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January 02, 2009
50 Ways to Improve Your Life
That's the promise of a recent Year-End issue of US News & World Report. Publishing wisdom is that people like lists: Best Movies of All Time, Ten Best Dressed Pro-Wrestlers, Top Ten Baseball Games, and so on. People also like "how-to" articles. So when you give readers a numbered list for "how-to" do nothing less than Improve Your Life, it's pure genius! Why, oh why, haven't I published "Fifty Ways to Get to Heaven"? or "Fifty Ways to Choose a Spouse Who Will Become a Saint"? [probably by being married to you]
So I shamelessly piggyback Mere Comments on to these life-changing steps to the truly Good Life, by listing a few of them, which they give in no apparent order other than 1-50:
9. Take an afternoon nap.
15. Save that Nov. 5 paper (Obama Wins)
16. Brush up your Socrates
19. Learn to speak Russian.
22. Start a non-profit.
24. Unscrew that Riesling: "an increasingly vocal segment of the wine industry argues that screw caps preserve wine better than the traditional corks."
27. Choose Obama stocks: in infrastructure, alternative energy, healthcare sectors
33. Line dry your laundry
34. Switch to a push mower
36. Help yourself and others (volunteer!)
44. Teach your kids to cook
49. Watch *Let It Be*
You get the idea. Hmm, not one shred of religion.... My list might start: Pray, study, and meditate in Scripture, confess, repent, confess some more, repent always, and all you need is to love God, your neighbors, especially your family, your co-workers, and those who hate you.
Most of the things on the US News list aren't all that bad, of course. As a matter of fact, number 9 looks pretty good as I write.
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Comments
Now there's a 'line' I never thought of! (in truth I don't use lines) "If you marry me, you'll be more likely to become a saint!" ;-) ;-) ;-)
Posted by: labrialumn | Jan 2, 2009 10:56:41 PM
Suppose you don't have anyone who hates you?
Why should I tell all my personal problems/issues/secrets to some stranger?
Posted by: fred preuss | Jan 2, 2009 11:23:32 PM
"not one shred of religion"
What about items 15 and 27?
Posted by: Marcel | Jan 3, 2009 7:33:48 AM
51. Stop reading books and lists of ways to improve your life, and get on with living it.
Also, how can you "brush up your Socrates", when Socrates never wrote anything?
As for No.22, I seem to be headed in that direction, though not intentionally.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 3, 2009 7:53:46 AM
Fred: Enemies can be a blessing, too. Your friends try to ignore your faults, while your enemies delight in pointing them out. It's a hard lesson, but you have to bite the bullet and listen hard. (Needless to say, I'm still working on it.)
Regarding revealing personal problems/issues/secrets to a "stranger," if it is the Sacrament of Reconciliation (penance, confession) you are referring to, the man you are speaking to may be not personally known to you (although having a regular confessor is important). However, God is the One to whom you are truly confessing, and He knows you inside and out. The priest is His agent, not His substitute.
Posted by: Michael D. Harmon | Jan 3, 2009 8:47:33 AM
>>>Fred: Enemies can be a blessing, too. Your friends try to ignore your faults, while your enemies delight in pointing them out. It's a hard lesson, but you have to bite the bullet and listen hard. (Needless to say, I'm still working on it.)<<<
Not only that, you can tell a lot about a man's character by the enemies he has; strive to have the right kind of enemies. And always remember, "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer".
>>>although having a regular confessor is important<<<
Can't stress this too much. Even better than a regular confessor is having a "spiritual father". And he would hardly be a stranger--a good one knows you better than you know yourself.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 3, 2009 8:59:17 AM
#1 should have been "THROW OUT THE T.V."
Posted by: Don | Jan 5, 2009 7:38:50 AM
Television is just a tool, to be used for good or ill. When you start blaming the technology, it's an admission of abdication of personal responsibility.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 5, 2009 8:09:38 AM
>When you start blaming the technology, it's an admission of abdication of personal responsibility.
Personal responsibility is not incompatible with recognizing the costs associated with television. Personal responsibility is seeing to it that you effectively deal with those costs.
Dour enough?
Posted by: David Gray | Jan 5, 2009 9:14:53 AM
>>> Personal responsibility is seeing to it that you effectively deal with those costs.<<<
One can say the same thing of a car, or a gun, or even that thing between our legs. It is easy to avoid dealing with the moral issues of all simply by getting rid of them, but it is not mature or responsible to do so.
>>>Dour enough?<<<
No, that wasn't dour, just persnickety.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 5, 2009 2:48:36 PM
We can easily live without television, while cars, guns and the other thing are useful in themselves. By your account, I must have been irresponsible and immature for much of my life when I didn't have television. (Oh wait . . . I was, but it had nothing to do with not having television.)
Posted by: Judy K. Warner | Jan 5, 2009 3:18:32 PM
"Television is just a tool, to be used for good or ill. When you start blaming the technology, it's an admission of abdication of personal responsibility."
Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, among others, would disagree. Some kinds of technology lend themselves more readily to abuse than others, and some may even be inherently abusive or corrosive. For more on this, see "Frankenstein."
Posted by: Rob G | Jan 5, 2009 3:19:28 PM
I grant that Stuart might have a point about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater for most things. But I've done without television for over two decades now and I haven't missed it at all. There is *always* something better to do (spiritually, intellectually, physically, and emotionally) than watch television. Sometimes the good in something is like picking undigested raisins out of a pile of dog feces. Yeah, you could clean them up and they might still be nourishing. But what's the point? TV programming has been like that for as long as I have been alive and watching (and I watched pretty regularly from age 8 to 18). That said, I do buy DVDs of things I have heard are good and watch those. I also watch feature movies and other sorts of filmed media.
Posted by: W.E.D. Godbold | Jan 5, 2009 3:22:17 PM
>>>But I've done without television for over two decades now and I haven't missed it at all.<<<
But Gene, how do you know? Maybe you missed out on quite a bit, but since you don't play, you can't win (even if the game is rigged). As I have said of the Amish, it is actually easy to turn your back on the world, to insulate yourself from all the temptations of modernity. It is much, much harder to go out into the world and engage it, while at the same time retaining your soul. Remember, every age has its "modernity", and in every age, there have been people recoiling from it in horror (that's pretty much the appeal of Wahabbism, by the way). But Christians really aren't given the option of turning away from the world, not if they want to fulfill the Great Commission. Sure, monastics withdraw from the world, but as I have said, they do so in order to return to it. Television is a powerful technology, with the ability to reach millions. But it is the message not the medium that is important, and Christians have been remiss in turning their backs on television, film and other mass media, thereby ceding the key terrain to the enemy without a fight. Time to stop dissing television and movies, time to start taking control of it by producing superior products that will attrack audiences. After all, we DO have the better message, don't we?
