Quote Of The Day
This passage is by Soren Kierkegaard, quoted from Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, a collection of existentialist writings assembled by Walter Kaufmann:
[T]o honour every man, absolutely every man, is the truth, and this is what it is to fear God and love one’s “neighbour”. But from an ethico-religious point of view, to recognize the “crowd” as the court of last resort is to deny God, and it cannot exactly mean to love the “neighbour.” And the “neighbour” is the absolutely true expression for human equality. In case every one were in truth to love his neighbour as himself, complete human equality would be attained. Every one who loves his neighbour in truth, expresses unconditionally human equality. Every one who, like me, admits that his effort is weak and imperfect, yet is aware that the task is to love one’s neighbour, is also aware of what human equality is. But never have I read in Holy Scripture the commandment, Thou shalt love the crowd- and still less, Thou shalt recognize, ethico-religiously, in the crowd the supreme authority in matters of “truth.” But the thing is simple enough: this thing of loving one’s neighbour is self-denial; that of loving the crowd, or of pretending to love it, of making it the authority in matters of truth, is the way to material power, the way to temporal and earthly advantages of all sorts- at the same time it is the untruth, for a crowd is the untruth.
[. . .] The crowd, in fact, is composed of individuals; it must therefore be in every man’s power to become what he is, an individual. From becoming an individual no one, no one at all, is excluded, except he who excludes himself by becoming a crowd. To become a crowd, to collect a crowd about one, is on the contrary to affirm the distinctions of human life. The most well-meaning person who talk about these distinctions can easily offend an individual. But then it is not the crowd which possesses power, influence, repute, and mastery over men, but it is the invidious distinctions of human life which despotically ignore the single individual as the weak and impotent, which in a temporal and worldly interest ignore the eternal truth- the single greatest individual.
Life is Finite
A man that I knew recently passed away. I didn’t know him well, only having met his acquaintance through various parties and social gatherings over the years, but I always enjoyed his company when I was around him. He happened to do the same work as I, a carpenter, and we both enjoyed talking about music and, specifically, guitars.
His death was unexpected, stemming from an accident at work. He was working under a house in a tight area, and (probably while fumbling around), accidentally fired a nail from his nail gun into his heart. He was air lifted to a hospital, treated, went through rehab, and was sent home to recover further. Several days later, his wife arrived home from work to find him dead, looking “almost as if asleep”.
Moments like this in life, when an acquaintance, friend, or loved one passes away changes your perspective, if only for a little while. Our time here is limited, and while we struggle daily against that fact, eventually our bodies will decay, we will contract a disease, or suffer an accident, and suddenly we will be no more, our existence being extinguished like the flame of a candle being blown out.
As it turns out, this absurdity of life is something I happen to think about often. What makes life meaningful? Why? Is my life meaningful? Is there or can there be an objective standard of meaningfulness? I struggle to answer these questions, but increasingly I feel as though I am being pushed away from the things that I think are constraining me; work, money, etc. I wonder how much I am actually constrained by these things I worry about, and how much is dead weight that I am forcing myself to carry to my own detriment.
I can’t claim to know what makes life meaningful, but for me personally, I enjoy it the most when I feel free.
Life is short. Live freely.
Are There Limits to Natural Rights?
I have been thinking about natural rights and their relation to political theory. Now, I have for quite a while now been in favor of a natural rights based approach, but lately have been questioning how viable it truly is. Most natural rights political theory begins with some form of the Non Aggression Principle, which according to Wikipedia is “… a moral stance which asserts that aggression is inherently illegitimate.”. Now that certainly sounds like a good starting point to me, but does it tell the whole story? Wikipedia goes further:
NAP and property rights are closely linked, since what aggression is depends on what a person’s rights are.[1] Aggression, for the purposes of NAP, is defined as the initiation or threatening of violence against a person or legitimately-owned property of another. Specifically, any unsolicited actions of others that physically affect an individual’s property or person, no matter if the result of those actions is damaging, beneficial, or neutral to the owner, are considered violent or aggressive when they are against the owner’s free will and interfere with his right to self-determination and the principle of self-ownership.
