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April 30, 2013 by Rachel

Is Austerity a Mistake?

A new paper from researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogo ff, has set the wonk world ablaze by debunking a 2010 study from Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, Growth In a Time of Debt. Reinhart and Rogoff claimed to have found a “main result is that…median growth rates for countries with public debt over 90 percent of GDP are roughly one percent lower than otherwise; average (mean) growth rates are several percent lower.” According to Michael Konczal,

This has been one of the most cited stats in the public debate during the Great Recession. Paul Ryan’s Path to Prosperity budget states their study “found conclusive empirical evidence that [debt] exceeding 90 percent of the economy has a significant negative effect on economic growth.” The Washington Post editorial board takes it as an economic consensus view, stating that “debt-to-GDP could keep rising — and stick dangerously near the 90 percent mark that economists regard as a threat to sustainable economic growth.”

However, when their results were replicated by Thomas Herndon, Michael Ash and Robert Pollin, they discovered a trifecta of mistakes and biases that essentially invalidated the study – whimsical weighting of national economies, selective exclusion of data that didn’t support their premise, and a coding error on the original Excel spreadsheet that failed to include five countries in the overall average.

ESCANDALO! Liberal economists who had expressed serious misgivings about the study since it was released quickly jumped into the fray, from Matt Yglesias’s thorough series of critiques to Paul Krugman’s history lesson on the tumultuous love affair that number-crunchers must have with their harsh mistress, Excel. However, as exciting as it is to watch guys in glasses argue over coding and spreadsheet columns, Jonathan Chait reminds us that the Rogoff and Reinhart paper was A) the starting point for the Bowles-Simpson Commission and B) the intellectual justification for a massive, devastating rise in unemployment here, and in Europe.

However, if any politician who used the flawed Rogoff and Reinhart study as a justification for embracing austerity measures changes their position now that it has been proven to be junk science, I will mail $5.00 to your home tomorrow.*

*First come, first serve until I run out of $5 bills. So, basically one person.

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April 14, 2013 by Rachel

Tokenism 101

Last week, whether you parked at the 50 Yard Line or rolled on the Informative Avenue, the GOP’s much-vaunted new Latino outreach efforts did not appear to be going well. Even Senator Don Young’s non-apology apology for casually tossing out a racial slur – “in my day, the word meant something different,” which, no it didn’t – indicated a much deeper problem.

Similarly, when Rand Paul went to Howard University last week, he offended the audience by assuming that they – elite students at a top university – did not know that Frederick Douglass was a Republican, while appearing to forget entirely about the Republican Party’s more recent racial history. According to Jamelle Bouie,

At no point did Paul acknowledge Nixon’s Southern Strategy, Lee Atwater’s racial demagoguery, or Ronald Reagan’s decision to denounce “welfare queens” and embrace “states’ rights” while campaigning in Philadelphia, Mississippi—where three civil-rights workers were murdered by white supremacists. Instead, he focused his time and attention on the 19th-century history of the GOP…I’m not sure Paul deserves any praise for his performance. It would be one thing if Paul had gone to Howard eager to listen as well as speak. Instead, he condescended with a dishonest and revisionist history of the GOP. “He didn’t say anything I didn’t expect,” said one student, a senior majoring in sociology and economics. I couldn’t agree more.

The modern Republican party believes that the only kind of racism that truly exists is reverse racism, and that affirmative action exemplifies this. However, this point of view results in considerable cognitive dissonance, as it requires overlooking basically any statistical or objective form of measurement (income levels, educational achievement, professional advancement, incarceration rates, political offices, and so forth) in favor of more…dubious explanations. Mitt Romney, in addition to his infamous 47% comments, offered one such insight after he was booed by the NAACP: “…if they want more stuff from government tell them to go vote for the other guy – more free stuff.”

“They,” meaning considerably more than 47% of the country (including 93% of black voters, 71% of Latinos, 73% of Asian Americans, 69% of Jewish voters, 67% of Native Americans, 76% of gay voters, 60% of youth under 30, and 55% of women), were not buying what the Republicans were selling. Due to these staggering deficits, Republicans find themselves with a particularly shallow bench of minority talent. Yet somehow, the powers that be within the GOP have decided that it is not their product, the actual policies, that voters have rejected; the problem lies only in the packaging.

However, with this dearth of qualified conservatives of color, over and over again Republicans have pulled up unripe backbenchers (Bobby Jindal, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson) who promptly embarrassed themselves on the national stage – because if you don’t believe in affirmative action, chances are you won’t execute it very well.

If Republicans intend to win over any voters outside of their core white male demographic, simply re-wording their mission statement more politely won’t cut it. Nor will sprinkling in a few Spanish words, or having them read by a person of color; it’s a form of condescension that is both blatant and deeply offensive. According to reporting by Buzzfeed,

One former RNC field staffer, who is Hispanic, described a culture of cynicism among his predominantly white colleagues when it came to minority outreach. He said that in his office, whenever they were notified of a new Republican outreach effort, they would pass around a Beanie Baby — which they had dubbed the “pander bear” — and make fun of the “tokenism.”
“Any kind of racially specific campaign activity was often treated with skepticism by white staffers,” he said.

I know that feel, bro.

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April 10, 2013 by Rachel

Six Ages of the World: the Role of Faith in the Development of the Calculus

Would you like to read a paper I wrote for an advanced math class? I dropped it, because what kind of cruel professor makes you do math and also makes you write a research paper? Plus, he was a horrible old misogynist. Also, he was convinced that I am a religious fundamentalist, which I was never really sure how to deal with, or what even…anyway, nobody ever read it. Until you, now! Who doesn’t love math and history and intersectionality, am I right?

