minister. There was general relief when Dr. Watts made bishop and left. I attended Sunday school also, moving up through the classes with my age group.
The church became a large part of our social life. They attended the suppers, the recitals, seasonal ceremonies, even the occasional lecture or book reading, often dragging me along.
Boston Avenue Methodists enjoyed the status of belonging to a large, respectable congregation, while tacitly acknowledging the social superiority of the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians. We could in turn look down benevolently on the Lutherans (and they on us) and most other main stream Protestant denominations, but finding the Baptists a tad too jubilant for our taste.
We wondered with disdain about the Holy Rollers, Christian Scientists, Adventists, Mormons and the like, while indulging in the casual overt prejudices of the day concerning Catholics and Jews. Any atheists or agnostics around were tucked safely in the closet. We were uneasy about Unitarians and Quakers, and the world’s non-Christian organized religions were considered Greek mythologists in contemporary dress and in dire need of enlightenment.
I was not one of the “we” cited above. Those were adult concerns. I went each Sunday, made friends, struggled with my inability to sing, especially around Christmas time, and over the years of childhood and adolescence absorbed elements of the old, old story without thinking much about it. It was something you were made to do like school and naps until it became habit.
Some friends (Bob, Mary Ella, Roger, Dolores, Betty Sue, Bill, Dorothy, Jimmy and Odean) were part of the other trinity -- church, school and neighborhood – through high school and beyond, and are alive in memory still. I sang “Oh What A Friend We Have In Jesus,” dutifully, not well and without conviction. I knew who my friends were.
I was in my early adolescence when the first heretical thought popped to mind. Adults, I suddenly realized, “Really believe this stuff!” The question, “Do I believe?” was sensed more than said, but as Yogi Bera famously knew, when the road forks you must choose. Not being much of a Pilgrim I eased on down the road marked Doubt.
My parents were not overtly religious at first. We didn’t often say grace at meals while I was growing up at home. They began that custom sometime after I moved out.. Gradually their convictions deepened into a conscious emotional commitment; conscious but not especially reasoned, an unquestioned comfort to their deaths.
Meanwhile, I graduated high school and for the first time left home to college. Oklahoma A & M College (Now Oklahoma State University) is a land grant school. It is not Harvard, Stanford or Berkeley. Nor is it Brown, Oberlin or Reed.
But for a young lad from pious Tulsa it was a den of subversion. A course in American history, while biased enough (this was 1948 after all), was vastly more nuanced than the patriotic pablum of high school. A course in World History dealt objectively and comparatively with Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and other belief systems. Clearly they couldn’t all be exactly right. Perhaps none were. If you thought about it, picking the one best faith was not easy.
Then I simultaneously took a course in the Humanities and, through the good offices of a girl friend, bonded with the campus collection of free thinkers, many of them active Unitarians. We were a scruffy bunch, disdainful of the main campus swirl, drawn to art and literature, stage and screen.
The core of the group we called “The Bohemian Coop.” Three women sharing a home and three men also sharing quarters, pooled our meager funds and ran a common kitchen and social club where the women lived. Others drifted in and out of the swirl.
It was during this two year association that I first began to explore the boundaries of a life of the mind. I had always been an avid reader, but my reading diet had been heavy on less than profound fiction and on “inspirational” articles from the Reader’s Digest.. Overtly philosophical conversations were new and eye opening. Books were cited and recommended (I never did get through Ulysses, though). Those days still reverberate (Joyce remains impenetrable).
Perhaps the most subversive book I devoured during this era was Philip Wylie’s 1942 popular polemic, “Generation of Vipers.” Largely forgotten, it is only occasionally remembered today for a gratuitous assault on “Mom.”. But it deftly and joyously slaughtered whole herds of sacred cows. Though clearly dated and thoroughly opinionated, it is still a useful read by those who are up for social criticism leveled at the way the Greatest Generation fumbled its way to war.
My first conversion was from Republican to Democrat. Franklin Roosevelt, I learned, was a great president in depression and war and not at all a traitor to his class. About this time I began a life long interest in the dismal dogmas of economics. A good dose of John Maynard Keynes and I was cured of free market dogmatic orthodoxy for life. I survived a short intense flirtation with Ayn Rand and the gold standard. Current events have only solidified my interest in economics and my disdain for its contemporary reigning theories.
Gradually I began to think of myself as a Unitarian. As the name implies, the Unitarian God is a unity that requires neither devine Son nor Holy Ghost. Jesus, a truly great human being, is free to teach homely truths about living and letting live rather than wandering around feeding the multitudes from meager stores, curing the ill and maimed, raising the dead, turning water into wine (if only!), walking on the remaining water, rolling away boulders, raising himself from the dead to walk again among the chosen and by all these empty dramatics diverting human attention from the mundane grubby stuff of living that needs doing before we die.
My Unitarian phase lasted through the rest of college, the two years of my required army duty and a while after. I never formally joined a congregation, nor was I too faithful in attendance. The only occasion on which I officially declared my affiliation was prompted by a bored army clerk.
“Religion?” she inquired while filling in a basic form for my personnel file. “Unitarian,” I replied after briefly hesitating and wondering what my parents would think. She looked at me doubtfully and then searched over her shoulder for her supervisor, “Unitarian?” The supervisor nodded and she typed, “Prot.” in the appropriate box. So much for nuance.
Eileen, one of the bohemian co-opers, had parleyed her college Unitarian youth activities into the directorship of Liberal Religious Youth, or LRY, as adolescents of the newly formed Unitarian/Universalist society chose to call themselves. She enlisted me as editor of their quarterly newsletter while I was stationed at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, practicing the waning traditional ways of the field artillery. (The full story of that and other episodes in my brief, episodic journalism career may get its own essay.)
Three quarterly editions later the army shipped me by train and troop transport to England for the rest of my two year obligation. On the way I slipped the surly bonds of soldering long enough to visit Eileen at 25 Beacon Street, Boston, the venerable home of Unitarians.
When I left for duty in England for not quite a year, I left the Unitarians as well, although I didn’t know it at the time. I am still closer to their ways than to any other named sect, both drawn to and discomfited by their lack of doctrine.
For there is comfort in settled belief. We all seek answers to a trinity of questions: Where did it all come from? How should we live? Why must we die and what then? As the species dispersed over the planet from our African locus, answers evolved. They were varied in form but strikingly uniform in their essentials. There was a creation moment for the world and its life followed by a fall from grace and a loss of innocence; the divinely conferred lordship of humans over all other life and other riches of the earth; a pantheon of gods on high where rewards awaited the worshiping, pleading faithful at death; a place of eternal punishment for all others; a cosmic struggle between good and evil with good ultimately triumphant.
A Look Ahead . . .
These answers still hang in the air, profound and comforting as ever for many, but fading by the steady light of science for those who aspire to think scientifically. At least since Copernicus science has absent mindedly embarrassed religion time and again by kicking one stone after another from doctrinal edifices, revealing their essentially mythical basis.
The heavenly spheres faded. as the universe’s cosmology gradually came into focus through the magnified eyes of Galileo and his modern successors. Newton’s elegant equations, Darwin’s magisterial insights; Watson's and Crick's reinforcing thought spiral; Einstein’s and Bohr’s dueling deductions; Mendeelev’s organizing principle; Popper’s philosophy of scientific methodology; Wegener’s insight; Kuhn’s critique; Lovelock’s inspiring synthesis are justly celebrated peaks along the road called Doubt. Which I still endeavor to travel.
But what, you might properly wonder, of spirituality, moral principles and the march of civilization. I find the methods of science will be sufficient to the tasks of comprehending and guiding all of these just as well as it has led us to an unprecedented understanding of the material world and its origins.
Feelings of spirituality are stirred by the awe and fear of natural forces from the sudden movements of the earth's crust to the abrupt violence of changing weather, to the wonder inspired by land forms, water courses, rainbows, sun and moon phases, wandering stars, lightening and fire, to the dangers of life competing with other.life. Scientific understanding dispels the fear and scientific instruments enhance our awe by expanding our senses.
Moral principles attributed to the gods congeal into empty ritual and pious rules of etiquette. The teachings of great religious leaders, such as Jesus and Buddha, once shorn of their mythic trappings, are better guides, but only that. Such classics as "love one another" and the Golden Rule, are fearfully hard to apply to the tumult and minutia of daily life. Our progress is anything but fast enough, but such progress as there is owed to the dispatching of magical, stereotypical and dogmatic ways of thought.
Civilized living, even in venues of splendor and ease, has too often removed us from the hardships of our primitive beginnings by the exploitation of others. Today we can glimpse, beyond mere dreams, the way a simple but fantastically rich life can be had by all without ceaseless deadening toil in harmony with each other and other life. We can even sense the beginnings of a future in which evolution moves at our pace and to our purposes. We have billions of years before cosmic forces engulf our solar system. Time to escape before we as a species die when the sun expands to vaporize the earth.
