In an excellent book published in 2007, The Stillborn God, Columbia University Professor Mark Lilla lays out an excellent analysis of what he calls the demise of Christian political theology. He argues that political theology arose in Greece, was transferred to Rome when that power overwhelmed the Mediterranean world, and after Constantine, it arose in the newly Christianized Roman context, but now as a "Christian political theology." That political theology was developed first by thinkers such as Eusebius, Athanasius, and the Cappadocian Fathers, but in spades by Augustine, especially in his City of God. Thomas further explicated how this could work, using especially Aristotelian categories, and Calvin finished the exposition, using biblical models for understanding exactly how such a culture should be molded.
This Christian political theology was not specific about just exactly what kind of rule was best (monarchy, empire, aristocracy, or polity), so that there was a great fluidity in Christian politics. But at some level the king was seen as the body of society and the church as its soul, or in some situations the king was seen as having "two bodies,"one physical and the other spiritual, or society was pictured as having two swords. In this trinitarian, incarnational theology of a God who was transcendent, yet not remote, lay the notion that God was close enough that he could come to us or that we could come to him, and that part of the governing structure of the body politic was to maintain that connection or nexus, however conceived.
Lilla argues that the beginnings of the end of this synthesis came with the English civil war. That war, waged largely between two varying interpretations of Anglicanism, brought an immediate, though not final, end to Anglican episcopacy. Lilla argues, though, that it had a larger impact. That impact can be seen especially in the work of Thomas Hobbes, and to a lesser degree, in the writings of John Locke. Hobbes's Leviathan spelled the end of Christian political theology, at least in the sense that he demonstrated it was no longer necessary, and that eventually it would fade from view. In the centuries that followed, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Marx and others would add their voices to the mix, and the result is what we see in European societies today, and, in an increasing obvious manner, in America.
The analysis is brief, though trenchant. One does not have to agree with all of Lilla's assumptions or conclusions to recognize that this is an important book. What surprises me is that I have missed the book for over two years though I have been working in this area. I recommend this as an important read for those interested in history, politics, or theology. Or all three!
Chad Owen Brand
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
DONALD GEORGE BLOESCH, 1928-2010
Donald Bloesch went to be with the Lord Tuesday, August 24, 2010. My interest in him goes back several decades, but his work on theological method was the subject of my Ph.D. dissertation in 1998. Bloesch was trained at the University of Chicago Divinity School and was a theologian in the United Church of Christ. He should have been a Process theologian, or at least a liberal in the old fashioned way of a Harry Emerson Fosdick or a William Newton Clarke. He was not. Encounters with Karl Barth, various American evangelicals, different forms of pietism, and a Bible-believing wife caused Bloesch to move increasingly in evangelical directions over the years. He was hired to teach at University of Dubuque Theological Seminary precisely because the administration was tired of their older professor (Arthur Cochrane), who was neoorthodox; they believed, because of his training and his heritage, that Bloesch would be a liberal. It was the first two years after doctoral studies that changed him. Bloesch wrote over thirty-five books in his lifetime, including two systematic theology sets, the first a two-volume systematic published in 1979, and the other a seven-volume opus published between 1992 and 2004. The latter set stands out as a remarkable addition to the field. Irenic, though feisty, Bloesch is often a joy to read, though at times he can frustrate evangelicals. He tends (though not always) to break most issues down into three possibilities: the liberal/mystical/irrational/novel possibility; the fundamentalist/simplistic/rationalist/traditional possibility; and then the third, which is his view and the correct view. His historical analyses were often brilliant, his exegesis was often sparse, and his knowledge of the literature was generally impressive. It is a rare theologian who really likes Irenaeus, Augustine, Anselm, Calvin, Luther, Wesley, Bavinck, Herrmann, Barth, Ellul, and Rahner all at the same time. If you want to position him at all, it is somewhere between Kierkegaard and Kuyper, somewhere between Henry and Herrmann. Bloesch made no large bold moves, hence there are no Bloeschites (or only a small group of them), but he made many small bold moves. He opposed what he called Carl Henry's evangelical rationalism, but he anathematized feminism's tendency to rename God into a feminine deity--he thought Henry compromised, but he considered Sallie McFague's theology to be idolatry. Thank God for Donald Bloesch. He will be missed, but his legacy is still here for us to learn from.
Chad Brand
Professor of Christian Theology
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Chad Brand
Professor of Christian Theology
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Monday, June 7, 2010
ADAM SMITH AND THE FIRST MAJOR INSTALLMENT OF "THE DISMAL SCIENCE"
Adam Smith and the First Major Installment of
“The Dismal Science”
Before the late eighteenth century, various thinkers gave serious consideration to the interface between theology, politics, and economic issues. But it is clear that none of these thinkers, not even Thomas Aquinas or John Calvin, had really developed a full-blown theory of how economies worked. In 1776, however, that empty spot would be filled. In that year, a Scottish “moral philosopher” named Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a volume destined to rock the intellectual world almost as powerfully as the revolution of that same year rocked the international world of politics.
Sometimes it seems as though a mystical sort of synchronicity brings apparently disparate forces together at the same moment. The late eighteenth century witnessed revolutions of various sorts—the two most prominent being the French and American revolutions, one of which created a new republic, and the other of which eventually created a new despotism. But political revolutions were not the only type of that genre. The Industrial Revolution was whipping into fever pitch at about the same time as the American Revolution, with new technologies such as the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and just a few years later, the cotton gin. This revolution in technology was preceded, about a century earlier, by a Scientific Revolution known to us as the Enlightenment. That movement, insofar as it can be called a “movement,” itself built on the foundation of the Reformation, which was ushered in at least partly as a result of the Renaissance, an intellectual and artistic explosion which was also preceded by the Scholastic tradition of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What seems clear from this is that there is no mystical synchronicity, but, rather, movements and individuals building their innovations, in part, on foundations laid by others.
It is not mere happenstance that the Industrial Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and Adam Smith’s famous volume all came at about the same time. (It is a bit odd that the Declaration and Wealth of Nations happened the same year, though!) These are connected to one another, even as they built on the foundations laid by Renaissance and Scholastic Scholars, and on the religious ideologies of the Protestant Reformers and the Evangelical Revivalists. The individualism implied in Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith, the notion of personal responsibility found in Calvin’s views on work, the concept of political freedom in a state with a division of powers articulated by both Locke and Montesquieu all came together in Smith’s volume and drove him to articulate a view of economics which is implicit in many of those earlier thinkers, but which never did quite come together until his work. As Skousen puts it, “Prior to this famous date, six thousand years of recorded history had passed without a seminal work being published on the subject that dominated every waking hour of practically every human being: making a living.” That history changed in a single day.
Smith’s basic ideology can be easily summed up, though his tome was nearly a thousand pages long. He believed in free trade, the division of labor, and the development of industrial technology. Throughout the book Smith advocated the principle of “natural liberty,” which meant, for him, that people ought to have the freedom to do what they want with little interference from the state, so long as they are law-abiding citizens. This is especially the case with reference to economic decisions. Smith believed that economic freedom was a basic human liberty, a view that he held in common with John Locke, who affirmed that we have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. In Wealth of Nations, he argued, “To prohibit a great people . . . from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.” The Scottish philosopher made it his point to stand up for those rights.
What was this “natural freedom”? For our Adam Smith, it included the right to buy goods from any source without having to pay crippling tariffs if the goods happened to be imported. It includes the right to seek any kind of employment one might desire. This was heavily restricted in most European countries in Smith’s day by both government regulations that required workers to obtain government permission to change jobs and by the stranglehold that trade guilds had on most skilled labor, trade guilds that held their authority by government sanction. Natural liberty for Smith also entailed the right to pay any wage that the market might bear and to charge any price for goods that the market might sustain, without the government setting standards for such things, arbitrary or otherwise. It also included the freedom to generate, accumulate, retain, and pass on capital and wealth to the next generation (or to anyone else) without government intrusion in the process. Adam Smith encouraged “the virtues of thrift, capital investment, and labor-saving machinery as essential ingredients to promote rising living standards.”
The most obvious implication of “natural liberty” was free trade. But Smith wrote during a time when trade was anything but free. Since the prevailing belief of mercantilism was that wealth was defined in terms of the accumulation of silver and gold, any threat to that supply was tantamount to a military threat. Because of that, most European countries had elaborate protectionist policies in matters of trade. High import tariffs were used to make it economically difficult for foreign countries to sell their goods in other countries—the cost passed on to consumers made it difficult for any but the richest of persons to buy those commodities. In the mercantilist understanding, trade was war.
Presumably that policy protected domestic production and manufacturing. Of course, what happened was that other countries enacted similar protective tariffs, thus preventing exports, which in turn damaged the economy of the producing nation that wanted to sell its goods in other countries. Smith argued that this circular policy of protection and threat helped no one in the long run, except the governments that collected the tariffs. When international trade itself is viewed as a kind of warfare, no one is helped and everyone is hurt. So, Smith argued for massive reductions of tariffs as a means to causing the wealth of all nations to increase. In his understanding the wealth of nations was not gold and silver, but productivity.
The second implication of “natural liberty” was the division of labor. Many trades had been regulated by government, by trade guilds, and by lack of technological advance so that there were many barriers to a worker being able to be hired and to have mobility in the work place. But in the area of technological development and innovation that came with industrialization some of that was already beginning to change in Smith’s day. His most famous example of the division of labor is his discussion if the “pin factory.” In previous generations a single individual would apprentice and then eventually master the skill of making pins to be used by seamstresses. There were many steps in making pins—cutting the wire, straightening the wire, sharpening the point, making the head, packaging the pins, and so forth. Pin-makers carefully protected their trade so that they could keep the price of pins high and so that they could earn a good profit, and forces within government and the guilds helped keep them protected.
Smith proposed, however, that an assembly-line process made more sense. Rather than have one man working, and making, perhaps, twenty pins in a day, Smith conjectured that ten workers, each of whom was adept at only one part of the process—cutting wire, sharpening points, etc.—that such persons, because they were not having to stop over and over again in the day to change work stations (Smith called it, quaintly, "sauntering"), could be far more productive. He estimated that the twenty pins made by one man per day might actually exceed 48,000 pins made by ten people operating under the principle of the “division of labor.” This would create more productivity, would employ more people in the making of pins, and would cause the cost of pins to decrease substantially, which, in turn, would lower household expenses, freeing up capital to be used to purchase other commodities, which, in turn, would create more jobs. Someone is hurt in the division of labor of course—the Master pin-maker, who now has to find other employment—but vast numbers of other people are helped in the process.
