Religion and Foreign Policy

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September 30, 2009

READING LIST

What to Read on Religion and Foreign Policy

Chris Seiple
CHRIS SEIPLE is President of the Institute for Global Engagement and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.Academic and policy discussions of international issues generally ignore religion or, at most, treat it as part of some other problem to be solved. But despite the conventional expectations of inexorable secularization, according to the World Values Survey, religion remains an influential aspect of public life, not only in the United States but around the world. To be relevant, therefore, U.S. foreign policy must acknowledge the place religion occupies in global politics and engage in candid conversations that include both secular and religious voices. The books here provide the basis for beginning such discussions.
Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft. Edited by Douglas Johnston and Cynthia Sampson. Oxford University Press, 1994.Purchase at B&N.com [1] | Purchase at Amazon.com [2]
This collection of essays highlights the positive contribution religion can make in preventing and resolving conflict. The book offers examples ranging from post-World War II Germany and France to South Africa, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Nicaragua, and the Philippines. It is designed to assist policymakers in understanding how religion and spirituality factor into foreign politics and societies. The methodology is generally historical-analytical; the book constitutes an excellent first choice for individuals with little background in religious studies who are interested in what practical analyses of specific cases can teach us about religion's function in statecraft and peacemaking.
Religion and Security: The New Nexus in International Relations. Edited by Robert A. Seiple and Dennis R. Hoover. Rowman & Littlefield, 2004.
Purchase at B&N.com [3] | Purchase at Amazon.com [4]
Religion and Security is a lively and insightful volume of analyses by distinguished scholars and practitioners in security, diplomacy, conflict resolution, human rights, and theology. It explores the connection between religion and security and argues that religious freedom should be a central tenet of U.S. foreign policy. The contributors offer multifaith perspectives that pay particular attention to the resources within the Abrahamic faith traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that foster sustainable peace. Divided into four parts, this book addresses themes of war and terrorism, pluralism and stability, military intervention and conflict resolution, and religious freedom and civil society. It underscores a crucial irony: nations that violate religious human rights in the name of security will ultimately leave themselves vulnerable to destabilization.
The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations: The Struggle for the Soul of the Twenty-First Century. By Scott M. Thomas. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.Purchase at B&N.com [5]| Purchase at Amazon.com [6]

Scott Thomas argues that a major paradigm shift in international relations theory is needed in order to explain the global resurgence of religion and its effects on key concepts and theories -- conflict, diplomacy, civil society, democracy, and economics. Modern liberal conceptions that reduce religion to an ideational variable, he writes, fail to grasp the essential function religion has always played as a marker of community integrity and identity -- an identity that has become increasingly important as social and religious groups struggle to reconcile faith and modernity. Instead, religion must be understood as a "cognitive script" that can override rational choice or utility-maximizing behavior. Students of religion in international relations should therefore seek to provide interpretative narratives rather than predictive science. In his own interpretative narrative, Thomas suggests that religion can play a positive role in international relations via faith-based ethics.
The Influence of Faith: Religious Groups and U.S. Foreign Policy. Edited by Elliott Abrams. Rowman & Littlefield, 2001.Purchase at B&N.com [7]
This volume brings together well-known voices to answer the question, How do religion and religious groups affect the formulation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy? The fact that it was published before 9/11 makes its contribution that much more remarkable. At the abstract level, Elliott Abrams writes, religious groups contribute to the conceptualization of national interests and the formulation of foreign policy objectives. More practically, they deliver humanitarian aid and other social services, thus advancing U.S. national interests by ameliorating hunger and poverty around the world. Religious organizations also engage the services of tens of thousands of Americans living at home and overseas, offering a perspective "far removed from the businessmen, academics, diplomats, spies, and soldiers who traditionally make up our foreign policy elites." Abrams pays special attention to perhaps one of the most visible intersections of religious advocacy and U.S. policy: the promotion of international religious freedom. Yet even this policy, the author suggests, highlights the advocacy limitations of religious groups in the public sphere.               
The Sacred and the Sovereign: Religion and International Politics. Edited by John D. Carlson and Erik C. Owens. Georgetown University Press, 2003.Purchase at B&N.com [8] | Purchase at Amazon.com [9]

This volume discusses the shifting place of state sovereignty in international affairs, giving special attention to religious dynamics and ethical implications. The editors explain that throughout history there have been varied approaches to the relationship between religious beliefs about the "sacred" and political prerogatives of the "sovereign." These approaches range from theocracies to religious or ethical movements that reject the authority claimed by secular nation states. New tensions have surfaced as the Westphalian system -- created in the aftermath of Europe's religious wars -- struggles to respond to both the damaging and beneficial influences of religion in the world today. The authors explore such issues as humanitarian military intervention, terrorism, and war crimes tribunals.
The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs. By Madeleine Albright. Harper Collins, 2006.
Purchase at B&N.com [10] | Purchase at Amazon.com [11]
Drawing on her personal beliefs and experiences as ambassador to the United Nations and as secretary of state, Madeleine Albright takes on the topic of religion in world affairs in a manner that none of her predecessors has attempted. Her approach is both comprehensive and critical and includes the role of morality in formulating U.S. policy, the rise of the Christian right, the complexities of responding to 9/11, and the importance of understanding Islam. Throughout her treatment, Albright stresses the need for policymakers to take spiritual motivations seriously and find ways to make religion a unifying rather than a divisive force in troubled regions of the globe. Failure to do so creates an opening that violent extremists are all too eager to fill. Albright couches her argument in pragmatic terms, suggesting that religion -- like economics, ideology, and culture -- is a key determinant of behavior and must therefore be fully grasped and frankly addressed if problems are to be solved. She also warns, however, that while religious principles can provide a framework for moral authority, a singular reliance on religious precepts as a guide to political action can be unrealistic and a cause for conflict.

Liberty and Power: A Dialogue on Religion and U.S. Foreign Policy in an Unjust World. Edited by E. J. Dionne, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Kayla Drogosz. Brookings Institution Press, 2004.
Purchase at B&N.com [12] | Purchase at Amazon.com [13]

Arguments by J. Bryan Hehir and Michael Walzer serve as the bedrock for this book on the relationship among faith, morality, and foreign policy. In responding to Hehir and Walzer, the four other contributors -- Charles Krauthammer, James Lindsay, Louise Richardson, and Shibley Telhami -- offer their own creative insights, which highlight and enrich the essays' main themes: the role of realism in foreign policy, the relationship between realism and religious/moralistic views, and the ways in which globalization and the emergence of powerful nonstate actors call into question traditional paradigms of international relations. Krauthammer offers the most strident counterpoint to the general consensus -- that religion can play both positive and negative roles in international relations and must be approached cautiously and pluralistically -- by employing historical examples to underline his direct rejection of the utility of religion as a moral guide to foreign policy.
Spiritual Weapons: The Cold War and the Forging of an American National Religion. By T. Jeremy Gunn. Praeger Publishers, 2009.
Purchase at B&N.com [14] | Purchase at Amazon.com [15]
Religion and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1960: The Soul of Containment. By William Inboden. Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Purchase at B&N.com [16] | Purchase at Amazon.com [17]