Death. The great fear exploited by every tyrant, whether armed with sword or sceptre. Why must I die? How can I possibly cease to exist? The objective case for death is grounded in the workings of evolution. One reasoned explanation is that the individual must die so the species may continue to evolve. In turn species must die to make room for successor species. It is true that only the most primitive forms of single cell life, which reproduce by cell division, are arguably immortal. Any life which reproduces by sex can only evade by evolution those causes of death which occur before the end of its reproductive life. Thus evolution might in due time rid our species of AIDS (or AIDS will rid the world of our species) but it will never lay a glove on Alzheimer's.
There is only one escape from this trap. Evolution itself must evolve. More precisely we must take charge of the evolution of evolution. Unconsciously we began to do this eons ago with the interbreeding of domesticated plants and animals. Lately we have unraveled the code of life itself and now explore its intricate control of life's molecular building blocks. This is basic training for manipulating the genetic machinery to our benefit in ways Darwinian evolution cannot.
We will cure Alzheimer's and other patterns of life's decay, extending life's quality in satisfying ways and less probably extending life's duration by decades more. But we will not do so by the worshipful study of ancient texts however profound and inspiring their contents. By the methods of science we have found life thriving on earth wherever we have looked, from Arctic cores to tropical swamps, from stratospheric clouds to the ocean's darkest depths, from boiling springs to hidden Antarctica seas.
But this was life at its most primitive, single celled mostly. What of living symbioses as intricate as ourselves? Can we so engineer humans for living comfortably amid such extremes. We must if we are to explore and colonize the universe. The alternatives are extinction or seeding; i.e. sowing single celled life among the planets and satellites of this solar system and further afield to the exo-plants now being discovered in abundance circling other suns.
But we will not do these things without casting aside all the ancient faiths as future guides. They are indelibly part of our history, neither to be ridiculed nor forgotten, but remembered for what they were: steps along a long and torturous way.
We were new, both as a family and in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the beating heart of the Bible Belt, and the question was, not what faith would we profess, but what church would we “go to?”
“There’s the big church on the hill,” my new father said.
“Is it Baptist? Mother wondered. “No, Methodist. Let’s try it and see if we like it.”
And that’s how I came to belong through childhood and adolescence to the Boston Avenue Methodist Church, an art deco edifice crowned by a towering phallus, easily the most prominent in town (See www.bostonavenue.org) .
It wasn’t my choice. I was not quite five, newly enrolled in kindergarten, and was seldom included in choices. And, no, I am not depending on perfect recall from that age for those quotes. My mother recounted the story consistently and often and I have no reason to doubt her version.
I also learned later that we went as a family, introducing ourselves as a mom and dad married the requisite number of years to have produced a legitimate five-year-old, and transferred to Tulsa from the Chicago office of the CIT, a financial corporation.
In truth, my mother was newly divorced and remarried. My father had left her scant months after I was born. She waited for him to return until my step-father’s proposal of marriage and a new life forced her to choose. Their secret held for over 50 years until the end of their lives,, but that’s another story.
Except for a couple of years when Dad played golf both Saturday and Sunday mornings – to Mother’s frequent and vocal disapproval – we attended church faithfully. Probably I liked being dumped into that den of vociferous cubs of my age called Sunday school.
Gradually my parents dropped church for Sunday school, notably the Married Folks' Class, taught by a bible thumping “teacher,” deemed much more inspiring than Dr. Watts, the church’s minister. There was general relief when Dr. Watts made bishop and left. I attended Sunday school also, moving up through the classes with my age group.
The church became a large part of our social life. They attended the suppers, the recitals, seasonal ceremonies, even the occasional lecture or book reading, often dragging me along.
Boston Avenue Methodists enjoyed the status of belonging to a large, respectable congregation, while tacitly acknowledging the social superiority of the Episcopalians and the Presbyterians. We could in turn look down benevolently on the Lutherans (and they on us) and most other main stream Protestant denominations, but finding the Baptists a tad too jubilant for our taste.
We wondered with disdain about the Holy Rollers, Christian Scientists, Adventists, Mormons and the like, while indulging in the casual overt prejudices of the day concerning Catholics and Jews. Any atheists or agnostics around were tucked safely in the closet. We were uneasy about Unitarians and Quakers, and the world’s non-Christian organized religions were considered Greek mythologists in contemporary dress and in dire need of enlightenment.
I was not one of the “we” cited above. Those were adult concerns. I went each Sunday, made friends, struggled with my inability to sing, especially around Christmas time, and over the years of childhood and adolescence absorbed elements of the old, old story without thinking much about it. It was something you were made to do like school and naps until it became habit.
Some friends (Bob, Mary Ella, Roger, Dolores, Betty Sue, Bill, Dorothy, Jimmy and Odean) were part of the other trinity -- church, school and neighborhood – through high school and beyond, and are alive in memory still. I sang “Oh What A Friend We Have In Jesus,” dutifully, not well and without conviction. I knew who my friends were.
I was in my early adolescence when the first heretical thought popped to mind. Adults, I suddenly realized, “Really believe this stuff!” The question, “Do I believe?” was sensed more than said, but as Yogi Bera famously knew, when the road forks you must choose. Not being much of a Pilgrim I eased on down the road marked Doubt.
My parents were not overtly religious at first. We didn’t often say grace at meals while I was growing up at home. They began that custom sometime after I moved out.. Gradually their convictions deepened into a conscious emotional commitment; conscious but not especially reasoned, an unquestioned comfort to their deaths.
Meanwhile, I graduated high school and for the first time left home to college. Oklahoma A & M College (Now Oklahoma State University) is a land grant school. It is not Harvard, Stanford or Berkeley. Nor is it Brown, Oberlin or Reed.
But for a young lad from pious Tulsa it was a den of subversion. A course in American history, while biased enough (this was 1948 after all), was vastly more nuanced than the patriotic pablum of high school. A course in World History dealt objectively and comparatively with Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and other belief systems. Clearly they couldn’t all be exactly right. Perhaps none were. If you thought about it, picking the one best faith was not easy.
Then I simultaneously took a course in the Humanities and, through the good offices of a girl friend, bonded with the campus collection of free thinkers, many of them active Unitarians. We were a scruffy bunch, disdainful of the main campus swirl, drawn to art and literature, stage and screen.
The core of the group we called “The Bohemian Coop.” Three women sharing a home and three men also sharing quarters, pooled our meager funds and ran a common kitchen and social club where the women lived. Others drifted in and out of the swirl.
It was during this two year association that I first began to explore the boundaries of a life of the mind. I had always been an avid reader, but my reading diet had been heavy on less than profound fiction and on “inspirational” articles from the Reader’s Digest.. Overtly philosophical conversations were new and eye opening. Books were cited and recommended (I never did get through Ulysses, though). Those days still reverberate (Joyce remains impenetrable).
Perhaps the most subversive book I devoured during this era was Philip Wylie’s 1942 popular polemic, “Generation of Vipers.” Largely forgotten, it is only occasionally remembered today for a gratuitous assault on “Mom.”. But it deftly and joyously slaughtered whole herds of sacred cows. Though clearly dated and thoroughly opinionated, it is still a useful read by those who are up for social criticism leveled at the way the Greatest Generation fumbled its way to war.
My first conversion was from Republican to Democrat. Franklin Roosevelt, I learned, was a great president in depression and war and not at all a traitor to his class. About this time I began a life long interest in the dismal dogmas of economics. A good dose of John Maynard Keynes and I was cured of free market dogmatic orthodoxy for life. I survived a short intense flirtation with Ayn Rand and the gold standard. Current events have only solidified my interest in economics and my disdain for its contemporary reigning theories.
Gradually I began to think of myself as a Unitarian. As the name implies, the Unitarian God is a unity that requires neither devine Son nor Holy Ghost. Jesus, a truly great human being, is free to teach homely truths about living and letting live rather than wandering around feeding the multitudes from meager stores, curing the ill and maimed, raising the dead, turning water into wine (if only!), walking on the remaining water, rolling away boulders, raising himself from the dead to walk again among the chosen and by all these empty dramatics diverting human attention from the mundane grubby stuff of living that needs doing before we die.
My Unitarian phase lasted through the rest of college, the two years of my required army duty and a while after. I never formally joined a congregation, nor was I too faithful in attendance. The only occasion on which I officially declared my affiliation was prompted by a bored army clerk.
“Religion?” she inquired while filling in a basic form for my personnel file. “Unitarian,” I replied after briefly hesitating and wondering what my parents would think. She looked at me doubtfully and then searched over her shoulder for her supervisor, “Unitarian?” The supervisor nodded and she typed, “Prot.” in the appropriate box. So much for nuance.
Eileen, one of the bohemian co-opers, had parleyed her college Unitarian youth activities into the directorship of Liberal Religious Youth, or LRY, as adolescents of the newly formed Unitarian/Universalist society chose to call themselves. She enlisted me as editor of their quarterly newsletter while I was stationed at Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas, practicing the waning traditional ways of the field artillery. (The full story of that and other episodes in my brief, episodic journalism career may get its own essay.)
Three quarterly editions later the army shipped me by train and troop transport to England for the rest of my two year obligation. On the way I slipped the surly bonds of soldering long enough to visit Eileen at 25 Beacon Street, Boston, the venerable home of Unitarians.
