I had another dream, I had another life
Over at The Slow Hunch, I have a post on the importance of aesthetics within organizations. I draw heavily from philosopher Roger Scruton and ICU physician and cultural historian (not mention fellow Mormon) Samuel Brown. While organizations often get the first two of the ancient triad Truth (science), Goodness (ethics), and Beauty (aesthetics) correct, the third tends to be ignored. Both organizations and the people they serve would be better off if it wasn’t.
Check it out.
Capitalism and free markets are good. Cronyism is bad. Sometimes trying to explain the difference between the two to people can be hard. The one upside to the state of New Jersey effectively banning Tesla from opening any stores in their state is that at least it makes it easier for people to tell which is which. It’s also helpfully in complete and total violation of your usual expectations for a story about economic liberty:
This is a startling inversion of political stereotypes: Northern Californian capitalists quashed by East Coast Republicans defending the use of government regulations to keep competition out of the marketplace.
In a nutshell, politically powerful car dealers are trying to slam the door on Tesla before Tesla has a chance to show people that buying a car need not be a painful ordeal. Meanwhile car makers, who are often at odds with car dealers, are united to do anything they can to prevent Tesla from changing the whole landscape for car manufacturing in the US. So they are both doubling down on old, outdated laws that gave car dealers geographic monopolies back in the day when car makers had all the power.
And that, in a nutshell, is the curse of government intervention in markets. Even in those cases where it might have been valuable and necessary once upon a time, the laws will still be around decades after their original purpose has been forgotten, and there will be plenty of politically powerful elites ready to pay whatever it takes to keep those laws on the books and in force to protect their business interests. That’s not socialism, but it’s not capitalism either. It’s cronyism. Wired has the rest of the story, by the way, and it’s worth a quick read.
In the interests of science, researchers asked this question. Then wrote a paper in the Journal of Evolution and Human Behavior. But you don’t need to read the paper because, thanks to the Visual Communication Guy, the results have been distilled into this handy-dandy infographic.
As a man with heavy stubble (based on these classifications), these results do not look too bad. Still, I wish I could grow mine out just a bit fuller…
Over at the Brookings Institution there is a fantastic post on how cultural norms affects social mobility with numerous links to pertinent research. For example:
Definitely worth checking out.
Greg Mankiw linked to a chart from a Washington Post story by Catherine Rampell: Women should embrace the B’s in college to make more later. The chart, all by itself, is arresting.
What the chart shows is that if a man gets a lower grade (a B instead of an A) in Econ 101 his chance of majoring in econ is basically unaffected. But for women, there is a very strong and obvious correlation between their grade in Econ 101 and their willingness to major in economics. Just going from an A to an A- (still an A!) drops the likelihood of majoring in econ by about 7 points, from 42% to 35%.
This is a really important finding because it could answer the question of why so few women graduate in STEM courses, despite the fact that more women start them than men. STEM courses are much harsher than humanities, and so if you’re highly responsive to grades, you’re going to abandon STEM to get a degree in something less intimidating. But STEM courses also pay more, so women are sacrificing earnings to avoid lower grades. This could have important relevance for the gender gap, because it is pretty strong evidence that it’s not just preferences that are leading women to lower-paying jobs. As Rampell writes: “If women were changing their majors because they discovered new intellectual appetites, you’d expect to see greater flows into STEM fields, too.”
For me the big question is why women react more to grades than men do. Rampell has ideas (maybe men are overconfident? maybe they just care more about future salary than about grades?) but no solid answers. My initial reaction was to think that women might be more concerned with achievement overall, but my wife pointed out that men may be perfectionists too, but in other areas. Like sports and video games. That really made me think. After all, one major reason I never did sports much in high school was that I knew I didn’t have any amazing athletic ability, so why bother? And to this day I don’t like playing StarCraft 2 online because I know I won’t have the time to get really good at it. On the other hand, I do play a lot of Call of Duty, and I’m only mediocre at that game.
So I’m curious: what do you think makes women more sensitive to grades? And what impact do you think it is having on things like the gender gap and the lack of women in STEM careers?
