Month: September 2014

Patrick Deneen discovers ultracalvinism

Uh oh:

… post-Protestant “religious” secularity is the established religion of, and increasingly indistinguishable from, liberalism as a political, cultural, and social form of human organization. It was once believed by many that liberalism was a neutral political order within which a variety of beliefs could flourish—among them, Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, etc. But what is clear both as an intellectual and theological matter as well as an observable fact from many current cultural battlefields is that what Smith describes more broadly as a “sacred project” is increasingly intolerant of competitor religions, and stridently seeks their effectual elimination by “liberal” means. It does so not in the name of some amorphous and tolerant “secularism,” but in the name of the new, and increasingly established, State religion of America. What we call “secularism” isn’t simply unbelief—it is a system of belief with distinctive “theology” without God and this-worldly eschatological hope, and it demands obeisance or the judgment of blasphemy and condemnation.

Where have we heard this before?

The “ultracalvinist hypothesis” is the proposition that the present-day belief system commonly called “progressive,” “multiculturalist,” “universalist,” “liberal,” “politically correct,” etc, is actually best considered as a sect of Christianity.

Specifically, ultracalvinism (which I have also described here and here) is the primary surviving descendant of the American mainline Protestant tradition, which has been the dominant belief system of the United States since its founding. It should be no surprise that it continues in this role, or that since the US’s victory in the last planetary war it has spread worldwide.

Ultracalvinism is an ecumenical syncretism of the mainline, not traceable to any one sectarian label. But its historical roots are easy to track with the tag Unitarian. The meaning of this word has mutated considerably in the last 200 years, but at any point since the 1830s it is found attached to the most prestigious people and ideas in the US, and since 1945 in the world.

(more…)

14890969477_5819a7df85_k

An economist considers Burning Man

I spent last week at Burning Man. It was one of the best experiences of my life. However, as much ink has been spilled on the experience of Burning Man, I will direct my attention to where I have a comparative advantage, understanding the social organization of Burning Man.

Burning Man is a city which exists for a week. In 2014 the city had 70,000 inhabitants. Creating a social order of 70,000 people is hard enough. However, what makes Burning Man so interesting is that they not only create a city, but they also operate under social norms that are alien to the outside world.

The two most important norms are that of a gifting economy and removing all trash. Monetary transactions are unacceptable. All matter brought into Burning Man must be brought out. The difficulty in enforcing both norms is that Burning Man is big enough to be anonymous. If I wanted to dump my trash during the night I might be yelled at, but it is easy enough to disappear into the dark with no further social repercussions.

Economists have long distinguished between familiar and anonymous social interactions.  The rules we use when interacting with family and friends are different from the rules we use when interacting with strangers.  This is because social pressure is sufficient to ensure cooperation among individuals who have long term repeated interaction. However, one shot interaction with strangers requires different rules to ensure cooperation. These rules range from reputation used by Ebay and Uber to formal contracts used in the business world.

What make Burning Man so impressive is that they have been able to sustain rules that primarily exist in small groups in a city of 70,000 people. Burning Man proves social pressure is scalable far beyond what is normally assumed. Further, such social pressure works even though each year 40% of Burners are new residents. These new residents, by and large, successfully are integrated into the wider social order.

This is where the tension between new and old Burners come in. For almost every event, there are people who complain that it has changed for the worse as time progressed. The new attendees don’t understand the culture, and have morphed the event into something unrecognizable. The dynamic exists in Burning Man too, probably to a greater extent than other events. However, while I tired of hearing people complain about the good old days, it is clear that such conversation fulfills an important social function. It pressures new attendees, such as myself, to learn and conform to the norms that have made Burning Man what it is.

(Image credit Neil Girling)

Why wasn’t anyone talking about police militarization?

Paul Waldman recently wrote a piece at the Washington Post asking a a reasonable question: where is the libertarian outcry against the overbearing use of police force? At face value, his commentary seems very illuminating: the tragedy in Ferguson shocked all reasonable people into consciousness, and we can’t hear the libertarians doing the same, so they must be unreasonable.

If you talked about police militarization before this tragedy, you would be considered somewhere on the spectrum of paranoid conspiracy nuts molded from the same clay as Alex Jones, especially if you identified as a libertarian. The reason that libertarians didn’t seem to adjust their focus to accommodate for Ferguson is because their focus was already there. Everyone else has since moved into this territory, previously occupied only by those conspiracy mongering weirdos.

Simply by googling “police militarization libertarian” and constraining the search for results from before August 9th to a few years back, we get a treasure trove of now embarrassing snark aimed at ostensibly paranoid and reactionaries. Here’s a great one that spends a majority of the article building the case that a Radley Balko is hopeless reactionary puppet, a racist and not a real journalist. Eventually, there is a payoff to this buildup, when Balko takes the side of a man who defended himself against armed, militarized police engaging in a drug bust. The Alternet writers practically roll their eyes at the assertion that this man may have saved his own life by defending himself, and imply that the libertarian noise surrounding police militarization is just paranoia that is attendant upon Balko’s reactionary beliefs. If this same dismissal of police militarization and the right of a black man to defend himself against such militarization were called into question today, you would be called a racist.

You’d probably be someone who watches Fox News, too. In an odd coincidence, libertarian John Stossel warned against the militarization of police in a piece posted on Fox only two weeks before the Michael Brown’s death-by-cop. He isn’t caught up in his own libertarian headspace, either. Stossel makes the point as diplomatically as possible in the title, earnestly trying to appeal across the political spectrum:

It’s healthy for conservatives, libertarians and liberals alike to worry about the militarization of police. Conservatives worry about a repeat of incidents like the raids on religious radicals at Ruby Ridge and Waco, Texas. Liberals condemn police brutality like the recent asphyxiation death of a suspect at the hands of police in New York….

This is a rare issue where I agree with left-wing TV host Bill Maher. On his TV show last week, Maher ranted about no-knock raids “breaking up poker games, arresting low-level pot dealers.”

Going a little further back to April 22, a Libertarian Party official in Michigan rallies civilians to sign a petition against the local police being supplied with military equipment. As you might have guessed, the petition ended up doing nothing. Libertarians tried to make as much noise as they could, but nobody really heard them. This is something that libertarians are used to, but everyone else seems to have a selective understanding of just how small of a soapbox the libertarians actually have. The signal to noise ratio between those who cared about police militarization pre-Ferguson and the paranoid isn’t very high. Remember when the DHS had practice targets of children? Take a look at the bizarre comments on that article. Whether it’s conspiracy mongers or johnny-come-lately activists, you can count on the libertarian voice being drowned out.