Why Seminary?

As many of you know, I am working on a book that looks at the declining enrollments at residential seminaries. My interest in the topic precedes the latest row at GTS. In 1998-99 I was placed in charge of the Graduate Theological Union’s reaccreditation, which gave me a very specific place from which to view its nine seminaries and (at the time) twenty-one research institutes. But in 1998 I still considered myself a historian. Now for the past eleven years I have been teaching economic theory and history at UC Berkeley. My perspective has changed, not a lot, but somewhat, since 1998.

Image result for pacific school of religion

One of the things that strikes me as I think about seminary is that seminaries are hybrids. We are familiar with the schools of Athens, at least Aristotle’s Lyceum and Plato’s Academy. And we are familiar from post-exilic diaspora literature of the “schools” of rabbinic teaching. Acts 15 offers a perfect example where “apostles and other leaders” gather to hash out whether non-Jewish believers need to be circumcised. But it doesn’t quite rise up to the standard of Aristotle’s curriculum at the Lyceum. Not by a long shot. And, yet, a direct line can be drawn from the so-called “Jerusalem Council” to the fourth century councils during which bishops and other learned disciples compared notes on what they had learned from the communities in their diocese. Their Nicene Creed might justifiably be viewed as the product of a learned seminar — the outcome of a deep and often cantankerous conversation over “well, then, what exactly do we believe?”

But the Nicene Council was not a seminary; not yet.

Seminaries preserve, germinate, and disseminate the “semen,” the seed. They, literally, inseminate those who pass through them. And, so, it is worth wondering with what seminarians are inseminated; is this rape or is it a more mutual, consensual engagement? Why is seminary?

Here is my thought. I think that seminaries are pre-conciliar. They introduce future ministers to all — yes, all — of the councils of the past, where women and men of faith wrestled with matters that the faithful, from all diocese, felt worth wrestling with. It is less important that they fall on one side or the other of these ongoing discussions than that they join the discussion, that they recognize its participants as members of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church, and that they are prepared to relate these discussions — yes, all of them — to the communities to which they are being called. But, it is not only the discussions that inseminate our seminarians. Seminarians are also introduced to practices and ways of seeing that transport them out of their isolated communities and into the communities of Christians spread out across time and space.

Seminaries are places where ministers in training meet and learn about all of these past discussions and where they learn about all of the different ways Christians have been Christians over time.

So, what might it mean for us to attenuate this process, streamline it, pare it down, trim off the fat? What is the fat?

Of course, in some traditions it is felt that I meet Jesus here and now, completely, at this very moment, in my highly personal and private encounter with God’s Spirit. Some traditions broaden and constrain this highly personal and private encounter by requiring that it conform to encounters attested to in Holy Scripture, but nothing more. My own Episcopal tradition is equally interested in the places and times, both of those who composed the Sacred text and of those who interpret it. And so we say that our own experience is informed by Scripture, Tradition, and (obviously) by our own (and others’) interpretations. But, even this leaves the question open: where is the fat? What body of commentaries should we eliminate? What communities’ experiences are no longer valid? Who are we going to eliminate from the discussion? What debate, in our view, do seminarians no longer need to know?

These are questions that institutional heads, trustees, and institutional patrons need seriously to raise both for themselves and for the parishes served by their graduates. What part of Church are you ready to eliminate? What voices do you want silenced? How small and insular and self-obsessed can Catholic be and still remain “Catholic” (i.e., universal)?

Our seminaries are struggling to meet inconceivable budget constraints. Yet, might I propose that the solution is not to place constraints on the instruction we provide for seminarians. The solution is to share our deep and comprehensive vision with the patrons of our communities who have every reason to desire their success. Our seminaries need a full and fuller offering of historians, theologians, musicians, philosophers, and preachers to plant the seed of emancipation in a new generation of ministers. Even to raise the question “Where is the fat?” is a question that ought to make every donor shudder. Because the answer is: this is not fat. It is life. It is salvation.

Kant on the Couch

Last Tuesday I participated in a mini-retreat organized by the Church Pension Group devoted to Planning for Wellness. The retreat was surprisingly well done. One of the presentations noted how, for purposes of survival, human beings were more inclined to focus on the negative. True that. The facilitator then went on to tell us that during her hellish commute she assiduously avoids listening to the news — negative — and, rather than focusing on fellow drivers cutting off and honking at one another, she instead focuses on fellow drivers who make way for one another and appear to be enjoying their commutes. She arrives at her office feeling more refreshed than when she left home.

