Hat Tip to Duncan~ Great find.
The late Jesse Livermore is considered one of the best traders of all time. His exploits have been chronicled in several books, with the most widely read being Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre, originally published in 1923.
Livermore was wealthy and broke several times over during his tumultuous life, which ended in his suicide. His ability to make and lose millions garnered him many lessons which the trading community have enshrined over the decades since his death. Yet these lessons and rules remain as pertinent today as they were in the early twentieth century.
We’ll take a look at several of his trading rules to remind us why we must have a plan in place before trading a dollar of our hard-earned money.
(I must give credit to the Lefevre book mentioned above, as well as Jesse Livermore: World’s Greatest Stock Trader by Richard Smitten, for the following ideas.)
Lesson Number One: Cut your losses quickly.
Nowhere is this rule more apparent than in the modern-day crash our markets experienced in the fall of 2008. For those market participants who “bought, held, and hoped,” the gut-wrenching drop left them paralyzed, disillusioned, and angry at the market. They felt like they had no control and no choice as the losses spiraled down the rabbit hole. The primary culprits of this death trap are hopeful thinking and fearful paranoia.
As a market slides lower, a trader will rationalize his losing position by either doubling down (buying more at these now-cheaper prices) or at the very least, holding on because "there's just no way this market can go lower." If merely this one simple rule was implemented to “cut your losses," the vast majority of traders would be light years ahead of the crowd.
As soon as a trade is contemplated, a trader must know at what point in time he'll be proven wrong and exit a position. If a trader doesn't know his exit before he takes the entry, he might as well go to the racetrack or casino where at least the odds can be quantified. Trading without an exit plan is like driving a car without insurance. You might go years without a major crash, but when the crash occurs (and it will), you want to be protected from a major financial disaster.
Lesson Number Two: Confirm your judgment before going all in.
Livermore was famous for throwing out a small position and waiting for his thesis to be confirmed. Once the stock was traveling in the direction he desired, Livermore would pile on rapidly to maximize the returns. He admitted that his biggest mistake was holding on to a position as it ran against him, and then selling out when the pain got too great.
Livermore learned to remedy this dilemma by taking on a small line at first, and only adding when he was proven correct. There are several decent ways to buy more in a winning position (pyramiding up, buying in thirds at predetermined prices, being 100% in no more than 5% above the initial entry) but the take home is to buy in the direction of your winning trade -- and never when it goes against you.
Lesson Number Three: Watch leading stocks for the best action.
One hundred years, ago Mr. Livermore didn't have near as many issues to track, yet he made it his mission to follow the market makers and big players when their money flooded into a specific stock or commodity. Livermore knew that trending issues were where the big money would be made, and to fight this reality was a loser’s game.
Today, traders have the ability to track sectors, ETFs, and the footprints of the best mutual-fund managers to ascertain where the heavy hitters are moving their capital. Superstars such as Google (GOOG), Goldman Sachs (GS), and General Electric (GE) can also show their hand when looking at the bigger picture of overall market health. Traders ignore these tells at their own peril.
Lesson Number Four: Let profits ride until price action dictates otherwise.
Perhaps the most famous quote attributed to Livermore is, "It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting." Traders are wired to be “doing something,” and this can cause churning, over-trading, getting out of positions too soon, and making your broker the wealthy one. The famous Turtle Traders were trend traders who made few trades and had learned the importance of staying in a winning trade.
For today’s traders, there are multiple variations to keep you in a trade. It's not so important which method you implement, but that you do recognize when to hold a winner for maximum potential, and when a trend has changed character and it's time to ring the register.
One method that satisfies the desire for profit and subdues the fear of a losing trade is to take one half of your profit off at a predetermined level, put a stop at breakeven on the rest, and let it play out without micromanaging the position. Even day and swing traders will benefit from letting a partial position play out when all indicators hint that more upside might be in the cards. Always remember this rule is letting a profitable position run, but it's not a license to bury one’s head on a losing position.
Lesson Number Five: Buy all-time new highs.
Traders love a bargain -- trying to bottom feed, buying in on limit orders instead of market to save a penny, buying on dips, and various other trickery to try and catch the swing low of a trade. These same traders can also recount when saving a penny cost them a dollar, buying that dip was only the start of a long downtrend, and buying new lows only led to lower prices and more misery.
Livermore understood that when a trader buys new highs, that for that moment in time, the only holders are happy holders. Blue skies are above and there are no longer-term investors waiting to sell once they get back to break even. The psychological merits of buying all-time or 52-week highs are immense and shouldn't be discounted as a part of your overall strategy.
Lesson Number Six: Use pivot points to determine trends.
Livermore famously called them “pivotal points” and today they're better known as swing highs and swing lows. When going long, traders are continually looking for confirmation by assessing the strength of a move. Higher highs and higher lows are a solid indicator that a current uptrend is merely taking a slight pause, and the odds of higher prices are in their favor. These same pivot points are integral to drawing support and resistance lines to give traders their line in the sand. Taken together, trend lines and pivot points can enlighten a trader to a change in momentum, which may change the character of a trade.
Lesson Number Seven: Control your emotions.
Easier said than done in everyday life, let alone in one’s trading account, controlling those emotional demons that lurk under the surface may be the most difficult task for traders (beginners and seasoned alike) to master. You finally hit a quick 10-point winner, and the euphoria and pride rush in to give you a virtual high-five. You hold on past your mental stop-loss and watch your equity bleed like a leaking faucet, which in turn causes you to seethe with frustration, whether on the outside or internally. If there's one absolute rule, it's that every trader has to confront the role they allow their emotions to play in their trading life.
Livermore chronicles the times when he was trading for revenge, to get back his lost stake, or merely to prove he was right. By his own admission, these were terrible reasons to put on a trade, and he was at his finest when he blocked out the noise of his day and just watched the tape.
http://news.moneycentral.msn.com/ticker/article.aspx?Feed=MY&Date=20091029&ID=10616006&Symbol=GS
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
3 November 2009
6 September 2009
The ethic of authenticity
During the week I was trying to reconcile Dawkins militant reason and my own antipathy with the manner in which various religious institutions seek to transmit culture, the contemptious ambivalence to modesty in all but a most literal, fashion sense is, imo, most worthy of much contempt that nevertheless contends with an acceptance that life requires meaning beyond the mere transmission of the truths of natural history.
The question "how are we to live" is therefore as pertinent as ever....and good advice for both groups is hard to find. Here is some....
Listen, if you prefer (download)
a recommendation from an eminent contemporary philosopher: about a way to live in our pluralist western world - and this is a key point - whether you are religious or non-religious.
Charles Taylor: You have to see yourself as one interlocutor among many, not necessarily fully understanding all your interlocutors but open and wanting to listen and to see what makes them tick and so on. There is that other exercise of the imagination, the if you like the hermeneutic imagination: understanding the strangeness of the other, which is part of the process of dialogue. I think that is also a crucial part of it.
Margaret Coffey: Welcome to the program - I'm Margaret Coffey and you heard there Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. He doesn't just make recommendations for living as we do in an often angrily pluralist context; he also challenges received ways of thinking about contemporary culture. There are misunderstandings there he says - history that is misunderstood - and what he wants to do is to explain Western culture to itself. We'll hear some of that cliché challenging explanation in this Encounter.
At the age of 76 Charles Taylor is an extraordinarily active philosopher and a politically engaged one too. He writes about western philosophy but his work generates interest all over the world: for example, last year he was awarded the 50 million yen Kyoto Prize for arts and humanities. We'll hear from him at length in a moment - in a discussion about the place of religion in contemporary western culture - but first, a little background. Ruth Abbey has edited a recently published collection of essays about Charles Taylor's philosophy - she gives us a sense of the reasons for its capacity to engage a diverse range of people.
Ruth Abbey: His works are an invitation to dialogue and conversation. Although he is an extremely successful philosopher there is nothing forbidding or intimidating about his writing style - if anything it is a little beguiling in its conversational way because it draws you in and you nod your head and think oh sure I can go along with this, that seems right, when sometimes what you need to do I stand back and subject some of the claims to closer scrutiny. There is also the depth of knowledge he brings to each of the topics he deals with. He is extremely erudite.
Margaret Coffey: Associate Professor Ruth Abbey teaches Political Science at Notre Dame University in Indiana where she curates a Charles Taylor bibliography that's freely available on the internet. Taylor has published considerably since the 1960s and he's intensely involved in various discussion networks. But three works that have been read particularly widely appeared over a twenty year interval: Sources of the Self, was published in 1989. The Ethics of Authenticity appeared in 1991, and most recently, in 2007, A Secular Age.
Ruth Abbey: What he is trying to do in that book is to think about what the conditions and experience of being religious are in the contemporary western world. This is something that is a bit more tacit in his argument rather than formal - but he thinks that humans by their very nature have an orientation to what he calls transcendence. For Taylor transcendence involves a belief that there is a reality above and beyond human beings and that the significance of that reality has some bearing back on how we live and how we try to live even if we don't always succeed.
Margaret Coffey: And before anyone is tempted into a Dawkins/Hitchens type response!
Ruth Abbey: He's not critical of science at all. He is in many ways a realist - he believes that the truths that Western science has discovered really are truths about the physical world. But what troubles him is the priority or the primacy some people have given to scientific ways of knowing, scientific forms of epistemology, and Taylor would want to argue that there is something much more fundamental in the way we know and engage with the world. And this is a line of thinking that he has inherited from the tradition of phenomenology , from thinkers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, that there is a certain knowledge that we have that comes from the fact that we are embodied beings engaged in practical coping with and making our way around the world on an everyday basis. For him that is the fundamental form of human knowledge and science comes after that, science presupposes that, science tries to abstract from that but the scientific way of knowing can never explain that more fundamental, grounded, practical, active, embodied style of knowledge that we have.
Margaret Coffey: Ruth Abbey, and armed with those insights in to Taylor's fundamental ideas, we'll turn to Taylor himself on our secular age. For Encounter, Professor Taylor spoke recently from Vienna with Adelaide based theologian James McEvoy. James teaches theology at the Catholic Theological College and at Flinders University. Charles Taylor begins his discussion of religion in a secular age with a key insight. He gives an account of religion's variety of condition - from precipitate decline in his home province of Quebec, for example, to the highest ever membership of churches in the US, and, with that, its tremendous variation in kind of religion. It's an account very different from the conventional secularisation thesis of inevitable decay, a thesis developed notably by British sociologist Steve Bruce. Professor Bruce, who teaches at the University of Aberdeen, has written extensively on religion in the modern world. Charles Taylor agrees with Bruce - religion has changed in the West - but, as you'll hear, he rejects the rest of Bruce's thesis.
Charles Taylor: Religion is tremendously changed, it's tremendously varied and it goes up and down and it is even very varied in its quantity today. I think the basic thing that I call the secular age is the openness of all these possibilities, that no matter how atheistic or how pious you are, you realise you live in a world where there is this immense spread of possibilities, that you are just one among many. There is a sense of its not being at all necessarily so. And I think this is what marks the secular age. Now in this set of possibilities in any given society more people will be in one than in the other and that is one of the facts of modern life.
James McEvoy: Amidst this diversity then when you look around in the book A Secular Age you've drawn this picture from the beginnings of the 16th century to the present and you trace a changing understanding, well a whole range of developing understandings of the place of religion over that time. I wonder if you could paint that basic picture for us?
Charles Taylor: Fifteen hundred is where I start the book, sort of. You look back to religion at that time ... in a certain sense there was a form, or a very complex you know concatenation of forms that were all embracing because everywhere in your life you came across it - you might be coming across it in a local ritual to ward off evil spirits from the crops or you might come across it because you went on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela or you might come across it at a high mass at Easter. You see there was a great many different aspects to it and there was thought to be a kind of unity. It wasn't conceivable that you could be a part of this society without being part of that. Now we have an incredible if you like fragmentation of human life - I mean that is what a lot of people have seen as essential to modernity. You know the fact that there are these different spheres - that in my business life I meet a whole lot of different people than I do in my home life, or in my football team I belong to or the orchestra I belong to. There is always a different set of people, and a different set of relations and they are not integrated. And they are not integrated with the whole society and they are not integrated with any with any world outlook. There is this kind of splaying apart, fragmentation, whatever you want to call it. And that means the kind of religion that existed in a Catholic monarchy of 1500 is just inconceivable today. There has to be another kind of religion which is more personally committed, more connecting me to certain people and not others, not necessarily related to everything else that I do, 'though I can relate it myself. That's the kind of religion that exists today. I think the Bruce idea, Steve Bruce's idea of religious indifference is really very, very wrong. I mean there is religious indifference in this sense: whenever there are lots and lots of possibilities some of them seem to me to be more attractive than others and some of them seem to me to be just off - I don't need to spend much time thinking about them. A lot of people feel that about religion today and even some religious people feel that way about unbelief but it is much more common to have unbelievers if you like feel that way about religion today. The kind of indifference that Bruce is talking about is something much more radical and I just don't see that happening, because he sees religious options as becoming as weird as some of the stranger notions coming out of Star Trek. And that to me is not possible for a very profound reason - that we still go on, people who don't believe still go on as defining themselves as people who don't believe. Their definition of themselves is over against what used to be the dominant definition. In that sense, the transcendent is always there as a possibility for people.
James McEvoy: Part of this contrast between that 16th century world and our own is around understandings of the self. You trace an immense shift in the way that we understand ourselves as human beings now in contrast to the way that people back there did - in fact you talk about the difference between porous self, that living in a sort of magical environment almost, and the buffered contemporary self. I wonder if you would let us into that world for a moment.
Charles Taylor: I mean this is very hard thing to define and I am sure that I haven't properly defined it, but I think it is extremely important. You can see it just in geography today; you can see in certain parts of Africa for instance that there is a completely different sense of spiritual forces and so on surrounding people there. And It is that shift in experience - the ancestors that did all these rituals to keep the wood spirits away from the cattle and so on had a very strong sense of potential threat which they had to do these rituals and so on to combat. And, the development of what I call the buffered self is a self that no longer feels that threat, that feels invulnerable to that, right, and there is a certain sense of almost relief and a sense of self-containment that goes with that and you can see the sign of it is that people now like to get a frisson by going to see films about witchcraft and so on whereas you know 300 years ago they would think you were absolutely out of your mind if you found sort of amusement in this. But at the same time, it is very clear if you look at how this is being lived in the last centuries that a lot of people feel this, exactly this, invulnerability from another point of view as a kind of desensitisation. They've lost something. If you like the whole Romantic Movement is full of a reaction where people are saying there is something bigger out there; there are bigger forces out there. I think of Wordsworth's notion of the great force moving through all things and so on, and their whole attempt is if you like to recover a certain sensibility which they never can quite do in the original form. But you can see that this, what is very good as an invulnerability, can turn around to be something very imprisoning, as a loss of sensitivity, a loss of contact with a larger world. And I think that tension is absolutely constitutive of modern Western experience.
James McEvoy: You pointed out strongly there the down side that the Romantic Movement sensed strongly: the lack of contact with what is outside of ourselves. Seems to me there are also benefits there you know - we are so profoundly buffered selves today - we live with the advances of modern science, nobody would want to forgo medical technology, there is a whole understanding of self that emerges out of this buffered self in which we are deeply implicit...
Charles Taylor: Yes, absolutely, and that is why you find that with some Romantics perhaps some of the deepest Romantics, there is an attempt not to go back but to recover what was lost in a new form. The conception of modern freedom, the self understanding of modern freedom, the sense that we can control our lives, is something they don't want to give up but they have the sense that we have to recover some functional equivalence of what they had before. I mean one of the most important strains in a lot of post Romantic thought is this idea of both/and. We have to somehow bring together again two sides of ourselves which have developed and the development of one was at the expense of the other but we don't want to give up either. And I think that that of course is what you see in Hegel, what you see in Marx, what you see in a whole host of other thinkers in the modern world, what you saw in various aspects of the sixties and so on - there is always this aspiration to put it all together.
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Margaret Coffey: Philosopher Charles Taylor, talking there with theologian James McEvoy, about the elements of the secular age we live in. In the next part of the discussion, Charles Taylor offers another different take: this time on religion not as victim of the secular age, but rather as progenitor! And progenitor therefore of much that is characteristic of our political, social, economic and cultural lives. Bur first, a gloss on Taylor's vocabulary. Ruth Abbey spoke earlier of just how accessible his philosophy is - he avoids technical language. But he does develop some unique concepts: you've just heard about the 'buffered self' for example. There's another Taylor concept coming up. You'll hear Charles Taylor refer to modernity as a time in which people live in an 'immanent frame,'
Ruth Abbey: The 'immanent frame' is a very important concept in A Secular Age. And it's a concept that some people have misunderstood. Taylor argues that the immanent frame is a key distinguishing feature of western modernity. You can think about the economy, the public sphere, the purpose of government, as simply serving human needs. It can serve them more or less well but the rationale for all these institutions can be given in a way that is simply human or immanent, in a way that makes no reference to God or some wider religious or transcendent reality. However, he wants to argue that you can live within the immanent frame in an open or a closed way. If you live the immanent frame in a closed way, you deny the existence of any transcendent reality - but we can also remain open to the transcendent while going on living within the immanent frame and that is Taylor's preferred model, if you like, for living religion in the modern western world.
So, I think he really needed to add a question mark to the title of A Secular Age because the title itself sounds like a pronouncement - here is our age, it is secular, there is an 'immanent frame' and that is our fate. And that is not really what he is trying to say.
Margaret Coffey: Ruth Abbey ... and now - on Radio National's Encounter - the next part of the discussion between Charles Taylor and James McEvoy - about Taylor's subversive history of modernity: he begins the history of modernity much further back than is usual, and then, in an interesting way he sheets modernity home to religion. Here's James McEvoy.
