Since the Enlightenment, humans have demonstrated dramatic moral progress. Almost everyone in the Western world today enjoys rights to life, liberty, property, marriage, reproduction, voting, speech, worship, assembly, protest, autonomy, and the pursuit of happiness. Liberal democracies are now the dominant form of governance, systematically replacing the autocracies and theocracies of centuries past. Slavery and torture are outlawed everywhere in the world (even if occasionally still practiced). The death penalty is on death row and will likely go extinct sometime in the 2020s. Violence and crime are at historic lows, and we have expanded the moral sphere to include more people as members of the human community deserving of rights and respect. Even some animals are now being considered as sentient beings worthy of moral consideration. Abstract reasoning and scientific thinking are the crucial cognitive skills at the foundation of all morality.
His evidence?:
“Numerous studies from the 1980s onward, for example, find that intelligence and education are negatively correlated with violent crime. As intelligence and education increase, violence decreases, even when controlled for socioeconomic class, age, sex, and race.”
“[N]ewer evidence that shows a positive correlation between literacy and moral reasoning, most particularly between reading fiction and being able to take the perspective of others.”
Negative correlation between high cognition and low demands for punitive punishment.
Positive correlation between high intelligence and classical liberal views.
“Positive correlation between the IQ of British children at the age of 10 and their endorsement of anti-racist, socially liberal, and pro-working women attitudes at the age of 30, holding the usual potentially intervening variables constant.”
This American Life episode #544 has a lame title but really profound content. It got me to thinking about the nature of love and also the nature of symbolism. So I wrote a post for Times and Seasons: When Symbolism isn’t Symbolic. You should check it out.
The latest issue of Econ Journal Watch has papers from the Mercatus-sponsored symposium “Economists on the Welfare State and the Regulatory State: Why Don’t Any Argue in Favor of One and Against the Other?” The issue features articles from economists like Robert Higgs, Arnold Kling, and Scott Sumner. However, the two that seem the most interesting to me are the articles by Swedish economist Andreas Bergh and social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. I’ve referenced Bergh’s work elsewhere due to his dispelling of several of myths regarding the Swedish welfare state (from both the Right and Left). His symposium contribution argues that a Hayekian welfare state can exist in theory by combining “low regulation with social insurance schemes that are not terribly vulnerable to the knowledge problem.”
In Haidt’s paper (with co-author Anthony Randazzo), the two surveyed economists and “found a relationship between views on empirical economic propositions and moral judgments.” Furthermore, in footnote #3, it says that Haidt is working on a book on capitalism and moral psychology. I imagine it will look something like his Zurich.Minds presentation.
Thomas Merton has remained one of my favorite spiritual writers for some time now. I often contemplate one passage in particular from his writings:
The West has lived for thousands of years under the sign of the Titan, Prometheus, the fire stealer, the man of power who defies heaven in order to get what he himself desires. The West has lived under the sign of will, the love of power, action, and domination. Hence, Western Christianity has often been associated with a spiritual will-to-power and an instinct for organization and authority. This has taken good forms, in devotion to works of education, healing the sick, building schools, order and organization in religion itself. But even the good side of activism has tended toward an overemphasis on will, on action, on conquest, on “getting things done” and this in turn has resulted in a sort of religious restlessness, pragmatism, and the worship of visible results.
There is another essential aspect of Christianity: the interior, the silent, the contemplative, in which hidden wisdom is more important than practical organizational science, and in which love replaces the will to get visible results. The New Man must not be a one-sided and aggressive activist: he must also have depth, he must be able to be silent, to listen to the secret voice of the Spirit. He must renounce his own will to dominate and let the Spirit act secretly in and through him…
I have seen this attitude both within myself and within Western Christianity in general. We are the do-something Christians, the sons and daughters of Protestant work ethic (even when we’re Catholic!). And like Merton says, this attitude has its positives. We are called to live out our faith in works of mercy and education.