There is a great post over at the Newton Blog on RealClearScience about Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, the agronomist who was the Father of the Green Revolution. It demonstrates the difference between the Green Revolution and Green Imperialism. Starting in Mexico, he toiled “for endless hours in the lab and in the fields to breed a wheat plant that was resistant to disease, thick-stemmed, and enormously productive.” Mexico’s wheat yield was six times higher in 1963, sixteen years after Borlaug’s arrival. Ninety-five percent of Mexico’s wheat was of “Borlaug’s dwarf variety.” Developing nations began sowing Borlaug’s crop. The results? “Global yields skyrocketed. Starvation rates decreased. Doom was postponed.”
Yet, environmental lobbyists attempted to block Borlaug’s expansion into Africa. They even convinced the World Bank, the Ford Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation to cut funding. While Borlaug was able to boost Ethiopia’s wheat yield to record levels, Africa is still steeped in starvation.
“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists…” he told The Atlantic. “If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”
But the post doesn’t stop there. It captures perfectly what is often wrong with environmental debates:
As with most debates, this one comes down to intrinsic values. From our lofty position in the developed world, we have the luxury to value the fallacious image of pristine, untouched nature over feeding ourselves. Hunger simply isn’t something that most of us are familiar with.
“These people have never been around hungry people,” Borlaug says of people like this. “They’re Utopians. They sit and philosophize. They don’t live in the real world.”
Proselytizing is easy. But try doing it when you’re starving.
Walker recently posted on a study showing that 19th century missionary efforts had a positive, even vital effect on the development of liberal democracy.
The study focused on “conversionary Protestants,” but if we look beyond the scope of democracy, we still find that the influence of missionary group was by large a positive one. This includes ”non-conversionary” Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox. Some interesting examples come from missionary efforts in 19th century Palestine, and they have something to tell us about the supposed dichotomy between science and religion, as well as the contention that religion is a corrosive, negative influence.
Missionary movements have made a very real contribution to the spread of modern medicine. As an example (though certainly not the earliest), for over half a century one of the few modern hospitals in Israel/Palestine was the one run by Scottish missionaries in Tiberias, by the shores of the Sea of Galilee. In 1885, the young Dr. David Watt Torrance arrived as a medical missionary. His clinic was at first very small- only two rooms- and the locals were understandably suspicious of his motives. Torrance gained the confidence of the locals due to his skill and compassion, although very few took any steps toward conversion. In 1894, a proper hospital was built, and it remained in operation until 1959. Malaria and dysentery were among the most common illnesses treated at the hospital.
To give an idea of just why this was a big deal, before the medical missionary efforts traditional medicine in Palestine involved amulets, pilgrimages to the tombs of holy men, exorcisms, and bloodletting. This was true no matter to what religion or social class you belonged.
One measure of these medical missions’ success was that Jewish communities in turn made increased efforts to establish their own hospitals and clinics wherever missionaries operated as a way to counter their influence.
It is probably not an exaggeration to say that tens of thousands owe their lives to the Torrances’ religion (Herbert took over from his father until his own retirement in 1953), and the number increases significantly if one takes other mission hospitals into consideration. Torrance himself paid a terrible price- he buried two wives and four children in Tiberias. It was Torrance‘s faith in God which led him to dedicate his life to improving the health and lives of Galileans, regardless of their religious denomination or convictions. Science, that is, modern medicine, was his tool, but religious faith was the motivator. What the Torrances and other medical missionaries show is that religion has often led to the spread of science in very practical ways.
The scholars Ruth Kark, Dietrich Denecke, and Haim Goren wrote a paper entitled “The Impact of Early German Missionary Enterprise in Palestine on the Modernization and Environmental and Technological Change, 1820—1914.”
We suggest that it is informative to emphasize a new dimension to the study of missions- that of the relationship between religion and belief systems and place or space. Within the missionary context this relates to the study of the impact of missionary concepts and activity on environmental and spatial change and the creation of new urban and rural landscapes. These reflect far-reaching effects that remain evident to the present.
Their study deals with two German missionary groups. The first, Protestants, founded an orphanage and school in 1860 just outside of Jerusalem for Christian victims of persecutions in Lebanon. Not only did they provide schooling, they also taught the children various practical trades employing and constantly upgrading modern methods of production.
In 1889, German Catholic missionaries purchased land at Tabgha, the traditional site of the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. They established a network of schools for local Arab Christians, and an agricultural commune run by monks. They introduced a lot of modern agricultural tools and techniques, re-introduced bananas to the region, and sailed the first motor-boat on the Sea of Galilee.