There are several problems that I have currently. One, strict adherence to the NAP would necessarily lead to anarchism, since taxation is a function of the state, and is inherently coercive, thereby violating the NAP (Also, notice how a definition of property rights is presupposed in the NAP, at least as presented here. The definition is taken for granted while using it to support the very thing in question!). Now, I see no reason to dismiss anarchism prima facie, but it could be a tough pill to swallow for some, and intuitively I think most people are inclined (whether rightly or not) to dismiss it. However, I myself am not an anarchist; I do believe a minimal state is necessary to secure individual’s rights. In any case, the supporter of a minimal state now finds his or her self at odds with the common natural rights approach.
Is there a way natural rights can be reconciled with a state? I read an argument, presented by Mark Friedman, which goes as follows:
Quite clearly, deterring or preempting foreign attacks and international terrorism promotes rational agency in a way the basic scientific research does not…Therefore, the coercion of rational agents to support national defense is an exception to Nozickian side constraints because it can be justified in terms of the very value, rational agency, which generates those constraints.
At first I found this argument rather compelling, but of late have questioned it. If rights truly are an inherent part of being human, and are universal across a myriad of cultures and times, then why is a state necessary to secure them? It seems as though the state must exist prior to those rights if they are to be secured through the state. In the absence of a state, can individuals truly be said to have intrinsic rights if they are unable to effectively secure them? (It is at this point that anarcho-capitalists will chide me for thinking a state is required to protect rights. For reasons I don’t care to get into at the moment, I do not agree with them, though I’m sympathetic to their commitment to non-coercion.) It is true that individuals would be free to contract with others to provide them with protection services, but this leads to the “free-rider” problem: Would enough people contract with a particular agency in order to effectively provide security for a given area? I think it is likely that they would not, perhaps not seeing any immediate threats to their rights that would prompt them to want to. But the free-rider argument is itself a consequentialist one. What place does that have in a system of natural rights?
To me this is a significant problem. Can we really just pick and choose what types of arguments we want to use in any given moment, even if they are at times contradictory? It may work well in your average internet political battles, but hardly would withstand scrutiny enough to be considered a consistent political theory.
I am naturally disinclined towards consequentialism. At the root of it, I feel as though there is nothing in the way of an ever increasing leviathan of a government, that there is no universal framework with which to point to when government goes too far. However, I am coming to grips with the idea that I may be wrong; after all, people can just as easily reject the whole idea of natural rights, and either way it is a battle for liberty. There may not be, in fact, any universal framework at all, but only individual’s subjective thoughts, feelings, and opinions on certain matters. If another individual doesn’t feel as though I have a right to something, then I can’t expect my right to be respected by them, can I? In aggregate, this can mean that by default I do not have a right after all, even if I feel as though I should. It might be nice to appeal to natural rights in such a case, however if we still must at times appeal to consequentialist arguments, why hold to natural rights at all?
I still would like to see natural rights saved, if you will. I’m open to hearing arguments for and against, but more and more I’m leaning towards consequentialism.
I Couldn’t Not Post This
Too funny.
The Kingdom of God is like a Post Scarcity Economy
John 6 1-15 says:
Some time after this, Jesus crossed to the far shore of the Sea of Galilee (that is, the Sea of Tiberias), 2 and a great crowd of people followed him because they saw the signs he had performed by healing the sick. 3 Then Jesus went up on a mountainside and sat down with his disciples. 4 The Jewish Passover Festival was near.
5 When Jesus looked up and saw a great crowd coming toward him, he said to Philip, “Where shall we buy bread for these people to eat?” 6 He asked this only to test him, for he already had in mind what he was going to do.
7 Philip answered him, “It would take more than half a year’s wages[a] to buy enough bread for each one to have a bite!”
8 Another of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up, 9 “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?”
10 Jesus said, “Have the people sit down.” There was plenty of grass in that place, and they sat down (about five thousand men were there). 11 Jesus then took the loaves, gave thanks,and distributed to those who were seated as much as they wanted. He did the same with the fish.
12 When they had all had enough to eat, he said to his disciples, “Gather the pieces that are left over. Let nothing be wasted.” 13 So they gathered them and filled twelve baskets with the pieces of the five barley loaves left over by those who had eaten.
14 After the people saw the sign Jesus performed, they began to say, “Surely this is the Prophet who is to come into the world.” 15 Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force, withdrew again to a mountain by himself.
We just covered this passage in church today, and although I have heard the story before, I found it interesting from an economic perspective.