When I left for duty in England for not quite a year, I left the Unitarians as well, although I didn’t know it at the time. I am still closer to their ways than to any other named sect, both drawn to and discomfited by their lack of doctrine.
For there is comfort in settled belief. We all seek answers to a trinity of questions: Where did it all come from? How should we live? Why must we die and what then? As the species dispersed over the planet from our African locus, answers evolved. They were varied in form but strikingly uniform in their essentials. There was a creation moment for the world and its life followed by a fall from grace and a loss of innocence; the divinely conferred lordship of humans over all other life and other riches of the earth; a pantheon of gods on high where rewards awaited the worshiping, pleading faithful at death; a place of eternal punishment for all others; a cosmic struggle between good and evil with good ultimately triumphant.
A Look Ahead . . .
These answers still hang in the air, profound and comforting as ever for many, but fading by the steady light of science for those who aspire to think scientifically. At least since Copernicus science has absent mindedly embarrassed religion time and again by kicking one stone after another from doctrinal edifices, revealing their essentially mythical basis.
The heavenly spheres faded. as the universe’s cosmology gradually came into focus through the magnified eyes of Galileo and his modern successors. Newton’s elegant equations, Darwin’s magisterial insights; Watson's and Crick's reinforcing thought spiral; Einstein’s and Bohr’s dueling deductions; Mendeelev’s organizing principle; Popper’s philosophy of scientific methodology; Wegener’s insight; Kuhn’s critique; Lovelock’s inspiring synthesis are justly celebrated peaks along the road called Doubt. Which I still endeavor to travel.
But what, you might properly wonder, of spirituality, moral principles and the march of civilization. I find the methods of science will be sufficient to the tasks of comprehending and guiding all of these just as well as it has led us to an unprecedented understanding of the material world and its origins.
Feelings of spirituality are stirred by the awe and fear of natural forces from the sudden movements of the earth's crust to the abrupt violence of changing weather, to the wonder inspired by land forms, water courses, rainbows, sun and moon phases, wandering stars, lightening and fire, to the dangers of life competing with other.life. Scientific understanding dispels the fear and scientific instruments enhance our awe by expanding our senses.
Moral principles attributed to the gods congeal into empty ritual and pious rules of etiquette. The teachings of great religious leaders, such as Jesus and Buddha, once shorn of their mythic trappings, are better guides, but only that. Such classics as "love one another" and the Golden Rule, are fearfully hard to apply to the tumult and minutia of daily life. Our progress is anything but fast enough, but such progress as there is owed to the dispatching of magical, stereotypical and dogmatic ways of thought.
Civilized living, even in venues of splendor and ease, has too often removed us from the hardships of our primitive beginnings by the exploitation of others. Today we can glimpse, beyond mere dreams, the way a simple but fantastically rich life can be had by all without ceaseless deadening toil in harmony with each other and other life. We can even sense the beginnings of a future in which evolution moves at our pace and to our purposes. We have billions of years before cosmic forces engulf our solar system. Time to escape before we as a species die when the sun expands to vaporize the earth.
Death. The great fear exploited by every tyrant, whether armed with sword or sceptre. Why must I die? How can I possibly cease to exist? The objective case for death is grounded in the workings of evolution. One reasoned explanation is that the individual must die so the species may continue to evolve. In turn species must die to make room for successor species. It is true that only the most primitive forms of single cell life, which reproduce by cell division, are arguably immortal. Any life which reproduces by sex can only evade by evolution those causes of death which occur before the end of its reproductive life. Thus evolution might in due time rid our species of AIDS (or AIDS will rid the world of our species) but it will never lay a glove on Alzheimer's.
There is only one escape from this trap. Evolution itself must evolve. More precisely we must take charge of the evolution of evolution. Unconsciously we began to do this eons ago with the interbreeding of domesticated plants and animals. Lately we have unraveled the code of life itself and now explore its intricate control of life's molecular building blocks. This is basic training for manipulating the genetic machinery to our benefit in ways Darwinian evolution cannot.
We will cure Alzheimer's and other patterns of life's decay, extending life's quality in satisfying ways and less probably extending life's duration by decades more. But we will not do so by the worshipful study of ancient texts however profound and inspiring their contents. By the methods of science we have found life thriving on earth wherever we have looked, from Arctic cores to tropical swamps, from stratospheric clouds to the ocean's darkest depths, from boiling springs to hidden Antarctica seas.
But this was life at its most primitive, single celled mostly. What of living symbioses as intricate as ourselves? Can we so engineer humans for living comfortably amid such extremes. We must if we are to explore and colonize the universe. The alternatives are extinction or seeding; i.e. sowing single celled life among the planets and satellites of this solar system and further afield to the exo-plants now being discovered in abundance circling other suns.
But we will not do these things without casting aside all the ancient faiths as future guides. They are indelibly part of our history, neither to be ridiculed nor forgotten, but remembered for what they were: steps along a long and torturous way.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Leica and the Jews
Note: This story was sent to me by my Sea Ranch and email buddy of long standing, Toni Louise Mayer. I agree with her: the good guys deserve their day in the sun and our thanks, however belated. No episode in our national history so shames us as much as our tepid, prejudiced response to the plight of European Jews in the 1930's and during the war. Thanks, Toni. BGJ
The Leica is the pioneer 35mm camera. It is a German product - precise, minimalist, and utterly efficient.
Behind its worldwide acceptance as a creative tool was a family- owned, socially oriented firm that, during the Nazi era, acted with uncommon grace, generosity and modesty. E. Leitz Inc., designer and manufacturer of Germany's most famous photographic product, saved its Jews.
And Ernst Leitz II, the steely-eyed Protestant patriarch who headed the closely held firm as the Holocaust loomed across Europe, acted in such a way as to earn the title, "the photography industry's Schindler."
As soon as Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany in 1933, Ernst Leitz II began receiving frantic calls from Jewish associates, asking for his help in getting them and their families out of the country. As Christians, Leitz and his family were immune to Nazi Germany's Nuremberg laws, which restricted the movement of Jews and limited their professional activities.
To help his Jewish workers and colleagues, Leitz quietly established what has become known among historians of the Holocaust as "the Leica Freedom Train," a covert means of allowing Jews to leave Germany in the guise of Leitz employees being assigned overseas.
Employees, retailers, family members, even friends of family members were "assigned" to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain , Hong Kong and the United States.
Leitz's activities intensified after the Kristallnacht of November 1938, during which synagogues and Jewish shops were burned across Germany.
Before long, German "employees" were disembarking from the ocean liner Bremen at a New York pier and making their way to the Manhattan office of Leitz Inc., where executives quickly found them jobs in the photographic industry.
Each new arrival had around his or her neck the symbol of freedom -- a new Leica. The refugees were paid a stipend until they could find work. Out of this migration came designers, repair technicians, salespeople, marketers and writers for the photographic press.
The "Leica Freedom Train" was at its height in 1938 and early 1939, delivering groups of refugees to New York every few weeks. Then, with the invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany closed its borders.
By that time, hundreds of endangered Jews had escaped to America, thanks to the Leitzes' efforts. How did Ernst Leitz II and his staff get away with it?
Leitz, Inc. was an internationally recognized brand that reflected credit on the newly resurgent Reich. The company produced range-finders and other optical systems for the German military. Also, the Nazi government desperately needed hard currency from abroad, and Leitz's single biggest market for optical goods was the United States.
Even so, members of the Leitz family and firm suffered for their good works.
A top executive, Alfred Turk, was jailed for working to help Jews and freed only after the payment of a large bribe.
Leitz's daughter, Elsie Kuhn-Leitz, was imprisoned by the Gestapo after she was caught at the border, helping Jewish women cross into Switzerland. She eventually was freed but endured rough treatment in the course of questioning. She also fell under suspicion when she attempted to improve the living conditions of 700 to 800 Ukrainian slave laborers, all of them women, who had been assigned to work in the plant during the 1940s.
(After the war, Kuhn-Leitz received numerous honors for her humanitarian efforts, among them the Officier d'honneur des Palms Academic from France in 1965 and the Aristide Briand Medal from the European Academy in the 1970s.)
Why has no one told this story until now? According to the late Norman Lipton, a freelance writer and editor, the Leitz family wanted no publicity for its heroic efforts. Only after the last member of the Leitz family was dead did the "Leica Freedom Train" finally come to light.
It is now the subject of a book, "The Greatest Invention of the Leitz Family: The Leica Freedom Train," by Frank Dabba Smith, a California-born Rabbi currently living in England .
Thank you for reading the above, and if you feel inclined, please pass this along to others. Memories of the righteous should live on.
The Leica is the pioneer 35mm camera. It is a German product - precise, minimalist, and utterly efficient.
Behind its worldwide acceptance as a creative tool was a family- owned, socially oriented firm that, during the Nazi era, acted with uncommon grace, generosity and modesty. E. Leitz Inc., designer and manufacturer of Germany's most famous photographic product, saved its Jews.
And Ernst Leitz II, the steely-eyed Protestant patriarch who headed the closely held firm as the Holocaust loomed across Europe, acted in such a way as to earn the title, "the photography industry's Schindler."