One slide in the presentation asks: “It’s All in My Head?” No. But you do have a choice on what you will focus your attention. (In my head I am hearing Ponty Python’s Graham Chapman —Brian — strung up on a cross between two criminals while the chorus sings “always look on the bright side of life.”)

The very next slide displays a quote from eminent psychologist and Holocaust survivor Viktor E. Frankl: “Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. . . . The last of one’s freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given circumstance.”

Freedom: the absence of constraint. The definition is pure Immanuel Kant. It is a definition of freedom on the boundary, which is to say at the extreme. When all our other freedoms have been stripped from us, what remains is Kant’s transcendental subject. Kant’s definition of freedom is perfectly suited to the death camps of Germany. No doubt, at this extremity, it works. Between German death camps and Napa County retreat centers I am sure there are plenty of boundary experiences.

And, yet, it strikes me that invoking Dr Frankl during a wellness retreat seeks to place every unpleasantness — e.g., a hellish commute — on the same level as a death camp experience. The two, I would argue, are incomparable. Or, more accurately, when I cast my daily displeasures as boundary experiences from which I should divert my attention, do I not also ignore the practical causes and potential solutions from which these displeasures arise?

Put differently, if focusing on the negative is, as the presenter noted, an evolutionary adaptation designed to protect us from harm, then what is the harm I am inviting into my life by “ac-cent-u-at-ing the pos-i-tive”?

Transforming all experience into the extreme case, inviting me to enfold myself entirely back into my transcendental subject, strikes me not simply as terrible practical advice, but also as empirically false. Yes. It might improve my attitude; who wants to hear about war, misogyny, oligarchs, climate change, refugees, and the opioid epidemic? “Always look on the bright side of life.”

But then there are the real-life threats that positive thinking — and breathing — cannot eliminate. To be sure, I can block them from my mind. But they are still there. Right? They are still threats. Right? That I am ignoring. Right?

So, let me offer a different definition of freedom, this one from the Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen: freedom is the conditions that make for freedom: education, good health, security, companionship, time, and reasonable wealth. Not then the absence of constraint, not the transcendental subject; but constraints that hold and bear me forward, valued and well cared for, but also valuing and caring for those around me.

If ever I should find myself against the existential wall, as Dr Frankl did, I will no doubt need to draw upon my inner resources to carry me through. Yet, in some measure, I will only find myself in that extreme place because others have retreated into their own transcendental bubble. In the face of war, misogyny, hatred, and mismanagement of the world, they have turned the channel, or simply tuned out.

Put differently, the good that I seek is not within me. Rather is this good found in relationship to the world. Indeed, were this not so then focusing on the negative would have no positive benefits with respect to survival.

Now it might be that I am a victim of abuse, that I have experienced some physical or mental trauma, and that I require therapy to help me overcome this trauma. Or it might be that my brain functions in such a way that I see danger and feel threats where there are none. In such cases, I might require pharmaceutical assistance to help my brain to more accurately distinguish real from imagined danger. Yet, it strikes me that, absent organic or traumatic cause, our focus on the transcendental subject invites the very dangers it seeks to avoid.

Transitions: Left to Right

As I have said before, ends of semesters are always bittersweet. I have done my best to engage with over a hundred students, to equip them to go to the next level. UC Berkeley Economics Department has once again earned a #1 ranking (I would like to believe not in spite of me.) And so, once again, I will be sending my graduates out to the best think tanks, financial houses, and graduate schools in the world.

And, yet, they know — and not only because I have told them — that today’s policy makers do not pay a great deal of attention to what they have learned over the past four years. Did they listen to my students, we could make short work of the economic troubles facing us. On the other hand, did we live in a world where policy makers set policy with the aid of scientific research, these troubles would not seem nearly so daunting. This, evidently, Cambridge economist John Maynard Keynes already knew when he wrote his article “The World’s Economic Outlook” for the May 1932 Atlantic Monthly.

I hope that in the future we shall not adhere to this purist financial attitude, and that we shall be ready to spend on the enterprises of peace what the financial maxims of the past would only allow us to spend on the devastations of war. At any rate, I predict with an assured confidence that the only way out is for us to discover some object which is admitted even by the deadheads to be a legitimate excuse for largely increasing the expenditure of someone on something!

Find a “legitimate excuse” we did. It was called World War II. And it solved the problem almost instantaneously; at a cost of $1T and 80M lives.