The third entailment of “natural liberty” would be to encourage industrial technological development. If the government and the guilds no longer control manufacturing and commerce, entrepreneurs and inventors would have a financial incentive to devote creative energy and time to technological development. When we think of the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, we think of a time of great technological advances. The steam engine (used on both land and water), the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, agriculture advances such as the McCormick reaper and the John Deere steel plow and new forms of milling grain and many other examples could be adduced to demonstrate how the Scientific Revolution had impacted and produced the Industrial Revolution.
It is not merely coincidence that many of these new inventions were created in Britain where governmental changes were giving greater freedom to individuals and in the new United States of America where the government laid a lighter hand on business and inventive creativity. Smith believed that a greater degree of liberty granted by governments would inevitably result in newer inventions that would make labor easier, faster, and more profitable. He was convinced that there was nothing wrong and everything right with all of this.
“Natural liberty” then was the key to economic development and the rising wealth of nations. There were, in addition, two other elements that we will discuss more briefly. The first is competition. Individuals have the right to compete with one another in the production and exchange of goods and services. Competition, in Smith’s view, is a sign of a healthy economy. There are several threats to competition, most of which are represented by the two regular sources of difficulty Smith had already identified: government and protectionist trade guilds or unions.
Governments can and do give preferential treatment either to certain sectors of the economy, or to certain competitors for the market within the economy, or to the guilds and unions. This is, in fact, the historic trend of governments all over the world. Some sector of the economy or some union or some wealthy entrepreneur provides needed political support to governmental leaders, and, in turn, they are rewarded with special government protection. This undermines competition, and, in the long run, eviscerates the freedoms of the people, and generally causes an increase in the cost for goods and service for all. To put it practically, it creates unemployment and rising inflation, along with other economic difficulties.
Alongside “natural liberty” and “competition,” Smith identifies one other important component to the development of wealth, and that is “justice.” “Justice,” for Smith, means that the economic actions of individuals must be just and honest. This is an important aspect of Smith’s philosophy that is sometimes ignored by his critics. Economic exchanges ought to be done in a just and honest manner. “Capitalism” (not Smith’s word, by the way), is not greed endorsed by political entitlement. This statement by Smith incorporates all three elements: “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men.” In other words, the process works as people pursue their own interests, but pursue them in a just manner.
When these three components come together in a nation’s economy, argued Smith, there will develop a “natural harmony” of interests between workers, landlords, entrepreneurs, and investors. In the pin factory workers and managers have to work together to accomplish their tasks. The division of labor was, for Smith, the key to a productive economy.
Consider the manufacture of a wool coat. There are dozens of steps in the process of growing the wool, shearing the sheep, making the cloth, producing the dye, bringing other cloths such as cotton into the process, the manufacture of buttons, of a fur collar, and many other steps besides. Large numbers of workers, most of whom never meet one another, are involved in making a single woolen coat. Each of their labor contributes to the other, though they never meet. Nor will they likely meet the eventual purchaser of the finished product—the retail consumer. At every step along the way people are simply pursuing their own self-interests—working to earn a paycheck, operating a business for profit, participating in a craft for various reasons, and shopping—and the net result is that everyone gets something out of it, something that they want.
Why does each one do that? Because each one is seeking his or her own self-interest of putting food on the table, of paying for college education, and so on. “By pursuing his own self-interest, every individual is led by an invisible hand to promote the public interest.” The larger part of this particular paragraph is worth quoting: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love. . . . Every individual . . . who employs capital . . . and labours . . . neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it . . . he is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . . . By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society." Through the concept of the “invisible hand,” Smith contends that if an economy is just left to operate, it will do so in such a way that peoples’ needs are met through the hydraulic process of working and living, buying and selling, running businesses and employing personnel.
Though this part of Smith’s argument has sometimes been vilified by critics as “Smith’s grabbing hand,” this is to misunderstand his whole point. He is simply saying that an economic system in this age in which we live is not intended to and never could work simply on an altruistic basis and no other. Rather, each man or woman, knowing his or her own needs and the needs of the family, will work to supply those needs. But each one working to supply the needs of family will contribute to the whole enterprise. Would there be abuses to the system that might arise? Certainly, and it would not be long before critics would identify Das Adam Smith Problem. That will be dealt with later in this discussion (actually not in this blog--you have to buy the book!).
Smith’s views on free trade spilled over into his understanding of religious freedom. He lived, of course, in a country, Scotland, that had a state church, though by his day there was a great deal of religious liberty in his country. Smith believed that “a great multitude of religious sects” would promote toleration and would be a healthy thing for a nation. In other words, what he thought was good for the economy—freedom from government intrusion—he also believed was good for church and religion.
Smith’s book was not met with universal acclaim, though at the time it was hard to find any substantial critics. Certainly in the next century the book would have plenty of detractors. But the book has received high praise, even from those who, at the end of the day, do not accept his system of economics. English historian Henry Thomas Buckle opined that in terms of its eventual impact, the book “is probably the most important book that has ever been written.” Readers on both sides of the Atlantic found this tome to be extremely helpful in understanding just what economics is, and just why nations had struggled for centuries to generate and sustain wealth over time. The book just “made sense” to many in its day, not the least of which intellectuals and industrialists in the new world of America.
One other issue has to be dealt with in understanding Adam Smith’s contribution to economics. As we noted earlier, Smith argues that the primary motive for economic activity is “self-interest.” Everyone, pursuing the need to take care of the needs of themselves and their family, will engage in work, commerce, and buying and selling. But that is not the only motivation for Smith. The other is “sympathy.” He argued that everyone has a basic desire to be accepted by others. In pre-industrial times this manifested itself in village life where everyone knew everyone else and where it was important to build good relations so that one’s business and personal life could prosper. Even in the industrialized city, though, this would still be necessary, since, over the long run, a good reputation would be important for success. But these two motivations might appear to be at odds with one another. German philosophers believed they were, and designated this motivation crisis, “Das Adam Smith Problem.” It was not a problem for Smith himself, however, since it was his belief that economic activity and moral behavior were not contradictory to each other.
In the early twenty-first century we live in a time when capitalism has been written off by many. Some even claim that it is the cause of the economic woes that have afflicted us recently. They say, "we have tried that, and look where it has gotten us." I want to respond by saying, "We have never tried it." Even in our country since at least the 1860s government intrusion of and manipulation of the economy (usually at the request of business!) have left us with a model not really tried in a national economy. I think we need a Das Adam Smith Revival!
(Excerpted from the forthcoming book, Seeking the City by Chad Brand and Tom Pratt.)
Chad Owen Brand
“The Dismal Science”
Before the late eighteenth century, various thinkers gave serious consideration to the interface between theology, politics, and economic issues. But it is clear that none of these thinkers, not even Thomas Aquinas or John Calvin, had really developed a full-blown theory of how economies worked. In 1776, however, that empty spot would be filled. In that year, a Scottish “moral philosopher” named Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, a volume destined to rock the intellectual world almost as powerfully as the revolution of that same year rocked the international world of politics.
Sometimes it seems as though a mystical sort of synchronicity brings apparently disparate forces together at the same moment. The late eighteenth century witnessed revolutions of various sorts—the two most prominent being the French and American revolutions, one of which created a new republic, and the other of which eventually created a new despotism. But political revolutions were not the only type of that genre. The Industrial Revolution was whipping into fever pitch at about the same time as the American Revolution, with new technologies such as the steam engine, the spinning jenny, and just a few years later, the cotton gin. This revolution in technology was preceded, about a century earlier, by a Scientific Revolution known to us as the Enlightenment. That movement, insofar as it can be called a “movement,” itself built on the foundation of the Reformation, which was ushered in at least partly as a result of the Renaissance, an intellectual and artistic explosion which was also preceded by the Scholastic tradition of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What seems clear from this is that there is no mystical synchronicity, but, rather, movements and individuals building their innovations, in part, on foundations laid by others.
It is not mere happenstance that the Industrial Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, and Adam Smith’s famous volume all came at about the same time. (It is a bit odd that the Declaration and Wealth of Nations happened the same year, though!) These are connected to one another, even as they built on the foundations laid by Renaissance and Scholastic Scholars, and on the religious ideologies of the Protestant Reformers and the Evangelical Revivalists. The individualism implied in Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith, the notion of personal responsibility found in Calvin’s views on work, the concept of political freedom in a state with a division of powers articulated by both Locke and Montesquieu all came together in Smith’s volume and drove him to articulate a view of economics which is implicit in many of those earlier thinkers, but which never did quite come together until his work. As Skousen puts it, “Prior to this famous date, six thousand years of recorded history had passed without a seminal work being published on the subject that dominated every waking hour of practically every human being: making a living.” That history changed in a single day.
Smith’s basic ideology can be easily summed up, though his tome was nearly a thousand pages long. He believed in free trade, the division of labor, and the development of industrial technology. Throughout the book Smith advocated the principle of “natural liberty,” which meant, for him, that people ought to have the freedom to do what they want with little interference from the state, so long as they are law-abiding citizens. This is especially the case with reference to economic decisions. Smith believed that economic freedom was a basic human liberty, a view that he held in common with John Locke, who affirmed that we have inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. In Wealth of Nations, he argued, “To prohibit a great people . . . from making all that they can of every part of their own produce, or from employing their stock and industry in the way that they judge most advantageous to themselves, is a manifest violation of the most sacred rights of mankind.” The Scottish philosopher made it his point to stand up for those rights.
What was this “natural freedom”? For our Adam Smith, it included the right to buy goods from any source without having to pay crippling tariffs if the goods happened to be imported. It includes the right to seek any kind of employment one might desire. This was heavily restricted in most European countries in Smith’s day by both government regulations that required workers to obtain government permission to change jobs and by the stranglehold that trade guilds had on most skilled labor, trade guilds that held their authority by government sanction. Natural liberty for Smith also entailed the right to pay any wage that the market might bear and to charge any price for goods that the market might sustain, without the government setting standards for such things, arbitrary or otherwise. It also included the freedom to generate, accumulate, retain, and pass on capital and wealth to the next generation (or to anyone else) without government intrusion in the process. Adam Smith encouraged “the virtues of thrift, capital investment, and labor-saving machinery as essential ingredients to promote rising living standards.”