As soon as Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany in 1933, Ernst Leitz II began receiving frantic calls from Jewish associates, asking for his help in getting them and their families out of the country. As Christians, Leitz and his family were immune to Nazi Germany's Nuremberg laws, which restricted the movement of Jews and limited their professional activities.
To help his Jewish workers and colleagues, Leitz quietly established what has become known among historians of the Holocaust as "the Leica Freedom Train," a covert means of allowing Jews to leave Germany in the guise of Leitz employees being assigned overseas.
Employees, retailers, family members, even friends of family members were "assigned" to Leitz sales offices in France, Britain , Hong Kong and the United States.
Leitz's activities intensified after the Kristallnacht of November 1938, during which synagogues and Jewish shops were burned across Germany.
Before long, German "employees" were disembarking from the ocean liner Bremen at a New York pier and making their way to the Manhattan office of Leitz Inc., where executives quickly found them jobs in the photographic industry.
Each new arrival had around his or her neck the symbol of freedom -- a new Leica. The refugees were paid a stipend until they could find work. Out of this migration came designers, repair technicians, salespeople, marketers and writers for the photographic press.
The "Leica Freedom Train" was at its height in 1938 and early 1939, delivering groups of refugees to New York every few weeks. Then, with the invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Germany closed its borders.
By that time, hundreds of endangered Jews had escaped to America, thanks to the Leitzes' efforts. How did Ernst Leitz II and his staff get away with it?
Leitz, Inc. was an internationally recognized brand that reflected credit on the newly resurgent Reich. The company produced range-finders and other optical systems for the German military. Also, the Nazi government desperately needed hard currency from abroad, and Leitz's single biggest market for optical goods was the United States.
Even so, members of the Leitz family and firm suffered for their good works.
A top executive, Alfred Turk, was jailed for working to help Jews and freed only after the payment of a large bribe.
Leitz's daughter, Elsie Kuhn-Leitz, was imprisoned by the Gestapo after she was caught at the border, helping Jewish women cross into Switzerland. She eventually was freed but endured rough treatment in the course of questioning. She also fell under suspicion when she attempted to improve the living conditions of 700 to 800 Ukrainian slave laborers, all of them women, who had been assigned to work in the plant during the 1940s.
(After the war, Kuhn-Leitz received numerous honors for her humanitarian efforts, among them the Officier d'honneur des Palms Academic from France in 1965 and the Aristide Briand Medal from the European Academy in the 1970s.)
Why has no one told this story until now? According to the late Norman Lipton, a freelance writer and editor, the Leitz family wanted no publicity for its heroic efforts. Only after the last member of the Leitz family was dead did the "Leica Freedom Train" finally come to light.
It is now the subject of a book, "The Greatest Invention of the Leitz Family: The Leica Freedom Train," by Frank Dabba Smith, a California-born Rabbi currently living in England .
Thank you for reading the above, and if you feel inclined, please pass this along to others. Memories of the righteous should live on.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Something New Under The Florida Sun
The other day a tiny ray of sunshine came in the mail from Florida Power and Light. It was an invitation to “Join [FPL’s] brightest Customers!” For only $9.75 more a month our lights, appliances – even the TV – can hum with “Sunshine Energy.”
“For each month that you participate in the program, FPL ensures that 1,000 kwh of cleaner electricity from sources like wind, bioenergy and solar is . . . delivered to power systems serving Florida and other states nationwide.”
Nor would we be alone. It seems that “. . .37,000 enlightened FPL customers” have already signed up." Hmmm. One moment while we do the math: 37,000 x 9.75 x 12 equals $4,329,000 a year that "enlightened" Floridians already pony up on top of their regular bills.
What do they get for their money beyond vague assurances that somebody somewhere is pumping somewhat cleaner electricity into the nation’s power grids? How, specifically, is FPL investing that windfall?
In their communique FPL happily told us. Near Sarasota a 250 kilowatt Solar Array is up and humming and will “ . . . prevent approximately 327 tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year.” That same other day the local daily paper confirmed the news, sort of. Wrote AP reporter Zack Anderson: “[A]n array of 1,200 panels . . . [was] supplying electricity to about 20 nearby homes” on a recent morning.
Well, it’s a start. Zack also reported that Florida Govermor Charlie Crist wants to triple state grants to homes and businesses for rooftop solar panels as part of a more comprehensive energy program. We’ve had one of those rooftops for 16 years now and like it fine even without a subsidy -- although the pool could be warmer in February, Governor.
Actually, it is good that Gov. Crist is attempting to herd all those Tallahassee cats in the right direction. “The Sunshine State” ought to quickly become a global leader in the deployment of solar energy or, in all honesty, adopt a more modest motto. Why? Because global warming is real, and for Floridians it is more real than for others. We live on flat terrain not much further above sea level than the Dutch.
The cause of global warming is equally real. The greenhouse gases that trap the sun’s heat pour from our smokestacks and tail pipes. The greatest warming is happening at the poles. The evidence is in and only the rare diehard ostrich is left to hide his head and scoff. And our best efforts may not be enough.
We may have to watch helplessly as the Greenland and Antarctica ice caps warm to the tipping point and slide – perhaps abruptly – into the global sea, which will rise and cover much of Florida, sparing neither churches nor shopping malls, flooding schools, roads and homes. Florida: "The Sunshine Sea."
Then, again, maybe nothing much will happen for a long time, a century even. Time enough, let’s hope, for FPL to sweet talk us all out of an extra $9.75 a month, and supply solar electricity for a lot more than 20 homes and for their electric cars to boot. Time enough, perhaps, for Gov. Crist to bell the cats and do something besides “research the issues” before he runs for vice-President.
“Be one of our ‘brightest’ customers today!” David Bates, FPL’s Sunshine Energy Program Manager urged at the close of his letter. Don’t know, Dave. We could give that money to the Sierra Club, get a tax deduction and enjoy watching the environmentalists harass you into doing something anyhow.
But we both know where the money for doing that “something” would come from, don’t we? It’s pay you now or pay you later. So count us in. We’ll be your 37,000 and first suck – er, partner. Could we be the 21st home? We're already budgeting for a plug-in Prius.
UPDATE: Gov. Crist ran for Senator and lost out to Marco Rubio, having been passed over for Sara Palin, who turned out not to be an inspired choice for the Republicans. FPL has discontinued its Sunshine Energy program and no longer bills us an extra ten spot, less two bits, a month. Our Volvo wagon is still with us, pending Toyota's roll out of that plug in Real Soon Now. Scientists now report that the polar ice is melting quite a bit faster than previously thought. They have reported this before and may do so again. It is not clear anybody is listening.
.
“For each month that you participate in the program, FPL ensures that 1,000 kwh of cleaner electricity from sources like wind, bioenergy and solar is . . . delivered to power systems serving Florida and other states nationwide.”
Nor would we be alone. It seems that “. . .37,000 enlightened FPL customers” have already signed up." Hmmm. One moment while we do the math: 37,000 x 9.75 x 12 equals $4,329,000 a year that "enlightened" Floridians already pony up on top of their regular bills.
What do they get for their money beyond vague assurances that somebody somewhere is pumping somewhat cleaner electricity into the nation’s power grids? How, specifically, is FPL investing that windfall?
In their communique FPL happily told us. Near Sarasota a 250 kilowatt Solar Array is up and humming and will “ . . . prevent approximately 327 tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year.” That same other day the local daily paper confirmed the news, sort of. Wrote AP reporter Zack Anderson: “[A]n array of 1,200 panels . . . [was] supplying electricity to about 20 nearby homes” on a recent morning.
Well, it’s a start. Zack also reported that Florida Govermor Charlie Crist wants to triple state grants to homes and businesses for rooftop solar panels as part of a more comprehensive energy program. We’ve had one of those rooftops for 16 years now and like it fine even without a subsidy -- although the pool could be warmer in February, Governor.
Actually, it is good that Gov. Crist is attempting to herd all those Tallahassee cats in the right direction. “The Sunshine State” ought to quickly become a global leader in the deployment of solar energy or, in all honesty, adopt a more modest motto. Why? Because global warming is real, and for Floridians it is more real than for others. We live on flat terrain not much further above sea level than the Dutch.
The cause of global warming is equally real. The greenhouse gases that trap the sun’s heat pour from our smokestacks and tail pipes. The greatest warming is happening at the poles. The evidence is in and only the rare diehard ostrich is left to hide his head and scoff. And our best efforts may not be enough.
We may have to watch helplessly as the Greenland and Antarctica ice caps warm to the tipping point and slide – perhaps abruptly – into the global sea, which will rise and cover much of Florida, sparing neither churches nor shopping malls, flooding schools, roads and homes. Florida: "The Sunshine Sea."
Then, again, maybe nothing much will happen for a long time, a century even. Time enough, let’s hope, for FPL to sweet talk us all out of an extra $9.75 a month, and supply solar electricity for a lot more than 20 homes and for their electric cars to boot. Time enough, perhaps, for Gov. Crist to bell the cats and do something besides “research the issues” before he runs for vice-President.