The Cold War fundamentally redefined both the scope of U.S. foreign policy and the character of American society, including the way policymakers thought about religion. Jeremy Gunn argues that it was through the development of U.S. Cold War policy in the years following World War II that an "American national religion" was formed, the primary tenets of which were governmental theism, militarism, and capitalism. In the polarized climate of Cold War politics, U.S. policymakers sought to establish America as the embodiment of everything the U.S.S.R. was not. Gunn's historical insights prompt a reconsideration of how public faith has been and can be transformed by world events. William Inboden offers a contrasting yet in some ways complementary perspective. Inboden argues that while the opposition of many of America's most influential leaders to communist authoritarianism stemmed directly from their belief in the moral authority of God, they also recognized the political utility of casting the Cold War as a struggle between religion and atheism. Since American Protestant churches were divided, political leaders enhanced civil religion by employing a new public theology to mobilize domestic support for Cold War measures. Policymakers also used religion as an instrument to maintain the international anticommunist coalition and to undermine communist regimes abroad.

Copyright © 2002-2012 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
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Links:
[1] http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Religion-The-Missing-Dimension-of-Statecraft/Douglas-Johnston/e/9780195102802/?itm=1&USRI=Religion, the Missing Dimension of Statecraft.
[2] http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Missing-Dimension-Statecraft-Johnston/dp/0195102800/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254340270&sr=8-1
[3] http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/results.asp?txt=Y&WRD=http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Religion-and-Security/Robert-A-Seiple/e/9780742532120/?itm=2&USRI=R&box=http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Religion-and-Security/Robert-A-Seiple/e/9780742532120/?itm=2&USRI=R&pos=-1
[4] http://www.amazon.com/Religion-Security-Nexus-International-Relations/dp/0742532127/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254340351&sr=1-1
[5] http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Global-Resurgence-of-Religion-and-the-Transformation-of-International-Relations/Scott-M-Thomas/e/9781403961570/?itm=2&USRI=the global resurgence of religion and the transformation of international relations
[6] http://www.amazon.com/Resurgence-Religion-Transformation-International-Relations/dp/1403961573/ref=tmm_pap_title_sr
[7] http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Influence-of-Faith/Elliott-Abrams/e/9780742507630/?itm=1&usri=The Influence of Faith Religious Groups and U S Foreign Policy
[8] http://search.barnesandnoble.com/The-Sacred-and-the-Sovereign/John-D-Carlson/e/9780878409082/?itm=1&usri=The Sacred and the Sovereign Religion and International Politics
[9] http://www.amazon.com/Sacred-Sovereign-Religion-International-Politics/dp/0878409084/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254340648&sr=1-1
[10] http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Mighty-and-the-Almighty/Madeleine-Albright/e/9780641979392/?itm=1&usri=The Mighty and the Almighty Reflections on America God and World Affairs
[11] http://www.amazon.com/Mighty-Almighty-Reflections-America-Affairs/dp/0060892587/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254340698&sr=1-6
[12] http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Liberty-and-Power/J-Bryan-Hehir/e/9780815735458/?itm=1&usri=Liberty and Power A Dialogue on Religion and U S Foreign Policy in an Unjust World
[13] http://www.amazon.com/Liberty-Power-Dialogue-Dialogues-Relligion/dp/0815735456/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254339405&sr=1-1
[14] http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Spiritual-Weapons/T-Jeremy-Gunn/e/9780275985493/?itm=1&USRI=Spiritual Weapons: The Cold War and the Forging of an American National Religion
[15] http://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Weapons-American-National-Religion/dp/0275985490/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254340831&sr=1-1
[16] http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Religion-and-American-Foreign-Policy-1945-1960/William-Charles-Inboden/e/9780521513470/?itm=1&usri=Religion and American Foreign Policy 1945-1960 The Soul of Containment
[17] http://www.amazon.com/Religion-American-Foreign-Policy-1945-1960/dp/0521513472/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1254340895&sr=1-3

Emerging Historiography of the New Religious Left

Robert Wuthnow, The Restructuring of American Religion (1988)--the latter chapters

Wuthnow, After Heaven: Spirituality in America Since the 1950s (1998)

Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmoderninty: 1950-2005 (2006)

Dorrien, Soul in Society (1996)

Dean Hodge, Benton Johnson, and Donald Luidens, Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers (1994)

Amanda Porterfield, The Transformation of American Religion: The Story of a Late Twentieth Century Awakening (2001)

David Swartz's book on the evangelical left from the 1950s to the 1980s due out from the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2012

Brantley Gasaway's book on progressive evangelicalism since the 1960s due out from UNC Press in 2013

For an interview with both Swartz and Gasaway see this site

Pamela Cochran, Evangelical Feminism: A History (2005)

Two projects from Catherine Osborne on Catholics and the moderate-left in the postwar era

Charles Struass is working on American Catholics and US foreign policy toward Central America in the 1970s and 1980s

Dan McKanan, Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition (2011)

McKanan, The Catholic Worker after Dorothy: Practicing the Works of Mercy in a New Generation (2008)

Sarah McFarland Taylor, Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology (2007)

Amy Koehlinger, The New Nuns: Racial Justice and Religious Reform in the 1960s (2007)

Lillian Calles Barger is at work on a history of Liberation Theology from its origins in early Enlightenment thought to the present.

Shawn David Young, is at work on a book on the Jesus People USA.

Adam Parsons is working on a dissertation on the Christian World Liberation Front

David King is working on the World Vision a Christian NGO

Marcia Pally, The New Evangelicals: Expanding the Vision of the Common Good (2011)

James Bielo, Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity (2011)

Frederich Douglas: Self reliance and community

"Perhaps the closest we can come to capturing the spirit of Douglass’s political philosophy in our time is to adopt the critical disposition he endorses in an essay he wrote in 1860 entitled, “The Prospect in the Future.” In that essay, he lamented the fact that “narrow and wicked” selfishness allowed Americans to proclaim their love of liberty while at the same time denying basic rights to so many human beings. Douglass wanted to resolve this “terrible paradox” by convincing Americans to move from “the downy seat of inaction” and replace their narrowness with egalitarianism, their selfishness with humanitarianism. In those moments when we are willing to ask ourselves how “narrow and wicked” impulses haunt our love of liberty—and when we ask how to close the gap between the ideal of liberty and the realities that surround us—we come closest to acting as the legitimate heirs of Frederick Douglass’s political project."