The article is well worth a read, and it gives a new spin on the role of religion in progress and modernization.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a frustrated counter-reaction to criticisms of Elder Callister’s article “What is the Lord’s Standard for Morality?” A lot of folks liked it. A lot of other folks did not. I found friends and family in both camps. That made me cautious as I wrote this followup. Not because I temper my words to try and please people, but because when folks I respect disagree with me I like to take the time to listen and reconsider. So I listened. And I reconsidered. This post is the result.
The idea that we should be careful in how we talk about sexual morality is valid. Last year, Elizabeth Smart provided a stark example. She described how an object lesson she’d heard in church that compared sex to chewing gum came to her mind after she was first raped by her kidnapper.
I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’m that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.’ And that’s how easy it is to feel like you know longer have worth, you know longer have value. ‘Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value.’
I’m sure that the person who gave this lesson meant well, but that object lesson (along with its cousins: the nail in the board, the licked cupcake, and the crumpled rose) is an example of purity culture, and purity culture is Satanic. Most of the time when we talk about sin, we use a mistake-paradigm. Sins are mistakes, and through the Atonement they can be fixed. Jesus says “though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” It is true that the Atonement cannot erase the consequences of our sins, but it can and does make us whole. That’s the point, and for the most part, it’s what we teach.
Except when it comes to sexual sins. Then, suddenly, we switch from a mistakes-paradigm to a purity-paradigm. You can fix something that is broken, but rotten meat is bad forever. Even more pernicious, however, purity-culture makes it seem as though virginity and chastity are the same thing. This implies that even a victim of a rape should somehow bear the guilt of sexual transgression. That is an abominable and indefensible teaching. The mistakes-paradigm is compatible with Christianity. Purity culture, although it’s often preached by Christians, is not. It is antithetical to the Savior’s message of hope and redemption. It is what Satan, the accuser, wants us to believe.
As she recounts in her autobiography, Smart remembered that lesson when it could have done the most harm to her. She was rescued from despair, however, by the memory of love. She knew that her mother and father would accept her back with loving and open arms no matter what had been done to her. Throughout her awful ordeal, she remembered the love of her family and felt the love of her Heavenly Father. Love won out, and because of that Elizabeth found the resolve to endure and, in the end, to defeat her tormentors. But first she had to defeat a false teaching she had been subjected to in Sunday school.
There is more to the story. As I wrote at the time, headlines covering her comments ran along the lines of “Elizabeth Smart: Abstinence-only education can make rape survivors feel ‘dirty,’ ‘filthy’” and “Traditional Mormon Sexual Purity Lesson Contributed to Captivity, Elizabeth Smart Tells University Audience.” There was no shortage of those who were ready to use her words to score points for the world’s view of sexual freedom, whether she agreed or not.
The Church’s unwavering adherence to strict moral standards is unusual in our modern society, and it is under constant attack. This attack could have tragic consequences, precisely because the Church’s stark and plain teachings on chastity and morality have measurable, beneficial effects. A 4-year study conducted at the University of North Carolina found that, compared to other religious denominations, Mormon youths were more devout, more able to articulate their own faith, and more likely to adhere to the standards set by the Church. As Deseret News reported, the study found that fewer Mormon teens:
There’s good reason to believe that clear teachings contribute to these measurably different outcomes for Mormons. Researcher Stephen Vaisey interviewed more than 20 Mormon youths for the project, and subsequently noted:
One of the groups that stood out … were the Mormons. In general they tended to be more articulate about their religion, what their religion actually taught and what kind of religious constraints it placed on them. [emphasis added]
Plain and unflinching talk from Church leaders is a shield between our children and the dangerous temptations of our modern world. These teachings are not a matter of sheltering youth, but rather of empowering them to see clearly the choices that lie before them.
We are trapped between the rock of purity culture and the hard place of the world’s dismissal of the seriousness of sexual sin.
The response to my original post that surprised me the most was the oft-repeated complaint that I had skipped over the worst line in the talk. That was:
In the end, most women get the type of man they dress for.
Some folks accused me of leaving it out because I didn’t know how to account for it, but the truth is that I left it out because it didn’t even register as problematic. I took it to be just a simple observation that dress, along with many other factors, is one way that like-minded individuals identify potential mates in a process known in economics, sociology and anthropology as assortative mating. If you would like to marry a man who values modesty in dress, then it makes sense to dress modestly. (The existence of assortative mating is itself so well known that some studies fault it for rising income inequality.)