Perhaps mastery over economics is not a sufficient answer after all.

Which reminds me. Ann Coulter is speaking on our campus this Thursday. Her topic: immigration. In a better world she would have enjoyed the care and attention she deserved as a young girl; her parents would have spoken to her about the complexity of the world; and when it turned out that she suffered from psychiatric problems that went beyond talk therapy, she would have received all of the care and treatment she deserved. Instead she grew up in a family whose parents hung upon ever word uttered by the alcoholic demagogue from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy. They taught her that we live in a dangerous world where the weak should not be coddled, but rather should be disposed of (discretely if possible). And, thanks to the academic freedom that prevails on U.S. university campuses, Ms Coulter found the “Objectivists” at both Cornell and Michigan who reinforced her conviction that the weak deserved to whither away on the vine. She would not be weak. She would be strong, strong like her idol Ayn Rand.

But this is neither here nor there. Psychologically unstable, abused individuals will seek comfort where they can find it. The fact that there are so many smart people who reject her version of the world simply proves that the liberals really are out to get her. Remember: it’s a dangerous world in which only the strong prevail. Right Ann?

The real point is that had U.S. policy makers passed the policies that economic science told them they needed to pass way back in 1947, when the U.S. was standing atop mountains of war-generated capital stock — had they truly universalized the educational franchise; had they implemented single-payer universal healthcare; had they tasked Detroit to build a state-of-the-art high-speed national and urban rail systems; and had they leveraged their post-war economic position on behalf of, instead of against, democratic, post-colonial movements around the globe — the number of souls attracted to Ayn Rand would not even have amounted to a trickle. When, to the contrary, they put their stock in a pay-to-play educational franchise tilted heavily toward the wealthy; when they deep-sixed public and high-speed rail and put their weight behind the private automobile; when they placed our nation’s health in the hands of private insurance providers; and when they put our earth in the hands of an industry that could only make profits by destroying the earth — they created precisely the world that makes Ayn Rand and Ann Coulter seem normal. No, seem virtuous.

My students know — flawlessly — the mechanisms that have generated the kind of world where Ann Coulter’s fear and hate-mongering not only survive, but thrive. They can identify the policies that, eventually, would eliminate Ann Coulter’s audience. In attendance would only be those mentally unstable, abused, tragic misfits who fell through the cracks of an otherwise robust healthcare system.

2017 is our 1932. Rant and rail as he might throughout the 1920s, even Lord Keynes was unable to prevail over the world’s leaders. They had bigger fish to fry. They were “making X [fill in the blank] great again.”

And, so, just as I have every semester I have ever taught, I renew Lord Keynes’ appeal; not to my students, who have already mastered these lessons, but to my students from four, six, eight, ten years ago — who evidently have forgotten them.

Remember? Before you joined the staff of the WTO and World Bank? Remember? Before you joined JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley? Do you remember what you swore to yourself you would do, and what you would not do?

It is 1932. You are now the decision-maker, the policy-maker. Six years ago you graduated from the No. 1 economics department in the United States. You now live in a home valued at between $1 and $10M. You control assets that are in line with those I told you you would control — four, six, eight, ten years ago. It is 1932. I am asking you to do the right thing.

And for those of my students who are walking this Spring? I have talked with all of you. You are receiving a bachelors degree from the No. 1 program in the United States. Congratulations! You are moving on, some of you to prized internships; some to financial houses; some to graduate schools. Congratulations!

But, it is 1932. And I am begging you to think clearly about where you are and where you are going. My former graduates? They are kind of locked in. They are terrified by their choices. They have clients. They have responsibilities. They want to do the right thing.

It is 1932.

Good Friday

I don’t know about you, but I always feel that Easter is premature; you know, kind of “if-this-is-resurrection-you-can-keep-it” premature. Good Friday? Now there’s a liturgy a can drink down whole to the last drop.

And, yet, there is one passage that for me links these two dimensions of the Triduum. It is Saint Paul’s discussion of new birth in Romans 8:

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body. For in hope we have been saved, but hope that is seen is not hope; for who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it (18-25).

In my experience, Evangelical Christianity invites us to an Easter without bodies, without creation, without groaning and without pain. It is Easter from the vantage point of every man: knock me up, knock me out, full epidural, wake me up when its all over. “Wasn’t that easy!” Well, “no.” That would be a “no.”