Yet more and more I have come to appreciate that all the work in the world is fruitless and possibly dangerous without the guidance of the Holy Spirit, without interior direction from prayer and contemplation. Without this guidance, we can go out and do one thousand things, and for all we know, all one thousand of those things are misguided, unhelpful, or just wrong. I think this is especially true in our everyday actions, where we’re running on auto-pilot or caught off guard. In those moments when we’re not actively thinking, whatever resides in our innermost being will come out, and if our innermost being is not attuned to Christ, something less-than-helpful is probably going to come out. And whereas people without any particular belief are only responsible for themselves, we affect how people view the entire body of Christ. The stakes have been raised. Our need for direction is dire.
Prayer and contemplation also do more than preventing missteps. We can focus in on the parts of our lives that really matter, that bring us closer to Christ, and discard what does not matter. We can lay ourselves bare to the will of Christ in ways that we cannot do in passing daily thought. Speak, Lord, your servant is listening. Truly, only from love of Christ can all good things come. We cannot earn it. We cannot win it. We cannot buy it.
How indeed those persons delude themselves who locate holiness anywhere but in loving God. Some see perfection in austerities, others in almsgiving, others in prayer, others in frequenting the sacraments. For my part, I know of no other perfection than that of loving God with all the heart, because without love all the other virtues are nothing but a pile of stones. – Saint Frances de Sales
The action attitude also bleeds into other aspects of Christian life. For example, how often have we felt, even though we know better, that praying isn’t ‘doing something.’ I know I’ve had this thought before. As a Christian, this has got to be the silliest thing I can think if I know anything about the Gospels or the Bible in general, and yet I still sometimes have to walk myself through the simple logic of prayer. If God exists, and if God is a personal God who listens to prayers and answers them, then prayer is doing something. I recall the words of the Centurion in Luke 7:
Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof;therefore I did not presume to come to you. But say the word, and let my servant be healed.For I am a man set under authority, with soldiers under me: and I say to one, ‘Go,’ and he goes; and to another, ‘Come,’ and he comes; and to my slave, ‘Do this,’ and he does it.”
The centurion says “I am a man set under authority.” In other words, I know how these things work. I will that something be done, and it is done. You, Lord, have ultimate power and authority. If you will it to be so, shall it not be so? So prayer goes. We need but ask and trust that the Lord will see it done, although not always in ways and times that we expect.
Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light for my path.
So let us turn at all times and listen to what the Lord is saying. We live in a busy world, busy with works, busy with responsibilities, busy with the thoughts of the day. Let’s step back for a moment. What do I want done, and what does the Lord want done. I abdicate my will. Let thy will be done this day.
Today’s elite is a long way from the rotten lot of West Egg. Compared to those of days past it is by and large more talented, better schooled, harder working (and more fabulously remunerated) and more diligent in its parental duties. It is not a place where one easily gets by on birth or connections alone. At the same time it is widely seen as increasingly hard to get into.
The rest of the article tries to explain why this is so, citing assortative mating as one big reason. Perhaps because of the same social attitudes that have led more women into the workplace and to getting college degrees, “between 1960 and 2005 the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25% to 48%, and the change shows no sign of going into reverse.” These pairs are much more likely to be correlated in terms of intelligence and other genetic factors that help people be successful, for one thing. But even if you set aside the genetic component, successful people are likely to raise successful children because they value success and they obviously understand what it takes to be successful. So the more you have assortative mating, the more a meritocracy ends up looking a lot like an aristocracy after all.
So… what do we do about? The Economist article has nothing to suggest.
But, writing nearly three years ago, David Brooks did. In Why Our Elites Stink he argues, similarly to The Economist that “today’s meritocratic elites achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by being ambitious and disciplined.” Although wealth is obviously a factor, he argues that “the real advantages are much deeper and more honest.” So, are meritocracies just fundamentally flawed? Brooks doesn’t think so:
The corruption that has now crept into the world of finance and the other professions is not endemic to meritocracy but to the specific culture of our meritocracy. The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites.