Economics centers around the idea of scarcity; resources are scarce, yet our wants are endless. The purpose of economics is to attempt to explain how and why people make the decisions they do in light of the limitations that they face. Going by the subjective theory of value, items cannot be said to have intrinsic value in and of themselves. People choose to trade what they have for things that they prefer more, and attempt to satisfy as much of those wants as they can with their finite resources, and the willingness of individuals to trade for things is what determine’s an item’s value.
However, in this story Jesus completely breaks those rules. The very thing that most limits us here on earth in our ability to satisfy our wants and needs, scarcity, is completely broken. All of the five thousand are fed, to the point where there is even twelve baskets left over! This of course points to how God is able to abundantly meet our needs, and isn’t bound by the same constraints as us humans.
My immediate thought is to say, “Well, in a post-scarcity economy, that would mean that everyone’s individual ends are satisfied, because there is no longer any reason for them not to be; everyone would be able to ‘afford’ whatever they want.” That would lead us towards the joy of heaven, where we experience happiness and community like we never had on earth. However, there is still a constraint here, at least from an earthly perspective. Jesus didn’t simply multiply the silver coins (which, from other sources I’ve read that an average day’s wage at the time would be one denarius, and if we assume a denarius to be one tenth of an ounce, then it would be $542.60 in today’s dollars to buy all the bread needed), and allow everyone to buy their own bread. After all, perhaps some people preferred wheat bread to barley bread, or some didn’t like fish (admittedly unlikely), or what have you. Jesus directly provided for their needs; he didn’t simply provide everyone the means to provide for themselves as they saw fit (ignoring, of course, the practical problem of how they would actually do that in this exact situation, with presumably no market nearby). What this tells me is that we as Christians are still to seek Jesus for our needs, that He still retains some sort of control over how we are provided for, even in a post scarcity setting.
There’s one more thing I would like to highlight: The people try to capture Jesus and make him King, by force. Besides the irony of trying to force someone to rule over you, Jesus rejects the idea and escapes. It reminds me of 1 Samuel:
4 So all the elders of Israel gathered together and came to Samuel at Ramah. 5 They said to him, “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead[b] us, such as all the other nations have.”
6 But when they said, “Give us a king to lead us,” this displeased Samuel; so he prayed to theLord. 7 And the Lord told him: “Listen to all that the people are saying to you; it is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king. 8 As they have done from the day I brought them up out of Egypt until this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are doing to you. 9 Now listen to them; but warn them solemnly and let them know what the king who will reign over them will claim as his rights.”
10 Samuel told all the words of the Lord to the people who were asking him for a king. 11 He said, “This is what the king who will reign over you will claim as his rights: He will take your sons and make them serve with his chariots and horses, and they will run in front of his chariots. 12 Some he will assign to be commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and others to plow his ground and reap his harvest, and still others to make weapons of war and equipment for his chariots. 13 He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. 14 He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive groves and give them to his attendants. 15 He will take a tenth of your grain and of your vintage and give it to his officials and attendants. 16 Your male and female servants and the best of your cattle[c] and donkeys he will take for his own use. 17 He will take a tenth of your flocks, and you yourselves will become his slaves. 18 When that day comes, you will cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.”
19 But the people refused to listen to Samuel. “No!” they said. “We want a king over us.20 Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”
21 When Samuel heard all that the people said, he repeated it before the Lord. 22 The Lordanswered, “Listen to them and give them a king.”
Then Samuel said to the Israelites, “Everyone go back to your own town.”
Quote of the Day
This passage appears in F.A. Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit, pages 112-113 under the heading Our Animistic Vocabulary and the Confused Concept of ‘Society’ (footnotes omitted):
[I]n the study of human affairs difficulties of communication begin with the definition and naming of the very objects we wish to analyse. The chief terminological barrier to understanding, outranking in importance the other terms we have just discussed, is the expression ‘society’ itself – and not only inasmuch as it has, since Marx, been used to blur the distinctions between governments and other ‘institutions’. As a word used to describe a variety of systems of interconnections of human activities, ‘society’ falsely suggests that all such systems as of the same kind. It is also one of the oldest terms of this kind, as for example in the Latin societas, from socius, the personally known fellow or companion; and it has been used to describe both an actually existing state of affairs and a relation between individuals. As usually employed, it presupposes or implies a common pursuit of shared purposes that usually can be achieved only by conscious collaboration.