A full-throated Easter would entail groaning and pain; it would not leave creation behind to fend for itself; it would not be Easter “in my heart,” “in my soul,” “by faith.” This kind of disembodied Easter is the perfect counterpart to the “speculative Good Friday,” where the Palestinian Jew only seems to undergo death. Except that in the “speculative Easter,” all of creation does not even appear to be made new. We can have Easter and trash creation. We can have Easter and deny human beings the basic dignity they deserve. Easter without any evidence at all.

Yes, yes. “Who hopes for what he already sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, with perseverance we wait eagerly for it.” Have faith! As though faith and hope were indistinguishable. “I hope for resurrection, for new life, for Easter. And, so I have it!” No pain or groaning required.

Full epidural? More like full lobotomy. Good Friday reminds us of the only path to Easter.

Hope (in theory)

After a long hiatus, we finally reviewed PRESENTATION 31 today. PRESENTATION 31 covers chapters 7 and 8 of Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (NY: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Immediately following the lecture a student texted “Your lecture today made me feel like a beautiful soul. I mean that in a complimentary way.” And so there is hope (in theory).

The problem raised by Presentation 31 is how capitalism might give rise — not politically by way of political intervention, but internally out of its own social logic — to its own supercession. This K Marx finds in the expanding gulf between material wealth and abstract value. Material wealth is the things we make and consume, however frivolous or necessary, “material” or “intellectual” or “aesthetic.” Material wealth is the “substance” of what we make and consume. Abstract value, by contrast, is the substance that relates all factors of production to one another, e.g., human capital to the commodities produced to the fixed capital used to produce these products to the finance capital leveraged to finance production, etc. Abstract value, by definition, lacks specificity. It is, simply, capital. It is for “abstract value” that anything is produced at all under capitalism. No marginal benefit, no product; it is that simple.

Yet, since it is the aim of every producer to reduce the cost of production, by reducing factor costs, there is an implicit compulsion to replace human labor with robotics, cybernetics, mechanization. That is to say, there is an implicit, systemic rationality to produce wealth in order to maximize value. The only problem is that whenever any innovation becomes socially generalized, it sets the “value meter” back to zeros. The good news is that this intrinsic capitalist logic has generated immense material wealth. Graphically, we need to imagine two lines that begin on the left at zero, but from there diverge, the top line climbing more steeply than the bottom line which cannot climb any more rapidly than the population of actual workers wealth over labor time = productivity. The bad news is that with every innovative plateau, the value of labor returns to zeros across the board.

K Marx invites us to think about this divergence of material wealth from the labor necessary to create that wealth as an “immanent contradiction” within capitalism. It is immanent — as opposed to external — because the contradiction arises within capitalism itself. So, for example, we can think of the shortening of the working day and the working week as evidence that we are creating more with less; which is the definition of productivity. But this also suggests that material wealth is growing increasingly independent from labor. Labor is becoming increasingly obsolete.

Neo-classical economists — left, right, and center — view this as a disaster. We need full employment. Why? Because value arises out of labor. Should unemployment rise to unacceptable levels this would place downward pressures on consumption, leave inventories unconsumed on shelves, place downward pressures on prices, and, therefore, place downward pressures on wages. Left, right, and center, neoclassical economists agree — unemployment is bad.

According to M Postone, K Marx invites us to think about this gap between material wealth and abstract value differently. This gap clearly shows that wealth is not dependent on labor. This is not bad news. It is good news.

The bad news is that our society is mediated by labor. All of our laws, regulations, and institutions are bent to accommodate a society where labor (implicitly) is the source of value, and where value (not wealth), is the driving impulse behind innovation and efficiency. At the very moment that abstract value is becoming increasingly obsolete — because of innovation, mechanization, cybernetics, robotics, AI — we are politically, legallystructurally making sure that cannot walk away. Why? Not because labor is the source of material wealth. Evidently it is not. But because it is the source of abstract value.

In my summarization of M Postone’s work, this growing gap between wealth and value is leading to several social pathologies:

  • A  shrinking industrial sector; this is widely viewed as bad by neoclassical economists while, in fact, in should be viewed as a good;
  • The expansion of the low-skill, low-wage service sector; these are jobs that could easily be mechanized or self-managed (as with self-check-out), but for which we often employ human capital to lower cost — there are some tasks that even machines will not perform
  • The pursuit of abstract value at the expense of the conditions that make it possible; this is perhaps the most serious pathology. Our material world is screaming that it cannot sustain further depredations to produce increasing returns on investment — and, yet, abstract value is so central a determinant in our social formation that we will destroy the world in order to maintain the forced relationship between wealth and abstract value
  • Finally, although the production of wealth no longer requires such massive amounts of human labor, we are willing to expand our carcéral, policing, and military apparatus in order to fix the relationship between wealth and labor, wealth and abstract value. Humans who are no longer needed for the production of wealth, instead of being employed as artists, musicians, naturalists, fathers, mothers, caretakers, citizens are instead herded into prisons or into wars to preserve the relationship of wealth to value.

