Is STL prolife ad racist?

Over at Angry Black Beeyotch there is outrage to spare over a putatively racist prolife ad in North City. The latest rant reads like one of those really bad spoken-word poems.

The ad in question declares that "The Most Dangerous Place for an African-American is in the Womb," citing the figure that, though black folks make up 12% of the population, they account for 37% of Missouri's abortions.

In response, any number of fancy terms are deployed at ABB, including my personal favorite, "agency." "The only way this campaign works," she decalres, "is if people accept that black women are the most wretched of creatures." It is an attack on the very "humanity" of black women. (The humanity of black fetuses is entirely another matter and is, of course, not up for debate, since it would constitute ... racism?)

Of course, the terms as used mean nothing and everything. Argue that your "humanity" necessitates you have the prerogative to terminate another human life, and you may as well argue that your "humanity" necessitates you have the prerogative to own another human life. In effect, of course, to terminate another human life is to claim you own it.

Aren't the dusty remains of the slaveholders sorry they didn't have terms like "agency" and "humanity" to use in defense of the prerogatives they claimed over other human lives?

And I fear what it would do to black women's agency if anybody mentioned that Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood with the expressed goal (among others) of causing there to be fewer black people.

Science and Mr. Shriver

Adam Shriver discusses the earnings tax over at the 'Hub, and doubts whether its negative effect on cities has been adequately proven:

So if one wanted to honestly study such a phenomenon he or she might begin with some research before performing analysis. How many cities have earnings taxes in the U.S.? answer 14 states and the district of Columbia a list encompassing hundreds of cities. Has there ever been a documented scientific study that demonstrates that employers avoid such cities? In truth I do not know.

The Sun King visits the Academy of
Sciences--but where are the marginal
value model equations?

He doesn't specify what he means by "scientific study," but I suspect he has in mind something like this: an empirical study demonstrating a correlation between cities employers avoid and earnings taxes. In the physical sciences, where work is done by isolating variables and demonstrating causation, such an approach can be quite productive.

But human societies cannot be readily reduced to controlled laboratory conditions -- which is why the constant reminder about statistics is that correlation does not necessarily prove causation. Say Portland enacted an earnings tax and didn't see any avoidance on the part of employers. Hypothesis demolished, right? But hold on -- we don't know what else Portland is doing. Are its other taxes (or wages!) attractively low? Does it ply potential employers with tax breaks? Is it the only game in town for certain industries, which allows it to extract (in an essentially monopolistic way) its earnings tax?

Such messy variables are the reason Austrian economists, for example, reject statistical studies of correlation as a valid basis for economic inquiry. Instead, economics must seek to understand the commonsense principles all human action is based on (what Mises called "praxeology"), and then derive economic conclusions from those principles. Such commonsense principles intuitively include the idea that, if I can do the same business in Clayton I can do in the City of St. Louis, but have less of my earnings taken away from me, then, all other things being equal, that's where I'm going to go!

Now, we can call that analysis "scientific" in the sense that it's pretty obviously true, but my suspicions are that Mr. Shriver wants something with charts and graphs. There are excellent reasons to think, though, that human diversity is more obscured than clarified by attempting to reduce it to colored bars and pie sections.

Gems from Joel Salatin's Library

Author: Dabdiputs

A couple of years ago, my wife and I got a chance to see Joel Salatin speak at Webster University, and it was an inspiring experience for both of us. He gave a detailed presentation on how things worked on his farm, especially the synergistic ways he uses cows, chickens and pigs as a part of one well-integrated system. He sparked our curiosity, and played a big role in inspiring us to go on our WWOOFing adventures. He had first come to my attention, as I imagine he had to many, from Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma.

Salatin is fascinatingly difficult to pigeonhole. He is one of the superstars of the organic/sustainable farming world, yet he is refreshingly free of any whiff of patchouli, free of the hollow twang of kumbaya around the campfire or any of the hippy-dippy trappings of many organic enthusiasts. When, after all, was the last time you heard about an organic farmer who graduated from Bob Jones University or refers to the Civil War as the "War of Northern Aggression"?

Salatin prioritizes efficiency and (gasp!) profitability as much as any CEO, and evokes in his personality the charisma of the self-made entrepreneur like Franklin or Ford, rather than the long-haired commune-dwelling back-to-the-land radical.

One of the great resources on the Polyface Farms website is a list of recommended books, which I have been trying to work through here and there. Bill Mollison's Permaculture: a Designer's Manual, through quite difficult to obtain (used copies appear to be going for $100 minimum), is, as Salatin bills it, a "compendium" of design info for agriculture and even home design. Mollison is the father of permaculture, a philosophy of agriculture which is difficult to summarize -- except to say it emphasizes perennials and a judicious employment of livestock, not only as sources of product, but as fellow-workers in farming!