The most obvious implication of “natural liberty” was free trade. But Smith wrote during a time when trade was anything but free. Since the prevailing belief of mercantilism was that wealth was defined in terms of the accumulation of silver and gold, any threat to that supply was tantamount to a military threat. Because of that, most European countries had elaborate protectionist policies in matters of trade. High import tariffs were used to make it economically difficult for foreign countries to sell their goods in other countries—the cost passed on to consumers made it difficult for any but the richest of persons to buy those commodities. In the mercantilist understanding, trade was war.
Presumably that policy protected domestic production and manufacturing. Of course, what happened was that other countries enacted similar protective tariffs, thus preventing exports, which in turn damaged the economy of the producing nation that wanted to sell its goods in other countries. Smith argued that this circular policy of protection and threat helped no one in the long run, except the governments that collected the tariffs. When international trade itself is viewed as a kind of warfare, no one is helped and everyone is hurt. So, Smith argued for massive reductions of tariffs as a means to causing the wealth of all nations to increase. In his understanding the wealth of nations was not gold and silver, but productivity.
The second implication of “natural liberty” was the division of labor. Many trades had been regulated by government, by trade guilds, and by lack of technological advance so that there were many barriers to a worker being able to be hired and to have mobility in the work place. But in the area of technological development and innovation that came with industrialization some of that was already beginning to change in Smith’s day. His most famous example of the division of labor is his discussion if the “pin factory.” In previous generations a single individual would apprentice and then eventually master the skill of making pins to be used by seamstresses. There were many steps in making pins—cutting the wire, straightening the wire, sharpening the point, making the head, packaging the pins, and so forth. Pin-makers carefully protected their trade so that they could keep the price of pins high and so that they could earn a good profit, and forces within government and the guilds helped keep them protected.
Smith proposed, however, that an assembly-line process made more sense. Rather than have one man working, and making, perhaps, twenty pins in a day, Smith conjectured that ten workers, each of whom was adept at only one part of the process—cutting wire, sharpening points, etc.—that such persons, because they were not having to stop over and over again in the day to change work stations (Smith called it, quaintly, "sauntering"), could be far more productive. He estimated that the twenty pins made by one man per day might actually exceed 48,000 pins made by ten people operating under the principle of the “division of labor.” This would create more productivity, would employ more people in the making of pins, and would cause the cost of pins to decrease substantially, which, in turn, would lower household expenses, freeing up capital to be used to purchase other commodities, which, in turn, would create more jobs. Someone is hurt in the division of labor of course—the Master pin-maker, who now has to find other employment—but vast numbers of other people are helped in the process.
The third entailment of “natural liberty” would be to encourage industrial technological development. If the government and the guilds no longer control manufacturing and commerce, entrepreneurs and inventors would have a financial incentive to devote creative energy and time to technological development. When we think of the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, we think of a time of great technological advances. The steam engine (used on both land and water), the spinning jenny, the cotton gin, agriculture advances such as the McCormick reaper and the John Deere steel plow and new forms of milling grain and many other examples could be adduced to demonstrate how the Scientific Revolution had impacted and produced the Industrial Revolution.
It is not merely coincidence that many of these new inventions were created in Britain where governmental changes were giving greater freedom to individuals and in the new United States of America where the government laid a lighter hand on business and inventive creativity. Smith believed that a greater degree of liberty granted by governments would inevitably result in newer inventions that would make labor easier, faster, and more profitable. He was convinced that there was nothing wrong and everything right with all of this.
“Natural liberty” then was the key to economic development and the rising wealth of nations. There were, in addition, two other elements that we will discuss more briefly. The first is competition. Individuals have the right to compete with one another in the production and exchange of goods and services. Competition, in Smith’s view, is a sign of a healthy economy. There are several threats to competition, most of which are represented by the two regular sources of difficulty Smith had already identified: government and protectionist trade guilds or unions.
Governments can and do give preferential treatment either to certain sectors of the economy, or to certain competitors for the market within the economy, or to the guilds and unions. This is, in fact, the historic trend of governments all over the world. Some sector of the economy or some union or some wealthy entrepreneur provides needed political support to governmental leaders, and, in turn, they are rewarded with special government protection. This undermines competition, and, in the long run, eviscerates the freedoms of the people, and generally causes an increase in the cost for goods and service for all. To put it practically, it creates unemployment and rising inflation, along with other economic difficulties.
Alongside “natural liberty” and “competition,” Smith identifies one other important component to the development of wealth, and that is “justice.” “Justice,” for Smith, means that the economic actions of individuals must be just and honest. This is an important aspect of Smith’s philosophy that is sometimes ignored by his critics. Economic exchanges ought to be done in a just and honest manner. “Capitalism” (not Smith’s word, by the way), is not greed endorsed by political entitlement. This statement by Smith incorporates all three elements: “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man or order of men.” In other words, the process works as people pursue their own interests, but pursue them in a just manner.
When these three components come together in a nation’s economy, argued Smith, there will develop a “natural harmony” of interests between workers, landlords, entrepreneurs, and investors. In the pin factory workers and managers have to work together to accomplish their tasks. The division of labor was, for Smith, the key to a productive economy.
Consider the manufacture of a wool coat. There are dozens of steps in the process of growing the wool, shearing the sheep, making the cloth, producing the dye, bringing other cloths such as cotton into the process, the manufacture of buttons, of a fur collar, and many other steps besides. Large numbers of workers, most of whom never meet one another, are involved in making a single woolen coat. Each of their labor contributes to the other, though they never meet. Nor will they likely meet the eventual purchaser of the finished product—the retail consumer. At every step along the way people are simply pursuing their own self-interests—working to earn a paycheck, operating a business for profit, participating in a craft for various reasons, and shopping—and the net result is that everyone gets something out of it, something that they want.
Why does each one do that? Because each one is seeking his or her own self-interest of putting food on the table, of paying for college education, and so on. “By pursuing his own self-interest, every individual is led by an invisible hand to promote the public interest.” The larger part of this particular paragraph is worth quoting: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love. . . . Every individual . . . who employs capital . . . and labours . . . neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it . . . he is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. . . . By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of society." Through the concept of the “invisible hand,” Smith contends that if an economy is just left to operate, it will do so in such a way that peoples’ needs are met through the hydraulic process of working and living, buying and selling, running businesses and employing personnel.
Though this part of Smith’s argument has sometimes been vilified by critics as “Smith’s grabbing hand,” this is to misunderstand his whole point. He is simply saying that an economic system in this age in which we live is not intended to and never could work simply on an altruistic basis and no other. Rather, each man or woman, knowing his or her own needs and the needs of the family, will work to supply those needs. But each one working to supply the needs of family will contribute to the whole enterprise. Would there be abuses to the system that might arise? Certainly, and it would not be long before critics would identify Das Adam Smith Problem. That will be dealt with later in this discussion (actually not in this blog--you have to buy the book!).
Smith’s views on free trade spilled over into his understanding of religious freedom. He lived, of course, in a country, Scotland, that had a state church, though by his day there was a great deal of religious liberty in his country. Smith believed that “a great multitude of religious sects” would promote toleration and would be a healthy thing for a nation. In other words, what he thought was good for the economy—freedom from government intrusion—he also believed was good for church and religion.
Smith’s book was not met with universal acclaim, though at the time it was hard to find any substantial critics. Certainly in the next century the book would have plenty of detractors. But the book has received high praise, even from those who, at the end of the day, do not accept his system of economics. English historian Henry Thomas Buckle opined that in terms of its eventual impact, the book “is probably the most important book that has ever been written.” Readers on both sides of the Atlantic found this tome to be extremely helpful in understanding just what economics is, and just why nations had struggled for centuries to generate and sustain wealth over time. The book just “made sense” to many in its day, not the least of which intellectuals and industrialists in the new world of America.
One other issue has to be dealt with in understanding Adam Smith’s contribution to economics. As we noted earlier, Smith argues that the primary motive for economic activity is “self-interest.” Everyone, pursuing the need to take care of the needs of themselves and their family, will engage in work, commerce, and buying and selling. But that is not the only motivation for Smith. The other is “sympathy.” He argued that everyone has a basic desire to be accepted by others. In pre-industrial times this manifested itself in village life where everyone knew everyone else and where it was important to build good relations so that one’s business and personal life could prosper. Even in the industrialized city, though, this would still be necessary, since, over the long run, a good reputation would be important for success. But these two motivations might appear to be at odds with one another. German philosophers believed they were, and designated this motivation crisis, “Das Adam Smith Problem.” It was not a problem for Smith himself, however, since it was his belief that economic activity and moral behavior were not contradictory to each other.
In the early twenty-first century we live in a time when capitalism has been written off by many. Some even claim that it is the cause of the economic woes that have afflicted us recently. They say, "we have tried that, and look where it has gotten us." I want to respond by saying, "We have never tried it." Even in our country since at least the 1860s government intrusion of and manipulation of the economy (usually at the request of business!) have left us with a model not really tried in a national economy. I think we need a Das Adam Smith Revival!
(Excerpted from the forthcoming book, Seeking the City by Chad Brand and Tom Pratt.)
Chad Owen Brand
Saturday, May 29, 2010
A Little Taste of Things to Come
A Little Taste of Things to Come
Here are a couple of historical paragraphs from the new book, Seeking the City: Wealth, Work and Stewardship in the Bible and History, which will be complete and sent off to publisher next week:
Before the rise of the modern world there was the notion that everyone had a place to fill, a task that had been given to them, and that they ought to be content with that and not attempt to change anything about it. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the Parson says, “God had ordained that some folk should be more high in estate and in degree and some folk more low and everyone should be served in his estate and in his degree.” Stick to what is yours. If you are a Lord, then be a Lord, and if you are a peasant, be content with that. Every political theorist from Plato to Aristotle to Augustine to Thomas Aquinas agreed on this. Humans are equal to one another only in that they are all humans and share in a common humanity. They are not equal in opportunity, however, but are virtually locked in to a status in life from which there is little hope for deviation, barring some tremendous shift in fortune.