Posted by: Stuart koehl | Jan 5, 2009 4:14:56 PM
>>>Some kinds of technology lend themselves more readily to abuse than others, and some may even be inherently abusive or corrosive. For more on this, see "Frankenstein."<<<
True, but television hardly qualifies (and MacLuhan is way overrated, by the way). Biomedical science is a good call, though. The question arises, though, of how you can determine whether a technology is 'inherently abusive or corrosive" until you have explored its uses. We could always follow the "better safe than sorry" route (equivalent to not having a television), and simply turn our backs on all but the most primitive medicine. Same for almost any other technology, or any other medium of communications for that matter. What is said of television was said of films; what was said of films was said of plays; what was said of plays was said of books; what was said of books was probably also said of epic poetry.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 5, 2009 4:50:58 PM
So, since pornography is pretty much everywhere, should we watch it so as to engage the world? How can we criticize it without immersing ourselves in it so we know what it's really like?
Posted by: Wahhabi Babe | Jan 5, 2009 4:52:36 PM
Here's something from Andrew Breitbart in the Washington Times today:
On Tuesday, I launch Big Hollywood (bighollywood.breitbart .com), a big group blog that will feature hundreds of the big minds from the fields of politics, journalism, entertainment and culture.Big Hollywood is not a "celebrity" gabfest or a gossip outpost - it is a continuous politics and culture posting board for those who think something has gone drastically wrong and that Hollywood should return to its patriotic roots.
Big Hollywood's modest objective: to change the entertainment industry. To make Hollywood something we can believe in - again. In order to give millions of Americans hope.
Until conservatives, libertarians and Republicans - who will be the lion's share of Big Hollywood's contributors - recognize that (pop) culture is the big prize and that politics is secondary, there will be no victory in this important battle.
...If conservatives don't figure out popular culture soon, the movement will die a deserving death. If Hollywood liberals can't learn how to play well with those with whom they disagree, Big Hollywood will have a field day at their close-minded and intolerant expense. The days of open bullying in the marketplace of ideas are nearing their end.
The whole thing is here. (It's two pages; read both.)
Posted by: Judy K. Warner | Jan 5, 2009 5:00:09 PM
>>>So, since pornography is pretty much everywhere, should we watch it so as to engage the world? How can we criticize it without immersing ourselves in it so we know what it's really like?<<<
You might want to meditate on the first generations of Christians, who had to deal with that reality in a much more blatant manner every day.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 5, 2009 5:02:35 PM
>You might want to meditate on the first generations of Christians, who had to deal with that reality in a much more blatant manner every day.
Yes, I imagine they would have been big fans of television...
Posted by: David Gray | Jan 5, 2009 8:13:25 PM
>>Yes, I imagine they would have been big fans of television...<<
If they had EWTN. I imagine Sister Angelica was a spitfire even back then.
Posted by: Bobby Neal Winters | Jan 5, 2009 9:16:25 PM
>>>Yes, I imagine they would have been big fans of television...<<<
No television, but they did have the theater, and the ampitheatre, and the circus, and all those statues with the herms, and the temples to Venus, Eros, Dionysius, Ishtar; and those murals, and the ubiquitous brothels.
>>>If they had EWTN. I imagine Sister Angelica was a spitfire even back then.<<<
I think that some of the Fathers, and possibly more of the Mothers of the Church, would have taken to the medium like ducks to water. Rhetoric, after all, was popular entertainment, and people went to hear great speakers carry on for hours at a time. And within the Church, the great homilists, trained in classical rhetoric, did likewise.
The life of John Chrysostom tells of how he had to chastise his congregation in Antioch for interrupting his homilies with raucus applause and cheering. He lambasted them for half an hour or more, at the end of which they clapped and cheered all the louder. This was, after all, "the Golden Age of Liturgy". I can easily see the Golden Tongue with his own half hour (no, better make it an hour) show, whereby he could reach millions rather than just hundreds or thousands at a time. Of course, he would have to share the airwaves with the like of Ambrose of Milan (over on the Latin channel), Basil the Great, Gregory Nanzianzen, Gregory of Nyssa, and their sister, St. Macrina the Elder--now, she WAS a pistol.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 5, 2009 10:36:22 PM
"how do you know? Maybe you missed out on quite a bit, but since you don't play, you can't win"
I've gone without TV now for over 8 years -- don't miss it a bit. How do I know? Because I hear daily discussions among all those people who haven't given it up, and I hear almost nothing I feel even remotely attracted towards. Indeed, much of it is repellent, both morally and aesthetically. It is, by-and-large, junk food for the mind.
About the only thing I miss is PBS -- Mystery, Masterpiece Theatre, etc. But I usually catch up with those later on DVD.
"True, but television hardly qualifies"
In your opinion.
"(and MacLuhan is way overrated, by the way)."
Again, in your opinion.
I was an avid TV guy from childhood till about eight years ago -- a span of over 30 years. The medium IS part of the problem. It creates short attention spans, and it lends itself to the dumbing down of culture. It trains viewers to think that huge problems can be solved in the space of an hour (with periodic stops for 2 to 3 minutes of the mind-numbing coercion known as "commercials"). Finding good television is, as Gene described it above, like picking peanuts out of poop.
**We could always follow the "better safe than sorry" route (equivalent to not having a television), and simply turn our backs on all but the most primitive medicine. Same for almost any other technology, or any other medium of communications for that matter.**
False dichotomy. Rejecting television does not imply going back to non-anesthetic dentistry or pre-modern hygiene and it's ludicrous to equate the two. "Turn off the radio and take the old fiddle down from the wall," wrote Andrew Lytle.
"Better safe than sorry" isn't always and everywhere applicable. But neither is "Create the monster. We're not sure if we can control him, but we'll worry about that later."
Posted by: Rob G | Jan 6, 2009 6:34:15 AM
>>>In your opinion.<<<
I only crib from the best.
>>>How do I know? Because I hear daily discussions among all those people who haven't given it up, and I hear almost nothing I feel even remotely attracted towards. Indeed, much of it is repellent, both morally and aesthetically. It is, by-and-large, junk food for the mind.<<<
You hang with the wrong people.
>>>About the only thing I miss is PBS -- Mystery, Masterpiece Theatre, etc. But I usually catch up with those later on DVD.<<<
So you DO watch television. What you mean is you don't watch broadcast television. Yet the programs you watched were originally broadcast, which means you COULD have watched them at that time, which means there WAS worthwhile programming, but you were too darned lazy--or didn't trust your judgment enough--to discriminate between the gold and the dross.