“Be one of our ‘brightest’ customers today!” David Bates, FPL’s Sunshine Energy Program Manager urged at the close of his letter. Don’t know, Dave. We could give that money to the Sierra Club, get a tax deduction and enjoy watching the environmentalists harass you into doing something anyhow.
But we both know where the money for doing that “something” would come from, don’t we? It’s pay you now or pay you later. So count us in. We’ll be your 37,000 and first suck – er, partner. Could we be the 21st home? We're already budgeting for a plug-in Prius.
UPDATE: Gov. Crist ran for Senator and lost out to Marco Rubio, having been passed over for Sara Palin, who turned out not to be an inspired choice for the Republicans. FPL has discontinued its Sunshine Energy program and no longer bills us an extra ten spot, less two bits, a month. Our Volvo wagon is still with us, pending Toyota's roll out of that plug in Real Soon Now. Scientists now report that the polar ice is melting quite a bit faster than previously thought. They have reported this before and may do so again. It is not clear anybody is listening.
.
Thursday, June 10, 2010
Ayn Rand is Not the Answer
George Will once wrote a sophomoric paean to novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand and her windy polemic, “Atlas Shrugged.” It should not go unanswered.
Will did get one thing right: Rand’s writings are an established rite of passage for legions of the educated young. This former undergraduate made the journey well before “Atlas” was published, and the steady sales of her works a half-century later show that the phenomenon continues.
But eventually we are supposed to put away childish things, and Will’s 2010 endorsement of a Wisconsin senatorial candidate who has yet to do so (he calls Rand’s 1,100 page fictional opus his “foundational” book), demonstrates that at least two nominal adults have not. Count Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Board chair for four Presidents and noted Rand acolyte, as a third.
Who is Ayn Rand, and why does she so captivate many of our kids and not a few influential grown-ups? Born Alicia Rosenbaum in Tsarist Russia’s ebbing days, she fled the horrors of Marxist collectivism when still an adolescent and fashioned a new life, name and philosophy in America exactly the opposite of what she had abandoned.. There is nothing to criticise about that; all praise, in fact.
From her earliest writings Rand championed an absolute individualism and the heroic in man. Her first, still successful novel, “The Fountainhead,” celebrated fidelity to artistic integrity and thrilled this writer to the marrow of his freshman bones. In a tempered way it still does. We should honor the creative among us -- artist, inventor, scientific genius -- and cut them a little slack when they single mindedly follow their muse to the exclusion of life's normal responsibilities shouldered by more ordinary folks.
That 1943 work is still Ayn Rand’s best; its well developed characters and plot stand in stark contrast to the stick figures that populate the didactic and gimmicky “Atlas.” Through one of her Fountainhead protagonists she demonstrates the corrosive effect of power on those who seek self worth through its exercise. Through another she illuminates the folly of living for the approval of others. Through her heroine she paints the futility of dispair over a world that places no value on personal integrity. Through her hero, an architect, she showed what a driven genius with no need or desire to serve anyone could create for us all -- and why he need not care that what he does is valued by others.
Where, then, did Rand get it wrong? When she moved from demonstrating that the artist must be his own man to do his best work to attempting to dress economic and political actors in the same philosophical garb. When, in other words, she expanded the theory of the transcendent individual applied to the special and appropriate case of creative expression, to encompass the life of the whole of society.
It is natural and necessary for the adolescent to strive to be an independent person. Society functions best when it is well stocked with mature individuals of integrity. But the basic unit of humankind is the family. Our children learn how to leave the nest in order to build another. (As another philisopher said, " No man is an island.")
In “Atlas Shrugged” there is exactly one reference to raising children, and that an obvious after thought. Nor are there any old folks in need of care. All the heroes are tall and striking with minds to match. The cripple and the deviant need not apply. Exit, for example, Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing.
All of us, without exception, have only to live long enough to be dependent on others at least twice in our lives. This is a bedrock fact overlooked by followers of the Randian creed. Nor is there room in their philosophy for organized help for innocent victims of hurricanes, oil spills, economic booms and busts, technological change, wars, accidents and disease. Altruism is their favorite four letter word. Because they do not care to live for and through others, they would eschew all empathy as empty sentiment, all calls for social justice as special pleading for the undeserving, all collaboration as theft from the creative.
There is valid tension between the individual and society, between man and state, and – fatefully – between humankind and nature. Resolution of these opposites will be forever a work in progress, within our breasts and our many tribes, and the continuing responsibility of those we send to places like Washington, DC.
They will need to take more than one book with them, and an open mind wouldn’t hurt.. Rapturous Randian followers might profit from reading “The Passion of Ayn Rand,” a compassionate biography by Barbara Branden (Doubleday, 1986) available new and used via http://www.bookfind.com/. Another, more recent and dispasionate account of Ayn Rand's life and philosophy is the recent "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right" (Oxford University Press, 2009) by Jennifer Burns.
They will learn, to their surprise, that their exalted hero is all too human, though just as fascinating and smart as they thought she was. One example of her occasioal lapse into human failing: she refused to countenance probability theory -- the basis of mundane statistical inference and and more esoteric quantum physics -- as a sufficiently rigorous method of logical reasoning until the day she was informed that, after a lifetime of constant smoking, she had not beaten the odds.
She crushed the fire from her cigarette and never lit another, though in the end, pneumonia and the absence of an excised lung, is what killed her. Obviously any man with the surname, Will, has to go for that.
Will did get one thing right: Rand’s writings are an established rite of passage for legions of the educated young. This former undergraduate made the journey well before “Atlas” was published, and the steady sales of her works a half-century later show that the phenomenon continues.
But eventually we are supposed to put away childish things, and Will’s 2010 endorsement of a Wisconsin senatorial candidate who has yet to do so (he calls Rand’s 1,100 page fictional opus his “foundational” book), demonstrates that at least two nominal adults have not. Count Alan Greenspan, Federal Reserve Board chair for four Presidents and noted Rand acolyte, as a third.
Who is Ayn Rand, and why does she so captivate many of our kids and not a few influential grown-ups? Born Alicia Rosenbaum in Tsarist Russia’s ebbing days, she fled the horrors of Marxist collectivism when still an adolescent and fashioned a new life, name and philosophy in America exactly the opposite of what she had abandoned.. There is nothing to criticise about that; all praise, in fact.
From her earliest writings Rand championed an absolute individualism and the heroic in man. Her first, still successful novel, “The Fountainhead,” celebrated fidelity to artistic integrity and thrilled this writer to the marrow of his freshman bones. In a tempered way it still does. We should honor the creative among us -- artist, inventor, scientific genius -- and cut them a little slack when they single mindedly follow their muse to the exclusion of life's normal responsibilities shouldered by more ordinary folks.
That 1943 work is still Ayn Rand’s best; its well developed characters and plot stand in stark contrast to the stick figures that populate the didactic and gimmicky “Atlas.” Through one of her Fountainhead protagonists she demonstrates the corrosive effect of power on those who seek self worth through its exercise. Through another she illuminates the folly of living for the approval of others. Through her heroine she paints the futility of dispair over a world that places no value on personal integrity. Through her hero, an architect, she showed what a driven genius with no need or desire to serve anyone could create for us all -- and why he need not care that what he does is valued by others.
Where, then, did Rand get it wrong? When she moved from demonstrating that the artist must be his own man to do his best work to attempting to dress economic and political actors in the same philosophical garb. When, in other words, she expanded the theory of the transcendent individual applied to the special and appropriate case of creative expression, to encompass the life of the whole of society.
It is natural and necessary for the adolescent to strive to be an independent person. Society functions best when it is well stocked with mature individuals of integrity. But the basic unit of humankind is the family. Our children learn how to leave the nest in order to build another. (As another philisopher said, " No man is an island.")
In “Atlas Shrugged” there is exactly one reference to raising children, and that an obvious after thought. Nor are there any old folks in need of care. All the heroes are tall and striking with minds to match. The cripple and the deviant need not apply. Exit, for example, Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing.
All of us, without exception, have only to live long enough to be dependent on others at least twice in our lives. This is a bedrock fact overlooked by followers of the Randian creed. Nor is there room in their philosophy for organized help for innocent victims of hurricanes, oil spills, economic booms and busts, technological change, wars, accidents and disease. Altruism is their favorite four letter word. Because they do not care to live for and through others, they would eschew all empathy as empty sentiment, all calls for social justice as special pleading for the undeserving, all collaboration as theft from the creative.
There is valid tension between the individual and society, between man and state, and – fatefully – between humankind and nature. Resolution of these opposites will be forever a work in progress, within our breasts and our many tribes, and the continuing responsibility of those we send to places like Washington, DC.
They will need to take more than one book with them, and an open mind wouldn’t hurt.. Rapturous Randian followers might profit from reading “The Passion of Ayn Rand,” a compassionate biography by Barbara Branden (Doubleday, 1986) available new and used via http://www.bookfind.com/. Another, more recent and dispasionate account of Ayn Rand's life and philosophy is the recent "Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right" (Oxford University Press, 2009) by Jennifer Burns.