But, the point — the hopeful point — is that, thanks to capitalism, we now enjoy a compressive, integrated grasp of how the entire system works. We now see it as a total system. And so we also appreciate why it cannot take us to the next stage. On its own terms, capitalism will degrade human beings. It will destroy the environment. It will deliver ever larger segments of the population to ever more meaningless and dangerous occupations, simply to produce more abstract value — because we feel that this is required by natural law, by the way things work, naturally.

The most pressing task for economists today is to carefully think through the next phase. What happens when labor is not necessary? Or when minimal labor is necessary? We have mastered the world. We know how it works. We now know what is necessary. What now?

In the Preface to his Philosophy of Right, GWF Hegel pens a curious observation:

When philosophy paints its grey in grey,
then has a shape of life grown old.
By philosophy’s grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood.
The owl of Minerva spreads its wings
only with the falling of dusk.

One way to interpret this observation is to note that we now really do understand our world. But understanding the world does not tell us where we go from here. Minerva has spread her wings. She has flown. We need to understand where she might alight next. I am guessing that it is in a world no longer governed by the necessary relationship between labor and value.

Perhaps that is hopeful thinking.

Noam Chomsky and the Cold War

What is it with Noam Chomsky and Russia?

Professor Chomsky and I are two generations removed. When he was beginning his starred career at MIT, I was just a boy, the son of a mid-level State Department director under John Kennedy. After leaving the State Department, my dad would go on to make his name as “the radical professor” and “faculty advisor to SDS,” Students for a Democratic Society, indicted for “inciting riot” in the aftermath of the Kent State Massacre. Neither my dad nor his family were in any sense hostile to the Soviet Union; we were inclined, like Professor Chomsky, to treat unfavorable headlines as mere propaganda. Fifty years later, teaching Economics at UC Berkeley, I am still inclined to treat unfavorable headlines as mere propaganda. Some things never change.

What has changed is my views toward Russia. In 2013-2014 I spent a year in Bosnia and Herzegovina conducting in-depth research on the conditions that precipitated the latest Bosnian War and its aftermath. Prominent in the literature was Professor Chomsky’s and Project Censored’s “double-blind” defense of Serbia, less as an independent nation than as a satellite of Russia; “double-blind” in the sense that what appeared most to matter to Professor Chomsky and to Project Censored was that the US — eventually — came to the defense of Bosnia, which, in the hagiography of Professor Chomsky and Project Censored, made Bosnia’s enemy a prime candidate for western misinformation campaigns. “Double-blind” in the sense that, having found evidence among Bosnian information channels of less than fully accurate reporting, this established for Professor Chomsky and Project Censored reasonable doubt sufficient to question whether Bosnia had ever been the victim of genocide.

Never mind the bones and mass graves. Never mind the countless cities I visited up and down the eastern border of Bosnia and Herzegovina that still bear the traces of genocide: there are no men, no menno men anywhere to be seen. For Professor Chomsky and Project Censored it is sufficient that the US was once the enemy of the Soviet Union, that it staged and supported a coup on behalf of Boris Yeltsin, and that any enemy of my friend is necessarily my enemy. End of story.

There are eery echoes of Professor Chomsky’s genocide denials in his response to Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad’s genocidal war against his own people. Since Al-Assad is an ally of Russia and since Russia is an enemy of the US, this must mean than Al-Assad is the victim of western propaganda.

There is something unmistakably Manichean to Professor Chomsky’s and Project Censored’s narrative; a kind of “children of light” “children of darkness” script. To which I must object. My condemnation of Al-Assad is not a defense of the US. My condemnation of Bosnian genocide is not a defense of the US. Professor Chomsky’s and Project Censored’s narrative appears inflected through a Cold War prism. This prism refracts light in ways that render actual events on the ground, and actual suffering, irrelevant, mere pawns in a game of ideological warfare. Which is a shame because Professor Chomsky and Project Censored — of which my father was a contributing editor — are capable of so much more.