As we have seen, though, movements such as the Reformation brought attention to individuals, to their own choices, and made it clear that such static roles might not be fixed. Individuals are worth something, and they have the ability to make choices that can change their lives in dramatic ways. That idea will only grow more and more common with the passing of time in early modern Europe, and will spill over beyond Protestant borders into Catholic thought as well. What is happening from the Reformation on to the late eighteenth century is a rising tide of individualism, and with it an attendant political philosophy of republicanism, and with those a concomitant notion of a free economy. These are, however, ideas slow to flower.
Chad Owen Brand
Here are a couple of historical paragraphs from the new book, Seeking the City: Wealth, Work and Stewardship in the Bible and History, which will be complete and sent off to publisher next week:
Before the rise of the modern world there was the notion that everyone had a place to fill, a task that had been given to them, and that they ought to be content with that and not attempt to change anything about it. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales the Parson says, “God had ordained that some folk should be more high in estate and in degree and some folk more low and everyone should be served in his estate and in his degree.” Stick to what is yours. If you are a Lord, then be a Lord, and if you are a peasant, be content with that. Every political theorist from Plato to Aristotle to Augustine to Thomas Aquinas agreed on this. Humans are equal to one another only in that they are all humans and share in a common humanity. They are not equal in opportunity, however, but are virtually locked in to a status in life from which there is little hope for deviation, barring some tremendous shift in fortune.
As we have seen, though, movements such as the Reformation brought attention to individuals, to their own choices, and made it clear that such static roles might not be fixed. Individuals are worth something, and they have the ability to make choices that can change their lives in dramatic ways. That idea will only grow more and more common with the passing of time in early modern Europe, and will spill over beyond Protestant borders into Catholic thought as well. What is happening from the Reformation on to the late eighteenth century is a rising tide of individualism, and with it an attendant political philosophy of republicanism, and with those a concomitant notion of a free economy. These are, however, ideas slow to flower.
Chad Owen Brand
Saturday, March 6, 2010
FASCISM, THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, AND GOVERNMENTAL SUSPENSION OF DEMOCRACY
Fascism, the French Revolution, and Governmental Suspension of Democracy
The American Revolution was not the only revolution of the late eighteenth century. The French Revolution (1789-99) saw that nation move from a monarchy to a republic to an anarchic state to a constitutional democracy to an empire in the space of ten years. Several years of famine and severe food shortages, coupled with crippling debt, created a severe economic crisis. The later Bourbon kings made foolish decisions relative to the French economy that devastated it. Louis XV spent massive amounts of money fighting the British in the American colonies in what was known in Europe as the Seven Years War and in America as the French and Indian War. Then his grandson Louis XVI (also known as Louis the Last) poured more resources into the American Revolutionary War, resources he did not have, and so had to borrow heavily from European banking houses. Poor harvests resulted in massive starvation on the part of the poor, all the while the nobility were conspicuous in their lavish consumption. Add to this the problem of how to care for large numbers of veterans of the wars against the British, massive unemployment, high bread prices due to the crop failures, and new Enlightenment ideals about the equality of all men, and you have a severe crisis.
In 1789 the Estates-General was called into session, something that had not happened since 1614. The Estates-General was made up of the First Estate, the clergy; the Second Estate, the nobility; and the Third Estate, the rest of France. The monarchy had governed absolutely in the meantime, but the crisis of 1789 made it clear to many intellectuals, nobles, church leaders, and activists, that the monarchy could not deliver them in the present hour. Together they formed a National Assembly that arrogated to itself the task of governing the nation in the stead of the King. Louis XVI responded by closing the building in which the Assembly was meeting and restructured the finance ministry. Many Parisians interpreted this to be an attempted coup on the part of the King against the National Assembly. With much of the French Guard now supporting them, insurgents stormed the Bastille, where there was a large cache of weapons and ammunition, and which many considered to be a symbol of the now-tyrannical Ancien Regime. The National Assembly thus became the de facto governing body in the stead of the monarchy. The Royal family attempted to leave Paris secretly, but was found out, and brought back. In January, 1793, Louis XVI was found guilty of various crimes and beheaded. Albert Camus commented that this constituted "an act that secularized the French world and banished God from the subsequent history of the French people.”
In the Fall of 1793 the Committee of Public Safety, led by Maximilien Robespierre, took control through a coup and unleashed the Reign of Terror in which over 16,500 people were executed, mostly by the guillotine, though some historians put the number as high as 40,000. Robespierre set price controls on all foodstuffs and many other goods, sent troops into the countryside to seize crops and arrest farmers, prosecuting anyone who resisted or attempted to preserve their own property from being seized by the Committee’s agents. What led him to take such Draconian measures?
Robespierre was a fervent disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who contended that individuals who live in such a way that they place the general will of the public first are truly “free” and “just,” while those who do not live in such a way are criminals or heretics. Those who refuse to live for the common good above all else must be forced to bend to the general will by the state. The state, as it were, “forces” them to be “free.” In so doing, it may have to suspend all of the usual devices of democracy, such as free elections, representative bodies that reflect the views of the majority of the public, and free speech, since those are “hardly ever necessary where the government is well-intentioned. For the rulers know that the general will is always on the side which is most favorable to the public interest, that is to say the most equitable; so that it is needful only to act justly to be certain of following the general will.” Robespierre was simply applying Rousseau to the situation in Paris in 1793. “The people is always worth more than individuals,” as he himself put it. Worth so much more, that the slaughter of tens of thousands of resisters is justifiable—in the name of “justice.”
The French Revolution was the first in a line of revolutions that would lead to totalitarian states. It was a fascist revolution in that, though it cast out the “demonic” religion represented by Roman Catholicism and the First Estate, it then capitulated to a new religion, the religion of the State. It was also the first revolution in modern times that purported to be more democratic for having removed the standard devices that had historically attended true efforts at democratic governing, again, such as free speech, representative government, and freedom from governmental invasion of private property without proper warrant. In France, the real problem was not the economy, not before the Revolution and not after the Revolution. The problem was governmental manipulation of the economy.
That kind of manipulation was something the American Founding Fathers wanted to avoid, at least most of them. The question is, when the government believes it knows best for the people and ignores their express wishes in enforcing legislation, how is this, philosophically, any better than the Committee of Public Safety? How is it any different in our country when our government wants to force legislation down our throats that the vast majority of Americans have clearly stated they do not want? I doubt that heads will roll, but then again, who knows? Maybe this Fall it will be just the heads of Congressional committees.
Chad Owen Brand
The American Revolution was not the only revolution of the late eighteenth century. The French Revolution (1789-99) saw that nation move from a monarchy to a republic to an anarchic state to a constitutional democracy to an empire in the space of ten years. Several years of famine and severe food shortages, coupled with crippling debt, created a severe economic crisis. The later Bourbon kings made foolish decisions relative to the French economy that devastated it. Louis XV spent massive amounts of money fighting the British in the American colonies in what was known in Europe as the Seven Years War and in America as the French and Indian War. Then his grandson Louis XVI (also known as Louis the Last) poured more resources into the American Revolutionary War, resources he did not have, and so had to borrow heavily from European banking houses. Poor harvests resulted in massive starvation on the part of the poor, all the while the nobility were conspicuous in their lavish consumption. Add to this the problem of how to care for large numbers of veterans of the wars against the British, massive unemployment, high bread prices due to the crop failures, and new Enlightenment ideals about the equality of all men, and you have a severe crisis.
In 1789 the Estates-General was called into session, something that had not happened since 1614. The Estates-General was made up of the First Estate, the clergy; the Second Estate, the nobility; and the Third Estate, the rest of France. The monarchy had governed absolutely in the meantime, but the crisis of 1789 made it clear to many intellectuals, nobles, church leaders, and activists, that the monarchy could not deliver them in the present hour. Together they formed a National Assembly that arrogated to itself the task of governing the nation in the stead of the King. Louis XVI responded by closing the building in which the Assembly was meeting and restructured the finance ministry. Many Parisians interpreted this to be an attempted coup on the part of the King against the National Assembly. With much of the French Guard now supporting them, insurgents stormed the Bastille, where there was a large cache of weapons and ammunition, and which many considered to be a symbol of the now-tyrannical Ancien Regime. The National Assembly thus became the de facto governing body in the stead of the monarchy. The Royal family attempted to leave Paris secretly, but was found out, and brought back. In January, 1793, Louis XVI was found guilty of various crimes and beheaded. Albert Camus commented that this constituted "an act that secularized the French world and banished God from the subsequent history of the French people.”
In the Fall of 1793 the Committee of Public Safety, led by Maximilien Robespierre, took control through a coup and unleashed the Reign of Terror in which over 16,500 people were executed, mostly by the guillotine, though some historians put the number as high as 40,000. Robespierre set price controls on all foodstuffs and many other goods, sent troops into the countryside to seize crops and arrest farmers, prosecuting anyone who resisted or attempted to preserve their own property from being seized by the Committee’s agents. What led him to take such Draconian measures?
Robespierre was a fervent disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who contended that individuals who live in such a way that they place the general will of the public first are truly “free” and “just,” while those who do not live in such a way are criminals or heretics. Those who refuse to live for the common good above all else must be forced to bend to the general will by the state. The state, as it were, “forces” them to be “free.” In so doing, it may have to suspend all of the usual devices of democracy, such as free elections, representative bodies that reflect the views of the majority of the public, and free speech, since those are “hardly ever necessary where the government is well-intentioned. For the rulers know that the general will is always on the side which is most favorable to the public interest, that is to say the most equitable; so that it is needful only to act justly to be certain of following the general will.” Robespierre was simply applying Rousseau to the situation in Paris in 1793. “The people is always worth more than individuals,” as he himself put it. Worth so much more, that the slaughter of tens of thousands of resisters is justifiable—in the name of “justice.”
The French Revolution was the first in a line of revolutions that would lead to totalitarian states. It was a fascist revolution in that, though it cast out the “demonic” religion represented by Roman Catholicism and the First Estate, it then capitulated to a new religion, the religion of the State. It was also the first revolution in modern times that purported to be more democratic for having removed the standard devices that had historically attended true efforts at democratic governing, again, such as free speech, representative government, and freedom from governmental invasion of private property without proper warrant. In France, the real problem was not the economy, not before the Revolution and not after the Revolution. The problem was governmental manipulation of the economy.