The foundations of the calculus were laid as early as the eleventh century, by a large and varied (geographically, historically and culturally) group of men. Surprisingly, a significant number of them were devoutly religious; Isaac Newton is as well known for his theological and philosophical writings as he is for his crucial role in the development of many mathematical theories. Similarly, famed Persian mathematician and physicist Alhazen, also known as Ibn al-Haytham, was a faithful Muslim who described his scientific work in spiritual terms, stating that “I constantly sought knowledge and truth, and it became my belief that for gaining access to the effulgence and closeness to God, there is no better way than that of searching for truth and knowledge.” (Plott, 465)

While the history books of the Western World attribute the development of calculus to Isaac Newton and Gottfried Liebniz in the seventeenth century, British professor Dr. George Gheverghese Joseph believes that they were beaten to the discovery by a quarter of a millennium by mathematicians at the Kerala School, in particular Madhava of Sangamagrama. His research team found that not only did Madhava and his students identify the “infinite series,” but that the work done in their university was very likely shown to Jesuit priests who had been sent by Pope Gregory XIII to Kerala to research modernizing the Julian calendar.

In a 2007 interview with Science Daily, Dr. Joseph explained, “There were many reasons why the contribution of the Kerala school has not been acknowledged – a prime reason is neglect of scientific ideas emanating from the Non-European world – a legacy of European colonialism and beyond. But there is also little knowledge of the medieval form of the local language of Kerala, Malayalam, in which some of most seminal texts, such as the Yuktibhasa, from much of the documentation of this remarkable mathematics is written.” Madhava, a devout Brahmin, wrote about the Newton power series hundreds of years before Newton’s birth; in fact, he referred to estimating an error term, which indicates that he understood the concept which would become known as the limit. (423)

While it is foreign to modern Western thought that faith and science could peacefully coexist, for most of human history it was a given. In earlier eras, science and religion were not considered distinct enterprises. The ancient Egyptians, Sumerians, Babylonians, and Greeks saw natural processes and events through a mythopoeic lens, viewing divine action and the natural world as one and the same. Storms at sea, for instance, were the expression of Poseidon’s rage. When later Greek culture separated supernatural agencies from their explanations of nature, it gave birth to an entirely new study of the natural world. If Zeus does not control the movement of the planets, then the patterns of the physical world must result from an entirely different set of dynamics. Merely asking that question – why? – rather than assuming it was the will of the gods set into motion an entirely new perspective.
Aristotle’s early studies of formal logic and natural sciences diverged from Plato, his mentor, in that he was more concerned with the actual substance of things rather than ideal Forms. Aristotle’s obsession with causation demonstrates the radical departure of his thought processes – God is no longer accepted as the cause. In Book 2 of “On the Soul,” Aristotle works through the question of what the soul consists of, and what it means to live, in an empirical fashion: “Living, that is, may mean thinking or perception or local movement and rest, or movement in the sense of nutrition, decay and growth. Hence we think of plants also as living, for they are observed to possess in themselves an originative power through which they increase or decrease in all spatial directions; they grow up and down, and everything that grows increases its bulk alike in both directions or indeed in all, and continues to live so long as it can absorb nutriment.” (Lawall, 831) Aristotle had clearly begun an entirely new, more naturalistic line of questioning about the state of being; however, he still considered metaphysics, or theologic science, as the “first philosophy.”

Europe, having lost the literary and scientific works of classical Greek and Roman civilizations, developed a strikingly different philosophical attitude. It was around 398 CE that the first signs of the “Great Divorce” in the Judeo-Christian world, between the faith-based inquiries of early scientists who sought to know more of God through study of the natural world and the coming post-Enlightenment rationalism, began to appear with the publication of St. Augustine’s “Confessions.” In his discussion of his boyhood, Augustine asserted that even the parts of his education that he most enjoyed, study of the classical Greek and Roman literature, had only served to lead him farther from God. Of his schooling, Augustine wrote,

“I loved not study, and hated to be forced to it. Yet I was forced; and this was well done towards me, but I did not well; for, unless forced, I had not learnt. But no one doth well against his will, even though what he doth, be well. Yet neither did they well who forced me, but what was well came to me from Thee, my God. For they were regardless how I should employ what they forced me to learn, except to satiate the insatiate desires of a wealthy beggary, and a shameful glory. But Thou, by whom the very hairs of our head are numbered, didst use for my good the error of all who urged me to learn; and my own, who would not learn, Thou didst use for my punishment- a fit penalty for one, so small a boy and so great a sinner.”

Augustine’s premise appears to be that all education is in essence a form of corruption that will lead inexorably to the sins of greed and pride, and a deepening entanglement with the degradation of the material world. (1116) As a subscriber to Plato’s Theory of Forms, Augustine argued that the natural, observable world was in all ways inferior to the world of pure spirit – the Platonic ideals of the Kingdom of Heaven were the true reality, while the physical world was merely full of shadows, a corruption of these pure abstractions. Developed in the third century of the Common Era by Plotinus, Neo-Platonic thought focused on transcendent religious ideals where God was the idea – the “One” which is the source of all being. What could be possibly be learned from a tree, the Neo-Platonists questioned, when the concept of Tree exists on an altogether separate plane, unclouded by the messy organic imperfections to be found in the realm of the sensual? Of his disdain for knowledge of the natural world, social critic Christopher Hitchens groused,

“Augustine was a self-centered fantasist and an earth-centered ignoramus: he was guiltily convinced that god cared about his trivial theft from some unimportant pear trees, and quite persuaded – by an analogous solipsism – that the sun revolved around the earth. He also fabricated the mad and cruel idea that the souls of unbaptized children were sent to ‘limbo.’ Who can guess the load of misery that this diseased ‘theory’ has placed on millions of Catholic parents down the years, until its shamefaced and only partial revision by the church in our own time?” (64)