Others, however, pointed out that the word “get” as opposed to “marry” was just too similar to the phrase “get what they deserve” and that, combined with a reference to a woman’s dress, it was just too close to victim-blaming. I do not dispute the validity of this reaction. One of the things I’ve learned, especially in private discussions, is that people can react to the same words in very, very different ways and that if you are willing to listen you will generally learn that people have good reasons for reacting the way that they do.
More than anything else, these discussions reminded me of Jacob’s haunting and cutting words when he spoke about chastity:
7 And also it grieveth me that I must use so much boldness of speech concerning you, before your wives and your children, many of whose feelings are exceedingly tender and chaste and delicate before God, which thing is pleasing unto God;
8 And it supposeth me that they have come up hither to hear the pleasing word of God, yea, the word which healeth the wounded soul.
9 Wherefore, it burdeneth my soul that I should be constrained, because of the strict commandment which I have received from God, to admonish you according to your crimes, to enlarge the wounds of those who are already wounded, instead of consoling and healing their wounds; and those who have not been wounded, instead of feasting upon the pleasing word of God have daggers placed to pierce their souls and wound their delicate minds.
10 But, notwithstanding the greatness of the task, I must do according to the strict commands of God, and tell you concerning your wickedness and abominations, in the presence of the pure in heart, and the broken heart, and under the glance of the piercing eye of the Almighty God.
I always imagined, when I read these verses as a kid, that the women and children in the crowd must have just had very delicate Victorian sensibilities about the topic of sex. Now I realize how dubious that reading is, and I wonder how many of those in the audience had been traumatized by sexual assault, rape, and abuse. I don’t say this to give Elder Callister a get-out-of-jail-free card, because after all the big difference between Jacob’s words and the Ensign article is that Jacob gave this extended apology/warning (the earliest known trigger warning?) and Elder Callister did not.
My position is this: I think Elder Callister meant no ill will, and that it’s probably impossible to talk about these issues without causing pain to at least some people. As an audience, we should try to understand the principle behind the words. But I also would hope that our leaders can continue to learn how to be as careful as they may, without diluting the message, in picking their words, and I sincerely acknowledge the validity of those who were hurt by these words. Perhaps it is some comfort, in re-reading Jacob 2, to find yourself in good company.
A post at Feminist Mormon Housewives called me out for misunderstanding what the term “rape culture” means. To be fair: that’s valid. I have my own definition of rape culture, but I shouldn’t have used a non-standard definition without more carefully explaining what it was and that it’s non-standard. I’m not going to get into that now, either (although the basics are in my original post). Instead, let’s just pause and consider a small irony.
One of the primary concerns with Elder Callister’s talk is that he used words and phrases that could be hurtful to his audience, even if the hurtful meaning wasn’t intended or even logically implied by his words. And that is valid. But wouldn’t the same concern apply to deploying a deliberately inflammatory term like “rape culture” to describe the talk? After all, there are quite a few people who aren’t familiar with the technical definition (that’s not in dispute, since the FMH post takes the trouble of providing the definition) so, by their own logic, perhaps critics ought to be more careful with their language? Just to be clear, my concern is not that Elder Callister’s feelings might be hurt, but rather that a very large number of faithful Mormons who do not keep current on feminist political terminology will be confused and hurt when some of their fellow Mormons start associating a general authority and advocacy of rape. So really, by the logic of the critics of the talk, we shouldn’t even be having a conversation using the term “rape culture” at all.
The substance of the rape culture accusation could be made without the incendiary terminology. Using the conventional definition, rape culture is the idea that common attitudes can lead indirectly to rape. Specific examples of rape culture include anything that condones or advocates (1) victim-blaming, (2) sexual objectification, or (3) trivializing rape. I don’t think anyone is seriously arguing that the talk trivializes rape. We’ve already talked about how the “get the type of man they dress for” line sounded like victim blaming. I have already conceded the validity of that painful association, but I am not willing to go from sounds like victim-blaming to engages in victim-blaming. (The observation that women’s dress can affect men doesn’t rise to the level of victim-blaming, either.)
