A Reading Reaction to Mark Twain?s The War Prayer
January 28, 2003
MCTC Economics 2200
Leo Waligora, OSB, a priest from Peru, Illinois frequently advised me to be careful of what I wished for because I might just get it. He wasn?t advising me about the glories of war or triumphant battles, but about the mundane things of the world. The prophet?s voice in this piece gives the same advice. But he puts he warns the congregation about what their prayers and entreaties to the deity would really mean, complete with body bags. By doing this, the narrator does something, which, due to my own density, I never gleaned from my conversations from Fr. Leo?he speaks of our connections and, with a bow to John Donne, how we do not live on an island.
I recall John Muir's admonition that when we try to select one thing from nature and remove it, we find ourselves unable to do so without also affecting something else. Lives are connected whether we see them or not. The flood in our neighbor?s valley, which comes as a byproduct of our prayer for rain, very clearly demonstrates this connection. If you kill the wolves, an abundant deer population may destroy your crops.
This prophet would find a very select audience if he were to address us today. If he wasn't condemned as a traitor by the Bush cabinet, just as many who have disagreed with steps taken by John Ashcroft were when they questioned the right of the federal government to suspend habeas corpus. And what about people who were born American citizens being held without trial on foreign soil. Detainees from the war in Afghanistan being held in Guantanámo, Cuba, aren't technically being held on American soil, but they clearly aren't being held under the auspices of the Cuban government, either. That at least a couple of them were American citizens by birth is a moot point.
Shoot! We don't have to look that far, even. Foreigners in the United States simply don't have basic human rights when it suits us. There are hundreds of Haitians, Dominicans, and others who can rot in United States jails without trial for years simply because they are not citizens and entitled to rights of due process.
It's far too easy for me to go off on a tangent, but I will say that what these activities have in common with the American economy, a so-called market-based economy is this: all of these activities lack compassion. There is no compassion shown to detainees in Cuba, no compassion shown to jailed non-citizens, and as the prophet in Twain's opus points out, no compassion shown toward a defeated enemy. That lack of compassion in market-based economies shows itself every day. Recently I heard a commentator lament the spiraling costs of health care in the United States make the declaration that left to its own devices, the market would take care of health care costs. Of course that means that some people don't have coverage but hey, Scrooge was right: let them die and we get the bonus of decreasing the surplus population. Humbug!
The problem in this prayer is that even if the supplicants are successful, even if the immediate repercussions of their success are tolerable, their descendants will be subjected to the hostility and resentment of their foe's offspring. (Are you listening, Israel?) That sort of hatred is too high an opportunity cost, and that is what this story is about.
Meeting Mara Head On
MCTC Economics 2200
February 18, 2003
If we were speaking as Buddhists, we could redefine economics not as the study of how society addresses scarcity, but as the way we get caught up in the world of Mara. Mara is the epitome of want, thirst, and desire. All of our actions are such that we spend a lot of time meeting Mara's demands. Mara wants us to have a new car. Mara wants us to go to that resort in Mexico. Mara wants us to want. These desires are the cause of our suffering, and we can change that. We can change what we want. We can be aware that we want.
It may be argued that we can begin by reprogramming ourselves, but it is also argued that we already know what truths we need to know. We simply let those truths become clouded by our own thoughts, beliefs, opinions, and ideas. This is, of course, how we naturally sort things out. The problem comes from giving that ideation power, accuracy, and validity that it doesn't really have. If we make the assumption that we will only be happy if we meet whatever scarcity need we may think we have, then we will not find that happiness until it's met. Unfortunately simply meeting that need will give us happiness. We will find that once that need is met, another arises, and another, and so on.
Other spiritual traditions assure us that we need not worry about getting our needs met. In the Koran we find this admonition: "They who hoard up gold and silver and spend it not in the way of Allah, unto them give tidingsof a painful doom." The Shari'ah empowers the Islamic state to appropriate excess wealth to satisfy the needs of the poor. For Christians, the book of Matthew, assures us that we shouldn't worry about tomorrow, because our needs will be met. Still, the undeniable truth is that there is still hunger in the world. And there are still homeless people in the world. And people continue to suffer.
In Buddhism, we hope to escape from this cycle of endless suffering by entering into nirvana. Nirvana is described as "inconceivable inner peace, the cessation of craving and clinging. [The] end of suffering." It would seem that quite a large number of us haven't made it to that state of being (or non-being). It would seem, too, that we owe a great deal of gratitude to those who, when attaining a state of nirvana choose instead to be reborn. These are beings who have chosen to put the Bodhisattva way into practice. They have reached a state where the compassion and loving-kindness they have cultivated are made into practice. It is the way of saints. Bodhisattvas are a hand pointing the way.
The economic model for Bodhisattvas is giving it all away. It is compassion made into life. It is not limited to Buddhists. It is something we all have within us. We are in a dangerous time now, because the world is lead by selfish men who practice a philosophy of greed and exploitation. So powerful is this group that we will soon be going to war over their fascinations with power, greed, and vengeance.