Nicholas Buccola is an assistant professor of political science at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon. His book, The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty, will be published by New York University Press in April.

http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=585

Fair Labor Association

http://abcnews.go.com/watch/nightline/SH5584743/VD55173552/nightline-221-apples-chinese-factories-exclusive

http://www.salon.com/2012/02/19/americas_last_hope_a_strong_labor_movement/

Philip Mirowski, Carl Koch Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/12/philip-mirowski-the-seekers-or-how-mainstream-economists-have-defended-their-discipline-since-2008-%E2%80%93-part-i.html

Philip Mirowski: The Seekers, or How Mainstream Economists Have Defended Their Discipline Since 2008 – Part I

By Philip Mirowski, Carl Koch Professor of Economics and the History and Philosophy of Science University of Notre Dame. Professor Mirowski has written numerous books including More Heat than Light, Machine Dreams and, most recently Science-Mart
Edited and with an introduction by Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland
A bibliography can be found here
During a recent interview with the eminent historian of economic thought, Philip Mirowski, I raised a series of questions relating to how mainstream economists had dealt with the crisis on an intellectual level and what this might mean for the discipline in the coming years. I asked if he thought that they could hope to recover their bearings and, under the tutelage of a figure like Paul Krugman, might re-establish the neoclassical research program by simply tacking on some watered-down Keynesianism, just as Paul Samuelson had done in the post-war era.
Mirowski said that he did not want to answer these questions. “Of course,” he wrote, “I am interested in all of them, but I have been trying to bring the application of history and philosophy of science a bit closer to the earth when it comes to the crisis.” He then sent me an article he had written for a recently published book entitled The Elgar Companion to Recent Economic Methodology.
After reading this 40-odd page article I knew that it was easily the most important statement on how the mainstream of the economics discipline had reacted to the crisis and what this might mean for the neoclassical research program in the future. I also knew that the book in which it was published would likely go unread by a broader audience of non-economists – and possibly even many economists – and so I asked him if we could publish an edited version. He kindly complied and the result is what the reader will see appearing on the Naked Capitalism website in the coming days.
This is a long and complex article and I feel it might be worthwhile if I highlight a few key points that the reader can use as a thread to follow through this series, especially the later few pieces.

• First of all, we should carefully note what Mirowski says in the coming sentences about the debates surrounding the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium Models (DSGE) models. These are the models that are today taught to economics graduates and used in central banks and the like. They are ‘trendy’ and mathematically sophisticated (relatively speaking, of course) – and some point to them as a major advance in economic theory. Of course, like all advances in this most conservative of disciplines they are no such thing. As Steve Keen has pointed out on Naked Capitalism before, they remain essentially static models that assume equilibrium. Thus, they are simply a rehash of the same thing that neoclassicals have been pushing for years: an ideological/metaphysical/theological idea about how capitalist economies work that posits harmony where no such harmony exists. But Mirowski points out that all the naval-gazing going on within the profession right now about the DSGE may be a sideshow – a means to evade the really fundamental questions about neoclassical economics and its foundations. As Mirowski writes in the piece: “The real bone of contention is not the DSGE model per se, but rather the pre-eminence of legitimacy of neoclassical microeconomics. The DSGE model is a herring of the brightest red.”
• This ties into another point that is raised by Mirowski. Those – like Paul Krugman – who attack the DSGE models and seek to return to the old ‘Keynesian’ ISLM models of the post-war era are also engaging in an unconscious, but no less pernicious obfuscation. First of all, Mirowski points out that they are pursuing a hopeless cause. If the post-ISLM economics is thrown out then the discipline has to admit that the vast majority of the work done since 1969 is only so much star-gazing rubbish. Fat chance that is going to happen! Secondly, and more importantly, by returning to the ISLM version of Keynes the neoclassicals in Keynesian garb (like Krugman) are once again avoiding the destabalising of the entire foundations of microeconomics to the point that it becomes self-contradictory and nonsensical that Keynes’ work actually led to (this is what the Sraffians and the post-Keynesians have been pointing out for years – most recently, we can name Steve Keen and his book Debunking Economics for a good summary, and Yves raised similar issues in ECONNED).
• Then there is Mirowski’s critique of Joseph Stiglitz and other attempts by many in the discipline to distance themselves from the now infamous Efficient Markets Hypothesis (EMH). These critiques, as Mirowski shows, are meaningless when looked at from a larger perspective. They are attempts to pick little holes in the edifice of the Great Equilibrator (The Market) and show where tiny little micro-irrationalities creep in. This insulates the economists from recognising that The Market might be inherently destabalising (think Minsky’s: ‘unstable economy’). Indeed, The Market may not even exist as a tangible entity, it may simply be a figment of the economists’ imaginations; a metaphysical/theological positing of equilibrium and harmony – a religious-like belief that somewhere out there is a Godlike Hidden Hand that ensures benevolence; in short: a primitive belief that real science did away with years ago.

Embedded in this critique is a smaller but no less substantial critique of behavioural economics. In this regard Mirowski points to popular exponents of the behavioural tradition like Robert Schiller. As Mirowksi clearly shows, behavioural economics is but another shallow, but superficially appealing defence of orthodoxy. It fundamentally alters nothing because its concepts of ‘rationality’ and ‘irrationality’ are largely ad hoc. This is important because anyone who has ever critiqued economists’ conception of ‘rationality’ is often met with apologists saying that the mainstream has now moved into the behavioural sphere and are thus becoming more scientific. This is nonsense of the highest order. Again, Mirowski puts it eloquently: “Two decades of behavioral research certainly has not resulted in any consensus systematic revisions of microeconomics, much less macroeconomics. Beyond wishful thinking, why should one even think that the appropriate way to approach a macroeconomic crisis was through some arbitrary set of folk psychological mental categories?”
There is much more in what follows and, indeed, these are only the key points that I would pull out of Mirowski’s excellent article. The piece does not drop into these critiques straight away. Instead it provides the reader with an excellent overview of the institutional critiques and counter-critiques of economics within the media. In this, the reader will see the second reason to engage fully with Philip Mirowski’s work (the first being that it is the most pressing and far-reaching critique of neoclassical economics that has ever existed): Mirowski’s work is entertaining. It is ironic, light-hearted and even at times genuinely funny. It engages the reader on a number of different levels – now theoretical, now literary. And in this I believe that Mirowski is one of the most important writers working today – and not only in the field of economics, but also in the fields of philosophy and the history of thought. Anyone interested in any of these areas who has not engaged with Mirowski’s work is far, far behind the times.
– Philip Pilkington
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Part I: Them Crazy Seekers
After the financial crisis of 2007-08, the economics profession were in a particularly vulnerable position. No sane person could welcome a worldwide economic contraction; but the economics profession was particularly vulnerable to scorn and derision with its onset, because the orthodox majority had been boasting of unprecedented success in guaranteeing prosperity during the first decade of the millennium, often under the rubric of ‘The Great Moderation’. [1]
Furthermore, the economists had grown so confident in their orthodoxy that they had driven out most rival views and approaches from the richest and most powerful academic settings. This relative homogeneity of their disciplinary convictions helped to set the stage for what has become a rolling come-uppance. Once the contraction proceeded in earnest in 2008, it became commonplace in newspapers, blogs and symposia at various universities to query openly why these economists had apparently been caught unawares. Disparagement grew sharper as time passed, such as in movies like Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job (2010). Individual economists have responded with a bewildering array of diagnoses, qualifications and bald excuses, in ephemeral blogs and interviews, but also in durable print. How can an observer extract signal from noise in order to come to understand the modern predicament of economics? Has it all really been just a flash in the pan? How did economists acquit themselves during the shellacking? As the reader will appreciate, this is eminently a methodological question; but by 2008 the economists were bereft of methodological and philosophical resources to inform their responses.
After a brief flirtation in the 1960s and 1970s, the grandees of the economics profession took it upon themselves to express openly their disdain and revulsion for the types of self-reflection practiced by ‘methodologists’ and historians of economics, and to go out of their way to prevent those so inclined from occupying any tenured foothold in reputable economics departments. [2] It was perhaps no coincidence that history and philosophy were the areas where one found the greatest concentrations of skeptics concerning the shape and substance of the post-war American economic orthodoxy. High-ranking economics journals, such as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Journal of Political Economy, declared that they would cease publication of any articles whatsoever in the area, after a prior history of acceptance.
Once this policy was put in place, and then algorithmic journal rankings were used to deny hiring and promotion at the commanding heights of economics to those with methodological leanings. Consequently, the grey- beards summarily expelled both philosophy and history from the graduate economics curriculum; and then, they chased it out of the undergraduate curriculum as well. This latter exile was the bitterest, if only because many undergraduates often want to ask why the profession believes what it does, and hear others debate the answers, since their own allegiances are still in the process of being formed. The rationale tendered to repress this demand was that the students needed still more mathematics preparation, more statistics and more tutelage in ‘theory’, which meant in practice a boot camp regimen consisting of endless working of problem sets, problem sets and more problem sets, until the poor tyros were so dizzy they did not have the spunk left to interrogate the masses of journal articles they had struggled to absorb. How this encouraged students to become acquainted with the economy was a bit of a mystery – or perhaps it telegraphed the lesson that you did not need to attend to the specifics of actual economies (Klamer and Colander, 1990). Then, by the 1990s there was no longer any call for offering courses in philosophy or history of doctrine, since there were very few economists with sufficient training (not to mention interest) left in order to staff the courses. [3] Methodology had been effectively defined as ‘not economics’. As one of the original interviewers noted about a follow-up survey of economics graduate students at major departments just before the crisis:

These students furthermore do not show a great deal of ability to reflect on their discipline. They are satisfied with the commonplace, the things that economists conventionally say about their discipline. This cohort appears to be mindless, or at least resourceless, when it comes to reflections on the nature of their science. They have no literature to fall back on. (Klamer in Colander, 2007, p. 231)

Consequently, when the Great Mortification followed in the wake of the demise of the Great Moderation, both those occupying the commanding heights of the profession and those in the trenches were bereft of any sophisticated resources to understand their predicament comprehensively. In a pinch, many fell into a defensive crouch, falling back on the most superficial of personal anecdotes, or else the last refuge of scoundrels, the proposition that ‘we’ already knew how to handle the seemingly anomalous phenomena, but had unaccountably neglected to incorporate these crucial ideas into our pedagogy and cutting-edge research. Streaming video sometimes captured these pageants on the Internet. [4] It takes some thick skin not to cringe at the performance of four famous economists at the January 2010 meetings of the American Economics Association in Atlanta, in a session expressly titled, ‘How Should the Financial Crisis Change How We Teach Economics?’ [5] Three out of the four were not even bothered actually to address the posited question, so concerned were they to foster the impression that they personally had not been caught with their pants down by the crisis. The fourth thought that simply augmenting his existing textbook with another chapter defining collateralized debt obligations and some simple orthodox finance theory would do the trick.
For the ragged remnants of economic methodologists, it was a dreary sight to watch a few older economists rummaging around in the vague recesses of memories of undergraduate courses criticizing Milton Friedman’s little 1953 benediction for believing whatever you pleased as long as it was neoclassical (Maki, 2009), and coming up with nothing better than badly garbled versions of Popper and Kuhn. Of course quite a few had premonitions that something had gone very wrong, but the sad truth was that they were clueless when it came to abstract philosophical argument isolating just where the flaws in professional practice might be traced, and assessing the extent that they were susceptible to methodological remedies. Mired in banality, the best they could prescribe was more of the same. No wonder almost every eminent economist took their philosophical perplexity as a convenient occasion to settle internecine scores within the narrow confines of the orthodox neoclassical profession: MIT v. Chicago, blinkered econometrics v. blinkered axiomatics, New Keynesians v. New Classicals, Pareto suboptima v. rational bubbles . . .
In what follows I shall try not to pay much attention to such local settling of scores, but instead attempt to comprehend these responses as a case study in the social psychological problem of cognitive dissonance.
The father of ‘cognitive dissonance theory’ was the social psychologist Leon Festinger. In his premier work on the subject, he addressed the canonical problem situation which captures the predicament of the contemporary economics profession:

Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart…suppose that he is then presented with unequivocal and undeniable evidence that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervour about convincing and converting people. (Festinger et al., 1956, p. 3)

This profound insight, that confrontation with contrary evidence may actually augment and sharpen the conviction and enthusiasm of a true believer, was explained as a response to the cognitive dissonance evoked by a disconfirmation of strongly held beliefs. The thesis that humans are more rationalizing than rational has spawned a huge literature (Fischer et al., 2008), one that gets little respect in economics. Cognitive dissonance and the responses it provokes goes well beyond the literature in the philosophy of science that travels under the rubric of ‘Duhem’s thesis’, in that the former plumbs response mechanisms to emotional chagrin, whereas the latter sketches the myriad ways in which auxiliary hypotheses may be evoked in order to blunt the threat of disconfirmation. Philosophy of science reveals the ways in which it may be rational to discount contrary evidence; but the social psychology of cognitive dissonance reveals just how elastic the concept of rationality can be in social life. Festinger and his colleagues illustrated these lessons in his first book (1956) by reporting the vicissitudes of a group of Midwesterners they called ‘The Seekers’ who conceived and developed a belief that they would be rescued by flying saucers on a specific date in 1954, prior to a great flood coming to engulf Lake City (a pseudonym). Festinger documents in great detail the hour-by-hour reactions of the Seekers as the date of their rescue came and passed with no spaceships arriving and no flood welling up to swallow Lake City. At first, the Seekers withdrew from representatives of the press seeking to upbraid them for their failed prophecies, but soon reversed their stance, welcoming all opportunities to expound and elaborate upon their (revised and expanded) faith. A minority of their group did fall away, but Festinger notes that they tended to be lukewarm peripheral members of the group before the crisis. Predominantly, the Seekers never renounced their challenged doctrines. At least in the short run, the ringleaders tended to redouble their proselytizing, so long as they were able to maintain interaction with a coterie of fellow covenanters.
In a manner of speaking, the legacy of renunciation of philosophy and methodology led much of the orthodox economics profession to behave in ways rather similar to the Seekers from 2008 onwards. The parallels between the Seekers and the contemporary economics profession are, of course, not exact. The Seekers were disappointed when their world didn’t come to an end; economists were convinced their Great Moderation and neoliberal triumph would last forever, and were disappointed when it did appear to come to an end. The stipulated turning point never arrived for the Seekers, while the unsuspected turning point got the drop on the economists. The Seekers garnered no external support for their doctrines, indeed, quitting their jobs and contracts prior to their Fated Day; the economists, on the other hand, persist in being richly rewarded by many constituencies for remaining stalwart in their beliefs. The public press was never friendly towards the Seekers; it only turned on the economists with the financial collapse. (There are already signs it may be reverting to its older slavish adoration, however.) But nonetheless, the shape of the reactions to cognitive dissonance was amazingly similar. The crisis, which at first blush might seem to have refuted most everything that the economic orthodoxy believed in, was in the fullness of time more often than not trumpeted from both the Left and the Right as reinforcing their adherence to neoclassical economic theory. Thus was made manifest the ‘spontaneous methodology of the economics profession’.