For the Neo-Platonists, if primary causes are spiritual, then science becomes unnecessary; anagogical thinking would lead to epiphanies more surely than observation and measurement could lead to sound conclusions. Europe, hunkered down into a defensive posture from invading forces on all sides, had lost the original Greek and Roman texts on observation of the natural world, and had instead developed an obsession with cataloguing and organizing every aspect of existence as it related to the Great Chain of Being. This perspective would be profoundly challenged when contact with the Moors was re-established. Of the re-integration of Greek knowledge, Hitchens writes, “The scholastic obsessives of the Middle Ages were doing the best they could on the basis of hopelessly limited information, ever-present fear of death and judgment, very low life expectancy, and an audience of illiterates. …they had to work with pieces of Aristotle, many of whose writings were lost when the Christian emperor Justinian closed the schools of philosophy, but were preserved in Arabic translation in Baghdad and then re-transmitted to a benighted Christian Europe by way of Jewish and Muslim Andalusia. When they got hold of the material and reluctantly conceded that there had been intelligent discussion of ethics and morality before Jesus, they tried their hardest to square the circle.” (68). Ironically, in seeking to export Catholicism and retake the Holy Land from the Arabs, the Vatican accidentally imported a vast amount of knowledge that had been lost to the Western world for hundreds of years – technologies like the compass and astrolabe, but even more importantly, the works of the great Greek and Roman philosophers. The impact was immediate, and undeniable. A cultural revolution against modi antichi, or the “old ways” commenced.

The Neo-Platonists didn’t go down without a fight, however. Over the course of the next thousand or so years, the conflict between these two perspectives would intensify until the two belief systems – faith and science – came to be essentially antagonistic. However, before this split developed into its current bitterly divided entrenchments, many philosopher scientists continued to hold that knowledge of God and knowledge of the natural world could not be opposed. Erasmus argued in his classic satire “In Praise of Folly” that the Neo-Platonic Stoics were essentially creating their own “gardens of Tantalus,” a reference to the mythological character who was surrounded by delicious fruit which he could not eat (1926).

In fact, a number of modern people with allegiance to both science and faith have attempted to build or uncover the bridge between the two that Augustine began to chip away at in the fourth century. According to Professor Mary VandenBerg of the Calvin Theological Seminary in Michigan, “…the Reformed theological tradition tends to affirm scientific inquiry.” Introduced by French theologian John Calvin in the sixteenth century, the “Two Books” theory is often used by scientists with Christian beliefs to reconcile apparent differences between the two. This theory proposes that God reveals himself to mankind through two books; the Bible, or “Special Revelation,” and the book of “General Revelation,” or nature. Calvin asserted that these two “books,” both authored by God, could not contradict each other in any way. If they appear to do so, the cause must be human error in interpretation of one or the other. Thus, according to Reformists, a religious scientist need not feel conflicted between a geologist’s claim that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old and a biblical scholar’s claim that it is 6000 years old. One of them has simply interpreted the data incorrectly; and since the carbon-dating method is more accurate, the biblical expert is probably wrong. This need not mean that the Bible is wrong, however.

Religious historian Arthur McCalla referred to Isaac Newton specifically as an example of a scientist who believed in the two books theory so completely that his faith was the specific driver of his scientific inquiry. Of Newton, McCalla wrote: “Whatever knowledge God has revealed in the (uncorrupted) Book of Scripture is harmonious with what he has inscribed in the Book of Nature.” (17) Similarly, Stephen Jay Gould’s well-known theory of non-overlapping magisteria, or NOMA, argues that there is no inherent conflict between the domains of science and religion, because there is no overlap between their areas of expertise. Science governs the empirical constitution of the universe, Gould claims, while religion is defined by the search for proper ethical values and spiritual meaning. Not only do the domains of these individual magisterium (teaching authority) not overlap, but they are not the sole means of inquiry by which humans seek to understand the world; for instance, Gould cites art and the meaning of beauty as another magisterium altogether. “To cite the arch clichés,” he jokes, “we get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages; we study how the heavens go, and they determine how to go to heaven.” (4) Hitchens, of course, rejects this escape hatch while offering some sympathy to early scientists. “One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human history where nobody – not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms – had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance, and other infantile needs).” (64)

For Isaac Newton, however, the question of whether scientific knowledge might be heretical was a moot point. He had his own secret religious heresies to worry about; as an anti-Trinitarian, he believed that worship of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit as equal deities to God was itself blasphemous within the context of monotheism. In fact, it was his Unitarianism that kept him from progressing beyond the prestigious Lucasian professorship at Cambridge, a position he was recommended for by his mentor, Isaac Barrow. Barrow had very nearly invented calculus himself; like his protégé, he held a keen interest in theology and left his position at the university to pursue his theological studies. Over the course of writing one of world’s great scientific works, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Newton described gravity, the Three Laws of Motion, and verified the accuracy of Kepler’s views on heliocentrism.

According to David Burton in The History of Mathematics, “Whereas Newton’s physical laws led some to view the universe as a self-sufficient mechanism, a gigantic piece of clockwork machinery, Newton himself insisted that the solar system was not a godless creation. This admirable ordering of the universe was precisely what confirmed in Newton his believe (sic) in a divine controller. The feeling that he was the man destined to unveil the ultimate truth about God’s creation led him to try his hand at theology and biblical studies.” (363). The depth of his faith, which consumed as much of his attention as had his mathematical studies, would lead Hitchens to later dismiss Newton as a “…spiritualist and alchemist of a particularly laughable kind…” in his anti-religion manifesto, “God is Not Great.” (65).

