March 2008 Archives

Over on the Corner today, John O'Sullivan links to a lengthy interview with Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. O'Sullivan says Wolf's remarks in this piece are rather alarming because he is known for his intelligence, experience and lack of a Cassandra disposition. I'll post an excerpt here, but I'm hoping ye with greater experience in and knowledge of economics will share your opinions. Here's the heart of it:

The uncertainties are so huge because of the complexity and the novelty of this situation that it really is impossible, it's simply impossible to say what's going to happen. I have my own guess that we're going to have a pretty deep recession and it's going to be a long process of recovery in the financial system and in the American economy. But that is a guess and I might well turn out to be wrong.

But he goes on to lay out some conceivable scenarios that are far worse. The takeaway is that this thing could get extremely bad, and nobody can say what it's likely to do with any confidence.

After a hiatus, I've started posting again at the Reluctant Vegan blog. Just put up a short reflection on factory farming in light of John Paul's teaching in Centesimus annus on how man, making the "anthropological error" of assuming that we had the unfettered right to treat the natural world as we saw fit, ended us "tyrannizing" nature rather than governing it.

From a 2005 Q&A Max Goss did with the conservative scholar Roger Scruton for the late, lamented Right Reason blog:

MG: What deleterious consequences result from the "free market ideology" you mention? Are there particular economic arrangements that conservatives ought to prefer?

Scruton: The free market is a necessary part of any stable community, and the arguments for maintaining it as the core of economic life were unanswerably set out by Ludwig von Mises. Hayek developed the arguments further, in order to offer a general defence of "spontaneous order", as the means to produce and maintain socially necessary knowledge. As Hayek points out, there are many varieties of spontaneous order that exemplify the epistemic virtues that he values: the common law is one of them, so too is ordinary morality.

The problem for conservatism is to reconcile the many and often conflicting demands that these various forms of life impose on us. The free-market ideologues take one instance of spontaneous order, and erect it into a prescription for all the others. They ask us to believe that the free exchange of commodities is the model for all social interaction. But many of our most important forms of life involve withdrawing what we value from the market: sexual morality is an obvious instance, city planning another. (America has failed abysmally in both those respects, of course.)

Looked at from the anthropological point of view religion can be seen as an elaborate (and spontaneous) way in which communities remove what is most precious to them (i.e. all that concerns the creation and reproduction of community) from the erosion of the market. A cultural conservative, such as I am, supports that enterprise. I would put the point in terms that echo Burke and Chesterton: the free market provides the optimal solution to the competition among the living for scarce resources; but when applied to the goods in which the dead and the unborn have an interest (sex, for instance) it wastes what must be saved.

Lots and lots of work to do here at the paper today, so blogging will be light. A friend just put me onto this fascinating site, PostSecret, in which people send in their secrets written on a homemade postcard. The website posts them. For example:

This morning, I wrote in a review of a new book about factory farming that pro-lifers often see pro-choice arguments as sophisticated justifications for maintaining an immoral status quo so people can continue to live exactly as they wish to live. Along those lines (I wrote), it strikes me that the refusal of so many of us, conservatives and otherwise, to deal forthrightly with the moral ugliness of factory farming, plays to the same bad-faith logic. Understand I am not saying that animal life is morally equivalent to unborn human life. Still, I find disturbing parallels between the way many pro-choice advocates defend the legitimacy of a barbaric, dehumanizing practice (it's necessary for the smoothe functioning of society, the embryo isn't human, sexual freedom and women's autonomy demands it, etc.) and the way factory farming defenders justify practices that shock the conscience. Animals don't have rights ... we couldn't feed everybody if we didn't factory-farm ... and so forth. What rarely gets talked about is whether or not it's wrong to treat animals -- even animals we are going to eat -- in the cruel way that factory farming does.

We seem to have collectively decided that we want cheap and plentiful meat, and we're going to do whatever it takes to justify the system that provides it to us. Similarly, we have decided that we want unlimited sexual freedom, and if that means keeping abortion with virtually no restrictions, then we'll do that. Maybe I'm making too much of a parallelism there, but the role of consequentialist thinking in the general approach to these two critical moral issues really does stand out. I.e., if X is wrong, then Y; but Y is unacceptable; therefore, not-X.

Gizoogle is completely addictive. Here is Pius IX's Syllabus of Errors (1864), run through the Gizoogle translator. Excerpt:

Human reason, witout any reference whatsoeva ta Gizzle is tha sole arbita of trizzay n falsehood, n of good n evil; it is law ta itself, n suffices, by its natural force, ta secure tha welfare of men n of nations.—Ibid.

4. All tha truths of religion proceed friznom tha innate strength of human reason; hence reason is tha ultimate standard by whiznich dawg can n ought ta arrive at tha knowledge of all truths of every kind.—Ibid. n Encyclical "Qui Pluribus," Nov with the S-N-double-O-P. 9, 1846, etc in tha dogg pound.

5. Divine revelizzle is imperfect, n therefore subject ta a continual n indefinite progress, correspond'n wit tha advancement of human reason.—Ibid.

6 . Hollaz to the East Side. The faith of Christ is in opposition ta human reason n divine revelizzles not only is not useful, but is even hurtful ta tha perfection of man.—Ibid.

7. The prophecies n miracles set forth n recorded in tha Sacred Scriptures is tha fiction of poets, n tha mysteries of tha Christian faith tha result of philosophizzles investizzles fo' sheezy. In tha books of tha Old n tha New Testament there is contained mythical inventions, n Jesus Christ is Himself a myth keep'n it real yo.

(Caution on following that link -- some profanity. And please, nobody tell dear Father Rutler about this abomination of desolation -- it may cause him to spontaneously combust!)

Here's the original version of the Syllabus of Errors, for comparison purposes.

And then there's Eunomizzleia... and National Review Online...