Permaculture presents an interesting challenge to modern farming -- not only conventional, but organic. A lot of the modern mega-CSAs, for instance (150+ shares) are as heavily reliant on annuals and tillage as conventional farmers, and sometimes even more so, since conventional no-till agriculture is in some ways more widely accepted than organic no-till. The long-term impact of even organic tillage on the soil, especially in intensive plantings, remains to be seen.

Salatin's model is, as you might guess, heavily influenced by permaculture. Since his main crop is grass to feed his cows (and, more indirectly, his chickens), he can rely on a perennial, no-till, no-seed crop which is cultivated and manured by the animals themselves (the "animals as co-workers" concept in action).

Gene Logsdon's The Contrary Farmer, a book I have not yet had the chance to read, is also present on the list. Though I haven't read it, I have read much of Logsdon's writing with pleasure, and his blog, also called The Contrary Farmer, is a must-read. His emphasis on small-scale farming for pleasure more than profit makes him a rich source of information on bygone traditions and old-fangled pleasures. His book Small-Scale Grain Raising is also still the definitive work on raising your own grains for food and animal forage.

Another book on Salatin's list that I picked up recently and was a little surprised I enjoyed so much is Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I have a healthy suspicion of books of the "self-help" genre, actually for reasons that Covey explains quite well. According to him, most recent self-help lit is based on the "personality" paradigm of success: success is caused by possessing the right techniques for greasing the social wheels, irrespective of personal character. Covey, on the other hand, is focused on the principles and especially habits (as the title implies) that make people successful (readers of the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre's seminal After Virtue may notice a certain similarity in thesis).

I'm still working through the book, so no final judgments yet, but so far it is living up to  Salatin's recommendation as the "the book which, next to the Bible, everybody ought to read." (In his article in ACRES USA on Family Friendly Farming.)

Another book from the recommended list I have read and would heartily commend as well is Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions. It is probably my single favorite cookbook; in fact, more than a cookbook, it would more appropriately be described as a complete gastronomic philosophy, one which often goes against the grain of conventional wisdom, but always deliciously so.

One which I haven't read, but am very curious about, is James Davidson's The Sovereign Individual. The description by Publishers' Weekly on Amazon sounds pretty mind-boggling:

The computer revolution, in the authors' dire scenario, will subvert and destroy the nation-state as globalized cybercommerce, lubricated by cybercurrency, drastically limits governments' powers to tax. They further predict that the next millennium will see an enormous decline in the influence of politicians, lobbyists, labor unions and regulated professions as new information technologies democratize talent and innovation and decentralize the workplace.

Something tells me that it doesn't seem so dire to the man who wrote a book titled Everything I Want to Do is Illegal!

Hoppe on Libertarian Philosophy

‎"Arguing never consists of just free-floating propositions claiming to be true. Rather, argumentation is always an activity, too. However, given that truth claims are raised and settled in argumentation and that argumentation, aside from whatever it is that is said in its course, is a practical affair, it follows that intersubjectively meaningful norms must exist—precisely those which make some action an argumentation—which have a special cognitive status in that they are the practical preconditions of objectivity and truth."
‎-- Hans Hermann Hoppe, The Economics and Ethics of Private Property, p. 315. 

The New Madrid Fault: a St. Louis Katrina?

It seems that public consciousness of the New Madrid Fault has been pretty low since Iben Browning's famed failed prediction of a quake way back in 1990. But though there has been considerable scientific speculation about the potency of the fault, there has been no definitive finding that the fault is inactive. On the contrary, the USGS still rates the chances of a catastrophic quake in the next fifty years as one in ten.

Back in the 1811-12 quakes, St. Louis was still lightly populated and Memphis did not even exist. An 8.0 earthquake such as occurred then, which was allegedly strong enough to ring church bells in Boston, would cause damage many orders of magnitude greater today, especially given Missouri's geologic susceptibility to liquefaction. The 1964 Good Friday Quake, which occurred in Alaska, caused $311M in damage, largely in Anchorage due to buildings not designed to withstand quakes. (The quake measured 9.0 on the Richter scale, which is ten times greater than an 8.0.) The 1994 Northridge Quake in LA, which was only a 6.7, caused twenty billion dollars in damage.

If we should learn any lesson from Katrina, it is that complacency can become a very expensive proposition. If the USGS is right, we have a lot riding on a one in ten shot, and yet who considers whether where he is living would be a good or bad area in the event of a quake, or whether his house would be likely to withstand an 8.0 on the Richter scale, or whether his neighborhood would be secure against looters? After the fact is too late to realize the imperative of survival.