Brooks’ argument is definitely not a popular for a lot of reasons. First, he doesn’t want to overthrow the meritocracy. He wants to work with it. I don’t think that this is because he likes it. I think it’s because he has that conservative tragic vision of the human condition: that life is fundamentally unfair and the only way to combat that unfairness is to recognize it. Some people are born smarter, stronger, and better looking than others. That will always be true. So life isn’t fair. There will always be elites. If the elites know they are elites, they can actually respond to that in appropriate ways (e.g. by being more service-oriented). But if we deny the fundamental unfairness of life, then we’re saying that people who have all the advantages don’t have to take any particular special care to help others.
The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.
Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.
If you read the e-mails from the Libor scandal you get the same sensation you get from reading the e-mails in so many recent scandals: these people are brats; they have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role.
Although it wasn’t a focus of his, I think another major element to this is the problem of America’s obsession with individualism. We have gone overboard in rejecting our collective, social nature. That is why modern hotshots have no sense of being “guardians for an institution the world depends on.”
Life will never be fair. There will always be elites. Saying that terrifies people, because they immediately think of racial or cultural or religious bigotry. But we can’t be so paralyzed by fear that we fail to heed reality. Also, the fear are largely unfounded, as The Economist observes that elites “included people with skin of every shade but rarely anyone with parents who worked blue-collar jobs.” So here we are, in a world that is unfair where elite people will pass down their elite traits to their elite kids. We can either try to redistribute everything (which will kill all incentives and lead to total social ruin) or we can instill an ethos of service and humility in elites. It’s not a perfect solution, but it seems like the best one.
Andrew Sullivan is a man of many beard stylings. They are basically all awesome.
Andrew Sullivan recently announced that he’s quitting blogging. That’s a big deal, especially if you were around in the early 2000s when blogging got started. (I once asked Megan McArdle about becoming a professional writer after reading The Up Side of DownWhich is incredible. The subtitle is “Why Failing Well is the Key to Success.” You should buy it.). She told me that the only shortcut she knew of was to start a blog in 2001. Oh well.)
I wasn’t around and blogging until 2006, when I launched my first (now abandoned) blog at Blogspot, so I’ve only come across Sullivan more recently, and I respect and admire him more for his political views (e.g. here) than as the god father of blogging. But I’ve read with interest the reaction of other elite bloggers to his news, like this Vox piece by Ezra Klein: What Andrew Sullivan’s exit says about the future of blogging.
Klein’s basic premise is that blogging is hard to scale. To some extent, this doesn’t matter to me very much. Klein notes that Sullivan “was trying to make his blog — and its sizable audience — into a business.” I, at Difficult Run, am not. I’d like to pay for hosting, but I have no interest in profiting substantially from DR. But Klein’s observation about why it’s hard to scale a blog is important to what we’re trying to do at DR. Basically, blogging is the antithesis of social networking:
Blogging is a conversation, and conversations don’t go viral… Blogging encourages interjections into conversations, and it thrives off of familiarity. Social media encourages content that can travel all on its own. Alyssa Rosenberg put it well at the Washington Post. “I no longer write with the expectation that you all are going to read every post and pick up on every twist and turn in my thinking. Instead, each piece feels like it has to stand alone, with a thesis, supporting paragraphs and a clear conclusion.”
My thoughts: some of this is about the low quality of blogs back when there was no competition. You could afford to assume your readers would do background reading on you because there weren’t many bloggers to compete with. This is also why Klein talks about how in the good ole days blogging was “unedited,” which is basically a polite way of saying poor quality, I think. The connection between having a more direct, personal tone and editing is just not that strong. You can edit and still sound like a blogger: casual, informal, and with a distinctive style. I’m not impressed by that.
But when it comes to social media: I absolutely agree that blogging is hard to scale. It’s long-form writing. Social networking is about memes. And I don’t mean the technical term, I mean annotated cat GIFs. Social networking is also about tribalism, echo-chambers, and outrage. Sure, there’s a lot of that in blogs too, but in a blog you have time for nuance if you want to. In a meme? Not so much.