Newsflash! Ninety percent of everything, at all times and in all places, is crap. So what you say of television can also be said of cinema, theater, fine art, music, literature and anything else produced by man.
>>> It creates short attention spans, and it lends itself to the dumbing down of culture.<<<
Again, I refer you to the fact that curmudgeons have been saying this about every new medium to come down the track since someone scratched a pictograph on a rock. Literacy destroyed oral poetry, and undoubtedly man lost a lot of his mnemetic skills, which was a loss. And a lot of stuff has been written to mislead and corrupt susceptible minds, thereby leading to a dumbing down of culture (read an Jacqueline Susanne lately?). But I doubt you would want us to burn all the books.
>>>Finding good television is, as Gene described it above, like picking peanuts out of poop.<<<
So is finding good books, good plays, good art--as I said, ninety percent of everything is crap. Over time, it is forgotten, which means, looking back over time, we see only those things people have thought worth preserving--it's not a representative sample. But to get that non-representative sample, someone had to pick the peanuts from the poop,
>>>"Turn off the radio and take the old fiddle down from the wall," wrote Andrew Lytle.<<<
So, now radio corrupts culture, too?
>>>"Better safe than sorry" isn't always and everywhere applicable. But neither is "Create the monster. We're not sure if we can control him, but we'll worry about that later."<<<
More along the lines of, this is a cool technology. Let's not use it to make monsters, OK?
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 6, 2009 7:36:53 AM
>No television, but they did have the theater, and the ampitheatre, and the circus, and all those statues with the herms, and the temples to Venus, Eros, Dionysius, Ishtar; and those murals, and the ubiquitous brothels.
And they brought all those things into the intimacy of their home?
Posted by: David Gray | Jan 6, 2009 7:56:10 AM
>>>And they brought all those things into the intimacy of their home?<<<
As a significant proportion of early Christians were slaves, I don't see how they avoided it. Even free Christians were immersed in a highly sexualized and violent culture, and lived in much more crowded conditions than we do. You really have no idea of how ubiquitous this stuff was. A good guide would be Wayne A. Meeks' "The First Urban Christians" and "The Moral World of the First Urban Christians". Paul alludes the the situation, and the ante-Nicene Fathers, Hermas. 1 Clement and the Didache do as well. Tertullian (who would have been a dour Presbyterian had he lived 1500 years later) turned his back on the culture; others, like Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr did not, nor did their successors Athanasius, Ambrose, Gregory Nyssan, or Basil the Great. Athens and Jerusalem have everything to do with each other, and if Jerusalem turns its back on Athens, then it risks becoming utterly irrelevant, failing the Great Commission, and, like the Jews of Christ's day, becoming insular and self-absorbed, hiding their light under a bushel basket, and thus not being a light unto the nations.
Aside from which, if you cannot tell, I get tired of invidious comparisons between the past and the present. It puts me in mind of the Prologue to John Keegan's "Six Armies in Normandy", which is a miniature Bildungsroman in which he describes how he and his view of history was shaped and reshaped by his sojourn in the English countryside during World War II:
. . .in a curious way, the war released me from its grasp. Another world, the world of the imagination, that of the more distant past, had already begun to possess me and, for what remained of my enchanted exile in the countryside, it was there that I dwelt. The surrounding landscape was planted particularly thickly with medieval churches and dotted with villages and townships on which Georgian domestic builders had laid a wide and kindly hand. I had got to know many of these buildings well in my travels, learnt to distinguish Norman from Perpendicular and both from Victorian Gothic (on which I directed a scorn untinged by Betjemanite doubt), came to admire the eighteenth century proportionality and the gentle adaptation of Doric and Corinthian severity to cozy market-place front doors. And I peopled them with dweller who seemed to me proper in their spirit; the churches with pre-Reformation parsons resembling the Benedictines at our neighboring abbey, Oxford and Cambridge men who interspersed their plainchant with rough shooting and rugger; the houses with decorous, benevolent, politely educated Jane Austen families differing only from their current occupants by way of buckled shoes and lace. Both sets of characters I found deeply attractive, and I surrounded them with the appropriate cast to play the supporting roles--with pious, sparsely prosperous villeins, craftsmanly, wordless guildsmen white with stone chippings or sawdust, packhorse drovers looking for packhorse bridges, millers, merchants, carters, bargemen, village schoolmasters with a thumb in Chapman's Homer, town worthies with a deep pocket and an eye for a classical cornice, scarlet-coated grenadiers soberly supping beside their sprig-muslined maids. The two worlds ran together in the mind's eye as easily and naturally as, in the prettier townscapes, did the two architectures, producing a vision of the past at once Catholic and Anglican, Plantagent and Hanoverian, feudal and municipal, pastoral and mercantile, and throughout friendly, easeful and utterly pacific.
Time, teaching and reading would show me that it was all the most perfect nonsense; that the world of the past was not a potpourri of its quainter elements but as getting-and-spending a one as that of the present, the getting harder and the spending stingier; that its prevailing mood was not harmony but conflict, which man's nastier qualities were more often deployed to resolve than charity or reason; that the lyrical emotions it aroused in me, dissolving all differences of class, interest, period, and place in a poetic haze, were a positive obstacle to grasping its passions, hopes and needs. I struggled against the death of romance and the dissolution of my peaceable kingdom. How could an age that had built Glastonbury Abbey not be kinder than that which had built the cotton mills? How could a world of hand tools not be more satisfying to work in than a world of machines? How could travel by horse not be more fun than by steam or oil? Who would not choose to live under thatch instead of slate, eat stone-milled instead of shop-bought bread, wear broadcloth instead of rayon? Disease, I accepted, was a hazard which afflicted the inhabitants of my imagined and vanished England with a frequency and severity we were spared. But that they were also afflicted in the vast majority by seasonal hunger, winter cold, constant poverty, backbreaking labor for little return, legal inequity, illteracy, ignorance, and frequent disorder as a view to which I retreated reluctantly, step by step, and with a lingering conviction that the sun-warmed stones of cloister and market cross could not really lie.
And of course, they do not altogether. But to begin to see how and why was to take as much times as unlearning the myths of beauty and peace they had spoken to me of in the first place. In the process I was taught a great deal about other places and times than the England of the late middle and early modern age, and of other subjects than the social and cultural history which were my starting points. I learnt enough imperial history to accept that it had two sides, enough political history to perceive that power was important and that parties had purpose, enough intellectual history to distinguish between debate and dissent, enough economic history to to see that work was about business not pleasure, enough military history to grasp the cardinality of force, dubiety of valor and marginality of the just cause. A cild of war, it was military history which particularly aroused me. In time I grasped that I had lived through great events, and that the determination I had placed on them--the certainty of victory, the indulgent contempt for the enemy, the patronizing acceptance of allies--was merely an index of how limited was my viewpoint. . .
