I had another dream, I had another life
Walker 
Plenty has been written on Mormonism and gender both here and elsewhere, especially in the wake of Ordain Women. David F. Holland, professor at Harvard Divinity School and son of LDS apostle Jeffrey R. Holland, gave an interview expounding on the common view Mormonism holds toward gender roles. The interview is balanced and thoughtful. Check it out.
I have a brief post over at The Slow Hunch about the perhaps unsurprising overlap of Viktor Frankl’s view of human imperfections and Peter Drucker’s view of management and organizations. Both have to do with weaknesses. Check it out.
Kevin Williamson has an article over at National Review that expresses many of the feelings I’ve had regarding some of the more hostile, self-righteous religious critics of capitalism. The article discusses the recent “panel of Catholic intellectuals and clergy, led by His Eminence Oscar Andrés Maradiaga,” that was “convened to denounce a political philosophy under the headline “Erroneous Autonomy: The Catholic Case against Libertarianism.” The conference was mainly about free-market economics rather than libertarianism per se…” But as Williamson notes, “There is something about the intellectually cloistered lives of religious professionals that prevents them from engaging in anything but the most superficial way with the 21st-century economy.” But then he just lays it out:
The implicit economic hypothesis [of the panel] is that producing a certain amount of goods more efficiently — in this case, with less labor — makes the world worse off. (“Why not use spoons?”) The reality is the opposite, and that is not a matter of opinion, perspective, or ideology — it is a material reality, the denial of which is the intellectual equivalent of insisting on a geocentric or turtles-all-the-way-down model of the universe.
The increasingly global and specialized division of labor and the resulting chains of production — i.e., modern capitalism, the unprecedented worldwide project of voluntary human cooperation that is the unique defining feature of our time — is what cut the global poverty rate in half in 20 years. It was not Buddhist mindfulness or Catholic homilies that did that. In the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens, neither of those great religious traditions, nor anything else that human beings ever came up with, made a dent in the poverty rate. Capitalism did.
Production and resources are important. “If the Good Samaritan had been the Poor Samaritan,” explains Williamson, “with no resources to dedicate to the stranger’s care, then the poor waylaid traveler would have been out of luck. All the good intentions that we may muster are not half so useful to a hungry person as a loaf of bread.” The fact that “men of the cloth, of all people, should be blind to what is really happening right now on the global economic scale is remarkable, ironic, and sad. Cure one or two people of blindness and you’re a saint; prevent blindness in millions and you’re Monsanto.” What is really happening is this: “there is no poverty in the capitalist world comparable to poverty in the early 18th century, much less to the poverty that was nearly universal in Jesus’ time. Our people are clothed, fed, and housed, and the few shocking exceptions, as with the case of the neglected mentally ill, are shocking because they are exceptions.”
It boils down to “how you intend to fulfill the Lord’s command to feed His sheep — with rhetoric or with bread…”
Too often, the “professional life” and the “spiritual life” are separated by both business leaders and their critics. The former don’t (or perhaps don’t want to) see how spirituality can impact their business, while the latter seem to think a “profane” object like business will taint the sacred. This has actually been a criticism lobbied at Mormonism: the mixing of the professional and the spiritual. But what is becoming more and more clear from research is that people-oriented practices (spiritual-based ethics) have positive impacts on the organization’s wealth and prosperity. I draw attention to this in my latest post at The Slow Hunch.
Check it out.
Hank Campbell at Science 2.0 has a great post on natural gas and climate change. After noting that the IPCC reported that methane has 23x the global warming effect as CO2 (though CO2 lasts longer), Campbell mentions a couple recent studies “that methane will cause global warming regardless of CO2″:[ref]Funny that few actually analyze the pros and cons of climate change, let alone the pros and cons of climate change policies.[/ref]
What changed? Well, CO2 emissions went down, and it wasn’t due to the $72 billion in taxpayer money which included solar panel subsidies or the afterthought of wind power or the other get-rich-quick schemes in alternative energy we have tried since 2009 – it even happened without nuclear power, the best and most viable zero-emissions energy of them all. It also happened without banning existing energy. The big change instead came because America switched to natural gas, and that was thanks to science and the free market. Due to that switch, energy emissions haven’t looked this good in 20 years. Coal emissions haven’t looked this good in 30 years.
Believe it or not, to environmental fundraisers, that is a really bad thing.
With CO2 emissions dropping, activists have started to wind up the machine against methane and they note it is worse than CO2 – without mentioning that it is short-lived or that it is the primary component in cleaner natural gas. Instead, ‘natural’ is being removed from the term completely and replaced with ‘shale’.
The answer to climate change according to many environmentalists is to just throw money at it:
Environmentalists…who know nothing at all about how real innovation works think they can just throw money at one thing and penalize another and capitalism magic happens. The real world, outside of academia and fundraising brochures, is a lot messier. Like evolution, innovation has starts and stops, sometimes it tries a few times and fails. What has never worked is assuming that if we spend 100X as much money, the process will go 100X as fast.