So that leaves sexual objectifcation. Here the problem is not with any particular phrasing of any particular talk, but with the concept of modesty as it exists in Mormonism. Critics argue that emphasizing modest dress turns women into sexual objects, and that the only solution is to talk about modesty less. (They also argue that we should encourage women to dress modestly for themselves and not just for the sake of men, but I’m not going to go into that because I agree with it.) So, should the Church shut up about modesty, or at least talk about it a little bit less?
As I mentioned, the number one criticism of my post was that I had skipped over the “get the type of man they dress for” line. Only slightly less prominent, however, was the argument that the critics of Elder Callister’s talk didn’t have anything against the Church’s standards or teachings on modesty. The theory was that the big kerfuffle wasn’t about what Elder Callister said. It was just about how he said it. I don’t for a moment doubt that the folks who told me that were sincere, but it’s worth pointing a couple of things out. First, even though some of them said (effectively) “I’m not going to criticize the content, just the delivery” they also disagreed with the content. Their position was “I think Elder Callister is wrong about sexual morality, but I’m choosing only to criticize his delivery. Not his message.” In other words, lots of the critics do, indeed have a beef with the Church’s positions. Secondly, plenty of the folks criticizing the talk did quite plainly criticize the Church’s teachings as well.
The original piece that set me off (Natasha Helfer Parker’s Morality? We can do much better than this) included an explicit rejection of the Church’s teaching that homosexuals ought to remain chaste and urged a shift to accepting monogamous gay sexual relations as moral. Several of the commenters on my piece insisted that, since there’s no direct scriptural evidence against masturbation, it ought not to be considered a sin (or at least, not a serious one). I was tempted to write this off as one of those weird, fringe issues that make the Internet such an interesting place until another piece at Feminist Mormon Housewives made the exact same case:
If you are going to say that the Lord condemns masturbation, please cite me chapter and verse on that. Masturbation is something that a vast, VAST majority of people on the earth and in the church have done. If it is sinful, it is a sin like lying, being inconsiderate, or any number of other mistakes that we all deal with.
And of course, in addition to teachings on homosexuality and masturbation, there are also those who would call for the Church to stop speaking so loudly and clearly about modesty. So, to my friends who tried to tell me that I was getting upset at nothing because no one actually challenged the Church’s teachings, I have to say: “look again.”
Keep in mind that in the first section of this post I argued (1) that the Church’s uniquely clear teachings on moral issues had led to uniquely positive results for our youth and (2) that the world outside is ready to abuse any possible opening to attack those teachings. In that context, the important thing isn’t that certain members of the Church feel comfortable publicly calling for the Church to retreat from traditional teachings. Instead, the important thing is why. What is the rationale behind this call for the Church to moderate moral teachings?
Sara Katherine Staheli Hanks’ (who wrote the FMH piece quoted above) argument boils down to the ever-classic: But everyone’s doing it! (Her exact words, just to re-quote, were that “Masturbation is something that a vast, VAST majority of people on the earth and in the church have done.” So, how bad can it be, right?) Parker, on the other hand, wrote that the standard on homosexual sex should be lowered because it “sets the Mormon LGBTQ population up for almost guaranteed failure,” and then broadened that logic at the end when she said: “The way that sexual standards are presented in this type of talk is unrealistic and sets people up for failure.”
It’s impossible to tell exactly which standards, other than those concerning homosexuality, Parker believes the Church should revise downwards, but the logic is basically limitless. If we accept the idea that whenever the Church’s standards get too high we need to lower them to more realistic levels, then they aren’t really standards at all. They are more like best practices or conventions. The principle of idealism cannot survive that assault. As I stated in my original piece: this logic is fundamentally anti-Christian. It’s the counterpart to purity culture. Purity culture says the Atonement cannot save you, and lowering standards until people can achieve them on their own says the Atonement is not needed to save you. These are just two different ways to repudiate the Gospel.
As much as moderate critics of Elder Callister’s talk may earnestly and sincerely believe in simply improving the way that we talk about sexual morality, it’s important to realize that we’re having that conversation in the midst of a greater battle. There are people both inside and outside the Church who are more than happy to use sincere complaints about how the Church teaches what it teaches to fuel their complaints about what the Church teaches. I don’t think that means that moderate critics ought to be silent or that their concerns are not legitimate. I just hope it explains the reaction of folks like me.