Professor Morris Kline proffers a very different perspective on the intersection of faith and genius in Newton’s life. “The Newtonian era created celestial mechanics but destroyed heaven…” he wrote. Kline described how Ptolemaic and Aristotelian philosophies, adopted by Christianity as a device to frame God, were gradually dismantled by successive scientific discoveries that curtailed the divine role in natural processes with each new observation. As rationalism replaced faith, the conflict between dogma and determinism intensified. “Each of the great intellects possessed a combination of mathematical or scientific genius and religious orthodoxy which today are regarded as incompatible and possible only in a period of transition….they attempted to reconcile their intellectual and spiritual affirmations. …[Newton] often justified the hard and, at times, dreary scientific work only because it supported religion by providing evidence of God’s order in the universe.” Kline also quotes Newton himself, who wrote in the second edition of Principles that “This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” (260)

Hitchens counters the example of Newton’s indisputable devoutness with the purely scientific viewpoint of another groundbreaking mathematician and astronomer, Pierre-Simon de Laplace. Laplace was the first astronomer to develop a concept of black holes, and revolutionized working models of solar systems by building them to be viewed from the outside. The French emperor, upon requesting and receiving his orrery, was confused; “…in his childish and demanding and imperious fashion, he wanted to know why the figure of god did not appear in Laplace’s mind-expanding calculations. And there came the cool, lofty, and considered response. ‘Je n’ai pas besoin de cette hypothese.’” (67) Hitchens is clearly impressed by Laplace’s assertion: “I do not need this assumption.”

German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, Newton’s peer and the cofounder of calculus, was also a deeply religious man who wrote principally about beliefs systems, thought patterns and theology. Leibniz’s philosophical bent is noted for its optimal perspective – that the universe was created to be the best possible version of God’s vision. Without being aware of Calvin’s two books philosophy, Leibniz espoused the concept implicitly in his seminal work, “Theodicy” by stating that reason and faith are both gifts from God and thus cannot contradict each other.

It is not difficult to see how he would have thought of calculus as a metaphysical question rather than strictly one of hard science; arithmetic can tell us what to do with integers, but how to explain Zeno’s paradox of Achilles and the rabbit? As the distance is halved, neither can ever reach the finish line – for Leibniz, this was not a question of pure mathematics as it was understood at the time, but of the nature of the space between spaces. He was certain that metaphysical problems must have a pattern that could be revealed through logic; though they might appear unconnected on the surface, his work on calculus was based in the belief that spiritual laws must somehow correspond to natural laws.
Mathematician Paul du Bois-Reymond described this mindset: “As is well known, the theory of the maxima and minima of functions was indebted to him for the greatest progress through the discovery of the method of tangents. Well, he conceives God in the creation of the world like a mathematician who is solving a minimum problem, or rather, in our modern phraseology, a problem in the calculus of variations – the question being to determine among an infinite number of possible worlds, that for which the sum of necessary evil is a minimum.” (143)

While critics argue that the faith of the fathers of calculus is no more relevant to modern scientific endeavors than their affection for powdered wigs, Dr. Elaine Ecklund’s three-year study of 1700 scientists and their views on religion and spirituality produced some surprising results. She found that almost half of practicing American scientists identify with a religious label; even among the 30% who classified themselves as irreligious, “Many atheist and agnostic scientists even think key mysteries about the world can be best understood spiritually, and some attend houses of worship, completely comfortable with religion as moral training for their children and an alternative form of community.” In fact, Ecklund found 20% of atheists in her survey consider themselves to be “spiritual.” (156) Despite a particularly American strain of fundamentalist zealotry and a corresponding British strain of atheistic zealotry that seek to increase the perception of hostility between science and religion, the truth is, as it always has been, considerably less binary. Like Aristotle, Newton and Leibniz, many modern scientists continue to view their own personal faith as a motivation for seeking the truth, rather than a hindrance to its discovery.

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April 7, 2013 by Rachel

Lifestyles of the Rich and Shady


Video: In this animation, see how investors can create companies and trusts in offshore jurisdictions, where an estimated one-third of the world’s worth resides. The Washington Post, April 6, 2013.

Oligarchs, politicians, and one-percenters around the world went into panic mode today as the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released details from a multi-year investigation of a mammoth leak of documents that describe the dirty dealings associated with offshore companies and trusts in a number of notorious offshore tax havens.

The ICIJ’s analysis of the coordination between shady offshore banks and large, equally shady European giants like HSBC and UBS on behalf of wealthy elites from around the world uncovered a massive, methodical, and frequently illegal transfer of trillions of dollars per year from nations to individuals. While politicians in the US and Europe lament their deficits and resort to austerity, the “…cross-border flows of global proceeds of financial crimes total between $1 trillion and $1.6 trillion a year,” landing in one of many unregulated hideaways where both ill-gotten gains and those who scammed, stole or extorted them are shielded.

The collapse of the Greek and Cypriot banking systems, the Russian Magnitsky Affair, and a shocking variety of other scandals and meltdowns are directly rooted in this deliberate effort to shield criminals from accountability, taxation and prosecution. While the techniques used by large banks, island governments, and unethical accountants are quite complex, the ICIJ provides a comprehensive breakdown of the specific workarounds tavailable to the very wealthy.

By the numbers: economist James S. Henry claims that between $21 trillion and $32 trillion of wealth is hidden in offshore tax havens – equal to 1/3 of the world’s wealth, according to the Washington Post, or approximately the entire economies of Japan and the United States combined; ICIJ found that “Among the 4,000 U.S. individuals are listed in the records, at least 30 are American citizens accused in lawsuits or criminal cases of fraud, money laundering or other serious financial misconduct.” 2.5 million documents have been leaked by confidential informants to the ICIJ. 86 reporters representing The Guardian, the BBC, Le Monde, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, The Washington Post, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and dozens of other media outlets in the ICIJ have been sifting through the documents, using both data mining and more traditional investigative techniques, for over 15 months.

While not every individual and corporation who banks in the Caymans is laundering money, evading taxes, or perpetrating financial fraud, every category of high-level financial crime requires an offshore account. By not recognizing the regulations, laws, or judicial rulings of any country, a network of tiny islands around the world have created a shadow system for the often-illegal flow of money from corrupt politicians, embezzling executives, and tax-dodgers.