Environmentalists should be happy. Unfortunately, many are too busy worried about their pet agendas.
British philosopher Roger Scruton has a thought-provoking article entitled “The Good of Government” in the June 2014 issue of First Things. I’ve been a fan of Scruton ever since his BBC special “Why Beauty Matters” and his book Beauty. There is a kind of sophistication to his conservatism. He understands the concern of American conservatives:
The seemingly unstoppable expansion of regulations; the increasing control over what happens in the workplace, in the public square, and even in the family; the constant manufacturing of new crimes and misdemeanors, aimed at controlling how we associate and with whom; the attempts to limit First and Second Amendment rights—these developments are viewed by many conservatives with alarm. They seem to be taking America in a new direction, away from the free association of self-governing individuals envisaged by the founders, toward a society of obedient dependents, who exchange their freedom and their responsibilities for a perpetual lien on the public purse. And you only have to look at Europe to see the result…The welfare state has expanded beyond the limits envisaged in the New Deal, and the Supreme Court is now increasingly used to impose the morality of a liberal elite on the American people, whether they like it or not. These developments add to the sense among conservatives that government is taking over. America, they fear, is rapidly surrendering the rights and freedoms of its citizens in exchange for the false security of an all-controlling state. Those tasks that only governments can perform…are forced to compete for their budgets with activities that free citizens, left to themselves, might have managed far more efficiently through the associations of volunteers, backed up where necessary by private insurance.
Yet, Scruton recognizes, “Government is wrapped into the very fibers of our social being. We emerge as individuals because our social life is shaped that way. When, in the first impulse of affection, one person joins in friendship with another, there arises immediately between them a relation of accountability. They promise things to each other. They become bound in a web of mutual obligations. If one harms the other, there is a “calling to account,” and the relation is jeopardized until an apology is offered.” “In other words,” writes Scruton, “in our tradition, government and freedom have a single source, which is the human disposition to hold each other to account for what we do. No free society can come into being without the exercise of this disposition, and the freedom that Americans rightly cherish in their heritage is simply the other side of the American habit of recognizing their accountability toward others.”
The article is incredibly well-balanced. Check it out.
Randall Balmer of Dartmouth College has an interesting article in Politico Magazine arguing that the the origins of the modern Religious Right in American politics can be found in the fight over segregation. Rather than Roe v. Wade (which was seen as a “Catholic issue” by many evangelicals both several years before and after Roe), it was Green v. Connally that caused evangelicals to organize. The case ruling declared that “racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to the Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions, and persons making gifts to such schools are not entitled to the deductions provided in case of gifts to charitable, educational institutions.” One such institution was Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist college located in Greenville, South Carolina. The school eventually lost its tax exempt status, “alert[ing] the Christian school community about what could happen with government interference.”
The article is quite a read. Of course, this isn’t the only thing that led to the rise of the Religious Right,[ref]For example, see Darren Dochuk’s From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism and Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise.[/ref] but it is an element often left out. This is also true of the American Left’s history, which was often critical of the Constitution (particularly Wilson) while friendly toward fascism and eugenics.
It kind of makes you lose faith in American politics altogether (if you had any to begin with).
A brand new volume of essays on income inequality was recently published by the Manhattan Institute and is available for free online. Economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth introduces the volume with the following:
Claims of ever-increasing shares of wealth going to top earners are a perennial complaint. This year, partly due to the publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, discussions of inequality are preoccupying policymakers and political pundits.
Today Economics21.org is releasing Income Inequality in America: Fact and Fiction, a series of essays from leading experts on different aspects of measuring inequality. For Winston Churchill, inequality was an unavoidable part of economic life in capitalist societies. “The main vice of capitalism,” said the British Prime Minister, whose youngest daughter, Lady Mary Soames, died last weekend at the age of 91, “is the uneven distribution of prosperity. The main vice of socialism is the even distribution of misery.”
In conclusion, she states, “Empirical analysis shows that many commonly accepted ideas about income inequality are false or overstated. If policy recommendations are to be effective, they must be informed by an accurate picture of the current situation. Income Inequality in America: Fact and Fiction offers the empirical tools for such an analysis.”
Check it out.
Philosopher Joseph Spencer’s new book For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope was published just this week by Greg Kofford Books. In one chapter, he compares the earliest revelations on what Mormons know as the Law of Consecration to medieval Christian monasticism. The analogy is one that I’ve been tinkering with for a few months, so I was thrilled to see it in Spencer’s book. In a new post at The Slow Hunch, I explore Spencer’s analogy by applying some economic work that has been done on the monastic tradition (Spoiler: it involves both “spiritual capital” and divine curses that protect property rights).
Check it out.
Chris Henrichsen at Approaching Justice posted this fantastic video from Amnesty International. Twenty-five years ago today, the still unknown “Tank Man” took his stand.
Just because China wants to forget doesn’t mean we should.