This last section of my response is the most theoretical, but perhaps also the most important. It starts with a concept from cryptography. The man-in-the-middle attack is basically just what it sounds like: two people are trying to communicate to each other and a third party steps between them, intercepts the message, modifies it (possibly), and then sends it on. For example, if you’re logging on to your bank and a hacker is trying to intercept your communication to steal your password, then he’s trying to pull off the man-in-the-middle attack.
Let’s imagine someone trying to pull of a man-in-the-middle attack to sabotage communication between the general authorities (at one end) and the members of the Church (on the other end). A silly example would be to try and hack into the Church’s servers and modify the text of the Ensign so that what the GAs sent out and what the members received wasn’t the same. That’s a silly example because it would be so obvious (among other reasons). But what if, instead of hacking into the Church’s servers, an adversary were to metaphorically hack into the minds of members of the Church and change the way they perceived certain words and phrases? In that case, the words the General Authorities used would not mean the same thing to their audience that they meant to the General Authorities. More importantly, however, the sabotage would be a lot harder to detect because everyone would be so busy arguing about what the “right” meaning of the terms was. The argument over who to blame, the leaders or the members, would obscure the deeper reality: someone had driven a wedge between the watchmen on the walls and the people they are there to warn.
What might this look like in practice? The most obvious examples is the way that professional counselors (like Parker) took Elder Callister to task for using the word “abuse” (when he called masturbation “self-abuse”) in a non-technical sense. Not only did Parker do this, but Hanks followed suit: “Do not co-opt a clinical term used to describe things like ritualistic cutting or burning of the skin to describe masturbation.” This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the way language works. Every specialized discipline in the world finds the need to invent new jargon and repurpose existing words from everyday language, but these technical terms are derived from the ordinary words and they are only valid within specific contexts. To argue that someone in a non-specialist outlet ought to be subject to specialized use of a term is not only irrational, it’s impossible. This is because quite often the same word will get repurposed again and again by different specialties. Off the top of my head, the phrase “tipping point” has a perfectly understandable meaning in plain English, but it also has a more technical meaning in economics and another, different, technical meaning in catastrophe theory. There’s a reason that Wikipedia had to invent disambiguation pages.
This example is too obvious to be a really powerful man-in-the-middle attack. The whole point of Parker’s critique is to assert the dominance of her expertise by calling Elder Callister wrong. Later on, when it starts to become a matter of course that we should bow to expert terminology, it may start to function as a man-in-the-middle attack, but for now we’re looking for a more subtle example. For example: Is it possible that the reaction to the “get the type of man they dress for” line is exacerbated because adherents of rape culture are actively looking for suspicious phrases? In other words, if you really believe in a political philosophy dedicated to unmasking sinister meanings behind otherwise ordinary terms, you’re probably going to find them whether they exist or not. This is the same danger behind accusation of dog whistle politics. When you’re accusing someone of something that is by definition hidden, how can they defend themselves? The reality is that anyone dedicated enough and clever enough is going to be able to find evidence of rape culture just about anywhere with only a little bit of effort and creativity.
This may seem like an academic quibble about linguistics, but the reality is that arguments about language are almost always really arguments about principles in the end. Without questioning the validity or sincerity of those who were hurt by Elder Callister’s word choice, I simply want to raise the possibility that in figuring out who is to blame, we may want to consider those who actively encourage us to look for evil intentions behind every ordinary turn of phrase. To the extent that secular politics (from any end of the spectrum) start to change the way we perceive the words we hear, there’s a risk that we’re starting to lose contact with the General Authorities. We should probably make it a matter of conscious effort to set aside our political filters somewhat when listening to what they have to say.
Having failed to stem carbon emissions in rich countries or in rapidly industrialising ones, policy makers have focused their attention on the only remaining target: poor countries that do not emit much carbon to begin with.
So begins a recent op-ed in the Financial Times by Roger Pielke (University of Colorado) and Daniel Sarewitz (Arizona State University). The attempt to cap carbon emissions in developing countries has vast consequences for the poor:
A recent report from the non-profit Center for Global Development estimates that $10bn invested in renewable energy projects in sub-Saharan Africa could provide electricity for 30m people. If the same amount of money went into gas-fired generation, it would supply about 90m people – three times as many.