This is hard. This is unscientific. This may be all the evidence needed to commit this writer to the loony bin, but I would wager that if we were to just sit, and just think about giving love and compassion to both George Bush and Saddam Hussein, we could make a difference. We could pull them away from the brink, if they would just allow it to happen. We could change the economic bent of the United States, which has become one of class warfare on the least of our citizens. We could all be uplifted. We could send Mara away.
Yet, perhaps Yoko Ono was correct when she observed that "there is no damned bodhi tree." Maybe even the myth that we can escape the cycles of endless birth and rebirth is delusional. If so, perhaps Hobbes was right when he said that "life is "brutish, nasty, and short." Perhaps I'd better learn my graphs.
Paradise Lost: A Discussion of the Chapter Entitled,
"Tunes and Dancers," in Daniel Quinn?s Book, My Ishmael.
MCTC Economics 2200
February 4, 2003
(This is a great book. It'?s required reading for my class, School and Society, at Augsburg. I was so amazed at how well this particular chapter fit into my study of economics at MCTC. I have to talk about it, so here goes....)
In this particular chapter, Quinn explains how on this planet, Terpsichore, an economic system was developed. It seems that in the beginning, the folks on Terpsichore had all the food they needed for the taking. No one owned food. No one hoarded food. While the kind of food available might change from season to season or place to place, it was there. These people were gatherers, and that's how they made their living. In gratitude to whatever gods they had, they began to perform dances of thanksgiving, just once in a while at first, then more often.
Somewhere along the way a faulty connection was made about the amount of dancing they performed and the amount and kinds of foods they ate. A certain group of them, folks who didn't like dancing, but who claimed to speak for the gods, insisted that there be more dancing by members who weren't in their priestly caste. They, of course, would be managing the dancing and the dancers, and wouldn't be able to dance themselves. They were busy intervening with the gods on the people's behalf.
The people grew tired of this, as the priestly folks demanded that there be more and more dancing. It wasn't very long before the people decided that, the gods be damned, they weren?t going to do all that dancing. The priestly caste approached another group of folks who didn't like to dance, either, and convinced them it was their duty to force everyone who wouldn?t dance to get up on their feet and shake. The food rewards for this enforcer group would be plentiful, and they wouldn't have to dance themselves. They would also merit additional rewards in the afterlife.
After a millennium or so, the religious pretense was either dropped or forgotten, or only hauled out occasionally to increase food production. In time, the practices of this group of Terpsichoreans would take over the whole planet. Those who resisted would either be subjugated or eliminated. Small groups of people who practiced the old way of living were forced to live on reservations, where the gathering wouldn't be so good owing to the small size of the reservations, and they would gradually weaken and die.
All of this happened because one group decided that they would own the food, and others would have to do their bidding to get it. They created scarcity where none had existed before. Quinn leaves us to make our own conclusions, so the moral to the story is our own to see.
It would seem that in order to pay for the resource management that they didn?t really need, the people paid too high an opportunity cost: they gave up their freedom and leisure. It could be argued that the manager class on this planet provided a great deal, such as more food production for increasingly greater populations, but in return they created greater environmental degradation. Greater populations also exposed the people to diseases that were more easily spread owing to the close nature of their managed societies. Diseases that were once limited to a cluster of people in an isolated valley or mountaintop now spread everywhere. Of course, the manager class developed treatments for these diseases, but is it really ethical to charge people to repair or replace broken windows that you have thrown the brick at?
Worse luck, they underwent a transformation in their society wherein classes of people developed. There were the managers, who controlled the enforcers, who threatened the dancers (producers). There was very limited mobility between these classes, and any hope that they could return to the days when they lived off the land was lost a long time ago and probably impossible to return to as well.
And the managers' power grew. Even though they had the most to lose if there were disruptions in the societal order, they insisted that it was unfair for them to pay more to the enforcers than the dancers. Soon, the dancers not only produced all the food, but they were also the only ones paying the enforcers whose job it was to make sure they kept dancing. Of course, any dancer who criticized these economic and tax policies was condemned as an instigator of class warfare.
All of this happened on Terpsichore, of course, an imaginary planet named after the muse of dancing.
Transplantation: Ethics and Economics
MCTC Economics 2200
February 10, 2003
Currently, the primary way donor hearts are distributed is determined by a number of factors, and to make it easy, I'll just list them here.
Dependency status. A child is more likely to receive a donated organ than an adult is. Youth matters, even stodgy old transplant directors are more likely to have their heartstrings tugged by a child than a wealthy old fart.
Urgency status matters as well. If a heart is diseased by an infectious agent the need for replacement is far more critical than it would be for a chronic sort of disease that hasn't been caused by an infectious agent.
If a diseased heart has been replaced temporarily by an artificial heart, in total, or even by an assistive device, a recipient will be moved to the top of the list. It doesnt always help, though. Just this week a man who had been living with an artificial heart for seventeen months died without receiving a transplant. He was 71, and a suitable donor didn't show up.
Patient compliance matters. If it appears that the patient is unlikely to stop smoking, abusing drugs or demonstrating an unwillingness to participate in a physical therapy program, priorities will be downgraded.