They will learn, to their surprise, that their exalted hero is all too human, though just as fascinating and smart as they thought she was. One example of her occasioal lapse into human failing: she refused to countenance probability theory -- the basis of mundane statistical inference and and more esoteric quantum physics -- as a sufficiently rigorous method of logical reasoning until the day she was informed that, after a lifetime of constant smoking, she had not beaten the odds.
She crushed the fire from her cigarette and never lit another, though in the end, pneumonia and the absence of an excised lung, is what killed her. Obviously any man with the surname, Will, has to go for that.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Why Not A Variable Principle Mortgage?
There can be a way for underwater mortgage holders not to walk away from their obligations and instead stay in their homes.
There even might be a way to exit our current mortgage mess, not just for home owners already in trouble, but also those merely struggling, and even some folks wishing to buy who can’t quite qualify for a loan – all without involving government beyond its usual roles of rule maker and referee.
That way involves inventing and adopting a new and more flexible kind of mortgage. Call it a Variable Principal Mortgage, or VPM.. Lenders could offer it as an additional alternative to more traditional instruments, both to new buyers and to owners needing to refinance.
A VPM would acknowledge up front that the risks and rewards of the housing market can be shared by both buyer and lender. The idea assumes that:
Home owners, now painfully aware that housing prices don’t rise forever and, in fact, can fall off a cliff, would willingly trade part of tomorrow’s potential gain for protection against falling values today and the possibility of a credit wrecking foreclosure.
Lenders in turn would trade a potential reduction in revenue today for a possible future equity payday, while avoiding the hassle and loss of foreclosure.
Here’s how a VPM mortgage could work:
If the home value rises above the purchase price the gain is shared between borrower and lender when the house is sold..
If the home value drops below the purchase price the pain is shared, perhaps annually, by reducing both the total principal owed and the principal payment due each month.
If that lowered value then rises, phoenix-like, from its financial ashes, the total principal owned and the monthly payment would rise in tandem with it -- up to the numbers the parties started with.
So far, so good, but getting there from here won’t be easy. Before borrowers and lenders can sign on to the concept there are many questions to answer:
1) What ratios for sharing equity gains and losses would be fair? Could they vary over the life of the mortgage and under what conditions?
2) Realized gains are easy to measure: subtract the purchase price from the sales price.
Unrealized losses have to be estimated. How, how often and by whom?
3) Suppose the house is sold "underwater" after a number of years in which the original buyer has faithfully made all payments due the lender. Do either or both have an implied equity in the property after the sale? At what point does this process stop?
4) Do federal loan guarantee programs and conventional mortgage insurance policies have a role?
5) Suppose the borrower dies? The lender already plays a role at escrow proceedings; is it now a privileged player during probate?
6) Are there implications for the special treatment of principal residence capital gains by the IRS?
7) Is there reason to limit this type of mortgage to first mortgages, principal residences only or to a finite number of properties owned by one person or family?
8) Such mortgages could be sold but could they be securitized? Should they be securitized?
9) How are real estate brokerage commissions affected, if at all?
10) What about second homes? For snowbirds?
These and no doubt other questions require careful answers, and as always, the devil is in the details. But the issues they raise do not appear unsolvable and with a little understanding and cooperation between those who look to government for utopian answers and those who abhor any governmental involvement at all in the private sector, a new partnership between home buyers and mortgage lenders could be crafted..
Is that too much to ask of our elected representatives and business leaders? Would we buy what they devise? Success is not certain in these polarized and acrimonious days, but one can hope.
There even might be a way to exit our current mortgage mess, not just for home owners already in trouble, but also those merely struggling, and even some folks wishing to buy who can’t quite qualify for a loan – all without involving government beyond its usual roles of rule maker and referee.
That way involves inventing and adopting a new and more flexible kind of mortgage. Call it a Variable Principal Mortgage, or VPM.. Lenders could offer it as an additional alternative to more traditional instruments, both to new buyers and to owners needing to refinance.
A VPM would acknowledge up front that the risks and rewards of the housing market can be shared by both buyer and lender. The idea assumes that:
Home owners, now painfully aware that housing prices don’t rise forever and, in fact, can fall off a cliff, would willingly trade part of tomorrow’s potential gain for protection against falling values today and the possibility of a credit wrecking foreclosure.
Lenders in turn would trade a potential reduction in revenue today for a possible future equity payday, while avoiding the hassle and loss of foreclosure.
Here’s how a VPM mortgage could work:
If the home value rises above the purchase price the gain is shared between borrower and lender when the house is sold..
If the home value drops below the purchase price the pain is shared, perhaps annually, by reducing both the total principal owed and the principal payment due each month.
If that lowered value then rises, phoenix-like, from its financial ashes, the total principal owned and the monthly payment would rise in tandem with it -- up to the numbers the parties started with.
So far, so good, but getting there from here won’t be easy. Before borrowers and lenders can sign on to the concept there are many questions to answer:
1) What ratios for sharing equity gains and losses would be fair? Could they vary over the life of the mortgage and under what conditions?
2) Realized gains are easy to measure: subtract the purchase price from the sales price.
Unrealized losses have to be estimated. How, how often and by whom?
3) Suppose the house is sold "underwater" after a number of years in which the original buyer has faithfully made all payments due the lender. Do either or both have an implied equity in the property after the sale? At what point does this process stop?
4) Do federal loan guarantee programs and conventional mortgage insurance policies have a role?
5) Suppose the borrower dies? The lender already plays a role at escrow proceedings; is it now a privileged player during probate?
6) Are there implications for the special treatment of principal residence capital gains by the IRS?
7) Is there reason to limit this type of mortgage to first mortgages, principal residences only or to a finite number of properties owned by one person or family?
8) Such mortgages could be sold but could they be securitized? Should they be securitized?
9) How are real estate brokerage commissions affected, if at all?
10) What about second homes? For snowbirds?
These and no doubt other questions require careful answers, and as always, the devil is in the details. But the issues they raise do not appear unsolvable and with a little understanding and cooperation between those who look to government for utopian answers and those who abhor any governmental involvement at all in the private sector, a new partnership between home buyers and mortgage lenders could be crafted..
Is that too much to ask of our elected representatives and business leaders? Would we buy what they devise? Success is not certain in these polarized and acrimonious days, but one can hope.
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Sex, Petraeus and Other Debacles
The best military statesman since George C Marshal has just been forced from public office as CIA director for a "scandal" that would cause few Hollywood celebrities to even blush. David Petraeus' affair with his biographer should not even be public knowledge, let alone end the service of a leader who is on every short list for cabinet posts and is often mentioned as a serious contender for the presidency.
To end this pious nonsense requires drastic action. We must forthwith amend the Constitution as follows:
“The private sexual acts of consenting adults shall not be prohibited by law, nor shall such acts be observed, questioned or revealed without the prior mutual agreement of the parties thereto.
Had this amendment been in place a decade ago much salacious wastage of newsprint could have been avoided:
-- Bill Clinton would have never been impeached or even exposed; Ken Starr's bullying of Monica Lewinsky would have been unconstitutional. And we would never have learned what the meaning of “is” is..
-- Tiger Woods would have continued to dominate professional golf at the height of his skill and the only spice on the sports pages would have been the erectile dysfunction ads.
-- We might have never learned that John Edwards, a former Democratic senator and candidate for higher office, loved his hair more than his wife or his many children.
-- A gaggle of half-forgotten, wholly hypocritical GOP congressional leaders might never have confessed to their infidelities while attempting to run Clinton out of office for the same conduct.
-- Elliot Spitzer's New York sins would not have forced him out, and he just might have curbed Wall Street's "Masters of the Universe" before they unleashed financial Armageddon.
-- “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” would not have been just for homosexuals, and the principle conveyed by the slogan would have protected private conduct from exposure by third parties.
– Tens of thousands of adult men and women convicted for doing what comes naturally for pay would not have been charged – or even been rousted. Civilization might tremble a bit, but it would not fall if prostitutes and their customers were accorded a scrap more respect than drug dealers and car jackers.
Of course, as these examples from the headlines show, a lot of what we have considered immoral conduct would have slipped by unexposed and unpunished. Many acts of contrition and confession, public and private, genuine and self serving, would never have been performed, at least to the point of naming names.
Would that have been good or bad? Probably some of both. .Much would depend on both how Congress chose to implement the amendment and how the Supreme Court decided cases on appeal. Legal wrangling certainly would center around the Supremes’ adjudication of what is “private,” “consenting,” “adult” and ”mutual.” But this is our normal way of finding out what we have wrought with any constitutional change.
Pulpits would thunder and marchers clog the streets in support or opposition, and attention would be paid as it should be when the people assemble. Teachers might titter and blush a bit while wondering how to approach this new topic, but it won’t hurt to have our hormonal adolescents scouring the Constitution for the good parts. At least they will have read it, and afforded their instructors a chance to point out that with new freedom comes new responsibility.
More important would be our kitchen table verdicts, reached, no doubt, after the young ones were in bed. But in the end I believe that this tolerant nation would wonder (1) why all this constitutional hoopla was necessary to ensure the privacy of private conduct and (2) how did we ever get along without it.