Fake News

Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat published a piece on Wednesday last that offers chilling insights into fake news. His piece, titled “UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it,” summarizes the research of University of Washington Assistant Professor Kate Starbird.

“Your brain tells you ‘Hey, I got this from three different sources,’ ” she says. “But you don’t realize it all traces back to the same place, and might have even reached you via bots posing as real people. If we think of this as a virus, I wouldn’t know how to vaccinate for it.”

Starbird says she’s concluded, provocatively, that we may be headed toward “the menace of unreality — which is that nobody believes anything anymore.” Alex Jones, she says, is “a kind of prophet. There really is an information war for your mind. And we’re losing it.”

Professor Starbird goes on to confess, “I used to be a techno-utopian. Now I can’t believe that I’m sitting here talking to you about all this.”

For my students and for others who follow this blog, Professor Starbird’s confession might sound an awful lot like Thucydides’ observations about late classical Athens.

People of violent views won automatic credence, and any opposing them were suspect. To lay a plot and succeed was clever: smarter still to detect another’s plot. Anyone whose own plot was to remove the need for any plotting was thought to be subverting the party and scared by the opposition. In short, the currency of approval was damage done — either the pre-emptive strike before an opponent could do his own intended damage, or the instigation of those who otherwise had no thought of doing harm. And indeed family became less close a tie than party, as partisans were more prepared to do the deeds without question. Such associations had no sanction in the established laws, but were formed in defiance of the laws for purposes of self-interest. The partisans’ pledges of loyalty to one another were cemented not by divine law but by partnership in some lawless act. Any fair proposals made by the other side were accepted by the stronger party only after precautionary action, and in no generous spirit. Revenge was more important than avoidance of the original injury. If ever there were any sworn reconciliations, the oaths on either side were offered simply to meet some current difficulty and had only temporary force, while one side or the other was without support from elsewhere. But when opportunity presented, the first to take bold advantage of an enemy caught off guard relished this perfidious attack yet more than open reprisal: into his reckoning came both his own safety and the accolade he would also win for intelligence shown in achieving gain through bad faith. Most people would rather be called clever rogues than stupid saints, feeling shame at the latter and taking pride in the former.

The cause of all this was the pursuit of power driven by greed and ambition, leading in turn to the passions of the party rivalries thus established (Pelopponesian War 3.82.4-8).

In his text, Thucydides makes clear where he feels blame lies for Athens’ descent into chaos. When public office stipulated strict qualifications, prior to the rise of Pericles; when office holders held one another in check; and when citizens held office holders in check with the threat of ostracism, there was less risk that equally qualified, equally powerful office holders could “pull a fast one” over on their peers. Cynically, Pericles eliminated all qualifications for office holding, inviting anyone and everyone to hold office. So long as he believe he could manipulate their decisions and thereby determine policy outcomes in his favor, it hardly mattered what their qualifications were. The trick worked. Pericles became immensely popular precisely among those whom he manipulated.

But his success was ephemeral since government by deceit and manipulation rewards precisely those qualities through which corruption spreads and empires fall. When Philip of Macedon grew weary of the civil wars to his south, he found it relatively easy to conquer this corrupt and corrupting so-called “civilization” of Athens.

Athens’ loss was Aristotle’s gain. Where once he was forbidden to establish a school — he was, after all, a Macedonian — he suddenly saw doors open. His instructor, Plato, had believed that statecraft could be saved only by the secret collaboration of those who were wise, who knew themselves to be wise, and who also accepted the corruptibility and corruption of those in power. The “guardians” would govern secretly “behind the scenes,” manipulating governors and governed alike “for their own good.”

Aristotle disagreed. Virtuous institutions are inseparable from virtuous citizens. Republics needed therefore to focus all of their resources on cultivating and preserving the conditions that make for virtuous citizens. Corruption and deceit by rulers cannot be undone by philosopher kings whose equally deceitful (if less corrupt) methods differed little from those in power. For such deceit, in Aristotle’s view, leads to precisely the conditions observed by Professor Starbird: “the menace of unreality — which is that nobody believes anything anymore.” So, what did Aristotle recommend?