Besides an ability to pay for the procedure, the patient also needs to demonstrate an ability to pay for the costly post-transplantation medications that will be needed for the rest of her life. We're talking thousands of dollars a month here. Insurance works.
What shouldn?t matter is the patient's financial status. If the patient is on a government medical program, that should suffice.
It shouldn't matter, either, whether or not the patient or his agent has donated a large sum of money to the transplant facility, either. In the real world, it does, even though any decision to perform a transplant will be justified in some other way should questions arise
Now we get to the really hard part of this argument, the one that puts us out on a limb, if you will. We never ask the question anymore whether they should be done at all. Or if they should routinely be paid for by insurance or other plans. Most organized religions have signed off on them. And every legislative session some representative body in the United States debates whether a person should be assumed to be a donor if it isn't clearly stated somewhere on his person that he doesn?t wish to be a donor.
None of us wants to die. I dont want to die. You don?t want to die. And certainly, we'd be hard-pressed to turn down a liver or pancreas if one of our children needed one. I recall Dosho Port relating the story of an old abbot at a monastery in Japan who sat for years in meditation. In the end, his last words were those of protest. He didn?t want to die either. So much for enlightenment.
As a society we have to stop and realize that transplants are just stopgaps on the way to something else, and that they are in fact still largely experimental. And all those dollars we spend on transplants are dollars wasted upon technologies not yet invented yet. What about parthenogenesis? A heart grown from our own tissue would never be rejected. There is already promising research in angiogenesis, a process wherein the heart grows its own bypass vessels, making the need for bypass surgeries or angioplasties redundant. Let's put more of our effort into those endeavors.
Post-Autistic Economics
MCTC Economics 2200
March 18, 2003
I very much appreciate the suggestion of post-autistic economics as a topic for a research paper, because it addresses concerns I have as a social studies teacher candidate about topic relevance to high school students. I am relieved to learn that the topic supports my educational philosophy, one that is underpinned by the notion that the social studies, including economics, are not boring, but a fascinating study of how human beings work.
The French are much maligned by our government and press these days, but I am grateful that they are known for not always stepping in line with prevailing attitudes or theories. I am pleased that those students at the Sorbonne  rejected the classical economics education they were receiving. I am pleased that that first rejection has led to the development of post-autistic economics theory. As a social studies teacher, I have appreciated for a long time that economics is really the study of a particular aspect of human behaviors, and not merely a division of mathematics practiced by those who breath rarefied air.
The use of the term, "autistic" is that of a metaphor. Autistic children seem to have an alternatively-wired brain which is frequently disabling. Classic economics is also wired in a way that is socially disabling, but those who coined the phrase mean no disrespect to those who suffer from the disease. It is simply an apt metaphor. Post-autistic economics has the following theoretical underpinnings:
A broader conception of human behavior. This means that the economic human is not merely a consumer of goods, but also a being with gender, culture, race, class and other sociological factors.
Recognition of culture. This means that economic systems are developed within social groupings that have political, religious, moral, and value-driven underpinnings.
Consideration of history. Economics is not static, but exists in time and space and driven by things that precede current thinking.
A new theory of knowledge. It does not accept positive-normative arguments at face values, and admits that the investigator has biases and values that color and shape outcomes.
Empirical grounding. Post-autistic economics removes the privilege that previous economic theorists enjoyed and demands that arguments be substantiated by empirical evidence before they are accepted.
Expanded methods. This adopts practices used within the other social sciences such as observation, case studies, and data analysis.
Interdisciplinary dialogue. This tenet requires economists to be aware of other schools of thought within the study of economics and other fields of social study
People who have written in defense of post-autistic economics have pointed out that the current practice of economics has in many cases been taken over by people with narrow political agendas, particularly right-wing ones. Those with dissenting viewpoints, because they do not speak the mathematical language of the old economics are left out in the cold. This is very similar to the co-opting of the word, Christian, by right-wing evangelicals. Tolerant is not a word that evangelicals would accept as being a descriptive of Christianity, yet many Christians are in fact quite tolerant and resent the way the right-wing has taken their identity away.
Another post-autistic writer, William Krehm, has pointed out "the gravity of our situation [as being] related to the prevalence of self-serving logic at the highest levels, illustrated by the debacle of the Long Term Capital Management Fund (with its Nobel laureate advisors) and many other examples  including Enron." In plain English that means that the jargon used in economics is so detached from the language in the real world that we've been duped as a society into believing that a sow's ear is really a silk purse. We all know what happened with Enron, even though the president's war has pushed it out of the headlines. The Long Term Capital Management Fund was a financial disaster that required rescue by the Federal Reserve, owing to speculative investments by the fund's highly-pedigreed managers to the tune of over one-trillion dollars with only two billion dollars' investment.
In summary, in many ways economics has been co-opted by those with their own agendas, by those who use a mathematical language that is not subject to the same scrutiny that other disciplines are subject too, and by those who insist that the study be based upon unchallenged assumptions. The result is that we?ve been screwed. Post-autistic economics will open the study up and let people see what's going on inside it.
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