To end this pious nonsense requires drastic action. We must forthwith amend the Constitution as follows:
“The private sexual acts of consenting adults shall not be prohibited by law, nor shall such acts be observed, questioned or revealed without the prior mutual agreement of the parties thereto.
Had this amendment been in place a decade ago much salacious wastage of newsprint could have been avoided:
-- Bill Clinton would have never been impeached or even exposed; Ken Starr's bullying of Monica Lewinsky would have been unconstitutional. And we would never have learned what the meaning of “is” is..
-- Tiger Woods would have continued to dominate professional golf at the height of his skill and the only spice on the sports pages would have been the erectile dysfunction ads.
-- We might have never learned that John Edwards, a former Democratic senator and candidate for higher office, loved his hair more than his wife or his many children.
-- A gaggle of half-forgotten, wholly hypocritical GOP congressional leaders might never have confessed to their infidelities while attempting to run Clinton out of office for the same conduct.
-- Elliot Spitzer's New York sins would not have forced him out, and he just might have curbed Wall Street's "Masters of the Universe" before they unleashed financial Armageddon.
-- “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” would not have been just for homosexuals, and the principle conveyed by the slogan would have protected private conduct from exposure by third parties.
– Tens of thousands of adult men and women convicted for doing what comes naturally for pay would not have been charged – or even been rousted. Civilization might tremble a bit, but it would not fall if prostitutes and their customers were accorded a scrap more respect than drug dealers and car jackers.
Of course, as these examples from the headlines show, a lot of what we have considered immoral conduct would have slipped by unexposed and unpunished. Many acts of contrition and confession, public and private, genuine and self serving, would never have been performed, at least to the point of naming names.
Would that have been good or bad? Probably some of both. .Much would depend on both how Congress chose to implement the amendment and how the Supreme Court decided cases on appeal. Legal wrangling certainly would center around the Supremes’ adjudication of what is “private,” “consenting,” “adult” and ”mutual.” But this is our normal way of finding out what we have wrought with any constitutional change.
Pulpits would thunder and marchers clog the streets in support or opposition, and attention would be paid as it should be when the people assemble. Teachers might titter and blush a bit while wondering how to approach this new topic, but it won’t hurt to have our hormonal adolescents scouring the Constitution for the good parts. At least they will have read it, and afforded their instructors a chance to point out that with new freedom comes new responsibility.
More important would be our kitchen table verdicts, reached, no doubt, after the young ones were in bed. But in the end I believe that this tolerant nation would wonder (1) why all this constitutional hoopla was necessary to ensure the privacy of private conduct and (2) how did we ever get along without it.
Friday, February 26, 2010
The Paradox of Jobs and Wealth
Introduction
In every economic dip, most especially those slow recoveries from financial freezes like the one we currently enjoy, jobs disappear and productivity soars as organizations of every stripe turn lean and mean to survive. This dip -- the Great Recession -- may permanently lose the most jobs yet.
Theories explaining this abound, but none of them are comprehensive enough to give a useful answer on which to base a recovery program with broad support.
In every economic dip, most especially those slow recoveries from financial freezes like the one we currently enjoy, jobs disappear and productivity soars as organizations of every stripe turn lean and mean to survive. This dip -- the Great Recession -- may permanently lose the most jobs yet.
Theories explaining this abound, but none of them are comprehensive enough to give a useful answer on which to base a recovery program with broad support.
One theory explains by asserting that remaining workers are toiling scared, driven by meaningful glances from sadistic bosses. Perhaps jobs will pick up when employee exhaustion sets in and strong unions return to popularity.
Another opines that things will hum again when the fired malcontents and time servers no longer monopolize the water coolers and tribal cohesion improves among the residue. Grateful employers raise some salaries. Unions not open to concessions don't share in the bounty. Profits return before jobs.
Yet another school of thought notes that the better managers are capitalizing on the opportunity to streamline, automate and innovate. Equal measures of fear and ambition cause resistance to change to melt away in the remaining ranks and work becomes permanently more efficient. Unions are shunned by fearful workers and lesser firms are bought at bargain prices.
Meanwhile, other commentators gleefully describe how businesses, so bold and confident when riding the bubble, turns timid and fearful. Business bosses stow the cigars and champagne and break out the stop watches and green eye shades. Costs are cut, cash is horded and new ventures put on hold. Business spokespersons loudly blame government for their loss of confidence due to its over regulation and other interventions that distort the marketplace, while some businesses quietly hit it up for easy credit, tax breaks, even direct loans.
Glee disappears when the behavior of consumers, also newly fearful, turns thrifty. Household savings soar; credit cards are scissored; home cooking returns; vacations becomes short, nearby and simple, and the old car gets new respect. These consumers of course are the lucky ones, with jobs and homes..
Notable, too, is that the disappearing jobs are mostly of unskilled labor, doable with inattentive minds and broad backs. Instead, workers -- men especially -- must vie for jobs requiring ever higher and constantly obsolescing skills for which they are not prepared either culturally or educationally.
Given this rich set of actors to blame, we are like those blind Hindus baffled by the elephant, we have no clear integrated theory of why wealth endures, even increases, even as demand for more of the work which created the abundance of riches becomes short on offer. We know the analyses just advanced each may explain part of our condition, but how they fit and interact together escapes us. We can only describe aspects of what is happening without knowing why.
Pundits conclude that “some” of the vanished jobs aren’t ever coming back. They point to the hard facts of soaring social security applications and college enrollments, the growth in “consultants” and involuntary part timers, and the rising ranks of the hopeless as job prospects fall further and stay down longer with each successive downturn.
Meanwhile economists note that economic activity bounces back,well before job growth They explain this by terming unemployment a “lagging indicator” of the prosperity that will surely return. At least the problem has a name, and isn’t that a comfort while the misery lingers on, especially afflicting the most vulnerable?
All this while the politicians, frantic to do something, and always happy for a chance to borrow and spend (the GOP no less than the Democrats), shower tax holidays and spending stimulus on anything with an economic pulse. Then they shudder over the mounting public debt, for few rainy day funds were adequately fed during the late boom (we are only half Keynesian's, and the easy half at that).
But step back now from the current crisis, and consider a longer view of the USA since we first ejected the Brits. It is as clear as capitalism that frothy bubbles followed by financial panics followed by economic woes are as predictable as sun spots, Florida hurricanes and California earthquakes..They keep coming: we just don’t know when or how bad the next one will be.
Panics differ from natural disasters, however. Real wealth is destroyed when an earthquake or flood pulverizes the civic landscape. While those without chairs take a hit when the music stops, the whole community loses little that is tangible in a panic. Our assets – land, plant and equipment, personal possessions, community structures, intellectual capital – stay intact even while their prices fall and buyers drive bargains, sellers lose personal wealth they never had except on paper and creditors line up like raw recruits for their haircuts.
For a dreary while we dwell in the doldrums while gathering the nerve to get moving again. Stuff and know how we don’t create or keep up while in the slough of our despond is the only wealth that actually goes missing. Stocks and durables such as housing are no longer worth their bubble prices of course, and sellers are the poorer for it, but buyers are richer by an off-setting amount.
The longer view also reveals that work has been vanishing all along. Only three percent of us farm. Once most of us did. Manufacturing is going the same way and it’s not all the fault of the Chinese. Car factories are in surplus world wide because they are way more efficient and produce better vehicles that last three times as long.
In fact much of the hard work on farms and construction sites, in factories and mines – even the battlefield – can now be done by manipulating machines, often indirectly, even from afar, using computer and communication systems teamed with satellites and far fewer people. This trend will only grow and continue.
Old information technologies will go next. Nostalgia for “real” letters, records, books, magazines and newspapers will not save them – or the post office -- from the Internet. Even the classroom model of education is under siege, militant teacher unions not withstanding. An average teacher and a white board can't compete with educational videos indistinguishable on their computer screens from the more sophisticated and entertaining games, and featuring master teachers when a teacher is needed at all.
"But," you exclaim, "prosperity will return. We'll never run out of work to do." That has been true, but as wealth piles up over time, what’s left to acquire becomes ever less vital, less desirable, even overwhelming. The act of piling up possessions beyond any need has become a recognized illness and the stuff of televised comedic entertainment.
It’s also true that for the most productive days of our lives – the ones in the middle years – we are working longer and harder than ever. Most women especially work like pistons They remain most responsible for raising kids and keeping house while getting and keeping jobs, starting and stopping careers, tending to the old folks and in general keeping families together and functioning. It would seem that the old saw "a woman's work is never done" is only more true today than when it was coined an age ago.
But during our national life we have banned slavery, indentured and child labor; educated far more of us for nearly a decade longer; invented the vacation, sick and family leave and the sabbatical; reduced by law working days and hours, and opted for ever earlier retirement to cap a lengthening life.
Even housework is not the drudgery it was in the days before electrical appliances, detergents, scotch guard and wrinkle free clothing. And some husbands do help, if only to mix the martinis at the end of the day.
We did this while looking down our noses at unearned leisure, extolling the value of honest labor to society and the worker and crying out the crying need for jobs! Jobs! More good jobs! Suppose we were to really try to create and distribute wealth and eliminate rather than make work? What would life be like without the tread mill and what will it take to get off?