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James McEvoy: Can I move on to the next idea about the role of religion in creating the secular age. That seems a very striking aspect of your account. You point out that the church in the late medieval and early modern period had a growing concern with reform, which you have a capital R for. Quote: a drive to make over the whole of society to higher standards. How do you see this drive to reform at work?
Charles Taylor: Well I think you still of course see it in all the kinds of reform movements we see in our politics trying to clean things up , make them work better, have a perfect democracy, have a citizenship which perfectly respects the rights of others and so on and so on. This is very clearly a lineal descendent of the whole movement for reform which you can see starting in the 11th century with Hildebrand moving through the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation and on - that the driving idea was that the present state of affairs was a kind of uneasy compromise between the demands of the Gospel on one hand and the order of things in this world, the type of power that had to be there in kings and emperors, the various kinds of compromise that had to be made with violence, with soldiers, with armies, with battle and so on. There is a sense of a continuing compromise. You have that earlier with Augustine's idea of the two cities, the city of God and the human city. And the idea behind reform, or the drive behind reform, the temptation to reform, is that we don't need to live in this conflicted, intermediary, bad compromise. We can move to make over everybody so that they fully reflect the demands of the Gospel and there isn't a necessity for kind of two sides to things any more, two demands on us anymore. I think you can see this moving forward in a way I don't fully understand because the ante was upped as it were every time: what Hildebrand, the Pope, in the 11th century was demanding -well what Calvin eventually demanded went well beyond this and what further reformers after went well beyond this and It ended up producing a well ordered, disciplined, organised society, one which was so well organised and so controlling of its environment that it in a certain sense began to eclipse the very notion of the transcendent. It's a society that we can now live as what I call immanent frame, where it sort of explains itself in its own terms and doesn't need to refer to a transcendent, though it allows for a transcendent. And in a certain sense at that point you can see various movements breaking off carrying on a program of reform while throwing aside the original impetus. So something like the Jacobins in the French Revolution are an excellent example of that - I mean they are carrying on this idea of let's reform everybody into a really good ordered citizen, fully loyal to the Republic, and taking on all the virtues of following nature and treating other people as equals and so on, but will do that without any reference to the ...what was the original impetus, which is living the life God wanted us to live. And I think the drive to reform we still see in our world is a continuation of that. It is part of the almost the cultural DNA of the modern West.
James McEvoy: Another implication just from a religious perspective is that there is a tendency in many religious thinkers to think of modernity as something that has happened to the churches and if only we could only get back to prior to that we'd get rid ourselves of this godless world, you know, whereas this picture of the effect of reform makes it very clear that secularisation is something that is brought about by the drive to reform itself.
Charles Taylor: Yes, the splitting off of a set of unbelieving outlooks on the world from this is a kind of own goal in a certain sense of the Christian drive to reform. You see, when one really successfully managed to, supposedly anyway, integrate the demands of the gospel right though ordinary life, right through the life of people in their families, in their productive lives and so on, you made this what looked like a kind of perfect system, the kind of thing that the Enlightenment eventually referred to, a kind of perfect system of behaviour, the perfect system in which everyone operates as a good citizen and equally with others and so on. Once you create this sense it can go along with the notion that, heh, we can do this. we human beings can do this, we don't necessarily need grace or some power from above - the whole 18th century is full of this, you find among elites the idea that, heh, we can do certain things, for instance we don't need to suffer these regular plagues which kill off I don't know what percentage of the population, we have ways of organising, quarantine. But the sense that we can do this - that human beings can do this alone, can play into a sense that we don't need the church, we don't need God. So in a certain sense as it were the bases for it were laid by the actual reform movements in the church.
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Margaret Coffey: So there it is. On Radio National's Encounter, abc.net.au/rn, you're listening to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, author most recently of A Secular Age. Listening to his account of the reform movement makes one think that there is much more that is religious in Australian history - and in contemporary debate - than is perhaps generally recognised. Take the way reform segues towards conformity.
Charles Taylor: Yes, its conformist effect is very, very strong. I mean take for instance - I hate to single this out but - the Protestant Reformation itself you can see a very radical homogenisation, a kind of crushing of the variety and difference in the forms of spirituality that existed before. I mean there were forms of spirituality of monks, of anchorites, of people who were totally outside ordinary life, and people who were in ordinary life but with in a rather strange relationship to it. And the consecration of a single way of being, married, family life, in a calling, with a sense of piety and so on. So you can see this, and indeed all forms of Puritanism this kind of homogenisation of peoples' lives. And you see it today in the contemporary church - in every Catholic Church in many parts of the world imposing in even clearer fashion a single way of being a sexual being, and we're not going to have any truck with homosexuality and so on and so on and so on. You see this reform drive homogenises, it allows for only one, or a small number of forms of correct, proper living. So one of the big things you find with the Romantics again is a defence of the heterogeneous, a defence of the offbeat, a defence of the different, a defence even of the shocking. Of course this pushes people like Byron and Nietzsche very, very far. But that's part of the tension that we are in in the modern world and the greatest force against this homogenisation, which is I would say today the ethic of authenticity - its basic thrust is that every person has their own way of being so you have to fight against this homogenising conforming force - that comes right out of the Romantic period, comes out of people like Herder and others. But we wouldn't have this kind of reaction if we didn't live in a world where the other force was so powerful - the force towards conformity, towards uniformity.
Conformity also goes along with a very important feature of the modern world, the rule of law. And if nonconformity, if originality is going to be destroying that, it is going to be destroying ..well... its most important protection. So there again all the attempts at human life in the modern world I think are filled with potential dilemmas, precisely because we are trying to have our cake and eat it; in a certain sense we are trying to have what we gained and trying to regain some of the things we have sacrificed in the process of gaining those first things.
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Margaret Coffey: Philosopher Charles Taylor, talking there with James McEvoy. You heard Taylor characterise the modern world as filled with potential dilemmas. Taylor's philosophy is about thinking through some of these dilemmas, including dilemmas produced by modernity's pluralism. In a multicultural, pluralistic society like Australia, for example, how do we resolve differences, and what kind of language do we use to conduct our discussions in the public space? Here's Ruth Abbey.
Ruth Abbey: The public space is indeed a very pluralistic one and in fact Taylor believes that the whole religious scene in the modern world is a profoundly pluralistic one. And in this way his project is much closer to the work of John Rawls who is an important 20th century liberal thinker in English language political philosophy. This comes out more clearly in a document he published about a year ago now, which was an enquiry into cultural diversity in his home province of Quebec. Taylor was the co-chair of a commission that travelled around Quebec, engaged in public hearings, did a lot research about cultural diversity and religious diversity as a part of that cultural diversity. And when you read that report - it's a 300 page document - his position on the role of religion in public life strikes me as very Rawlsian. So I think there is something of a convergence between these two thinkers.
Margaret Coffey: Many people decipher a language of reason, a language which we supposedly can all share in this public space, but Charles Taylor has something to say about that, doesn't he? It's not that distinctive and autonomous as we might like to think?
Ruth Abbey: That's right - it won't be distinctive and it won't be autonomous and the idea that you could find a language of reason that was somehow neutral and impartial that could rise above the conflicting perspectives is something that he would be suspicious of. But it seems to me that there is a similarity between the two because Taylor argues that one of the ways in which religion is experienced in the modern world is through what he calls cross pressures and fragilisation and what he means by this [is] that anyone living in the modern western world has to realise that there is this plurality of religious positions and that people who hold different religious views from one's own are not all stupid or wicked or immoral. And this is very close to Rawls' concept of the burdens of judgement, that when someone else arrives at a different conclusion from us we can't just say you're wrong or you're stupid. The free exercise of their reason has led them in one direction; the free exercise of someone else's reason has led them in another direction. So it is not as if for Rawls reason is going to dictate an outcome that everyone will be able to agree upon. When you take this insight into account in order to respect the freedom and equality of other people you have to acknowledge that plurality of thinking, that diversity of thinking that for Rawls as for Taylor will be ineradicable in modern western societies. Only through government oppression could we end that diversity.
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Margaret Coffey: We'll return to Charles Taylor in a moment, this time in an explicitly religious vein. But first another gloss on his wonderfully evocative and telling vocabulary. Along with the 'buffered self', and the 'immanent frame', he's come up with the 'ethic of authenticity'.
Ruth Abbey: He argues that the ethic of authenticity is something that is unique to western modernity. This idea that there is, if not a true me, then there is a way of being in the world, that is genuinely mine, that is not bred of conformity, not in any way artificial, that's not in any way based on self deception, this sense of being true to who I am in my own unique fashion. The interesting thing that Taylor does with that is to show that this idea of being true to yourself in your own unique fashion is itself a cultural product. Taylor doesn't run it down for that reason - on the contrary, he's trying to put it into context, show it as a modern development and in many ways he talks about the positive things that have grown out of this ethic of authenticity.
Margaret Coffey: And in his book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor talks about how this ethic of authenticity imbues religious thinking in the modern world - it has a powerful influence, he says, on the way individuals think about religion. James McEvoy again, talking with Professor Taylor.
James McEvoy: One sentence that I am very fond of in A Secular Age describes the place of religion in the age of authenticity. You say the religious life or practice that I become part of must not only be my choice but it must speak to me, it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this. Now clearly this presents some strong challenges in different ways and perhaps we will get to those in a moment. But it seems to me that it captures the perspective of a wide range of believers. It reminds me of perhaps Augustine's most famous line, "You've made us for yourself O God and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Perhaps the most liberal and the most conservative believer would see their faith as making sense of their spiritual development. Do you see this understanding as a gain?
Charles Taylor: Absolutely. You know, 'cause I mean your quote from Augustine really I think points that up. It touches something very deep in the whole Christian revelation - that it's not about conformity to a single model but it is about communion between people who come to God and to each other through very different paths. This sense of course was always there in the church: you think of all the strange offbeat saints, St Francis, St Ignatius Loyola, and so on who went through extraordinary itinerary including sometimes a very important itinerary in their lives before they became followers of Christ. And you see these itineraries in all their difference converging and somehow these converging but different paths get canonised afterwards. But then the same church that canonises them very often wants to impose total conformity, a single path, on people today. Now, you can open this up in a much more creative way I think if you take the step into an ethic of authenticity - in that sense there is a fuller living of this feature of the Christian tradition. Obviously there are also losses, that lots of people go off in other directions. Now, that's path of the package, but this positive side of the package from a Christian point of view is that this very, very important feature of the whole Christian vision which I try to sum up with the notion of communion of saints, people coming through different itineraries, is finally given its full force, it can finally breath fully in a certain sense in the life of Christians today.
James McEvoy: You've already said that the age of authenticity has a down side for religious traditions, or at least makes some things difficult. I think in the book you say that it can easily lead to trivial spiritual options. I was presenting this picture of religion in the age of authenticity to a staff of a large Catholic school in the West of Adelaide and in response to your sentence about faith making sense of my spiritual development, one very talented and also very committed teacher said some of my students turn to Madonna for spiritual nourishment and they are not thinking about the mother of Jesus. I wonder how you would respond to her.
Charles Taylor: I mean I think two thoughts on that question. Number one, there are gains and losses and this gain is very important. But number two, when you have this kind of real civilisational shift, in which the mindset in which everybody lives changes, you just can't go back to the older forms and the creative response of Christians and of the Church to this is to be part of the process of searchers, sharing their search, to show how much Christian faith is a kind of set of paths of search, as against a set of already given answers before you even ask a question, right? What we have to take from this is a way of speaking to this world rather than trying to roll it back to what it was before 1800, which apart from the fact that it would forgo the important gains, is actually utterly impossible.
James McEvoy: It seems to me an implication of that is that it's not that you are implying that the Gospel is any less important or that we have to shear off different aspects of it, but that we have to find a new way to proclaim it in this age.
Charles Taylor: This is something that again points up what was always there, that is that there are all these different paths. Astonishingly enough in a very early part of the modern period before the West got really arrogant in the 19th century, there were missionaries, Jesuit missionaries for instance Matteo Ricci in China and De'Nobili in India in China who had this idea well that the faith is not something that belongs to Western civilisation, it is something, people come at it from all these different directions, and we have to help the people here find their own very different path. Now in a certain sense that is already multiculturalism and in a certain sense it is the same spirit behind the notion of authenticity. So, a germ that was there has now really flourished in the 20th and 21st century in the West. This is not to say that we are compromising or shearing off parts of the Christian faith but we are finding a way for very different people to come together in it.
Margaret Coffey: On ABC Radio National's Encounter, you've been listening to Charles Taylor emerge as a philosopher who is a religious person. Two things you've gathered about Taylor that are important: he's from Quebec, and he is religious.
Ruth Abbey: He grew up in a bilingual and bicultural family and so this has given him not only a bifocal way of thinking about language and meaning and so forth. And this made him a mediator, someone always looking for common ground between the two, and this has been a powerful motif in all of his philosophical thinking. And he does this in A Secular Age when he talks about people who are absolutely religiously committed and people who are absolutely committed to the reality of atheism and he tries to show that these two groups have more in common in their style of thinking than either would really like to recognise.
Until the publication of A Secular Age, many people would have read Taylor's work not knowing that he was a Catholic. It wasn't relevant to the issues that he discussed, it didn't come out in his arguments. It began slowly with the end of his 1989 book Sources of the Self when in the last pages of that work he ponders whether the very demanding ethics that we have these days of universal solidarity can be sustained without some sort of religious underpinnings. But it is most powerfully evident in this work A Secular Age. It is not typical for philosophers to come out with statements of their religious positions so Taylor was taking some risks.
Margaret Coffey: So, finally, Charles Taylor on the religious perspective. Here's James McEvoy putting the question.
James McEvoy: In the book you draw a contrast between two different understandings of human fulfilment - what you call the immanence perspective and the transformation perspective. And you are saying there that this secular age is in a sense less hospitable to the transformation perspective. I should be more clear about those two perspectives: the immanence perspective and the transformation perspective where human flourishing is seen in the very goods of human life like family or community or career, and the transformation perspective where good is found in a God who is way beyond human flourishing. I think your argument is that the secular age itself is less hospitable to the transformation perspective. It is difficult to open the immanent frame, to use another of your images.
Charles Taylor: Yeh it is hard to say just what I wanted to say there because in a certain sense that is true - I mean the very fact that we have this notion of a self sufficient immanent world - which you know people in the middle ages wouldn't have understood what you meant because everywhere the forces of spirits and so on, of God, are working so that it isn't a self-contained world - but the fact that we can live in this world can be an invitation to some people to think well there is nothing beyond it. And that means that not only, you know, there isn't a God but this notion of transformation, we can't expect people to transform themselves beyond what it would mean to be a good citizen, a good lover of one's family, a benevolent human being and so on. The kinds of extraordinary transformation we find in a Francis of Assisi would make us uneasy as it made David Hume uneasy in the 18th century - this is not possible and if you try to do this kind of thing you are going to not only break your teeth but you are going to take on some kind of terrible self-distortion. So, the possibility of becoming really in a certain sense sanctified and the sense that that is not possible, that we have got to keep our sights low, these two reactions just grind against each other in our world. And in a certain sense it's easier to take the immanent perspective today, but in another sense a lot of people feel a tremendous hunger out of that. See, every one of these things works in both ways. The sense of being enclosed in the immanent world is for some people a comfort and for other people a sense of imprisonment. So how does it all add up: it is harder, is it less hard? Well in different ways it is each.
James McEvoy: Something about hope Charles: the book seems an immensely hopeful work - it is an immense work that draw together philosophical and historical perspectives as well as those of social and political theory and sees itself as giving an adequate, a good account of each of those, which is just an amazing task. Yet it is also immensely hopeful. I wonder what kind of hope does your view of the place of religion offer.
Charles Taylor: I think it is a strong but, where's the word, limited, I mean it's - that there is always some path further to tread. That's the point, that one can see a new kind of frontier that we have to move on to, this frontier of dialogical, diversified world or church that's still in communion, connecting. Dialogue really requires some sense of communion. If you break any sense of commonality with your interlocutor then the dialogue is over, right. So, there is this movement that we can make to open up something that is perpetually in danger of being closed in our world, being closed not only by very narrow definitions of the church's function but being closed by various kinds of narrow negation of God altogether. So, the hope that there is always some further direction to walk in, there is always some further road to move, that we are not at the end point, that - it's in a way obvious to me. But why limited? Because how far will this go? How much will this produce, how much evil will this actually avoid right now, all the terrible things going on and so on, I just don't know. You have to just in this sense take this road and hope that it produces certain good effects, which it may not.
Margaret Coffey: And you take this road, Charles Taylor says, through dialogue.
Charles Taylor: The stance of dialogue is really a stance where you recognise that there very likely is something deep and powerful that makes some kind of sense in animating the lives of other people. I mean there also can be moves towards evil and so on that you plainly see but there can also be something you don't understand now but it is there and you really want to understand it. It is that kind of opening to the possibility which makes all the difference. And then when you can get an interlocutor who has the similar reciprocal stance, it is extraordinary how things change. In two ways: I mean one, you throw away the crutch of supporting your own faith by looking on that person as being some kind of depraved figure, and that itself does you immense amount of good because faith only grows through living in the doubts. And secondly, you do discover that there are things there you never suspected, but that are really quite remarkable, that there is a kind of complementarity between yourself and those others, even people from very different religious perspectives, atheists and so on. This stance can open up something and open up into a kind of friendship across these barriers where you both know you have gained tremendously from the exchange and there is a sense of solidarity in this, which is again from the Christian point of view, is what life is all about. Life is about communion across distances.
So you get the sense that something very new and very creative is happening here.