That kind of manipulation was something the American Founding Fathers wanted to avoid, at least most of them. The question is, when the government believes it knows best for the people and ignores their express wishes in enforcing legislation, how is this, philosophically, any better than the Committee of Public Safety? How is it any different in our country when our government wants to force legislation down our throats that the vast majority of Americans have clearly stated they do not want? I doubt that heads will roll, but then again, who knows? Maybe this Fall it will be just the heads of Congressional committees.
Chad Owen Brand
Friday, February 19, 2010
ELTON JOHN LOOKS IN THE MIRROR AND CLAIMS TO SEE . . . JESUS
Elton John Looks in the Mirror and Claims to See . . . Jesus
The Internet is all a-twitter (literally) with Elton John's comment about Jesus. If you have been on Mars the last two days and missed it, here is the gist. In an interview with U.S. magazine, Parade, the 62-year-old musician said, "I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems. On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don't know what makes people so cruel. Try being a gay woman in the Middle East - you're as good as dead."
One is reminded of John Lennon's 1966 statement. "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me." I had just discovered the Beatles a year before this, and now his off-the-cuff statement (if it was off the cuff) threatened to remove my Beatles records from my shelf since my parents were incensed by the comment.
Elton John's statement has raised the ire of many, including both Roman Catholics and fundamentalists. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League had this to say: "More seriously, to call Jesus a homosexual is to label Him a sexual deviant. But what else would we expect from a man who previously said, 'From my point of view, I would ban religion completely.'" Even from gay circles there was a negative assessment of the British singer's comments. "I don't think that comments like this are particularly helpful," Reverend Sharon Ferguson from the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement told ABC News.
This is not the first time Elton John has been at the center of religious controversy. His song, "If there's a God in Heaven (What's He Waiting For?)" stirred opposition from conservative Christians in 1976 when it was released on his Blue Moves album. He was married to his gay lover, David Furnish, in London in 2005. So, we ought not to be surprised that the singer would say something like this.
Why would he say something like this at this point in time, knowing that it would gain the ire of many even of his own fans? I do not claim to know his heart, but it may be no coincidence that he makes the comment on the heels of the announcement that his summer tour with Billy Joel will be canceled. Apparently Billy Joel wants to take a year off. I am not an insider on the rock music front, but it may be that this publicity will generate other opportunities.
There have been efforts by liberal scholars to argue that various biblical characters were really gay. Robin Scroggs argued that Jesus might have been gay in a book he wrote in 1983. Others have made the same case for David and Jonathan. On the one hand, such allegations are not even worthy of response, but apparently in the homosexualized world that we live in, some response has to be made. Of course, the Bible teaches that Jesus never had sex and never sinned. Gays, however, generally redefine sin so as not to include gay sex. So, the singer could make such an allegation without feeling that he was disrespecting the Savior. But he ought to realize that others--probably most others--would not have the same response.
Political ploy? Career move? Arrogance? Only God knows John's heart.
I predict that it will make him popular in some circles, but I also believe that it will damage his career overall. Many evangelicals like his music in spite of his lifestyle. I know, because I am one of them. I prefer C & W music, but I am pretty eclectic and I have a half-dozen Elton John albums (really, albums, not CD's) in my collection. I doubt that I will buy anything else from him.
Maybe it's just hard to get old as a performer.
Chad Owen Brand
The Internet is all a-twitter (literally) with Elton John's comment about Jesus. If you have been on Mars the last two days and missed it, here is the gist. In an interview with U.S. magazine, Parade, the 62-year-old musician said, "I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems. On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don't know what makes people so cruel. Try being a gay woman in the Middle East - you're as good as dead."
One is reminded of John Lennon's 1966 statement. "Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me." I had just discovered the Beatles a year before this, and now his off-the-cuff statement (if it was off the cuff) threatened to remove my Beatles records from my shelf since my parents were incensed by the comment.
Elton John's statement has raised the ire of many, including both Roman Catholics and fundamentalists. Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League had this to say: "More seriously, to call Jesus a homosexual is to label Him a sexual deviant. But what else would we expect from a man who previously said, 'From my point of view, I would ban religion completely.'" Even from gay circles there was a negative assessment of the British singer's comments. "I don't think that comments like this are particularly helpful," Reverend Sharon Ferguson from the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement told ABC News.
This is not the first time Elton John has been at the center of religious controversy. His song, "If there's a God in Heaven (What's He Waiting For?)" stirred opposition from conservative Christians in 1976 when it was released on his Blue Moves album. He was married to his gay lover, David Furnish, in London in 2005. So, we ought not to be surprised that the singer would say something like this.
Why would he say something like this at this point in time, knowing that it would gain the ire of many even of his own fans? I do not claim to know his heart, but it may be no coincidence that he makes the comment on the heels of the announcement that his summer tour with Billy Joel will be canceled. Apparently Billy Joel wants to take a year off. I am not an insider on the rock music front, but it may be that this publicity will generate other opportunities.
There have been efforts by liberal scholars to argue that various biblical characters were really gay. Robin Scroggs argued that Jesus might have been gay in a book he wrote in 1983. Others have made the same case for David and Jonathan. On the one hand, such allegations are not even worthy of response, but apparently in the homosexualized world that we live in, some response has to be made. Of course, the Bible teaches that Jesus never had sex and never sinned. Gays, however, generally redefine sin so as not to include gay sex. So, the singer could make such an allegation without feeling that he was disrespecting the Savior. But he ought to realize that others--probably most others--would not have the same response.
Political ploy? Career move? Arrogance? Only God knows John's heart.
I predict that it will make him popular in some circles, but I also believe that it will damage his career overall. Many evangelicals like his music in spite of his lifestyle. I know, because I am one of them. I prefer C & W music, but I am pretty eclectic and I have a half-dozen Elton John albums (really, albums, not CD's) in my collection. I doubt that I will buy anything else from him.
Maybe it's just hard to get old as a performer.
Chad Owen Brand
Monday, February 15, 2010
HAITI'S DEBT CANCELLATION: JUSTICE OR GRACE?
Haiti's Debt Cancellation: Justice or Grace?
On Friday, February 5, US Treasury Secretary Geithner announced, “Today, we are voicing our support for what Haiti needs and deserves – comprehensive multilateral debt relief.” On Saturday the G7 finance ministers declared their agreement with Geithner--Haiti would not have to pay back its debt. In light of the terrible loss and the indescribable pain taking place in that Caribbean nation, such an act is understandable and appropriate. But is it "just"?
Sojourners believes that this move constitutes "a matter of justice," and the only "just" approach to Haiti's billion dollar debt. Hayley Hathaway, in an article published online February 8, made that very case. Here is the heart of her case.
"This is also a win for debt campaigners and people of faith and conscience around the world. Fifteen years ago, the U.S. Treasury Secretary never would have uttered what Geithner said on Friday. It would have been considered crazy to cancel Haiti’s debts to help it recover. Debt was sacred; countries had to pay their debts before anything else — before clean water, education, or health. Yet thanks to a growing call from people of faith around the world who believed in scripture’s vision of debt cancellation and restoration of right relations between nations, the Jubilee movement was born."
http://blog.sojo.net/2010/02/08/victory-for-haiti-debt-cancellation/
All of this sounds very fine and it tugs at our heart strings, especially in light of the terrible suffering we see chronicled on television screens every night. And I mean that! I am not being sarcastic. But there are a couple of issues that arise from Ms. Hathaway's article that give me pause.
First, she appeals to the Jubilee Law of Leviticus 25:8-12 in making her case. The Jubilee Movement, a movement founded in 2000 for the purpose of "seeking to cancel the
debts of impoverished countries" (from their website), has argued that the Jubilee of the OT entails that poor countries ought not to have to pay back their loans. I argue that the Jubilee law does not mean that at all. The problem here is hermeneutical. The Jubilee law was instituted so that families would not permanently lose their land because of poverty. During the Jubilee year all lands that had been lost as a result of collateral for loans had to be returned to the families from which they had been taken. Land in Israel was a zero-sum game. Once lost, it would likely never be returned. That family would be cursed to perpetual poverty. Hence the Jubilee year. Every family could recover from its losses if it could just be patient. But it was a matter of land. The Jubilee reminded that Israelites that everything came from the hand of the Lord, and that all wealth had to be held with a loose grip.
That is not the same situation with reference to the debt of poor countries. They have borrowed money from lending institutions and from countries that have capital to lend to extricate themselves from poverty, to build infrastructures and businesses to help bring themselves out of debt. And there has been great success in many places in the world, especially among the "Asian Tigers" in doing just that, though hardship still exists in many places throughout the world. But that fact is also worthy of exploration. With all the capital out there, why have many countries, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, had such a difficult time pulling themselves up by the bootstraps? The answer to that is vast, but among answers would be: political corruption in nations receiving help so that only the few in power receive the benefice (can you say, "Haiti"?), lack of incentive to do work on the part of many when handouts are coming their way, and legal and environmental restrictions placed on them by the lending nations. Malaria kills more Africans every year than AIDS, and that malaria could be destroyed in a few years by the application of DDT, but Rachel Carson's famous book (and other arguments by environmentalists) has caused Western nations to refuse to apply DDT. If malaria were wiped out, many African nations would have a real "leg up" to finding their way to productivity. But leftists do not want that.
In my opinion many leftist intellectuals are the modern incarnation of plantation owners. They decry the loss of American manufacturing jobs to third world countries, even though those losses have dramatically increased the productivity of those nations. At the same time they issue their calls to give donations of cash, goods, and debt forgiveness to those very countries. They want governments to be charitable to poor countries, but they do not want them to find their own productivity in a global economy.
The second issue that bothers me about Hathaway's article is her use of the word "justice." That is the catch-word for leftists on the global poverty issue. It is "just" to forgive their debts. It is "just" to transfer Western wealth to them by transfer payments of one kind or another. If Copenhagen is instituted, that is exactly what will happen. Governments will levy taxes against productive Westerners and transfer that money to the Third World countries, where, again, it can be stolen by corrupt politicians and just given to people without any expectations that such funds will ever eventually enable them to stand on their own two feet. Is that "justice"? Not in my opinion. It might be "grace" at some level (though likely a misbegotten and mishandled version of grace), but it is not "justice." The left is currently trying co-opt that word for their own purposes, but thinking Americans will not let them do that. Justice and generosity are not the same thing.