Religion And the Rise of Capitalism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_the_Rise_of_Capitalism

Interpreting Adam Smith in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism:

“

If preachers have not yet overtly identified themselves with the view of the natural man, expressed by an eighteenth-century writer in the words, trade is one thing and religion is another, they imply a not very different conclusion by their silence as to the possibility of collisions between them. The characteristic doctrine was one, in fact, which left little room for religious teaching as to economic morality, because it anticipated the theory, later epitomized by Adam Smith in his famous reference to the invisible hand, which saw in economic self-interest the operation of a providential plan… The existing order, except in so far as the short-sighted enactments of Governments interfered with it, was the natural order, and the order established by nature was the order established by God. Most educated men, in the middle of the [18th] century, would have found their philosophy expressed in the lines of Pope: Thus God and Nature formed the general frame, And bade self-love and social be the same. Naturally, again, such an attitude precluded a critical examination of institutions, and left as the sphere of Christian charity only those parts of life which could be reserved for philanthropy, precisely because they fell outside that larger area of normal human relations, in which the promptings of self-interest provided an all-sufficient motive and rule of conduct.[51]

Peace

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
... I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— Wendell Berry

Multiculturalism and philosophy

http://us-intellectual-history.blogspot.com/2011/06/when-zulus-produce-tolstoy-we-will-read.html

The disappearance of economic independance and social power

http://nplusonemag.com/obama
http://www.salon.com/2012/02/12/americas_failed_promise_of_equal_opportunity/

The Submerged State

http://jacobinmag.com/blog/2012/02/thirty-more-years-of-hell/

Thirty More Years of Hell

By Connor Kilpatrick On February 6, 2012

“I wouldn’t want to be twenty-years-old now. I fear for what’s coming.”
- Hunter S. Thompson, 2003

Generational analysis is bullshit. Or so I’m told. Fit for netroots liberals and horoscope clippers, maybe.  And to be fair, it’s mostly thinktank types who’ve been profiting off that whole Millennials Rising genre. One of the authors of that book is a former writing partner of Pete G. Peterson’s, the octogenarian billionaire who has spent the last couple of decades trying to kick over the Social Security ladder before us young’ns can scamper up and collect. Most of it reads like a debriefing after a recon mission–you can feel them sizing us up, drawing up blueprints for the generational counterrevolution that we’re living through right now.
So if you want to screech about the trappings of generational politics and the careless demonization of everyone born in a twenty-year stretch in one particular country, fine. I hear you. But this piece isn’t for you. You’re okay.
This is for my fellow Millennial. The one who gets his or her rocks off to visions of a glorious Boomer-hegemonic extinction, like those old claymation movies of dinosaurs getting nuked by meteor-fire. This is for those of you who, like me, need a vision of that mighty Boomer Brontosaurus keelin’ over for good–and the furry little dino-eating Repenomamuses scurrying across all the corpses to claim the planet once and for all.
Take a hit of that glorious vision, friends. It’s okay to get a little excited. Just as long as we keep in mind that the Brontosaurus, we now know, was nothing more than a big paleontologist fuck up–the misassembled and amalgamated remains of other great lizards. Yet it remains a useful word for ancient, gigantic beasts with acorn-sized brains and a penchant for mindlessly crushing everything in its wake.