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Margaret Coffey: This has been Encounter - Charles Taylor and A Secular Age. My thanks to Charles Taylor, and to Ruth Abbey and James McEvoy. Professor Taylor is the Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal. Rev Dr James McEvoy is a theologian who teaches at Adelaide's Catholic Theological College and at Flinders University. Associate Professor Ruth Abbey teaches in the political science department of Notre Dame University in the United States and she is also the curator of a web-based Charles Taylor bibliography. She has written and edited studies of Charles Taylor's philosophical thinking. You'll find a transcript of this program at Radio National abc.net.au/rn - just locate Encounter. Along with the transcript there'll be further information about each of the participants, book references and interesting weblinks. Charles Taylor's subtle ideas bear another listening session .. so don't forget the podcast version - at Encounter, on Radio National, abc.net.au. Technical production of this program was by Chris Lawson. I'm Margaret Coffey.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/encounter/stories/2009/2671691.htm#transcript
The question "how are we to live" is therefore as pertinent as ever....and good advice for both groups is hard to find. Here is some....
Listen, if you prefer (download)
a recommendation from an eminent contemporary philosopher: about a way to live in our pluralist western world - and this is a key point - whether you are religious or non-religious.
Charles Taylor: You have to see yourself as one interlocutor among many, not necessarily fully understanding all your interlocutors but open and wanting to listen and to see what makes them tick and so on. There is that other exercise of the imagination, the if you like the hermeneutic imagination: understanding the strangeness of the other, which is part of the process of dialogue. I think that is also a crucial part of it.
Margaret Coffey: Welcome to the program - I'm Margaret Coffey and you heard there Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. He doesn't just make recommendations for living as we do in an often angrily pluralist context; he also challenges received ways of thinking about contemporary culture. There are misunderstandings there he says - history that is misunderstood - and what he wants to do is to explain Western culture to itself. We'll hear some of that cliché challenging explanation in this Encounter.
At the age of 76 Charles Taylor is an extraordinarily active philosopher and a politically engaged one too. He writes about western philosophy but his work generates interest all over the world: for example, last year he was awarded the 50 million yen Kyoto Prize for arts and humanities. We'll hear from him at length in a moment - in a discussion about the place of religion in contemporary western culture - but first, a little background. Ruth Abbey has edited a recently published collection of essays about Charles Taylor's philosophy - she gives us a sense of the reasons for its capacity to engage a diverse range of people.
Ruth Abbey: His works are an invitation to dialogue and conversation. Although he is an extremely successful philosopher there is nothing forbidding or intimidating about his writing style - if anything it is a little beguiling in its conversational way because it draws you in and you nod your head and think oh sure I can go along with this, that seems right, when sometimes what you need to do I stand back and subject some of the claims to closer scrutiny. There is also the depth of knowledge he brings to each of the topics he deals with. He is extremely erudite.
Margaret Coffey: Associate Professor Ruth Abbey teaches Political Science at Notre Dame University in Indiana where she curates a Charles Taylor bibliography that's freely available on the internet. Taylor has published considerably since the 1960s and he's intensely involved in various discussion networks. But three works that have been read particularly widely appeared over a twenty year interval: Sources of the Self, was published in 1989. The Ethics of Authenticity appeared in 1991, and most recently, in 2007, A Secular Age.
Ruth Abbey: What he is trying to do in that book is to think about what the conditions and experience of being religious are in the contemporary western world. This is something that is a bit more tacit in his argument rather than formal - but he thinks that humans by their very nature have an orientation to what he calls transcendence. For Taylor transcendence involves a belief that there is a reality above and beyond human beings and that the significance of that reality has some bearing back on how we live and how we try to live even if we don't always succeed.
Margaret Coffey: And before anyone is tempted into a Dawkins/Hitchens type response!
Ruth Abbey: He's not critical of science at all. He is in many ways a realist - he believes that the truths that Western science has discovered really are truths about the physical world. But what troubles him is the priority or the primacy some people have given to scientific ways of knowing, scientific forms of epistemology, and Taylor would want to argue that there is something much more fundamental in the way we know and engage with the world. And this is a line of thinking that he has inherited from the tradition of phenomenology , from thinkers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, that there is a certain knowledge that we have that comes from the fact that we are embodied beings engaged in practical coping with and making our way around the world on an everyday basis. For him that is the fundamental form of human knowledge and science comes after that, science presupposes that, science tries to abstract from that but the scientific way of knowing can never explain that more fundamental, grounded, practical, active, embodied style of knowledge that we have.
Margaret Coffey: Ruth Abbey, and armed with those insights in to Taylor's fundamental ideas, we'll turn to Taylor himself on our secular age. For Encounter, Professor Taylor spoke recently from Vienna with Adelaide based theologian James McEvoy. James teaches theology at the Catholic Theological College and at Flinders University. Charles Taylor begins his discussion of religion in a secular age with a key insight. He gives an account of religion's variety of condition - from precipitate decline in his home province of Quebec, for example, to the highest ever membership of churches in the US, and, with that, its tremendous variation in kind of religion. It's an account very different from the conventional secularisation thesis of inevitable decay, a thesis developed notably by British sociologist Steve Bruce. Professor Bruce, who teaches at the University of Aberdeen, has written extensively on religion in the modern world. Charles Taylor agrees with Bruce - religion has changed in the West - but, as you'll hear, he rejects the rest of Bruce's thesis.
Charles Taylor: Religion is tremendously changed, it's tremendously varied and it goes up and down and it is even very varied in its quantity today. I think the basic thing that I call the secular age is the openness of all these possibilities, that no matter how atheistic or how pious you are, you realise you live in a world where there is this immense spread of possibilities, that you are just one among many. There is a sense of its not being at all necessarily so. And I think this is what marks the secular age. Now in this set of possibilities in any given society more people will be in one than in the other and that is one of the facts of modern life.
James McEvoy: Amidst this diversity then when you look around in the book A Secular Age you've drawn this picture from the beginnings of the 16th century to the present and you trace a changing understanding, well a whole range of developing understandings of the place of religion over that time. I wonder if you could paint that basic picture for us?
Charles Taylor: Fifteen hundred is where I start the book, sort of. You look back to religion at that time ... in a certain sense there was a form, or a very complex you know concatenation of forms that were all embracing because everywhere in your life you came across it - you might be coming across it in a local ritual to ward off evil spirits from the crops or you might come across it because you went on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela or you might come across it at a high mass at Easter. You see there was a great many different aspects to it and there was thought to be a kind of unity. It wasn't conceivable that you could be a part of this society without being part of that. Now we have an incredible if you like fragmentation of human life - I mean that is what a lot of people have seen as essential to modernity. You know the fact that there are these different spheres - that in my business life I meet a whole lot of different people than I do in my home life, or in my football team I belong to or the orchestra I belong to. There is always a different set of people, and a different set of relations and they are not integrated. And they are not integrated with the whole society and they are not integrated with any with any world outlook. There is this kind of splaying apart, fragmentation, whatever you want to call it. And that means the kind of religion that existed in a Catholic monarchy of 1500 is just inconceivable today. There has to be another kind of religion which is more personally committed, more connecting me to certain people and not others, not necessarily related to everything else that I do, 'though I can relate it myself. That's the kind of religion that exists today. I think the Bruce idea, Steve Bruce's idea of religious indifference is really very, very wrong. I mean there is religious indifference in this sense: whenever there are lots and lots of possibilities some of them seem to me to be more attractive than others and some of them seem to me to be just off - I don't need to spend much time thinking about them. A lot of people feel that about religion today and even some religious people feel that way about unbelief but it is much more common to have unbelievers if you like feel that way about religion today. The kind of indifference that Bruce is talking about is something much more radical and I just don't see that happening, because he sees religious options as becoming as weird as some of the stranger notions coming out of Star Trek. And that to me is not possible for a very profound reason - that we still go on, people who don't believe still go on as defining themselves as people who don't believe. Their definition of themselves is over against what used to be the dominant definition. In that sense, the transcendent is always there as a possibility for people.
James McEvoy: Part of this contrast between that 16th century world and our own is around understandings of the self. You trace an immense shift in the way that we understand ourselves as human beings now in contrast to the way that people back there did - in fact you talk about the difference between porous self, that living in a sort of magical environment almost, and the buffered contemporary self. I wonder if you would let us into that world for a moment.
Charles Taylor: I mean this is very hard thing to define and I am sure that I haven't properly defined it, but I think it is extremely important. You can see it just in geography today; you can see in certain parts of Africa for instance that there is a completely different sense of spiritual forces and so on surrounding people there. And It is that shift in experience - the ancestors that did all these rituals to keep the wood spirits away from the cattle and so on had a very strong sense of potential threat which they had to do these rituals and so on to combat. And, the development of what I call the buffered self is a self that no longer feels that threat, that feels invulnerable to that, right, and there is a certain sense of almost relief and a sense of self-containment that goes with that and you can see the sign of it is that people now like to get a frisson by going to see films about witchcraft and so on whereas you know 300 years ago they would think you were absolutely out of your mind if you found sort of amusement in this. But at the same time, it is very clear if you look at how this is being lived in the last centuries that a lot of people feel this, exactly this, invulnerability from another point of view as a kind of desensitisation. They've lost something. If you like the whole Romantic Movement is full of a reaction where people are saying there is something bigger out there; there are bigger forces out there. I think of Wordsworth's notion of the great force moving through all things and so on, and their whole attempt is if you like to recover a certain sensibility which they never can quite do in the original form. But you can see that this, what is very good as an invulnerability, can turn around to be something very imprisoning, as a loss of sensitivity, a loss of contact with a larger world. And I think that tension is absolutely constitutive of modern Western experience.
James McEvoy: You pointed out strongly there the down side that the Romantic Movement sensed strongly: the lack of contact with what is outside of ourselves. Seems to me there are also benefits there you know - we are so profoundly buffered selves today - we live with the advances of modern science, nobody would want to forgo medical technology, there is a whole understanding of self that emerges out of this buffered self in which we are deeply implicit...
Charles Taylor: Yes, absolutely, and that is why you find that with some Romantics perhaps some of the deepest Romantics, there is an attempt not to go back but to recover what was lost in a new form. The conception of modern freedom, the self understanding of modern freedom, the sense that we can control our lives, is something they don't want to give up but they have the sense that we have to recover some functional equivalence of what they had before. I mean one of the most important strains in a lot of post Romantic thought is this idea of both/and. We have to somehow bring together again two sides of ourselves which have developed and the development of one was at the expense of the other but we don't want to give up either. And I think that that of course is what you see in Hegel, what you see in Marx, what you see in a whole host of other thinkers in the modern world, what you saw in various aspects of the sixties and so on - there is always this aspiration to put it all together.
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Margaret Coffey: Philosopher Charles Taylor, talking there with theologian James McEvoy, about the elements of the secular age we live in. In the next part of the discussion, Charles Taylor offers another different take: this time on religion not as victim of the secular age, but rather as progenitor! And progenitor therefore of much that is characteristic of our political, social, economic and cultural lives. Bur first, a gloss on Taylor's vocabulary. Ruth Abbey spoke earlier of just how accessible his philosophy is - he avoids technical language. But he does develop some unique concepts: you've just heard about the 'buffered self' for example. There's another Taylor concept coming up. You'll hear Charles Taylor refer to modernity as a time in which people live in an 'immanent frame,'
Ruth Abbey: The 'immanent frame' is a very important concept in A Secular Age. And it's a concept that some people have misunderstood. Taylor argues that the immanent frame is a key distinguishing feature of western modernity. You can think about the economy, the public sphere, the purpose of government, as simply serving human needs. It can serve them more or less well but the rationale for all these institutions can be given in a way that is simply human or immanent, in a way that makes no reference to God or some wider religious or transcendent reality. However, he wants to argue that you can live within the immanent frame in an open or a closed way. If you live the immanent frame in a closed way, you deny the existence of any transcendent reality - but we can also remain open to the transcendent while going on living within the immanent frame and that is Taylor's preferred model, if you like, for living religion in the modern western world.
So, I think he really needed to add a question mark to the title of A Secular Age because the title itself sounds like a pronouncement - here is our age, it is secular, there is an 'immanent frame' and that is our fate. And that is not really what he is trying to say.
Margaret Coffey: Ruth Abbey ... and now - on Radio National's Encounter - the next part of the discussion between Charles Taylor and James McEvoy - about Taylor's subversive history of modernity: he begins the history of modernity much further back than is usual, and then, in an interesting way he sheets modernity home to religion. Here's James McEvoy.
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James McEvoy: Can I move on to the next idea about the role of religion in creating the secular age. That seems a very striking aspect of your account. You point out that the church in the late medieval and early modern period had a growing concern with reform, which you have a capital R for. Quote: a drive to make over the whole of society to higher standards. How do you see this drive to reform at work?
Charles Taylor: Well I think you still of course see it in all the kinds of reform movements we see in our politics trying to clean things up , make them work better, have a perfect democracy, have a citizenship which perfectly respects the rights of others and so on and so on. This is very clearly a lineal descendent of the whole movement for reform which you can see starting in the 11th century with Hildebrand moving through the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Counter-Reformation and on - that the driving idea was that the present state of affairs was a kind of uneasy compromise between the demands of the Gospel on one hand and the order of things in this world, the type of power that had to be there in kings and emperors, the various kinds of compromise that had to be made with violence, with soldiers, with armies, with battle and so on. There is a sense of a continuing compromise. You have that earlier with Augustine's idea of the two cities, the city of God and the human city. And the idea behind reform, or the drive behind reform, the temptation to reform, is that we don't need to live in this conflicted, intermediary, bad compromise. We can move to make over everybody so that they fully reflect the demands of the Gospel and there isn't a necessity for kind of two sides to things any more, two demands on us anymore. I think you can see this moving forward in a way I don't fully understand because the ante was upped as it were every time: what Hildebrand, the Pope, in the 11th century was demanding -well what Calvin eventually demanded went well beyond this and what further reformers after went well beyond this and It ended up producing a well ordered, disciplined, organised society, one which was so well organised and so controlling of its environment that it in a certain sense began to eclipse the very notion of the transcendent. It's a society that we can now live as what I call immanent frame, where it sort of explains itself in its own terms and doesn't need to refer to a transcendent, though it allows for a transcendent. And in a certain sense at that point you can see various movements breaking off carrying on a program of reform while throwing aside the original impetus. So something like the Jacobins in the French Revolution are an excellent example of that - I mean they are carrying on this idea of let's reform everybody into a really good ordered citizen, fully loyal to the Republic, and taking on all the virtues of following nature and treating other people as equals and so on, but will do that without any reference to the ...what was the original impetus, which is living the life God wanted us to live. And I think the drive to reform we still see in our world is a continuation of that. It is part of the almost the cultural DNA of the modern West.
James McEvoy: Another implication just from a religious perspective is that there is a tendency in many religious thinkers to think of modernity as something that has happened to the churches and if only we could only get back to prior to that we'd get rid ourselves of this godless world, you know, whereas this picture of the effect of reform makes it very clear that secularisation is something that is brought about by the drive to reform itself.
Charles Taylor: Yes, the splitting off of a set of unbelieving outlooks on the world from this is a kind of own goal in a certain sense of the Christian drive to reform. You see, when one really successfully managed to, supposedly anyway, integrate the demands of the gospel right though ordinary life, right through the life of people in their families, in their productive lives and so on, you made this what looked like a kind of perfect system, the kind of thing that the Enlightenment eventually referred to, a kind of perfect system of behaviour, the perfect system in which everyone operates as a good citizen and equally with others and so on. Once you create this sense it can go along with the notion that, heh, we can do this. we human beings can do this, we don't necessarily need grace or some power from above - the whole 18th century is full of this, you find among elites the idea that, heh, we can do certain things, for instance we don't need to suffer these regular plagues which kill off I don't know what percentage of the population, we have ways of organising, quarantine. But the sense that we can do this - that human beings can do this alone, can play into a sense that we don't need the church, we don't need God. So in a certain sense as it were the bases for it were laid by the actual reform movements in the church.
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Margaret Coffey: So there it is. On Radio National's Encounter, abc.net.au/rn, you're listening to the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, author most recently of A Secular Age. Listening to his account of the reform movement makes one think that there is much more that is religious in Australian history - and in contemporary debate - than is perhaps generally recognised. Take the way reform segues towards conformity.
Charles Taylor: Yes, its conformist effect is very, very strong. I mean take for instance - I hate to single this out but - the Protestant Reformation itself you can see a very radical homogenisation, a kind of crushing of the variety and difference in the forms of spirituality that existed before. I mean there were forms of spirituality of monks, of anchorites, of people who were totally outside ordinary life, and people who were in ordinary life but with in a rather strange relationship to it. And the consecration of a single way of being, married, family life, in a calling, with a sense of piety and so on. So you can see this, and indeed all forms of Puritanism this kind of homogenisation of peoples' lives. And you see it today in the contemporary church - in every Catholic Church in many parts of the world imposing in even clearer fashion a single way of being a sexual being, and we're not going to have any truck with homosexuality and so on and so on and so on. You see this reform drive homogenises, it allows for only one, or a small number of forms of correct, proper living. So one of the big things you find with the Romantics again is a defence of the heterogeneous, a defence of the offbeat, a defence of the different, a defence even of the shocking. Of course this pushes people like Byron and Nietzsche very, very far. But that's part of the tension that we are in in the modern world and the greatest force against this homogenisation, which is I would say today the ethic of authenticity - its basic thrust is that every person has their own way of being so you have to fight against this homogenising conforming force - that comes right out of the Romantic period, comes out of people like Herder and others. But we wouldn't have this kind of reaction if we didn't live in a world where the other force was so powerful - the force towards conformity, towards uniformity.