According to the Post, these crooked dealings represent an existential threat to the ability of governments to fund themselves, and lobbying efforts by anonymously funded interests, including the banking and accounting industries and a conservative nonprofit group, the Center for Freedom and Prosperity, have stymied the attempts of lawmakers to rein in the hemorrhaging of tax funds as deficits rise. Founded by Andrew Quinlan, a senior economic analyst for the Republican National Committee, and Daniel J. Mitchell, a Senate Finance Committee staffer and tax expert for the conservative Cato Institute, CF&P refuses to divulge whether their donors are based offshore. “I don’t think it matters what percentage of the money comes from which donor,” Quinlan told the Washington Post.

Thomas Ward, the cofounder of Commonwealth Trust Ltd. (CTL), one of the worst offenders on the banking rolls, shares Quinlan’s coyness. “I regard myself as an ethical person. I don’t think I intentionally did anything wrong…I certainly didn’t aid and abet anybody doing anything illegal.” Now, however, email chains in the leaked documents show that Quinlan was fully aware of many clients’ probable criminal activity.

It has long been an open secret that corrupt politicians and individuals stash legal and illegal profits in a sketchy alternate economy where they are neither required to contribute to the infrastructure that created their wealth, or answer for their crimes. It’s high time that the mask of anonymity is stripped away, and the names and actions of the ultra-wealthy are exposed to the bright tropical sunshine.

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March 24, 2013 by Rachel

Representative sample

Recall the 2009 hullabaloo about how the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, required “four reams of paper” to print, because its length clocked in at “thousands of pages”? While some of this hysteria was deliberately engineered to symbolize the physical embodiment of Big Government, those who actually read the Senate versions of legislation understood something that escaped the punditry and armchair legislators: with only 12 senators under the age of 50, according to Michael Bommarito,

“Those versed in the typesetting practices of the United States Congress know that the printed version of a bill contains a significant amount of whitespace including non-trivial space between lines, large headers and margins, an embedded table of contents, and large font. For example, consider page 12 of the printed version of H.R. 3962. This page contains fewer than 150 substantive words.”

Translation: elderly readers require a million-point font; at standard 12 point type, those “thousands of pages” shrink down to roughly the size of a Harry Potter novel. Being represented by a council of wise elders has certain drawbacks and skewing effects.

menfolk

For instance, a sizable majority of Americans support Obama’s gun control proposals; 91% for background checks, 60% are in favor of the assault weapons ban. Yet somehow, it’s considered to be an extraordinarily heavy lift to get either of these measures through congress.

Brendon Ayanbadejo, shot for Men’s Journal by photographer John Loomis.

Similarly, a a Washington Post poll this month found that 58% of Americans support gay marriage. Even in the hypermasculine bastion of professional football, players are lobbying for marriage equality – yet members of congress are significantly less willing to entertain the idea than voters are.

Leaving out money and class – a difficult ask, since the makeup of congress is overwhelmingly white and wealthy, in addition to elderly; the cultural lag of our elected representatives may best be explained in terms of their own outdated perspectives. For instance, a working paper showed that elected representatives overestimated the conservatism of their constituents by 20 points, on average. Clearly, the American public is culturally outpacing their representatives on a number of important issues – but what is truly troubling is the question of whether said representatives know it, and choose to ignore it, or if they have no idea at all that those they are leading are headed in an entirely different direction.

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March 17, 2013 by Rachel

The Divine Comedy: Habemus Papam edition

Italy’s recent elections featured the return of legendarily corrupt, thrice-indicted bunga-bunga enthusiast Silvio Berlusconi in a three-way tie with a comedian and a career politician – only a few days before his conviction and sentencing on a corruption charge. The juries are still out on his other pending charges of sex with an underage prostitute and tax fraud.

Berlusconi and Benedict, 2009. Image: ALESSANDRA TARANTINO/AP/Press Association Images

Zooming into the country within a country, Italy’s legally distinct Siamese twin the Vatican also is roiled by sex-and-corruption farces and tragedies that have led to the first and only Nazi pope clicking his red Prada heels as he relinquishes the divine right to pontificate.

Because the Italian state has proven so adept at self-governance, Milanese archbishop Angelo Scola was the pre-conclave frontrunner for the papacy – until his offices were raided by anti-mafia police over corruption charges in the hours leading up to the first vote. The candidacies of Brazilian and Angolan clergy also raised the tantalizing possibility of a pope who more accurately reflects the modern, global south oriented face of Catholicism; but in the end, the cardinals split the difference and chose an Italian from Argentina, 33-to-1 dark horse Jorge Bergoglio. Beyond the personalities, however, lie deep-rooted structural issues of modernity and morality, wherein the horrific abuse of children and demonization of women has led to a subsequent global collapse of both authority and funding that must be resolved if the Holy See is to survive.

Significantly, the College of Cardinals who made up the conclave are themselves implicated in many of the worst of these abuses. Bergoglio, who took the name Francis I, also has his share of quickly unearthed skeletons, both individual and systemically shared with his brethren. For instance, per reporter Marco della Cava,

“The word that spread Friday was of Pope Francis’ actions during Argentina’s “dirty war” between 1976 and 1983, when the ruling military government abused and killed countless citizens suspected of being Communists. At issue is whether Jorge Mario Bergoglio, then a young priest in his 30s…was complicit in allowing two Jesuit priests, Orlando Yorio and Franz Jalics, to be apprehended and tortured for five months.”

Rumors swirled, fueled by different agendas – from glowing reports that the new Pope had hidden and perhaps saved the priests’ lives, to sinister assertions that he had not only given them up, but had actually participated in their brutal “interrogations.” Father Jalics, the lone survivor, issued a statement that forgave Francis, but declined to exonerate him, closing the investigation in a disconcerting but presumably final manner.