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 6, 2009 8:24:21 AM
"You hang with the wrong people."
My TV-watching friends and acquaintances run the gamut from working class blue-collar types to folks with graduate degrees, both pagan and Christian. It is a wide spectrum.
"you were too darned lazy--or didn't trust your judgment enough--to discriminate between the gold and the dross"
Hah. On the contrary, I learned to discriminate by consciously attempting to improve my 'palate'. You don't learn to appreciate Cabernet by drinking gallon after gallon of Riunite Lambrusco.
"But to get that non-representative sample, someone had to pick the peanuts from the poop"
Yes, and in the parlance of the day, they are called "critics." They get paid to pick through poop so I don't have to.
"More along the lines of, this is a cool technology. Let's not use it to make monsters, OK?"
Fallen man's penchant for monster-making seems to be irresistable.
"And they brought all those things into the intimacy of their home?"
Not only that, but PAY to have them brought in!
Posted by: Rob G | Jan 6, 2009 8:36:53 AM
By the way, the television is an inanimate piece of machinery. Having one in your house is no different from having a coffee table. Your main concern is the content transmitted via the television, and then again, there is no way that can invade the intimacy of your home unless you allow it, for the television comes with two features that allow you to shut it out whenever you like: a channel selector and an off switch. In a way, your veto over television content is far more immediate and absolute than your veto over the contents of a book. Don't like what you are seeing on the tube/ Change the channel or shut it off. But a book is insidious--it sneaks up on you slowly, and before you know what is happening, the corrupting thought is already insinuated into your consciousness. There is really no way to know what is in a book, or whether it is worthwhile, other than to read it through to the end.
By which time it is too late.
Books are dangerous. Much more dangerous than television.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 6, 2009 8:45:54 AM
>>>Yes, and in the parlance of the day, they are called "critics." They get paid to pick through poop so I don't have to.<<<
So, you are content to let others do your thinking for you?
>>>Fallen man's penchant for monster-making seems to be irresistable.<<<
Of course. But since one can make a monster out of anything, the only way to avoid situations where one could make monsters is never to touch anything at all that could possibly, in any way, be used to make them.
>>>Not only that, but PAY to have them brought in!<<<
Again, do not cherry pick the past so as to denigrate the present.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 6, 2009 8:48:59 AM
"So, you are content to let others do your thinking for you?"
Anyone who reads criticism is not thinking for himself? I guess Touchstone should nix its book review section then!
"the only way to avoid situations where one could make monsters is never to touch anything at all that could possibly, in any way, be used to make them"
Right, but no one I know is advocating that. There is, however, considerable support for a no-holds-barred technology extravaganza.
"So, now radio corrupts culture, too?"
It had just started to in 1930 when Lytle wrote that piece. And it does today via rotten corporate-created pop music.
Posted by: Rob G | Jan 6, 2009 9:16:15 AM
"By the way, the television is an inanimate piece of machinery. Having one in your house is no different from having a coffee table."
Used to be. The new ones, you can't set anything on top of them. My grandmother's old one, in the garage, still provides a pretty good work surface.
I think that the path of least resistance, today, leads us to cafeteria-style religion and indiscriminate pop culture intake. Cafeteria-style media interaction, instead, works for me - even if the media is a very unhealthy cafeteria full of fried foods, fats, and much more fast-acting poisions than those. At least I pick the unhealthy stuff which I enjoy the very most, in relatively small portions, instead of letting them fill my plate for me.
Whereas at church, I try very hard to eat my vegetables without complaint...
Posted by: Joe Long | Jan 6, 2009 9:38:05 AM
>>>Anyone who reads criticism is not thinking for himself? I guess Touchstone should nix its book review section then!<<<
You're the one who put it that way. So, do you let criticism determine whether you read or don't read, see or don't see (my parents, until quite recently, lived by whatever was said in the New York Times; that they don't anymore is not due to some epiphany, but to poor delivery service at the end of Long Island). That cuts both ways--critics today, for the most part, do not share your values or your tastes. To rely on them is to allow your foes to determine your preferences. On the other hand, are reviews just one of many ways in which you discriminate between the good, the bad and the ugly? Critics can be useful, and some even have something interesting to say, but for the most part, they're drones. At the end of the day, the only way to decide is to see or hear for yourself.
>>>There is, however, considerable support for a no-holds-barred technology extravaganza.<<<
Again, who determines what is "good" and what is "bad" technology? And by what criteria? Hence my unwillingness to subject this area to prior restraint. Cloning and recombinant DNA, for instance, can be a very useful technologies, applied to animals, plants and bacteria; but we should not clone or genetically modify human beings. In order to prevent the latter, I do not think we need to turn our backs on the rest.
>>>It had just started to in 1930 when Lytle wrote that piece. And it does today via rotten corporate-created pop music.<<<
So don't listen. Though, of course, radio did a lot more to bring great music, as well as drama, humor, and information to the masses than you are willing to concede. In addition, the very demon technology that you would blame for corporate-created pop music now also makes available so many stations that all tastes can be accommodated.
By the way, you need to read some of the old 17th and 18th century broadsides if you think pop music today is worthless. As I said--Sturgeon's Law.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 6, 2009 12:13:10 PM
Hmmm...but Jim's point is how do we improve our lives? Like Rob, I'm a non-user of television: I kicked the habit for Lent about 15 years ago and haven't looked back. But my wife and kids are still avid viewers. For me, life is too short for TV and there are too many books to read, too many classical CDs to enjoy. So how do you improve your life? It's easy to make lists, but much tougher to define the principle. I think simplification is a fairly obvious rule, but even that has to be taken in moderation. ;-) Some complications are definitely worth the effort. (I'm thinking, for example, of the Ipod, which I think is a net benefit, although it does introduce new problems as well.) Perhaps developing a sharper sense of mortality? A lot of silly fluff gets dropped then. Perhaps becoming more attuned to God, through Scripture, worship, nature, people? Or seeking to "know thyself," and all the pain that entails? No one rule fits all.
One thing that has worked for my wife and for me since our kids have left the house is to spend up to a half hour of some evenings after dinner just sitting in the living room with a glass of wine, the dog, a bit of soft music, and any random conversation that comes to mind. We don't DO anything. We reflect, chat, pet the Doodle. It just sort of developed. Let the kitchen cleanup wait; let the TV cool; let the newspapers go unread (it's basically the same news day after day anyway). Do nothing actually. It's an improvement!