In Nigeria, the UN Development Programme is spending $10m to help “improve the energy efficiency of a series of end-use equipment . . .in residential and public buildings”. As a way of lifting people out of poverty, this is fanciful at best. Nigeria is the world’s sixth-largest oil exporter, with vast reserves of natural gas as well. Yet 80m of its people lack access to electricity. Nigerians do not simply need their equipment to be more efficient; they need a copious supply of energy derived from plentiful local sources.
Or consider Pakistan, where energy shortages in a rapidly growing nation of 180m have led to civil unrest – as well as rampant destruction of forests, mostly to provide firewood for cooking and heating. Western development agencies have refused to finance a project to use Pakistan’s Thar coal deposits for low-carbon natural gas production and electricity generation because of concerns over carbon emissions.
This is worth considering, especially on the heels of Nathaniel’s climate science post. Science writer Matt Ridley has compared the policies proposed to address climate change to a tourniquet being used to stop a nosebleed: the bleeding is real, but the solution will do more harm than good. It is actually my acceptance of climate change that drives my support for innovation-based solutions. It strikes me as morally wrong to deny the poor energy consumption (such as a washing machine). As Pielke and Sarewitz write,
…[I]f the rapidly urbanising poor are to have any chance of prosperity, they need access to energy on the same scale as all modern economies. Climate activists warn that the inhabitants of poor countries are especially vulnerable to the future climate changes that our greenhouse gas emissions will cause. Why then, do they simultaneously promote the green imperialism that helps lock in the poverty that makes these countries so vulnerable?
Indeed.
Oleksandr Muzychko, a radical Ukrainian militant.I’m Israeli with Ukrainian Jewish roots, and my wife is Ukrainian, so naturally the topic of anti-Semitism in Ukraine concerns me. Since I’m also studying journalism, I couldn’t help but notice a recent article from the Russian network RT that has been going around on various social networks. The article is illustrative of a problematic approach to reporting the Maidan protests in Ukraine. It shows footage of an anti-government protester, Oleksandr Muzychko, waving a Kalashnikov. It claims that Muzychko (AKA Sashko Biliy) is a notorious right-wing Ukrainian extremist and terrorist who as a foreign volunteer in the Chechnyan War was responsible for significant Russian losses in the battle for Grozny. In his book on the Chechnyan War, the journalist Anatol Lieven described Muzychko as
A volunteer from the Ukranian extreme nationalist UNA-UNSO movement… who looked as if he had been born in a cave. He had a massive face with a forehead sloping straight back from his eyebrows, a jutting jaw and a broken nose, and was wearing an American baseball cap turned back to front and a green Islamic headband. He said that he was there to ‘fight against Russian imperialism and help destroy the Russian empire… and then on its ruins, we will build a new, truly great Slavic power, uniting all the Slavs under the leadership of the Ukrainians, the oldest, greatest and purest Slav people.’ I was told some months afterwards that he had been killed in action in Grozny. Biliy was one of perhaps twenty Ukrainian volunteers who fought in Chechnya; I met three of them…
Lieven was wrong, as it turns out. Muzychko was not killed in action. Instead, he returned to Ukraine and was later jailed for several years on a charge of kidnapping. A brief review of UNA-USO activity reveals a markedly ultra-nationalist platform, but so far very little actual violence apart from that committed by volunteers like Muzychko in Chechnya.
Still, in an interview for a documentary produced by REN in 2007, Muzychko declared that “As long as blood flows in my veins, I will fight communists, Jews and Russians. This is my credo.”
Jews are understandably worried. For one, some of the worst atrocities against Jews were historically committed by Ukrainians. At a central location in Kiev there is a prominent memorial to the 17th century Cossack Hetman, Bohdan Khmelnytsky. During Khmelnytsky’s uprising against the Poles (a foundational narrative amongst Ukrainian nationalists) around a fifth to a quarter of the entire Jewish population of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth perished. In 1919, the armies of Symon Petlyura slaughtered around 17,000 Jews in a serious of vicious pogroms. The Jewish writer Isaac Babel vividly described the aftermath of one of these pogroms in his characteristic terse, laconic style. The family of David Zis, in their home, the old prophet, naked and barely breathing, the butchered old woman, a child with chopped-off fingers. Many of these people are still breathing, the stench of blood, everything turned topsy-turvy, chaos, a mother over her butchered son, an old woman curled up, four people in one hut, dirt, blood under a black beard, they’re just lying there in their blood…
A mere generation later, many Ukrainians collaborated with the Nazi invaders, including the insurrectionist movement OUN before it had a falling out with Germany. The German-raised Ukrainian police was an important instrument for murdering Jews in those years of occupation.