As troubling as the shadowy allegations from the Dirty War are, however, non-war-crimes related revelations pose an even greater existential threat to both his papacy specifically, and the Catholic church at large. Though the 76-year old Bergoglio’s history of advocating for the impoverished in Latin America shows great promise, his conservative approach to other issues of social justice are closely in line with his demographic and peers. His attacks on gay marriage as “destructive to God’s plan” in 2010 were so vitriolic, they were widely considered to have backfired, boosting the efforts of pro-equality activists in Argentina.

Similarly, a range of experts from Bergoglio’s biographer to Vatican insiders have unanimously affirmed that when the Cardinals say they want ‘reform,’ they are not referring to ordaining women into the priesthood, green-lighting contraceptive use, or prosecuting those within the Church who covered up abuse and shuffled child-rapists from parish to parish. In other words: the anachronistic, doctrinal cancers that are currently rotting Catholicism from the inside will remain firmly in place, at least for the 5-10 years that the elderly Francis is likely to serve as the infallible mouthpiece of God.

Pope Francis waves to the crowd from the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. Photo: AP

If he can tackle the hornet’s nest of Italian politicians in priest’s robes within the Vatican – and that is a very large if, both in terms of sheer historical difficulty, and in the face of mounting evidence that Benedict intends to play the Putin to Francis’ Medvedev – there is a significant chance that Bergoglio can at least lay the groundwork for genuine reforms within one of the world’s oldest, richest, most corrupt and most influential institutions. If he is successful, perhaps he will allow the Italian Senate to copy his homework as they attempt to institute a prime minister who is not both a convicted criminal and a global punchline. And if not, at least Rome and the Vatican are conveniently located for access to non-stop bunga-bunga parties.

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March 2, 2013 by Rachel

We’re all being trolled


Much has been made over the past few weeks of two of the younger, more attractive members of the Phelps clan publicly splitting with their mother and grandfather, Fred Phelps, and deciding that maybe God doesn’t hate dead soldiers and gay people so much after all. Per Westboro Baptist Church spokesman Steve Drain:

“‘We can’t control whether or not somebody decides, when they grow up, that they don’t want to be here,’ Drain said. ‘Those two girls were kind of straddling the idea that they wanted to be of the world but that they would also miss their family, the only thing they ever knew. If they continue with the position that they have, those two girls, yeah, they’re going to hell.'”

The girls, Megan and Grace, understandably take a less brimstone-oriented tone in their own statement, a blog post, natch, titled after a lovely song by earnest indie darlings the Avett Brothers, which begins with a Batman quote. Megan asserts that, “At WBC, reciting lines from pop culture is par for the course. And why not? The sentiments they express are readily identifiable by the masses – and shifting their meaning is as easy as giving them new context.”

And this brings home a long-held suspicion: the Westboro Baptist Church is performance art.

I have only one piece of evidence to support this thesis, but it’s quite compelling:

This video is amazing and amusing on multiple levels, but it’s at the 4:37 mark that the jig is up. The upside down Canadian flag. It’s too perfect, right? Think about it: if a very clever pro-equality activist were to design the most offputting, ludicrous straw man to make the opposing case, could they improve upon the Phelps family? Sure, you could make them Nazis, but having them be Baptists is just much more elegant. And for a group as media-savvy and well-funded as they are (tens of thousands of protests in dozens of cities ain’t cheap), they are cognizant of the affects of their actions, and that they are widely considered to be the most hated family in America. That’s not a title you earn by accident. I’ve encountered a number of true believers in my day who are committed enough to engage in many acts well outside of general social conditioning, like plastering graphic full-color photos of mangled fetuses on the side of their vehicle, or gleefully describing their certain doom to strangers. But the one thing that none of those diehards would ever in a million years do, is to laugh at their own beliefs. The way these WBC members are giggling at the absurdity of the lyrics as they sing them? These people are in on the joke, y’all.

Furthermore, if you take into account the degree to which gay rights have advanced since 1991, when WBC first started waving fluorescent signs reading “Fags Eat Poop,” and how they have stepped up their game at crucial moments (advancing from picketing the funerals of AIDS casualties to picketing the funerals of dead soldiers, for instance, a move both designed and guaranteed to alienate even their natural allies), it’s pretty clear that they are demonstrating the reductio ad absurdem endgame of homophobia with absolute self-knowledge and clarity of purpose. What makes it art, you ask? The little touches, as when they made a weekly target of a local hardware store which sells Swedish vacuums. The reasoning behind this choice is every bit as convoluted as you might expect, because the choice itself is completely arbitrary. The sole purpose, I believe, is to discredit a specific point of view with a scorched-earth thoroughness and a delightful soupçon of whimsy.

Have you ever seen Andy Kaufman and Shirley Phelps Roper in the same place? I REST MY CASE.

Take notes, Joaquin Phoenix: this is how it is done.

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February 24, 2013 by Rachel

The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things: the Unconscious Roots of Conservative Ideology

fox red tie

The ideal of democracy – a well-informed public engaged in good faith in a passionate, yet reasoned debate – has never truly existed. Still, if one removes the qualifiers from the previous statement, it is relatively close to the actual American practice of self-governance.

Yet, the gulf between almost-universally endorsed political abstracts and specific policies becomes painfully apparent when the polity attempts to apply them in the real world. For instance, when Herbert McClosky and John Zaller examined attitudes towards “capitalism” and “democracy,” principles which are theoretically linked, they found that “The evidence on this point is unequivocal: people who are most firmly attached to democratic values tend to exhibit the least amount of support for capitalism,” and vice versa.