***

A Pew poll from a few weeks back asked Americans how they felt about capitalism versus socialism. The results said all you need to know about how much longer we’re going to have to wade through this misery. You guessed it: until the Boomers finally croak.
For maybe the first time in modern history, we now have a generation that actually has warmer feelings about socialism than it does capitalism: 49% to 46%. And a few days later, amid a multi-billion dollar war on public sector workers, another poll was released demonstrating that a whopping 69% of Millennials think teachers are underpaid (56% for Americans of all ages).
Boomer technocrats long ago conceded that Millennials skew to the left on social and cultural issues, but have tried to muddy the waters when it comes to the economy–hence the “libertarian” con. But now, the verdict is in and it’s undeniable. Journalist Doug Henwood thinks “this may be the most left-thinking younger generation in modern history.”
Sure, polls have shown a general ambivalence on the part of the American public towards the free market for some time now. The 50-64 crew isn’t that much keener on capitalism–53% approve—but with 68% holding negative views on socialism, they’ve proven that they can still pop a Red-baiting boner with the best of them. It’s the Millennials who are the first to open their arms towards a left-wing alternative.
How could that even happen over here? I first heard the s-word from by my sixth grade history teacher–this was in the early days of Yeltsin. She said socialism is when you have to wait in line for hours just for a Happy Meal. (We had a visiting student from Russia–Elena–who solemnly confirmed the horror to us all.) According to most of our political discourse, “socialism” means either compact fluorescent lightbulbs or massive corporate-welfare checks. But considering the long saturation of Cold War propaganda in this country, I’d like to think it’s enough that the utterance of the word doesn’t send them into an anti-commie tizzy.
But maybe it’s not. Now that the student loan bubble has swollen past the trillion dollar marker as of last year, we have the president of the University of California system nodding approvingly at a proposal–drawn up by a liberal grassroots organization no less–to replace the tuition system with a 5% tax on all wages for 20 years after graduation. So de facto debt servitude is replaced by old school indentured servitude.
And yet the usually spot-on Hamilton Nolan of Gawker–a dyed-in-the-wool Millennial in every sense–is enthused about the proposal, which he calls, approvingly, “socialism.” Apparently, going back to the tuition-free heydays of CUNY and the University of California system–when those universities were among the most prestigious in the world–is completely off the table. But I can hardly blame him. With so many of us hammered down by six-figure student loan debt, actual indentured servitude that ends before our first colonoscopy sounds like Scandinavian social democracy. But that’s not even the worst of it. Read the fine print: it’s 5% of wages, income from “investments” is excluded. Tax the poor wage-slave, spare the wealthy rentier. Americans still can’t see the play even with Buffett rubbing his secretary’s tax return in our faces.
Whereas the average state tuition in the early 1980s ran around $8k (in 2008 dollars) for four years, most Millennials are forced into the mid-five-figures range for a second rate public university education. (Pell Grants–when the Boomers were attending college–covered 77% of the cost for a four-year public university. For us, the figure is 35%.) And it’s a servitude from which we can never escape. Forget bankruptcy. Default on a student loan and the government will garnish your wages until they get it all back, plus interest. They can even go after your social security money, off limits for all other debts.
The actual cost of universal free higher education is more than manageable—out-of-pocket costs are around 1% of GDP. That’s a relatively tiny pinprick from the federal budget that could transform higher education overnight into a truly public good. And yet the US government is already spending tens of billions of dollars on higher education. But they’re not using it to pay our tuition. They’re using it just to prop up our heinous student loan system—through tax deductions and credits, inflating the cost for all. They’re bending over backwards just to fuck us and collect.
Mike Konczal sees this as just another sign of a “submerged state”–the unholy fertilizer that keeps the American libertarian discourse in full bloom. None of the “welfare,” but all of the “state.” And it explains everything from how the government subsidizes mortgages to our health care system. A submerged state, according to political scientist Suzanne Mettler, is what you get when a government refuses to distribute funds and services directly to individuals and families, and instead uses tax breaks or payments to private companies all in order to hide the hand of government and exaggerate the role of the market.
But for this, blame not the Boomer, but his overrated progenitor. It’s the generation that made capitalism work so well for so many–the Band of Brothers–who are the real culprits here. The New Deal electorate and the Great Society coalition. Sure, the ruling class reactionaries hated FDR’s reforms, but as Michael Harrington pointed out, “these same reactionaries benefited from the changes that the New Deal introduced far more than did the workers and the poor who actively struggled for them.”
“After the Great Society program in the 1960s,” says Leo Panitch, “left-wing Democrats, rather than calling for more public housing to rebuild America’s cities instead called for the banks to lend money to poor black communities…one of the effects of winning those demands was a channeling of those communities more deeply into the structures of finance, the most dynamic sector of neoliberal capitalism.”
The Boomers grew up under a capitalism that had to be hammered and shaped into respectability over a thirty year period. But for us, we’re left staring at the monstrosity in its natural state. With a quarter-century’s worth of quasi social-democratic reforms either neutralized or withered away, and with no more credit to hose us down, we’re able to see the beast for what it truly is.
While a liberal looks upon the New Deal and Great Society generation as a pantheon of benevolent patriarchs, I see a bunch of technocrats who slapped together a crude simulacrum of social democracy and called it “free-enterprise.” Just as in the submerged state of 2012, they did their best to make the government’s hand all but invisible, all the while using the machinery of the Cold War to purge labor radicals–McCarthyism’s real target–leaving us helpless after the onslaught began. They then told their children–the Boomers–to scorn these dirty reds, and to thank good ol’ American capitalism for the chicken in every pot.
So by the time Reagan had gone to war against “the state,” the children of labor union households and GI Bill dads didn’t know any better. The ruling class walked away from a relatively informal compact which they honored only while it worked for them. Instead of handing out raises, they just started pocketing all the profits for themselves. And so began nearly four decades of stagnating wages.
Unlike the nations of Western Europe, American workers failed to get a good deal of the social democratic compact written into law, which means it was all the easier to dismantle over here. Not necessarily the case elsewhere. The labor policies and institutions that rose up in the 1930s in places like Scandinavia “were the result of conscious theory rather than the political improvisation of the New Deal,” says Harrington. So much for pragmatism over ideology.
As Cornell historian Jefferson Cowie put it, “the biggest social democratic achievements in American history were an aberration.” The Boomers inherited the largesse of World War II, but without the laws, social traditions, and institutional structures to keep the bourgeoisie from gobbling it all up. “The benefits of the welfare state become one more fact of life for those who did not have to struggle for them, something to be exploited for convenience,” as Harrington put it.

***

But student loans are just one prong in the Boomer phalanx–and maybe the least ghoulish. Even if they can’t rope us into the student scam and even if they fail to turn us into dutiful little low-wage baristas and register-jockeys, they can always sick the multi-trillion-dollar U.S. Security State on us.
There are the wars, of course–now pretty much the only way for a good many of us to get a debt-free education. And if you make it through Afghanistan without the “signature wound”–shredded genitals and two legs blown off, on the rise as of last year–you have PTSD, suicidal despair, and drug addiction to look forward to. Or maybe even a shoot-out with the cops–a fate that seems to be growing more and more common among Millennial combat veterans.
Then there’s the ever-popular Drug War, always trolling for some fresh blood. The Millennials are, after all, the least white generation in U.S. history, making us perfect fodder for the country’s ongoing race war. The Boomers didn’t start it, but they’re the ones who amped it up and tried to make us like it–the ones who sent D.A.R.E. officers into our schools and told us to rat out our pals. As The Wire’s David Simon has pointed out, it was Clinton–the first Boomer president–that passed some of the most draconian “anti-crime” laws. Even business in the for-profit juvenile prisons sector is a-boomin’. Same goes for our expanding network of privatized immigration detention centers–a direct beneficiary of the Tea Party campaign for a brutal crackdown on “illegals.”
My soon-to-be father-in-law likes to tell us stories about how he and his brothers used to outrun the local West Virginia cops–gunning it Dukes of Hazzard style–how they’d get dragged into courtrooms where the judges would give ‘em a stern talking to before sending them back to mama for a spanking. But the mass murders at Columbine unleashed a White Terror that put an end to whatever was left of that America. Whereas post-Stalinist Russia saw the release of dozens of classic gulag memoirs, I expect our very own Kolyma Tales out of a rustbelt juvey hall within the next couple decades.
Much of the Patriot Act itself was comprised of legislation creeping around the halls of powers well before 9/11, much of it written with the burgeoning “anti-globalization” movement in mind and especially “ecoterrorists”–a name for Millennials who take issue with carcinogenic drinking water and the Mengele-like torture of animals. Throw a brick through the window of a fur store, and you can be charged with violating the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act of 2006. And if they nab you for that, you’re lucky if you don’t end up in a “Communication Management Unit”–no mail, no visits, no talking.
The fact is that being arrested is pretty much a rite of passage today–or the end-of-the-line for your hopes and dreams if you happen to be a darker shade of pale. In 1967, 22% of Americans could expect to be arrested before they hit 23 years of age. Today, it’s 30.2%.
And now, with the spread of broadband Internet, Boomers have opened up a new front: the decade-long crusade on filesharing. No more coddling us with “Don’t Copy that Floppy!”. Take the case of Hana Beshara, proprietor of the dearly departed link sharing video website NinjaVideo. SWATed up Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stormed into her home last year and now–just a couple of weeks ago–she was sentenced to 22 months in prison and fined over $200,000 in restitution to her “victim,” the Motion Picture Association of America. Or there’s Aaron Swartz of Reddit, charged with the crime of attempting to create a database of academic papers and reports–largely the work of unpaid graduate student labor in the first place. He faces up to 35 years in prison and a fine of $1 million. Or Joel Tenenbaum, the kid who’s being sued for $4.5 million for sharing a handful of Nirvana mp3s. Remember that video of Texas Judge William Adams viciously beating his teenaged daughter? He claimed that it was her Internet downloads that set him off. Just a little “discipline,” he said, after “she was caught stealing.”
Which is why I love the Tea Party so much. They don’t dick around about any of this. It’s a full-scale generational war they’re after. Sociologist Theda Skocpol’s The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism devotes a good chunk to understanding the generational warrior inherent in Tea Party politics. Skocpol refers to the clash as “the ‘grey’ versus ‘brown’ divide.” Grey meaning the old white people who dominate all of our political and economic institutions, and brown meaning the young, most racially diverse generation in the history of this country: ours.
Grey versus brown is “a tension that superimposes divisions by age and experience, income, and ethnicity…the Tea Party is very much a reaction by older white conservative Americans who resent and fear what they think might be the political accompaniments of a nation transformed by rising younger cohorts with different experiences, values, and social characteristics.”
Fittingly, the Tea Partiers have chosen the Ryan Budget as their very own spiritual lodestar–the Port Huron Statement of the old, white and reactionary. The Ryan Budget–and the GOP campaign around it–divides the American populace into “those who are 55 or older now, and those who are younger.” Meaning Boomers will receive Medicare and Social Security checks unchanged, whereas Millennials get the axe–despite the fact that many of us have been paying into these programs for the past 15 years. Let the record show that it was they who fired the first shot.
We’re not even the first ones to fall into their cross-hairs. They lined up their own moms and dads for “assisted-obsolescence” decades ago. Overrated though they were, the New Deal and Great Society electorates had little faith in laissez-faire. For a prissy Ruling Class Boomer like Grover Norquist, their extinction over the past fifteen years has been a most joyous occasion:
“We’ve had four more years pass where the age cohort that is most Democratic and most pro-statist, are those people who turned 21 years of age between 1932 and 1952…That age cohort is now between the ages of 70 and 90 years old, and every year 2 million of them die…their idea of the legitimate role of the state is radically different than anything previous generations knew, or subsequent generations…one-size-fits-all labor law, one-size-fits-all Social Security. We will all work until we’re 65 and have the same pension. You know, some Bismarck, German thing, okay? Very un-American.”