If we’re going to realize the potential of the Internet, we’re gonna need writers who are willing to write with some depth and readers who are interested in reading it. That’s what we’re trying to do here. Slowly but surely, we’re committed to carving out a little space where important social and economic and technological and religious ideas get discussed at greater length (and with greater context and civility) than outlets like Twitter or Facebook tend to foster. The reasons Klein thinks blogs are on the ropes, in short, are precisely some of the reasons I’m committed to staying the course.
Which, btw, is not at all a dig at Sullivan. I’m not sure Klein’s analysis was really correct. I think Sullivan’s business was largely successful and take him at his word that his real reason for hanging up his hat is to unplug and get back into the real world. That I can understand.
Larry Correia decided that twice was enough for him, but this year Brad Torgersen (friend of Correia, albeit a more mild-mannered conservative) took up the torch instead. So you’ve got a lot of blog posts from folks like Correia, Torgersen, John C. Wright, Sarah Hoyt, and others on what the Hugos have come to be about versus what they should be about.
One of the major flashpoints is a short story called, “If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love.” To the conservative contingent, this story represents basically everything that is wrong with modern sci-fi. John C. Wright wrote that It “was a story I could — and did — do a better version of in one sitting, in less than an afternoon,” ridiculed it for ripping off If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, and called it neither a story nor science fiction. (I haven’t read his version, The Queen of the Tyrant Lizards, yet.) Sarah Hoyt attacked it at great length, writing that “It… could have been written by me at 12 and would have got, from my middle school teacher, exactly the sort of praise it got from science fiction professionals.”
In terms of substance: both Wright and Hoyt have a point. Even folks who have praised the work, like Ana Grilo, point out that there’s not really anything science fiction about it. Hoyt’s argument goes beyond questions of genre or quality, however, saying that “it’s the ideas packed into the story that are truly disturbing.” She goes on:
A story that reveals a total lack of knowledge of an entire class of people (manual laborers) and instead others them as sort of scary all purpose evil that will beat to death anyone who doesn’t look/act like them won an award voted on by – supposedly – adult professionals. Not only that, but adult professionals who keep claiming their tolerance and love of the “other.” What’s more, adult professionals who would almost certainly embrace “Marxism” as a good or at least correct idea. When did Marxists start loathing and fearing the working class? And admitting it?
Hoyt is not wrong. Want to see for yourself? The full text is online, and the whole thing is less than 1,000 words. Give it a read. I only read it after reading Hoyt and Wright trash it and my response was, “Hey, that’s pretty good.” Don’t get me wrong: it’s melodramatic and a little manipulative, but I’m kind of a sucker for that.
The Sad Puppies crew is far from unanimous in anything, but to the extent that there is a consensus, it has two parts. The first part holds that the Hugos shouldn’t be merit badges for doubleplusgood duckspeak. I’m on board with that. Intentionally or not (could just be an offshoot of standard clique behavior), the Hugo process has come to be dominated by a small, ideologically uniform faction. And that’s a bad thing.
The second part of the consensus holds that the Hugos are bound to be a popularity contest, so you might as well make the a popularity contest with the widest possible fan base. Which boils down to pretty much one concept: fun. Again and again the central complaint of Correia, Torgersen, and others boils down to this nostalgia for sci-fi as pop entertainment. I’m not on board for that.
The three books that defined sci-fi for me as a teenager were Dune, Ender’s Game, and Speaker for the Dead. All three won the Hugo, and Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead remain the only two books to win the best novel award for the same author in back-to-back years (1986 and 1987). Ender’s Game is an easy, fun read that has come to be marketed as YA in subsequent editions. I don’t know how many times I reread it, but it was quite a few. But Dune and Speaker for the Dead were not fun. They were grim and a little disturbing to the incredibly idealistic young man I was at the time. I didn’t reread either one until I was in my 30s, although when I did I found that they had aged much better than Ender’s Game (although I do still love Ender’s Game, don’t get me wrong!) If I had to pick one word to describe these books, it would not be fun. It would be great. Not like Tony the Tiger great, but like “great work of art” great.