The anti-communist and anti-Russian sentiment expressed by Muzychko is fairly self-explanatory. In the previous century alone, Russia has pursued policies that have aimed at the suppression (and at times destruction) of the Ukrainian nation. There was the artificially-prolonged famine, the Holodomor, which resulted in the deaths of more than 4 million Ukrainians due to starvation. In 1939, the NKVD instituted a reign of terror in newly-occupied Galicia and Volhynia. The Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church was dissolved by the NKVD in 1946 and its assets and congregations turned over to the politically compliant Russian Orthodox Church. There was also the systematic repression of the Ukrainian language, for example, no factory in the Soviet Union produced typewriters with the Ukrainian alphabet (it differs somewhat from Russian). Even as late as the 1970s and 1980s, Ukrainian poets like Hryhoriy Chubay and Vasil Stus were imprisoned, and an extraordinarily well-loved composer of popular music, Volodymyr Ivasyuk, was kidnapped, beaten, and hanged on a tree. The middle-aged Stus died in a forced labor camp in 1985.
But even with a long history of anti-Semitism in Ukraine, the question still remains. Why the Jews? Partially because of deep-seated Orthodox anti-Semitism, partially because of rhetoric originating in 19th and 20th century Russian circles which painted the Jews first as partners with Freemasons for world domination, and then as the masterminds behind communism, not to mention the prominent involvement of many Jews in the Soviet regimes. Compounding the issue, some of the more visible members of Yanukovich’s odious party- such as Dobkin, Kernes, and Tabachnik– are Jewish. Sadly, when members of visible, cohesive minorities behave poorly people tend to assign blame and complicity to the group as a whole.
Yet, surprisingly little anti-Semitic outburst has occurred during the protests. I don’t think that this can be emphasized enough. On February the 23rd there was a fire-bombing of a synagogue in Zaporizhie, one of those Eastern Ukrainian towns which had undergone significant russification. As of today there is still no information released on who might have done it. Even if we assume that Maidan activists are the perpetrators (and they are a minority in Zaporizhie), have any other synagogues been attacked? In the areas where we’d expect them the most, I.E., the areas where nationalist and radical influence is strongest, there have been no such attacks during the course of the protests. Not in the Maidan-controlled parts of Kiev, not in Lviv, stronghold of the ultra-rightwing party Svoboda, and not in Rivne, where different footage shows Oleksandr Muzychko brandishing his Kalashnikov during a municipal meeting. There have been organized Jewish groups participating in the Maidan, and the oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, president of the United Jewish Community of Ukraine, is also a staunch supporter of the Maidan. The Chabad rabbi in Kiev has closed his schools and called upon Jews to flee, but the chief rabbi since 1990, Yaakov Bleich, long sympathetic to Ukrainian aspirations, has issued no such statements. Indeed, Josef Zisels, a vice-president of the World Jewish Congress who monitors the spread of anti-Semitic incidents in the former Soviet Union, noted that there were only two incidents in all of the forty Maidans throughout Ukraine, and both were purely rhetorical.
As a knowledgeable friend remarked (we’ll call him Eustace), a certain wave of anti-Russian and anti-Semitic sentiment is to be expected, though how serious remains to be seen.
What the RT article fails to do is pose questions which would allow one to contextualize the information. What happened to UNA/USO and what precisely is the Praviy Sektor? What role does Muzychko play in the Praviy Sektor, and what role does the Praviy Sektor play in the Maidan? How ideological is the movement? How do Jews rank in importance in Muzychko’s views as opposed to communists and Russians? What do other Maidan leaders think of Muzychko? How powerful is he? Has he ever attacked Jews?
It is unreasonable to expect full, definitive answers in a brief online piece, but none of the questions were even raised. That is the problem. The article is basically saying that here is a protestor, and he is a modern Nazi “aiming for power.” Thus, by extension, the protests are driven by Nazis aiming for power, and everyone knows how bad Nazis are, hence the protests are bad. Timothy Snyder said it best when he said that
If people in the West become caught up in the question of whether they are largely Nazis or not, then they may miss the central issues in the present crisis.