***

It’s not like Millennials are better people or anything. No, actually, fuck that. We are better people on the whole–we play well with others. But that’s one thing I do worry about: we’re all too nice. That’s the problem with the goody-two-shoes nature common to so many Millennials, especially the ones out in the streets. We’re just not mean enough.
Boomers know how to get mean. But we just can’t do it. This is how creeps like Jon Stewart and Obama manage to make in-roads with us. Remember that shot of the Iranian revolutionaries with the captured and bloodied riot cop? And they protected him from everyone else? Admirable, brave, and–tactically speaking–probably the right decision. But a dangerous omen, I fear.
All of the hippies who skulked off into the world of children’s programming to ride out the counterrevolution have cursed us with both our potential salvation (respect for the commons) and our ultimate weakness (pacifist nonsense). Who would deny that Obamaism was the canniest of Boomer plots to dope Millennials with that perfect cocktail of lefty-flirtation, racial inclusiveness, and pathological congeniality? It wouldn’t surprise me if the DNC had brought in old Sesame Street writers to help deconstruct our brains.
But mostly our decency stems from the fact that we’ve all been muzzled and defanged by student debt, slave wages and mass unemployment. Unlike our parents, we’ll never even get the chance to gobble up our own children and leave them with the tab. So let’s stick to the Marxian materialist route: the Boomers are a generation soaked with the spoils of war–the biggest war in human history, from which only the USA walked away relatively unscathed. They were always going to be total shits.
And in that respect, we should pity the Boomer. They’re like the frog soaking in the pot of slowly-warming water. They can barely feel it. As Mark Schmitt put it:

“A baby born in 1956 would have graduated from high school in about 1974, from college in 1978 or so. Look at almost any historical chart of the American economy, and you see two sharp breaks in the 1970s. First, in 1974, household incomes, which had been rising since World War II, flattened. Real wages started to stagnate. The poverty rate stopped falling. Health insurance coverage stopped rising. Those trends have continued ever since.
Second, a little later in the decade, around the time today’s 55-year-olds graduated from college (if they did—fewer than 30 percent have a four-year degree), inequality began its sharp rise, and the share of national income going to the bottom 40 percent began to fall. Productivity and wages, which had tended to keep pace, began to diverge, meaning that workers began seeing little of the benefits of their own productivity gains. The number of jobs in manufacturing peaked and began to drop sharply…If there was ever going to be a generational war in this country, that high school class of ’74 would be its Mason-Dixon line.”

Which is why, psychologically, this Great Depression of ours can never hurt us like it hurts them. I see it all the time: the unemployed Boomer thinks himself a loser. He’s spent his life watching his peers accumulate wealth and power. Now he feels like the rug has been pulled from under him. Something has gone terribly wrong. When he files for food-stamps, he feels exactly what the Ruling Class wants him to feel: shame and personal failing.
Whereas a Millennial shrugs and swipes the SNAP card at the farmer’s market for a quart of fresh cider and a pomegranate muffin. Why should she feel guilty? Even if she grew up in one of our country’s bourgeoisier enclaves, she could point to a handful of peers who graduated top-of-the-class, worked hard, played by the rules, but live with mom and dad. And despite all that guff about how we’re all lazy freeloaders, most of her friends probably have two or three jobs, each one barely hovering over the minimum wage. Few among them have managed to nab that most beautiful of American luxuries: health insurance coverage. For her, it’s taken for granted that capitalism is unfair–that hard work, socially beneficial skills, and playing by the rules guarantees nothing.
We Millennials have all the same ludicrous delusions of grandeur as our parents, but now, we’re ready to shuck capitalist gospel out the window. The Boomers call us spoiled, and ask us to do more with less, telling us to tamper our dreams. But the best thing we Americans have going for us is our entitlement, sans the free-market faith.
Look at Japan. They’ve been in something like a depression for twenty years. But where’s their Occupy? Instead, they have a new word–hikikomori–to describe the phenomenon of young men who refuse to leave their bedrooms, and the shame-ridden parents who try to keep it all under wraps. These kids did what a generation must never do: they’ve internalized the judgment of the free-market, a horrible and depressing process currently playing out among the Boomer unemployed over here as they head into Year IV of this hell.
Boomers felt it was their destiny to get rich–that if they just put in the hours, wealth would rain down from the heavens. And they could look to their peers for confirmation. From around 1820 to 1970, mom and dad could tell junior that life, for him, really would be better. That’s 150 years of rising wages. That’s a hell of a stretch–a success that no other country could claim. The Boomers stewed in those juices just long enough to believe all that free-market bullshit, even as they were yanking the rug out from under each other.
Way back in 1892, Friedrich Engels knew that success was the real curse of the USA. And that a powerful, anti-capitalist left could never take off in this country until the game stopped paying out: “Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America.”
Sound familiar? That’s what Occupy is for most of us–a guttural roar that capitalism will not do. The Boomers are right that it all smacks of entitlement. We are entitled. The world, and this country in particular, is awash in capital. With the billions floating in and out of this city every day, it’s amazing that you can walk around Manhattan and not end up with at least a grand worth of cash sifting around in your shoes like beach sand. The big lie is that the coffers are empty and budgets must be balanced. What a fucking joke. American workers have spent hundreds of years building this country and amassing this wealth, and it’s about time we claimed the vast majority of it.