Conformity also goes along with a very important feature of the modern world, the rule of law. And if nonconformity, if originality is going to be destroying that, it is going to be destroying ..well... its most important protection. So there again all the attempts at human life in the modern world I think are filled with potential dilemmas, precisely because we are trying to have our cake and eat it; in a certain sense we are trying to have what we gained and trying to regain some of the things we have sacrificed in the process of gaining those first things.
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Margaret Coffey: Philosopher Charles Taylor, talking there with James McEvoy. You heard Taylor characterise the modern world as filled with potential dilemmas. Taylor's philosophy is about thinking through some of these dilemmas, including dilemmas produced by modernity's pluralism. In a multicultural, pluralistic society like Australia, for example, how do we resolve differences, and what kind of language do we use to conduct our discussions in the public space? Here's Ruth Abbey.
Ruth Abbey: The public space is indeed a very pluralistic one and in fact Taylor believes that the whole religious scene in the modern world is a profoundly pluralistic one. And in this way his project is much closer to the work of John Rawls who is an important 20th century liberal thinker in English language political philosophy. This comes out more clearly in a document he published about a year ago now, which was an enquiry into cultural diversity in his home province of Quebec. Taylor was the co-chair of a commission that travelled around Quebec, engaged in public hearings, did a lot research about cultural diversity and religious diversity as a part of that cultural diversity. And when you read that report - it's a 300 page document - his position on the role of religion in public life strikes me as very Rawlsian. So I think there is something of a convergence between these two thinkers.
Margaret Coffey: Many people decipher a language of reason, a language which we supposedly can all share in this public space, but Charles Taylor has something to say about that, doesn't he? It's not that distinctive and autonomous as we might like to think?
Ruth Abbey: That's right - it won't be distinctive and it won't be autonomous and the idea that you could find a language of reason that was somehow neutral and impartial that could rise above the conflicting perspectives is something that he would be suspicious of. But it seems to me that there is a similarity between the two because Taylor argues that one of the ways in which religion is experienced in the modern world is through what he calls cross pressures and fragilisation and what he means by this [is] that anyone living in the modern western world has to realise that there is this plurality of religious positions and that people who hold different religious views from one's own are not all stupid or wicked or immoral. And this is very close to Rawls' concept of the burdens of judgement, that when someone else arrives at a different conclusion from us we can't just say you're wrong or you're stupid. The free exercise of their reason has led them in one direction; the free exercise of someone else's reason has led them in another direction. So it is not as if for Rawls reason is going to dictate an outcome that everyone will be able to agree upon. When you take this insight into account in order to respect the freedom and equality of other people you have to acknowledge that plurality of thinking, that diversity of thinking that for Rawls as for Taylor will be ineradicable in modern western societies. Only through government oppression could we end that diversity.
Music
Margaret Coffey: We'll return to Charles Taylor in a moment, this time in an explicitly religious vein. But first another gloss on his wonderfully evocative and telling vocabulary. Along with the 'buffered self', and the 'immanent frame', he's come up with the 'ethic of authenticity'.
Ruth Abbey: He argues that the ethic of authenticity is something that is unique to western modernity. This idea that there is, if not a true me, then there is a way of being in the world, that is genuinely mine, that is not bred of conformity, not in any way artificial, that's not in any way based on self deception, this sense of being true to who I am in my own unique fashion. The interesting thing that Taylor does with that is to show that this idea of being true to yourself in your own unique fashion is itself a cultural product. Taylor doesn't run it down for that reason - on the contrary, he's trying to put it into context, show it as a modern development and in many ways he talks about the positive things that have grown out of this ethic of authenticity.
Margaret Coffey: And in his book, A Secular Age, Charles Taylor talks about how this ethic of authenticity imbues religious thinking in the modern world - it has a powerful influence, he says, on the way individuals think about religion. James McEvoy again, talking with Professor Taylor.
James McEvoy: One sentence that I am very fond of in A Secular Age describes the place of religion in the age of authenticity. You say the religious life or practice that I become part of must not only be my choice but it must speak to me, it must make sense in terms of my spiritual development as I understand this. Now clearly this presents some strong challenges in different ways and perhaps we will get to those in a moment. But it seems to me that it captures the perspective of a wide range of believers. It reminds me of perhaps Augustine's most famous line, "You've made us for yourself O God and our hearts are restless until they rest in you." Perhaps the most liberal and the most conservative believer would see their faith as making sense of their spiritual development. Do you see this understanding as a gain?
Charles Taylor: Absolutely. You know, 'cause I mean your quote from Augustine really I think points that up. It touches something very deep in the whole Christian revelation - that it's not about conformity to a single model but it is about communion between people who come to God and to each other through very different paths. This sense of course was always there in the church: you think of all the strange offbeat saints, St Francis, St Ignatius Loyola, and so on who went through extraordinary itinerary including sometimes a very important itinerary in their lives before they became followers of Christ. And you see these itineraries in all their difference converging and somehow these converging but different paths get canonised afterwards. But then the same church that canonises them very often wants to impose total conformity, a single path, on people today. Now, you can open this up in a much more creative way I think if you take the step into an ethic of authenticity - in that sense there is a fuller living of this feature of the Christian tradition. Obviously there are also losses, that lots of people go off in other directions. Now, that's path of the package, but this positive side of the package from a Christian point of view is that this very, very important feature of the whole Christian vision which I try to sum up with the notion of communion of saints, people coming through different itineraries, is finally given its full force, it can finally breath fully in a certain sense in the life of Christians today.
James McEvoy: You've already said that the age of authenticity has a down side for religious traditions, or at least makes some things difficult. I think in the book you say that it can easily lead to trivial spiritual options. I was presenting this picture of religion in the age of authenticity to a staff of a large Catholic school in the West of Adelaide and in response to your sentence about faith making sense of my spiritual development, one very talented and also very committed teacher said some of my students turn to Madonna for spiritual nourishment and they are not thinking about the mother of Jesus. I wonder how you would respond to her.
Charles Taylor: I mean I think two thoughts on that question. Number one, there are gains and losses and this gain is very important. But number two, when you have this kind of real civilisational shift, in which the mindset in which everybody lives changes, you just can't go back to the older forms and the creative response of Christians and of the Church to this is to be part of the process of searchers, sharing their search, to show how much Christian faith is a kind of set of paths of search, as against a set of already given answers before you even ask a question, right? What we have to take from this is a way of speaking to this world rather than trying to roll it back to what it was before 1800, which apart from the fact that it would forgo the important gains, is actually utterly impossible.
James McEvoy: It seems to me an implication of that is that it's not that you are implying that the Gospel is any less important or that we have to shear off different aspects of it, but that we have to find a new way to proclaim it in this age.
Charles Taylor: This is something that again points up what was always there, that is that there are all these different paths. Astonishingly enough in a very early part of the modern period before the West got really arrogant in the 19th century, there were missionaries, Jesuit missionaries for instance Matteo Ricci in China and De'Nobili in India in China who had this idea well that the faith is not something that belongs to Western civilisation, it is something, people come at it from all these different directions, and we have to help the people here find their own very different path. Now in a certain sense that is already multiculturalism and in a certain sense it is the same spirit behind the notion of authenticity. So, a germ that was there has now really flourished in the 20th and 21st century in the West. This is not to say that we are compromising or shearing off parts of the Christian faith but we are finding a way for very different people to come together in it.
Margaret Coffey: On ABC Radio National's Encounter, you've been listening to Charles Taylor emerge as a philosopher who is a religious person. Two things you've gathered about Taylor that are important: he's from Quebec, and he is religious.
Ruth Abbey: He grew up in a bilingual and bicultural family and so this has given him not only a bifocal way of thinking about language and meaning and so forth. And this made him a mediator, someone always looking for common ground between the two, and this has been a powerful motif in all of his philosophical thinking. And he does this in A Secular Age when he talks about people who are absolutely religiously committed and people who are absolutely committed to the reality of atheism and he tries to show that these two groups have more in common in their style of thinking than either would really like to recognise.
Until the publication of A Secular Age, many people would have read Taylor's work not knowing that he was a Catholic. It wasn't relevant to the issues that he discussed, it didn't come out in his arguments. It began slowly with the end of his 1989 book Sources of the Self when in the last pages of that work he ponders whether the very demanding ethics that we have these days of universal solidarity can be sustained without some sort of religious underpinnings. But it is most powerfully evident in this work A Secular Age. It is not typical for philosophers to come out with statements of their religious positions so Taylor was taking some risks.
Margaret Coffey: So, finally, Charles Taylor on the religious perspective. Here's James McEvoy putting the question.
James McEvoy: In the book you draw a contrast between two different understandings of human fulfilment - what you call the immanence perspective and the transformation perspective. And you are saying there that this secular age is in a sense less hospitable to the transformation perspective. I should be more clear about those two perspectives: the immanence perspective and the transformation perspective where human flourishing is seen in the very goods of human life like family or community or career, and the transformation perspective where good is found in a God who is way beyond human flourishing. I think your argument is that the secular age itself is less hospitable to the transformation perspective. It is difficult to open the immanent frame, to use another of your images.
Charles Taylor: Yeh it is hard to say just what I wanted to say there because in a certain sense that is true - I mean the very fact that we have this notion of a self sufficient immanent world - which you know people in the middle ages wouldn't have understood what you meant because everywhere the forces of spirits and so on, of God, are working so that it isn't a self-contained world - but the fact that we can live in this world can be an invitation to some people to think well there is nothing beyond it. And that means that not only, you know, there isn't a God but this notion of transformation, we can't expect people to transform themselves beyond what it would mean to be a good citizen, a good lover of one's family, a benevolent human being and so on. The kinds of extraordinary transformation we find in a Francis of Assisi would make us uneasy as it made David Hume uneasy in the 18th century - this is not possible and if you try to do this kind of thing you are going to not only break your teeth but you are going to take on some kind of terrible self-distortion. So, the possibility of becoming really in a certain sense sanctified and the sense that that is not possible, that we have got to keep our sights low, these two reactions just grind against each other in our world. And in a certain sense it's easier to take the immanent perspective today, but in another sense a lot of people feel a tremendous hunger out of that. See, every one of these things works in both ways. The sense of being enclosed in the immanent world is for some people a comfort and for other people a sense of imprisonment. So how does it all add up: it is harder, is it less hard? Well in different ways it is each.
James McEvoy: Something about hope Charles: the book seems an immensely hopeful work - it is an immense work that draw together philosophical and historical perspectives as well as those of social and political theory and sees itself as giving an adequate, a good account of each of those, which is just an amazing task. Yet it is also immensely hopeful. I wonder what kind of hope does your view of the place of religion offer.
Charles Taylor: I think it is a strong but, where's the word, limited, I mean it's - that there is always some path further to tread. That's the point, that one can see a new kind of frontier that we have to move on to, this frontier of dialogical, diversified world or church that's still in communion, connecting. Dialogue really requires some sense of communion. If you break any sense of commonality with your interlocutor then the dialogue is over, right. So, there is this movement that we can make to open up something that is perpetually in danger of being closed in our world, being closed not only by very narrow definitions of the church's function but being closed by various kinds of narrow negation of God altogether. So, the hope that there is always some further direction to walk in, there is always some further road to move, that we are not at the end point, that - it's in a way obvious to me. But why limited? Because how far will this go? How much will this produce, how much evil will this actually avoid right now, all the terrible things going on and so on, I just don't know. You have to just in this sense take this road and hope that it produces certain good effects, which it may not.
Margaret Coffey: And you take this road, Charles Taylor says, through dialogue.
Charles Taylor: The stance of dialogue is really a stance where you recognise that there very likely is something deep and powerful that makes some kind of sense in animating the lives of other people. I mean there also can be moves towards evil and so on that you plainly see but there can also be something you don't understand now but it is there and you really want to understand it. It is that kind of opening to the possibility which makes all the difference. And then when you can get an interlocutor who has the similar reciprocal stance, it is extraordinary how things change. In two ways: I mean one, you throw away the crutch of supporting your own faith by looking on that person as being some kind of depraved figure, and that itself does you immense amount of good because faith only grows through living in the doubts. And secondly, you do discover that there are things there you never suspected, but that are really quite remarkable, that there is a kind of complementarity between yourself and those others, even people from very different religious perspectives, atheists and so on. This stance can open up something and open up into a kind of friendship across these barriers where you both know you have gained tremendously from the exchange and there is a sense of solidarity in this, which is again from the Christian point of view, is what life is all about. Life is about communion across distances.
So you get the sense that something very new and very creative is happening here.
Music
Margaret Coffey: This has been Encounter - Charles Taylor and A Secular Age. My thanks to Charles Taylor, and to Ruth Abbey and James McEvoy. Professor Taylor is the Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at McGill University in Montreal. Rev Dr James McEvoy is a theologian who teaches at Adelaide's Catholic Theological College and at Flinders University. Associate Professor Ruth Abbey teaches in the political science department of Notre Dame University in the United States and she is also the curator of a web-based Charles Taylor bibliography. She has written and edited studies of Charles Taylor's philosophical thinking. You'll find a transcript of this program at Radio National abc.net.au/rn - just locate Encounter. Along with the transcript there'll be further information about each of the participants, book references and interesting weblinks. Charles Taylor's subtle ideas bear another listening session .. so don't forget the podcast version - at Encounter, on Radio National, abc.net.au. Technical production of this program was by Chris Lawson. I'm Margaret Coffey.
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/encounter/stories/2009/2671691.htm#transcript
27 August 2009
What is patriotism?
This is the anchored and nuanced community patriotism that springs from the central paradox of human freedom, which is, according to Durant, that it can arise only out of the rule of law. Civilisation is the contract with fellow citizens that sets us free (within parameters)....
It was the Law that gave us our high estate via the idiosyncratic Brits and complete accident. The Lessons of History suggest that our soceity will thrive only to the extent that we show each other respect, are slow to judge and confine our arguments to the cool terms of our collective common good.
Clearly I related to this peice, then, which you can hear here.
A young Australian academic wants to redefine Australian patriotism and he's approached the subject from the point of view of Australia's most recent arrivals.
Tim Soutphommasane is 26. His parents were Chinese and Laotian, he was born in Paris, and he grew up in Sydney's southwest suburbs. He's just spent three years at Oxford, doing a PhD, and his book, Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation Building for Progressives, is published next week.
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Patriotism doesn't have to be about cultural superiority. It doesn't have to be about racism. It can be a very positive sentiment that binds citizens together and motivates them for improving their community.
MARK COLVIN: So how do you distinguish these two types of patriotism?
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Well that's the challenge I think. I think progressives or liberals in Australia in recent years have been content to sit back and allow conservatives and reactionaries to claim the language of national values and I think progressives and liberals really sold themselves short there.
They never actually tried to articulate and alternative to what I see as the two strands of patriotism that have emerged in recent years and they are 1) the narcissistic strand of patriotism that is associated for instance with tattooing your body with the southern cross or draping yourself in the national flag and 2) the neo-conservative strand of patriotism that you see for example on the right when they belief that patriotism has to involve a missionary pursuit of Judeo-Christian values.
MARK COLVIN: Why do you associate it with the right? I mean, it was Dr Johnson who was high Tory of the 18th century who said that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Feelings of patriotism in Australia haven't always been associated with the right. I think there's a very long left-wing tradition for instance of radical nationalism. Don't forget values of egalitarianism, mateship and the fair go have always been tinged with a very left-wing nationalistic flavour, until recently.
I think John Howard was very effective in seizing this territory from the traditional left during his prime ministership with his form of Anzac nationalism so I don't think it's always been that case, the case that patriotism has been of the right, but it certainly is the state of play at the moment.
MARK COLVIN: All right but we are a multicultural society and inevitably that means that you've got some people who call themselves Australian but who barrack for the English cricket team or still count themselves a bit Greek when it comes to the soccer or, you know, people have dual-allegiances. How are you going to ask them to suddenly be patriotic?
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Well I think there is room for difference within patriotic sense of national identity and that's a nuance that hasn't always been articulated convincingly. Where I start is civic values.
I think when people think of patriotism, they think that you have to love meat pies, you have to drink VB, you have to love sport. But they're very superficial things. They're lifestyle components of Australia.
But I want to focus on civic values and I guess being Australian in my view means taking very seriously things like the fair go, egalitarianism and mateship and those values don't just exit in vacuum but exit in a context of a very discrete, national history.
I think Australians tell stories very well but we don't get our civic stories right all the time. Our civic history might not have the same flair or flamboyance as the Americans say. We weren't born of a revolution but I think there's a very distinguished and sober record of democracy as well that's worth celebrating and I want to shift the emphasis back on those aspects of the national history and the national story.
MARK COLVIN: There are some people in this country who have come here really to get away from nationalism. I think about people from the Balkans for instance. What wouldn't they be suspicious of any project that says, "let's be more nationalistic".
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Well I think their suspicions are quite often very well grounded. I think the mistake is to think however, that a love of humanity or that cosmopolitanism will be enough. Stories and communities still count, not least national ones and I always say to people we don't for example see our politicians speaking to us in Esperanto but they speak to us in a national language appealing to a discrete national history in order to motivate citizens
The real challenge is really to get the balance right and I think there is a possibility of a moderate, liberal patriotism or national pride that we can celebrate. But I certainly don't want to deny that there are instances such as the Balkans where nationalistic excess have ended in bloodshed. That's not the kind of nationalism I would like to defend.
MARK COLVIN: From the peace movement to the globalisation supporters, from left to right, there is a stream of thought that says that nations themselves are, should vanish away, that we are international, that we are a world community.
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: What do I think of that? Well I think that yes, there has been a movement towards globalisation but that doesn't mean that the nation state has already been superseded. We still live in a world of nation states. The big decisions affecting us are made primarily by national governments. Our democracy takes a national flavour. We can't run away from that and I think there is a need for a dose of sociological realism if you will in these debates.