Many commentators on the current crisis over “fake news” (mistakenly in my view) focus on the news itself instead of on the conditions that enable us to make reasonably good sense out of the barrage of information that comes our way. To be sure, just as there is value in professional standards for doctors, psychiatrists, engineers, architects, and pharmacists, so there is value in professional standards for journalists and information. But, unless we expect information consumers to vet every piece of information that comes their way, we must leave the ultimate vetting to the good, albeit rough, “common sense” of those who consume news. This is because, as Professor Starbird’s research suggests, our brains are hardwired to make sense out of all of these pieces of news that come our way, often not knowing that they come from the same compromised source. You don’t know what you don’t know.

And it was for this reason that Aristotle recommended that we begin at the other end of this knot. Individuals are deceived because they need to be deceived; and deceivers deceive them because they win rewards from doing so. If I am not well fed, well clothed, and not in particularly good health; if I feel insecure, threatened, and ill-equipped to master all of the questions that come my way, then I have an interest in believing that my shortcomings and fears can be resolved by, say, building a wall or getting tough on crime. Need provokes a need to be without need. Need is an absolute precondition for charlatans. Some examples:

If I enjoy good health and good healthcare, if I eat well and exercise often — if I feel good about my body and my self — I am much less susceptible to snake-oil peddlers who are selling just what I need to make me feel good. If I am reasonable well off, not wealthy, but not in need, and am happy in my occupation, which offers real opportunities for performance-based advancement, I am not looking elsewhere to explain why I am not well off, why I am poor and in need, unhappy and unfulfilled.

More than perhaps anything else, the New Deal and Great Society, by placing the good life within reach of ever expanding groups of individuals, shifted our focus away from the immediate causes of our pain and suffering — our need — and gave us the luxury to focus instead on the blessings we already enjoyed and the opportunities that lay ahead.

Fake news feeds on suffering, pain, and discontent. My need is like a flashing neon sign inviting the attention of every fake news outlet. Why do I fall for every piece of left-leaning, but imperfectly vetted, news? “Trump Resignation Immanent, sources report.” One reason is that I so desperately want — need — to see some ray of light, of hope.

According to Aristotle, what I really should be focusing on is making sure that an ever-expanding circle of citizens enjoys good health, good education, security, and sufficient leisure time to grow and mature and participate. Charlatans there will always be. The Peloponnesian War unleashed such pain, fear, and hopelessness — such need — that Athenians grasped at any piece of information that offered solace. It would have been nothing short of miraculous had Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania not voted for Trump. Ironically, their voting patterns vindicates the validity of our model.

Put differently, what we know (or think we know) has everything to do with where we come from and where we think we are going. The most sure antidote to “fake news” may therefore be to do all in our power to make sure that where people are is safe, secure, affirming, and healthy. So, while we often portray health, education, and welfare as though these were matters of equity (which, of course, they are), it might be more helpful to think of them as the very conditions that make for a robust republic.

This throws the burden back in our laps, I know. We are the change we seek. Yet, this, it strikes me, offers a far more realistic portrayal of the conditions that make for good information than epistemological hand-wringing over the conditions that make for accurate coverage, reporting, or dissemination of news.

Morehouse College

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Two years ago I had the privilege of sharing my ideas about the state of our religious institutions with some of the heads of these institutions, among them the Reverend Lawrence Edward Carter, Sr., Dean of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Chapel at Morehouse College. Reverend Carter proved to be an invaluable contributor to our discussion. We spoke briefly after my talk.

Last Winter, Reverend Carter sent me a letter asking whether I would be willing to be inducted into the College of Ministers and Laity at the Chapel in a ceremony to be held that Spring. Of course, he sent it to my UC Berkeley address, an address used principally by creditors and solicitors. So I missed the invitation. When I learned of it — too late — I took the (for me) highly unusual step of sending my own letter (not email) apologizing for my delinquency. Not deterred the Reverend Carter sent a second missive this Winter, this time both through the US Post and electronically. I was elated.

Tomorrow I will travel to the haunts of Saint Martin Luther King, Jr. to be honored, along with others, in the Chapel that bears his name. Cynics — among whom I am more than occasionally numbered — will say that this is simply good politics; building relationships, collaborating among institutions. Perhaps there is even some anticipation that I might be a future — I am surely not, nor could be, a present — donor. Who knows what fortunes the future might bring? But I would like to believe that this honor really has to do intimately with brothers who discover in one another’s language and demeanor a spirit that is not their own, not their’s exclusively, a calling and a mission to share that grace we all have received, building that community we all earnestly desire.