You could ask a pundit, an economist and a politician how to achieve such a Utopian vision and all you will get is another Sunday morning round table of pontification by clueless talking heads. Our thinkers and leaders have not yet wrapped their minds around a simple truth: we do not need the labor of all to create wealth enough for all. There is a signal measure of truth in the commonplace saying that eighty percent of the work is done by 20 percent of the workers. But it is even possible to ease the eighty percent to the sidelines iin dignity and comfort?
Most poverty today is the result of cultural ignorance and inertia, and is now dissipating more rapidly than at any other time in human history. But the approximate end of poverty will not be the end of humankind's troubles. Our species is due to learn this hard and tragic lesson: when something cannot logically continue indefinitely, it will stop. One such something is economic growth. We cannot fill earth's every niche with human beings, their needs and their stuff.. Nor can we live indefinitely. Nor can we endlessly violate the planet's cycles and limits, while plundering its riches, without ending its ability to sustain our species' life.
If jobs are disappearing even as growth continues apace in much of the world, and if growth itself cannot continue indefinitely without proving Malthus, Darwin, and Hobbs right, what are we to do? We might start by ending the current rift between political and economic theory as if economic life could exist outside a political frame.
ON ECONOMICS
The central tenant of this materialistic religion of ours has been the notion of "the free market." The notion is wrong. There is no such thing as the market. Look around and note the many markets. Note too that each one is organized, manipulated, regulated or otherwise shaped by some group or other with an avid interest in doing so. No market is truly, purely free, or, in the jargon of economists, perfectly competitive. When one occurs, either by accident or design, it does not stay that way for long.
How could it be otherwise when every market participant struggles and connives to escape market discipline at every turn? The closest thing to an economic free for all in modern times is the lawless Gangsta Capitalism practiced briefly in post-communist Russia. Resurrected Cossacks are no economic model for a civilized society.
Less agreeable is the inconvenient truth (thank you, Al Gore, for that useful phrase) that our corporate cowboys, Wall Street raiders and hedge fund pirates have become our Cossacks. In suits and ties they wield computer screens as effectively as sabers. To risk another metaphor, in the name of free market theology we let them off the reservation Franklin D Roosevelt allotted them and now we have to corral them again.
To round them up we must revisit another central tenant of our economic theology, most aptly phrased by Ronald Reagan: government is the problem, not the solution. The Great Communicator was not totally wrong. History backs his assertion all too often. The more enlightened concepts of Adam Smith, for example, replaced mercantile dogmas that had strangled ambition and innovation for centuries. Now, though, Smithian theory has congealed into a computer modeled theology.
The first modern economist to find a principal (rather than supporting) role for government was British economist John Maynard Keynes. It is his play book that the principal actors in Washington today are reading from. Keynes demonstrated that economic downturns such as the one we lately enjoyed are not always self correcting. Supply and demand can reach a stable equilibrium well below the level of economic activity that fully employs us all. When, as lately, this happens, governments cannot and, after Keynes, should not, fail to fill the gap. Free market theologians will argue that governments simply can’t, and on the record they have a point. But there is nobody else to do it so we had best bend ourselves to learning how.
Still, following past Keynesian fixes will not be enough. We have recently rediscovered that dumping mounds of cash into the coffers of reluctant lenders and traumatized consumers is like pushing on a string and expecting the other end to go somewhere. Government investments in infrastructure -- roads and bridges (hopefully to somewhere), a smart electrical grid, electronic medical records, new sources of energy and such -- are agonizingly slow to ramp up. They tend to stimulate just as business, too, revives, and the reinforcing combination twists the economy into an inflationary spiral.
If Keynes as traditionally applied is not enough, what is? Set aside the possibility of a Marxian style revolution. The world's economic systems evolve. Attempts to invent one from scratch fail miserably, often horribly. Traces of old systems linger in the mercantile policies of China, Japan and South Korea.
The beginnings of capitalist theory were built on the foundation of the fundamental factors of production: land, labor and capital. The witches brew we call wealth was concocted presumably from the toil and trouble of their proper mixture. Capital was the catalytic ingredient though; land was passive and labor docile or reactive. At least as equally fundamental today as this trio are two more active ingredients: energy and information, and tomorrow’s theories would do well to take them fully into account.
Our approach to evolving markets should be scientific and creative rather than prayerful and passive. Such thin theories as perfect competition, rational actors and perfect information need to be demonstrated or discarded. With personal consumption counting for two thirds of all economic activity, "economic man" needs to be replaced with homo sapiens in all his and her evolved glory. This will not go down easy, for economists just love the simplifying assumption, and do not like fuzzy minded psychologists, game theorists, data miners, political scientists, evolutionary biologists, ecologists and (especially) sociologists mucking up the elegant simplicity of their take on humankind.
Some markets cannot abide unfettered competition. We have recently learned anew that the financial markets are first among them. Governments and international institutions cannot let go of the reins of money and credit without risking an inevitable runaway. That fact needs to be embedded in the DNA of all political parties serious enough to be allowed to govern and conduct diplomacy.
Another such market is the financing and provision of health care. The best care anywhere in the US is provided entirely by government to our aging veterans of past wars. The Veterans Administration builds and operates the hospitals, hires the doctors and nurses, bargains hard for low drug prices and even exports the only electronic medical support system in the country worth calling comprehensive. And they do it in the face of resources that are chronically delayed by a dithering Congress that continually ignores the post war consequences of the wars it funds.
Other critical economic activity would never occur if we waited on markets to join supply with demand. Still other markets grow like weeds and can’t be eradicated even by the most draconian methods. Thus government largely succeeds in providing the market for basic science research and utterly fails to quash the markets for illegal drugs and illicit sex.
We need better measurements of what we do economically to replace the gross national product and other such aggregates. A system that adds Hurricane Katrina’s recovery without subtracting its loss measures what is easy, not what is real.
Equally a system that doesn’t deliberately include "externalities" -- from garbage disposal to polluted land, air and water to accelerated species extinction to global climate disruption – in the cost of goods and services bought and sold, should not be called capitalism.
Finally, as John Kenneth Galbraith, the finest student of economic phenomena never to win a Nobel Prize, long ago said, and I paraphrase, none would select the squirrel wheel for an economic model. Growth, in other words, must end some day. Either we achieve wealth beyond measure just before our well deserved extinction or we learn how to create and distribute basic goods and agreeable comforts in tune with that somewhat longer journey called a sustainable future.
The next economic system will not be handed down from above as holy writ. It will have to be deliberately built and continuously perfected by dedicated human beings for humankind. We will probably call them economists and politicians for lack of better four letter words.
ON POLITICS
Left to its own devices capitalism concentrates wealth even as it "lift all boats" during the growth phase of the business cycle. Then it is ruthless about cutting costs and preserving capital when the bubble bursts. Labor is just another cost in most nations. In only a few countries, notably Germany, do firms routinely reduce hours worked rather than lay off "redundancies" among the rank and file.
In bad times the business comes first, of course. Those who have, or seize, power over its assets rank next. Those in control of personnel decisions survive just ahead of employees deemed "key." For the rest, survival depends on how bad things are; many through no obvious fault of their own become unemployed.
Enter government. Just about everything bad you hear about government is true. At best it merely muddles through. Democracies are no better, occasionally even worse, than authoritarian models, because the rabble will rob the rich with their votes, cooking and eating the capitalist goose stuffed with the seed corn until all are impoverished.
Yet as the centuries drift by, government does get better. While this sunny view is hard to credit in the sharply divided American electorate, the government's performance over the past five years under two polar opposite administrations has been outstanding. Yes, really, outstanding. Compared, you might ask, to what?
To the last time we grappled with a similarly bursting financial bubble in the 1930's. Our present doldrums have been as nothing compared to the meltdown and decade of stagnation of the Great Depression. We have greatly benefited from the application of lessons learned from close study of that world-wide debacle. The game we have played has been one of damage control, and for that reason our performance will not get the accolades it deserves. With millions kicked out of their jobs and homes, it feels like we lost, and when you tell the genuine losers of this time around that it could have been much worse, all they can do is wonder how.
For there is nowhere in the American Dream a place for hailing a set-back that was measurably better than the last one. Two steps forward and one back is not the way this nation strides toward the future. So the speed and acumen with which the Federal Reserve and the Treasury secretaries of two presidents moved to shore up the financial system, rescue the auto industry and contain the contagion to an acceptable degree within our borders, must await the verdict of history for their attaboys.
There is much that could have been done better. Weaknesses and abuses in the home mortgage industry need careful study and remedy. The national enthusiasm for home ownership needs tempering. The risk of leverage applied to opaque financial innovations rquires better understanding and a system of adult supervision that is accepted as something other than a bothersome meddle by the government in the workings of free markets. The "Masters of the Universe" must meet their master.
And that is how we will proceed. The political economy will evolve by the workings of tension between the goverment and private institutions. One fine day we may even get the tensile strength of this interaction tuned just right and lovely harmonies will play. If Mother Nature doesn't order us out of here before that new Eden can flourish.
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