MARK COLVIN: So this is about civic virtue for you? Where do you start to build that in the society?
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Well a lot I think depends on getting the language of leadership right. I think liberals and progressives in Australia have a great opportunity at the moment to build a new social contract for the 21st century. But that requires a consensus for reform.
I think Kevin Rudd has shown us that he's a very philosophically engaged leader but I think there's an opportunity for him here to engage in a new cultural narrative and to articulate a vision of citizenship.
MARK COLVIN: Surely you just can't do this with politics though?
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Well of course not but I think...
MARK COLVIN: If you're talking about patriotism, it's got to imbue the society or it won't mean anything.
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: No indeed. But the starting point I think must rest in politics. Language and debates percolate from the top down I think. But I think with a dose of cultural leadership, we will see a more diffuse debate at large among Australians.
I think this really is a debate that Australians have wanted to have for a long time and it's a debate that isn't stuck I think in the old paradigm of left and right. I think we're talking really about a new generational debate here.
MARK COLVIN: Tim Soutphommasane whose book, Reclaiming Patriotism, Nation Building for Progressives is published next week.
It was the Law that gave us our high estate via the idiosyncratic Brits and complete accident. The Lessons of History suggest that our soceity will thrive only to the extent that we show each other respect, are slow to judge and confine our arguments to the cool terms of our collective common good.
Clearly I related to this peice, then, which you can hear here.
A young Australian academic wants to redefine Australian patriotism and he's approached the subject from the point of view of Australia's most recent arrivals.
Tim Soutphommasane is 26. His parents were Chinese and Laotian, he was born in Paris, and he grew up in Sydney's southwest suburbs. He's just spent three years at Oxford, doing a PhD, and his book, Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation Building for Progressives, is published next week.
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Patriotism doesn't have to be about cultural superiority. It doesn't have to be about racism. It can be a very positive sentiment that binds citizens together and motivates them for improving their community.
MARK COLVIN: So how do you distinguish these two types of patriotism?
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Well that's the challenge I think. I think progressives or liberals in Australia in recent years have been content to sit back and allow conservatives and reactionaries to claim the language of national values and I think progressives and liberals really sold themselves short there.
They never actually tried to articulate and alternative to what I see as the two strands of patriotism that have emerged in recent years and they are 1) the narcissistic strand of patriotism that is associated for instance with tattooing your body with the southern cross or draping yourself in the national flag and 2) the neo-conservative strand of patriotism that you see for example on the right when they belief that patriotism has to involve a missionary pursuit of Judeo-Christian values.
MARK COLVIN: Why do you associate it with the right? I mean, it was Dr Johnson who was high Tory of the 18th century who said that patriotism was the last refuge of the scoundrel.
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Feelings of patriotism in Australia haven't always been associated with the right. I think there's a very long left-wing tradition for instance of radical nationalism. Don't forget values of egalitarianism, mateship and the fair go have always been tinged with a very left-wing nationalistic flavour, until recently.
I think John Howard was very effective in seizing this territory from the traditional left during his prime ministership with his form of Anzac nationalism so I don't think it's always been that case, the case that patriotism has been of the right, but it certainly is the state of play at the moment.
MARK COLVIN: All right but we are a multicultural society and inevitably that means that you've got some people who call themselves Australian but who barrack for the English cricket team or still count themselves a bit Greek when it comes to the soccer or, you know, people have dual-allegiances. How are you going to ask them to suddenly be patriotic?
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Well I think there is room for difference within patriotic sense of national identity and that's a nuance that hasn't always been articulated convincingly. Where I start is civic values.
I think when people think of patriotism, they think that you have to love meat pies, you have to drink VB, you have to love sport. But they're very superficial things. They're lifestyle components of Australia.
But I want to focus on civic values and I guess being Australian in my view means taking very seriously things like the fair go, egalitarianism and mateship and those values don't just exit in vacuum but exit in a context of a very discrete, national history.
I think Australians tell stories very well but we don't get our civic stories right all the time. Our civic history might not have the same flair or flamboyance as the Americans say. We weren't born of a revolution but I think there's a very distinguished and sober record of democracy as well that's worth celebrating and I want to shift the emphasis back on those aspects of the national history and the national story.
MARK COLVIN: There are some people in this country who have come here really to get away from nationalism. I think about people from the Balkans for instance. What wouldn't they be suspicious of any project that says, "let's be more nationalistic".
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Well I think their suspicions are quite often very well grounded. I think the mistake is to think however, that a love of humanity or that cosmopolitanism will be enough. Stories and communities still count, not least national ones and I always say to people we don't for example see our politicians speaking to us in Esperanto but they speak to us in a national language appealing to a discrete national history in order to motivate citizens
The real challenge is really to get the balance right and I think there is a possibility of a moderate, liberal patriotism or national pride that we can celebrate. But I certainly don't want to deny that there are instances such as the Balkans where nationalistic excess have ended in bloodshed. That's not the kind of nationalism I would like to defend.
MARK COLVIN: From the peace movement to the globalisation supporters, from left to right, there is a stream of thought that says that nations themselves are, should vanish away, that we are international, that we are a world community.
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: What do I think of that? Well I think that yes, there has been a movement towards globalisation but that doesn't mean that the nation state has already been superseded. We still live in a world of nation states. The big decisions affecting us are made primarily by national governments. Our democracy takes a national flavour. We can't run away from that and I think there is a need for a dose of sociological realism if you will in these debates.
MARK COLVIN: So this is about civic virtue for you? Where do you start to build that in the society?
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Well a lot I think depends on getting the language of leadership right. I think liberals and progressives in Australia have a great opportunity at the moment to build a new social contract for the 21st century. But that requires a consensus for reform.
I think Kevin Rudd has shown us that he's a very philosophically engaged leader but I think there's an opportunity for him here to engage in a new cultural narrative and to articulate a vision of citizenship.
MARK COLVIN: Surely you just can't do this with politics though?
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: Well of course not but I think...
MARK COLVIN: If you're talking about patriotism, it's got to imbue the society or it won't mean anything.
TIM SOUTPHOMMASANE: No indeed. But the starting point I think must rest in politics. Language and debates percolate from the top down I think. But I think with a dose of cultural leadership, we will see a more diffuse debate at large among Australians.
I think this really is a debate that Australians have wanted to have for a long time and it's a debate that isn't stuck I think in the old paradigm of left and right. I think we're talking really about a new generational debate here.
MARK COLVIN: Tim Soutphommasane whose book, Reclaiming Patriotism, Nation Building for Progressives is published next week.
24 August 2009
Taleb ~ a real actual hyper-conservative
I'm reading Taleb now. He is a philosopher and a big thinker. Being a Popperian sceptical empiracist myself, the idea of the man signing off on the the bullshit that passes from the nexus between banking and politics, not to mention climate change denial, is absurd. Hat tip to Duncan.
LETTER TO THE GUARDIAN ---
Dear sirs,
I am extremely honored to see my conversation with MP David Cameron at the RSA so repeatedly covered in your paper. However I was astonished by the representations that you made as they were in complete reverse to my positions on three subjects: the environment, market crashes, and taxation of the rich.
1) Climate Change. I am hyper-conservative ecologically (meaning super-Green). My position on the climate is to avoid releasing pollutants in the atmosphere, regardless of current expert opinion (climate experts, like banking risk managers, have failed us in the past in foreseeing long term damages and I cannot accept certainty in a certain class of nonlinear models). This is an extension of my general idea that one does not need rationalization with the use of complicated models (by fallible experts) to the edict: "do not disturb a complex system" since we do not know the consequences of our actions owing to complicated causal webs. (Incidentally, this ideas also makes me anti-war). I explicitly explained the need to “leave the planet the way we got it” .
Instead, I, a super -Green was presented as a “climate-change denier” (Lucy Mangan), and my environmental views summarized by “Climate change is not man-made” (Nicholas Watts).
2) Crashes. By some coincidence I spoke at the same venue, the RSA, some 30 months earlier, way before the current crash, as part of my crusade against the risk of financial collapse and the need to robustify society. I find it depressing that the British public could have saved several trillion pounds and hundreds of thousands of jobs had they minded these hidden risks in the system. My position is that a robust system needs to produce frequent crashes, with citizens immune to them, rather than infrequent total collapse, for which we have no robustness. By constraining cycles and assuming “no more boom and bust” (as your current government did) you end up with a very large bust –and I am sure that I do not need more events like the most recent crisis to prove the point.
Instead, the anti-Black Swan crusader was portrayed as someone who “loves crashes” (Nicholas Watts and Lucy Mangan). Go figure.
3) Social Fairness. I spent 13 years fighting bankers bonuses (when nobody else did) and am currently crusading for bankers clawbacks as I have shown how regular taxpayers have been financing bonuses of millionaire bankers (“socialism for the losses, capitalism for the profits”). I said explicitly during the meeting that we are financing today those who got us here, with tax hikes on those who do the right thing, and larger tax break for those who blew us up. Companies who made mistakes and fragilized the system are being financed by the countercyclical ones who make it more robust.
Instead, I was quite shocked to see the headline “David Cameron's guru Nassim Nicholas Taleb says rich should not pay more tax to help the poor”. This transformation of my ideas by Nicholas Watts is extremely wicked.
The depressing part is that nowhere does your paper discuss my central idea, that the risks that were there 30 months ago are still there now, and that unless we lower debt to “definancialize” the economy (instead of increasing deficits through stimulus) we face more risks of blowups.
As someone trying to be systematic thinker with a body of work around these risk management ideas --not a politician with ad hoc opinions -- the game of selective (and aggressively biased) quoting does not work very well. With the same game one could easily make Karl Marx an apologist of capitalism and Adam Smith a promoter of communism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, PhD.
Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, New York University, principal, Universa LP, and author, The Black Swan
PREVIOUS COMMENTS
Culprits (journalists I despise): Guardian (Nicholas Watt), Scotsman (Gerri Peev). How can I ever believe what they write about some other thinker I have never read? How? How?
Perhaps the worst of this story is the fan mail I’ve been getting from right-wing anti-environmentalists.
LETTER TO THE GUARDIAN ---
Dear sirs,
I am extremely honored to see my conversation with MP David Cameron at the RSA so repeatedly covered in your paper. However I was astonished by the representations that you made as they were in complete reverse to my positions on three subjects: the environment, market crashes, and taxation of the rich.
1) Climate Change. I am hyper-conservative ecologically (meaning super-Green). My position on the climate is to avoid releasing pollutants in the atmosphere, regardless of current expert opinion (climate experts, like banking risk managers, have failed us in the past in foreseeing long term damages and I cannot accept certainty in a certain class of nonlinear models). This is an extension of my general idea that one does not need rationalization with the use of complicated models (by fallible experts) to the edict: "do not disturb a complex system" since we do not know the consequences of our actions owing to complicated causal webs. (Incidentally, this ideas also makes me anti-war). I explicitly explained the need to “leave the planet the way we got it” .
Instead, I, a super -Green was presented as a “climate-change denier” (Lucy Mangan), and my environmental views summarized by “Climate change is not man-made” (Nicholas Watts).
2) Crashes. By some coincidence I spoke at the same venue, the RSA, some 30 months earlier, way before the current crash, as part of my crusade against the risk of financial collapse and the need to robustify society. I find it depressing that the British public could have saved several trillion pounds and hundreds of thousands of jobs had they minded these hidden risks in the system. My position is that a robust system needs to produce frequent crashes, with citizens immune to them, rather than infrequent total collapse, for which we have no robustness. By constraining cycles and assuming “no more boom and bust” (as your current government did) you end up with a very large bust –and I am sure that I do not need more events like the most recent crisis to prove the point.
Instead, the anti-Black Swan crusader was portrayed as someone who “loves crashes” (Nicholas Watts and Lucy Mangan). Go figure.
3) Social Fairness. I spent 13 years fighting bankers bonuses (when nobody else did) and am currently crusading for bankers clawbacks as I have shown how regular taxpayers have been financing bonuses of millionaire bankers (“socialism for the losses, capitalism for the profits”). I said explicitly during the meeting that we are financing today those who got us here, with tax hikes on those who do the right thing, and larger tax break for those who blew us up. Companies who made mistakes and fragilized the system are being financed by the countercyclical ones who make it more robust.
Instead, I was quite shocked to see the headline “David Cameron's guru Nassim Nicholas Taleb says rich should not pay more tax to help the poor”. This transformation of my ideas by Nicholas Watts is extremely wicked.
The depressing part is that nowhere does your paper discuss my central idea, that the risks that were there 30 months ago are still there now, and that unless we lower debt to “definancialize” the economy (instead of increasing deficits through stimulus) we face more risks of blowups.
As someone trying to be systematic thinker with a body of work around these risk management ideas --not a politician with ad hoc opinions -- the game of selective (and aggressively biased) quoting does not work very well. With the same game one could easily make Karl Marx an apologist of capitalism and Adam Smith a promoter of communism.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, PhD.
Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, New York University, principal, Universa LP, and author, The Black Swan
PREVIOUS COMMENTS
Culprits (journalists I despise): Guardian (Nicholas Watt), Scotsman (Gerri Peev). How can I ever believe what they write about some other thinker I have never read? How? How?
Perhaps the worst of this story is the fan mail I’ve been getting from right-wing anti-environmentalists.
why money is collapsing and why central banks need adult supervision
Hat Tip Taichi
Introduction: Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the money trust." She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Brown developed an interest in the developing world and its problems while living abroad for eleven years in Kenya, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. She returned to practicing law when she was asked to join the legal team of a popular Tijuana healer with an innovative cancer therapy, who was targeted by the chemotherapy industry in the 1990s. That experience produced her book Forbidden Medicine, which traces the suppression of natural health treatments to the same corrupting influences that have captured the money system. Brown's eleven books include the bestselling Nature's Pharmacy, co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker, which has sold 285,000 copies.
Daily Bell: Nice to meet you.
Brown: My pleasure!
Daily Bell: Nice to meet you.
Brown: My pleasure!
Daily Bell: Can you tell us your book's thesis in a nutshell?
Brown: Our money is an illusion. Except for coins, which compose only one ten-thousandth of the money supply, all of our money today consists of debt to private banks. Banks always take back more money in principal and interest than they put into the money supply as principal, making the system basically a pyramid scheme. After 300 years, this scheme has spread around the world and has now reached its mathematical limits. The whole world has been captured in the debt trap of a private international banking monopoly.
Daily Bell: These are clearheaded deductions about economics. How did you get interested?
Brown: In my earlier books, which were on health and the politics of health, I saw the pharmaceutical industry as the force to be reckoned with and exposed. I was on the legal team of a Tijuana cancer therapist named Jimmy Keller, who showed Ed Griffin's documentary "World Without Cancer" to all his patients. I read Griffin's book of the same name and realized that the banking, drug and oil cartels were basically the same entities, and that their power came from the power to create money that they had usurped from the people themselves. This was such a mind-boggling insight that I felt I had to write about it.
Daily Bell: How did you make the jump from nutrition to finance?
Brown: My first book was on nutrition but my later books focused on the politics of health and what is wrong with our health care system. I feel we have been misled about drugs and healing, and I wanted to expose that and set it right. After reading "World Without Cancer," I read Ed Griffin's book "The Creature from Jekyll Island," which I thought was great right up to the end; but I felt his solution would not work. I then read other books on the subject and got my grounding in it. I actually got interested in writing on economics and the Federal Reserve in the seventies, but that was before the Internet, and I wasn't able to follow my hunches to the end. When that remarkable tool became available, the missing puzzle pieces fell into place and I could see the larger picture and had to write about it.
Daily Bell: Tell us some more about your background, where you grew up and when you traveled.
Brown: I was born in California, grew up in the Detroit and Denver suburbs, graduated from UC Berkeley in English and then from UCLA Law School. I met my husband Cliff in law school, and we worked as attorneys in L.A. for 10 years (11 for him), until he burned out on Beverly Hills law and decided to join the U.S. Agency for International Development. He always wanted to go abroad, and it gave me a chance to write and have more time with the kids (we have two). From 1989 to 2000, we lived in Kenya, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Then I got divorced and returned to the States, where I discovered this most interesting of writing subjects. I'm still good friends with my ex; I just ran out of topics overseas! There was more to it than that, of course, but I do feel I had to come back to the States to find this topic du jour. My daughter now works for a U.N. N.G.O. and my son is a graduate student in economics in Michigan.
Daily Bell: What's been the reaction to your book?
Brown: Remarkably good. I get flooded with email, which is great. With my other books, I didn't have much contact with readers and felt like a ghostwriter. With this one, I feel like a lightning rod, attracting ideas from everywhere. I credit it to the Internet, an amazing historical development that has changed the game worldwide.
Daily Bell: Are you familiar with Austrian finance? What do you think of it?
Brown: I am, and I enjoyed reading Murray Rothbard; but I don't think the Quantity Theory of Money is correct. Prices do not benignly adjust to a contraction in the money supply; this has been shown historically. When the money supply contracts, workers get laid off, businesses shut down, and the economy goes into a recession or a depression. It's a fallacy to think you can control prices by controlling the money supply - or even that you can control the money supply ("you" meaning, of course, the central bank). In the 1970s and 1980s, when Milton Friedman's monetarism was popular, attempts were made to regulate prices by regulating the money supply, and they didn't work. Some major recessions resulted, and Third World countries got locked hopelessly in debt from a radical increase in interest rates, but the money supply couldn't be controlled.