Christianity and Government Authority

Bust of Constantine I,
photographed by
Jean-Christophe Benoist.

This is a must-read article on Romans 13 and Government Authority by Paul Green. For those keeping score, there have been at least three major answers to the problem of just how much authority the government has according to Christian doctrine:

• Absolutist (the government may do more or less whatever it wants).
• Compatibilist (the government may do most things, as long as it does not compel me to do anything against my Christian-informed conscience.)
• Anabaptist (all coercion, violence and authority are immoral. Jesus was a pacifist.)

The Compatibilist view has been I'm sure the most common view, and it exists both on the Religious Left and Right as they are commonly understood. For example, it makes perfect sense in the Compatibilist-Left view that the government can set up a compulsory welfare state, and those on the Right who question whether this is the state's role are missing the point from the Left-Compatibilist's viewpoint. According to him, the government can compel us to do anything not actually immoral; and certainly taking care of the poor is not immoral. The Right-Compatibilist generally concedes that ground, and limits his critique to pragmatic objections -- that churches are better at taking care of the poor than the state -- rather than questioning the very legitimacy of compulsory charity.

The absolutist view is not common, though there is good evidence that it was Luther's view -- such as when he sided against the peasants in their rebellion. Green, of course, gives evidence of its persistence.

The Anabaptist view is also not common, though it has had some brilliant expositors. Tolstoy and Gandhi probably did a good deal to inspire it, but the key works are John Howard Yoder's Politics of Jesus and Jacques Ellul's Anarchy and Christianity. It has some passionate contemporary advocates, such as Shane Claiborne (author of Jesus for President) and the folks at Jesus Radicals.

Yoder's masterpiece
of Christian pacifist
exegesis.

Despite its compelling and often learned advocates, the view is not without flaws. For one thing, it's anachronistic. Christian pacifism simply has more to do with Gandhi and Tolstoy than it has to do with Jesus, and Jesus' teachings and actions are frequently inconsistent with a doctrinaire pacifism (Green cites many of the best examples). Moreover, there is very little historical evidence that the early Christian fathers interpreted the gospel as calling for pacifism -- about the only thing that can be cited are controversies about whether Christians could be soldiers in pagan Rome, and this is inconclusive to say the least, since participating in the Roman army was problematic for any number of Christian reasons without even raising the question of doctrinaire nonviolence. All this is without going into the frank inconsistency of pacifism with the Old Testament (Christian pacifism, it seems to me, demands some form of Marcionism.)

The brilliant part of Green's analysis, though, is that he takes many of the smartest critiques of the Anabaptist school (1 Samuel 8 alone is a pregnant chapter) and demonstrates that they make more sense as a critique of the coercive state than as a critique of violence per se. The verses usually cited by the Anabaptist interpreters retain all of their potency and pose none of the same interpretative problems when read in the way Green suggests. Green's essay might also be profitably read in light of James Davison Hunter's critiques of political Christianity in To Change the World (expect a fuller review of that book in a future post).

Let me close with a quotation that will hopefully pique your interest if it hasn't been already to read the article:

In Anglo-Saxon countries until the mid 1800’s with the introduction of police, the administration of justice worked well, largely without government. The Common Law was (and still is in some places) administered by unpaid local Justices of the Peace and Constables who were independent and often opposed the State. "Citizen’s arrest" was the primary means of enforcement. Enforcement of law under ancient Israel was similar, with Judges and volunteer officers of the court.

Sketches of a Critique of the Arch

My previous post on the Arch was not really a critique in any systematic sense (though the comparison to the statue of Louis IX might have been suggestive to some), but comments I have since received have suggested to me what the lineaments of such a critique would be:

An excellent critique
of "placeless"
architecture.

• A public architecture of placelessness: the defining feature of modernist architecture is its lack of place; public architecture, on the other hand, succeeds primarily through conveying content, essential to which is a sense of place; a placeless public architecture is therefore a kind of contradiction.
• The purpose of fascist architecture was to make the individual feel dwarfed, while exalting the potential of collective action (cf. the fasces); the resemblance to Mussolini's never-completed arch is therefore not incidental, but actually quite central to the artistic effect of both structures.
• In comparison, the defining feature of a monument like the statue of Louis IX or the Jefferson Memorial is humanity: they commemorate certain individuals whose lives we regard as exceptional, and perhaps as models to our own; Louis IX may just inspire someone to do good for someone less fortunate: nobody ever reflected on their life because of a giant hunk of metal.