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Half the battle is making sure that you understand the logical consequence of your argument:
The fact that religion is absurd does not entail that it is bad for the world, and conversely the fact that a belief system is bad for the world does not imply that it is ill-founded.
More here. While I don’t agree with the conclusions, at least the argument makes sense.
It’s Global Entrepreneurship Week but practical help from the Government is hard to come by
More here in The Times. Had Hobsbawm (not Eric) argued that the government needs to get out of the way of entrepreneurs, then I might have been more favourable. She doesn’t. The bank bailout appears to have sparked a cycle of rent-seeking.
(Follow my Google Reader shared items feed here.)
1. An excellent look at the role of Turkey in the Middle East, by Sarah
2. Hybrid States has a question for the editors of the NYT
3. I was in Berlin last week, but unfortunately not for the fall of the wall celebrations. Comment Central puts together a great reader, though
4. (Spanish) The excellent Fran Sevilla asks whether Obama has been a foreign policy failure
5. Is the financial stimulous working, and are policy-makers being held responsible?
6. Are creeds a good idea?
In The Penguin History of the Church: the Early Church, Henry Chadwick charts the Christian church from the time of Christ to the fall of the western Roman Empire. The initial development of an underground body of converts which grew to spectacularly in size is, Chadwick argues, a remarkable event, affecting people of all social classes and spreading widely through the world, with large centres developing in North Africa, Europe and the Middle East.
While the Church’s initial growth was remarkable, the eventual conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine, inextricably linked the fate of the church to that of the Empire. The power struggle between the bishops of Rome, Alexandria and Constantinople, the doctrinal differences and the responses to the Arabs and the Barbarians—all these were at least in part a reflection of the underlying political power games being played in the Empire.
It fell on the early Church to settle questions of authority, the Biblical cannon and doctrine. On these issues the real merit of Chadwick’s book is his clear explanation of the issues without taking sides, leaving readers to decide for themselves which position is right. Did the church grow because of divine intervention or as the result of persecution? Does Jesus have two ‘substances,’ one divine and one human or does he combine divinity and humanity in one ‘substance’? Chadwick records what people said and why they said it, leaving the reader to decide.
This book is a good place to go to to understand the issues involved in Gnosticism, the Arian Controversy, The Council of Nicaea, Augustine’s secularism or the person of Christ, and to see the political machinations involved behind the scenes. While politics lurks behind the scenes, though, Chadwick is never so lazy as to argue that these disputes were only political. On the contrary, they were real, principled and important. Politics seized these disputes to advance its own aims, to the detriment of the Church in the end.
Is this book worth reading? I think so. There can be tendency among Christians to take received wisdom, without necessarily understanding why and how it came to be. Why is the Church run in the way it’s run? Why is the Bible important? This book can help you to understand and make your mind up on these. For others, learning about the history of an organisation that has influenced the world so much can be no bad thing.
Henry Porter of The Guardian despairs of the EU, while declaring his love for Europe. The EU should not be a totalitarian, undemocratic body without the interests of its people at heart, and without their political participation being encouraged.
But this is what is happening, he argues. The European Court of Human Rights has ridiculously ruled that Italian children should not be allowed to wear crucifixes at school. Shouldn't the EU concentrate on weightier matters, he asks?
Well he’s right that dress codes in Italian schools are not an important subject matter. But I despair of anti-EU maniacs who refuse to take the time to understand its institutional structures. For the record, the European Court of Human Rights is not in any way affiliated to the EU. It is a body of the Council of Europe (which is different from the European Council, which is an EU body) and which rules on the European Convention of Human Rights, which is separate from the EU, though all EU states are signed up to it, as well as non-EU members such as Russia and Turkey. I realise it might be confusing and people can by all means criticise the EU, but a little research would not go amiss.
For a better commentary on Europe, EU-related and not, read Charlemagne. My own (half-formed) view on the EU is here, and all my posts on Europe are here.
I have long thought that Ha-Joon Chang, a Korean development economist at the other place, is wrong to argue that countries should erect high tariff barriers and activist industrial policies if they want to develop. Chang looks at today’s rich countries and those Asian countries that developed over the past 50 years, and argues that since they all had high tariff barriers and activist industrial policies, then theirs is the example to follow.