I don’t think we have any better chance of finding objective criteria for greatness than we do for funness, but it’s still an important distinction. A great work can also be a fun work, and I don’t think that a Hugo award winner should ever be a slog to read. But a great work doesn’t have to be a fun work. A great work is a work that is reaching beyond fun, which may (or may not) come along for the ride.
I’ve read a good proportion (about one third, I believe) of all the Hugo-winning best novels. They do not come close to living up to the standards of Dune, Ender’s Game, and Speaker for the Dead, but the decline in quality is not some sudden, new problem.
The first winner ever, from 1953, is The Demolished Man. It doesn’t hold up very well, but it’s clearly an attempt to be a meaningful, significant book even if the psychological theories are dated to the point of quaint. But if you look at books like They’d Rather Be Right (also known as The Forever Machine) which won in 1955 or Waystation (also known as Here Gather the Stars) which won in 1964, you’re going to see message fiction so didactic, awkward, and transparent that Ancillary Justice (which won in 2014) appears downright subtle by comparison. Let’s be honest: lecturing the reader may be most closely associated with Robert Heinlein, but it’s been a tradition in sci-fi since the beginning. If you want to fil in the gap between the 1950s and the 2010s, look no farther than Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, which got a nomination in 1994 and a win in 1995 and 1997. These books are basically just the mirror image of Ayn Rand. (On Mars.)
The fact that message fiction is winning in the 2010s is not news. Message fiction has always been a part of the tradition of sci-fi. That’s just the baggage you carry with you when you’re “the literature of ideas” (as Pamela Sargent referred to sci-fi.) Whether the ideas are political or technical, there’s always the risk that they are going to steal the show and ruin your story. Hugos have gone to books like Ringworld or Rendezvous with Rama which are nothing more than flimsy, slipshod excuses to show off clever inventions. It’s not exactly message fiction, but it’s the same basic problem: a story that exists as an excuse for someone to tell you this really neat idea that they had. It’s like listening to someone describe their dream to you: shoot me now.
Nope, what is different about the 2010s is not fun-vs-message. It’s that the message has never been so dogmatically uniform. Heinlein and Robinson will both frustrate you with their philosophical meanderings (although Heinlein could also write), but at least they are polar opposites. Being frog-marched through a tour of someone’s neat invention might make you weep for the English language, but at least you’re not going to be labeled as a bigot if you find fault with Niven’s ringworld concept. (For the record: the concept really is stunning.)
The current crop of social justice message writers imagine they are the first on the scene to explore gender or write sympathetically about LGBT characters, but the only way it is possible to think that is if you have not actually read the masters who came before, folks like LeGuin and Bradbury that should be household names even if you don’t read a lot of sci-fi. The philosophies and minority characters of contemporary social justice writers have been an integral part of the sci-fi community for literally decades. There’s nothing wrong with standing on the shoulders of giants, but it is galling when a writer looks down from their lofty perch and thinks they made it up there all alone. That’s not the real problem, however. The real problem is that these writers are not only interested in expressing their message fiction in their writing, but also in enforcing conformity to it outside of the writing through (e.g.) control of the SFWA and domination of the awards process. The risk is not that we will get stuck with award-winning, unreadable message-fiction dreck. We’ve had a half century of that (off and on). The risk is that genuine intellectual diversity—which has been one of sci-fi’s greatest contributions—may finally be stamped out. That is an existential threat to the genre.
Which is why, as I said, I am basically on board with Sad Puppies. I am particularly happy that they went out of their way to put some authors on the slate who are liberal rather than conservative, as an expression that sci-fi should welcome intellectual diversity. Bravo. Let’s fight back against the homogenization of sci-fi. Down with echo chambers and three cheers for cognitive dissonance and multi-party conversations!