***

But batten down the hatches, because if there’s one thing they’ve made abundantly clear, the Boomers are going to cling to life and power until the very last EKG blip, fleecing us all the while. Conservative apostate David Frum recently characterized the contemporary GOP’s platform as “a going-out-of-business sale for the Baby Boomer generation.” Which is pretty much the Democrats’ platform too. They just have better table manners.
We’ll be spending the rest of our formative years diving for cover from their collective Death Rattle. Thirty years from now, even if we walk away with all of our soft tissue intact, John Roberts will probably still be Chief Justice.
Boomers know what they’ve wrought. Climate change? Don’t believe the polls. They know it’s happening. Yeah, if you confront one of them, he might put up a denialist front for a couple of minutes. But keep pelting him and it all crumbles, giving way to “well, it’s too late.” Translated: “I’ll be on, or near, my deathbed when the shit really hits the fan. You, youngster, will be hauling your family across the country George Romero style, scavenging for orphans to sell off as catamites to the warlord chieftains.”
But as they begin their transition from their autumnal years of denial to the sad introspection of their wintry decades, I’m starting to think that they know something has gone wrong–a mutation of some kind. Since the Boomers’ adolescence in the 1960s and 70s, they’ve undergone a metamorphosis not unlike Jeff Goldblum’s in The Fly. In the teleportation pod on the left, party-hearty Jimmy Buffett. But in the pod on the right, hidden from view, a tiny little Grover Norquist, buzzing around in the corners. Zap! The DNA passes from pod left to pod right, fusing the two specimens. A few seconds later and the journey is complete. Out steps the mutated Boomer–an entirely new creation.
At first, they’re strong. They can kill, fuck, and maim whomever they please. They always get what they want. But after a while, the rot begins. One morning, they find a powerful, but hideous mutant staring back at them in the mirror–with a knack for crawling up the walls and vomiting acid upon its enemies. And, most importantly, ready to leech a little lifeforce from their own unborn child stirring in Geena Davis’s womb, all for just a few more years of power.
Documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has spent the past few years chronicling this ghastly mutation step-by-step–unraveling the seemingly incongruous strands and the hideous parentage of Boomer ideology. Their embrace of American libertarianism–with all of its absurdities, vulgarities and utopianism–was the final cry for help.
Like Jeff Goldblum’s Brundlefly slowly lifting the shotgun to its temple, the Boomers are ready for us to assert Millennial hegemony and put them out of their collective misery. Trust me, it’s the humane thing to do.

Friday, Feb 10. 6:00 Am

I (barely) awoke this morning, like every morning, for years, with one nightmare after another drifting into the twilight of my consciousness, forcing my heart to swell and deliver more pounding blood to a brain obsessed with identity, or lack there of, and a past with insufficient grounding.  I awoke this morning with the thought, "I am a professor".  This is who I am. 

I read the greatest works of humanity and share those works with others.  I write anecdotes of these meditations on Facebook, where I fight for the truth--no matter what good comes of it.  "The Professor": This is what my co-workers at eBay--that "job" and effort to redefine myself outside of "the academia"--used to call me.  This is my comfort...where I feel at home in my skin.

I make this fight in the basement of my home.  Partner and children resting upstairs--despite my fears that some day we will be separated by fire, and a floor that drops out as I run. Self destruction and re-creation (dear I say "exploration" since there is nothing to find that is not created) is dangerous, and threatens to rip the delicate threads of love and friendship that hold me together with the others on this (nightmare) journey--I dreamed last night that my partner had finally moved me out of her bedroom while I slept.

As I walked up stairs this morning, and poured a cup of coffee, aware of my children sleeping through the doorway, I remembered : I am a father too.   A professor and a father.  A father first, in a dream and nightmare of a "professor."

the New Socialism

http://jacobinmag.com/winter-2012/four-futures/

Racism and denial

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/interviews/anti-racist-activist-tim-wise/#.TzHDLoeOU0w.facebook

http://www.amazon.com/Racism-without-Racists-Color-Blind-Persistence/dp/1442202181/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ2tmS6gKtA&feature=share

http://www.illumemagazine.com/zine/articleDetail.php?racism-2012-gop-candidate-romney-gingrich-santorum-paul-13941

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0212/72485.html?fb_ref=.TzASFuegqIw.like&fb_source=profile_multiline

Nietzschean socialism

Is there a "socialism" that raises his contenders up to fight again.  We don't really know who are our equals.

The Future of History Can Liberal Democracy Survive the Decline of the Middle Class? By Francis Fukuyama

Something strange is going on in the world today. The global financial crisis that began in 2008 and the ongoing crisis of the euro are both products of the model of lightly regulated financial capitalism that emerged over the past three decades. Yet despite widespread anger at Wall Street bailouts, there has been no great upsurge of left-wing American populism in response. It is conceivable that the Occupy Wall Street movement will gain traction, but the most dynamic recent populist movement to date has been the right-wing Tea Party, whose main target is the regulatory state that seeks to protect ordinary people from financial speculators. Something similar is true in Europe as well, where the left is anemic and right-wing populist parties are on the move.
There are several reasons for this lack of left-wing mobilization, but chief among them is a failure in the realm of ideas. For the past generation, the ideological high ground on economic issues has been held by a libertarian right. The left has not been able to make a plausible case for an agenda other than a return to an unaffordable form of old-fashioned social democracy. This absence of a plausible progressive counter­narrative is unhealthy, because competition is good for intellectual ­debate just as it is for economic activity. And serious intellectual debate is urgently needed, since the current form of globalized capitalism is eroding the middle-class social base on which liberal democracy rests.
THE DEMOCRATIC WAVE
Social forces and conditions do not simply “determine” ideologies, as Karl Marx once maintained, but ideas do not become powerful unless they speak to the concerns of large numbers of ordinary people. Liberal democracy is the default ideology around much of the world today in part because it responds to and is facilitated by certain socioeconomic structures. Changes in those structures may have ideological consequences, just as ideological changes may have socioeconomic consequences.
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/136782/francis-fukuyama/the-future-of-history