The Federal Reserve doesn't create money; banks do. The Federal Reserve just responds by providing the reserves they need after the fact if they come up short. And adding money to the system doesn't raise prices - not if workers and materials are available to make goods. If you add money to the system, the money will go looking for goods, and merchants will respond by making more. Supply and demand will go up together and prices will remain stable. An increase in interest rates is more likely to raise prices. Merchants raise their prices to cover their costs, and interest is a major cost.
Daily Bell: Are you a free-market economist or something else?
Brown: I believe in free markets, but I don't believe we have them today. Virtually every market now is manipulated and controlled. We lost our free markets when we gave away the power to create money to a private banking elite. They got their power through sleight of hand, and it can be reversed only by reversing the sleight of hand. Ironically, to get back our free markets, we need some government intervention. The economy has been captured by thieves, and we need some rules and regulations to put the genie back in the bottle.
Daily Bell: What's wrong with a gold or silver monetary system?
Brown: To answer that question properly will take more than a few sentences, but I'll try to be succinct. There are three ways a precious metal system could be set up: (1) a "gold-backed" fiat currency, of the sort we had until 1933 domestically and until 1971 internationally; (2) 100% gold coins, as Ed Griffin recommends; or (3) gold, silver and anything else trading freely with dollars, as recommended by Ron Paul.
The first alternative failed historically and doesn't work mathematically. Nixon had to take the dollar off the gold standard internationally after DeGaulle traded in his dollars for gold and the British then tried to trade in theirs, and the U.S. was about to run out of gold. In a "fractional reserve" system, only a fraction of the gold necessary to cash in all the dollars "backed" by gold is actually held in the banks' vaults. When people figure that out, you get runs on the banks and the banks have to close their doors. Roosevelt was faced with the same problem. People had panicked and were trading in their dollars for gold at the banks. The dollar was then 40% backed by gold, so whenever anyone cashed in $2 in paper money, $3 in loans had to be called in. The result was a radical collapse in the money supply.
Option #2, an all-gold currency, won't work for a number of reasons, but I'll just mention one: where are you going to get the gold? To be fair, the government would have to swap all the dollars in the money supply for gold. Assume a $13 trillion money supply (M3) and that there is $4 trillion worth of gold in the world (per the last report I saw). Even if you could acquire every penny's worth of gold, you'd have to revalue the gold so that it was worth $3000/ounce. Goldbugs say that's doable, but here's my question: how are you going to get the gold? What are you going to buy it with? Your paper dollars are going to be worthless. What Indian woman wearing that gold around her neck is going to be foolish enough to trade it for your paper dollars?
Ed Griffin would just divide the outstanding money supply by the gold in Fort Knox, but we don't know if there's any gold left in Fort Knox, and even assuming there is, the dollar value per ounce is going to be so far from anything resembling the real market value of gold that tying the dollar to gold will lose all meaning. If you want a fixed money supply, why not just have Congress order up X number of dollars, forbid any more to be issued, and make it illegal for banks to create credit on their books? Let them lend what they have and no more. Even that won't work though; you'll quickly degenerate into recession or depression, because there won't be enough money for innovation, development and the like. The ability to create and extend credit is a good thing and is necessary to a thriving economy. It's just a question of who gets to create it, private banks (which then proceed to charge interest on it that they siphon off the top as profits) or public banks, drawing on the "full faith and credit of the United States" because they are the United States and can return the profits to the United States, maintaining a mathematically sound system?
The third idea - allowing people to trade in any currency they want - doesn't solve anything and just creates new problems. What's the exchange rate going to be between these various domestic currencies, and who is going to set it? Are you going to allow shortselling between currencies, derivative bets, etc.? If you have silver and gold coins trading together, what happens if gold goes up in value relative to silver? Will you have to change the face value of the coins? They could be left unstamped, but then you won't really have coins; you'll just have round gold bars. Then why not just keep your gold bars and sell them for paper dollars as needed? If the paper dollars lose value, as goldbugs are sure they will, the gold bars will fetch more dollars when sold, so value will have been preserved just as it would have been if the gold were actually turned into gold coins.
Daily Bell: You are somewhat cynical about government, yet your solutions feature government involvement. Can government really be trusted to do the right thing?
Brown: I have faith in the sort of government "of the people, by the people, for the people" described by Abraham Lincoln; but we don't have that now. What we have is government controlled by a few giant corporations, and they got their power by acquiring the power to create the national money supply. "Allow me to issue and control a nation's currency," Amschel Mayer Rothschild allegedly said in the 18th century, "and I care not who makes its laws." That statement may be apocryphal, but that is how they did it, and that is the power we have to get back if we want a just and trustworthy government that represents people rather than wealthy corporations.
Daily Bell: Do you believe in a business cycle - and that central banks aggravate it by printing too much money?
Brown: We had obvious business cycles in the 19th century when we were on the gold standard. Banks would issue banknotes that were many multiples of the gold they held in their vaults, until the paper money supply so far outstripped its backing that people realized the banks could not make good on all their gold-backed notes and there would be runs on the banks. "Fiat money" was not the problem though. The whole system was a ruse. The gold backing allowed private bankers to create paper money on a printing press and lend it at interest, pretending it represented gold the bankers did not really have in their vaults. Privately-issued paper money that is only partially backed by precious metals is a form of counterfeiting whether the sums are prudently managed or not.
Daily Bell: Was central banking over-printing of money the proximate cause of the economic crisis?
Brown: No. Alan Greenspan did lower interest rates to ridiculously low levels in 2001, precipitating the housing bubble that precipitated the current crisis; and he gave his blessing to derivatives, which allowed banks to move loans off their books, package them up, and sell them to investors, making room on their books for more loans and fanning the housing bubble. But it wasn't the central bank that over-printed money. It was the commercial banks, and of course they don't actually "print" it. They just create it as accounting entries on their books. The "crisis" came when there was a sudden shift in accounting rules, from "mark to fantasy" to "mark to market". The idea was to rein in the over exuberance\ of the banks; but the banks were just doing what they had to do to keep the Ponzi scheme going: create ever more loans. The real cause of the crisis was the Ponzi scheme itself: it just ran out of its food source.
Daily Bell: What are the best investments to make throughout the business cycle, and do they change over time?
Brown: They change over time, and because markets are so heavily manipulated, you can't really know what they are unless you're an insider. The rest of us just have to pay very close attention and ride the roller coaster. A case in point was a year ago, when gold was about to break through $1000, oil was hovering near $150/barrel, bank stocks were plummeting, and so was the dollar. Suddenly in July, everything miraculously reversed - the dollar and bank stocks shot up, and gold and oil plunged. What happened? The Japanese central bank later admitted in its local paper that the central banks had colluded to manipulate the markets.
Daily Bell: What do you think of the current economic crisis. Are Western countries handling it well?
Brown: Yes and no. The credit system has collapsed and Western central banks are trying to pump it back up with "quantitative easing," which is a better approach than President Hoover took when he tried to tighten the government's belt and "balance the budget" in the early 1930s. But bailing out the banks is the wrong approach. Governments should be using quantitative easing (essentially money-printing) to build infrastructure and pay the government's bills rather than trying to clean up the toxic books of failed banks. The problem is that the central banks are there to serve the banking system, not the people. We need truly national central banks. England and Canada technically own their central banks, but their governments still borrow from private banks. They don't use their central banks as if they owned them. China, Malaysia, and South Korea do; and they're faring quite well these days.
Daily Bell: Do you believe in the bailouts taking place in America?
Brown: No. We've been extorted into them. We've been made to believe the only way we can save our credit system is to spend our hard-earned taxpayer money to save the banks that got us into the mess, but that's not true. We can set up our own public credit system and let the private parasitic cartel fend for itself. They made billions in the free market; let them go down in the free market.
Daily Bell: Can you explain the genesis of the financial crisis?
Brown: Taking the long view, it's the end of a 300 year Ponzi scheme. Virtually all of our money is created by banks as loans; but banks create only the principal, not the interest necessary to pay their loans back. More is always owed back than is created in the first place, and new borrowers must continually be found to take out new loans to create the money to pay this extra interest. After 300 years, the whole world has been locked in debt, and the parasitic pyramid has run out of its food source.
All sorts of scams and schemes were devised to plunder the last dollar out of borrowers - securitization of subprime mortgages to move them off the banks' books and make room for more, derivatives to supposedly eliminate the risk of subprime default and induce investors to buy, etc. But the schemes have been exposed, and the "shadow lenders" - the investors induced to buy these bundles of subprime debt - have gone away and they aren't coming back any time soon.
The shadow lenders made up $10 trillion worth of the mortgage market. Virtually all of our money consists of credit (or debt), and a big chunk of this credit has disappeared. The money supply is collapsing, and that is what has caused the financial crisis. The solution is to put money back into the system; but the banks can't do it, because the Bank for International Settlements has imposed a tourniquet on lending with the Basel Accords.
We need to set up our own public banks, which cannot run short of "the full faith and credit of the United States" because they ARE the United States (or whatever local government is setting them up). In the U.S., we should nationalize the Federal Reserve and let it operate like a real government-owned bank, issuing money and credit on behalf of the public for infrastructure and other government expenditures. States could also set up their own credit mechanisms by setting up their own banks.
Daily Bell: Do you believe that some of your ideas will be taken up officially?
Brown: I keep trying, knocking at any doors I see; but it's a slow-moving machine. The first step is mass education and popular understanding.
Daily Bell: Have you heard from Wall Street about your ideas?
Brown: No.
Daily Bell: Are you at all worried about the reaction to your ideas?
Brown: I try to suggest solutions that are good for everyone. I think the private banking business has actually come to the end of the line. They're scrambling desperately to hold it all together, but there's not much more they can do. The whole multi-trillion dollar derivatives edifice was constructed in an attempt to bring business back that the banks were losing to their competitor non-bank institutions, but it didn't work in the end. I think the bankers might be relieved to pass the baton. Not that they want to lose their existing fortunes, but they might be ready to retire to their favorite islands and let the next generation tackle the problem; or to take jobs exercising their expertise in a new public banking arrangement with the stable backing of the government.
Daily Bell: You do a great deal of public speaking. What do you emphasize most in your talks?
Brown: Solutions, solutions, solutions. This nut can be cracked. We've been looking at the problem wrong. When we step outside the box and look again, it's all quite simple. Truth is simple.
Daily Bell: What are the most important - seminal -- articles of yours that you would encourage everyone to read? Where can they be found?
Brown: My articles can all be found on my website at WebofDebt.com. I try to write one every week or two, and they're quite topical, but the most popular (per the OpEdNews ratings) have been "It's the Derivatives, Stupid!", written in September 2008 after the Lehman/AIG collapse; "Borrowing from Peter to Pay Paul: The Wall Street Ponzi Scheme Called Fractional Reserve Banking" (December 29, 2008); and "Toward a Solution to the Debt Crisis in California" (July 13, 2009). My latest article is "The Public Option in Banking: How We Can Beat Wall Street at Its Own Game" (August 8, 2009), posted on the Huffington Post among other places.
Daily Bell: On behalf of all of our readers we thank you for sharing your views with us - and for your courageous and important work.
Brown: You're welcome. I don't feel courageous; I just write. I live with my 90-year-old mother in a senior village. I need the excitement!
http://www.thedailybell.com/496/Ellen-Brown-Web-of-Debt.html
Introduction: Ellen Brown developed her research skills as an attorney practicing civil litigation in Los Angeles. In Web of Debt, her latest book, she turns those skills to an analysis of the Federal Reserve and "the money trust." She shows how this private cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how we the people can get it back. Brown developed an interest in the developing world and its problems while living abroad for eleven years in Kenya, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. She returned to practicing law when she was asked to join the legal team of a popular Tijuana healer with an innovative cancer therapy, who was targeted by the chemotherapy industry in the 1990s. That experience produced her book Forbidden Medicine, which traces the suppression of natural health treatments to the same corrupting influences that have captured the money system. Brown's eleven books include the bestselling Nature's Pharmacy, co-authored with Dr. Lynne Walker, which has sold 285,000 copies.
Daily Bell: Nice to meet you.
Brown: My pleasure!
Daily Bell: Nice to meet you.
Brown: My pleasure!
Daily Bell: Can you tell us your book's thesis in a nutshell?
Brown: Our money is an illusion. Except for coins, which compose only one ten-thousandth of the money supply, all of our money today consists of debt to private banks. Banks always take back more money in principal and interest than they put into the money supply as principal, making the system basically a pyramid scheme. After 300 years, this scheme has spread around the world and has now reached its mathematical limits. The whole world has been captured in the debt trap of a private international banking monopoly.
Daily Bell: These are clearheaded deductions about economics. How did you get interested?
Brown: In my earlier books, which were on health and the politics of health, I saw the pharmaceutical industry as the force to be reckoned with and exposed. I was on the legal team of a Tijuana cancer therapist named Jimmy Keller, who showed Ed Griffin's documentary "World Without Cancer" to all his patients. I read Griffin's book of the same name and realized that the banking, drug and oil cartels were basically the same entities, and that their power came from the power to create money that they had usurped from the people themselves. This was such a mind-boggling insight that I felt I had to write about it.
Daily Bell: How did you make the jump from nutrition to finance?
Brown: My first book was on nutrition but my later books focused on the politics of health and what is wrong with our health care system. I feel we have been misled about drugs and healing, and I wanted to expose that and set it right. After reading "World Without Cancer," I read Ed Griffin's book "The Creature from Jekyll Island," which I thought was great right up to the end; but I felt his solution would not work. I then read other books on the subject and got my grounding in it. I actually got interested in writing on economics and the Federal Reserve in the seventies, but that was before the Internet, and I wasn't able to follow my hunches to the end. When that remarkable tool became available, the missing puzzle pieces fell into place and I could see the larger picture and had to write about it.
Daily Bell: Tell us some more about your background, where you grew up and when you traveled.
Brown: I was born in California, grew up in the Detroit and Denver suburbs, graduated from UC Berkeley in English and then from UCLA Law School. I met my husband Cliff in law school, and we worked as attorneys in L.A. for 10 years (11 for him), until he burned out on Beverly Hills law and decided to join the U.S. Agency for International Development. He always wanted to go abroad, and it gave me a chance to write and have more time with the kids (we have two). From 1989 to 2000, we lived in Kenya, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Then I got divorced and returned to the States, where I discovered this most interesting of writing subjects. I'm still good friends with my ex; I just ran out of topics overseas! There was more to it than that, of course, but I do feel I had to come back to the States to find this topic du jour. My daughter now works for a U.N. N.G.O. and my son is a graduate student in economics in Michigan.
Daily Bell: What's been the reaction to your book?
Brown: Remarkably good. I get flooded with email, which is great. With my other books, I didn't have much contact with readers and felt like a ghostwriter. With this one, I feel like a lightning rod, attracting ideas from everywhere. I credit it to the Internet, an amazing historical development that has changed the game worldwide.
Daily Bell: Are you familiar with Austrian finance? What do you think of it?
Brown: I am, and I enjoyed reading Murray Rothbard; but I don't think the Quantity Theory of Money is correct. Prices do not benignly adjust to a contraction in the money supply; this has been shown historically. When the money supply contracts, workers get laid off, businesses shut down, and the economy goes into a recession or a depression. It's a fallacy to think you can control prices by controlling the money supply - or even that you can control the money supply ("you" meaning, of course, the central bank). In the 1970s and 1980s, when Milton Friedman's monetarism was popular, attempts were made to regulate prices by regulating the money supply, and they didn't work. Some major recessions resulted, and Third World countries got locked hopelessly in debt from a radical increase in interest rates, but the money supply couldn't be controlled.
The Federal Reserve doesn't create money; banks do. The Federal Reserve just responds by providing the reserves they need after the fact if they come up short. And adding money to the system doesn't raise prices - not if workers and materials are available to make goods. If you add money to the system, the money will go looking for goods, and merchants will respond by making more. Supply and demand will go up together and prices will remain stable. An increase in interest rates is more likely to raise prices. Merchants raise their prices to cover their costs, and interest is a major cost.
Daily Bell: Are you a free-market economist or something else?
Brown: I believe in free markets, but I don't believe we have them today. Virtually every market now is manipulated and controlled. We lost our free markets when we gave away the power to create money to a private banking elite. They got their power through sleight of hand, and it can be reversed only by reversing the sleight of hand. Ironically, to get back our free markets, we need some government intervention. The economy has been captured by thieves, and we need some rules and regulations to put the genie back in the bottle.
Daily Bell: What's wrong with a gold or silver monetary system?
Brown: To answer that question properly will take more than a few sentences, but I'll try to be succinct. There are three ways a precious metal system could be set up: (1) a "gold-backed" fiat currency, of the sort we had until 1933 domestically and until 1971 internationally; (2) 100% gold coins, as Ed Griffin recommends; or (3) gold, silver and anything else trading freely with dollars, as recommended by Ron Paul.
The first alternative failed historically and doesn't work mathematically. Nixon had to take the dollar off the gold standard internationally after DeGaulle traded in his dollars for gold and the British then tried to trade in theirs, and the U.S. was about to run out of gold. In a "fractional reserve" system, only a fraction of the gold necessary to cash in all the dollars "backed" by gold is actually held in the banks' vaults. When people figure that out, you get runs on the banks and the banks have to close their doors. Roosevelt was faced with the same problem. People had panicked and were trading in their dollars for gold at the banks. The dollar was then 40% backed by gold, so whenever anyone cashed in $2 in paper money, $3 in loans had to be called in. The result was a radical collapse in the money supply.
Option #2, an all-gold currency, won't work for a number of reasons, but I'll just mention one: where are you going to get the gold? To be fair, the government would have to swap all the dollars in the money supply for gold. Assume a $13 trillion money supply (M3) and that there is $4 trillion worth of gold in the world (per the last report I saw). Even if you could acquire every penny's worth of gold, you'd have to revalue the gold so that it was worth $3000/ounce. Goldbugs say that's doable, but here's my question: how are you going to get the gold? What are you going to buy it with? Your paper dollars are going to be worthless. What Indian woman wearing that gold around her neck is going to be foolish enough to trade it for your paper dollars?