But when we do all that, I’d rather shoot for greatness than for fun. When I think of greatness, I think of a work where a great idea and great writing come together. Not necessarily a great story, however. Wright knocked “If You Were a Dinosaur” for not being a story, but I wonder what he would think of LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” This work is also arguably not a story, since it has not a single named character, no dialogue, and—strictly speaking—no plot. It is also, without doubt, one of the most powerful short stories ever penned in the English language, and it won the Hugo for Best Short Story in 1974. Once again, I urge you to judge for yourself. Here’s the complete text. It’s a little longer than “If You Were a Dinosaur,” but it’s also much better. Be warned, however, it might break your heart. Which is to say, it is not fun. But it is great.
This is why I can’t hop on the populist bandwagon that wants to dismiss literary sci-fi. Literary sci-fi, when it fails, fails miserably. You have fiction that is neither fun to read nor great. Case in point: Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos: Archives series. The first book in that series, Shikasta, was literally unreadable for me. (That didn’t stop her from winning a Nobel in literature. Go figure.) But when it is good, it can be really profound. I didn’t like every single story in The Secret History of Science Fiction (an anthology of literary sci-fi), but I did like a lot of them. I also found a book like Never Let Me Go incredibly powerful. I don’t care that The Handmaid’s Tale is message fiction because the writing is incredible and the story is also really, really compelling. I know The Road is trendy, but when I read it last year I decided it deserved the accolades.
I don’t have anything against fun fiction. Every time I start a John Ringo series, I find my self-control vanishing as I pony up for the sequels in Audible instead of waiting for my monthly credit because I just can’t restrain myself. (Side note: no one can tell me with a straight face that Ringo doesn’t have a political agenda loud and clear in his books, either.) Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter series doesn’t do it for me, but his Grimnoire books were amazing, and contained some of the best fight scenes I’ve ever read in any genre. Jim Butcher is my favorite living author, bar none, due to his incredible Dresden Files series which is definitely some of the funnest reading I’ve done in my life. Nor am I discounting fun fiction as merely fluff: both Ringo and Butcher have brought tears to my eyes. (That might seem a bit odd, especially of Ringo, but I dare anyone to read the first chapters of Islands of Rage and Hope and not wipe their eye at least once. If you pass the test, congratulations: you have no heart.)
But let’s be honest: the reason most franchise fiction doesn’t get nominated (despite its popularity and despite a lot of it being fun) is that most of it is dreck. There, I said it. It’s mediocre writing just one notch above fan fiction designed to milk diehard fans who would pay money for a book containing nothing but the ingredient lists from breakfast cereals if it had Star Wars or Star Trek on the cover. And let’s further stipulate that if the Hugos were really just a broad-based popularity contest we could skip the whole nominating / voting hoopla and just use pick the best-seller for the year. Then the problem just reduces to data availability and politics are out the window (except as they pertain to the aggregate purchasing behavior of fandom). Nothing says “popular” more loudly than “sales,” am I right?
The trouble is, we don’t need an award for best-seller status. We already have that award. It’s called “best-seller status.” What the Hugos should try to be, in an ideal world, is the best guess of people who are smart and educated (about the sci fi canon in particular) of which of the stories that came out this year are going to be the stories that will still be powerful, relevant, and important in the future. In short: which of this year’s stories are great.
Sometimes, the awards have done a pretty good job of that (as with Dune, Ender’s Game, Speaker for the Dead, and several others). Sometimes, the awards have done a lousy job at that. But, until now, the awards may have been very uneven, but they were not hijacked and used as a tool in an ideological war. I’m rooting for Sad Puppies. If the Hugos just went back to their regularly scheduled unevenness: that’d be great. But hey, as long as the topic is open for discussion, I’m pulling for us to aim a little higher.
As all three readers of The Slow Hunch probably know, I have onceagain failed to link to its latest posts here at Difficult Run. Alas, this is probably one of many reasons that my personal blog tends to be rather lonely.
Therefore, instead of linking to every single TSH post individually whenever it goes live, I will do monthly recaps with links to all the latest write-ups. My posts tend to be short and it seems a bit much (both for readers and my memory, apparently) to dedicate a DR post to a single TSH one. So, without further ado, here’s what you missed at The Slow Hunch this last month or so:
Feeling Good About Work – Features a TED talk by behavioral economist Dan Ariely on how meaning, creativity, and challenge can motivate us at work. I briefly connect it to the Mormon concept of eternal progression.