What apparently is being forgotten here is that those loans given to third world countries came from somebody's pocket. They came from me, and from you, and from hard-working auto workers in Oslo, and from farmers in Spain, and from waitresses in Toronto--"eh?" They came from these people because they came from taxes levied by Western nations and from banks where people like this have their savings accounts and 401K's. But people like Hathaway would have you think that these monies came from evil bankers and heads of corporations. Therefore, the loans just have to be "forgiven"and then evil will pass out of this world like the smoke from fireworks rises up and passes out of sight. What is "just" about that? It is not that easy, especially when those same poor nations will need other funds again and not very long from now. What then?
This is a complex issue. I am not trying to mitigate that. And I do believe in generosity. I am a Christian--I believe very much in generosity. But generosity does not consist in giving away someone else's money. What should we do? We should do Jubilee--real Jubilee--and in most cases we already have. Western colonial powers decolonialized in the 1940's through the 1970's. The land was given back to the people. That really was Jubilee. Some debt should be written off. In other cases, interest payments ought to be reduced. But what we really need is for Western governments to stop taxing their people in "unjust" ways, and allow people of faith who are skilled in building businesses and in making money to go to these places and help them build businesses that will enable them to compete in a global market--yes even compete with American businesses.
Here's my point: don't let leftist Christian organizations try to manipulate you into believing that the problems of the world lie with the West. The problems of the world are a result of sin--Western sin, Southern sin, and all kinds of sin. The solution is not another government program--whether a Democratic one or a Republican one. The solution, insofar as there is any solution in this age, lies in the application of atonement to every situation--even the problem of global poverty.
I pray for Haiti every day. I also pray that both grace and justice will prevail so that the earth shall be filled with His knowledge and glory as water that covers the sea.
Chad Owen Brand
On Friday, February 5, US Treasury Secretary Geithner announced, “Today, we are voicing our support for what Haiti needs and deserves – comprehensive multilateral debt relief.” On Saturday the G7 finance ministers declared their agreement with Geithner--Haiti would not have to pay back its debt. In light of the terrible loss and the indescribable pain taking place in that Caribbean nation, such an act is understandable and appropriate. But is it "just"?
Sojourners believes that this move constitutes "a matter of justice," and the only "just" approach to Haiti's billion dollar debt. Hayley Hathaway, in an article published online February 8, made that very case. Here is the heart of her case.
"This is also a win for debt campaigners and people of faith and conscience around the world. Fifteen years ago, the U.S. Treasury Secretary never would have uttered what Geithner said on Friday. It would have been considered crazy to cancel Haiti’s debts to help it recover. Debt was sacred; countries had to pay their debts before anything else — before clean water, education, or health. Yet thanks to a growing call from people of faith around the world who believed in scripture’s vision of debt cancellation and restoration of right relations between nations, the Jubilee movement was born."
http://blog.sojo.net/2010/02/08/victory-for-haiti-debt-cancellation/
All of this sounds very fine and it tugs at our heart strings, especially in light of the terrible suffering we see chronicled on television screens every night. And I mean that! I am not being sarcastic. But there are a couple of issues that arise from Ms. Hathaway's article that give me pause.
First, she appeals to the Jubilee Law of Leviticus 25:8-12 in making her case. The Jubilee Movement, a movement founded in 2000 for the purpose of "seeking to cancel the
debts of impoverished countries" (from their website), has argued that the Jubilee of the OT entails that poor countries ought not to have to pay back their loans. I argue that the Jubilee law does not mean that at all. The problem here is hermeneutical. The Jubilee law was instituted so that families would not permanently lose their land because of poverty. During the Jubilee year all lands that had been lost as a result of collateral for loans had to be returned to the families from which they had been taken. Land in Israel was a zero-sum game. Once lost, it would likely never be returned. That family would be cursed to perpetual poverty. Hence the Jubilee year. Every family could recover from its losses if it could just be patient. But it was a matter of land. The Jubilee reminded that Israelites that everything came from the hand of the Lord, and that all wealth had to be held with a loose grip.
That is not the same situation with reference to the debt of poor countries. They have borrowed money from lending institutions and from countries that have capital to lend to extricate themselves from poverty, to build infrastructures and businesses to help bring themselves out of debt. And there has been great success in many places in the world, especially among the "Asian Tigers" in doing just that, though hardship still exists in many places throughout the world. But that fact is also worthy of exploration. With all the capital out there, why have many countries, especially in the Southern Hemisphere, had such a difficult time pulling themselves up by the bootstraps? The answer to that is vast, but among answers would be: political corruption in nations receiving help so that only the few in power receive the benefice (can you say, "Haiti"?), lack of incentive to do work on the part of many when handouts are coming their way, and legal and environmental restrictions placed on them by the lending nations. Malaria kills more Africans every year than AIDS, and that malaria could be destroyed in a few years by the application of DDT, but Rachel Carson's famous book (and other arguments by environmentalists) has caused Western nations to refuse to apply DDT. If malaria were wiped out, many African nations would have a real "leg up" to finding their way to productivity. But leftists do not want that.
In my opinion many leftist intellectuals are the modern incarnation of plantation owners. They decry the loss of American manufacturing jobs to third world countries, even though those losses have dramatically increased the productivity of those nations. At the same time they issue their calls to give donations of cash, goods, and debt forgiveness to those very countries. They want governments to be charitable to poor countries, but they do not want them to find their own productivity in a global economy.
The second issue that bothers me about Hathaway's article is her use of the word "justice." That is the catch-word for leftists on the global poverty issue. It is "just" to forgive their debts. It is "just" to transfer Western wealth to them by transfer payments of one kind or another. If Copenhagen is instituted, that is exactly what will happen. Governments will levy taxes against productive Westerners and transfer that money to the Third World countries, where, again, it can be stolen by corrupt politicians and just given to people without any expectations that such funds will ever eventually enable them to stand on their own two feet. Is that "justice"? Not in my opinion. It might be "grace" at some level (though likely a misbegotten and mishandled version of grace), but it is not "justice." The left is currently trying co-opt that word for their own purposes, but thinking Americans will not let them do that. Justice and generosity are not the same thing.
What apparently is being forgotten here is that those loans given to third world countries came from somebody's pocket. They came from me, and from you, and from hard-working auto workers in Oslo, and from farmers in Spain, and from waitresses in Toronto--"eh?" They came from these people because they came from taxes levied by Western nations and from banks where people like this have their savings accounts and 401K's. But people like Hathaway would have you think that these monies came from evil bankers and heads of corporations. Therefore, the loans just have to be "forgiven"and then evil will pass out of this world like the smoke from fireworks rises up and passes out of sight. What is "just" about that? It is not that easy, especially when those same poor nations will need other funds again and not very long from now. What then?
This is a complex issue. I am not trying to mitigate that. And I do believe in generosity. I am a Christian--I believe very much in generosity. But generosity does not consist in giving away someone else's money. What should we do? We should do Jubilee--real Jubilee--and in most cases we already have. Western colonial powers decolonialized in the 1940's through the 1970's. The land was given back to the people. That really was Jubilee. Some debt should be written off. In other cases, interest payments ought to be reduced. But what we really need is for Western governments to stop taxing their people in "unjust" ways, and allow people of faith who are skilled in building businesses and in making money to go to these places and help them build businesses that will enable them to compete in a global market--yes even compete with American businesses.
Here's my point: don't let leftist Christian organizations try to manipulate you into believing that the problems of the world lie with the West. The problems of the world are a result of sin--Western sin, Southern sin, and all kinds of sin. The solution is not another government program--whether a Democratic one or a Republican one. The solution, insofar as there is any solution in this age, lies in the application of atonement to every situation--even the problem of global poverty.
I pray for Haiti every day. I also pray that both grace and justice will prevail so that the earth shall be filled with His knowledge and glory as water that covers the sea.
Chad Owen Brand
YOUNG OBAMA AND MARXISM
Young Obama and Marxism
In the video posted below there is a fascinating interview with John Drew, who knew Barack Obama when they were poly sci students together at Occidental College. It is an intriguing interview.
Chad Owen Brand
In the video posted below there is a fascinating interview with John Drew, who knew Barack Obama when they were poly sci students together at Occidental College. It is an intriguing interview.
Chad Owen Brand
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
SCOTT BROWN'S VICTORY
What Brown Can Do For You
I do not know that I have anything unique or profound to say about Scott Brown's victory as a political issue. But as many of you know, I am feverishly trying to finish edits on a book that deals with the interface of Christianity, America, and economic issues. So, on that basis, and on basis of my own research into these things, here is my read.
Americans are, and have always been, a compassionate people, a fair people, and a sober people when it comes to matters economic. Those commitments have led Americans sometimes to take odd stands on matters politic. So, when the Industrial Revolution resulted in many moving to the cities, cities that were then over-crowded with under-employed and hungry people, some Americans embraced socialism, or at least some mild version of it. But the numbers who accepted hard-core Marxism were always very small in comparison. A greater number embraced the Social Gospel (which was not Marxist), and still even larger numbers embraced various forms of sacrificial compassion. Americans have not been, by and large, extremists on these issues. So, in recent months, as they have perceived that the federal government was moving in the direction of greater forced redistribution, their instinct to compassion, which is still very much there, has raised a red flag out of fear that "compassion" can sometimes be used by politicians as a stalking horse for other political ideals.
Americans are a fair people. This has led significant numbers in the distant past to embrace unionism. But, being fair, they also began to recognize when unions themselves began to use strong-arm tactics and to ask for special benefits and exemptions. In the recent debates over health care, the Democrats in Congress indicated a willingness to exempt unions from some of the restrictions on health care that everyone else would bear--everyone else except Congress (and the unions). Somehow, THAT does not seem fair! If politicians cross that fairness line, they are in deep trouble in America.
Americans are a sober people when it comes to economics. Not everyone, of course, but most Americans know what it is like to keep a family budget. It was a great American who said, "A penny saved is a penny earned." They understand pinching pennies so that you can later be able to splurge on a family vacation or buy a nicer car. But they know that you have to pinch pennies to get there. The last year has been nothing but one huge spending spree by the federal government, with cap and trade, health care reform, and green concerns running rampant over everything. We are spending like the drunk at the bar who pulls out his American Express Card and says, "Give everyone whatever they want." Some time later, when the hangover wears off, somebody has to reconcile the bill, and normal people can't rob a bank, print money on their computer, or just blow it off. At some point, somebody was going to walk to the bartender and say, "That's enough." This time, it was the voters in Mass who did that.