Ed Griffin would just divide the outstanding money supply by the gold in Fort Knox, but we don't know if there's any gold left in Fort Knox, and even assuming there is, the dollar value per ounce is going to be so far from anything resembling the real market value of gold that tying the dollar to gold will lose all meaning. If you want a fixed money supply, why not just have Congress order up X number of dollars, forbid any more to be issued, and make it illegal for banks to create credit on their books? Let them lend what they have and no more. Even that won't work though; you'll quickly degenerate into recession or depression, because there won't be enough money for innovation, development and the like. The ability to create and extend credit is a good thing and is necessary to a thriving economy. It's just a question of who gets to create it, private banks (which then proceed to charge interest on it that they siphon off the top as profits) or public banks, drawing on the "full faith and credit of the United States" because they are the United States and can return the profits to the United States, maintaining a mathematically sound system?
The third idea - allowing people to trade in any currency they want - doesn't solve anything and just creates new problems. What's the exchange rate going to be between these various domestic currencies, and who is going to set it? Are you going to allow shortselling between currencies, derivative bets, etc.? If you have silver and gold coins trading together, what happens if gold goes up in value relative to silver? Will you have to change the face value of the coins? They could be left unstamped, but then you won't really have coins; you'll just have round gold bars. Then why not just keep your gold bars and sell them for paper dollars as needed? If the paper dollars lose value, as goldbugs are sure they will, the gold bars will fetch more dollars when sold, so value will have been preserved just as it would have been if the gold were actually turned into gold coins.
Daily Bell: You are somewhat cynical about government, yet your solutions feature government involvement. Can government really be trusted to do the right thing?
Brown: I have faith in the sort of government "of the people, by the people, for the people" described by Abraham Lincoln; but we don't have that now. What we have is government controlled by a few giant corporations, and they got their power by acquiring the power to create the national money supply. "Allow me to issue and control a nation's currency," Amschel Mayer Rothschild allegedly said in the 18th century, "and I care not who makes its laws." That statement may be apocryphal, but that is how they did it, and that is the power we have to get back if we want a just and trustworthy government that represents people rather than wealthy corporations.
Daily Bell: Do you believe in a business cycle - and that central banks aggravate it by printing too much money?
Brown: We had obvious business cycles in the 19th century when we were on the gold standard. Banks would issue banknotes that were many multiples of the gold they held in their vaults, until the paper money supply so far outstripped its backing that people realized the banks could not make good on all their gold-backed notes and there would be runs on the banks. "Fiat money" was not the problem though. The whole system was a ruse. The gold backing allowed private bankers to create paper money on a printing press and lend it at interest, pretending it represented gold the bankers did not really have in their vaults. Privately-issued paper money that is only partially backed by precious metals is a form of counterfeiting whether the sums are prudently managed or not.
Daily Bell: Was central banking over-printing of money the proximate cause of the economic crisis?
Brown: No. Alan Greenspan did lower interest rates to ridiculously low levels in 2001, precipitating the housing bubble that precipitated the current crisis; and he gave his blessing to derivatives, which allowed banks to move loans off their books, package them up, and sell them to investors, making room on their books for more loans and fanning the housing bubble. But it wasn't the central bank that over-printed money. It was the commercial banks, and of course they don't actually "print" it. They just create it as accounting entries on their books. The "crisis" came when there was a sudden shift in accounting rules, from "mark to fantasy" to "mark to market". The idea was to rein in the over exuberance\ of the banks; but the banks were just doing what they had to do to keep the Ponzi scheme going: create ever more loans. The real cause of the crisis was the Ponzi scheme itself: it just ran out of its food source.
Daily Bell: What are the best investments to make throughout the business cycle, and do they change over time?
Brown: They change over time, and because markets are so heavily manipulated, you can't really know what they are unless you're an insider. The rest of us just have to pay very close attention and ride the roller coaster. A case in point was a year ago, when gold was about to break through $1000, oil was hovering near $150/barrel, bank stocks were plummeting, and so was the dollar. Suddenly in July, everything miraculously reversed - the dollar and bank stocks shot up, and gold and oil plunged. What happened? The Japanese central bank later admitted in its local paper that the central banks had colluded to manipulate the markets.
Daily Bell: What do you think of the current economic crisis. Are Western countries handling it well?
Brown: Yes and no. The credit system has collapsed and Western central banks are trying to pump it back up with "quantitative easing," which is a better approach than President Hoover took when he tried to tighten the government's belt and "balance the budget" in the early 1930s. But bailing out the banks is the wrong approach. Governments should be using quantitative easing (essentially money-printing) to build infrastructure and pay the government's bills rather than trying to clean up the toxic books of failed banks. The problem is that the central banks are there to serve the banking system, not the people. We need truly national central banks. England and Canada technically own their central banks, but their governments still borrow from private banks. They don't use their central banks as if they owned them. China, Malaysia, and South Korea do; and they're faring quite well these days.
Daily Bell: Do you believe in the bailouts taking place in America?
Brown: No. We've been extorted into them. We've been made to believe the only way we can save our credit system is to spend our hard-earned taxpayer money to save the banks that got us into the mess, but that's not true. We can set up our own public credit system and let the private parasitic cartel fend for itself. They made billions in the free market; let them go down in the free market.
Daily Bell: Can you explain the genesis of the financial crisis?
Brown: Taking the long view, it's the end of a 300 year Ponzi scheme. Virtually all of our money is created by banks as loans; but banks create only the principal, not the interest necessary to pay their loans back. More is always owed back than is created in the first place, and new borrowers must continually be found to take out new loans to create the money to pay this extra interest. After 300 years, the whole world has been locked in debt, and the parasitic pyramid has run out of its food source.
All sorts of scams and schemes were devised to plunder the last dollar out of borrowers - securitization of subprime mortgages to move them off the banks' books and make room for more, derivatives to supposedly eliminate the risk of subprime default and induce investors to buy, etc. But the schemes have been exposed, and the "shadow lenders" - the investors induced to buy these bundles of subprime debt - have gone away and they aren't coming back any time soon.
The shadow lenders made up $10 trillion worth of the mortgage market. Virtually all of our money consists of credit (or debt), and a big chunk of this credit has disappeared. The money supply is collapsing, and that is what has caused the financial crisis. The solution is to put money back into the system; but the banks can't do it, because the Bank for International Settlements has imposed a tourniquet on lending with the Basel Accords.
We need to set up our own public banks, which cannot run short of "the full faith and credit of the United States" because they ARE the United States (or whatever local government is setting them up). In the U.S., we should nationalize the Federal Reserve and let it operate like a real government-owned bank, issuing money and credit on behalf of the public for infrastructure and other government expenditures. States could also set up their own credit mechanisms by setting up their own banks.
Daily Bell: Do you believe that some of your ideas will be taken up officially?
Brown: I keep trying, knocking at any doors I see; but it's a slow-moving machine. The first step is mass education and popular understanding.
Daily Bell: Have you heard from Wall Street about your ideas?
Brown: No.
Daily Bell: Are you at all worried about the reaction to your ideas?
Brown: I try to suggest solutions that are good for everyone. I think the private banking business has actually come to the end of the line. They're scrambling desperately to hold it all together, but there's not much more they can do. The whole multi-trillion dollar derivatives edifice was constructed in an attempt to bring business back that the banks were losing to their competitor non-bank institutions, but it didn't work in the end. I think the bankers might be relieved to pass the baton. Not that they want to lose their existing fortunes, but they might be ready to retire to their favorite islands and let the next generation tackle the problem; or to take jobs exercising their expertise in a new public banking arrangement with the stable backing of the government.
Daily Bell: You do a great deal of public speaking. What do you emphasize most in your talks?
Brown: Solutions, solutions, solutions. This nut can be cracked. We've been looking at the problem wrong. When we step outside the box and look again, it's all quite simple. Truth is simple.
Daily Bell: What are the most important - seminal -- articles of yours that you would encourage everyone to read? Where can they be found?
Brown: My articles can all be found on my website at WebofDebt.com. I try to write one every week or two, and they're quite topical, but the most popular (per the OpEdNews ratings) have been "It's the Derivatives, Stupid!", written in September 2008 after the Lehman/AIG collapse; "Borrowing from Peter to Pay Paul: The Wall Street Ponzi Scheme Called Fractional Reserve Banking" (December 29, 2008); and "Toward a Solution to the Debt Crisis in California" (July 13, 2009). My latest article is "The Public Option in Banking: How We Can Beat Wall Street at Its Own Game" (August 8, 2009), posted on the Huffington Post among other places.
Daily Bell: On behalf of all of our readers we thank you for sharing your views with us - and for your courageous and important work.
Brown: You're welcome. I don't feel courageous; I just write. I live with my 90-year-old mother in a senior village. I need the excitement!
http://www.thedailybell.com/496/Ellen-Brown-Web-of-Debt.html
12 August 2009
StrangeCapitalist, or how I learned to stop worrying and love Zombies
Reprising the dude's work which addresses why a nations dreams and goals must exist apart from its means. Money is mere means and in a perfect world finance would be boring and invisible and apparent only in the enabled ends...
Making money can no more be the authentic central goal of capitalism than the search for pleasure can be the goal of life. The pursuit of pleasure for its own sake is ultimately self defeating because the real purpose of pleasure is to modulate action....
During his campaign for President in 1980, George Bush famously dubbed Ronald Reagan's platform "voodoo economics." He must have been on the right track for in its wake we now see the mythic creations of voodoo doctors walking among us- Zombies.
We have Zombie Banks, Zombie Corporations, a Zombie currency and, if I may go so far, Zombie Economics.
There is, of course, nothing new in this observation. Others have beaten me to the punch. Banks and other corporations which should be dead are still walking, ergo, they are Zombies- blindingly obvious. Yet, just as a miner skilled in deep extraction might buy a vein most think of as "played out" I'm going to deep mine this well used metaphor.
There are many aspects of Zombie lore, from the aforementioned voodoo doctors to the film genre inspired by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. In Romero's Mythos, Zombies don't do the bidding of their voodoo masters. Instead, they shuffle around in search of the living- to eat. Further, the living bitten by a Zombie become Zombies themselves.
Combining the two mythic strands, Reagan's Voodoo Economics, which manifested in the mind of Dick Cheney as "deficits don't matter" created, by allowing debt levels to rise beyond that which which could easily be extinguished in a normal bankruptcy, the Zombie Banks and other corporations which don't serve their creators but instead feed, not on people, but capital, creating more Zombies in the process.
Unlike those in Romero's films, however, we are not trying to rid ourselves of these Zombies. We are incorporating them in our economic policies. Thus we have Zombie Economics.
In a recent round table discussion, George Soros opined: There are two features that I think deserve to be pointed out. One is that the financial system as we know it actually collapsed. After the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, the financial system really ceased to function. It had to be put on artificial life support.
The problem with the "artificial life support" of the financial system is that the voodoo doctors (government regulators) decided to play Frankenstein- a violation of the laws of capitalism as profound as re-animating dead flesh is to the laws of biology- instead of transplanting the dead banks' useful parts into living organisms.
In a sense, the problem begins at birth. To incorporate is to embody, or give substance to. Nature both incorporates the living and ensures that they die. Modern Man, however, at least the American variant thereof, seems loathe to allow its creations to follow suit.
The "creative destruction" aspect of Capitalism has been aptly described as an evolutionary process- the strong procreate and the weak are culled. Within a Capitalist framework, then, zombie corporations have as little place as zombie humans would in real life.
In Romero's films the living are eventually consumed by the zombies and if we are not careful the same could happen to us. Financially mediated trade has risen, flourished, and died many times in human history- e.g. Roman commerce gave way to Dark Age feudalism. I often wonder if the much more recent experience of Mao-ism (a taste, if you will, of feudalism) informs the Chinese perspective of the virtues of financially mediated trade. They seem amazed that we would flirt with such an outcome.
American leadership, reminiscent of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove- perhaps Dr. StrangeCapitalist, or how I learned to stop worrying and love Zombies, would be more apt- now faces the daunting tasks of rewriting the rules of Capitalism and convincing our creditors that Zombies are normal. Most recently, Treasury Secretary Geithner visited China and assured them our Zombie currency (the US$) wouldn't consume the capital they create and store therein.
On the home front, Zombies are not just consuming capital, they are, in a sense, consuming Capitalism.
In an ironic twist worthy of Greek Tragedy, the supposed proponents of free markets who refuse to let bankrupt corporations die are engendering the very regulations they worked so hard to remove. They have forgotten one of the essential aspects of capitalism- free markets cut both ways. You are free to succeed AND free to fail.
Complaints over executive compensation, or even transportation weren't credible until those executives decided to turn their corporations into Zombies instead of letting them die. Bankruptcy and dismemberment are the check and balance of Capitalism. Without that check and balance we are left with Zombie Economics and, apparently ever-increasing regulations. The longer we allow Zombies to walk among us the more intrusive will state regulations become.
There is another, more mundane sense of the word Zombie which also seems to apply to the current situation- a person without an animating force, just going through habitual motions.
This last sense seems to aptly describe the US economy in in the 21st Century. While the Clinton years were not without problems, there was an animating force driving the economy beyond the desire to just "make money"- we were getting on the "information super-highway." Yes, it's a cliché, but it worked. Economic growth was, in a sense, a function of, inter alia, getting the country "wired." While the guys doing the "wiring" were getting rich in the process it, at least to me, seemed as if people were excited about more than just money- they had a dream of a wired world in their minds and they manifested it in the real world.
Could it be that Capitalism which aims solely to make money is indeed soul-less?
I believe so.
This isn't a knock on Capitalism, but rather a recognition that the system is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Policies that aim to re-invigorate growth by re-invigorating growth will likely fail. It seems to me that there needs to be a greater goal to engender durable economic growth, be it the desire to save ourselves from Nazi-ism, pave the country for our new cars or wire it up.
Let me try to explain this view from a different perspective. Finance, per se, creates nothing. Finance used in pursuit of a goal can be extremely helpful so long as the goal is not merely making money (at which point the financial system, as seems obvious, becomes parasitic). Finance, in a sense, is a Zombie requiring an animating force, be it the desire to "go green" (by retooling our transportation and energy production sectors), make America beautiful (by rebuilding infrastructure), or some other desire.
We need, it seems to me, a goal, a dream, or we're just going to keep shuffling around like a Zombie.
http://dharmajoint.blogspot.com/2009/06/zombie-economics.html
Making money can no more be the authentic central goal of capitalism than the search for pleasure can be the goal of life. The pursuit of pleasure for its own sake is ultimately self defeating because the real purpose of pleasure is to modulate action....
During his campaign for President in 1980, George Bush famously dubbed Ronald Reagan's platform "voodoo economics." He must have been on the right track for in its wake we now see the mythic creations of voodoo doctors walking among us- Zombies.
We have Zombie Banks, Zombie Corporations, a Zombie currency and, if I may go so far, Zombie Economics.
There is, of course, nothing new in this observation. Others have beaten me to the punch. Banks and other corporations which should be dead are still walking, ergo, they are Zombies- blindingly obvious. Yet, just as a miner skilled in deep extraction might buy a vein most think of as "played out" I'm going to deep mine this well used metaphor.
There are many aspects of Zombie lore, from the aforementioned voodoo doctors to the film genre inspired by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead. In Romero's Mythos, Zombies don't do the bidding of their voodoo masters. Instead, they shuffle around in search of the living- to eat. Further, the living bitten by a Zombie become Zombies themselves.
Combining the two mythic strands, Reagan's Voodoo Economics, which manifested in the mind of Dick Cheney as "deficits don't matter" created, by allowing debt levels to rise beyond that which which could easily be extinguished in a normal bankruptcy, the Zombie Banks and other corporations which don't serve their creators but instead feed, not on people, but capital, creating more Zombies in the process.
Unlike those in Romero's films, however, we are not trying to rid ourselves of these Zombies. We are incorporating them in our economic policies. Thus we have Zombie Economics.
In a recent round table discussion, George Soros opined: There are two features that I think deserve to be pointed out. One is that the financial system as we know it actually collapsed. After the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 15, the financial system really ceased to function. It had to be put on artificial life support.
The problem with the "artificial life support" of the financial system is that the voodoo doctors (government regulators) decided to play Frankenstein- a violation of the laws of capitalism as profound as re-animating dead flesh is to the laws of biology- instead of transplanting the dead banks' useful parts into living organisms.
In a sense, the problem begins at birth. To incorporate is to embody, or give substance to. Nature both incorporates the living and ensures that they die. Modern Man, however, at least the American variant thereof, seems loathe to allow its creations to follow suit.
The "creative destruction" aspect of Capitalism has been aptly described as an evolutionary process- the strong procreate and the weak are culled. Within a Capitalist framework, then, zombie corporations have as little place as zombie humans would in real life.
In Romero's films the living are eventually consumed by the zombies and if we are not careful the same could happen to us. Financially mediated trade has risen, flourished, and died many times in human history- e.g. Roman commerce gave way to Dark Age feudalism. I often wonder if the much more recent experience of Mao-ism (a taste, if you will, of feudalism) informs the Chinese perspective of the virtues of financially mediated trade. They seem amazed that we would flirt with such an outcome.
American leadership, reminiscent of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove- perhaps Dr. StrangeCapitalist, or how I learned to stop worrying and love Zombies, would be more apt- now faces the daunting tasks of rewriting the rules of Capitalism and convincing our creditors that Zombies are normal. Most recently, Treasury Secretary Geithner visited China and assured them our Zombie currency (the US$) wouldn't consume the capital they create and store therein.