2015 Faith & Knowledge Conference – The abstract for my upcoming presentation at the Faith & Knowledge Conference at the University of Virginia, entitled “”Labour…Is Their Religion”: Toward a Mormon Theology of Work.”
Reimagining Business – Features a TED talk by business professor Raj Sisodia on why business is good, ethical, noble, and heroic and how conscious capitalism can keep it that way.
“…Working With, For, and Through Other People” – Features an interview with Wharton professor Adam Grant on creating a “giver” culture within organizations. I round it out with a quote from Hugh Nibley on consecration and charity.
Jonathan Haidt on Dynamism With Decency – Features a Zurich.Minds presentation by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt about capitalism and business ethics. His comments fit comfortably into my version of a Mormon theology of work.
Wellbeing: The Dignity of Work – Looks at Gallup research on the impact one’s career (or lack of) has on overall well-being. Long-term unemployment can be surprisingly detrimental. Plus, you get a performance by Irish folk singer Christy Moore.
Blessed Are the Laborers? – Draws on Arthur Brooks’ research on work and happiness, eschatological hopes of the Old Testament, and Jesus’ beatitudes to suggest that work has an integral role in the age to come. Plus, Incubus rocking out.
I expanded my thoughts on the LDS Church and gay rights from a blog post into a piece that First Things liked enough to run with. Couple of quick notes. First, that article has even more typos than my usual posts. The “heard of Jesus’s message”? I can only hang my head in shame and try to do better next time. Second, I’ve been talking with a law professor about religious liberty to make sure I’m not too far off-base. The one thing he says I was missing from my analysis was that liberals don’t believe religious liberty is confined to only the liberties that you get via secular civil rights (like freedom of speech or privacy). They also tend to suggest that religion ought to be treated as a suspect classification like race or gender. This means that any law which explicitly targeted a religious group would be subject to strict scrutiny.
Practically speaking, however, that doesn’t change much. Most of the rules that would constitute a real burden on a person’s free expression of religion are not going to be crafted as explicitly anti-religious, so we’re still talking about a huge gulf between what conservatives have in mind when they talk about religious liberty (and also what the First Amendment strongly implies about religious liberty by mentioning it explicitly) and what liberals have in mind when they talk about religious liberty.
“Heart of Africa” is a feature film set in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country consistently misrepresented. We will show it in its dignity and beauty. The film is based on experiences of missionaries there, both African and Anglo. One of the missionaries is a Congolese former revolutionary and another a young man from Idaho who has heretofore not seen black people. Aime Mbuyi, who was a revolutionary before he became a missionary, has provided the screenwriter with full descriptions of the revolutionary meetings, including the songs sung at the boarding school where the revolutionaries lived.
The film will be bi-continental, much of it filmed in South Africa using the “Out of Africa” production team, with portions shot in Kinshasa, DR-Congo. Our director is one of the best in the nation, Sterling Van Wagenen.
The initial goal of the Kickstarter is $30,000, but they can do a lot more if they raise the funds.
At the $400,000. level, we can move into filming beyond the preliminary and do full principal photography. With another $100,000–making a total of $500,000–we can do editing and post-production, and we can integrate the music as well. (Music will be one of the most compelling aspects of the film.) Were we to raise $1.8 million, we could not only complete the film but move into wide distribution.
That’s a long way to go, but this is a project that is well worth supporting. The faster we help them get to $30,000 the better shot they have of getting to the higher goals, and the early days of a Kickstarter campaign can be the most crucial. Check it out and if–like me–you think that this is a story worth supporting then lend a hand. Backer levels start at $5. Here’s the link again.
Science writer Michael Shermer argues that we are in the March 2015 issue of Reason, based on his new book The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom. He writes,
Which is incredible. The subtitle is “Why Failing Well is the Key to Success.” 