Thank you Reverend Lawrence Edward Carter, Sr. And thank you Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

Where climate denial lives

I am always intrigued by the role — if any — that scholarship plays in how Americans evaluate their world. So when researchers at Yale published the results of their nationwide study of attitudes towards climate change, I was more than curious to read their report. (See the NYT piece.)

At a very high level, the results reflected what we might expect: there is a direct correlation between wealth, education, and trust in climate science. Wealthy coastal regions, east and west, were right up there at the top. The middle of the country, less so. The south even less.

The surprise (at least to me) is that most Americans everywhere — blue, red, purple — in fact, greater than fifty percent even in the deep south “support strict CO2 limits on existing coal-fired power plants.” Nationwide the numbers are even higher: sixty-nine percent. Wow! Even in solidly red voting districts! Go figure.

Does race make a difference? Unfortunately, the researchers did not test this hypothesis. And, yet, if we look, for example, at the Texas southwest border with Mexico, an economically depressed region where Hispanic Americans make up greater than fifty percent of the population, we encounter numbers seen elsewhere in the study only in African American and wealthy European American voting districts. Which could suggest — again — that race matters.

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It is also noteworthy that even in coastal communities that have been buffeted by extreme weather — along the coast between Corpus Christi and Houston — respondents were less inclined than their neighbors along the border to feel that global warming was already or within 10 years will be harming people in the US. Will it eventually harm people in the US? Most Texans say “Yes.” But again, notably, not most Texans who live in or around Dallas-Ft Worth or the wealthier districts just east of Houston.

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So, if greater than fifty percent of voters — everywhere — recognize that CO2 and coal-fired power plants are causing catastrophic climate change, this must mean that the Republicans are in for a rude awakening at the polls after they eliminate President Obama’s restrictions on carbon emissions, right? Well, no. And here’s why; Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, took that tack and he lost:

Bob Inglis . . . warned that committed activists — like the Tea Party — can shape politicians’ approaches to issues like climate change. “Those are the ones who can take you out at the next primary,” he said. He lost his primary in 2010 to Trey Gowdy, a Tea Party candidate who attacked his climate views.

Which is to say, poor (and poorly educated) European American voters join their plutocratic representatives on what they perceive to be economic issues: caps on CO2 are “job killers.” When the Koch brothers and Betsy DeVos carpet bomb poor European American voting districts with adverting dollars associating carbon controls with high un- and underemployment, poor European Americans listen and vote with what remains of their pocketbooks and wallets.

For me, this may be the strongest case anywhere for Democrat-leaning plutocrats to rethink their rhetoric (and, of course, their action) around income inequality and its effects not simply on voting patterns, but on the survival of human beings on planet Earth. Blame them if you like, but people who are underemployed and unable to take full advantage of the American dream are unlikely to hear any other message. Yes, the 45th President packed his administration with plutocrats from top to bottom. Yes, the fortunes of his European American supporters will not improve under his policies. Yet, since he at the very least mirrors (models?) their hatred and anger, they clearly trust him more than they trust well-graduated Ivy-leaguers who counsel calm and understanding from the safety of their Goldman Sachs portfolios. Hate trumps love; not the reverse.

Love would only trump hate under the condition that working families actually felt that it was improving their lot in life in tangible ways, now, not in ten years. What’s at stake? Only the world.

Worth the Gamble

Dateline March 16, 2017: Trump voters punish Trump for policies that harm them. Are you kidding? Really?

Let’s assume for a moment that pain comes with its own diagnosis and treatment. Well, yes, then in that case, Trump voters, punished by the flight of manufacturing abroad, will recognize that the fake President’s policies have left them even worse off than before his election.

Now let us assume that pain does not come with either its own diagnosis or its own treatment. Trump voters really do not know why or how things got so bad. Trump voters really do not know how to fix it. Which means that when their world takes a turn for the worse — when tax subsidies from blue states stop flowing to recipients in red states, when blue states adopt their own versions of Obamacare, leaving red states with Wealthcare (care for the wealthy), and when blue states fully fund education and training for all their citizens, while red states languish under the weight of poorly funded schools and minimum wage jobs — Trump voters are just as likely to believe that it is the Democrats who are still, though out of office at every level of federal government, giving them hardship. The fake President and his Congressional allies have tried to help ease their pain. But NAFTA, and the EU, and United Nations, and blue state Democrats, and Hillary and Barrack and Michelle are out to get them.

So, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to tune in to Fox News tonight. Listen carefully. Not one peep about the harm the fake President’s policies are inflicting on Trump supporters. ‘Nuff said.