As we have seen, it is one of the necessary conditions of the extension of human cooperation beyond the limits of individual awareness that the range of such pursuits be increasingly governed not by shared purposes but by abstract rules of conduct whose observance brings it about that we more and more serve the needs of people whom we do not know and find our own needs similarly satisfied by unknown persons. Thus the more the range of human cooperation extends, the less does motivation within it correspond to the mental picture people have of what should have in a ‘society’, and the more ‘social’ comes to be not the key word in a statement of the facts but the core of an appeal to an ancient, and now obsolete, ideal of general human behaviour. Any real appreciation of the difference between, on the one hand, what actually characterises individual behaviour in a particular group and, on the other, wishful thinking about what individual conduct should be (in accordance with older customs) is increasingly lost. Not only is any group of persons connected in practically any manner called a ‘society’, but it is concluded that any such group should behave as a primitive group of companions did.
Thus the word ‘society’ has become a convenient label denoting almost any group of people, a group about whose structure or reason for coherence nothing need be known – a makeshift phrase people resort to when they do not quite know what they are talking about. Apparently a people, a nation, a population, a company, an association, a group, a horde, a band, a tribe, the members of any particular place, all are, or constitute, societies.
To call by the same name such completely different formations as the companionship of individuals in constant personal contact and the structure formed by millions who are connected only by signals resulting from long and infinitely ramified chains of trade is not only factually misleading but also almost always contains a concealed desire to model this extended order on the intimate fellowship for which our emotions long. Bertrand de Jouvenel has well described this instinctive nostalgia for the small group – ‘the milieu in which man is first found, which retains for him an infinite attraction: but any attempt to graft the same features on a large society is utopian and leads to tyranny’.
The crucial difference overlooked in this confusion is that the small group can be led in its activities by agreed aims or the will of its members, while the extended order that is also a ‘society’ is formed into a concordant structure by its members’ observance of similar rules of conduct in the pursuit of individual purposes. The result of such diverse efforts under similar rules will indeed show of a few characteristics resembling those of an individual organism possessing a brain or mind, or what such an organism deliberately arranges, but is it misleading to treat such a ‘society’ animistically, or to personify it by ascribing to it a will, an intention, or a design. Hence it is disturbing to find a serious contemporary scholar confessing that to any utilitarian ‘society’ must appear not ‘as a plurality of persons… [but] as a sort of singe great person’.
Today marks the 21st anniversary of Hayek’s death. His was a great mind, and we could do well to have more thinkers like him.
Quote Of The Day
This is quoted from Kierkegaard’s Spiritual Writings, translated by George Pattison:
“Every good and every perfect gift is from above and comes down from the Father of Lights, in whom is no change or shadow of turning.”
These words are so healing, so curative, and yet how often has the penitent soul understood them in such a way as to let itself be healed by them; how often has it understood not only the seriousness of the judgement it implies but also its merciful grace?
Or, my listener, perhaps you never had occasion to find these words difficult? Were you always satisfied with yourself, so satisfied that you perhaps thanked God that you were not like other people? Did you perhaps get so clever as to understand the deep meaning in the meaninglessness saying that it was good not to be like other people?
I admit that I am sometimes proud enough to be glad that I am not like other people. It’s not a comforting position; to not be like other people is to feel misunderstood and alone, with only the authenticity of self to assuage the deep seated uneasiness. To be like other people, on the other hand, is to deny some part of who you are as an individual, and is like a slow death, a constant drip of water eventually wearing through your artificial skin and penetrating deep within your being, forcing you to make a decision: Is this who I am, or is it not?
On Individuality
To be an individual is to have irreducible complexity.
What do I mean by that? When people are viewed as groups, details about the individuals within the group get lost or ignored. Those details, those individuals, matter. They’re what define us as ourselves and what we derive meaning from.
Being an individual doesn’t preclude being a part of society; that would go against a fundamental part of being human. But to be at once an individual and also a part of society is a challenge. How does one interact with the people around us, themselves individuals, while remaining full in the nuances of who we are? It’s easy to think in terms of groups; to aggregate people loses those details of who they are, and doesn’t force us to contend with information about those people that would possibly go against our assumptions. Our minds see a pattern as it wants it see it, instead of seeing someone as themselves, a full individual. It is the individual within those groups that has value, not the group per se.