On the home front, Zombies are not just consuming capital, they are, in a sense, consuming Capitalism.
In an ironic twist worthy of Greek Tragedy, the supposed proponents of free markets who refuse to let bankrupt corporations die are engendering the very regulations they worked so hard to remove. They have forgotten one of the essential aspects of capitalism- free markets cut both ways. You are free to succeed AND free to fail.
Complaints over executive compensation, or even transportation weren't credible until those executives decided to turn their corporations into Zombies instead of letting them die. Bankruptcy and dismemberment are the check and balance of Capitalism. Without that check and balance we are left with Zombie Economics and, apparently ever-increasing regulations. The longer we allow Zombies to walk among us the more intrusive will state regulations become.
There is another, more mundane sense of the word Zombie which also seems to apply to the current situation- a person without an animating force, just going through habitual motions.
This last sense seems to aptly describe the US economy in in the 21st Century. While the Clinton years were not without problems, there was an animating force driving the economy beyond the desire to just "make money"- we were getting on the "information super-highway." Yes, it's a cliché, but it worked. Economic growth was, in a sense, a function of, inter alia, getting the country "wired." While the guys doing the "wiring" were getting rich in the process it, at least to me, seemed as if people were excited about more than just money- they had a dream of a wired world in their minds and they manifested it in the real world.
Could it be that Capitalism which aims solely to make money is indeed soul-less?
I believe so.
This isn't a knock on Capitalism, but rather a recognition that the system is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Policies that aim to re-invigorate growth by re-invigorating growth will likely fail. It seems to me that there needs to be a greater goal to engender durable economic growth, be it the desire to save ourselves from Nazi-ism, pave the country for our new cars or wire it up.
Let me try to explain this view from a different perspective. Finance, per se, creates nothing. Finance used in pursuit of a goal can be extremely helpful so long as the goal is not merely making money (at which point the financial system, as seems obvious, becomes parasitic). Finance, in a sense, is a Zombie requiring an animating force, be it the desire to "go green" (by retooling our transportation and energy production sectors), make America beautiful (by rebuilding infrastructure), or some other desire.
We need, it seems to me, a goal, a dream, or we're just going to keep shuffling around like a Zombie.
http://dharmajoint.blogspot.com/2009/06/zombie-economics.html
11 August 2009
Don't ditch that baby! In praise of western civilisation
The West in a Nutshell is a collection of essays that ranges widely from sport to geopolitics. Essayist Paul Monk applauds western literary and philosophical traditions and the encouragement of creativity and conceptual thinking they enabled.
Download audio
Jessica Stern is an expert on terrorism. In this conversation, first broadcast in 2003/4, Jessica talks about her book which is the result of 4 years research, interviewing a range of Jewish, Christian and Muslim terrorists.
Download
I've got to agree with Sheehan in the SMH on the weekend, here, while I think that US policy in the Middle East is flakey and counterproductive and the hardball of the last century left the Arab world with nothing but profound and chauvanistic extremisms to defend their sense of self, I really wonder how the enlightenment project can work in a nation indifferent to the classic social virtue of religious tolerance. In the middle ages Jews and Christian dissidents fled to the safety and tolerance of classic Islamic civilisation, without which the heritage of the Greeks would never have made it to Europe. The Mongols, colonialism, the triumph of the science and the technological revolution the mastery of nature spawned smashed that classic Muslim liberalism. The Americans enabled the rabid antiwestern fundamentalism of the Saudi's and funded a coalition of ratbags to defeat the USSR in Afghanistan.
The last gasp of an unreconstructed tribalism? A reaction to the suppression of political moderation in the arab world? Time will tell.
All five of those arrested on terrorism charges were treated with great generosity by Australia as they set up new lives here. But their behaviour in court has been an exemplar of the problem of reconciling sharia with civil law. One of the accused, Wissam Fattal, refused to stand as the magistrate read out the charges and followed this with a torrent of abuse as he was led out of the court. Another of those charged, Nayef El Sayed, informed the court he would stand for no man, only for his God.
In other words, they accept only sharia, the rest is a charade.
Even the family and supporters of the accused went out of their way to express contempt for the legal system and, by extension, the society it represents. Reporters were called ''faggots'' and ''dickheads'' amid a general attitude of animus recorded by the journalists covering the proceedings.
I have observed the same thing first-hand numerous times during criminal trials involving Muslim defendants, families and supporters.
In every case, the idea that Muslims are in trouble because they have been ''marginalised'' by society is reality turned on its head. They are the ones who have marginalised a society they are happy to exploit but not respect.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/ideological-passion-sells-us-short-20090809-ee65.html?page=-1
Download audio
Jessica Stern is an expert on terrorism. In this conversation, first broadcast in 2003/4, Jessica talks about her book which is the result of 4 years research, interviewing a range of Jewish, Christian and Muslim terrorists.
Download
I've got to agree with Sheehan in the SMH on the weekend, here, while I think that US policy in the Middle East is flakey and counterproductive and the hardball of the last century left the Arab world with nothing but profound and chauvanistic extremisms to defend their sense of self, I really wonder how the enlightenment project can work in a nation indifferent to the classic social virtue of religious tolerance. In the middle ages Jews and Christian dissidents fled to the safety and tolerance of classic Islamic civilisation, without which the heritage of the Greeks would never have made it to Europe. The Mongols, colonialism, the triumph of the science and the technological revolution the mastery of nature spawned smashed that classic Muslim liberalism. The Americans enabled the rabid antiwestern fundamentalism of the Saudi's and funded a coalition of ratbags to defeat the USSR in Afghanistan.
The last gasp of an unreconstructed tribalism? A reaction to the suppression of political moderation in the arab world? Time will tell.
All five of those arrested on terrorism charges were treated with great generosity by Australia as they set up new lives here. But their behaviour in court has been an exemplar of the problem of reconciling sharia with civil law. One of the accused, Wissam Fattal, refused to stand as the magistrate read out the charges and followed this with a torrent of abuse as he was led out of the court. Another of those charged, Nayef El Sayed, informed the court he would stand for no man, only for his God.
In other words, they accept only sharia, the rest is a charade.
Even the family and supporters of the accused went out of their way to express contempt for the legal system and, by extension, the society it represents. Reporters were called ''faggots'' and ''dickheads'' amid a general attitude of animus recorded by the journalists covering the proceedings.
I have observed the same thing first-hand numerous times during criminal trials involving Muslim defendants, families and supporters.
In every case, the idea that Muslims are in trouble because they have been ''marginalised'' by society is reality turned on its head. They are the ones who have marginalised a society they are happy to exploit but not respect.
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/ideological-passion-sells-us-short-20090809-ee65.html?page=-1
28 July 2009
N.S.W is not New Jersey; Why is that?
There's been a bit in the Australian press in amazement about goings
on in New Jersey. Here's Adam Graycar, who used to run the
Australian Institute of Criminology here, giving his take on the
US system compared with the Australian one. It's pretty superficial,
but cross-cultural studies are revealing, so here goes:
================================
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2635881.htm
MARK COLVIN: It's a story with the all the hallmarks of a script
of the Sopranos; a massive corruption scandal in New York's
hinterlands of New Jersey and Brooklyn.
Three mayors, a member of the New Jersey Governor's cabinet,
two state assemblymen and five rabbis are among the 44 people
arrested in a huge police round-up.
Most of them are accused of taking big backhanders to help
developers get their building projects through.
Professor Adam Graycar used to run the Australian Institute
of Criminology, but now he's living in New Jersey as Dean of the
School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. He's back in
Australia where he's taking a seminar at the United States Studies
Centre at Sydney University.
You must also be wishing you were back in New Jersey again?
ADAM GRAYCAR: Well, I can read it on the net, but nevertheless
it's like another day in New Jersey.
MARK COLVIN: But you run an institute for the study of corruption.
Just tell us the story here, what's been going on?
ADAM GRAYCAR: We do that… I work in the criminal justice school.
Corruption is a very important area of study; it's an important area
of criminality.
When I set the institute up I wanted to work internationally - World
Bank, United Nations and the local media gave me stick and they
said why don't you study local things there's enough happening.
MARK COLVIN: In New Jersey, in the city in which I teach five of the
last seven mayors have gone to jail…have been indicted or gone to
jail for corruption. Numerous governors and others have done
things that you wouldn't even read about in novels.
MARK COLVIN: Some of this is absolutely lurid. Some of it actually
involves the sale of human kidneys.
ADAM GRAYCAR: There are two elements to this story today. One
part of it is, you know, good straight honest corruption; you pay the
local mayor a bag full of money so that you can get a building
approval through.
But a lot of the money that was being handled was laundered also
by a group of rabbis it appears. One of whom was deeply involved
in selling kidneys, getting donors to contribute their kidneys for a
small amount of money, selling them for a large amount of money
and laundering the money.
MARK COLVIN: Were people taking money for themselves or for
the Democratic Party, or what?
ADAM GRAYCAR: I've only just started to read the charge sheets.
It's a bigger issue than that. Very often money comes as campaign
contributions below the radar, but a lot of it does go into private
pockets.
The Mayor of a town called Hoboken, which is just on the waterfront
opposite Manhattan, was arrested today. He'd been in the job for 23
days and he had more than $25,000 in bribes, and this was the third
payment…
MARK COLVIN: In that 23 days?
ADAM GRAYCAR: That he'd taken. And the FBI had wire tapped him
according the charge sheet and he said we know who's with us and
we'll, you know, grind into the ground those who aren't. So it appears
- and this is the cultural thing - many people have gone into politics
so that they could get their hands on the loot.
MARK COLVIN: Could this happen here in Australia? Could… it seems
to be a sting operation. Would Australia law allow this?
ADAM GRAYCAR: Ah, it's not the sort of thing that I think Australian
law enforcement officials would get themselves involved in.
I'm here at the United States Studies Centre trying to look at some of
comparisons. And I tell people story after story about New Jersey and
of course not all of America is like New Jersey. But there are parts of
Pennsylvania and New York and, where things have happened and I
keep saying - could his have happened here? And the answer, I think,
is no, for many reasons.
MARK COLVIN: You mean the corruption couldn't have happened or
the operation against it couldn't have happened.
ADAM GRAYCAR: The corruption would not have happened. I don't
know enough about the local law as to whether a sting operation
could take place. Some of the sting operations in the United States
have set up fictitious situations and that is, yeah, ethically, you
know, quite challengeable.
MARK COLVIN: So what is about the culture there?
ADAM GRAYCAR: I think there are two significant differences. One,
the American system of government, or the many systems of
government, doesn't really have any responsibility fixed in any place.
Municipalities do a lot of stuff. There's local government, there's
county government, there's state government, there's federal
government. The rules are so complex and things change all the
time and so the lower down you go the easier it is to be below the
radar. And secondly, there is no generally accepted culture of
integrity. There are individuals with integrity, but the very thought
of having something like a corruption commission, an ICAC
[Independent Commission Against Corruption], giving it teeth,
just wouldn't work there because people don't see it.
And thirdly, I suppose, people are rewarded for getting ahead,
and if you cut a corner or two to get ahead, well, it shows that
you've got a bit of wherewithal.
MARK COLVIN: Is it an area where there's actually too much
democracy. I mean, we know that in some municipalities in
America even the dog catcher is elected. Is the fact that there
isn't a permanent public service to the level that we have it,
is that part of it?
ADAM GRAYCAR: The public service in… where I work is
generally despised. It's regarded as low grade people who
can't do anything else and there in it for security. People don't
go into public service as they do in Europe, in the United
Kingdom and Australia, you know, to do good work and
who've done well.
But it's more than that. It's the complexity of the situation
and a culture where people feel you've got to get ahead.
And there are so many rules.
When you read the history of New Jersey, what you read today
is no different to what you read a decade ago and two decades
ago and three decades ago. And numerous politicians have come
in saying - I'm going to clean it up, this is not acceptable. And
within a year, two years, you know, they're indicted as well.
MARK COLVIN: In the meantime can we watch old editions of
the Sopranos as if they were a documentary?
ADAM GRAYCAR: (laughs) I've never worked out whether the
movies follow real life or real life follows the movies.
MARK COLVIN: Thank you very much Professor Adam Graycar.
====================
Keith
on in New Jersey. Here's Adam Graycar, who used to run the
Australian Institute of Criminology here, giving his take on the
US system compared with the Australian one. It's pretty superficial,
but cross-cultural studies are revealing, so here goes:
================================
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2008/s2635881.htm
MARK COLVIN: It's a story with the all the hallmarks of a script
of the Sopranos; a massive corruption scandal in New York's
hinterlands of New Jersey and Brooklyn.
Three mayors, a member of the New Jersey Governor's cabinet,
two state assemblymen and five rabbis are among the 44 people
arrested in a huge police round-up.
Most of them are accused of taking big backhanders to help
developers get their building projects through.
Professor Adam Graycar used to run the Australian Institute
of Criminology, but now he's living in New Jersey as Dean of the
School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. He's back in
Australia where he's taking a seminar at the United States Studies
Centre at Sydney University.
You must also be wishing you were back in New Jersey again?
ADAM GRAYCAR: Well, I can read it on the net, but nevertheless
it's like another day in New Jersey.
MARK COLVIN: But you run an institute for the study of corruption.
Just tell us the story here, what's been going on?
ADAM GRAYCAR: We do that… I work in the criminal justice school.
Corruption is a very important area of study; it's an important area
of criminality.
When I set the institute up I wanted to work internationally - World
Bank, United Nations and the local media gave me stick and they
said why don't you study local things there's enough happening.
MARK COLVIN: In New Jersey, in the city in which I teach five of the
last seven mayors have gone to jail…have been indicted or gone to
jail for corruption. Numerous governors and others have done
things that you wouldn't even read about in novels.
MARK COLVIN: Some of this is absolutely lurid. Some of it actually
involves the sale of human kidneys.
ADAM GRAYCAR: There are two elements to this story today. One
part of it is, you know, good straight honest corruption; you pay the
local mayor a bag full of money so that you can get a building
approval through.
But a lot of the money that was being handled was laundered also
by a group of rabbis it appears. One of whom was deeply involved
in selling kidneys, getting donors to contribute their kidneys for a
small amount of money, selling them for a large amount of money
and laundering the money.
MARK COLVIN: Were people taking money for themselves or for
the Democratic Party, or what?
ADAM GRAYCAR: I've only just started to read the charge sheets.
It's a bigger issue than that. Very often money comes as campaign
contributions below the radar, but a lot of it does go into private
pockets.
The Mayor of a town called Hoboken, which is just on the waterfront
opposite Manhattan, was arrested today. He'd been in the job for 23
days and he had more than $25,000 in bribes, and this was the third
payment…
MARK COLVIN: In that 23 days?
ADAM GRAYCAR: That he'd taken. And the FBI had wire tapped him
according the charge sheet and he said we know who's with us and
we'll, you know, grind into the ground those who aren't. So it appears
- and this is the cultural thing - many people have gone into politics
so that they could get their hands on the loot.
MARK COLVIN: Could this happen here in Australia? Could… it seems
to be a sting operation. Would Australia law allow this?
ADAM GRAYCAR: Ah, it's not the sort of thing that I think Australian
law enforcement officials would get themselves involved in.
I'm here at the United States Studies Centre trying to look at some of
comparisons. And I tell people story after story about New Jersey and
of course not all of America is like New Jersey. But there are parts of
Pennsylvania and New York and, where things have happened and I
keep saying - could his have happened here? And the answer, I think,
is no, for many reasons.
MARK COLVIN: You mean the corruption couldn't have happened or
the operation against it couldn't have happened.
ADAM GRAYCAR: The corruption would not have happened. I don't
know enough about the local law as to whether a sting operation
could take place. Some of the sting operations in the United States
have set up fictitious situations and that is, yeah, ethically, you
know, quite challengeable.
MARK COLVIN: So what is about the culture there?
ADAM GRAYCAR: I think there are two significant differences. One,
the American system of government, or the many systems of
government, doesn't really have any responsibility fixed in any place.
Municipalities do a lot of stuff. There's local government, there's
county government, there's state government, there's federal
government. The rules are so complex and things change all the
time and so the lower down you go the easier it is to be below the
radar. And secondly, there is no generally accepted culture of
integrity. There are individuals with integrity, but the very thought
of having something like a corruption commission, an ICAC
[Independent Commission Against Corruption], giving it teeth,
just wouldn't work there because people don't see it.
And thirdly, I suppose, people are rewarded for getting ahead,
and if you cut a corner or two to get ahead, well, it shows that
you've got a bit of wherewithal.
MARK COLVIN: Is it an area where there's actually too much
democracy. I mean, we know that in some municipalities in
America even the dog catcher is elected. Is the fact that there
isn't a permanent public service to the level that we have it,
is that part of it?
ADAM GRAYCAR: The public service in… where I work is
generally despised. It's regarded as low grade people who
can't do anything else and there in it for security. People don't
go into public service as they do in Europe, in the United
Kingdom and Australia, you know, to do good work and
who've done well.
But it's more than that. It's the complexity of the situation
and a culture where people feel you've got to get ahead.
And there are so many rules.
When you read the history of New Jersey, what you read today
is no different to what you read a decade ago and two decades
ago and three decades ago. And numerous politicians have come
in saying - I'm going to clean it up, this is not acceptable. And
within a year, two years, you know, they're indicted as well.
MARK COLVIN: In the meantime can we watch old editions of
the Sopranos as if they were a documentary?
ADAM GRAYCAR: (laughs) I've never worked out whether the
movies follow real life or real life follows the movies.
MARK COLVIN: Thank you very much Professor Adam Graycar.
====================
Keith
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