Do you know who won this election? The American people. I don't care if it was a Republican or a Democrat, quite frankly. In the last administration, drunken spending was too often the case. Why can't we return to the promises and the platform of 1994? When the government shrinks and spends less and is more concerned about balancing budgets than breaking them, we all win. I have six grandchildren. The burden that is going to be placed on them is already immense. Maybe, just maybe, because of what happened in, of all places, Massachusetts, that burden will be barely bearable.
Chad Owen Brand
I do not know that I have anything unique or profound to say about Scott Brown's victory as a political issue. But as many of you know, I am feverishly trying to finish edits on a book that deals with the interface of Christianity, America, and economic issues. So, on that basis, and on basis of my own research into these things, here is my read.
Americans are, and have always been, a compassionate people, a fair people, and a sober people when it comes to matters economic. Those commitments have led Americans sometimes to take odd stands on matters politic. So, when the Industrial Revolution resulted in many moving to the cities, cities that were then over-crowded with under-employed and hungry people, some Americans embraced socialism, or at least some mild version of it. But the numbers who accepted hard-core Marxism were always very small in comparison. A greater number embraced the Social Gospel (which was not Marxist), and still even larger numbers embraced various forms of sacrificial compassion. Americans have not been, by and large, extremists on these issues. So, in recent months, as they have perceived that the federal government was moving in the direction of greater forced redistribution, their instinct to compassion, which is still very much there, has raised a red flag out of fear that "compassion" can sometimes be used by politicians as a stalking horse for other political ideals.
Americans are a fair people. This has led significant numbers in the distant past to embrace unionism. But, being fair, they also began to recognize when unions themselves began to use strong-arm tactics and to ask for special benefits and exemptions. In the recent debates over health care, the Democrats in Congress indicated a willingness to exempt unions from some of the restrictions on health care that everyone else would bear--everyone else except Congress (and the unions). Somehow, THAT does not seem fair! If politicians cross that fairness line, they are in deep trouble in America.
Americans are a sober people when it comes to economics. Not everyone, of course, but most Americans know what it is like to keep a family budget. It was a great American who said, "A penny saved is a penny earned." They understand pinching pennies so that you can later be able to splurge on a family vacation or buy a nicer car. But they know that you have to pinch pennies to get there. The last year has been nothing but one huge spending spree by the federal government, with cap and trade, health care reform, and green concerns running rampant over everything. We are spending like the drunk at the bar who pulls out his American Express Card and says, "Give everyone whatever they want." Some time later, when the hangover wears off, somebody has to reconcile the bill, and normal people can't rob a bank, print money on their computer, or just blow it off. At some point, somebody was going to walk to the bartender and say, "That's enough." This time, it was the voters in Mass who did that.
Do you know who won this election? The American people. I don't care if it was a Republican or a Democrat, quite frankly. In the last administration, drunken spending was too often the case. Why can't we return to the promises and the platform of 1994? When the government shrinks and spends less and is more concerned about balancing budgets than breaking them, we all win. I have six grandchildren. The burden that is going to be placed on them is already immense. Maybe, just maybe, because of what happened in, of all places, Massachusetts, that burden will be barely bearable.
Chad Owen Brand
Sunday, January 3, 2010
INTERLUDE ON SHERLOCK HOLMES
INTERLUDE BLOG ON SHERLOCK HOLMES
I know I have been promising to finish the blog on American Evangelicalism and the Economy, and I will have a second installment up tonight or tomorrow, but this has been an unusually active weekend for Tina and me on the movie theater front, and the second film we saw was Sherlock Holmes. I want to share a few thoughts on that.
Someone said about Augustine that he was like a guy who had spent too much time reading and rereading too few books. (That is not my comment on Augustine, by the way.) One might have made a similar comment about my reading practices when I was a teenager. Though I did read hundreds of books from age 13 to 18 (actually, probably between 1,200-1,500 altogether in those five years--my dad was always complaining that I read too much), I was also guilty of reading some books over and over again. Among my favorites were Tolkien's four volumes (which I read four or five times in that period, and I have now read 25 times), Asimov's Foundation Trilogy (which I think I read three times in those five years), Cooper's The Pathfinder ( a couple of times), Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage (three or four times), and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Complete Sherlock Holmes (three or four times at that time and several times since). There were several other science fiction books that I read more than once, but the books above were the biggest impact on me during those mid-teen years. I also read the Bible through several times during my years 17-18.
When you read the same texts over and over again, you create your own mental image of what that world is like, how the subjects speak, how to pronounce the names (especially a challenge with Tolkien), and the actual look of the location of the events (the old west) or even of the building where these events occurred (i.e., 221 B Baker Street). So, when one of these stories is finally presented in film, you can have a tendency to hate the film because it gives a different mental image of how that "world" looks than the one you have envisaged. That was a barrier to me when the Lord of the Rings films appeared a few years ago, though I was pleasantly surprised at how much of it was similar to my own imagined understanding, though I did not like the departures from the script (Tolkien's) that happened repeatedly in those films.
With Sherlock Holmes and the new film starring Robert Downey, Jr. the situation was different. There have been previous attempts to capture Holmes, dating back to "The Hound of the Baskervilles," in 1939 (what a magic year for film), starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson--still one of my favorite films. There have been several other, not very notable, attempts in recent decades to capture the Holmes essence. For me, the only one who really "got" Holmes was Rathbone. Even now, when I read "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," or "Silver Blaze," for instance, I can see in my mind's eye Basil Rathbone, curved pipe held in right hand, deep in thought in his big shabby chair there in London. He and Bruce collaborated on fourteen SH films in fourteen years.
I expected to be disappointed by Downey, Jr. I have never liked him very much as an actor. I am not even sure I know why. I just thought him to be unremarkable. (I have not see Iron Man yet, though I am planning to very soon.) I was surprised. I really liked him as Holmes. Let me go through the downs first and then the ups.
The story plays fast and loose with the person of Holmes created by Conan Doyle. Though he fancied himself something of a boxer, he is not an "Extreme Fighter" in Conan Doyle's novellas and short stories. But he is here. Several times in the film he is engaged in serious fisticuffs that would have made Steven Seagall or Mel Gibson proud. At first the Victorian hackles on my neck rose and I wanted to say to my wife, "Let's get out of here--this is not Holmes." But I didn't, and I will tell you why in a minute. Then there is Irene Adler. She figures heavily into the film, and figures as someone with whom Holmes had apparently had a liason in a hotel. Hmm, Adler is in the stories, but she is a character in only one of the short stories ("A Scandal in Bohemia"), and there is absolutely no hint of anything romantic between Holmes and Adler. Doyle's portrait of Holmes is of a rather stuffy Victorian bachelor when it comes to anything resembling romance. He admired Adler, but only her mind. I think that even if she had remained in London and been featured in other stories, that their relationship would have been, specifically, Platonic. Plato believed the philosopher-kings (or queens!) would have no need for or interest in romance and marriage, hence the term, "Platonic relationship." If anything, Holmes would have qualified for philosopher-king in a different political world.
These are the two most egregious departures from the "historical Holmes" (if you can have a "historical" figure who was fictional). So, what of it? My response? No Big Deal! New looks at older figures almost always have to go through some kind of metamorphosis. That is especially true if you want to make any money on the art. I don't think that most twenty-first century Americans would be interested in a film that recaptures the essence of Holmes himself. We live in a time when detectives get in fist fights--all the time. We live in a time when crime-fighters have a woman on their arm--a beautiful woman. If anyone is going to sell Sherlock Holmes at the box-office today, it would have to be something like this new Holmes. I did not say that I like it; I merely acknowledged that this is the nature of the case. So, no big deal! I like the movie, and I am about as fussy a curmudgeon as you will find on the Holmes image.
OK. Now to the positive. I really liked the film, and I really, really liked Robert Downey, Jr. He is better as a middle-aged Londoner than as anything else I have ever seen him play. He really has captured the essence of Holmes more than anyone, with perhaps the exception of Rathbone. And that is good, since it appears there will be a sequel. He captures the heart of the Holmes, who sometimes uses drugs when he does not have a case to work on, whose habits are less than tidy (the film may have overplayed this element), but who strikes to the heart of any situation with his incredible attention to detail and his decisive intellect. Downey, Jr. nailed that! He also captures Holmes's wit. Sherlock Holmes was often a funny guy! At least, he appreciated humor. He was not slapstick, but he was humorous in a very British way. This new Holmes does that even better than Rathbone did.
Other strengths? Dr. Watson! I have to say that I love Nigel Bruce the actor, but I always thought that he only portrayed one side of the Dr. Watson in the stories--as the foil for Holmes's intellect. I felt he was too bumbling and dim-witted. Watson in the stories usually does not grasp the situation as Holmes does, but he had been a doctor in the British Army in Afghanistan, and he is sharper than the image depicted by Nigel Bruce. But Jude Law gets it! He is great. Also, the sets, the photography, the directing were all magical.
I want to see this one again. With all the caveats I throw in to the mix above, it is still one of the best nights at the theater we've had in a while.
Chad Owen Brand
I know I have been promising to finish the blog on American Evangelicalism and the Economy, and I will have a second installment up tonight or tomorrow, but this has been an unusually active weekend for Tina and me on the movie theater front, and the second film we saw was Sherlock Holmes. I want to share a few thoughts on that.
Someone said about Augustine that he was like a guy who had spent too much time reading and rereading too few books. (That is not my comment on Augustine, by the way.) One might have made a similar comment about my reading practices when I was a teenager. Though I did read hundreds of books from age 13 to 18 (actually, probably between 1,200-1,500 altogether in those five years--my dad was always complaining that I read too much), I was also guilty of reading some books over and over again. Among my favorites were Tolkien's four volumes (which I read four or five times in that period, and I have now read 25 times), Asimov's Foundation Trilogy (which I think I read three times in those five years), Cooper's The Pathfinder ( a couple of times), Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage (three or four times), and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Complete Sherlock Holmes (three or four times at that time and several times since). There were several other science fiction books that I read more than once, but the books above were the biggest impact on me during those mid-teen years. I also read the Bible through several times during my years 17-18.