There are many terms that characterize me: Christian, male, introvert, depressive realist, artistic, etc., but no single one of them is me. I am a sum of all of those things, and more, more than I could even find words for. Furthermore, just as no one trait of mine could be considered “me”, to remove one would be to artificially reduce the complexity that encompasses my individuality. I am a whole person, however broken in an eternal perspective. “I”, is irreducible.
But if “I” is irreducible, how does one function in a group, or society at large? Groups are based on several characteristics that its members share, which defines the group from others that don’t share those characteristics. Groups, by their nature, minimize the individual by seeking to place value on those characteristics, rather than the people within them. They attempt to reduce the irreducible complexity of the individual, of “I”, and homogenize the individuals within them, replacing the “I” with “We”.
“We” is not a substitute for “I”. “We” is where individuality is lost, experience is lost, and truth is lost. “We” is unthinking, the poor replacement for the discernment of “I”. “We” does not have value apart from “I”.
“I” has irreducible complexity. “I” has value.
I am an individual.
What Is The Human Condition?
I recently watched the movie Blue Like Jazz. I greatly enjoyed the book; Donald Miller is a fantastic writer and really knows how to get real and personal, and isn’t afraid to show himself, and ultimately humanity, the way it really is. Watching the movie has led me to ponder further what the state of humanity is; are we inherently flawed, or are we overall pretty good, and capable of eventually achieving perfection? If we are capable of perfection, what would it even look like?
To be sure, humanity as a whole has evolved materially. Even the poor are better off materially in developed countries than the rich were two hundred years ago. Things that were once considered luxuries like indoor plumbing, electric lights, refrigeration, air conditioning, or automobiles are now considered staples, and are generally readily available. But is that what perfection looks like, ever improving circumstances and material goods? What about the human heart? What about it’s motives?
There seems to be a divide between progressive and individualistic thought that sometimes it seems no bridge can span. Progressives look at circumstances and seem to be more willing to let the ends justify the means. Progressives have the best of intentions (at least, according to their own morality), and see that as moral justification for their actions and ideas. They see how power and authority could be used positively, in their view, and that’s why they seek it out actively.
Individualists on the other hand are ever wary of authority and the various ways it’s power can be abused. I think it represents an underlying understanding that people are capable of great evil, and to give someone with that capacity authority over another is not only immoral, but a recipe for disaster. I need not invoke the names of some of the totalitarian regimes of the past.
But why is there this disconnect? How can something so fundamental be so disagreed upon? Are we inherently good, or aren’t we? The answer to this question has phenomenal ripples effects into the rest of our thinking. It completely shapes our sense of morality; if we’re inherently good, then our circumstances really are the problem, aren’t they? After all, I can’t be the problem if I’m good, so the problem must lie elsewhere. That’s not to say that people don’t make bad choices, of course, but overall, according to this view, people are fundamentally good.
To flip the coin over, if people are inherently flawed, then it’s a very different picture. Circumstances aren’t the problem, we are. Of course, as an individualist, I think this view has much merit. I think the enlightenment thinkers and classical liberals understood this as well; Lord Acton wrote, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” So from an individualist perspective, the human heart doesn’t preclude moral actions, but the tendency for error or corruption is always there.
When I see all the ways that power gets abused, I can’t help but to wonder whether any authority structure is inherently flawed, because you will always be placing one potentially corruptible person over another. Of course, that fits right in line with the rest of my thinking; if we’re inherently flawed, why should anything we create not be as well?
In the movie, the main character starts out as an assistant to a youth pastor in his church. Eventually it is revealed that the youth pastor is having an adulterous affair with the main character’s mother, who we later find out is pregnant. This causes him much turmoil as he sees just how deeply he has been betrayed, not just by his mother and youth pastor, but by the church structure as a whole.
I liked that part of the movie, because that’s how people really act. We screw up all the time, we hurt people, we lie, cheat, steal, and then do it all over again to cover it up. When we get together and form a government, we do the same things, only this time everything has been magnified exponentially. Given that those are our actions, why would we seek to have others rule over us? What really is the net gain there? Because it’s easier than running our own life? Isn’t that just another flaw of the human heart?
We humans have been on this earth a long time, and while we’ve improved our overall circumstances, our hearts haven’t changed. And that is why authority must be questioned, and power restrained.
The Existential Christian 
C.S. Lewis on Government
I recently stumbled across an article at The Beacon on C.S. Lewis’ views towards government. Long, but engaging and worth the read. I will leave you, dear Reader, with a quote of his, quoted in the article: