Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in kimchalister's LiveJournal:

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Friday, October 16th, 2009
11:08 pm	Who Owns the World? this is, I believe, a really important sermon.  I have been reading a book about the promise of Tom Paine's America.  Doug quotes Tom Paine briefly, but there is so much more there that we are in danger of losing.  But, this is about the very important concept of property -- whose definition will we use? and what does it mean for how the world is run?  And it is about justice. --Kim Tuesday, October 06, 2009 Who Owns the World a sermon by Doug Muder delivered at the Community Church of Chapel Hill October 4, 2009 Opening Words The opening words are the first verse of an anonymous poem from 18th century England. It protests a process known as Enclosure, or what today we would call privatization. Through Enclosure, a village's common land would become the private property of some rich lord. The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from off the goose. Readings The first reading is from a papal encyclical, Laborem Exercens by Pope John Paul II. Working at any workbench, whether a relatively primitive or an ultramodern one, a man can easily see that through his work he enters into two inheritances: the inheritance of what is given to the whole of humanity in the resources of nature, and the inheritance of what others have already developed on the basis of those resources, primarily by developing technology, that is to say, by producing a whole collection of increasingly perfect instruments for work. The second reading is from Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, specifically from the 100-page speech by John Galt that is the novel’s climax and centerpiece. Here, Galt discusses the relationship between one of the novels’ heroes, the industrialist Hank Rearden, and his workers: The machine, the frozen form of a living intelligence, is the power that expands the potential of your life by raising the productivity of your time. If you worked as a blacksmith in the mystics’ Middle Ages, the whole of your earning capacity would consist of an iron bar produced by your hands in days and days of effort. How many tons of rail do you produce per day if you work for Hank Rearden? Would you dare to claim that the size of your pay check was created solely by your physical labor and that those rails were the product of your muscles? The standard of living of that blacksmith is all that your muscles are worth; the rest is a gift from Hank Rearden. I’ll hit this point harder in the sermon, but right now I want to call attention to what Galt’s speech has done to the Pope’s second inheritance, the inheritance of technology. In this passage Rand anoints the factory owner as the sole heir to technological progress. His workers inherit nothing from the inventors of the past. If they benefit at all from the progress of technology, it is not by right of inheritance, but due to the generosity of their employer. It is “a gift from Hank Rearden.” Sermon When Unitarian Universalists talk among ourselves about social justice, we all more-or-less know what that means: Things should be more equal. The poor should be richer. The disadvantaged should be less disadvantaged. No one should be hungry. The sick or injured should be cared for. Education should available to everyone. And so on. We’re much better making these kinds of lists than we are at explaining why this world we’re envisioning is just. I think that’s because, among ourselves, we don’t need to explain it. Most people with UU values just feel it, without explanation. You say, “Isn’t it awful that in such a wealthy country, some people are poor or hungry or have to go without healthcare or education?” And whoever you are talking to says, “Yes, it is awful.” And the conversation goes on from there. There’s nothing wrong with that conversation. But if that’s what we’re expecting, we’ll be at a loss if people feel differently. They might, for example, focus on the cost of doing all these things and wonder why they should pay it. In his We Surround Them broadcast, for example, Glenn Beck made this one of the 9 principles of his 9/12 Project (principles which he stated not simply for himself, but because he expected his listeners to share them): "I work hard for what I have, and I will share it with others when I choose, who I choose, should I choose. The government cannot force me to be charitable." At a townhall meeting in Indiana this summer, someone said, "I'm responsible for myself and I'm not responsible for other people. I should get the fruits of my labor and I shouldn't have to divvy it up with other people." If working people feel that way, imagine how rich people must feel. The CEO of Whole Foods began his newspaper editorial against President Obama’s healthcare plan with this famous Margaret Thatcher quote: “The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.” When you’re expecting a compassionate response and don’t get it, it’s tempting to write people off as selfish or hard-hearted. But many of them aren’t. Some people who look at the world this way are quite generous. They give money away. They put themselves out for others. They volunteer. But the model they put on this behavior isn’t justice, it’s charity. Justice, to them, would mean keeping what is theirs. Giving it away is charity. American history includes some outstanding examples of charity. In the Gilded Age, it sometimes seemed that the more ruthlessly money was acquired, the more generously it was distributed. People like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie endowed countless libraries, museums, hospitals, and universities. The richest men in today's America, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, have put tens of billions of dollars into a foundation that is doing wonderful work around the world. But charity and justice are very different models. The Brazilian Archbishop Helder Camara got right to the root of the difference in this quote: “When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” A charitable worldview doesn't critique the way the world works, it just tries to mitigate the unfortunate results. If the world’s resources are controlled by relatively few people, and if that small class gets richer and richer as time goes on, a charitable person may think that's fine as long as the privileged class is generous. By avoiding a critique and embracing compassion, charity is fundamentally a system of the heart. And a society that relies on charity to solve its problems will find itself in a perpetual argument between head and heart. In any situation there will be the sensible thing to do and the compassionate thing to do, and the two will rarely align. By contrast, a justice-focused worldview does critique the system. It asks why the poor have no food. It asks how the difference between rich and poor came about. It asks how the system that leads to this result justifies itself. A justice-based view does not accept that head and heart are naturally in conflict. If your reason has led you to a system that your compassion rejects, maybe you missed something. Maybe you're taking something for granted that you shouldn't. Social justice does not ask you to give up on thinking and follow your heart. Instead it asks you to check your assumptions and think again. Today I want to focus on one of the great works of the justice tradition, which unfortunately is not nearly as well known as it ought to be. I’m talking about a short, simple, and very insightful little book by Thomas Paine called Agrarian Justice. Thomas Paine's name-recognition has gone up recently, because Glenn Beck has written a best-seller that claims to update Paine’s American-revolution classic Common Sense. This shows the difference between name-recognition and being well known, because if people have heard of Paine but think of him as an 18th-century Glenn Beck, they don't know him at all. By the time he writes Agrarian Justice, Paine has already played his role in the American Revolution, has gotten himself thrown out of England for preaching revolution there, and is in Paris trying to keep the French Revolution from going off the rails. Agrarian Justice is his proposal to the English, that they should give each young adult (of either gender) a stake of capital to get started in the world, and also establish an old-age pension, and that it should all be funded by an inheritance tax -- or (as Beck might say) a death tax. And what is most interesting from our point of view this morning is that he proposes this not as charity but as justice. Paine is speaking not just from the heart, but from head and heart together. Paine's analysis challenges one of the most fundamental economic concepts: property. He realizes that once you accept the property system, you’re stuck in a charity model. If you accept that people own what they own, free and clear with no obligation to anyone, then from that point forward, Margaret Thatcher is right: doing anything for the poor means using other people’s money. Those people own it, and you have to either beg it from them by appealing to their generosity, or take it from them by force. When people have lived under a property system their entire lives -- as the English had then and we have today -- they tend to take it for granted. But Paine did not take property for granted, because he had seen the example of the Native Americans. He writes: The life of an Indian is a continual holiday compared with the poor of Europe; and, on the other hand, it appears to be abject when compared to the rich. Civilization, therefore, or that which is so called, has operated in two ways: to make one part of society more affluent, and the other more wretched, than would have been the lot of either in a natural state. But wait, civilization is supposed to be a good thing, isn’t it? Paine agrees: The first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period. Now that’s a fine sentiment, a statement of the heart. But if our heads are going to go along on this trip, we need to understand why things didn’t turn out that way. Is there some reason why the poor have to be wretched, or did we make some initial mistake that led to that result? Paine says there was a mistake, and it has to do with how we created property. Let me stop here for a minute, because I just snuck in a radical idea: We created property. A lot of people today write about property as if it were a natural concept, something that exists prior to all societies or governments Not at all. Paine expresses this idea in Biblical terms: Neither did the Creator of the earth open a land office from which the first title-deeds should issue. He might also have pointed to the animal world, because nothing remotely like property exists in nature. Animals have territory, which is a very different idea. A bird may build its nest in a tree and chase off all competing birds. But no bird has ever sold a tree to another bird, or rented a nest, or taken in someone else’s egg in exchange for a few worms. When a lion kills a zebra, the other animals stay away until he has eaten the lion’s share. But when the lion trots away for his nap, the hyenas and jackals and vultures don’t buy the zebra corpse from the lion. They don’t owe the lion any future favors, because the zebra is not property. Private property is not a natural concept, and it is not some mystical connection between a person and an object or a piece of land. Paine writes: The earth in its natural, uncultivated state, was, and ever would have continued to be THE COMMON PROPERTY OF THE HUMAN RACE. In that state every man would have been born to property. He would have been a joint life-proprietor with the rest in the property of the soil, and in all its natural productions, vegetable and animal. Being a practical man, Paine recognizes that American or English-style agriculture would not work on those terms, because it requires a long investment of effort before you see any product. You have to cut down the trees and pull up the stumps and dig out the rocks. Each year you have to plow and plant and fertilize and weed. And who would do all that if, in the end, he had no more right than anyone else to gather the harvest? And so Paine believed it was right and just for the difference in value between cultivated land and uncultivated land to be private property. Not the land itself -- the difference in value between cultivated and uncultivated land. And here he locates the original mistake, the original sin for which the poor pay the price. Rather than just let people own the value of their improvements in the productivity of the land, we created a system in which they own the land. We created a system in which the Earth itself is owned, not by humanity in general, but only by the people who have their names on deeds. In other words, the poor of Europe were worse off than Native Americans not because God created them that way, but because they had been disinherited; their share of the common inheritance of humankind had been usurped. Paine was just talking about land, but it’s easy to see how his ideas extend to other areas. Individuals deserve to have some kind of property in the mines they dig and the wells they drill, but what they pull out of the Earth -- the gold, the silver, the coal, the iron, the water, the oil -- is also part of the common inheritance. And consider not just our physical inheritance, but our cultural inheritance. I’m a writer. I work in words and I sell my words. But I did not invent words. I did not invent the English language. I did not teach it to all of you so that you could understand me. So if there is value in my words, I didn’t create that value out of nothing. Part of that value should belong to me, but part rightfully belongs to the common inheritance. Newton said, “If I have seen further than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.” He did not say: “Those are my giants. I own this perch up here on their shoulders. I -- and not you -- are the heir to these giants.” No. Inventors, researchers, and technologists do indeed create value, but they don’t create it out of nothing. The ideas that are the raw material of their creations belong to the common inheritance. Only part of the value they create should belong to them; the rest belongs to everyone. Once you buy into the illusions of property; once you accept that people own what they own and owe nothing to anyone -- you’ve given the social-justice game away. You’ve accepted the usurpation of our common inheritance. You’ve agreed to disinheriting the poor. And the resources that are needed to feed the hungry, to care for the sick, to educate the young -- you can beg for them or you can seize them by force, but you can’t claim them by right anymore. From that point forward, your heart may still be with the poor, but your head will always pull you back towards Margaret Thatcher, because all the money in the world is other people’s money. So if you accept that the poor have an inheritance coming, how should they collect it? Paine, as I said, was a practical man, and he recognizes that he can't even calculate the rents and royalties that the poor have coming, much less collect and distribute them. Instead, he proposes that everyone be offered a deal. In payment for your share of the common inheritance, in exchange for your acceptance that you were born into a world where every single object of value was already claimed by someone else -- we’ll offer you this: When you reach adulthood, we’ll give you a stake, some bit of capital that you can use to buy a little land or some tools or something else that will launch you into a profession. And if you make it to old age, to the point where you can’t reasonably expect to work any more, we’ll give you a pension. Notice that Paine does not propose a dole, or some program of bread and circuses, or make-work projects that will give everyone a meaningless job. His proposal is much more radical than that: The poor should be capitalized. Everyone should have a stake, a chance to launch themselves into the middle of the economy rather than start at the bottom. In Paine’s day, there was a world of difference between a poor family and one with just little bit of capital. Think about all those traditional English names. With some capital, you could buy a wagon and become a Carter. With a grindstone you could be a Miller. With some tools and a little training you could be a Smith or a Taylor or a Cooper. But without capital, you were a nobody. In Biblical times capital meant land, and so in Micah’s vision of the just world “Every man shall sit under his own vine or his own fig tree, undisturbed.” Later on in the encyclical I quoted, Pope John Paul II envisions the world not as a Great Feeding Trough but as a Great Workbench, where we all have our place and access to the tools we need. Launching yourself into the middle of an information economy is more complicated, but by now the value of the common inheritance has grown. Exactly what deal it makes sense to offer today, in lieu of the inheritance we can’t deliver, is a topic for another day. Certainly education must be part of it, and childhood nutrition. In general, people should be freed from poverty traps, from situations in which their short-term survival depends on doing things that harm their long-term interests. No heir of a rich inheritance should ever have to eat the seed corn. The Pope’s image goes a long way towards helping us evaluate the adequacy of any proposal: Everyone should have a seat at the Great Workbench. That seat should belong to them by right, and not through anyone's generosity. Even if we had such a program, if we had a way to deliver to each and every person the value of their share of the collective inheritance, things could still go wrong. Some Prodigal Sons would waste their inheritance. Some unlucky people would lose it to accident or illness. Some people's abilities would be so limited that, despite our best efforts, we could not find tools that would make them productive. There would, in other words, still be occasions for charity -- even if all people received the full value of their inheritance. But that is not where we are today. In the world we live in, people are poor because the collective inheritance has been usurped by people who believe that what is theirs is theirs, and they owe no one for its use; who believe that only land-owners are beneficiaries of the Creation; who believe that businessmen and industrialists are the sole heirs of technological progress; who believe that only the educated rightfully inherit our cultural legacy. After the inheritance or some acceptable compensation for it has been delivered to all people, then charity might be enough. But until then, we should never stop talking about justice. Closing words That poem I opened with has four verses, and the final one echoes the first: The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common And geese will still a common lack Till they go and steal it back. Current Mood: tired (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, September 26th, 2009
10:58 am	looking up at the stars I just was reading a post (at The Gods Are Bored) about meteor showers and light pollution and seeing the stars.  I wrote this in the comments: A few years ago we were in San Felipe in Baja.  We came out of the restaurant and found ourselves standing in the parking lot looking up at all those stars.  A few minutes into this, our real estate agent came out and saw us standing there and laughed delightedly.  He said, "We all do that around here.  That's why the homeowners' association voted not to put in street lights." I thought you might like to see that.... Current Mood: chipper (Comment on this)
Sunday, August 9th, 2009
2:57 pm	My response to the anti-democratic astro-turfers   In my opinion, it should be illegal to lie about what is in public bills that may or may not make it into law:   This is the same as bearing false witness in court, or perjury, because this is the Court of Public Opinion, and truth is necessary for a democracy to function.  Saying, for instance, that the Public Option would kill your grandma is an out and out lie, and as such it steals your ability to make decisions based on the truth, and is therefore theft, and should be prosecuted as such.  Perjury and theft: the platform of the Conservative Big Money interests.  --Kim Current Mood: calm (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, June 15th, 2009
7:36 pm	Obama and LGBT rights On June 13, I went to the Whitehouse website and sent this email to Obama: I am outraged! Mr. Obama, you need to fire W. Scott Simpson, now! You need to change that decision. You are overplaying your hand in this and appearing to be a closet homosexual yourself. It is completely outrageous to compare same-sex marriages to incest or bestiality or pedophilia. It applies exactly as much as it does to your marriage or your parents' marriage. You have betrayed some of your staunchest supporters. You have repeatedly stabbed us in the back, but this, this is going too far. You have to undo it, NOW! We are cautiously waiting to see if you really have a plan for health care, despite not giving us what we want. We gave you credit for playing politics when you said you weren't for gay marriage in the campaign. But not being for us is different from being against us. And this shows you are against us. What you need to do is to get some close personal friends who are gay or lesbian. And listen to them. And listen again. And hold their babies in your arms. Know that same-sex couples NEVER have unwanted children, they are never accidents. And know that they love their children at least as much as you love yours. If you can't give us real marriage, at least don't stab us in the back! I am so angry! Kim Current Mood: angry (Comment on this)
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009
2:24 pm	On global warming I just posted this on a thread about global warming on BeliefNet.  Of course, they were arguing whether it's real, whether it's human-caused, and whether we shouldn't wait another 20 years until we have more information.  but the original post started with "it's already too late to avoid global warming".  Here's what I said: All the problems of the world are knitted up together.  Global warming, or general pollution, do not stand alone.  They are firmly intertwined with the problem of greed, feudal business practices, lack of democratic understanding, authoritarian outlooks, too much respect for money and too little respect for work or humanity.  If businesses were run democratically, for the good of the people doing the work and for the commons as well as those with "ownership", then greed would not have us over a barrel so badly, and we could decide, as a community, how much pollution we want to tolerate and what we want to do about it.  But, as it stands now, it is no individual, but the system who decides.  And the system has no conscience, and does not breathe the air or drink the water, and it is set up to make rich people richer and poor people poorer rather than to give money to those who actually do the work. (That's why they call them "workers".) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 22nd, 2009
9:24 pm	Can we? Could we pass a law saying that any corporation that has a lobbyist must make their tax returns public? Current Mood: content (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009
3:14 pm	quality versus luck Americans tend to assume that business people who make lots of money are good at what they do.  When I was studying about roses, one of the books I read quoted a great rosarian as saying, "If you feed them and spray them and baby them, you'll get gorgeous roses. And if you neglect, them you'll get gorgeous roses.  Because, after all, they are just glorified brambles." What if the USA was so rich in resources, both "natural" and human ingenuity, that people have been able to make vast fortunes even doing all the wrong things?  What if they have been doing well in business in spite of their policies instead of because of them?  what if what they have been teaching in business schools is all wrong, and it just never really mattered until now?  Now that we are running out of cheap energy, running out of an educated and motivated population, running out of hope?  What if the way they are doing business in other countries, those social-democracies in Europe for instance, is really a better way to do it?  And we just never noticed that we could be doing a lot better if we based what we do on different theories? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ We are going to be offering a workshop at District Assembly on worker-owned cooperatives.  I will do the introduction, my partner will do the next part, and Kasper will talk about actual real-live worker owned cooperatives that exist in the Bay Area right now.  Here is the text of my introduction: My name is Kim, and I am a life-long UU and a member of UUs of SM.  In 1776 we, the American People, changed the world.  We decided that our new government would not be just another monarchy like all the rest, ruled by hereditary rulers of wealth and privilege.  We decided we wanted to try to run our country with The People being sovereign. Now, it is time for us to complete what we started in 1776 and make business democratic too. History goes in cycles and we are at a time of great change.  We need to grab the change and make it go in a positive direction rather than negative. Today’s young people are of a practical mind, and if we join with them to do it, we can direct the next big step toward life, liberty, and the common good.  Right now, Humpty-Dumpty economics is what our government appears to be doing, which is picking up the broken financial system and putting it back together again as it was, so that nothing much has changed and we will have to go through this Depression thing again in another eighty years.  The current form of Capitalism is based on feudalism and oligarchy, on what could be called Wealthism.  It is a system where money is more important than people, and we just go along with the idea that people who already have money should find it easier to make more money than people who don’t.   We go along with the idea that shareholders, who contribute almost nothing to a business, should vote in that business, but the workers, who contribute almost everything, shouldn’t have a vote.  We go along with the idea that stockholders deserve first dibs at the profit and that workers, who make the profit, should get as little of it as possible: we continue to look at stockholders as assets and workers as expenses, when the reality is that the workers are the biggest assets a business has, while stockholders are a major expense.  We are overdue for a whole revolution in how we think about modern business.  We need a form of Capitalism suitable for a stable society rather than a frontier society, something sustainable that lifts everyone who is willing to work, not just those who already have money.  Since UUs are dedicated to Justice, which necessarily includes Economic justice, this is a topic we should be studying and understanding, because there IS something we can do about it.  Capitalism can evolve into a new form.  It’s not just a choice between capitalism and socialism, there are other ways to run capitalism that put the workers and the community first. By changing the way the market is run, we can evolve without needing to plead with the government to lead that change.  The first thing you can do is to vote with your pocketbook.  But that’s just the first thing.  And here to talk to you today about what is happening now, and what more you can do are Joyce, Kaspar, and Dave.  Joyce is my partner and a member of UUs of San Mateo, and Kasper and Dave are members of the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives, or  NoBAWC,.  Current Mood: good (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 21st, 2009
2:32 pm	Huston Smith said that the proper function of religion in politics is to keep everyone honest.  Can we start a movement for honesty? Honesty in politics, in media, in life?  I feel that is the center of morality, and we need a return to the value of honesty.  And religion should have something to say about this.  Why not us? (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
9:06 pm	The Obama Code by George Lakoff Here is a great article by George Lakoff (the linguist who taught us about framing, author of Moral Politics and Don't Think of an Elephant.)  I strongly recommend reading it.  It analyzes Obama's expression of his vision for America.  It's about the difference between policies and vision.  Read it.  --Kim The Obama Code Tuesday 24 February 2009 by: George Lakoff, t r u t h o u t | Perspective   President Barack Obama. (Photo: Jae C. Hong / AP)     As President Obama prepares to address a joint session of Congress, what can we expect to hear?     The pundits will stress the nuts-and-bolts policy issues: the banking system, education, energy, health care. But beyond policy, there will be a vision of America - a moral vision and a view of unity that the pundits often miss.     What they miss is the Obama Code.     For the sake of unity, the President tends to express his moral vision indirectly. Like other self-aware and highly articulate speakers, he connects with his audience using what cognitive scientists call the "cognitive unconscious." Speaking naturally, he lets his deepest ideas simply structure what he is saying. If you follow him, the deep ideas are communicated unconsciously and automatically. The Code is his most effective way to bring the country together around fundamental American values.     For supporters of the President, it is crucial to understand the Code in order to talk overtly about the old values our new president is communicating. It is necessary because tens of millions of Americans - both conservatives and progressives - don't yet perceive the vital sea change that Obama is bringing about.     The word "code" can refer to a system of either communication or morality. President Obama has integrated the two. The Obama Code is both moral and linguistic at once. The President is using his enormous skills as a communicator to express a moral system. As he has said, budgets are moral documents. His economic program is tied to his moral system and is discussed in the Code, as are just about all of his other policies.     Behind the Obama Code are seven crucial intellectual moves that I believe are historically, practically, and cognitively appropriate, as well as politically astute. They are not all obvious, and jointly they may seem mysterious. That is why it is worth sorting them out one-by-one.     1. Values Over Programs     The first move is to distinguish programs from the value systems they represent. Every policy has a material aspect - the nuts and bolts of how it works - plus a typically implicit cognitive aspect that represents the values and ideas behind the nuts and bolts. The President knows the difference. He understands that those who see themselves as "progressive" or "conservative" all too often define those words in terms of programs rather than values. Even the programs championed by progressives may not fit what the President sees as the fundamental values of the country. He is seeking to align the programs of his administration with those values.     The potential pushback will come not just from conservatives who do not share his values, but just as much from progressives who make the mistake of thinking that programs are values and that progressivism is defined by a list of programs. When some of those programs are cut as economically secondary or as unessential, their defenders will inevitably see this as a conservative move rather than a move within an overall moral vision they share with the President.     This separation between values and programs lies behind the president's pledge to cut programs that don't serve those values and support those that do - no matter whether they are proposed by Republicans or Democrats. The President's idealistic question is, what policies serve what values? - not what political interests?     2. Progressive Values Are American Values     President Obama's second intellectual move concerns what the fundamental American values are. In Moral Politics, I described what I found to be the implicit, often unconscious, value systems behind progressive and conservative thought. Progressive thought rests, first, on the value of empathy - putting oneself in other people's shoes, seeing the world through their eyes, and therefore caring about them. The second principle is acting on that care, taking responsibility both for oneself and others, social as well as individual responsibility. The third is acting to make oneself, the country, and the world better - what Obama has called an "ethic of excellence" toward creating "a more perfect union" politically.     Historian Lynn Hunt, in Inventing Human Rights, has shown that those values, beginning with empathy, lie historically behind the human rights expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.     Obama, in various interviews and speeches, has provided the logical link. Empathy is not mere sympathy. Putting oneself in the shoes of others brings with it the responsibility to act on that empathy - to be "our brother's keeper and our sister's keeper" - and to act to improve ourselves, our country, and the world.     The logic is simple: Empathy is why we have the values of freedom, fairness, and equality - for everyone, not just for certain individuals. If we put ourselves in the shoes of others, we will want them to be free and treated fairly. Empathy with all leads to equality: no one should be treated worse than anyone else. Empathy leads us to democracy: to avoid being subject indefinitely to the whims of an oppressive and unfair ruler, we need to be able to choose who governs us and we need a government of laws.     Obama has consistently maintained that what I, in my writings, have called "progressive" values are fundamental American values. From his perspective, he is not a progressive; he is just an American. That is a crucial intellectual move.     Those empathy-based moral values are the opposite of the conservative focus on individual responsibility without social responsibility. They make it intolerable to tolerate a president who is The Decider - who gets to decide without caring about or listening to anybody. Empathy-based values are opposed to the pure self-interest of a laissez-faire "free market," which assumes that greed is good and that seeking self-interest will magically maximize everyone's interests.     They oppose a purely self-interested view of America in foreign policy. Obama's foreign policy is empathy-based, concerned with people as well as states - with poverty, education, disease, water, the rights of women and children, ethnic cleansing, and so on around the world.     How are such values expressed? Take a look at the inaugural speech. Empathy: "the kindness to take in a stranger when the levees break, the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job, the firefighter's courage to storm a stairway filled with smoke, but also a parent's willingness to nurture a child..." Responsibility to ourselves and others: "We have duties to ourselves, the nation, and the world." The ethic of excellence: "there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of character, than giving our all to a difficult task." They define our democracy: "This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed."     The same values apply to foreign policy: "To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and make clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds." And to religion as well: By quoting language like "our brother's keeper," he is communicating that mere individual responsibility will not get you into Heaven, that social responsibility and making the world better is required.     3. Biconceptualism and the New Bipartisanship     The third crucial idea behind the Obama Code is biconceptualism, the knowledge that a great many people who identify themselves ideologically as conservatives, or politically as Republicans or Independents, share those fundamental American values - at least on certain issues. Most "conservatives" are not thoroughgoing movement conservatives, but are what I have called "partial progressives" sharing Obama's American values on many issues.     Where such folks agree with him on values, Obama tries, and will continue to try, to work with them on those issues if not others. And, he assumes, correctly believe, that the more they come to think in terms of those American values, the less they will think in terms of opposing conservative values.     Biconceptualism lay behind his invitation to Rick Warren to speak at the inaugural. Warren is a biconceptual, like many younger evangelicals. He shares Obama's views of the environment, poverty, health, and social responsibility, though he is otherwise a conservative. Biconceptualism is behind his "courting" of Republican members of Congress. The idea is not to accept conservative moral views, but to find those issues where individual Republicans already share what he sees as fundamentally American values.     He has "reached across the aisle" to Richard Lugar on nuclear proliferation, but not on economics.     Biconceptualism is central to Obama's attempts to achieve unity - a unity based on his understanding of American values. The current economic failure gives him an opening to speak about the economy in terms of those ideals: caring about all, prosperity for all, responsibility for all by all, and good jobs for all who want to work.     I think Obama is correct about biconceptualism of this sort - at least where the overwhelming proportion of Americans is concerned. When the President spoke at the Lincoln Day dinner recently about sensible Midwestern Republicans, he meant biconceptual Republicans, who are progressive and/or pragmatic on many issues.     But hardcore movement conservatives tend to be more ideological and less biconceptual than their constituents. In the recent stimulus vote, the hardcore movement conservatives kept party discipline (except for three Senate votes) by threatening to run opposition candidates against anyone who broke ranks. They were able to enforce this because the conservative message machine is strong in their districts and there is no nationwide progressive message machine operating in those districts. The effectiveness of the conservative message machine led to Obama making a rare mistake in communication, the mistake of saying out loud in Florida not to think of Rush Limbaugh, thus violating the first rule of framing and giving Rush Limbaugh even greater power.     Biconceptual, partly progressive, Republicans do exist in Congress, and the president is not going to give up on them. But as long as the conservative message machine can activate its values virtually unopposed in conservative districts, movement conservatives can continue to pressure biconceptual Republicans and keep them from voting their conscience on many issues. This is why a nationwide progressive message machine needs to be organized if the president is to achieve unity through biconceptualism.     4. Protection and Empowerment     The fourth idea behind the Obama Code is the President's understanding of government - "not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works." This depends on what "works" means. The word sounds purely pragmatic, but it is moral in operation.     The idea is that government has twin moral missions: protection and empowerment. Protection includes not just military and police protection, but protections for the environment, consumers, workers, pensioners, disaster victims, and investors.     Empowerment is what his stimulus package is about: it includes education and other forms of infrastructure - roads, bridges, communications, energy supply, the banking system and stock market. The moral mission of government is simple: no one can earn a living in America or live an American life without protection and empowerment by the government. The stimulus package is basically an empowerment package. Taxes are what you pay for living in America, rather than in Congo or Bangladesh. And the more money you make from government protection and empowerment, the more you owe in return. Progressive taxation is a matter of moral accounting. Tax cuts for the middle class mean that the middle class hasn't been getting as much as it has been contributing to the nation's productivity for many years.     This view of government meshes with our national ideal of equality. There needs to be moral equality: equal protection and equal empowerment. We all deserve health care protection, retirement protection, worker protection, employment protection, protection of our civil liberties, and investment protection. Protection and empowerment. That's what "works" means - "whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified."     5. Morality and Economics Fit Together     Crises are times of opportunity. Budgets are moral statements. President Obama has put these ideas together. His economic program is a moral program and conversely. Why the quartet of leading economic issues - education, energy, health, banking? Because they are at the heart of government's moral mission of protection and empowerment, and correspondingly, they are what is needed to act on empathy, social and personal responsibility, and making the future better.     The economic crisis is also an opportunity. It requires him to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the right things to do.     6. Systemic Causation and Systemic Risk     Conservatives tend to think in terms of direct causation. The overwhelming moral value of individual, not social, responsibility requires that causation be local and direct. For each individual to be entirely responsible for the consequences of his or her actions, those actions must be the direct causes of those consequences. If systemic causation is real, then the most fundamental of conservative moral - and economic - values is fallacious.     Global ecology and global economics are prime examples of systemic causation. Global warming is fundamentally a system phenomenon. That is why the very idea threatens conservative thinking. And the global economic collapse is also systemic in nature. That is at the heart of the death of the conservative principle of the laissez-faire free market, where individual short-term self-interest was supposed to be natural, moral, and the best for everybody. The reality of systemic causation has left conservatism without any real ideas to address global warming and the global economic crisis.     With systemic causation goes systemic risk. The old rational actor model taught in economics and political science ignored systemic risk. Risk was seen as local and governed by direct causation, that is, buy short-term individual decisions. The investment banks acted on their own short-term risk, based on short-term assumptions, for example, that housing prices would continue to rise or that bundles of mortgages once secure for the short term would continue to be "secure" and could be traded as "securities."     The systemic nature of ecological and economic causation and risk have resulted in the twin disasters of global warming and global economic breakdown. Both must be dealt with on a systematic, global, long-term basis. Regulating risk is global and long-term, and so what are required are world-wide institutions that carry out that regulation in systematic way and that monitor causation and risk systemically, not just locally.     President Obama understands this, though much of the country does not. Part of his challenge will be to formulate policies that carry out these ideas and to communicate these ideas as well as possible to the public.     7. Contested Concepts and Patriotic Language     As President, Barack Obama must speak in patriotic language. But all patriot language in this country is "contested." Every major patriotic term has a core meaning that we all understand the same way. But that common core meaning is very limited in its application. Most uses of patriotic language are extended from the core on the basis of either conservative or progressive values to produce meanings that are often opposite from each other.     I've written a whole book, Whose Freedom?, on the word "freedom" as used by conservatives and progressives. In his second inaugural, George W. Bush used "freedom," "free," and "liberty" over and over - first, with its common meaning, then shifting to its conservative meaning: defending "freedom" as including domestic spying, torture and rendition, denial of habeus corpus, invading a country that posed no threat to us, a "free market" based on greed and short-term profits for the wealthy, denying sex education and access to women's health facilities, denying health care to the poor, and leading to the killing and maiming of innocent civilians in Iraq by the hundreds of thousands, all in the name of "freedom."     It was anything but a progressive's view of freedom - and anything but the view intended in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.     For forty years, from the late 1960's through 2008, conservatives managed, through their extensive message machine, to reframe much of our political discourse to fit their worldview. President Obama is reclaiming our patriotic language after decades of conservative dominance, to fit what he has correctly seen as the ideals behind the founding of our country.     "Freedom" will no longer mean what George W. Bush meant by it. Guantanamo will be closed, torture outlawed, the market regulated. Obama's inaugural address was filled with framings of patriotic concepts to fit those ideals. Not just the concept of freedom, but also equality, prosperity, unity, security, interests, challenges, courage, purpose, loyalty, patriotism, virtue, character, and grace. Look at these words in his inaugural address and you will see how Obama has situated their meaning within his view of fundamental American values: empathy, social and well as personal responsibility, improving yourself and your country. We can expect further reclaiming of patriotic language throughout his administration.     All this is what "change" means. In his policy proposals the President is trying to align his administration's policies with the fundamental values of the Framers of our Constitution. In seeking "bipartisan" support, he is looking beyond political affiliations to those who share those values on particular issues. In his economic policy, he is realigning our economy with the moral missions of government: protection and empowerment for all.     It's Us, Not Just Him     The president is the best political communicator of our age. He has the bully pulpit. He gets media attention from the press. His website is running a permanent campaign, Organizing for Obama, run by his campaign manager David Plouffe. It seeks issue-by-issue support from his huge mailing list. There are plenty of progressive blogs. MoveOn.org now has over five million members. And yet that is nowhere near enough.     The conservative message machine is huge and still going. There are dozens of conservative think tanks, many with very large communications budgets. The conservative leadership institutes are continuing to turn out thousands of trained conservative spokespeople every year.     The conservative apparatus for language creation is still functioning. Conservative talking points are still going out to their network of spokespeople, who still being booked on TV and radio around the country. About 80% of the talking heads on tv are conservatives. Rush Limbaugh and Fox News are as strong as ever.     There are now progressive voices on MSNBC, Comedy Central, and Air America, but they are still overwhelmed by Right's enormous megaphone. Republicans in Congress can count on overwhelming message support in their home districts and homes states. That is one reason why they were able to stonewall on the President's stimulus package. They had no serious media competition at home pounding out the Obama vision day after day.     Such national, day-by-day media competition is necessary. Democrats need to build it. Democratic think tanks are strong on policy and programs, but weak on values and vision. Without the moral arguments based on the Obama values and vision, the policymakers most likely be unable to regularly address both independent voters and the Limbaugh-FoxNews audiences in conservative Republican strongholds.     The President and his administration cannot build such a communication system, nor can the Democrats in Congress. The DNC does not have the resources. It will be up to supporters of the Obama values, not just supporters on the issues, to put such a system in place. Despite all the organizing strength of Obama supporters, no such organizing effort is now going on. If none is put together, the movement conservatives will face few challenges of fundamental values in their home constituencies and will be able to go on stonewalling with impunity.     That will make the president's vision that much harder to carry out.     Summary     The Obama Code is based on seven deep, insightful, and subtle intellectual moves. What President Obama has been attempting in his speeches is a return to the original frames of the Framers, reconstituting what it means to be an American, to be patriotic, to be a citizen and to share in both the sacrifices and the glories of our country. In seeking "bipartisan" support, he is looking beyond political affiliations to those who share those values on particular issues. In his economic plan, he is attempting to realign our economy with the moral missions of government: protection and empowerment for all.     The president hasn't fooled the radical ideological conservatives in Congress. They know progressive values when they see them - and they see them in their own colleagues and constituents too often for comfort. The radical conservatives are aware that this economic crisis threatens not only their political support, but the very underpinnings of conservative ideology itself.     Nonetheless, their brains have not been changed by facts. Movement conservatives are not fading away. They think their conservative values are the real American values. They still have their message machine and they are going to make the most of it. The ratings for Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are rising.     Without a countervailing communications system on the Democratic side, they can create a lot of trouble, not just for the president, not just for the nation, but on a global scale, for the environmental and economic future of the world. Current Mood: bouncy Current Music: The Walls of Red Wing sung by Joan Baez (Comment on this)
Monday, December 1st, 2008
3:54 pm	What has Kim done with her life? (Things I've done are in bold. Meme stolen from ChaliceBlog, who stole it from Earthbound Spirit) Started my own blog Slept under the stars Played in a band Visited Hawaii Watched a meteor shower Given more than I can afford to charity Been to Disneyland/world Climbed a mountain Held a praying mantis Sung a solo Bungee jumped Visited Paris Watched lightning at sea Taught myself an art from scratch Adopted a child Had food poisoning Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty Grown my own vegetables Seen the Mona Lisa in France Slept on an overnight train Had a pillow fight Hitchhiked Taken a sick day when not ill Built a snow fort Held a lamb Gone skinny dipping Run a marathon Ridden in a gondola in Venice Seen a total eclipse Watched a sunrise or sunset Hit a home run Been on a cruise Seen Niagara Falls in person Visited the birthplace of my ancestors Seen an Amish community Taught myself a new language Had enough money to be truly satisfied Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person Gone rock climbing Seen Michelangelo's David Sung karaoke Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant Visited Africa Walked on a beach by moonlight Been transported in an ambulance Had my portrait painted Gone deep sea fishing Seen the Sistine Chapel in person Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower in Paris Gone scuba diving or snorkeling Kissed in the rain Played in the mud Gone to a drive-in theater Been in a movie Visited the Great Wall of China Started a business Taken a martial arts class Visited Russia Served at a soup kitchen Sold Girl Scout Cookies Gone whale watching (though I did see some, once) Gotten flowers for no reason Donated blood, platelets or plasma Gone sky diving Visited a Nazi concentration camp Bounced a check Flown in a helicopter Saved a favorite childhood toy Visited the Lincoln Memorial Eaten caviar Pieced a quilt Stood in Times Square Toured the Everglades Been fired from a job Seen the Changing of the Guard in London Broken a bone Been on a speeding motorcycle Seen the Grand Canyon in person Published a book Visited the Vatican Bought a brand new car Walked in Jerusalem Had my picture in the newspaper Read the entire Bible Visited the White House Killed and prepared an animal for eating Had chickenpox Saved someone's life Sat on a jury Met someone famous Joined a book club Lost a loved one Had a baby Seen the Alamo in person Swam in the Great Salt Lake Been involved in a law suit and I've been a witness in a criminal trial Owned a cell phone Been stung by a bee Ridden an elephant (I've had the chance many times, but have you ever seen an elephant ride where the elephant didn't look depressed and miserable?) Read all three volumes of the Lord of the Rings Visited the Taj Mahal Performed in a dance recital Been on horseback while the horse jumped over something Won an athletic competition Gotten a straight-A report card Prayed to Zeus Watched news coverage, rapt, to see what was going to happen Gotten lost in a building more than 500 years old Kissed somebody milliseconds before bells started to ring Current Mood: anxious (Comment on this)
Monday, November 17th, 2008
12:08 pm	Bailing out the auto industry Friends -- I sent this earlier today to hosts on liberal talk radio. Now I send it to you. (with two more bullet points. It was early and we weren't fully awake....) Congress will decide this week whether and how to help America's auto industry. We the People would like to help, but we don't want to be cheated or taken advantage of, nor do we want to reward bad behavior or incompetence. Please pass this on -- to your friends and relatives, whether liberal or conservative, and to your government, to radio people, to other media -- to anyone and everyone who can help us get the word out that we want to help but we want to get something for our money. -- Kim, editor, Access News Service We have what we think is a good idea for how to help the American auto industry to recover without wasting the taxpayer's money and with ensuring jobs for Americans. -Determine the amount of money we were going to use to "bail them out". for example, $25B. -Contract with American car companies to buy $25B worth of electric, hybrid, and other alternative fuel cars. -Add rules to the contract about not using the money for executive bonuses, buy-outs, or other unrelated purposes, or whatever is necessary to make sure the money is used to create jobs and cleaner cars. -The government can use a lot of the cars as government transportation. -Other cars can be sold to the public as government surplus. -When the auto companies feel they are back on their feet, they may buy back the rest of the contract, thus the taxpayers will get that money back. -This will provide both good jobs and cleaner autos for America, as well as showing Detroit that they really can make and sell cleaner cars. Thank you for your attention, and for all you do, --Kim, editor, Access News Service Current Mood: hopeful (Comment on this)
Friday, October 24th, 2008
10:44 am	In a discussion of fashion and economics, I recently posted this. I thought you might be interested in this metaphor. I picture those economic cycles like this: First, the economy is solidly over it's feet. then, it goes a little bit out on a limb. Nothing bad happens, so... It goes a little further out on the limb of debt. Nothing terrible happens, so.... it goes a little further out on the limb of debt and speculating. Well, it seems to be still working, so.... the economy goes even further out on the limb of debt, speculating and outright futures gambling. then the limb breaks, to "everyone's" great surprise, and we have a major Depression. when we get our economic feet under us again, we start the whole cycle over again. As people progressively forget how dangerous that limb is, we go further and further out, and do it all again. I think the cycle is inherent in Capitalism, and that we need to progress to post-capitalism if we are to stop it from recycling again and again forever. Not socialism necessarily, but democratic capitalism, where the workers own the means of production and run even large businesses democratically rather than hierarchically, as they are starting to do in Argentina. Kim C | Homepage | 10.24.08 - 10:48 am | # (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008
4:04 pm	Ack! Another quiz! Your result for Reincarnation Placement Exam... Tralfamadorian Messenger 44% Intrigue, 59% Civilization, 49% Humanity, 34% Urbanization. <img src="http://cdn.okcimg.com/php/load_okc_image.php/images/0x0/0x0 (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 21st, 2008
11:12 am	a really stupid quiz This one, if it copies ok, is the stupidest of all. It's about my fashion sense, which of course, is pretty non-existent. I guess I did somewhat better when I had a beautiful body, but I was never into fashion at all. So I don't think this test if very accurate when it says I'm a Fashionista. Your result for The Fashion Style Test... Fashionista [Tasteful Original Deliberate Prissy] One is certain: you have great taste and plenty of ideas. You have clearly defined beliefs about what's good and what's bad in fashion but they are far from banal. Stylish and imaginative, you prefer to inspire admiration than to shock and you mostly succeed. Even if sometimes you'd like to have more courage to put on something absolutely outrageous you do great job in creating a unique look that others look up to. There is a possibility that you work in the fashion industry. If you don't, perhaps you should. The opposite style from yours is Bar Cruiser [Flamboyant Conventional Random Sexy]. All the categories: Librarian Sporty Hottie Office Master Uptown Girl/ Boy Brainy Student Movie Star Fashionista Glamorous Soul Fashion Enemy Bar Cruiser Kid Next Door Sex Bomb Hippie Kid Fashion Rebel Fashion Artist Catwalk God(ess) Take The Fashion Style Test at HelloQuizzy (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, May 26th, 2008
11:06 am	Sermon On Consumer Hedonism Reading: (reading by Doug Muder.) “The beginning of a productive liberal/conservative dialog is for both sides to acknowledge that we share a nightmare, a Dystopia: • Where all relationships are transient. • Where life is cheap. • Where winning is everything. • Where no one will sacrifice for the common good. • Where impulse satisfaction outweighs any consequences. • Where the innocent are not protected. • Where the old are cast aside and the next generation is left to raise itself. • Where profit is the ultimate argument, and money answers all questions. • Where no one is willing to stand on principle and truth doesn't matter. “We both see that path and we both don't want to go there. In theory, we could work together to avoid it. But in practice we can't even talk about it in a civil tone. Why? Because we both forget what we've been struggling against, and instead imagine that we've been struggling with each other.” Sermon: The subject I am going to talk about this morning is how we form our moral structures. It’s a big subject, so I’m going to try to narrow my focus down to two main aspects of how we arrive at our moral positions. One is the dominant religion called Consumer Hedonism, and the other is a phenomenon long known to sociologists; that of internal versus external consciences. I’ve been saying for years that the source of moral decay we are seeing in America today – the decline of honesty, the increase in violence and exploitation – that the Right blames on the Left and the Left blames on the Right – is really due to neither, but is due to some third group that no one sees because each thinks it’s part of its opposite. Slowly, I’ve been seeing others come up with a similar theory that reassures me I am on the right track. One is a system called Spiral Dynamics that talks about cultural memes, and I hope to introduce that system to you, but not today. The other is a spectacular sermon by Doug Muder, who writes for UU World, my favorite magazine. I was very tempted just to read it to you whole. I will be quoting it extensively –It’s called Right and Left Together, and was delivered in the Quincy UU church November of 2006. The other main concept I want to address today is that of internal and external consciences.(Are you an inny or an outy?) Though I first ran across this concept in the early 70’s in a sociology class, I want today to credit Andrew Bard Schmookler and an essay of his called “Moral Endo Skeletons and Exoskeletons: a Perspective on America’s Cultural Divide and Current Crisis”. There’s a quip going around that says “If you think the 60’s were good, you are probably a liberal, if you think the sixties were bad, you’re probably a conservative.” What were the values of the sixties? Peace and Love, Fairness, Community, individual choice, spiritual growth, freedom, and yes, hedonism. The sixties loosened sexual mores and made divorce more acceptable. While the red states are the ones who decry this loosening most loudly, still it is also true that the red states also have the highest divorce rates, highest rates of unwed pregnancy, and the highest rates of domestic violence. Schmookler says “The sleazy TV and movies the traditionalist and Christian Right denounce so energetically also tend to have their highest ratings in the same parts of the country most populated by such people.” Liberals tend to jump to the conclusion that this is just plain old hypocrisy – deliberate dishonesty and posturing in public. But, is it? These same conservatives look at liberals and assume that they must be living lives of sin and debauchery – because they can’t understand how liberals could possibly live well-ordered lives as hard-working and law-abiding citizens, as responsible and dedicated family people if liberals do not believe in their firm moral structures and absolute rules of moral conduct. They think that if you do not have a firm moral structure, you must have none at all. What is happening here? Why is everyone looking past each other? These misunderstandings come from the two groups having different moral structures. A student of Schmookler’s came up with the terms he uses – she said she didn’t need society to give her a lot of rules because she’s got her moral beliefs firmly inside of her, a sort of moral endo-skeleton, whereas the distress American traditionalists have felt at the erosion of a social consensus of what constitutes the straight-and-narrow path is because morality, for them, is a sort of exo-skeleton. They rely on external moral structures like laws, punishments, and active disapproval to keep them within the moral confines in which they believe. Liberals have often failed to understand how genuinely threatening a loosening of society’s moral standards can be to an exo-skeleton person who deeply wants to toe the line but needs help doing it. Meanwhile, those of us with an endo-skeleton structure, who can live moral and orderly lives even if we live in an “anything goes” society, have our own blindnesses. In the 60’s we simply tore down many of society’s moral structures and assumed all would be well. Schmookler says “What many in our counter culture did, I believe, was to look at themselves – in their ‘liberated’ state --- and imagine that they saw human nature in its pristine state. But in reality, most of the middle-class youth – brought up in the 1940s and 1950’s – who comprised the counterculture had already internalized a great many of the disciplines – moral and otherwise—of traditional American culture. Our endo-skeletons made the social enforcement of norms and standards and morals unnecessary. “For us, that is. Meanwhile, the rest of society was not identical to us endo-skeletons. And there, the costs of the cultural loosening have been more visible.” I knew Schmookler’s paper was an important one after I read it because of this paragraph that haunted me: He says, “The loosening of the cage of America’s social morality had one meaning, therefore, among America’s endo-skeletons, but another darker meaning among America’s exo-skeletons. It is as though a boat was tipped by the left, but it was the right that got wet.” Here Schmookler calls for us to invent a new form of the external moral system, one that is less oppressive, because it is the very oppression that produces the darker tendencies that erupt when the restraints are loosened. He goes on: “What is needed this time around is not a wanton rejection of the old structures, replacing them with nothing. We endo-skeletons must understand more fully the structures that hold us together. We must understand, that is, that the endo-skeleton is not nothing. “And, more, we need to understand that the endo-skeleton does not come from nothing. It is the internalization of the order the growing creature encounters around him/her. “And no skeleton at all is a recipe for falling apart.” And we do know what is it that makes our children grow up with either a moral endoskeleton or exoskeleton. In Don’t Think of an Elephant, linguist George Lakoff introduced two types of families, the Strict Father and the Nurturant Parent. It’s the Strict Father, authoritarian, fear-based punishment-and-reward system that produces a moral exoskeleton, because, as psychology tells us, punishment and reward teaches that there is no intrinsic value to correct behavior. On the other hand, remember Dr. Spock? Yes, what he taught us in Baby and Child-Rearing is what produces an internal conscience. Reinforcing good behavior, modeling good behavior, warm, caring parenting with clear and consistent expectations. Yes, what Lakoff called the Nurturant parent, produces an individual with an internalized conscience, whereas neither permissive nor authoritarian parenting does. So, somewhat ironically, it turns out, that both believing that children are basically evil and need fear and punishment to behave, and believing that they are basically good and need nurturant guidance to bring out their innate goodness – both of these are self-fulfilling prophesies. Meanwhile, with the moral exoskeleton in tatters, Consumer Hedonism has rushed in to fill the gap. Has Consumer Hedonism, the dystopia I read to you about earlier, become the moral authority? Let’s have a look. Doug Muder recounts a story, a “friend told me about his son, a young man not too far out of high school. The son works an unskilled job, and seems to have no plan for doing more with his life. Now, under other circumstances that lack of career ambition could be downright admirable -- if, say, it meant that he had rejected materialism and was putting his energy into doing good or making art or even just appreciating this beautiful world. But, as his father tells the story, it just reflects a lack of depth, a failure to grasp that something important is going on in life. If the son can keep gas in his car and occasionally buy something for his girl friend – well, what more is there?” “Assuming that this young man really is the way I've imagined him, what religion does he belong to today? Because whatever it is, I think that's the religion that's winning. “The superficial approach to life, the belief that you buy some things and satisfy some desires and that's all there is -- who teaches that? This other religion, which is neither liberal nor conservative nor even moderate, is actually in control.” This religion may not look like what we think of as a religion – after all there is no towering cathedral that calls itself the Church of Consumer Hedonism, (unless you consider the Big Box stores). No temple