When you read the same texts over and over again, you create your own mental image of what that world is like, how the subjects speak, how to pronounce the names (especially a challenge with Tolkien), and the actual look of the location of the events (the old west) or even of the building where these events occurred (i.e., 221 B Baker Street). So, when one of these stories is finally presented in film, you can have a tendency to hate the film because it gives a different mental image of how that "world" looks than the one you have envisaged. That was a barrier to me when the Lord of the Rings films appeared a few years ago, though I was pleasantly surprised at how much of it was similar to my own imagined understanding, though I did not like the departures from the script (Tolkien's) that happened repeatedly in those films.
With Sherlock Holmes and the new film starring Robert Downey, Jr. the situation was different. There have been previous attempts to capture Holmes, dating back to "The Hound of the Baskervilles," in 1939 (what a magic year for film), starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson--still one of my favorite films. There have been several other, not very notable, attempts in recent decades to capture the Holmes essence. For me, the only one who really "got" Holmes was Rathbone. Even now, when I read "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches," or "Silver Blaze," for instance, I can see in my mind's eye Basil Rathbone, curved pipe held in right hand, deep in thought in his big shabby chair there in London. He and Bruce collaborated on fourteen SH films in fourteen years.
I expected to be disappointed by Downey, Jr. I have never liked him very much as an actor. I am not even sure I know why. I just thought him to be unremarkable. (I have not see Iron Man yet, though I am planning to very soon.) I was surprised. I really liked him as Holmes. Let me go through the downs first and then the ups.
The story plays fast and loose with the person of Holmes created by Conan Doyle. Though he fancied himself something of a boxer, he is not an "Extreme Fighter" in Conan Doyle's novellas and short stories. But he is here. Several times in the film he is engaged in serious fisticuffs that would have made Steven Seagall or Mel Gibson proud. At first the Victorian hackles on my neck rose and I wanted to say to my wife, "Let's get out of here--this is not Holmes." But I didn't, and I will tell you why in a minute. Then there is Irene Adler. She figures heavily into the film, and figures as someone with whom Holmes had apparently had a liason in a hotel. Hmm, Adler is in the stories, but she is a character in only one of the short stories ("A Scandal in Bohemia"), and there is absolutely no hint of anything romantic between Holmes and Adler. Doyle's portrait of Holmes is of a rather stuffy Victorian bachelor when it comes to anything resembling romance. He admired Adler, but only her mind. I think that even if she had remained in London and been featured in other stories, that their relationship would have been, specifically, Platonic. Plato believed the philosopher-kings (or queens!) would have no need for or interest in romance and marriage, hence the term, "Platonic relationship." If anything, Holmes would have qualified for philosopher-king in a different political world.
These are the two most egregious departures from the "historical Holmes" (if you can have a "historical" figure who was fictional). So, what of it? My response? No Big Deal! New looks at older figures almost always have to go through some kind of metamorphosis. That is especially true if you want to make any money on the art. I don't think that most twenty-first century Americans would be interested in a film that recaptures the essence of Holmes himself. We live in a time when detectives get in fist fights--all the time. We live in a time when crime-fighters have a woman on their arm--a beautiful woman. If anyone is going to sell Sherlock Holmes at the box-office today, it would have to be something like this new Holmes. I did not say that I like it; I merely acknowledged that this is the nature of the case. So, no big deal! I like the movie, and I am about as fussy a curmudgeon as you will find on the Holmes image.
OK. Now to the positive. I really liked the film, and I really, really liked Robert Downey, Jr. He is better as a middle-aged Londoner than as anything else I have ever seen him play. He really has captured the essence of Holmes more than anyone, with perhaps the exception of Rathbone. And that is good, since it appears there will be a sequel. He captures the heart of the Holmes, who sometimes uses drugs when he does not have a case to work on, whose habits are less than tidy (the film may have overplayed this element), but who strikes to the heart of any situation with his incredible attention to detail and his decisive intellect. Downey, Jr. nailed that! He also captures Holmes's wit. Sherlock Holmes was often a funny guy! At least, he appreciated humor. He was not slapstick, but he was humorous in a very British way. This new Holmes does that even better than Rathbone did.
Other strengths? Dr. Watson! I have to say that I love Nigel Bruce the actor, but I always thought that he only portrayed one side of the Dr. Watson in the stories--as the foil for Holmes's intellect. I felt he was too bumbling and dim-witted. Watson in the stories usually does not grasp the situation as Holmes does, but he had been a doctor in the British Army in Afghanistan, and he is sharper than the image depicted by Nigel Bruce. But Jude Law gets it! He is great. Also, the sets, the photography, the directing were all magical.
I want to see this one again. With all the caveats I throw in to the mix above, it is still one of the best nights at the theater we've had in a while.
Chad Owen Brand
Saturday, January 2, 2010
INTERLUDE BLOG ON AVATAR
AVATAR
This is an interlude in my series on "Economics in the Church since Smith," but it is timely and so I decided to break up my series to offer my comments on the film, Avatar. I don't have a lot to say that others have not said, but maybe one or two new comments.
First, let me say that I enjoyed the film very much. It was entertaining, it was a generally good story, a little predictable, perhaps, and even more so for those who have followed Cameron over the years (and who has not?). Most of the characters were compelling, though not all of them, and the film kept me interested the whole way through. So, I enjoyed the film, and I feel the need to say that first, because next I am going to offer some criticism.
The movie was clearly political, far more political than Cameron's earlier films. Not only is that clear from the film itself, but Cameron himself has said so on more than one occasion. It is anti-human, or at least, anti-most humans. The little bit at the end that says, in effect, the Navi decided to allow a few aliens to remain on their planet is a punctuation to that. But the film is filled with anti-most-humans sentiment throughout. Of course, what it is against is about as interesting and surprising as the fact that the Canadian-born producer will make money on this venture. It is anti-military, anti-non-green, anti-American (at least Bush and Reagan's America), and anti-Custer.
And I have to say, that is fine with me. Film makers have the freedom to promote whatever agenda they might have in their films, and we, the movie-going public, can buy it or not--literally or figuratively. The problem with the film for me was that the people Cameron likes are portrayed in a sensitive, sympathetic, and realistic manner, but the ones he does not like in the film are, generally, not portrayed in this manner. Colonel Quaritch is the best example. Cameron clearly wants us to hate him, and we do. All of us hate him. But that is just the problem. No one is that monochromatic. I lined up and waited for two hours the night Star Wars debuted. We hated Darth Vader, but we sensed that there was another part of his story that we did not yet know about. So, we could hate him, but in a way kind of "bracket" that hate. No one can bracket their hate toward the Colonel. He's just a bad guy. The same is true, but to a lesser degree of Parker Selfridge, the "head" of the project. Sully, Neytiri, and Dr. Grace, on the other hand, are complex individuals with mixed emotions, conflicting commitments, and polychromatic personalities. I think Cameron could have done a better job depicting the Colonel and Parker. But maybe he could not bring himself to believe that such persons really are more subtle than he thinks they are. Maybe Cameron should live in the real world for awhile and have lunch with some real military people and even play cards with a few Republicans.
Some have noted that this film is similar to Dances with Wolves. I see the similarity, but I don't care about that. If someone came up with a completely new genre it would probably be a bad film. Someone once said there are only 17 Country and Western songs out there, and that the really creative person is the one who finds a way to repeat one of those songs in a new and fresh way. I agree with that.
Oh, and by the way, the ending leaves everything wide open for a sequel. What? A sequel to a James Cameron film? No one would ever expect that!
I liked the film. I will probably watch it again. But I am not going to drink the KoolAid.
Chad Owen Brand
This is an interlude in my series on "Economics in the Church since Smith," but it is timely and so I decided to break up my series to offer my comments on the film, Avatar. I don't have a lot to say that others have not said, but maybe one or two new comments.
First, let me say that I enjoyed the film very much. It was entertaining, it was a generally good story, a little predictable, perhaps, and even more so for those who have followed Cameron over the years (and who has not?). Most of the characters were compelling, though not all of them, and the film kept me interested the whole way through. So, I enjoyed the film, and I feel the need to say that first, because next I am going to offer some criticism.
The movie was clearly political, far more political than Cameron's earlier films. Not only is that clear from the film itself, but Cameron himself has said so on more than one occasion. It is anti-human, or at least, anti-most humans. The little bit at the end that says, in effect, the Navi decided to allow a few aliens to remain on their planet is a punctuation to that. But the film is filled with anti-most-humans sentiment throughout. Of course, what it is against is about as interesting and surprising as the fact that the Canadian-born producer will make money on this venture. It is anti-military, anti-non-green, anti-American (at least Bush and Reagan's America), and anti-Custer.
And I have to say, that is fine with me. Film makers have the freedom to promote whatever agenda they might have in their films, and we, the movie-going public, can buy it or not--literally or figuratively. The problem with the film for me was that the people Cameron likes are portrayed in a sensitive, sympathetic, and realistic manner, but the ones he does not like in the film are, generally, not portrayed in this manner. Colonel Quaritch is the best example. Cameron clearly wants us to hate him, and we do. All of us hate him. But that is just the problem. No one is that monochromatic. I lined up and waited for two hours the night Star Wars debuted. We hated Darth Vader, but we sensed that there was another part of his story that we did not yet know about. So, we could hate him, but in a way kind of "bracket" that hate. No one can bracket their hate toward the Colonel. He's just a bad guy. The same is true, but to a lesser degree of Parker Selfridge, the "head" of the project. Sully, Neytiri, and Dr. Grace, on the other hand, are complex individuals with mixed emotions, conflicting commitments, and polychromatic personalities. I think Cameron could have done a better job depicting the Colonel and Parker. But maybe he could not bring himself to believe that such persons really are more subtle than he thinks they are. Maybe Cameron should live in the real world for awhile and have lunch with some real military people and even play cards with a few Republicans.
Some have noted that this film is similar to Dances with Wolves. I see the similarity, but I don't care about that. If someone came up with a completely new genre it would probably be a bad film. Someone once said there are only 17 Country and Western songs out there, and that the really creative person is the one who finds a way to repeat one of those songs in a new and fresh way. I agree with that.
Oh, and by the way, the ending leaves everything wide open for a sequel. What? A sequel to a James Cameron film? No one would ever expect that!
I liked the film. I will probably watch it again. But I am not going to drink the KoolAid.
Chad Owen Brand
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