With an inherent but invisible conflict brewing beneath the generalities that the public widely agrees upon, heuristics can be an extremely useful tool to develop a sort of mental shorthand for both diehard ideologues and the politically unsophisticated masses. Rather than becoming an expert on every subject, most citizens necessarily rely on a combination of personal experience and cues from elites. Nonetheless, as scientists are fond of noting, the plural of anecdote is not ‘data,’ and a reliance on one’s own standpoint and social group alone often results in problematic inconsistencies. This incoherence between abstract idealism and functional reality is particularly evident within the extensive research into the operational-symbolic paradoxes of conservative ideology. Analysis into how psychosocial predispositions act on political ideology assists in identifying errors in forming policy views, and ultimately in determining how occasionally contradictory political beliefs can be simultaneously held.

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February 18, 2013 by Rachel

“Alright then, I’ll go to hell.”

In honor of the publication in 1885 of “Huckleberry Finn,” let’s talk about how ahead of the curve America’s Favorite Ginger Mark Twain was on practically every serious issue facing the country.

Samuel Clemens came of age during a period in American history marked by problematic moral questions, from the spiritual devastation of slavery to an explosion of scientific advances that upended the known world. As the literal and metaphorical borders shifted, traditional Judeo-Christian values failed to address these new questions. Reflecting on the meaning of this failure, Twain observed that “the altar cloth of one eon is the doormat of the next.”

He was almost obscenely prolific; the Mark Twain Project at the University of California received approximately one million handwritten pages from his daughter Clara. Additionally, more than 5000 new letters have been discovered since 1960, although some experts believe he wrote at least 50,000. Like Tom Sawyer spying on his own funeral, Twain gleefully anticipated the scandals and fanfare which he hoped would accompany his posthumously released works, many of which were scathingly heretical. Harold Bush and William Phipps, who wrote “Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age” and “Mark Twain’s Religion” respectively, tried to solve the problem of how Mark Twain could be on the one hand this sharp-tongued social critic, while Sam Clemens was deeply in love with his devoutly religious wife Olivia, and close friends with Reverends Joe Twichell, and Thomas and Henry Ward Beecher. In fact, the heresy trial of Henry Ward Beecher greatly alienated Clemens from organized religion. Additionally, the massive (and growing) inequality of the Gilded Age, along with the rise of scientific thinking, contributed to a widespread spiritual malaise which he both helped to create, and was deeply affected by.

More compelling than the national mood, however, was his own personal history. Half of his family, 3 of his 6 siblings and his father, were dead by the time he turned 12. He held himself responsible for the death of a fourth sibling, his younger brother Henry, and later for the illness and death of his infant son Langdon. He lost 2 more daughters in their 20’s, and he outlived his wife Olivia as well. He made and lost several fortunes, including Olivia’s inheritance, and was forced by bankruptcy into exile for almost a decade. There is little consensus on his religious perspective – Bush called him an adherent of the social gospel, Phipps labels him a “tolerant monotheist,” and many scholars believe he was an atheist –Twain was such a skilled satirist that sifting genuine beliefs out of the exaggerations and tall tales can be difficult. However, the string of personal tragedies he experienced must surely have called to mind the much put-upon Job. He wrote in The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, “All say, ‘How hard it is that we have to die’ – a strange complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.”

Clemens’ personal heartbreak coincided with the national upheaval of the Civil War. His slave-owning mother Jane was a proud confederate, while his brother Orion joined the Union Army. Sam himself briefly joined a militia composed of childhood friends, but his wartime experience was limited to camping in the woods for a week. The Clemens family’s split clearly mirrored that of the country at large; the moral compass provided by the church spun wildly as both abolitionists and slave-owners used opposing interpretations of the Bible to support their claims. He recalled how literal biblical interpretations were used by the clergy as evidence of God’s approval of slavery; later, he wrote that in the years leading up to the war, “There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity for the slave. No place in all the land but one – the pulpit.”

Like the country at large, he would wrestle with issues of race and slavery for the rest of his life, returning to them again and again in his writing. The church’s claim to moral authority was catastrophically damaged in the wake of abolition. He wrote that:

“In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them. Long after some Christian peoples had freed their slaves the Church still held on to hers. If any could know, to absolute certainty, that all this was right, and according to God’s will and desire, surely it was she, since she was God’s specially appointed representative in the earth and sole authorized and infallible expounder of his Bible. There were the texts; there was no mistaking their meaning…she had no word to say against human slavery. …. The texts remain: it is the practice that has changed. Why? Because the world has corrected the Bible. The Church never corrects it…”

For Twain, like many Americans, the Church’s place on the wrong side of such a serious and clear issue as slavery irreparably damaged her credibility as an ethical leader.

While the church was failing to correct the world, Twain discovered a group of European social critics and scientists. He had left school at the age of eleven, and instead of attending college he devoured the newly published texts of Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Arthur Schopenhauer, Sir Charles Lyell, Friedrich Nietzsche, and many others. In a letter to his brother Orion in 1865 he wrote, “I have a religion – but you will call it blasphemy. It is that there is a God for the rich man but none for the poor. You are in trouble, & in debt – so am I. I am utterly miserable – so are you.” Twain had grown disillusioned with the traditional teachings of the Christian church, and began to look towards scientific fields for answers. He found that the principles of secular humanism (belief in science, ethical naturalism, a focus on fulfillment in this life rather than a possibility of an afterlife, rational moral principles not predicated on supernaturalism, rejection of religious dogma, and critical assessment of ideologies) made far more sense in assessing reality. For all practical purposes, he had begun the process of conversion from a good Presbyterian boy to a secular humanist.

Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, a tide of scientific advances were challenging religious dogma – and winning. Darwin’s “Origin of the Species” sent shock waves through society when it was published in 1859, inspiring an immediate and vicious denunciation from the religious community. Twain found the evidence more convincing than the rebuttal. In his biography, he remarked that “[t]he Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition.” In 1887, Twain crystallized his shifting spiritual views in a letter to his dear friend William Howells, writing:

“People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did at all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they can lie so. It comes of practice, no doubt. They would not say that of Dickens’ or Scott’s books. Nothing remains the same. When a man goes back to look at the house of his childhood, it has always shrunk: there is no instance of such a house being as big as the picture in memory and imagination call for. Shrunk how? Why, to its correct dimensions: the house hasn’t altered; this is the first time it has been in focus.