Posted by: Bill R | Jan 6, 2009 12:14:09 PM
>>>Like Rob, I'm a non-user of television: I kicked the habit for Lent about 15 years ago and haven't looked back. But my wife and kids are still avid viewers. For me, life is too short for TV and there are too many books to read, too many classical CDs to enjoy.<<<
I tend to multitask. And despite what some might think, I have no problem with people who do not watch television. I DO have a problem with people who elevate an aesthetic choice to a moral imperative--precisely the problem I have with Crunchy Conservatism in general: like the liberalism it mirrors, it is very much concerned with appearances, not so much with substance. Don't want to watch TV? Fine with me. Don't want to eat meat? Also fine. Only buy locally grown organic produce? Well, hey, it's your money. On the other hand, don't imply that because you don't watch television, don't eat meat and only eat locally-grown produce you are a better person than anyone else. It puts you on the same level as people who buy Priuses.
>>>So how do you improve your life? <<<
I think I gave my position earlier: Stop reading other people's lists and start living your own life.
>>>Do nothing actually. It's an improvement!<<<
Quite right. You can achieve a lot just by doing nothing in a creative manner. That's why most of my favorite books and movies are about nothing.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 6, 2009 12:27:16 PM
"I DO have a problem with people who elevate an aesthetic choice to a moral imperative--precisely the problem I have with Crunchy Conservatism in general: like the liberalism it mirrors, it is very much concerned with appearances, not so much with substance"
On the contrary, what it says is that aesthetic choices often have a moral component, and it tries to get people to see that and adjust their lifestyles accordingly, not by coercion but by information.
"On the other hand, don't imply that because you don't watch television, don't eat meat and only eat locally-grown produce you are a better person than anyone else"
Your inferring of it doesn't mean that the person who makes those choices implied it. Unless you're arguing that making choices of that nature includes an automatic implication of superiority. If that's the case, then you might as well chuck asceticism altogether because in one sense that's really all that "crunchy con-ism" is -- asceticism applied to the marketplace.
Posted by: Rob G | Jan 6, 2009 1:06:01 PM
>Aside from which, if you cannot tell, I get tired of invidious comparisons between the past and the present.
That is because you regularly deceive yourself as to the nature of the present and its relationship with the past. Father Reardon showed that quite effectively some time back...
Posted by: David Gray | Jan 6, 2009 1:42:53 PM
But Gene, how do you know? Maybe you missed out on quite a bit, but since you don't play, you can't win (even if the game is rigged).
Note that I said I do occasionally watch television shows (like the 1996 A&E version of P&P, though Colin Firth's Darcy has begun to gripe my hindquarters) but I don't want to waste my time with advertising. I watch a lot more movies that I have heard (through critics and friends) are good. I have friends in video and audio production who are Christians and I do think they are salt and light in those fields. I don't disparage them.
Stuart, ultimately this argument is rather silly. Unless you devote your life to scanning the 100s of stations available, you, too, *may* have missed something life-changing (ennobling) showing on the idiot machine. I think that's a bad cost/benefit ratio, however. There are too many good (acknowledged through the passage of time and reflection of serious people) books to read, too many interesting things to do to find the gold among the dross of the TV wasteland that you, yourself have admitted is 90% crap (just like books and most other things, I agree).
Posted by: W.E.D. Godbold | Jan 6, 2009 3:01:35 PM
No criticism of Colin Firth's Mr. Darcy is tolerated within this household (a consequence of my living under the Monstrous Regiment of Women). In fact, yesterday was my daughter's Darcython--she watched it from beginning to end, non-stop.
>>>I watch a lot more movies that I have heard (through critics and friends) are good. I have friends in video and audio production who are Christians and I do think they are salt and light in those fields. I don't disparage them.<<<
Word of mouth is an acceptable means of discriminating, but, at some point, your friends are going to pass you a lemon, and, invariably, they are going to steer you away from a gem.
>>>Stuart, ultimately this argument is rather silly. Unless you devote your life to scanning the 100s of stations available, you, too, *may* have missed something life-changing (ennobling) showing on the idiot machine. I think that's a bad cost/benefit ratio, however. There are too many good (acknowledged through the passage of time and reflection of serious people) books to read, too many interesting things to do to find the gold among the dross of the TV wasteland that you, yourself have admitted is 90% crap (just like books and most other things, I agree).<<<
Well, at the end of the day, it is a personal choice, and as I said, I do not interfere with it. However, television is part of the culture, and to turn away from it unequivocally is to render one's self culturally illiterate in at least one dimension of the culture. I confess I do it myself, having no time whatsoever for most popular music--or even modern "serious" music (the best of which is actually being written for films and--I kid you not--video games). So, when Jeopardy comes on (one of the things you are missing, though I concede that the game was better when I was in third grade and watched it when I walked home for lunch--the money was smaller and the answers were harder), that's the category i don't pick.
As I mentioned also, it is the job of Christians to be lights unto the gentiles, and I do not see how that can happen if Christians turn their back on the culture instead of engaging it and bringing it over to their side. Television is an important element of that popular culture, and it does the world no good for Christians to shun it, and their only policy being to advise others to do the same. We need to follow after Paul, who was all things to all people to make all in all in Christ.
By the way, it would be much easier on my pocketbook if I just watched television, because my bibliomania is costing me a mint. Don't say use the library--their even vaster wastelands than television, and staffed by trained monkeys.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 6, 2009 6:21:24 PM
>>>That is because you regularly deceive yourself as to the nature of the present and its relationship with the past. Father Reardon showed that quite effectively some time back...<<<
So you say. I was not convinced.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 6, 2009 6:23:00 PM
>>>"crunchy con-ism" is -- asceticism applied to the marketplace.<<<
It's a funny kind of asceticism that pays a premium price for specialty products in order to avoid the corrupting influence of materialism.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 6, 2009 6:55:08 PM
"It's a funny kind of asceticism that pays a premium price for specialty products in order to avoid the corrupting influence of materialism."
A) Locally-grown produce and free-range meat are hardly 'specialty products.' A $50 dollar computerized coffee mug from Brookstone? That's a specialty product.
B) The purpose of buying such things is not simply to avoid consumerism. It is also to support those businesses which have chosen to operate in a healthier and less consumerist manner so that they can prosper, and thus compete with the junk purveyors.
C) The price of many of these things is not substantially higher than their mainstream counterparts, and when it is the slightly higher price is often warranted by the difference in quality. Example: the Qdoba Mexican restaurant chain uses factory farmed meat and poultry, the 'Chipotle' chain does not. The prices are almost identical, and there is no difference in the quality of food.
D) There's nothing anti-ascetical about nonconsumerist marketplace choices. When I buy an Orthodox book, for instance, I'll buy it at the local monastery bookstore instead of on Amazon, even though it may cost a few bucks more. Why? Because my purchasing it there helps support the monastery, and to my mind that's a good thing. I realize that to the pure capitalist that's a stupid decision, because I'm spending in a way that's in conflict with my economic self-interest; but as the song says, "Here's a quarter, call someone who cares."
Of course I could buy the book on Amazon, then give the difference to the monastery as a donation, but why go through that trouble when I can get the same result in one transaction?
I find it strange that you seem to have more issues with Christians who buy fair trade coffee than you do with Christians who own Rolex watches or drive Hummers. Sorry, but I'll take a Crunchy Con over a Robb Report Christian any day of the week.
Posted by: Rob G | Jan 7, 2009 6:48:53 AM
>>>A) Locally-grown produce and free-range meat are hardly 'specialty products.' A $50 dollar computerized coffee mug from Brookstone? That's a specialty product.<<<
On the contrary, they are, especially when it is economically inefficient to do so. If one happens to be a person concerned about carbon emissions (as I am not), then for instance, do you buy a locally grown lambchop, or a New Zealand lamb chop? Turns out that the New Zealand sheep requires fewer carbon emissions to get from pasture to market than the locally grown variety. Same thing, e.g., for organic vs. conventional tomatoes: the former requier 3-4 times the footprint for given yield as a conventional tomato.
Seems to me that a person truly, truly being ascetic would buy the cheapest product in small quantities and prepare it in the simplest possible manner.
>>>Example: the Qdoba Mexican restaurant chain uses factory farmed meat and poultry, the 'Chipotle' chain does not. The prices are almost identical, and there is no difference in the quality of food.<<<
I suspect that Qdoba's margins are considerably lower than Chipotle's, though. Their prices are constrained by the competition from the other chain. If Chipotle did not exist, then Qdoba would raise its prices to compensate for the higher cost of its raw materials. Because, frankly, organic and free range meats are ALWAYS more expensive to produce. You make the error of examining only the retail end of the food chain, and ignore the market pressures that make equivalent prices at that end.
>>.There's nothing anti-ascetical about nonconsumerist marketplace choices. When I buy an Orthodox book, for instance, I'll buy it at the local monastery bookstore instead of on Amazon, even though it may cost a few bucks more. Why? Because my purchasing it there helps support the monastery, and to my mind that's a good thing.<<<
Certainly. On the other hand, supporting an inefficient family farm by buying their produce doesn't exactly do much for the farmer in Chile or Mexico, who can raise the same crop more economically, and needs the money more. Also, while the family farm may be able to cater to your modest needs, if we replaced all large farms with corporate farms, people around the world would starve, so taken to its logical conclusion, your choice will result in the deaths of millions.
It is one of the inconsistencies of Crunchy Conservatism to want to have their cake and eat it, too. If, for example, large families are a Good Thing, and if everybody agreed and behaved in that way, then populations would constantly be rising, requiring more food, requiring more land--unless ways are found to increase yields per acre, which can only be done through industrial farming. But we want to have our locally grown meat and produce from the neighbor's hundred-acre farm, preferably raised without artificial fertilizers, insecticides and herbicides.
>>.I find it strange that you seem to have more issues with Christians who buy fair trade coffee than you do with Christians who own Rolex watches or drive Hummers. Sorry, but I'll take a Crunchy Con over a Robb Report Christian any day of the week.<<<
I have no problem with people who buy fair trade coffee--it's their choice if they want to pay more for a cup of Joe. There's no evidence, however, that "fair trade" coffee does anything to improve the lot of indigenous peoples, and I do take umbrage with those who settle for appearances over substance. As for Rolexes, never owned one. I prefer a $199.99 Coleman digital watch--it keeps time just as well, I don't have to worry if it gets dinged, and it has a light and a compass, too.
Now, to take the logic of Crunchy Conservatism to its illogical conclusion, I should prefer the Rolex, since it is a handmade product manufactured by skilled artisans who take pride in their work. My cheap rolex, on the other hand, is cranked out on an assembly line in Korea by people who don't give a damn about watches. But the ultimate Crunchy Watch would be produced by the local watchsmith, by hand, in a little storefront shop, to the user's own specifications. Of course, it would probably cost a lot more than a Rolex, especially if you wanted the watch any time soon, but you would be buying locally.
As for Hummers, they're big and noisy, and to my mind not to practical unless you live in Montana or Alaska, but nobody is forced to buy one. To my mind, they are probably less problematic than hybird cars, whose true cost is hidden in a web of subsidies and tax incentives, and whose environmental impact has never been adequately assessed. For instance, at some point, we are going to have to start disposing of those batteries, which are major environmental hazards in their own right. We also have no idea what the impact of manufacturing those batteries really is, but if experience with large batteries for submarines is any indication, they aren't very nice at all. So not only is the monetary cost of hybrids hidden, so is the environmental cost. At least with a HUMMER, WYSIWYG.
The problem with all of these fads is an inability to understand complex, multidimensional problems or to think beyond one's own horizons. In fact, it is almost impossible for any one individual or group of individuals, no matter how intelligent, educated or enlightened to do so.
To take another Crunchy Con festish, the Big Box Store. Most Crunchies hate Walmart and its counterparts, and decry the death of the small country store. Of course, most of them never had to live in a place where the small country store was all their was. So they don't understand that rather than being noble pillars of the local community, more often than not these stores provided a limited range of second-rate goods at premium prices. Nor did those premium prices get passed down to hard-pressed workers: most local stores were and are family owned and operated, and offer the lowest possible wage and minimal benefits (if any), because the purpose of a family business is to pump money back into the family. They are also inefficient and their margins are low.
As a result, people living in the town either had to drive far away to get goods not provided by the local store, or they had to pay higher prices for what goods the store did carry. They had less disposable wealth and their standard of living as a result suffered.
Once, on the other hand, a WalMart moves into town, people have a comparatively unlimited choice of products at considerably lower prices. A child's coat that at the local store (assuming it was available) cost $40-50, might be available for as little as $10-15. With the extra money, the parents can buy more food, or books braces, or whatever. But the fact is money in their pocket provides more choices for them.
In addition, since the Big Box is a large store, it provides much more employment than the small town store did. And being publicly rather than family owned, it tends to pay better and offer better benefits (yes, even WalMart). And it provides its employees with a career path, too (which the family store doesn't unless you happen to belong to the family).