Chang goes further, though. Since today’s developed countries are now mostly trying to persuade developing countries to lower tariffs and use markets rather than government intervention, they are being ‘Bad Samaritans,’ kicking away the ladder that they all used so successfully to climb to where they are.
I have always thought that Chang’s methodology is seriously flawed. He finds immutable laws of determinism where it has always seemed to me that no such laws have been shown to exist. (Incidentally, this is a common passtime of professional economists...) He assumes that there is only one way for countries to develop, and that all countries must follow this path, without giving any justification as to why there can only be one path to follow. Moreover, even if he is right (and many question his analysis) it would follow that the trajectory for today’s developing countries will be slow, just as it was for the US, Europe and the rest. Chang’s answer, even if it is one, is not the quick fix that many believe it to be.
But today I read an even better take on Chang’s work, by Bill Easterly, the writer of the Aid Watch blog, who I have criticised before. In a review of Chang’s latest book and subsequent responses, Easterly looks at the statistics behind Chang’s theory and finds it to be full of holes. For example, he argues that Chang cannot make such sweeping assertions based on such a small data sample, and that the causal relationships and probabilities that Chang infers are simply wrong. Here is an excerpt:
[Chang] bases most of his argument on the probability that if you are a successful East Asian Gang of Four economy, then you have East Asian Gang of Four policies. This probability is 100 percent by construction. But for another country trying to assess these policies, what it needs to know is: If I adopt East Asian Gang of Four policies, how likely is it that I will have economic growth comparable to the East Asian Gang of Four? Chang never attempts to compute this radically different probability. To do so, we would have to take into account all countries that have tried protectionism. This group would now include some huge disasters that were very protectionist, like Tanzania from the 1960s through the 1980s, when output per factory worker was steeply declining despite huge state investments in manufacturing. The Morogoro shoe factory, established in Tanzania during this time, was supposed to become a major exporter but never produced more than 4 percent of capacity and then went out of business.
Easterly debunks a lot of myths and concludes that ultimately, beyond some common sense answers, we don’t really know how to develop countries. This might not be the easiest answer to swallow; clever people usually think they can solve most problems and often resort to dubious statistical practices to convince people. But if Easterly is right, scepticism is the order of the day when confronted by those who claim to have the silver bullet to development.
Car horns seem to me to be a redundant feature of cars these days. I can understand that in times when there were fewer vehicles and people they may have been an interesting novelty.
The idea that they are there for safety (ie, you can honk to let someone know they are about to crash into you) has some merit, but I imagine that the majority of their use is not for this purpose. In any case, flashing lights tends to be more effective, since it can be difficult to identify exactly where the honk is coming from.
Honking is generally used only gratuitously and pointlessly. To announce grandly a driver’s presence or to hurry people up, or to express frustration or anger. On top of this, they are often used late at night in residential areas of Syria where residents are trying to sleep. Car horns make my life a misery.
So, given that horns are unecessary and a social menace, shouldn’t cars be made in future without them?
(Photo credit: Travel Aficionado.)
A new blog you should seriously consider subscribing to, and which has been set up by a good friend of mine, is Hybrid States (the feed is here). Yaniv outlines his motivation thus:
It is time to add my voice to the quietly growing number of Israelis, Americans, and Jews worldwide, who are ready for the serious introspection necessary to debate our identity and national aspirations in a twenty-first century in which we are now oppressors.
Beyond that opening salvo, I would recommend reading this blog because: (a) This is an important issue in the world today, and (b) Yaniv is a philanthrope, his arguments stem from a desire to see the rights of Israelis and Palestinians as people respected.
I am looking forward to reading along. To get started, here are posts on water rights, Israeli denial and Goldstone.
Reading through The Guardian this evening (lovely to have the paper copy in hand once again) I came across a piece by Madeleine Bunting, suggesting she had a contribution to make to discussions of justice and ethics. Dropping my guard, I read on.