Well, that’s loss. To have house and Bible shrink so, under the disillusioning corrected angle, is loss–for a moment. But there are compensations. You tilt the tube skyward and bring planets and comets and corona flames a hundred and fifty thousand miles high into the field. Which I see you have done, and found Tolstoi. I haven’t got him in focus yet, but I’ve got Browning…”

But the reactionary hysteria of religious institutions towards science was not the only area ripe for criticism; Twain would become increasingly more incensed by the symbiosis of imperialism and missionary zeal.

The turn of the twentieth century marked a very public political awakening for Twain. He underwent a 180 degree change regarding colonialism and interventionism in the one year period between 1898 and 1899. Formerly an ardent supporter of the Spanish American War, he had believed that US involvement would help to free Cuba from Spanish abuse. However, the very next year, when the US expanded operations to the Philippines, Twain sided with the Pilipino nationalists. He explained that he had been a “…red-hot imperialist. I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the Pacific … But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the treaty of Paris, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Philippines.” Although his ire was primarily directed against the political powers, he would soon come to believe that the Church bore as much, if not more, of the responsibility for military and economic devastation of resource-rich lands.

Twain referred to himself as “The American,” but when he made his definitive stand against religionists, it was in China. The violent Boxer Uprising which kindled and raged throughout China for three years was directly traceable to imperialistic policies of western nations, who forced the importation of both opium and millions of missionaries, seized Chinese land and exempted foreigners from many laws (a scenario that would play out again, with similar results, in 20th century Iran). Because many Christians had been targeted and slain in the rebellion, a prominent missionary named William Scott Ament, along with a number of missionary organizations demanded indemnities. Ament led both Chinese and foreign Christians to retaliate against the Boxers with looting, murder, extortion and arson on a massive scale. Twain, aghast at a Christmas Eve newspaper report of Ament’s actions, was inspired both to join the Anti-Imperialist League and to write a scathing indictment of imperialism, “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” which refers to Kiplings pro-colonialism ode “White Man’s Burden.” Twain laid the sarcasm on thick, claiming that

“Mr. Ament’s financial feat of squeezing a thirteen-fold indemnity out of the pauper peasants to square other people’s offenses, thus condemning them and their women and innocent little children to inevitable starvation and lingering death, in order that the blood money so acquired might be ‘used for the propagation of the Gospel,’ does not flutter my serenity…”

The venom dripping from his pen is palpable. Although the sharpest barbs were aimed at Ament’s jugular, Twain used the essay to broadly criticize European and American imperialism in not only China, but the Philippines, Cuba, and South Africa. In another venue, a speech to the Red Cross, Twain said:

“I bring you the stately matron named Christendom, returning bedraggled, besmirched, and dishonored, from pirate raids in Kiaochow, Manchuria, South Africa, and the Philippines, with her soul full of meanness, her pocket full of boodle, and her mouth full of pious hypocrisies. Give her soap and towel, but hide the looking glass.”

Clearly, his political and religious views had radicalized from the weak neutrality of his Civil War days; he had come to believe that detachment in the face of oppression was a luxury no moral person could afford. But Twain’s most stylized and eloquent response to the tide of American military actions was kept under wraps while he was alive. “The War Prayer,” written in 1904, describes an unnamed country that has just declared war. The excitement and righteous fervor of the citizenry is palpable, as young volunteers prepare to leave for the front to fight for God and country. In church, the pastor prays “that an ever-merciful and benignant Father of us all would watch over our noble young soldiers, and aid, comfort, and encourage them in their patriotic work; bless them, shield them in the day of battle and the hour of peril, bear them in His mighty hand, make them strong and confident, invincible in the bloody onset; help them to crush the foe, grant to them and to their flag and country imperishable honor and glory…”

An old man claiming to be a messenger from God appears to complete the “unuttered” second part of the prayer, for suffering, chaos and death in the land of the enemy. The flock of the faithful concludes that he must be crazy. When Twain’s publisher refused to print the essay, he sent it to Harper’s Bazaar, who also declined. It was eventually printed in Harper’s Monthly in 1916, six years after his death, only months before the beginning of US involvement in the First World War.

The body of Twain’s nonfiction writing illustrates the deeper problem that the American public had to contend with. Governments have always been corrupt in their pursuit of power. However, a major role of religion has always been as a moral arbiter, resolving conflicts and maintaining social cohesion. Throughout Twain’s life, the church failed to properly serve their clear purpose, instead sowing greater seeds of discord and confusion as her grip on power slipped away. He was not merely disappointed by this spiritual failure; he feels righteous fury at the church for her betrayal of an ancient covenant. This anger is illuminated somewhat by his description of his own place in society. Upon receiving an honorary degree from Yale, Twain explained that his job as a humorist is

“…a worthy calling; that with all its lightness and frivolity it has one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, and it is constant to it – the deriding of shams, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence; and that who so is by instinct engaged in this sort of warfare is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties.”

Twain had made a lifelong good-faith attempt to understand and improve religious piety. Because she either could not or would not do the same, he judged the church to be a bankrupt institution. Today, studies show that religious adherence in the United States has massively declined since Twain’s lifetime. Despite the strength of his denunciations, Twain did maintain hope for religion – derived, ironically enough, from the premise of evolution. In “Europe and Elsewhere,” after he excoriated the church for needing to be dragged behind the moral arc of the universe kicking and screaming, he closed the chapter with a hopeful prognostication: “It does certainly seem to suggest that if man continues in the direction of enlightenment, his religious practice may, in the end, attain some semblance of human decency.”

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