Going beyond the local community, the global supply chain of the Big Box Store provides a higher standard of living for workers around the world. Critics of globalization make the error of comparing the wages and living standards in the developing countries providing the goods with those in developed countries that consume the product. The correct comparison is actually between what these workers make working in suppliers' factories and what they would be making if the factories did not exist. And there, a lot of people just avert their eyes. It may seem to YOU that a dollar an hour and a twelve hour work day are barbaric, but are they barbaric as compared to a dollar a day for a longer day working in the fields? It may seem cruel to have children of twelve or thirteen working in a factory, but is it less cruel than having them working in a rice paddy or selling their bodies?
But we should pay these people comparable wages, we are told. OK, suppose we did. Now there is no competitive advantage to buying products from them as compared to workers in developed countries--less, in fact, since the transportation costs have to be considered as well.
And, in typical wanting-it-both-ways fashion, some people also complain that buying from Third World suppliers undermines local workers. But doesn't this make a mockery of their concern for the plight of the poor Third World factory hand? He has nothing, while the millworker in South Carolina (who was once the Third World worker as compared to the pampered mill hands of New England) lives a life of inconceivable luxury in comparison. Just where does it say that a U.S. worker is entitled to a job, even if the product he makes is not competitive with that from other places around the world (or even in the country, if we would like to talk, say, about automobile manufacturers)?
This perspective also ignores how, over time, countries that are allowed to do so can progress and move into the ranks of the prosperous. Japan, for example, was once the producer of cheap goods, but over time it moved up the ladder, and began passing these low-value-added and non-competitive industries to the South Koreans. South Korea, in its turn, repeated the process, and is now a major industrial power, which passes its non-competitive, low-value added industries down to countries like Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. In this way, hundreds of millions of people have been pulled out of poverty much more rapidly than anyone could ever have conceived. On the other hand, countries that have consistently tried to protect their local markets remained mired in squalor.
It makes no economic or even moral sense for a country to protect an industry that cannot compete globally (there may be strategic reasons for so doing, but they are an increasingly rare exception). It make absolute moral sense to allow people to do jobs who can do them in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. In this way, costs are lowered, wages can increase because of improved productivity, and real wealth is generated that betters the lives of the people. Overall, then, despite its social dislocations--dislocations comparable to those caused by any major historical movement, though in the past these have mainly been movements of armies or peoples rather than goods and services--has done much more good than harm, particularly in raising people out of the backbreaking poverty that was once the lot of half the world, and which today still afflicts about a billion people--but that's only 17%, not 50%.
I notice how you (and everybody else) looked past or studiously ignored the very illuminating quote from John Keegan, particularly this snippet:
"[T]he world of the past was not a potpourri of its quainter elements but as getting-and-spending a one as that of the present, the getting harder and the spending stingier; that its prevailing mood was not harmony but conflict, which man's nastier qualities were more often deployed to resolve than charity or reason; that the lyrical emotions it aroused in me, dissolving all differences of class, interest, period, and place in a poetic haze, were a positive obstacle to grasping its passions, hopes and needs. . . How could an age that had built Glastonbury Abbey not be kinder than that which had built the cotton mills? How could a world of hand tools not be more satisfying to work in than a world of machines? . . . Disease, I accepted, was a hazard which afflicted the inhabitants of my imagined and vanished England with a frequency and severity we were spared. But that they were also afflicted in the vast majority by seasonal hunger, winter cold, constant poverty, backbreaking labor for little return, legal inequity, illteracy, ignorance, and frequent disorder as a view to which I retreated reluctantly, step by step, and with a lingering conviction that the sun-warmed stones of cloister and market cross could not really lie."
In short, the Crunchies live the same sort of romantic fantasy as Keegan did when he was a small child in wartime England. But he grew out of it, and was thus able to look at the past with clear eyes, and recognizing a world not all that different, in its essentials, from our own. Conversely, that should give one the ability to look at the present with clear eyes as well, and recognize both the good as well as the bad, and tine inextricable interaction of the two. You cannot have the benefits of modernity without taking on the architecture and infrastructure that make it possible. You can't say, "I will accept modern medicine, and maybe some labor-saving technologies, and perhaps some forms of telecommunications and transportations--but all else I reject!" If you examine the entire chain of technologies, institutions and processes, they are all tied together. You can ignore all those things, of course, and PRETEND that you aren't part of the "problem", but that would be the precise elevation of style over substance I criticized in the first place. If you want medicine, then you have to accept the science and technology behind the medicine, which in turn is linked to broader economic and industrial trends of which you probably do not approve. You can want the computer or the telephone, and not accept all the baggage that goes with them. You can't even accept books without doing that.
And this was true in every age and every place. It would be very hard indeed for a classical Greek or Roman to live a "slave free" lifestyle, for instance. He might not approve of slavery, he might not own slaves, but it would be almost impossible for him to live without at some point interacting with slaves or the products of slaves, whether we talk food, or clothing, or coinage (stamped from silver and gold mined by slaves), to roads (built and maintained by slaves) to water (from aqueducts built by slaves). In short, slavery was as pervasive for them as technology is for us. Might as well try to live without air.
Only, in our case, all the connections are much more complex and intricate, so that very few people even recognize they are there, This is what allows them to pretend they can opt out. Not even the Old Order Amish can opt out. So the real question is not whether to accept or reject technology, but how to use technology in a manner consistent with the stewardship over creation that God gave to man.
And stewardship always involves hard choices and compromises. You cannot escape that; stewardship requires dirty hands.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 7, 2009 9:07:42 AM
Stuart, it would take a book to answer all your objections, and a second book to correct all of the misstatements, misconceptions, straw men, and false dichotomies. Frankly, I have neither the time nor the inclination to do so. Fortunately, many have already been written, some even by economists.
I'd refer you, or any other interested reader, to such authors as Michael Pollan, Wilhelm Roepke, William Cavanaugh, Edward Hadas, Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, Matthew Scully, Caleb Stegall, Tobias Lanz, John Sharpe, John Medaille, Jeff Martin, etc., etc.
I've read many of the critiques of the 'Crunchy Con' approach. The harshest and most dismissive come from either neo-cons or fundamentalist libertarians, that is, people who think the free market is pretty much the be-all-and-end-all of human earthly activity, the cure of all ills, the answer to all mundane problems. For any folks skeptical of such delusions, I suggest you read some of the authors above, starting with Roepke's "Humane Economy," recently reprinted by the conservative publisher ISI Books (the same publisher, by the way, who did Dr. Esolen's "Ironies of Faith").