Bunting’s central claim is that people have stopped thinking about ethics in everyday life. This is bad, and they should start doing so again. The problem began when, in 1950s Chicago, a group of narrow-minded economists, spear-headed by Friedrich von Hayek, began suggesting that all that mattered in life was self-interest. Fortunately, two philosophers from Harvard, Amartya Sen and Michael Sandel, have written books encouraging us to think about what justice consists of and to apply that to our lives and the world around us.
Let me make three points about this:
- To suggest that people from the Chicago School, such as Hayek and Milton Friedman, did not think about ethics is ridiculous. Rarely have I read two economists or academics who thought about ethics and justice, what constituted right actions and how to apply them in real life. Bunting may not like their conclusions, but she cannot say they didn't have them
- Bunting writes that Sandel’s conception of justice draws from the work of John Rawls, without apparently realising that these two men come from very different, even opposing schools of political philosophy, namely Communitarianism and Liberalism. It's easy to see where the mistake comes from. In Bunting’s mind both are vaguely lefty, claimed as intellectual bases for lefty political movements, so surely they must be from the same tradition
- There is an underlying assumption in this piece that self-interest and concern for greater society are opposed to one another. Actually, they can be the same thing. Individuals who maximise their utility may do so by seeking highly paid jobs, but they can also do so by doing charity work, or campaigning for the rights of others. Bunting shows an alarming lack of self-awareness as well as narrow-mindedness in the quick way she tries to face the two ideas off against each other
All of this is a great pity. People should think more carefully about ethics in the actions they take and in the world around them. But they should do so in a more considered way than Bunting has.
Two places to start would be Simon Blackburn’s book on ethics, and my post on John Rawls.
I tend not to write about philosophy on this blog, as I don’t feel especially qualified to do so, but on The Immanent Frame I read a great profle of Jürgen Habermas, the moral and political philosopher, by Charles Taylor.
Two aspects of Habermas’s ideas are particularly interesting. First is the notion that rationalism, at least in the social sphere, cannot reason its way to a universal maxim without diaglogue between all those with a stake in it. Taylor puts it better than I can:
[F]or Habermas, ethical deliberation is primarily social, dialogical; it is worked out between agents. Of course, in a secondary way, we can and often do deliberate on our own, but the shape of our ethical world is dialogically elaborated, and this conditions all our moral thinking, even when we want to rebel against the morality of our community.
Building on this idea, Habermas articulates another:
For Plato and much of the Western tradition, reason is a single faculty or power which can strive to define not only the True, but also the Good and the Beautiful. That is, the same reason can establish the shape of all the important dimensions of human life: establishing what really is, deciding what we ought to do, and determining what is truly beautiful. We might speak of the scientific, the moral and the aesthetic dimensions of human life.
What Habermas proposes in the place of this is not, as we have seen, a restriction of reason to the scientific domain, and a relegation of morals and aesthetics to the arbitration of emotion or subjective taste. Rather it is a diversification of the very procedures of reason. Scientific reason tries to map the real; but moral reason, as we saw above doesn’t try to map some other domain, say, of human nature. Rather the whole notion of rationality here doesn’t rely on the idea that valid ethical norms correspond to some domain of fact. Rather the justified conclusion is designated as such by its emerging from a certain form of dialogical deliberation. Being right here has a quite different shape than it does in the factual or scientific domain.
This is a very practical political philosophy which lays a firm basis for secularism, which I am broadly in favour of. Tentatively, however, I would argue that there is no necessary link between the inability to reach a universal maxim of how a society to be ordered and the necessity for dialogue in reaching social settlements. In order to prefer secularism and / or pluralism, it is simply necessary to show that people cannot agree on the universal conception of the good. For whatever reason, whether it is because reason will not take us there (as I am inclined to argue), or because such a concept does not exist. Still, I think it is a fascinating quesiton.
For more reading on reason, I would recommend Daniel Blanche’s series on Kant (parts 1, 2, 3 and 4).
In The Penguin History of the Church: the Early Church, Henry Chadwick charts the Christian church from the time of Christ to the fall of the western Roman Empire. The initial development of an underground body of converts which grew to spectacularly in size is, Chadwick argues, a remarkable event, affecting people of all social classes and spreading widely through the world, with large centres developing in North Africa, Europe and the Middle East.