where people get together to commit themselves to the superficial life and preach the Consumer Hedonism theology or sing Consumer Hedonism hymns, (unless it’s the malls). So it’s tempting not to think of it as a religion. Muder says Consumer Hedonism looks different from other religions because it is the dominant religion of our society. You can’t see it because it’s like water to a fish -- it’s everywhere. Everyone is a member. The world is its temple, we can’t see it because we live in it, we can’t get out of it. “The fundamental questions a religion needs to answer aren't about God and the afterlife, they're about life here and now. What should we be trying to do? Where should we look for fulfillment? What is going to save us from misery? What really matters and why? Some religions may need a theory of God or the afterlife to make sense out of their answers, but Consumer Hedonism doesn't. That doesn't mean it's not a religion. “So what are Consumer Hedonism's answers? Basically this: Only two things are really worth doing in life – satisfying your desires and projecting the right image. If you could do both, you'd be as fulfilled as it is possible to be. So how do you do it? You satisfy your desires by buying things and by manipulating people into giving you what you want. And you cast the right image by aligning yourself with the saints of Consumer Hedonism, the celebrities. “No Sunday school teaches us how to worship the celebrities, but we all do it. Sometimes we imitate them. We wear their t-shirts and sunglasses. We repeat their famous lines, which we know by heart, as if we learned them from a catechism. Or we worship them from afar. We know their nicknames, their cars, their pets, and the convoluted mythology of who has been married to whom. “If you fall out of step with the celebrities, no church council has to vote to shun you. It happens automatically. Conversations just pass you by. Everyone else laughs and you're there saying “What? What?” “But if you could be one with the celebrities, if you could have the same car or the same haircut or learn to flash the same smile – you'd be so cool. How could you not be totally fulfilled? “Some people hope in the Lord. Some people hope in the Lottery. “Whatever your hope is, wherever you look for a better life, that's the religion that is real to you, the one you're counting on to save you from misery. And not until you become disillusioned with that religion will you have any deeper spiritual awakening. “Most of us do get disillusioned at some point, because Consumer Hedonism is all sizzle and no steak. You actually can't be fulfilled by satisfying your desires and impressing people. Brad Pitt and Britney Spears will not save you. We all know that at some level, but Consumer Hedonism laughs at our knowledge. It sells us movies about its own emptiness and invites us to project an image of being wise to it all. “No matter how many times we fail to consume our way to fulfillment, it always seems like our own fault. Salvation-by-coolness could still work, if you were just a little bit cooler. “No it couldn't. Don't try again. Don't try to do better this time. It doesn't work. “It doesn't work because there really is something deep and important going on in life, and you can only find fulfillment by connecting with those deeper values. “Liberals and conservatives alike reject the emptiness of Consumer Hedonism, and nurture values that transcend desire and image: Values like family and friends and community. Compassion for the stranger. A just society. Appreciating the wonder of creation. Building a personal relationship with Beauty and with Knowledge and with Understanding. When those values are part of your experience of every moment, when you have trained yourself to experience them as immediately as you experience your physical desires, you're there. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” … … When Right and Left accuse each other of lacking morals, “Neither side has to lie to make its case, because Consumer Hedonism has in fact corrupted and subverted people on both sides. That's what it does, and it does it very well. You set out to make the world a better place, and you end up buying things and striking a pose. You try to take The Road Less Traveled, and you wind up at The Road Less Traveled Gift Shop. You try to walk the narrow path, and you wind up buying a t-shirt that says “I Walked the Narrow Path”. Whether you set out to the Left or to the Right, the gravity of Consumer Hedonism is always pulling you back. … “What if liberals and conservatives could realize how much they have in common? What if we all understood that traditional values and progressive values are allies against the real enemy, which is no values at all?” So, where does Consumer Hedonism come from? Well, Andy Schmookler says it’s a side effect of our affluence, but I’m not so sure that’s the whole answer. James Dobson, Right-wing Christian author and leader, complains about the immorality river sweeping away the children and he assigns it to liberals and makes it intentional – but it’s neither. I think it’s a by-product. Remember what Bill Kennedy, our intern minister, said about advertising: the product is us. What TV sells is viewers and the advertisers buy it. Sex and violence is just the delivery system. And the delivery system is there to deliver consumers of the advertisers’ goods, not spiritual or moral beings. So the job of the delivery system is to convert you to the religion of Consumer Hedonism. Think about that. We all get bombarded daily. Everything you see on TV and in movies and magazines is all in service of Consumer Hedonism. How can you escape it? How can you escape it? We escape it by cultivating a more spiritual, compassionate state of mind. By modeling that for our children. By working more consciously to resist the pull of Consumer Hedonism and focusing on the deeper aspects of life. Watch where you spend your time and your money, for those are the things that you value. Here are the URLs of the main references: http://www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=147 on moral skeletons http://freeandresponsible.blogspot.com/2006_11_01_archive.html on Consumer Hedonism Current Mood: hopeful (Comment on this)
Friday, March 7th, 2008
11:23 pm	this one's weird... I'm a Mandarin! You're an intellectual, and you've worked hard to get where you are now. You're a strong believer in education, and you think many of the world's problems could be solved if people were more informed and more rational. You have no tolerance for sloppy or lazy thinking. It frustrates you when people who are ignorant or dishonest rise to positions of power. You believe that people can make a difference in the world, and you're determined to try. Talent: 23% Lifer: 46% Mandarin: 54% Take the Talent, Lifer, or Mandarin quiz. (Comment on this)
11:15 pm	Oh darn! Not another one!?! I'm a Porsche 911! You have a classic style, but you're up-to-date with the latest technology. You're ambitious, competitive, and you love to win. Performance, precision, and prestige - you're one of the elite,and you know it. Take the Which Sports Car Are You? quiz. Current Mood: calm (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 6th, 2008
9:02 pm	Yikes! another quiz! Your Score: Piglet You scored 13 Ego, 14 Anxiety, and 11 Agency! "It's a little Anxious," he said to himself, "to be a Very Small Animal Entirely Surrounded by Water. Christopher Robin and Pooh could escape by Climbing Trees, and Kanga could escape by Jumping, and Rabbit could escape by Burrowing, and Owl could escape by Flying, and Eeyore could escape by -- by Making a Loud Noise Until Rescued, and here am I, surrounded by water and I can't do anything." You scored as Piglet! ABOUT PIGLET: Piglet is a Very Small Animal, who used to live in his own house, a nice big tree. However, after Owl's house was blown over by a storm, he "found" Piglet's house, and Piglet didn't want to tell him that the home was already lived in. So he went to live with Pooh. WHAT THIS SAYS ABOUT YOU: You are a rather nervous person, and you tend to worry about The Worst happening. You don't really feel capable of dealing with the things that life could throw at you, and so you tend to fret about it. You are one of those people who seems to think that worrying actually accomplishes something... and your friends can't help but love you for it. Your humble manner and self-deprecating ways make your friends feel good about themselves. They want to help and protect you. Your loving friends are always trying to encourage you to be more independent, and they are right. You need to develop a bit of self confidence and stand on your own two feet. Link: The Deep and Meaningful Winnie-The-Pooh Character Test written by wolfcaroling on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test View My Profile(wolfcaroling) Current Mood: depressed (Comment on this)
Monday, February 25th, 2008
11:38 am	ok, another stupid quiz Your Mind is Yellow Of all the mind types, yours is the most intellectual. You crave mental stimulation, and your thoughts tend to very complex. Your thoughts tend to be innovative and cutting edge, though many people don't understand them. You tend to spend a lot of time thinking about science, architecture, and communication. What Color Is Your Mind? Current Mood: blah (Comment on this)
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
5:10 pm	Here's another stupid quiz. I guess I'm not much of a writer. You Are a Boston Creme Donut You have a tough exterior. No one wants to mess with you. But on the inside, you're a total pushover and completely soft. You're a traditionalist, and you don't change easily. You're likely to eat the same doughnut every morning, and pout if it's sold out. What Donut Are You? Current Mood: depressed (Comment on this)