Posted by: Rob G | Jan 7, 2009 10:07:27 AM
The free market is not the be-all and end-all of human activity, but economic freedom is the prerequisite for all other forms of freedom, including political freedom and religious freedom. For without economic freedom, there can be no prosperity, and without prosperity, there can be no security, and without security, there can be no peace, and without peace, there can be no moral development.
Furthermore, there is only one criterion by which any economic system can be judged: does it deliver the goods (quite literally)? And to date, I haven't seen any alternative to a free market that does that. The caveat, of course, is the free market, like Christianity, has been found difficult and not tried.
If you read your Adam Smith, by the way, you would see that morality is the necessary foundation for a free market. Without a moral foundation, there can be no trust; without trust, there can be no contract; without contract, there can be no transactions; without transactions, there can be no free market.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 7, 2009 10:16:56 AM
Rob, which part of Stuart's objections do you disagree with? I think he's right about Wal Mart--that triumph of instrumental human reason applied to commerce that has been enabled by cheap and reliable information technology. It does appear to involve more people more effectively than the mish-mash of stores that existed previously. And it does allow who have less money to buy goods of decent quality that they couldn't otherwise afford. (I also think that such stores leave niches where small business owners can effectively compete in the communities in which they are located. There is a Mennonite store out in my neck of the woods that carries food specialty items at reasonable prices that the big supermarkets and big box stores just couldn't make money with. It also has a lovely atmosphere with a surrounding farm--including a nasty male turkey who reacts against any substantial concentration of testosterone in his presence.) It also appears to be "spreading the wealth" out to poorer countries. Commerce and merchant both have "mercy" as a root. Have you ever read Rodney Stark on how Christianity contributed (overwhelmingly) to this state of affairs? I don't think he's a libertarian or a neo-con (or a Christan, for that matter).
Posted by: W.E.D. Godbold | Jan 7, 2009 10:42:03 AM
"Rob, which part of Stuart's objections do you disagree with?"
With apologies to the late Herbert Lom, how high is up? (That's a slight exaggeration...)
One problem with WalMart is its unscrupulous business practices, some of which are just this side of legal. Did you hear about the one where they wanted to build a store in one town, where the town council or whatever wanted them, but the people didn't (happens all the time -- it happened in fact in a town across the river from me, near where I grew up, but God intervened. The Walmart environmental study was incorrect, and when they started their inevitable bulldozing and grading, heavy rains caused the hillside on which they were building to collapse, blocking a four lane highway and some railroad tracks. Walmart has since abandoned the site, being unable to shore up and stabilize it. God is good). Anyways, Walmart went into the town next door, then proposed to the town fathers of the original municipality to be annexed -- the council voted for the annex and voila!, a Walmart in your town even if you don't want one!
In addition, Walmart is a huge beneficiary of corporate welfare, having the skids greased for them practically everywhere they go. As one article puts it, they "shop for subsidies," and thus have economic advantages handed to them that smaller competitors don't have. Free market my arse.
Also, they subvert the market by acting as a defacto monopoly (I forget the precise economic term), in that they are so big they can set their own prices to their suppliers. In other words, instead of the market working in its usual give-and-take manner, Walmart can pressure its suppliers to accept lower wholesale prices by simply saying, "No. If you want us to sell your product you need to give it to us at X instead of Y, or we won't carry it."
How "free" is it that, say, RCA has to give Walmart their CD players at $10 a pop, while every other retailer has to pay $12.50 for them?
In other words, WalMart acts not in the market but above it, as a sort of commodities holding-tank, micro-managing not only their own company, but the interactions of their suppliers.
The idea that WalMart is a bastion of the free market system is poppycock. In many ways, they're a big government, liberal creation.
Posted by: Rob G | Jan 7, 2009 11:18:03 AM
"The caveat, of course, is the free market, like Christianity, has been found difficult and not tried."
Ironic that you quote Chesterton here, as he would most certainly disagree with you on corporate capitalism.
"If you read your Adam Smith, by the way, you would see that morality is the necessary foundation for a free market."
Exactly. And the foundation precedes the house. Hence, the market will only work morally with a moral people. The problem is, most supporters of corporate capitalism believe that the market is somehow amoral, or beyond the moral. But that's not what Smith, or Roepke, following him, said, and you can't have it both ways.
Posted by: Rob G | Jan 7, 2009 11:39:29 AM
Rob,
WalMart can't *make* another corporation lose money on a deal. (What was that joke of which the punchline is: I lose money on every sale, but I make it up in volume?)
1) I'm going to assume you're correct about the anecdotes you relate, but as it is we're just trading opinions on the cost/benefit ratio.
2) It doesn't stand to reason though that the people who are are running WalMart are morally *worse* than the local businesses they supplant.
3) If the muncipal governments consider "luring" a WalMart are doing their homework, the "deal" they offer any corporation is based on a rational assessment of what they stand to gain vs what they are going to pay out. This is complicated of course if a number of municipalities in a given area are competing for the store. There's a theory--I forget the name of it--the gist of which is that the entity that bids the lowest price usually gets it wrong while those who cluster around the mean are those who correctly judge a situation. A little municipality collusion in bidding (which I don't think is regulated by anti-trust laws) might be best in this sort of case. Greed (for commerce or tax revenues) works both ways, though.
Posted by: W.E.D. Godbold | Jan 7, 2009 12:57:50 PM
>>>Ironic that you quote Chesterton here, as he would most certainly disagree with you on corporate capitalism.<<<
Yeah, but Chesterton was an economic illiterate and a political naif, so I don't weigh his opinion very highly in those areas. And, by the way, it's a paraphrase, or perhaps an allusion, not a quote.
Posted by: Stuart Koehl | Jan 7, 2009 1:13:03 PM
"WalMart can't *make* another corporation lose money on a deal"
True, but they can use leverage to the extent that such a loss becomes nigh inevitable unless the other party plays by their rules.
"I'm going to assume you're correct about the anecdotes you relate, but as it is we're just trading opinions on the cost/benefit ratio."
True -- where I differ is that I believe there are things which cannot and should not be commodified. Therefore it becomes difficult to do a cost/benefit analysis of them, because you're comparing apples and oranges.
"It doesn't stand to reason though that the people who are are running WalMart are morally *worse* than the local businesses they supplant."
It does if it becomes clear that greed motivates them to bend the rules.
Here's a piece worth reading on Walmart's government skid-greasing. The argument isn't so much that it's illegal or immoral, but that it's not 'free market' competition.
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=091306E
Posted by: Rob G | Jan 7, 2009 1:28:24 PM
"Chesterton was an economic illiterate and a political naif, so I don't weigh his opinion very highly in those areas"
If he were alive I'm sure the feeling would be mutual.
Posted by: Rob G | Jan 7, 2009 1:31:17 PM
